The recent killings of al-Qaida’s top commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan by US airstrikes raise the common question of how such developments are going to affect the organization. Whereas these events highlight another loss for al-Qaida, recent history has shown that the organization recovers quickly and, in some cases, capitalizes on the deaths of its commanders.

The first recent hit was in Iraq. Abu Umar al-Baghdadi (Hamid al-Zawi), the Emir of the Islamic State in Iraq (ISI), was killed on 18 April in al-Tharthar desert area, north of Baghdad. He was killed with Abu Ayyub al-Masri (Yusuf al-Dardiri, otherwise known as Abd al-Mun‘im al-Badawi), his Minister of War. An Egyptian, who was a former mid-rank in al-Jihad Organization of Egypt, al-Masri succeeded the deputy of Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, in taking the command of al-Qaida on 15 June 2006. In October of that year, al-Baghdadi’s Shura Council of al-Mujahidin and al-Masri’s al-Qaida in Iraq (AQI) merged together, along with more than ten other smaller organization and various factions to form the ISI.

However, the formation of the ISI was a beginning of a decline of al-Qaida’s influence. The indiscriminately violent behaviour of AQI and its successor, the ISI, along with the expansion of the lists of enemies and targets to include less cooperative Arab-Sunni tribesmen, in addition to the coalition forces, the Iraqi military and security bureaucracies, Iran, and virtually all non-Sunnis; led to the revolt of Arab-Sunni tribesmen in early 2007. Al-Anbar province started the sahwat (awakening) phenomenon that not only pointed the guns at the AQI instead of the coalition forces, but also disseminated anti-Iranian propaganda and ideological materials as opposed to anti-American. The lack of a charismatic leader after al-Zarqawi and the stricter security policies of Syria and Saudi Arabia to stop the flow of funds and volunteers also helped undermine the AQI. Since no insurgency can survive without popular support, especially when the geography is not insurgent-friendly and the ideology and its manifestations are far from attractive to the locals, there was a sharp decline in the operational capacity of AQI/ISI after 2007.

Despite that, the ISI was swift in replacing its top commanders. Its new communiqué declared that “two were gone and three came.” Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi al-Qurashi became the new emir, Abu Abdullah al-Qurashi became his deputy and first minster, and al-Nasr Lidin Allah Abu Sulayman became the Minister of War, replacing the late al-Masri. All of these aliases have historical and religious relevance. Quraysh is the tribe of Prophet Muhammad and linking the ISI new leaders directly to the Prophet makes them ashraf or ‘noblemen’ in the Islamic culture. Al-Nasr Li Din Allah (The Supporter of the Religion of God) was the title of Saladin, the famous Muslim commander who fought against the Crusaders in the Levant in the 12th century. AQI/ISI is using more symbolism to substitute for the lack of charismatic leadership.

As for the new commanders, there is little known about them. Abu Bakr was a commander of one of small organizations that merged under the ISI. His minister of war is a Moroccan with close contacts to al-Qaida Central, like his predecessor. In his very first statement, al-Nasr followed the rhetoric of al-Zarqawi calling for an escalation against Shiite targets and Iraqi military and security forces.

In Afghanistan, Sheikh Said (Mustafa Abu al-Yazid), another former mid-rank in al-Jihad Organization of Egypt who became a leading figure in al-Qaida and, in May 2007, its top commander in Afghanistan, was also killed in a drone strike in Pakistan on 21 May. But, as opposed to its sister in Iraq, al-Qaida in Afghanistan (AQA) did not lack the charismatic leadership or the symbolism. To avoid the mistakes of Iraq, Sheikh Said declared more than once that al-Qaida is fighting under the banner of the Islamic Emirate in Afghanistan (the Taliban). In his interview with al-Jazeera in June 2009, he urged all other armed groups, including the Islamic Party (partly led by Gulbddin Hekmatyar), to join the Taliban. In other words, Sheikh Said was ‘embedding’ al-Qaida in its local contexts to guarantee the lifeline of local insurgent support. This is not far from the pattern in Yemen, where al-Qaida in the Peninsula is trying to avoid the mistakes of Iraq and therefore attentive to the interests of influential tribal leaders as well as the Southern Movement.

The deaths of Sheikh Said, Abu Ayyub and Abu Umar are important development in the war against al-Qaida. But the key lifeline to al-Qaida in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen is its tribal and organizational alliances. Those alliances were undermined quite significantly in the Iraqi case, with the awakening councils, the inhospitable Arab-Sunni tribal areas, and the clashes with other armed groups most notably the Islamic Army of Iraq and the 1920 Revolution Brigades. Such developments have no parallels yet in Afghanistan and Yemen.

Decapitating the organizational leaders of al-Qaida, despite its significance, is not enough to end the lifeline for the rest of its transnational bodies. The other effect is that it may enhance the “demand side” to support or join al-Qaida. In his memoirs, Sayyid Qutb mentions that out of the 98 Muslim Brothers member imprisoned with him, 35 strongly supported his newly developed radical ideology, 23 strongly opposed, and 50 were hesitant. After his execution, the number of supporters and sympathizers was not only in the hundreds of thousands, but the commitments and the manifestations, took another level.  

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In On Spies and Introductions I’ve already referred to the unfortunate Marwan Affair.

I knew Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of Egypt’s former President Gamal Abdel Nasser, quite well. In Israel’s Wars I hinted that he was an Egyptian spy who misled the Israeli Mossad, and I went on to provide more details in A History of Israel.

However, my concealed references to him in these and other publications, led to a serious spat between us: Marwan responded with an outright denial in an Egyptian newspaper, dubbing my version of events a “silly detective story”, and I – then - unmasked him, challenging him to prove that he wasn't the agent in question. News of the spat was widely reported in the Middle Eastern press.

Then came the plot twist that even the most audacious writer of fiction might balk at: Marwan made contact with me and we met in person for the first time, on 23 October 2003, at the Intercontinental Hotel in Park Lane; we would keep in touch for five years. In our meeting I suggested to Marwan that I write a book about his life, but he had a better idea. He said, “I’ll write the book myself and you’ll be my consultant … I‘ll consult you from time to time”, which he did.

On 26 June 2007, we spoke on the phone – as we would often do - and agreed to meet the next day. Several times I popped up from my basement office at Strand Bridge House to get mobile reception to see if Marwan had called, but eventually I gave up and left. That day Marwan was found dead after falling from the balcony of his fourth-floor flat in central London.
The post-mortem determined that Marwan had died as a result of a rupture to the aorta, caused by the fall, but beyond that little is certain. The police investigation took three years to complete and last week a coroner in London held an inquest into Marwan’s death.

I was invited to give evidence and was asked about our 26th June telephone conversation, the meeting that never happened, and about the manuscript of his book that has not been seen since his death; as far as the family is concerned, the missing book is one of the strongest indications that he was murdered.   

After three days of deliberations the coroner, William Dolman, rejected suggestions of suicide or murder and he returned an open verdict on the death. He said, “there are many unanswered questions [that involve the] murky and secretive world of espionage. We simply don’t know the facts, despite careful investigation. Did he jump or did he fall? Here the evidence does not provide a clear answer”.

His wife Mona – the dignified daughter of Gamal Abdel Nasser – welcomed the verdict but she insists that, “he was murdered … I’m sure that there was somebody else involved”.

The family have vowed to continue their search for the truth, but for now it seems that Marwan's enigmatic life and death will continue to remain a mystery.

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It has become something of an article of faith to say that poverty and economic misfortune are not drivers of terrorism. This seems a sensible conclusion to reach when one considers the volume of poverty and misery in the world and the relatively small volume of terrorists that emerge from it. Were poverty truly a determinant of a predilection for terrorist radicalization then theoretically speaking there would be far more terrorists in this world than there are.

But at the same time, it seems clear that there is some sort of correlation between social deprivation and radicalization – even if only from the perspective that it often appears as a constant in communities where radicalization seems able to take root (though of course this is not always the case). This is a difficult correlation to understand as it is not one that appears to exist on a steady or universal gradient, but it is clearly plays some sort of a role in the radicalization picture.

Understanding this question, however becomes increasingly salient as we enter ever tighter economic times, as theoretically speaking we are increasing one of the possible drivers. The core point is: are we are going to see an increase in radicalization amongst communities as they feel the economic squeeze?

One possible vision of the consequent trends can be seen in the recent annual Europol report on terrorism trends in the EU (which I wrote about for the Jamestown Foundation). Amongst other things, it highlighted a growing level of concern about left-wing and anarchist radicalization: “In 2009, the total number of left-wing and anarchist terrorist attacks in the EU increased by 43% compared to 2008 and more than doubled since 2007.”

These trends are discernable at a wider level too: the emergence in the UK of far-right groups like the English Defence League appears to at least in part be the product of social disaffection stirred up by disenfranchisement. Rioting in Greece has taken an increasingly violent turn and there has also been a more general increase in anarchist violence and extremist activity. And German officials have expressed concern about the discovery of an 80-page pamphlet entitled “Prisma” which offers ideas for bomb-making, avoiding detection by police and other tips for urban guerrillas. They have also marked a 53% jump in left-wing attacks in 2009 which has included some large scale acts of vandalism and violence.

All of which would point to an increase in radicalization amongst communities that do not appear to be so directly influenced by the Al Qaeda narrative. So does this mean that the poor economic climate is directly contributing to radicalization in general: youths are becoming angry at the system and fighting against it, is the free time they are left with due to their economic disenfranchisement giving them the time to indulge in such activity? Well, possibly, but it seems as though it would be best not to leap to any conclusions about this quite yet or any draconian reactions. Anyway, what exactly would be the abrupt security reaction be: pour security funding into economic stimulus packages?

At the end of the day what we might assess as the underlying causes of some of the increase in right/left/anarchist violence may indeed be the economic crisis, but care must be paid to not exaggerate our response to this particular cause over others. As previous experience has shown, an exaggerated response leads to mistakes the impact of which is impossible to measure.

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H.E. Tzipi Livni brought the event to a close with an hour long speech entitled ‘Fighting Against Terror – Fighting for Peace’, in which she discussed a range of issues surrounding the Middle East peace process and Israel’s standing on the world stage. Below is a summary of the speech, the full recording of which will be made available on this site shortly.

She began by explaining that the main threat to Israel emanates from extreme religious ideologies which reject the values of the free world. The extremists who imbibe these beliefs fight to take away the rights and freedoms that they so often claim to represent, and are a threat not only to Israel, but to all liberal democracies.

Livni argued that organisations like Hamas and Hezbollah are at odds with the beliefs of their host governments, the Palestinian Authority and Lebanese government respectively and should not be allowed to take part in the political process. Her study of many of the leading constitutions in the world showed that none allow the participation of a terrorist group, and partaking in democracy is not only about gaining votes and must include a commitment to the values that it represents. Hezbollah are an armed militia and terrorist group, yet they are political partners with the Lebanese government – making the war on terror impossible to win in her opinion.

The existence of the Salafi-jihadi ideology means that the Israeli Palestinian issue is not the primary cause of global terrorism – and solving this issue will not immediately and miraculously placate al-Qaeda. The peace process is therefore first and foremost an Israeli interest, and one which Livni believed that Israel is still committed to.

She was also concerned about about the deep misunderstandings of Israeli actions such as the blockade, as well as their military operations, all measures that are designed to stop Hamas terrorism. It is difficult for Israelis to accept some of the criticism that is leveled against them, although she made it clear that she did not want Israel to be exempt from any censure or for the international community to turn a blind eye to their mistakes.

Kadima’s commitment to peace is unwavering, and the very difficult but necessary decision to force settlers from their homes in Gaza in 2006 – a decision which she claimed that her party was willing to make again – was made in order to expedite this process. However, she was also clear that no agreement can ever be made with Hamas, recognising the Palestinian Authority, as well as politicians such as the Third Way’s Salam Fayad, as the only legitimate actors in the region. She reminded the audience that Hamas have repeatedly refused to meet the requirements of the Quartet, and this is the main reason for the current controversial blockade. Behind closed doors, she said that many Arab leaders agree that Hamas must be stopped, and she had no doubt that the Arab world has a crucial role to play in any successful solution.

She concluded by saying that both sides now owe it to future generations to put aside discussions about who has the right to an embarrassingly small piece of land, and they must now look forward and come to a viable agreement. This she firmly believed was still a strong possibility.

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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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‘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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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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After the morning’s first panel, Lord David Trimble gave a keynote address in which he discussed the Northern Ireland peace process in impressive detail.  Below is a summary, and a full recording of his speech will be available here shortly.

 

In order to understand Northern Ireland there were two types of grievances, which helped fuel the IRA insurgency: a national question and a social question. The former encompassed the question of whether Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom, or join an all-Ireland unitary state. The latter concerned the rights of the minority community (of nationalists) within Northern Ireland – and had been exacerbated by the perception of injustice inflicted on that community by the majority (Unionist) community.

