SIVACRACY.NET

I'm a little dismayed at how quickly The Scotsman identified the newest Bali bombing as the work of Al Qaeda. The extent of Al Qaeda's reach, as well as the proper ways of identifying it, have been research interests of mine for a while, and I've written articles specifically on Southeast Asia in this journal issue and this edited volume.

It's not that Jemaah Islamiah, which has quickly and (from what I can surmise) appropriately been labeled the likeliest culprit, is unconnected to Al Qaeda. In a superb 2003 report (note: you must register at www.crisisgroup.org to get access, but registration is free and, in my judgment, this is an indispensable website) that details the history and structure of Jemaah Islamiah, the International Crisis Group argues:

Despite these clear ties, JI’s relationship with bin Laden’s organisation may be less one of subservience, as is sometimes portrayed, than of mutual advantage and reciprocal assistance, combined with the respect successful students have for their former teachers.

I've argued that it's better to think of Al Qaeda as a social movement organization, or rather the ideological and, in some ways, financial core of a much larger movement of Islamist groups whose most important goals are highly local and provincial. I don't mean that they have no global aspirations; indeed, Al Qaeda's language is usually effective because it links local disputes in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Uzbekistan, and elsewhere to a global struggle. Even so, at a certain level, I think all politics is local, and we can't understand a given terrorist act (whether the 2003 Bali bombing or the terrible one last night) without taking into consideration who the local actors are and how they're choosing their targets. I suspect that it's significant that Indonesia has a history of relatively low-level violence directed by Islamic movements (sometimes operating as enforcers for extortion rings) at "impious" institutions such as bars, nightclubs, etc. These attacks were notably carried out by the Islamic Defenders' Front in Jakarta, a group that has reportedly disbanded, but left in its wake a repertoire of violence focusing especially on the kinds of institutions that have now twice been targeted in Bali.

My point is not that these groups aren't dangerous, and it's not that Al Qaeda is somehow irrelevant. But in describing the attack as an Al Qaeda attack, we once again return to the claim that there's somehow a great brain operating in the mountains of Afghanistan/Pakistan, which is strictly directing the minutiae of a global jihad. Remember after the first Bali bombing, when we heard that Al Qaeda was now focusing on "soft targets" like the discos? One could easily describe the first 1993 World Trade Center bombing as an attack on a "soft target," since there wasn't very tight security and it wasn't a government or military installation. The idea that the central organization "decided" to change tactics and now was somehow directing global efforts in a clear and identifiable manner is a difficult one to defend. I mean, I'm not inside Bin Laden's head (thankfully; I've got enough problems dealing with my own shit), but does anyone really believe that he has a cache of explosives and he and his colleagues determined the best place to use them was in a restaurant in Bali?

When journalists and pundits speak (idiotically, in my view) of a transition to "Baby Al Qaedas," indicating that the problem as now spread like a family of snakes, they incorrectly imply that there was a dominating, operational core to begin with. Most likely, there wasn't, at least not in the way that many would believe. The most reputable research on the organization (for example, Gilles Kepel's Jihad) suggests a fractious network of mujahedeen operating out of Afghanistan, with different leaders trying desperately to turn the larger movement toward their own interests (whether in obliterating Israel, toppling the Saudi royal family, attacking DC and NYC, or assassinating Mubarak, inventing less decadent Ben & Jerry's, whatever).

Two more comments from ICG reports.

Within Jemaah Islamiah itself, there are deep doctrinal divisions that seem to affect leaders more than followers, who seem able to cooperate on attacks even when those at the top disagree over tactics:

While it is a mistake to see JI views as monolithic, it is also a mistake to see the divisions as immutable, and cross-cutting fault-lines in the organisation can sometimes bring two people on different sides of one debate into the same camp on another.

and

...training programs, whether Afghanistan, Mindanao or local ones like Cijeruk, are always places where new bonds are forged and lasting friendships made. Alumni of a program are likely to be able to call on fellow alumni for help in times of need, in a way that may strengthen a logistical support network.

Local communal conflicts such as Ambon and Poso serve as important incentives for reactivating old networks and reinvigorating jihadist groups. It is one more reason for trying to prevent simmering tensions from erupting into violence.

In other words, local politics matters a lot. Al Qaeda, particularly because of the size and international reach of its training camps in Afghanistan, has been particularly important in establishing networks between militants, but it almost certainly doesn't "call the shots" in any meaningful operational way in many of the attacks that foreign journalists and pundits ascribe to it.

From a poltical science perspective, I'm not completely satisfied with using "social movement theory" to explain Al Qaeda, because the literature on social movements itself is beset with tensions over the specification of key variables, definitional problems, and occasionally murky causal pathways. But social movement theory, whatever its problems, has yielded a lot of top-notch research over the years, particularly as a heuristic device for grasping the strategies that movement organizations use as well their susceptibility to larger discursive and symbolic environments. And I like social movement theory better than any of the available options from security studies or other frameworks that tend to want to establish Al Qaeda as a threat that can be compared, in some meaningful way, with that posed by an enemy state.

It's possible that members of Al Qaeda's inner circle were involved in this latest atrocity, but I would be very surprised to hear it. And while most of us probably would also assume that local militants were behind the attack, perhaps it's time to start being more careful with how we label Al Qaeda's proper role. I'm hardly trying to get Bin Laden's crew off the hook. But in misspecifying the nature of the threat, we also turn the public's eyes away from potentially effective remedies.