194 Johns Hopkins University Center for Advanced Governmental Studies and Conflict Records Research Center
Muslims (such as skepticism about the intentions of the United States) but other features that are attractive to very few (such as the commitment to wanton violence). They believe that the movement is adaptive and evolving, but also deeply vulnerable. These findings are both interesting and should be useful to policymakers.
Al-Qaeda’s Past was Not so Rosy If that is the past and present of the jihadist studies community, what do the past and present of the jihadists themselves look like? Several speakers at the conference argued that al-Qaeda’s past was not so rosy when it first appeared. Even Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens’ paper on al-Qaeda’s communication strategy, perhaps the most bullish on the jihadist movement in this collection, notes that senior members of al-Qaeda critiqued the group for poor media efforts during the 1990s.7 Jessica Huckabey took the jihadists’ failures as the topic of her paper on “jihads in decline.”8 Drawing primarily on captured documents, she gives numerous examples of pre-9/11 problems and outright failures on the part of the jihadists. Of course, she gives attention to the debacle that was the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria in the 1990s, rightly saying that “this was a jihad…in a death spiral.” She also highlights the jihadists’ utter failure in Syria in the early 1980s, the subject of a 900-page tome by Abu Musab al-Suri with the evocative title of “Lessons Learned from the Armed Jihad Ordeal in Syria.” She summarizes al-Suri’s lessons pertaining to failures of leadership, failures of strategy and planning, failures to explain goals, failures in recruitment, failure to unify, failures of trust, and failures of security. One might reasonably ask what else the Syrian jihadists could possibly have failed at. These were merely the most dramatic jihadist failures in the past and Huckabey mentions many others and the shortcomings that gave rise to them. To this effect, she quotes al-Suri from a 1999 document as having scathing opinions of just about every jihad of recent decades: Most movements and arenas suffered great and grave defeats: The killing and imprisonment of most of the heads and scholars of the jihad awakening; the scattering of the remainders of its symbolism, its leaders, its intellectuals, and its cadre; chasing them from one place to another all over the world; campaigns of turn-ins, and kidnappings reach the youth of the jihad movement and their supporters.9 Al-Suri is renowned for being cantankerous and contrarian, but Huckabey and other speakers in the conference made clear that his criticisms were echoed by other jihadists. For instance, Huckabey’s presentation touches on a theme some other conference speakers did, as well, namely that Sunni jihadists have had a tendency to put the “military cart before the political horse,” as one anonymous jihadist put it in a captured document.10 This and other failures amounting to a lack of organization have caused the jihadists to repeatedly suffer “huge losses.” As the anonymous jihadist concluded, “a quick look at the results of the Islamic guerrilla wars proves it.”11 Similarly, prominent jihadist leader Abu Walid al-Masri was quite willing to talk about the chaos that prevailed in pre-9/11 Afghanistan.
7 Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, “The Development of al-Qaeda’s Media Strategy and Its Role in Mobilizing Western Muslims,” in Ten Years Later: Insights on al-Qaeda’s Past & Future through Captured Records Conference Proceedings. 8 Jessica M. Huckabey, “Jihads in Decline: What the Captured Records Tell Us,” in Ten Years Later: Insights on al-Qaeda’s Past & Future through Captured Records Conference Proceedings. 9 Ibid. 10 AQ-SHPD-D-000-982, “Historical perspectives of guerrilla war and their relation to jihad and fight against the Soviet occupation,” undated (circa 1980s), Conflict Records Research Center, Washington, D.C. 11 Ibid.