To overcome terrorism, political solutions are needed, worked out with local jihadists
The French scholar, Olivier Roy, gives many hints on how this can be done: Afghanistan and Mali provide proof that counterinsurgency that relies on armed force alone does not work. The armed groups need to be re-engaged in the game. Why is such re-engagement necessary: Islamist movements that have a base in society and mobilising power will not be weakened by counter-terrorism measures and military operations alone. Few have asked themselves two other questions either: How could the Taliban take control of the Afghan capital without firing a single shot? And: Have the Taliban ever been directly involved in an act of violence outside the country?
THE TWO FACES OF JIHAD
After the return of the Taliban, the West fears becoming the target of Islamist attacks again. But those who view the tensions in Afghanistan or Mali solely in terms of international terrorism fail to appreciate the complexity of local conflicts.
by Olivier Roy
Today, everything that happens in the Islamic world is very quickly linked to the problem of terrorism: After the fall of Kabul on 15 August, the media and many observers kept asking whether Islamist attacks could now be expected to increase again in the world after the return of the Taliban to power.
However, few have asked themselves two other questions: How could the Taliban take control of the Afghan capital without firing a single shot? And: Have the Taliban ever been directly involved in an act of violence outside the country?
It is true that they provided Osama bin Laden with shelter from 1996 to 2001, for which they paid with their removal from power after a war that lasted only a few weeks. But they were never accused by the Americans of being privy to the preparation of the attacks of 11 September 2001 in New York and Washington.
This focus on armed violence makes it difficult to understand the phenomenon of radicalisation, as well as the processes that lead to a terrorist actually taking action. This is because it assumes a continuity from religious radicalisation to the proclamation of jihad to international terrorism - as if these were necessarily successive steps.
Those who think this way assume that every reference to the Sharia and every call for holy war is a harbinger of attacks on a global scale.
For the West's political dealings with Islamist movements, the presumed proximity of these movements to terrorism thus becomes the only criterion. And this proximity, in turn, is defined by the "degree of intensity" of the religious frame of reference - perhaps to an even greater extent than by the actual extent of the use of violence.
Lessons from Syria, Mali and Chechnya
The rule of thumb is: the more often an Islamist group talks about Sharia, the more strongly it challenges the policies of the major powers and the greater the terrorist threat it poses. From this derives the principle of preventive war: one attacks the Islamists before they take action.
Anyone who takes a closer look at jihadist movements will realise: This supposed continuity is, firstly, implausible and, secondly, leads to slipping into territorial wars that are, at best, futile and, at worst, result in local conflicts becoming internationalised and manifesting themselves in forms of global jihadism.
Such a framework of analysis also blocks any political approach that would make it possible to circumnavigate the impasse of terrorism and bring armed groups back into the game. The answer to the question why such a re-engagement should be necessary is simple: Islamist movements that have a base in society and mobilising power will not be weakened by counter-terrorism measures and military operations alone.
Afghanistan and Mali provide proof that a counterinsurgency strategy that relies solely on armed force does not work. The same applies to the strategy of keeping the radical forces in check until a stable, democratic rule of law capable of good governance has been established. All attempts in this direction have failed.
And hardly anyone asks about the reasons for these disappointing experiences. At best, culturalist arguments are put forward: The rule of law, they say, is a Western model that is not suitable for Muslim societies. This overlooks the fact that many of these societies - including Afghanistan's - do have their own state tradition, which could pave the way for a constitutional state.
Terrorism is, of course, a reality. Al-Qaeda has made it its sole reason for being, and the Islamic State (IS) has systematically linked it to jihad. However, jihad is not inseparable from terrorism - neither theologically (there is an Islamic legal tradition that regulates the use of force) nor politically (the Afghan mujahideen never attempted international acts of terrorism against Soviet targets).
The idea that terrorism is a reaction against the armed interventionism of the West in the Middle East (this is how al-Qaida has always argued) is not wrong, but it falls short. It does not provide an explanation for why different wars provoked very different reactions - why, for example, the war in Chechnya, where the West was not involved, and the Bosnian war, where Nato fought alongside Muslims, provoked greater solidarity among young radicalised Europeans than the war in the Sahel, where the French army has been deployed since 2012.
