Osama bin Laden may be dead but his successors at al-Qa'eda have the same goals. Which makes it as important as ever to try to understand what motivates these jihadists, but the West still isn't doing this.

So says CIA veteran Michael Scheuer. He's one of the most respected Western commentators on Osama bin Laden and he worked within the CIA's bin Laden tracking unit until 2004. And in the spirit of understanding your enemy, he made a close study of bin Laden's public statements over many years.

He now believes that the West is seriously mistaken about what drives al-Qa'eda, and that this has derailed Western policies.

In February of this year, while bin Laden was still alive and at large, Michael Scheuer spoke about where Western thinking is wrong, and the consequences.


Michael Scheuer: I think we've all heard this innumerable times. Americans are hated and attacked by Islamic militants for their freedom and their lifestyle. In more than 800 pages of primary documents, there is no focus whatsoever on how Americans live and think, the focus is squarely on what the United States government does in the Muslim world. To be sure, bin Laden makes it clear that no Muslim state run by him or other Islamists would look like Canada, but neither does he rage against primaries in Iowa, women in the workplace, or after-work pictures of Sam Adams, knowing that almost no Muslim would risk his life to end these practices. This fact is perhaps the most important take-away for ordinary American from bin Laden's papers. Because it both lays bare how consistently they have been lied to by the last three Presidents, and explains why they do not understand the enemy their nation is fighting is motivated by the impact of Washington's foreign policy in the Muslim world.

I use the word 'lie' deliberately, because the data needed to expose the lie is so easily accessible that the US bipartisan political leadership, so many of whom were educated in the Ivy League, have no ground for claiming ignorance. Their knowingly false description of the motivation of America's Islamist enemies may be politically expedient but it most certainly is a lie that will ultimately lead to spiralling defence costs, domestic violence in the United States, severely curtailed civil liberties and endless war with Islam.

The second piece of common wisdom is that bin Laden's mind was shaped by the most radical modern Islamic theorists, men such as the Egyptian Sayyid Qutb. Qutb is a theorist of Jihad that made war look like a Hobsian war of all against all. And he's seen in the West as the principal shaper of bin Laden's thought and actions. But in the corpus of bin Laden's own work, there is not a single quotation from any of Qutb's works, nor does bin Laden ever mention the man's name. That bin Laden accepts some of what Qutb said is clear, as long as Qutb and others like him does not stray from the solipsist view of the Qu'ran and the Suna as the primary documents of Islam, bin Laden concurs with him. But this is really no more than saying that the Qu'ran and the Suna are central to bin Laden and most Muslims. When Qutb diverges from these sources, bin Laden clearly has no use for his recommendations and does not deign to even mention him. In the solifi tradition the Prophet's sayings and traditions, and the Qu'ran are the primary documents and that's where at least solifists look exclusively for guidance and for direction in how to fight a war, how to run a government, how to run your life. And one of the reasons we do not understand the breadth of bin Laden's appeal is because we seek sources of his thought beyond the Qu'ran and Suna, which are immediately recognisable and dearly beloved to Muslims from Malaysia to Morocco to Montreal.

The third piece of common wisdom is that bin Laden is not a very smart fellow, and the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri is really the 'eminence grise'. Western politicians and writers often refer to al-Zawahiri, the former chief of the Egyptian terrorist group and now al-Qa'eda's deputy leader, as bin Laden's brain. An examination of bin Laden's work however, reveals no significant impact by the Egyptian and his thought or his rhetoric. Indeed, such an assessment clearly delineates how far bin Laden has drawn Zawahiri away from his original positions and strategy. Before joining bin Laden for example, al-Zawahiri opposed attacks on the United States, and championed attacks first on Egypt and then on Israel.

As with Qutb, bin Laden never once quotes from al-Zawahiri's massive corpus of work in his own statements, but stands with him as long as the Egyptian sticks to the abovementioned foundational documents of Islam.

A fourth piece of common wisdom is al-Qa'eda is outside the acceptable parameters of Islam, and champions a heretical form of Islam called Takfirism. A Takfiri is one who believes he can decide for himself whether another Muslim is a good Muslim or not a good Muslim, and if he makes the decision negatively the individual is open for being killed or robbed at his property.

In bin Laden's work, there is nothing but a thorough and unequivocal denunciation of Takfiri doctrine. Bin Laden and his lieutenants seldom deign, really, to respond to criticism or accusations from Western states or Arab tyrannies, but when accused of Takfirism, he, al-Zawahiri and other senior al-Qa'eda lieutenants have been quick to rebut the accusations. Bin Laden clearly and accurately foresees oblivion for al-Qa'eda and its allies if the Muslim masses come to believe that they are indeed Takfiris. His concern is evident in that he twice used public statements to implicitly apologise to all Muslims for the Takfiri behaviour of a man named Abu Musaba Zakawi, al-Qa'eda's late leader in Iraq, and to assure Muslims that such actions would not occur again, and to publicly and explicitly order all al-Qa'eda fighters to avoid Takfiri actions.

