AL QAEDA'S NEXT MOVE

Now that they have lost Iraq and Afghanistan, and with them possibly most of the Middle East, where will al Qaeda try to establish itself next? This article says Africa, and makes an interesting case.

Al-Qaeda sees Africa as a prize well worth going after. It is a graveyard of failed states, of corrupt governments whose power seldom goes much beyond capital city shantytowns and of areas of Muslim radicalism. The problems of the region are opportunities for Al-Qaeda.

At the same time, al-Qaeda strategic moves in Africa serve its larger purpose of attacking Western economies. In 2002, Ubeid al-Qurashi, a pseudonym of an Osama bin Laden lieutenant, wrote an article saying that Western economies cannot stand high oil prices. One way to strike fear into the West, he wrote, is by repeated attacks on oil installations or on tankers. After the attack on the French tanker Limburg, in October 2002, the al-Qaeda political bureau described the attack as not merely an attack on a tanker. Rather, al-Qaeda said, it was an attack against international transport lines and an attack on the West' s commercial lifeline, petroleum.

Terror and attacks on Western economies are one part of al-Qaeda ' s grand plan. A second part counts on the vulnerabilities in the continent that will allow al-Qaeda to establish radical Islamism in one state after another. Nigeria is a case in point. The tenth largest producer in the world, 95 percent of Nigeria's foreign exchange comes from oil. It has close to 25 billion barrels of proven reserves, and major explorations are underway for more.

Nigeria is a tempting target for al-Qaeda. According to Transparency International, Nigeria is the most corrupt state in Africa. It is also a state that has received the attention of Osama bin laden. In a tape broadcast by Al-Jazeera television channel in February 2003, bin Laden urged Muslims to unite and mobilise the Islamic nation to "liberate themselves from unjust regimes". He named Nigeria as one of those nations where Muslims should unite.

Bin Laden's aim almost certainly was to foment civil war in Nigeria between the Muslim north and the largely Christian south.

To graft Tom Barnett's template onto this, Africa is probably the single largest gap zone in the world, meaning it is the largest mostly lawless region where human rights driven and trade-oriented rule sets either don't exist or are not in force. Such a legal and social vaccuum does represent an opportunity for al Qaeda--it's no accident that al Qaeda's two most recent homes were Sudan and Afghanistan, both lawless no-man's-lands operated, thought not necessarily ruled, by failing states with caliphascist bents, and it's also no accident that al Qaeda's remnants remain in the tribal areas on the Afghan-Pakistan border. They flow downhill to the worst spots on the planet, where government is nonexistent or arbitrary and heavily influenced by tribalism and radical Islam.

Africa makes a great deal of sense as al Qaeda's next springboard to empire. We're seeing caliphascist violence across that continent, from Nigeria to Sudan and beyond into Somalia and elsewhere. That is no accident, either.