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Ten Years Later: Insights on Al-Qaeda's
Past and Future Through Captured Records
Introduction:
Ambassador Nancy McEldowney,
Acting President, National Defense University
Audio File Entitled "110913-opening-panel01-with-Vickers"
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AMBASSADOR McELDOWNEY: Thank you very much, Lorry, for that very kind
introduction which reveals, if nothing else, how long I've been at this business, so thanks for that.
It is my great pleasure to welcome everyone today to the National Defense University,
and I am delighted to see that we have such a large, such a prestigious, and such an expert group
here to join us today for this very important event.
Now, this conference and many other events over the past days have served to mark the
very solemn anniversary of 9/11. Ten years on, the scars of this tragedy are still raw for so many
of us, and I know that is true for many people in this room. The 9/11 attacks were a tragedy that
transformed our country and then shaped a generation. The quest to defeat al-Qaeda has proved
to be similarly enormous and a truly vexing challenge.
While we have made some significant progress and we want to acknowledge the
importance of that progress as we have degraded the leadership, we have to also acknowledge
that al-Qaeda and its affiliated movements continue to present a major threat, as we saw so
vividly in the threat reporting over this past weekend.
What you will do here today and tomorrow and the work that you will carry forward on
the basis of your deliberations at this conference are a crucial part of our effort to combat this
threat. Your conclusions, your research, and your expertise can help us unlock the mystery not
just on what happened in the past but what we need to do to shape the future as we move
forward.
Now, questions that loom over all of us and that will certainly animate your deliberations
here are threefold. First, what did we really know before 9/11, and how did we overlook or
misuse that knowledge? Second, what have we learned since 9/11, and how can you help us put
that knowledge to maximum benefit? And third and most importantly, how do we ensure that
future research by both government and private entities is focused on the right subject and using
the right tools? These are fundamental and credibly important questions that we must continue
ask and answer if we are to remain on the right path.
One key part of our attempt to answer these questions is the project that we have
launched here at NDU that we hope to use this conference to introduce all of you do, and that is
the Conflict Records Research Center. The CRRC has an invaluable database of primary source
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material that will help inform sound scholarship and smart policy over the years to come.
The Secretary of Defense launched the CRRC to make captured records available to
civilian researchers, so that together, we can analyze and interpret this vast and vitally important
resource.
The CRRC staff is charged with growing this archive to include not only al-Qaeda
records but also records from Saddam Hussein's regime. In the future, we hope and expect the
records from other conflicts will be incorporated into this database for your use and use by other
scholars.
Though still in the early days, what we have found from this archive from examining
these records is truly revelatory. What they have given us is the capacity to view ourselves
through the eyes of an adversary. They are allowing us to look at what has happened and to see
it as they saw it. That is really extraordinary and extremely powerful.
Now, in conjunction with this conference, we have released a number of these
documents, and I want to touch on just two of them, which are available for you outside. The
first one is a record that was captured in Afghanistan, and it contains a history of al-Qaeda as
well as an after-action report of the 9/11 attacks. Think about the power of being able to look at
that through their eyes.
Another document describes the terrorist hijacking of an Air France commercial aircraft
in 1994, 6 years before 9/11. The terrorist intent to fly that aircraft into the Eiffel Tower was
foiled, but we know now that they had been planning for more than 6 years to use aerial mode of
operations against us.
And to go back to the questions that I posed to you, what did we know before 9/11 and
how did we use that information, we have to continually ask that.
Now, as we look at this material, what we can do with it, how you can help us and we can
help you, we need to keep that tactile sense of the relevance of our work, the urgency as we go
forward. I believe we have that synergy, we have that momentum, and your presence here today
demonstrates that, but there's another ingredient that we must have if we are to be successful, and
that is political will and political support from both the executive and the legislative branches.
We want people who are prepared to ask hard questions and to challenge accepted wisdom.
Now, it is our great good fortune to have someone exactly like that with us today,
someone who has been at the forefront of understanding this threat and what it will take to
protect ourselves and to defeat these adversaries.
It is my great honor to introduce to you that type of person who is I think the perfect
example of what we are trying to achieve today, and it is Congressman Mac Thornberry from
Texas' 13th District.
Congressman Thornberry is the vice chairman of the Armed Services Committee, the
chair of the Emergency Threats Subcommittee, and a member of the Permanent Select
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Committee on Intelligence.
The National Journal of American Politics has described him as one of Congress'
"brainiest and most thoughtful leaders on national defense issues." The Congressional Quarterly
has called him a, quote, "most respected voice on national security matters," and the people in
this room know just how well deserved this praise is.
Congressman Thornberry was pressing during the 6 months before the 9/11 attacks.
Drawing on the Hart-Rudman Commission's work on terrorism, he introduced a bill to establish
a national homeland security agency. His work and this bill served as the basis for legislation
that subsequently founded today's Department of Homeland Security.
Since 9/11, Congressman Thornberry has been an advocate with those on both sides of
the aisle to improve interagency cooperation, and I think most acutely significant for this
audience, he has said repeatedly that he believes in and is willing to fight for the importance of
developing a deeper understanding of terrorism, so that he can take, together with our friends and
allies, the appropriate actions to prevent its spread and to stop the threat.
So please join me in welcoming one of the preeminent leaders of our country on national
security questions. Congressman Mac Thornberry.
[Applause.]
•-•-•
Ten Years Later: Insights on Al-Qaeda's
Past and Future Through Captured Records
"Why a Conference on 9/11?"
Remarks by
Congressman "Mac" Thornberry, (13th District of TX)
Vice Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Chairman of the
Subcommittee on Emergency Threats, and Member of the
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Audio File Entitled "110913-opening-panel01-with-Vickers"
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REPRESENTATIVE THORNBERRY: Well, good morning. Thank you,
Ambassador for the overly generous introduction. I'm probably about to dispel all of the nice
things she just said about me, but I appreciate it nonetheless.
On the morning of 9/11, I was one of a handful of members who had breakfast with the
Secretary of Defense. The previous day, he had given a speech about transforming the
Department of Defense. He wanted to build some legislative support, so there were a handful of
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us who were there in the Pentagon that morning.
I remember his military aide bringing him a note saying that a plane had struck one of the
World Trade Centers in New York, and we kind of decided that we needed to get out of his way,
so he could go about his business and we could go about ours. As we were saying goodbye,
somebody came back to him and said, "This looks like it's pretty serious," and so we left.
As I was on the 14th Street Bridge going towards the Capitol in my car, I heard on the
radio, the second plane had been hit -- or the second plane had hit the second tower, and then got
to my office and was watching it on televisions and saw that the building I had left about 20
minutes before had been struck. And those of you who were here at the time remember there
were also reports that there were other bombs going off around town, in the State Department
and various places.
And then the Capitol Hill Police come running through the building, saying -- ordering us
to evacuate. I remember somebody yelling, "Get out, get out. There's another one coming for
us," and then so with the throngs of people, you know, you go out into the streets where it's
chaos, and you spend the next several hours in Washington gridlock trying to make contact with
your wife and kids to figure out where they are, whether everybody is safe, and what you're
going to do from there.
Everybody who was here or in New York has a story, has their story about 9/11 and what
their memories are, and much of what my work life and I'm sure much of the work life of the
people in this room have been to devoted to dealing with the consequences and implications of
that day.
But I got to confess, I feel a little overloaded about all the 9/11 coverage over the past
weekend, and most of the people I visited with kind of feel the same way. Maybe it's because
nearly all of us have kind of an emotional reaction to the tragedy of that day, and you can only
kind of have that emotional reaction for so long. Maybe part of it is because the media in trying
to outdo one another and keep your attention, rehash, and sensationalizes, and just flat wears you
out on things. And maybe it's because a lot of us think, well, we know what happened. We read
the 9/11 Commission report, and we've seen all that before.
So that kind of leads to the question that I was asked to address: Why have another
conference dealing with 9/11 and its consequences? Well, I'd offer three reasons that it's
important for us all to be here and to share information. One is that violence from terrorists
continues to be a significant threat to the country. Secondly, the al-Qaeda movement is evolving
and changing, and we've got to keep up with it at least in our understanding, and third, I would
suggest we've got to battle not just the individuals but the ideology, and to battle the ideology
requires understanding. And so I might offer just a few thoughts on each of those things.
First, it is important that we continue to study not just that day but those responsible for
it, because violence from terrorism continues to be a significant threat to our country, and it's
going to be with us for a long time. Maybe it's always been that a single committed individual
who is willing to sacrifice his life could make a big difference in history. Certainly, we all think
of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 as an incident by a committed individual that
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had a big impact.
But I think we're at a time where an individual or, even more so, a committed small group
of individuals can make a big difference. There's a lot being written these days about the
super-empowered individual, partly because of new communication and connectedness, partly
because of new tools that are available for good or for ill. Whatever the reason, a committed
individual or group of individuals can make an even bigger difference now, I think, than in the
past.
And al-Qaeda certainly includes a number of individuals who are very committed. You
know, for a while, there was the rhetoric these are cowards. I don't think they're cowards. I just
read the book. Some of you all may have read "Triple Agent," which goes through this
Jordanian who was responsible for the deaths of our CIA and security folks at the host base in
Afghanistan. Now, that guy may have taken some literary license by getting inside the terrorist
head, but still, you look at the course of his life, the degree of his commitment, where he went,
what he did, nervousness about carrying it out, but the fact is he did carry it out, and some of our
very best intelligence folks were killed as a result. These folks, no question, at least a subset of
them, are very committed, and they're not going to back off anytime soon.
They're also innovative. The Ambassador mentioned now we get documents that shows
their interest in flying planes and using them as weapons, but I believe, other than a couple of
novels, there really wasn't anyone in the intelligence community or otherwise who speculated
about terrorists using planes as weapons before 9/11. And as we well know, they continue to
explore other ways to attack us. Some of the most recent reports involve work in planting bombs
inside bodies and the challenge that that presents to us all.
A lot of my time these days is spent in the world of cybersecurity. There is no doubt they
are exploring options through the Internet on ways to have real-world effects, so that
cyberterrorism could be a real possibility.
So they're committed, and they're innovative, and at the same time, there is no doubt that
they are committed to acquiring and using, if they can get them, weapons of mass destruction.
Obviously, the ultimate would be a nuclear weapon, but even a radiological weapon, a chemical
or biological weapon would have enormous consequences.
Not long after 9/11, Kissinger said, "This is not aimed at our policies; this is aimed at our
existence," and so I don't think any of us should doubt the seriousness of the breadth that this
movement continues to pose to the lives of individual Americans and what they are attempting to
achieve in the broader sense.
And the rest of the story is the media brings it into our living rooms and makes it very
real to us, wherever it happens around the world, so it adds in some ways to their power or to
their leverage, and all of that combined, I think, makes violence from terrorists a significant
threat to the country that will continue.
The second thing, though, is that al-Qaeda is evolving. It is different today than it was
9/11. It is different today than it was May 1st, 2011, and it will be different a year from now or 2
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years from now. And one of the reasons I think these documents, the Ambassador talked about
are so valuable, as she said, it allows us to look at us through their eyes and to see part of the
evolution, how they have changed, and hopefully, that can give us insight on the trajectory about
how they will change in the future.
Some of it, it seems pretty clear, as we have put more pressure on core al-Qaeda and
Afghanistan and Pakistan, we have had the rise of the affiliates. Two of the most prominent
attacks or attempted attacks against us came from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and we
know from their public statements, as well as other information, that they are very determined to
try to attack us here at home, and they will continue to pursue that.
But we also have al-Qaeda in the Land of the Maghreb, which has not been a particularly
effective terrorist organization, but they're right there with all the turmoil in Libya, with a variety
of weapons that probably are getting out into the wrong hands, and so taking advantage of that
chaos and that increased weaponry may well make AQIM a more potent threat in the future.
And it goes on. We're watching events in Somalia. We're watching other organizations,
LeT and the rest. So we see these affiliated groups that seem to be gaining in stature. At the
same time, there is this pressure on the core, but what we've also seen, of course, is the rise of the
individual, sometimes motivated, encouraged, radicalized maybe even by the Internet, a gigantic
challenge for our security and intelligence folks. But the point is it's changing. It's different than
it was 9/11.
And I think just as is true with the terrorist movement is also more generally true with
national security. In his book, "War Made New," Max Boot looked at warfare from 1500 on,
and one of his conclusions was keeping up with the pace of change is getting harder than ever,
and the risks of getting left behind are rising. Today there is no room for error, and so the
importance of studying so that we can see the way that al-Qaeda is changing and hopefully be
able to get ahead of that curve through conferences like this, through documents like are made
available is greater than ever.
The third point I'd make, though, is that we've got to battle the ideology, not just the
individuals, and the fact is, of course, al-Qaeda and these associated groups have an ideology. It
can be both a good and a bad thing. It can be a good thing from our sense in that it enables us to
use it against them. Where they're inconsistent with it, we can decrease their credibility in the
world, and so it gives us an opportunity to fight this ideology when they have one, when it's not
just criminals looking out for their self-interest.
But the downside of it is that the ideology lasts beyond individuals. So you remove bin
Laden, but the ideology allows the movement to continue to expand, maybe even to grow, as I
mentioned over the Internet, and through other ways.
So the fact that they have an ideology, I think is somewhat a mixed bag, but I'm struck by
the fact that we dealt with ideologies before. It was part of the war plan dealing with
communism that we had to battle the ideology.
In their book, "Winning the Long War," Carfano and Rosenzweig talked about three
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lessons from the cold war, and one of them is, to win a long-term war, the fundamentals are the
same. You got to have sound security, economic growth, a strong civil society, and a willingness
to engage in a public battle of ideas. Now, we may have problems on more than one of those
fronts, but that will be another seminar. But the point is we've got to be willing to engage in a
public battle of ideas.
They go on to argue that to do that, you got to first understand the enemy. Secondly,
you've got to delegitimize his view of the world. Third, you've got to offer a counter-view of the
world, and fourth, you've got to demonstrate the will to prevail, something again the Ambassador
mentioned in her remarks.
And this is an area where, in my opinion, we have been as a government woefully short.
To me, the "aha" moment came shortly after 9/11 when I realized that we would never be able to
kill or capture all of the terrorists that were out there, and that if we tried, we'd probably end up
creating more than we removed from the battle. We have to engage in this war of ideas and on
many fronts. It's not just about trying to get a better broadcast out there and say how great
Americans are, even though that was kind of the approach at the beginning of the efforts that
have been made. It's not marketing or simplistic slogans. It starts with a much deeper
understanding of the target audience, the cultures we are trying to influence, and a lot of times, it
cannot possibly, of course, come directly from us. But it's got to include an understanding of the
networks of influence within these societies.
I've been to Afghanistan a couple times this year. One of the most promising
developments it seems to me, and in the opinion of many, are the village stability operations that
largely are being run by our special operations forces, who live in the villages, work with the
villagers to develop village-level security. You understand the networks of influence, because
they are living there in the villages, and helping do it in their way, in a way that's consistent with
their culture, and it's having tremendous impact.
Now, there's going to be arguments about to the extent to which it is scalable throughout
the country and so forth, but my point is real success starts with real understanding, and it's not
just book learning. You've got to understand in the best case the way the tribes work, the
networks of influence, what their anxieties are, what means more to them, what their value
structure is. Those are not things that come easily, and yet that's exactly the sort of deeper
understanding that is required for us to successfully engage in a war of ideas, particularly
because it's got to extend in a variety of places around the world, and what works in one place
does not necessarily work in another.
But I would cite for you, among other things, Zawahiri's letter to Zarqawi in Iraq in 2005.
"If you have any doubt," he said, "more than half of the battle is taking place in the battlefield of
the media." They understand that. I'm not sure that we understand it and are prepared to deal
with it in that level.
So, if you kind of step back and look, I think it reemphasizes, to me at least, the
importance of study and understanding of terrorism and generally in national security.
I agree with Colonel John Boyd of OODA Loop fame who said, "It's people, ideas, and
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hardware, in that order," and I think that is true for our national security.
I'm also struck by David Ben-Gurion's quote that, "The most dangerous enemy to Israel
security was the intellectual inertia of those who are responsible for that security." So I think
that puts a lot of the responsibility back on us.
I need to make a few comments probably on my own branch of government and how
Congress can help or hurt in this wider effort. I think the rule for Congress on many things is,
first, do no harm, following the doctors. I'm not saying we always do that, but I think when it
comes to developing national security understanding, having the tools to take that understanding
and apply it, the first rule should be do no harm.
But secondly, I think Congress can and should and hopefully is trying to aid in that
understanding. We're having a series of hearings, for example, in the Armed Services
Committee, looking back at these last 10 years, what we've learned, what it tells us about the
future. We had former Chairman and Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last week, for
example, and these things will continue. We've having a hearing next week in my Emerging
Threats Subcommittee about the first 25 years of the Special Operations Command, has it
worked, is its charter right, do we need to recalibrate a little as we look back over the last 25
years and especially the use of the next 10 years.
So Congress can help improve understanding, but also Congress can help prevent the
sclerosis of our national security establishment, and it seems to me that that is one of the big
challenges that our country faces. When you have as big a bureaucracy, an organization, a
national security as the United States of America, they tend to be big battleships or carriers that
are pretty hard to turn and are not necessarily known for their agility and flexibility.
So Congress has played a role in organizational form, whether it's Department of
Homeland Security or the creation of the Director of National Intelligence. You all may have
different opinions about how well any of those have worked out, but the point is that sometimes
a little push helped by a commission from Congress is necessary. Of course, everybody cites the
Goldwater-Nichols example from several years ago, and a number of us think that some sort of
formulation, as is called the Goldwater-Nichols for the Interagency, is something that should be
pursued to try, as the Ambassador said, to bring all the tools of national power and influence to
the table.
Obviously, the key role of Congress these days is money, and in incredibly tight and
tighter budgets, the importance of figuring out what tools we need going forward is greater than
ever, I think. And again, that brings us back to understanding and studying. If we have to make
choices on what's going to be the most effective tools in the future, we need to be sure we're
investing in those, even if some other things may not be funded to the extent we would like.
So the bottom line, I think, is that all of us involved in national security have been given a
precious charge. It includes the safety of our citizens and the freedom and opportunities that our
kids are going to enjoy and the future of our republic. Discharging our duty will require the best
from each of us, and that includes the intellectual preparation of the battlefield. And it's my vote
that this conference can significantly contribute to that, especially in the area of terrorism.
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So thanks for having me, and I'll be happy, if time allows, for questions, comments, or
suggestions that you all have that you'd like me to take back.
•-•-•
Ten Years Later: Insights on Al-Qaeda's
Past and Future Through Captured Records
Panel 1: "What Did Scholars and Policy-Makers Know
About Al-Qaeda and Affiliated Movements (AQAM) before 9/11?"
Dr. Thomas Hegghammer (Chair),
Senior Research Fellow, Norwegian Defence Research Establishment
Dr. Mark Stout, Lecturer, Center for Advanced Government
Studies, Johns Hopkins University
Ms. Cindy Storer, Lecturer at Coastal Carolina University,
Senior Analyst at Pherson Associates LLC; and former CIA Analyst
Dr. Mary Habeck, Association Professor of Strategic Studies,
School of Advanced International Studies,
Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Yonah Alexander, Director,
Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies
Audio File Entitled "110913-opening-panel01-with-Vickers"
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DR. THOMAS HEGGHAMMER: Thank you very much, Lorry, for this overly
generous introduction. I am very, very grateful for the invitation to come here and chair as the
first panel where we will be discussing what scholars and policy-makers knew about al-Qaeda
and associated movements before 9/11.
I also want to just congratulate the organizers on putting together what I think is really
one of the most impressive lineups of conference speaks that I've seen in the past decade, and the
panel that we have here is a very good illustration of that.
We have four truly distinguished speakers, some of whom were pioneers in al-Qaeda
studies, and we have a very interesting combination of informative intelligence analysts and
academics, which should make for a fascinating discussion this morning.
Let me just say a few words about the format, which is that each of the panelists will
speak for 10 minutes, and when everyone has presented, I will offer a few comments and, well,
many questions, really. You'll have a chance to respond, and then at the end, we'll open it up for
questions.
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Our first speaker is Dr. Mark Stout, who is a former intelligence analyst who served in
various institutions, including the CIA, and he now lectures at Johns Hopkins University.
Mark's main research interest, I believe, is intelligence history, and he also works as the
historian at the International Spy Museum here in D.C. And I also warmly recommend his blog,
"On War and Words."
