Delegitimizing Al-Qaeda: A Jihad-Realist Approach
Abstract
The 9/11 Commission Report identifies three strategic objectives decapitation, deradicalization, and hardening homeland security as key to disrupting, dismantling, and ultimately defeating the al-Qaeda terrorist enterprise. Though the first and third have been notably successful, the second objective has been relatively less so. Approaches to counter-radicalization that rely on so-called counterideological or counternarrative approaches miss their mark: they presume ending al-Qaeda s reign of terror requires that Islam as a religious faith delegitimize core Islamic and Islamist tenets, including key planks anchoring religious faith. They also fail to acknowledge and engage the breadth and depth of nonreligiously-motivated opposition to existing U.S. foreign and military policy, especially in the Middle East and the Israel-Palestine conflict. Finally, and most specifically, counternarrative approaches unnecessarily burden this strategic objective by casting a net far too wide and capturing in it a vast Islamic, Islamist, and salafist universe whose adherents are overwhelmingly morally repelled by al-Qaeda s terroristic methods. Islam is a law-governed religious faith that proscribes and prescribes human conduct. The jihad the religious prescription to struggle and strive in the path/way of Allah until Allah s word reigns supreme throughout the earth including its military sense, is despite disavowal in popular piety and much modern moderate Islamic discourse, a binding religious prescription. This presumption of an enduring obligation to wage the military jihad is an essential starting-point in potentially delegitimizing al-Qaeda s reign of terror among adherents for whom shari a compliance is an essential requirement.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Mar 01, 2012
- Accession Number
- ADA559024
Entities
People
- Paul Kamolnick
Organizations
- United States Army War College