In the summer of 2003, during the early days of the Iraq war, “counterinsurgency” was still an odd and cumbersome word. Soon it dawned on politicians, military officers, and scholars that they better understand its nuances. The literature on “coin” began to mushroom, and today small libraries could be filled with the books and articles devoted to the subject. Most notably, in 2006 the U.S. Army published a much-anticipated field manual, 

 Known among aficionados simply by its official publication number, FM 3–24, it became the blueprint for improvement in Iraq, and now, possibly, Afghanistan. The University of Chicago Press republished the manual in 2007 as a book, and it became one of the publisher’s bestsellers in recent years. The gist of the counterinsurgency wisdom is that the local population, not territory, is what matters most. Counterinsurgent and insurgent, in theory, compete for the trust of the locals, for legitimacy. The population is the “prize.”

Mark Moyar pitches his book as a challenge to that thesis. Counterinsurgency must not be just population-centric. Nor can it be merely enemy-centric, as conventional wars against opposing armies were. No, successful counterinsurgency is “leader-centric.” Counterinsurgency struggles are contests between elites, in which the elite group with better “leadership attributes” usually wins. The superior elites manage to gather more popular support, and use it to subdue or destroy the enemy elite and their supporters. So what makes for superior leadership? Ten things: initiative, flexibility, creativity, judgment, empathy, charisma, sociability, dedication, integrity, and organization. Moyar, who teaches at the U.S. Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia, sets out to explore these qualities in nine widely disparate case studies.

His aim, he writes, is to “assist” those who are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And to do that, he journeys—like the authors of earlier books with a similar goal—back in history. But 

 stands out because it reaches back quite far, and to unexpected destinations—St. Louis, Missouri, and Little Rock, Arkansas. The American Civil War and the subsequent period of Reconstruction are rediscovered as counterinsurgency struggles, with Confederate soldiers and Ku Klux Klan members depicted as insurgents. Other historical examples include the Philippine-American war from 1899 to 1902, which pitted the United States against Filipino revolutionary forces under Emilio Aguinaldo; the Huk Rebellion, a communist insurgency that fought the Philippine government from 1946 to 1954; the Malayan Emergency, a guerrilla war for independence between Britain’s armed forces and the communist Malayan Liberation Army; and the Vietnam War. Why these cases and not others? And what are the hazards of comparing them? The reader is left to guess.

Perhaps it is the wide swath cut by Moyar’s choice of case studies that forces his argument into a narrow corner. Leadership explains everything and nothing. Brilliance and mediocrity, of course, are important in counterinsurgency. And some of the book’s anecdotes may contain good insights. But leadership matters in all types of war—as well as in baseball and banking. All failures and all successes can be traced to some leadership decision that was made right or wrong, even if the context matters more.

A few of Moyar’s examples: In the early days after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, L. Paul Bremer, issued an infamous de-Baathification edict that sent perhaps 100,000 government employees, formerly on Saddam’s payroll, into unemployment, further rousing the insurgency—clearly a case of bad leadership. No planning in the Pentagon under the helm of Douglas Feith for Iraq’s postwar occupation in the first place—bad leadership. General Muhammad Fahim, a corrupt Tajik military leader who packed the Afghan ministry of defense with his cronies—poor leadership.

And it works in reverse, too. Brigadier General Samuel B. M. Young, commander of the First District in northern Luzon in the Philippines around 1900, shielded his subordinates from political demands and “promoted creativity and initiative”—great leadership. During the Civil War, somewhere in West Virginia, Colonel George Crook, “one of the best Union counterinsurgency commanders,” crushed the guerrillas by picking good officers and, with no specific instructions, “setting them loose in the countryside,” where they succeeded in “capturing or killing large numbers” of insurgents—sound leadership.

Each of the wars Moyar studied has certainly seen great military men with impressive accomplishments. Most recently, commanders such as David Petraeus and Sean MacFarland have achieved extraordinary results under adverse conditions in Iraq. It still is too early to pass historical judgment, but their hard work may have helped pull the country back from the abyss of civil war. So leadership, for sure, is a fascinating aspect of studying operations against insurgents, if the approach is granular enough to absorb vital detail and context. But to be of use in today’s wars, a book on command cannot ignore three towering questions.

The troop buildup in the Iraq war, widely referred to as the “surge,” was the initiative mainly of military leaders who nominally were not in charge of such decisions, as Tom Ricks reported in his book The Gamble, published earlier this year. Jack Keane, a retired general, played a key role, as did several officers in Iraq and civilians at the American Enterprise Institute. All this seemingly happened in a vacuum of political leadership. From what we know, little guidance and few probing questions came from the White House or the vice president’s office. A weighty slice of one of the nation’s most important policies may have been developed and executed without the appropriate supervision of elected leaders. Sure, in hindsight the outcome might be a good one. The infusion of 30,000 combat troops into Iraq at a critical time has contributed to stability in the country’s war-ravaged cities and provinces. Still, a momentous question begs to be answered: Was one of the most fateful strategic decisions in recent American history the result of a crisis in civil-military oversight, albeit a beneficial one?

