Ali Soufan's book chronicling his insider account of the hunt for al Qaeda, The Black Banners, is now available.

Robert Baer, former CIA agent, describes it as "Superb. An education. And best book on al Qaeda out there, bar none."

Soufan discusses some of its contents on last nights's episode of 60 minutes.

And here's more from the New York Times review:

Despite a successful and improving record of effectively countering terrorism, the Obama Administration's recently released strategy memo suggests that the president's team is more interested in engaging in stalled domestic political debates than clearly articulating ways to defeat terrorist threats.

Barack Obama began his tenure as Commander in Chief by ordering the daring sniping of Somali pirates attempting to gouge a hefty ransom out of western oil companies and their insurers. In the next years, his counterterrorism team foiled and weathered multiple plots on Americans, including two failed plots involving commercial jets and another fizzling attempt targeting Times Square. Most recently, Obama directed a special forces unit, Navy Seals Team 6, to carry out the action-cinema-worthy elimination of Osama bin Laden. And all the while, the President has racked up a significant number of terrorist kills using precision drone strikes that, by some credible counts, have not generated an unintended civilian casualty in nearly a year.

Though many of these successes have made headlines, the President has not harped on them, his rivals have ignored or downplayed them, and his political allies to the left have been reluctant to cheer them, instead quietly grumbling to themselves about Obama's failure to implement the entire civil libertarian agenda they had envisioned together during his campaign. As a result, many of the greatest CT successes realized during Obama's watch have enjoyed less news coverage than local issues or mini-scandals like the Casey Anthony verdict or Kanye West's outburst at the Grammy Awards.

Obama's reluctance “to spike the football,” as he put it in response to a reporter's question about why he was not releasing photos of the deceased bin Laden, has played into a strategic communications approach seeking to productively engage with modernizing forces in majority-Muslim countries while undercutting the appeal of anti-western groups there. Thanks to this approach together with surgically-targeted special operations and drone strikes, an endogenous Muslim backlash against al Qaeda, and the timely Arab Spring, the administration finds itself positioned to push the Hirabi theocratic movement over the brink into irrelevance. The most recognized brand of that movement, al Qaeda, apart from when it was ludicrously scapegoated by outgoing Libyan dictator Muomar Ghadaffi, has only made recent news for the defeats it has suffered.

If the trend line continues, al Qaeda will next become an off-brand among a set of increasingly unpopular Hirabi theocratic groups mostly focused on their own national and regional ambitions. Intelligence from bin Laden's compound even shows that he was beginning to doubt the appeal of the brand, apparently considering renaming the loosely networked organization.

In their recently released "National Strategy for Counterterrorism," Obama and his chief CT adviser, John Brennan, touch on several ways they might continue to undermine the appeal of Hirabi terrorism, even itemizing the multiple regionally-dispersed factions of al Qaeda they seek to hive off and eliminate. Kudos.

But their articulation of their strategy is disappointing in its lack of ends/means correspondence.

Continue reading "Obama/Brennan CT Strategy Memo Underscores Stalled Debate" »

As expected, though quite belatedly, Al Qaeda has followed its former leader's succession plan, naming Ayman al Zawahiri as the head of the global hirabi organization. In a statement released Thursday, the group vowed to continue attacks on American and Israeli interests and to aide ongoing fighting in Somalia, Chechnya, and Palestine. President Obama's White House responded to the terror group's statement with strategic communications aimed at diminishing Zawahiri in the eyes of his subordinates whom, many accounts suggest, reserve less loyalty for the man than they did for his predecessor. Complicating matters for Zawahiri, he seeks to fill bin Laden's shoes at what may be the weakest strategic moment for Al Qaeda since its founding. The revolutions of the Arab Spring have not only obviated any impulse for hirabi attacks in a number of Muslim-majority countries, they have also shown the hirabi tactics and strategies to be unnecessary and significantly less successful than mass protests.

The Least Bad Man for a Difficult Job?

