Will the Jihad Ever Catch Fire?

To Osama bin Laden and the other radical militants of jihad, Sept. 11, 2001, was a gigantic provocation, a great blast meant to free their movement from the spiral of political decline that had ensnared it since the early 1990s. But if the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon demonstrated remarkable technological, financial and practical agility, they did not achieve the political expansion the militants had sought--quite the contrary. The extremist supporters of the U.S. attacks have posted a disastrous record during the past year. In their principal objective--to mobilize the Muslim masses behind a victorious jihad that would overthrow existing regimes and replace them with Islamic states--the extremists have failed utterly.

To say they have failed seems particularly contrarian when so much attention on bin Laden and his followers in the past year has finally granted them the stature they crave. And their failure was by no means a given. Not so long ago, the jihadists appeared to be moving from one success to another: first the Iranian revolution in 1979, then the successful guerrilla war that forced the Soviet army from Afghanistan in 1989. But in Saudi Arabia following the Gulf War, for example, a rupture appeared between moderate Islamists--those of the pious middle classes imbued with conservatism--and the more radical movements that view the Wahhabi kingdom as a U.S. protectorate that must be destroyed. In the first half of the 1990s, radical fighters sought to repeat the Afghan victory by making jihad in Bosnia, Egypt and Algeria. As the host states took repressive measures to smash them, however, these militant groups saw their support from the masses decay. By 1997 a number of exiled leaders of Egypt's al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, or Islamic Group--responsible for the assassination of foreign tourists, native Egyptian Christians known as Copts, police officers and politicians--had come to recognize violence against tourists as a dead end and publicly renounced the practice. The group has not conducted an attack inside Egypt since 1998. Likewise in 1997, one of the Islamist factions waging a civil war in Algeria called for a truce after five years. And mujahedin in Bosnia lost all hope of transforming that nation's ethnic war into a jihad after the signing of the Dayton peace accord in 1995. They were forced to leave the country without seeing their radical fervor infect the local population.

It was within this context of failure that the networks to which bin Laden had lent his name and image began a strategy of substitution. The strategy involved focusing on purely terrorist activities by small groups and striking highly symbolic targets, especially American interests in the Arabian peninsula: the 1995 car bombing of a U.S.-run training facility for the Saudi National Guard in Riyadh, which killed five Americans; the destruction of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000. The enormous media impact of these operations was designed to demonstrate that America was not invincible and to renew popular support for militant Islam. But the attacks had only limited consequences and did not destabilize pro-Western regimes to any degree or permit radicals to seize power.