Terrorists Not Getting Along

I finally finished off the articles on the divided jihadist movement from The New Republic and The New Yorker, and the basic message is the same in both: many of the radical thinkers who in the past provided the religious justification for Al Qaeda's violence are now abandoning the cause. I was struck by how little Americans figured in either piece, and I'm curious what, if any, impact American policy had on fomenting the infighting. It seems to contradict the tendency in the Bush Presidency to lump all our Islamic adversaries in one group. For most of the past seven years, they were all either with us or against us, and it didn't really matter who they were with or against on their own side.

Then again, that characterization may be outdated. I read this George Packer piece in 2006 about the efforts David Kilcullen to encourage a more discriminating approach, so as to isolate and weaken the worst of the worst. I don't remember hearing a lot more about such efforts, other than when Kilcullen himself would pop up touting them, but it's possible that American officials thought publicizing our attempts to divide terrorists would undermine them.

I need to wrap this up before I start wandering down another tangent: I wonder to what extent the Bush or the Kilcullen anti-terrorism mentality has won out in the past three or four years, and therefore whether the prevailing paradigm encouraged or resisted the rift in jihadist thinking.