The chaps over at the Center for Social Cohesion were kind enough to share with me a copy of their recent comprehensive text Islamist Terrorism: The British Connections. It got quite a bit of media attention at the time of publication, as it was basically the only substantial text to be published in time for the five year anniversary of the 2005 bombings on the London underground (this is not to forget the special edition of International Affairs that also came out at around the same time featuring a number of heavy hitters in the world of terrorism studies).

The report meticulously goes through all of the “Islamist related offences” committed in the UK between 1999-2009, though it looks as far back as 1993 for plots which have British links: some early fighters in Bosnia drawn from Azzam publications tapes, and Ramzi Youssef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center plot, who was no doubt radicalized by his time in Oxford and Swansea.

In an attempt to bring some statistical analysis to bear on the information, they have culled background and biographical data to create pie charts and tables. Problematically, the dataset itself is not actually that big (they have included “120 Islamism-inspired terrorist convictions and attacks in the UK”), meaning that the figures are a little less than conclusive and rapidly impacted by subsequent prosecutions.

Nevertheless, one detail that does seem clear is that South Asian’s, and specifically Pakistani’s, are the largest single group to be drawn towards terrorism in the UK. This may seem unsurprising given the fact that they are the largest single community of Muslims in the UK, but the detailed figures are actually quite interesting. Even if one includes all of the individuals classified as of uncertain South Asian origin into the Pakistani total, the figure that is reached is 36.21%. This compares to 46.69% of Muslims drawing their identity from Pakistan in the general population (according to the 2001 census figures). Meaning that Pakistani’s are, proportionally speaking, substantially under-represented in the terrorist roster in the UK as drawn up by CSC.

But frankly, the most useful thing about the report is the fact that they have collected in one place a great deal of the information about the many individuals who have been convicted for Islamist terrorism related offences in the UK. For those who follow these things (and for those only interested in the topic in passing), this will become a very useful reference tool.

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Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al Awlaki has becoming something of an international boogeyman, with traces and connections to him being found amongst an ever expanding array of terrorist plots around the world. According to the U.S., he has gone beyond being a nuisance preacher to being actively involved in terrorist plotting – his connections to underpants bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab have earned him a place on the U.S. Predator hit-list.

But in many ways, more interesting than his apparently growing role as a preacher moving up the ladder to training individuals, is his ability to reach out through cyberspace to an ever-expanding and diverse community of people. Two recent cases highlight this in particular: Paul “Bilal” Rockwood and his wife Nadia in Alaska, and on the other side of the world in Singapore, Muhammad Fadil Abdul Hamid.

Awlaki is the common thread between the two. According to court documents, Rockwood was a long-term follower, having converted in “late 2001 or early 2002” while he was living in Virginia. He rapidly became a “strict adherent to the violent Jihad-promoting ideology of cleric Anwar al-Awlaki….This included a personal conviction that it was his (Rockwood’s) religious responsibility to exact revenge by death on anyone who desecrated Islam.” While his timings appear to correlate with when Awlaki was also in Virginia it is unclear from information in the public domain whether they actually met.

Having been radicalized, over the next eight years Rockwood, who when he was arrested was a 35 year-old weatherman in the charmingly named King Salmon, Alaska, identified a list of possible targets through “visiting websites on the internet that professed to identify individuals, including American servicemen, who were alleged by the websites to have committed crimes of violence against Muslim civilians.” He further researched how to execute them “including discussing the use of mail bombs and the possibility of killing targets by gunshot to the head.” He narrowed his list down to 15 possible targets and planned on sharing this list, through his knowing wife, with a third person whom he believed shared his beliefs. From here it got to the Feds, certainly suggesting that this third party was not all that he or she seemed.

On the other hand, it seems highly unlikely that Muhammad Fadil Abdul Hamid ever had opportunity to meet the preacher. A 20-year old national serviceman in Singapore, he self-radicalized online and attempted to make contact with Awlaki through the net claiming to want to fight alongside him in Yemen. He was also in contact with a suspected Al Qaeda recruiter who urged him to go fight in Afghanistan and he produced at least one “self-made video glorifying martyrdom and justifying suicide bombing.” According to information released after his detainment under the Internal Security Act, his main influences appear to have been Anwar al-Awlaki and Australian-Lebanese former boxer Feiz Muhammed.

At around the same time as they detained Hamid, Singaporean police also placed Muhammad Anwar Jailani, 44, and Muhammad Thahir Shaik Dawood, 27 on two-year “restriction orders.” Jailani was apparently distributing Awlaki material, while Dawood went so far as to try to join the preacher in Yemen, though he was unable to connect with him and was instead rather disillusioned by what he did find there.

While not delving into the detail of the plots (which are not quite on the scale of 9/11), the running theme is Anwar al-Awlaki and his ability to provide some sort of indirect ideological guidance to people through the internet. While he may have had some contact with Rockwood early on, it still took Rockwood about five years before he started his research, and another three years before he moved into action. For the Singaporean’s, no contact appears to have taken place, but (like many others) the men appear to have sought out Awlaki as a guide to carrying out contemporary jihad. It would seem in many ways as though Awlaki, rather than Osama or even Abu Musab al Suri, is actually proving to be the globalized voice of jihad. His cry for personalized jihad in English appears to resonate amongst the global community of disenfranchised individuals across racial, national, and generational lines (I have not seen any evidence of gender yet, but women in jihad remains a marginal feature).

What is not clear if this is anything particularly new, or whether he is simply the latest in a long line of radical clerics whose charisma is able to draw people to him and it his ability to use the internet that has given him a global reach. Whatever the case, it is clear that his online presence is also what will guarantee him longevity beyond if the Predator’s do ever catch him.

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The first discussion of the morning session brought together regional experts to discuss where the major terrorist threats are now emerging from, and what governments must do to counter them.  Moderated by ICSR Deputy Director John Bew, the panel participants were the former Prime Minister of Yemen, H.E. Abdulkarim Al-Eryani; Sabri Saidam, a senior advisor to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas; Dr. Robert Rotberg of Harvard’s Belfer Centre; and Ali Jalali, the former Afghan Interior Minister.  The audience was also given a brief welcome by Carrie Lemack, co-founder of Families of September 11 and the Global Survivors Network.

Dr. Bew began by asking Jalali if al-Qaeda’s recent forays into Somalia and Yemen signaled that they were being defeated in Afghanistan.  He responded by saying that he believed al-Qaeda are still a major threat with significant influence over the Taliban, who have in turn gained a lot of operational and tactical knowledge from the terrorist network.

Discussing al-Qaeda’s gradually increasing presence in Yemen, Al-Eryani reminded the audience that the government there has been combating global terrorists since 2000. He estimated that al-Qaeda’s current numbers in the region are around 700, and noted that they are strengthened by tribal protection in the Eastern mountainous regions.  He also specifically mentioned Anwar al-Awlaki as one of the main al-Qaeda members currently under tribal protection, but perceived him to have no base or major following in the region, instead appealing more to Western Muslims via the internet.   Although al-Qaeda does have a presence in Yemen, Al-Eryani did not assess that they had any capability to topple the current government, and he saw much of their influence to be outside of Yemen.

When asked by Dr. Bew whether or not US intervention in Somalia is exacerbating the situation there, Dr. Rotberg said he believed that to some extent it was creating further problem.  Although he also stressed the importance of working with the Somali people, particularly in the North of the country, where there is a smaller presence of militant jihadist groups.  He added that the al-Qaeda connected militants were mainly in the South of Somalia.

Dr. Bew then shifted the discussion to the importance of stable government in resisting terror networks, and what role ideology played in inspiring these movements.  Ahmed Jalali placed much significance on both of these factors, saying that many terrorist groups were motivated primarily by their ideology, and that they thrive in ungoverned spaces.  It is crucial, he argued, to gain control of these spaces using a combination of military force and political negotiation if countries are to neutralise terrorist groups.  Dr. Rotberg was similar in his assessment, claiming that the main focus must be on improving governance in regions where global jihadist networks are currently thriving.  He also stated that in order to achieve this, negotiations with militant organisations and others who “we wouldn’t normally talk to” was crucial. Saidam echoed this idea but warned the audience that democracy and good governance cannot be “parachuted in” – it must be cultivated and supported from within.

After the initial discussion, an audience member asked Al-Eryani about his views on the strategic benefit of drone attacks, and whether or not they were a necessary tool.  He argued that, although al-Qaeda propaganda benefits from civilian casualties often caused by drones, there are certain circumstances where they must be used.

This signaled the end of the first discussion of the morning, after which the audience was treated to an in-depth analysis of the Northern Ireland peace process by Lord David Trimble (click here for a summary of his speech and pictures).

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The penultimate panel discussion of the conference, ‘Counter-terrorism Cooperation: Is It Working?’, addressed the important subject of international counter-terrorism cooperation and whether or not it has worked over the last few years.  Chaired by Dr. Peter Neumann, the panelists were Richard Barrett, head of the UN’s al-Qaeda and Taliban Monitoring Team; Ambassador Bill Paterson, Australian Ambassador for Counter-Terrorism; Eric Rosand, the Senior Adviser for Multilateral Engagement in the US State Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism; and Dr. August Hanning, Germany’s former State Secretary for Counter-Terrorism.

Dr. Hanning began by explaining the importance of a good relationship among European intelligence agencies due to their countries' close borders, which allows for the relatively easy movement of terrorists.  Unsurprisingly, he also identified Afghanistan and Pakistan as “the biggest problem”, and claimed that around 150 Muslim Germans had received terrorist training in the region. The UN’s Richard Barrett followed up on this, claiming that his organisation played a “central role” in coordinating European counter-terrorism efforts, citing the 2006 UN Global Counter-Terrorism strategy as evidence of an ongoing commitment to this.  This approach was, according to Barrett, constantly evolving and becoming increasingly sophisticated as countries learn from each other’s experiences.

When discussing the main obstacles to cooperation, Ambassador Paterson argued that the most effective partnerships are not “government-government”, but rather “government-NGO”.  He cited his own government’s relationships with NGOs in East and South-East Asia as examples of very effective counter-terrorism partnerships.  All of the panelists agreed that one of the major obstacles was countries that did not abide by human rights laws in their treatment of terrorism suspects – they cannot be co-opted until they improved their practices.  Ambassador Paterson suggested that Western governments make more effort help stop the torture of suspects, and that this is the point where counter-terrorism crosses over to developing and assisting governments.  Rosand added that the US government refuses to train officials who they know are involved with human rights violations, and recognised that sending enemy combatants from the US to countries which may torture them is a “great challenge”, stating that often prisoners have not been extradited from the US for this very reason.   Dr. Hanning insisted that Germany would never participate in torture, and nor would they accept intelligence from other countries that they assess to have poor human rights records.  Barrett summed up this part of the discussion, strongly stating that observance of human rights must be an absolute, and this is one of the four pillars of the UN’s counter-terrorism strategy.

The panel then moved on to discuss the role of multi-lateral organisations in counter-terrorism coordination.  Ambassador Paterson began by describing how the Australian government works with the UN on police and prosecutors workshops in South Asia – bringing together lawyers and judges from Pakistan and India, and providing them with an opportunity to develop important relationships, thus allowing for cross-regional contact that may otherwise not have been possible.   Germany, explained Dr. Hanning, also has a very close relationship with the UN and he placed a lot of emphasis on the importance of multi-lateral organisations, which provide platforms through which different national security agencies could exchange information.

During the audience question and answer session,  the panel was asked about how they assessed the effectiveness of the internet as a tool for terrorist networks.  There was unanimous agreement that the internet was among the chief problems faced by the counter-terrorism community, more so even than radical preachers and recruiters.  They also agreed that, rather than attempting to censor or shut down jihadist sites – an almost impossible task – governments should harness its power and use it to counter extremist messages.

Following a short break, Professor Gary Lafree, Director of START and Dr. Neumann announced the launch of a joint ICSR-START report, Prisons and Terrorism: Radicalisation and De-radicalisation in 15 Countries.  To access the study, click here.

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‘How Terrorism Ends’ was the title of the final panel discussion of the conference, and despite a packed two day schedule, the speakers remained on top form.  Moderated again by Dr. Peter Neumann, the panelists were: Professor Audrey Kurth Cronin, author of How Terrorism Ends; Shiraz Maher, Senior Research Fellow, ICSR and former seniot member of the British wing of Hizb ut-Tahrir; Hekmat Karzai, Director of the Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies in Kabul; and Michael Semple, Fellow at Harvard’s Carr Centre.

Audrey Kurth Cronin kicked off the session by giving the audience a quick overview of the findings of her fine book, in which she identified the six main ways that terrorist groups come to an end:

1)    A decapitation of the group in which the leader is killed or captured and the organisation dissolves;

2)    Successful negotiations;

3)    The group succeeds in achieving its aims;

4)    The group fails, and loses popular support;

5)    State repressed succeeds in crushing the group;

6)    A re-orientation toward different behavior, whereby the group shifts its focus to criminal enterprise or insurgency.

Of these six, it was the fourth outcome that Kurth Cronin found to be the most common.
Shiraz Maher was then asked by Dr. Neumann what prompted him to leave the extremist organisation in which he was involved for a number of years after 9/11.  As well as citing his move to a city where he was not surrounded by former members, Maher also very interestingly noted of Islamist dogmas that “once you pick at them, they can collapse very quickly.”
Dr. Neumann then asked Hekmat Karzai to share with the audience some of the findings of a recent study his organisation had undertaken on how and why young people were becoming suicide bombers or fighting for terrorist groups in Afghanistan.  Karzai gave five main motivators:

1)    Financial: Many fighters join groups for the monetary benefits, and the families of suicide bombers are often very well taken care of;

2)    Revenge:  civilian casualties have sometimes “provided the oxygen” which fuels extremism;

3)    Lack of governance;

4)    Madrassas: many insurgents and terrorists are brainwashed in religious schools;

5)    Ideology: a salafi-jihadist belief system which demanded confrontation with the West.

Addressing the same issue, Michael Semple said that his research also found that many terrorists in Afghanistan join insurgent groups so as to earn a livelihood and gain a status in society unattainable in most other circumstances. He also cited a desire to be part of a peer network.

Asked by the Chair to compare the conditions for Muslims in Afghanistan and Europe, Shiraz Maher said that although there was a crucial dynamic difference, there is also a global and unified “core ideology”, which is shared by all extremists.  He also referred to a number of jihadist defectors in Britain – such as Noman Benotmen and Abdullah Anas – who were working towards dismantling and countering the ideological roots of jihadism.  Maher also recommended that any strategy adopted by the United States to prevent violent extremism should not co-opt non-violent Islamists, but must instead adopt a “values-led approach” that seeks to groups and individuals who represent these values.

The final part of the discussion addressed a question from the audience about how the current conflict in Afghanistan will end. Although the majority of the panelists agreed that there will have to be some form of political solution, which included negotiations with the Taliban.  Karzai was concerned that the current strategy in the country was contradictory to the achievement of a political solution and that the approach had to change.  The only dissenting voice was that of Shiraz Maher, who was skeptical about the effectiveness of any negotiations with the Taliban.  He pointed to the series of failed talks between the Pakistani Taliban and the Pakistani government over the past years, which often reached agreements only for the Taliban to renege on them soon after – using lulls in combat to consolidate and expand.

On this interesting, if pessimistic, note, the final panel discussion of the conference was concluded and the stage was set for the final keynote address delivered by H.E. Tsipi Livni, former Israeli Foreign Minister and no leader of the opposition Kadima Party.

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This is the first in a series of blogs covering the panel discussions at our Peace and Security Summit in New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel.

After morning and afternoon sessions of expert working groups (the findings of which will be posted later), the first panel discussion of the ICSR Peace and Security Summit took place.  Entitled ‘Nine Years After 9/11: Are We Safer?’, the panel brought together an

All four of our panelists: (from left to right) Arif Alikhan, Amb. Cofer Black, Steve Clemons and Fran Townsend

impressive mix of government officials and experts to discuss if the terror threat in the West has changed and if the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the billions of dollars invested in security, have had any real and positive effect.

Representing the Department of Homeland Security was Arif Alikhan, the Assistant Secretary for Policy Development.  He was joined by Ambassador Cofer Black, former Director of the CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center; Steve Clemons, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation; and Fran Townsend, who was previously the Homeland Security Advisor to President George W. Bush.

Moderated by our very own Dr. Peter Neumann, the panelists discussed a range of crucial issues, beginning with the simple question of are we safer now than we were nine years ago?  Fran Townsend was optimistic but cautionary, pointing out that although America is now safer, they have become victims of their own success.  Expanding on this point, she noted that a lack of successful terror attacks on the US homeland since 9/11, which was down to successful counter-terrorism measures, meant that a sense of complacency was beginning to creep into the American psyche, whereby a lack of attacks has translated into a dangerous underestimation of the threat.  She also laid out her three main solutions to the threat: a re-strengthening of alliances with foreign intelligence agencies; an improvement of the relationship between central and local government; and encouraging a greater understanding among American citizens of the true extent of the terrorist threat, who without their active involvement and support the government would be unable to prevent future attacks.

Steve Clemons was far less optimistic in his assessment, claiming that the US was far less safe now than it was.  His main worry was that whereas before 9/11 the world perceived America as a dominant country with no bounds, the attacks engendered a global shift in this attitude, whereby the country is now seen as “beset by constraints” both militarily and economically.  In response, Clemons said that the US must now take steps to “reinstate its capacity to change global gravity” and “gain a capacity to sculpt the global system.”  

When the same question was posed to former CIA agent, Ambassador Cofer Black, he seemed to agree more with Townsend, noting that before 9/11 it was very difficult for the US to “accept and validate” the real threat of jihadist terrorism, and was struggling to make the transition from a Cold War mentality.  Crucially, the US military had not undertaken any sort of counter-terrorism training and was wholly unprepared for the emerging threat.  The attacks on New York awoke the government and its security agencies from their collective slumbers, and as a result, Ambassador Black said that the country is far better prepared to face the threat than it was almost a decade ago.  His message did come, however, with a warning: although tactically the US and its allies are now safer, the threat can “change quickly and dramatically”.

