Thoughts on Yemen

The Relationship Between Radicalization and Terrorism

Wed, 08 May 2013 23:44:13 -0400

Given the interest in determining why the Boston bombers carried out their attacks, it is unsurprising that radicalization has become a hot topic of late. Take two young men who have lived in the United States for the better part of a decade who then decide to carry out a bombing against unsuspecting civilians – of course questions are going to arise as to how and why such a thing could happen.

In light of this circumstance, it’s also understandable why journalists would turn to someone like Dr. John Horgan to explain the relationship between radicalization and terrorism. What’s perhaps a bit more surprising is that Rolling Stone would be the one to publish an article called “Everything You’ve Been Told About Radicalization Is Wrong.” While the title is a bit misleading compared to the content, Horgan does make a strong statement in the piece, arguing that “The idea that radicalization causes terrorism is perhaps the greatest myth alive today in terrorism research.”

This assertion drew a bit of feedback from, among others, Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, who wrote a retort for al-Wasat called “Radicalization and Political Violence.” In his piece, Gartenstein-Ross argues that Horgan doesn’t provide the empirical evidence necessary to back up this claim.

The discussion between Horgan and Gartenstein-Ross touched off a cascade effect of input and analysis, including a post from J.M. Berger called “Myths of Radicalization.” I half-jokingly tweeted Berger saying that he wrote the blog post I intended to. As you can tell by reading this, that didn’t quite turn out to be true, although it did change the nature of my post a bit.

Before I go any further, I want to point out that I respect the work of all three of these men. I have written often about the role Horgan’s work on de-radicalization and disengagement had on my MA dissertation on Yemen’s de-radicalization program, and I positively reviewed books by both Gartenstein-Ross and Berger. I also happen to think that this is a needed discussion, partially because it helps elaborate on the way people mean different things while using the same language. It’s quite easy to talk past one another, as the Australian Department of Defence’s lengthy document on Countering Violent Extremism makes clear.

Consider Horgan’s statement: “The idea that radicalization causes terrorism is perhaps the greatest myth alive today in terrorism research.” Gartenstein-Ross takes this to mean that radicalization doesn’t lead to terrorism, and disputes the logic under that understanding. I wonder if a clearer meaning might be the way Berger put it in his first myth about radicalization, which is that radicalization leads to terrorism. “But there are hundreds of thousands to millions of people in the world who are radicalized, and only a handful take up violence,” he writes. “So the road of radicalization by no means leads invariably to terrorism.”

It is the word invariably here that may be the most important. To say that it is a myth that radicalization causes terrorism, by my reading, is not the same thing as saying radicalization never leads to terrorism. Rather, the point is that the causal link between the two is overstated and misunderstood. Thus, one could argue like Horgan does that radicalization’s role in terrorism research is misplaced without arriving at the conclusion that Gartenstein-Ross proposes, that the myth means radicalization never leads to terrorism.

The problem here is how we think about radicalization. Radicalization means many things to many people. I’ve found the Youth Justice Board of England and Wales’ document “Preventing Religious Radicalisation and Violent Extremism: A Systematic Review of the Research” helpful because it presents several models of how radicalization works, including the NYPD one discussed in the Rolling Stone piece. (On that subject, I think the way the FBI presents its version of the radicalization process to be slightly better than the NYPD’s, though the two are similar.) The short takeaway from these various models is that radicalization is a process; it involves several steps that are not clearly separated; it is not pre-ordained to go from start to end (in fact, the vast majority do not); and a number of internal and external factors come into play. It’s also clear that models are only useful so far, and cannot be applied universally.

Bad policy arises from assuming that radicalization inevitably leads to terrorism. Incorrect public opinion and media narrative focused heavily on the subject don’t help either. It’s possible that having more academic work studying radicalization separate from terrorism would be helpful for contextualizing the relationship between the two. Having clear definitions spelled out in the academic work that discusses it would undoubtedly be beneficial. I was annoyed by this constant focus on definitions when I first seriously delved into the academic world, but it’s become apparent to me that you can’t assume that concepts are self-explanatory. For example, radicalization defined as believing violence is an appropriate way to further a political or religious cause is different from radicalization defined as believing in violent, offensive jihad. Moreover, believing that something is appropriate is yet different from acting on it – and it is through action that (at least in the US) one can step over the line from free speech to criminal activity.

Gartenstein-Ross raises some valuable points in his piece. Among them is the view that terrorist motivations are multifaceted, and can include borderline understanding of Islamist concepts. There is a lack of nuance in this area of study, with one side essentially arguing that Islam necessarily leads to terrorism (it doesn’t) and the other arguing, as this piece does, that because many terrorists do not have a good understanding of Islam the role of Islamism should be left out of the discussion completely (it shouldn’t, although it shouldn’t be limited to Islamism either). Going back to the Boston bombers, if the two brothers intermixed shallow religious and political beliefs to derive their motivation, it’s still important to try to understand how that worked.

Why is all of this important? For one, it matters how it drives our use of resources. David Petraeus rather famously stated that we can’t kill our way to victory, which (while not speaking of terrorism per se) highlights the need for “softer” approaches to terrorism. But there’s the rub: is counter-radicalization the same as counter-terrorism? More specifically, will counter-radicalization lead to less terrorism? To the first question, the answer is no; to the second, it’s hard to show that the answer is yes. So many counter-radicalization programs are vague and lack measureable goals that its impossible to gauge their effectiveness, even before getting into questions of free speech and inadvertent alienation of target audiences. What, then, is the best approach to stopping terrorism; is it focusing on radicalization?

Even if we are looking primarily at terrorist motivation, it’s worth separating assumptions about radicalization from data. For example, Horgan mentioned to me recently that in the research he’s performing common trends appear to indicate that many people join terrorist groups based on personal relationships and only adopt radical beliefs after joining, and that radical beliefs tend to be more common among lower-tier members than among leaders. The second point is anecdotally seen in Ken Ballen’s book Terrorists in Love. As Gartenstein-Ross points out, this doesn’t negate the relationship between radicalization and terrorism, but it does make us think about it differently. It will be interesting to see how Horgan lays out this data in more detail.

These trends should also call into question the things we look for to prevent terrorism as well as how to respond to it. As the Soufan Group pointed out, “attacks like the Boston bombing are nearly unpreventable.” The FBI and other agencies have limitations on how they carry out investigations (as well they should), and none can peer into the soul of a potential terrorist. Other pre-attack factors may be more important for stopping terrorist attacks. And understanding that it’s not possible to stop all terrorist attacks should make us think more about building resiliency, not only in physical systems but in societal views.

Assumptions and opinions about terrorism are a dime a dozen, and the debate about radicalization’s role is far from over. If Horgan is correct in arguing that de-radicalization – changing people’s beliefs – is less important than disengagement – getting people to leave terrorism behind, even if their beliefs do not change – then it stands to reason understanding engagement with terrorist activity and groups may be more important than showing how radical beliefs lead to terrorism. The two are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they mutually inclusive. Well, at least depending on how you define radicalization.

How to Respond to Online Radicalization

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 18:30:00 -0400

A couple of weeks ago, as I was pondering the role the public plays in countering online radicalization, I thought I would open the discussion up to Twitter. After all, if radicalization to violence can occur online, shouldn’t the Internet be a natural place to look for answers on how to counter it?

As it turns out, my question got a fabulous response from Dr. John Horgan, Director of the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State University, and Humera Khan, Executive Director of Muflehun. Especially since Khan took her tweets down in order to maintain a none-too-heavy Twitter presence, I thought it would be worthwhile to share a synopsis of the conversation.

Both participants were responding to the generic questions, “How should people respond if they think they know someone being recruited or self-radicalizing into violent extremism? What is John Q. Public’s appropriate response if he thinks someone is radicalizing?” What I wanted to get at was what the individual’s role is alongside government or community efforts.

Dr. John Horgan’s response:

Some general ideas:
Reduce opportunity.
Fill the gap.
Redirect.
Don’t de-legitimize emotions.
Make available alternative channels for expression.

Given a hypothetical uncle concerned that his 16 year-old nephew is visiting radical websites online:

Try to determine, what answers is the nephew looking for?
Are those answers something he can’t find elsewhere?
Engage with the nephew.
There are multiple stakeholders at multiple levels, each of which can play a critical role.
You have to address the Internet behavior. Is the nephew: Searching for specific answers? Being groomed/recruited by someone else? Bored? Showing emotional avoidance?

Research on community CVE may offer some insights as to how individuals should respond. Responses are all very context-specific.

Humera Khan’s response:

There are different approaches depending on where the potential radical is located, what type of radicalization we are talking about [e.g., I presume, Islamist vs. white nationalist, etc.], and how far along the person is in the radicalization process.
Given a hypothetical uncle concerned that his 16 year-old nephew is visiting radical websites online:
Response depends on how involved the uncle wants to be as well as his relationship with the nephew
Some general suggestions for parents/family members/friends/concerned individuals include the following:

1. Do not ignore the situation. [This was emphasized quite strongly.]

2. Move some of the conversations from the online forum to the living room.

You have to have rapport with the person to have any conversation.
Telling a 16 year-old not to go online or not to visit a specific website will backfire.
Engage softly; head-on confrontation with a teenager is not going to work well.
The person engaging needs to control his anger/temper/emotions when engaging.
Honesty is necessary, no matter how taboo an issue is that comes up. Youth are not stupid.
Don’t pretend to know answers if you don’t know.

3. Get help as needed (i.e., from imams, parents, mentors, youth directors, counselors).

Countering radicalization is not an overnight process so don’t try to rush it.
The teenage years can be very angst-filled. Consider what other things are going on in the teen’s life.
What alternatives exist to divert the teen’s attentions, such as youth group, sports, etc.?

4. After determining other factors in the teen’s life, apply steps 1 through 3 to those as well, and not just the immediate issue of radicalization.

5. The theoretical age of 16 is young for action, but if involvement is more than just talk then different responses are required.

Look at who the teen’s friends are and what other things he’s doing.
If he is in the U.S. and is planning on acting alone, then guns are the easiest means to access to commit violence.
Does the teen have friends or groups that he hangs out with? What is happening in those groups?
Clichés like “it takes a village” are actually on point.
Is the teen trying to acquire weapons or other methods of hurting people? Is he making travel arrangements?
Is he trying to save large amounts of money, or receiving money from unknown sources?

