Did Al Qaeda Win the War on Terror?

Reflections on the "long road" to Damascus

About a decade ago, at the height of the U.S.-led military campaign to destroy the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, I found myself in Jordan, sitting in a living room with Abu Qatada, one of the most infamous figures in the global Salafi-Jihadist movement. At the time, in addition to a series of wars between local regimes, insurgents, and a U.S.-led military coalition, the region was being rocked by an escalating confrontation between rival jihadists from Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Abu Qatada was more on the Al Qaeda end of the spectrum. Ironically, this made it easier for me to get in touch and meet with him. I had come to interview Qatada for a story that later became the basis for a lengthy investigation that I published for a news outlet. But, given the rare opportunity to spend the day with one of the most influential jihadist theorists of his generation, I also wanted to get an understanding of the aims of a movement that had caused so much destruction, and had even drawn the world’s lone superpower into crisis.

When we met, the Al Qaeda project seemed to be at its nadir. Hundreds of thousands of people were dead across the Levant, the ancient cities of Aleppo and Mosul lay in ruins, and the proud people of the region were being reduced to masses of refugees seeking shelter in the West. On top of it all, rather than being ennobled, the image of Islam itself had been tarnished.

After a few hours spent sipping tea and chatting with Qatada about jihadism, the Arab Spring, and various other topics, I decided to confront him about how he could keep promoting a movement that seemed to be generating endless disaster for the world.

“The whole jihadist project has produced so much death and destruction,” I began. “All these countries are ruined, millions of people are becoming refugees…”

Qatada closed his eyes, nodding sympathetically. He did not seem surprised at all by my intervention.

“I know,” he said calmly. “I understand.”

“But listen, be patient.”

Known Unknowns

I was reminded of Qatada’s words recently while taking in the flurry of news reports from Syria over the past few months, including, most recently, the cordial personal meeting between President Donald Trump and former Al Qaeda in Syria leader Ahmad al-Sharaa.

Not long ago, Al Sharaa, now president of Syria, had been known to the world only by his nom de guerre, Abu Mohammad al Jolani. As viral images of the meeting ricocheted across social media, many people were clearly disoriented. Why was a former Al Qaeda militant, who recently had a $10 million bounty on his head, shaking hands with the U.S. president? Were the conspiracies holding that Al Qaeda was merely a cats paw of the CIA true all along? Had Jolani sold out his jihadist principles in exchange for a Trump Tower in Damascus?

In this case, I was not among the perplexed. Nor have I been surprised by Sharaa’s decisions to send his foreign minister to Davos, open up the Syrian economy to foreign investment, meet with Christian and Jewish groups, and many other actions that have resulted in him being branded a “neoliberal jihadist” by social media wags. In fact, I have seen all this as a natural culmination of the Al Qaeda movement, consistent with its earliest stated aims.

On a personal level, I have never been enamored with the ideology or tactics of hardline Islamists, preferring instead the Sufi intellectual tradition of Islam, as well as secular pragmatists like Deng Xiaoping, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. But, whether you like it or not, those are not the type of people who defined our generation.

The U.S. spent nearly three decades fighting what it called radical Islam without ever really understanding its enemy, the nature of the war in which it was engaged, or whether it was even worth fighting in the first place. That war is now ending. The conquest of Damascus by the Al Qaeda spinoff Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and, more importantly, the formal acceptance of this by Washington, marks the closing of a chapter that began three decades prior. That gives us an opportune moment to actually reflect on the outcome of the Global War on Terror, which destroyed the lives of so many, and consider what both sides ultimately gained from this generational conflict.

“A Long Road, Full of Trials…”

In the years following the shock of the September 11 terrorist attacks, despite becoming a focus of national attention, the actual views of Sunni jihadists were never fully explained to the American public. Nor did our elites seem to understand them. This incuriosity gave rise to a series of tragic missteps, including futile wars that took the lives of thousands of Americans, as well as over a million in the Islamic world.

Contrary to popular misconception, the majority of Sunni Islamist groups, including radical movements like Al Qaeda, have aimed at being included in the global system as an ultimate goal, rather than overthrowing it. With a few exceptions, most notably the extremist Islamic State, they have not pursued quixotic quests such as conquering the world, destroying global capitalism, enslaving mankind to their interpretation of Islamic law, or waging perpetual war against the West.

These groups have often used extreme tactics, which they claimed were necessary to fight against equally extreme enemies. But their major goal has always been the relatively modest one of replacing the postcolonial elite in their own countries, and being accepted by the world as the new rulers. In the eyes of the Islamists, the process of decolonization was incomplete. Illegitimate rulers had taken power after the departure of the old empires, and they were now being held in place by their foreign sponsors. All action had to be directed towards shattering this intolerable status quo.

