Here is an article on the theory from the Washington Post.

How do you feel this will effect the war on terror?

Also being that they are apparently dispersing themselves to the many eagerly awaiting terror entrepreneurs around the world..how will this effect al Qaeda itself? It's undoubtable that giving your plans and corporate mission statements over to other smaller more regional groups with a very low level of oversight will allow for these groups to infuse their own reginal flavors into your "product". Will al Qaeda's objective and Osama's "vision" get diluted in this fanatical franchising? How can a fanatical idea freely flow and be openly adopted by many culturally different groups?

What has been conveniently simplified more than anything else in this whole sorry (but much more expensive) rehash of Reagan's war on terror is Al Qaeda.

Al Qaeda simply means "the struggle" or something like that. It is not an organisation as such. It is, in fact, more of an ideology than a group. But even then, a loose ideology.

What Bush and the like fail to comprehend is how Al Qaeda is essentially a "brand name" for a particular flavour of Islamic Militant. They are all over the world. A dark, angry, seething blanket of religious righteousness we still have not got a handle on.

Therefore, "groups linked to Al Qaeda" is merely wordplay. All those who buy into the general philosophy of Bin Laden are Al Qaeda, regardless of their name or nationality.

Al Qaeda, like so many of the US's enemies, were founded and funded by US agencies. In the same way that Hamas received significant covert backing from the Israeli government in the 70s. Once disenfranchised Muslims had a radical hat to hang their discontent on, a network grew up. Loose, independent cells with philosophies that rarely entirely meshed with one another but which had a similar general thrust made it easier to carry out attacks in a hard-to-trace manner.

In short, Al Qaeda always has and always will franchise. That is what it is.

Schooly

From the WP article:


I think that this just illustrates a misunderstanding about what AQ (and indeed, any given terrorist group) is. "Their organisation's brand of sychronised devastating violence" is just terrorism.

The only unique things about AQ and wider Islamic terror are firstly that they use suicide tactics - which other western terror groups like the IRA or ETA have teried to avoid - and that they went bigger than any other terror group had been before in a single action on 9-11.

Does anyone really believe that, if the IRA had been desperate enough to be able to convince recruits that suicide was a helpful contribution, they wouldn't have used suicide attacks on London in the 1970s?

AQ are a terrorist group, certainly, and are well financed enough to be able to run training for anyone sympathetic to them. But the same was true of Libya in the 1980s - where many IRA mean learned their skills. The NI peace process took a step back a few years ago when two senior IRA men were found to be running a training camp in Central America for local terror groups.

If you look hard enough, there are links between all terror groups.

So franchising of terror is nothing new at all. Indeed, the CIA franchised some of their skills to mujahideen fighters in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan. Of course, they were "freedom fighters" then, and have only been seen as terrorists since they've applied those skills, and some new ones, to Western targets.