6. If it seems like the teen is involved in more than just rhetoric, then law enforcement involvement is essential.

It’s not just a matter of telling the FBI, but making sure other appropriate adults are involved in the process as well.
Some communities, imams, schools, etc. have good law enforcement liaisons that can be used.
In some places, law enforcement will monitor the teen but allow the community to continue engagement with him.
Remember that the process is not accomplished overnight, and that containing/preventative actions need to be repeated over and over.
Work to bring the teen back from the edge of action, which means identifying alternative ways to let off steam are necessary. The people who are engaging can’t withdraw when the going gets tough.

7. Parents, mentors, good friends, and positive role models are necessary for a strong social support network on an ongoing basis.

8. In a nutshell, engage, empathy, redirect, support.

Thoughts on "The Next Wave"

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 19:01:00 -0500

Sometimes the library doesn’t have the book(s) I am looking for, so I end up checking out another tangentially-related work in the hopes of learning something new. I don’t mean this as a slight, it’s simply the explanation for how I came across Catherine Herridge’s book The Next Wave: On the Hunt for Al Qaeda’s American Recruits. I didn’t look at the author’s bio – it turns out she’s a reporter for Fox News, which is neither a plus nor a minus for me because I don’t watch news television – but I thought the premise sounded like a good follow-up to J.M. Berger’s book Jihad Joe, which I recently reviewed. Unfortunately for Herridge, reading The Next Wave so closely after Jihad Joe left her book coming up short.

Herridge tries to tell the story of al-Qaeda’s growing reliance on American recruits largely through connections to three stories: Nidal Hasan’s shooting at Ft. Hood in 2009, Carlos Bledsoe’s attack on the military recruiting office in Little Rock a few months before that, and Faisal Shahzad’s attempted bombing of Times Square in 2010. (It’s fairly clear from reading the book that it was largely written prior to 2011, the year it was published, although it does include some off-hand references to 2011 incidents like bin Laden’s killing.) A few other people and plots do appear, including brief descriptions of Omar Hammami, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Najibullah Zazi, Colleen LaRose and Zachary Chesser.

The thread holding it all together, though, is Anwar al-Awlaki, who is apparently described in later versions of the book at “Al Qaeda 2.0’s leader.”* From Herridge’s telling, Awlaki might be responsible, in one way or another, for nearly every terrorist plot involving Americans to any degree for at least the past five years. He is an internet radicalizer and recruiter par excellence, and is (at the time of writing) a dire threat to the United States.

Awlaki is certainly something of a lighting rod in the counter-terrorism community. Herridge repeatedly mentions government officials clamming up at the sound of Awlaki’s name, and describes the (ultimately unsuccessful) struggle she went through to obtain Awlaki’s mug shots from his prostitution arrests. (One was later leaked by the FBI, but not, she points out, not to Fox News.) By reading this book, one would suspect that Awlaki headed up al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (that would be Nasir al-Wuhayshi) and that his participation was essential for AQAP to persist (a theory disproven by the past 15 months).

Herridge’s writing is rife with speculation about Awlaki, particularly related to the arrest warrant against him that was vacated the same day Awlaki returned to the United States from Yemen. Herridge eventually lays out why she thinks that happened: “Neither the FBI nor my law enforcement contacts ever challenged our conclusion that the Bureau was trying to cultivate al-Awlaki as a human intelligence asset. Or at the very least, the Bureau wanted to track the cleric after he entered the country” (p. 216). In the paperback version, Herridge apparently doubles down on this concept, writing “a confidential source said [to Herridge], ‘The question is not whether the FBI was running al-Awlaki. The question is how many were running the cleric.’”** Despite the 9/11 Commission’s reluctance to identify Awlaki as a key player in the September 11th attacks, the circumstantial evidence in Herridge’s book leads the author to conclude that Awlaki was essentially the ringleader of al-Qaeda’s pre-9/11 American cell. (As an aside, Berger has engaged with Herridge’s reporting recently on the level of connection between Awlaki and the 9/11 hijackers.)

At times its difficult to tell whether this is a book about al-Qaeda recruitment in the U.S. or about Awlaki’s life and nefarious actions. There are some very interesting parts to the book, however, often appearing as tidbits of interviews with intelligence professionals. For example, former National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) director Michael Leiter is quoted as saying “We are a resilient country, and small attacks like that [Fort Hood, the failed bombings of Christmas Day and Times Square] don’t threaten us, and the only way we can actually threaten our society is to overreact and give terrorists a victory that they otherwise wouldn’t have” (p. 111, bracketed portion in the original). It’s a valid point, and one that’s too easily missed in media-hyped stories about terrorism.

Similarly insightful is a quote from pseudonymous NCTC analyst “Victoria,” who expressed displeasure with the oft-used phrase “connecting the dots” as it pertains to intelligence analysis. “As a culture, she said, we were too reactive and too busy playing catchup. ‘The really crucial thing for our organization is trying to get ahead of these trends, Victoria said [.…] It’s thinking ahead and it’s trying to understand the terrorists from their perspective, not just ours’” (p. 114). Importantly, this includes bringing in people who intimately know the subjects they are analyzing, including indigenous speakers and former criminals.

Another pseudonymous analyst pointed out that “The Internet is an inanimate object. The Internet can’t make people do things” (p. 116), which is a careful when thinking about the role of the Internet in radicalization. While others quoted in Herridge’s book rightly emphasize the role recruiters play in bringing potential extremists into the fold – a point summed up by Clint Watts as “the best recruiter of a foreign fighter is a former foreign fighter – not the Internet” – former CIA director Michael Hayden offered some valuable insight. In addition to pointing out that attacks like Mumbai are “really frightening to us” because they are not very complex and fairly easily carried out by terrorists with a low level of training, Hayden also noted that pre-9/11 notions of radicalization and terrorist recruitment may be changing. “The most important element in any recruitment was personal contact, and while the Web may have been useful, fundamentally it was the personal contact,” he said. “It’s the mentoring thing. I don’t know if that was true then but it seems to be less so now as some people, Hasan for example, seem to have just done it purely with the Internet” (p. 187).

Herridge’s own writing is not quite so simple to follow. It is an easy read, but the lack of chronological consistency or a clear thematic outline means that the book wanders at times and gets ahead of itself at points. For example, an entire chapter is devoted to the trials of Guantanamo prisoners. While raising some valid questions about the process, including statements by President Obama and Attorney General Holder that seem to suggest that guilty verdicts are all-but-guaranteed for Gitmo’s detainees, the relevance of this section to the overall thesis of al-Qaeda recruitment of Americans is unclear. A careful reader might similarly point out that Abdulmutallab is not American, even if he was allegedly inspired by and potentially trained by Awlaki, and Shahzad was a product of the Taliban’s tutelage, not al-Qaeda’s.

While questions certainly remain about Awlaki’s treatment by the government, including why his arrest warrant was pulled and what specific evidence led to his inclusion on the drone strike list, some of Herridge’s subtle suggestions about how to counter such radicals are a bit troubling. “[T]he enemy was also using the very freedoms we were fighting to protect against us,” Herridge writes in her concluding chapter, referencing protections under the law for all Americans, even suspected terrorists. Perhaps more telling is a quote from cyber security professional Dale Meyerrose, which Herridge includes without criticism:

Meyerrose, who had held some of the toughest technology and intelligence jobs, predicted a change in our thinking. We had to stop throwing up roadblocks that prevented us from looking at our own people. “In some cases, I’m not saying this for overemphasis, in some cases we’re protecting people from an eighteenth-century mind-set in the twenty-first century. And the eighteenth-century mind-set is that we don’t want our military or intelligence community to have any role in domestic affairs” (p. 194).

Dana Priest and William Arkin point out in their book Top Secret America just how much the military, intelligence, and law enforcement communities are doing to protect America, including their role in domestic affairs, as well as some of the technological and privacy challenges the approach raises. It might have been instructive to include a similar analysis in this book.

Despite Herridge’s attempts to frighten, anger, or otherwise coerce the reader into agreeing that the threat of radicalized Americans is severe and that, ostensibly, we should determine that it’s time to “throw away the key” (p. 227) for Gitmo detainees and other terrorists alike, the book fails to convince. In some ways, it is unfortunate that Herridge’s book does not more fully address its declared subject, because she does have some good points sprinkled throughout the book. She clearly cares about the topic, and her passion for protecting Americans from terrorism is apparent from her personal comments throughout the book. The sample size from which she draws her conclusions is too small to be representative, however, as is clearly apparent by comparing The Next Wave’s essentially 5-year view of radical American participation in violent extremism to Jihad Joe’s more than 30-year perspective. Americans have participated in violent jihad at least since the Soviet war in Afghanistan, and this fact could have been explored more in Herridge’s book. Given that the two books were published within a month of one another, the information was apparently available, even though Herridge is focused on the more narrow topic of al-Qaeda recruitment.

Moreover, while homegrown terrorists remain a threat, the danger is not quite as dire as Herridge presents it. Data collected by Charles Kurzman suggests that “Muslim-American terrorism” has essentially plateaued throughout the past decade. One of NCTC’s analyst rightly points out to Herridge that al-Qaeda should be kept in the proper perspective when compared to dangers like countries who are legitimate enemies of the US. Finally, while I think it’s fair to suggest that some terrorists are truly evil, a concept Herridge clearly embraces, I don’t think the appropriate answer is to strip away Constitutional rights or federal protections separating the military, intelligence, and law enforcement. Understanding the threat doesn’t mean undercutting the system that makes the US the country that it is.

Herridge makes a valiant attempt at writing a great book on an important topic, and had I read it a month ago I might have appreciated it more. Jihad Joe is simply the better take on the subject.

——-

* I say apparently because this description showed up in a Google Books search when I was trying to find a particular quote. The page referenced – ix. – does not appear in my version.

**Ditto to the above, p. xv.

Thoughts on "The Last Refuge"

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 21:56:00 -0500

Gregory Johnsen’s The Last Refuge: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia is a one-of-a-kind take on the rise, fall, and resurrection of al-Qaeda in Yemen. Richly detailed, it provides more than just a sequential list of attacks and their perpetrators. Instead, it’s a compelling narrative of al-Qaeda’s development and practice, including the group’s non-violent side. No matter how much you know about al-Qaeda or Yemen, you will no doubt learn something new in the pages of this book.