Finally, Arif Alikhan concurred that the US was now safer, but warned that threats are not static.  Comparing terrorists with the criminals he had dealt with in the past as a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, he claimed that they will evolve and adapt over time.  In response, governments must anticipate future threats, and translate this into action.  Like Townsend, Alikhan also stressed the central importance of a strong relationship between central and local governments.

 

In discussion: Alikhan and Amb. Black

Dr. Neumann then shifted the discussion to specifically address the threat of ‘homegrown’ terrorism, asking the panelists if they thought that this represented a sudden change in terrorist tactics, or if indeed it was something that has been coming for some time.  None of the panelists believed that this was in any way a dramatic shift or change, and Townsend referred to two English speaking jihadist ideologues, Adam Gadahn and Anwar al-Awlaki, as evidence of a long term al-Qaeda strategy to appeal to young, Western Muslims.

Alikhan was also asked by Dr. Neumann if he, as the highest ranking Muslim in the Obama administration, believed that American Muslims were less vulnerable than their counterparts in other countries to becoming radicalised.  He began by stressing that there is in fact no ‘Muslim community’, and there are hundreds of different communities that are by no means a homogenous block.  He argued that it is not communities that are susceptible to extremism, but rather it is often isolated individuals who become terrorists and that communities are not the problem, but the solution.

In the closing minutes of the discussion, the floor was opened to the audience who asked a number of incisive and interesting questions.  Chief among them was a request that that each panelist give a short and sharp assessment of the how they saw the future threat.  Ambassador Black commented that an attack on the US homeland was an “actuarial certainty”, and Townsend agreed, also foreseeing that these attacks will likely have a low casualty count, involve a transport target and will emanate from either al-Qaeda or one of its regional affiliates, including the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).

Thus, this impressive and informative discussion was concluded, leaving the audience with much to take in and think about, and setting the tone for a successful conference.

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Counter-terrorism sage Bruce Hoffman has an article in the latest issue of the National Interest which I would recommend as a sanguine assessment of the threat that the U.S. faces from domestic Islamist terrorists.

The article opens with a cold-eyed assessment based on insider conversations of the intelligence disaster that took place around Abdulmutallab’s failed attempt to bring down an airliner in December 2009. Highlighting a number of missed connections that were likely in part for Admiral Denny Blair’s resignation recently, the main point appears to be that the dots were simply not put together in time to stop Abdulmutallab getting on the plane in Amsterdam. Apparently, preparations had been built around the assumption that AQAP was about to launch an attack on a U.S. target abroad, not that an attack was about to be launched on the homeland.

The broader point of the article, however, is the lack of imagination which has led the U.S. to treat a tactic as a strategy (Predator strikes) and a mistaken belief that America was somehow immune to the sort of domestic radicalization which has become the primary preoccupation of many European planners. A list of events, plots, and groups is provided showing how short-sighted this analysis has been, showing how links to various AQ affiliates can be found in a long list of plots, as well as a larger pool of low-level attempts all carried out by American citizens. A lack of imagination which is also found in the inability to recognize that AQ is a multifaceted organization with many different locations and iterations, rather than a monolith which can be focused on in an organized fashion in one location at a time, “we rivet our attention on only one trouble spot at a time, forgetting that Al Qaeda has always been a networked transnational movement.”

This is coupled with an ongoing failure to admit that the Predator strategy which is regularly trumpeted as crippling Al Qaeda’s ability to carry out attacks has done nothing to stem the flow of foreigners going to train in the camps in Pakistan (he cites a figure of about 100 who have graduated from the camps and now returned home). Something that is only a tactic appears to have become the only show in town when it comes to strategic planning in addressing the threat from Al Qaeda in Pakistan. As has been repeatedly said by numerous experts, it is unlikely that you will be able to kill your way of this problem. As Hoffman puts it: “until we dissemble the demand side….we will never be able to staunch the supply side.”

So simply hammering AQ or its affiliates in local insurgencies abroad is not going to get rid of the problem, especially as the ideology continues to appear to have deep resonance amongst a community of individuals living in the West. Management is key, and making sure that we are able to contain the problem from exploding as it did in the case of Abdulmutallab or some of the other plots that have managed to come to fruition in the U.S., is likely the best we can do in terms of stopping AQ or the ideology it inspires. This is not going to eradicate the problem in the immediate term, but neither is the current approach. But admitting to this will hopefully open doors which maybe lead in a better direction.

There was one point in the article which bothered me, which was when he refers to Abdulmutallab’s profile as defying “conventional wisdom about the stereotypical suicide terrorist being poor, uneducated and provincial.” My question would be: whose conventional wisdom is this still? Given the laundry list of well-educated and assimilated terrorists, who out there still sees simpletons from the provinces as the main incubator of radicalization in the West? I do not actually disagree with what Professor Hoffman says, but it bothers me that there might still be those out there looking for such a profile.

One final point which struck me as interesting is the assertion that Lone Wolves might be part of a strategy by AQ to “flood already-stressed intelligence systems with ‘noise’.” The suggestion, if I am reading it correctly, is that low-tech attacks by “lone wolves and other jihadi hangers-on,” are more coordinated than one might think and are in fact an effort to keep security planners busy and distracted from focusing on serious directed plots from abroad.

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Those with institutional journal access should check out the new issue of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, particularly an article by Na’ama Nagar of the State University of New York.

In Who is Afraid of the T-Word? Labeling Terror in the Media Coverage of Political Violence Before and After 9/11, Nagar suggests that we should be cautious when thinking about one particular aspect of the relationship between media and terrorism:

Several studies conducted after 9/11 found that American journalists have largely embraced the government's official frame of the ‘War on Terror’.  Drawing from the claim of an ideological bond, this study investigates how American news media covered politically violent organizations that are not linked to Al Qaeda or the events of 9/11.  More specifically, the article examines whether the media's inconsistent use of the word ‘terror’ changed as a consequence of 9/11 by comparing the coverage of these organizations before and after 9/11.  A quantitative content analysis of American media indicates that overall the coverage of political violence did not change after 9/11.  Moreover, journalists remained vigilant about using the word ‘terror’ when covering politically violent organization.

This is an interesting conclusion, given that it is often assumed―and I have fallen prey to this myself―that the press have actually been quite irresponsible at times in their representations of both ‘terrorism’, and ‘political violence as terrorism’, regardless of the actual tactics or strategies of the objects of their journalistic gaze.

Nagar concludes that the news media are actually ‘rather cautious’ when investigating political violence, and suggests why this might be so:

First, the news media may strive for objectivity and balance, which would be called into question by the use of the t-word since it implies choosing a side.  The fact that the t-word is often put in quotation marks seems to support this interpretation.  Second, as noted by [Brigitte] Nacos, news organizations may wish to maintain access to politically violent groups, which use of the t-word might jeopardize.

If correct―and I have no reason to doubt Nagar’s analysis―this means that the journalistic ethos is alive and well and, I would suggest, actively resisting the reproduction of ‘war on terror’ discourse.  However, Nagar cautions that the study only analyses the ‘elite press’, what we in the UK would call ‘broadsheets’.  As Nagar states, ‘Future research might want to analyze popular [tabloid / red-top] newspapers, which could be more likely to adopt the official language’.  This would seem―intuitively, at least―to be a sensible suggestion.  

In 1984, at a heavyweight Harper’s Magazine discussion on terrorism and the media, John O’Sullivan of the Daily Telegraph said:

The assumption of the popular press is that terrorists are important for what they do.  The assumption of the quality press is that terrorists are important for what they say.  I suggest that the first assumption is much more sensible.

That’s quite a striking differentiation, which could easily form the basis for about five doctorates, so I won’t go into it here, but it does suggest that, long before 9/11, there was marked distinction between how terrorism was reported and represented in the two principal genres of mainstream printed news.

Nagar examines how real, actual organisations engaging in political violence are referred in the press―Lord’s Resistance Army, FARC, ETA, etc.  There’s probably a bunch of studies out there looking at how ‘terrorism’ is used as a frame for people, events and processes that have nothing to do with terrorism-as-political-violence.  To me, this is the more insidious discourse and I suspect―again, just a hunch―that this is more common in the popular press than the broadsheets.  

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Inspired by a post over at Kings of War which looked at the three big party’s defense proposals in their manifestos, I decided to perform a similar operation of the big three counter-terrorism proposals. As it turned out this was a pretty easy endeavor, given the almost complete absence of major shifts or proposals in any of them. To look at their respective proposals in alphabetical order:

Conservative
- ban Hizb-ut-Tahrir and “close down organizations which attempt to fund terrorism from the UK”
- create a new National Resilience Team for Homeland Security
- (I have to confess that I could not find this in their manifesto, but the BBC seem to think it is) review “the controversial control orders system”

Labour
- “we will develop our PREVENT strategy to combat extremism.”

Liberal Democrats
- scrap control orders
- reduce pre-charge detention to 14 days
- allow intercepts in court, make greater use of post-charge questioning.

All three seem to suggest that the police should take the lead in counter-terrorism, and all condemn torture (the Libdems want to launch a “full judicial inquiry into allegations of British complicity in torture and state kidnapping”). Afghanistan features in all three as linking a foreign threat to a domestic threat, while Pakistan is of greatest apparent concern to Labour – though all are concerned with unstable states as a threat to domestic security. Al Qaeda is only mentioned specifically by Labour. Aside from Labour, none of the parties discuss the allegedly all-important Preventing Violent Extremism strategy (and even Labour merely refers to it as listed above, without giving any more detail). In the debates, the topic has come up even less, with it merely being referred to within the context of Afghanistan.

Now on the one hand, it is worth remembering that for the two parties not in power, they do not have access to all of the intel that the government does and thus are potentially preparing blind. But at the same time, it is surprising that in essence all of the main parties have failed to present in their party manifesto’s anything substantial to address the threat of terrorism.

There are, in my mind, two answers to this: they either think that it is not a problem (or agree with the current strategy approach aside from the small tweaks they offer) and have thus omitted it consciously, or they have no idea what to do. Either option, however, offers the conclusion that they have no fresh ideas about what can be done to address a problem that senior police officers, politicians and security agents believe will remain with us “for a generation” and for which the budget has trebled since Labour have been in power (according to their own figures cited in the manifesto).

Of course, there is the possible conclusion that it is my personal fixation on the topic which is exaggerating the importance of its absence. Maybe in fact this is all a conscious effort to tone down the centrality or importance of counter-terrorism within the government’s duties, and thus maybe defuse some of the mythology around it. Still, if this is the really the case, then you would expect some greater acknowledgement of the choice given the fact that the government has been moving in the opposite direction, spreading counter-terrorism across an ever expanding number of agencies and departments.

To look at the specific proposals, the Liberal Democrat proposals seem most progressive, but at the same time, I wonder if they will not find themselves of a different view when they are in power and can see what I imagine is the intelligence that is bringing around the control order regime. Still, there is some substantial logic behind the premise that the government should prosecute or lift control orders and that the ongoing situation is not sustainable in the extended long term. If they are able to force the discussion about how to conclude this situation, then this is excellent news. In contrast, I remain unsure about the proposal to proscribe Hizb ut Tahrir. If it is implemented, I have a feeling it will merely increase the power and mystique of the organization with little substantial counter-terror benefit.

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I have been re-reading Stefan Aust’s excellent book The Baader Meinhof Complex and have just finished trudging through the part which looks at the Stammheim trials period when four of the main Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Fraction, RAF) members, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Ulrike Mienhof, and Jan-Carl Raspe were held in the high security Stammheim Prison while they were on trial for a series of RAF attacks.

What is interesting about the Baader-Meinhof story is that in many ways there are parallels to be drawn with the current wave of extreme Islamist terrorism in the West. A small group of individuals, mostly young, educated and from middle class families, become persuaded that the system that they were born into and live in is fatally broken and the only way to fix it is through the use of purgative violence. Of course, it is equally easy to pull holes in the comparison, but that is not the focus of my train of thought here.

The Stammheim part highlights the differences to me. For the RAF group the trial was an opportunity to grandstand for the media and an attendant audience. They disrupted the trial to the point that they were not even present to hear the conclusion. This has manifestly not been the case with the ever increasing roster of Islamist terrorist cases in the West, where instead the defendants have chosen, for the most part, to use the trials as an opportunity to plead innocence while they remain silent about any connections to other terrorists.

Olivier Roy, in his paper, “Al Qaeda in the West as a Youth Movement: The Power of a Narrative,” describes the phenomenon thus:

“most of AQ suspects keep silent or deny any involvement during their trial, a very unusual attitude for political militants, who traditionally transform their trial into a political tribune.”

This is one of the fascinating elements of the movement which has found appeal amongst a specific community of young Muslims in the West. These individuals appear committed enough to go and train in camps in dangerous corners of the world and then come back home to plot, but they do not appear willing to try to stand up for their convictions in court or to publish voluminous texts to support their activities. At the same time they are also remarkably resilient in terms of caving to pressure and giving each other or their superiors up. To paraphrase what I recall hearing a former senior copper saying, the halls of Paddington Green police station (where most terror suspects are taken in the UK), are not “ringing” with the sounds of confessions.

On the one hand, this could be explained away by the fact that they genuinely are innocent and are merely sticking to their guns. But in counter to this, in cases where there is a pretty heavy burden of evidence against them (for example, Bilal Abdulla who was literally caught sitting on his bomb outside Glasgow airport), we have still had them denying culpability and offering pretty thin political statements to defend their actions. Nowhere have there been the sort of detailed political writing and haranguing that we find during the RAF trials: the RAF prisoners used to send letters between each other arguing about their political beliefs and published books and statements about their cause. The closest I have seen to this is the odd letter that leaks out from the prison system which is claimed to be written by incarcerated extremists, but these mostly complain about their treatment inside rather than going into the finer points of Islamic jurisprudence.

But the question remains as to whether this is a sign of a lack of seriousness and thus weakness of the central motivating ideology, or whether it is a sign of strength. Weakness since they do not appear to be able to back their convictions with stirring rhetoric, or strength since they are willing to take their punishment and silently sit it out to prepare to return to the fight when they are released. Given the control order regime which can continue to hinder activity once released, there is a benefit to staying quiet and acting calm. After all, hatred is patient.

For the RAF the Stammheim trials marked the end of the first generation of fighters. Ulrike Meinhof killed herself long before the trial ended, while the other three killed themselves a few months after the verdicts were handed down (a fourth member, Irmgard Moller, also attempted suicide, but survived the attempt and claimed it was all a government plot). The group continued on until it officially disbanded in 1998 – giving it a total lifespan of 28 years. I am unsure how far we are along in the current lifespan.

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The Real IRA, the dissident republican terrorist organisation, has admitted that it was responsible for the car bomb early this morning, which exploded within a mile of the MI5 headquarters on the outskirts of Holywood, County Down. A full report is available here but the bomb was loud enough to resonate across both sides of Belfast Lough, reminding residents of the worst years of the Troubles.

The timing of the explosion, at 0020 BST, was designed to coincide with the moment policing and justice powers were devolved to Northern Ireland’s local power-sharing government. Police said that no telephone warning was given and it is extremely lucky that no serious casualties have yet to be reported. Nonetheless, the fact that the Real IRA could get so close to such an important target, at so sensitive a moment – when an attack was anticipated – will be regarded as an important propaganda victory by the dissidents. It is also likely to raise questions about long-term effects of the devolution of policing and justice powers and the capacity of the security services to handle what seems to be a growing threat.

In one important sense, the dissident republican movement is notably different from that of its predecessor, represented by the Provisional IRA and Sinn Fein: that is, in the limited stock the movement places on political activity as a means of achieving victory. While the Real IRA and other dissident groups do use political outlets, they are also aware that they do not have the means or the support to play the electoral game as effectively as Sinn Fein have done since the early 1980s. Among the dissidents there is a strong belief, based in history, that engagement with politics has corrupted and undermined the purity of the movement on a number of occasions.

At the same time, however, the timing of this latest act is confirmation that the dissidents retain an acute sense of political timing. There has been a steady continuation of attempted bombings and shootings for a number of months in Northern Ireland but this is arguably the most headline-grabbing act by the Real IRA since the murder of two British soldiers in Northern Ireland in March 2009. Many analysts believe that the frequency and scale of attacks is likely to increase further in the run-up to the general election, as they are seek to achieve as large an audience as possible and optimise the opportunity to destabilise the wider political situation.
The choice and timing of the MI5 centre in Belfast is not just designed to grab the attention of the UK government. It also represents an attempt to fire an ideological volley into republican circles and to challenge the narrative of the peace process offered by the Sinn Fein leadership. The MI5 centre in Holywood is not a bastion of colonial British rule in Ireland, or an old symbol of historical oppression. It is a new and state-of-the-art building, first opened in 2007, and with a much more extensive remit than Northern Ireland-related issues.

According to the MI5 website, it “was established in addition to a network of nine regional stations around the UK, which the Service began to establish from 2005 onwards in response to the nationwide threat from international terrorism … [and] provides a possible contingency fall-back location if our London headquarters is unavailable for use.” In other words, it is seen as a crucial back-up centre for the intelligence service should the London headquarters ever come under attack.

For dissident republicans, the building of a new MI5 base is a confirmation that the British state is actually strengthening its position in Northern Ireland with a long-term intention to maintain a presence on Irish shores. This is a direct challenge to the Sinn Fein narrative, which holds that the peace process is a building block in the slow march to a united Ireland. Sinn Fein would prefer its core supporters to forget that the MI5 building is there, precisely because they know it is not going away any time soon. The Real IRA are therefore speaking directly to a republican audience, saying that they are the only organisation really still committed to forcing the British out of Ireland.

