I finally had a chance to listen to Osama bin Laden's new recording, which we've posted in full (عربي). If you prefer English, the NEFA Foundation has a transcript (pdf).
The takeaway is that bin Laden went "back to basics" and discussed, in broad terms, the issues that fuel Muslim anger towards the West: Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush administration's humiliation and torture of Muslims. As Marc Lynch writes, bin Laden didn't get too far into the weeds. He didn't offer any thoughts on whether Hamas is a legitimate Islamic movement; instead, he talked about the Gaza blockade.
This is bin Laden adjusting his strategic communications. He obviously knows that the strident salafi Al-Qaeda that emerged over the last few years didn't play well in the wider Muslim world. A variety of polls (and Al-Qaeda's reported recruiting problems) testify to that. But bin Laden also can't come out and say, My bad! We shouldn't have been killing Iraqi civilians, after all. Instead he's hoping to sweep that under the rug and get back to more popular jihadi themes.
It's fair to conclude, as Spencer Ackerman does, that this change reflects a weakened Al-Qaeda.
But I think it's wrong to conclude (as Ackerman does on Twitter) that this means the end of Al-Qaeda.
Ideological, not operational
The reason is that the original Al-Qaeda -- defined as bin Laden and the core of advisers around him -- has ceased to be the operational locus of "greater Al-Qaeda." The majority of attacks conducted by Al-Qaeda are actually conducted by affiliates with vague, ill-defined links to the core of the group.
Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor-in-chief of Al-Quds Al-Arabi, makes this point in a compelling op-ed today.
Whereas eight years ago there was one address for al-Qaeda, the caves of Tora-Bora in Afghanistan, today there are a number of different addresses for different branches of the organization, which are perhaps stronger and more dangerous than the "main" branch. There is now al-Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula and in the Islamic Maghreb, in addition to the branches in Iraq and along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. There is also the Somali branch, which has revived and rebuilt and is now stronger than it was in a previous iteration.
These groups, unlike the core of Al-Qaeda, do not seem to have recruiting problems. (And let's not make too much of bin Laden's thin staff. Working for him is a tough sell: How many jihadis really want to live on isolated Pakistani mountains, under the constant threat of aerial bombardment, unable to carry out operations?)
Bin Laden, then, serves as a sort of spiritual leader for the group. His job isn't to attract new recruits; his job is to unite Al-Qaeda's disparate affiliates under one banner.
Each affiliate has different motivations, though, and that prevents bin Laden from getting too specific in his statements. The issues that motivate Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb might not matter to the Abdullah Azzam Brigades or the Al-Shebab movement in Somalia. There are a few exceptions to that rule, though, and those are the issues bin Laden focused on in today's statement.
Put another way: Bin Laden is trying to rebuild his popularity in the ummah, but that's a secondary goal; this recording seemed like an effort to "rally the troops" and encourage them to keep fighting.
He talks frequently of "the war" that Obama is escalating, and most commentators assume he means the war in Afghanistan. But bin Laden's language is often deliberately vague, hinting that he's talking about a broader war on Islam (which he suggests Obama inherited from Bush). I think that's why he included the paragraph about a war of attrition against the U.S., which he says will be fought "on all possible fronts." He likens it to the guerrilla war against the Soviets, but maybe he's not just talking about Afghanistan; maybe he's talking about the entire region, and using that line as a rallying cry for terror groups from Rabat to Karachi.
No subtitles!
One other related point. I spent a while this morning looking for an English transcript to post along with the recording, which is in Arabic and therefore not that useful for many of our readers. I couldn't find one, but didn't think much of it; the tape did just come out this morning, after all, and it was hard to find a copy. Then I noticed this paragraph in Marc's analysis:
By far the most important technical point about the tape is this: no English-language subtitles were offered on the video version. Al-Sahab productions very often provide such subtitles. For them to be absent in a video ostensibly produced as a direct message to the American people is frankly quite odd. Does it suggest degraded capabilities? Poor judgement? I really don't know, but it's worth noting.
I don't really know either. It could be technical problems -- or it could be that the English-speaking world wasn't bin Laden's main audience. He knew the key points of the recording (the anti-Israeli bits, the "war of attrition" line) would make it into the media. And perhaps the rest was geared towards the Arabic-speaking world.