Devolving Engagement with Al Qaeda

Ram Manikkalingam and Pablo Policzer *

Despite the overthrow of the Taliban regime and the expulsion of Al Qaeda from its base in Afghanistan, more than six years on the United States’ war against Al Qaeda has reached a stalemate. Osama bin Laden remains at large, Al Qaeda has not been defeated, and there is growing speculation about the possibility that the organization can be defeated, at least in the near term.

Opposition to the United States and support for Al Qaeda have both increased over the past several years. Moreover, Al Qaeda has learned how to disperse and survive in response to US military pressures and is arguably a more formidable adversary that is harder to annihilate than in the past.

The stalemate with Al Qaeda has prompted two types of responses. First, some argue that Iraq is a distraction which takes US national security attention away from the focus on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. They suggest that the current US approach, especially toward Iraq, has multiplied the number of enemies poised against it thereby weakening its position in the world and undermining its own citizens’ security. To win the War on Terror, in other words, the US must fight smarter against Al Qaeda, and root out Osama bin Laden and his cohorts instead of getting bogged down in Iraq.

Others have argued that instead of fighting Al Qaeda, the US should consider entering into political negotiations with it. In this view, Al Qaeda is not an apocalyptic cult as it is sometimes portrayed but a rational actor with clear political demands. Some of these demands – such as complete withdrawal of the United States from the Middle East – may be incompatible with the US’s goals, but because Al Qaeda pursues rational goals, it is possible to at least consider engaging it politically. The argument here is that such political engagement offers more promise than a prolonged military standoff.

In contrast to both of these positions, we argue that Al Qaeda’s dispersion needs to be taken more seriously as a political, military, organizational, and analytical challenge. Paradoxically, the same dispersal strategies that have allowed the centre of Al Qaeda to survive by making it harder to target militarily, make it easier to bypass politically. In other words, the very adaptation strategies that have led to the calls for talking to Al Qaeda – its flexibility and resilience – are also the strongest reason for not doing so at its centre. Instead, we argue, engagement should take place at the periphery.

Devolving engagement in this way requires disaggregating demands, evading global divides, and multiplying local and regional responses. Understanding the organizational, political, and military challenges of engaging Al Qaeda will shed light on the more general challenge of engaging armed groups. Al Qaeda is not the exception to this challenge (a position implicitly shared by the advocates of military as well as political engagement of Al Qaeda at the center), but the latest, if most complicated, instance of it.
Seen this way, the conflict between Al Qaeda and the United States with its allies begins to look less like a global clash between two formidable opponents, and more like a series of overlapping local, national, and regional conflicts with multiple players -- some more connected than others.

Similarly, Al Qaeda begins to look less like a single transnational terrorist organization capable of carrying out devastating attacks anywhere in the world, and more like a number of armed groups that are more or less allied to one another (as well as to some states), confronting and combating a number of states that are more or less allied with one another (as well as to some armed groups). These conflicts are more numerous than the single contest of the United States against Al Qaeda, but they are also conceivably more amenable to resolution. This is because some of these armed groups may themselves be more willing to resolve their conflicts, and because we are more familiar with the tools — security, military, political, humanitarian and economic — that can be applied locally, nationally, and regionally in such cases.

Building on this notion, the focus of our attention should not be a single Al Qaeda center, albeit with many peripheries. It should be multiple centers and peripheries, with varying degrees of attachment to Al Qaeda and to Osama Bin Laden, and with varying degrees of commitment to political, ideological, or social projects espoused by different armed groups in each context. Each of these problems can and should be disentangled from the singular divide between Islam and the West that the conflict with Al Qaeda would suggest and instead addressed autonomously on their own terms.

All of these challenges are familiar to us, not because we have always been successful in addressing them, but because we have dealt with them before in other parts of the globe. Dealing with the respective elements of the divide between Islam and the West (such as democratic transition, immigration, pluralism, and institution-building) will help us acknowledge that there may be a whole to it as well. Since the whole of this divide is unlikely to be greater than the sum of the conflicts that make it up, it makes little sense to focus on the whole at the expense of the parts.

Moreover, instead of being limited to the kind of high-level politics that some observers suggest should characterize the engagement with Al Qaeda, once the peripheries are taken seriously, engagement looks quite different. There is, of course, no reason not to engage the center as well, but in a decentralized organization the peripheries matter. This kind of engagement may or may not involve issues of major international importance such as removing US troops from the Middle East or curbing US support of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. It is likely, however, to involve more mundane local issues and problem solving, which will matter to groups at the peripheries. Among others, these are likely to include basic infrastructural issues such as policing and security, health care, education, and economic development – all of which are key determinants of human security.

Engagement necessarily involves different types of policies, activities, and approaches to problem-solving, including the appropriate application of coercive force. Therefore, it is difficult to draw sharp distinctions between negotiations (whether for political or humanitarian ends) and counterinsurgency. Instead of seeing these as sharply dichotomous, it is more useful to think of engagement and force as parts of a continuum of activities and options. Localized problem-solving and political negotiation involves coercive measures to establish order and control as well as a more humanitarian approach to improve the lot of those who happen to live in these conflict zones.

It is not possible in a brief essay to provide any more than a few suggestions about approaching the various complex challenges involved in this engagement. What is beyond doubt is that the time has come to devolve our engagement with Al Qaeda, and to shift our focus from its center to its periphery. In doing so, we will begin to address the challenges posed by armed groups in general, regardless of their connections to Al Qaeda and its affiliates.

This article is based on a longer paper, "Al Qaeda, Armed Groups, and the Paradox of Engagement" , published in September 2007 by theTransnational and Non-State Armed Groups Project web portal, operated by the program on Humanitarian Policy and Conflict Research at Harvard University. See also the authors' "Talk or Fight? Al Qaeda from Centre to Periphery" , Oslo Forum (2007), and "Al-Qaida: from centre to periphery," openDemocracy.net.

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* Ram Manikkalingam is an advisor to the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, and a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam.
  Pablo Policzer is an assistant professor and holder of the Canada Research Chair in Latin American politics at the University of Calgary.