John Rapley - Foreign FocusACCORDING TO a report released this week by a United Nations Security Council panel, al Qaeda is alive and well. The report confirms what American intelligence sources have been saying for months: far from being smashed in the American-led invasion of Afghanistan, al Qaeda has regrouped and reorganised itself.
Inevitably, this has led to questions on the local scene; namely, is it possible that al Qaeda might one day wash up on Jamaica shores. My own view is that it is likely if not inevitable that Jamaica will sooner or later get drawn into the current war, though when and how is unclear.
The paradox of organisations like al Qaeda is that while they purport to resist globalisation, they have mastered its technologies. They could write the textbook on new organisational theories. In place of the hierarchical, pyramidal, centrally planned structure of the twentieth-century multi-national corporation, management gurus have for years called for the substitution of networked, decentralised firms in which lower levels are given greater autonomy and creative power.
If the nation-state served as the model of the old kind of firm, the Internet serves as the model for the new one. The Internet was born when the Pentagon decided, decades ago, to come up with a communications structure that would enable the US to respond to a devastating nuclear attack. The question was put, what would happen if the American command structure were completely decapitated?
The answer was that by creating multiple nodes that would relay information to all other nodes in a network, it would be possible to continue communication. If an individual node were taken out, communication would be re-routed to a new node. It might follow a circuitous path in reaching its destination, but that would be of little interest to either sender or recipient. New nodes could constantly be built, so that no matter how many communications centres were destroyed, commands would still be going out.
When applied to firms, this technology gave rise to the network. Rather than producing all their output in one plant, firms began breaking up the assembly process and sending it to outlying regions, often across the globe. This weakened unions, which could no longer shut down a firm's production. For now, if one of the assembly plants was lost to industrial action or political unrest, a new one elsewhere could be rapidly activated. And with the commercialisation of the military technology that was the Internet, it became possible to monitor operations around the word and reroute production at dizzying new speeds.
Such a cellular structure was not novel. In guerrilla campaigns like the Algerian war for independence, rebel armies found they could easily confound a military foe by breaking up their organisation and decentralising command. And it is this kind of cellular structure, co-ordinated via the Internet, that has enabled al Qaeda to regroup once its Afghan command centre was pulverised.
It is now clear that the organisation has found ways to redirect its financial flows. Its money reserves are believed to still be quite considerable. In losing its central command, the organisation's effectiveness has been dented somewhat. But it appears to have responded by breaking up its command and moving it among nodes, and allowing each of the nodes greater autonomy. What this means is that whenever the war on terror breaks up an individual cell, it has little if any impact on the remaining network.
So, despite their ideological grounding, these cells employ corporate approaches. That means they will strike partnerships that are not strictly political. In September, it was reported that al Qaeda was found to be dealing with a Colombian drug cartel, exchanging money for weapons. The cartel had no interest in al Qaeda's political campaign; but there was big money to be made.
At some point or another, it seems inevitable that Caribbean criminal networks will get drawn in by the promise of riches. In light of their ability to penetrate the US, for instance, they offer a service that will be increasingly in demand by anti-American militants. Moreover, their own globalised structure puts them in contact with other criminal networks. Islamist radicals, after all, have often recruited within the urban gang underworld. And the apparent widening of the Islamist campaign to "soft" targets like tourist resorts will have implications for the tourist industry.
Like it or not, the region is likely to get drawn into the new global age.
John Rapley is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
