By Matt Korade, CQ Staff

Those predicting a long war against al Qaeda might be surprised by what Marc Sageman has to say. The former CIA agent believes if the current set of circumstances continues, the war might be a lot shorter than people expect.

Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who ran U.S. unilateral programs with the Mujahedin from Islamabad in the late 1980s, made that prediction during a discussion of his new book “Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century” at the Center for National Policy Tuesday.

In it, Sageman argues that seven years after Sept. 11, al Qaeda is more an inspiration for independent local groups that have taken its name than a central organizing force. What links these groups together is the general characteristics of their members, which differ from al Qaeda’s previous incarnations in several important respects, Sageman said.

For one, the current al Qaeda is primarily a youth movement, he said, and it is best understood in that light.

“I think the young people want a level of significance, they don’t want to be forgotten, they’re willing to sacrifice,” Sageman said. “In a sense, al Qaeda is the ultimate Kennedy-esque question, you know, ‘ask not what al Qaeda can do for you, ask what you can do for al Qaeda.’”

As such, Sageman said, al Qaeda is now fairly limited in its ability to control its members and carry out terrorist attacks. While it presents a concern, there are bigger problems on the not-too-distant horizon — including the remaining threat of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union and of the potential use of a biological weapon.

Sageman explained that past generations of al Qaeda came from secular, middle-class backgrounds. More than 60 percent attended college — studying engineering, not religion. More than 70 percent were married. Most did not suffer mental illness or have criminal histories.

They made the transition from middle-class existence to Islamic extremist by a process of radicalization that involves several stages, Sageman said.

First, they developed a sense of moral outrage against the policies of Western nations and interpreted those policies in a specific way, as a war on Islam. Then they formed networks, usually involving their social circles — friends and family members who both echoed and encouraged their views.

Marginalized by society at large for their extremism, these members channeled their disaffection and desire for self-glorification into acts of violence against the civilian population.

This in turn provoked “blowback” from the general population in the form of the increased popularity of political parties with nativist agendas, garnering as much as a fifth of the vote in some elections.

This cycle of extremist violence followed by increased nationalism poses a special problem in Europe, which remains more stratified than America, Sageman said. In France, for example, Muslim men aged 15 to 30 face almost three times more unemployment than indigenous Frenchmen. The unemployed receive public assistance, from which they derive about 60 percent of the funding for their terrorist activities, he said. Bored, marginalized and jobless, many are soon drawn to the extremist ideologies they find online.

In the United States, the situation is far different, in part because America is more selective about whom it allows to enter the country. Most Muslims here are college educated and have better prospects than their European counterparts; according to Sageman, the average annual income of Muslim households in the United States is more than $70,000 — well above the national mean — and more than two-thirds of U.S. Muslims believe the American dream is possible.

As another example of the difference in extremism between the United States and Europe, Sageman said, the United States has made about 30 arrests on terrorism-related charges since Sept. 11, 2001, the Europeans, more than 2,000. The problem in Europe is not likely to get better, he said, because it has an aging population and declining birth rate and will have to rely increasingly on outside labor to keep its economy going.

The current generation of al Qaeda differs from past terrorist groups, who either were the educated associates of Osama bin Laden or foreign fighters who sought out al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The new members are much younger, with ages ranging from 16 to 19 years old, and more amateurish than their forebears; they are mostly homegrown and self-financed; and, perhaps most important, they are not able to connect with al Qaeda’s leadership. The severe military and financial pressure that the world has placed on al Qaeda has forced the group to go online to communicate, making it difficult for the leadership to exert any control over or even to communicate with member groups.

While this makes al Qaeda difficult to fight by traditional top-down methods, such as decapitating the organization by removing its leadership, the organization is also forced to remain in its disorganized state; if it were to coalesce into an actual group, it would become a target. The group has thus become extremely unstable and is driven in large part by youth culture, albeit, one that has attached itself to feelings of alienation and extremism.

For these reasons, the current generation is self-limiting, Sageman said, and a good strategy is to contain the spread of al Qaeda while doing nothing to postpone the group’s internal decay, such as raising its status by publicizing every arrest or allowing American credibility to be damaged by actions such as using waterboarding.

Contacted Tuesday evening, David Heyman, director of the homeland security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, agreed that al Qaeda should be broken down into a few factions to be properly understood: the core group operating under bin Laden; the disciples at work in places such as Iraq, the border region of Pakistan, and the strip of northern Africa known as the Maghreb; and the groups who, to use a marketing analogy, have adopted the al Qaeda brand for themselves.

Heyman said he believes bin Laden’s core group, al Qaeda central, has been pressured and its organization and finances diminished to the point where it exhibits little command and control over its followers, but he wouldn’t count out the middle group of disciples, who have had mixed success in their geographic areas of operation. In Iraq, for example, al Qaeda’s well-established financial and operational networks have been severely damaged by the U.S.-led multinational forces. But in Pakistan and the Maghreb, especially Algeria and Morocco, al Qaeda has launched a number of successful operations, Heyman said.

Meanwhile, those who adopt the al Qaeda brand have grown in strength since the group’s ideology became known to the public following Sept. 11, 2001.

“That’s as strong as ever, certainly as strong as it’s been in the past,” Heyman said. “And that’s the part of the analogy we really need to pay attention to because that’s what leads to homegrown terrorism.”

For example, in the United Kingdom, law-enforcement officials are tracking several thousand cases, and the governments of the Netherlands and Germany are seeing cases in their countries as well — cases, Heyman said, that are largely the result of al Qaeda the brand, which is sustained by the marketing and public affairs activities of perhaps thousands of people on the Internet.

Matt Korade can be reached at mkorade@cq.com.