What's Up With al-Qaeda?

Zvi Bar'el has a column in Haaretz examining the ways in which al-Qaeda now seems to turn up in discussions of every terrorist attack. A key graft:

"The problem is that the organization has developed into a kind of worldwide lexicon of terrorism. So, when two vehicles blow up on the same day in the same place, it's taken to be "a characteristic operating method of al-Qaida." Every terrorist who was ever in Afghanistan or Pakistan is automatically a member of the organization. Every extremist preacher in a remote mosque is from al-Qaida, and every Arab regime that wants to arrest opponents of the regime can do so very comfortably by declaring that the detainees have ties to al-Qaida."

I don't think we should look at terrorist organizations as closed compartments, but rather networks. I believe the key phrase is "tied to al-Qaeda," not "members of al-Qaeda"; the latter may be few, but the former are many. Most traditional Islamic institutions did not have the sort of formalized institutional structures you see in the West, and while terrorist groups are in no way a traditional Islamic institution, my thought is that they follow the same pattern. The key to understanding them is not a leadership structure per se, but rather the pattern of personal ties (based partly on priority of targets) and money flows through which Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is linked together.