Almost from the start it seemed clear to me we were witnessing something truly new; a coalition for freebooter violence - part of an emerging era of globalized technique. Not anti-modern, as we believe, but thoroughly tuned to the destructive possibilities of a nearly fully wired, transnational travel enabled modernity.
Here, we continue to talk about and focus on jihad, religious extremism, "cave dwellers" and other reliable explanations to give us something to hold onto - some way of making sense of the thing that's growing with, as Bruce Sterling wrote about a very different subject, "sinister majesty", right before our misunderstanding eyes.
These comforting labels don't convince me. We name it, then pass on, not stopping to consider the accuracy of our descriptions. Something else is taking shape. Nihilism seems nearer to the target though still incomplete. I think Pepe Escobar comes closest so far to getting a fix on the situation.]
Why al-Qaeda is winning By Pepe Escobar
<snip>
The al-Qaeda makeover
Al-Qaeda is more of a multi-headed hydra than ever: the "global" head plus the "local" heads. "Global" al-Qaeda includes groups of multinational operatives striking in the US (as in September 11) or in Western Europe (Madrid's train blasts). These are above all Arab-Afghans, remnants of the jihad of the 1980s against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. "Local" al-Qaeda on the other hand strike in their native countries against Western targets (for example in Casablanca, Bali and Istanbul): these are all part of the big al-Qaeda franchising.
The "historic" al-Qaeda is itself split in two: bin Laden's faithfuls, who have followed him since the Peshawar, Pakistan, days for more than two decades; and the new breed who "graduated" in Afghanistan from 1997 to 2001. Many of bin Laden's faithful have been killed or captured - in essence by Pakistani, not US, forces: they include Mohammed Atef, Abu Zubayda, Suleiman Abu Graith and the alleged mastermind of September 11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
For a long time Western intelligence was prone to propagate the myth of al-Qaeda as a pre-September 11 organization with many heads, with sleeping cells occasionally galvanized into action. This is false. Al-Qaeda as a rule waits for no one - unless technical glitches occur, and these usually involve delays in recruitment, research, team-assembling and elaborate counter-security measures. The delays also prove that al-Qaeda is much less of a well-oiled organization than the Bush administration would like the world to believe.
Al-Qaeda subscribes to no political strategy, other than the strategy of total opportunism: as any kind of attack can happen any time, anywhere, it rules by fear - while at the same time demonstrating it is immune to any large-scale US war, from Afghanistan to Iraq. The rule-by-fear tactic also serves the Bush administration well, as fear is constantly used as a powerful political argument to justify the administration's policies ("Be afraid, be very much afraid, but you can count on us to protect you").
Unlike the Bush administration's spin, European intelligence experts in Brussels assured Asia Times Online that the Madrid bombing was only accidentally tied to Spain's national elections. It was not the case that "Spaniards had bowed to terror" (Washington's version), but that Bush ally Jose Maria Aznar's conservative government was mendacious enough to lie to the country, blaming Basque separatists when it already had evidence to the contrary.
[...]
full at -
<http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FI11Ak03.html >