Mark is going to speak about the evolution of intelligence assessments of the Jihadi threat
and from 1989 to 2009. Before I hand it over to you, Mark, I just want to stress that you will
have 10 minutes to speak. I may not look it, but I am very straight about keeping these
deadlines. So, please, Mark, the floor is yours.
DR. STOUT: Well, thank you very much, Thomas. It's a pleasure to be here. I'll just
jump right into it.
The terrorist attacks of 9/11, of course, will be remembered as one of the great
intelligence failures in many ways in American history, but of course, also, the failure to stop
these attacks obscures, I would argue, a success story, one which has much to do, more to do
with a nuanced real world of intelligence analysis in which day-to-day work is more about
conveying and understanding than predicting specific events.
The success was a development over time of a picture of a Salafi-Jihadist enemy, which
violated numerous presumptions of the national security and the intelligence communities in the
United States at the time, and notable among these presumptions was the terrorism was not,
frankly, a vitally important national security issue, and to the extent that it was important, it was
largely a matter of state sponsorship. And also notable among these presumptions was the idea
that religion wasn't really a factor to be considered in national security.
Just very briefly, looking at intelligence assessments, there are a number of things that go
into influencing them. Obviously, the first is objective reality, but it's an awkward fact here that
al-Qaeda changed over time quite substantially, and then to add onto that fact, there's always an
intelligence lag. Just by the intrinsic nature of the business, intelligence officers always are
behind the times, a literally unavoidable problem.
Secondly, of course, is interaction with policy-makers, and I'm not speaking here in the
sense of actual politicization where policy-makers tell analysts what they want the analysis to be,
rather that intelligence analysis is often focused on what it is that policy-makers ask about and
what they're interested in. If they don't think terrorism is important, if they're not particularly
interested in non-state-sponsored terrorist and not interested in religious issues, they're not going
to ask about it, and thus, huge amounts of time gets sucked up into doing other things.
And then finally -- so let me just say that in the early 1990s when these issues started to
come to the attention of American intelligence analysts, the very small number of analysts
working on the problem, a very small number of analysts -- the woman to my right is by herself a
significant percentage of that initial group. And they found themselves in the first half of -actually through much of the '90s in a game of what they considered catch-up, at the same time
that they had to sell these, frankly, heretical ideas to their policy consumers.
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1993 with the first World Trade Center bombing was when really we began to see focus,
some degree of serious attention on the Jihadists. These folks who were leaving Afghanistan,
bleed out from Afghanistan. That attack led to early work on funding from non-governmental
organization sin the Islamic world, which previously had been looked on, to the extent they were
interested at all, they were to some degree our allies, because these were in some cases groups
that had been funding the Mujahideen in Afghanistan.
1993 saw also a really prescient paper written by an analyst at I&R, certainly not the only
paper at the time that addressed these sorts of issues, but it was, A, a good one and, B, it's
actually publicly available now. Gina Bennett, an analyst at I&R, wrote a paper called "The
Wandering Mujahidin: Armed and Dangerous" in which she talked about the bleed-out from
Afghanistan of these people who felt like they had triumphed over the Soviet Union and were
now going back to their home countries and searching for ways in which they could carry on
what they viewed to be their religious mission. The paper noted that among these people, among
these leading lights, was a man named Osama bin Laden, and talked about a variety of conflicts
around the world and how there were links on a lot of these Jihadist groups.
By 1995, in one of the very, very few national intelligence estimates that talked about this
problem, there was a discussion of a new breed of terrorist who had emerged, referring to these
wandering Mujahideen that Gina had written about, and how this new breed was increasingly
capable of operating inside the United States.
Over the next couple of years, the community decided to -- or expanded its understanding
of this community. By 1995, they learned the name "al-Qaeda," which at that point was 8 years
old, and they started to see al-Qaeda as an organization, started to see bin Laden at its head,
started to see how it was connected to groups like the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Egyptian Islamic
Group, and others.
By 1996, when the key defector came out from al-Qaeda and who had been embezzling
money from al-Qaeda and decided that that would be -- got caught and figured that would be a
good time to leave, he came out with a blueprint of the organization in his head, and this was
important in two ways, because, one, in a lot of ways, it allowed analysts to confirm a lot of what
they had pieced together from individual sources and, secondly, really to color this in. They now
saw an al-Qaeda that had a sophisticated command and control structure, that had a presence in
something on the order of 50 countries around the world. It was the center of a constellation of
Jihadist groups and was interested in acquiring WMD.
So the next few years then were devoted to filling in the details of this, proselytizing, and
watching the developments over time, but we can skip strictly ahead then to 9/11. Certainly,
there were numerous plots and whatnot in between, some of them foiled, some of them sadly not,
but 9/11 saw important change sin perception, not only in the intelligence community but among
their consumers.
I think part of this was just a visceral impact of the threat. Part of it also was that you had
enormous numbers of new analysts who were being brought into CIA's Counterterrorism Center
and other counterterrorism components of the intelligence community, who brought with them
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their own perceptions about the problem, sometimes informed, sometimes not, and frankly often
brought in a great deal of animosity towards the people who had been doing this job on 9/11.
The sense of the analysis and also the way it was being received by the administration
and then transmitted by the administration to the public was en enemy of unbounded
bloodthirstiness. You started to see the daily publication taking the to the precedent of the threat
matrix, which was basically just a laundry list, if you will, of the days in new threat reporting,
which was an enormous list, big every day. And what that did was, that even though everybody
knew that most items on this were going to turn out to be garbage and some of them were
laughable on their face, the sheer bulk and volume every day of enormous amounts of threat
reporting increased this level of anxiety, both on the part of the intelligence analysts and the part
of the people receiving it.
There was great attention now being focused on the notion that al-Qaeda or one of its
affiliates might actually have or might be on the cusp of acquiring a nuclear weapon. At least
one, nuclear weapons were reported to be in the United States, concern about the enemy amount
us, sleeper cells in the United States, and also then a return actually to this issue of state
sponsorship. And one of the big issues over which blood was let in 2002, 2003 was over the
extent, if any, of the relationship between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda, with people in the
counterterrorism world tending to see more of a relationship possibly and people, the regional
analysts, tending to see less of a relationship, but all agreeing that no hard conclusions could be
drawn.
But perhaps most importantly, religion came to front and center as an issue here, but this
was something that the national security community was profoundly uncomfortable dealing with,
and it was a real, real difficult thing. It had been beaten out of intelligence analysts, any
inclination to address religion to begin with.
One of the things you started to see in the first, maybe somewhere around 2004 or so,
very roughly speaking, was there started to be a strain of thought that developed in the
intelligence community, and as near as I can tell, it was particularly strong, though by no means
exclusively, but particularly strong in the military intelligence world that looked at al-Qaeda and
its brethren and said -- and from that inferred that Islam itself was the problem. After all,
al-Qaeda is saying not only that they are Muslims, but that they are the true Muslims. They are
going back to the way Islam is properly done, and they were annunciating themes, al-Qaeda was,
that appeared on their face to be very widely popular in the Islamic world, and nobody really
likes the United States very much, nobody is really enthused about Israel, you know, et cetera, et
cetera.
So you had some people within the intelligence community who argued literally Islam
itself is the problem. Analysts at CIA, by and large, did not tend to support that view, and some
of them started fighting back, expressing ideas that had been sort of bubbling below the surface
for a long time, largely unexpressed in formal products.
They did agree with those folks that Islam is definitely relevant here, Al-Qaeda and its
affiliates really are sincere Muslims, and their ideology is genuinely rooted in Islam; but these
analysts, this trend of thought, also emphasized the marginality of the Salafi-Jihadists in the
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broader Muslim community. Perhaps, they suggested -- and here is one of these places where
the evolution of al-Qaeda itself comes into play. They suggested that al-Qaeda wasn't merely a
network, but also, it was maybe an idea or a brand or even a sputtering social movement that was
trying to spread its ideas to all 1.5 billion Muslims in the world.
So then, sort of taking some of these ideas in approximately 2005, this women right here
with some of her colleagues received a request from consumers to put the al-Qaeda movement
into some sort of holistic context, and out of that developed a structure, a concept called the
"Zuggurat of Zealotry," which basically saw the Islamic world as consisting of a stepped
pyramid. And at the bottom of the pyramid was most Muslims, peaceful Muslims simply
wanting to lead pious lives. Above them were Islamists who sought social change. Above them
were radicals who sought the overthrow of what they thought was apostate regimes by any
means necessary but not necessarily violent, and at the very pinnacle then was a small group of
radicals, violent radicals who were seeking neutralization of the West and the overthrow of the
nation state system by violence, people like al-Qaeda.
And what was useful about this movement or what was useful about this analysis was
that it emphasized, it acknowledged, rather, the reality that al-Qaeda and their various affiliates
and their brethren and their followers are legitimately and truly and genuinely anchored in Islam,
but it also made clear that they are not identical with Islam. And I think strategically, that turns
out, I would argue, to have been -- and by the way, this product that Cindy can speak to from
first knowledge was very popular, widely briefed, and really like lodged itself in the brains of
police-makers. And I think what this did was it opened up this strategic opportunity to pursue
policies which would not only be of the kinetic kill-capture variety against the actual terrorists
themselves, but to open up that gap and to lever open that gap between al-Qaeda, the
Salafi-Jihadists on the one hand, and all other Muslims on the other hand.
So I would simply close by saying, then -- and this has been a whirlwind tour. Read my
book chapter if you want the detailed version, but I think if you look over time, the analysts were
chasing not only an elusive enemy, elusive in the sense it was hard to acquire information, but
that the enemy itself was evolving over time as it gained adherence, as it became a brand, as U.S.
and allied forces sought to dismantle the network. But also, you saw sort of, first, an
overreaction in terms of the role that religion played and then sort of a modulation of that, and I
think if you look more specifically -- and I haven't focused on them here -- at views about WMD,
for instance, and to a lesser degree views about state sponsorship, you have seen that.
So we saw a remarkable development of understanding in the 1900s, a quick
overreaction. The pendulum swings in a far opposite direction at 9/11 and for the first couple
years after that, and then I think we've settled down to I think a remarkably nuanced
understanding that I would argue forms a good basis for strategy going forward.
DR. HEGGHAMMER: Thank you very much.
Our next speaker is Cindy Storer, who has been briefly introduced already. I'll say that
Cindy spent 20 years as an analyst in the CIA, but she's now an adjunct professor at -- the
University of Maryland?
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MS. STORER: Actually, I am now a lecturer at Coastal Carolina University in South
Carolina.
DR. HEGGHAMMER: Okay.
I first read about Cindy not by name but in my chosen books about the legendary women
in the Bin Laden unit in the CIA in the late '90s. It is a real pleasure to meet yo in person finally.
Cindy's paper is entitled "Al-Qaeda: Analytical Challenges before 9/11."
MS. STORER: Thank you. I'm actually quite glad to meet you as well.
I think following up on what Mark has said, I want to make some comments about what
it's like working with the kinds of material that we're talking about here and what it's like
working on a new phenomenon, if you will, because we're going into a period now with the Arab
Spring that feels eerily familiar for those of us who began working al-Qaeda when they were
founded, even though we didn't know what they were at the time. The world was sort of turning
upside-down, if you think about it.
At the beginning, the Soviet Union was collapsing. The whole globalization issue was
coming to the fore, and new technologies were being invented. This left room for a kind of
social movement that we hadn't seen in the Islamic world, and that was very hard for people to
come to grips with. I think with the Arab Spring -- and some other analysts have mentioned this
to me -- we're in another one of these situations where things can be turned upside-down, and we
need to start thinking about how to deal with that, including on the terrorism issue, and so I hope
there will be some lessons from our experiences on al-Qaeda that we can bring forward into this
new era.
Let me start with just giving you a brief summary of what we knew by 1997 and 1998,
before the Africa bombings, because we were working on a broad range of issues, and I'm going
to talk about each of these things and how we worked with it.
We knew, and we had warned, al-Qaeda was capable of car bombings. They had the
training. They had a fatwa justifying suicide bombings, which is something that was fairly new
for Sunni Muslims. They had a pattern of conducting multiple simultaneous attacks. This was a
matter of debate in the intelligence community, but the case was being made by some people.
They had an operational presence in Africa. They were exploring chemical, biological, and
nuclear weapons. All these things were things that we had been -- they had a plot previously to
fly a plane into CIA Headquarters. They had been training people on deep sea scuba diving.
Why were they doing that? We know all of these things beforehand.
Then finally, when al-Qaeda's fatwa came out in February of 1998, it gave us an inkling
of the timing of what would be their first major anti-U.S. attack, the simultaneous bombing of
two embassies in Africa, and we knew that that that gave us some timing, because we had
studied the religion, even though we couldn't write about it. We knew what the words in that
fatwa meant, and we knew there would be attacks sometime after 3 months had passed. And
indeed, when that 3-month time was over, bin Laden came out with his big press conference in
Afghanistan, to which a lot of people attended, mostly reporters, and he said, "Okay, your time is
15
up. We're going to attack now." So we knew we were on the right track. We just didn't have, as
usual, exact place, date, all those things. We just ran out of time.
So I'm going to talk a little bit about how we got to that point now. Ten minutes is
challenging. I'll do my best.
Let me give a series of lessons. So number one is you have to, as colleagues of mine
have said, love and respect ambiguity and uncertainty. Terrorists are what we call a hard target.
You're never going to have the whole picture. You're constantly assessing your gaps. You have
to make judgments along the way, without perfect information, without perfect models, without
great data sets. All those things that we would love to have when doing academic research, right,
we never quite get?
It's the same problem on the intelligence side, but amplified, because you have to make
those decisions daily, and somebody's life is at stake if you're working counterterrorism.
This means you have to hold those mental models in your head all the time, and you have
to hold more than one in your head all the time, because there's more than one possible way to
read all of the information.
Now, Mark has talked about us figuring out the search of al-Qaeda by 1996. There's on
contradiction in this, because it was all dotted lines. There was a box, but as far as I was
concerned, the box was dotted lines. And we didn't necessarily know all the contents, and they
were mixed up, and some of them were damaged, and some of them had been taken out of the
box. So you have to keep all of that in mind as you continue to sift through the information.
This process is not inductive of deductive, which is, I know, what people like to teach as
abductive, and I like this definition that was posted online by Butte College, because it really
does describe what it is that intelligence analysts do, "Abductive reasoning typically begins with
an incomplete set of observations and proceeds to the likeliest possible explanation for the set.
Abductive reasoning yields the kind of daily decision-making that does its best with the
information at hand, which often is incomplete." It really affects you from the bottom up, and
then through an iterative process, continually modifying your understanding and your mental
models with the information.
So the downside of just doing a deductive approach is it's easy for people to cherry-pick
the information, which, of course, there's been plenty written about how the Bush administration
did this in the run-up to the Iraq War, and the downside to just doing an inductive approach is
that you can have a small base set and draw way too many conclusions from your small set,
which I continue to see people doing today.
Now, this takes a lot of patience. Some of us analysts have speculated maybe this is why
women do this, tend to do this better than men. Obviously, there are exceptions, but it is largely
the women who have done this over the years. Everywhere I traveled in the world, it was
women as well. I just think that's interesting and would be a good subject for someone to study
why that has been the case.
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Let me talk about how we assembled this picture very quickly. We put together all these
bits and pieces, as Mark was talking about, and you have to put all of that into context of what's
going on in the world, which I had just talked about, too, for the world turned upside-down.
Our first insights of what was going on, that something big was going on was because we
were looking at Peshawar, Pakistan, and we were seeing all sorts of things happening at the end
of the Afghan War. And when we started pulling those threads, all roads led back to Muhammad
Atef, which we now know, of course, was al-Qaeda's chief operating officer, if you will.
That in turn led us to more reflection, which in turn led us to the rest of the network, so
that by 1996, we had built up the knowledge of this network all over the world through lots of
collection. Part of that collection was Mike Scheuer and his team. I was the analyst, the
Director of Intelligence Analysis, and then Mike had the people working for him. And they went
out into the world, and they just collect -- they got all the information that was available. You
know, there's nothing wrong with going to all of your friends and allies and even other people
and saying, "What do you know?" It's a great place to start, right, rather than risking lives and
resources?
So that was done. We had a good picture by '96. Then we had to walk in. Okay. That
process continues today. Every success on al-Qaeda is built on that basis, and it continues with
all of the information that continues to come in. Analysts are going through this constantly.
Now, this put analysts at odds with the way things are done in the rest of the agency,
because the men just said policy-makers want one line of analysis, otherwise they get confused.
[Laughter.]
MS. STORER: So you're not supposed to give them two or three different possibilities
from the same bit of data, but of course, this is a bad practice, because then you're not telling
people what you don't know and what could go wrong based on information you don't have.
And then when the different information comes in, you have to change your line of analysis or
you look stupid. So this is bad all the way around, bad practice in my opinion.
An alternative analysis doesn't help. Taking a footnote on a paper doesn't help, because
then that makes like, "Well, most people think this, and only one person thinks that, so we can
ignore that one person." I have seen NIE coordinating sessions where it's almost 50/50, but only
one view is going forward. That's bad for policy.
All right. Secondly, the only way to fully investigate all of these possibilities is to make
use of multiple disciplines at the same time, and we use what's used in the business world called
STEEP, PESTLE, SWOT, call it whatever you want. It's looking at various factors that are
important.
One of these factors is socially, are you all looking at all the social issues that are going
around. I have mentioned this sort of new world that was emerging and needing to look at those
issues. Terrorist analysts focused on subcultures. Analysts tend to focus on the mainstream, you
know, what is stability at the time, but terrorism analysts are focusing on the subcultures. So
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that's why we were busting a lot of conventional wisdom, because we were looking at this very
specific set of people.
To say at the time that Iraq had a bunch of Mujahideen, could be capable of running a
worldwide multifaceted organization bent on taking over the world sounded like James Bond, so
it sounded a little crazy to people, but that was in fact what was going on.
On language, we took translations very seriously, and the issue here with translation is,
again, you're talking about how people talk in a particular subculture in a clandestine
organization, so it's a linguistic problem, not just a language problem, and that's very important
to understand. I will never have enough Arabic to be able to sort all that out, but we had people
who did. And the analysts learned the right questions to ask.
Politically -- oh, sorry. Religion. Two minutes. I got to go fast.
So then we talked about the religious issues. Politically, you're looking at organizational
behavior mostly, rather than state behavior and small group dynamics and individual psychology
reports.
Economically, you're focused on the unofficial economy as opposed to the official
economies. That even reached to al-Qaeda being used to skirt nonproliferation agreements by
various states at times. Technically, you're looking at piecing together aspects of technical
programs. You don't have a blueprint. You don't know whose plan or whose model they're
following. If you want to know what would happen if you fly a plane into a building, you need
engineers and architects, not political analysts like me, and it's not always easy to get those
people on board.
Legal issues, you're talking about, again, religion. Al-Qaeda has their own aqidah, their
own doctrine, and if you try to analyze them from the perspective of more traditional doctrines,
you're going to get it wrong. An example, I'll just skip over.
Okay. Analytical methods. You know, this means putting everything in a chronology.
Don't throw data out. You've got to keep it somewhere. Doing network analysis, using process
models, using models of leadership, psychology, organizational dynamics, insurgency, political
instability, anything and everything you can get your hands on, and feeding all of those models
all the time. That's resource intensive and again not something that we generally have enough
people or enough time to do. And if folks on the outside do it, they don't have access to the same
classified information, so we really do have a problem of how the inside and the outside relate to
each other to bring the best minds to bear on these problems.
You've got to have a creative approach to source evaluation, because everybody lies, and
somehow, you've got to find a true in all of those lies. You can't just throw it out, because people
lie because they're psychologically unstable, because they're selling information, because the
posted on Wikipedia, or they sent a text. You've got to carefully analyze everything, which of
course has an impact on data analysis. You can't just throw stuff out.
Be careful not to confuse intent and capability. Always ask why, why am I not seeing
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intent, why am I not seeing capability, why am I seeing one or the other, why am I seeing only
some aspects in others. Sometimes you're not seeing it, but it's there. Sometimes you're not
seeing it, it isn't there, but the reason why it isn't there is important.
And then finally, your consequences in all of this are very real. We can go on forever
about the debate between law enforcement and war, but the reality is that it's a war with law
enforcement. It's all going on at the same time. Every country in the world does terrorism,
counterterrorism the same way, and so everything you say has consequences. Everything an
academic says and everything a journalist says can have real-world consequences with
policy-makers, so it's important to keep all of these things in mind -- and intelligence analysts.