As for the devolution of policing and justice, this remains a controversial political issue in Northern Ireland. Traditionally, the unionist community have been most sensitive about changes to the police service in Northern Ireland; the replacement of the Royal Ulster Constabulary with the Police Service of Northern Ireland was one of the most important issues in undermining support for David Trimble, for example.

However, there also remains a core component of Sinn Fein’s natural support base which is of the opinion that the police service has not changed as much as it should have done and is still very hard to palate. With the devolution of policing and justice, the Sinn Fein leadership are now required to back the security services more strongly than ever before. Many of its traditional supporters will be less than comfortable with this development, a fact that the Real IRA is eager to highlight.

It would be extremely difficult for the Real IRA or other dissident groups to bring Northern Ireland back to the cycle of sectarian violence which characterised the conflict in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. But it is clear that they do retain a capacity for a spectacular and deadly attack.

Having spoken to a number of experts this morning, I should report one final piece of informed speculation. A number of recent attempted dissident attacks have been foiled or disrupted by the excellent cooperation between the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) and police from the Republic of Ireland: one clear dividend of the peace process. However, there is a growing worry that the dissidents are getting a stronger hold in Belfast than they have done for many years; last night’s attack started with a taxi being hijacked in north Belfast. The reform of the police and the devolution of policing and justice powers were both implemented with peace and progress in mind. But the reality is that the devolved police force now faces a serious and ongoing campaign by experienced and determined terrorists and will have to learn quickly to stand on its own two feet.

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Cognizant of my own limited knowledge on the topic of Russia and terrorism, I asked Dr Cerwyn Moore of the University of Birmingham, one of the top scholars on the topic in the UK, for his thoughts. He has kindly agreed to share them with us all:

“Since 2000, there have been three waves of suicide attacks linked to the insurgency in the North Caucasus. I won’t detail the three waves here, but will note that the recent attacks in Moscow on Monday (29th March), and the most recent suicide attack directed against security personnel in Dagestan (Kizlyar, 31st March), form part of a wave of attackers which began in 2008, when a lone bomber detonated explosives near military officials in the highland Chechen town of Vedeno. Thereafter, a suicide attacker attempted to assassinate Musa Medov, an Ingush official, again in 2008. Although overshadowed by the war in South Ossetia, another suicide attack occurred in 2008, in November, when a female attacker detonated explosives in a taxi cab in the North Ossetian capital, Vladikavkaz. Few statements were released related to these attacks, but all served symbolic, tactical and strategic purposes, in support of the case of the North Caucasus insurgency led by Dokku Umarov. Throughout 2009, suicide attacks became commonplace in Chechnya, Ingushetia and latterly in Dagestan, as the third wave gained momentum. For the most part, the attacks revolve around five points:

1)    They have served a broader strategic goal, garnering international news attention, while allowing the insurgents to draw federal forces into an evermore internecine cycle of violence, thereby demonstrating the weakness of federal and local security measures. 
2)    They have served a tactical goal, targeting key officials such as the Ingush President, federal forces including key police compounds in Nazran (17th August, 2009) and in Dagestan (6th Jan 2010) and more general interior ministry and political officials.
3)    Thirdly, they have been used symbolically, on the one hand, to unnerve local political officials, and on of the other hand, to bring the war to the heart of Russia. Given widespread human rights abuses by local law enforcement agencies, although condemned by the wider population, the attacks are viewed as a legitimate retaliatory tool by the military units of the insurgency.
4)    Politically and strategically, the leader of the insurgency, Doku Umarov has successfully integrated different ethnic groups, including a younger generation of disillusioned men and women into the insurgency. In 2008, Umarov re-instated the Riyad us-Saliheyn, a franchise organisation which links different jamaats and facilitates the use of suicide terrorism. The Riyad us-Saliheyn, essentially a group of martyrs, was founded by Shamil Basayev as part of the second war, and was used to deadly effect in the second wave of suicide attacks, named ‘Operation Boomerang’. Following the Beslan school siege and a series of decrees and military reforms by the leader of the resistance between late 2005 and 2006, the unit was disbanded.
5)    Finally, the recent attacks raise the broader issue of the relationship between insurgencies and terrorist networks. How do the former host the latter? How do these relationships evolve and change over time? The insurgency in the North Caucasus is, and indeed always has been multi-ethnic, with Chechen fighters at the forefront. The transformation from a separatist movement to a North Caucasus movement has its roots in the early 1990s, but became more marked in the inter-war year. This shift has also acted as a catalyst as a result of widespread poverty, years of conflict and latterly, the influence of religious radicalism and internal radicalisation.

Together these points have given insurgents from the North Caucasus, and Umarov, a willingness and capability to mount a campaign of suicide terrorism across the North Caucasus and in the heartland of Russia, as part of a broader anti-Russian or anti-federal campaign.  
The return of suicide attacks to Russia, as well as the steady escalation in the usage of this tactic is partly due to the pressure exerted by federal forces since April 2009, and partly due to internal radicalisation in the North Caucasus insurgency. Commentators, reporters and even some academics often mistakenly focus on the sensational aspects of the attacks; the use of female attackers (depending on how attacks are assessed, there have been nearly as many male attacks over the last ten years) or so-called ‘black widows’, highlighting trauma, the influence of foreign groups or Wahhabi religion, contagion or Al Qaeda, as a motivational causes, instead of recognising the tactical, retaliatory and strategic and symbolic nature of the attacks, or the local cultural narratives of resistance and blood revenge, and dynamics in the insurgency. Moreover, commentaries often conflate attacks with suicidal intent (such as the Moscow Theatre or Beslan School siege) with suicide attacks. All of which blurs, rather than effectively highlights the decision to employ, halt and resume the use of suicide attacks as part campaign of terrorism within a broader multi-ethnic insurgency.

Although notable exceptions exist, a tendency also exists to view attacks through the lens of Russian studies, clouding analysis of the organizational dynamics in the insurgency. At the forefront of the recent wave of attacks, as I have argued, are two key jamaats – the first, the Ingush group headed by a long serving insurgent who operates under the nom de guerre Magas, hosted the young Islamic convert and radical ideologist, widely considered to be one of the advocates who re-instigated the use of suicide attacks – Said Buratsky. Said Buratsky was killed, along with around eight other people in a two day shoot-out in Ingushetia at the start of March. A few weeks earlier, a long-serving member of the Arab mujahideen, and key leader involved in the organisation of the insurgency, Seif Islam, was also killed by federal forces, who have had other notable successes in recent months targeting the jamaats which operate in Dagestan. Moreover, in the last few weeks Abu Khaled, another foreign fighter, and a key aid of the leader of the insurgency, Doku Umarov, was also killed in federal operations. These setbacks, along with the severe restrictions, widespread human rights abuses appear to have forced the insurgents to escalate their campaign – targeting the metro stations near the FSB headquarters, the Lubyanka, and the Park Kultury station, near the interior ministry in Moscow, as part of the broader wave of suicide attacks. Both the FSB and Interior Ministry were said to be behind the recent military successes which have targeted the leadership of the insurgency.    
The recent attacks in Moscow clearly result from recent federal successes in the low-intensity conflict which has beset the region since 2007. Whilst federal authorities have repeatedly claimed major successes, indicating that the insurgency was all but defeated, wide-scale poverty in the region, corruption and hard-line policies by Kremlin – repeated in recent days in statements by Vladimir Putin (which are, incidentally, eerily reminiscent of statements he made prior to the outbreak of the second Russo-Chechen War) - appointed strongmen, and apparatchiks have helped to radicalise a generation of new fighters willing to undertake ‘smertniki’ operations or suicide attacks.” 

Cerwyn has covered this topic extensively elsewhere (see his webpage for a complete list), including two recent pieces for the Jamestown Foundation on the recent wave of attacks (here, and here). He also has a forthcoming book “Post-Modern War in Kosovo and Chechnya” from Manchester University Press. He can be contacted directly at: c.moore.1@bham.ac.uk

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Up North at Manchester Crown Court, brothers Abbas and Ilyas Iqbal have been found guilty this week of charges relating to their the dissemination of material useful to terrorists and preparation of acts of terrorism. A third man, a white Muslim convert, was cleared of charges against him.

The men became dubbed the "Blackburn Resistance" after a video was uncovered on a mobile SIM card in Abbas Iqbal’s luggage as he tried to board a plane at Manchester airport. The clip showed the men running around a park in Blackburn in camouflage and seemingly imitating command training with As Sahab-type music in the background. At the beginning of the video the words the "Blackburn Resistance" featured prominently, and a voice intoned "They are fighting against oppression, they are The Blackburn Resistance."

Alongside this footage and a wide array of other photos of the men brandishing or trying weapons out, a variety of knives, BB guns, an air rifle and pistol, crossbows and live ammunition were found with the men. Two documents entitled “attack planning” and “urban combat” were also found bearing the brothers fingerprints.

But while some of the pictures of the group are quite dramatic looking, the reality is that it is very hard to imagine this group as a cell of hardened terrorists. Cognizant of this, the prosecution was very careful to not paint the men in too heavy a light, recognizing that "some aspects of the material may at first blush seem almost comical in [their] amateurishness." Nonetheless, they saw the group as "intoxicated by the evil of terrorism," and actively preparing to disseminate recruiting material abroad.

The men ultimately received relatively light sentences, Abbas Iqbal, 24, was sentenced to two years in prison for the dissemination of terrorist publications, while his younger brother Ilyas, 23, was incarcerated for 18 months for possessing a document likely to be useful to a terrorist. Given he has spent almost that amount of time already on remand, Ilyas was released, while his older brother will still serve another three to four months. Their co-defendant was cleared on all charges having spent 387 days in custody. A fourth man picked up with them at the airport is still on trial in a separate case.

But it is hard to judge exactly how much of a victory this really is for counter-terrorists. This is not a cell of global travelers with contacts to Al Qaeda core, but rather a group of young men who through the internet and home computers were able to create an imitation set of videos and pictures of themselves dressing up as terrorists. That they may have later gone on to do something is of course perfectly possible, but as the prosecutor pointed out: "at the stage when they were stopped by police, they had not got very far."

It is easy to see how this could play badly in the court of public opinion, where what even the prosecution described as "larking around in a park in Blackburn," was painted as potential terrorist training. The fact they seem not to have been receiving much coverage in the press is a good thing, and probably the product of the fact that very few editors would have taken the group very seriously.

A final point I would add about these chaps, however, is how lucky they are to have been caught doing these acts in the UK – had they been nabbed for similar things in the U.S., they would probably be looking at very long stints inside.

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The UK is often seen at both the forefront of the violent Islamist threat and also the legislation that is being crafted in the West to counter it. Consequently, it was very interesting to see the Home Office publish a paper by DSTL (which I always thought was a more tech-based lab) that provides an overview and analysis of the current research that has been undertaken in the UK looking at counter-terrorism legislation and its impact on public opinion and opinion forming.

The conclusions are pretty bleak for those actually seeking to obtain useful information from the sea of research that has been produced on the topic (as someone in HMG put it to me late last year, much of what has been pumped out under the aegis of research on countering terrorism is "dross."), but I suppose are quite positive for those who are in fact planning to produce more of this research: the report concludes highlighting "the need for further research".

This would I suppose discount reams of speculative articles essentially re-treading what are believed to be public perceptions based on reading the press or Comment is Free (one can only hope that previous pieces I have done do not fall into this category, apologies if they do).

Here are a few quick points I took away from the DSTL paper:

Perceptions are at the heart of what this paper is trying to probe and government is clearly trying to understand: the very title "What perceptions do the UK public have concerning the impact of counter-terrorism legislation implemented since 2000?" shows this, but at the same time, the report highlights how this is something that has not been analyzed or measured effectively at all. In part this is a problem since more generally the report concludes this is a topic that is hard to measure.

But with regards terrorism legislation, it is an even harder thing to measure practically when we consider the low number of actual terrorist attacks (though this is a good problem to have), and thus measuring reactions to legislation which can appear to be targeting individuals who, in practical point of fact, have failed yet to carry out their murderous plans.

A big tangible take-away is that people don't like stop and search and think that it is targeting groups unfairly, etc. In fact, according to the paper stop and search is the only demonstrable policy which can conclusively said to be unpopular in implementation (conclusions about reactions to other policies are mostly anecdotal). Hardly a surprising conclusion to reach, and one that increasingly makes me feel as though I need to see some conclusive evidence that it actually helps or does anything if we are to continue it – under certain circumstances maybe it is necessary, but blanket stop and search for terrorism issues cannot have stopped or disrupted many terrorist plots.

In a way connected to this, it seems as though the public has absolutely no faith in the government on terrorist matters, though this likely is exacerbated by my earlier point about perceptions. While apparently if something has a judicial stamp on it, it is seen in a more positive light, I have a feeling people are in fact equally skeptical about that if pushed.

I recall giving a presentation in which I highlighted that in fact police had to present a suspect before a judge every 7 days while he was being held in a pre-charge state on terrorism charges to present their case for keeping him longer, I was met with a wave of skeptical hems and haws about the fairness of this.

Two statistical details highlighted which I rather enjoyed: it turns out we really don’t like the government getting their hands on our DNA unless we have done something very naughty. An understandably high degree of paranoia I would have thought, but good to see in numbers. Secondly, and less amusing, apparently 45% of people think that denying people a trial for terrorism charges is a "price worth paying." Admittedly the date the poll was taken is relatively soon after 7/7, but it seems to me that this is a fundamental thing that we need to hold on to if we are planning on marking long-term success in this conflict.

We will only do this if we fight it on terms that we have laid out before we step on to the battlefield, not making it up as we go along. We may have to build some flexibility into this in the long-term, but nonetheless there are certain key elements we have to establish agreement on before we proceed too far.

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An increasing number of analysts in the United States are beginning to address the problem of home-grown Islamist terrorism in much greater depth than ever before. Unlike the 7 July 2005 London bombings, the attacks of 9/11 were, of course, perpetrated by foreign nationals.

In part, this has contributed to something of a consensus in the United States that home grown radicalisation was a problem which was largely confined to Europe and that the main threat to American national security was external.  "The feeling was we're a country of immigrants and people tend to come to the US and feel accepted, whereas in Europe they are caught between two worlds", observes Stephen Grand, director of US-Muslim relations at the Brookings Institution.

However, a number of events in recent weeks and months have led to a serious reappraisal of this view. The most dramatic of these was the Fort Hood shootings of 15 November 2009, which killed 13 people, and was allegedly perpetrated by Nidal Malik Hasan, a US Army major who was serving as a psychiatrist. Hasan’s radicalisation has also been linked to Anwar al-Awlaki, the radical Islamist preacher of Yemeni dissent, who is a US citizen and has spent much of his life in the country.

There is worrying evidence that these events are indicative of a broader pattern. Al Qaeda has a history of trying to attract UK and American citizens to become active agents for its cause. Further, as the The Sunday Times has reported, during the past eight months alone, there have been 13 cases in which 30 American citizens allegedly plotted to carry out attacks or joined terrorist organisations in Pakistan or Somalia. Earlier this month, Sharif Mobley, a 26 year old New Jersey man of Somali heritage, was arrested in Yemen and charged with membership of Al Qaeda. Reports also claimed that Mobley had worked in power plants in the US before moving to Yemen.

Last week, in another dramatic development, news broke of the October arrest of Colleen LaRose ('Jihad Jane'). LaRose has been accused of actively trying to recruit others as part of a plot to assassinate the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who lives under a fatwa for cartoons he drew about the Prophet Mohammed. As part of the same investigation, it also emerged that another American woman, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, 31 years old and originally from the town of Leadville in the Rocky Mountains, had been arrested in Ireland. Newspaper stories claim that both women had been discontented divorces, until finding Islam and becoming radicalised; it also seems that the internet played an important part in their radicalisation.

These incidents feed into another growing concern, which is the potential role of women in Islamist terrorism. In a prescient article for the Hudson Institute, published the very day that the 'Jihad Jane' story broke in the media, Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens observed that Islamist teachings on the involvement of women in jihad have developed significantly in recent years, and seem to forecast an increasingly prominent role for female jihadist. As Meleagrou-Hitchens summarises:

As the United States and Europe have slowly come to terms with the grim reality of the Islamist terror threat, comment and analysis on how to deal with it have almost invariably concentrated on angry young males. What has frequently been overlooked is the role played by females on the peripheries of many terror plots in the West. Their involvement has ranged from encouraging their jihadi relatives, ensuring that their will to carry out the operation remains strong until the end, to withholding information from the authorities. Although the West has yet to see its first female suicide bomber, recent developments suggest that such an incident is likely, perhaps even inevitable.

In late 2009, the wife of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote "A letter to the Muslim sisters" in which she argued that Muslim women should "fulfill whatever they [the commanders of jihad] ask of us, may it be through monetary aid to them or any service or information or suggestion or participation in fighting or even through a martyrdom operation." Nor is this an unprecedented phenomenon. Between 1985 and 2006, there were an estimated 134 Islamist-inspired suicide attacks carried out by women across Russia and Chechnya, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Lebanon, Iraq, Morocco, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan.

On Wednesday 10 March, the Center for Strategic and International Studies convened a panel to discuss the issue of domestic radicalisation in the US. The contents of the discussion can be viewed here. The Center has also published a report, by Rick Nelson and Ben Bodurian, which contains two overriding pieces of advice for US policy makers in this area:

First, they must consider new ways to interdict the growing trend of "Internet radicalization." Many of last fall's suspects connected with transnational terrorist recruiters via the Internet; stopping this sort of activity is crucial to stemming domestic extremism in the United States.

Second, several of those arrested last fall seemed to harbor the belief that the United States is at war with Islam. This is a "narrative" that al Qaeda and other global terrorist groups actively promulgate; it holds that U.S. counterterrorism efforts signify a "clash of civilizations" between the West and Islam. The United States must continue to work to puncture this narrative. White House officials already have discarded phrases like "war on radical Islam." But ultimately, the United States needs to go further than this, because al Qaeda seizes on more than just U.S. rhetoric to galvanize support for its agenda; the group also points to America's military presence in Muslim countries as evidence for its preferred narrative. The United States, then, should consider how to balance the need to combat global terrorism with the drawbacks of large-scale, direct military intervention. Doing so will require the United States to forge stronger partnerships with states plagued by extremist violence.

