The Myth of Grass-Roots Terrorism

Since Rudy Giuliani's early exit from the Republican presidential primary, the issue of terrorism has barely been mentioned by any of the candidates in either party. Given its absence from this year's U.S. presidential campaign, it is easy to forget how prominent a role terrorism played in 2004. Many observers believe that Osama bin Laden's dramatically choreographed videotaped appearance on October 29, 2004, may have tipped the vote in President George W. Bush's favor by reminding Americans of the horrors of 9/11 and instilling a fear of future attacks. And although terrorism has largely been ignored as a campaign issue thus far, bin Laden and al Qaeda may deliberately raise its visibility once again.

The publication of Leaderless Jihad is therefore timely. Its author, Marc Sageman, brings unique credentials to the study of terrorism. European-born but American-educated, Sageman holds a doctorate in political sociology and is a practicing psychiatrist. He served in the U.S. Navy as a flight surgeon before joining the CIA in 1984. During the late 1980s, Sageman was based in Islamabad and worked closely with the Afghan mujahideen forces that were fighting the Soviets.

Sageman's first book, Understanding Terror Networks, was an important work that received little public attention when it was published four years ago. It provocatively challenged the conventional wisdom that victory in the war on terrorism would be achieved by killing and capturing bin Laden, his main ideologue, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the rest of al Qaeda's leadership. According to Sageman, al Qaeda was not an organization to be systematically destroyed but a social network that had to be disrupted. The only effective defense against Salafi terrorists, he claimed, was a thorough understanding of the web of relationships that sustained them -- something that was sorely lacking in both the government and academe at the time.

Sageman continues this line of argument in Leaderless Jihad. The gravest threat facing the United States and the West today, he maintains, is not a revived al Qaeda straddling the lawless border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Rather, he contends, the true menace comes from loose-knit cells of Western-born Muslims or Muslim immigrants studying and working in the West. These disaffected "bunches of guys" are often friends, roommates, or classmates who undergo the process of radicalization together.

Although these informal local terrorist groups are certainly a critical part of the global terrorist network, Leaderless Jihad's salient weakness is its insistence that this dimension represents the entire threat facing the United States today. This shortcoming can largely be explained by Sageman's brusque dismissal of much of the existing academic literature on terrorism in general and terrorist networks in particular.

THE CENTER HOLDS

Sageman's impressive resumé cannot overcome his fundamental misreading of the al Qaeda threat, which is at the heart of his book. He contends: "The present threat has evolved from a structured group of al Qaeda masterminds, controlling vast resources and issuing commands, to a multitude of informal local groups trying to emulate their predecessors by conceiving and executing operations from the bottom up. These 'homegrown' wannabes form a scattered global network, a leaderless jihad." According to Sageman, al Qaeda has ceased to exist as either an organizational or an operational entity and is therefore irrelevant to U.S. security concerns. Sageman believes that "al Qaeda Central has receded in importance" and goes so far as to assert that it has been "neutralized operationally." Instead, the principal terrorist threat today, Sageman claims, comes from diffuse low-level groups.

But this view flies in the face of the two most recent authoritative analyses of terrorist threats to the United States: the July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate and the annual threat assessment presented by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence this past February. The publicly released portion of the 2007 NIE, for example, stated unambiguously that al Qaeda "is and will remain the most serious threat to the Homeland, as its central leadership continues to plan high-impact plots, while pushing others in extremist Sunni communities to mimic its efforts and to supplement its capabilities." This was also the unambiguous conclusion offered by the former CIA and National Security Council official Bruce Riedel in these pages a year ago ("Al Qaeda Strikes Back," May/June 2007). The unmistakable message is that al Qaeda is a remarkably agile and flexible organization that exercises both top-down and bottom-up planning and operational capabilities. It is not exclusively focused on the grass-roots dimension that is Leaderless Jihad's sole preoccupation. The NIE further stated, "We assess the group has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), operational lieutenants, and its top leadership." These findings are dismissed by Sageman as "alarmist" without any further analytic explanation or empirical justification whatsoever.