"The Arab Spring Was Bad for al Qaeda."
If only. The Arab Spring triggered an initial -- perhaps naive -- wave of optimism that al Qaeda had lost the war of ideas. Take Egypt, where a group of plugged-in liberal youths in Cairo appeared to be guiding the revolution. "The young men and women who had filled Liberation Square," wrote scholar and author Fouad Ajami, "wanted nothing of that deadly standoff between the ruler's tyranny and the jihadists' reign of piety and terror."
Not so fast. A growing body of research conducted by such scholars as Stanford University's David Laitin and James Fearon has found that weak, ineffective governments are critical to the rise of insurgencies -- and, ultimately, are fertile ground for terrorist groups. Weak states do not possess sufficient bureaucratic and institutional structures to ensure the proper functioning of government, and their security forces are unable to establish basic law and order.
In other words, the Arab Spring revolutionaries may not be sympathetic to violent jihad, but the instability they sow may be al Qaeda's gain. The unfortunate reality, at least for the moment, is that the uprisings over the past year have weakened governments across the Arab world from Syria to Yemen. The World Bank ranks many among the world's worst-performing governments.
Even on the off chance that democracy takes root in the Arab world, a dose of reality is still appropriate. Research conducted by the University of Vermont's Gregory Gause and other scholars has found that democratization does not reduce the likelihood of terrorism. Democratic states are just as likely to face terrorism and insurgency as undemocratic ones. Nor is there any evidence that democracy in the Arab world would "drain the swamp," as U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld put it in 2001, eliminating support for terrorist organizations among the Arab public. Just ask Turkey, which has suffered through several decades of terrorism by Kurdish groups, despite remaining one of the Muslim world's longest-lasting democracies. Terrorism, in short, is not caused by regime type.
If Zawahiri gets his wish, the Arab Spring will be a boon for al Qaeda. In an eight-minute video released in February, titled "Onward, Lions of Syria," Zawahiri urged each Muslim to help "his brothers in Syria with all that he can, with his life, money, opinion, as well as information." Al Qaeda in Iraq responded to the call by standing up terrorist cells in Syria and participating in several attacks, as U.S. intelligence officials had warned publicly.
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