Super terrorism after Osama bin Laden

Jihadi thinkers such as Abu Musab al Suri had characterised the 1991 Gulf War as an "earthquake" that shook the jihadi movement. It is not hard to see how the US-Saudi alliance could be construed by someone like bin Laden, with the emphasis on territory derived from the example of Azzam, as a casus belli against both the United States and the now apostate Saudi regime. In Osama bin Laden's construal of jihad, crucially, any American anywhere, both civilian and military, was a legitimate target.

This most expansive conception of legitimate jihadi action does fit the super terrorism narrative.

What is interesting, however, is to observe what has happened to al Qaeda.

The 9/11 attacks had horrified and disgusted the Islamic world as much as it did the rest of the world. Overwhelmingly Muslims rejected bin Laden's jihad and the spike in terrorist violence following 9/11 can be attributed to the invasion and occupation of Iraq rather than an intrinsic attraction toward al Qaeda ideology and strategy. Within Iraq itself the shocking level of violence directed toward Shia Muslims by al Qaeda further alienated whatever reserve of support bin Laden was able to gather following the invasion.

As political revolutions and uprisings, motivated by social and economic grievances, sweep the Arab world it is interesting to see that al Qaeda observes events from afar both impotent and obsolete. US action has severely degraded al Qaeda, to be sure, but such action has had devastating effect because al Qaeda became isolated from the ummah and failed in its objective of using anti American grievances to develop a social movement. In military parlance al Qaeda was cut off from its supply lines and so was ripe for encirclement.

Let us assume for the moment that the approach adopted by Hoffman and others is correct. We should see that even if accurate the events of the past twenty odd years actually reinforce rather than disprove the Jenkins thesis.

Following the Oklahoma bombing there was a discernible drop in support for extremist right wing identity politics in America, now being repeated in Europe post the Oslo killings, Aum Shinrikyo is no longer what it was, and al Qaeda has surely failed.

A key reason for failure in all three cases was that the terrorists were too violent for their own good. They had overstepped the bounds of violence that Jenkins had identified and have accordingly suffered the consequences.

At a minimum, thereby, we can state the following. Even if some of the arguments that appear in the super terrorism literature are correct, nonetheless the trajectory of terrorist groups that moved beyond the terrorist event horizon demonstrates that there does exist very powerful political forces that limit the scope of terrorist violence for all types of terrorist; to move beyond the boundary is to be isolated and crushed.

As such super terrorism did not, and cannot ever become, a new norm.

This conclusion is one of the more important intellectual findings of political science in the last 40 years.