On the other side of the ledger, real quick, because I'm sure I'm over time, you should
never take any kind -- you know, what I've learned in sort of a more academic world to apply
into intelligence analysis -- and other people have talked about intelligence analysis -- never take
anything off the table. Have that discussion about should you kill bin Laden or not. Nothing
should be taboo.
Analytical methodologies and assumptions should be in papers. People should know
how you got from A to Z. New analysis on topics should be required to produce a literature
review inside the intelligence community.
And then finally, the issue of peer review, we don't do peer review in the intelligence
community. We do coordination, which is not at all the same thing, and so we've got to find a
way for the minority voices, the people who see things first, as Mark said, to get your message
out and to be heard.
Sorry I ran over time.
DR. HEGGHAMMER: Thank you very much. You will get a chance to expand a little
bit in the Q&A.
Our third speaker is Dr. Mary Habeck, who is associate professor at Johns Hopkins
University, and she is the author of the acclaimed book, "Knowing the Enemy." She's also
served as a Special Adviser for Strategic Planning -- or Planning on the National Security
Council staff. And Mary is going to talk about al-Qaeda strategies, operational art, and tactics on
9/11.
DR. HABECK: For the sake of time, I'm actually going to cut out a lot of that and focus
on the things that I think are going to be perhaps the most interesting but also the most
controversial in my talk.
This is amazing for EL professors. As at least one of my students can attest, when I left
there in 2005, they still weren't using PowerPoint. I'm a major electronic [inaudible] are
concerned.
What I'm going to do is talk very briefly about al-Qaeda's grand strategy; that is, the very
highest policy level. I'm using a very academic term, because I think it encompasses a whole lot
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more than just policy objectives. This follow-on, actually I'm in the midst of writing a triology.
The first was the ideology, why they attacked us. The second is how they are fighting their wars,
so that's strategies and tactics, and the third one will be our response to all that, how it's
interacted with those other two pieces.
So what I'm going to do very briefly, if I can get things to work for me, is talk about just
the last three, only very briefly about the first two, but just so you know, I cover all of those in
my first chapter of this book, which is sort of setting the stage by saying where was al-Qaeda at
on 9/11, what did they think about the world, about the war they were involved in, and how they
were going to go about winning it. And then from there, the rest of the book takes that as a kind
of starting point and how they evolved over time in order to adjust the changing circumstances.
So their views as the enemy and their self-image are extremely important for
understanding what they thought they were dealing with in the world today. First of all, they had
a whole series of enemies that basically encompassed about 90 percent of the world, maybe 99
percent, and their problem was sorting out who was the most important enemy to attack first and
then how you deal with each one of these groups in nuanced ways.
So they had two innovations that they came up with when it comes to Jihadist groups.
The first innovation was they argued that all the Jihadist movements of the 1980s and '90s had
failed because people had insisted on trying to attack the apostates first, and because they had
done that, they had left alone the main support for the apostates; that is, their puppet master, the
United States. Until you took out the United States, you couldn't get at the apostates. That was
the first innovation. The second innovation they had was that we need to involve not just a small
Jihadist group but the entire community in this war, and if we don't find some way to mobilize
the entire community, we're going to lose. And those two innovations make them different from
every other Salafi-Jihadist group or every other Jihadist group when they were created.
Their vision of themselves is that they are fulfilling prophecy, literally. They look back
at the sayings of Muhammad, the Hadith, and they found themselves in references, the end times,
when this victorious sect, the Saved Party would come out and rescue the Muslim community
from a terrible situation and usher in the end of the world. That's their vision of themselves.
And these, I'm also going to be very, very brief about, because I cover them in great
depth in "Knowing the Enemy," but in my second book, I actually talk about the practical
strategic implications for each one of these concepts, just enough to know that they refused to
compromise on any of these visions, and they will not compromise on their vision of Tawhid.
The center, the core of the Islamic religion implies that democracy, elections, voting are evil and
wrong and must be avoided in all cases. That Jihad, we must fight, we can't avoid fighting. That
"wala wa'l-bara'a" means that we cannot align ourselves with anybody who disagrees with us and
must in fact hate and avoid them, and promoting virtue and preventing vice, that we have to
impose Sharia first and foremost on other Muslims.
And finally, those principles are always balanced with a pragmatic outlook, so these
principles kind of set their constitution, their boundaries, their legal boundaries that they don't
want to go beyond, but beyond that, there is an awful lot that these touch on, and military,
economic, media strategies, they're very open to all sorts of pragmatic meetings when it comes to
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things like that. Who is the epi du jour? Whatever circumstances say. Lots of TTPs are entirely
based on pragmatic things.
I have this in here just to show you all of these words used, and you can find them in
every single -- and emphasize, because one of their main problems is that group that I called the
"SHEET," don't seem to get it and don't seem to understand. So every single speech they give, it
doesn't matter when it was made -- and I put something from the 1990s as easily as 2009, you
would see it the same way -- have to be convinced of these ideals.
Here's their objectives as they then were based on this reading of the world situation and
their enemies. First of all, we have to expel the occupies, so that is attack the Americans, so that
they leave our lands and stop supporting the apostates; then we can overthrow the apostates, only
after we've gotten rid of the Americans.
We are going to impose our version of Sharia on everybody, even unwilling Muslims -well, especially unwilling Muslims, because it's the only right vision for God to unearth.
We're going to establish the Caliphate; by that, they just mean an Islamic state, and it can
be as small as a city and as big as the entire world eventually.
And then eventually, we're going to make the word of God the highest, and by that, they
mean the whole world will acknowledge our version of Sharia and live by its rules.
Those are their grand strategic objectives. How are they going to go about achieving
these, though? Well, here's the means. Fighting and fighting alone, they argue. Then
throughout the 1990s, they had arguments back and forth with lots of other groups that
eventually gave up fighting, that tried getting into elections, that tried working through social
transformation, gradual sorts of things, and they argued all those are failing, and they're failing
because we're not fighting.
The second thing that they did was we are going to train Mujahideen, tens of thousands
of them if necessary, in order to take up this fight. We are not going to be dependent on just a
small vanguard, that is, us, to carry out this fight. We are going to have a lot of people trained in
how to use weapons, tactics, and all sorts of other things, so that they can carry this fight to the
rest of the world.
We're going to insight the entire community then to join us with us somehow, either
through words or deeds, and get them to join us in the fight.
And we are going to unify all of the Jihadist groups that are out there into one by
radicalizing them. They have an entire program of radicalization that they put Jihadist groups
through, just as they do individuals, in order to get them on their side and eventually become
what I call "many bees." All of these were first developed during the 1990s and first attempted
in places like Chechnya and elsewhere.
Their plan, then, at the very highest level divided the world into three arenas for Jihad.
There were the Zionist Crusaders, who were the first people we're going to have to take on, but
21
then there were these open battlefronts; that is, places where the battle is already joined, and
there are Jihadist groups not affiliated with us, perhaps, already out there fighting openly. And
finally, there are what they called the "occupied Islamic lands," i.e., every other place that's ruled
by a so-called "Muslim ruler," and they decided to take each one of these on with their own
specific strategies in order to take them down.
In fact, they came up with a staged plan to win the war. This is one of those things they
actually get from a closed reading of Muhammad's life, the so-called "sirah." Their vision was
that we have to have stages, because each one will take on a different enemy and defeat them and
then move on to the next bigger, and we will have different means that we will emphasize during
each one of these as well.
So here's the plan. Phase one, attack America. And by the way, that was the tentative
title for my second book, "Attacking America: How Al-Qaeda is Fighting its 200-Year War with
the West," and I'm actually changing the title because it no longer made sense, because I
understand that attacking America is actually not their main purpose in life. We used to think it
was all about us, but it's not.
Phase two, they want to globalize the Jihad; that is, take it beyond just one or two arenas;
in fact, make it as many arenas as possible open to Jihad.
Phase three, overthrow those; that is, the tawaghits that rule our countries.
Set up the Caliphate through the use of Amirates, which will be sort of testing grounds
for ideas and eventually will spread somehow to running into each other and create the
Caliphate.
And finally, phase five, that's sometime in the eschatological future, we'll make word
about the highest.
Along with every single one of these phases, there were military strategies, economic
strategies, media strategies, all sorts of things in order to support these concepts, but I'm only
going to talk about the military strategies, because I think these are the most controversial part of
what I'm going to say.
The first phase was attack America with qualitative strikes and raids. They figured it
would take more than one in order to take down the United States, but eventually, after one or
two or three strikes, the U.S. would get the picture and would just leave all of our lands.
Phase two, we'll mobilize the Umma through inciting them to Jihad through strikes that
will catch their imagination. We'll unify the Jihad by now making the appeal to all the other
Jihadists and say, "Look, we're the ones who are on the right path, and it's working," and then
we'll create the conditions for a global Jihad.
Phase three, use trained Mujahideen that have already sent out there, that are in other
countries, already favor your ideology, your ideas, and are trained the way you want them to be
trained to create multiple battlefronts against the tawaghit.
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Phase four, what one of the great theorists -- I highly recommend his book, "Management
of Savagery" -- said, "We'll manage savagery by imposing our version of Islamic law and slowly
create the conditions for states.
And finally, we will around the world have everyone obeying our version of Islamic law.
That also has to be done through violence.
So here's the evidence from captured documents that I used for a lot of this, and for my
focus now on the training and combat sections of al-Qaeda -- rather than focusing on what we
call the "external operations" for things like that.
So here's the actual organizational charge for al-Qaeda from the 1990s. At the very top is
what they call the "High Command or the "Command Council." It had two committees or
councils that hung off of it that didn't report to other things but reported just up the chain to the
High Command, and one of them, the Fatwa Committee, had the right to overrule any of their
orders, so that Regional Council, I'll talk about in greater depth later. And there were military,
financial, political media, and a lot of other committees. Muhammad Atef was the head of the
military committee. That's why he shows up in so much of the reports.
Underneath that, then, were about 10 seconds, but number one and two were the training
section and the combat section. Those are the ones that got most of the attention, the time, and
the best people assigned to them, because they saw those creation of those Mujahideen that they
were going to send around the world as "the" focus group for globalizing the Jihad.
Underneath those was what they called "special operations." That in fact is what KSM
was the head of. when people talk about that guy as being number three in al-Qaeda, I look back
at this chart, and I go, "I don't even think he's number ten," you know. That's how much
emphasis they placed on attacking America. We're number ten, you know? We're not anywhere
near number three in their visions.
And here's some more evidence. I think the numbers speak for themselves, right, where
the emphasis was placed? Well, how about funding? This is from a UN report in 2003. Ninety
percent was going towards their globalizing the Jihad; 10 percent was going towards attacking
us.
And there's an awful lot more that is said during the 1990s that supports the concept that
al-Qaeda was creating a centralized command and control center node that would be able to
handle somehow a global Jihad. Now, whether they're actually going to be able to do that or not,
I'm going to find out when I start doing my 1990 to post-9/11 in-depth summary on this
particular issue, but they also created a Regional Council, which was supposed to bring together
all of their affiliates in other countries and coordinate their activities, so that they would follow
al-Qaeda's particular vision for the world.
And that's basically my presentation, so thank you.
[Applause.]
23
DR. HEGGHAMMER: Thank you very much.
We have one last speaker, and that is Dr. Yonah Alexander, who is a Senior Fellow at the
Potomac Institute for Policy Studies and also the Director of the Inter-University Center for
Legal Studies. He's published numerous books on terrorism, and many of you will know him as
the author of one of the very first books on bin Laden and al-Qaeda published before 9/11.
Yonah will speak about academic intelligence on al-Qaeda pre-9/11, lessons learned.
DR. ALEXANDER: Thank you, Tom.
First, if I may commend the NDU and Johns Hopkins University for their continued
leadership and scholarship and professionalism in this field. I want to personally take this
opportunity to cooperate with the two institutions, and I want to thank the panelists, my
colleagues, for their rich insights, which are very important.
If I may, I would like to provide a broader perspective or context to see if the forest,
they're not just the trees, because otherwise, we don't realize exactly what happened before 9/11
and what is likely to happen in the future.
After all, the world academic community, as all of us know, number one is to learn the
lessons of history in order to know something about the future, to try to anticipate at least some
permanent trends, and we always talk about being surprised about the surprise and uncertain
about uncertainties, but there are certainties about certainties that are a given. And as we all say,
that nothing is new under the sun, King Solomon observed that about the intentions of there is no
end to the evil intentions of terrorism. There is no end to their imagination. As far as
capabilities, the only difference between other types of terrorism and contemporary is basically
the technology or elements.
Now, as a participant observer in this area, I would like to share with you some of my
understanding of what took place, actually going all the way back, if I may, 50 years ago when I
studied at the University of Chicago and then Columbia. I tried to do a Ph.D. in this field, but
there wasn't one professor who specialized in the area. There weren't any courses at the time.
So now today, we do have, obviously, Ph.D. dissertations in the field. Maybe this is a
sad commentary, but on the other hand, that's the good news. We have probably more terrorist
specialists than terrorists.
[Laughter.]
DR. ALEXANDER: But, at any rate, I would like to point out that, again, as a
participant observer, I have the opportunity to be a member of the New York State, New York
City task force with the FBI, the police, and the Tri Border Area of the Tristate Group, Port
Authority, and we met, ironically, at the World Trade Center in the 1980s. And I'm mentioning
this because for us it wasn't really a surprise to talk about the realization about the politicization
of religion an particularly from the Middle East states itself. So we weren't exactly surprised
about the surprise, because on the top list of targets, both the World Trade Center and the garage
24
-- and in 1993, as we know, it was the first strike of the al-Qaeda there.
Now, I prepared a PowerPoints to share with you. Since I'm sending materials, it is going
to be published, and then I am going to look through with you very quickly on some of the
broader aspects, as I said, to put it in the context, and you will have obviously a copy of the
presentation. If you have any particular questions, I can deal with that.
Now, we have to remind ourself again and again that terrorism is only one of the major
challenges facing civilization in terms of the threat and in terms of the responses. Then again, it
became very vivid after the cold war that we were dealing with a different type of strategy. This
is just a reminder.
And I think the key questions we have to ask ourselves, especially at the 10th
anniversary, is the worst ye to come, and the short answer is definitely yes. It's not if, but when,
where, and with what impact.
And if this is the case, through the al-Qaeda, if it makes some other sources, will
civilization survive, and again, the short answer is definitely yes. If we want to, we are going to
do whatever is necessary to control that challenge, and clearly, this book is part of the solution.
Now, we have to understand that we are dealing with a challenge for the survival of
civilization, and unless we cooperate, the survival of the fittest, then all of us are going to sink.
Now, I'm not going to go into details, because it seems to me the academic work and the
work of the intelligence community is very similar in many ways. It is certainly
interdisciplinary. It is international and so forth. But before we discuss today the role of
Congress -- and this is just one example, and I worked with Congress very closely for any years.
Twenty-seven years ago, Senator Barry Goldwater in a letter to me indicated exactly that one
response there was, his strategy, the targeted killings, for example, but it's not going to be
accepted by the American people, and now today we know this is a major, I think, principle of
counterterrorism strategy of this administration.
As I said, we have to look at the history and learn from history. Unfortunately, we
learned from history that we don't learn trough history and so on.
[Laughter.]
DR. ALEXANDER: One of the problems, the definition of bankruptcy, we cannot
really agree, or the terrorists. We cannot agree what are some of the root causes of the political
and social and so forth. That what is clear, which is a permanent fixture of life throughout
history, and we see it now through the al-Qaeda particularly but not only the al-Qaeda group.
Clearly, the use of religious terms, concepts, ideas, and clearly, you will try to outline exactly
what it is all about in order to achieve some political strategy.
Now, a key, it seems to me -- and this actually is reflected, what we knew about al-Qaeda
before 9/11 -- is the existence of international networks throughout the world and how they
organized themselves. It is clearly right to point out what it is.
25
I want to remind all of us that here, with the 10-year anniversary, if we look to this month
of September, one of the major encouraging, I think, effects, both the Munich effect -- and this
clearly illustrated that if al-Qaeda wanted to put on the map of the world, that the entire world
will see, then they looked at the Munich effect. And, of course, there were some others.
We know history just to remind us they attack, for example, in Tehran and Beirut and so
forth. What is really critical to remember -- and I think you tried to outline in your studies -exactly the roots go all the way back, as we know. So we shouldn't be surprised about al-Qaeda.
We shouldn't be surprised about their social structure. We knew about it before 9/11, and we
knew about the goal of the Muslim diaspora, so to speak, the foreign affinity of links and so on.
We knew exactly about the Deed by Propaganda. They didn't have to throw a bomb.
They simply sent their communications, going all the way back, as we know, to '96 and in '98,
and then, of course, in '98 in terms of the stipulation to the weapons of mass destruction that
al-Qaeda tried to obtain over the years. And then, of course, the propaganda by the deed,
selected targets throughout the world before 9/11.
Now, it seems to me that we missed actually the critical aspects of the [?]. They knew
about that, to prevent, to pursue, to prosecute, to punish, to persuade and protect. Somehow -and, of course, we read the 9/11 Commission report, and we know exactly what happened. We
knew exactly what it means, success, how to reduce the incidents, for example, and so on, but
more importantly, the question of reserving the basic structures and policies, the rule of law in
democracy and civil liberty and all that was a critical element in fighting terrorism before 9/11.
Now, again, on the basis of the academic work, my colleagues, myself, all over the
world, we gave to some specific inclusion for surety with the government. We distributed the
report. It wasn't a question of the absence of the report. It was a question of the implementation
of recommendations.
Now, finally, I think that the balance should be very, very clear, and we're still debating
how to deal with that particular challenge, and hopefully, this conference will provide some
recommendations in this area.
Thank you.
[Applause.]
•-•-•
Ten Years Later: Insights on Al-Qaeda's
Past and Future Through Captured Records
Panel 2: "What Have We Learned about AQAM Since 9/11?"
Mr. Peter Bergen (Chair), Director,
National Security Studies Program,
New American Foundation, and CNN
26
Dr. Nelly Lahoud, Senior Associate,
Combating Terrorism Center
Dr. Flagg Miller, Associate Professor,
University of California-Davis
Ms. Jessica M. Huckabey, Research Staff Member,
Institute for Defense Analyses
Dr. David Cook, Professor of Religious Studies,
Rice University
Audio File Entitled "110913-afternoon"
[Begin at Audio Counter 00:01:10 and end 01:10:04.]
MR. BERGEN: Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Wagner, and thank you, Dr.
Fenner, for organizing this very interesting conference, and it's my privilege and duty to
introduce our four panelists.
We are going to go left to right, in that order. Each is going to speak for 15 minutes
approximately, starting with Dr. Nelly Lahoud, who has written a very, very good book, "The
Jihadis' Path to Self-Destruction," which was published last year, is an associate professor of the
Social Sciences Department at West Point, Ph.D. from Australia National University, was a
Research Fellow at Belfer, at Harvard University.
To her right, Dr. Flagg Miller, who is an associate professor of Religious Studies at the
University of California-Davis and is about to publish a book based on audiocassettes recovered
from Kandahar that illuminate issues about al-Qaeda internally and is also an expert, amongst
other things, on Yemen.
To his right, Jessica Huckabey, who is at the Institute for Defense Analyses and was the
acting director here at the Conflict Records Center previously and is studying for her Ph.D. at the
University of Leeds.
And to her right, Dr. David Cook, who is one of the country's leading experts on Jihadi
thought, probably "the" leading expert in fact, an assistant professor at Rice University whose
book, "Understanding Jihad," I thought was one of the books of the last decade in this area.
So we'll start with Dr. Lahoud.
DR. LAHOUD: Thank you.
The East Africa bombings that targeted the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, in Dar
employees Salaam, Tanzania, in 1998 transformed al-Qaeda's propaganda into tangible deeds,
elevating it virtually overnight into the Versace of the Jihadi landscape. The key al-Qaeda
operative who coordinated the attacks was a native of the Comoro Islands by the name of Fadhil
Harun. Some of you may know him also by the name of Fazul Abdullah Muhammad.
27
On June 7th of this year, Harun was shot and killed by Somali government forces. He
bequeathed the Jihadi community and those who study it, a two-volume autobiography about his
al-Qaeda career, consisting of 1,156 pages, which he titled "War Against Islam: Fadhil Harun's
Story."
My presentation today is based on a forthcoming report I am preparing to be released by
the Combatting Terrorism Center at West Point, my employer. It is a study of al-Qaeda's
ideology through the lens of Harun's autobiography, focusing on its ideology and the dynamics it
sought to juggle between the organization and the Jihadi movement at large.