The former doctor and Egyptian Islamic Jihad member, Zawahiri has just turned 60 and is believed to be hiding out in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. As acting deputy to the deceased Osama bin Laden, Zawahiri is perhaps best situated to take over the day-to-day operations of Al Qaeda's Central organization in Afghanistan, but many analysts note that his managerial style has rubbed many of his operatives the wrong way, and that he may not possesses the charisma necessary to hold the group together during this difficult time. Zawahiri's relative inexperience in battle may also hamstring his efforts to cast himself as a hero to be emulated. As a senior Obama administration official has pointed out to ABC News, "Unlike many of al Qaeda's top members, Zawahiri has not had actual combat experience, instead opting to be an armchair general with a 'soft image."

Zawahiri also takes the reins of a hirabi movement whose underlying raison d'etre has been significantly diminished since the uprisings of the Arab Spring. Why use terrorism -- nearly all who seek change in the Middle East must wonder -- when mass protest is so much more effective? Worse for the hirabi movement, Zawahiri is in many ways a poster-child (or poster-geriatric) for the long-term failures of violent terrorist approaches to revolution. He began his struggle against the secular authoritarian regime in Egypt over four decades ago. But when overthrow came in recent months, it was sparked not by a bloody campaign of polarizing violence, but by an Egyptian-American Google employee armed with a non-violent strategy and an excellent operational knowledge of social networking tools.

Hirabi Movement Strategically Anemic and Fracturing

Local terrorist groups -- deeply motivated by a desire to see fundamentalist Islam direct government policies -- may be asking themselves what there is to gain by transferring their loyalty oaths from the late bin Laden to the new al Zawahiri. By setting down their weapons and campaigning within civil society, they have everything to gain. By taking up arms against Americans now, they lose opportunities to concretize their policy vision in a formative moment of history and risk provoking American reprisals likely to kill them. The irrelevance of a "far enemy" strategy in this context probably drives the Al Qaeda statement's reference to Somalia, Chechnya, and Palestine -- places where violent struggle can be seen as potentially useful -- and their ommission of any reference to the Arab Spring or any of the countries experiencing it.

Faced with diminished loyalty and deep irrelevance, Al Qaeda Central is in desperate need for a win, but has few operatives to turn to in order to achieve it. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Qaeda's strongest unit at the moment, is being driven to ground by U.S. drone strikes and is distracted by the unrest in Yemen. And Al Qaeda Central, no doubt paranoid that bin Laden's file cache has revealed members' whereabouts, is clearly laying low if it takes them six weeks to announce their pre-determined succession plan. Some other affiliate in the network could take it upon themselves to attack the U.S., but none has successfully done so in the decade since 9/11 and there is no clear reason to suspect they have the capability or inclination now.

Obama Ready to Fight

In the face of all this, President Obama's strategic communications are spot on. They send a signal to doubting hirabis that Zawahiri is not even feared or respected by his adversaries. Whether or not hirabis agree with the assessments that Zawahiri is a 'soft' 'armchair general,' this language is very different than that reserved for bin Laden. And, as the anonymous White House official interviewed by ABC stated, "no matter who is in charge, he will have a difficult time leading al Qaeda while focusing on his own survival as the group continues to hemorrhage key members responsible for planning and training operatives for terrorist attacks." Whether that hemorrhaging is literal or figurative, the message is clear: the White House smells blood and will be pressing its attack.

by Nick Adams

Thanks to what Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, called the most "remarkable example of focused integration, seamless collaboration and sheer professional magnificence" he'd witnessed in his half century career, Osama bin Laden is dead. The men and women who have made this moment possible have the well deserved gratitude of a nation.

But bin Laden's death does not accomplish the fatal decapitation of Al Qaeda some may have hoped for, only the amputation of one of its many (if most symbolically prominent) operational arms. And while there may be some advantages to be gained for counterterrorism operations as Al Qaeda's lieutenants jockey for position to fill bin Laden's shoes, the largest long-term threat to the terror network may be the pro-democracy movements throughout the Middle East, which in many countries are making Al Qaeda seem ineffectual, tiny and irrelevant by comparison.

