Is Al-Qaeda Fifty Times Larger Now Than on 9/11?
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Western and other intelligence agencies recently told the United Nations that Al-Qaeda now has 25,000 members globally. The press coverage has been quick to point out that Al-Qaeda had 500 members on 11 September 2001. The not-so-subtle implication here—that the Global War on Terror was worse than useless—should be resisted.
The numbers themselves should be regarded sceptically. Assessing the size of militant groups, even non-clandestine ones, is fraught. Intelligence agencies presumably have sources researchers do not. Reliable or not, though, visibility is not the main issue.
Defining Al-Qaeda membership was extremely difficult even when its core was a tight-knit cadre based in Taliban Afghanistan. For example, Khaled Shaykh Muhammad was not a formal Al-Qaeda member, yet it would seem bizarre not to count the lead architect of 9/11. The 9/11 Commission, which had an upper-estimate of 5,000 core Al-Qaeda members, documented up to 20,000 jihadists trained at the Al-Qaeda camps, who spread out across the world and maintained various forms of coordination with Usama bin Laden. Do they all count as Al-Qaeda? Some of them? How is the distinction made? It is interpretation all the way down.
Once Al-Qaeda created its “affiliates” structure after 2004, with its first branch in Iraq—what became the Islamic State (ISIS)—and subsequent branches in West Africa, Yemen, and Somalia, things became murkier still.
Perhaps Al-Qaeda is larger now than in 2001, but nobody can honestly claim to know that, and certainly not with any degree of statistical accuracy.
Statistics are also useless is capturing the primary achievement of the War on Terror: to force Al-Qaeda into a strategic reassessment that reoriented its focus from terrorism against the West to insurgent activity in the Muslim world.
9/11 was conceived as a shortcut to push the Americans out of the Middle East so the jihadists could topple the local American-backed regimes and join the captured states into a caliphate. Hit them and they will run, Bin Laden had told his followers. Eighteen months later, Bin Laden and his Taliban patrons had been put to flight, and the Americans had struck into the heart of the Arab world in Iraq. Over the next decade, Al-Qaeda suffered remorseless attrition and saw all its plans for 9/11-scale follow-on attacks in the West thwarted.
The last things Bin Laden was writing before the Navy SEALs came for him in 2011 were confessions of weakness, a need to avoid direct combat with the West, and expand Al-Qaeda’s ranks by integrating with Muslim populations, building up the social base for an eventual caliphate. The “affiliates” had already started doing this, and in the years since Al-Qaeda has sharpened its “populist” approach, in no small part to define itself against the “elitism” of ISIS, its renegade branch which tried to brutally impose a caliphate immediately—and then recklessly went to war with the world.
This is not to say Al-Qaeda is no threat. There will be sporadic opportunistic attacks such as in Pensacola in 2019, and Al-Qaeda may yet overwhelm several governments in West Africa, a Western problem immediately because of the refugees and if Al-Qaeda consolidates African bases close to Europe its calculus on external terrorism may change. Still, this prospective threat is different to ISIS, which poses a current danger.
Unlike Al-Qaeda, which has made efforts, in Africa and beyond, to offer reassurances about its local focus, ISIS has advertised its intention to use its growing strength in Africa to attack Europe, and this is not idle signalling. The organisation recognises, as its leadership constantly emphasises, no borders and no distinction between jihad near and far. External operations are central to its mission, and violence abroad has the benefit of reinforcing ISIS’s claims of continued relevance and momentum.
After the effective destruction of ISIS’s caliphate in Syria and Iraq nearly a decade ago, its terrorism in Western countries never fully abated and has escalated since the officially declared resumption of the foreign attacks campaign in January 2014. The Hanukkah Massacre in Australia in December is only the latest illustration. While Al-Qaeda should never be ignored, for the foreseeable future ISIS will remain the greater internal threat to the West.
Always the best analysis in this arena.