Newsgroup: it.cultura.militare
Titolo: Al Qaeda as Warfighting Entity

Sperando di fare cosa gradita, posto un articolo su Al Qaeda di StratFor 
(articolo che si riceve solo in abbonamento).
Al Qaeda as Warfighting Entity	
By George Friedman
In recent weeks, we have been trying to analyze the state of the 
U.S.-jihadist war, touching on subjects ranging from the decision -- 
announced this past week -- to begin reducing U.S. troops in Iraq to the 
idea that we are in the midst of a surge of jihadist attacks, intended 
to reshape the course of the war.
As often happens, our readers -- mostly non-subscribers, we would note 
-- have lambasted us. Critics of the war have accused us of pimping for 
the Bush administration for daring to imply that the war was anything 
but a total and catastrophic failure. Supporters of the war wrote to 
condemn us for even imagining that al Qaeda might consist of people who 
actually think and plan things, rather than of raving psychotics seeking 
slaughter because they feel like it. One e-mail said the war is the 
result of George W. Bush's unresolved Oedipal conflicts. Another said 
that we were naīve in assuming that all Muslims were not deranged 
killers. Discussions of the war have never been elevated, but they have 
now degenerated to a Warner Brother's cartoon -- with Sylvester, Tweety, 
Elmer and Bugs all cranked up on speed and self-righteousness.
In the midst of this cartoon-like mayhem, one group of quite serious 
e-mails caught our attention and seemed to require serious consideration.
Stratfor has been treating both Iraq and the global U.S.-jihadist 
conflict as a war, understandable by the rules of warfare. We have 
treated this as an asymmetric war in which two sides, using very 
different methods, have engaged in a global duel. If this is so, then 
looking to previous wars will provide us with guidance. As an example, 
we spoke last week of the current offensive as similar to the Battle of 
the Bulge and Tet -- one unsuccessful and one successful military gambit 
to reverse an unacceptable course of events.
A series of thoughtful e-mails arrived, arguing that in thinking in 
terms of conventional warfare -- and these readers regard even the 
unconventional warfare of Vietnam as ultimately conventional -- we are 
fundamentally missing the point about what is happening. The United 
States may be engaging in warfare, but the jihadists are not. As one 
writer put it, al Qaeda is engaged in a kind of theater and is 
indifferent to the outcome in any practical sense. Creating terror is an 
end in itself. Therefore, so long as it can continue to inflict terror 
at some level and with some randomness, it will be satisfied.
Put simply, this argument goes, al Qaeda does not think of itself as 
being in a war but in a permanent confrontation with Christianity, 
Judaism and Hinduism. This is not warfare properly understood because it 
is not politics properly understood. Moreover, another stream went, 
terrorism is not a warfighting strategy but a psychological one. Yet 
others argued that al Qaeda is not sufficiently coherent as an 
organization to be engaged in warfighting and that what the United 
States faces is not a military force but a social movement.
These are good, thoughtful arguments that have some merit. Ultimately, 
however, we think them to be in error.
Karl von Clausewitz wrote that war is the continuation of politics by 
other means. In order for the United States to be engaged in a war with 
al Qaeda, three things seem to be necessary.
1. Al Qaeda must be an entity that is capable of making and enforcing 
decisions. There can be no war without strategy and tactics, and no 
strategy and tactics without a command structure.
2. Al Qaeda must have political goals that are in some sense practical. 
Punishing the infidel is not a political goal: It is not intended to 
achieve a political outcome, nor is it intended to create or influence 
regimes.
3. Al Qaeda must have a warfighting strategy that it is pursuing. Its 
actions must fit into the paradigm of war and make sense from a military 
standpoint.
In our view, all three of these criteria are met. This does not mean 
that al Qaeda will or won't be successful; it simply means that al 
Qaeda's behavior can be properly understood in terms of war.