Al-Qaeda has been studied through a variety of lenses, but it has yet to be studied through
the lens of an operational figure tasked with carrying out al-Qaeda's maison d'etre, namely the
propaganda by the deed. As a trusted operative, Harun brings a novel perspective on al-Qaeda
on account of his insider's knowledge of the organization and on his operational experience.
As such, the reader is introduced to an al-Qaeda that is hardly known. Two aspects of
al-Qaeda that are hardly known and which I shall discuss are, first, al-Qaeda's ideology.
Al-Qaeda's ideology through Harun's lens is premised on minimum religiosity and
maximum militancy. Harun's account, corroborated by al-Qaeda's founding documents that are
available on the Harmony Database that were captured in Afghanistan, strips al-Qaeda from this
theologically burdened discourse that has shaped the secondary sources dealing with this subject.
Second, Harun's account conflicts with the view that al-Qaeda is a franchise. Instead, he
speaks of the original al-Qaeda, "Al-Qaeda Al Um," to use his words, as opposed to what I shall
term the "imitations"; that is, other Jihadi groups that have affiliated themselves with the name
"al-Qaeda" but act on their own.
I would be happy to discuss in the Q&A the story of the manuscript, the merits of Harun's
account, some of its inconsistencies and at times contradictions, but to provide you with some
context, I shall limit myself to some essential background materials.
Harun was recording events until January 2nd, 2009. The spirit driving his
autobiography is to produce a corrective history of what is reported about al-Qaeda,
disassociating it from the rest of the Jihadi landscape. The manuscript has a WikiLeaks aura to
it, except that Harun is volunteering the information in the interest of transparency and to
exonerate al-Qaeda from the charges leveled against it.
While Harun is at pains to exonerate al-Qaeda's conduct to Jihad, he is by no means
making na apology for Jihadism broadly. Indeed, he is most critical of the ideological and
operational landscape of Jihadism because, as he put it, and I'm quoting him, "Not every blood
that gets shed constitutes Jihad, but in every Jihad, blood is shed," end of quotation, he reminds
fellow Jihadis.
The value of Harun's critique lies in his commitment to Jihad. Until he was killed in June
2011, he continued to believe in al-Qaeda and its mission as he remained an active Jihadi at
large.
28
So where does it fit into al-Qaeda? On the basis of his own account, Harun joined
al-Qaeda in 1991, perhaps in September of that year. He received advanced training, ranging
from the preparation of explosives, planing mines, to spying, typography, forgery, et cetera.
After the 1998 East Africa bombings and his return to Afghanistan, he was selected to become
the confidential secretary of al-Qaeda, amin sirr, al-Qaeda. By then, Harun was 26 with 8 years
of active commitment to al-Qaeda and the 1998 attacks recently added to his résumé.
Judging by the description of the tasks he was in charge of, the position should be
understood as a secretarial one requiring advanced computer skills, particularly forging
documents, and more importantly a high level of security clearance. All the committees
involved in al-Qaeda's operational activities had to work in one way or another with Harun, so
much so that he was privy to the 9/11 attacks when they were still in their planning stage in early
1999. This gives us a sense of the level of trust he enjoyed by al-Qaeda's leadership.
So let me now turn to al-Qaeda's ideology through is lends as well as through the
Harmony data document. Though Harun does not see himself in any way as an ideologue,
ideology is a recurring theme that preoccupies him and his ways on virtually every single page of
his large book. The students of Jihadi ideology are most interested not so much in what Harun
tells us what al-Qaeda's ideology is, but it's more interesting of what al-Qaeda's ideology is not.
Time and again, Harun is keen to emphasize that the various labels that are used by
outsiders to describe al-Qaeda's ideology are but distortions, following typologies devised by the
West. He rejects all labels such as Wahhabi, Salafi-Jihadis, and most of all Takfiris. The
portrait of a Takfiri is that of a narrow-minded Muslim who is ready to declare fellow Muslims
to be unbelievers whenever he disagrees with their interpretation of the Islamic creed, with some
Takfiris believing that such differences warrant shedding the blood of fellow Muslims. In his
mind, the Takfiris are the biggest calamity befalling the Jihadis, Atam al-Kubra [ph].
Al-Qaeda, he insists, is pragmatic in religious matters. It embraces all schools of law and
is open to Rajia [ph], a legal exercise that allows the believer to have the option of preferring
another schools of law's judgment over one's own. "We Muslim," he says, "We follow Ahli
us-Sunna wal-Jama'ah." Now, this is a broad designation that surfaced in the 9th century when
Muslims were still in the process of consolidating their theological and political differences. It is
roughly rendered as adherent of right practice and communal solidarity. The great scholar of
medieval Islam, Patricia Crone, explains that as a description that many groups were to adopt
without necessarily meaning very much by it, so it's a middle-ground position, if you like, a
one-size-fits-all.
As for religious instruction in its training camps, al-Qaeda appears to place little
emphasis on theology but more on politics and militancy. In Harun's words, and I'm quoting
him, "There were legal lectures held every day. Preachers would discuss issues dealing with
Muslim situations around the world, most importantly occupied Palestine. They would also
lecture about the heroism of the Sahaba or the companions of the Prophet and decisively
historical battles. There were no lectures dedicated to partisanship or Al-Hakimiya or any Takfir
thought."
29
So does al-Qaeda have an ideology? Well, ideology is an important component of
al-Qaeda, and religion does indeed define its paradigm, but judging by Harun's account and
al-Qaeda's founding documents in the Harmony Database, it would be a mistake to understand its
ideology solely through a theological lens. A close reading of these documents show that
al-Qaeda's world view is premised on minimum religiosity and maximum militancy.
By minimum religiosity, I mean a meta-religious ideology, one that is incapable -- that is
capable of encompassing a plurality of theological orientations, so long as they are subordinated
to Jihad. The covenant a Jihadi must hear and obey cannot be more explicit on the primacy of
Jihad, and now I'm reading the covenant that a Jihadi has to hear and obey when they join.
Here's what it says: "Al-Qaeda is an Islamic group, and Jihad is its path. Jihad is the principal
reason that members have joined this group to carry out together with observing various other
Islamic duties insofar as it is possible. When Jihad and other religious duties are in conflict,
members of al-Qaeda are expected to give priority to the duty of Jihad ahead of other duties,"
end of quotation.
Far from indoctrinating its members in rigid religious doctrines, the covenant of al-Qaeda
advises members, and I'm quoting, "to avoid differences and argumentations pertaining to
religious issues. Discussing religion without firm knowledge is prohibited," end of quotation.
So the importance of maintaining a meta-religious ideology is to serve as an alternative
paradigm to the secular paradigm of the nation state. Al-Qaeda rejects the Westphalian World
Order because it is unlawful and its eyes, and acknowledging it would rob al-Qaeda of its Jihad
program." That is to say, that should al-Qaeda be open to entertain working within the processes
of the international world order, it would need to recognize the state's monopoly over the
legitimate use of violence, which would in turn deny al-Qaeda's its Jihad.
So let me now turn to al-Qaeda the original and al-Qaeda the imitations. I'll just say very
briefly, time and again, Harun draws a distinction between the original al-Qaeda and -- I'm
quoting him -- "the new generation of young men who, after the fall of the Taliban regime, have
dispersed around the world, those who are in the habit of striking in random fashion at unlawful
targets without consulting anyone. I wish to make clear to those who choose random targets,
purposely causing innocent casualties, be they Muslims or non-Muslims, this is not our method."
As the manuscript develops, the reader senses Harun's frustration with many Jihadi groups, the
"Jihadis.com," as he calls them, those who have learned about Islam from the nonsense they read
on surfing the Internet and obsess about martyrdom.
So what we get time and again from him is that -- here's another quotation -- "There are
many who use the name al-Qaeda without authorization from the central leadership. Most of the
operations that have been carried out following the 9/11 attacks," he says, "lack the authorization
of Shiek Osama or the central leadership of al-Qaeda." So the al-Qaeda with which he identifies
is the al-Qaeda that was founded in the mountains of Jaji with bin Laden, Abu Ubaida
al-Banshiri, and it was called "ma'sadat al-ansar," which in 1988, it became al-Qaeda itself.
What we sense from that specific al-Qaeda is that it always saw itself as a distinct entity
ever since it was founded. It also sought to invest at the same time in human capital that could
potentially be put in a surface of global militancy. This is also intrinsic to its mission and DNA.
30
Both Harun's account as well as the founding documents speak to this dimension of
al-Qaeda which has allowed it to globalize Jihad but without having to control it. Harun relates
that al-Qaeda opened its camps to provide military training to Muslims from around the world,
irrespective of their nationalities or theological orientations. It would provide even some
Muslims with one day of training if that's all the time that they had.
So, as early as 1991, it was contemplating the Jihadi potential of the events that were
unfolding in Central Asia, Horn of Africa. So, in 1991, it provided military training for Tajik,
Uzbek, Kashmiri groups in Afghanistan, and in 1992, it sent an investigative team to Somalia.
Harun himself would be sent to East Africa in 1993. He would train the Ugandans who were
fighting against Ethiopia, and before long, al-Qaeda expanded its activities in Somalia. It never
sought to bring these groups under the umbrella of al-Qaeda.
Perhaps Harun's own dealings with al-Shabab is emblematic of al-Qaeda's distinctness on
one hand and its schemed desire to assist others to embrace militancy on the other hand. Despite
agreeing to serve as leader of Al-Shabab's security apparatus, Harun refused to be considered to
be a member of that group. He insisted that he would work with them as an assistant but not as a
member. He was frustrated with their lack of political immaturity, but still deemed it necessary
to help to bring some unity amongst the different factions in Somalia, and dedicated himself to
setting up training camps to prepare a new generation of militants who shall carry the burden of
Jihad after him.
So let me conclude with two points. The one is basic: All al-Qaeda members are Jihadis,
but not all Jihadis are al-Qaeda. The second, it would not be inaccurate to blame al-Qaeda for
the misdeeds of the Jihadis since it provided many with miliary training and it continues to
promote the merit of global Jihad, without ensuring that all Jihadis would live up to its ethical
standards, but it would be inaccurate to credit al-Qaeda for attacks carried out in the name of
Jihad.
By crediting al-Qaeda with successful attacks or even failed attempts, one risks not just
empowering al-Qaeda by continuously making it bigger than what it actually is, but more
importantly, one risks neglecting other, perhaps more threatening Jihadi groups, their agenda,
their interests, and so on.
My colleagues, Don Rassler and Vahid Brown recently released a report in which they
argue that the Haqqanis are actually a worthy enabler of al-Qaeda, the biggest enabler. So, if
al-Qaeda is the Versace of the Jihadi landscape, there may well be some Hermes, Gucci on the
rise. Thank you.
[Applause.]
MR. BERGEN: Dr. Miller?
DR. MILLER: I've got 15 minutes?
MR. BERGEN: Yes.
31
DR. MILLER: Okay.
Standard accounts of al-Qaeda's formation, I rely on court documents from the USA vs.
Enaam Arnaout trial from 2002 to '3. The essence of the narrative goes like this: "On August
11th of 1988, bin Laden met Adullah Azzam, Abu Hafs al-Masri, and Abu Ubaida al-Banshiri
and others in Peshawar to discuss the formation of an organization called al-Qaeda with the aim
of keeping Jihad alive after the Soviets were gone." Minutes for the meeting turned up in Bosnia
and were subsequently used in the court cast against Arnaout, former director of the now-banned
Benevolence International Foundation.
While details are sparse and original Arabic texts unavailable, bulletpoints include a
mention of a discussion, quote, "regarding the establishment of a new military group," unquote,
along with the word "general camp," "special camp," and "qaeda," left untranslated and in italics.
Journalist Lawrence Wright concludes from these notes that, quote, "For most of the men
in the meeting, this was the first time that the name al-Qaeda had arisen," unquote. Shortly later,
court documents report a meeting at bin Laden's house in Peshawar that led to the official
formation of al-Qaeda. Most of the meeting focused on selecting an advisory council, the head
of which is said to have been bin Laden, along with Saudi Red Crescent Chief Wael Jalaidan,
Abu Ubaida, and Abu Hajer al-Iraqi.
Training of recruits was divided into sessions outlined as follows, quote, "First, limited
duration, they will go to Camp Echo, then get trained and distributed on Afghan fronts. Two,
open-ended duration, they enter a testing camp, and the best of the brothers are chosen in
preparation to enter the military base, al-Qaeda al-Askariya," unquote.
In my longer paper, I argue that during these late summer months in Peshawar in 1988,
the base being set up, "al-Qaeda" in Arabic, was not the al-Qaeda that we have come to know
since 9/11, and it would have been evident enough to American jury members in 2002. The
al-Qaeda al-Askariya it issue was instead the al-Farouq training camp in Khost, Afghanistan.
Founded in a post-Soviet era with the goal of training militants for transnational Jihad, the
primary enemies identified in this camp were Muslims themselves rather than the "far enemy," as
it's sometimes called.
Over the past few years, I've been conducting a set of research on these 1,500 audiotapes
that were acquired from bin Laden's former residence in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The vast
majority, including approximately 14 tapes from the al-Farouq camp, feature lectures, sermons,
and conversations that elaborate the nature of this multifaceted and in many cases global enemy
within.
Before talking further about the al-Farouq camp, let me provide an important textual
anchor for my argument. In his 2005 memoir entitled "The Al-Qaeda Organization from
Within," bin Laden's former bodyguard, Nasser al-Bahri, describes Afghan Arabs' decision to
establish the al-Farouq training camp. He writes in particular that the al-Farouq camp was a
necessary improvement over an existing camp based in Pakistan called Camp Echo, or Sada
camp, quote, "With an increase in the number of Arab Mujahideen coming to Afghanistan, a
32
training camp called Camp Echo was established. After the arrival of many well-qualified
militants from the Jihad group and the Egyptian Islamic group, bin Laden and his Jihadi
associates set up a new and more advanced training camp. It was called the al-Farouq camp, the
al-Farouq military college where military base training occurs."
The particular terms chosen by al-Bahri to describe al-Farouq's establishment supply a
valuable historical commentary on the sketchy notes provided by later U.S. prosecutors in the
Enaam Arnaout trial. Meeting notes from Peshawar in 1988 mirror al-Bahri's description of
camp institutions. Camp Echo's courses are, quote, "general and of limited duration." The camp
is an inaugural facility. There's a more advanced training camp. Graduates advance to the
military base, al-Qaeda al-Askariya.
The Peshawar meeting notes say that Echo's courses are general and of limited duration,
and al-Bahri says the camp is an inaugural facility. The meeting notes say there's a special
separate and open-duration camp, and al-Bahri says there's a more advanced training camp.
Graduates advance to the military base, al-Qaeda al-Askariya, and al-Bahri says they enlisted in
al-Farouq military college where base training occurs, [speaking non-English language].
Some ex-militants have said that bin Laden was a top leader at al-Farouq, notably among
them Jamal al-Fadl, one of bin Laden's earlier associates in the Sudan and a star witness in the
USA vs. bin Laden trial. Al-Fadl's testimony about bin Laden was part of his plea bargain
arrangement with prosecutors in exchange for a lighter sentence. Other documents convey a
different story.
One of the most frequently cited of them is a text described by many analysts as
al-Qaeda's founding charter posted online by West Point's Counterterrorism Center in 2006. The
charter lists no names and is laden with general bureaucratic notes on subcommittees. A closer
analysis suggests, however, that bin Laden was not simply unspecified as a leader but was, in
fact, the subject of attempted marginalization by those who drafted the charter.
Al-Fadl recalls in his testimony that when first arriving at the al-Farouq camp, he was
asked to sign a form whose description almost exactly matches that of the CTC charter
document. After signing the form, al-Fadl gave an oath, not to bin Laden but rather to three
other individuals, Abu Ubaida and Abu Hafs, the Egyptian military commanders at the camp,
and also an Iraqi Kurd by the name of Ayoub. The latter insisted al-Fadl was in fact the group's
first emir, an assertion that's been made elsewhere by others.
The charter documents makes things more explicit. In a section outlining the leader's
security apparatus, the following qualification is added, quote, "Neither the emir's commander of
the guards nor his associates can be from any of the Gulf states or from Yemen." I'll just read
that again: Neither the emir's commander of the guards nor any of his associates can be from the
Gulf states or from Yemen.
This is a very strange document -- a very strange clause -- excuse me -- for a document
purporting to represent the militants from Arab world and Muslims generally. The implications
here, I think, are clear. Bin Laden's core Saudi and Yemeni supporters, those most likely to
pledge their lives in his defense, were ensured no part of al-Qaeda's praetorian guard.
33
Why would al-Farouq founders have wanted to marginalize bin Laden at the time? To be
brief, al-Farouq's ideological orientation and courses in militancy focused primarily on
supporting insurgent movements across the Islamic world that were fighting what were perceived
to be corrupt Muslim states and their apostate rulers. Foremost among the advocates for such
dose of revolution were Egyptians, notably al-Farouq instructors, Abu Hafs, Ayman al-Zawahiri,
and Dr. Fadl. They also included Jihadi theorists from North Africa and Iraq, countries that had
significant representations on al-Farouq's advisory council.
To be sure, a host of these individuals would later prove to be bin Laden's staunchest
supporters. In the late 1980s, however, bin Laden was viewed by Afghan Arabs from
non-Peninsular backgrounds as insufficiently committed to the kind of transnational Pan-Islamic
radicalism required of cam leaders. It's hard to believe, but things were different back then. Like
many Saudis, Yemenis, and Gulfi nationals, bin Laden was able to return to his homeland after
the Afghan Jihad had ended, unlike the majority of hard-core militants from Egypt or North
Africa. Many of them had been in jail. They could not go home. They tended to view the
Saudis and their neighbors as inadequately steeled in the transnational Jihadi cause, however
valued their pocketbooks might be.
Bin Laden appears to have directed no funding to al-Farouq. His tape-recorded speeches
from the period, moreover, convey is a zeal for liberating the Arabian Peninsula in particular, a
zeal whose Arab and Hijazi centrism, I think, is often lost in accounts of his ecumenical
post-9/11 influence.
What significance does my re-reading have for understanding al-Qaeda's legacy? First,
al-Qaeda's inner conflicts in the late 1990s and 2000s, much documented by scholars, cannot be
contrasted with an earlier period in which the group was more ideologically coherent and
consolidated.
Second, assessments of bin Laden's historical influence need to account for the ways in
which the concept of the base, "al-Qaeda," came to be exploited by bin Laden, his militant
associates, and also some of their western detractors to lend a semblance of organizational
coherence to a set of transnational militant movements that drew strength from a broad range of
Jihadi training camps, a few of which were directly under bin Laden's control.
Finally, my own review of tape recordings from al-Farouq and bin Laden's former house,
an analysis of writings produced at the camp allow the following observation. The primary drift
in most courses was not instruction on the finer points of Jihadi text through the ages, nor even
reinforcing homage to the ideas of an Islamic state and accomplishing Muslim brotherhood
ideology. Instructors instead purported to coach students in Islamic doctrine, "aqidah," more
than in governance or in jurisprudence.
I think it's interesting just to pause for a minute, just the kind of comparison with what
you were observing in Harun's paper, because there he was very much explicitly saying theology
is to have no place in al-Qaeda. Part of what I think my argument is suggesting is that if we're
talking about a specific base, a specific training camp, and not kind of an ideology, we are
allowing into the discussion the fact that there were lots of different visitors to this camp, lots of
34
different discussions, lots of different debates, and "aqidah" appears to have been one of them.
Again, we're getting into the blends between different kind of potent militant groups and
their objectives and recruits and al-Qaeda and what it stands for.
Salafi renderings of Saudi Wahhabism were paramount, especially those emphasizing
self-discipline and the need to call leaders to account. The predominantly doctrinal element of
most courses on transnational militancy at al-Farouq requires some rather fundamental shifts in
what our thinking of al-Qaeda offered to its recruits. The primary enemy through many of the
early years especially was not the American Jew or Christian but rather the errant Muslim within.
Camp instructors devoted much attention, of course, to the common bonds that united
Muslims, foremost among them a shared commitment to monotheism and a rejection of takfir,
excommunication.
Themes of unity, however, were belied by instructors' arguments, most of which
developed to correct inaccurate interpretations or practices, give students a portfolio f
transportable debate strategies when canvassing support for controversial causes in other Muslim
majority societies. The assumption is the majority, that being the Muslim majority, is against
you. Instructors expound this view in numerous ways, among them scenarios of global western
domination and classical Jihad against infidels occupying Muslim lands.