The fifth piece: bin Laden and al-Qa'eda are running from rock to rock and cave to cave, and so have no central control over their organisation. To test this claim, let's again look at the just-mentioned and now dead, al-Qa'eda chief in Iraq, Abu Musaba Zakawi. As noted, al-Zakawi's murderously Takfiri behaviour in Iraq has been the only potentially fatal strategic threat to al-Qa'eda since 9/11. Indeed, if the US military did not kill him, al-Qa'eda would have found a way to dispose of him, either by promoting him to a position where he could not command fighters, or by killing him themselves. Bin Laden's handling of what can be called the al-Zakawi problem, demonstrated his indirect management style.

Bin Laden did not take on al-Zakawi in public, but assigned that job to al-Zawahiri and another senior figure known only as Atea, to bring al-Zakawi back in al-Qaeda's non-Takfiri reservation. Al-Zawahiri did so in a measured but clearly pointed manner. He stressed that al-Qaeda's respect for al-Zakawi's success in killing Americans and their allies was great, but told al-Zakawi that he was part of a bigger whole that had an international agenda which was being damaged by his actions, especially by televised beheadings, and the bombing of mosques and shrines.

When al-Zakawi took minimal remedial action, Atea followed with a much harsher letter. It opens by saluting al-Zakawi's lethal accomplishments against US-led forces, but then harshly chastises him for ignoring the fact that he is subordinate to bin Laden and other al-Qa'eda leaders, demanding that his actions must complement, not retard, al-Qa'eda's international goals, and pledging to him that he would be removed from commanding al-Qa'eda in Iraq if he did not quickly fall into line behind the directions of al-Qa'eda's senior leadership.

The content of both letters, as well as al-Qa'eda's ongoing rebound in Iraq ought to give pause to the authors who have identified al-Qa'eda as either a non-centralised organisation, now isolated from independent affiliates, or as a doctrinally Takfiri organisation. These authors are largely mistaken, and have skewed the now losing US military's understanding of its Islamist enemies, as well as the doctrine our military has shaped to defeat them.

The sixth, that al-Qa'eda has failed. After reviewing bin Laden's words it is irrefutably clear that he has always intended al-Qa'eda's primary role to be that of inciting and instigating Muslims to drive America from the Muslim world, to attack Israel, and to overthrow Arab tyrannies, and not, as a military machine, meant to defeat Islam's enemies by itself, or in alliance with a few other groups. Thus the whole concept hawked by self-serving Western politicians that they have made Western populations safer because they have not been attacked since 9/11, reflects not only wishful thinking, but a singular ignorance of al-Qa'eda's goals and the expanding power of its media operations.

At 9/11 for example, al-Qa'eda's main planning, training and operational platform was in Afghanistan. As the second month of 2011 ends, the group retains part of that platform, and has added a large section of Pakistan and sections of Yemen, Iraq, Somalia, and North Africa. In addition, al-Qa'eda's example of hurting the United States and then not only surviving, but growing in numbers and expanding geographically, has been an inspiration for continuing or increased organisational activity and/or violence by Islamist fighters in the north Caucasus, in Southern Thailand, in Europe, across the Far East in Kashmir, the Arabian Peninsula, India, Nigeria and other places in Africa, and in the United States. In short, al-Qa'eda not only retains substantial military capabilities for a group of its limited size, but it has developed an outsized media and geographical reach. In terms of inspiration and instigation capabilities, al-Qa'eda is today exactly what bin Laden intended it to be: an unqualified success in inspiring Muslims to wage jihad against their governments and Western powers across the Islamic world.

Seventh and finally: Muslim world polling shows that bin Laden is no longer popular and that al-Qa'eda is irrelevant. Not surprisingly, many non-Muslim authors place high value on the results of polling by reputable Western firms in the Muslim world. And some of it is indeed very valuable. But the polls' celebrity measuring and personality-based questions, such as 'Do you approve of Osama bin Laden?' or 'Would you want to live under a bin Laden government?' are virtually worthless. The key polling questions are the ones that mesh with what bin Laden identifies as the motivation for jihad, and with what he wants to achieve. Questions such as, 'What do you think of US foreign policy?' 'Do you want to be governed with a large measure of Sharia law?' and 'Do you believe that your current government is un-Islamic, has failed and/or is oppressive?' elicit the most informing responses. Polling shows virtual unanimous hatred among Muslims for the impact of US foreign policy, and for current Muslim governments, and a large majority favouring a substantial measure of Sharia law in their governance in the future. These results moreover, are nearly the same among key cohorts, young and old, male and female and militant and moderate. As long as these results remain consistently high, as they have for a decade, bin Laden is on the right track for his own purposes.

Kathy Gollan: That was CIA veteran and biographer of Osama bin Laden, Michael Scheuer, speaking at the Commonwealth Club in February of this year.