In the early years of the Northern Ireland, the British government’s failure to establish a long-term strategy exacerbated the problems. However, after 1976, the government settled upon a new approach which compromised three strands:

- Efforts to restore security (a key aspect of which was to fight an ideological war) – which brought the IRA to a point in the late 1980s where 4 out of 5 operations were being interdicted by the security forces

- Policies to tackle the nationalist sense of social exclusion (and improve the economic situation by fostering economic development)

- An attempt to construct a political solution agreeable to the parties in Northern Ireland (though there were no informal party talks from 1975-92)
The ultimate consequence of this effort was the establishment in 1998 of an Agreement to end the conflict. Crucial to this were wider shifts in context –particularly at the regional level. This saw the rise of the EU, which both transformed Ireland into a modern western European nation – and helped render obsolete traditional forms of irredentist nationalism. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of that revolutionary project also had an impact on undermining the IRA’s campaign. 

 

In the end, the IRA was forced to accept a peace process, the outcome of which it could not control. By signing up to the Mitchell Principles, Sinn Fein agreed to abide by the results of a process over which they had no veto?

Why did it take so long to get an Agreement –the shape of which was known from the mid-1970s?

- In the end, details mattered – it took time to get the actual format of the Agreement right – an Agreement that safe-guarded the vital core interests of the communities in Northern Ireland

- Leadership proved crucial – there was a “maturing” process within each community until there were people in place prepared to accept the parameters for settlement

- In the end, there had to be an acceptance that victory was not possible – that the representatives of nationalism and Unionism in Northern Ireland were ready to accept an accommodation

Eventually, however, all the pieces were in place – and the result was a settlement that seems destined to last and should secure a peaceable future for Northern Ireland.

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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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The ICSR Peace and Security Summit began last night at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York with the drinks reception and welcome dinner.  Hosted by the Rockefeller Foundation, speakers  included ICSR Chairman, Henry Sweetbaum and the former Canadian Prime Minister, and ICSR trustee, the Rt. Hon. Kim Campbell.

Running until 1 July, the Summit has brought together some of the world's leading experts to discuss the main counter-terrorism and security issues of our time, including the futures  of Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the role of Somalia in the global jihad and the phenomenon of 'homegrown' terrorism.

Throughout the event, this blog will provide readers with up-to-the-minute updates and pictures from all of the panel discussions, so stay tuned!

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At its Peace and Security Summit in New York later this week, ICSR will launch its latest report, ‘Prisons and Terrorism: Radicalisation and De-radicalisation in 15 Countries’.

Based on a survey of prison policies in 15 countries, the report offers the most comprehensive study to date of the role prisons can play in radicalising people – and in reforming them.

The report identifies trade-offs and dilemmas but also principles and best practices that will help governments and policymakers spot new ideas and avoid costly and counterproductive mistakes.

Among the key findings and recommendations are:

•    The current emphasis on security and containment leads to missed opportunities to promote reform. Prison services should be more ambitious in promoting positive influences inside prison, and develop more innovative approaches to facilitate extremists’ transition back into mainstream society.

•    Over-crowding and under-staffing amplify the conditions that lend themselves to radicalisation. Badly run prisons make the detection of radicalisation difficult, and they also create the physical and ideological space in which extremist recruiters can operate at free will.

•    Religious conversion is not the same as radicalisation. Good counter-radicalisation policies – whether in or outside prison – never fail to distinguish between legitimate expression of faith and extremist ideologies. Prison services should invest more in staff training, and consider sharing specialised resources.

•    Individual de-radicalisation and disengagement programmes – such as the ones in Saudi-Arabia, Singapore, Indonesia, and other countries – can make a difference. Their positive and outward-looking approach should serve as an inspiration for governments and policymakers everywhere.

•    Even in the best circumstances, however, such programmes complement rather than replace other instruments in the fight against terrorism. They work best when the political momentum is no longer with the terrorists or insurgents.

Sixteen of the world’s leading experts contributed to the report, which was funded by the governments of Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, and carried out in partnership with the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), based at the University of Maryland.

In the words of ICSR’s Director, Dr Peter Neumann, ‘Prisons are not just a threat – they can play a positive role in tackling problems of radicalisation and terrorism in society as a whole. Many of the examples in the report demonstrate how.’

The report will be officially launched at the ICSR Peace and Security Summit on 1 July.

Download it here. 

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ICSR is launching a great paper today. It deals with Islam4UK, an off-shoot of the extremist Islamist group Al Muhajiroun, which was banned by the British government earlier this year.

Written by Zara Raymond, it provides an overview of the group and its activities – based on in-depth interviews with some of its leaders, including Anjem Choudary and Omar Bakri Mohammed.

Equally important, it looks at the government’s decision to ban the group. Very reasonably, it takes the position that the government had valid reasons for banning the group but that its decision to do so was undermined by the timing of its announcement.

Islam4UK was proscribed shortly after the group had announced their intention to stage a march through Wootton Basset – a town which regularly holds funeral processions for British soldiers killed in Afghanistan.

The group could have been banned earlier – given that Islam4UK was merely another name for a group that had already been banned under British law.

In waiting until the Wootton Bassett protest, the government unintentionally added plausibility to Anjem Choudary’s tirades against the double standards of Western liberal democracy and the limits of free speech.

Furthermore, the government seemed to act on short-term political considerations rather than long-term security imperatives, which won’t make counter-terrorism legislation more plausible or legitimate in the public’s eye.

All in all, the paper provides an excellent case study of how difficult it is for governments to deal with this kind of group. It also includes a number of valuable lessons that should be learned (and heeded) by governments everywhere.

The paper will be published on ICSR’s website later this afternoon (British time). A launch event with Zara Raymond will take place at King’s College London at 5pm.

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ICSR is delighted to announce the ICSR Peace and Security Summit at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City on June 30th and July 1st.

The most important event of its kind in 2010, the Summit will bring together 400 leading policymakers, diplomats, senior officials and experts from across the globe, encouraging them to share their experiences and approaches in a number of working groups and high-level panels.

The Summit will explore the greatest security challenges of our time, ranging from domestic radicalisation and violent extremism to ongoing conflicts and the struggle for peace in places such as Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, and the Middle East.

Among the many keynote speakers and panellists are:

•    Dr. Abdulkarim Al-Eryani, former Prime Minister of Yemen
•    Amb. Daniel Benjamin, Counterterrorism Coordinator, State Department
•    Noman Benotman, former leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group
•    Amb. Peter Galbraith, former UN Deputy Special Representative
•    Christopher Hitchens, Vanity Fair
•    Hekmat Karzai, director of Centre for Conflict and Peace Studies, Kabul
•    Tsipi Livni, leader of the Israeli opposition
•    Fran Townsend, Homeland Security Advisor to President George W. Bush
•    Lord David Trimble, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

The ICSR Peace and Security Summit is organised in partnership with the Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University, and receives support from The Rockefeller Foundation, Public Safety Canada, as well as Rena and Sami David.

Thanks to our supporters, there will be no attendance fee. However, places are strictly limited and will not be allocated on a first come first serve basis. If you would like to attend, write to Katie Rothman at katie.rothman@icsr.info before June 25th. Make sure you include your full name, title, affiliation, and current position.

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I promised myself I wouldn’t utter a word about the unfortunate Israeli Navy attack on the flotilla carrying aid to the Gaza Strip, knowing that I would say things and later regret it. 
   

But the other day I saw Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressing the nation, defending the Navy’s raid, and I’ve decided to react to it. So here we go:
   

What the Prime Minister was doing was to complain that his commandos who stormed the ships from helicopters: “were mobbed, they were clubbed, they were beaten, stabbed … And our soldiers had to defend themselves.”
   

And I thought, “Wait a minute Mr Netanyahu, to say something like that is like having a rapist complaining that his victim hit back at him”.
   

And I also wonder: what did Mr Netanyahu expect? That his commandos would be showered with flowers? or with scented rice? That the people on the ship take out a red carpet and unfold it on the ship’s deck?
   

One good thing, though, comes of this sorry affair: it draws the world’s attention to the medieval siege the Israelis have imposed on the Gaza Strip, where the military, for three years now, decides what foods will go into the Strip and what the Gazans will have on their daily menus: Rice – yes, but pasta – no. Tuna fish – yes, but canned fruit (it’s a luxury) – no. 
   

This is now the time to press the Israelis to end the Gaza blockade. Israel, as I put it elsewhere, only moves under open pressure, and their recent terrible clumsiness – acting like pirates, attacking a Turkish ship on the high seas, when it was bearing humanitarian help to the Gaza Strip – is an opportunity to help the Gazans.
   

Expect the Israeli usual response: They will moan that, “the world is against us”, and they might even resort to their ultimate weapon (no - you silly reader – not their atomic bombs! They’ve got none), using the magic word “anti-Semitism”, which is a potent and effective weapon.  
   

This, however, should be ignored in order to help the Israelis – who have totally lost their way in recent years - help themselves, and also to save innocent people from perhaps another stupid Israeli scheme.

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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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Just two days after six Palestinians were killed by an (almost certainly accidental) explosion in one of the smugglers’ tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, this morning I woke up to the news that ten to twenty Turkish civil rights activists had been killed by Israeli forces whilst in the process of trying to convey 10,000 tons of aid to the port of Gaza via a flotilla of ships organized by the ‘Free Gaza’ Group. By lunchtime the BBC was talking about little else.

This outcome, tragic as it is, is not a complete surprise. Since the ships set sail from Cyprus a few days ago, Israeli authorities have repeatedly affirmed their intention to prevent the aid from breaching the naval blockade, viewing the mission as direct provocation. The flotilla, which has hardly concealed its movements – quite the contrary - has consequently been steering itself on a steady but inevitable collision course with the Israeli Defence Force.  Less inevitable was that the confrontation would end so bloodily. ‘Free Gaza’, an association of multi-national pro-Palestinian human rights groups have staged a number of maritime aid missions to Gaza, only few of which have actually reached their destination in the past, but all of which have been peaceful, and the group notes in its mission statement:

We want to break the siege of Gaza. We want to raise international awareness about the prison-like closure of the Gaza Strip and pressure the international community to review its sanctions policy and end its support for continued Israeli occupation…We have not and will not ask for Israel’s permission. It is our intent to overcome this brutal siege through civil resistance and non-violent direct action, and establish a permanent sea lane between Gaza and the rest of the world.

“Free Gaza” spokesperson Greta Berlin told the Guardian last week with reference to the latest mission that "The previous boats were making a statement   these boats will be making a real impact," raising questions as to quite what they hoped to achieve. 10,000 tons of aid is a lot to waste, after all, when the primary objective is to raise international awareness and the chances of delivering the aid are slim. Israel will doubtless claim that if the activists truly had the humanitarian interests of the people of Gaza at heart, they would have found an alternative way to channel the aid through Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli spokesmen have for their part claimed that the resistance staged in the latest incident was hardly non-violent, as Israeli commandoes were greeted by militant opposition, knives and clubs as they boarded one of the ships early this morning.

 

Whatever the circumstances, Israel faces immediate difficulties in accounting for this death toll.  And, in view of early reports that the victims are predominantly Turkish nationals, these difficulties will only be compounded in the longer term by increasingly strained diplomatic relations between Israel and its erstwhile ally, Turkey. Once a lone friend to Israel amidst a hostile Muslim world, Turkey still shares immense trading links with Israel, but diplomatically, bilateral relations between the two countries have flagged since the 2009 Israeli war on Gaza. In what many see as an attempt to hive off domestic Islamist opposition, Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan personally signaled his growing distaste for Israeli policies to Shimon Peres at the Davos summit last year. If that was a bad time for Israel to lose its regional ally, then Turkey too has suffered over the last year from this deterioration in the form of US disapproval.

Hamas may well be able to salvage some sort of PR victory from yesterday’s events, but other than that, it is difficult to see any winners. Israel faces the world’s condemnation; Turkey has lost at least a dozen nationals; both countries are set to lose from a collapse in their alliance; “Free Gaza” has perhaps foolishly frittered away the chance to deliver aid, and the Gazaens get nothing.

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According to alarming reports from Pakistan, coordinated sectarian attacks on mosques in Lahore have led to the deaths of approximately 70 people.  Earlier today, gunmen armed with grenades and automatic weapons attacked two mosques 15 kilometres apart in the city. It seems to have followed the fedayeen style of operation that have becoming increasingly popular with jihadist groups in the region, since the 2008 assault on Mumbai and 2009 attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team attacks.  Three attackers also blew themselves up as police entered the building to end the siege.

One eyewitness described how one of the attackers “reminded me of the people who attacked the Sri Lankan cricket team, he was wearing similar clothes - the traditional Pakistani dress shalwar kameez and he looked like someone from a tribal area.” Early reports from Pakistan suggest that this was the work of the Punjabi wing of the Tehrik e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), on which ICSR recently held a seminar.