This question of accountability doesn't merely concern the political sphere. In May 2007, a debate raging among junior and midlevel officers in the U.S. Army went public when an active-duty officer, Lieutenant Colonel Paul Yingling, published a widely read article in the 

, “A Failure in Generalship.” Senior military officers, not only civilian officials, carried the responsibility for the fiasco in Iraq, he argued. “America’s generals have failed to prepare our armed forces for war and advise civilian authorities on the application of force to achieve the aims of policy.” Elsewhere, he charged, “as matters stand now, a private who loses a rifle suffers far greater consequences than a general who loses a war.” Only Congress could “restore accountability” among the nation’s top military leaders. The article hit a nerve. As was widely reported, a large number of deeply frustrated junior officers publicly voiced support for Yingling’s criticisms, putting the Army’s senior leadership under real political pressure. Has the problem highlighted by these brave young officers been tackled adequately? Moyar doesn’t even mention this remarkable episode.

A third intriguing question is itching to be asked on the enemy’s side, about leadership and political violence. Combating terrorism was the prime rationale for launching the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and the Taliban regime were crippled by American and British firepower. As a result, Osama bin Laden’s outfit and other violent Islamic groups were forced to transform themselves from hierarchical organizations into an amorphous movement composed of isolated and decentralized cells and activists, tied together by a common ideology, not much more. So how are they led? The world’s best terrorism scholars feud over this question. On the one end are those who say that jihad in the 21st century is “leaderless” and most terrorists the world over are “homegrown,” without central coordination. Others counter that “Al Qaeda Central,” the organization’s command post, is still up and running in the rugged mountains of Afghanistan’s and Pakistan’s ungoverned badlands, and that’s where the jihadis should be confronted. There’s probably something to the contentions on both sides. In any case, the question cannot be ignored in a book on “leader-centric” warfare.

Yet Moyar is certain that he has discovered the sole antidote to failure, not just in Iraq or Afghanistan, and in the successful operations of the past, but in the wars ahead as well. The odds are “good,” he writes, that more dirty wars are in store for America. But A Question of Command exemplifies a wider trend in counterinsurgency studies: an obsession with historical comparisons of dubious utility selected to drive home particular arguments. Military and civilian experts love to learn lessons from what French colonizers did in Algeria and Indochina, from the British Empire’s campaigns in Malaya and Kenya, or from the U.S. Army’s experiences in Vietnam. That urge is remarkable, not only because most of those campaigns were failures. The scholarly temptation to distill general truths from past experiences of war is as old as it is seductive.

Moyar seems aware of this danger, yet succumbs to it. He is driven to rummage through history by the urge to free commanders from the red tape that counterinsurgency doctrine imposes on them. “Universally applicable” rules, such as the directive to avoid the use of force against the population, might tie one hand behind their back. The result is a romantic view of violence. Moyar approvingly quotes one U.S. Army major in Iraq who says, “The more violent you seem and the more scared they are, the more they cooperate.” The United States must not hobble its potential heroes, but “develop its most talented counterinsurgency leaders.” Once they are developed, and their charisma improved, it’s easy: “Place them into positions where they can wage war without fetters, their unshakable initiative and creative brilliance streaming across the plains and mountains.”

Such language leaves a lump in the throat, particularly as it is the book’s parting shot. Scholars who try to provide insights for those who endure hardship and personal risk in Iraq and Afghanistan should indeed be hungry for history and detail—not about the Civil War or Vietnam, but about Iraq’s tribal relations, Islamic doctrine, sectarian identities and grievances, Afghanistan’s violent past, Afghan and Iraqi political systems and culture, the interests of surrounding countries, language, even local literatures, narratives, and myths. Some of these books are being written. But in the counterinsurgency field, they continue to be overshadowed by would-be histories that aim right between scholarly relevance and practical utility—and sometimes miss both.

, a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, is the author of 

War and Media Operations: The U.S. Military and the Press From Vietnam to Iraq

War 2.0: Irregular Warfare in the Information Age

"A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency From the Civil War to Iraq"

 by Mark Moyar, Yale University Press, 2009. 

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Examining counterinsurgency and the new focus on local populations rather than territory as the magic formula for victory in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The Winning Formula

“Get ready for all Muslims to join the holy war against you,” the jihadi leader Abd el-Kader warned his Western enemies. The year was 1839, and nine years into France’s occupation of Algeria the resistance had grown self-confident. Only weeks earlier, Arab fighters had wiped out a convoy of 30 French soldiers en route from Boufarik to Oued-el-Alèg. Insurgent attacks on the slow-moving French columns were steadily increasing, and the army’s fortified blockhouses in the Atlas Mountains were under frequent assault.

Paris pinned its hopes on an energetic general who had already served a successful tour in Algeria, Thomas-Robert Bugeaud. In January 1840, shortly before leaving to take command in Algiers, he addressed the French Chamber of Deputies: “In Europe, gentlemen, we don’t just make war against armies; we make war against interests.” The key to victory in European wars, he explained, was to penetrate the enemy country’s interior. Seize the centers of population, commerce, and industry, “and soon the interests are forced to capitulate.” Not so at the foot of the Atlas, he conceded. Instead, he would focus the army’s effort on the tribal population.

Later that year, a well-known military thinker from Prussia traveled to Algeria to observe Bugeaud’s new approach. Major General Carl von Decker, who had taught under the famed Carl von Clausewitz at the War Academy in Berlin, was more forthright than his French counterpart. The fight against fanatical tribal warriors, he foresaw, “will throw all European theory of war into the trash heap.”

One hundred and seventy years later, jihad is again a major threat—and Decker’s dire analysis more relevant than ever. War, in Clausewitz’s eminent theory, was a clash of collective wills, “a continuation of politics by other means.” When states went to war, the adversary was a political entity with the ability to act as one body, able to end hostilities by declaring victory or admitting defeat. Even Abd el-Kader eventually capitulated. But jihad in the 21st century, especially during the past few years, has fundamentally changed its anatomy: Al Qaeda is no longer a collective political actor. It is no longer an adversary that can articulate a will, capitulate, and be defeated. But the jihad’s new weakness is also its new strength: Because of its transformation, Islamist militancy is politically impaired yet fitter to survive its present crisis.

