Contrary to the apocalyptic worries of some commentators, hirabi (aka jihadi) terrorists are employing a polarization and recruitment strategy that does not benefit from WMD attacks -- and, bluffs aside, they are nowhere near capable of developing or acquiring such weapons.

Instead, they will continue their attempts to inspire a violent movement striving for an (increasingly) unpopular theocracy. Furthermore, they will persist with their longstanding repertoire of weapons and attack styles -- gravitating around Planes, Trains, and Car Bombs -- because it is so adequate for the goals of creating spectacle, shocking the senses, and intimidating governments.

Read more, here.

Brian Fishman "says it all when he says it" in his piece running at FP's AfPak Channel.

An excerpt:

Trust also matters in covert networks if communication is to be effective. And Atiyah had that trust with many of al-Qaeda's key actors and affiliates; that is why he will be hard to replace -- perhaps even more so than current al-Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Zawahiri is a critical leader of the organization, but he operates within a structure that increasingly emphasizes the ability to move information rather than generate authoritative commands. In other words: in al-Qaeda, connectedness is more important than authority and Atiyah was connected.

In Iraq yesterday militants carried out 42 separate attacks - an inauspicious start to the holy month of Ramadan. So far, over 80 people have died from those attacks, with some still in critical condition. In a piece headlined, "Threat Resurges in Deadliest Day of Year for Iraq," New York Times' columnist Michael Schmidt opines that "After hundreds of billions of dollars spent since the United States invasion in 2003, and tens of thousands of lives lost, insurgents remain a potent and perhaps resurging threat to Iraqis and the American troops still in the country." Only time will tell if Schmidt is right or wrong, but his analysis rests on some very faulty assumptions.

First, Schmidt is drawing a trend from only two or three data points. His logic goes: On Sunday (and for weeks prior), few attacks occurred. On Monday, many attacks occurred. Therefore, the likelihood of attacks is generally higher now. This logical fallacy is tempting because the most obvious and widely reported data we get on terrorist activity relates to the number of their attacks and their corresponding death tolls. Based on an extrapolation from these data alone, it does appear that more attacks are coming, perhaps many more. If we draw a straight line from the 14 attack per day average over the last year, through the 42 yesterday, and into next week, we can expect well over a thousand attacks a day with multiple thousands killed per day by the end of the weekend!

Schmidt doesn't go this far, but he does suggest that insurgents and terrorists have stepped up attacks to a new level. That suggestion rests on Schmidt's second flawed, implicit premise, that a particularly active day of insurgency and terrorism reflects not exceptional activity levels of relatively small and weak groups, but the average activity levels of relatively large and strong groups. He misunderstands that groups can flex, but then must retreat to ground and avoid detection while plotting future activities. The militant groups that carried out Monday's attacks did not suddenly grow in number or capacity in the days before the attacks. Instead, they geared up to spend a lot of their assets all at once. Some of those assets -- ammunition, bombs, suicide bombers (in three cases), time, and emotional energy -- can be replenished, but not overnight.

Finally, Schmidt is confusing operational success for strategic success. Many people were killed and a lot of property was destroyed on Monday. But that does not mean the attacks make the various insurgent and terrorist groups responsible stronger in the medium- or long-term. Strategic success in asymmetric warfare depends on militants' ability to hold their ranks together, recruit new followers, and use their larger enemies' strengths against them. These attacks may have only achieved one of those objectives. Attacking on the first day of Ramadan could have fortified hardcore supporters who see these missions as sanctioned by God, but pulling men out of a Mosque during prayer to execute them in the street -- as occurred in one attack apparently carried out by Al Qaeda in Iraq -- probably only fuels Iraqis' already widespread disgust with the group.

Whether these attacks provoke the U.S. and Iraqi Security forces to behave in strategically counterproductive ways remains to be seen. Some have suggested that the attacks are meant to send a message to the U.S. that it needs to leave. Others surmise that they are intended to keep the U.S. in the region so that Al Qaeda will have a battlefield in Iraq. It is possible that the attacks were carried out because they can serve either strategy. Al Qaeda can claim a victory if the U.S. withdraws or remain relevant (if only to itself) if the U.S. stays.