These conclusions provide a starting point for a range of discussions, particularly the connections between foreign policy and domestic radicalisation which have previously been identified in the UK. The report also makes a brief suggestion that ‘Europe’s experience with, and responses to, homegrown extremism have much to offer U.S. policymakers and officials’, arguing that small-scale initiatives such as the Quilliam Foundation illustrate the value of official engagement with Muslim communities.

Understandably, senior US policy makers have taken great interest in the fact that the UK has funnelled much time, money and effort into counter-terrorism policies, as part of the CONTEST (and CONTEST II) strategies. But the emphasis on outreach and engagement leaves a number of questions unanswered. What does 'engagement' mean and, more importantly, just who should the state be engaging with?

There are some things the UK does very well in this field; other things it does less well. Approaches to domestic counter-terrorism have evolved significantly since 9/11 and 7/7.

Nonetheless, it is important for US policy makers to recognise that the sagacity of the CONTEST (and CONTEST II) and the Prevent strategies continue to remain a great source of debate within the UK. In particular, the long-term wisdom of using non-violent extremists as a bulwark against those prepared to use violence has been questioned, alongside the precise criteria used for 'engagement' with various Muslim groups.

As Amm Samm's previous posts on FREERad!cals have made it clear, senior US policy makers should think long and hard before they transport the UK model to American soil. Further quality in the debate is needed.

 

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A recently released high-level report reveals the UK intelligence services' assessment of the threat posed by Islamist terrorists in the form of 'electronic attack', or what are increasingly referred to as 'cyber attacks'.

The Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) is the statutory body with oversight of the Security Service (MI5), Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), and Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).  Since it was set up in 1994, its remit has expanded to include the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), and the Intelligence, Security and Resilience Group (ISRG).  Every year, it presents a report to the Prime Minister, which also includes the results of its consultations with other bodies, including the Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS).  In short, its job is to tell Number 10 how well the UK's intelligence agencies are doing, and what problems exist.

The new report [pdf] was presented to the PM on 16 December last year and was eventually published last week [press release, PDF]. The section of interest to us is on page nine:

The Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) told the Committee:
...
Electronic attack is also used by Islamist terrorists who have the capability to launch limited forms of attack over the internet. Technical capability varies greatly, and it appears that their intentions are the defacement or denial of service of specific websites. These attempts are often ***. There are, however, indications that awareness and use of electronic attack is on the increase and ***.

Note the redacted sections, which I'll leave to you to fill as you see fit. It is clear from this document that CPNI regards the two principal vectors of cyber attack to be foreign intelligence services and Islamists. The report notes that GCHQ agrees, and it created something called the Network Defence Intelligence and Security Team (NDIST) in September 2008, to address this issue. This is a group you won't find on Google, and which I've never heard of. How this will play together with the Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC), also at GCHQ , and due to become operational at the end of this month, remains to be seen, particularly as the ISC criticises government for not letting it know sooner about the CSOC.

For obvious reasons, the report is short on details, but it does give us a glimpse of how the UK's intelligence community views the Islamist threat in the specific area of cyber attacks. It's not talking about propaganda or recruitment, just about attacks on infrastructure and networked assets. To be honest, it's hardly earth-shattering, and government seems to have a handle on it, even if GCHQ complains about a lack of staff and is running at "about a third below the level planned" in this field. I guess we'll have to wait until next year to see how things change with respect to this particular confrontation in cyberspace.

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Earlier this week, the United Nations met with private sector representatives at Microsoft’s Redmond HQ, to discuss how to tackle the use of the internet for terrorist purposes.  This is from the UN press release:

The Working Group on Countering the Use of the Internet for Terrorist Purposes – part of the UN Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force (CTITF) – is holding talks at Microsoft’s headquarters, near the United States city of Seattle, with the company and others, including Symantec and McAfee, to examine technical issues surrounding the topic.

The two-day gathering which started today is the first of its kind at the UN level to bring together Member States and entities of the world body with the private sector and academia to examine ways to counter terrorist use of the Internet.

There is a high level of crime on the Internet, and “it is essential that you bring in the private sector, [which is] an essential partner in moving forward,” Richard Barrett, who co-chairs the Working Group, told the UN News Centre.

This reliance on private-public partnerships is certainly where things are moving in cybersecurity generally.  It is recognition that governments do not have the necessary skills and capabilities in-house to tackle issues that in part derive from and also affect the global communications infrastructures that are, after all, largely under corporate control.  

It will be interesting to see what the Working Group proposes as a result of this ongoing consultation process.  The melding of commercial, political, media and security networks is an inherently tricky and risky business and the UN will have to address up front how to preserve the integrity and safeguards afforded to ‘normal’ users of the internet.  It is no simple task just to get everyone talking, and for progressive proposals to emerge from that process.  As the press release recognises of just one particular issue:

Member States have yet to agree on a precise definition of “terrorism.” This complicates discussions on possible legal frameworks to prevent or curtail terrorists’ use of the Internet due to the resulting questions over possible infringements on the freedom of speech and human rights, Mr. Barrett noted.

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Over at the Inner London Crown Court the case is being heard against Cossor Ali, the wife of Abdullah Ahmed Ali, one of the leaders of the UK end of the plot disrupted in August 2006, alternatively known by its police codename "Overt" or as the "liquid plot" after the main bomb ingredient (and the reason for the subsequent restrictions on liquids on airplanes). Cossor Ali stands accused of being complicit in the plot by knowing about it prior to its occurrence and failing to alert the authorities.

The outcome of the case is unclear at this point, and at the moment one of the newer pieces of information to emerge is that Abdullah Ali was something of an absent and abusive husband – or at the very least domineering. Cossor Ali has claimed she felt her personality was being erased when she was absorbed into her husband's family and that he was away for the birth of their child.

The evidence for the prosecution appears to hinge around statements recorded in Cossor Ali's diary about extremist literature she read and the fact that she appeared to support the activities her husband was undertaking. She hoped he might become a "shahada" (a "martyr", though the defence contends this means "the highest form of spirituality"). Her fingerprints were also found on some radical material at their home.

She is not the first wife in the UK to be brought up on charges of either knowing or being complicit in their husband's activities. Mehreen Haji, wife of convicted Al Qaeda member Habib Ahmed, was cleared of arranging terrorist funding.

Tahira Tabassum, wife of attempted Tel Aviv bomber Omar Khan Sharif, was cleared of knowing what her husband was plotting. Bouchra el-Hor was tried and cleared, while her husband Yassin Nassari, was convicted on charges of possessing extremist material.

Mohammed Siddique Khan's wife was picked up in a wave of arrests that followed the long investigation into the July 7, 2005 bombings, but was later released without facing any charges. On the other side of the coin, Yeshiembert Girma, the wife of Hussain Osman one of the failed July 21 bombers, was convicted of helping orchestrate Osman's escape and of knowing about the plot prior to the event.

Fellow failed bomber Yassin Omar's 17-year old recent fiancée Fardosa Abdullahi pled guilty to charges of facilitating his escape. Beyond British shores, there is of course the story of Muriel Degauque, the Belgian convert who blew herself up in Iraq soon after her husband had attempted a similar attack.

In other instances, there are stories of couples that meet while involved in radical groups (or join them together), a phenomenon that is maybe less surprising when one considers the time commitment and passion that is required when one joins such groups.

The underlying question, however, is the role, if any, of wives in terrorist plots? In Saudi Arabia, wives (or future spouses) are an integral part of the de-radicalization process, supposedly acting as stabilizers to men who have strayed.

While in Belgium Malika el Aroud, the wife of one of Ahmed Shah Masood’s assassins who later remarried a different plotter, is alleged to be a key figure in a radicalizing network. The point is that it would appear as though wives can play both a positive and negative role – and this is not to pry into the broader role of women in radicalizing networks more generally.

A recent story in the Telegraph suggested that security services believe a team of women had been dispatched by Al Qaeda to attack the West, while the BBC highlighted the phenomenon of female recruitment into extremist groups.

What remains somewhat unexplored (to my knowledge – any pointers to interesting reports greatly appreciated) is the role that women have played in terrorist plots – are they accelerators in their husbands radicalization (or possible plotters)? Or are they innocent naïf's who either get caught up in their husband's plotting or are firmly kept out of the loop by domineering males?

Or is none of this the case, and in fact they could play a positive role in shifting the husband’s attention from his extreme ideas? All of which would be useful knowledge when attempting to craft a counter- or de-radicalization strategy.

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I am taking a break from my series on Countering Violent Extremism (parts one, two, three, four, and five). I’ll get back to that next week.

Perhaps the most flawed area of study when it comes to modern Islamist terrorism is Islamist ideology. Nowhere is this more obvious than the literature and discourse on al-Qaeda’s understanding of jihad. It seems that everywhere I look, I see people claiming al-Qaeda’s jihad is not offensive; rather, it is defensive.  Time to bring some clarity to the issue (see my post on this from August).

Perhaps not surprisingly, this is where many academics get it wrong and practitioners get it right. I once attended a lecture where a respected academic provided an overview of al-Qaeda’s ideology for his audience, explaining that they believed in defensive – not offensive – jihad. I thought he had misspoken and raised my hand for a clarification, asking him if he said al-Qaeda sought to wage a defensive jihad rather than an offensive one. He confirmed his words as such and then pre-emptively berated us, waving a copy of a volume of Osama Bin Laden’s messages to the world, ‘To understand al-Qaeda, you simply must read what they say and write!’

My immediate thought was: ‘I couldn’t agree more, but have you done this?’

Then just today I was reading an otherwise excellent and thought-provoking article in the recent issue of Studies in Conflict & Terrorism by Alia Brahimi of LSE, ‘Crushed in the Shadows: Why Al Qaeda Will Lose the War of Ideas.’

Dr. Brahimi explains al-Qaeda’s jihad is defensive, citing statements by Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri where they explain they are fighting America because America is attacking the Muslims. In the words of Zawahiri right after the 2004 US presidential election, ‘We only care about purifying our country of the aggressors and resisting anyone who attacks us.’

(This raises the question of how al-Qaeda defines an aggressor and being attacked, but I don’t have the room to address this here. Luckily, Brahimi does briefly address that in her paper, so read it).

Indeed, in a 1997 interview with Peter Arnett, Bin Laden calls his jihad ‘defensive’ and explains it is meant to drive U.S. forces from the Arabian Peninsula and ‘desist from aggressive intervention against Muslims throughout the whole world.’

The volume that prints that interview (and that the academic waved in our faces), Bruce Lawrence’s Messages to the World, explains in a footnote: ‘Bin Laden always describes his jihad as “defensive.”’

So am I wrong?

Herein lays the root of confusion. Bin Laden, Zawahiri, and other AQ leaders certainly do frame their jihad in defensive terms in many of their public communiqués, but these ‘messages to the world’ must be understood in the context of their purpose. They are propaganda pieces. In this sense, I am not entirely fair to Brahimi as she writes Bin Laden ‘presents’ his jihad as defensive – and true, he often does present it that way when messaging to certain audiences. But a clarification must be made.

Let’s take Bin Laden’s statement before the 2004 presidential election, for example. It has widely been observed that the content and timing of the release was meant to influence the American voting public.  In words similar to Zawahiri, he said:

Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.

Rather than viewing this as an expression of ideology, Bin Laden was ‘framing’ the situation for the American people, painting his terrorist network as a threat only as long as the Americans attack the Muslim world (I previously addressed framing in this post on Fort Hood and Anwar al-Awlaki and will address it again in a post to follow this one). You can argue whether the release was meant to help Kerry or Bush (probably Bush, just b/c the very appearance of Osama at that moment may have made the more hawkish candidate seem like a better protector), but the concept holds.

This is not to say that Al Qaeda is disinterested in driving the ‘Zionist-Crusader forces’ from Muslim lands – they most certainly are – but looking to media interviews or propaganda pieces broadcasted either to the West or the Muslim ‘street’ they seek to mobilize is not the most effective way to understand and take accurate measure of their ideology.

Other sources reveal a more accurate picture. These include the longer ‘think pieces’ and books penned by al-Qaeda targeted at smaller audiences rather than propaganda and ‘influence pieces’ that are designed to ‘frame’ issues for current/potential recruits as well as opponents.

For example, in a letter Bin Laden wrote to Saudi intellectuals in the wake of 9/11 (which you can find in The Al Qaeda Reader), he argued:

[O]ur talks with the infidel West and our conflict with them ultimately revolve around one issue – one that demands our total support, with power and determination, with one voice – and it is: Does Islam, or does it not, force people by the power of the sword to submit to its authority corporeally if not spiritually? Yes. There are only three choices in Islam: either willing submission; or payment of the jizya, through physical though not spiritual, submission to the authority of Islam; or the sword – for it is not right to let him [an infidel] live. The matter is summed up for every person alive: Either submit, or live under the suzerainty of Islam, or die.

Bin Laden’s purpose in writing this letter was to refute a letter these intellectuals had written to the U.S. that he saw as ‘full of humility, entreaties, and prostration.’ He condemns their letter for ‘reputiad[ing] Offensive Jihad.’

He insists,

Offensive Jihad is an established and basic tenet of this religion. It is a religious duty rejected only by the most deluded. So how can they call off this religious obligation [Offensive Jihad], while imploring the West to understandings and talks ‘under the umbrella of justice, morality, and rights’?

It is fascinating how he condemns the quoted values of the letter he criticizes even though al Qaeda propaganda attempts to appeal to those same values when he ‘explains’ to the West and the Rest why al-Qaeda is at war. Could it be that AQ propaganda might not be an accurate representation of AQ ideology?

Coming up next, ideological justification for offensive jihad from a prominent jihadist ideologue.

In the meantime, your homework: read Milestones by Sayyid Qutb [pdf] and see what he has to say about offensive vs. defensive jihad. If your job is even remotely concerned with Islamist terrorism and you haven’t read this short volume yet, please remedy this immediately.

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In response to Amm Samm's last post, "visitor" raised a number of interesting points, one of which I wanted to use the opportunity to quickly highlight.

Amm Samm: "there are no clear metrics for measuring success"
Visitor: "what do you offer?"

This is something that I have to admit that I have also been guilty of, complaining about the absence of metrics of PREVENT without necessarily offering any solutions. Consequently, I will use this opportunity to sketch out some thoughts I have been recently having on the topic (Amm has some coming up too I believe).

On the one hand, it should be quite easy to measure success: no terrorism attacks means the strategy is "preventing" terrorism. But how do we know whether what we are spending public money is actually having an impact and it is not other factors? This is important if we do not simply want to be throwing money away.

One solution that has been offered is to calculate the amount of good that groups receiving Prevent funding are able to do in their community: are they helping kids, providing useful local social functions, etc.

A police view that I have instead heard is that success in Prevent is measured by the amount the community trusts and engages with them – are communities coming forwards to offer information on people unsolicited? Are traditionally more sceptical communities using local social services, and thus "trusting" the system and becoming more engaged and less alienated?

But while both of these sound like reasonable areas to use as a basis to measure success, it remains hard to know exactly how many terrorists have been "prevented" in each case for each pound spent. Also, it seems awfully unclear to me that either of these metrics is somehow evidence that the government's strategy is in fact shielding us from the few individuals within society who choose to get involved in terrorism.

Without wanting to sound like I am throwing the baby out with the bathwater, maybe the root of the problem is that the scope we have defined for PREVENT is simply too large, and thus this is why we cannot find suitable metrics: maybe if we pared PREVENT down to simply being activity which pre-empts terrorist activity before it reaches the PURSUE stage then we might be able to measure success it in better.

As I have said before, this does not mean stopping work being done under PREVENT, simply de-tagging it from security. Instead, let us have PREVENT be more intelligence based activity or strengthened (and targeted) social work, alongside efforts to actively counter the spread of radical ideas and breaking up groups actively recruiting people to go abroad to fight. While it will remain hard to calculate success (we are still after all talking about measuring something by its absence), it will theoretically be more tangible than the slightly abstract societal measures that are currently offered by NI 35.

I look forward to hopefully having a conversation with people on this either in the comments or via email if you would prefer.

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On Tuesday Jane Perlez at the NYT reported that Pakistan offered to mediate with Taliban factions who use its territory and have long served as its allies. This is not the first time that Pakistan floated such an idea. In July the Army's spokesman Athar Abbas floated the idea during a CNN interview when he stated Pakistan still had contacts with various Taliban factions and hinted at what wanted [hint: it had something to do with keeping the country to its east out of the country to its west] in exchange for helping to broker a solution. That trial balloon got popped a few hours when the Inter-Services Public Relations denied Abbas ever made the comments.

This time around, the offer came from Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief, during a meeting last month at NATO headquarters. Two things jump out from Perlez's reporting. First, this:

Pakistani officials familiar with General Kayani's thinking said that even as the United States adds troops to Afghanistan, he has determined that the Americans are looking for a fast exit.

The idea that Pakistan is moving because it thinks the U.S. is working on borrowed time could be read many ways, but two broad notions stand out. One is that America has done a poor job of convincing its allies and its enemies that it is prepared to stay the course and Pakistan is positioning itself to resume some sort of hegemonic relationship vis-à-vis Afghanistan. Maybe not turning the clock back to September 10th, but it has successfully waited the U.S. out and is now poised to deliver an acceptable peace.

The other is that Pakistan sees the writing on the wall and realizes that without the U.S. there in the long-term it is going to be forced to deal with a government in Kabul that is much closer to Delhi than it would like. Further, this suggests that Pakistan doubts whether, even without the U.S. there, it could turn the clock back to September 10th and enjoy a proxy government [even one that did not listen to it all that much] in Kabul.