Johnsen is not content to tell just the story of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the post-2009 amalgam of Yemeni and Saudi al-Qaeda members that is the most dangerous terrorist threat facing the United States today. Rather, Johnsen takes the reader back to the beginning, telling the story not only of jihad in Afghanistan and the roles Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden played in that conflict, but also relaying relevant stories from Mohammad’s life in appropriate places. In this way, Johnsen’s obvious knowledge of the Middle East in general and Yemen in particular clearly shows through.

The story is not just about al-Qaeda but also about modern Yemen – the complex, at times nearly incomprehensible to outsiders, deeply complicated country that has been at times a key ally and at others a main threat in the war on terrorism. What sometimes might seems like deviations from the main thrust of the book nearly always return to violent jihad’s role in Yemeni society. To understand the role of jihadists in Yemen’s government, for example, one must know about former Yemeni President Saleh’s use of jihadists in the 1994 Yemeni civil war. That, in turn, takes one back further into the history of Saleh’s precipitous 30-year-plus rule, Yemen’s former division, Cold War politics, and Saudi and Egyptian battles for power in Yemen.

The interwoven tale of Yemen and jihad is told in fine detail, though at times I wondered if the author assumed too much about his readers’ knowledge of Yemen. The complex array of family names and tribal affiliations can confuse even those with a familiarity of the country, and I can’t imagine trying to untangle the web without previous study. I found myself wanting not only the list of key players found at the end of the book, but an organizational diagram showing their relationships to one another as well. Those who have studied Yemen will notice how Johnsen subtly slips in references to overused phrases about the embattled country, such as Saleh’s description of governing as “dancing on the heads of snakes,” the high number of guns per capita, and bin Laden’s “ancestral home” in Hadramawt.

Other reviews have rightly pointed out that Johnsen is a masterful writer. Johnsen’s fondness for literature, which he frequently mentions on Twitter, has clearly influenced his ability to tell a good story. Indeed, at times it seems like you are reading a novel, particularly in Johnsen’s descriptions of some of the major players and regions. Barbara Bodine is not merely a former ambassador to Yemen, for example; she’s a “trim, no-nonsense career diplomat from Missouri” whose “unveiled, angular good looks came as a shock to many in the conservative country” (pp. 59-60). I doubt Yemenis would appreciate as much Johnsen’s colorful descriptions of some areas of their country, including his portrayal of Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, looking “more like a garbage dump” than Mohammad’s “paradise of earthly paradises.”

The only problem with this seamless narrative is that when the reader has a question or a quibble about some aspect of the text, it’s difficult to know from where the information came. There are no footnotes in the book, except for an occasional explanatory aside. I did find, to my surprise, that there are endnote references; there’s no indication of that fact in the body of the text. Because these notes are based on phrases from the book rather than in-text notations, narrowing down sources for particular statements is not as easy as in, say, J.M. Berger’s book Jihad Joe, which I recently reviewed.

Most of the time, this lack of notated source material is not a significant issue. For example, most accounts that I have seen of Abdullah Azzam’s assassination included sly references to Osama bin Laden’s potential implication in the bombing. In Johnsen’s telling, bin Laden was surprised by Azzam’s death (p. 17). At times when reading, I simply wanted to know more about the story, such as when Johnsen recounts conversations between al-Qaeda operatives in prison. In others, it seemed like it would have been worthwhile to more clearly substantiate assertions, such as alleged mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo. When there’s a question, it’s nice to be able to quickly and easily source a contention.

The chapter I was most looking forward to reading was chapter 10, the story of Yemen’s de-radicalization program. (This was also the subject of my master’s dissertation.) True to form, Johnsen brought new insights to the story, though to quote John Horgan in reference to a chapter in Berger’s book, Johnsen’s telling was tantalizingly short. I found myself most drawn in by the story of AQAP proper’s formative years, first in prisons and then immediately out of them. Fresh details of al-Wuhayshi’s relationship to bin Laden and the detainees’ machinations to resurrect al Qaeda in Yemen both fleshed out my understanding of the organization and reinforced its pedigree. I was reminded again of how young so many of the important players are. Perhaps most important was Johnsen’s focus on Osama bin Laden’s emphasis on centralization of decision and decentralization of execution. AQAP has finessed this approach to create a dangerous and compartmentalized threat in Yemen. Bin Laden’s leadership philosophy may be too often overlooked both by those who asserted that bin Laden was completely removed from the game prior to his death and those who argued for (one time) total control by al Qaeda Central.

As other reviewers have pointed out, the books is a bit like a train taking off, carefully picking its way through the story at the beginning and hurtling at breakneck speed by the end. The problem with political science, my undergraduate history advisor told me, is that by the time you have figured out what is going on, the situation has changed. Johnsen faces a similar problem in trying to recount the most recent developments in Yemen. The final pages on AQAP and Ansar al-Shariah, while all pertinent, felt at times like a mad rush to assemble all the relevant material in an ever-evolving situation and to capture it in print before things changed once again. (And, perhaps, before the manuscript’s deadline arrived.) Partially because I did not realize there were any endnotes padding out the last pages of the book, I was taken by surprise by the rather abrupt end.

Lest I seem uncharitable, Johnsen surely faced a difficult task compiling the necessary information in an appropriate timeframe. Particularly as a non-Arabic speaker, I am indebted to him for his comprehensive history of the subject. This book is certainly a must-read on Yemen and AQAP, and I expect to read it more than once. Somewhat like Victoria Clark’s book Yemen: Dancing on the Heads of Snakes, the first reading set the framework for understanding, and subsequent readings will fill out extra or overlooked detail. Both in quality of writing and depth of detail, Johnsen’s book is better than Clark’s, falling somewhere on the scale of complexity between Clark and Paul Dresch’s A History of Modern Yemen. Much to Bruce Hoffman’s dismay, Johnsen’s PhD thesis is on the 1962-1970 Yemeni civil war, so I doubt we will see a scholarly work or popular book equal to The Last Refuge any time in the near future.

Thoughts on "Jihad Joe"

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 13:06:00 -0500

I received a handful of books for Christmas, among them Gregory Johnsen’s The Last Refuge and J.M. Berger’s Jihad Joe: Americans Who Go to War in the Name of Islam. I decided to read Berger’s book first because I knew it was written earlier than Johnsen’s, and I was particularly interested to see how Berger’s and Johnsen’s portrayals of Anwar al-Awlaki compared and contrasted. I should probably note that I didn’t come to either of these books completely unbiased, as I have interacted with both of the authors on Twitter.

Jihad Joe holds a unique position in books on radicalization, at least that I have seen. On one end of the spectrum are biographies, profiles, and case studies of individuals or small groups of people who have become radicalized. These books tend to be very detailed accounts of how one or more persons became radicalized, and how they acted after radicalization – sometimes including how they left a radical mindset or group. Somewhat representative of books in this vein are Daveed Gartenstein-Ross’s My Year Inside Radical Islam and Ken Ballen’s Terrorists in Love, both of which I’ve written about before. From a disengagement perspective, you could also include John Horgan’s Walking Away from Terrorism.

On the other end of the spectrum are the theory-laden books on radicalization, like Tore Bjorgo and John Horgan’s anthology Leaving Terrorism Behind. These books offer the big picture on radicalization and de-radicalization without digging too far into individual stories. Both ends of spectrum offer valuable insights into the process and scope of radicalization. In the middle, there’s Jihad Joe, which surveys a vast range of Americans who chose to pursue a violent version of jihad, offering yet another perspective on the subject.

And on that subject, Berger was precise in his definitions. Unlike some government documents or academic treatises, Jihad Joe was not full of technical jargon, acronyms, or obscure theoretical terminology. Instead, Berger set out at the beginning to be clear exactly what he was – and was not – talking about. For example, Berger writes:

A key term in this book is “jihadist.” Generally, anyone characterized as a jihadist will fit into one of the following categories:

Someone who travels abroad to fight in a foreign conflict specifically in the name of Islam.

Someone who takes part in terrorist activities that are explicitly defined by the participants as a form of military jihad or that are explicitly motivated by jihadist ideology.

Someone who actively finances, supports, advocates, or provides religious justification for explicit military jihad as described previously. (p. x)

Berger also lays out useful definitions for terrorism, jihad, radicals, jihadist incitement, etc. While acknowledging that the definitions will have their critics, as any definitions on these subjects do, they do help frame the book to understand Berger’s points properly. Moreover, Jihad Joe was (mostly) neutral in its descriptions of American jihadists. A note of derision can be detected when describing some of the most incompetent jihadists, though in some cases their mistakes a truly laughable. Though not quoted directly in Jihad Joe, I was reminded of the 9/11 Commission Report’s note on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, when one of the participants was apprehended after trying to recoup the rental cost of the vehicle used in the bombing:

[A]lthough the bombing heightened awareness of a new terrorist danger, successful prosecutions contributed to widespread underestimation of the threat. The government’s attorneys stressed the seriousness of the crimes, and put forward evidence of Yousef ’s technical ingenuity. Yet the public image that persisted was not of clever Yousef but of stupid Salameh going back again and again to reclaim his $400 truck rental deposit. (p. 73)

It’s difficult to remain entirely neutral in the face of such incompetence, or the similarly foolish choices made by some of the jihadists Berger recounts. However, Berger’s writing stands in contrast to, say, Jayna Davis in The Third Terrorist, who uses loaded language both to flatter those who agree with her and to decry those who disagree or equivocate. What Berger does make clear is that his derision is not for Islam on the whole. In the conclusion especially Berger emphasizes the miniscule proportion of Muslims who choose to pursue violent jihad, as well as the roles Muslims and non-Muslims alike can play in combatting the threat of extremists.

Berger walks a fine line in his book. On the one hand, there’s the pressure to ensure a coherent narrative so that the book is both pleasant to read and logically intact. On the other hand, there’s the danger of making all of the many jihadists described sound like they are connected by a single thread. While some plots are certainly linked – the 1993 World Trade Center bombing shared some participants/planners with the planned attacks against New York City landmarks, for example – it’s not true that there is an unbroken succession of jihadist generations starting in the 1970s and continuing to today that links every American jihadist to every other American jihadist before or after. Berger handles the challenge admirably, showing how American jihadism has progressed in the past few decades without making it sound like one giant conspiracy or cabal.