In the years since late 2001, when U.S. and coalition forces toppled the Taliban regime and all but destroyed Al Qaeda’s core organization in Afghan­istan, the bin Laden brand has been bleeding popularity across the Muslim world. The global jihad, as a result, has been torn by mounting internal tensions. Today, the holy war is set to slip into three distinct ideological and organizational niches. The U.S. surge in Afghanistan, whether successful or not, is likely to affect this development only marginally.

The first niche is occupied by local Islamist insurgencies, fueled by grievances against “apostate” regimes that are authoritarian, corrupt, or backed by “infidel” outside powers (or any combination of the three). Filling the second niche is terrorism-cum–organized crime, most visible in Afghanistan and Indonesia but also seen in Europe, fueled by narcotics, extortion, and other ordinary illicit activities. In the final niche are people who barely qualify as a group: young second- and third-generation Muslims in the diaspora who are engaged in a more amateurish but persistent holy war, fueled by their own complex personal discontents. Al Qaeda’s challenge is to encompass the jihadis who drift to the criminal and eccentric fringe while keeping alive its appeal to the Muslim mainstream and a rhetoric of high aspiration and promise.

The most visible divide separates the local and global jihadis. Historically, Islamist groups tended to bud locally, and assumed a global outlook only later, if they did so at all. All the groups that have been affiliated with Al Qaeda either predate the birth of the global jihad in the early 1990s or grew later out of local causes and concerns, only subsequently attaching the bin Laden logo. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, for example, started out in 1998 as the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, an offshoot of another militant group that had roots in Algeria’s vicious civil war during the early 1990s. Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba, the force allegedly behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai, India, that killed more than 170 people, was formed in the 1990s to fight for a united Kashmir under Pakistani rule. In Somalia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, the Al Qaeda brand has been attractive to groups born out of local concerns.

Jihad in the 21st century, especially during the past few years, has fundamentally changed its anatomy: Al Qaeda is no longer a collective political actor. It is no longer an adversary that can articulate a will, capitulate, and be defeated. But the jihad’s new weakness is also its new strength: Because of its transformation, Islamist militancy is politically impaired yet fitter to survive its present crisis.

By joining Al Qaeda and stepping up violence, local insurgents have long risked placing themselves on the target lists of governments and law enforcement organizations. More recently, however, they have run what may be an even more consequential risk, that of removing themselves from the social mainstream and losing popular support. This is what happened to Al Qaeda in Iraq during the Sunni Awakening, which began in 2005 in violence-ridden al-Anbar Province and its principal city, Ramadi. Al Qaeda had declared Ramadi the future capital of its Iraqi “caliphate,” and by late 2005 it had the entire city under its control. But even conservative Sunni elders became alienated by the group’s brutality and violence. One prominent local leader, Sheikh Sattar Abdul Abu Risha, lost several brothers and his father in assassinations. Others were agitated by the loss of prestige and power to the insurgents in their traditional homelands. In early 2006, Sattar and his sheikhs decided to cooperate with American forces, and by the end of the year they had helped recruit nearly 4,000 men to local police units. “They brought us nothing but destruction and we finally said, enough is enough,” Sattar explained.

The awakening (sahwa in Arabic) was not limited to al-Anbar. One after another, former firebrand imams, in so-called revisions, have started questioning the theological justifications of holy war. The trend may have begun with Gamaa al-Islamiya, Egypt’s most brutal terrorist group, which was responsible for the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 and the slaughter of 58 foreign tourists in Luxor in 1997. As the Iraq war intensified during the summer of 2003, several of Gamaa al-Islamiya’s leaders advised young men not to participate in Al Qaeda operations and accused the organization of “splitting Muslim ranks” by provoking hostile reactions against Islam “and wrongly interpreting the meaning of jihad in a violent way.”

Another notable revision came in September 2007, when Salman al-Awda, an influential Saudi cleric who had previously declared that fighting Americans in Iraq was a religious duty, spoke out against Al Qaeda. He accused bin Laden in an open making terror a synonym for Islam.” Speaking on a popular Saudi TV show on the sixth anniversary of 9/11, al-Awda asked, “My brother Osama, how much blood has been spilt? How many innocent people, children, elderly, and women have been killed . . . in the name of Al Qaeda?”

Other ideologues have followed, including Sajjid Imam al-Shareef, one of Al Qaeda’s founding leaders, who used the nom de guerre Dr. Fadl. “Every drop of blood that was shed or is being shed in Afghanistan and Iraq is the responsibility of bin Laden and Zawahiri and their followers,” he wrote in the London-based newspaper Asharq Al Awsat.

In Afghanistan, coalition soldiers see the global-local split replicated as a fissure between what they call “big T” Taliban and “small t” Taliban. The “big T” ideologues fight for more global spiritual or political reasons; the “little t” opportunists fight for power, for money, or just to survive, to hedge their bets. A family might have one son fighting for the Taliban and another in the Afghan National Army; no matter which side prevails, they will have one son in the right place. U.S. Marines in Helmand Province say that 80 to 85 percent of all those they fight are “small t” Taliban. The U.S. counterinsurgency campaign aims to co-opt and reintegrate many of these rebels by creating secure population centers and new economic opportunities, spreading cleared areas like “inkblots.” But the Taliban have long been keen to spread their own inkblots, with a similar rationale: attracting more and more “accidental” guerrillas, in the famous phrase of counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen, not just hardliners.

