The Leaderless Jihad’s Leader

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Review Essay

The Myth of Grass-Roots Terrorism

Bruce Hoffman

Marc Sageman claims that al Qaeda's leadership is finished and today's terrorist threat comes primarily from below. But the terrorist elites are alive and well, and ignoring the threat they pose will have disastrous consequences.

Response

Does Osama Still Call the Shots?

Marc Sageman and Bruce Hoffman

Debating whether the real terrorist threat is top-down or bottom-up.

The headlines splashed across papers worldwide this past week said it all. The New York Times shouted that “Data From Raid Shows Bin Laden Plotted Attacks;” on Reuters, the news read “Bin Laden remained active in targeting U.S;” and El Pais asked "¿Quién dijo jihad sin líder?" (Who Said Leaderless Jihad?). Information confirming bin Laden’s active role in al Qaeda continues to emerge, painting the portrait of a “micro-manager,” as an unidentified U.S. official quoted in ProPublica, called him. “He was down in the weeds [determining] best operatives, best targets, best timing.” And U.S. intelligence analysts pouring over bin Laden’s personal diary have concluded that he was involved in “every recent major al Qaeda threat.” He also remained involved in planning future attacks and urged his followers to recruit non-Muslims and minorities -- especially African Americans and Latinos -- for attacks on New York City, Los Angeles, and smaller cities on significant dates such as July 4 and September 11. As the world’s foremost expert on bin Laden, Peter Bergen, summed up, “OBL was the leader of the leaderless jihad!”

Yet, until the documents seized in the May 2 U.S. commando raid on bin Laden's hide-out in Abbottabad were leaked a week after the raid, the conventional wisdom was that bin Laden was an irrelevant figurehead, especially given al Qaeda's declining fortunes. Indeed, many U.S. government officials and terrorism analysts went so far as to argue that al Qaeda had ceased to exist in any meaningful operational sense. Al Qaeda maven Leah Farrall wrote* in Foreign Affairs that the organization was a "devolved network hierarchy, in which levels of command authority are not always clear."  The 7 May 2011 issue of The Economist (which went to press before any of the bin Laden documents were revealed) carried an article arguing that "the core leadership is largely relieved of direct operational responsibilities, which devolve to the branches and franchises." In this view, if al Qaeda was no longer relevant, then neither was bin Laden. 

So why were so many people so wrong? For one, U.S. President George W. Bush and other government officials had consciously tried to downplay bin Laden’s importance. Many had criticized the way the administration portrayed bin Laden immediately after 9/11, claiming that the United States had inadvertently inflated the stature and prominence of this heinous criminal by attributing the attacks solely to him. Moreover, years of failure to fulfill Bush’s pledge to get bin Laden, “dead or alive,” had been embarrassing and frustrating, and so the administration tried to avoid the subject.

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq also changed the war on terrorism and bin Laden’s place in it. If, as the Bush administration argued, the principle threat facing the United States had moved from South Asia to the Middle East, then it had also surely shifted from bin Laden to Saddam Hussein. As attention, intelligence resources, and special operations and conventional forces were transferred from one theater to the other, bin Laden’s importance was minimized.

Finally, some of the perennial dismissal and diminution of bin Laden’s role and al Qaeda’s strength was surely just wishful thinking. The clearest example is arguably a 2006 New York Times article titled, “Terrorism Experts Say Focus on Al Qaeda Misses a Broader Threat.” The article was about the arrest, days earlier, of nearly two dozen believed to have been involved in an ingenious plot to simultaneously blow up seven U.S. and Canadian passenger planes using liquefied home-made explosives concealed in ordinary fruit juice containers and detonated by rigged disposable cameras. Among those arrested was Rashid Rauf, a British Muslim of Pakistani heritage, who was the key player in the plot and a known al Qaeda liaison. Even so, the Times story concluded that any focus on al Qaeda would be misplaced, quoting one of the experts interviewed for the story, Marc Sageman, as saying “There is no such thing as Al Qaeda as it existed before we went to Afghanistan and destroyed it.”

Yet such claims were always based on a misreading of the terror threat. In “The Myth of Grass-Roots Terrorism: Why Osama bin Laden Still Matters” (May/June 2008), I addressed the accumulating evidence of al Qaeda and bin Laden’s oversight of the most consequential terrorist attacks and plots. Even then, it was clear that the organization’s reach was not fully appreciated. Since then, the evidence has only multiplied.

In September 2009, for example, the FBI and NYPD uncovered a plot to stage simultaneous suicide attacks on the New York City subway system to coincide with the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. The ring-leader was Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born Green Card holder who lived in Queens. He and his two fellow conspirators had been trained in bomb making at an al Qaeda camp in Pakistan. Senior al Qaeda commanders had overseen and directed the operation, which was linked to another set of attacks planned for April 2009 in Manchester, England.