Is the west playing into Al Qaeda's hands in Libya?

Yet at the same time, a striking feature of the revolutions and protests in Cairo, Benghazi and Sana is that no one is carrying placards of bin Laden. Nor have we seen pictures of burning American flags – usually de rigueur in that part of the world. This strongly suggests that al-Qaeda is not part of the Arab Spring, which has been driven instead by a bulging youth population; grim economic prospects for many; and rage at the authoritarian kleptocracies that have ruled for decades.

Al-Qaeda’s leaders are defensive about the minuscule role they have played so far. On Tuesday, Anwar al-Awlaki, a Yemeni-American cleric and leading Islamist ideologue, released a lengthy rebuttal to the idea that al-Qaeda is marginal to the Arab revolutions. On the pages of the online magazine Inspire, a slickly laid-out publication that includes features on the proper use of an AK-47, Awlaki explained, “The mujahidin around the world are going through a moment of elation and I wonder whether the West is aware of the upsurge of mujahidin activity in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Arabia, Algeria, and Morocco?”…

Yet my hunch is that whatever the outcomes of these various uprisings, they will not be pleasing to bin Laden. The protesters are not clamouring for Taliban-style rule, but the same things most of us want: accountable government, the rule of law, and a better future. And when it comes to any of these matters, al-Qaeda doesn’t have much in the way of real ideas.