The sheer number of names referenced within Jihad Joe can be a bit overwhelming. Berger does try to help by reminding you who some of the key players are, though that was a bit repetitive at times. The number of individuals described does show the extent of Berger’s research, which is is chock full of footnotes and quotes from primary sources. (I love both knowing exactly where information comes from and seeing primary sources used heavily, so I appreciated Berger’s approach.) However, while you can see the broad arc of American jihadism in Jihad Joe, you don’t really get a detailed look into any one person’s life. Even Anwar al-Awlaki, who received probably the most detailed biography in the book, does not get a full accounting. (As an aside, Berger’s contrast of Awlaki to bin Laden is quite good. It was also interesting to read about both Awlaki and bin Laden from the perspective of a few short months before their deaths.)

Of course, the intent of Jihad Joe is not to detail each person’s life. It serves as a primer on the subject of American jihadism, letting readers pursue further research on any of the individual subjects they desire to know more about. Necessarily, that means if you know a fair amount about one of the people or plots described in the book, you’ll see some of the minutiae that was beyond the scope of this book. If you’re like me, though, by reading Jihad Joe you’ll also learn about a number of individuals and planned (or successful) attacks that you weren’t aware of before. It’s well worth the read.

Shadow Wars

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 21:07:51 -0500

In my previous post, I talked about the Biden Doctrine of counterterrorism operations built on Special Operations, drone strikes, and cruise missiles. Wired’s Danger Room has an article out about Defense Secretary Leon Panetta discussing that very future for the Defense Department. And Gregory Johnsen has written a scathing op-ed in the New York Times decrying this approach to counterterrorism in Yemen. Both pieces hit at the “small footprint” shadow wars that are likely to continue in the near future.

America, Politics, and Yemen

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 11:43:00 -0500

Note: Unfortunately, this post likely will not mark a regular return to blog posting. I will try to post semi-regularly, as time constraints allow.

As the dust settles from the presidential election and the fallout in Washington over the Petraeus scandal, questions arise about what the next few years of American politics will mean for Yemen (as well as, of course, other countries around the world). A number of articles and video segments have recently covered various aspects of this broad question:

In reviewing Gregory Johnsen’s new book, Bruce Riedel writes that, according to the title of the piece, “Yemen is the Scariest Challenge Facing Obama Abroad.”
Other articles call AQAP “the most dangerous of the diffuse terrorist network’s [al-Qaeda Central] regional organizations,” and “the world’s most capable and active terror group targeting the United States.” (The latter piece and accompanying video segment note that AQAP is assisted by bomb maker Ibrahim Asiri, who is apparently “the world’s most dangerous man.” I won’t comment on NBC’s lack of mention of al-Wuhayshi, or the statement that for a year almost no one in the world knew about AQAP/Ansar al-Shariah’s governance in south Yemen.)
As PRI’s The World host Marco Werman put it in an interview with Johnsen, AQAP’s obvious danger means “Defeating Al Queda [sic] in Yemen is one of the top priorities on President Obama’s national security agenda.”
Joshua Foust and others have questioned the role of the CIA post-Petraeus, with Foust arguing that the intelligence community’s shift in focus to counterterrorism “can create blind spots that pose unique challenges for the president.” Other articles question whether the CIA has become too militarized, with too little focus on analysis, and whether the lines between the CIA and JSOC are too blurry. Steve Coll weighs in with what he thinks the next CIA leader should look like.
Robert Worth also discusses what he calls diplomacy that “is now so heavily encumbered by fortresslike embassies, body armor and motorcades that it is almost unrecognizable,” while the Obama administration’s “light footprint” in the Middle East is called into question elsewhere in the New York Times.
Amidst all this, Ibrahim Sharqieh argues that, according to the title of the piece, “US-Yemeni terror obsession will not solve Yemen’s woes.”
Specifically, Brian O’Neill (writing at Waq al-Waq) discusses Obama’s “Second Term Politics and Yemen.”

To accompany all of these articles, two recent videos bring to light the discussion about American political maneuvering and Yemen’s future: a Brookings Institute-sponsored discussion on Yemen (which I’ll admit I haven’t watched yet), and a Huffington Post roundtable on intelligence, inspired by Foust’s article.

So what do the last couple of weeks in American politics mean for Yemen? Probably very little – or, that is to say, probably very little that’s different from the past few years.

The overwhelming result of the national election is that the status quo held. Congress largely returned the same members to Washington, and Obama was re-elected. While there will certainly be a new head of the CIA, and allegedly new heads of the State and Defense departments, what we’re likely to see in the next four years is a renewal of the focus on “smart power” in fighting terrorism. This is encouraged by what some have called the “Biden Doctrine,” based on Vice President Biden’s focus on narrow counterterrorism efforts like using special operations forces, launching cruise missiles, and initiating drone strikes. It is probably bolstered as well by the successful raid on bin Laden’s compound.

As Sharqieh points out, Yemeni President Hadi strongly emphasized counterterrorism efforts in a cable congratulating Obama for his re-election. The status quo hasn’t changed all that much in Yemen, either, in the transition from Saleh to Hadi. There have been shakeups, to be sure, but the primary basis of the relationship between the U.S. and Yemen remains the battle against terrorism. (As Foust pointed out in the HuffPo video, the U.S. does give a lot of money to Yemen for reasons other than terrorism. The application of American policies in Yemen shows a strong focus on counterterrorism, however.)

Potentially, changes at the CIA could affect American policy in Yemen. A de-militarization of the Agency, for example, could mean fewer drone strikes. A greater focus on HUMINT would have a number of benefits, among which could be more accurate strikes and/or raids. A shared understanding of the goals for Yemen and other countries, incorporated by the broad spread of American agencies involved with national security and foreign policy, could achieve a focused end state towards which to strive. (This point was eloquently stated by Heather Hurlburt in the HuffPo discussion.) Whether or not any of these will happen is anyone’s guess. Whether or not any of them will happen in the very near future is doubtful.

A major point of discussion in the debate about the future of intelligence and national security concerns the role of terrorism in the overall threat picture, and particularly the role of al-Qaeda. Some have argued, as Jeremy Scahill does in the HuffPo discussion, that the focus on terrorism is disproportionate given the other national security threats to the U.S. The challenge for achieving the right balance on terrorism is two-fold: international terrorism is quite diffuse, begging a “needle-in-the-haystack” allusion, and the political climate requires absolute success. Guiding both points is the truism that “We have to be successful 100% of the time; they only have to be successful once.”

It is perhaps unsurprising that so much money and manpower is devoted to fighting terrorism. Whether accurate or not, the widespread belief is that the U.S. will not soon find itself slugging it out with an equally large foe; a Cold War-esque U.S. vs. U.S.S.R style fight is not the major concern. Moreover, while foreign militaries undoubtedly use guile and subterfuge to mask their capabilities and intentions, the structured nature of such potential adversaries differs significantly from the de-centralized framework of terrorist threats. To put it bluntly, it takes more effort to catch people when they aren’t in uniform and can blend in with the population.

Additionally, while some advocate an Israeli-style resiliency to terrorism in the U.S., noting that we can’t be successful every time, the current political climate is such that failure to defeat terrorist attacks – at least in the homeland – is probably a deal killer for most politicians. It might not single-handedly end careers, but it certainly won’t help them. Therefore, those in power must work from a position of perceived strength.

Complicating the fight against terrorism, especially in places like Yemen, is that there are so few people who have a strong grasp of the countries in which we are operating. (I say this while acknowledging that, by necessity, I can speak only of those who are in the public sphere. The government’s stable of culturally-proficient analysts aren’t writing open-source articles.) America lost a great analyst of Yemen when Christopher Boucek died just over a year ago. Gregory Johnsen is one of the few American experts on Yemen who consistently engages the public sphere. While there are certainly others who offer good analysis, we simply do not have enough people to provide the context we need for policies in places like Yemen.

Moreover, changing political winds mean that constant analysis is required. For example, Johnsen has repeatedly pointed out that official estimates for the size of AQAP have risen from 200-300 in late 2009 to more than 1,000 today, possibly as much as 6,000. This, Johnsen argues, is largely the unintended result of radicalization arising from Yemeni displeasure over American drone strikes. Now, Johnsen doesn’t assert that Yemeni deaths are the only cause, but a major one. We also have to factor in potential implications of the Arab Spring (both pro- and anti-government sentiments), Yemeni poverty, and any number of other factors that are often difficult to nail down. The only way to get a good grasp on the situation is continual observation and analysis.

Unfortunately, too often we simply don’t know what’s going on, and that affects our decision-making. I would be interested in seeing if there has been a similar growth in jihadist groups in the same timeframe as AQAP has expanded. As Scahill pointed out in the HuffPo roundtable, we often don’t know what other groups are doing, or even if they exist. (I was reminded at that point of my dissertation supervisor, who on a U.N.-sponsored fact-finding trip to Palestine came back with a lengthy list of extremist Islamist movements the U.N. had never heard of.) Is AQAP’s growth self-perpetuating? That is to say, is AQAP’s post-bin Laden prominence as a dangerous group drawing recruits, making it more dangerous and thus more attractive? Are we under-estimating the scheming and leadership capabilities of AQAP’s leader and bin Laden deputy Nasir al-Wuhayshi?

Given our lack of knowledge, can we realistically expect anything to change in the near future? If things get significantly worse, American leadership may seek an alternative to our current approach. Just what that would look like, I don’t know. Success in Yemen requires not merely Yemeni involvement but Yemeni leadership of the approach. Unless something drastic happens to force a change, however, I think we’ll continue to see a piecemeal approach of eliminating one terrorist leader at a time with implicit Yemeni approval, rather than a grand new direction in Yemen. And if something drastic does happen, I don’t know if anyone knows what to do next.

A temporary break from posting

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 18:48:13 -0400

In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve had to take a break from posting. Between moving and switching jobs, I just haven’t had a whole lot of down time, and what I’ve had has been spent with family. I do intend to resurrect the blog, to spend time looking at Yemen, and to start interacting on Twitter again. I just don’t know when that’s going to happen.

In the mean time, check out the people who know more about Yemen than me anyway: folks like Gregory Johnsen, Aaron Zelin, Iona Craig, Jeremy Scahill, Jane Novak, Haykal Bafana, and others (this certainly isn’t intended to be an all-encompassing list).

