Thomas Joscelyn:
Editor’s note: Below is Thomas Joscelyn’s testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Terrorism, Nonproliferation, and Trade, on al Qaeda, the nature of the group’s central command and its relationship with its affiliates, and the future challenges the West faces in battling the terror organization.
Chairman Poe, Ranking Member Sherman and members of the Committee, thank you for inviting me here today to discuss the threat posed by al Qaeda. We have been asked to “examine the nature of global al Qaeda today.” In particular, you asked us to answer the following questions: “What is [al Qaeda’s] makeup? Is there a useful delineation between al Qaeda’s core and its affiliates? If so, what is the relationship? Most importantly, what is the threat of al Qaeda to the United States today?”
I provide my answers to each of these questions in the following sections. But first, I will summarize my conclusions:
More than a decade after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks there is no commonly accepted definition of al Qaeda. There is, in fact, widespread disagreement over what exactly al Qaeda is.
In my view, al Qaeda is best defined as a global international terrorist network, with a general command in Afghanistan and Pakistan and affiliates in several countries. Together, they form a robust network that, despite setbacks, contests for territory abroad and still poses a threat to U.S. interests both overseas and at home.
It does not make sense to draw a firm line between al Qaeda’s “core,” which is imprecisely defined, and the affiliates. The affiliates are not populated with automatons, but they are serving al Qaeda’s broader goals. And al Qaeda has dispatched “core” members around the globe. As the 9/11 Commission found, Al Qaeda’s senior leaders have always pursued a policy of geographic expansion. The emergence of formal affiliates, or branches, has been a core al Qaeda objective since the early 1990s. While the affiliates have varying degrees of capabilities, and devote most of their resources to fighting “over there,” history demonstrates that the threat they pose “over here” can manifest itself at any time.
In addition to its affiliates, al Qaeda operates as part of a “syndicate” in Central and South Asia. As former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said in 2010, “A victory for one [member of the syndicate] is a victory for all.” Al Qaeda and its allies control territory inside Afghanistan today. If additional parts of Afghanistan fall to the syndicate in the coming years, it will strengthen both al Qaeda’s ideological messaging and operational capability.
What is al Qaeda?
This should be a straightforward question to answer. But in reality there is no commonly accepted understanding of al Qaeda. Writing in 2003, Bruce Hoffman wrote that there was “[d]isagreement over precisely what al Qaeda is.”1 It is “remarkable,” Hoffman noted, that “al Qaeda remains such a poorly understood phenomenon” even after the 9/11 attacks. Incredibly, any attempt to answer basic questions about al Qaeda’s structure (similar to the ones proposed by this committee), “provokes more disagreement than agreement in government, intelligence, and academic circles.”
Ten years later, Hoffman’s words still ring true. In early 2013, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) commissioned a workshop of experts to assess the future of al Qaeda. CSIS was interested in how al Qaeda will adapt to the “death of Osama bin Laden, the popular uprisings spreading across the Middle East and North Africa, and the global recessionary pressures that are causing governments to re-evaluate their [counterterrorism] strategies.” The final report issued at the conclusion of the workshop reads: “Workshop participants recognized that part of the challenge in imagining AQ’s future lies in the very definition of AQ.” Unsurprisingly, there was a “lack of consensus” among the experts. Echoing Hoffman’s assessment a decade earlier, CSIS found: “How AQ adopts to the challenges and opportunities that will shape its next decade is a source of spirited debate amongst government officials, academic experts, think-tank analysts and private consultants.”2
“At its broadest,” the CSIS report’s authors found, “the phenomenon includes a central group of senior leaders commonly referred to as AQ Core, regional affiliates which together with that core make up the AQ network, like-minded groups in the network’s key operating areas (eg, fellow travelers), homegrown Islamist extremists in Western countries, sympathisers across the globe and the AQ ideology itself.” Despite this complex mix, the workshop’s participants concluded that the “AQ Core and its network affiliates” will have “the most profound” impact “on the broader phenomenon’s future prospects.” For the most part, I concur with the CSIS definition of al Qaeda.
The Al Qaeda Network
The backbone of today’s al Qaeda consists of its “general command” in Afghanistan and Pakistan (others refer to this as the “AQ Core”) and its formal affiliates. The established al Qaeda affiliates include: Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) and its the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), and Shabaab in Somalia. All of the affiliates have publicly sworn bayat (an oath of fealty) to al Qaeda’s senior leadership. Jabhat al Nusra in Syria should also be included in this list as well, because the group has openly proclaimed its allegiance to Ayman al Zawahiri. Collectively, al Qaeda’s general command and the affiliates form an international terrorist network that is focused on both acquiring territory and executing terrorist attacks against the West. There is evidence showing that al Qaeda’s general command guides the overall strategy pursued by the affiliates and even sometimes gets involved in specific tactical matters. However, the affiliates enjoy a large degree of latitude in deciding how to run their day-to-day operations. Relentless pressure from the U.S. and its allies has repeatedly disrupted the network, making the general command’s job more difficult.
In addition to the established affiliates, there are numerous associated jihadist organizations that the Al Qaeda Network either influences or outright directs without officially recognizing the group as an affiliate. Consider two brief examples. In Mali, AQIM has fought alongside Ansar al-Dine (AAD), which was designated a terrorist organization by the State Department in March.3 At the time, the State Department noted that AAD “cooperates closely with” and “has received support from AQIM since its inception in late 2011.” AAD “continues to maintain close ties” to AQIM and “has received backing from AQIM in its fight against Malian and French forces.” Similarly, Boko Haram in Nigeria is not a formal al Qaeda affiliate, but according to the U.S. government the group has maintained ties to three affiliates. “There are reported communications, training, and weapons links between Boko Haram, al Qaida in the Lands of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), al-Shabaab, and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which may strengthen Boko Haram’s capacity to conduct terrorist attacks.”4