The whetting stone for sharpening one's thoughts, words, and actions, however, was the
fellow Muslim. Perhaps, especially as we commemorate the victims of the 9/11 attacks, it's
worth remembering, too, how many men and women in the Muslim world itself has struggled
and also fallen victim to al-Qaeda's extremism and terror. Such reflection is particularly urgent
as we identify and build our future allies.
Thank you.
[Applause.]
MS. HUCKABEY: The title of my talk is "Jihads in Decline: What the Records Tell
Us." Sorry. I've got a bit of allergies. I'll try to have my voice hold out here.
And I chose that topic because I really want to put the documents themselves front and
center, because I know a lot of you are curious about what is behind the Conflict Records
Research Center. So I'm going to particularly talk about certain things, themes and things you
can pick out from the records themselves, because this collection at CRRC offers scholars a
unique insight to what al-Qaeda was thinking at the time of the 9/11 attacks.
It used to be kind of a rarity working in these records, these private records, captured
records, the work that we did at IDA for terrorist perspectives, as well as the Combatting
Terrorism Center also worked with these documents, allowed us to see some of the private
internal dialogues going on, but now that the access is here, it's becoming much more
commonplace to look at al-Qaeda and its aims and its own words, and it's even expected these
days.
35
So I'm going to take a look at a very small subset of these records, just to give you an
idea of what can be in there; a quick tour, if you like. The advantage of these records is they're
all digital in a database. You will see them in the original language as well as translated and an
information sheet that will tell you about each record. For those of you who took the tour, that
was explained.
A portion of these records in the research database, I will call -- and it's my own term -"Jihads in Decline," and I'll define that in just a moment, but basically, it's a snapshot of
practitioners of Jihad and what we were thinking about the state of Jihad at the time, the Afghan
era and also in the 1990s.
I'm going to give you a very quick tour, highlight some countries, and then break out
some of the themes that you can find in these documents, and those fall into the areas of
sanction, the need for strategy, the need to sustain a Jihad, and the need to have sanctuary or safe
havens as well as security.
And I'm using the term "Jihads in Decline," and what I mean by that, it's a lot of nuances.
It could mean either Jihad is failing, it has failed, it missed the mark somehow, it did not live up
to expectations. It basically reflects the thinking of "If only we had more or less of that, it would
have turned out much better for us." And there's also a few wishlists for if we go for Jihad in
certain areas, this is what we have to make sure that we have in place, so it's a checklist to avert
failure in Jihad as well.
Of course, no plan for Jihad can survive once it makes contact with the enemy. So once
they went past the discussion and planning phase you see a lot of these frictions that appear in
the documentary record, and they talk about just how difficult things are. Of course, Jihad by its
nature means struggle, and yes, they are used to working in hardships, but I would like to point
out that there is a difference between working on the margins and where you think you're going
to be successful and becoming marginalized. I think we see that bin Laden spent his final years
in Pakistan worrying about the perpetual decline of the global Jihad he had hoped to start.
Of course, there were always some internal thinkers. Many of you will be familiar with
Abu Musab al-Suri. He always thought that the 9/11 attacks was a big mistake and put the whole
global Jihad effort into decline. He was one who saw a problem from the start. He, of course, is
the chronicler of failed Jihads. It took him 1,600 pages to tell everybody about that, but I've got
some examples here that are a bit shorter.
He thought about Jihad and did a lot of his work at his al-Ghuraba camp in Afghanistan
in the late 1990s, so a lot of these things come from what he was thinking back then.
Of course, I am going to talk first about a few of the arenas of Jihad and some documents
that relate to those. Ayman al-Zawahiri, now the emir, was writing back in 2001, and he said
that a Jihadist movement needs an arena that acts like an incubator, which the seeds can grow,
you can get practical experience, you can train, you can gain knowledge. And Afghanistan was
that incubator for al-Qaeda. From that, those Afghan graduates went, of course, to various
arenas around the world, to Chechnya, Bosnia, Somalia, Tajikistan, and I will point out some of
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these.
Of course, all these efforts, though, did not turn out as expected, and some of the
documents that you will see, they're after-action reports, they're books, they're studies, letters that
kind of highlight a less-than-rosy picture on how rough the path to Jihad could be.
The record from Afghanistan from the largest part of the collection -- and you have an
example of one of those. That is one of the benefits of having this conference and showing
people what we're talking about. The period of the Afghan records, of course, covers the 1980
Jihad, the establishment of al-Qaeda in the camps, and then there are ties in the relationships with
the Taliban. So intermixed with all of the leadership memos, organization, those bylaws, those
contracts, newspaper clippings, just all the detritus, the administrivia that you find there, you will
also find what are historical perspectives or analysis, lessons learned, that talk about Jihad and
Afghanistan, both during the Soviet era and what one document called "Phase Two," what they
were living through in the 1990s prior to 9/11.
I'm not going to talk too much about Afghanistan, because I bet a lot of you are familiar
with a lot of these documents. I want to highlight some other countries that have just been put
into the database you may not know about. But just as a quick example, you would find
historical perspectives on guerilla war written in the 1980s that looked at a bunch of case studies
from people's wars around the world through the lens of all their problems they were
experiencing in the 1980s fighting the Soviets. The number-one lesson was there's a problem
with a spontaneous Jihad, because you put the military action in front of the political horse, and
it's real hard to recover your organization and thinking if you rush in without a political plan. It's
hard to fix things organizationally if you get ahead of yourselves in the action.
The author of this said the extent of the huge losses that we suffered as a result of our
lack of organization, a quick look at the results of all the wars prove it, so they very much noted
that you had to be well organized.
Quite a few documents come from Abu Walid al-Masri's "Chat from the Top of the
World" series. There are five parts of it there that are translated into English, and it's certainly
one of the most contrarian views of the Afghan Jihad of what most al-Qaeda members
considered a success of ethic proportion. He takes a much dimmer view, and if you would like
to hear someone, an insider from the Jihad, it was absolutely critical, it's almost a polemic
against what al-Qaeda was doing then, then this is your document for that. He talks about chaos.
He talks about fistfights over money in the Peshawar office from bin Laden. The Saudi
influence, the sudden influx of money and resources caused a lot of problems. You always think
it's lack of funding. No. They became known as the mules, the donkeys who brought the
money, and it caused a lot of friction.
He also talked about martyrdom was not all to be embraced back then to such success.
He calls the Battle of Jalalabad that began in 1989 a horrible tragedy, and he very much holds
Abdullah Azzam and bin Laden to account for that. He even throws in the keyword, the
"quagmire" that they got drug into, and the Arab Mujahideen stupidly kept reinforcing it and
took horrible casualties.
37
There's also a lot of criticism for both Abdullah Azzam and bin Laden. He credits them
with being huge influential figures, but he also points out that they had a lot of failings, and he
discusses them at length here. But ultimately, he considers this a failed Jihad because they did
not get their Islamic state. Afghanistan, as we all know now, fell into chaos. So, as a direct
result of that Jihad, it did not get what it wanted.
Jihad in Afghanistan Phase Two is another document that picks up where it left off
saying, Wow! Weren't we all surprised and disappointed that we didn't get that Islamic state
from Afghanistan? But we're going to do it better this time." Phase Two. And it lays out
economic, military, and a political plan. It says, "This time, it will be Afghan-based, and it will
be a Jihad throughout Central Asia."
And I just want to make one note that said, more than anything, a lot of the problem is the
political problem. He specifically points to the Arab section having a lot of infighting and
involving themselves in pointless battles that weren't sanctioned and getting involved in tribal
affairs and causing a lot of problems, and they said, "We've got to fix that for Phase Two."
The next section -- I'm just running through alphabetically -- they're documents on
Africa, which Dr. Lahoud talked about. They went through a phase in the early '90s of setting up
some training camps, so you will find documents that discuss those. A lot of it talks about lack
of planning, not a lot of confidence in leadership and organization.
Just very briefly, very insightful is Saif al-Islam's memoirs about trying to set up a camp
in Ethiopia called the "Ogden File," and the one thing he does note, he said that it was a strange
reception. He somehow logistically challenged, got this camp set up, a 10-week-course camp set
up and running; however, he did note that there was a Sufi versus Salafi problem, that there was
a lot of frictions between the outside fighters and the locals. That they stole a Toyota and caused
a lot of bad blood, and it has to be returned.
And those of you who have studied Jihads around the world realize there's these frictions
and problems that come in when one group comes in with the "We're better Muslims than you"
attitude and "We're going to call the shots here." There's some of that in there.
The next one that I don't believe folks have had to have been able to see is the document
on Algeria, and of course, Algeria has become the watchword for excessive killings in Jihad. It
was not only in decline, but it was in a death spiral by '96, '97. There is a document in there
called -- by shorthand, I'll just call it the "Algiers Letter," the dates from that time, December
1996, and it could be subtitled, "What on earth are we going to do about JIA? Because this is
bad." That is in there, and it says, "Okay. Military-wise, we're going okay, but politically, it's
alarming. This is a dangerous gap in our flank, what JIA is doing."
I would note that how these collections have evolved, I started looking at this, and I went
back in to look at something, and I discovered there is another document that's the other half of
this letter that had not been translated, and so I have pointed out to the center that for the full
look at the Algiers Letter that they should put that in for translation, so that it will become
available for everybody. But what's already there now is fascinating. It talks about the clear rift
between the Islamic Salvation Front at the time politically, and JIA on its own killing, rampage.
38
There was hence that, of course, the Algerian government is going to take advantage of this and
cause schisms and even an open confrontation. It's all there. They knew how very badly it was
going to go if JIA continued on this path. It basically said that this was a Jihad in dire trouble,
and pretty much, it was all JIA's fault. They said their biggest challenge was their default action
on anything was military, defaulting to the liquidation principle. They said the thing was, they
were going to be very isolated. They used the term "going down a dark tunnel," and that if they
weren't careful, they were going to take all of its members and perhaps even Algeria down with
it.
The letter closed with a 10-point course of action that was less than convincing. There
was probably not much they could do at that point, the damage has been so bad, to restore trust
and get things back in order, but of course, as we all know, that did mean that the absolute failure
of that Jihad, and it took a long time for the Jihadist effort to revive itself and come back into the
fold after that.
There are some documents related to Central Asia and specifically Tajikistan in there.
There was a time in the 1990s, they tried to figure out what could be done as a Jihadist
movement in the former Soviet Union regions there. Both Abu Musab al-Suri and Abu Walid
al-Masri offered their strategic advice on what to do. Al-Suri had a book, "Muslims in Central
Asia and the Coming Battle of Islam," that was written in late 1999 that possibly could have
been an advice to Mullah Omar on what to do in the region.
So, after going through the CIA fact book thumbnail version of the area, he says, "The
time is right. We should have struck there right when the Soviet Union collapsed, but we can do
this now still." He says, "This is part of the prophecy that victory will come out of this region,"
and he says that of note, he was almost salivating at the opportunities to get a successful Jihad in
a region like that, because the opportunity can control the region's vast resources, as sufficient to
solve the resource problems of Jihad, "If only we can get our hands on that level of resources."
He pointed to the Soviet's stockpile of weapons, and he also talked about the possibility of then
at some point having weapons of mass destruction as a result.
Another document, "The Basic Facts of Jihad in Tajikistan," also takes a look at it.
Al-Suri saw only positives. Oddly enough, as critical as he can be looking at Jihads, he never
really saw the downside to it. It was all gung-ho, let's do this, and he does this several times for
Jihads that haven't happened yet. He can't cast his critical eye on what it may turn into; however,
al-Masri, Abu Walid al-Masri takes a look at Tajikistan and says, "Pretty small, not really
connected in with any resources, lack of support there," and he says, "You know what, we're
going to have to do something different there." And the template he offered sounds awfully like
what happened to pass in Afghanistan, corruption, drugs, bribery, using explosive devices on the
cheap.
I'll skip over the one on al-Suri. If you haven't read al-Suri on Syria, you really must. It's
a long laundry list of failure of planning, leadership, failure to explain your objectives. Their
recruitment failed. They were thoroughly infiltrated and penetrated by the Algerian government.
So that is really the template for other Jihads.
And finally, he looks at Yemen. It was always on his list during his camp lectures that he
39
put Yemen at the top, and the reason he did this was both he and Abu Walid al-Masri believed
that Yemen was going to be this springboard, the spearhead for a larger Jihad throughout the
Arabian Peninsula, given its population. Given the animosity that it felt particularly towards
Saudi Arabia, it was very much ready for an Islamic awakening, and he lays out what can be
done there.
I will skip over the requirements for Jihad. Again, you will find plenty of themes about
the need to have religious sanction. There's complaints that the "ulama" never got on board.
There's page after page of the need to have strategies, that they went into some of these military
actions without a whole lot of planning, and that they just didn't have the organizational skills to
overcome.
Lots of stuff about how to sustain a Jihad, how you get the manpower, how you replace
leadership once you take a lot of hits in the early phases, how to get the right financial resources,
et cetera, et cetera. Especially the cohesion, but there's a lot of infighting, a lot of lack of
discipline that goes on, and finally, a lack of security. You will find that over and over again
about how careful they need to be in the recruiting, that you can't take quantity over quality.
Even if you need the people, slow it down because you're going to open yourself up to a lot of
security risks.
So, if the documents themselves, what I would say about those that talk about Jihads, less
successful Jihads, is that these are, in one way, a time capsule of what the members, some of the
members -- and I'm going to caveat that -- were thinking at the time of the 9/11 attacks. It shows
several things. They show that the war against the Soviets and the Afghan Jihad cast a very long
shadow over all the Jihads in the 1990s. All the time, you hear, "But we can't let it end up like
Afghanistan again where we didn't get our Islamic state out of it, but be careful on that."
Secondly, that there was a small strain of self-criticism that existed within Jihad. Of
course, I have highlighted just a few of them, and of course, those who will write these
inside-Jihad criticisms will be critical of what happened. And I'm not saying they're even
correct. I'm just observing their existence within the documentary record, whether what they
said was correct or not, but they certainly lead us to benchmarks of further analysis of what can
bring a Jihad down.
I would also like to posit the question. I don't know whether this is also a time capsule
that this era of looking so self-critically of Jihad. It's maybe a passing from one phase to another.
There certainly doesn't appear to be a replacement for al-Suri writing such huge treatises on
Jihad, and a lot of the critique, the commentary seems to be the more ephemeral things, you
know, chatroom discussions now and glossy magazines directed at the West. A lot of those
magazines are just excerpts of this stuff. There's nothing really new in there. So perhaps this is
also a time capsule in another sense, that their era of really looking at problems has ended.
Finally, it kind of shows that Jihad is like a lot of human endeavors. They end because
they're human organizations, and someone along the way has failed to learn, adapt, or anticipate.
And I want to leave with a quote from the Algiers Letter, and he said, "How to measure
the success of the war" -- and I immediately thought, "Ah, a metric." Basically, the writer said
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the success of any war is measured by the extent of achieving objectives. It has waged war.
Consequently, the success of the Jihadi war is measured by the extent of its success and applying
God's laws in an established Islamic regime.
And by that measure, I believe I would put forth that it has all failed. Thank you.
[Applause.]
DR. COOK: Well, I have to admit for one, I'm glad that the era of Abu Musab al-Suri
has passed, having had to read through a couple of his tomes, so pardon my joy at that.
My paper is entitled "The Collapse of the Religious Justifications for Globalist Radical
Muslims." One of the manifestations and the downturn in popular Muslim support for
Salafi-Jihadis during the last 10 years has been the collapse of the tacit religious support
accorded to their methodologies and tactics within the world of Islamic jurisprudence. This talk
will briefly examine the nature of this support, the reasons it was accorded or acquiesced to in
the first place, and note the elements of it that have remained in place.
Religious justifications for Salafi-Jihadi violence have comparatively shallow roots. For
the most part, the tactics utilized by these groups were developed by Egyptian radicals during the
1970s and '80s but were not followed through and given full fruition until the 1990s and early
2000s.
These justifications constitute a major part of the intellectual framework that
Salafi-Jihadis have created for themselves and serve a propagandistic and media purpose to
convince the larger Muslim community that the violence perpetrated by these groups is in fact
accorded with the Prophet Muhammad's example and is not merely nihilistic in character, and
that it will lead inexorably to victory otherwise unobtainable were it not through these means.
To a large degree, Muslims, even the Muslim religious elite, until September 11, 2001
were unaware of the vibrant Salafi-Jihadi religious culture that flourished away from the
limelight. Even for some years until 2004 or 2005, for the most part, their religious justifications
went unanswered.
During the 1990s, with some few exceptions, the Salafi-Jihadi debates and publications
were unknown, the exceptions being when security forces periodically raided or confiscated
materials from these groups and then published them.
However, as the focus of Jihadi violence has turned during the past 10 years more and
more away from fighting the, quote, "far enemy" to the task of establishing an Islamic state, a
process that has involved the use of suicide attacks, killing large numbers of Muslim civilians,
the general public has more and more become aware of the religious justifications that underlie
such violence.
This fact has led to the gradual collapse of the religious underpinnings of al-Qaeda and its
ideological affiliates during the same time. First of all, it is important to realize that the religious
justifications for Jihad and specific tactics utilized by radical Muslims are not some afterthought
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on their part. Both the Salafi-Jihadi overall strategy and its tactics must be ultimately derived
from or related to the example of Muhammad. Without that basis, the radicals would lose their
legitimacy as Sunnis, those who follow the example of Muhammad, and would lack the ability to
convince the broader Muslim community of their goals.
Second of all, it is equally important to note that one of the principal targets of
Salafi-Jihadis is in fact the larger Muslim religious establishment, whose conservatism stands in
the way of their achieving a radical reform of Islam and its symbiotic relationship with the
governments as deemed by radicals to constitute apostasy.
Thus, development of religious justifications for Jihad, both in its strategy and its tactics,
constitute a challenge to the authority of the Muslim religious elite and serves an attempt to wrest
away from the latter, control over a major and prestigious element of religious law. In essence,
radical Muslim jurisprudence exemplifies the type of Islam that the movement wants to promote
as an alternative to the conservative religious elite or to the Sufi masses that stand behind them.
Point number one, Takfir. Takfir or the arrogation of the right to declare an apparent
Muslim to be an apostate and thus legitimize his or her death stands at the heart of Salafi-Jihadi
theological justifications for violence. Traditionally, Sunnism has been particularly cautious
about the use of Takfir, which is almost exclusively a phenomenon of the period since 1960 in
the Muslim world. But in a statement of February 14th, 2003, Osama bin Laden said, quote,
"The most significant of these shackles and obstacles in our present time are the rulers, the false
witnesses among the scholars of evil, the corrupt court ministers, the writers for hire, and others
like them, those rulers who wanted to solve our issues through the United Nations or by orders of
the United States. These rulers have betrayed God and his Prophet, and they have gone beyond
the pale of the religious community and betrayed our umma," end quote.
While it is possible to understand this indictment in light of the, A, democratic state of
most of the Muslim world, because of doctrinal reasons, bin Laden and other Salafi-Jihadis must
include a much larger number within their Takfir; otherwise, it is impossible to explain the failed
state of the Muslim world in their perception. This is accomplished by bringing out the Doctrine
of Al-Wala' Wa'l-Bara', which is love or loyalty or hatred or dissociation on the basis of Islam.
In the interview that he did with Tayseer Allouni of Al Jazeera TV on October 21st,
2001, when questions about relations with non-Muslims, bin Laden cited Quran 5:54 denouncing
such relations and saying, quote, "I stay to the Muslims, take the strongest warning from
associating with Jews or Christians. Whoever lets slip a word before one of them, let him fear
God, renew his faith, and repent of what he's done," end quote.
The disbelief of Allouni is clear in his response. He says, "Even a word?" to which bin
Laden says, quote, "Even a word assists them by this and falling into apostasy." Immediately,
Allouni points out the obvious, "But this is a large section of the Muslim community." Although
bin Laden very breezily denies that fact, it is apparent that what the Salafi-Jihadi Takfir does, it
does indeed comprise a large majority of the Muslim community. From this ideological
religious basis, it is easy to see the reasons why radicals have been able to morph themselves
during the period following 2003 from fighting non-Muslims and defending the Muslim world to
mass casualty attacks aimed almost exclusively at Muslims.