Links Dump 9/14/12

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 22:24:00 -0400

Sometimes I feel bad about not writing more on this blog. In times like these, though, I know that there is more value in pointing you to other thinkers than in pontificating myself. That being said, here’s the latest links dump of stories I (mostly) haven’t been able to read but wanted to (updated with a few more links):

Jihadica: US Embassy Protests
Intelwire: Nuanced to Death
Waq al-Waq: Guest Post: Reflections on a Riot
Slate: Peace Be Upon You
The Guardian: Anti-western violence gripping the Arab world has little to do with a film
The Majlis: The film that wasn’t
Foreign Policy: State Department sets up 24-hour monitoring team for embassy crisis
CNN: Clinton demands Arab Spring nations protect embassies, halt violence
Foreign Policy: The Silent Hand of Saleh
Foreign Policy: The life and deaths of Sa’id al-Shihri, AQAP’s #2
Christian Science Monitor: Killing Yemen Al Qaeda’s No. 2 is no death blow to the group
Al-Monitor: Covering Yemen Imperils Journalists
NYT: How Resilient Is Post-9/11 America?
Global Post: Al Qaeda in Africa (series)
Global Post: In Mali, Al Qaeda now controls an area the size of France
The Economist: Somalia’s new president: Can he really rescue the place?
CTC Sentinel: Understanding Drivers of Violent Extremism: The Case of al-Shabab and Somali Youth
NYT: When It Pays to Talk to Terrorists
Sydney Morning Herald: Terrorists receiving religious counselling
Tempo Interactive: Calls for Stronger Deradicalisation Efforts after Sampang Incident
Foreign Policy: Does the F.B.I. Have an Informant Problem?

Links Dump 9/6/12, drone edition

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 22:08:06 -0400

Apparently it’s time for a new links dump of stories related to drones. I haven’t read all of these, but I highly recommend Aaron Zelin’s in Foreign Policy (the first link). It’s one of the better pieces I’ve seen, pointing out that while we know the short term outcome of using drones (terrorists = dead), we don’t know the medium-to-long term impact, either on terrorist groups or the countries in which they operate.

In no particular order, recent stories on drones:

Foreign Policy - Dodging the drones: How militants have responded to the covert US campaign
Foreign Policy - What’s Not Wrong With Drones?
The Guardian - Who is held to account for deaths by drone in Yemen?
Gulf News - Drone strikes in Yemen do more harm than good
Reason - The War in Yemen; 100+ Drone Strikes Since May 2011
Wired Danger Room - Obama Finally Talks Drone War, But It’s Almost Impossible to Believe Him
CNN - Drone is Obama’s weapon of choice

Yemen's Competing Challenges

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 19:32:13 -0400

Rather than re-writing the lengthy post I had about Yemen’s overlapping challenges (after Tumblr, for no apparent reason, unceremoniously dumped everything but the first word of the post when I went to publish), I’m just going to link to the relevant stories here:

Potential AQAP/Ansar al-Shariah growth due to drone strikes. The Economist - Yemen and the United States: Don’t drone on
Potential collusion between the Yemeni government and AQAP. Foreign Policy - Whose Side Is Yemen On?
Dealing with the vestiges of government infighting and tribal politics. The National Interest - Time to Get Serious about Yemen
Dealing with Yemen’s quickly depleting water source. Foreign Policy - Yemen’s water woes
Describing just where all that water goes: mostly to qat. The Toronto Star - Tracking khat from Kenya to Canada
Facing the realities of the Yemeni revolution. Iona Craig - No More Tears

Measuring Success Against al-Qaeda

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 21:19:00 -0400

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how we measure success in our fight against al-Qaeda. After all, it’s been over 10 years since 9/11, the event that brought al-Qaeda shockingly to the forefront of public attention regarding terrorism. Surely we have an objective way of saying we are or are not succeeding against al-Qaeda?

While this seems like a fairly straightforward topic, it’s actually a little blurry (for reasons I get into below). There’s more of a general sense of how things are going than specific measurable data and examples, in large part because “al-Qaeda” and “success” are amorphous topics.

I should note that this post isn’t intended to be an assessment of al-Qaeda, but rather rumination about how we can even carry out such an assessment. A good analysis of the fight against al-Qaeda requires knowing the enemy and knowing the goals.

1: To have success, we have to know who we are fighting. Again, at first glance this seems both obvious and obtuse: we are fighting al-Qaeda, the perpetrators of 9/11, the USS Cole bombing, the African embassy bombings, and other carnage before and since. The issue that arises, though, is that just who “al-Qaeda” is has become rather muddled.

This is really a question with two sides: who is al-Qaeda, and who are we authorized to take action against? (I say authorized here, but the larger question also involves who we are capable of taking action against, and who should we take action against.)

1.A: We have to know who al-Qaeda is. As Clint Watts pointedly displayed in a survey on Selected Wisdom this week, just who we should call al-Qaeda is a subject up for debate. This goes beyond whether or not franchises and affiliates actually fit the al-Qaeda bill to a bigger question of defining terrorist and jihadist groups at large.

Watts got into this in more detail in piece he wrote called “What If There Is No Al-Qaeda? Preparing for Future Terrorism,” as well as a blog post called “Al Qaeda Doesn’t Know Who Is In Al Qaeda.” I’ll leave it to you to read those pieces for the specifics, but Watts does a nice job of summarizing his point in the blog post:

Last summer, I helped J.M. Berger launch a survey asking CT enthusiasts “What is al Qaeda?”. The results (Part #1 & Part #2) were quite interesting and the conclusion was that we in the West don’t really know what organizations or individuals really constitute al Qaeda. I wonder how al Qaeda members would answer the same survey? I bet the results would be quite similar. [Emphasis added]

While positively identifying al-Qaeda might not be completely straightforward, the concept is: to have measurable success, we have to know what we are measuring. That means having a good definition of who, precisely, al-Qaeda is - and who it isn’t.

1.B: We have to know who we can take action against. I am getting out of my realm here by getting into the legal justification side of the kinetic action formerly known as the GWOT, but I’m going to venture on anyway. The past decade has seen a wide-ranging approach to fighting terrorism, both in scope of practice and target, all ostensibly supported by the law.

Public law 107-40, otherwise known as “Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists” (or AUMF) states in part:

the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

Now, this is both specific and broad. It is specifically tied to 9/11; you couldn’t use this act to justify force in response to, say, the USS Cole bombing, even though some of the same people were involved.

It is quite broad, though, too: whole nations, organizations, or individuals can be targeted, and at the President’s determination. Those people didn’t have to be the ones who directly participated in the attack (obviously, as it was a suicide attack). Rather, anyone who planned, authorized, committed, aided, or harbored the attackers is a legitimate target.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is an interesting example of the confusion over legitimacy. AQAP didn’t exist in its present form until 2009, though it was preceded by al-Qaeda groups operating in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. Therefore, at first glance it would appear that AQAP is not a legitimate target under the AUMF.

However, as Leah Farrall points out in her 2011 Foreign Affairs article “How al Qaeda Works,” plans for what became AQAP existed before 9/11 and were executed at bin Laden’s command (p. 131). Moreover, much of AQAP’s leadership, including Nasser al-Wuhayshi, is directly linked back to al-Qaeda central pre-9/11. The Institute for the Study of Violent Groups has a fascinating graphic showing some of the inter-linkages between AQAP and AQC.

Is AQAP therefore a legitimate target? Are only the leaders who were part of AQC before 9/11 legitimate? Are only the leaders who were part of AQC before 9/11 and who were directly involved in the 9/11 plot legitimate?

To measure success, we need to clearly define who we can count toward that success. Eliminating a Taliban leader, for example, might make the world a safer place, but it can’t count towards success in defeating al-Qaeda.

2: To have success, we need to know how to define success. Again, this is an apparently straightforward concept that gets less so the more you look at it.

In the past few of years we’ve heard how al-Qaeda was stronger than ever and now lately that al-Qaeda is going the way of the dodo. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross has an article in Canada’s National Post that argues, as the title proclaims, “It’s far from safe to say that al-Qaeda is dead.” There are some great points in there, and I recommend reading it. As I mentioned to Gartenstein-Ross in Twitter, though, I think we sometimes overlook possible short-to-mid term plateaus in al-Qaeda’s trajectory because we are so intent on the long term.

Now, obviously, long term analysis of al-Qaeda’s future is valuable, particularly when it’s good analysis. (In a separate conversation with Gartenstein-Ross, we discussed how too often pundits swing to the extremes about al-Qaeda, either to garner attention, to get a scoop, or to just be contrary to the prevailing sentiment at the time.) But the focus on al-Qaeda’s demise or lack thereof can be distracting, because it dilutes other definitions of success.

Consider this: which of the following constitutes success in fighting al-Qaeda:

Arresting or killing Osama bin Laden
Arresting or killing al-Qaeda’s leadership
Arresting or killing al-Qaeda’s foot soldiers
Rehabilitating/de-radicalizing al-Qaeda members
Preventing al-Qaeda from conquering/holding territory
Preventing al-Qaeda from carrying out its stated goals
Preventing an al-Qaeda attack on the US homeland
Preventing an al-Qaeda attack on US interests abroad
Watching al-Qaeda collapse on itself and fragmenting into smaller, weaker groups
Watching al-Qaeda collapse on itself and dissipate entirely
Seeing al-Qaeda the group destroyed but its ideology living on
Seeing al-Qaeda remaining as an organization, but transitioning its focus to a non-jihadist, non-violent political movement

Each in its own way is a success in fighting al-Qaeda; moreover, many overlap with one another. However, as long as there is no single rubric for success - or, perhaps more appropriately, as long as the rubric for success is not stated clearly when talking about success against al-Qaeda - it’s impossible to really say whether we are achieving success.*

Success requires measurable goals. Overlapping or contradictory goals in public opinion make talking about success in a general sense much more difficult, because people mean such different things when they say the same thing.

Some would say the last decade is a success because there hasn’t been another 9/11. Others would disagree because al-Qaeda has spread out into so many affiliates. A third group would disagree, arguing that the rise of franchises and affiliates shows a weak core. Success, then, isn’t quite so clear.