So one has to look more closely. There is no automatic link between local jihad and international terrorism. The Taliban, for example, have never exported violence from Afghanistan to other countries, and most of the indiscriminate attacks against civilians or against Shiites in Kabul during the 20-year US presence have been claimed by jihadist groups, as most recently by the local offshoot of IS after the 26 August attack at Kabul airport.
Even more astonishing is the case of Mali. Although France is fighting on the front line against terrorist groups in the Sahel and its army loudly celebrates its own hunting successes against terrorists - as recently after the killing of Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, the emir of the Islamic State in the Grand Sahara (État islamique dans le Grand Sahara, EIGS) -; although the Malian state is kept afloat by Paris and, moreover, there is a colonial history: So far, no terrorist feels motivated by the French presence. How can that be?
When it came to their motivation, almost all perpetrators talked either about Syria or Iraq (like Salah Abdeslam, who has been on trial since 8 September as the main suspect in the Paris attacks of 13 November 2015). Or from the French authorities' backing for the weekly Charlie Hebdo and its publication of the Muhammad cartoons.
Malian immigrants in France are not very numerous, and they belong to ethnic groups that do not participate in jihad. And there is no major terrorist mobilisation among immigrants from Iraqi cities like Fallujah or Mosul either.
But why do so many young people from the second generation of Maghreb immigrants become active for Syria and Iraq and not for the Sahel, even though it is geographically closer to their parents' homeland? Why do converts from Normandy, Brittany or Reunion never refer to Mali, but always to Iraq or Syria, where French forces played a secondary role? So far, the French war in Mali has not motivated any terrorist to carry out an attack on French territory.
The solution to the puzzle is to distinguish between local and global jihad, although there can be overlaps between the two.
A local jihad means that a group wants to establish an Islamic emirate on a certain territory, where Sharia law applies and where an emir is at the head.
The only group that has recently proclaimed a caliph - i.e. a leader of the ummah, the world community of Muslims - is IS.
The local organisations develop their activities primarily in tribal areas in the broader sense.1 They are the product of local tensions and shifts in power, whereby various factors can play a role: Retaliatory acts of subordinate clans against the tribal aristocracy, conflicts over water and land, the inability of the state to tackle corruption and violence, and the rise of new generations that are more "culturally uprooted", i.e. have distanced themselves from traditional rules and customs.
Not to mention that Islam is invoked to overcome local fragmentation and deny legitimacy to the state, but also to other institutions such as clan chiefs, tribes and religious brotherhoods.
Everywhere, from northern Nigeria to Mali, Chad and Sudan, Egypt's Sinai, Yemen and northeastern Syria to the Afghan and Pakistani tribal areas, the emergence of jihadist groups has always had its roots in the political anthropology of the societies concerned.
The emergence of local jihads preceded and accompanied the rise of the globally active organisations al-Qaida and IS.
Both groups share the same analysis: victory can never be merely local, because either the liberated territories are quickly reconquered or the new state entity renounces the global jihad in order to secure recognition by the major powers. First, therefore, the West must be brought to its knees so that there is any chance at all of uniting the various emirates into a single entity.
Faced with this logic, the local jihadists must decide whether to retain their independence (as the Taliban will do) or to attach themselves to one of the two organisations by swearing allegiance to the Emir of al-Qaeda or the IS Caliph. Such as the Algerian Salafist group AQMI or Ansar Bait al-Maqdis in Sinai.
This strategy has an advantage and a disadvantage: if they internationalise, they not only strengthen their legitimacy vis-à-vis any domestic rivals, but can also take volunteers from abroad into their ranks and thus better intimidate the rest of the population; on the other hand, internationalisation entails the risk of military intervention from outside.
Is international terrorism at an end?
In the choice between al-Qaida and IS, personal connections may of course play a role, for example if local leaders have participated in previous wars. But above all, it has to do with different ideas about the relationship between Islam and territory.
Al-Qaida has always rejected the territorial option and considered the Islamic emirates merely as a place of refuge: Bin Laden swore allegiance to Mullah Omar, the emir of the Taliban, and not vice versa. His organisation did not interfere in the political system established by the Taliban; it even served the Taliban domestically by assassinating their main opponent Ahmed Shah Massud (9 September 2001), also in order to have a free hand for their global terror project.