In Afghanistan, coalition soldiers see the global-local split replicated as a fissure between what they call “big T” Taliban and “small t” Taliban. The “big T” ideologues fight for more global spiritual or political reasons; the “little t” opportunists fight for power, for money, or just to survive, to hedge their bets. A family might have one son fighting for the Taliban and another in the Afghan National Army; no matter which side prevails, they will have one son in the right place.

Yet even Afghanistan’s “big T” Taliban, the ideologues, cannot simply be equated with Al Qaeda. Last fall, Abu Walid, once an Al Qaeda accomplice and now a Taliban propagandist, ridiculed bin Laden in the Taliban’s official monthly magazine al-Sumud, for, among other things, his do-it-yourself approach to Islamic jurisprudence, as Vahid Brown at the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point observed. A number of veterans had criticized bin Laden in the past, among them such towering figures as Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, one of the key architects of the global jihad. But Abu Walid’s criticism was more biting. Bin Laden’s organization lacks strategic vision and relies on “shiny slogans,” he told Leah Farrall, an Australian counterterrorism specialist, in a much-noted dialogue she reported on her blog. Consequently, the Taliban would no longer welcome the terrorists in Afghanistan, he said, because “the majority of the population is against Al Qaeda.”

At the root of the disagreement between the two groups is the question of a local, or even national, popular base. Last September, Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s founding figure and spiritual overlord, issued a message in several languages. He called the Taliban a “robust Islamic and nationalist movement” that had “assumed the shape of a popular movement.” Probably realizing that pragmatism and a certain amount of moderation offer the best chance of a return to power, Omar vowed “to maintain good and positive relations with all neighbors based on mutual respect.”

Al Qaeda’s reaction was swift and harsh. Turning the jihad into a “national cause,” in the purists’ view, was selling it out. Prominent radicals, in a remarkable move, compared the Taliban’s turnabout to the efforts by Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza to distance themselves from Al Qaeda. Hamas in particular, perhaps because it is, like Al Qaeda, a Sunni organization, has been the subject of “relentless” criticism in Al Qaeda circles, says Thomas Hegghammer of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. When a self-proclaimed Al Qaeda faction appeared in Gaza, Hamas executed one of its leading imams and many of his armed followers. Jihadi ideologues were aghast. The globalists shuddered at the thought that local interests could compromise their pan-Islamic ambitions. “Nationalism,” declared Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two, “must be rejected by the umma [Muslim community], because it is a model which makes jihad subject to the market of political compromises and distracts the umma from the liberation of Islamic lands and the establishment of the Caliphate.”

A few weeks later, Mullah Omar pointedly reiterated his promise of good neighborliness and future cooperation with Afghanistan’s neighbors, including China, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan—all of whom face their own jihadi insurgencies and are on Al Qaeda’s target list.

The Taliban’s new tactics are throwing an “ideological bridge” not only to nearby countries but to parts of the current Kabul elite, most notably politically mobilized university students, notes Thomas Ruttig of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. Even the newly moderate Taliban, it should be clear, remains wedded to inhumane and medieval moral principles. Yet Omar’s pragmatism immediately affects the question of who and what is a desirable target of attacks.

Globalists shuddered at the thought that local interests could compromise their pan-Islamic ambitions. “Nationalism,” declared Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s number two, “must be rejected by the umma [Muslim community], because it is a model which makes jihad subject to the market of political compromises and distracts the umma from the liberation of Islamic lands and the establishment of the Caliphate.”

Perhaps the greatest tension between the local and global levels of the jihad grows out of a divide over appropriate targets and tactics. Classical Islamic legal doctrine sees armed jihad as a defensive struggle against persecution, oppression, and incursions into Muslim lands. In an attempt to mobilize Muslims around the world to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, Abdallah Azzam, an influential radical cleric who was assassinated in 1989, helped expand the doctrine of jihad into a transnational struggle by declaring the Afghan jihad an individual duty for all Muslims. Azzam also advocated takfir, a practice of designating fellow Muslims as infidels (kaffir) by remote excommunication in order to justify their slaughter. Al Qaeda ideologues upped the aggressive potential of such arguments and expanded the defensive jihad into a global struggle, effectively blurring the line between the “near” enemy—the Arab regimes deemed illegitimate “apostates” by the purists—and the “far” enemy, these regimes’ Western supporters.

In the remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan that produce many of today’s radicals, however, local and tribal affiliations are powerful. One U.S. political adviser who worked in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, a hotbed of the insurgency, describes prevailing local sentiment as “valleyism” rather than nationalism. It is a force that drives the tribes to oppose anybody who threatens their traditional power base, foreign or not—a problem not just for the Taliban and Al Qaeda but for any Afghan government. Al-Zawahiri complained of this in an address, "Even the students (talib) themselves had stronger affiliations to their tribes and villages . . . than to the Islamic emirate.” The provincial valleyists, to the distress of Al Qaeda’s more cosmopolitan agitators, are selfishly eyeing their own interests, with little appetite for international aggression and globe-spanning terrorist operations.

