In the aftermath of the Istanbul bombings, This LA Times piece suggests that since the destruction of its base of operations in Afghanistan al Qaeda has, of necessity and with success, “(mutated) into a more decentralized network relying on local allies to launch more frequent attacks on varied targets.” In a sense, the al Qaeda name has become a brand name indicating a franchise operation seeding violence by perhaps providing training, financing and ideological inspiration to loosely affiliated semiautonomous local “terrorist cells”.

The idea that al Qaeda has become more decentralized, however, is based on a possibly unjustified assumption that there was a central al Qaeda organization to decapitate in the first place, and that this was successfully done by the US-led WoT®. The transparent, pitiful efforts to link al Qaeda to Baghdad in the leadup to the invasion of Iraq were just the most dramatic example of the need to imagine a unified enemy and attribute to it all the malice we find in the anti-American world. (I used to say the same thing about the ‘global Communist conspiracy’ trope during the Cold War.) In a sense, by insisting al Qaeda was behind every hostile act, it may be us who have created al Qaeda as an ideology and a brand name. It may never have been much else, although I will grant you the premise that the Afghani training camps and the command-and-control structure, supposedly under Osama bin Laden, imposed some uniformity before 9-11. We continue to be surprised by the breadth and reach of an organization that is little more than a meme, a name given to and invoked by anyone sharing an increasingly ubiquitous common purpose. As the article notes:

A top French counter-terrorism official cautioned against blaming Al Qaeda for every act of Islamic terrorism. “We have to be prudent,” said Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the dean of France’s anti-terrorism magistrates. “These attacks are part of a climate, a planetary offensive. Al Qaeda is important. But there is too much of a tendency, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, to personalize the threat. It is not all [Osama] bin Laden, it is not all Al Qaeda.”