On January 24, a voice purported to be that of Osama bin Laden claimed
responsibility for the botched attempt to bring down Northwest Airlines flight
253 on Christmas Day. The short one-minute and two-second audio statement,
which was broadcast on al-Jazeera television, called the 23-year-old Nigerian
suspect Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab a hero and threatened more attacks.
The voice on the recording said the bombing attempt was in response to the
situation in Gaza and that the United States could never dream of living in
peace until Muslims had peace in the Palestinian territories. The speaker also
said that attacks against the US would continue as long as it continued to
support Israel.
While the US government has yet to confirm that the voice is that of bin Laden,
al-Jazeera claims that the voice is indeed that of the
al-Qaeda leader. Bin Laden's health and welfare have been the topic of a lot of
discussion and debate over the past several years, and many intelligence
officials believe he is dead. Because of this, any time an audio recording
purporting to be from bin Laden is released it receives heavy forensic
scrutiny.
Some technical experts believe that recent statements supposedly made by bin
Laden have been cobbled together by manipulating portions of longer bin Laden
messages that were previously recorded. It has been Stratfor's position for
several years that, whether bin Laden is dead or alive, the al-Qaeda core has
been marginalized by the efforts of the United States and its allies to the
point where the group no longer poses a strategic threat.
Now, questions of bin Laden's status aside, the recording was most likely
released through channels that helped assure al-Jazeera that the recording was
authentic. This means that we can be somewhat confident that the message was
released by the al-Qaeda core. The fact that the al-Qaeda core would attempt to
take credit for a failed attack in a recording is quite interesting. But
perhaps even more interesting is the core group's claim that the attack was
conducted because of US support for Israel and the treatment of the
Palestinians living in Gaza.
Smoke and mirrors During the early years of al-Qaeda's existence, the
group did not take credit for attacks it conducted. In fact, it explicitly
denied involvement. In interviews with the press, bin Laden often praised the
attackers while, with a bit of a wink and a nod, he denied any connection to
the attacks.
Bin Laden issued public statements after the August 1998 East Africa embassy
bombings and the September 11, 2001 attacks, flatly denying any involvement. In
fact, bin Laden and al-Qaeda continued to publicly deny any connection to the
9/11 attacks until after the US invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. These
denials of the 9/11 attacks have taken on a life of their own and have become
the basis of conspiracy theories that the US or Israel was behind the attacks
(despite later statements by bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, that
contradicted earlier statements and claimed credit for 9/11).
In the years following 9/11, the al-Qaeda core has continued to bask in the
glory of that spectacularly successful attack, but it has not been able to
produce the long-awaited encore. This is not for lack of effort; the al-Qaeda
core has been involved in several attempted attacks against the US, such as the
attempted shoe-bomb attack in December 2001, dispatching Jose Padilla to the US
in May of 2002 to purportedly try to conduct a dirty-bomb attack, and the
August 2006 thwarted plot to attack trans-Atlantic airliners using liquid
explosives.
Interestingly, while each of these failed attempts has been tied to the
al-Qaeda core by intelligence and investigative efforts, the group did not
publicly claim credit for any of them. While the group's leadership has made
repeated threats that they were going to launch an attack that would dwarf
9/11, they simply have been unable to do so. Indeed, the only plot that could
have come anywhere near the destruction of the 9/11 attacks was the liquid
explosives plot, and that was foiled early on in the operational planning
process - before the explosive devices were even fabricated.
Now, back to the failed bombing attempt on Christmas Day. First, the Yemeni
franchise of al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has already
claimed responsibility for the attack, and evidence strongly suggests that AQAP
is the organization with which Abdulmutallab had direct contact. Indeed, while
some members of AQAP have had prior contact with bin Laden, there is little to
suggest that bin Laden himself or what remains of al-Qaeda's core leadership
has any direct role in planning any of the operations conducted by AQAP.
The core group does not exercise that type of control over the activities of
any of its regional groups. These groups are more like independent franchises
that operate under the same brand name rather than parts of a single
hierarchical organization. Each franchise has local leadership and is
self-funding, and the franchises frequently diverge from global al-Qaeda
"corporate policies" in areas like target selection.
