Information Technology and the Future of Al-Qaeda
Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 19:50 From: Abu Aardvark
To unpack the likely impact of changes in information technology on al-Qaeda, I think that it is important to break out two very different types of things al-Qaeda tries to do: terrorism and outreach. IT will affect these two domains very differently. Trends in IT might well strengthen its ability to care out acts of terrorism - whether by AQ Central or by Marc Sageman-style small groups of self-motivated radicals - but at the same time diminish its ability to spread its ideology, frame public discourse in the Islamic world, or assert claims to leadership of Islamist movements. This is particularly the case because the same IT trends which empower al-Qaeda in the "war of ideas" realm are equally available to its main rivals - the Muslim Brotherhood, Arab regimes, traditional Islamic trends, non-jihadist salafis.... and us.
I've argued before that al-Qaeda's grand strategy uses terrorism in the service of a 'constructivist' mission: spreading and deepening Islamic identity among Muslims, defining this Islamic identity in very specific salafi-jihadist terms against the competing definitions offered by other Islamist groups, and establishing that Islamic identity requires costly participation in a very specifically defined jihad. The first stage requires reaching out to a broad, mainstream, non-Islamist audience and convincing them of the reality of a deep existential conflict between Islam and the West. That puts al-Qaeda in conflict with other Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, who offer a very different substantive vision of Islamist identity and strategy. The second requires mobilizing those individuals who have accepted the AQ identity into jihadist action and giving them the tools to act. The outreach / "constructivist" phase involves very different Information Technology components than does the operational / terrorist phase.
One way to think about how AQ will adapt to new information technologies is to look at how they adapted to past innovations. Over the last decade, Arabic satellite television was a key vehicle for the first stage. Al-Jazeera and its counterparts helped bring al-Qaeda's ideas and discourse to a broad public, and to mainstream their ideas of a clash of civilizations. AQ adapted extremely well to the new Arabic TV environment in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Bin Laden was able to reach a mass audience previously unavailable to such ideologues, and at times to dominate the news agenda.
But this has had dramaticallly diminishing returns over the last few years. The fragmentation of the Arab media market and the rise of strong competitors to al-Jazeera, changes in even al-Jazeera's editorial policy (most visible in its coverage of Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and its presentation of AQ videos), the diminishing news value of AQ productions and speeches, and the aggressive counter-AQ campaign waged by (especially) the Saudi media have all reduced the utility of the Arab media for al-Qaeda. At the same time, other Islamist competitors have used the Arab media more effectively, from the Muslim Brotherhood to the popular 'Islam Lite' offered by Amr Khaled. In short, al-Qaeda adapted very quickly and effectively to the satellite television revolution.. but its competitors have caught up, its advantage has diminished, and it is not likely to ever again enjoy the satellite TV advantage it had in the past. Information overload, intense competition and fragmentation, and the increasingly aggressive counter-ideology campaigns all stand in the way.