The contrast with the character of jihad in the Muslim diaspora could not be starker. For radical Islamists in Europe, the local jihad doesn’t exist. And they understand that toppling governments in, say, London or Amsterdam is a fantasy. These radicals are less interest driven than identity driven. Many young European Muslims are out of touch with their ancestral countries, yet not fully at home in France or Sweden or Denmark. For some, the resulting identity crisis creates a hunger for clear spiritual guidelines. The ideology of global jihad, according to a report by EUROPOL, the European Union’s police agency, “gives meaning to the feeling of exclusion” prevalent among the second- and third-generation descendants of Muslim immigrants. For these alienated youth, the idea of becoming “citizens” of the virtual worldwide Islamic community may be more attractive than it is for first-generation immigrants, who tend to retain strong roots in their native countries.

In the remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan that produce many of today’s radicals, however, local and tribal affiliations are powerful. One U.S. political adviser who worked in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, a hotbed of the insurgency, describes prevailing local sentiment as “valleyism” rather than nationalism.It is a force that drives the tribes to oppose anybody who threatens their traditional power base, foreign or not—a problem not just for the Taliban and Al Qaeda but for any Afghan government.

The identity problems of these young people seem to have affected the character of the jihad itself. Like the disoriented Muslim youth of the diaspora, the global jihad has loose residential roots and numb political fingertips. One sign of this disconnection from the local is that Al Qaeda’s rank and file does not include many men who could otherwise join a jihad at home: There seem to be few Palestinians, Chechens, Iraqis, or Afghans among the traveling jihadis, who tend to come from countries where jihad has failed, such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Syria.

Al Qaeda’s identity crisis is also illustrated by how it treats radicalized converts, often people without religious schooling and consolidated personalities. Olivier Roy, one of France’s leading specialists on radical Islamism, has pointed out that convert groups assume responsibilities “beyond all comparison with any other Islamic organization.” Roy has put the proportion of converts in Al Qaeda at between 10 and 25 percent, an indicator that the movement has become “de-culturalized.”

These contrary trends, in turn, create chinks in Al Qaeda’s recruitment system. The most extreme Salafists, deprived of identity and cultural orientation, have an appetite for utopia, for extreme views that appeal to the margin of society, be it in Holland or Helmand. Recruitment in the diaspora, as a result, follows a distinctive pattern, not partisan and political but offbeat and outré. The grievances and motivations of European extremists and the rare American militants tend to be idiosyncratic, the product of unstable individual personalities and a history of personal discrimination. Many take the initiative to join the movement themselves, and because they are not recruited by a member of the existing organization, their ties to it may remain loose. In 2008 alone, 190 individuals were sentenced for Islamist terrorist activities in Europe, most of them in Britain, France, and Spain. “A majority of the arrested individuals belonged to small autonomous cells rather than to known terrorist organizations,” EUROPOL reports.

As a result of the change in its membership, the global Al Qaeda movement is encountering strong centrifugal forces. The rank and file and the center are losing touch with each other. The vision of Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, who laid much of the ideological foundation for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, blends a Marxist-inspired focus on popular mass support with 21st-century ideas of networked, individual action. Al-Suri’s aim was to devise a method “for transforming excellent individual initiatives, performed over the past decades, from emotional pulse beats and scattered reactions into a phenomenon which is guided and utilized, and whereby the project of jihad is advanced so that it becomes the Islamic Nation’s battle, and not a struggle of an elite.” The global jihad was to function like an “operative system,” without vulnerable, old-fashioned organizational hierarchies. That method is intuitively attractive for a Facebook generation of well-connected young sympathizers, but the theory contains an internal contradiction. Self-recruited and “homegrown” terrorists present a wicked problem for Al Qaeda. As a bizarre type of self-appointed elite, they undermine the movement’s ambition to represent the Muslim “masses.”

The problem is embodied in the online jihad. For Al Qaeda, Web forums operated by unaffiliated Islamists have been the most important distribution platform for jihadi materials. But after the arrest of a top-tier online activist in London two years ago, the connection between the forums and Al Qaeda’s official media center, al-Sahab, began to loosen. Al Qaeda has lost more and more control of the online jihad. And, just like others online, jihadi Web administrators face increasingly tough competition for visibility. Within the forums the tone has become harsher. Brynjar Lia, a specialist on Salafism at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, says that “interjihadi quarrels seem to have become more common and less ‘brotherly’ in tone in recent years.”

As a result of the change in its membership, the global Al Qaeda movement is encountering strong centrifugal forces. The rank and file and the center are losing touch with each other.

Some far-flung jihadi groups are enjoying newfound independence of another kind, as a result of criminal ventures they have established to fund their efforts. This too is intensifying the centrifugal forces within the global movement. Some groups are tipping into a more purely criminal mode.

A cause is what distinguishes an insurgency from organized crime, as David Galula, an influential French author on counterinsurgency, noted decades ago. Organized crime does not have to be incompatible with jihad. It may even be justified in religious terms: Baz Mohammed, an Afghan heroin kingpin and the first criminal ever extradited from Afghanistan, bragged to his co-conspirators that selling heroin in the United States was jihad because it killed Americans while taking their money.

A budding insurgency has only a limited window of opportunity to grow into a serious political force. If the cause withers and loses its popular gloss, what remains as a rump may be nothing but a criminal organization, attracting a following with criminal energy rather than religious zeal, thus further damaging jihad’s status in the eyes of the broader public. For some groups, this already appears to be happening. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb funds itself through the drug trade, smuggling, extortion, and kidnappings in southern Algeria and northern Mali. Indonesia’s Abu Sayyaf Group and the Philippines’ Jamiyah Islamiyah engage in a variety of criminal activities, including credit card fraud. The terrorist cell behind the 2004 Madrid bombings earned most of its money from criminal activities; when Spanish police raided the home of one of the plotters, they seized close to $2 million in drugs and cash, including more than 125,000 Ecstasy tablets, according to U.S. News and World Report. The Madrid bombings had cost the terrorists just $50,000.

