The al Qaeda PR campaign

Belmont Club:

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Al-Qaeda was above all a popularizer of ideas. It was a creature of a the global consciousness, a presence on every scene. If al-Qaeda were a demon then the thing it sought to possess was the front page. But what exactly was it that Bin Laden was selling, Kilcullen asked himself: was it Islam? It was more eclectic than that.

Just before the 2004 American elections, Kilcullen was doing intelligence work for the Australian government, sifting through Osama bin Laden’s public statements, including transcripts of a video that offered a list of grievances against America: Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, global warming. The last item brought Kilcullen up short. “I thought, Hang on! What kind of jihadist are you?” he recalled. The odd inclusion of environmentalist rhetoric, he said, made clear that "this wasn’t a list of genuine grievances. This was an Al Qaeda information strategy."

Just as al-Qaeda was present in the local politics of a tribe in Waziristan, so too did it haunt Washington, DC.

Bin Laden shrewdly created an implicit association between Al Qaeda and the Democratic Party, for he had come to feel that Bush’s strategy in the war on terror was sustaining his own global importance. Indeed, in the years after September 11th Al Qaeda’s core leadership had become a propaganda hub. "If bin Laden didn’t have access to global media, satellite communications, and the Internet, he’d just be a cranky guy in a cave," Kilcullen said.

But what was the connection between the global themes of Osama Bin Laden and the particulars of every place and clime? What held joined al-Qaeda's global vision and the local grievances together, Kilcullen reasoned, was that the former provided a rationale for the latter. The young and discontented all wanted to be part of a rebellion that would change the world. Bin Laden would provide the justification for universal adolescence to rise in rebellion against the global adulthood.

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And there was certainly other anecdotal evidence to support the theory of "disaggregation". Western observers may have failed to understand that the Islamic Courts Union was making itself very unpopular in Somalia because it banned women from public in a country where women were the chief breadwinners. Others noted how the Islamic prohibition on the traditional narcotic of khat, much more than any political reason a Western academic could understand, condemned the imams in the sight of the populace. Diplomats may understand radical Islamism in terms of geopolitics, but the tribesman may weigh it in the scales of his livelihood. It is easy to say "your task is to become the world expert on your district," but how does America, the epitome of the modern state with huge bureaucracies and a gigantic military establishment, actually do this? How does it re-engineer itself to fight wars locally instead of with big battalions and aid programs. The answer, apparently, is only with great difficulty....

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There is much more. It should be recognized that al Qaeda and its allies are not a popular movement. They are a movement based on intimidation and fear where ever they are in control, be it the Taliban or the Islamic Courts. In many ways they are the equivalent of Saddam's Iraq with a religious veneer. This seems to be a consistent pattern in many Muslim countries where corporal punishment is used as the primary negative inducement to follow rules that make little sense.

Kilcullen's greatest insight, in my opinion, is to see the public relations aspect of the enemy campaign. Even the enemy's kinetic attacks are based more on their PR aspects than any military significance. There is no military reason for deliberately killing non combatants. None. The killings are part of a media strategy, which the western and Arab media have compliantly followed. Rather than covering these atrocities as the serial war crimes that they are, they are critical of the US and the Iraqi government for not stopping them. By giving them this type of compliant coverage the media is actually complicit in the murders. Without the coverage there would be no reason to engage in mass murder of non combatants.

The biggest US failure in the war has been its inability to respond to the campaign in the media battle space. It needs a media war room like that used in political campaigns to relentlessly respond to the enemy media strategy. While the Bush administration has tried to bring a "new tone" to the debate in Washington, it is a mistake to extend that to al Qaeda's political public relations campaign.