Though bin Laden remained the most wanted man in the world for nearly a decade, his influence within Al Qaeda and affiliated movements had been waning for some time. Yes, he was the titular head of that organization and the movement of loosely-networked smaller organizations it helped to spawn. Yes, bin Laden held a hero status among the hundreds (or maybe thousands) who swore bayat to him and his cause. Yes, those adherents will revere him as a martyr.

But, since Operation Enduring Freedom destroyed half his organization in 2001/2002, bin Laden has controlled an ever-shrinking share of Al Qaeda operations. Killing him does not accomplish the defeat of Al Qaeda, and there are plenty of lieutenants eager (if not yet ready) to take up the mantle of leadership for the group. Bin Laden was not just operationally crippled by the initially successful U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, his escape into Pakistan tarnished his image in the eyes of many of his followers, according to Peter Bergen's recent book The Longest War.

Surrounded and outgunned in Tora Bora, bin Laden prepared for his own death, and then in an unlikely gambit abetted by U.S. bobbling of a command decision/order, he used a misdirection endangering his own men to escape under the cover of darkness. Not exactly a profile in courage. While many of his operatives understood the move as necessary to preserve their leader, others witnessed a shaken bin Laden, at least temporarily unable to muster the resolve of his more trenchant diatribes.

Many others in the Taliban and throughout bin Laden's network immediately questioned the wisdom of greenlighting Khaleid Sheikh Mohammed's brazen 9/11 attacks in the first place. Injured, on the run, second-guessed, and with his organization decimated, bin Laden laid low while other strategists charted a new course for the irhabi movement -- one seeking to establish multiple operational nodes that would allow the movement to survive even if a significant portion of the network was damaged or destroyed. This new course has directed the activity of Al Qaeda since early 2002. The terrorist network now has a stronghold in Yemen, a robust organization in Algeria, thick and growing ties to the Shabab in Somalia, and variously committed adherents self-organizing in small groups around the world.

Unfortunately, Al Qaeda is not finished because of this small victory. That is not to say the organization is on the rise, either.

Continue reading "Al Qaeda and Counterterrorism After Bin Laden" »

The White House announced today that it will be trying terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo using the Military Commissions created by Obama's predecessor and ratified by Congress in 2005.

The President was not pleased with the move, saying that "he remains committed to closing Guantanamo some day and to charging some terrorist suspects in civilian criminal courts," which have a proven track record compared to the rarely used and institutionally weak military commissions. But his hand was forced by a Congress that refuses to allow any Guantanamo detainee to be tried on U.S. soil.

Mr. Obama has already pointed out the irrationality of any concern that a terrorist might escape one of the U.S.'s maximum security prisons (which have never been breached), but Congress has not budged. He might also have cited the ample evidence suggesting that military trials reinforce terrorists' attempts to paint themselves as heroic global warriors who sit on par with the American military officers comprising the "jury of their peers" in those courts.

He could even have offered examples illustrating how military courts have produced shorter sentences than traditional criminal courts. A driver and weapons transporter for Osama bin Laden (tried in a military commission) is walking free today while the driver of a low-level Pakistanti extremist who transported paintball equipment is still serving a 15 year sentence handed down by a civilian jury. Similarly, David Hicks (sentenced in a Military Commission) walks free today, while John Walker Lindh continues to serve out a 20 year sentence (meted out by a civilian jury) for essentially the same crime.

Obama could debate all day with Congress about these issues, and show all the ways in which our constitutional system of due process rights produces surer and more exacting justice outcomes than military courts. But that would only be worthwhile if the U.S. Congress was interested in evidence. On this issue, for now, the politics of keeping "the bogeymen" off of American soil continues to hold the day.