The goal of leading Islamists has always been to turn their battle into “the Islamic Nation’s battle,” as al-Suri wrote. Far from reaching this goal, the jihad is veering the other way. Eight years after 9/11, support for Islamic extremism in the Muslim world is at its lowest point. Support for Al Qaeda has slipped most dramatically in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Jordan. In 2003, more than 50 percent of those surveyed in these countries agreed that bin Laden would “do the right thing regarding world affairs,” the Pew Global Attitudes Project found. By 2009 the overall level of support had dropped by half, to about 25 percent. In Pakistan, traditionally a stronghold of extremism, only nine percent of Muslims have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, down from 25 percent in 2008. Even an American failure to stabilize Afghanistan and its terror-ridden neighborhood would be unlikely to ease Al Qaeda’s crisis of legitimacy.

A budding insurgency has only a limited window of opportunity to grow into a serious political force. If the cause withers and loses its popular gloss, what remains as a rump may be nothing but a criminal organization, attracting a following with criminal energy rather than religious zeal, thus further damaging jihad’s status in the eyes of the broader public. For some groups, this already appears to be happening.

But it would be naive to conclude that the cracks in Al Qaeda’s ideological shell mean that the movement’s end is near. Far from it. Islamist ideology may be losing broad appeal, and the recent global crop of extremists may be disunited and drifting apart. Yet in the fanatics’ own view, the ideology remains a crucial cohesive force that binds together an extraordinarily diverse extremist elite. Salafism, despite its crisis, continues to be attractive to those at the social margins. One of the ideology’s most vital functions appears to be to resolve the contradictions of jihad in the 21st century: being a pious Muslim, yet attacking women and children; upholding the authority of the Qur’an, yet prospering from crime; depending on Western welfare states, yet plotting against them; having no personal ties to any Islamic group, yet believing oneself to be part of one.

Al Qaeda’s altered design has a number of immediate consequences. The global jihad is losing what David Galula called a strong cause, and with it its political character. This change is making it increasingly difficult to distinguish jihad from organized crime on the one side and rudderless fanaticism on the other. This calls into question the notion that war is still, as Clausewitz said, “a continuation of politics by other means,” and therefore whether it can be discontinued politically. Second, coerced by adversaries and enabled by the Internet, the global jihadi movement has dismantled and disrupted its own ability to act as one coherent entity. No leader is in a position to articulate the movement’s will, let alone enforce it. It is doubtful, to quote Clausewitz again, whether war can still be “an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will.” And because jihad has no single center of gravity, it has no single critical vulnerability. No matter what the outcome of U.S.-led operations in Afghanistan and other places, a general risk of terrorist attacks will persist for the foreseeable future.

But it would be naive to conclude that the cracks in Al Qaeda’s ideological shell mean that the movement’s end is near. Far from it. Islamist ideology may be losing broad appeal, and the recent global crop of extremists may be disunited and drifting apart. Yet in the fanatics’ own view, the ideology remains a crucial cohesive force that binds together an extraordinarily diverse extremist elite.

In combating terrorism, therefore, quantity matters as much as quality. But some numbers matter more than others. How many additional American and European troops are sent to Afghanistan matters less than the number of terrorist plots that don’t happen. Success will be found subtly in statistics, in data curves that slope down or level off, not in one particular action, one capitulation, or even one leader’s death. It will be marked not by military campaigns and other events but by decisions not taken and attacks not launched. Because participation in the holy war in both its local and global forms is an individual decision, these choices have to be the unit of analysis, and influencing them must be the goal of policy and strategy. As in crime prevention, measuring success—how many potential terrorists did not join an armed group or commit a terrorist act—is nearly impossible. Success against Islamic militancy may wear a veil.

, a former Wilson Center public policy scholar, is the author of 

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Jihad in the 21st century has fundamentally changed its anatomy. It is only growing more difficult to defeat. 

Cracks in the Jihad

Over the past five years, Andrew Bacevich has emerged as one of the most prolific and eloquent critics of American foreign policy. In several influential books and essays, Bacevich, a professor of international relations and history at Boston University, has often walked the fine line between scholarship and mass-audience opinionating. As a self-styled realist, he has mostly crafted these positions with detached, historically balanced analysis.

 breaks with this trend: It is the passionate, personal, and polemical story of how Bacevich, as an Army officer visiting Berlin in 1990, embarked on an educational journey that led him to discover the ideological roots of America’s path to permanent war. At times 

 articulates a sophisticated critique of the United States’ global ambitions. But with this book, Bacevich is dancing along another line. He now has at least one foot in the murky territory of conspiracy theory.

The first indicator is Bacevich’s obsessive use of dogma and quasi-religious language. The country is run not by presidents and senators, but by something bigger, the “Washington rules.” These rules start with the “credo”: All presidents from Harry S. Truman to Barack Obama have faithfully adhered to a “catechism” of American statecraft founded on four assertions: (1) The world must be organized and “shaped.” (2) America, and only America, has the vision, the will, and the wisdom to lead and enforce this global order. (3) America has articulated the principles that govern the international order, and these principles are, not surprisingly, American ones. (4) The world, despite occasional complaints, wants the United States to lead.