In reality, both of these calculations probably exist simultaneously. Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage has claimed the ISI stayed out of Afghanistan more than the U.S. expected for the first 4-5 years of the fight because it assumed the U.S. would triumph. When the Taliban’s insurgency gained legs a few years back, the ISI reengaged. It probably did so out of fear and opportunism. In any event, the question is not just what Pakistan hopes to gain in terms of influence in Afghanistan, but what it can deliver for the U.S. and whether that aligns with American goals for the region.

This goes to the second item that jumped out at me:

What the Pakistanis can offer is their influence over the Taliban network of Jalaluddin and Siraj Haqqani, whose forces American commanders say are the most lethal battling American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan.

The Haqqani network is responsible for much of the violence in southern Afghanistan and the major suicide bombing operations in the country. The Haqqani's are close to al-Qaeda's leadership – a relationship that goes back to the war against the Soviets – and have acted as a proxy for Pakistan in Afghanistan. It was responsible for planning the suicide bombing operation against the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008, which U.S. officials claim the ISI engineered. It also helped AQ and the TTP to stage the 30 December attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan. The million dollar question is, therefore, which way would the Haqqani's swing?   

My evolving sense of the ISI vis-à-vis control over proxies like these is that it has a lot more contact and influence than it claims publicly and a less influence than it claims privately. Could Pakistan get the Haqqani network to ratchet back in Afghanistan? Maybe. But could it get the Haqqani's to deliver their AQ allies? I'm pretty skeptical. And while stability in Afghanistan would be great, the idea was always to degrade al-Qaeda. Perlez reports:

According to a Pakistani military official, the Pakistanis would first have to resolve where Qaeda fighters would go and whether they might be given safe passage to Yemen or another location.

This seems a bit far-fetched to me and I can't imagine the U.S. agreeing to it. Of greater concern is that, if the U.S. does pull back from an Afghanistan where Pakistan has greater influence without rolling up al-Qaeda elements in the tribal areas then it is going to be much more difficult to keep the pressure on. Again, stabilizing Afghanistan would be wonderful and taking players like the Haqqanis off the pitch would go a long way toward doing that.

 

But fighting in Afghanistan was always supposed to be a means to the end of al-Qaeda elements in the region. On that score, Dan Markey who knows a thing or two about Pakistan summed it up pretty well when he told Perlez 'The United States side is pretty worried about seeing a deal emerge that suits everyone other than us.'
 

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Last week, the UK government quietly announced that a new unit in Whitehall would begin sifting through complaints from the public about 'hate, extremism and terrorism online'. In what seems to be the result of four years of civil service head-scratching about how to design a delivery mechanism for the Section 3("notice-and-takedown", NTD) provisions of the Terrorism Act 2006, the result is probably the most benign mechanism Whitehall could come up with to assuage pressure groups (both internal and external) whilst saving political face.

Under the new initiative, the government is enlisting the help of the internet-using public to find and report on various types of content and behaviour deemed illegal under the provisions of the Terrorism Acts of 2000 and 2006. To its credit the Home Office states, “most hateful or violent website content is not illegal. While you may come across a lot of things on the internet that offend you, very little of it is actually illegal.” That’s an important message, although I guess it will be some time before we know if it sufficiently discourages axe-grinders from submitting various types of legal content to the new Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit.

There may be some utility to this measure. It signals that certain types of material that fall foul of counterterrorism legislation will not be tolerated in the UK. As such, it will bolster government's promotion of its 'values' in this area, as well as contributing in some small way to making "the internet a more hostile environment for terrorists and violent extremists who seek to exploit modern technology", as the press release claims. However, as a genuine bulwark against violent extremism it is a non-starter and will certainly fail to deliver on government's stated objectives of reducing radicalisation and countering violent extremism online. For a start, even if such a scheme―assuming it can maintain any kind of visibility, which is unlikely―succeeded in driving all illegal internet material currently served by UK persons and companies to foreign locations, this content would still be accessible to those who look for it.

This criticism relates to a mere practicality but there is a more important issue. This looks very like policy retrospectively trying to justify poor legislation. Recall that the Section 3 provisions of the Terrorism Act 2006 have never been used, partly because the police―who are charged with serving NTDs―have consistently backed away from being the ones to adjudicate on what might be lawful or not in contentious areas like the 'glorification of terrorism'. Rather than just accept that if they were really serious about prosecuting UK citizens and companies for hosting certain types of material that breach any number of much older established statutes regarding incitement, racial hatred, etc, this government persists in attempting to justify badly drafted legislation under the rubric of counterterrorism policy.

Why a specific reporting mechanism for terrorism? We have one for child abuse, surely a near-universal taboo, but we don’t bother for much else. Why not any other crimes? If it's deeply-held cultural convictions and social norms that the government is trying to uphold, why resort to highly contentious legislation borne of fear and panic, rather than existing legislation that, quite apart from having been successfully tested many times in the courts, directly reflects those norms and values upon which British society claims to be based, pre-9/11?

This government, in common with most others, has yet to make a firm case demonstrating even the weakest causal relationship between internet 'content', 'radicalisation', and 'violent extremism'. Sure, it crops up in the biographies of many terrorists as a behavioural indicator, but many other things do too. This is not a disingenuous statement, and it should not be up to academics, civil servants and rights activists to refute the case for regulation of expression. Rather, it is up to government to make the case for it, and it has yet to do so.

So much for evidence-based policy. In 2002, in a speech to the Economic and Social Research Council, then Home Secretary David Blunkett said, "this government has given a clear commitment that we will be guided not by dogma but by an open-minded approach to understanding what works and why." Unless this government is sitting on a body of data that has thus far eluded the world’s academic community, I suggest that even a small thing like the new internet referral unit shows how hollow this claim sounds now. On its own, this initiative is unlikely to do much damage―nor achieve much of anything, to be frank―but one has to wonder at the institutional processes that more-or-less demanded something like it, for better or for worse.

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Last night BBC 2 showed the first episode of Peter Taylor's three-part series on 'Generation Jihad'. The opening episode focused on the roots of radicalisation among young British Muslims.
Taylor is an experienced and talented journalist, who is chiefly known for a series of well-regarded documentaries on Northern Ireland. But the first instalment of Generation Jihad also raised a number of important additional questions – particularly about the relationship between radicalisation and Western foreign policy.

Two prominent themes that emerged early in the programme were the central importance of the internet as a tool of radicalisation (something dealt with at length in Tim Stevens's report for ICSR) and the crucial role played by radicalisers, as active and predatory agents of extremism within Muslim communities.

For example, Taylor discussed the case of Hammad Munshi, Britain's youngest terrorist convict who was targeted and groomed by older extremists at the age of 15, without the knowledge of his family. Indeed, there is evidence that even younger children have been targeted in this way. At the end of January, police from the Counter-Terrorism Unit in Manchester released a video seized in a raid, apparently showing two infants handling a Kalashnikov rifle and being encouraged to express their desire to 'kill the infidels'.

In tracing the genesis of Islamist extremism within the UK, Taylor identified the furore over the publication of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses in 1988 as a moment of awakening and heightened political consciousness among UK Muslims, which was subsequently manipulated by extremists to their own ends. He also emphasised the continued importance attached by UK Muslims to the 'Ummah', the wider Islamic diaspora.  

Most of Generation Jihad was filmed in West Yorkshire, the home of a number of Mohammad Sidique Khan, the 7/7 bomber, and where Taylor himself grew up. Those interviewed (by a Muslim colleague, rather than Taylor himself) included Bilal Mohammed and Rizwan Ditta, who have both served prison sentences for terrorism-related offences. These young men articulated a long list of Muslim grievances about the conduct of 'Western' foreign policy over the last two decades. The list included the plight of Bosnian, Chechnyan and Palestinian Muslims, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. While denying active support for terrorism, some of the interviewees did express sympathy for the al Qaeda aim of cleansing Muslim lands of the presence of Westerners.

Much of this is binary narrative is, of course, familiar. Indeed, it is often given credence by those who campaign against perceived Western ‘imperialism’ but have no formal connection to the Muslim community. It is also temptingly plausible to Western audiences, as its exponents are well aware. But the reality is that extreme Jihadist Salafist ideology is not as relativist or reactive to Western actions as this narrative would suggest.

It would have been interesting to see the interviewees pressed further on the contradictions in the Al Qaeda narrative, and the shifting sands on which it is predicated. In the case of Bosnia for example, there is evidence that it was the failure of the West to do more to prevent the slaughter of innocent Muslims – that radicalised many young British Muslims, rather than the NATO intervention of the mid-1990s.  

Likewise, even amongst strong opponents of the Western presence in Iraq, it is hard to make a case for Al Qaeda in Iraq as liberators. That group’s tactics, which peaked in 2007, have been to ignite sectarian warfare between Muslims through a succession of huge attacks against the Shi'ite community in the country.

In other words, while there are many links between foreign policy and domestic radicalisation, these are not as simple as are often presumed and should be distilled with care.
Taylor ended the programme by reflecting on the difficulties faced by the authorities in dealing with the threat of home-grown terrorists. He agreed that it was serious and that 'the police and security services cannot afford to take their eyes of Generation Jihad' but expressed concern that 'the danger is that we create even greater resentment that will only end in further attacks'.

This evokes a point that Taylor has often made in his earlier work on Northern Ireland – that heavy-handed security measures exacerbated the terrorist threat from the IRA, by gaining them more sympathisers and recruits. It is certainly the case that the less resentment the police and the security services create, the more that they will be able to isolate extremists within these communities. As yet, however, despite some notable mistakes, there have been no major security blunders against 'Generation Jihad' on the scale that characterised the early phase of 'the Troubles' in Northern Ireland. And to this point, as far as existing evidence goes, the counter-terrorism efforts of the authorities have not in themselves been a primary driver of violent radicalism.

The next part of Generation Jihad will be on BBC Two at 9pm on Monday 15 February.

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I apologize for taking so long to continue this series (see parts one, two, three, and four). I have been travelling. Still am actually. I'd like to start in on Prevent in the UK. There are some significant misconceptions about Prevent in Washington (particularly about its implementation and the 'changes' in CONTEST II) that I worry may hinder informed policy analysis and formulation. In this post, I just explain the basics of Prevent and briefly mention some of its flaws. The sins of Prevent will be explained in more detail in following posts.

Prevent is one of the four 'P's' of CONTEST, the UK's counterterrorism strategy. It seeks 'to stop people from becoming terrorists or supporting violent extremism.' According to the revised CONTEST strategy released last year:

To reduce the risk from terrorism – our aim – we need not only to stop attacks but also to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting violent extremism. The Government introduced its revised Prevent strategy in October 2007. The strategy is based on a better understanding of the causes of radicalisation (the process by which people become terrorists or lend support to violent extremism), to each of which it aims to provide a coherent response.

Thus, Prevent seeks to challenge violent extremism ideology and support 'mainstream' voices, disrupt those who promote violent extremism, support vulnerable individuals, increase community resilience, and address grievances exploited by "ideologues." It does so by allocating funds to local authorities who in turn fund community initiatives that are meant to interface with Muslim, er, I'm sorry, 'vulnerable' youth and prevent them from becoming violent extremists. This is known as PVE, or preventing violent extremism and is the aspect of Prevent that Daniel Benjamin and other US government officials like Arif Alikhan, Assistant Secretary for Policy Development for the Department of Homeland Security (more on that later), seem to be taking a liking to

The police also receive Prevent funds. The Channel program, as part of Prevent, identifies those who are vulnerable to being recruited by those who seek to launch attacks in the UK and seeks to channel them in a different direction.

Now to some flaws (in this context, I recommend Lorenzo Vidino's Foreign Policy piece, 'Toward a Radical Solution'):

(1)    Wrong partners: A significant number of the community groups being funded by local authorities and the Home Office happen to be Sawha-type Salafis (see page 53 of this book) or are oriented toward the Muslim Brotherhood. The reasoning behind this seems to be that these groups are the only ones with the Islamic credibility and 'street cred' to convince radicalizing/radicalized youth from becoming violent in the UK. Further, they seek to channel people into 'political activism' (usually Brotherhood-style) that serves as a sort of 'safety valve' for anger and disaffection.

This is problematic to say the least. If, as I have stated in earlier posts that grievance is far less important than grievance interpretation in driving people toward action, it is folly to fund groups who foster the same grievances and promote such similar narratives to that of al Qaeda. It is also misguided to finance those who are openly supportive of jihad against British and American personnel (not just military personnel) in Afghanistan and Iraq.

(2)    PVE is not well-suited to the British Muslim population. The dominant religious interpretation and practice among those receiving Prevent funding are Brotherhood, Jama'at, and Salafi oriented. These are all hard-line interpretations of Islam, but the plurality of British Muslims come from a Sufi background. While these are all within the Sunni sect, Brotherhood/Jama'at/Salafi Islam are all in direct conflict with Sufism (despite the fact that Hasan Al Banna himself was a Sufi).

(3)    There are no clear metrics for measuring success.

(4)    PVE is a security program with a social orientation. It should be a social program with a security orientation.

(5)    It is essentially a social re-engineering effort and there has been no serious discussion about whether social re-engineering is something the modern liberal state should be engaging in.

(6)    The idea of local councils being empowered toward differential application of Prevent based on varying local environments is a good one, but a lack of oversight from the center has led to differential interpretations of what Prevent is trying to do.

(7)    The idea of preventing extremists from becoming violent extremists (rather than trying to prevent them from becoming extremists in the first place) is cynical to say the least. The idea that the most effective way the British can prevent terrorism is to cede their Muslim youth to conditionally non-violent extremism (not entirely non-violent, as they support violence there rather than here) is intellectually bankrupt and reflects ignorance about the natures of (a) movement participation, (b) the Islamist movement, and (c) Islamist ideologies.

(8)    Lastly, Prevent is in direct conflict with social cohesion. Empowering hard-line social actors within the Muslim community who do not support gender equality, homosexual rights, free speech, etc can only deepen divisions in society and create new ones.  The societal consequences of this are already beginning to emerge and will only worsen over time.

 

More on all this in following posts.

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The UK Home Affairs Select Committee has this morning published the results of its recent hearings on The Home Office’s Response to Terrorist Attacks, and it’s a mixed bag as expected. I haven’t read the whole thing but here are a few preliminary thoughts on its headline findings.

•    Ministers need to place greater emphasis on participation in emergency simulations.

No idea why this should be top of their list. I just keep hearing the late great Jean Baudrillard chuckling in my ears...

•    A formalised National Security Committee chaired by the Home Secretary or Prime Minister and assisted by prominent, publicly accountable National Security Advisers must be appointed.

This is also exactly what the Conservatives want. They claim it will not be “a new bureaucracy but a centre of decision-making”.

•    A lack of political will hindered the creation of regional counter-terrorism units; the Government was not proactive enough in instigating valuable reforms to the policing structure.

I wonder what the committee’s case is here? It implies that the reforms were valuable but happened too slowly.  Big deal.

•    The primacy of the Metropolitan Police in counter-terrorism operations should be enshrined in statute to increase accountability and simplify the command structures.

In statute? They already take the lead in SO15. I’m curious if the Met wants this too. Retired Met Deputy Commissioner Andy Hayman did make the point in evidence that if anything went wrong the current “gentleman’s agreement” between the Met and other forces would be seriously strained. What legal instrument would be employed to do this? Another Act of Parliament, in which the NSC is also set up forever?  We’ve already had six, or seven, or ... how many is it now?

•    The creation of a separate National Terrorism Agency modelled on the American Department of Homeland Security has the potential to cause major problems and will not represent a major simplification of policing structures.

Hallelujah. Such an organisation would have to be a standalone creation, or the merging of existing agencies. The last thing we actually need is a monolithic security agency à la DHS. There might be some short-term marginal gains but it seems to me that you need some tension between agencies to preserve oversight and avoid the worst group-think.

•    The Government should immediately introduce legislation allowing the admission of intercept evidence in court.

Absolutely. If you’re going to collect this stuff then at least use it in court. It’s a form of processual transparency, and will help CPS’ case if the evidence is good enough to bring genuine prosecutions.

•    Control Orders no longer provide an effective response to the continuing threat and the control order regime is no longer viable.

Finally. There has been a quite bizarre and persistent adherence by the government to control orders. Time to throw them out.

•    Budgets for counter-terrorism work have increased greatly but there is a lack of Parliamentary oversight of this spending and a possibility of problems caused by "ring fencing" this money.

This criticism cuts a lot deeper than might first appear, although I doubt the Committee is really being ballsy here. How about asking the really important question: just why are we even spending this money? And what the implications of this securitisation are?

•    The structures that are now in place may be suitable for combating the terrorist threat as currently constituted, but we are not confident that government institutions have the desire to constantly adapt to meet ever-changing threats.

“The terrorist threat as currently constituted”? And what’s that exactly? So, the threat’s constantly adapting, and government institutions are to do the same?  Good luck with that. This is an aspirational point, and governments everywhere are unlikely to deliver on this point. It’s a good idea not to support an NTA, as that would almost certainly stifle the adaptation they desire. I also wonder whether they’re conflating adaptation and innovation as processes/outcomes of change?

We’re a few months shy of a general election, so don’t expect much to change before summer. If the Tories get in we will see a National Security Committee/Council (they use both terms), and perhaps some legislation. There’s also the Defence Review in the next parliament, so there may be some overlap there too. In the meantime, I leave you with Home Secretary Alan Johnson’s reaction to the report. Would we have expected this government to have said anything else?

“I totally refute the unsubstantiated and wholly inaccurate claims in this inadequate report. The government fully understands the threat this country faces from international terrorism and has extremely effective systems and processes in place to deal with it. Indeed, it is all the more surprising, given that the same committee found only six months ago that; ‘the UK's counter-terrorism strategy is first-class, effective and as “joined-up” as any system of government can expect.’"