In conclusion, I wouldn’t even begin to suggest that we try to establish one definition for al-Qaeda or for success, though I think both would be helpful. It’s beyond the scope of practicality. As Richard English points out, the various agencies of the US government can’t even agree on a single definition of terrorism; how then could all the people involved in the study of and fight against al-Qaeda agree on specific definitions?

What we can do, though, is be as clear as possible when we talk about success against al-Qaeda. That way, the audience can clearly know what we mean and how to interpret our analysis.

It’s not much, but it’s a start.

——-

* [Edit: I forgot to mention this originally, but success in any of these areas tends to produce unintended consequences in others. Eliminating a prominent leader, for example, can produce a number of new recruits, perhaps even offsetting the initial benefit. Because these consequences can be impossible to predict, true success or failure may not be immediately apparent.]

The Cost of Hunger

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:20:00 -0400

In the past few weeks, the very important story of Yemen’s food crisis has been making the rounds of various news sites. The pictures accompanying these stories are absolutely heartbreaking (yes, that is a warning about following any of the links below). The facts are equally horrifying, as related here in a story from Voice of America:

The World Food Program (WFP) estimates that nearly 10 million Yemenis are “food insecure.” They fall into two categories - five million are classified as “severely food insecure,” that is, those who are unable to buy or grow food themselves, and another five million who are “moderately food insecure,” that is, they are at risk of going without food due to rising food prices and the ongoing civil conflict. Combined, they account for 44.5 percent of Yemen’s population of close to 25 million.

Children are particularly vulnerable. The WFP reports that half of Yemen’s children are chronically malnourished and that one out of ten does not live to reach the age of five.

Such emergency levels of chronic malnutrition, according to the WFP, are second globally only to Afghanistan. In its assessment of the situation, the organization characterizes “the picture [as] one of a country on the brink of a disastrous and rapid decline into humanitarian crisis.”

[…]

Jerry Farrell, Save the Children’s country director for Yemen, told VOA that there is a difference between a food crisis and hunger.

“This is not a food crisis. There is plenty of food in the markets, with the exception of Abyan, the scene of recent fighting,” Farrell said. The problem is that people either lack the money to buy food or are unable to travel to markets.

Many other news organizations have picked up on this devastating situation, including the Guardian, al-Monitor, the Christian Science Monitor, and the New York Times, just to name a few.

It’s difficult to know, though, just where this situation will lead. There’s certainly an opportunity for the international community to step up and make a difference - and from all accounts, international organizations are working on it. But it’s hard to know where Yemen will go from here, precisely because there’s just no way to predict what will happen.

I was reminded of this when reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s The Last Stand, about the battle of Little Bighorn. While I’m not one for saying we can pull random facts from one historical situation and apply them wholesale to another completely different one, Philbrick’s description of the Lakota Sioux’s identity and sustenance crisis going into the mid 1870s struck me as familiar:

From this distance in time, it seems obvious: After more than a century of dramatic, seemingly preordained expansion, the Lakota were about to face inescapable catastrophe when their food source, the buffalo, disappeared. Not so obvious, especially today, is what a society about to confront such changes is supposed to do about it.

The future is never more important than to a people on the verge of a cataclysm. […] fear of the future can imbue even the most trivial event with overwhelming significance. (p. 31)

I’m not far enough along in Philbrick’s book to know how much emphasis he places on hunger as a motivating factor in the Sioux’s lives. Moreover, Yemen’s dwindling resources are oil and water (and stability), not bison. I think it’s fair to say, though, that desperate hunger can lead nowhere good.

What significance can we place on current events in Yemen? What events will we look back on to see that we missed their significance in the moment? And what will be the outcome of those events?

On many levels, I fear to find out. I fear for what the people of Yemen will find out.

Profiles of AQAP's leadership

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 00:59:33 -0400

In case you missed it, Gregory Johnsen has a nice piece out in the CTC sentinel profiling four of the top leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula:

Nasir al-Wahayshi
Said al-Shihri
Qasim al-Raymi
Ibrahim Asiri

Concise and to the point, Johnsen’s article complements some of the backgrounders out there on AQAP, such as the Council on Foreign Relations’ or the National Counterterrorism Center’s. AEI’s Critical Threats Project put out a good profile about a year ago that covered a lot of the same ground as Johnsen (as well as a lot more on Yemen), but this new piece is both more detailed and more up-to-date.

Two quick thoughts from Johsen’s piece:

While de-radicalization certainly has value, Said al-Shihri should be a constant reminder that it’s not guaranteed to work. As Johnsen writes:

Once back in the kingdom [of Saudi Arabia], al-Shihri was required to take part in a rehabilitation program run by the Ministry of the Interior. Less than a year later, in September 2008, Saudi officials decided he no longer posed a threat and he was released. The 35-year-old al-Shihri was offered a wife and a job, but he declined.

Within weeks of his release, al-Shihri organized and led several former Guantanamo Bay detainees over the border to Yemen to rejoin al-Qa`ida.

I think we can draw lessons for future programs from the successes and failures of both Yemen’s and Saudi Arabia’s attempts at de-radicalization. We have to remember, though, that it’s no magic bullet.

We have to know who we’re fighting against if we’re going to win. It’s always a little surprising to me how often people misconstrue the leadership of AQAP. Nasir al-Wahayshi is the leader, and has been since the merger. I don’t doubt that our diplomats, military leaders, and intelligence professionals know this fact. It would be nice if our media picked up on it, though. (For those of us who aren’t Arabic speakers, it would also be helpful if we could pick just one way to transliterate his name. However, given the debate over Qaeda/Qaida and Usama/Osama, I’m not counting on it.)

On the Nature of the Threat

Thu, 12 Jul 2012 23:38:19 -0400

Recently, some news stories and blog posts have me thinking about the nature of the threat emanating from Yemen. I consistently see Yemen named as one of the top places to fear the rise of terrorism, but there’s not always a lot of good reporting from Yemen.

By that, I don’t necessarily mean the day-to-day stuff, because there are certainly some good reporters out there who can provide something of a local reaction to, say, an alleged drone strike. Rather, it’s the big picture that often seems a bit muddled, perhaps because, as Gregory Johnsen recently pointed out on Twitter, many people only seem to pay attention to Yemen when something bad happens.

Given that fact, I thought it might be interesting to speculate on just what threat AQAP poses to the US, along with its affiliated group Ansar al-Shariah (which I often shorten to AS). Here’s my quick and dirty interpretation of how things stand:

1. AQAP is not an existential threat to the US. Even al-Qaeda as a whole – or as a conglomeration of groups – isn’t an existential threat, not in the sense that, say, the USSR was during the Cold War.

Now, AQAP has the potential to cause us grievous harm. The old standby is as true of AQAP as it is of any terrorist organization: we have to be successful every time, while they only have to be successful once. The fact that we’ve gone as long as we have without a successful full-scale terrorist attack on the US homeland is both a testament to our security services and our luck, and a likely indicator that our success can’t hold. (I know that this is essentially an argument out of nothing, but I think the odds are against us keeping up this pace.)

AQAP’s best chance of truly defeating us is the goal AQ has long expressly stated: getting us to over-extend and over-spend. (Potentially, if al-Qaeda and other groups could form the much-vaunted caliphate they could together become an existential threat, but I don’t see that happening any time soon.)

2. AQAP is not focused only on Yemen or only on the US. In a brief Twitter exchange with Gregory Johnsen and Casey Coombs the other day, I mentioned that “the hallmark of AQAP has been [their] ability to balance near and far attacks on enemies.” Or as Johnsen stated, a “Mistake many have made is to assume AQAP could only focus on one type of attack - domestic v. international.”

Christopher Swift commented on this as well in his piece in Bloomberg, To Defeat Al-Qaeda, Win in Yemen. Swift writes:

As drone strikes have debilitated al-Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan, its Yemeni affiliate — al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula — has emerged as the next vanguard of global jihad. But the group has a second, more tangible objective: Yemen itself.

[…]

The group is the first al-Qaeda franchise to successfully blend the ideological dictates of global jihad with the practical requirements of local insurgency.

I think it’s enough to say that AQAP isn’t singularly focused on either Yemen or the US. They want a safe haven in Yemen, which means defeating their enemies there. They want to destroy their enemies in the West too, including the US. They’re going to keep going at both, and have established a fine partner/arm to do so in Ansar al-Shariah, as Swift points out in his article.

Knowing how to defeat AQAP means knowing not only about AQ central’s and AQAP’s history and justification, but also about Yemen and the cultural goings-on there.

3. AQAP is not going to give up easily. I don’t fully understand the drone approach to Yemen particularly because it is so integrated into an insurgency movement. Yes, drones can have a big effect on the group, particularly if we get good intel and good targeting.

Just knocking off the top leaders isn’t going to cut it, though, because AQAP’s so tied to local issues (it’s not just a cult of personality). Just whacking the lower-level guys is like trying to plug the hole in the dyke with your finger: it might work for a while, but it’s not going to work forever.

As long as AQAP is around – and as long as they’re bringing people into the ranks – they’re going to stay on target. We’ve got to bring all our resources to bear, rather than picking the most risk-averse option.

4. AQAP is collaborative. We saw this in al-Awlaki (though his role in AQAP is contested). We’ve seen it both in their connections to AQ central and al-Shabaab. Now there’s news of AQAP connections in Nigeria:

Sam Rascoff, who teaches law and national security at New York University, sees AQAP’s latest ambitions in Nigeria as all of a piece.

“Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula doesn’t confine its recruitment to Yemen and certainly doesn’t confine its operational vision to the Arabian Peninsula,” he says. “They’re an organization with an increasingly global recruitment platform and global ambitions for where they are going to strike, and they see Nigeria as one of the places that will help them get there.”

It’s easy to think of each of the AQ affiliates as their own thing, and to some extent they are; al-Qaeda as a single unified brand and organization is no more, if it ever was.

At the same time, AQAP perhaps more than any other of the franchises is built on the backbone of AQ’s ideology and history. Al-Wuhayshi and the other leaders of AQAP have every reason to attempt to continue the umbrella organization that is/was/was intended to be al-Qaeda’s front.

It’s my contention that the AQ groups can be most successful when they can focus on regional issues and recruitment while sharing costs, resources, and loose commonality of purpose with one another (as opposed to trying to operate as a single entity).

