Too many in the West persist in seeing al Qaeda as a territorialised West Asian organisation bent on expelling the Christians and Jews from the region in order to create a “Dar al-Islam” (land of Islam) under the umbrella of a caliphate.

al Qaeda is not a continuation of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas or Hezbollah. It is a non-territorial global entity which has never tried to implement an Islamic state, even in Afghanistan, where it found sanctuary in the 1990s.
It is pointless thinking of al Qaeda as a political organisation seeking to conquer and rule a territory. al Qaeda recruits among disenfranchised youth, most of them without direct connections with the embattled countries of West Asia. al Qaeda seeks to hijack existing conflicts and make them part of the global jihad against the West.

However, in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and now Iraq, the Islamist internationalist groups have been unsuccessful in diverting local and national conflicts, playing only the role of auxiliaries. The key actors of the local conflicts are the local actors: the Taliban in Afghanistan, the different Sunni and Shiite groups in Iraq, Hezbollah in Lebanon. These groups are not under the leadership of al Qaeda. The Bosnians got rid of the radical foreign fighters once they achieved their independence; the Taliban rank-and-file refused to die for al Qaeda when the Western forces landed in Afghanistan after 9/11.

In Iraq, many among the Sunnis, including the Salafists, resent not only al Qaeda’s tactics of indiscriminate suicide bombings, but also the strategy of confronting the Shiites. The fact is al Qaeda plays a role in the deterioration of the conflicts but is unable to succeed in coordinating them. Local, national, tribal or sectarian religious channels are stronger.

al Qaeda may recruit some local organisations, acting within a limited area or linguistic region, with their own history. These groups then claim affiliation with al Qaeda.

But these organisations do not need al Qaeda in order to recruit or operate. If they have rallied to it, it is because they have difficulty in defining or achieving a local objective. They become globalised therefore by default.

In short, there may be good reasons for the US to remain in Iraq, but they have nothing to do with al Qaeda; they have more to do with a damage-control operation. If the US troops leave, there might be a civil war, there might be a growing Iranian influence, Iraq might be turned into a battlefield by proxies between Saudi Arabia and Iran. There could be a Sunni-controlled area, a Shiite state and an independent Kurdistan, but no Qaedistan. It would have been better to concentrate the Western forces on Afghanistan, which has been the real cradle of al Qaeda. If only part of the brains and armour devoted to the “surge” in Iraq had been devoted to Afghanistan, instead of the incessant turnover of disparaged NATO troops with little knowledge of the country, things would have been better.

But in Afghanistan, as anywhere else in West Asia, there is no military solution, only a political solution by dealing with the local actors, and dropping the senseless idea of a “global war on terror”.
International Herald Tribune