The two mosques belong to the Ahmadiyya sect, a sizeable religious Muslim minority in Pakistan that have long been the targets of sectarian Islamist groups who consider them to represent a deviant sect of Islam.  For most Sunni Muslims, a central tenet of Islam is that Mohammed was the final prophet (rusool) of God, whereas the Ahmadiyya sect are followers of Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Kadiani, who they believe succeeded Mohammed.   

In Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Jamaat-e-Islami (JI) have been at the forefront of this persecution, inciting violence and hatred against the Ahmadiyya, referring to them as kafir (non-Muslims) and calling for the nationwide closure of all their mosques.  In 1984, under the patronage of President Zia ul-Haq, the JI successfully lobbied for Ahmadi practices to be outlawed under blasphemy laws, preventing, among other things, “an Ahmadi, calling himself a Muslim, or preaching or propagating his faith, or outraging the religious feelings of Muslims, or posing himself as a Muslim.”  In 2009, Amnesty international issued a press release appealing for the law to be reviewed, stating:

Attacks on religious minorities have been exacerbated by Pakistan’s blasphemy laws which have fostered a climate of religiously-motivated violence and persecution. Accusations of blasphemy have frequently resulted in the murder of both Muslims and members of religious minorities.

The blasphemy laws, while purporting to protect Islam and religious sensitivities of the Muslim majority, are vaguely formulated and arbitrarily enforced by the police and judiciary in a way which amounts to harassment and persecution of religious minorities.

Today’s attacks, though the worst in recent memory, are by no means the first of their kind and are probably not going to be the last.  Regular sectarian attacks on the Ahmadiyya rarely make the news in this country, overshadowed as they are by the conflict in the northern regions against the Taliban. The international community must take much more interest in these types of sectarian attacks. Those who persecute the Ahmadiyya are often the ideological partners of those who wish to attack targets in the West.

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My first substantive post to this blog was on the topic of terrorism in Italy and the attempt by Mohammed Game to blow himself up at a barracks in Milan. Fortunately, no-one was killed in Game’s attempt and he remains in custody along with two alleged accomplices – the three are going on trial (in two separate cases) May 12 and June 26.

While undoubtedly more information will come out during the trials, it would appear from what is already in the public domain as though Game and his contacts were a relatively free-standing “Lone Wolf” terror cell. A phenomenon which appears to be increasingly common in Italy, where details have just been revealed about the reasons behind the expulsion of a couple of Moroccan students from Perugia University towards the end of April. The two students, now apparently living freely in Rabat, were thrown out of Italy following an assessment that they were a threat to public safety.

It has now been revealed that Mohammed Hlal, 27, was overheard saying that he wanted to kill the Pope in order to guarantee himself a place in paradise, part of a regular digest of anger apparently directed at the Catholic Church. It is unclear what role his accomplice 22-year old Ahmed Errahmouni had in the plot, though a wide array of images of famous Italian locations were found in their possession, alongside numerous maps, and an instruction manual on how to build bombs. No actual weapons or explosives were located, though apparently confiscated computers had encryption programs installed.

Italian services had been alerted to the two in October of last year, following unspecified leads about concerns being expressed of radical views heard amongst some Moroccan students in Perugia. An investigation was launched, and in late April a series of arrests were made, allegedly because the group was becoming more isolated and radical and there were concerns that some action might be on the horizon. In the initial sweep another four Moroccans, a Tunisian and a Palestinian with an Israeli passport were also picked up: the group apparently used to attend the same mosque in Perugia.

Reporting to have emerged from the cell appears to point to the fact that it was a largely self-contained group who self-radicalized – much like the narrative being painted around Mohammed Game and his cell. This is a phenomenon which Italian investigators are seeing an increasing amount, including in the case further north  of Abdelkader Ghafir, 44, and Rachid Ilhami, 31, two Moroccan laborers accused by security head Bruno Megale of being in a cell like Game’s atlthough in an earlier phase (two others stand charged of immigration offences alongside them). Those men’s trial is currently ongoing. And Game’s cell has been repeatedly referred to in the context of the Perugia cell that threatened the Pope.

In all cases, the groups appear to be self-contained and have (according to reporting) no connections to Al Qaeda core or a regional affiliate. The individuals involved appear to be mostly of North African extraction (like most Muslim migrants in Italy) and male, but aside from this they tend to defy uniform classification. Their radicalization appears for the most part to be self-generated, though they appear to also operate on the fringes of known networks. In the case with the Game group who were also linked to the radical Viale Jenner mosque in Milan, a former Imam of which was incarcerated last month, while Ghafir and Ilhami were also apparently helping run a local Islamic center. According to the press, the other students involved in the Perugia sweep are being looked into for connections.

In my earlier post on Game I described the group as a Lone Wolf Pack – something I have been exploring in greater detail in a longer paper that I am currently working on. The phenomenon is not in fact isolated to Italy, both the Fort Dix group in the United States from 2007 and Jihad Hamad and Youssef el Hajdib, who in July 2006 left a set of suitcase bombs on a Cologne train, have elements similar to the Italian groups. What is interesting, however, is the apparent high instance of these sorts of groups in Italy – I have yet to see any analysis as to exactly why this is (of course, it has to be said that all of these Italian groups are being tried or are on trial (or have not been tried and simply ejected from the country) – so they are in fact still innocent until proven guilty. Only Game would appear to be conclusively guilty of something).

What is not clear is to me yet is whether these sorts of groups coming together is something which needs to be analyzed within the context of Al Qaeda plots or if it should be analyzed within the context of trying to understand the impact of the internet as an accelerant of the ideology. Or maybe it is something which is a social phenomenon which needs to be understood using the sort of social network analysis that Marc Sageman deploys. Whichever is the case, it would not surprise me if this sort of phenomenon in one way or another becomes an increasingly important element of counter-terrorism in the West that will require deeper understanding and research.

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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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 Well done to the ICSR for bringing Israeli Minister Benny Begin to speak to us about “Israel’s Strategic Priorities in Peace Negotiations”.

I found Begin junior to be as eloquent and pompous as his late father Menachem Begin.
Otherwise, my main conclusion, after listening very carefully to what he had to say (which was essentially that Arabs are bad and threatening and Israelis are peace-loving), is that with people like him in government there is little chance of any progress in Middle Eastern peace talks.

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Discussions of Islamic terrorism frequently draw a distinction between Salafi religious zeal – which may be quietist - and jihadism. Some even attempt to exonerate religious fundamentalism by claiming that it is precisely those who don’t know their tradition well, or are alienated from it in some way, that gravitate to violence. But the plain fact remains that the alleged Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, the 7/7 Bombers or the Algerian GIA were all religious fundamentalists. Their worldview is defined by a moral perfectionism which prescribes one model for human behaviour. All else is deviance and evil. As Mark Rieff notes, this totalising worldview characterises both quietist and politically-militant brands of fundamentalism, and one can readily tip over into the other. From chiliastic Shi'ism to 'rapture-ready' Protestantism, we have seen groups who once retreated from the world suddenly enter politics to change it. As Shiraz Maher points out with respect to Salafi-jihadis, many see their violence as a spiritual act. Salafi mosques are prime jihadi recruiting grounds. Maajid Nawaz adds that Wahhabism was born in bloodshed and can invoke that past at any point to legitimate violence. So we can't neatly separate the quiet from the militant. Not all fundamentalists are terrorists but all jihadis are fundamentalists.

Religious fundamentalism is a reaction against the threat of secularism or syncretism, and tends to be associated with the modern period. Wahhabism, Deobandism, Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy and American apocalyptic fundamentalism all got their start in the nineteenth century. These theologies are characterised by the tendency to select the most world-denying aspects of both Scripture and commentaries. This takes a boundary-marking stand against secular modernity. The moral perfectionism of these creeds marks them out as uncompromising. Those who do not adhere to their strictures are derided as second-class, or worse. Framed in this way, nonmembers can readily be stigmatised by fundamentalist entrepreneurs: as backsliders, traitors, or even takfiris.

The Salafist Islamic revival, or Da’wa, which has swept much of the Muslim world since 1970 cannot be divorced from jihadism. (Here I use the term Salafi to cover Brotherhood, Wahhabi and Caliphatist strains) Nor can the battle for shari’a - and let us not forget that a majority in the Middle Eastern/South Asian core of the Muslim world supports shari'a law, at least in theory. Spiritual puritans can turn political very quickly, as we saw with Shariati and Khomeini, custodians of a centuries-old tradition of Shia quietism. Meanwhile, as the influence of religious fundamentalism increases in a society, a market is inevitably created for more radical, activist brands. As religious supply increases, new religious entrepreneurs seek to differentiate themselves from competitors and tap into the new demand, offering militancy and action in place of contemplation. Thus religious revival inevitably spawns militant offshoots.  

In my talk at ICSR last week (and here I wish to thank John Bew, Katie Rothman and others at ICSR for putting together a great event), I argued that those who study religion too often ignore the fact that most people get their faith the old fashioned way: through inheritance. This means that one of the big drivers of religious fundamentalism is demography. The tremendous population growth experienced in the Muslim world increased the Muslim share of world population from 15 to 20 percent between 1970 and 2000. It produced a youth bulge and a flow of pious and uprooted rural people into urban slums. As Gilles Kepel notes, this helped many Muslim societies overwhelm the small enclaves of western secular-educated people in the larger cities. But what is particularly interesting is that in large cities of the Muslim world, where there is no material incentive to have large families and where contraception is increasingly available, Muslim women most in favour of shari’a bear twice the number of children of those Muslim women least in favour. In Europe, the most pious Muslim women are 40 percent more likely to have 3 or more children than their least pious coreligionists.

The picture is even more extreme among Jews: in Britain, the ultra-Orthodox make up a mere 17 percent of observant Jews but three-quarters of British-Jewish births. In Israel, the ultra-Orthodox are now a third of the first-grade class in the Jewish school sector, up from a few percent in 1960. The ultra-Orthodox do not serve in the military, but religious zionists (typically modern Orthodox) do, and have family sizes that stand between the ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews. This is changing the composition of the Israeli Defence Force. As Yoram Peri notes in the winter 2006 issue of Dissent, the proportion of religious zionists in the IDF 'grew exponentially...By 2005, half of the junior command and approximately 30 percent of the senior officers were religious, and, for the first time in Israel’s history, four members of the general staff wore skullcaps'.

As we enter a period of unprecedented demographic upheaval, in which the population gap between developed and developing world hits a peak (in 2050), demography will increasingly make its mark by expanding the proportion of religious fundamentalists in all faiths. This increases religious demand, which invariably spawns a growing fringe who are receptive to  jihadi, Gush Emunim, anti-abortion Protestant and other fundamentalist terrorism. The pattern will be most evident in modern contexts, such as Israel, the West, and the urban Muslim world. I go into more detail on all of this in my newly-released book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, and in associated talks and podcasts. More details can be found at: http://www.sneps.net/

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At the beginning of last month, I posted a story about London’s Metropolitan Police entering into a voluntary surveillance-and-reporting arrangement with internet cafe owners in North London, specifically the borough of Camden. There was a little uncertainty at the time about whether this was correct but the following poster was snapped at an internet cafe in Leather Lane, EC1:

 

Credit: Cory Doctorow (gruntzooki) on Flickr [image link]

This was not just any random blogger either, it was Cory Doctorow, science fiction author, copyright reform campaigner, and highly influential netizen. If the Met wanted advertising for this pilot project, they’ve certainly got it now―Doctorow posted this story at Boing Boing, the #7 most popular blog in the English-speaking world.

Because it’s election day here in Blighty, I won’t detain you any further but just in case the image should disappear or something, the text of the poster reads:

Police Notice

Internet Policy

The owners of these premises are working with the Metropolitan Police Service to prevent unlawful or offensive material being accessed on the internet.

All customers agree that while using our systems they will not access, upload, download any material, or author, transmit or store documents, including emails or attachments of a pornographic, violent, extremist, or otherwise offensive or inappropriate nature.

Breaching the above will result in the user’s internet access being terminated immediately and, where appropriate, the police being informed.

Downloading or accessing certain material could constitute a criminal offence.

Well, at least they’re telling us we’re being watched. Just like the Chinese. Congratulations.

 

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 I came across the following in the course of my research for a new book. It is, I think, a most interesting message:

 “K – You know my position of standing firmly with Israel … we are now Israel’s only major friend in the world. I have yet to see one iota of give on their part. This is the time to get moving [with a peace process] – and they must be told that firmly … The time has come to quit pandering to Israel’s intransigent position. Our actions over the past have led them to think we will stand with them regardless of how unreasonable they are …” (emphasis in the original)

The “K”, let me tell you, is US National Security Advisor and later Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and the note was sent to him by President Richard Nixon in February 1973.

