Cracks in the Foundation:
Leadership Schisms in al-Qa’ida from 1989-2006

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From its beginnings in the wake of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, al-Qa’ida has been at war with itself. In disputes that have largely been invisible to the broader public, its leadership has been in a constant battle over what al-Qa’ida should be, what strategy it should pursue, even who its real enemies are. Very early in al-Qa’ida’s development there emerged two factions, one committed to building an effective guerrilla organization and one bent on establishing al-Qa’ida as a global brand, a banner that could be taken up by any and all engaged in violent Islamist resistance. Conflict between these two poles has defined every major leadership schism in al-Qa’ida, with the latter camp, led by Usama bin Ladin, victorious nearly every time. In the end, the “brand managers” succeeded in converting al-Qa’ida from an allegiance-based paramilitary organization, complete with formalized hierarchies of command and control into an emblem, an ideological banner capable of inspiring homegrown cells of any size, the members of which pledge allegiance not to any particular person, but to the vision of jihad that al-Qa’ida embodies. The origins and consequences of this long-running conflict, even its existence, remain underappreciated by American policymakers. While the efforts of the United States and its allies to target al-Qa’ida’s organizational capacities have yielded tangible and hard-won gains, more must be done to degrade al-Qa’ida’s ability to control and project its brand – to inspire scattered and isolated Sunni militants to kill in its name.

These are the key insights that emerge from the following analysis of documents declassified from the Harmony Database and made available to the Combating Terrorism Center by the Department of Defense. Though it has long been known that al-Qa’ida has suffered from disunity at the leadership level, these documents allow us to gain a fresh insight into the engine driving those conflicts and illuminate the vulnerabilities that these conflicts have created for the organization.[1] In what boils down to a struggle between branding and bureaucracy, al-Qa’ida has consistently put its ability to inspire a broader movement over the development of its organizational capacities to pursue strategic military goals. While its guerrilla strategists have fought for the resources to build an effective command-and-control military organization, its two supreme leaders – Usama bin Ladin and Ayman al-Zawahiri – have preferred press releases over battlefield preparedness. Al-Qa’ida’s preference for branding, the military incompetence of its autocratic leaders and the unanticipated ferocity of the United States’ response to the attacks of 9/11, have together left the “brand managers” the only ones standing. This is not to say that al-Qa’ida has not been able to credibly threaten American interests by carrying out isolated but devastating acts of violence; it has. But its real strength has never been as a fighting force, but rather its ability to transform what have traditionally been the local or national concerns of Islamist activism into a vision of apocalyptic inter-civilizational conflict.

The following analysis, grounded in the data from the Harmony documents, charts the history of this transformation and of the internal divisions that surrounded it.[2] The Harmony documents shed light on cohesion problems that have been bedeviling Salafi jihadi organizations going back more than thirty years. One of these documents, analyzed in the Combating Terrorism Center’s first Harmony report, provides a lengthy “after-action report” on the failed jihadi activism in Syria in the 1970s and 1980s; its author, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, identifies disunity and disorganization at the leadership level as the single most important factor in the failure of that movement.[3] As the evidence from the Harmony documents discussed below shows, this has been a constant challenge for al-Qa’ida as well. While the branding-versus-bureaucracy crux outlined above has consistently been the driving force, at different points in the development of al-Qa’ida the scope and consequences of this leadership struggle have changed.

During the first phase, from the founding of the organization at the close of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan to the return of the leadership to South Asia after its misadventures in Africa, al-Qa’ida had failed in both areas, creating neither an effective guerrilla organization nor a consistent jihadi message.

In the second phase, from al-Qa’ida’s re-establishment in Afghanistan to its dispersal from that refuge by American-led attacks, al-Qa’ida was able to exploit the relative security provided by its uneasy alliance with the Taliban to develop and begin to “market” its anti-American message. Though it was during this period that it was able to carry out the large-scale acts of terror for which it is famous – the 1998 bombings of two American Embassies in Africa and the attacks of September 11, 2001 –internal divisions over the decision to target the United States severely degraded al-Qa’ida’s organizational capacity.

During the third and current phase, which began with the United States’ response to 9/11, al-Qa’ida as a centrally-controlled bureaucracy all but disappeared, with most of its key military and strategic leaders dispersed, captured or killed. In this period al-Qa’ida Central has been largely reduced to a media organization, while the Iraq war has created a market for its message, a field in which jihadis with little or no connection to the remnants of al-Qa’ida’s central bureaucracy can take up (and thus alter) the al-Qa’ida banner.[4]

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