Nine years after 9/11, al-Qaeda is exercising more power than ever before

Nine years after the tragic events of 9/11, al-Qaeda has lost much of its top leadership, commands just a few hundred fighters and is strapped for cash. Paradoxically enough, it also probably exercises more power than at any point the past.
From the north-western Himalayas to the deserts that surrounds Timbuktu, al-Qaeda’s message has been taken up by a new generation of jihadist leaders I call ‘Baby bin-Ladens’. In the main, the new al-Qaeda subsidiaries are led by Islamists who participated in the anti-Soviet Union jihad in Afghanistan, and went on to found jihadist movements in their own countries.
They successfully tapped local issues and political grievances to build a political base for the jihadist movement – and are now expanding their constituency in the West.
Muhammad Illyas Kashmiri, a Pakistan-based jihadist who commands several hundred fighters, is thought to be responsible for an operation to attack British airports that has sparked off a nationwide alert.
The turn of the decade has seen a string of similar jihadist operations targeting the West: British resident Taimur Abdelwahab al-Abdaly’s suicide attack in Sweden; Somali-born Mohamed Usman Mahmoud conspiracy to bomb Christmas festivities in Portland. Police in Denmark stopped a plot to stage a Mumbai-style attack, and Pittsburgh college student Emmerson Begolly was charged with being a top online jihad propagandist.
Each has been linked to one or the other of the ‘Baby bin-Ladens.’
Keeping the west under sustained pressure is key to al-Qaeda’s new strategy.  It seeks to do that without relying on a expensive – and relatively easy to target – central infrastructure, of the kind the 9/11 attacks needed.
The Baby bin-Ladens have been adroit in using the internet to recruit cadre in the West, and meeting their logistical needs.
Last month, jihadist websites released an English-language book called The Explosives Course, offering illustrated, step-by-step instructions for assembling improvised explosive devices from things you could buy in Boots.
The book’s introduction states that it has been written by students of ‘Khabab al-Masri’ – the pseudonym of al-Qaeda’s top explosives expert, Midhat Mursi al-Sayyid Umar.  Before his death in a 2008 drone strike, Umar was a key figure in al-Qaeda’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction.  He ran the notorious Derunta complex of camps, where al-Qaeda tested chemical weapons on dogs, and also wrote the explosives manual used by the organisation’s operatives.
Experts agree that even if the new jihadists have been unable to successfully stage a major attack in the West, they impose costs disproportionate to the actual threat they hold out.  Each terror alert is, in al-Qaeda’s view, a small victory, because it costs its adversaries millions and sows fear.
This sustained war of attrition, al-Qaeda hopes, will undermine public support for the West’s increasingly-unpopular military commitments against Islamist movements in Asia and Africa – and thus give jihadists a crack at the big prize: seizing control of a nation-state.
From states at risk, there’s almost nothing but bad news.
Pakistan doesn’t publish official data on terrorist incidents.  But data from the US National Counter-Terrorism Centre’s Wordwide Incident Tracking System, as well as the South Asia Terrorism Portal’s media-based monitoring, suggest that Pakistan’s own war against terrorism is flagging.
Fatalities, the databases show, have fallen sharply in 2010, after year-on-year increases from 2003 to 2009.  That might sound like good news – but isn’t.  If Pakistan’s armed forces were aggressively pursuing terrorists into their safe havens in the country’s north-west, 2010 would likely have seen an escalation in both combatant and non-combatant fatalities.
Jasmine Zerinini, a senior French intelligence official, is reported to have said that Pakistan’s all-powerful army chief, General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani, was manipulating its institutions to scale back the country’s war against terror.
This means 2011 is unlikely to see a major push against jihadists in North Waziristan – which will mean both al-Qaeda and the Taliban will enjoy continued safe haven in Pakistan.
Somalia’s al-Shabaab, for its part, has released a recruitment video aimed at foreigners, featuring jihad volunteers from Britain, Sweden and Pakistan.  In the 35-minute video,  an al-Shaabab spokesperson appealed to more foreigners to come to the group’s aid.  Later, Fuad Mohammad Qalaf, an al-Shabaab spokesperson, demanded that President Barack Obama “embrace Islam before we come to his country.”
Uganda is preparing to send 4,000 more peacekeepers to fight al-Shabaab in Somalia – but underpaid, ill-trained government forces there mutinied recently, and there’s no reason to believe the dysfunctional, US-backed provisional government will be able to defeat the jihadists any time soon.
Yemen faces similar problems.  Concerns over corruption have led to the country getting only part of the aid it needs for its crisis-hit economy, which means the pro-western government’s legitimacy is eroding fast.  The jihadists are gaining influence.
The bottom line is this: al-Qaeda might be on its knees, but there’s no reason to believe the jihadist movement, of which it was even at its peak just a small part, is anywhere near defeat.  There just aren’t the troops, the cash or the public goodwill needed to fight a war with limitless fronts and with no end.
“History,” wrote Abdullah Azzam, bin-Laden’s mentor, “does not write its lines except with blood. Glory does not build its lofty edifice except with skulls; honour and respect cannot be established except on a foundation of cripples and corpses.”
In 2011, that foundation seems set to grow.Telegraph