Nixon, sick and tired of Israel’s intransigent positions, tried during this period to put pressure on the Israelis to compromise with their Arab neighbours by evacuating occupied lands. But to no avail. 

We all know what happened a few months after Nixon sent this message to Kissinger: a terrible Middle Eastern war which came to be known as the Ramadan, or the Yom Kippur War, and in which Egypt and Syria struck at Israel in an attempt to recover their lost lands.

Some 37 years after the 1973 conflict and the Middle East resembles, yet again, a powder keg, with growing tensions between Israel and her neighbours. Nobody wants to see another Middle Eastern war, but the conditions, you’ll agree, are ripe for a confrontation. Even a minor incident could easily ignite it all.

Much is dependent on Israel’s behaviour, as militarily it is the strongest Middle Eastern nation, and its activities in the Occupied Territories – particularly in Jerusalem – strongly influence Arab behaviour. 

Washington, which is still, to borrow from Richard Nixon’s words, “Israel’s only major friend in the world”, must make it clear to the Israelis that, “this is the time to get moving” with a peace process. As a first step the Israelis must stop building settlements in the occupied lands as this provokes the Arabs, leads to rising tensions, and is also illegal according to international law of occupation.

I’ve already said in “It has nothing to do with my rude comment about balls”, that the Israelis “only move under open pressure”. And as they also do not understand nuances, they must – and again I borrow from Nixon’s words – be told “firmly” that enough is enough, and that the US will not stand with them (Nixon again) “regardless of how unreasonable they are”.

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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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In June 2006 the infamous leader of al-Qa’ida in Iraq, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi, was killed in US airstrikes north of Baghdad. Amidst the general excitement, President Bush announced at the time that the killing was "a severe blow to Al Qaeda and… a significant victory in the war on terror."  

In these post-Bush days, nobody says too much about the War on Terror, although the hunt for terrorists continues apace. In fact, with regard to Iraq, US forces have long been fighting against an ‘insurgency’ as opposed to a ‘terrorist campaign’ in common parlance, even if the insurgency is driven by terrorists…. The Iraqi government, meanwhile, has been less troubled by what it apparently considers to be semantic concerns.

Yesterday it was announced that Zarqawi’s two replacements as the top leaders of al-Qa’ida in Iraq; Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri had been killed by a US/
Iraqi rocket attack near Tikrit.  Nuri al-Maliki described the killings as "a quality blow breaking the back of al-Qa’ida”, whilst US vice President Joe Biden said they were a "potentially devastating blow" to al-Qa’ida in Iraq. And so they are... potentially.

Biden’s relatively cautious welcome to the news reflects the sea of change in the attitude towards combating terrorism in Iraq over the past few years, and the recognition that the very amorphousness of al-Qa’ida has enabled it to produce new figureheads to replace defeated ones – even if they are not entirely real (the existence of al-Baghdadi was long questioned). Of course, dynamics in Iraq have changed: it is no longer the primary theatre for jihad, and as such has lost appeal to many ardent jihadis. But irrespective of this, many political commentators suspect that the leadership of al-Qa’ida in Iraq is of limited importance.  

In the aftermath of the US confirming the killings yesterday, Reuters rapidly collected some feedback from political analysts to the news. These included Gareth Stansfield from Chatham House, Mustafa Alani of the Gulf Research Centre, Jeremy Binnie, editor of Jane’s Terrorism and Security Monitor, and Peter Harling of the International Crisis Group. Their respective views draw attention to the nuanced strengths and weaknesses of al-Qa’ida in Iraq and the Iraqi government itself, but overall reflect a careful hedging of bets on the significance of al-Baghdadi’s and al-Masri’s deaths. One view that does come across loud and clear is that right now, their deaths are overshadowed by the post-electoral Iraqi political situation. As Peter Harling notes, “the next government is the talk of the town”; and personally, I think that’s how it should be.

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A cloud seems to be forming over the Middle East, not of volcanic ash, but from the fumes of those exasperated by the evasion of a seemingly evasive peace. However in this particular case, the engines and shuttles of diplomacy have been left grounded on the political tarmac for far too long.

U.S. Secretary of State Clinton, recently speaking at the Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, had stern words for both the Israelis and the Arabs this time. In short, start doing not doodling was the message. She is right. Both sides must, in fact, make momentous moves that may not be particularly pleasing to their publics but that put the bolts on a final pact. That is the only way a durable peace will be brought about. However, the time is also right for the US to uphold and rectify its own role which for many years was perceived as having departed from partner and fair arbitrator. Only a change in the US attitude to approaching peace will assist in bringing about a better final act. Secretary Clinton’s reprimanding does little service and gives little credit to an initiative already on the table that of the Arab Peace Initiative. The Arab peace plan offers full recognition and normal relations with Israel in return for its withdrawal to the 1967 lines. A basis for negotiation to allow for a flight towards negotiations on final status issues. It is a vision for a comprehensive solution and a basis for a rekindling of dialogue and most significantly a security guarantee for all including the United States. At present, it seems that the US diplomatic temperament seems to be transforming towards a more positive and practical engagement and with a more persistent determination to achieve a solution.

Ever since Barack Obama’s stride into the White House, there has been hope that with his leadership he will bring about a just solution. Therefore, there is no more opportune time than now for the US to take that bold step and administer diplomatic vigour to establish that unprecedented political venture. The stakeholders must not only converse but make concessions on final status issues long kept on the backburner to fester. A two-state solution is the only way that they may emerge from this and only with American pressure will this be possible. Building upon previous agreements and taking in a collective assortment of the Road Map, the Arab Peace Initiative and the Clinton Parameters, amongst other positive steps, will go a long way to sealing a final deal.

But if they are indeed to manufacture a durable peace, all sides must start working harder lest the volcanic ashes of warfare and political intransigence blind us from attaining a much needed peace.

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The US News & World Report has been digging into ‘hundreds of pages of heavily redacted court documents’ and finds evidence that al-Qaeda ‘has launched successful cyberattacks, including one against government computers in Israel.’ According to the paper, this is the first public acknowledgement of a terrorist group launching offensive cyber operations.

The court records are from one of the many legal hearings involving Mohamedou Ould Slahi, since his arrest in November 2001 on suspicion of involvement in the failed ‘Millennium Plot’ to bomb LA International Airport. The Mauritanian spent the subsequent years in Guanatanamo until a district court recently ordered his release on the basis that the US government could not in fact prove he was a ‘member of the Taliban or al Qaida’ at the time of the alleged offence [pdf], partly because the use of torture could have compromised the evidence provided.

The US News journalist, who has at least been following this case for a while, claims to have unearthed the following:

The court records do not specify when and under what circumstances Slahi discussed al Qaeda's venture into cyberwar ... For instance, Slahi told interrogators that al Qaeda ‘used the Internet to launch relatively low-level computer attacks.’ Al Qaeda ‘also sabotaged other websites by launching denial-of-service attacks, such as one targeting the Israeli prime minister's computer server,’ court records show. The Israeli embassy in Washington had no comment on the information published in the court records.

Denial of service attacks are common and relatively easy and cheap to coordinate. They aim to overload and temporarily disable websites for the duration of the attack. Al Qaeda's interest in the tactic, however, has received little discussion and attention.

Slahi, like many al Qaeda recruits, was highly educated and knowledgeable about computers, according to court filings. A citizen of Mauritania, he says he worked as a systems administrator for an Internet service provider there from May 2000 until July 2001. Slahi told interrogators that bin Laden's group posted hacking instructions ‘on specific websites that directed the date and time of the attack.’

I don’t know if anyone has more details of this particular individual’s skills, or AQ’s actual capabilities in this area. This is not a naive enquiry, as I don’t mean any one of the thousands of articles on cyberterrorism clogging up the arteries of policy space. On that note, this piece quotes Richard Clarke, ex-presidential counterterrorism advisor:

To date, al Qaeda has not used its own hackers or rented hackers to damage, disrupt, or destroy important systems like banks, electric power grids, trains. We should expect that at some point a terrorist group might engage in low-level cyberwar, but the real threat is nation state action.

Which is what his new book is about, of course. It’s quite interesting to note how cyberterrorism has been downplayed since there’s a more plausible ‘cyberthreat’ to shriek about in the media. It would be quite ironic if now the furore over cyberterrorism has died down a little some evidence might emerge in the public domain that shows AQ actually were planning such attacks, even if they were not carried out to much effect. More likely, this information would be used as post facto justification for all the hysterical yelling over the topic in recent years.

Nevertheless, Clarke is technically correct on the terrorist threat, as also is the quoted ‘senior US counterterrorism official’ when he says, ‘sure, some computer-savvy terrorist sympathizers try to make trouble from time to time, but at this point we’re talking about things that cause more of a nuisance than lasting harm.’ One of his colleagues rounds out the piece, saying ‘when someone from al Qaeda jumps online, then we can jump on them.’ This is a sentiment heard often in counterterrorism circles―keep ‘em where you can see ‘em, the mantra goes.

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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 enemy of yesterday is the friend of today...it was a real war, but those brothers are free men now.” By these words, presidential scion Saif al-Islam al-Qaddafi referred to the leadership of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) in a press conference on March 23, 2010 attended by Western ambassadors and guests. The public proceedings of this event started last March by an invitation to a group of Western scholars, including the author of this article, to mark the release of LIFG leaders and discuss the major transformation of Libya’s largest Jihadist movement.

Established in 1990, the LIFG was modelled along the lines of the Egyptian al-Jihad organization: secretive, elitist, exclusively paramilitary, and aiming for a decisive action to topple the regime. However, the movement was discovered by the Libyan authorities and therefore it had to declare its existence for the first time on 18 October 1995. A brutal crackdown followed and the LIFG led a three-year insurgency mainly based in eastern Libya, including three attempts to assassinate Colonel Muammar Qaddafi in 1995 and 1996.  The confrontations left 165 Libyan officials dead, including high-ranks in the security and intelligence apparatuses, and 159 injured. The LIFG lost 177 members, including its top military commander in Libya and four of its Consultative Council members in the country. By 1998, the Consultative Council of the LIFG decided to impose a three-year ceasefire in Libya that was to have been reviewed in 2001, but the September 11 terrorist attacks that year changed all calculations.

According to the LIFG leaders and members I interviewed in Tripoli, the dialogue with the Libyan regime started in 2005. In 2006, six members from the Consultative Council, including the Emir of the LIFG, were involved in such talks. The breakthrough occurred when Saif al-Islam, the main sponsor of the de-radicalization and reconciliation process, invited former senior LIFG commander Noman Benotman to visit Libya secretly in January 2007 and consult with the imprisoned leadership. “It was very risky but I really trusted Saif...still this process was by no means an easy one,” Benotman said. Tensions between LIFG members and wary Libyan officials were still evident during the meetings in Libya; the head of the Libyan Internal Security, for example, referred to the process as “repentance from heresy” as opposed to reconciliation.
As opposed to the Saudi approach of rehabilitating selected individuals mainly at the grassroots level, the Libyan authorities targeted for de-radicalization well-known figures in the jihadist world. The released commanders included LIFG Emir Abd al-Hakim Belhajj (Abu Abdullah al-Sadiq), principal ideologue Sami al-Sa‘idi (Abu al-Munzir), and commander of the military apparatus Khalid al-Sharif (Abu Hazim). When I asked Belhajj about the current status of the LIFG, he replied that it had been dismantled; followers will be released and reintegrated as individuals, not as members of an organization.

The Libyan de-radicalization process followed a pattern seen before in Egypt and Algeria. Officials employed state repression, winning over charismatic leaders, encouraging interactions with the non-jihadists, and selective inducements. To a large degree, the LIFG was undermined militarily by the end of the 1990s. The military losses and the interactions with non-jihadists forced the LIFG leadership to update its worldviews, rethink strategically, and ultimately abandon political violence. Moderate Islamist figures, notably Sheikh Ali al-Sallabi, apparently played a crucial role in interacting with jihadist leaders, to the extent that Saif al-Islam thanked him publically in the press conference. Ex-jihadist leaders then had to interact with followers to convince them that armed action was illegitimate, an extremely difficult process in every de-radicalization case I examined. Finally, the Libyan authorities bolstered the process by offering selective inducements, starting with the release from prisons and ending with reintegration into Libyan society.  

As for the future, Saif al-Islam called on all Libyan fighters in the mountains of Algeria and Afghanistan, the deserts of Mali and Niger, and the valleys of Iraq to return home. The reintegration policies directed at the LIFG and other released prisoners will be crucial in providing credibility and support for this call. The lack of reintegration programs for the returnees from Afghanistan in the 1980s and early 1990s was one of the causes for radicalizing and internationalizing their activities.

