The New Terror Franchise

The ever-reliable Monitor has a piece on the changed structure of the al Queda-style terror movement following the London blasts, and it more closely resembles a fast-food franchise than a corporation:

A decade ago Al Qaeda was an entrepreneurial jihadist start-up firm. Today it may have evolved into something bigger, and less tightly controlled: a worldwide franchiser of terrorist attacks.

That may be one lesson of last week's London bombings, say some terrorism experts. The British attacks were well-organized, low-tech, and prepared in great secrecy - all hallmarks of the now-decentralized Al Qaeda network. The Madrid subway attacks of 2004 were similar. So were the bombings carried out in Casablanca, Morocco, in 2003.

Having ceded some initiative to local operations, Al Qaeda may now find it more difficult to carry out such spectacular assaults as those of Sept. 11, 2001. But it possibly has evolved into a threat that extends across the globe, capable of striking almost anywhere, at almost any time.

"Al Qaeda is no longer a hierarchical organization, but rather an enabler for myriad terrorist groups and sympathizers to fight the jihadist holy war," says Ivo Daalder, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.

The whole structure of al Queda has shifted beneath our feet, and it is, of course, in response to the American-led War on Terror. It is a survival tactic, a kind of natural, predictable response for an organization like this that lives on fanatic fringes, but has no particular rules of engagement and membership.

So the fracturing structure relies on individual, self-motivated cells of fanaticists who still will operate in sympathy with the accordance of the stated al Queda goals. Some, or many, of these participants may have had some or a great deal of training directly with al Queda. But likely, these cells aren't reflective of a huge organized hierarchical structure of terror. In fact, many of these people may be already assimilated to some degree into Western Society, and are striking out violently against what they percieve as some historical wrongs. See this article by the Monitor as well.

But it does reflect a vibrant change in the nature of the attacks:

Local groups affiliated with Al Qaeda, or simply imbued with their worldview, now carry out most terror attacks against the US and its allies, says the study.

Southwest Asia's Jemaah Islamiyah is one of the best-known such groups.

"An increasing percentage of jihadist attacks are more local, less sophisticated, but still lethal," says the [US State Department's "Country Reports on Terrorism, 2004"] report.

To most of the world the scenes of violence in London - and in Madrid, and other recent bomb targets - are senseless. The victims were innocent people, for the most part just on their way to work. If polls are any guide, a majority of them opposed the British participation in the US invasion of Iraq.

"The human response is to say this is senseless violence. But the whole point is it is not senseless. There are goals, and this is an attempt to communicate," says Gary LaFree, director of the University of Maryland's National Center for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism.

One of the main tenets of the jihadist ideology is that US power is based on its economy - and thus a primary goal is to damage US and other Western economic targets. Commuter mass transit is a mundane, but highly vulnerable, such target.

The jihadists may also be still attempting to splinter the US coalition in Iraq. For that reason, many in Italy, another nation where the government has pushed participation with the US while the population has largely opposed it, fear that they may be the next terror target.