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There are at least a half-a-dozen major works, as a matter of fact, on the subject of
Al-Wala' Wa'l-Bara' authored by major Salafi-Jihadi figures, such as al-Zawahiri himself. The
fact that the beliefs that stand behind such actions is that most Muslims are in fact apostate, and
that Salafi-Jihadis have the right to attack them or at least disregard the likelihood that they
would be killed in an operation.
This mass Takfir was already refuted by major Sunni figures in the 1990s, including
Nasiruddin al-Albani and many different other Saudi figures, and since that time, intellectual
radicals such as Abu Basir al-Tartusi, who during the 1990s very closely associated with such a
broad definition of Takfir, have been careful during the years since 2003 to redefine themselves,
allowing for the possibility that while certain Muslims may have objectional practices associated
with them, this does not necessarily give radicals blanket right to kill them. This was, indeed,
also the stance that has been taken by Egyptian radicals who since the 1990s have issued a
number of treatises in clarification of the issue of Takfir.
Equally, it is clear that such broad definitions of contact with non-Muslims are
impossibly strict, even within Muslim majority countries. Thus, although the idea of global
Takfir is still one of the mainstays of Salafi-Jihadis as a propaganda tool, it has lost its efficacy
and alienates precisely the people it needs to convince.
Point number two, exigencies of Jihad. A major factor in the Salafi-Jihadi
encouragement of Jihad has been the idea that the presence circumstances of the non-Muslim
world's attempt to attack Muslims en masse requires Muslims to operate under the rules of,
quote, "defensive Jihad." Traditionally, Jihad was divided into two categories: offensive Jihad,
which had to be waged by some Muslims but not all; as opposed to defensive Jihad, which was
invoked when Muslim lands were attacked. Under the latter set of rules, all Muslims were
required, and many of the strictures limiting the types of tactics available for Muslims to use
were also disregarded.
During the 1990s and beyond, Salafi-Jihadis have tried to make the argument that the
present conflicts represent precisely such an emergency situation for the entire Muslim
community. Success in this argument would have liberated the radicals from the confines of the
Sharia structures placed upon the fighting, making the killing of enemy civilians and the
destruction of collateral damage not so problematic.
Additionally, defensive Jihad would enable the Jihadis as religious scholars to come to
the fore and to accomplish that radical transformation of Islam that they crave.
There are several factors which enabled radicals to make the argument that Jihad at the
present time is defensive. The first and primary one was the perception that many of the
conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims during the 1990s were religious in nature, rather
than nationalistic, especially in the Balkans, in Africa, and South and Central Asia.
The second was the lack of clarity promoted by Salafi jurists concerning the question of
what constitutes an attack upon Muslims or occupation of Muslim lands. While certainly most
Arab Muslims accept the premise that Israel constitutes such an attack or an occupation, it's
43
apparent that the radicals associates with al-Qaeda wanted to globalize this sense of attack or
occupation to make the worldwide attacks upon non-Muslims, mainly the West, possible.
Bin Laden in his October 21st, 2001, interview with al-Allouni also expands upon the use
of exigency saying, quote, "This prohibition against killing innocent children is not absolute.
God says, 'If you punish, let your punishment be proportionate to the wrong done to ou,' which is
Quran 16:126. "So the infidels, if they intend to kill our women and children, there's nothing
wrong in our treating them in the same way in order to deter them," quote. Of course, this line of
reasoning opens up to the radicals, possibilities that they can decide who will live and who will
die, and it's been critiqued on those grounds even by Saudi religious leaders.
Al-Zawahiri in his 2008 treatise, a "tarbiyah," tries to defend such exigencies when
discussing the murder of the little girl Shayma in Cairo as a result of the attack on the Egyptian
Prime Minister, November 25th, 1993, by saying, quote, "We were all saddened by the killing of
this little innocent girl unintentionally, but what is to be done? It is necessary to wage Jihad
against the government, which is fighting against the law of God an din alliance with hits
enemies. We expended all of our energy in such circumstances not to hurt any Muslim and
warned individuals or the people many times previously to stay away from the centers of the
pillars of the regime, their dwellings, and the roads they passed," but when the commander of the
operation was asked concerning the death of Shayma, he said he was sorry for the killing of this
little girl, but the Jihad must not be halted, end quote.
It's clear that this callous attitude towards human life is problematic for the message that
al-Qaeda and its ideological affiliates need to bring to the Muslim world, although it is very
useful and necessary when one considers that it allows radicals to justify any of their collateral
damage in terms of a higher goal.
Exigencies of Jihad also help the radicals justify their signature operation: the suicide
attack. Point number three, martyrdom operations.
One of the major developments in Jihadi tactics during the later 1990s and the first
decade of the 2000s has been the use of the suicide attack. This attack is one in which the
attacker either drives or transforms, on his or her body, a bomb which is then exploded in the
midst of an enemy. Developed first by the Lebanese radicals, mostly Shiites during the 1980s,
this tactic was taken up by the Palestinians in the 1990s and then by Salafi-Jihadis everywhere.
Starting with the Palestinian use of suicide attacks, there was a large development of
religious literature designed to accord the attack of suicide attack legitimacy and to protect its
utilizers from charges that it actually constituted a suicide on the part of the attacker and it killed
innocent civilians. For the most part, with some exceptions, the line of justification provided by
this literature was accepted during the 1990s and during the al-Aqsa Intifada as long as the
primary target was Israel.
However, during the 1990s, especially after September 11th, al-Qaeda used suicide
attacks against Americans targets using parallel religious arguments to justify its tactics. Those
included the following arguments. One, the attacker was not committing suicide along as he or
she was truly intended Jihad. Two, the choice of general civilian targets was legitimate because
44
of the fact that all citizens were responsible for the government's actions through their voting and
paying taxes and, thus, could be killed. Three, collateral damage could be justified on the
principle of the mangonel, the rock-bearing ancestor of the catapult, in which the Prophet
Muhammad is said to have used against the city of al-Ta'if. If Muhammad used the mangonel,
which does not discriminate between civilian and soldier as it descends, then it's legitimate to use
a bomb which equally does not discriminate.
All of these arguments were first developed with regard to Israel but then applied to the
United States in the religious justifications of September 11th of which there were at least seven
available on the Internet and then to other mass casualty martyrdom operations.
Because of the close connection of the suicide attack as an operation to Palestinian
operations against Israel, it's been difficult for Muslim religious leadership, after having
embraced them so obviously during the 1990s in the al-Aqsa Intifada, to then reject them, but it
is equally a fact that during the past 7 years, progressively Muslim religious opinion has turned
away from the support of suicide attacks.
Earliest to make this move were obviously the Turks, who published a number of
religious refutations of suicide attacks, but then especially after the Riyadh bombings of 2003
and the increased use of suicide attacks against Muslims, even the conservative Saudi
establishment has stated categorically, "The one who carries out a suicide attack" -- [speaking
non-English language] -- "is actually a suicide and will be judged as such."
While it's true there's still intellectual incoherence in some of the recent fatwas, in order
to allow for suicide attacks to be used against Israel, it's very significant that in a short period of
time, the religious support for such attacks, broad as it was on September 11th, has collapsed.
Conclusions. During the last 10 years, the tone of religious studies of Jihad has changed
considerably; whereas, in the tone of Jihad articles and books from the mainstream and from
radical circles during the 1990s and early 2000s was that of encouragement of Jihad and a fairly
open-ended development of new tactics, and especially martyrdom operations, to be utilized in it.
The tone of such articles and books today in the mainstream is one of limitation and closer
definition, and in some cases, refutation of the tactics of Jihad. Without a doubt, this change is a
result of September 11th and most especially as a result of the suicide campaign in Iraq 2003 to
present and in Pakistan 2007 to present.
Al-Qaeda and its ideological affiliates have relied during the last 15 years for their
religious justifications upon the widespread acceptance of the formula that Israel equals the
United States in order to legitimize their attacks. Although there's been a good deal of
development in the religious justifications associated with radical Islam, primarily from Egyptian
radicals and then secondarily from Saudis, the principal and most popular arguments presented to
the Muslim world were always those taken by analogy from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Today, that secondhand intellectual and religious link is largely broken, most especially by the
elite which has been able to see how dangerous it is to make blanket allowances for violence to
be utilized.
All those allowances in the end have been turned against Muslims and have turned
45
countries such as Iraq and Pakistan into war zones, as well as fomented a wide variety of
sporadic attacks against other countries. Muslims have been the primary targets of suicide
attacks now for a number of years, and this trend shows no signs of abating. However, at least
the religious underpinnings of such attacks has largely collapsed.
[Applause.]
•-•-•
Ten Years Later: Insights on Al-Qaeda's
Past and Future Through Captured Records
"A Decade Beyond the 9/11 Attacks"
Remarks by
C. Michael Hurley, Senior Counsel,
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States
Audio File Entitled "110913-Michael-Hurley-dinner"
[Being at Audio Counter 00:04:15 and end at 00:50:48.]
MR. HURLEY: Ambassador Norland, thank you so much for that very kind
introduction. You did leave out one thing, and that is that -- and I think it's important to know -I grew up in a family with seven brothers. So, from a very early age, I got excellent training in
terrorism and counterterrorism.
[Laughter.]
MR. HURLEY: And guerilla tactics.
It's a great pleasure to have a chance to talk with you all tonight, and there are so many
things that I want to talk about. Some of what I am going to say comes from a white paper
released a week ago about the chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission. I'm going to take
liberally from that, which I can do because I had a small hand in drafting it. So, if I am
plagiarizing, I'm sort of just plagiarizing from myself which, come to think of it, is a pretty good
source.
[Laughter.]
MR. HURLEY: Winston Churchill once said that history would be good to him because
he intended to write it, and he did in six volumes.
[Laughter.]
MR. HURLEY: But anyway, now on the really solemn occasion of the 10th anniversary
of the attacks, it's really important, I think, to reflect and evaluate where we are in national
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security reform and what we have yet to achieve. How secure has the United States made itself
since 2001? I really think that's one of the key questions. And how do we keep our country and
allies and innocent people around the world safe? What's the story of the last 10 years?
Well, we've come pretty far. The 9/11 attacks were an event of staggering importance.
There was the before and the after. Step back for a moment and think about the past 10 years.
Here's a fact that strikes me. We haven't suffered a major attack here, at least of the kind and the
kind of scale of a 9/11 attack and what we feared in the days, weeks, and months after the 9/11
attacks.
Well, why? We have lots of reasons for that, at least in part because there's been
dramatic change in our country. We went on the offense. We took the fight to the enemy.
Secretary of Defense Panetta said recently, while still Director of CIA, that we are within
reach of strategically defeating al-Qaeda. The killing of Osama bin Laden helped. Bin Laden is
dead, but al-Qaeda is not. It still adaptive and resilient. It's a network, not a hierarchy. Zawahiri
is alive and has taken command of it. It's fragmented and decentralized. It's still lethal in places
like Yemen and Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere.
The bin Laden success, I believe, highlights many reforms that have taken place since the
2001 attacks, the excellent cooperation between special operations forces and the CIA. I really
think it was extraordinary. Really, in a way now, the combatant commander of a lot of this
against violent Islamic extremists is now the Director of CIA. This is a profound change.
Just look at the use of the Predator, the unmanned aerial vehicle that's gotten so much use
lately. In fall of 2001, before the 9/11 attacks, then-CIA Director Tenet was raising at Principals
Committee meetings, the highest level meetings of the United States government and national
security apparatus, about whether he should actually have the trigger for the Predator. I don't
think he wanted it, but he definitely wanted everybody on board if they were going to give it to
him, and he wanted the principals to think through what does this mean, so think about how
that's changed.
So there have been dramatic changes in our government: NASA reorganization, creation
of the Department of Homeland Security with its now-$53-billion annual budget, a surge to more
than $80 billion annually on intelligence, the creation of the Director of the Office of Director of
National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorist Center, new commands in the military,
Northern Command, Cyber Command, significant changes in the FBI and CIA. We'll talk a little
bit about that. CIA, the Washington Post recently argued, has become central to killing the
enemy. It seems to be its primary role now, another profound change.
Just think about our lexicon now. Really in the days, just try to think back before 2001,
we didn't really talk about homeland security. We talked about national security. The use of the
word "homeland" really kind of came up after the 9/11 attacks, I think. Obviously, the economic
effect on our country and the world of the attacks and their aftermath has been huge. So we went
on the offense. We clearly also hardened our defenses in many ways.
So what is the threat that we face today? I think the biggest threat to our national security
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in many ways still comes from affiliates of core al-Qaeda. Peter Bergen, who you know form his
appearance today, in a report he co-authored a year ago for the chair and vice chair of the 9/11
Commission highlights the threat from al-Qaeda Jihadists, calling it a "strategy of diversification,
attacks mounted by a wide variety of perpetrators of different national and ethnic origins and
backgrounds that cannot be easily profiled as threats." I commend to you Peter Bergen's "The
Longest War," his latest book. It's an insightful account of the last 10 years and of the threat and
challenges that we face today.
Most troubling, I think, is the pattern and recruitment of American citizens and residents,
the so-called "lone wolves," and people who become self-radicalized in many cases over the
Internet.
In 2009, there were two actual attacks on our soil, the Fort Hood shootings that claimed
13 lives and a U.S. military recruiter was killed in Little Rock, Arkansas. Somali youth are
being recruited in Minneapolis an Portland, Oregon, in some respects, moving the front lines to
the interior of our country. These are really, really big problems. It's really simply impossible to
know the inner thinking or pathology of every person that is at risk in the country.
Now, al-Qaeda is kind of adopting, this fragmented al-Qaeda, sort of a strategy of
innovation . We saw in October 2010, the discovery of explosives packed in toner cartridges
addressed to Chicago synagogues, and shipped on FedEx and UPS cargo flights from Yemen. It
failed, but clearly, these guys are looking for new ways to inflict great harm and damage. That
would have been an attack without even crossing our borders, really, the people doing it.
Cyber attacks, this is potentially a big problem. Our leaders, our Homeland Security
leaders have been warning of cyber attacks to critical infrastructure, electrical grids, financial
systems, telecommunications, that could be a nightmare scenario. That's what some are calling
it. I think as the current crisis in Japan shows, the disruption of power grids and infrastructure
can have devastating effects on society. It's not science fiction. It's possible to take down cyber
systems and trigger cascading disruptions and damage across a large area.
I read with great alarm -- this is now a couple of years ago -- what seemed to be an
offhand or nonchalant remark by a Chinese general interviewed by some obscure economic
journal, and he was asked, "Well, do you fear, does China fear war with the United States?" And
it was the nonchalance of his reply that sort of said, "No. You know, we don't really fear it,
because in the first few minutes, we're going to show up, we're going to throw a switch and
knock out all of the United States's telecommunications coming from satellites, and then we're
going to throw a second switch and disrupt their financial communities." I don't know if they're
capable of doing that. I don't know if it's possible, but people are sure thinking about these
different possibilities. So that's the threat.
And so what has the country done? Well, there's been substantial reform and progress.
I'm ont going to go into all these details, but, you know, just consider, for example, the creation
of the National Counterterrorist Center. I think most people regard that organization as a pretty
good success. It's made mistakes, that's for sure, but it's a pretty good success.
Let's compare it. Lee Hamilton, who was the vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission and
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my boss, has said that -- the commission said it's always hard for politicians to set priorities.
Sometimes it's hard for the intelligence community to set priorities as well.
Anybody here remember the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, TTIC? That was the
precursor of the NCTC. They produced -- and this is in the months after and years after and
immediate years after the 9/11 attacks -- something called the "Threat Matrix." Anybody
remember that? The Threat Matrix sort of collected every day all the threats that were kind of
coming into our vast system, whether through diplomatic channels, intelligence, military,
whatever it happened to be, local law enforcement. Basically, this Threat Matrix was put
together and kind of dumped on the President's desk, "Here's 115 or 150 threats." I'm not really
sure what good that does, because unless you tell the President how to sort of prioritize
decisions, it's not really solving much of a problem. We're a lot better at that now, I think, than
we were in those initial days.
So big change at the Central Intelligence Agency as well, too, I think in terms of the
sharpening of intelligence and analysis.
The FBI. A lot of people think that the 9/11 Commission went easy on the FBI, that it
should have been reformed more than it was, but it has changed in substantial ways. It has taken
its focus in large part, still doing law enforcement, but it's deeply involved in counterterrorism
and intelligence work with respect to terrorists. It wasn't really all that solid on that before the
9/11 attacks.
Creation of all these joint terrorism task forces across the country, I think there's 105 of
them now, and there's something like 72 fusion centers. It gets to the whole question of
information sharing, which we were sort of poor on in many ways before the 9/11 attacks. I
think we're better now at that, and I'll talk a little bit more about it, but it's not perfect.
I'd like to reserve kind of a discussion of the Director of National Intelligence and how
that's working or not working as you see it for the questions and answers a little bit later.
So I think we're safe for today because of all of this, but we're not ultimately safe, and we
never will be, because of lots of things that have been left undone. I think there's some
unfinished business that the government has to deal with.
The 9/11 Commission recommended that it was really important to have a unity of
command and effort, something that's very natural to our military, but to have this sort of
implemented across the country for responding to either manmade disasters or natural disasters.
Now, we made some progress on that, and I think, depending on who you talk to from the
Department of Homeland Security, they will sort of say, "Well, we've got this covered." You go
around in municipalities around the country and you talk to police chiefs and fire chiefs, you get
somewhat of a different story. It's not always altogether clear.
If we go back to Hurricane Katrina -- not Katrina. If we go back to the oil spill, the Gulf
oil spill, a bit more than a year ago, there were some glitches in that whole effort. The
centralized sort of system was set up, so that there was one person in charge, an admiral, but
49
States were still kind of going in their own direction at times, and that can be a bit of a problem.
One problem that we haven't solved that I think is really appalling is we still don't have
complete interoperability of radios to be used in emergency response. That's really appalling,
because all you have to look at is what happened in New York City on the day of the attacks.
We lost hundreds of firemen and policemen because of the inability to be able to communicate
on incompatible radio systems. We do not have the bandwidth reserved for specialized use in
emergency situations that the country needs. It's a big political problem and a big political fight,
but the fact that it hasn't been done in 10 years is really an appalling problem.
I think another thing that hasn't been done -- and this was a key recommendation of the
9/11 Commission -- was the creation of a privacy and civil liberties board. We've had so many
changes in our country, so many laws and regulations and different procedures all over the place,
that we really do need sort of a board that analyzes and evaluates the trade-off and the balance
between security, which is very important, but also maintaining privacy and civil liberties and
striking that right balance.
The 9/11 Commission recommended the creation of a panel to do this. The Bush
administration created it and staffed it out, selected a few of the panel members for it, but it
never really did very much of anything. The Obama administration, surprisingly to me, has
named two people for it, but they never met. There hasn't been a quorum, and it hasn't done
anything. And I think, but more importantly, the chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission
believe that this is an appalling failure, that even just the notion of being able to explain to the
American public why certain steps are necessary to say that we looked at this and evaluated the
impact on privacy and civil liberties, and this makes sense in the broader scheme of things is
really important. And we're lacking that now.
Now, Congress was very quick to insist that other agencies in the national security
community make significant changes and reform, but the 9/11 Commission also recommended
important changes that Congress reform itself in terms of oversight and intelligence and
homeland security. It really hasn't done that. So quick to sort of criticize others and insist that
others make changes, but congressional leadership has not stepped up to the plate to reform
Congress, and it's not just a question of reform for reform's sake.
If you're in the Department of Homeland Security and you're getting oversight by a total
of 88 committees and subcommittees, you're not really getting coherent advice or instruction,
and Congress' role really should be to help these important agencies in the national security with
those kinds of responsibilities. Do good work. That's what they should be doing, working hand
in hand, and it's hard to do that when you have fragmented oversight. And Congress has been
unwilling to change. I'll tell you, the chair and vice chair of the 9/11 Commission hit Congress
hard about that, about that recommendation as one that really should be fulfilled, and we need to
focus on it.
Again, I want to kind of reserve the discussion about D&I, which is really important
maybe for questions and answers. On transportation security, we need to really improve the
ability of screening checkpoints to detect explosives on passengers, you know, people kind of
going through these machines and so on. It's possible they still get through. The technology is
50
still wanting, and it's probably going to be a problem in the future.
The Commission recommended that we also have biometric exit screening. We kind of
know when people are coming into the country now. We don't know when they're leaving. We
don't know if they've overstayed their visas. That was a problem before 9/11, because a number
of the 9/11 hijackers had overstayed their visas, and that's pretty important.
