Leaderless Jihad

A decade after the war on terror began, the United States has made a concerted effort to boost funding for effective counterterrorism policy. The efforts of the US intelligence agencies to destroy Al Qaeda has created a massive counterterrorism infrastructure but policy makers need to know how to best use Government spending to effectively stop terrorists. A question that Marc Sageman’s book might cause readers to ask is, “Does the US counterterrorism infrastructure need to go after Al Qaeda’s central leadership or has the Al Qaeda group evolved into a different type of organization?” How experts answer this question could change the nature of counterterrorism policy. Sageman’s argument is that Al Qaeda is no longer run by a top-down leadership but has changed into a loose coalition of bottom-up networks.

To prove his argument, Sageman examines the organizational structure of Al Qaeda, beginning with a dataset that he compiled of jihadi terrorists. He started with the 19 hijackers directly involved in 9/11 and then examined who they had direct operational relationships with. The dataset grew to include 500 different individuals associated with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Using this dataset, Sageman sets out to, “develop an understanding of this form of terrorism in order to help contain it and prevent further atrocities on the scale of… the September 11 attacks.” He examines common traits between individual terrorists and their group interactions. From his dataset, Sageman examines what causes radicalization. He argues that it is the key to stopping the terrorist threat from growing. Radicalization is the process that individuals undergo before they eventually resort to political violence. If policy-makers better understand w...

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...s interpret the nature of Al Qaeda’s organizational structure will change where they invest their money for counterterrorism efforts. If Hoffman is correct then the US should focus on removing the leaders of the group but if Sageman is correct then there should be more emphasis on targeting the causes of radicalization. However this argument is concluded, Sageman provides incite into the mind and makeup of new terrorist organizations.

Works Cited

Hoffman, Bruce. “The Myth of Grass-Roots Terrorism: Why Osama bin Laden Still Matters.” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 3 (2008).

Sageman, Marc. Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008.

Sageman, Marc and Bruce Hoffman. “Does Osama Still Call the Shots? Debating the Containment of Al Qaeda’s Leadership.” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 4 (2008): 163-166.