Al Qaeda’s Bureaucracy

Committees, memos, application forms, retirement benefits. A trove of recently declassified memos captured in Afghanistan and Iraq sheds light on al Qaeda's bureaucratic side:

[T]he egalitarian veneer coexisted with the bureaucratic mentality of the chiefs, mostly Egyptians with experience in the military and highly structured extremist groups. "They may have imposed the blindingly obdurate nature of Egyptian bureaucracy," said a senior British anti-terrorism official who asked to remain anonymous for security reasons. "You see that in the retirement packages they offered, the lists of members in Iraq, the insecure attitude about their membership, the rifts among leaders and factions." Like newly arrived fighters in Iraq today, recruits in the 1990s filled out applications that were kept in meticulous rosters. The shaggy, battle-scarred holy warriors of Afghanistan were micromanagers. They scrupulously documented logistical details -- one memo accounts for a mislaid Kalashnikov rifle and 125 rounds of ammunition. They groused and nagged about money. ... Committees and titles proliferated. And for years, schisms pitted Bin Laden's inner circle against factions who saw him as a chaotic commander prone to military miscalculation. They also faulted him and his deputies for disdain toward non-Arabs, a persistent point of conflict, according to the West Point study.

For anyone else unfamiliar with the reputation of Egyptian bureaucracy, in a twenty-year old book on comparative bureaucracy in the Arab world, Middle East scholar Nazih N. Ayubi refers to "the notorious Egyptian bureaucracy with its ponderous weight and its slow, rigid, and complicated procedures" (69). He goes on to explain the difficulty this posed for adapting to a number of economic developments. Adding further description, he writes:

In the Nasserist era, the setting-up of parallel agencies charged with similar tasks, the existence of overlapping jurisdictions among various organisations, and the practice of frequent, sudden appointments and dismissals, were all used to enhance the power of the political leader. The result was continuous competition for turf, for the leader's approval, and for resource allocations (70).