Open Source Terrorism- Cyber Jihad and what it means to the future world order
As I've posted before, after the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan, al Qaeda lost its physical base in the Muslim world; a prerequisite to fulfilling the three stages of the prophet Muhammed's life (Dawa, Hijra and Jihad). Al Qaeda, however, adapted to this loss very quickly and has now become "the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate from physical space to cyberspace." Now the web is al Qaeda's virtual territory. Technology has gotten ahead of the rulesets that govern it, hence al Qaeda's move is merely a continuation of its real world strategy in cyberspace; moving and establishing a presence in places that are either too far, or unreachable for any state to establish any meaningful authority.
According to many reports, including a recent one by Stephen Coll and Susan B. Glasser for the Washington Post, al Qaeda and many other groups sharing its ideological persuasion and goals have created a "massive and dynamic library of training materials" online for anyone who wants to join the jihad to access freely. In many ways it is an open source community for terrorist and guerrilla training, not to mention Islamist indoctrination. The sites they set up contain videos which attempt to replicate the Afghan training experience providing training, ranging from how to conduct a roadside assasination or blow up a car to, according to Michael Scheuer, the training that made the London and Sharm al-Sheikh terrorist operations possible; urban guerrilla operations.
It has recently been reported by Stephen Ulph that would be mujaheeden are now pledging allegiance to al Qaeda on the web. Ulph argues that this new phenomenon is both a show of support and a recruiting poster for jihad since
it calls for the oath to commit the respondent to "allegiance to death… in the very near future," and at the same time sets itself a month to garner statistical information on the number of respondents who would be prepared to actively engage in jihad "so that Osama bin Laden will have an army in Afghanistan, an army in Iraq, and a huge army on a waiting list on the Internet pages."
The Mujaheeden in these pages state that the internet is a battle space for jihad and that it is one of the primary outlets for jihadi propaganda and training. This sentiment was echoed by Kuwaiti Information Minister Dr Anas al-Rashid, who essentially argued at a recent anti-terrorism seminar in London with regard to the role of the media and the internet by terrorist organizations that "the legislative deficiency related to the Arab media and the lack of legislations to hold accountable internet sites" allowed these sites and media outlets to incite and legitimize terrorism.
The materials that make up the emerging e-library of Jihad can be found in many of the major languages of the region, ranging from Arabic, to Pashto to Urdu and many sites argue that "in order to join the great training camps you don't have to travel to other lands...alone, in your home or with a group of your brothers, you can begin to execute the training programs," sounding eerily like the Video Professor or those online GED programs.
In addition, as the article by Coll and Glasser argues, "apart from [their] ideology and clandestine nature, the jihadist cyberworld is little different in structure from the digital communities of role-playing gamers, eBay coin collectors or disease sufferers." This is part of the reason why I've become somewhat dissatisfied with Tom Barnett's assertion that al Qaeda is simply a sympton of disconnectedness (though I myself have used that argument before). Now, I am beginning to see the movement, not so much as wanting to disconnect the Muslim world from the rest of the globalized world, but rather trying to rewire the manner in which globalization itself works; as a type of counter-globalization, where religion, rather than markets and consumerism is the glue that binds the world together. This argument is more in line with that Peter Bergen makes in "Holy War, Inc."
In many ways the internet, although denying al Qaeda a physical territory it needs to fulfill the first stage of jihad (Dawa), allows al Qaeda to do away with the artificially imposed boundaries of the Muslim world giving it a chance to promote the idea of a borderless Ummah. Furthermore, e-Qaeda's (al Qaeda on the internet's) ability to recruit lone would-be terrorists, and organize them into cells to carry out attacks both in the Muslim world and the Western world, as Scott Atran argues in "The Virtual Hand of Jihad" makes it far more dangerous than it has ever been before. Tom Barnett has argued recently that
The fear mongers (typically, experts on terrorism whose stock rises with each elevated pulse they trigger with their warnings) will ALWAYS tell you how these transnationals are redefining everything and making the state superfluous, and they'll be no more correct than when the globalization utopians like Thomas Friedman made it sound like connectivity would trump all (remembering he also gave name to such Super-Empowered Individuals)
meaning that those who believe that al Qaeda or similar groups waging 4GW can play a waiting game because time is on their side in the horizontal scenario they are battling us in are wrong, why? Well, because for Barnett, "Globalization is the ultimate horizontal scenario, the ultimate open-source net." I believe his argument works only insofar as al Qaeda's objective is solely to disconnect the Muslim world from Globalization, because as he says "resistance is futile." The question becomes trickier however, if al Qaeda's goal is not so much disconnecting the region from globalization, as rewiring that globalization to suit its own purposes, in conjunction with removing from power the one actor on the world stage that binds it together; the United States. Of course, the counter to that is that globalization has expanded beyond the point where a single actor is solely responsible for holding it together, and that in order to change or alter it, al Qaeda would need to take on not only the US, but also China, Europe, Japan and other emerging world powers. I am struggling with these questions at the moment, so I thought I would throw them out there to see what if any feedback anyone could give me. I mean, it could also be argued that absent the US's security guarantee Japan would accelerate its militarization, the EU would likely begin to tear itself at the seams, and the world powers would be at each others' throats in no time, but this could just be my own biased view of the world through my belief in American exceptionalism.
One thing is certain, al Qaeda's move to the internet has had many consequences which cannot be discounted, the most troublesome being, what is now being called "the globalization of martyrdom," where suicide operations are no longer carried out to address grievances within one's territory, but rather are "transnational in nature and in their aspirations." This phenomenon can be seen from the operations Michael Scheuer identified above at Sharm al-Sheik and London, to the export of the strategy and tactics used in Iraq to Afghanistan as reported recently by the Washington Post. It is a subject worthy of further exploration and on it depends our strategy to win this misnamed war on terror.