The other half of the Washington rules consists of the “sacred trinity”: the convictions that the United States must maintain a global military presence, that it must configure its forces to project power globally, and that it must counter anticipated threats around the world with interventions. The credo and the trinity—terms Bacevich uses throughout the book—promise prosperity and peace but, in effect, usher in the opposite: insolvency and perpetual war.

 imposes a grand and simplifying scheme on a vast set of complex facts. Consider Bacevich’s explanation of the Washington rules’ origins: the cloak-and-dagger world of Cold War spies and the hidden Air Force command centers where cigar-chomping four-star generals devised strategies for nuclear overkill. The most important masterminds were Allen Dulles, the first and most influential director of the CIA, and Curtis LeMay, the first and most influential commander of the Strategic Air Command, the agency that was in charge of nuclear war. These two “semiwarriors,” as Bacevich calls them with a curl of his lip, “left an indelible mark on our age.” He describes how the Washington rules and America’s global footprint survived the defeat in Vietnam as well as the demise of the Soviet Union, aided by legions of semiwarriors on the left and the right, apparently uninfluenced by partisan politics. President Bill Clinton’s secretary of defense, William Cohen, conserved the rules, and his secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, midwifed them into the 21st century. President George W. Bush’s defense team, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, applied them in Afghanistan and Iraq.

For Bacevich, there is an obvious “chain of events” that paved the way to 9/11: the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran in 1953; America’s “deference” to Israel after the 1960s; U.S. dealings with Saddam Hussein in the 1980s; Washington’s support for jihadis in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan; and the Gulf War in 1990–91. If George W. Bush had acknowledged the connection between these policies and the fall of the Twin Towers, Washington’s sacred dogma would have been called into question, so he deliberately ignored it. Instead, under the Bush administration, the standard of debate fell to a level “hitherto achieved only by slightly mad German warlords.”

For Andrew Bacevich, there is an obvious chain of events that paved the way to 9/11.

Bacevich carefully acknowledges that the Washington “elite” is not all-knowing and often just doesn’t get it. Yet, especially when he discusses recent examples, he unearths willful deceit. General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency doctrine, for instance, is dismissed as “counterfeit coin,” a strategy that only gives the 

 of purpose to military activity, and in truth is a recipe for more and more wars in the various broken quarters of the world. Bacevich dismisses the threat of Islamic terrorism in a nonchalant way, shrugs off the geopolitical relevance of the Middle East and Central Asia, and disregards mad dictators eager to get their hands on nuclear weapons. Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Kim Jong Il are ridiculed as not more than “a motley collection of B-list foes”; North Korea, Syria, and Cuba are derided as “pygmies.” America and its allies seem to have no A-list enemies. Consequently, there is no need for Bacevich to suggest alternative policies beyond just “getting out.”

This book is a pity. U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East and Central Asia, driven by ideology and now hope, is indeed producing more and more questionable outcomes. An authoritative and constructive critique by an outsider with an insider’s knowledge would be highly welcome. 

 offers a few illuminating glimpses, but no balanced view. Bacevich ends up doing a great service to his reviled semiwarriors by handing them a straw man they will manage to shoot down with ease.

is a visiting scholar at the University of Konstanz in Germany and was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2009. His most recent book, 

Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War

 by Andrew J. Bacevich, Metropolitan Books, 286 pp, 2011.

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Over the past five years, Andrew Bacevich has emerged as one of the most prolific and eloquent critics of American foreign policy.

American Conspiracy

"Do these people in Egypt really understand what freedom means?” a well-meaning friend asked Hamed Abdel-Samad after he returned home to Germany from Cairo’s Tahrir Square earlier this year. “Probably not,” the young political scientist, who had witnessed thugs and policemen beating protesters, replied sarcastically. “It would be great if you could come to Egypt with me to teach them your experience with freedom, how you fought for it, how you risked your life, how you came to appreciate it.” Abdel-Samad, who was born in Egypt, said in a radio interview earlier this year that we—by whom he means Westerners—are spoiled by peace, saturated with freedom, and take our inherited liberties for granted. “Right now,” he said, “I can’t see an expression of freedom anywhere that is fresher than in the Arab world.”

William J. Dobson vividly portrays this struggle against authoritarian rule in 

, a collection of short, evocative dispatches from the Arab countries and Egypt, but also Russia, China, Venezuela, and, in less depth and detail, Malaysia. Dobson’s main argument is that the nature of dictatorship has changed. Today’s dictators and authoritarian regimes, he writes, are “far more sophisticated, savvy, and nimble” than those of the past. In contrast to 20th-century totalitarian rulers, modern dictators understand the importance of keeping up appearances: It can be essential to appear to be a democracy, especially if the goal is to avoid becoming one. They’ve also learned that using and abusing a warped version of legal process can be an effective tool of control, and a subtler one than blatant repression and violence.

, is at his best when he is telling stories—often instances in which “the dictator’s learning curve” was put to viciously effective use. Hugo Chávez’s innovative methods of keeping Venezuela’s opposition down offer a frightening example. One summer day in 2010, Dobson was waiting on the front steps of a government building in Caracas for an appointment with a Chavista congressman. As he waited, street vendors kept walking up to him trying to sell what he believed were pirated DVDs of Hollywood films, as is customary on many a street corner in Moscow, Beijing, and New York. But when he looked more closely, he realized he was being offered copies of the Maisanta for $1.50.

