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Ideology is Al Qaeda’s Achilles’ heel

WASHINGTON: The United States could discredit Al Qaeda in the Muslim world by challenging its violent Islamist ideology and muzzling its leading proponents, an independent report released on Thursday said.

The 364-page study, published by the RAND Corp think tank, described Al Qaeda’s Islamist ideology of violent resistance as a “global revolutionary creed” akin to the Marxism-Leninism philosophy that the West defeated with “a robust political warfare” campaign during the Cold War. “If the ideology is countered and discredited, Al Qaeda and its universe will wither and die,” concluded the two-part study, entitled “Beyond Al Qaeda” and funded by the Air Force. “It follows that a comprehensive US strategy needs to move beyond the boundaries of conventional counterterrorism theory and practice, and address these ideological and political factors,” it said.

The study’s authors recommended the Bush administration expand “decapitation strategies” to include ideologues, holding up as examples decisions by British and Indonesian authorities to either jail or deport hard-line Muslim clerics. “Preventing Al Qaeda’s ideological mentors from continuing to provide theological justification for terrorism could expedite the movement’s ideological deterioration,” they concluded. Much of the research in the RAND study was completed in 2004 but has never been released. The authors updated the data to reflect developments in Iraq, the Middle East, Chechnya, Southeast Asia and Somalia. “The importance of ideology has become even more evident. The passage of time has only reaffirmed and reinforced it,” said lead author Angel Rabasa, RAND senior policy analyst.

A separate study released this week by the US Army’s West Point military academy said the most effective counter arguments could come from Saudi clerics who subscribe to the Salafist theology from which Al Qaeda draws its legitimacy. CIA Director Michael Hayden told a Senate panel on Wednesday: “As a Western nation, we have limited tools to counteract that kind of propaganda. We need to make sure our own message is clear, but we also need to work with our Muslim allies.”

US intelligence officials and other experts believe the popularity of e-books such as “39 Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” could be instrumental in inspiring homegrown militant cells in Western countries.

The RAND study said the ever-expanding library of Islamist tracts could be vulnerable to ideological challenges. It recommended both overt and covert information operations to make clear the gaps between Al Qaeda’s global vision and the local priorities of Islamist guerrilla groups in places such as Southeast Asia, South Asia and North Africa.

Such operations could also exploit ethnic differences by emphasizing Al Qaeda’s Arab core in non-Arab Muslim countries, and highlight the elevated socio-economic status of Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, scion of a wealthy Saudi family, and his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri, an Egyptian physician. Reuters

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