What about standardizing secure identifications? The Commission recommended sort of
standards in birth certificates and issuance of driver's licenses, and States were supposed to get
on board. I think about a third of the States have complied, but it means two-thirds haven't. And
their deadlines have been extended by the Department of Homeland Security until 2014, I think.
It's really pretty unacceptable. We have to know who people are when they're getting on planes,
when they are going into places where they can cause problems and so on, so getting that
straightened out, I think is hugely important.
Another thing, it's the whole question of developing coalition standards for terrorist
detention . I don't want to get too much into that issue, but this is a bitter problem that has vexed
two presidents. It is very, very difficult to resolve this. How are we going to treat these
prisoners? I think this is a Congress problem. This is a problem for congressional legislation,
because they have to pass legislation and spell out these are the procedures and this is how the
should be handled, and that hasn't been done. The government and the President needs help on
this, and the fact that two Presidents, with I think all goodwill and good intention to resolve this
really tough, thorny issue, have been unable to really make substantial progress is indicative of
that.
I think the Obama administration did something pretty important at the beginning of the
administration, which was to review all the cases of the folks, people held in Guantanamo and to
sort of start sifting through that. I think that's a good first step. But Congress needs to get
involved. We have to determine as a country what the procedures are for handling these people,
and we have to codify that into law. I think that's really, really important.
Let me talk a moment about counter-radicalization. That's a really important fact our
friends in Europe have dealt with for a long time. I don't think we fully focused on this in the
United States. Counter-radicalization, how do you keep people from becoming radicalized? It's
not just a question of law enforcement and law enforcement going into the communities that
might be at risk. It's already too late if you're at that point. You have to be on top of this.
Basically, I think what we need to do is inoculate these communities and inoculate
particularly the young people and the young men who are at risk from the virus of Islamic
extremism. We have to approach this also in a coherent way. I think if you ask most people, it
would be very difficult, even experts on counterterrorism, for them to identify just what
department or what individual in the United States government is in charge of our
counter-radicalization policy. It's very hard to place.
You know, I recommend a recent report on this that the chair and vice chair of the 9/11
Commission put out, kind of pointing out, I think, in a very constructive way what the
difficulties are in terms of our overall counter-radicalization policy and what needs to be done.
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So the threat is still evolving, I think, from al-Qaeda in some ways.
I go back to right after 9/11, and I think about this great fear that we had that people in
the intelligence community, the military, those that have been reading intelligence that were
involved in what al-Qaeda was up to had about the fear of a nuclear weapon or nuclear materials
getting into the hands of al-Qaeda. This is recounted, I think, pretty well in the memoirs of
George Tenet who was Director of CIA at the time, but in fall of 2001, soon after the attacks,
there was deep, deep concern across the Washington community on the A.Q. Khan, the sort of
father of the Pakistani nuclear program, had sort of proliferated weapons potentially to al-Qaeda.
Nobody knew, but there was at least some evidence and there was some intelligence about this.
Tenet recounts this in his book, and it's very interesting to read this, but this really -- I
mean, this is one of the things, besides the anthrax scare and all this stuff that was going on after
the 9/11 attacks as we were sort of, you know, figuring out what had happened and what we
needed to do about it. This was what was keeping people really in the know off in this first
couple of months to try to figure out had that exchange taken place, did al-Qaeda have some
very, very dangerous weapon, could something be in the United States. And the big concern was
what if we don't find this, what if something like that has happened, but we miss it. That's really
what was on people's minds.
I'll tell you an anecdote from my work on the 9/11 Commission. I had on my team, I had
the counterterrorism policy investigation, and a very, very bright young historian from Columbia
University with a Ph.D. in history -- he's a brilliant guy, and both he and I were kind of doing the
investigation and helped the Security Council with the decision-making with respect to al-Qaeda.
One day, as part of the many interviews we conducted of people that have staff jobs at the
NSC staff, we went in and we interviewed a very, very bright woman who had a responsibility in
the counterterrorism directorate there to sort of track nuclear weapons and the possibility of
terrorists having them. And I remember being in this interview with her, so this would have
been in late 2003, I think, and we were asking her questions to describe what really concerned
her. I wasn't jaded exactly, but I had been reading intelligence, and I kind of knew that there was
this big threat out there. My colleague, though, was kind of new to this, and he was very, very
bright. And we were asking questions, and I remember her telling us, because she was in this
key office, I think, from like 1997 onward. And she told us that on many drives from her home
into her office at the White House, on any particular day, she thought she might see a mushroom
cloud over Washington, D.C., from a terrorist attack. And you should have seen the reaction of
my colleague. I mean, he was horrified. I was horrified, but he was petrified. Why? Because
the public had no inkling that these experts have those kinds of concerns about our country, and
that was the first indication for him.
That all led to a key 9/11 Commission recommendation. You may remember it, and the
9/11 Commission said our number-one priority needs to be keeping the most dangerous weapons
in the world from falling into the hands of the most dangerous people, al-Qaeda.
The interesting thing now is this is not emphasized as much. Things have changed. It's a
big change. In recent threats assessments, you don't really sort of see the emphasis on the fact
that there may be a nuclear attack, and I don't think it's completely ruled out the use of a dirty
52
bomb, but I think it doesn't have the same emphasis that it did. We still need to worry about it,
of course. You have to sort of weigh the likelihood or the probability of something like that
occurring versus the gravity of harm, which would be obviously severe, and changing a society
that actually should take place.
So here's some things that I have been thinking about. The awareness that we've all had
since the shock of the attacks is maybe one of the most important and underrated attributes of our
success, I think, in preventing attacks over the last 10 years or major attacks, and I don't mean,
by the way, to minimize the Fort Hood shootings with 13 people killed. That was severe and
tragic, and a Senate review of that basically suggested that it could have been prevented. And
that's a report worth reading as well, too. We can learn things from these kinds of reviews.
Think of the pre-9/11 mind-set. The 9/11 Commission, I think, pointed out very fairly
weaknesses in CIA's portraiture of al-Qaeda before the 9/11 attacks. Obviously, CIA and the
military, everybody is very aware of the threat from al-Qaeda, but there were still weaknesses in
the portraiture.
But the Commission said -- and I think this is really telling kind of the conclusion or
point that the Commission made, so I want to read it to you. The Commission said that both
Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush and their stop advisers told us they've got the picture of
the threat. They understood bin Laden was a danger, but given the character and pace of their
policy efforts, we, that is, the Commission, do not believe they fully understood just how many
people al-Qaeda might kill and how soon it might do it. We said at some level that is hard to
define, we believe the threat had not yet become compelling. And our public, despite the attacks
at our embassies in East Africa in 1998, despite the attack on the USS Cole -- I think 17 sailors
killed, maybe 40 or 41 grievously wounded, a half-billion dollars damage to a U.S. warship -and going back to the East Africa bombings, I think there were 12 Americans killed. There were
over 200-and-some Africans, 5,000 wounded, and over a thousand of the Africans wounded were
blinded by those attacks. But despite all that, our public still didn't have a clue, I think, about the
hatred these people bore us.
We knew about anti-Americanism in some countries but not in others, so it was kind of
shocking. And I heard that from everybody, people that I know, people that I went to school
with, people in my home community.
Let's take a look at the big picture. I want to mention that a colleague of mine, who is a
brilliant colleague from the 9/11 Commission, he was the executive director named Philip
Zelikow. He has written, by the way, an afterward to the latest edition of the 9/11 Commission
report that has just been issued in connection with the 10th anniversary of the attacks. If you
haven't read it, I highly recommend that you read this afterward. It's always worth paying
attention to what Dr. Zelikow says, and so I am going to make a few of his points. These are his
points, but I think they are really worth considering here.
One of the things that he says is that one of the most common misunderstandings of the
9/11 Commission report is that the Commission blamed the attack -- and I actually say here the
failure, blame the failure to prevent the attack -- on a lack of imagination, and the implication is
that if only the government had done more out-of-the-box thinking, the attack could have been
53
averted. But as Dr. Zelikow says, our point instead was that the imagination of large
organizations must take an institutional form to be carried out effectively by ordinary people
every day. That means the development of a craft or a culture of routine procedures.
Part of the problem of 9/11 was that parts of the government had actually already
mastered the craft of analyzing surprise attack dangers but had not systematically applied its
proven techniques to the enemy that in 2001 was most likely to attack the United States. So we
had these procedures. We didn't really use them, though, and the procedures themselves, the
warning, knowing when warning was important and being able to warn of a potential attack
obviously developed during the cold war, it really had their basis, and it was borrowed from
engineering. Engineers consider the most credible, likely dangerous pathways that will lead to a
catastrophic failure, and then they look for telltale indicators, and they collect intelligence on
those indicators. It seemed like there was an element of randomness to our collection of
intelligence on al-Qaeda, and it wasn't really sort of knitted together. And it gets interesting to
think about.
So I talked about the threat, and here it is again. I am going to direct you to what my
colleague from the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, how he sees it, because, again, I
emphasize he's always worth listening to. And he kind of summarizes it this way, and you will
see this if you read his afterward. He says by 2001, al-Qaeda was seriously weakened, and I
think that's true. They retained strength in Pakistan and Afghanistan in some respects in 2006.
Ambassador Norland is well aware of that from his position there. And we saw the plot to blow
up several commercial airliners over the Atlantic in summer of 2006. I think that was averted,
but it would have been a complex plot. In 2008, the United States government stepped up its
tempo of missile attacks into the Pakistan sanctuary, because of all these things that were going
on. President Obama, as you know, has accelerated the tempo of that.
We thin it's true that, and as Zelikow says, that the organizational capability of al-Qaeda
today now seems to be back at the level it had in the mid 1990s. Its scattered fanatical
adherence, though, have crystallized in some places. The most deadly recent attack on U.S. soil
was carried out by a solo fanatic, the Army psychologist inspired by Islamic propaganda to
murder 13 people at Fort Hood.
I think the danger of global Islamist terrorism is now fairly significantly reduced from
what it was on 9/11. In Pakistan, it's probably true that the core -- I emphasize the core al-Qaeda
-- is down to a few hundred reliable operatives. That's Dr. Zelikow's position as well.
From Richard Reid to Christmas, to the Christmas 2009 underwear bomber on the
Northwest plane, the risk of catastrophic terrorist attack is significantly lower than on 9/11, but
the risk is not zero. It's far from zero.
And it's true, I think, that an attack could happen at any time. What shape will it take?
We don't really know. Would it be a swarming Mumbai-style attack? Would it be an Oklahoma
City sort of attack? Would it be something different, a Fort Hood kind of shooting? I don't
know. We saw that attempted in Times Square a year and a half ago or so. Those things, we
have to consider. So an attack really could happen at any time.
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Politically, as Zelikow says, we can't downplay the danger or right-size the enemy to a
more normal proportion. It's really difficult to do that politically. He calls that the paradox of
adjustment. The efforts to right-size or to normalize or reduce risk seem, in Dr. Zelikow's words,
"too risky."
The most serious threats are posed by a relatively tiny number of people, few in number
and not well organized, but they can be bands of zealots. To some extent, I think we succeeded
that denial of sanctuary but with very important qualifications, like parts of Yemen and other
parts of the world. We've also succeeded in interdicting travel in many instances and disrupting
terrorist financing. I think that's a pretty good success.
At 9/11 Commission, Richard Ben-Veniste says that we might best combat terrorists by
taking away the terror, and I think that's an interesting insight that he has.
As Dr. Zelikow says, contemporary societies will remain vulnerable to the abilities of
even a few people to do terribly disruptive things. How we deal with failure, because there will
be some, we need honest self-examination and thoughtful accountability. We need to go on the
offensive against the most dangerous groups, rely on mobile allies where they're reliable, I might
add, and regional staff strategies, develop those to shape ignitions on the ground and contain
dangers.
So what's Dr. Zelikow saying? That we can scale back? I don't think he's really saying
that. The threat is diminished, but there's still a big problem of potential lethal attacks, and that's
going to be with us for a long time.
So what does it say about funding and how we should allocate our money and set our
priorities? You know, for the first time, I am noticing that Congress is really getting interested in
the question of how much money are we spending on all of this. Lee Hamilton, the vice chair of
the 9/11 Commission, sort of says when he talks about it and he's asked that question, we need to
rationalize spending. He sort of says that the immediate concern of Congress and our leadership
after 9/11 attacks was the security of the country, obviously, of our people. Our leadership didn't
really care about what it cost. We can't really do that now anymore, and these tough decisions
have to be made. Like I said, for the first time, you're sort of seeing questions. You're seeing
Senators and Representatives sort of raising these issues, and I think it's important that we do
that. You have to figure out what's working and what isn't. Is it just a calculation, though?
I remember the old deterrent strategies that the United States government had, and many
of you do here as well. They worked in the era of two super powers.
Speaking of that, by the way, I always thought the Soviets would blow us up, and just
before we were smoked, we'd blow them up. And look what's happened instead. Our own
bankers have blown us up.
[Laughter.]
MR. HURLEY: But in those days, it was nukes versus nukes, equations versus
equations. The deterrence was really kind of mechanistic in a way. Go back and look at the
55
classic films, "Failsafe" and "Dr. Strangelove." You get a sense of that. Sort of like once the
doomsday machines were set in motion, the opera was ending, because the fat lady was singing,
and she was singing, "Good night, Irene." But it's humans versus humans now. That's what I
think we really have going here. That's what we confront. When the New York Times' Tom
Friedman calls "people of mass destruction," people that strap explosives on themselves to blow
up a base, a CIA base in eastern Afghanistan.
So do we deter that? I know there are theorists -- I've read about these -- who say that we
can do that, and that these committed zealots can be deterred. I'm really not so sure how, and I
haven't been persuaded by any of the arguments that I see. And I think it's a fruitful area to
investigate.
What are our positive differentiators here in our country? I think we have a lot of them.
Our capabilities are enormous. Believe it or not, our big organizations can be agile and nimble
when they need to be. We probably have all seen this in our careers. What can we say about
ourselves that the enemy can't say that they can do because of the pressure that we keep them
under?
Just a very quick anecdote, years ago, when working in the intelligence of CIA, there was
kind of a big bad bank in the world called BCCI, Bank of Commerce and something or other
International. And it was moving a lot of drug money, narco money from South America, just
hundreds of millions of dollars. And what I came to understand -- this was kind of a very late
point in my career -- is if you kind of look at CIA, even the way the military works in some
respects, you have this system of a chain of command, and it can get amazing things to happen
very quickly all over the world, figuratively speaking by pressing a button. But when we moved
-- and I don't just mean CIT, but our diplomatic friends, you know, our people in Treasury and so
on -- to crush that bank's transactions, it happened overnight, demarches made all over the world
when everybody is lit up to go at the same time, and the narco traffickers, the money people in
South America, didn't know what hit them. And we have those rather amazing capabilities, and I
think that's a big advantage to us. When the system functions well, it functions beautifully. It
doesn't always function well, and we've seen that.
A big, huge comparative advantage for us, I think, is information sharing. It was pretty
appalling before 9/11 for all kinds of reasons. I remember a story, an interview that we did with
a three-start general at the Pentagon, who really had rs in the area of terrorism, but for reasons
that were unclear to us was sort of kept out of some of the decision-making and some of the
different things, but I know people have different jobs and need to know and so on. But this was
really way too closely held before the 9/11 attacks, and I think we lost a lot of brain power. We
certainly never included the 19,000 State and local law enforcement organizations that we have
in this country that were clueless basically about the threat that we faced. And that's one hell of
a lot of experience that we didn't take advantage of, and it was really a shame.
Things are profoundly better now, I think, albeit imperfect, as we all know. Today, for
example, we have software with amazing power that interconnects just about everything, but
there's always a price.
I urge you -- I'm giving you these reading assignments to night -- to take a look at a new
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book called "Triple Agent" by Joby Warrick of the Washington Post that tells the story of the
Jordanian doctor, Al-Balawi, who was recruited by Jordanian intelligence. You have to read this
account, and this is the guy that strapped explosives to himself and blew up seven CIA officers
and some other people at the CIA on a base in Khost, Afghanistan, a year and a half ago. That's
part of the price, I think, that we pay as we aggressively try to deal with this threat, and there's
always a crisis. We can never be afraid to ask the question, though, what's really working and
what needs to be done. Do measures that we've implemented, are they keeping us safe, and is it
lessening the chance of terrorism.
Here, we get back to price. Think about the use of the Predator. The Predator strikes
have accomplished a lot, I think. They killed enemies of the United States and enemies of the
West. Killing those enemies have protected a lot of people, but the truth is they're double-edged.
They are, because there's always a price. Do we know who the strikes are radicalizing, how
many people they're radicalizing? It doesn't take much to radicalize people in these parts of the
world, Pakistan and the sanctuaries and so on. It's just a big problem.
Again, it's anecdotal, but there are a few hard answers in this area, so we gain some
benefit, and there's a price to be paid. We have to analyze that. That's the reality it's missing.
The terrorists are not going to give up, even if the threat is diminished to some extent.
We have had our successes, but we really can't let our guard down. That would be a huge
mistake. We're going to see new attempts and successful attacks. We're safer than 10 years ago,
and we've hit the enemy hard, but we have to regularly assess, reassess, and recalibrate.
And I hope that's what's going on with you in your work, whether you're a manager or
not, just taking a look at all this, raising questions, recalibrating, anticipating what are the best
ways to stay ahead of a determined enemy.
One of our major deficiencies before the 9/11 attacks was the failure by national security
agencies to adapt quickly to new and different kinds of enemies. We're better at adapting now, I
think.
But when our story is told, what will it be? Overreaction? Reason? Did we keep our
heads when confronted with a new and horrific reality? I think for the most part we did, but in
all honesty, we've made mistakes.
Peter Bergen's "The Longest War" makes that clear. Again, I commend that to you. We
missed opportunities, and there really is much more to do.
Overall, I have to say I agree with many commentators that the U.S. military has been the
greatest source for peace in the history of the world. I remember I had some role, a minor role in
the Kosovo conflict in policy-making, and I remember the leader, president of the Czech republic
at the time, Vaclav Havel, speaking before the Canadian Parliament in Ottawa in spring 1999,
just the NATO bombing. Serb forces was taking place. He was talking about Kosovo, and he
said that -- this very eminent leader and historically, he said that the U.S.-led coalition was one
of the most altruistic acts in history. We didn't get anything out of what we did, just very little.
Take a look at that.
57
I think that in confronting the challenges that we face with terrorism, we are going to
move forward using our brains and our know-how more than our brawn. We need to rely on
that. It's going to see us through. That's really what intelligence is all about.
And I'd like to leave you with a thought. I want you to understand that when the 9/11
Commission or really any other serious panel does an investigation, the primary purpose is not to
find fault per se. Rather, it's to do things better and make suggestions to do things better to
protect our people. So we're in a common endeavor. The research you do in the academic world
to understand the world in which we live, the challenges that we face, the ideologist, the cultures,
every aspect of this, I think it is critically important.
We can't do without that analysis and those insights. Whether they come from the
government, whether they come from scholars, the academic community, wherever it comes
from, we need that ability to find the truth to put it together to see the patterns. So you're all
doing important work, and it's not the time to let up. The threat is still very much with us and
will be into the future.
It's really a deep honor to talk to you, and on behalf of Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton
that chairs the 9/11 Commission and myself, I want to thank you for the long hours you put in
and the sacrifices you and your families make really for everything you do. Thank you so much,
and I really look forward to your questions.
[Applause.]
•-•-•
Ten Years Later: Insights on Al-Qaeda's
Past and Future Through Captured Records
Panel 3: "What Should be the Focus of AQAM Studies
for the Future?"
The Honorable Juan C. Zarate (Chair),
Senior Adviser for the Transnational Threats Project
and Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Program,
Center for Strategic and International Studies
Mr. Brian Fishman, Counterterrorism Research Fellow at
New American Foundation
Dr. Zabikhulla Saipov,
The University of World Economic and Diplomacy
(Tashkent, Uzbekistan)
Ms. Anne Stenersen, Research Fellow,
Norwegian Defense Research Establishment (FFI)
Dr. Thomas Lynch, Distinguished Research Fellow for
Near East and South Asia at the Institute for
National Strategic Studies
Mr. Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens,
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Ph.D. Candidate in War Studies at King's College, London; and
Research Fellow at The International Center
for the Study of Radicalism
Audio File Entitled "110914-Panel03"
[Begin at Audio Counter 00:03:37 and end 01:57:13.]
MR. ZARATE: Mark, thanks for the kind introduction. Welcome, everybody. Good
morning. I hope everyone is doing well.
