In this concise and fascinating book, Fawaz A.
Gerges argues that Al-Qaeda has degenerated into a fractured, marginal body kept alive largely by the self-serving anti-terrorist bureaucracy it helped to spawn.
In The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda, Gerges, a public intellectual known widely for his expertise on radical ideologies, including jihadism, argues that the Western powers have become mired in a terrorism narrative, stemming from the mistaken belief that America is in danger of a devastating attack by a crippled al-Qaeda.
To explain why al-Qaeda is no longer a threat, he provides a briskly written history of the organization, showing its emergence from the disintegrating local jihadist movements of the mid-1990s-not just the Afghan resistance of the 1980s, as many believe-in a desperate effort to rescue a sinking ship by altering its course.
During this period, Gerges interviewed many jihadis, gaining a first-hand view of the movement that bin Laden tried to reshape by internationalizing it.
Gerges reveals that transnational jihad has attracted but a small minority within the Arab world and possesses no viable social and popular base.
Furthermore, he shows that the attacks of September 11, 2001, were a major miscalculation--no river of fighters flooded from Arab countries to defend al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, as bin Laden expected.
The democratic revolutions that swept the Middle East in early 2011 show that al-Qaeda today is a non-entity which exercises no influence over Arabs' political life.
Gerges shows that there is a link between the new phenomenon of homegrown extremism in Western societies and the war on terror, particularly in Afghanistan-Pakistan, and that homegrown terror exposes the structural weakness, not strength, of bin Laden's al-Qaeda.
Gerges concludes that the movement has splintered into feuding factions, neutralizing itself more effectively than any Predator drone.
Forceful, incisive, and written with extensive inside knowledge, this book wi.
