A Couple Goodies from the NYT

Here are two articles which say things I have been worrying about–and thinking on–for a while:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/world/africa/10terror.html?th&emc=th

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/10/world/middleeast/10kurds.html?th&emc=th

The Crisis Within the al-Qa’ida Movement

Here is a thought I had today regarding the current state of al-Qa’ida:

AQ currently faces a problem with a disjuncture between its global strategy and its operational tactics.

First, strategically the AQ movement is best classified as “militant Salafist” or “Qutbist” but operationally it is best described as Takfiri, due to the inability of groups aligned with AQ to achieve their local objectives without killing other Muslims.  (Here is where Kilcullen wrongly describes the AQ social movement as Takfiri in nature)

Secondly, the strategic goals of AQ are concrete, with clear goals and objectives (Weaken/attack the US, build emirates, unite emirates under a new Caliphate).  However, operationally these goals and objectives can not be achieved because AQ’s actions/ideology turn away the population (or ummah) it is trying to influence.

Because of these problems, AQ franchises and their members may believe they are working to restore the Caliphate, but what they actually are doing is working to create “grey areas” where the state and administration doesn’t exist.  Some Qutbist strategists say that this is the point where AQ has to show local populations that it can provide/protect their security and well-being (See Naji).  But, the road to get to this point will have made any chance of winning the “hearts and minds” of the larger population virtually impossible.

This has been said before, but maybe not in the same way.  Any thoughts would be great.

Safe Havens and U.S. Foreign Policy

As I think about it more, another answer to Exum’s question which I could endorse is: yes, we are willing to intervene in the physical safe havens which directly affect US security, because the scale will not be as grand as Exum implies. Do the refugee camps in Lebanon directly affect our national security? Where else, beyond the HOA, can we legitimately see a safe haven on the scale of Afghanistan creeping up? Any failed/failing state? I understand there are already numerous potential and current safe havens around the globe, but to claim they will develop to the level of the threat of Afghanistan is possibly a stretch (and possibly not).

No, we will never be able to eliminate safe havens, but the US government must act to protect our security wherever it is legitimately threatened. Will we intervene against a new safe haven if one creeps up? It depends. It will take prudent calculations on the level and nature of the threat. We must not try to rid the world of safe havens, but we also have a responsibility to protect our country’s citizens. So all I did was contradict myself, and not really answer Exum’s question, but this is the only way I can think of answering it.

Exum’s Overlooked Point

An interesting point made by Andrew Exum in his latest piece in TNR.

The emphasis on destroying “safe havens” also establishes a tricky rationale for our presence in Afghanistan. Even if we succeed in spreading effective governance to southern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, are we then prepared to go to wherever the transnational terror groups relocate? Are we prepared to clear out the Palestinian refugee camps of Lebanon? Or provide governance to the Horn of Africa? The new Obama plan is a dangerous precedent. If the reason we are staying in Afghanistan is to deny al-Qaeda the use of safe havens, where are we going next?

I think Exum raises a great point here concerning the scale of the problem, which is something that we seem to overlook when we examine Afghanistan, and combating safe havens in general.  Here the question of scale does remind me of Hans Morgenthau, who warned of a foreign policy driven by morality and “humanitarianism” because the scale was too grand, and the United States (or whoever) would stand to look like a hypocrite by championing morality in some circumstances, and then ignoring others.

I think the answer to Exum’s questions is simply, no, we are not prepared to intervene in all those places, but should we be?  Committing ourselves to Afghanistan does not mean we subscribe to a mission of putting an “end” to international terrorist safe-havens.  This would be impossible, and would be similar to a fighting a “war to end all wars” or bringing an “end to poverty.”  These types of crusades end poorly.  Afghanistan is however a campaign we are actively involved in.  As my good friend Chris Mewett points out, leaving Afghanistan now “would be a perfect public diplomacy storm of military failure, sacrificed international goodwill, and eroded American credibility.”  The US does not face these drawbacks if, for instance, it decides to not invade Somalia if al-Qa’ida’s core would move from Af-Pak to Somalia (which I doubt would happen anyway).  This then implies that we are fighting in Afghanistan not to exterminate a terrorist safe haven, but to restore some of the United States’ credibility  and garner international goodwill.   However, after the previous 7-8 years, isn’t this something worth fighting for?

Have a Qur’an and a Smile

I haven’t posted on here in a while… This is a post I wrote in June of 2008 but I never finished/published.  Since I won’t be posting anything soon, I figured I would just put this on here…

While I had initially intended this blog to be more “journalistic” in nature, I feel like I am being compelled to write more in an “op-ed” type manner. While I want to distance myself from being a ranter, there are a number of things which I have thought about and said, “now that’s a good blog topic!” So here goes it:

After perusing many other blogs, newspaper sites, and talking with many individuals I have grown weary with how often individuals tend to oversimplify the reasons behind Islamic radicalism, or as Olivier Roy puts it, neo-fundamentalism. While I understand this tendency to oversimplify the complex is not solely homogeneous to this topic, I find it to be disturbing how pervasive it is for people to resort to saying “those damn crazies with their Islam!” Others echo the views of Michael Scheuer that the US can only blame itself for its foreign policies in the Middle East, and its “one-sided” alliance with Israel. Even the higher ups in our government are making the mistake. While attending the El Paso Border Security Conference this past week, Ralph Basham, Commissioner of the US Customs and Border Protection repeatedly spoke of the threat of “Islamic terrorists” which he actually said are “everywhere.” Another former General talked about the “inevitability” of “Islamic radicals” utilizing IEDs on the homeland. Massachusetts Governor and former GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney equated Sunnis, Shiites, Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood at a debate when asked about the threat of terrorism to the United States.

