Because most people think of Islamic State, al-Qaida and their ilk as being crazies motivated solely by hatred, they are not puzzled by recent terrorist attacks on the West like those in Paris, Brussels and Los Angeles. Like the villains in comic books, the terrorists are simply evil, and no further explanation is needed. But in the real world, being violent and fanatical does not make you stupid.
The small group of Arab Islamists who started fighting the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 were by 2014 the rulers of a new country of some 5 million people they call Islamic State, which suggests they are clever people who pursue rational strategies. And yet they go on backing terrorist attacks in the West, which no longer seems like a rational strategy.
It was a perfectly sensible strategy, once. By the year 2000 the Islamist revolutionaries of the Arab world were close to despair. They had been trying to overthrow the dictators and kings who ruled the Arab countries for a quarter-century, and there was blood all over the walls — around 300,000 Arabs were killed in the struggles between the Islamists and the regimes in 1975-2000 — but they had not managed to overthrow a single regime.
It was Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaida, who came up with a new strategy: attack the West. The ultimate goal was still to come to power in the Arab world, but instead of revolution in the streets the Islamists would now win power by leading a successful guerrilla resistance movement against an invasion by infidel foreigners.
Bin Laden had hit on this strategy because he had fought in Afghanistan as a volunteer, and that was exactly how the game played out there. The Russians invaded in 1979; Islamist extremists took over the resistance movement; after a long and bloody war, the Russians went home in 1989; and the Afghan Islamists (the Taliban) then took power because they were the heroes who had driven the infidel foreigners out.
To relive this triumph required getting some other infidel army to invade a Muslim country, and the obvious choice was the United States. Al-Qaida’s 9/11 attacks in New York and Washington in 2001 gave Americans the necessary motivation, and two U.S. invasions followed in rapid succession, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The mass-casualty terrorist attacks against Western targets continued for a long time — Madrid, Bali, London, etc. — presumably in order to give Western countries a reason to keep their troops in the Middle East. But the attacks gradually diminished as al-Qaida’s fighters in Iraq came closer to their goal of creating their own state: that would clearly be easier to do if most of the Western troops had already gone home.
The creation of Islamic State and the proclamation of the “Caliphate” in 2014 was the culmination of this long struggle, and it should have ended Islamist terror attacks on the West. Now they have a real state, they are seeking to expand in Syria and Iraq by military force, and the last thing they need is Western troops around to make matters more difficult. So why didn’t the attacks on Western countries stop?
The only plausible explanation is the great split in the Islamist movement in 2014, when Islamic State broke away from al-Qaida. Since then there has been a ferocious competition between them both for recruits, and for the loyalty of Islamist organisations across the Muslim world. (The main Islamist organizations in Egypt and Nigeria have switched their allegiance from al-Qaida to Islamic State in the past two years.)
In this competition, the best and cheapest way of showing that your organization is tougher, more dedicated, more efficient than the other lot is to kill Westerners in spectacular terrorist attacks. So, for example, al-Qaida sponsored the “Charlie Hebdo” attack in Paris in February 2015, and Islamic State replied with the much bigger attack in Paris last November.
There is no strategic cost in these attacks, because Western and Russian forces already are bombing Islamic State and al-Qaida’s local franchise in Syria, the Nusra Front. The material cost of the attacks is negligible: neither organization is devoting even 1 percent of its resources to them. So they will continue for a while, and the West will just have to deal with them as they occur.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.