Debates and disputes among analysts in august intellectual journals primarily engage the cognoscenti. Rarely, though, does the debate ripple beyond the realms of theory or have a direct impact on fundamental policy decisions. The publication of the book Leaderless Jihad, Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008) earlier this year, however, and the sparks it’s set off in counter-terrorist analyst circles may be a major exception to this rule. Click here for information about the book. 

Though the debate thus far has taken place on the printed pages of publications still largely off the radar screen of popular media, the issues opened up by the debate, specifically over the question of “What is the nature of Al Qaeda as a global threat?” and whether it should be be seen (and taken on) as a unified global movement or as a series of individualized essentially disconnected jihadist threats. 

Eschewing standard scholarly niceties Leaderless Jihad author Mark Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former CIA case officer, is not coy about his intent to take on the dominant view of the counter-terror establishment which models global terrorism, however ostensibly decentralized its operations, as nonetheless a cohesive, coordinated top-down movement. 

“Since Sept. 11, 2001,” he writes in "The New Generation of Terrorists", an excerpt from the book published in Foreign Policy, “ the threat confronting the West has changed dramatically, but most governments still imagine their foe in the mold of the old al Qaeda.” Instead, he argues,“ The enemy today is not a product of poverty, ignorance, or religious brainwashing. The individuals we should fear most haven’t been trained in terrorist camps, and they don’t answer to Osama bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahiri. They often do not even adhere to the most austere and dogmatic tenets of radical Islam. Instead, the new generation of terrorists consists of homegrown wannabes—self-recruited, without leadership, and globally connected through the Internet. They are young people seeking thrills and a sense of significance and belonging in their lives.” 

The new generation of terrorists, Sageman believes, is unlike either the first wave to join Al Qaeda, the Afghan Arabs who came to Pakistan and Afghanistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s, or second wave of elite expatriates from the Middle East who went to the West to attend universities and then traveled to Al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s. 

This “third wave”, he writes, “consists mostly of would-be terrorists, who, angered by the invasion of Iraq, aspire to join the movement and the men they hail as heroes. But it is nearly impossible for them to link up with Al Qaeda Central, which was forced underground after 9/11. Instead, they form fluid, informal networks that are self-financed and self-trained. They have no physical headquarters or sanctuary, but the tolerant, virtual environment of the Internet offers them a semblance of unity and purpose. Theirs is a scattered, decentralized social structure—a leaderless jihad.” 

No longer coordinated with or answering directly to what he describes as “Al Qaeda Central”, this leaderless array of loosely coupled networks are connected primarily via the internet. As Sageman puts its, “virtual marketplaces for extremist ideas, have become the “invisible hand” that organizes terrorist activities worldwide. The true leader of this violent social movement is the collective discourse on half a dozen influential forums.Al Qaeda Central cannot impose discipline on these third-wave wannabes, mostly because it does not know who they are.” 

Without this command and control, each disconnected network acts according to its own understanding and capability, but their collective actions do not amount to any unified long-term goal or strategy. These separate groups cannot coalesce into a physical movement, leaving them condemned to remain leaderless, an online aspiration. Such traits, Sageman believes, make them particularly volatile and difficult to detect, but they also offer a tantalizing strategy for those who wish to defeat these dangerous individuals: The very seeds of the movement’s demise are within the movement itself. 

Strategically this assessment implies that the way to extinguish the force of violent jihadism at this stage is to deprive the fires of jihadist terrorism of the only oxgen keeping them burning, publicity. 

“The U.S. strategy to counter this terrorist threat continues to be frozen by the horrors of 9/11,” Sageman concludes. Where the pursuit of “high-value targets” who were directly involved in the 9/11 operation more than six years ago was an appropriate first step to bring the perpetrators to justice, he argues, “this strategy is not only useless against the leaderless jihad; it is precisely what will help the movement flourish. Radical Islamist terrorism will never disappear because the West defeats it. Instead, it will most likely disappear for internal reasons—if the United States has the sense to allow it to continue on its course and fade away. The main threat to radical Islamist terrorism is the fact that its appeal is self-limiting. The key is to accelerate this process of internal decay.” 

The proper way to do this, by this analysis, is strip terrorist acts of glory and reduce them to common criminality. 

“Most aspiring terrorists,” says Sageman, “ want nothing more than to be elevated to the status of an FBI Most Wanted poster. Any policy or recognition that puts such people on a pedestal only makes them heroes in each other’s eyes—and encourages others to follow their example. These young men aspire to nothing more glorious than to fight uniformed soldiers of the sole remaining superpower. That is why the struggle against these terrorists must be demilitarized and turned over to collaborative law enforcement. The military role should be limited to denying terrorists a sanctuary.”

By and large early reviews from within established policy circles were either sympathetic or circumspect in their criticisms. In the Washington Post, for instance, David Ignatius wrote,“Politicians who talk about the terrorism threat—and it's already clear that this will be a polarizing issue in the 2008 campaign—should be required to read a new book by a former CIA officer named Marc Sageman. It stands what you think you know about terrorism on its head and helps you see the topic in a different light." 

In the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, however, Bruce Hoffman, launched a frontal counter-attack on Sageman’s thesis, declaring that the thesis of an Al Qaeda in rapid decomposition was a dangerous misreading of the facts. Click here to read full essay.