Columbia International Affairs Online: Working Papers

CIAO DATE: 03/2014

The al Qaeda network: A new framework for defining the enemy

Katherine Zimmerman

September 2013

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

Abstract

The failure to define al Qaeda properly has confused American policy and strategy. The enemy was not just the man shot dead on May 2, 2011, in Abbottabad, Pakistan, nor is it the 1.5 billion Muslims for whom Osama bin Laden claimed to speak. The United States should have sought to answer key questions about the state of al Qaeda after bin Laden’s death and the succession of Ayman al Zawahiri. What is al Qaeda? Is it only the group directly headed by Zawahiri? Or is it more expansive? How is al Qaeda operating today? How do the groups within the al Qaeda network relate to each other and to the core? Answers to these questions are necessary to inform the crafting of a successful strategy to counter the real al Qaeda. The year of Osama bin Laden’s death is the year that the overall al Qaeda network became stronger. The al Qaeda network benefited significantly from the breakdown in governance across the Middle East and North Africa. Affiliates such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), and al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) all expanded their area of operations and exploited openings caused by the Arab Spring’s unrest. Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s new emir, named two new affiliates: al Shabaab in Somalia, which had a robust, though covert, relationship with al Qaeda, and Jabhat al Nusra in Syria, established with the assistance of AQI. American strategy remained focused on degrading the capabilities of the core group in Pakistan even as the al Qaeda network expanded.