Despite their limited aims, the jihadists knew that changing this situation would require that they and their countries endure tremendous suffering over an extended period of time. Just as Qatada had told me to “be patient,” when I complained to him about this destruction, other senior jihadist ideologues I’d interviewed over the years spoke as though current conditions barely mattered. They had already girded themselves for a long conflict that they had calculated would take lifetimes of struggle. They were patient. In contrast, Westerners had trained themselves to think in terms of short, four-year election and media cycles, and were already exhausted of the whole conflict after one bad decade in Iraq.

The jihadists were fighting a war in the anticolonial style, taking direct influence from groups like the Vietcong and the FLN. Yet while those groups were leftists, the jihadist ideology should be described as “far-right anticolonialism.” Under the pressure of the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the movement gradually broke off into psychotic splinter movements like ISIS that engaged in nihilistic violence targeting other jihadists, minorities, foreign civilians, and anyone else who ran afoul of their worldview.

Photo I took when I interviewed Abu Qatada in Jordan.

Despite that, the core of the movement somehow maintained itself. The jihadists knew that they were the weaker party. But they also knew that they had the numbers, as well as a greater commitment to fight and die for a land that was ultimately their own. Meanwhile, they calculated that within a few years the U.S. would realize that it had little abiding interest in sending its sons and daughters to die in a foreign land for unclear motives. And that is exactly what happened.

The influential jihadist theorist Abu Bakr Naji stated as much when he wrote in his book Idarat al-Tawahhush, that, "We must drag the enemy into long wars of attrition to exhaust its resources and manpower.” Adherents of the jihadist movement had to be ruthless with themselves and others and expect generations of struggle. Naji told them to steel themselves for this lengthy fight, writing, "be patient, for it is a long road, full of trials and setbacks, and it requires people who are strong in faith and vision."

That long road reached a new junction last year in Damascus, when Sunni jihadists took the city in a lightning offensive that toppled the decades-long Assad dictatorship. Naji, whose book was essentially a field manual for the jihad, would have applauded their tactical proficiency.

But what of the startling events afterwards?

Neoliberal Jihadism

Prior to the victory of Hayat al-Tahrir Sham in Syria, the most celebrated Sunni militant group was the Afghan Taliban. The Taliban was viewed as a success not merely because they won militarily, but because they forced U.S. officials like Mike Pompeo, Brian Hook, and Zalmay Khalilzad to negotiate with them on equal terms, before finally accepting them as rulers of Afghanistan.

That outcome is exactly what the Taliban spent two decades fighting for in a strictly “nationalist jihad” that avoided global terrorism. Having accomplished their mission, the Taliban is now negotiating trade deals with Chinese and Indian diplomats, and cooperating with the U.S. on counterterrorism operations. Rather than betraying the Sunni Islamist project, these pragmatic actions represent its culmination.

Founding Al Qaeda figures like Mustafa Setmariam, known by his nom de guerre as Abu Musab al-Suri, expected that jihadists and the West would ultimately come to a peaceful detente after their goal of toppling the postcolonial regimes in the Middle East was achieved. Setmariam, a lifelong Al Qaeda militant and ideologue who had once been close with Osama bin Laden, was the author of a landmark jihadist text called “The Global Islamic Resistance Call.” Over 1,600 pages, he laid out the aims and strategies of a movement that saw itself as tasked with expelling tyrannical regimes and foreign exploiters from the Islamic world.

Setmariam’s book proposed a strategy of leaderless resistance that would later be used by self-radicalizing individuals to carry out armed attacks on behalf of the movement, and later notoriously be adapted by competitors like ISIS. But unlike the Islamic State, Setmariam took a pragmatic approach towards issues like sectarianism, the treatment of minorities, and the ultimate goals of Islamists in their confrontation with the West. The Islamists final aim, he said, after toppling local tyrannies, first among them being the Assad regime in his native Syria, would be convincing the international community to accept them as legitimate rulers. That would then allow them to negotiate new terms of their relationship, including, specifically, a reformed economic partnership.

Al Qaeda theorist Mustafa Setmariam.

When Syria’s notorious prisons opened last December, many people, including myself, wondered if Setmariam would emerge alive from the darkness to take stock of the jihadists unlikely victory. He did not do so. But one can imagine he would be pleased by the scene of fellow Al Qaeda veteran Ahmed al-Sharaa being greeted in Riyadh by an American president, and accepted as the new ruler of Syria. After all, that had been the aim of the movement for which he and others had suffered so greatly.

The newly-victorious Hayat Tahrir al-Sham is now courting multi-million dollar investments in Syria from the West, the Gulf Arab states, and China. Again, far from being surprising, that is precisely what one would expect based on their conservative ideology and worldview. The same goes for Sunni militant groups like Hamas, who, were they to ever prevail militarily over Israel, should be expected, like al-Sharaa, to declare the revolution over, before sending delegations to the World Bank to drum up foreign direct investment in Palestine, just as their Syrian fellow travelers are doing today.

Left Behind

If the Sunni Islamists are the far-right anticolonialists, they do have a counterpart on the Islamic left. Since the 1979 Iranian revolution, the branch of the Shia Islamist movement that follows the teachings of Ayatollah Khomeini has defined itself as avowedly anti-systemic, speaking and acting in the name of a global revolution.