5. AQAP is both pragmatic and creative. I’ve talked at length before about AQAP/AS pragmatism, so I won’t go into detail on that here. Despite being quite practical, however, they’re also pretty creative.

AQAP has made something of a name for themselves with different ways to incorporate bombs in or around a person’s body. They’ve got a nuanced approach to air attacks that is both subtle and effective. Airplanes make easy targets – you’ve got a bunch of people confined in a fragile environment – but there’s different ways to both strike fear and run up the cost of the security environment, and AQAP has been eager to exploit those differing routes.

Moreover, they’re happy to use foreigners to carry out their attacks, if for no other reason than because it makes it easier to slip the attacker through security. The Underwear Bomber was Nigerian; the Underwear Bomber 2.0 was apparently British-Saudi; al-Awlaki was Yemeni-American (though there’s nothing I’ve seen personally tying him to specific attacks); and now there’s stories about Norwegian and Vietnamese recruits. (Of course, this is just a small sample.)

They’re a wily adversary who can’t be under-rated. That being said…

6. AQAP – and al-Qaeda is general – is not the be-all-and-end-all of terrorism. Perhaps it’s because my educational background has included quite of bit on Northern Ireland and the Troubles, but I’ve never quite got the total focus on al-Qaeda. Yes, they’re a big threat. Yes, they’ve attacked us directly. But take a look at the State Department’s list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. They’re not all AQ-linked, or even Islamist, or even religious.

Clint Watts makes some excellent points on this in his article What If There Is No Al-Qaeda? Preparing For Future Terrorism that probably warrant further evaluation by some in the field.

It’s good that we’re keeping up the fight against al-Qaeda, and their active branch in AQAP. We need to make sure, though, that doing so doesn’t blind us from other enemies.

Links Dump 7/1/12

Sun, 01 Jul 2012 17:13:33 -0400

I’ve kind of been out of the pocket lately, but I’m hoping to get back into the swing of things soon with a post responding to Christopher Swift’s multiple articles on Yemen out in the last couple of weeks. In the mean time, here’s a random roundup of Yemen stories from the past month, whenever I actually checked the news or my Twitter feed to see what was going on (which I haven’t done all that much).

Yemen

NPR - As ‘Hungry Season’ Nears, Yemenis Struggle For Food
The Spokesman-Review - Pentagon weighs plan for aircraft in Yemen
Reuters - ICRC worker killed in Yemen air strike - ICRC

AQAP

CTC Sentinel - Arc of Convergence: AQAP, Ansar al-Shari`a and the Struggle for Yemen
Bloomberg - To Defeat Al-Qaeda, Win in Yemen
Homeland Security Policy Institute - Drones in Yemen: Is the U.S. on Target?
Gulf News - US too focused on terrorism in Yemen, experts warn Obama
Gulf News - Yemenis: Al Qaida gave town security, at a cost
NPR - Al-Qaida Takes To The Hills Of Yemen’s Badlands
Reuters - Yemen and Oman hunt al Qaeda infiltrators
The Daily Star - Yemeni troops consolidate recapture of Al-Qaeda strongholds
The Atlantic - It’s Not Just Newspapers: Circulation Tanks at Al-Qaeda’s Magazine, ‘Inspire’
Jarret Brachman - Ibrahim al-Asiri: AQAP’s Colonel Sanders??
US News - Al-Qaida Trains Norwegian to Attack
Time - Yemen: What an Al-Qaeda Assassination Has Exposed
Foreign Affairs - The Drone Blowback Fallacy
Middle East Strategic Perspectives - FLASH: Yemen: Predators and Brotherhood

Al-Qaeda, Terrorism, and Counter-terrorism

Selected Wisdom - Counterterrorism 2012: No Drones, No Detention, No Intervention
CNN Security Clearance - Time to declare victory: al Qaeda is defeated (Opinion)
Foreign Policy - Can we declare the war on al Qaeda over?
Jihadica - State Dept’s Initiative to Counter al-Qaeda Propaganda
Wired Danger Room - Next-Gen Terror Watchers Go Deep Into Al-Qaida, Tweet a Lot
AzmatZahra.tumblr.com - Why Call Him Roger?
Reuters - Al Qaeda threatens Arab Spring nations-UK spy chief
The Guardian - MI5 warns al-Qaida regaining UK toehold after Arab spring
START - Masculine honor ideology shapes responses to terrorism
Middle East Online - Al-Qaeda eyes children for jihad
Daily Mail - Al Qaeda ‘plot to blow up passenger jet’ in run up to Olympics uncovered by security forces
NYT Opinion - Cargo, the Terrorists’ Trojan Horse
The Daily Beast - Somalia’s Prisons: The War on Terror’s Latest Front
Social Science Research Network - The CIA and Targeted Killings Beyond Borders
Homeland Security Policy Institute - Counterterrorism Intelligence: Fusion Center Perspectives
Huffington Post - Generation Terror
Jarret Brachman - The “Malfeasance” of ‘Counter-Jihad/Creeping Shariah’ Trainers
Warfare Center - Warfare Center Welcomes Special Forces CSM (ret.) William (Billy) Waugh
Wired Danger Room - Top CIA Spy Accused of Being a Mafia Hitman

Politics, International Relations, and Miscellaneous

Abu Muqawama - The Special Operationalization of U.S. Foreign Policy
Foreign Policy - Debating the Failed States Index
CNN - Obama leak ‘scandal’ is wildly overblown
The Telegraph - Of course the Arab Spring has brought forth monsters
Huffington Post - Is It Time to Reconsider the Term Islamist?
OpenCanada.org - Why the Old Ivory Tower Won’t Stand

Links Dump 6/6/12

Wed, 06 Jun 2012 08:27:42 -0400

Apparently I need to change the title of this blog to “Links to Drone Stories,” at least until some of the raging debate about drones and national security leaks dies down, and I get enough down time to write again.

(I feel like this is a constant - and ironic - complaint on here, where I write about not having enough time to write. C’est la via. At least I’ll have plenty of source material handy when I get to that point.)

The dynamic of the last couple weeks has certainly been interesting, as apparently intentional national leaks fanned the flames of the burning drone debate. With good reason, drones’ effectiveness and the strategy guiding their use has been questioned as they apply to specific places, most notably Yemen and Pakistan.

Unfortunately, what is sometimes lost in the discussion are the fundamental questions: what will make the US safer? and what will make Yemen more stable?

I hope to blog some more on this soon, and in the meantime here’s a bunch of stories on drone use and other topics.

PBS Frontline - Understanding Yemen’s Al Qaeda Threat
ReliefWeb - The man in the middle of Yemen’s transition: An interview with Abdul Karim Al-Eryani
Waq al-Waq - Kill lists, Scorecards and the lack of Human Intelligence
Waq al-Waq - Drones, Drift and the (New) American Way of War
Selected Wisdom - Drone (ing) on about Yemen, AQAP
Arabian Peninsula Focus - Time for a light touch intervention in Yemen
Kings of War - A wavering vector: the end of western military interventionism?
NYT - Drone Strike Killed No. 2 in Al Qaeda, U.S. Officials Say
CNN - And now, only one senior al Qaeda leader left
The Blog Formerly Known as All Things Counterterrorism - Some quick thoughts on reports Abu Yahya al-Libi has been killed
Foreign Policy - Missionaries of jihad [6/2011]
Jihadica - Al-Qaida Advises the Arab Spring: Yemen
NYT - Elite Military Forces Are Denied in Bid for Expansion
[Pakistan] Daily Times - VIEW: Drone attacks — myth and reality
Pro Publica - Dissecting Obama’s Standard on Drone Strike Deaths
Al Jazeera - Obama’s ‘kill list’
Guardian - Drone attacks create terrorist safe havens, warns former CIA official
Guardian - From dreams to drones: who is the real Barack Obama?
Miami Herald - The president as hitman in chief
Salon - Electing an assassin-in-chief
CNN Security Clearance - Loose lips and the Obama national security ship
Washington Post - CIA memoirs offer revelations and settle scores among spies
Security Debrief - Protect Sources and Methods – The Threats from Intel Leaks
Washington Post - Stuxnet was work of U.S. and Israeli experts, officials say

Yemen in the News

Thu, 31 May 2012 22:35:00 -0400

I finally got around to watching Frontline’s amazing piece on AQAP in Yemen. If you haven’t watched it yet, you definitely should. There’s a reason everyone was talking about it Tuesday night.

While there wasn’t a lot of new information in the piece for me, there was something dramatic about seeing it in video rather than reading about it, or even seeing pictures. At the same time, al-Qaeda seems both more sinister and more approachable. In fact, while watching the scenes in Jaar, all I could think of was how easy it seemed to approach al-Qaeda members. (Of course, easy from my couch is very different than easy from south Yemen.)

Of all the things that stand out from the documentary, little is more important than the absolutely necessary involvement of Yemeni tribes in kicking out AQAP. ”If the millions of tribesmen decide collectively one day that they would like to kick out al Qaeda,” gutsy reporter Ghaith Abdul-Ahad stated in the conclusion, “it will just disappear.” (A full transcript is here.)

What I’m seeing lately is that Yemen is in the news more - and I have to think that’s a good thing. AQAP has been repeatedly described as the most dangerous al-Qaeda franchise attacking America. Beyond that, Yemen’s strategic position means its stability - or lack thereof - can have far-reaching effects. Plus, discussion about Yemen necessitates discussion about drones, because right now the US doesn’t have a Yemen policy so much as a drone policy in Yemen. (Case in point on the drone discussion: the much discussed NYT piece on Obama’s kill list.)

There is a downside to Yemen being in the news so much (besides the fact that most of the news is negative); the more Yemen is featured, the more people who know little to nothing about Yemen get to regale us with their punditry. Fortunately, there’s some really good reporting coming out on Yemen as well. I’m including some of that in the following links dump of stories from the last couple of weeks.

