Posing as an (entirely fictitious) think-thank tasked with providing advice to Al-Qaeda’s strategic planning cell, Paul Rogers identifies the three primary goals of Al-Qaeda;
- ‘removal of foreign forces from the Islamic World’
- ‘termination of the House of Saud as … Keeper of the Two Holy Places’
- ‘establishment of an independent Palestine’ (link)
But while Al-Qaeda may have explicit aims, each feeding the longer-term intent of establishing ‘legitimate Islamic governance, initially in the Arab world … as a prelude to a wider global conversion’ (ibid), it has been constructed as the limitless threat, alien and utterly devoid of any governing logic. Indeed, any attempt to
engage with the limitless threat on an analytic basis risks being interpreted as ‘a fateful step towards perhaps making an effort to understand their motives, something that might lead to somehow ‘justifying’ what is unjustifiable.’ (link, p. 33)
In the meantime, why did they do it? ‘Because they are evil.’ (link, p. 137)
Only by shielding himself behind the fictional apparatus of the so-called ‘South Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics’ has Rogers been able to engage with the threat on anything other than a purely structural basis. Of course, for the purposes of my argument, an initial interrogation of the limitlessness of global terrorism is required. Here, the notion of ‘limitlessness’ is understood to possess a double meaning; standing both for the mathematical limitlessness of that which cannot be quantified, and the geopolitical limitlessness of that which is capable of disregarding sovereign borders and boundaries.