Among the more remarkable features of the March 23 press conference was Saif al-Islam’s brief reference to the June 1996 massacre at Abu Selim of hundreds of political prisoners, which is still a taboo in Libya. It was the Libyan equivalent of Syrian President Bashar al-Asad opening the file of the Hama massacre of 1982 or Jamal Mubarak of Egypt acknowledging mass torture leading to deaths at the al-Wadi al-Jadid or al-‘Aqrab prisons in the 1990s.

Many questions remain unanswered in the Libyan de-radicalization case, most importantly the future of this process and whether it will lead to any real political reform in Libya. On the last issue, there is no question that the March releases were a significant step, not only towards innovative security policies but also towards a more mature, conciliatory approach towards opposition. This is a rare approach in the Arab world, where the elite generally perceives political conflicts as zero-sum games and adopts a “kill or be killed” approach. But it is also entirely possible—as has been the case in Egypt, Algeria, and Saudi Arabia—for a government to take a conciliatory approach to jihadists in order to end the security threat they present while ignoring their reintegration and still maintaining repressive policies toward non-violent political opposition. These policies may make both jihadist de-radicalization and national reconciliation a short-lived phenomena.  

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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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In an article in this past weekend’s Observer, Luke Harding tells the story of 17-year old Dzhennet Abdurakhmanova. According to Harding, it was she who detonated her suicide belt at Moscow’s Lubyanka metro station, killing nearly two dozen commuters last Monday, 29 March. Notwithstanding the confusion over the identities of who did what where, Harding has at least identified the reason why this act of terrorism happened:

But though a precise explanation for Dzhennet's actions can never be known, we shouldn't ignore a simpler reason: the internet. In recent years the insurgency in Russia's north Caucasus has mutated. During the 1990s, the rebels were largely Soviet-educated and secular, seeking to establish their an [sic] independent Chechen state. Today's insurgents are radical Islamists, fighting for a Taliban-like emirate across the Caucasus mountains. The web has become a potent tool for recruiting volunteers. According to Kommersant newspaper, Dzhennet and Umalat [Magomedov, husband, insurgent, dead] met while chatting online; at the time she was just 16.

And so ends the article. Somewhat abruptly, but that’s OK as the ‘mystery’ is obviously solved.  This is fairly typical for what passes as comment and analysis in the mainstream press when it comes to examining the links between the internet and political violence.  

In this case, what Harding has provided is a classic case of a ‘logical fallacy’, of the post hoc ergo propter hoc or ‘questionable cause’ variety: because Y happened after X, X must have caused Y. In the context of Abdurakhmanova’s internet use and her subsequent terrorist act, correlation does not imply causality, and this particular example is a form of technological determinism that allows little room for human agency.

It belongs to the same school of thought that treats people as empty vessels into which an ideology is placed, ‘causing’ radicalisation, leading to terrorism.  At the same time, proponents of this view also like to generalise from specific cases, an inductive approach that tends to result in ‘othering’ as many people as possible. You can argue for the relevance of many factors in someone’s biography leading to the commission of violence but you can’t have your cake and eat it.

What compounds Harding’s error is that he arrived at this conclusion because he cannot appeal to any other data. This is not even an application of Occam’s Razor: it’s just lazy. Such linear and dubious argumentation has plagued counterterrorism policy for years, although governments are far cannier about such things these days. In this case, both journalist and The Observer’s editorial staff are at fault. Why is taking so long for the media to catch up?

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Not so many years ago, al-Qa’ida’s Iraqi franchise, the Islamic State of Iraq, was enthusiastically announcing that Iraq would serve as the launching ground for imminent jihad to liberate Palestine. And as recently as last year, in the wake of the January 2009 Israeli war on Gaza, al-Qai’da central leaders Usama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were refreshing the dream of an al-Qa’ida takeover in Gaza.

Within Gaza, where the Hamas leadership has consistently condemned the al-Qa’ida message, such rhetoric must always have seemed rather fantastical. Hamas gained substantive public support for its resistance to the Israeli offensive, in marked contrast to al-Qa’ida central, who contributed little more than words to the campaign. As for the possibility of a mass influx of foreign fighters into Gaza, well, it’s slim. Some Palestinian entrepreneurs are doing a roaring trade smuggling goods into Gaza from Egypt via the unsanctioned tunnels at Rafah, but the Egyptian authorities are scarcely likely to permit al-Qa’ida fighters across their borders into Gaza.

This is not to say that Hamas, or Gazans, can write off al-Qa’ida sympathizers in their midst.  Over the past few years a small stream of salafi-jihadi groups have emerged in Gaza. Many of them have proclaimed their allegiance to al-Qa’ida, though none so far has gained the movement’s lasting recognition. Most prominent amongst them were the Army of Islam – infamous for the kidnapping of British journalist Alan Johnson - and Jund Ansar Allah, both of whom developed a vociferous presence in the jihadi web forums and boasted of their rocket attacks on Israel, before being virtually wiped out in Hamas orchestrated massacres. In the case of the latter, Hamas responded to a declaration by the Jund Ansar Allah’s ideologue Sheikh Abdul Latif Mousa of the establishment of an Islamic Emirate in Palestine by bombarding the mosque where Mousa preached, leading to 24 people being killed, including 6 unarmed civilians, and Mousa blowing himself - and a Hamas operative - up with a suicide belt.

If Hamas has been quick in the past to crush unruly salafi-jihadi rivals, then the events of last week have again given cause for outsiders to question the leadership’s authority. Responding to Israeli airstrikes on Western Gaza in retaliation for rocket attacks launched from there, Hamas insisted that it is doing its level best to restrain groups launching rocket attacks. And if this is true, one has to wonder just how much leverage they have.

In a prescient brief published last month by Professor Yezid Sayigh for the Crown Center for Middle East Studies, “Hamas Rule in Gaza: Three Years On”, Sayigh, whilst stressing that the Salafist threat should not be overestimated, notes that

…Gaza remains one huge prison, with massive unemployment and crushing poverty. Hamas has the wherewithal and the stamina to endure as a movement, but it runs the risk that, in promoting a discourse of armed resistance and martyrdom and in encouraging the Islamization of society – as a means both of containing dissent and of deflecting internal pressure to resume active hostilities with Israel – it inadvertently encourages its core constituency to defect to more militant Salafist groups that it does not control, and which increasingly vie for recognition by al-Qaeda as its local affiliates.”

Israel, for its part, has tended to play down the idea of an al-Qa’ida threat, preferring to point to the menace posed by Iran, who backs Hamas, and against whom Israel would like to garner more robust Western support.  But by pursuing the blockade and isolation of Gaza it may well be increasing salafi-extremism.  Whether or not al-Qa’ida fighters can penetrate the Gaza strip becomes a moot point: the threat of even more violent extremism does not come from interference by foreign al-Qa’ida affiliates: precisely the opposite. It comes from isolation.

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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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It’s difficult to know what to make of this new Metropolitan Police counterterrorism pilot scheme in north London, announced in the press last week:

Anti-Terror Police Seek Help from Internet Cafes, BBC News, 25 March 2010

Police battling the threat of terrorism have unveiled a new tactic - they are targeting internet cafes. As evidence suggests that several people convicted with terrorism acts have visited internet cafes while plotting their crimes, the Metropolitan Police are trialling a new initiative in which owners agree to monitor what customers are looking at, and report any suspect activity to police.

The visit by two policemen and a community support officer is unannounced - but this is not a raid. Instead they are here at an internet cafe in Camden in London as part of a new programme in the government's £140m Prevent strategy to help counterterrorism.

The new initiative involves getting internet cafe owners to monitor the websites their customers view and to pass on any worries over suspicious activity to the police.

Critics claim this is ‘another step in the direction of creating a society of total surveillance’. Given the recent Community and Local Government Committee report on problems with Prevent, this project will look to many like another attempt to monitor Muslims’ behaviour.  The BBC goes on to quote more from the author of these concerns, Arun Kundnani of the Institute of Race Relations:

 

What is dangerous about this initiative is that it does not just focus on preventing access to illegal material but also material that is defined as 'extremist' without offering an objective definition of what that is. It thus potentially criminalises people for accessing material that is legal but which expresses religious and political opinions that police officers find unacceptable.

This is a good point but it is not constables in the front line of this endeavour but internet cafe owners and users.  This is another delegation of state responsibilities to the populace, which sounds like an attractive proposition but is precisely the opposite.  I find it difficult to see why this is significantly different to reporting someone for reading a ‘seditious’-looking book on the Underground.  

The police say that ‘the internet cafe programme is not about arresting people, but more to determine if their users need what they term as "support"’.  This is distinctly problematic.  What this says to the casual observer is not that this is a law enforcement issue but a social engineering one.  If the intention is to shape people towards the norms engendered by the last ten years of counterterrorism legislation as regards what we are allowed to access on the internet, we should perhaps wonder about the legitimacy of such measures when another parliamentary committee last week called for a ‘thorough going, evidence-based review of the necessity for and proportionality of all the counter-terrorism legislation’ passed since 9/11.

When I lived in Egypt, a country famous for its political pluralism, I had frequent cause to use internet cafes.  I vividly remember the first one I used in downtown Cairo in about 2004.  Pinned to each wall behind the monitors were laminated posters which said, ‘Patrons are asked to refrain from accessing material which deals with sex, religion, or politics’.  Whilst the UK has a very long way to go before it is even remotely as bad as Egypt with respect to communication rights, the new Met scheme will use posters and screensavers to ‘tell people that what they’re doing is not on’.  Not illegal, just ‘not on’.  Be careful: this time, somebody actually is watching you.

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The Sadrists have done it again: risen from the ashes of political irrelevancy; put a spanner in the works of blossoming secular Iraqi democracy; reintroduced the spectre of Iranian interference in Iraqi politics…

Well, that's not quite the truth of the matter: the Sadrist's militant Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM) wing has been down since Maliki's military offensives against it in Basra and Baghdad in 2008, but the political leadership has never been out and made a respectable showing in January 2009's provincial elections; even without the Sadrists, Iraqi politics would still be fraught with sectarian tensions; and Iran has shown ready in the past to back whichever Shi'a horse looks strongest and accepts its patronage.

Nonetheless, Friday's unanticipated announcement of electoral victory for Ayad Allawi's secular Iraqiyya Coalition could ring very hollow indeed over the coming months if he cannot bring the Sadrists on board. The radical Shi'a political bloc has taken 39 seats from a national total of 325 with the possibility of more after compensatory seats are allocated. This puts the Sadrists miles ahead of Badr and the Iraqi Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI), their unlikely allies in the Iraqi National Alliance (INA). Overall the INA has 68 seats, and if this result appears to put them in a poor third place when compared with Allawi's 91 seats and Maliki's 89, for the Sadrists, it could be a dealmaker.

So what does all this mean?  The expectation of Sadrist success has understandably been seized upon with alarm by commentators. Anthony Shadid's piece in the NYT last week took the result as proof that Iraqi support for former exiles who collaborated with the US post 2003 had collapsed, and speculated that the Sadrists could usurp the position of the Kurdish bloc as kingmakers in the Iraqi parliament.

Ned Parker and Raheem Salman followed this with an article in the LA Times set amidst the supporters of victorious Sadrist politician Hakim Zamili in Sadr City, Baghdad. The article gently mocked the efforts of US forces over the preceding seven years by pointing out that Zamili was arrested just three years ago by US Forces on suspicion of orchestrating death squads through the Iraqi Health Ministry. These days, he is smiling at the prospect of imminent political influence.

But in truth, nobody really knows what it means yet - not even the Sadrists themselves. As the component parts of fragile coalitions scramble to realign themselves with the promise of key positions or stakes in key issues, there is no telling who will jump which way. Given the turbulent past of their relations, there is no evidence that the political glue currently binding the Sadrists to ISCI will hold; but after Maliki's treatment of the Sadrists over the past few years, an alliance between them and the State of Law with Maliki at the helm must appear equally if not even more unsavoury. A political arrangement that brought the Sadr bloc closer to Allawi's secular Coalition seems frankly hard to imagine, but in Iraqi politics, who is to tell?

At any rate,  alarming as the prospect of a strong Sadrist presence in the next Iraqi parliament may be, there was no good reason ever to believe that the Sadrists would not do relatively well in the elections. The socially and economically disaffected Shi'a populace who comprise the backbone of Sadr's support may have become disillusioned with the violence JAM militants brought to their communities, but what evidence have they been given that any of the other political groupings will fight their corner?

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Britain, the other day, kicked out the Mossad station chief in London after Israel was held responsible for the use of cloned British passports in the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai.
The British decision to expel the Israeli "diplomat" follows an investigation by the Serious Organised Crime Agency into how copies of the documents were obtained from British citizens.