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Thanks for staying with me as I am unfolding my argument (Parts One, Two, and Three). This is the fourth post in a series about the coming Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) policy in the US.  I launched into this because I am worried about some fundamental misunderstandings I have seen about radicalization and movement participation. I am also concerned that US policymakers aren't as aware of the flaws of the UK's Preventing Violent Extremism strategy as they should be (next post is on the "sins" of Prevent).

As I have argued in previous posts, the frustration-aggression and grievance obsessed models that policymakers and others are applying are woefully incomplete lenses through which to understand why people participate in movements and are driven to action.

In this post, I point to collective identity as the foundation of what has come to be called radicalization.  Islamist movements from al-Qaeda to the Muslim Brotherhood work hard to foster a sense of collective identity among Muslims worldwide. This identity is not simply "I am a Muslim" – 1.57 billion people hold that identity. It goes beyond that, tying into a network of shared meaning. I call it an ummah-oriented Muslim activist identity.  It involves membership in the ummah, which becomes the most salient source of identity and loyalty. Islam (or an interpretation of it) becomes the highest source of legitimacy for thoughts and actions from the mundane to the profound. It is an activist identity that fosters affective bonds between all members of the ummah and encourages a compulsion to some sort of organized action (some good, some bad, some neither – but let's try to keep moral judgments out of this as long as we can) on its behalf – whether that be donating to an Islamic charity for earthquake victims in Kashmir, protesting outside of an Israeli embassy, funnelling supplies to the mujahideen, or strapping explosives to your crotch and boarding a plane bound for Detroit.

This is not to imply that collective identity is inherently threatening. It is a social phenomenon that every person on the planet experiences in one way or another. Patriotism (otherwise known as nationalism) is a potent example of collective identity.

Collective identity is a necessary foundation for mobilizing people to action – for any cause.  Unlike grievance, alienation, relative deprivation, etc a great deal of social science research has unambiguously found that that collective identity is an explanatory variable or an "intervening causal mechanism."

Thus, when shaping policy on counter-radicalization, it would be wise to avoid designing and funding programs that encourage and foster an ummah-oriented Muslim activist identity among Muslim-American youth.  This mistake has been made in a big way by our British friends and it is one of the cardinal sins of Prevent.

Beyond that, grasping the concept of collective identity will allow policymakers, practitioners, and other stakeholders to better understand (1) why and how people are hostile towards out-groups, (2) what shapes peoples' interpretations of justice and injustice, (3) why some people are more willing to engage in collective action or individual action on behalf of a collective, and more.

Collective identity can be defined as

[A]n individual's cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution.  It is a perception of a shared status or relation, which may be imagined rather than experienced directly, and it is distinct from personal identities, although it may form part of a personal identity.  

More simply, it is a sense of "we-ness" with distinct boundaries. It is not just what "we" are; it is what "we" are not. Collective identity mediates the relationship between the society and the world, and the individual and society. It is at the crux of the relationship between objective and subjective realities. We have numerous collective identities simultaneously – but one collective identity is usually more salient than the others, focusing one’s attention on issues that impact the group one believes he/she is a part of, often at the expense of individual concerns.

All social movements seek to enlarge the sense of collective identity for mobilization. Studies have found that out-group hatred and discrimination is not difficult to activate or generate "even absent direct conflict and prior hostility." Such is the power of collective identity. Thus, generating a collective identity among a constituency is the important task facing social movements. Collective identity also serves five psychological functions for the individual: belonging, distinctiveness, respect, understanding/meaning, and agency. These functions help explain why grievances are seen as such and through what prism or scripts they are understood. Identity often precedes grievance. This explains in part, for example, why a British-Pakistani teenager from Leeds feels tied to Palestinian suffering.

Gamson explains that collective identity "is central in understanding people's willingness to invest emotionally in the fate of some emergent collective entity and take personal risks on its behalf." He continues:

It has the consequences for how people understand the sociocultural system they are attempting to change and which strategies and organizational forms they will see as appropriate. Groups that have achieved a successful integration of personal and collective identity will have an easier time doing what it takes to launch many kinds of collective action.

Melluci argues: "The propensity of an individual to become involved in collective action is thus tied to the differential capacity to define an identity."

Collective identity helps overcome the free rider dilemma, as "high levels of group identification increase the costs of defection and the benefits of cooperation." Drawing on Melluci's concept of "networks of shared meaning," Wiktorowicz explains:

[R]adical Islamic activists promote a set of values and identities that challenge dominant cultural codes. In doing so, they seek to create a common community of "true believers" tied together through a shared interpretation of Islam typically characterized by high levels of tension with common religious understandings. Activist proselytizing thus focuses on teaching Muslims (and even non-Muslims) about the deviance of mainstream interpretations while offering the movement's own understanding as definitive. The resulting network of shared meaning is the basis of a common identity that frequently involves commands to risky activism in the name of God.

This is a very broad overview of a huge body of literature and I am at a 1,000 words so my conclusion is abrupt. As such, I had to pass over some things, but I think I made the case that collective identity is a – if not the – foundation for any process leading to collective action or action on behalf of a collective.

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There's a good discussion going on at Kings of War, our academic cousins in the KCL family.  Rob Dover's post, Terror on Campus, has kick-started some informed debate about the role of higher education in radicalisation, and the susceptibility of well-educated persons to radical narratives and ideas.

In response to Rob's suggestion that 'a look back in history might be worth while', the commenters have come up with several historical examples, touching on the 'engineers of jihad' phenomenon and the radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s.  David Betz mentions the Red Army Faction (RAF/Baader-Meinhof) and wonders about the 'revolution is sexy' interpretation of RAF recruitment, which Steve Corman develops further.  I've just finished reading Stefan Aust's The Baader-Meinhof Complex (2008), the revised edition published as a tie-in to the film of the same name that acts mainly as a visual portrayal of the book.  David is right about the narcissism of the main protagonists, particularly Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin, and the relatively dispassionate tone of movie and book allows this facet of their characters to emerge quite naturally.  Although we can happily argue that the initial impetus of the RAF derived in part from the broader political milieu of the turbulent '60s, including the student movements of the far left―radicalised bourgeois youth, let’s not forget―it's hard to ignore the role of charisma in the sustenance of the first and second generations of the RAF.

More pertinent to the radicalism/education discussion, I came across a passage late in the book on the life of Zohair Youssif Akache prior to his role as 'Captain Mahmud' in the hijacking of a Lufthansa 737 in 1977.  The hijacking was intended to force the West German government to release Baader, Ensslin and other RAF members from prison, and ended in Mogadishu in October 1977 after the plane was successfully stormed by German special forces.  Have a read of what Aust has to say about Akache, and note the similarities between this account and the concerns raised recently about Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s background and the intelligence failings prior to his attempted destruction of Delta Flight 253:

'Captain Mahmud', whose Iranian passport bore the name of Ali Hyderi, and whose real name was Zohair Youssif Akache, was known to the police.  He had enrolled as a student of the Chelsea College of Aeronautical and Automobile Engineering in London in 1973, and received his diploma in aeronautical engineering two years later.

He first came to the notice of Scotland Yard in December 1974, when he suddenly attacked police officers at a peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Trafalgar Square.  He was known to be a member of the PFLP, and was in danger of being deported, but was finally allowed to remain and continue his studies.  A year later, Akache attacked the police during another pro-Palestinian demonstration.  This time he was arrested and ended up in Pentonville prison.  After going on hunger strike, he was deported to Beirut.

He was back in London at the beginning of 1977.  Under a false name he moved into a hotel opposite the Royal Lancaster, where the former prime minister of North Yemen was staying.  On 10 April, the ex-prime minister, with his wife and a member of the staff of the Yemeni embassy, got into a Mercedes outside the hotel.  Akache had been in wait behind the car.  He walked around the vehicle, opened the right-hand front door, and fired a pistol fitted with a silencer at the three occupants.  They died instantly.  Akache managed to fly out of London the same day.  Scotland Yard had had him under surveillance before the assassination, but had not sent his personal details and description through to Heathrow Airport. (pp.384-5)

Six months later he was dead on the Somali tarmac, and dozens of airline passengers could breathe again.  The differences between the two men are as great as their superficial similarities but 32 years later, does any of this sound even remotely familiar?  


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As a break from my series on the upcoming Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) policy in the United States (parts one, two, and three), I interviewed Charles Burnard of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). Charles is a Research Analyst with RUSI Qatar's Middle East and North Africa program (full bio at bottom). I spoke with Charles about Yemen in the wake of the Christmas Day Plot in an effort to put things in a broader perspective than we are getting in the ongoing media coverage.

Charles, what do you think the broader impact of the Christmas Day Plot will be on Yemen?

I would not be surprised to see an increase in support and popularity for AQAP, both locally and abroad. The movement has very effectively harnessed local grievances such as poverty and government corruption, as well as external issues such as the Yemenis held in Guantanamo, to feed its narrative. In this sense, even though the Christmas plot failed, it will be construed as a victory for AQAP and a demonstration of this movement’s ability to severely disrupt Western security and transport infrastructure.  
 
It will be also be interesting to see how the Yemeni Central Government reacts to the promise of increased support and cooperation from the US and the UK. In the past it has been willing to collaborate with Western governments after significant attacks, only to loosen its grip once the furor has died down. Recent statements by Yemeni officials do not sound promising - Yemen's Foreign Minister Abubakr Qirbi recently stated in local newspapers that although he welcomed intelligence-sharing initiatives with the West, he is not committed to joint counter-terrorism operations. This may, however, simply be a case of preserving the domestic image of independence from the West.

How do you think recent events will shape US and Western involvement in Yemen?

We hear a lot of talk about conferences, special ops support, intelligence support, so on and so forth.
As you just alluded to, the US has already promised to double its 2009 financial aid figure of $70m and promised increased military support. Gordon Brown has promised a £100m commitment as well as increased intelligence support. I think it is important to ask whether simply proving more money and military aid is the most effective means of addressing Yemen's insecurity. Channeling additional funds to a government plagued by corruption (and often concerned more with its own survival than the prosperity of its citizens) strikes me as an ineffective approach.  

There has been much talk in the media of Yemen as the 'next-Afghanistan' or the next front in the War on Terror. These are convenient taglines, but they oversimplify a very complex situation. The worst thing Western states could do at this point is increase their military presence in the country beyond special operations and advisors (or adopt these taglines) and, thankfully, I get the sense that there is recognition of this fact. The central government walks a very fine line. On the one hand, it needs external support to address this challenge and on the other, it needs to maintain an image of independence from the West to be credible.        
 
With all the focus on al Qaeda, it feels like other issues are getting lost. Do you think the issue of AQAP and the recent Christmas Day Plot has overshadowed other, perhaps more significant, issues in Yemen?

Without a doubt. Yemen has been plagued by a whole host of political and economic issues which, if you’ve been following recent coverage of Yemen, I’m sure you’ve head all about: conflicts in the north and south, dwindling water and oil resources, rampant poverty and human rights violations. Recent talk of counter-terrorism has been at the expense of these issues. Just recently, the next chapter in Saleh's quest to suppress uncooperative elements of the media played out when a group of citizens were machine-gunned in front of al Ayyam newspaper HQ in Aden. Outside of local and regional media, this event received almost no coverage.   
The recent frenzy surrounding Abdumutallab's exploits has become part of the all-too-familiar reactionary approach to counter-terrorism strategy. While terrorism in Yemen clearly has the greatest capacity to affect Western security, it simply cannot be isolated from the other issues I've just mentioned. Broader security concerns drive AQAP’s narrative. We need to move away from knee-jerk reactions and adopt a smarter, more nuanced understanding of local issues and how these issues interact with terrorism.  

Bringing it back to the UK, do you have high hopes for the upcoming international conference in London on Yemen, to be held parallel with one on Afghanistan?

I am relieved to finally see Yemen on the agenda, but am equally concerned about the Western approach. Simply pumping additional financial support and military aid into the country will prove to be an ineffective strategy -  before any effective counter-terrorism and security initiatives take place, the Yemeni Central Government needs to function in a responsible and transparent fashion, and the economic and political infrastructure of the country needs to be developed. There is no quick fix – we cannot decapitate the organization (as we did in 2002) and expect [it] to vanish. AQAP today is more complex than ever and thoroughly rooted in Yemeni society.
 
Scheduling the Yemen conference in parallel with one of Afghanistan, one would hope that governments will discuss and heed the lessons learned from the latter. This is not to suggest that Yemen is analogous to Afghanistan, far from it, rather it is a call to understand that an effective approach to counter-terrorism rests on understanding local complexities and recognizing that terrorism cannot be separated from wider security concerns.     




Charles  Burnard is a Research Analyst with RUSI Qatar's Middle East and North Africa program. He has an MA in Intelligence and International Security from King's College London and a BA in International Relations from the Australian National University. Prior to moving to London, Charles held positions in the Australian Government, the Australian Embassy in Washington DC and several think tanks. His research interests include Middle Eastern security, salafi-jihadi terrorism, radicalisation and Australian foreign policy.

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Part One
Part Two

In my last post I addressed the focus on marginalization, alienation, and relative deprivation in the discourse about radicalization and counter-radicalization, as seen in Daniel Benjamin's speech last month on CT policy. I pointed out that these are discredited and/or insufficient explanations for why violent radicalization – and indeed movement participation as a whole – occurs. As I noted, we find that individual terrorists do not experience higher levels of relative deprivation, but that they often come from communities or even countries that are relatively deprived.  This, however, should not come as a surprise as most places and communities have less than other countries and communities.

Thus, saying that violent extremism emerges from relatively deprived communities is not much more analytically useful than observing that violent extremism emerges from communities where they breathe oxygen. Both are everywhere. Not to mention the fact that violent extremism also emerges from communities that are not relatively deprived (but not communities where they don't breathe oxygen…so far, at least).

This brings me to another quote from Daniel Benjamin's speech:

There is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, when people despair and are aggrieved, they become more susceptible to extremist ideologies.

Benjamin's speech reflects the assumption that grievances represent root causes and that it thus is possible to identify grievances, structural strain and dysfunction which have ‘alienated’ individuals from society, driving them to look for different providers of belonging, satisfaction, and meaning which can lead them to violent Islamism. The implication is that, if the right grievances and system imbalances can be identified, we can tackle the 'roots' of terrorism by changing policies or implementing programs aimed at resolving them. As a result, individuals will feel less alienated and extremism melts away.

The trouble with this logic is grievances are ubiquitous, but collective extremist ideologies aren't. Grievances do not lead to ubiquitous terrorism. They don't lead to ubiquitous violence. They don't even lead to ubiquitous collective action of a milder sort, like protests and boycotts.

As Trotsky said, 'In reality the mere existence of privations is not enough to cause an insurrection; if it were, the masses would be always in revolt.'  Most of the poorest countries in the world, where basic needs are not provided (except for a select elite), and jobs are few and far between have produced little or no terrorism, despite the presence of deprivation – both absolute and relative – political disenfranchisement, and other things to be aggrieved about.

Along these lines, Wiktorowicz decries 'overly simplistic formulation of an inexorable linkage between structural strain and movement contention.'

He continues:

Systems are not inherently balanced or static, but rather consistently dynamic as they experience the pressures and strains of societal changes, events, and interactions. More importantly, structural strain and the discontent it produces (the alleged catalyst for contentious action) are ubiquitous in all societies...yet do not always elicit a movement....Movements are not merely psychological coping mechanisms.

So if strain, deprivation, grievance and discontent are everywhere on every country and in every ethno-religious community, how do we account for violent Islamism? How do we account for the majority of people that do not become involved in it? Why do some 'aggrieved' people choose terrorism over crime or charity or political involvement? The answer is: we need to look elsewhere or bad policy will result.  

Bert Klandermans, professor of applied social psychology at Free University (Amsterdam), argues that grievance interpretation is at the core of the social construction of contention and 'interpretations, rather than reality itself, guide political actions…'

But we don't want to get ahead of ourselves.  We first must address collective identity, or that sense of 'we-ness' that makes the interpretations meaningful and relevant to the individual and group. This is the most crucial and under-appreciated element of 'radicalization' – violent or otherwise. Crucial because without it, the rest doesn't happen.

Stay tuned...


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"Brother Mujahid Umar al-Farouk is a hero who destroyed the legend of American intelligence."

By that sentence al-Qaida's branch in the Arabian Peninsula (mainly in Yemen) took responsibility for the recent terrorist attempt to blow up the Northwestern flight over Detroit on Christmas day. The statement declared war on all western diplomats in the region, called for launching a full-scale war against the "crusaders," and stated that the failed attempt was a response to the US-sponsored attacks on al-Qaida’s camps in Yemen earlier this month.

The rhetoric is not new, nor is the elusiveness of al-Qaida. The organization and its branches suffered severe losses in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Saudi Arabia, its central command is under intense pressures in Pakistan. But then it reemerges like a phoenix in Yemen to plot an international attack in Detroit. This "phoenix phenomenon" can also be observed in West Africa (the home region of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab) and East Africa (where the Shabab movement declared allegiance to al-Qaida-Central). In the Middle East, however, al-Qaida's center of gravity has shifted from Iraq to Yemen.

Since al-Qaida's birth in the late 1980s, Yemen has been always under the organization's radar. In addition to Bin Laden's blood ties to Hadhramaut in Central Yemen, the conservative social setting, the rugged geographical terrain, the traditionally weak central authority, and the dominance of the tribal system over the state system are all factors that al-Qaida manipulated and capitalized upon.