If we are going to attempt to effectively combat a threat, we must not mischaracterize and misunderstand it. We must not group every single “terrorist” in to a single group of “whackos” or “reactionaries.” Grouping Salafist and non-Salafist groups together is both irresponsible and dangerous. The motivations for an individual to join a terrorist group, follow a Radical cleric, become a suicide bomber, or join any type of anti-globalist group are numerous. As any good police officer would tell you, it is often times a combination of many factors which drives someone to turn to crime or violence, why would a terrorist be any different? That same officer would likely agree that a criminal who commits his or her crimes in order to feed their family must be dealt with differently than a criminal who is driven to crime out of an ideology. But still in the eyes of many, the man shooting on the streets of Baghdad is no different than a Palestinian suicide bomber, or a Saudi Wahhabi flying in to the Pentagon.

Fawaz Gerges Deciphers the Sageman-Hoffman Debate

Fawaz Gerges, author of Journey of the Jihadist, lends some good analysis of the Sageman-Hoffman debate:

What is missing from the Sageman-Hoffman debate is clarity about the most practical level of analysis. The real question is not whether al Qa’eda Central is dangerous, but the extent and degree of its threat to American national security and the international order. This analytical and conceptual confusion muddies the waters and obscures the need to clearly delineate the nature of the threat.

Al Qa’eda possesses neither non-conventional weapons nor armed divisions; rather, roving bands and suicide bombers in the valleys and mountains of the Afghan-Pakistan tribal frontier. Seven years on, al Qa’eda has not delivered on its repeated threats to strike inside the United States. Bin Laden succeeded on September 11, and he may succeed again. But this reality, frightening as it is, must not blind us to the self-limiting nature of the al Qa’eda menace.

Despite their disagreement on the significance of al Qa’eda’s leadership, Sageman and Hoffman – and their respective camps – agree that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has intensified anti-American sentiment and bolstered both al Qa’eda and its affiliates by supplying ideological motivation and ammunition to militants. It is a conclusion that the next American president would ignore at his peril.

Getting Terrorism Right Part 1: The Threat of Al-Qaeda Central

Earlier this year a debate between two of the world’s top counterterrorism specialists played out on the website for Foreign Affairs magazine. The two combating analysts argued over the reality and scope of the threat of al-Qaeda, and more principally, al-Qaeda’s core group (bin Laden, al-Zawahiri, etc.). The first expert is Bruce Hoffman, current Georgetown professor and author of Inside Terrorism, a seminal piece of terrorism literature. Hoffman warns of an al-Qaeda core group gaining in strength, and increasing its ability to coordinate terrorist activities from its safe-haven along the lawless Afghanistan-Pakistan border (Waziristan). Marc Sageman, a former CIA case officer and author of Understanding Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad, contends that the threat from al-Qaeda has evolved over time. According to Sageman:

Threat: Real or Perceived?

Al-Qaeda Central is of course not dead, but it is still contained operationally…. The surviving leaders of al-Qaeda are undoubtedly still plotting to do harm to various countries in the world and have the expertise to do so, but they are hampered by the global security measures that have been put in place.

The real threat to Sageman is encapsulated in his new work Leaderless Jihad, where he lays out his bottom-up terrorism thesis, that the actual threat of al-Qadea comes from home-grown self-organizing groups of individuals who are motivated by, but not trained/organized/directed by al-Qaeda’s core group.

I am more of a follower of Sageman than Hoffman, as I view the fairly recent Madrid and London bombings along with the foiled transatlantic plot as correlating more closely with Dr. Sageman’s work. However, I view the most significant threat of al-Qaeda as something touched on by Peter Bergen, not Sageman himself. Sageman is correct that the threat of al-Qaeda Central is real, but he does not lay out the reality of that threat or how it actually relates to his Leaderless Jihad theory. The true threat of al-Qaeda Central does not lie in their ability to mastermind, plan, coordinate, and implement a 9/11-style attack, but rather as a point-of-contact, facilitator, and motivator for Sageman’s radicalized networks which seek assistance in their self-organized attack plans. As Bergen points out, Sageman’s radicalized networks become truly lethal if they are able to make contact with al-Qaeda central in Pakistan. While the abilities of al-Qaeda’s core group have undoubtedly been scaled back, they still play a vital role in the al-Qaeda network. Al-Qaeda is not a centralized and hierarchical type organization, and it is wrong to analyze it as one.

The threat of al-Qaeda as a whole—not just the core group—differs from the debate between Sageman and Hoffman. In addition to Bergen’s piece, Oliver Roy, a scholar on political Islam and the Middle East, lays out a more nuanced assessment of al-Qaeda as a whole in his latest book, The Politics of Chaos in the Middle East. In the interest of keeping this post short of novel-like length I won’t synopsize Roy’s work here, but I will be more than willing to give my two cents in a later post.

This post is a part of three-part series aimed at examining the true threat of terrorism and how often it is mischaracterized and misunderstood.