In announcing the decision to throw out the Mossad chief, Foreign Secretary David Miliband said:

"Given that this was a very sophisticated operation, in which high-quality forgeries were made, the Government judges it is highly likely that the forgeries were made by a state intelligence service … taking this, together with other inquiries, we have concluded that there are compelling reasons to believe that Israel was responsible for the misuse of the British passports …"

 

Note the words Miliband uses: "highly likely" and “compelling reasons to believe". In short, while the minister doesn't have the "smoking gun" to show Israeli involvement in the forgeries, he, nontheless, believes that the weight of evidence is such that one could safely assume that the Israelis are the culprits. 

I was not surprised by the Israeli response: "We have never been given proof that Israel was involved in this affair", by which they meant: But where's the hard evidence to link us to this case?

I agree with the British foreign secretary and reject the Israeli approach. I think that the world stage isn’t a court room, and it isn't always necessary to produce a smoking gun as a proof. Often, as in this case, the weight of evidence is sufficient.

And here's why '’m telling you this story: I strongly believe that the Israelis assassinated Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. Do I have the smoking gun to show that this was indeed the case and that the Israelis are linked to Arafat’s death? No, I don't. But the weight of evidence – and I will not go into all the details here - shows that it is "highly likely" and that there are "compelling reasons to believe" - if to use Miliband's words - that Israeli agents poisoned Arafat.

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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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Iraq's March 7 Parliamentary Elections seem to have crept up on the mainstream British press relatively unawares, certainly by comparison to the fanfare accompanying the 2005 elections.  If the Arab press has remained rather more attentive to Iraq's democracy experiment, then one aspect that in general seems to have been glaringly absent from critical discussion is the matter of post-electoral economic agendas.  More to the point; this aspect appears to have been largely absent from the contending coalitions' own manifestos.

A week on from the elections, preliminary results suggest that things are panning out pretty much as predicted in pre-electoral opinion polls conducted by Iraq’s National Media Centre. The Rule of Law Coalition of outgoing Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki leads in seven of eighteen provinces; the Iraqiyya bloc headed by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi leads in four; the Iraqi National Alliance combining Sadrists and the ISCI is ahead in three southern provinces, whilst the Kurdish Alliance holds sway in the three northern Kurdish provinces.

Results for the disputed Kirkuk province hang in the balance with al-Iraqiyya and the Kurdish Alliance fighting it out. Despite widespread finger-pointing for suspected ballot box rigging and accusations made by some contenders against the Independent High Electoral Commission (IHEC) for its partiality towards the Shi’a, these results are not hugely contentious.  However, nor are they particularly revealing or decisive of what is to come. Whichever Coalition emerges ahead, it will not be governing single-handedly.

The real nature of Iraq's future government will be decided over the coming months by a painstaking process of building fragile political alliances… and if the experience of Iraqi politics over the past 7 years has taught us anything, it is that some very surprising alliances may emerge.

This latest round of elections has brought to light positive and negative developments. On the upside, a 62% registered voter turnout despite a series of bombing attacks throughout the country during the campaign does credit to the electorate's optimism in the political system, and in contrast to 2005, this time the Sunni population have participated en masse. 

A further breakthrough in the proportional representation electoral system was the imposition of an open list of candidates, enabling voters to choose precisely whom they elect, and forcing candidates to individually pursue popular support. This measure, heavily influenced by popular demand, should ensure that some of the less savoury characters in Iraqi politics are not re-elected. 

On this note, the electoral campaign, following the trend of the 2009 Provincial Elections, has witnessed a dramatic decrease in sectarian rhetoric, and the emergence of more secular or mixed sect alliances. On the downside, the run-up to the elections was marred by boycotts and vetoes concerning the numbers of parliamentary seats and provisions for the election in the oil-rich Kirkuk (a matter remains heavily disputed between Iraqi Arabs and Kurds). 

The decision by the Accountability and Justice Commission to ban over 500 candidates on the grounds of their association to the former Ba'ath party just weeks before the elections was seen as an unambiguous attempt to target the secular parties and to derail the smooth-running of  the election.

Amidst all of these considerations, however, it strikes me that what has been surprisingly absent has been any serious campaigning by any of the leading Coalitions on the basis of serious economic reform. And this is worrying not only because it suggests that the parties do not have clear plans for how to encourage economic growth and to maximise their national budget, but also because it suggests that the Iraqi populace have not made demands on them to do so.

Despite the perception that the 2009 Provincial Elections punished those parties who, through a combination of incompetence and corruption,  had failed to provide people with basic services, the political groups do not appear to have taken these lessons on board in terms of economic agendas.  True; the Iraqi budget is beset by uncertainties; tied in part to donor contributions; in part to global oil revenues; and in part to the relative control exercised by provincial governorates over internal revenues.

Nonetheless, the party-political formulation of clear economic programmes and priorities is a vital component of functional democracies, and in the context of Iraq, one which is central to averting prolonged vulnerability to extremist tendencies within society.

Since 2003 Coalition Forces in Iraq frequently deliberated over the chicken-and-egg dilemma of what comes first: security or economic opportunity.  For the most part, circumstances forced an emphasis on the provision of security, with the focus on reconstruction and moreover long-term economic growth taking a back seat. 

But this cannot be the long term way forward. It is not enough for Maliki's party, or any other party, to attract voters via short-term employment incentives; at some stage they must offer daring economic visions for the future.  March 7 should have been a good stage for that.

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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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I'd planned to be focusing on final preparations for an upcoming field research trip to Lebanon and Algeria. But then Pakistan went and arrested half the Quetta Shura. The full consequences won't become clear for a while, and a number of questions now loom.

There's obviously the issue of the degree to which this will impair the Taliban operationally. As well as the question of how this move will affect the Taliban's relationship with al-Qaeda on the one hand and Pakistan on the other. The biggest question, for me at least, is what this says about Pakistan's calculus. On the optimistic end one could hope this marks a critical break with Pakistan's past protection of the Afghan Taliban? Or for cynics out there was this a play to remove some of those actors who might have sought a separate peace that excluded Pakistan from the equation?

The Christian Science Monitor, which broke the story, carries a couple of quotes that point toward the latter:

The crackdown may to be related to efforts by some Taliban leaders to explore talks with Western and Afghan authorities independently of Pakistan, the UN official said. Pakistan is widely suspected of backing the Afghan Taliban in a bid to maintain influence in Afghanistan, a charge Islamabad has long denied. But Pakistan may also be wary of Taliban attempts to initiate talks without its involvement or sanction.

"Pakistan wants a seat at the table," says the UN official, who is familiar with Taliban efforts to initiate talks. "They don't want the Taliban to act independently."

"It's possible that Mullah Baradar and those around him wanted to start thinking about an eventual settlement," says Mr. Muzjda. Former and current Taliban figures emphasize, however, that such a settlement necessarily involves a timetable for withdrawal of foreign forces in the country.    

Perhaps. Or maybe Pakistan concluded that the best way to guarantee a seat at the table was to show the U.S. that it deserved one.

On an unrelated matter, I'm not in the practice of linking to different articles that carry an odd quote of mine. But a week ago I gave an interview to the Hindustan Times about LeT's recent activities and what I said ended up differing from what made it into print. I'm going to chalk this up to a crappy phone connection, but nonetheless some important nuances were lost and I wanted to take this opportunity to set the record straight. I appreciate this blog’s readership indulging me.

The crux of the story, which you can read here, was about Lashkar's resurgence especially in light of the recent Pune attack. In it, the reporter quoted me as saying:

Lashkar resurgent spells India bloodied. While Lashkar has shown pan-Islamic tendencies, says Stephen Tankel, author of Storming the World Stage: The Story of Lashkar e Taiba, "for the core leadership, India remains the main enemy." Another fillip for Lashkar, he says, is that despite Mumbai its infrastructure has been unharmed and it's incurred no costs.

I did not say its infrastructure was unharmed and it incurred no costs as a result of the 2008 Mumbai attacks. I said its social welfare operations were restricted, but continued to operate. I also added there was nominal government control over some facets of the organization, but by no means all of it. Further, the government did take JuD [its social welfare wing] out of the formal banking system. While I did say its military infrastructure emerged relatively unscathed, I emphasized I was referring to the military infrastructure and not the overall infrastructure. An important distinction given the restrictions, however minimal they may be, placed on JuD. Overall, I said, the group incurred minimal costs in proportion to the benefits it accrued from the Mumbai attacks.

"Unharmed" and "no costs" are absolutist statements. They give the impression that Pakistan did absolutely nothing, which is not true. I'll be the first to hammer the Pakistanis for not doing nearly enough – and have a number of times – but it's incorrect to suggest they did nothing at all.

Regarding the questionable claim of responsibility by a LeT splinter, the reporter also quoted me as saying  "I've never heard any rumblings about Lashkar splinters." Not what I said. I can name at least one LeT splinter, not to mention the temporary split in the organization in 2004. What I said was that I’d not heard any rumblings about a new splinter organization having emerged.









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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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Fred Burton is a good friend and author of the bestseller memoir, Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent.

Fred is a former State Department counter terrorism Special Agent and one of the world's foremost experts on security and terrorist organizations.

In this clip he is talking about the assassination, in a Dubai hotel, of Mahmoud al-Mabhough, a top Hamas commander.

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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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I'm retiring …
This is to announce that I’m retiring. The reason for that is the translation into Chinese of my A History of Israel and its publication in China.
    

I strongly believe that A History of Israel, which the Chinese titled The History of Israel, by which they probably mean that this, in their view, is the definitive history of Israel, will sell well in China.
  

I have just Googled "population of China" and I can tell you that it stands at a number which I can't really read: 1,330,044,605.
  

I'm not an idiot and I do acknowledge that some Chinese (particularly in small villages) are unlikely to buy my book. But even if, say, 10 per cent of the total Chinese population does purchase this masterpiece, at its current paperback price of 35 Yuan 元 (which is £3.15), then I’m still financially safe and can afford an early retirement.
    

My readers and admirers are asked to please email me their thoughts on the follwing: 1. destinations to which I could retire. 2. Books I should carry with me should what is proposed above is an isolated place (say, an island); but please no Bible, nor books on the Middle East.

Thank you.

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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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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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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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The subtitle of my 2005 book Elusive Peace is How the Holy Land Defeated America. And after listening to President Obama's annual address to Congress and the nation's televisions, I can categorically say that the Holy Land defeated America again.

In his speech, Obama did not refer at all – not even a single word - to the Middle East peace process. True, he is facing huge problems and pressures at home, but not to mention the peace process which, in the past, was quite high on his agenda, is also to admit failure.  

It would not be fair to put the blame for failing to resume peace talks in the Middle East on Obama alone, as Israelis and Arabs are not easy clients to deal with; but no doubt mistakes have been made by the Obama team.  

Back in July 2009, I wrote in Words are easy and many that, "Obama is now losing momentum…" Indeed, Obama's principal mistake was his attempt to squeeze concessions from Israelis and Palestinians before bringing them together; to force the Israelis, for instance, to stop building settlements on the disputed land before the renewal of peace talks. He failed, however, to realise that in the never-ending-Middle-Eastern-souk, trying to squeeze concessions takes time and, in the meantime, you lose momentum. Instead, Obama had to take advantage of his (then) huge popularity and drag Israelis and Arabs to the negotiating table, forcing them to compromise then and there.   

So what's next? As I have already argued in He's a nice guy, I have held barbecues at the Sea of Galilee and elsewhere, the way forward is to put on ice the complicated Israeli-Palestinian peace track and focus, instead, on trying to sort out the less complex Israeli-Syrian dispute.
Ahron Bregman

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"From Usama to Obama, if our letters could be sent to you by words, we would not have sent it by plans!" By those words Usama Bin Laden (UBL) started his short audio message to the American President. Despite the short length, the contents of the message were quite salient. This was one of the rare time that Bin Laden himself takes direct responsibly for an operation organised and executed by a branch of al-Qaida. By doing that, he wanted to say that after eight years since 9/11, he is still an organizational leader, not only just a spiritual 'godfather' for global jihadists. This brings to mind the statement of General Stanley McChrystal to the BBC last December: "I don't think that we can finally defeat al-Qaida until Bin Laden is captured or killed." 

Another message was clearly demonstrated by the focus on Palestine. Al-Qaida intends to capitalize on the current increasingly frustrating conditions in the Middle East Peace Process in general and in the Gaza Strip in particular. Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan were all missing in Bin Laden's new message. Palestine was not; Bin Laden stressed that the operation was for it and about it. He repeated his old and probably favourite recruiting statement: "the Americans will not live in peace, until the Palestinians do."

The current conditions in the Middle East features a stalemate in negotiations between the PA and Netanyahu's government, a ceasefire imposed by Hamas in Gaza, a blockade imposed by Israel and the Mubarak regime in Egypt on Gaza, expanding settlement activities in the West Bank, a failure of the US envoy in the region, and a confession by President Obama that he underestimated the obstacles to peace in the Middle East. In other words, this is a good time for al-Qaida's recruitment activities. And the chances for recruitment can be significantly higher if the rhetorical focus is on Palestine. Bin Laden did not wait too long to capitalize.

