The attack on the United States mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens has set off a new debate here and across the Middle East about whether Al Qaeda has been reinvigorated amid the chaos of the Arab Spring or instead merely lives on as a kind of useful boogeyman, scapegoat or foil.
In the week since the attack, the president of Libya’s newly elected national Congress blamed foreign fighters from Algeria or Mali with links to Al Qaeda who he said entered the country months earlier to plan the assault. The Al Qaeda affiliate in North Africa praised the attack on Tuesday and urged more like it across the region. And in Washington, some Republicans have embraced that narrative, implicitly faulting the administration for prematurely declaring the demise of Al Qaeda with the killing of Osama bin Laden last year.
But the Libyan militia leader whose fighters ultimately beat back the attack on behalf of the government insisted that the brigade of Islamist militants involved in the violence was entirely homegrown and well-known in their city. The leader of that brigade, Ansar al-Sharia, on Tuesday denied any ties to Al Qaeda or responsibility for the attacks, although he praised Al Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, and lauded the group’s goals.
This may be the one narrow wedge of common ground between Ansar al-Sharia and senior Obama administration officials who say they have not seen signs of advance planning or Al Qaeda involvement, although intelligence analysts are trying to determine whether Ansar fighters and Qaeda operatives communicated before the assault.
At the heart of the debate is the reality that whatever the continued ability of Al Qaeda or regional groups bearing its name to inflict damage on local or American interests, the terrifying power of its name has also given it a spectral second life as a kind of catchall for Islamist militants. Far-flung militants with little connection to the original group find the use of its name an easy way to exaggerate their threat, and politicians eager to campaign against them — whether in the United States Congress or Arab capitals — share that incentive.
“It is a ghost,” said Fahmy Howeidy, an Egyptian commentator. “People here don’t believe that Al Qaeda is this huge scary thing that is moving everywhere and behind everything in the whole world. They think that is American propaganda.”
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Tuesday that there were no intelligence warnings that an attack was imminent. She said that F.B.I. investigators had arrived in Tripoli and that the United States, with the Libyan authorities, would find those responsible. She did not discuss any potential ties to Al Qaeda, but blamed extremists opposed to the democratic changes in places like Libya, Tunisia and Egypt for the violence and protests around the region generally.
For political leaders in the United States or the Arab world, both addressing audiences that may have little familiarity with the various schools of ultraconservative or militant Islam, “the big name — Al Qaeda — can mobilize people,” said Diaa Rashwan, an expert on Islamist movements at the state-funded Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. “It is very difficult to use another name that people don’t know when you already have this brand.”
“Al Qaeda as an organization, as a command, it doesn’t exist,” Mr. Rashwan said. “There are no orders from Ayman Zawahri coming to jihadists in Libya or Sinai to make something,” though he added, “Since the death of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda has been in a sense reborn because some of its ideas and the model have inspired new militants.”
Many news reports in Egypt, and some in the Western media, have said that Al Qaeda was operating in the relatively lawless and Bedouin-dominated Sinai area along the Israeli border. But officials at the Egyptian Interior Ministry, who have been collaborating with the military in a campaign to combat a militant presence, said Tuesday that they have never believed or reported that any of those militants had links to Al Qaeda, or even outside Egypt.
In Syria, the government of President Bashar al-Assad has often asserted that Al Qaeda is active among the rebels there in order to discredit them. But rebel fighters and opposition groups in Syria say they have found mainly homegrown militants or, more recently, independent foreign fighters enlisting in rebel brigades.
In Tunisia, where a mob angry over a video denigrating Islam attacked the United States Embassy and stormed an American school, some critics of the moderate Islamist governing party have sought to suggest that Al Qaeda may have played a role in inflaming the attacks. But on Tuesday, Rafik Abdessalem, Tunisia’s foreign minister, said at a news conference that Al Qaeda had no toehold at all in the country.
In Washington, the question of whether Al Qaeda was involved in the Benghazi attack has injected itself into a presidential campaign in which Republicans have tried to chip away at President Obama’s top counterterrorism achievement: the death of Bin Laden and the weakening of the terrorist group’s reach and effectiveness.
A United States intelligence official said Tuesday that the attack “was hatched opportunistically that day” — something more than spontaneous but well short of a premeditated plot.
But some Republicans who have reviewed the same information scoffed at the idea. “We can’t say for certain it was an Al Qaeda event; it just has all of the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda-style event,” said Representative Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee.
In Libya before the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, he and his government propagandists constantly maintained that their opposition was dominated and led by Al Qaeda, although journalists moving among the rebels saw no sign of it.
On Tuesday the commander of Ansar al-Sharia, Mohammed Ali al-Zahawi, made his first public statement since the attack. He asserted that the group needed to hold on to its weapons because of the continuing uncertainty about Libya’s future, but that it was not responsible for the violence and that it was not aligned with Al Qaeda. “We are in a battle with the liberals, the secularists and the remnants of Qaddafi,” he said, relaxing in a Western-style shirt and jeans in the brigade’s fortified compound. “Our brave youths will continue their struggle until they impose Shariah.”
Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo. Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Benghazi, Libya; Hend Hassassi from Tunis; and Steven Lee Myers from Washington.
This article, "Questions about Al Qaeda's potency follow Libya attack," first appeared in The New York Times.