Over the past twenty years, Al-Qaida's life in Yemen can be divided into three phases:

•    The first was between 1990 and 1994 when Bin Laden and his Yemeni associates tried to unite other Islamist factions to topple the regime and declare an Islamist state. That attempt failed. Instead, elements of al-Qaida and their supporters fought in the 1994 Yemeni civil war on the side of the incumbent president, Ali Abdullah Salih.
•    The second phase is between 1995 and 2006. That phase was characterized with a distinct organizational structure for al-Qaida and a constant confrontation with the Yemeni regime. By 2006, al-Qaida was severely weakened due to security strikes, international coordination, and a de-radicalization program that was partly successful.
•    In 2006, a third phase for al-Qaida in Yemen started with a successful escape attempt from the Political Security Prison in Sanaa by al-Qaida’s commanders. The escape was just the tip of the iceberg. The imprisoned leaders were able to reorganize the group and communicate with Iraq and Afghan Yemeni veterans. Following reorganization, al-Qaida was able to strike multiple targets including military, state security, and foreign ones. The more recent activity of the group was giving life to the defunct “al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula,” an organization that was already burned-dead by the Saudi security services.

Al-Qaida has declared that it reestablished a regional, organizational leadership in Yemen. Last January, the leader was declared to be Abu Basir Nasr al-Wahishy from Abyan Province in the south. Earlier this month, al-Qaida held a public rally in Abyan, in the same site of the US-backed air raid; there its commanders declared that they will take revenge, just a few days before the Detroit terrorist plot unfolds.

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The new year opens with governments around the world showing that their most imaginative response to terrorism is to crack down further on innocent citizens everywhere.  Viva, the War on Terror!  As if further proof were needed that states lack the critical capacity to examine their own actions and characters, governments left and right have decided that the principal appropriate response to recent acts of intended and actual violence is to abandon any appreciation of risk management and go for a zero-tolerance, 100%-security option.

So, it's all systems go for full-body scanners at airports!  Let's fire up the Interception Modernisation Programme!  Load up the cyber-bombs, lads, we're going to launch pre-emptive strikes in cyberspace!  Expect security vendors to have a bonanza year.

Forgive my scepticism but really, does anyone truly believe that increasing 'security' in these ways is going to make any real difference to the central purpose of counterterrorism, i.e. to prevent acts of terrorism taking place?  There is no surer sign of the hollowness of many counterterrorism policies than kneejerk calls for more CT measures once a failure occurs.  We would do far better to improve our current systems than to plaster on additional layers of restriction and invasions of privacy.

The most significant failure ahead of the thwarted Delta Flight 253 plot was not Schiphol airport security but of the US intelligence community, including the National Security Agency, State Department, CIA, and possibly the National Counter-Terrorism Center.  Together they managed not to process effectively information already collected under the existing security regime.  It's not that the CT procedures in place can't work but that the processes currently in operation did not function properly on this occasion.  The failure to integrate already extensive global intelligence networks is not the fault of law-abiding citizens, and we should not be held accountable for the actions of a few extremists.  The problem is one that will be familiar to students of Information Theory 101: information does not equal knowledge.  

If I follow 25,000 people on Twitter, this does not make me wise.  It's all very well absorbing information osmotically, as it were, but how does this help me to make decisions, or to parse vast tracts of data to inform appropriate responses and effect positive outcomes?  I need to be able to filter that information somehow, so I can use it intelligently.  This is the challenge that faces those who call for massive monitoring and data-gathering programmes like the IMP that may, rather than help counterterrorism, actually hinder it.  You can have too much of a good thing, particularly if the data you seek are buried in a mass of irrelevant data.  There's a scene in The Simpsons Movie (2007, 2 stars in the Stevens film reviews) in which an NSA operative in a room full of eavesdropping peons rejoices when he finally overhears a US citizen plotting something subversive.  All those billions of dollars―and the erosion of civil liberties―and Uncle Sam learns only of a little girl's plans to save a local lake from toxic dumping.  

Supporters of such schemes do not understand the Law of Diminishing Returns.  They will say that the answer to this conundrum is simple and twofold: if we employ more people, and ramp up the technology, the system will yield the results we want.  Wrong.  The answer―unless we really want total surveillance―is to improve how we use information rather than a priori increase the amount we gather.  Something nasty will always slip through the net and the sooner governments accept that total security is impossible, the sooner we can jettison the absurd myopia of this 'war' on terrorism and get on with our lives.  Whilst we allow politicians to continue to make political capital out of this charade, Abu Musab al-Suri must be laughing all the way to the exercise yard.

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I suppose I knew it was inevitable, but it looks as if Britain's Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE) strategy is coming to America, as...Countering Violent Extremism (CVE). Prevent is one of the 4 P's (the others being Pursue, Prepare, and Protect) of CONTEST, the UK counterterrorism strategy. Prevent is a national effort that draws heavily on local governments and funds community organizations. It is designed to:

•    challenge violent extremist ideology and support 'mainstream' voices
•    disrupt those who promote violent extremism and support the institutions where they are active
•    support individuals who are being targeted and recruited to the cause of violent extremism
•    increase the resilience of communities to violent extremism
•    address the grievances that ideologues are exploiting

And, it is very controversial.

I now quote Daniel Benjamin, the head of the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism at the State Department, at length. He gave a speech last month on CT policy in the Obama Administration. I know this post is about a month late, but I thought it best to wait until after the holidays.

Benjamin's speech is signaling a major domestic and foreign policy development – partially in reaction to a year full of Islamist terrorist plots. Benjamin is an old National Security Council hand from the Clinton years and one of the first people to start seriously talking about al Qaeda and mass casualty terrorism in government before 9/11. Now, as Benjamin explained in his speech:

We are also addressing the local drivers of radicalization that still lead large numbers of people to adopt al-Qaida's ideology, and as I said earlier, we understand the dangers of radicalization, and we are working both to undermine the al-Qaida narrative and to ameliorate the conditions that make it attractive. We know that violent extremism flourishes where there is marginalization, alienation, and perceived–-or real–-relative deprivation. In recognition of this, my first step has been to build a unit focusing on what we in the government call "Countering Violent Extremism" in my office to focus on local communities most prone to radicalization. There is a broad understanding across the government that we have not done nearly enough to address underlying conditions for at-risk populations–-and we have also not done enough to improve the ability of moderates to voice their views and strengthen opposition to violence.

Adopting a tailored-approach to countering violent extremism does not mean we can neglect broader structural problems. There is no denying that when children have no hope for an education, when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, when people despair and are aggrieved, they become more susceptible to extremist ideologies. But a tailored-approach to CVE requires identifying which of these problems are driving radicalization and are amenable to change with the help of local governments and leaders who understand the problems best.

Over time, the measures and the methods I have described above will reduce terrorists' capacity to harm us and our partners. No element can be neglected if we are to succeed since they reinforce one another. Global engagement builds coalitions based on mutual interests and mutual respect. And these coalitions, in turn, help us partner with individual nations to enhance their capacity to counter extremism. This, finally, enables us to work with them to develop tailored-approaches to preventing extremists from becoming violent extremists.

The influence of the British experience is evident: Focusing on 'local communities most prone to radicalization.' Local governments and leaders will be vital to the effort.  And, most significantly, the last sentence in the excerpt indicates the strategy will be focused on keeping extremists from becoming violent extremists, rather than keeping them from becoming extremists in the first place – a major hallmark (some might call it a flaw) of Prevent. And c'mon: PVE and CVE?

Stay tuned for a series of posts on radicalization and counter-radicalization. I'll be...

•    Challenging some of the assumptions in Benjamin’s remarks that are also pervasive in the discourse on the subject (namely about marginalization, alienation, and deprivation – relative or otherwise);
•    Addressing the crucial and overlooked role of collective identity;
•    Discussing the problems with Prevent in the UK and its applicability to the US;
•    Observing how US-based ‘non-violent’ Islamists have seen the writing on the wall and are positioning themselves to co-opt any US counter-radicalization programs;
•    And tying it together with some other thoughts and observations.


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The revelations that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab may have been in part radicalized in the United Kingdom are not entirely surprising. He was in the UK while he was a student, traditionally a young person's most fecund period of political activism. Furthermore, there is the unfortunate reality that while the more overt forms of extremism and training offered by individuals like Abu Hamza al-Masri, Abdullah el-Faisal or Abu Qatada may have died down (or gone beneath the radar), many elements of what has been termed "Londonistan" do remain active. Put simply, London remains a place where extreme elements and ideas are easy to find for anyone seeking them.

But nonetheless, we need to be wary of sparking off some sort of overreaction to this. That Abdulmutallab, like a number (according to the Times count, a further three) of previously convicted terrorists in the UK, may have been the President of the University Islamic Society and organized conferences on subjects related to Islam and the war on terror cannot in itself be read as some sort of marker of his later terrorist action. How many have been through these roles and gone on to nothing remotely related to terrorism? To watch all of these individuals would doubtless be tough for already stretched services, and to ban all such groups and conferences would merely drive them underground and raise all sorts of fearsome debates about freedom of speech.

Unlike some friends, I would also contend the argument that the University of London is somehow the connective tissue – while a number of convicted British terrorists have passed through these hallowed halls (about 10 if I recall a count over drinks the other night) – innumerable others have passed through harmlessly (including most contributors to this blog). Compared to other Universities, it may seem like a high concentration (though I have not seen an absolute count yet anywhere making this an unsubstantiated assertion), but then again, consider how many students have passed through University of London: according its own count, there are currently 120,000 enrolled. The most likely explanation for these similarities is that extremist recruiters seeking warriors for Al Qaeda’s cause are probably hidden amongst London's diverse community, and they are fishing in the pools nearest to them.

Maybe a more disturbing link should be drawn through the Yemen-UK connection. Back in late 1998, seven British Muslims (two of whom were related to Abu Hamza) were picked up and incarcerated for their part in plotting a bombing campaign and kidnapping alongside a local Islamist group. In 2000, following the death of a young Briton in a incident involving a firearm at a madrassah north of the capital Sanaa, the British Ambassador went to investigate and was shocked to discover 30 British students at the school. Since then I have heard stories of journalists coming across young Britons, amongst other foreigners, seeking jihadi camps in Yemen. Furthermore, the presence of fabled extremist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki, means that these youngsters can find a teacher there who speaks a language they understand.

What really stands out, however, is the familiarity of all of these connections. The fact they are not that novel highlights the fact that the ideological battle is nowhere near won. Here we are almost a decade since 9/11 and we are still seeing suicide attackers on airplanes, having passed down a path that is not unknown. This is both a break-down in security, but also a sad indictment that the stream of young men seeking martyrdom has not diminished.

Here are a few links if you want to dig deeper:

News from Nigeria
Britain turned him away
Organized "terror conf"
AQ "groomed" him in London
His time at UCL
Unis "complicit" in his radicalization
Con Coughlin "when will we wake up"
NYT long piece on London links
NYT piece news on his contacts and family background
CNN with interviews with London friends, and that he became more radical in London
Farouk "not radicalized" at UCL
THES article by UCL head

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Earlier today, Danish police arrested a Somali national for attempting to kill the Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaart with an axe and a knife.

Westergaart drew several of the infamous Mohammed cartoons, whose publication sparked an international crisis in 2006.

In the next days, some of the wider ramifications of the attack will become clearer.
The following points will no doubt be of particular concern:

The attacker is said to have had links with the Somali insurgent group As Shabaab. If it turns out that the group actively directed this attack, the incident will mark a significant change of strategy for Shabaab.

Thus far, Shabaab has used its links to Al Qaeda principally to promote their struggle in Somalia and attract money and foreign fighters. Diaspora Somalis from as far as Minnesota have made their way to East Africa, but few – if any – showed any interest in carrying out terrorist attacks in the West.

Attacks against American or Western targets – never mind Danish cartoonists – simply weren’t on Shabaab’s agenda. If Shabaab is fully buying into Al Qaeda’s global jihad now, this will create an enormous headache for Western security services, especially those in countries with large Somali diaspora populations.

Second, the attack underlines what we’ve already seen with the Detroit bomber, namely that the Al Qaeda threat is becoming more and more diverse. It’s no longer just the tribal areas in Pakistan that cause concern, but a whole lot of locations across the world. There now seem to be regional hubs, which provide all the things – resources, training, direction –  that used to be done in one place.

The UK and US may now have agreed to support the Yemeni government with money and training. But focusing on one or even two places isn’t good enough. There needs to be a comprehensive strategy for dealing with terrorist safe havens across the world.  
Third, and perhaps most importantly, Al Qaeda is back. It may look different from the Al Qaeda of 2001, and another 9/11 still seems far-fetched, but Detroit and now Denmark show that the threat hasn’t gone away.

Having the makers of the Danish cartoons killed would have been hugely popular with Al Qaeda’s sympathisers. Given how much criticism Al Qaeda has had to face by its own constituency in recent years, this would have revived the Al Qaeda myth and mobilised its supporters once more. (This, in fact, is a point very well made by my friend and colleague Yassin Musharbash at Spiegel Online.)

All in all, there’s clearly more to today’s events than a crazed Somali storming a suburban house in Denmark with an axe and a knife. 2010, it seems, will be anything but a quiet year...

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Al Qaeda’s haven in Yemen and the alleged failure of US homeland security procedures are two issues that are receiving a lot of scrutiny right in the wake of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s failed Christmas Day plot. I will address the former in this post.

As Peter Neumann noted in an ‘instant analysis’ on the heels of the attack, Abdulmutallab was thought to have received his training, explosives, and instructions from al Qaeda in Yemen. As Vahid Brown reported on Jihadica, the media wing of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has claimed responsibility (side note: Brown has a fascinating post from a few days before Christmas, ‘A Mujahid’s Bookbag’ that everyone should read). According to a translation provided by the NEFA Foundation, AQAP claims:

The heroic mujahid, martyrdom-seeking brother Omar al-Farooq waged a unique operation on-board of an American aircraft that took off from the Dutch city of Amsterdam, heading towards the American city of Detroit, during their [Christians] celebration of the Christmas holidays on Friday December 25th, 2009, by which he infiltrated all the advanced, new machines and technologies and the security boundaries in the world’s airports. Heroically and straightforwardly, fearless of death, dependent on Allah, by his great act he broke the American and international intelligence legend, and he showed their fragility and rubbed their noses in the mud, and he made all of what they spent on security development techniques a [new] heartbreak for them.

Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was in touch with the American-born extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who resides in Yemen. According to an interview al-Awlaki gave a couple days ago, he provided Hasan with religious sanction for the attack. As Peter wrote in his analysis, Yemen launched strikes (with some sort of US assistance) days ago within its own borders against AQAP targets.  30 people were killed, including two top leaders and possibly al-Awlaki. AQ men vowed revenge at a gathering of thousands the next day where a representative for the group stated:  ‘[Y]ou should understand that we do not want to fight Yemeni soldiers. There is no problem between us and the soldiers. The problem is between us and America, but victory is coming soon.’

These strikes against AQAP followed another set of strikes a week before that saw cruise missiles launched at AQAP training camps in Yemen, killing 34 al Qaeda fighters. Accompanying ground raids captured 17 more al Qaeda members.

AQAP claims that Abdulmutallab’s failed bombing was a response to these cruise missile attacks. They stated:

Unification in doctrine and Islamic brotherhood are the reasons that pushed this wealthy young man, from Nigerian origins—the mujahiden brother Omar al-Farooq—directly respond to the unjust American aggression over the Arabian Peninsula, and, grace to Allah, that was through direct coordination with the mujahideen in the Arabian Peninsula after the monstrous raids using cluster bombs and cruise missiles that were launched from the American warships occupying the Gulf of Aden, targeting the proud tribes of Yemen in Abin, Arhab, and lastly in Shabwa, and they killed tens of Muslim women and children, and they also killed entire families. These operations were waged through a Yemeni, American and Saudi collaboration, including a number of neighboring countries.

Abdulmutallab was almost certainly trained and provided with explosives well before these strikes in Yemen took place, which makes AQAP’s claim that this was a response ring a little hollow, but it is possible that the timing of Abdulmutallab’s fateful trip to Detroit was influenced by the strikes. That is one of many questions we hope will be answered.

Just yesterday, Yemeni authorities arrested 29 al Qaeda members who were supposedly planning attacks on government targets and the British embassy.

For more on AQAP, see here and here. For an interesting short piece on al Qaeda in West Africa, see here.

Rep. Jane Harman may have exaggerated a bit when she said that ‘Yemen is the new FATA, or it will be,’ but either way, Yemen’s problems have clearly become the world’s. The CIA and Special Forces teams have already been in Yemen for about a year, working against AQAP and training Yemen’s military and Interior Ministry personnel.

Putting these highly trained men on the ground in Yemen comes at no small cost to the US taxpayer.  Some have screamed bloody murder over the idea of American ‘boots on the ground’ in Yemen, but fairly recent history shows that as terrorist safe havens develop, waiting too long may only increase that necessity along with the number of boots we’ll need.