In any case, we can expect that Al Qaeda's propagandists will attempt to use U.S. reactions as evidence of their victory. But to respond in a way that minimizes the efficacy of the attacks, U.S. and Iraqi leaders must first understand who they are up against. It probably is not -- as Schmidt and others have suggested with alarm -- a larger, stronger, and ascendant version of the group that seemed anemic and unpopular only weeks ago.

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.

Audrey Kurth Cronin is a professor of war and statecraft the U.S. National War College and also continues as a non-residential Senior Research Associate at Oxford. Before that, Dr. Cronin was Specialist in Terrorism at the U.S. Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, where she advised Members in the aftermath of 9/11. She has taught at numerous other universities including Columbia, the University of Maryland and Georgetown, where her long-standing graduate course on terrorism was featured in the New York Times shortly after 9/11. In addition to her academic expertise, she has served periodically in the U.S. government, including positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Office of the Secretary of the Navy, and the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. She regularly consults with agencies in both the Executive and Legislative branches. We were pleased to have the opportunity to speak with her two days after the death of Osama bin Laden to clarify the impact of his death.

Audrey Kurth Cronin: Well, first let me state that I’m speaking only for myself, as an academic.

Al Qaeda has many parts, so the term 'al- Qaeda,' is often overly broad, over-used and over-generalized. Every time we use 'al-Qaeda' to refer to this movement as if it were a seamless monolith, we give it more credit than it deserves. It is better to talk about al-Qaeda as being comprised of three levels: al-Qaeda the core, specific al-Qaeda affiliates, and local individuals inspired by the broader movement. The various parts aren't necessarily all working seamlessly with the core and, indeed, sometimes we find they are working at odds.

Beginning with the last, the third level, individuals in small cells or even on their own are responding to messages, images, blogs and chat rooms on internet sites. For them, “al-Qaeda” is more like a social movement, driving them to be inspired and even hatch plots, with sometimes tenuous operational links to the central organization.

At the second level, you have numerous affiliates, some of whom have been associated with al-Qaeda for a long period of time and some of whom are groups with quite distinct local agendas who have only adopted the al-Qaeda “brand” in recent years.

And then we have Al Qaeda central. With heavy military pressure on the core, including the recent campaign of drone attacks, we have seriously weakened the central leadership in the last 2-3 years especially. By killing bin Laden, we have greatly advanced that process by dealing a devastating blow to the core of al- Qaeda.

But you have asked what will happen as a result of “decapitation,” by which I mean the capture or killing of the leader of a group that uses terrorism. It is indeed a long-established way of damaging or ending a group—states often try to eliminate the central inspirational figure. The historical record shows that it works best with certain types of groups. And unfortunately, al-Qaeda does not match all the classic characteristics of those groups. First, groups that have ended by decapitation have generally been hierarchically structured. But, as I have explained, since 9/11 al-Qaeda has evolved through various stages, becoming more horizontal and layered. Second, groups that end through the capture or killing of a leader don't tend to have a clear succession plan. And Osama bin Laden was very careful to designate a successor and plan for the group's survival after him. Third, groups that end through decapitation tend to be younger than other groups. Having existed for at least 20 year, al-Qaeda is not young by the standards of terrorist groups: most struggle to make it beyond the average lifespan of 5-8 years. Finally, groups that end through decapitation have a strong cult of personality attached to their leader. Although bin Laden in his rhetoric insisted that the movement is not about him--that he expected to die and welcomed his own martyrdom, because the movement is much bigger than one person--Osama bin Laden has definitely developed a kind of cult of personality. So, from that perspective especially, this is a serious blow—though one not likely to END al-Qaeda.

Incidentally, looking at local groups and individuals, there's already a lively response to bin Laden’s death on the three to four thousand so-called ‘jihadist’ internet sites, chat rooms and blogs. On the whole, they are insisting that they are still dedicated to the cause and that bin Laden's death will not end of the movement.