Furthermore, in an environment where the jihadis know that US
signals-intelligence efforts are keenly focused on the al-Qaeda core and the
regional franchise groups, discussing any type of operational information via
telephone or e-mail from Yemen to Pakistan would be very dangerous - and
terrible operational security. Using couriers would be more secure, but the
al-Qaeda core leadership is very cautious in its communications with the
outside world (Hellfire missiles can have that effect on people), and any such
communications will be very slow and deliberate. For the al-Qaeda core
leadership, the price of physical security has been the loss of operational
control over the larger movement.
Taking things one step further, not only is the core of al-Qaeda attempting to
take credit for something it did not do, but it is claiming credit for an
attack that did little more than severely burn the attacker in a very sensitive
anatomical area. Some have argued that the attack was successful because it has
instilled fear and caused the US government to react, but clearly the attack
would have had a far greater impact had the device detonated. The failed attack
was certainly not what the operational planners had in mind when they
dispatched Abdulmutallab on his mission.
This attempt by the al-Qaeda core to pander for publicity, even though it means
claiming credit for a botched attack, clearly demonstrates how far the core
group has fallen since the days when bin Laden blithely denied responsibility
for 9/11.
The Palestinian focus
Since the beginning of bin Laden's public discourse, the Palestinian cause has
been a consistent feature. His 1996 declaration of war and the 1998 fatwa
declaring jihad against the West and Israel are prime examples. However, the
reality of al-Qaeda's activities has shown that, to bin Laden, the plight of
the Palestinians has been less an area of genuine concern and more of a
rhetorical device to exploit sympathy for the jihadist cause and draw Muslims
to al-Qaeda's banner.
Over the years, al-Qaeda has worked very closely with a number of militant
groups in a variety of places, including the Salafist Group for Preaching and
Combat in Algeria, Jemaah Islamiyah in Indonesia and the East Turkestan Islamic
Movement in China. However, while one of bin Laden's mentors, Abdullah Azzam,
was a Palestinian, and there have been several Palestinians affiliated with
al-Qaeda over the years, the group has done little to support Palestinian
resistance groups such as Hamas, even though Hamas (as the Palestinian offshoot
of the Muslim Brotherhood) sprang from the same radical Egyptian Islamist
milieu that produced Zawahiri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), which Zawahiri
later folded into al-Qaeda.
Jihadi militant groups such as Jund Ansar Allah have attempted to establish
themselves in Gaza, but these groups were seen as problematic competition,
rather than allies, and Hamas quickly stamped them out.
With little help coming from fellow Sunnis, Hamas has come to rely on Iran and
Iran's Lebanese proxy, Hezbollah, as sources of funding, weapons and training.
Even though this support is flowing across the Shi'ite-Sunni divide, actions
speak louder than words, and Iran and Hezbollah have shown that they can
deliver.
In many ways, the political philosophy of Hamas (which has been sharply
criticized by Zawahiri and other al-Qaeda leaders) is far closer to that of
Iran than to that of the jihadis. With Iran's help, Hamas has progressed from
throwing rocks and firing homemade Qassam rockets to launching the longer range
Grad and Fajr rockets and conducting increasingly effective irregular-warfare
operations against the Israeli army.
Hezbollah's ability to eject Israel from southern Lebanon and its strong stand
against the Israeli armed forces in the 2006 war made a strong impression in
the Middle East. Iran, Hezbollah and Hamas are seen as very real threats to
Israel, while al-Qaeda has shown that it can produce a lot of anti-Israeli
rhetoric but few results. Because of this, Iran and its proxies have become the
vanguard of the fight against Israel, while al-Qaeda is simply trying to keep
its name in the press.
Claiming credit for failed attacks orchestrated by others and trying to latch
on to the fight against Israel are just the latest signs that al-Qaeda is
trying almost too hard to remain relevant.
(This report is republished with permission of STRATFOR.)
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