The Al Qaeda Franchise
October 4, 2010
“What I’d like to tell you today is a story of change,” said William Braniff, the director of external education for the Combating Terrorism Center at The United States Military Academy at West Point. “The global jihad has evolved.”
With these words, he began his September 30 lecture to an auditorium of University of Chicago students. Co-sponsored by the Harris School and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the event, titled “Global Jihad: Adaptation and Evolution,” shed light on how Al Qaeda has become decentralized since its 2001 New York City attack, and how this has altered 2010 U.S. counter terrorism strategies.
Established with private funding in 2003, the Combating Terrorism Center provides education research and policy analysis to combat threats to the United States, focusing primarily on issues surrounding terrorism, counter terrorism, homeland security, and weapons of mass destruction.
“Al Qaeda is story of both adaptation as well as continuity,” continued Braniff, a graduate of West Point. “Its continuity, its ability to persist, to continue doing what it does over 22 years, has allowed Al Qaeda to drive evolutionary change at the global level.”
But while its goal “to sever ties between Muslim world and the West” has remained constant for more than two decades, how Al Qaeda functions today has morphed into something far more decentralized and evasive, Braniff explained.
Al Qaeda was founded in the 1980s to recruit and train foreign fighters from 40 different countries and deploy them in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. Now, instead of training camps and indoctrination, its “core”—the estimated 100 to 200 members havened at the Afghanistan-Pakistan boarder—is more likely to enable violence through consulting, informing, and financing other affiliate or associated organizations around the world.
There are also unaffiliated individuals, who simply self-identify as Al Qaeda. “They act in the name of Al Qaeda having never met anyone in the organization,” Brandiff explained, allowing Al Qaeda to claim credit for an attack they neither planned or executed.
Not only has this made U.S. counter terrorism strategies based on group membership obsolete, Braniff says this evolutionary change has led to more violence. “The kind of acceptable tactics increases, the kind of acceptable targets increases, the barriers to entry are lower, the constraints on violence are thrown off,” he said “Jihad has, in effect, become globalized.”
“It’s a franchise,” agreed Alex Galloway, another West Point graduate, during a Q&A session following the lecture moderated by Associate Professor Ethan Bueno de Mesquita. “Al Qaeda is a brand; it is an idea, as much as it is an organization.”
Questions from the audience shifted the conversation to how anti-Islamic sentiments in the West—from veil-banning in France to uproar over the lower Manhattan mosque and Koran burning threats—have only assisted a decentralized Al Qaeda in recent years. According to the Combating Terrorism Center, 25 percent of all jihadist cases that occurred in the U.S. happened last year alone.
Educating the American public on the difference between Islam and Al Qaeda is crucial to preventing more attacks on American soil, the panel insisted. This is especially true as U.S. troops continue to withdraw from the Iraq and Afghanistan in coming years, and perceptions of “western oppression” become less ostensible to the Muslim world, they said.
During their trip to Chicago, Braniff and others from the Combating Terrorism Center partnered with the FBI’s local field office to educate first responders and the metropolitan law enforcement community on these issues.
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