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  Seven Years after 9/11: How Dangerous Is Al-Qaida?

Seven Years after 9/11 How Dangerous Is Al-Qaida?

By Yassin Musharbash

Part 8: Magnus Ranstorp, Sweden: "The West Still Finds it Difficult to Understand al-Qaida"

The British government recently described al-Qaida as a security problem but not a strategic threat. Al-Qaida does not have the sufficient quantitative or qualitative possibilities to completely shut down the functions of the society or the country. I agree. At the moment al-Qaida is a terrible annoyance that one has to live with but not a strategic threat -- at least as long as al-Qaida does not manage to get its hands on weapons of mass destruction or to paralyze the New York financial district with a dirty bomb.

Of course, al-Qaida is going to continue trying to do exactly that. And the al-Qaida leadership is still very influential, having forged strong ties with the Pakistani Taliban. On the one hand, al-Qaida is today somewhat weakened by the measures taken against it after 9/11 but also because the terror network has to increasingly justify its brutal deeds. On the other hand, there are clearly new al-Qaida branches and new regions where the network is gaining in strength, for example, in the Horn of Africa, Yemen or North Africa.

I assume that al-Qaida will surprise us with attacks in the future, attacks that we have not prepared for. Will they sink a ferry? Attack a chemical plant? The plans for an attack in London that were thwarted last summer -- and that would have destroyed seven passenger airlines -- show that al-Qaida is still contemplating ambitious targets.

And what is al-Qaida today? An organization, a network, a movement? Al-Qaida is all of these things. Some people try to put al-Qaida in one of these pigeonholes. But that doesn’t make sense, because al-Qaida functions and operates on all of these levels.

While the threat that al-Qaida poses is very real, the true danger when it comes to terrorism is, in my opinion, a very different one. It is the way in which terror influences our society: polarization, xenophobia, fear of migrants are the terrible aftereffects of terrorism and are a greater threat than the terror itself.

Even seven years after 9/11, the West sometimes finds it difficult to understand al-Qaida. Al-Qaida has no king who could be overthrown, no checkmate move that just has to be found. In the West we often think in these kinds of chess categories: linearly, structurally, the same way we used to always wage wars. Our idea of victory also derives from this way of thinking. However the Asian game "Go" would really be a more suitable model for the war on terror. In that game, it's not about establishing some kind of victory but, rather, about dominating the battle field.

Magnus Ranstorp is Research Director at the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies (CATS) at the Swedish National Defense College.