A third message that can be read is that al-Qaida is continuing and officially adopting decentralization as its strategy in 2010. Branches, cells, or individuals may be self- or organizationally recruited. They will operate either by orders from al-Qaida Central or will self-activate. In the latter case, the centre will take responsibility for the action and it will be accredited to al-Qaida. Basically, we are back to 2001!  

A final message is about al-Qaida’s resilience. After each defeat, there is a quick recovery. The defeat in Afghanistan (2001-2002) was followed by a re-emergence in the Afghan-Pakistan border regions (2004-Present). Other defeats in Saudi Arabia (2004-05) and Iraq (2007-09) were followed by resurgences in Algeria (2007), Somalia (2009) and Yemen (2009). The 'resilience' was a clear message conveyed by Bin Laden: "our attacks will continue as long as there a US support for Israel." Eight years after 9/11, al-Qaida's leader still has the will and the capacity to continue the terror campaign and still lacks the desire for changing the rhetoric, the ideology, and the behaviour.   

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One of the things that's always bothered me about the 'lone wolf' moniker, used to describe violent extremists seemingly acting on their own initiative, is the simple fact that they’re usually not alone.  Although there may be little or no material support from an active network of co-conspirators, 'lone wolf' Islamists act precisely because they are not, in their own minds, isolated at all: they have the love of Allah, solidarity with the ummah, and the ideological and psychological support of online and other communities, who may or may not be aware of their intentions.

For me, the term retains associations with Freud's Wolf Man, of whom Lacan wrote, his "fascinated gaze is the subject himself", and Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf, in which Harry Haller attempts to achieve transcendence of his paradoxical nature through the murder of the bourgeois Hermine. Haller's sociopathy may well be apparent in the psychology of some terrorists, and the narcissism of many terrorists and insurgents has long been evident. Think of Andreas Baader and tell me that guy didn't 'fancy himself', in modern parlance.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I’m aware the use of 'lone wolf' to describe Islamist terrorists is a Western characteristic, and it speaks more to our north European cultural heritage than it does to its analytical utility in trying to understand the phenomenon. In fact, it may be a classic example of framing, or at least projection, and reveals more of our cultural anxieties than it does of the organisation or psychology of those who would attack 'us'. In that sense, it may hinder the West's abilities to counteract those individuals rather than help it.

Last October, Raff Pantucci suggested that lone wolves might run in a 'pack', which he quickly equated with a 'cell', a transference of terms quite compatible with theories of 'leaderless resistance' originating in earlier white supremacist movements. I don't know if Raff meant thereby to neutralise the lupine metaphor but I think he did it quite successfully anyway. Lone wolves are, in this context, potential or actual terrorists, and the collective noun is a 'cell', as per decades of insurgent and terrorist theory (i.e. it didn't start with Marc Sageman's 'leaderless jihad').  

In a new article for Foreign Policy, essentially a review of jihadi online punditry, Jarret Brachman writes of Al Qaeda's Armies of One. Jarret argues that web jihadists are now 'joining the physical fight', and that,

countries across the world―and particularly the United States―should brace themselves for an exodus from the Web forums and onto the battlefield by self-styled al Qaeda armies of one.

'Armies' can belong to larger military units like battle groups, military alliances and international coalitions, and the phrase taps into the belligerent rhetoric of jihad quite succinctly, as well as noting the importance of self-image. Again, I don't know if Jarret is intentionally abandoning the 'lone wolf' tag, but it does not appear once in his piece. The point here is that discussions of 'online radicalisation' usually include this phrase to somehow both describe and explain those who become radicalised via internet activity, and go on to perform acts of violence we normatively recognise as terrorism.

'Lone wolf' is applied to almost anyone outside of a traditional command structure, regardless not only of ideology, but whether they actually communicate with others of similar mindset. The original 'lone wolves' of the far right were defined by their lack of contact with their ideological brethren. The current crop of Islamists is defined precisely by mutual contact and the sense of shared identity, another reason why the term doesn't sit well with me. A terrorist acting alone is rare enough, one truly thinking alone even more so.

What should they be called, then? I’m not sure, and my thoughts can be rubbished at many levels. I don’t think Jarret means for 'an army of one' to be a unit of analysis, for example, and we would perhaps do best just to call these guys terrorists or extremists, or something that is generally understood across the security spectrum as a measure of tactics and intent. That doesn't help us discover or define their specific modus operandi but neither particularly does 'lone wolf', as this can mask the connections that actually exist between superficially autonomous individuals and the movements of which they are a part, formally or otherwise. The Unabomber was a genuine lone wolf, so perhaps Abdulhakim Muhammad and many others; the likes of Hasan Nidal are not. Just because the ties are virtual does not mean they act in isolation, and we should understand what lies behind the term before we sprinkle our discourse with it. Otherwise it means very little indeed.

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Last night, the UK Chief of General Staff Gen Sir David Richards gave a speech at the IISS describing his aspirations for British armed forces ahead of the forthcoming defence review.  The basic gist was that our adversaries are fighting irregular wars and we should be prepared to engage them in flexible and agile manner.  Upshot: ditch the Cold War mentality, and let's get busy in these new theatres, not least of which is cyberspace.

Whether this will transfer into new cyber forces, we don't know, but it seems likely, should the money be found for the required investment in this field.  The current opposition is also very keen to develop offensive cyber capabilities, as set out last week in their national security green paper.

In his speech, Richards talks about the rationale for developing capabilities in cyberspace, which are actually quite understandable, but his comments at one point inevitably turned to al-Qaeda:

... Al Qaeda's use of technology has created a global network of grievances that are often linked by a nihilist theology used to justify local violence.  Dan Rather, the veteran US journalist, has commented that AQ’s physical location is virtual: "it's a worldwide, internet-based movement."

In all this time looking at the relationships between communications technologies and conflict, I have never once heard Dan Rather cited as an authoritative source on the subject.  I tracked down the quote to an interview with Rather on HDNet's World Focus in December 2009, in which he said, "al-Qaeda is not centred anywhere ... it's worldwide, it's internet-based", and then proceeds, without drawing breath, to say that AQ is actually based in Pakistan.

Rather looks like a spent force in the interview―permanent fallout from his ignominious departure from CBS Evening News in 2005 I guess―but the inconsistencies in his statement are obvious.  It would be unfair to single him out for criticism in this respect though―it's trendy now to say that AQ has a 'virtual sanctuary' and all that jazz, whilst at the same time declaring that we know them to be hiding out in Waziristan, or wherever.  

Everyone who reads this blog knows that 'AQ' can be parsed in various ways.  It's a shame that Richards saw fit to quote Dan Rather out of all the people that could have been cited on this subject.  Elsewhere in his speech, he quoted another venerable silverback of news broadcasting, the BBC's Nik Gowing, on communications technologies and democracy.  Richards could perhaps have turned to someone slightly more engaged with the subject, like Evgeny Morozov for example.  

I very much doubt anyone at the IISS cared, and it's really no big deal, I suppose.  Speeches like this do make me concerned that those who draft and make them aren't quite as clued up as they should be.  Richards is a military man, and doubtless knows UK defence inside out, but if he's moving into cyberspace he may need to update his sources.  It just sounds tired to trot out these two just because they're TV personalities.


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This week, the Philippines instituted a nationwide, five-month ban on guns in the run-up to elections in May. Several thousand checkpoints are due to be set up and dozens of people have already been arrested for violating the ban.

Such a drastic measure – in a country with an estimated 1 million unlicensed guns and dozens of private militias controlled by political leaders and warlords – is seen as necessary given high levels of political violence surrounding elections in recent years. In 2007 more than 100 people died in violence around local elections. More recently, last November saw the massacre of 57 people in Maguindanao, and several local election candidates have been killed in different parts of the country. Kidnappings have also occurred, which makes it even more striking that the ban applies to private bodyguards. Even off-duty police and military are expected to leave their guns at home.

I was personally struck by this story because it reminded me that at times the study of political violence can wander into rather abstract territory. It's possible to spend a lot of time talking about ideology, psychology, social movement theory, indoctrination, cyber-recruitment, et cetera – and forget about the actual instruments of violence that militants use. Without the bomb and the gun, would we even care what radicalised fringe movements are up to? And yet, it seems to me we don't spend enough time considering access to weaponry as part of holistic counter-campaigns against political violence throughout the world (and when we do, it is often at the extreme end of terrorist acquisition of WMD).

In some ways, this makes sense. Guns and bomb-making materials are ubiquitous in modern society – easily trafficked and bought, relatively inexpensive, difficult to eliminate entirely. Why focus on the instruments of violence when their presence and availability are largely a given part of the equation?

But surely it is just as naïve or idealistic to think that radically minded and violently oriented individuals will ever be completely eliminated from society as well. Their specific pathology and political mindset may vary from decade to decade, but as a sub-constituency of modernity their continuing presence can be safely assumed.

The Filipino example highlights the extent to which political will – not projected efficacy – drives anti-violence strategies. Plenty of CT officials in the US, for example, wonder whether Mumbai-style attacks will emerge in the American homeland; we’ve already seen the tragic example of how much damage firearms can wield in the Fort Hood shootings.  Yet there is virtually no chance that significant gun control measures will be enacted in the United States. Even the nationally traumatic mass shootings at Columbine and Virginia Tech did not generate sustained political interest in gun control. The idea that a country would ban guns as a preventive measure simply would not compute in an American cultural and legal context.

At the same time, efforts to control the vast flow of small arms around the globe have been hampered by both practical difficulties – such as the sheer number of guns in ungovernable conflict zones – and a lack of collective political action at the international level. The Obama administration has indicated a greater openness to multilateral efforts to control the small arms trade, generating the predictable howls of outrage among certain domestic American constituencies (who also, by the by, display some interesting ideological narratives of their own, as well as an apparently unswerving commitment to Godwin's law).

In short, while the Filipino example has its limits – i.e., we cannot count on a global gun ban to solve the problem of political violence – I think it's an interesting example of how different political contexts can generate different anti-violence strategies.  Its temporary nature also showcases a certain sort of societal expediency, with restrictive measures tied to specific events rather than implemented ad infinitum (thus potentially antagonising key actors and the general populace).

It is also, in the end, a refreshingly honest step to take – a way of admitting that political tensions in the country are at such a level that violence cannot be mediated or precluded without removing the instruments of force themselves. It is this sort of embrace of reality – rather than a fatalistic submission to the ubiquity of weapons – that one hopes might catch on in other parts of the world. At the very least, I think it deserves a greater voice in our ongoing discussions.

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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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The decision to proscribe Al Muhajiroun, Islam4UK, and a cluster of their successor groups is not entirely surprising. The combination of a successful prosecution in Luton of five members (or individuals linked to Al Muhajiroun or one of its off-shoots) after their performance at a homecoming parade for troops from Iraq in March 2009 and the fact that the Prime Minister got dragged into the public debate over whether the group was going to make some sort of ceremonial march through Wootton Bassett, all pointed to things coming to some sort of a head. The question really is whether this time it might mean something final for the group?

The short answer is: no. It would seem highly unlikely that this is the last we shall hear of Omar Bakri Mohammed’s acolytes. Last time the Home Office went forwards with a decision to proscribe some of them in July 2006 (that time it was Al Ghurabaa (the strangers) and the Saved Sect), the decision was made in the months after a group of them had been picked up and charged by police for comments they made at a protest outside the Danish Embassy in which they crossed the line and "solicited murder." In that instance four group members were given custodial sentences, while in April and May of 2007 another six group members were arrested on charges of "inciting terrorism overseas" and "terrorist fundraising." 

This clamp-down of sorts appeared to work for about a year, though the group did not go away and simply adopted a lower profile. Then the website http://www.islam4uk.com popped up and things started to take off again, culminating with ever more confrontational and loud statements, an attack on Conservative Muslim peer Baroness Warsi and the protests for which the aforementioned Luton group were just convicted. And while I have seen nothing linking Christmas Day underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to the group, the renewed attention he drew to today's Londonistan meant some reaction was likely.

If history is anything to go, this should mean that we will see some further arrests in the near future – recent comments by some prominent members appear to tread close to the lines laid out in recent terrorism legislation of incitement or glorification of terrorism. But this will undoubtedly not stop them from reappearing once again, as such groups thrive on the oxygen of publicity (Anjem Chaudhury was quite open in his admission that the main reason for their raising the idea of the march in Wootton Bassett was to attract publicity), and given the relatively light sentences that will be imposed, these individuals will be in and out of jail (some of those from the previous swathe of arrests are already back out). These boys believe they are about God's work and a short stint inside is unlikely to deter them.