AKC: Some of it is. But al-Qaeda the core has not been cutting edge on the use of technology in recent years. al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has been more inventive, and they have their own followers and participants. And they will continue without bin Laden.

Continue reading "Q&A, with Audrey Kurth Cronin " »

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" »

As the nation's new suspicious activity reporting fusion centers come online this year, observers are beginning to notice a major problem: there is a significant gap between the demand for and supply of experts able to train local police officers who will be charged with the difficult task of sniffing out terror suspects in their communities.

Unmet demand means lucrative teaching and training appointments for those who are able to fashion themselves as CT experts. But it also seems to mean that local police forces are taking what they can get in terms of tutelage, even if the curricula on offer are inaccurate or unhelpful.

According to an NPR story, Army Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, a career intelligence officer who heads the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, "has been watching with alarm the phenomenon of officials with limited experience selling themselves as terrorism instructors."

"You've got a lot of individuals who are not academically qualified to be instructing in these venues, and more importantly they are speaking with authority, which empowers the audience with knowledge that is not necessarily accurate," said Sawyer, adding that these short courses tend to stereotype Muslims in a way that just isn't helpful as officials redouble their efforts to fight homegrown terrorism and radical Islam."

A more detailed interview study by Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze, published in the Washington Monthly, highlights the mentality of some of the (mostly) men making the rounds training local law enforcement. For instance, "the trainer Joe Bierly, based in Riverside County, California … doesn’t think American law enforcement is ready for the next terrorist attack. At the end of the day, he said, the question is this: 'Can you run fifteen yards on a blood-slicked floor, take aim, and still hit the target?'”

"Richard Hughbank, another counterterrorism trainer, is a fourth-generation combat veteran on his father’s side. 'Honestly, I kinda fell into it,' Hughbank told [Stalcup and Craze] when [they] interviewed him in November 2009.'“I think most of us did.'”

Another self-made CT trainer, John Giduck writes, “'I think the first thing we need to do is pass federal legislation exempting law enforcement from any civil or criminal prosecution, any liability at all, for what they do if there is a terrorist attack on U.S. soil.' … 'In attempting to prepare the American psyche for the worst possible terrorist act—the taking and killing of children—we must all shed the veil of civility and luxury in which we conduct our lives.'”

"Despite their different backgrounds, the counterterrorism trainers [Stalcup and Craze] interviewed have a remarkably similar worldview. It is one of

Continue reading "Unqualified, Self-appointed CT Experts Training Local Law Enforcement " »

Writing for Foreign Affairs, Leah Farrall describes Al Qaeda's operational and organizational evolution over the last two decades, concluding that the terrorist group "is stronger today than when it carried out the 9/11 attacks."

But was her article finalized just a few days too early?

Farrall described how Al Qaeda's flexible, far-reaching and somewhat weak organizational ties have been heavily fortified by a manhaj (narrative of a strategic pathway) able to attract many extremists and revolutionaries. But recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Oman may significantly undermine Al Qaeda's raison d'etre.

Well-organized, peaceful, televised protests have repudiated the (frequently disproved but perennially reanimated) notion that violence best achieves transformative political outcomes. In only a few short weeks the perception of Al Qaeda among people seeking change in the middle east has probably fallen dramatically. In mid January, they were seen as a potential (if complicated) answer for the Middle East. Now, their approach seems so unnecessary and so opposite of what has worked, that the group is being used as a scapegoat by none other than Muammar Qaddafi. The apparent absurdity of Al Qaeda's violent strategy for transformation of the Middle East is emphasized all the more by Qaddafi's outlandish claims that AQ members have been distributing mind-twisting hallucinogenic drugs to motivate his otherwise adoring subjects.

The bottom line: Al Qaeda has played virtually no part in the democratic uprisings reshaping the region. Furthermore, it appears, at this point, that any attempt by Al Qaeda to hi-jack the movements underway will only antagonize populations...

Continue reading "AQ organizationally stronger but strategically/motivationally anemic?" »