First, it is true that al Qaeda is not a nation. The history of warfare 
is replete with sub-national groups that have waged wars on the way to 
becoming nations or to taking over a state. What is interesting about al 
Qaeda is that it is not a sub-national grouping but a trans-national 
grouping. Its goals do not involve any one country, but a range of 
countries. What comes to mind is the First and Second Communist 
International, before the Bolshevik Revolution captured revolutionary 
communism for the Soviet state.
In the end, however, the issue is less whether there is historical 
precedent for al Qaeda than whether there is a decision-making structure 
that can guide combatants through the war. There certainly was one on 
Sept. 11, 2001. At this point, that structure appears to be frayed. But 
if it is frayed, that is not due to the nature of al Qaeda but rather to 
the reversals it has suffered. In addition, decision-making must be 
appropriate to a particular battlefield. Whereas the United States may 
require a highly technical command, control and communication system to 
manage its assets on the battlefield, al Qaeda commands sparse forces on 
a global basis in an intensely hostile environment.
The very process of command, control and communication represents the 
Achilles' heel of their system. More precisely, the enemy -- the United 
States -- owns the electromagnetic spectrum. Communications through that 
domain will lead to detection and destruction. This leaves al Qaeda's 
primary path of communication as the movement of humans from one point 
to another to deliver messages. Command and control is dramatically 
slowed by communications. By necessity, operational and tactical control 
devolve to forces in the field. The situation on the global battlefield 
requires that al Qaeda provide only general guidance. That does not 
prevent the waging of a global offensive, planned in general with 
sufficient time for couriers to arrive with instructions. Al Qaeda is a 
warfighting system -- but one that, of necessity, operates by different 
rules than others. Al Qaeda has a command structure and does wage war.
Al Qaeda also has political goals. Indeed, it differs from prior groups 
that used terror tactics by the fact that it embarked on the war with 
political goals. The long-term goal -- creating a caliphate encompassing 
all the lands it deems to be part of the dominion of Islam -- was not 
the immediate goal. Rather, al Qaeda's immediate goal was to increase 
the effective Islamist opposition to existing Muslim regimes to force at 
least one successful uprising. The means toward that end were two-fold: 
First, to demonstrate in the Muslim world the vulnerability of the 
United States -- the patron of many of these existing regimes -- and 
second, to force a response from the United States that would increase 
either contempt or effective hostility among Muslims. If the United 
States refused combat, this would be a sign that it was a paper tiger. 
If it surged into the Islamic world, this would prove the United States 
was the enemy. Either way, al Qaeda thought it would win.
This perspective differs wildly from that of terrorist groups of the 
1970s and 1980s. Consider groups such as the Bader-Meinhof gang in 
Germany, the Weather Underground in the United States or even Black 
September. The first two couldn't state a coherent political program, 
let alone correlate their actions with that program. Black September had 
a goal -- the creation of a Palestinian state -- but there was no clear 
connection between any of its actions and that goal. Killing Israeli 
athletes in Munich was theater.
Al Qaeda had a very clear goal and, from many perspectives, it was not a 
preposterous goal. It wanted governments like that in Egypt to fall in 
an Islamist uprising. It felt that the submerged sentiment in these 
countries favored Islamism, and that -- depending on the behavior of the 
United States -- risings were achievable. Al Qaeda might have been 
wrong, and an element of psychological warfare was present, but in the 
end, the attacks on Sept. 11 and afterward were carefully connected with 
a political goal.
If they made an error, it was only in assuming that genuine 
anti-Americanism and hatred of local regimes supported by the United 
States would translate into effective anti-Americanism that could be 
leveraged to al Qaeda's advantage. Public sentiment matters in 
democratic regimes; it doesn't matter in warfare very much. Consider: 
Most of Europe hated the Germans and their occupation during World War 
II. Anti-German feeling was overwhelming. Nevertheless, this did not 
translate into effective anti-German sentiment. European states were 
never in a position to overthrow German power. That required an external 
intervention. In Vietnam, on the other hand, anti-Americanism proved 
effective: It turned into a warfighting process.
Where al Qaeda miscalculated was in assuming that sentiment would turn 
into effective sentiment. Thus far, except in four Sunni provinces in 
Iraq, that hasn't happened. But that it didn't happen was neither 
pre-ordained nor obvious. Al Qaeda knew what it was doing.
