[Terrorism] Conceptualizing Al Qaedaas an Internet Database

Instead, as Giles Kepel, the leading French authority on Islamists, puts it in his important study, The War For Muslim Minds: "al-Qaeda was [and is] less a military base of operations than a database that connected jihadists around the world via the internet ... this organisation did not consist of buildings and tanks and borders but of websites, clandestine financial transfers and a proliferation of activists ranging from Jersey City to the paddies of Indonesia". This central failure to understand the nature of al-Qaeda was the reason that the US attempted to counter it with such unsuitable policies: by targeting nations it considered sponsors of terrorism, so inadvertently turning itself into al-Qaeda's most effective recruiting agency.

Marc Says: I like this abstract model. We have a WWIII (Cold War) military designed to fight a nation (the USSR) and that military keeps tring to fight WWIV (the GWOT against Al Qaeda and others) as either as it it were a nation (Afghanistan) or as if it were the KGB-like action arm of a nation state (Iraq?).