Khomeinism was an ideology that coalesced during the Cold War, and that defined Islam as a revolutionary “third pole” in opposition to capitalism and communism. Pro-regime Iranians, as well as groups like Hezbollah and Ansar Allah, today often speak in the style of 20th century left-wing revolutionaries, making grand criticisms and denunciations of the existing global order led by the U.S. that they say they want to replace.

Notwithstanding their conservative religious practices, I think it is accurate to describe Khomeinist groups as left-wing. Their worldview is informed by Marxist-influenced, universalist beliefs that lead them to not only seek local political power, but to entirely reject a global order that they view as corrupt and unjust. That anti-systemic worldview has allowed them to make great sacrifices for ideological causes like Palestine, while building sympathetic ties with non-Muslim states like Venezuela and South Africa. It is also why Khomeinist groups today tend to be viewed more sympathetically by the global left, including in the West: They recognize each other.

While the U.S. may be on the road to wrapping up its conflict with Al Qaeda, their standoff with the Khomeinists is still at an impasse. As improbable as it may have seemed for al-Sharaa, the idea of Ayatollah Khamenei shaking hands with Donald Trump and discussing plans to build luxury towers in Esfahan is simply impossible. While the U.S. is clearly wearying of its fight with the left wing of the Islamist movement as well, the last pages of that story are still to be written.

Changing Clothes

The War on Terror was a painful chapter in American history. Yet it is already slipping from popular consciousness. The September 11 attacks and subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan defined the worldview of my generation. But younger people have fleeting awareness or interest in these events. It may be too much to expect people to learn from history. But given the tremendous energy and suffering that this era consumed, it seems like it at least deserves a coda that gives it some meaning.

Rather than being consigned to oblivion, after tremendous suffering and destruction Al Qaeda ultimately survived, and even prevailed, in its grand struggle with local regimes and the West. More upheavals undoubtedly lie in the future. But the conquest of Damascus and rapprochement between the jihadists and Washington, is a signal moment in their history, and another grand step towards the realization of their goals.

Although groups like Al Qaeda and the Taliban may have won the War on Terror, that doesn’t mean that the United States lost. Had the U.S. wanted, they could have kept fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for the rest of the century. The issue is that, just as the jihadists predicted, the U.S. had no interest in any such thing. A handshake deal to leave one another alone and open business deals between Sunni Islamist-run Damascus and the West was a better outcome for Washington. Rather than perpetual war, it was also what the mainstream of the jihadist movement had ultimately wanted.

There is a reason that a normally taciturn al-Sharaa was smiling so broadly in his photos with Trump. Trump seemed happy with it as well. In comments describing al-Sharaa as a “young, attractive guy” with a “strong past,” Trump even acknowledged that only a brutal and ruthless leader could have prevailed in the Darwinian conditions of modern Syria. “Are you going to put a choirboy in that position? I don’t think so.”

This all brings me back to my conversation with Abu Qatada all those years ago. Over the course of many hours chatting, drinking tea, and eating maklouba, I asked him for his assessment of the ongoing struggle between local regimes, the West, and the jihadist movement.

Qatada spoke mainly in terms of grand-historical processes, rarely getting into specifics. Yet despite his archaic appearance and antiquated Islamic references, I got the clear sense that the person I was talking to was not a medieval reactionary, but a hard-edged revolutionary figure on par with Leon Trotsky or Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. His ideology may have been expressed in the form of a now-ancient religion, but it was thoroughly modern in every sense.

“The more that the West puts pressure on the jihadist movement, the more that it opens up new opportunities for them to move forward,” Qatada vowed. “New states are coming and a serious historical struggle is coming.”

I was skeptical at the time. But looking back, it strikes me that Qatada knew what he was talking about. In the long struggle, Al Qaeda had its eye on the ball much more than its adversaries. The Sunni jihadist movement is still riven by dissent, including among those who believe it has compromised too much, or betrayed its ideals. I know firsthand that many inside the movement are not happy with al-Sharaa’s actions, both before and after taking Damascus. And by all accounts, now that they have deposed Assad, the Islamists are at risk of falling prey to Che Guevara’s apocryphal dictum “Cruel leaders are replaced, only to have new leaders turn cruel.”

But today, rather than being eradicated, we can simply observe that the jihadist movement has clearly survived, while achieving something for which its adherents had long fought: Toppling the old Arab regimes that were their primary enemy, while winning acceptance from the world for their rule. So who really won this strange war that began three decades prior?

“The West and the dictators think that the Arab Spring is over, but the big tsunami has not even hit yet,” Qatada told me when we met, his voice intent and unwavering.

He was undaunted by my questions about the destruction then playing out across the region. He had a goal.

“If the clothes that you are wearing have holes in them you must change them,” he continued. “And, we shall see, it will be the same with our old regimes.”