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The internet is abuzz with rumours and speculation about the incident onboard the Delta Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Friday night. As you will have heard by now, one of the passengers attempted to ignite an explosive device shortly before landing. The US authorities are treating the event as an attempted terrorist attack.
It’s too early still to gauge the full extent of what happened. The following points, however, are sure to be prominent as the story unfolds:
THE ATTACK
Why did airport security fail? Amsterdam Schiphol – where the suspected terrorist got onboard the plane – is one of Europe’s largest airports, and has a good reputation for its security. Why weren’t the explosive materials detected? What were they, and how did they get on the plane?
UPDATE: The latest reports are saying that the suspect did NOT board the plane in Amsterdam, and that no secondary screening had taken place at Schiphol.
Similarities with the ‘shoe bomber’.  Richard Reid, the so-called ‘shoe bomber’ tried to blow himself up onboard an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami shortly before Christmas in 2001. As with today’s incident, Reid was caught fiddling with the explosive device, which failed to set off. Interestingly, it later turned out that Reid had an accomplice, Saajid Badat, who was hoping to bomb a different plane.
Al Qaeda still obsessed with blowing up planes. More than eight years since the 9/11 attacks, Al Qaeda – if it really was Al Qaeda – hasn't come up with anything new. Most Al Qaeda-linked plots in the West have been directed at airliners or public transportation.  Also, they still prefer conventional explosives – none of the more adventurous predictions about chemical, nuclear, or radiological attacks have become reality.
THE SUSPECT
Who is Abdul Mutallad? The suspect - a 23 year old Nigerian national - is currently in hospital with injuries. According to the BBC, he might have been enrolled as a student at University College London at the time of the attack. Was he radicalised in Nigeria, or is he a product of London(istan)? Given that his name was mentioned in US databases, was he also known to the British authorities? What exactly did they know about him?
Leaderless jihadist or Al Qaeda operative? The suspect’s name appears on US government lists, but there is no evidence that the suspect was a trained, hard core Al Qaeda activist. This leaves us with the (by now) familiar dilemma of deciding if the attempted attack should count as Al Qaeda. Who recruited and equipped him? Who directed the operation? It seems fairly unlikely that he pulled this off all by himself, but the extent and level of Al Qaeda involvement will remain an issue of contention for months.  
THE CONNECTIONS
Terrorism going global. The incident is a good illustration of how Al Qaeda inspired terrorism has become more and more transnational -- a Nigerian national, who seems to have received training and instructions in Yemen, boards a plane in Holland, and nearly blows it up in the United States. Four continents – and that’s only the main suspect!
Nigerian Al Qaeda operatives. The involvement of a Nigerian in an Al Qaeda type operation is a novelty. Few, if any, Nigerians have played prominent roles in the organisation, and there remains little concrete evidence of significant Al Qaeda activity in Nigeria (though there are plenty of rumours). At the same time, the country is riven by civil unrest between the Christian South and the Muslim North, and there are several other, sometimes violent Islamist groups who are active in Nigeria, including Boko Haram, the Hisbah, the Zamfara State Vigilante Service, and Al-Sunna Wal Jamma (also known as the Nigerian Taliban).
Flashpoint Yemen. US government sources claim that the suspected perpetrator received the explosives and his instructions in Yemen -- one of the hotspots for Al Qaeda activity about which Western security services have been warning for years. Only yesterday, Yemen launched a strike against an Al Qaeda training camp in the south of the country and killed eight aspiring suicide bombers in the north. Among the people who died were two top leaders and (possibly) Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born extremist cleric who is said to have inspired the Fort Hood shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan.

 

As we learn more about the plot, I will keep updating this post...

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Check out Lorenzo Vidino's new paper for the Real Instituto Elcano, The Homegrown Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland (pdf). Here is the summary of this very timely piece:

The wave of arrests and thwarted plots recently seen in the US has severely undermined the long-held assumption that American Muslims, unlike their European counterparts, are virtually immune to radicalisation. In reality, as argued in this ARI, evidence also existed before the autumn of 2009, highlighting how radicalisation affected some small segments of the American Muslim population exactly like it affects some fringe pockets of the Muslim population of each European country. After putting forth this argument, this paper analyses the five concurring reasons traditionally used to explain the divergence between the levels of radicalisation in Europe and the US: better economic conditions, lack of urban ghettoes, lower presence of recruiting networks, different demographics and a more inclusive sense of citizenship. While all these characteristics still hold true, they no longer represent a guarantee, as other factors such as perception of discrimination and frustration at US foreign policies could lead to radicalisation. Finally, the paper looks at the post-9/11 evolution of the homegrown terrorist threat to the US homeland and examines possible future scenarios.

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Another week passes and more stories of young Westerners showing up on Somalia's battlefields. Two distinct tales jump out this time – first, the recent bombing in Mogadishu was the work of a Danish-Somali suicide bomber; and second, an 18 year old Italian-Somali handed himself over to government forces claiming that he was sent over to fight by his father.

The first case appears to be what can increasingly be described to be the traditional model of recruitment for al-Shabaab. Drawn by a combination of religious zeal and nationalism, 25 year old Abdulrahman Ahmed Haji moved back to Somalia from his adopted home just outside Copenhagen about 18 months ago, taking a pregnant wife with him. Friends report that he was a gregarious young man who used to party and play football, but that recently he had started to withdraw into himself. A local leader in Copenhagen claimed that the young man had increasingly turned to religion.

The young man’s father claims that Abdulrahman has apparently been made a scapegoat as he was the only person who was not recognized amongst the dead in the hall – he claims he was invited to the graduation ceremony that was bombed by a friend who was also killed in the blast. As is typical of Shabaab, they denied responsibility for the attack which killed 24 including 3 government ministers. The bomber allegedly masqueraded as a veiled woman, and since the attack took place during a graduation ceremony at the local medical university there was further chaos afterwards at local hospitals.

The second story is stranger, and was initiated when a young man started waving a white flag on the battlefield in Mogadishu, surrendering to local government forces. Under interrogation, the 18 year old revealed his Italian roots and claimed "I have no intention of being a suicide bomber. My father sent me into this hell. He wanted me to fight jihad, holy war. But none of this interests me." Born in Mogadishu, Asad Shami Sharif Abdallah joined his father in Padova, Italy when he was four, where he went to school and obtained an Italian passport. According to his father, he was awkward in Italy and wouldn’t always go to school, wandering instead around the city.

The father's account has been called into question – according to the son, it was the father who at 16 filled his head with stories of jihad, told him about his religious duty as a holy warrior and took him as far as Dubai on the path to fight. Once in Dubai his father put him a separate plane which took him to Mogadishu where he was met by three men who took him to Chismaio for training. The father denies this, however, claiming that he did indeed send the boy back to Somalia, but because his mother had called for him. The Italian press has focused on the fact that the father would choose to send his son from il bel paese to war-torn Mogadishu, but it is also worth pointing out that it took the boy almost three years to hand himself in.

Whichever the specifics of these two cases, they do point most clearly to the continuing strength of connection between diaspora Somali's and the conflict that ravages their home country. While the west has not seen any tangible backlash yet (the specifics of the Melbourne case remain unclear), and the numbers remain relatively small, there have been numerous cases in the past that demonstrate that returning jihadis can produce problems.

I have written a bit about this topic, including this paper for the ASPI and a shorter piece on the Minneapolis group. Grazie to Lorenzo for his thoughts and tips on this topic.

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I fail to see why anyone is surprised anymore that the internet is routinely used in the planning or execution of terrorist attacks, or that it is a factor in the passage of individuals from peace to violence.  It’s also inevitable that every time it crops up in the context of a new arrest, someone somewhere calls for increased powers for security agencies to monitor the internet.  The former is a fact of life; the latter will not change that.

The current debate is about the so-called Sargodha Five, a group of young men detained in Pakistan last week, who travelled from the US to link up with Islamists in the Punjab.  The basic story is that back in North Virginia they bonded over YouTube jihadi videos, and that an initial laudatory comment left on one alerted a man called Saifullah to their presence and proclivities.  They subsequently set up a dead-letter email drop in order to correspond with Saifullah, who eventually facilitated their passage to Pakistan.  Once there, Saifullah had problems passing them off to local al-Qaeda (possibly) activists due to their unproven legitimacy, and they wound up in the hands of local security services instead.  Saifullah is assumed to be a form of middleman, possibly freelance, and is now the subject of a manhunt keen to snare one of the 'mystery men' thought to be a recruiter for various extremist groups.  The men themselves are in a tug-of-war between the FBI and the Pakistani courts.

Aaron Weisburd writes that this is a standard pattern of behaviour, observed many times over the years.  Raff Pantucci wonders if they copied the email drop method from previous cases revealed in court but they might also have been instructed by Saifullah to do so.  Whilst some uses of the internet might be extraordinary, most are banal, and we should remember this when thinking about how to tackle this element of terrorism.  

You’d have to be a fool to argue that the internet plays no role in many of the cases that come to light in the press and in the courts.  It almost always does.  So do cars, telephones and cheap hotels.  The internet is so deeply embedded in the lives of most people residing in the West that it would be unusual were this not so.  It is too easy to argue that government consistently fails to spot extremist use of the internet, and that more powers are needed to combat it.  If, as liberal societies, we determine that total surveillance of interpersonal communication is undesirable, we should also understand that it is utterly impractical.  It also won’t stop people turning to violence as a solution to their particular problems.  

The answer is not to monitor us all to combat the actions of a few.  Total security, in cyberspace or otherwise, is impossible, and attempts to create it are subject strongly to the law of diminishing returns.  The only way to combat violent extremism is to tackle its causes, a banal statement in itself perhaps.  Like it or not, states will decide what types of material are deemed inappropriate to view and share online, but treating all internet use as de facto potentially problematic and appropriate for regulation does no-one any favours.  Hot on the heels of Google's CEO last week stating, 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place' (a specious argument at the best of times) there are rough times ahead.




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The conclusion of the trial against Adam Khatib, 22; Nabeel Hussain, 25; and Mohammed Shamim Udin, 39 marks further confirmation of the apparently very real plot that was being hatched back in the summer of 2006. The three, described by the prosecution as the "backroom team" were all linked to Abdulla Ahmed Ali, the man who appears to be at the centre of the UK end of the plotting. Ali was convicted in September of this year along with co-conspirators Tanweer Hussain and Assad Sarwar – all were given life sentences (Ali 40 years; Hussain 36 years; and Sarwar 32 years). Three other men who appeared in court with them are facing a third re-trial, sometime next year.

These three appear to be part of the network of East London natives that Abdullah Ali recruited to help in various aspects of the plot. It is not clear that any of them knew that airlines were the target, but in at least Khatib's case, he was deeply involved in the plot. By his own account a rebellious teenager, Khatib dabbled in drugs and wrote an essay at school for French class about "going to Afghanistan, finding a wife and joining Al Qaeda," signing it "Adam Osama bin Laden." After graduating, he met Abulla Ali through one of Ali's brothers and the older man appears to have taken him under his wing.

Significantly, in 2005 Khatib went with Ali on a six month trip to Pakistan – at the same time as already convicted co-conspirator and plot "quartermaster" Assad Sarwar. Sarwar admitted on the stand to learning how to make bombs in Pakistan, and in emails and information released during this trial, it would appear as though Khatib too – as when they returned from their trip in Pakistan, he started undertaking in-depth research into bomb making materials. He also shared notes on his findings with other plotters, giving advice on how to construct devices and was apparently in direct contact with their contacts in Pakistan.

The other two appear to have played a more supportive role – Nabeel Hussain met with Ali a number of times, had written a will, was in contact with him on a particular number that Ali only used for him and Sarwar, and had applied for a £25,000 loan. The jury obviously did not find anything suspicious in the fact that Uddin had allowed Ali to use his computer to do research on bomb making material, but did find him guilty of possessing information useful to terrorists. According to a police statement, "the three men made no comment during police interviews."

While two allegedly key players in this plot remain at large – one on a control order and the other living freely in London (Bruce Hoffman's recent article in Studies in Conflict and Terrorism goes into some detail about them) – this set of arrests highlights again the importance of Abdulla Ali in this cell. He may not have been the absolute emir of the plot, but it certainly appears as though it was his ability to draw his East London friends into his conspiracy that turned a plan being developed in the badlands of Pakistan into a conspiracy involving up to 8 British Muslim suicide bombers.

Yahya Birt has argued that this plot will mark the "end of an era" in Al Qaeda plotting against the UK – in that the model of using British Muslims who appear loosely connected to networks on the periphery of the radical preachers appears to have been repeatedly compromised and is probably now beyond practical use for Al Qaeda. This may be a premature, though it has been almost three years since these chaps were arrested and while a number of other individuals connected to this network have been arrested, none have been involved in what Jonathan Evans described as "late stage planning." This is unlikely, however, to mark the end of Al Qaeda's plotting against the UK.

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I've just had the pleasure of finishing reading Heartland by Anthony Cartwright. It is what I have been allowing myself by way of a break as I continue to plough through mountains of information about extremism and radicalization in the UK.

The book is a work of fiction (hence the break I referred to above), that explores in a wonderfully nuanced and sensitive way the issues around the BNP's rise in the British Midlands against a backdrop of inter-racial tensions in the immediate post-9/11 period. Set in the fictional ward of Cinderheath – which is in the real city of Dudley in the heart of the Black Country – the book follows Rob, a young man who briefly touched minor celebrity as a footballer, but who is settling into life as a school P.E. teacher/assistant. His uncle is the local Labour councilor who is fighting a seemingly losing battle against a slick BNP candidate and his army of football thugs, as the local Muslim community builds a large mosque and people worry about the precedent set by the revelation that three local lads are in Guantanamo Bay (the very real "Tipton Taliban"). In the front of everyone's minds, however, is football – with England battling their way through the 2002 World Cup (to no avail), while the country's press are fixated on a local league game which is pitting a local Muslim side against a non-Muslim side.

Written in a way that seamlessly blends dialogue and prose, with a fine ear for the local brogue, the book does get a little confusing in parts. There are no chapters (it is divided into four sections: first half; half-time; second-half; and final score), and it can be hard to know exactly what is being said sometimes. But it really feels like it captures the underlying tensions that lie at the heart of the BNP's rise. There is less exploration of the motivations that might persuade young men from these areas to throw their lot in with the Taliban, but we get a sense of what it might be like for the locals with the references to a ghostlike "Adnan the mujahedeen" peppered throughout the book. Overall, well worth the read if you have a moment.

This also gives me an opportunity to highlight the case of the Tipton Taliban – who after being freed worked with Michael Winterbottom to produce the impressively one-sided The Road to Guantanamo (which can actually be found on YouTube in its entirety), which while rightly highlighting the excesses of Guantanamo, probably should have done a little more background research before charging ahead. I say this, as on largely un-watched and un-reported Channel 4 show called "Lie Lab," one of the chaps admitted that he had in fact been to a training camp and fired weapons while in Afghanistan (another refused to take the polygraph-type device that was at the heart of the show). Not quite the babes in the wood that they are portrayed as in the film.

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ICSR hosted Maajid Nawaz of the Quilliam Foundation for a talk today on their new report, Unlocking Al-Qaeda: Islamist Extremism in British Prisons (pdf).

Nawaz said that the UK's National Offender Management Service (NOMS) faces a huge challenge now that more and more people who have been convicted of terrorist offences are populating the prison system.

In his view, the authorities have vastly underestimated the potential role of prisons in the process of radicalisation. Prisons have been the incubators of terrorism, yet – in many countries – they have also served as the principal engines of de-radicalisation.  

Which one it will be in the UK's case remains to be seen.

Right now,  he says, there are few signs that the challenge is being taken seriously. Extremist literature is widely available in prisons, and – on a number of occasions – imprisoned extremists have been allowed to become the representatives of prison wings.

The audience was particularly interested by Nawaz' explanation of the latent, untapped power of a corpus of literature renouncing violence that was produced by al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya, the Egyptian Islamist group responsible for waves of terrorist violence in Egypt during the 1990s.

Those of us studying terrorism have been aware of these books for a long time and, like Nawaz, we have wondered why they have not been translated into English.

His analysis is connected, of course, to his incredibly powerful personal story. As many readers of this blog are likely to know, Nawaz – a former member of Hizb-ut Tahrir – was imprisoned in Egypt shortly after the 9/11 attacks in the United States. There, he became acquainted with the imprisoned luminaries of the Egyptian Islamist movement, including some of those behind the assassination of Anwar Sadat.  

While in prison, Nawaz came to question his (then) radical beliefs, especially under the influence of al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya's new literature and after he was adopted by Amnesty International – an organisation he had previously vilified – as a prisoner of conscience.

Maajid Nawaz' talk was recorded and can be listened to here. 

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In lieu of substantive commentary this week I'd like to point readers to a couple of recent pieces by acknowledged terrorism academics that are worth reading.

First, Audrey Kurth Cronin.  Cronin will be familiar to many readers as the author of How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns (Princeton, 2009).  In The Guardian (30 November 2009), Cronin argues that al-Qaeda is an idea, not a cult, which has important ramifications for dealing with this strain of international terrorism.

The al-Qaida movement is widespread but also fractionalised, a fact that suggests both opportunity and danger for western strategy.  The opportunity is the vigorous debate and fundamental areas of contention that are increasingly obvious within: most sharp is the divide between those who consider targeting Muslim civilians to be legitimate and those who do not.  There is ample potential for driving a wedge between them – they are doing this themselves.  The danger is that our focus on killing the al-Qaida leadership has led to strategic myopia, over-concentration of intelligence resources, and a failure to think through second- and third-order effects within a broader constellation.  The primary aim of decapitation should be to discredit the popular mobilisation that this movement seeks to catalyse, and it is doubtful that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri remain at the forefront.

These comments are set against the backdrop of Gordon Brown's commitment to a decapitation strategy and the Afghanistan troop surge just announced by President Obama.  She was also on BBC Radio 4's Start the Week talking about these issues and others.

Second, Malise Ruthven reviews Richard English's Terrorism: How to Respond (Oxford, 2009) in a recent issue of Prospect magazine (18 November 2009).  I’ve not read the book, but some of English's conclusions sound familiar and correct:

In English’s view, the most serious danger posed by terrorists is their capacity to "provoke ill-judged, extravagant, and counter-productive state responses" rather than the actual damage caused by their actions.  As a tactic, in other words, terrorism’s impact is more psychological than physical.  The 'propaganda of the deed'—showing people jumping from skyscrapers or bodies pulled from the Underground—creates an atmosphere of panic.  It is this mood that empowers the terrorists, creating the impression that, militarily speaking, they dispose of forces beyond their own numbers or the size of any constituency they may speak for.

It looks like English spent a substantial portion of the book tackling the definition of terrorism. 

 

This is the result:

Terrorism involves heterogeneous violence used or threatened with a political aim; it can involve a variety of acts, of targets and of actors; it possesses an important psychological dimension, producing terror or fear among a directly threatened group and also a wider implied audience in the hope of maximising political communication and achievement; it embodies the exerting and implementing of power, and the attempted redressing of power relations; it represents a subspecies of warfare, and as such it can form part of a wider campaign of violent and non-violent attempts at political leverage.

Snappy, but as Ruthven points out, 'pragmatic and realistic', and cognizant of the historical dimensions of terrorism.

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