Blood and Rage_ A Cultural History of Terrorism - Michael Burleigh [290]
All terrorist groups have to adapt to their environment if they are to survive; if they do not they will have the limited life-cycle of nineteenth-century anarchists or nihilists. On the run, Al Qaeda proper decided to use Al Qaeda Plus—that is, the couple of dozen affiliated groups which Al Qaeda armed, financed, trained or influenced through its leaders.92 Al Qaeda proper would thenceforth be a form of incitement, as well as an example, method or rule that others followed without being directly part of the organisation. Widely perceived as a clever evolutionary move, it in fact reflected a concern with security that overrode the drawbacks of such a strategy.93
This networked terrorism is not new, any more than Osama bin Laden is unique as a financial sponsor of international terrorism, a role once performed in Europe by millionaire publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. The PLO was an umbrella organisation for dozens of armed groups. The German RAF had no military-style hierarchy befitting an ‘army’, and it had extensive contacts with the Red Brigades, ETA, IRA and the Palestinians. Loosely affiliated networks, especially if they consist of ad-hoc amateur groups devoted to a similar objective as the parent firm, have several strengths. Lacking a hierarchy, or state sponsorship, they cannot be decapitated or stopped by regime change. If communication with Al Qaeda merely consists of subscribing to its ideology, and allowing it to claim responsibility for one of the networked groups’ atrocities, then they are not regular or sustained enough to represent a weak point that intelligence agencies can exploit.94 The drawbacks of networked terrorism are multiple, paradoxically jeopardising the very security they are supposed to ensure by the abandonment of hierarchy. It provides opportunities to disaggregate the groups through their own internal dynamics since it is notoriously difficult to plant agents inside.
From Al Qaeda’s perspective, there are no means of controlling the operational choices or levels of violence used by remote groups not subject to the discipline of a hierarchical organisation. Indeed, they may be far more violent than the franchising group, whether in terms of launching indiscriminate attacks or killing anyone sent to restrain them. UVF terrorists in Northern Ireland complained that an admiral in the Royal Navy does not have to fear being shot by a renegade rating if the latter decides to sell drugs. Technical information on bomb making has to come from sources like the internet, which leaves plenty of scope for security agencies to fake sites filled with misinformation. This forces groups to contact the parent franchise more frequently, increasing the likelihood that these contacts will be monitored. If it is the case that, for reasons of paranoia, terrorists recruit from kin groups, then pressure on the wider kin will create the perception that this source of recruits is insecure too, and it will be if commitment to terrorism clashes with wider social obligations.
Finance is a further vulnerability. In the absence of centralised funding, and the sort of regular accounting Al Qaeda is known to practise, money has to be raised through crime. This presents opportunities for embezzlement, or the temptation to become full-time drug traffickers, extortionists and armed robbers, presenting many opportunities to be caught. Money derived from crime also has to be laundered, which routinely diminishes the proceeds to a considerable extent as each person in the laundering chain takes a cut. Even the legal hawala system, for moving money without wire transfers, intermediary