Evil Genius?

Craig Whitlock, in today's Washington Post has a disturbing biography of Mustafa Setmariam Nasar, an influential al Qaeda strategist captured in Pakistan last year. What emerges is a portrait of a very, very harsh and unyielding foe of the West.

Counterterrorism officials and analysts see Nasar's theories in action in major terrorist attacks in Casablanca in 2003, Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. In each case, the perpetrators organized themselves into local, self-sustaining cells that acted on their own but also likely accepted guidance from visiting emissaries of the global movement.

Nasar's masterwork, a 1,600-page volume titled "The Call for a Global Islamic Resistance," has been circulating on Web sites for 18 months. The treatise, written under the pen name Abu Musab al-Suri, draws heavily on lessons from past conflicts.

Nasar, 47, outlines a strategy for a truly global conflict on as many fronts as possible and in the form of resistance by small cells or individuals, rather than traditional guerrilla warfare. To avoid penetration and defeat by security services, he says, organizational links should be kept to an absolute minimum.

"The enemy is strong and powerful, we are weak and poor, the war duration is going to be long and the best way to fight it is in a revolutionary jihad way for the sake of Allah," he said in one paper. "The preparations better be deliberate, comprehensive and properly planned, taking into account past experiences and lessons."

Intelligence officials said Nasar's doctrine has made waves in radical Islamic chat rooms and on Web sites about jihad — holy war or struggle — over the past two years. His capture, they added, has only added to his mystique.

"He is probably the first to spell out a doctrine for a decentralized global jihad," said Brynjar Lia, a senior counterterrorism researcher at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, who is writing a book on Nasar. "In my humble opinion, he is the best theoretician among the jihadi ideologues and strategists out there. Nobody is as systematic and comprehensive in their analysis as he is. His brutal honesty and self-criticism is unique in jihadi circles."

It's a long article, but is a must read. This is where a lot of the strategy that is being used today comes from. We must understand this doctrine if we are to be able to defeat it. That this man has been captured is a good thing. That he was not captured in time to stop the publication of some of his tracts is not.