Al Qaidas Flawed spawn

The attempted bombing of the Northwest Airlines flight exposes an unresolved tension at the heart of militant Islam

Almost before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was being led down the steps of Northwest Airlines flight 253 he had been linked to al-Qaida. He himself has apparently claimed he was trained and commissioned by an al‑Qaida master bomb-maker in Yemen. Whatever the eventual conclusion about his alleged international mission – a Nigerian living in London, trained in Yemen to blow up US planes – his case should not distract us from the fact that modern Islamic militancy is primarily a local phenomenon, not a global one.

The tension between these two is the unresolved flaw at the heart of the international militant project. Al-Qaida was set up by Osama bin Laden, a Saudi, and a handful of others, many Egyptian, to overcome the disunity among the foreign volunteers who fought with the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets in the 1980s. The global call to arms that Bin Laden issued in the 1990s was only partially effective. In a letter I found in an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan in 2001, a Jordanian volunteer complained that his Algerian, Moroccan and Saudi counterparts kept to themselves even at prayer times.

This parochialism was obscured through the first years of the 9/11 era as bombs exploded from Bali to London and, more recently, as new al-Qaida offshoots were formed. However, beneath this apparent internationalism other elements were present. In many of the major actions, bombers struck within the country – and sometimes within the town – of their birth. Many targets were selected with an international dimension in mind, but many others were not.

One reason conspirators said they bombed the nightclub in Bali in 2002 was that it did not allow locals in. In Morocco, alongside the Jewish targets, a restaurant patronised by the local elite was hit. In Madrid, immigrants struck under a mile from where many of them lived or socialised. There was little international about the targets or the perpetrators of the 7/7 London bombings.

One key shift came in 2006. With its international global jihad increasingly rejected by the Sunni minority in Iraq, al-Qaida there tried to rebrand itself as "the Islamic state of Iraq". When the disparate factions of Pashtun tribesmen formed a coalition in Pakistan's North-West Frontier province in 2007, they called it Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan, the union of Pakistani Taliban, a title that insists on a primarily national identity.

In Yemen and Saudi Arabia in recent years, 90% of the efforts and rhetoric of local militants have been directed against local targets. Al-Qaida in the Maghreb is actually 90% Algerian in composition and agenda. In Indonesia, Jemaa Islamiya, responsible for the Bali bombing, has decided the local situation doesn't justify violent jihad, and it has ceased military operations in the country. Recent attacks in Jakarta were the work of a breakaway group.

Al-Qaida's project is often wrongly portrayed as having roots in the protection of local specificity against a rampant globalisation. In fact, al-Qaida's ideology is as disrespectful of local difference as any other global ideology.

Where the al-Qaida project does coincide with local concerns, the combination is potent. Yet such situations are rare. The problem with "joining the dots" between the countries any individual militant may have visited is that it falsifies the picture by over-emphasising the international dimension. Ultimately, all politics is local. And, whatever the story of Abdulmutallab, we should not let it blind us to the fact that Islamic militancy is no exception.

Jason Burke
CIF Guardian