Daniel Pipes in “What the Terrorists Want” in FrontPage (thanks to EPG) says what I have been saying again and again and again: that the ultimate goal of the jihadists is not to secure our withdrawal from Afghanistan or Iraq, or even to destroy Israel, but to reestablish the caliphate and the rule of Sharia.
In nearly all cases, the jihadi terrorists have a patently self-evident ambition: to establish a world dominated by Muslims, Islam, and the Shari”a (Islamic law). Or, again to cite the Daily Telegraph, their “real project is the extension of the Islamic territory across the globe, and the establishment of a worldwide “˜caliphate” founded on Shari”a law.”
Terrorists openly declare this goal. The Islamists who assassinated Anwar el-Sadat in 1981 decorated their holding cages with banners proclaiming “The caliphate or death.” A biography of Abdullah Azzam, one of the most influential Islamist thinkers of recent times and an influence on Osama bin Laden, declares that his life “revolved around a single goal, namely the establishment of Allah’s Rule on earth” and restoring the caliphate.
Bin Laden himself spoke of ensuring that “the pious Caliphate will start from Afghanistan.” His chief deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, also dreamed of re-establishing the caliphate, for then, he wrote, “history would make a new turn, God willing, in the opposite direction against the empire of the United States and the world’s Jewish government.” Another al-Qaeda leader, Fazlur Rehman Khalil, publishes a magazine that declares, “Due to the blessings of jihad, America’s countdown has begun. It will declare defeat soon,” to be followed by the creation of a caliphate.