The more interesting question is what is their relationship to terrorism? The fact they have been proscribed under anti terrorism legislation means that the British government says there is a link – according to the BBC the impetus for the ban was a JTAC report that was commissioned after Al Muhajiroun reappeared last year – but it is hard to imagine that serious terrorists would associate with people who go around drawing the sorts of attention to themselves that the Al Muhajiroun chaps seem to thrive on. Instead, it is more likely that individuals who are involved in terrorism operate on the fringes of such groups – keeping an eye out for possible recruits amongst the zealous youngsters who are drawn in by to these groups. By shutting them down in this way, the government is at least creating a further hurdle to making them quite so easily accessible – though it is likely that they will in the long-term simply reappear under a new guise. For a period at least, they will have to tread carefully.

Conveniently I suppose, this decision to ban the group comes just ahead of an upcoming article that I have in March's Studies in Conflict and Terrorism journal entitled "The Tottenham Ayatollah and the Hook Handed Cleric: An examination of all their jihadi children," which catalogues the links to terrorism from Al Muhajiroun and Supporters of Shariah (Bakri and Hamza's groups respectively). More on that later!


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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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The temperature is rising between Egypt and the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip. The reason: Egypt is constructing a massive steel barrier, which will reach a depth of between 18 and 30 metres, along its 11 kilometre-long-border with the Gaza Strip; an electronic fence is also going up along the same route, equipped with cameras and electronic eyes. 

 

This barrier is still under construction, but when completed it will replace the light fence which existed before and – as Egypt and Israel hope – it will curtail the smuggling of weapons from Egypt's Sinai into the Gaza Strip; these weapons are often used to fight Israel. 

 

The weapons are smuggled through a system of at least 500 tunnels, running under the Gaza-Sinai border. But here's the problem: in addition to weapons, the tunnels serve as a key conduit to bring into the Strip other products, such as food, medicine, petrol, construction materials, electronic goods, livestock, small cars and even drugs and prostitutes. And if the barrier does succeed in killing off the smuggling of weapons, it might well also cripple Gaza's already shaky economy. 

 

There is strong opposition to the project in Gaza and in the Arab world, but Egypt seems determined to proceed anyway. It is even building, along with the underground barrier, a giant pipe to carry water from the Mediterranean and flood the tunnels, which will inundate broad areas on both sides of the border. 

 

It is likely that the resourceful Sinai smugglers – mainly Bedouin tribes – will find ways to circumvent the new obstacle, but the barrier will make life harder for them and complicate their task. 

 

How this new reality along the Sinai-Gaza border will affect Hamas' grip on the Gazans is an open question. But if public resentment in Gaza grows because, for instance, food prices rise, then Hamas might well attempt to divert attention from its troubles at home by renewing war with Israel.

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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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This post is the second in a series, following on my post about the developing policy of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) that was announced by Daniel Benjamin of the State Department.  

Before I set off on this very wonky and technical post (I'm sorry, but it's necessary), I'd like to make it clear that CVE isn't just a foreign policy initiative. This will be domestic as well.  From what I have pieced together, high level DHS officials are working on developing domestic CVE as well. I think FP also sees the writing on the wall.

Also, I apologize for not citing something at every turn here, but this is a blog post, not an essay, and I just don't have the time. As always, feel free to challenge me on any of this.

I also want to make it clear that I am not trying to beat up on Daniel Benjamin – a guy who was onto al Qaeda and mass casualty terrorism before most. His speech has presented an opportunity for public debate about a major policy formulation and I think we’d be fools not to take advantage of it.  

The flaws I point out are not unique to the speech. They are symptomatic of a larger affliction: the discourse on violent extremism and movement participation remains haunted by bad social science. Disproven ideas have managed to hang on because (a) they seem intuitive and (b) much (though not all) of the work that has been done on studying radicalization since 9/11 is poor and ignores major advances in sociology and social psychology – a point I will return to later in the series.

Benjamin said in his speech, 'We know that violent extremism flourishes where there is marginalization, alienation, and perceived–-or real–-relative deprivation.'

Really? Do we?

Relative deprivation is a contestable and woefully incomplete explanation for violent extremism and especially terrorism. And as far as alienation and marginalization, this is almost a return to the Hoffer school of movement participation – a model that has long been disproven. Many of these flawed explanations for political violence and movement participation can be broadly traced to various strains and breakdown theories as well as the related frustration-aggression model.

The frustration-aggression model posits a linear casual link between (you guessed it) frustration (or, interference with goal-directed behavior) and aggression (in order to remove the source/cause of frustration, see John Dollard, Frustration and Aggression, 1939).

Eric Hoffer popularized a version of this model in his 1951 book, The True Believer. He wrote about participants in Communist and Nazi parties, painting them as atomized, alienated, and dysfunctional souls with a need to believe in something – it didn't matter what – and a compulsion to subsume themselves in a collective geared toward the realization of drastic goals. [Insertion: I feel like I should mention that Hoffer's ideas share a great deal with mass society theory, which was pioneered 8 years later by Kornhauser, but that could just be that both were heavily influenced by Durkheim. Any professional sociologists out there should feel free to chime in to clarify]. Even though the central premises of this book were discredited decades ago, they still have an uncanny hold on the discourse about participation in radical movements. Hoffer's Wikipedia entry says The True Believer remains 'an insightful classic today.' Let's just hope the average Free Radicals reader isn’t the sort that trusts Wikipedia.

However, movement participants – including violent Islamists - are usually not alienated and dysfunctional. Action as part of a movement does not emerge from an accumulated number of atomized individuals. Movement participants are, in fact, well-embedded in their societies and social networks, which is, incidentally, the means through which they become involved in violent extremism, (this doesn’t just apply to violent Islamism, by the way).  If they were atomized, they wouldn’t join movements.  This is just one of the intersections where Hoffer took a wrong turn, and it feels like we are still along for the ride.

The idea of relative deprivation emerged from the frustration-aggression school of thought in the 1960s, largely thanks to James Davies, James Geschwender, and Ted Gurr. Relative deprivation is when social actors perceive themselves as deprived when compared (or relative) to others.  As Buechler explains:

In this case, the strain is most evident on the social-psychological level of how people assess their current situation against various reference groups or past or anticipated future situations. Whenever they find a benchmark that implies they could or should be better off than they are, a condition of relative deprivation exists and this psychological strain triggers participation in collective behavior.

As David Ronfeldt observes,

[A]t an everyday-language level, 'deprivation' retains a strong hold on the public mind, including among policy analysts and practitioners, as a seemingly sensible way to understand why societies that produce suffering and frustration also produce political violence and sometimes terrorism.

But, as Ronfeldt and many others have pointed out, just because it seems sensible, doesn’t mean it is correct.

While many studies have not discounted the idea that relative deprivation may be an indirect contributing factor, it should not be given the explanatory weight that it has in the contemporary discourse.  For example, we find that relative deprivation is not common among individual terrorists, but 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.  

More in the next post…

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Since October 2009, the Egyptian Muslim Brothers (MB), one of the largest and most influential Islamist movements in modern history, has been going through a leadership crisis between the General Guide, Muhammad M. Akif (leader of the MB), and some of the members of the Guidance Office (GO - the highest executive body in the MB).

In the latest elections held on 18 and 19 December, the Conservative factions held an outright majority in the 18-member GO. This is not good news. But it should not come as a surprise either.

Despite (incorrect) rumors that the leadership crisis originated from Akif's statements siding with Hezbollah against the Mubarak regime; the General Guide asserted in an interview with al-Jazeera Network that the decision to support Hizbullah was unanimous in the GO.

This crisis (like in 1949, 1951, 1964, and 1995) had more to do with the enduring factionalism within the MB, a persisting phenomenon within the organisation since the 1930s. The different factions can be loosely termed as 'Reformists,' 'Pragmatists' and 'Conservatives.' The main points of contention between them are the nature of relationship with the Mubarak regime, with the West (and with the "other" in general); the relationship between the missionary and the political activities; and, finally, the relationship between the organisation and its peculiarities on the one hand and the society on the other.

The Reformists, whose leading figures include Dr Abd al-Moneim Abu al-Futuh (a member of the GO until this month) and Dr Essam al-Arayan (a former MP in 1987), tend to be more open towards the "other" and more interested in separating the missionary (or the religious) and the political (in other words secularism finally!).

The most well-known figure of the Pragmatic camp is Dr Muahmmad Habib, a geology professor from Assyut University in Upper Egypt and the first deputy of the General Guide. The stance of this camp shifts quickly depending on the balance of power within the organisation. The Pragmatist camp is perceived as the main losers in the latest GO elections. As a result, Habib declared that the elections were "illegitimate."

The Conservatives, or as some analysts like to call them, the ‘Qutbists’ (though it is a bit misleading since they include more than just the followers of Sayyid Qutb) are led by Dr Mahmud Izzat, the General Secretary of the MB.  That faction has multiple ideological orientations. But its defining characteristics include utter secrecy when it comes to internal organisational affairs (in other words the MB should remain a black box for the outsider), mistrust regarding the "other," and less inclination for political alliances. Many of the Cons leaders (Izaat included) belong to the so-called "1965 generation" (the grassroots and mid-ranks who were imprisoned with Sayyid Qutb in 1960s, witnessed the time of his execution, and were severely repressed by the state). The mentality of that generation is usually different from those of the "1970 generation" (the mid-ranks who were active during the time of relative openness of the Sadat regime). Most of the leading Reformist figures belong to the latter generation.  

The success of the Conservatives in the recent elections are rooted in the conditions of political repression and frustration in Egypt do not in any way reward moderation of behavior or encourage openness or toleration. For the grassroots, the mid-ranks and the shura (Consultative) Council members, the intense cycles of repression made the Conservatives’ preferred behavior of secrecy, mistrust and exclusion sound necessary for survival.

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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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"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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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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On 16 December, Jarret M. Brachman, author of Global Jihadism: Theory and Practice (2008)―and fearless blogger―gave testimony before the US House Armed Services Committee’s Sub-committee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capabilities.  The topic of his statement was ‘cyberspace as a medium for radicalisation and counter-radicalisation’ and should be required reading [pdf] for all those interested in the relationships between online technologies and people’s transitions to violence of thought and action.

Jarret cites a series of 2009 case studies, all characterised by some level of online activity―Nicky Reilly, David Headley, the Sargodha Five, Hasan Nidal, Najibullah Zazi, all of whom have been discussed on this blog over the last few months.  No surprise that the internet has played a role in all these foiled plots, and Jarret moves swiftly on from this element of radicalisation to address a much broader point about US policy.

His observation is that the US is ill-equipped to engage in the ‘war of ideas’ because it has insufficient intellectual capital to do so.  Jarret maintains that the US has no equivalent to the Norwegian FFI’s TERRA program, for example – a dedicated centre for the study of Islamist ideology and culture.   Jarret’s reasoning is summed up best thus:

History, culture and language are the keys to long-term national strategic endurance.  Understanding the world, not on a reactionary, threat-by-threat basis, but from a global perspective is the preferred approach, and a lesson that was not seemingly learned from the Cold War.

We have seen glimpses of the US admitting this.  The flawed Human Terrain System is an attempt to redress the institutional paucity of area experts by employing civilian social scientists in the US Army.  I recall (hopefully not erroneously, as I can’t find the source) some figures from a couple of years ago suggesting that when the US finally invaded Iraq in 2003, their in-house language skills were such that only a single officer spoke Kurdish, for example.  No-one’s suggesting that the US must have staff competent in every language of the world but when the Middle East is one of your strategic priorities it pays to have people who can converse with those who live there.
 
The importance of cultural understanding applies to almost every field of human intervention―medicine, law, social policy, commerce, etc.  It’s not for nothing that HSBC claims to be ‘the world’s local bank’.  Jarret recommends that a program is implemented that allows for ‘creative, collaborative academic scholarship’, with the first step of developing an online platform where ideas can be exchanged about jihadi ideologies and cultures; mirroring, in fact, the ways in which jihadis and Islamist use the internet.  A network to counter a network.

This does raise questions about the relationships between the academy and government, however, not least of ethics and autonomy.  Academics who work in security policy should constantly be aware of their own epistemological stance and seek to be open about what it is they do and why.  Although Jarret states that the US ‘needs to invest in up-and-coming scholars doing work on social, cultural and historical topics, particularly when it does not seem directly applicable to operational necessities at-hand’ (my emphasis), I can see a lot of academics bristling at the idea of conducting research just in case it becomes useful to government.

It’s not for me to decide for government or scholars what they research and why, although I’d obviously be happy for more state investment in research, with obvious caveats.  I think that Jarret’s ideas are useful for one simple reason though: I’d rather the US and its allies acted with cultural understanding than without it.  Academics surely do not know all but as Karl Popper said: ‘Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.’ The last eight years reminds us of the costs of action at the expense of understanding. 

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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 affe