Finally, al Qaeda used a reasonable method of warfighting to achieve its 
aims. Given its intention -- to strike the United States and other 
countries -- and its resources, its only option was to conduct 
counterpopulation operations. Allied bombing of Germany and Japan and 
the German bombing of London constituted counterpopulation attacks. The 
goal was to drive a wedge between the state and population, or cause a 
social breakdown, through mass bombings designed to inflict hardship and 
generate terror among the civilian populace.
Al Qaeda's use of terror attacks suited its strategic goals. The 
organization intended to destabilize the target country, forcing it into 
military actions that would bring the desirable result. Given al Qaeda's 
resources and expertise in covert operations, it had few options other 
than pursuing terror attacks.
At this point, al Qaeda is losing the war from the standpoint of its own 
strategic goals. No Muslim regime has fallen since Sept. 11, save two -- 
Afghanistan and Iraq -- that fell to the United States. The Iraqi 
resistance showed extreme promise for a very long time, given American 
miscalculations. Anti-Americanism had turned effective. However, the 
shifting calculus among the Sunni elders has threatened to undermine 
support for al Qaeda's man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, and the Sunni 
nationalist insurgency -- onto which al Qaeda has clamped parasitically 
-- has been in danger of disruption. This, coupled with serious breaches 
in al Qaeda's global system, forced the group into a desperate 
counteroffensive.
The counteroffensive could be only loosely organized, given the 
difficulties in command, control and communication. Moreover, the 
resources available were local supporters in places such as London who 
lacked the key skills needed for strategic operations -- operations on 
the order of Sept. 11. The counteroffensive may not be over, but thus 
far the attacks appear to be politically ineffective. There has been no 
shift in the basic trends. The center of gravity of the situation now is 
in Iraq, among the Sunnis. As the Sunnis go, so goes the war in Iraq. As 
the war in Iraq goes, so goes the general war in the Muslim world. The 
trend favors the United States, but al Qaeda is attempting to reverse 
that trend.
In short, al Qaeda is very much a warfighting entity. It adheres to the 
general rules of warfare and therefore can be understood and, to a 
limited extent, predicted, on the basis of its political program and 
resources. The outcome of the war is still uncertain, and the level of 
violence is not a measure of anyone's warfighting capability unless you 
know their resources. In warfare, the most intense fighting frequently 
occurs prior to collapse. If the Sunnis in Iraq switch sides -- which is 
one of the things U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld recently 
visited Iraq to try to arrange -- al Qaeda's back will be against the 
wall. The violence will not end, but its significance will decline.
We therefore feel that we can, in fact, understand the U.S.-al Qaeda war 
in relatively conventional ways, so long as we adjust for the asymmetric 
nature of the conflict. In the end, war is simply politics by other 
means. The United States has its means, and so does al Qaeda. But it is 
still war.
--------------------
    Luca Morandini
www.lucamorandini.it
--------------------

Secondo me invece ci sono ottime possibilità che il regime egiziano pro-usa
cada entro l'anno (a seguito delle elezioni che imho porteranno o ad una
situazione simile a quella della Turchia di Erdogan o in caso contrario ad
una rivolta contro il governo) così come si possa verificare una mutazione
genetica del regime saudita. E' proprio ora che inizia il bello, e poi la
situazione Irachena sta favorendo l'Iran più che gli il che non vuol
necessariamente dire che sia una vittoria per i jihadisti, ma una sorta di
risultato si. Che al qaeda stia mettendo in difficoltà la posizione degli
usa nel mondo non è discutibile, che questo voglia dire portare al potere i
talebani in tutto l'islam non è affatto vero. 
-- 
You_fuck_with_the_bull-You_gonna_get_the_horns

 Al Qaeda as Warfighting Entity
visti i profondi legami tra Bush e sauditi io il titolo l'avrei corretto
cosi' : Al Qaeda as Washington Entity  <g>
-- 
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