Frontline’s Yemen/AQAP website has a bunch of resources, not just the documentary.
Gregory Johnsen blogged about his full response for Frontline’s questions.
The New Yorker hosted a chat with Frontline about AQAP.
Iona Craig - The lost land of Abyan
The (Lowy) Interpreter - Yemen: US fight against al Qaeda likely to fail
Small Wars Journal - Talks about Talks – Does Yemen Need More Time?
NPR - Weighing The ‘Yemen Option’ For Syria
The Guardian - Yemen must not be allowed to become another Somalia
NYT - Yemen’s Many Factions Wait Impatiently for a Resolution
Salon - Losing Yemeni hearts and minds
Washington Post - In Yemen, U.S. airstrikes breed anger, and sympathy for al-Qaeda
NPR - Why The U.S. Is Aggressively Targeting Yemen
Al-Monitor - Time to Rethink US Strategy in Yemen
UPI - Yemeni evolution a regional concern
Arab Reform Initiative - Reform of the Security Sector in Yemen [pdf]
Time - How al-Qaeda Is Gaining in Its War Against Yemen
Jamestown - Hot Issue — The Ansar al-Shari’a Insurgency in Southern Yemen: The View from the Ground
Al-Jazeera - Remembering Yemen before the bombs
NYT - Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will
The Daily Beast - Drones: How Obama Learned to Kill
BBC - Is Obama’s drone doctrine counter-productive?
Harper’s Magazine - Eye of the drone
Pro Publica - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Drones
Abu Muqawama - Virtual War, Impunity, and the Undiscovered Country
Slouching Towards Columbia - Drones are a symptom, not a cause
CFR - Human Rights Report and Targeted Killings
Human Rights First - The Costs of U.S. Counterterrorism Policy
CTC Sentinel - The Arab Spring and its Influence on Al-Qa`ida
Foreign Policy - How Obama Missed an Opportunity for Middle East Peace
ABC News - Full Transcript: Defense Secretary Leon Panetta
Wired Threat Level - The Hack That Wasn’t: Sec. Clinton and Operation AdWords
Intelwire.com - Exclusive: CIA Documents on 9/11
AFP - Texas man gets 20 years in jail for Al-Qaeda links
Saudi Gazette - Terror cell had plans to storm Riyadh’s DQ
The Long War Journal - Al Qaeda affiliate and Turaeg rebels merge, create breakaway state in Mali
Esquire - Loving the Warrior, Hating the Wars: Our Memorial Daze

Lessons from the "Son of Hamas"

Sat, 26 May 2012 17:15:00 -0400

I recently finished reading Mosab Hassan Yousef’s book Son of Hamas. For those who don’t know, the book is the story of Hamas founder Sheikh Hassan Yousef’s son, who provided aid to the Israeli Shin Bet against Hamas, and who converted to Christianity.

I can’t say it was the best-written book I’ve ever read, but I picked the book up on a whim and it was interesting. While Hamas is certainly not my area of expertise, and I don’t know enough about the situation to be able to spot any falsities in the account, there were a few lessons/reminders to take away from the book that I think have broader application.

1. Things are not always as they seem. While I a skeptic in general, I think I also falsely trust people not to lie to my face. In Mosab Yousef’s life, deception became a daily activity.

Yousef’s story isn’t interesting because of his conversion to Christianity or because of his turn from specific extreme Islamist beliefs, key elements of Daveed Gartenstein-Ross’s memoir My Year Inside Radical Islam. (My review of that book is here.) Rather, Yousef’s book is interesting because of the intrigue of his work as a double agent for Shin Bet against Hamas. Here’s the son of one of the founders of the group working to identify and arrest top leaders - surely an unexpected turn of events.

2. Disengagement doesn’t always mean abandoning the group. While Horgan makes this clear in his work on deradicalization and disengagement, I was reminded of this point when Yousef spoke of identifying the shadow leaders of Hamas in the 2003-2006 period. The four men who were eventually identified all had “advanced university degrees and were at one time very active in Hamas. But for whatever reason, they simply dropped out of sight about ten years ago” (p. 220).

In that case, disengagement was merely a way to stay undercover while ultimately pulling the strings. (Of course, this isn’t true disengagement in the way that Horgan talks of it, but the point is that apparent disengagement may not be final.)

3. Assassinating terrorist leadership isn’t guaranteed to stop violence. Part of what is interesting about Yousef’s book is his clear loyalty to and passion for both the Israeli and Palestinian people and causes. At times, he is critical of each, while at others he speaks strongly for them. At one point, he makes clear that he disagreed with Israel’s policies.

“Israel was more determined than ever to cut off the head of the snake,” he writes. ”It should have learned by then, however, that if imprisoning faction leaders did nothing to stop the bloodshed, assassinating them was unlikely to work either” (p. 156).

There’s certainly room for debate over the policy of assassination as a primary counter-terrorism tactic - and that debate is far beyond the scope of this post. What’s clear, though, is that assassinating terrorist leadership doesn’t always solve the problem.

4. Reliable intelligence is both invaluable and irreplaceable. Part of the reason Shin Bet used Yousef for so long was his unprecedented knowledge of and access to some of the top Palestinian terrorist leadership. By his telling, there simply was no one else who could do the job.

This focus on needing good intelligence - and sometimes having a surprising lack of it - also plays into Yousef’s comments on 9/11:

Why had the U.S. intelligence services not been able to prevent the disaster? For one thing, they operated independently and competitively. For another, they relied mostly on technology and rarely collaborated with terrorists. Those tactics may have been fine in the Cold War, but it’s pretty tough to combat fanatical ideals with technology.

Israeli intelligence, on the other hand, relied mostly on human resources; had countless spies in mosques, Islamic organizations, and leadership roles; and had no problem recruiting even the most dangerous terrorists. They knew they had to have eyes and ears on the inside, along with minds that understood motives and emotions and that could connect the dots.

America understood neither Islamic culture nor its ideology. That, combined with open borders and lax security, made it a much softer target than Israel. (p. 174)

5. It may be easier to destroy an organization from the inside out than the outside in. While Hamas has certainly not been destroyed, the factions within the Palestinian cause are obvious. According to Yousef, that is at least partially Israel’s doing, as he explains when speaking of the paranoia common in Israel’s prisons:

The maj’d [Hamas’ security wing] hated collaborators, and until we could prove otherwise, we were all suspected for being collaborators, spies for the Israelis.

Because Israel had been so successful in identifying Hamas cells and imprisoning its members, the maj’d assumed that the organization must be riddled with spies, and they were determined to expose them. They watched every move we made. They watched our manners and listened to everything we said. And they tallied up the points. We knew who they were, but we didn’t know who their spies were. Somebody I thought was a friend could work with the maj’d, and I could find myself being investigated tomorrow.

As I was reading this part, I was reminded of the speculation over the AQAP underwear plot 2.0: who worked for whom, if the whole thing was a false flag operation, etc. If one of al-Qaeda’s main goals is to draw western powers into overextending themselves, perhaps one way to counter al-Qaeda or other terrorist groups is to sow such dissent that they overextend themselves in rooting out potential spies - alienating their target populaces in the process.

6. It’s difficult to make the transition from terrorism to political leadership. As Hamas was speculating about whether to run candidates in the 2006 parliamentary elections, Yousef and his father were worried about the outcome. If “high profile leaders like [Yousef Sr.] who were loved and admired by the people” ran, then “Hamas would win. And [the elder Yousef] knew a Hamas victory could prove to be a disaster for the people. Events proved him right” (p. 225).

Mosab Yousef identifies the exact problem such groups face when they attempt to transition:

Being a revolutionary is all about purity and rigidity. But governing is all about compromise and flexibility. If Hamas wanted to rule, negotiation would not be an option; it would be a necessity. As elected officials, they would suddenly be responsible for budget, water, food, electricity, and waste removal.” (p. 224)

Again, I tie this back to AQAP. I’ve written before about AQAP and Ansar al-Shariah drawing upon the models of Hamas and the Taliban. To my mind, the more a militant group provides pragmatic solutions, the more the populace is likely to support them - but also the more potential there is to drive a wedge between the populace and the group on the grounds of dissatisfaction with tangible results, rather than theoretical promises.

None of these “lessons” are profound, fleshed out, or even new. They are simply the things that stood out to me when reading Yousef’s book. I suppose the one thing that is perhaps surprising - and perhaps encouraging - about Yousef’s story is that even those who one might expect could never encourage a life outside terrorism still have the potential to do so.

[Edit: I’m just beginning part two of Leah Farrall’s series of posts on The Blog Formerly Known as All Things Counter Terrorism about children, jihad, and “terror spawn,” but it looks to have interesting parallels to Yousef’s book. (The link is to the first post in the series.)]

Links Dump 5/22/12

Tue, 22 May 2012 08:34:00 -0400

The latest is mostly about the push back against al-Qaeda in southern Yemen, and of course, more drones. And then there’s the suicide bomb, which is its own category.

NYT - Yemen Moves to Recapture Towns Controlled by Islamist Insurgents
Foreign Policy - Nation-Building in the Yemen
NPR - Why The U.S. Is Aggressively Targeting Yemen
Voice of America - US Military Role Deepens in Yemen
USA Today - Toll climbs in Yemen’s fight against al-Qaeda
BBC - Yemen’s hidden war with al-Qaeda
Time - The Yemeni Front Against al-Qaeda Heats Up
Reuters - U.S. trainer shot in Yemen, army advances on militants
CNN - New al Qaeda video rails against Yemen’s president
Washington Post - Outside Sanaa, a struggle for influence grips the new Yemen
UPI - ‘Terror Sheik’ son calls for jihad
Al-Monitor.com - Jordanian Jihadists Prefer Yemen
Al-Jazeera - Ali Salim el-Beidh: Separating South Yemen
CFR blog - You Might Have Missed: Yemen and Drone Wars
WSJ - U.S. Rethinks Secrecy on Drone Program
AP - Who will drones target? Who in the US will decide?
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism - How Twitter mapped a ‘covert’ US drone operation in Yemen
PBS Frontline - Al Qaeda In Yemen [preview]
The Atlantic - Tracing the CIA Underwear Bomb Leak Back to the White House
WSJ - George W. Bush: The Arab Spring and American Ideals
NYT - Charting Obama’s Journey to a Shift on Afghanistan
Rocky Shoals - The Vickers Doctrine

Sana’a suicide bomb

NYT - Attacks in Yemen Raise Concerns About Qaeda Affiliate
BBC - Suicide bomber kills dozens at Yemen army parade ground
BBC - Yemen al-Qaeda attack is new blow to stability
Toronto Star - Yemen suicide bomb massacre ‘beginning of Jihad,’ says Al Qaeda