The Maisanta (the name is a reference to a 19th-century rebel leader) is a digital database that contains detailed information on Venezuela’s registered voters, including name, address, voter identification number, and whether the identified person receives government support or has abstained from voting in past elections. Most important, the database reveals whether someone voted for a controversial 2004 recall referendum that challenged Chávez’s grip on power. This trove of information about the country’s 12 million voters conveniently fits on one compact disc. In normal democracies, such information would be closely protected, but Chávez’s government had either actively released it or neglected to keep it secure. As Dobson observes, “In a society ruled by patronage politics, being identified as an enemy of the state can have serious consequences.” One woman told Dobson that when her fiancé needed urgent medical treatment and went to the emergency room, the admissions staffer ran his voter ID card through the computer and told him he had to go elsewhere. He had cast a ballot for Chávez’s recall in the referendum. Academics, of course, could also work with the database, and some ran household surveys that they matched against the Maisanta information. The statistics showed that the income of Chávez’s opponents dropped by five percent after the roster was published. Once the information was publicly available, the government did not even actively need to use the data against its opponents; Venezuelans knew whom not to hire, grant a permit, or give medical treatment.

Dobson’s riveting account of a Russian “accidental activist,” Yevgenia Chirikova, offers an example of how those who resist authoritarian regimes may prevail using the same modern methods. A decade ago, Chirikova and her family moved to Khimki, a leafy suburb an hour northwest of Moscow. The town’s Soviet-style residential buildings were unremarkable, but were surrounded by an attractive woodland, the Khimki Forest, a rare Russian natural reserve that enjoyed public protection.

One day, on a walk in the woods with her two young daughters, Chirikova saw trees marked with red paint and small cuts in the trunks. Back home, she learned from a quick Internet search that the region’s governor, Boris Gromov, had slated the forest for demolition in order to make space for a motorway from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Chirikova wrote a letter to the governor, naively thinking she had uncovered a plain error. Slowly she realized the corruption around the project (well-connected real estate developers had peddled soon-to-be prime property ahead of the motorway’s announcement), and began rallying neighbors and activists to pressure the local authorities to abandon the plan. Thugs threatened her neighbors and rounded up sleeping activists who had camped out to protect the trees, the authorities attempted to take away her daughters, and a local journalist was beaten nearly to death for covering the story. Chirikova managed to enlist Europe’s Green parties and environmental organizations in her cause, and the European Union subsequently cut funding for the project, buying time for the Khimki Forest.

Despite Dobson’s eye for detail in such accounts, this book is an imprecise hybrid: part journalistic storytelling, part political analysis. At one point Dobson relates a conversation he had with then–Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s former public relations adviser, Ali Eddin Hilal. The man admitted—and this was well before the 2011 revolution—that the regime’s fake political opening could not go on indefinitely. “His response,” Dobson writes, “reminded me of Alexis de Tocqueville’s admonition that ‘the most dangerous moment for a corrupt regime is when it attempts to reform itself.’ ” Dobson doesn’t elaborate. But it is not enough merely to remind readers of Tocqueville’s admonition. Nor is it enough to say that modern dictators are different from their 20th-century forebears without exploring the nuances of that comparison. Didn’t Hitler, practicing gestures with a mirror, or Stalin, with his altered pictures, also appreciate the significance of appearance? Is Chávez really more sophisticated than Mao? Dobson leaves these questions untouched.

Two-thousand eleven was a historic year. A wave of revolutions swept the Arab world, although their outcomes still hang in the balance. Some of the world’s oldest and most formidable authoritarian regimes fell, in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Syria likely will be next. Other non-democratic governments in the region survived, such as those in Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates. Why did some fall while others did not? This question is foremost on the minds of authoritarian leaders in countries including China, Russia, and Venezuela. “Dictators,” as Dobson likes to call them, are scared pale by the possibility of sudden popular revolt.

So what explains the difference? Those regimes that have so far weathered the storm of the Arab Spring are monarchies, not republics. This is no coincidence. Any political ruler, even the most brutal tyrant, requires a degree of tacit legitimacy. Monarchies can fall back on a symbolic legitimacy, especially in conservative societies, that is fed by a deep-rooted belief in dynastic, hereditary rule—hence the quasi-monarchic tendencies in several republics (see Muammar al-Qaddafi’s attempt to install his son Saif al Islam in power, Mubarak’s attempt to pass his rule on to his own blood, or Bashar al-Assad’s continuation of his father’s brutal reign). But such analysis is mostly absent from Dobson’s fast-paced storytelling.

 falls flat. Many of the stories of bold activists and the various creative attempts of governments to keep them down or out are compelling. Dobson’s coverage of Venezuela’s internal political struggles is particularly fascinating. He had spectacular access to well-placed sources in this oil-rich country, including political prisoners. His account of the fate of María Afiuni is bone chilling: Formerly a judge in the Thirty-First Control Court in Caracas, Afiuni made a decision that displeased the regime, and was put behind bars indefinitely—in the same jail with criminals she had convicted.

The book’s travel reports are uneven. Dobson’s treatments of Venezuela and Russia are excellent, while his dispatches from Egypt are too focused on Hosni Mubarak and his son Gamal; they appear to have been written before the January 2011 revolution, and thus at times feel outdated. Dobson’s Thomas Friedman-like style of reporting may explain the variations in quality: The chief criterion for various anecdotes’ inclusion in the book seems to be whether Dobson was able to add “he told me” or “she told a friend of mine.” Fortunately, this me-first attitude recedes somewhat as the book progresses and Dobson turns his attention to the people who have come to understand what freedom means.

 is a reader in war studies at King’s College London and was a public policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center in 2009. He has coedited 

 (2007). He is currently at work on a book about deterrence.

The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy

 by William J. Dobson, Doubleday, 341 pp. 

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Today’s dictators and authoritarian regimes are “far more sophisticated, savvy, and nimble” than those of the past.

Thomas Rid