This may prove one of the most daunting challenges confronting al Qaeda now: how is the global jihadi network going to survive, in the near or distant future, the inevitable fall of Moammar Qaddafi? Let’s face it: Osama Bin Laden could remain quiet since the beginning of the Arab uprising, some three months ago in Tunisia, because he had found with the Libyan ruler the perfect partner in his propaganda war. Qaddafi has repeatedly said that the rebels who dare to resist him are just a bunch of Bin Laden’s young operatives, high on drugs generously provided by al Qaeda (the Libyan leader even explained a short-lived lull in the insurgency by the fact that drugs were “wearing out”!).
This tragic farce had an invaluable side-effect for the jihadis: it rejuvenated their big fantasy of global boogeyman, at a moment when the revolutionary movements in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are practically pushing al Qaeda to the limbos. Even more important, Qaddafi saved Bin Laden the trouble of speaking the unspeakable, of trying to cope with the magnitude of the collapse of anything al Qaeda stood for. Other jihadi luminaries have failed miserably in that regard. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghrib’s (AQIM) call for support of the Tunisian revolution was issued on the eve on Ben Ali’s departure and went unnoticed in Tunisia. Al Qaeda in Iraq, at the height of the occupation of Tahrir, with Egyptian flags all over the square, warned the protesters against “the putrid idolatry of patriotism.” And Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden’s Egyptian deputy, waited one week after President Hosni Mubarak’s fall to issue a message designed as though the deposed president was still ruling Cairo.
So those are hard times for al Qaeda: movements which managed to stay peaceful in Tunisia and Egypt were able to topple in a few weeks regimes the jihadis could not destabilize over the past two decades; masses went bravely into the streets to demand democracy, transparency, and accountability, concepts alien and even heretic for al Qaeda; and the American “far enemy,” instead of backing the autocrats all the way, facilitated their stepping down. What is even worse for al Qaeda is that nobody cares anymore in the Arab world about the jihadi statements, which find their main audience in the West. Bin Laden and his followers now pray for some counterrevolution to succeed here or there, in order to reharness their propaganda and machinery. They displayed many times in the past their capacity to make their best out of the Arabs’ worst. And they now hope Qaddafi will remain as long as possible in power, because he could emerge as the last true believer in al Qaeda’s power and influence.
Jean-Pierre Filiu is a professor at Sciences Po, Paris, and Columbia, New York, and author of “Apocalypse in Islam.”