From bin Laden's point of view, the global jihad was superior to the territorial projects. In June 2013, his successor Aiman al-Sawahiri condemned the founding of the "Islamic State in Iraq and Syria" by Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The al-Qaida leadership saw territorialisation as a trap that risked provoking a massive attack by professional armies with unchallenged air supremacy. Further developments were to prove them right.
The IS is and remains the only organisation that has combined territorialisation and globalisation by, on the one hand, taking up the tradition of the local emirates and, on the other, inheriting the legacy of al-Qaida and perpetrating acts of terror through suicide bombers. The caliphate proclaimed in June 2014 was thus a synthesis of global and local action: The IS linked every territorial gain with terror campaigns in the West, partly because it assumed that this would make the public there critical of the military interventions against the caliphate.
In addition, the IS waged a blitzkrieg in the Middle East in the hope that the regimes would collapse of their own accord. However, this strategy did not prove to be viable: By expanding its territory more and more, disregarding borders, initiating an ideological purge and eventually turning against local factions and especially the tribes that may have welcomed it kindly in the beginning, the organisation accelerated its own decline.
Moreover, the IS's long-term calculus contained an assumption that was to prove wrong: The US army did not get bogged down as in Iraq and Afghanistan, but withdrew as soon as the caliphate was defeated and handed over the reins of action to the Shiite militias and Kurdish forces.
In the meantime, even though the threat of assassination in the West remains significant, international terrorism seems to be running out of steam; after dominating the scene for more than 20 years. Between 1995 and 2015, the profile of terrorists active in the West has not changed at all: From Khaled Kelkal - who was involved in the 1995 series of attacks in France - to Salah Abdeslam, they were almost without exception second-generation immigrant Muslims or converts.2
After 2016, the profiles became more disparate: the attacks bore a more individual signature and appeared more improvised. The motivation of the perpetrators was no longer so clearly discernible and was decoupled from the major strategic issues of global jihad.
This development suggests that global jihad was never particularly deeply rooted in society. In France, for example, the "terrorists" have no social base: therefore, their suicidal attitude and better police cooperation and security technology make them reasonably easy to defeat.
So one can certainly speak of a decline of the global jihad, but not of a decline of the local jihads. This is shown by the victory of the Taliban as well as the difficulties France is facing in Mali. Such territorialised conflicts must no longer be seen as mere sideshows of a globalised holy war, but on the contrary as processes deeply rooted in the societies in which they take place.
The perspective of political anthropology can help here: All local jihads that endure are not content with killing or establishing a reign of terror. The Taliban owe their influence mainly to the fact that they are able to resolve micro-conflicts (over land and water or because of blood feuds and so on).3 And the jihadist back-and-forth in the Sahel can only be seen through if one understands that the jihadists intervene in existing conflicts that the states are unable to control (land, water, ethnic and social tensions).
These local conflicts attract few foreign volunteers and cannot provide what was the greatest force of al-Qaeda and the IS: the creation of a grand millenarian narrative that elevated young radical internationalists who broke with society into heroes of a new world.
The history of the Taliban, as well as of the dissident Al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria Hai'at Tahrir al-Sham, shows that local jihads are subject to political constraints that can lead them to negotiate and "territorialise" within a framework acceptable to the international community (respecting borders, renouncing global terrorism).
This is precisely what the Taliban have done, thus teaching a lesson to both jihadists of all stripes and their opponents: the lesson that there are no military victories, only political ones.
1 The starting point for our analysis of this phenomenon of local emirates was a study of the self-proclaimed "Islamic State of Afghanistan", which had formed in Nuristan in the west of the country in 1985. See Virginie Colombier and Olivier Roy (eds.), "Tribes and Global Jihadism", Oxford (Oxford University Press) 2018.
2 See Olivier Roy, 'You love life, we love death', Munich (Siedler) 2017.
3 See Adam Baczko and Gilles Dorronsoro, "Taliban - the unknown enemy", LMd, September 2021.
Translated from the French by Andreas Bredenfeld
Olivier Roy is professor of political science at the European University Institute in Florence.
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