We have a very rich panel discussion today. The panelists today have produced some
very important papers that will be part of the monograph of this conference, but I think set the
stage for a very rich discussion. With all due respect to the conference yesterday, probably the
most important part of the conference, which is what should our focus with respect to al-Qaeda
and al-Qaeda and associated movements be moving forward, how should we be thinking about
research, how should we be thinking about the movement and the ideology.
I am honored to be here today. I want to thank National Defense University, Johns
Hopkins, and all of the folks who put this conference together for inviting me, because it's a
pleasure for me to do this.
We clearly know that the al-Qaeda of 2011 is not the al-Qaeda of 2001. We have had a
decade of experience with al-Qaeda and its associated movements, but I think what is most
interesting is the question of what the al-Qaeda of 2021 or 2025 may bring.
I was fortunate enough to be a part of a study that we produced from the Center for
Strategic and International Studies, published on September 7th, that actually challenged
ourselves and others to think through what al-Qaeda, its ideology, its manifestations around the
world, might look like reaching out to 2025.
Looking back at the history of al-Qaeda, the factors that attended to its growth and
manifestations, taking 10 case studies with respect to groups like al-Qaeda in Iraq,
Lashkar-e-Taiba; Jamaat-e-Islami, and others, and then projecting forward, looking at future
factors, the future environment, potential strategic shocks that may impact the global
environment and that would impact potentially al-Qaeda as well as U.S. and western reaction to
the movement.
So, I commend the study to you, because it was the work of over a year. It built on a
baseline study called "The Threat Transformed," published in February, which was an
assessment of where al-Qaeda was in 2011, right at the beginning of the Arab Spring and, in
particular, the uprisings in Egypt. This study is called "Confronting an Uncertain Threat," and I
think you will enjoy it. In particular, for the policy-makers in the room or those who are in the
policy field, it back end attempts to lay out recommendations and polices as to how one may
think about trying to impact the environment that al-Qaeda may operate in.
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And it is with that in mind then, that I come to this panel. I am very happy to moderate it,
because I think the reality is that we may have multiple manifestations of al-Qaeda and
associated movements, that it will not present as a monolithic organization, clearly as we saw in
2001, and it may not be as easily definable as we have seen even in the last couple of years. But
instead, you may have a mixture of the potential paradigms or manifestations that we have
already seen around the world.
It may continue to take the form of an insurgency in places like Yemen and Somalia. It
may continue to try to influence states or even gain control of states as it once did in
Afghanistan, but it may continue to do in places like Pakistan, or even with new political
openings in places like Egypt and Libya. It may embed more aggressively in local sectarian or
regional conflicts. What we have begun to see with Boko Haram in Nigeria, what we've seen,
obviously, with the role of AQI and the sectarian divides within Iraq plays clearly into that. And
you may begin to see alternative platforms for the global Jihadi agenda; that is to say, alliances
of the affiliates that creates a new arc or a new platform of instability or successor organizations,
like Lashkar-e-Taiba, that more aggressively take on the global Jihadi agenda and project
forward.
Finally, as we all know and we've discussed at length over the last couple of years in our
circles, the rise of inspired individuals, call them moguls, call them radicalized individuals, call
them what you will, the notion of inspired individuals, who in their own environment, in their
own context, hybridize the ideology, contextualize it, and then decide to mobilize, and the
question as to whether or not that then becomes yet another manifestation not only of lone
wolves but packs of lone wolves.
With that, you have the role of technology as the major wildcard not only influencing the
movement but perhaps helping to organize and mobilize; the question of political change
sweeping, particularly the Arab world, the Sunni Arab world, with the Arab Spring; and then the
question of strategic shocks, what may come, for example, seeing the conflicts that may arise
with respect to Israel, with respect to Iran and others. How that environment then impacts the
movement becomes incredibly important and important to think about.
So the future of AQAM, as we all call it now, is certainly complicated. It is unclear. I
think it is folly to try to predict it, which is exactly why it requires study and some of the best
minds in the field, such as the panelists today, to do exactly that.
So, without further ado, let me introduce very briefly the panelists. What we like to do is
have the panelists present the basic core themes and ideas of the papers they presented. We'll go
down the line, and what we'll then do is I will mix it up a little bit but then ask a few questions,
and then we'll open it up with you all. We very much want to make this a discussion not only
between us but between the panelists, so I encourage you to be provocative, and I encourage the
panelists to be interactive.
First up is Brian Fishman. Known to many of you, he's the Counterterrorism Research
Fellow at the New America Foundation. He is one of the sort of young guns in the field who has
proven himself time and time again to be on the cusp of important thoughts on these issues. He
has written a paper called "The Fourth Decade of Modern Jihadi Violence: Evolution and
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Impact." It's a succinct piece that I think you will enjoy the premise of.
Next to him is Dr. Zabikhulla Saipov, who comes to us a lecturer at the University of
World Economy and Diplomacy in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. He is world-renown, has worked both
in government and in the region, particularly on issues in Central Asia. His paper today is called
"Reflections on Government Strategies to Counteract Unofficial Islam in Uzbekistan." And I
will just note, Dr. Saipov, that CSI has done a lot of work in terms of the rise of radicalism
Central Asia, something that goes underreported and understudied, so we commend you on your
work.
To his right is Ms. Anne Stenersen, Research Fellow at the Norwegian Defense Research
Establishment. Her paper, "The al-Qaida-Taliban Relationship Revisited," pulls from her latest
research, which I think is fascinating, on the growing questions on the historical as well as future
relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which then I think sets the platform for
questioning and asking very important questions about the relationships between Jihadi groups,
this obviously, critical as we look to 2014 in Afghanistan. So I am incredibly interested to hear
what Ms. Stenersen has to say, and I think you will be as well.
To her right, a common figure known to many of us, and certainly you all here at NDU,
is Dr. Thomas Lynch, who had a distinguished military career before joining academia here at
NDU. He is a Distinguished Research Fellow for Near East and South Asia for the Institute for
National Strategic Studies here. He has presented a very interesting piece on the importance of
the death of bin Laden. It's entitled, "The 80% Solution: al-Qaeda, the Death of bin Laden and
the Future of South Asian Security." And I think he really brings a new and a better perspective
and a more complex perspective on the strategic impact of the death of bin Laden, which I think
is not well understood, and what that means in terms of our policy in South Asia. So, Dr. Lynch,
I am looking forward to that very much.
Then finally, to his right is Mr. Alexander Meleagrou-Hitchens, Ph.D. candidate in War
Studies at King's College in London. He is also a Research Fellow at the International Center for
the Study of Radicalism. He has probably the best title of any of the papers, "As American As
Apple Pie: How Global Jihadism Has Spread to The West." And in that paper, as you will hear,
he talks about the allure of the ideology in the West, what it means in terms of radicalization, and
what the future of the ideology in western context means.
So without further ado, I'd like to introduce the panelists. They will present for about 15
minutes, perhaps a little bit less, if possible, and then we will just go down the line, and then we
will open it up for questions.
So, with that, Brian?
MR. FISHMAN: Well, first of all, thank you for the kind introduction, Juan, and for
everyone that had a hand in organizing the conference, thanks for having me.
I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about the sort of shell of a paper that I was
actually able to produce for the conference, and then I'm going to diverge a little bit and talk
about some of the questions that I think this community that is in the room should be asking right
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now, because I think we have gotten to a point where we have started to ask some of the same
questions over and over again, and there are a lot of really relevant questions that we need to
look at. Some of those issues are driven directly by assumptions that we are using to inform
policy today that I think the research community needs to contend with and either confirm or
challenge, and that's going to require some real research.
My printer died at home, so some of this, I will be looking at my phone for my notes.
[Laughter.]
MR. FISHMAN: So the core argument in this paper is that we need ways to try to
understand how different al-Qaeda affiliates are going to organize their violence, how are they
going to achieve goals with violence, and we know that different affiliates are going to choose
different methodologies.
Now, one way to try to understand that is to see what they say. Oftentimes, they are
relatively forthright about what they are going to try to accomplish, but sometimes they're not.
And so my thought is that one way we can try to think about this is we can understand their
theories about social movements and their larger sort of ideas about the role of a group like
al-Qaeda, beyond just violence, in a particular social environment. There are cues in those ideas
that may give us clues as to how they are actually going to operationalize their violence.
A key distinction, a key argument, I look at essentially two spectrums. The first one is a
spectrum that exists between those in the Jihadi movement that believe that society is generally
good, meaning that society generally agrees with them, but it is repressed by governments that
are anti-Islam, as al-Qaeda would define it. Right?
Ayman al-Zawahiri falls into that camp. He is the current emir, and that's where he sits.
It is one of the reasons why I think he is, generally speaking, well situated to deal with the
challenges of the Arab Spring today, because he thinks that the people agree with him, and he
always has, going back to Egyptian Islamic Jihad years ago.
That conflict came to a head when he was debating Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq.
Zarqawi was not just a murderous sadist. He believed that society needed to be purged before
you could actually get anywhere. That you couldn't just cut off the head, you couldn't just
destroy the head and have a truly sharia-governed society pop up in its place, because society
itself, from his perspective, had become corrupt.
That spectrum gives us a clue about how organizations are going to actually
operationalize violence, what will their theory of victory be. This is not just a matter of fear.
This is not just a matter of whether you are going to kill fellow Muslims. It's a matter of how
you are going to try to win over a population, what's the propaganda going to look like, are you
going to try to provoke a response, as Zarqawi did, to try to radicalize and alienate a population,
or can you assume that it is generally loyal, as somebody like Zawahiri would essentially do.
That gives us one framework, one way to think about differences within the Jihadi movement
that might have implications for how they operationalize violence.
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The other one I would point to is how intent are these groups on creating a polity in the
immediate term. This is another distinction between Zarqawi and Zawahiri. We heard yesterday
al-Qaeda wants to create a caliphate. There are some differing views about what that exactly
means, but essentially, where they are headed is that it is essentially a global oil spot strategy
where you develop Islamic states in various places, and then they kind of grow together over
time and are connected in a conceptual sense.
But there is real disagreement within the Jihadi community about when you would
actually declare a state, because there is real disagreement about what a state actually means and
what its responsibilities actually are. There is the assumption among many that al-Qaeda doesn't
really play with the idea of what an Islamic state should look like, that it doesn't have a positive
vision. That is just wrong, and we have repeated it over and over again for a decade. It is not
true. The Islamic State of Iraq, for example, wrote what I would refer to as the "Federalist
Papers for al-Qaeda," where basically they argue, "This is what a state should look like. These
are the responsibilities it ought to have. These are why we should structure it in this particular
way. This is what the succession looks like."
What happened is that many in the Jihadi community looked at their document and said,
"Well, this is garbage. I disagree," but again, the notion of how Jihadis in a particular
environment engage with trying to establish political authority as opposed to just discrediting
their enemies tells us something about how they may operationalize their violence in a particular
setting.
Again, look, this is most useful for trying to understand how these groups may behave in
a particular environment. Whether it's Yemen or Iraq or Algeria, this doesn't really say a lot, I
think, about how are they going to try to operationalize violence against the West, though I think
there are some other questions that I am going to raise here that get at that issue. There are
limitations to this approach, but that's the road I am heading down, and I am really interested to
hear if anybody has thoughts, because, again, this is a bit of a shell of a paper that is still going
forward.
Another question that I would look at that I tried to address in a recent paper is looking at
al-Qaeda's views on China, which is a question that nobody's really thought about. These are the
kind of questions we should be asking, questions that nobody's really thought about. Folks in
government don't have time. Those of us in the research community, we need to do that stuff.
So, why is that question important? Well, the question is important because we need to
think about how does the global context impact the strategies and the approach that al-Qaeda is
going to take over time. The issue is not just how is al-Qaeda going to change in the next 10 or
15 or 50 years. It's how is the world going to change in the next 10 or 15 years.
I haven't read Juan's recent report about China. I think this is one way we need to think
about these sorts of questions. To put it most bluntly, will the far enemy change? Right? China
imports just as much Saudi oil now as we do. If al-Qaeda's rationale for attacking the United
States is, in part, because we prop up governments they don't like economically and politically, is
their rationale going to change? Now, I think it probably won't in the immediate term, but it
probably will over the long run. Those are the kinds of questions we should be thinking about.
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It's not just China. It's relationships with India, it's relationships in a lot of places around the
world. We should ask those questions.
Another key question, especially when we look at the environment in the Arab Spring
today, is there was a counter-intuitive hypothesis posed by some of my colleagues at the
Combating Terrorism Center years up at West Point in a paper about East Africa, where they
suggested that an environment where society has broken down completely is actually more
difficult for al-Qaeda to operate in, in order to attack the West; the idea being that when society
breaks down, communities sort of devolve into their elemental groups, and al-Qaeda generally is
not one of those elemental groups. They're an outsider, and so they have a hard time using those
environments in order to attack the West.
I think that makes a lot of sense, actually, but nobody has really looked at it. We haven't
really tested that hypothesis, and we should test that hypothesis, because it matters. Right? What
if the environment in Yemen 5 years from now, if it is total chaos, is actually more difficult for
al-Qaeda to use as a base for attacks against the West? It may be better for it to use, to try to
build an Islamic state, but is there a tension there between a place that al-Qaeda can use as a
good base of operation for attacks on the West versus a place that al-Qaeda wants to build an
Islamic state?
Jihadi writers address this issue in a variety of different ways, and they seem to think that
there may be some tension. We really need to explore that issue. I don't have the answer. I
don't have the answer for a lot of these questions.
Another key question is that we are facing the possibility of other terrorist movements
that pose threats, maybe not on the level, certainly not on the level of al-Qaeda, but they are
interacting with that movement in dynamic ways. I am thinking, of course, of Anders Breivik in
Norway. We need to ask the question whether right-wing groups like this that tailor themselves
as counter-Jihadis -- Thomas Hegghammer mentioned this yesterday, and I would recommend
you to his piece in the New York Times a month or so ago right after the attacks, where he deals
with what he calls "macro nationalists," people that define their identity in transnational terms
with a sort of religious bent. How different are these groups? How much are they the same?
If you go back and read some of the sort of right-wing, white-nationalist propaganda
from the United States in the 1980s, it's pretty ugly, dangerous stuff, and you can very easily find
white nationalists saying, "Our goal is to dominate and control every part of the world that was
ever controlled by white Christians." It's basically the caliphate, you know, defined in racial
terms.
We need to ask that question. We just need to ask that question. I don't know what the
answer is, but there are people out there -- John Berger is sitting in the back -- who have a lot of
primary source material on this kind of stuff, and we need to ask them to wrestle with these sorts
of things.
Here is a provocative one, that it matters for today in the United States: Do people really
radicalize online? Now, of course, they do. "Of course, they do," we all say. Well, where is the
data? It took until this week when Alexander Hitchens put together a list at the back of his new
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report just listing all of the places in public where Anwar al-Awlakis are connected with an
actual plot.
We need to expand that. We need to ask the question, "What is the role of these online
forums?" Is it really radicalization, or is it reinforcement of views that are developed offline?
That matters in a very important way. It matters because we are having increasingly to interact
with Muslim communities in the United States, Muslim communities in the West more
generally, and when you interact with those folks and you go to community leaders and you say,
"You guys have a problem," the community leaders will look at you and they'll say, "We don't
have a problem. I've never even heard of these websites you are talking about or half of the
people you're referencing, and you're accusing me of having a problem." When we define these
issues in very broad terms, when there are just a very few people radicalizing, we can have
counterproductive effects in our interactions with communities. So we need to define these
problems in very, very careful terms.
Same kind of issue. Does it actually matter when you piss people off overseas?
[Laughter.]
MR. FISHMAN: No, I am dead serious. Does it matter that 85 percent of the Pakistani
population doesn't like us? Does that actually mean that the very small percentage that are
actually going to join violent groups gets bigger?
A different way of asking that question is, does it matter that just because there is a vastly
integrated American Muslim population in the United States, does that matter and indicate
anything about the willingness of a very small fringe group to actually turn to violence? We sort
of use those metrics as if they mean something. I haven't seen any evidence that we've really
connected those things.
We need to ask those questions. We haven't answered those questions. We just made
assumptions, and we're basing policy on those assumptions. I'm not saying it's wrong, but as a
research community, we can address those issues.
This range of research questions is really important. I just released another paper on
al-Qaeda in Iraq, which the core thesis of it essentially is that the al-Qaeda in Iraq of 2011 is
extraordinarily different from the al-Qaeda in Iraq in 2006. If we use the framework that we
developed then to understand the movement today, we're not going to get them.
There is a real contradiction in the sorts of methodologies that we use to try to understand
these groups. Both West Point, where I used to work, and the CRRC here are doing wonderful
things when they are getting primary source documents out, but we have to make sure that we
challenge ourselves and we challenge those documents in an appropriate way. The document
that is 10 years old doesn't necessarily tell us what is going on today. These strategic ideas, the
range of strategic and ideological ideas within the Jihadi Movement is incredibly broad, and it is
incredibly malleable. Look at the turn that they have taken since the Arab Spring.
They have been arguing -- for how long, Aaron? -- a long, long time that you have to
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overthrow countries using violence; it is the only way. Well, it took Ayman al-Zawahiri maybe a
month and a half, 2 months to sort of get his act together, and then he pivoted 180 degrees and
said, "No, no, no. It doesn't matter how these governments go away. That doesn't matter at all.
What is important that they're gone and what we put in their place."
These core ideological concepts that we would have probably argued were set in stone a
year ago have been inverted. We've got to be careful about how much we ascribe to their
ideological rights. A big part of this is that we make a mistake in our intelligence analysis that
we usually think of as a mistake in terms of our own self-assessments, and that is that we
measure effort, not impact. We criticize ourselves in our counterinsurgency operations all of the
time, that we measure, "Well, how many troops do we have on the ground? How much has gone
out the door? How many guns have been distributed?" whatever we are going to measure, rather
than measuring the impact of those investments.
Well, when we look at al-Qaeda, oftentimes we measure their effort. We measure, "Oh,
my goodness, there is all of this information online. It is unbelievable." Well, is that actually
having an impact? We haven't asked that question. We honestly have not asked that question.
When Inspire magazine was released, we all kind of flipped out as a community. Right?
Everybody flipped out. Inspire magazine was essentially a re-branding of an existing magazine
that had been around for a long time. Not that that re-branding wasn't important. It was. It
brought it closer into al-Qaeda. It represented a change in the way that al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula was communicating with the world. I'm not discounting it, and clearly, Anwar
al-Awlaki, in particular, is a key and effective communicator with folks in the West, but we can't
let al-Qaeda lead us around by the nose. Just because they're trying something doesn't mean it is
going to work.
We did a study at New America a year and a half ago, and it was written by a guy named
Dan Kimmage, and one of the things he found was that as-Sahab propaganda doesn't know its
target audience. Well, that sounds familiar, right?
[Laughter]
MR. FISHMAN: So what he found is about half -- he studied as Sahab propaganda in
2009. He found that about 50 percent of Sahab -- and this is Arabic language -- of Sahab sort of
releases focused on Afghanistan and Pakistan, which makes sense. Why would they do that?
Because that's where the cameras are. That's where their cameras are. That's where the network
that gets them the stuff that they can put out is. Any TV news producer will tell you, you get the
story where you get a picture, right? That's what they are doing.
But what he found is that the Arabic-speaking audience on the forums doesn't care.
Generally speaking, they are not downloading the Afghanistan and Pakistan stuff. What they
cared about most was Gaza. When Sahab would pull together a video or a release about Gaza,
those are the ones that were getting downloaded and, secondarily, the ones about Iraq and
Yemen, the ones about the sort of heart of the Middle East Arabic-speaking world.
But that half of Sahab's releases were not on those issues. So are we giving these guys
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too much credit? We haven't really answered that question. We repeat over and over again how
good they are, but what is their impact? In the United States since 9/11 -- and Peter Bergen may
have mentioned these statistics yesterday, I don't know -- 17 people have been killed by Jihadi
terrorism, 17, and those are numbers that Peter and some of my other colleagues at New America
came up with. That compares to about 72 people killed in hate crimes during the same time
period. About 1,500 Americans are killed annually via murders.
I am not downplaying this threat. I'm saying we need to look it directly in the eye, and
we still don't do that, especially at policy level, looking at these dynamics. We like to tell stories
about these guys, and the research community that is assembled here, we need to do a better job
of sort of polling our policy-makers and forcing them to look at the heart of the real problems.
And I still don't think we are doing that.
That said, in 2005 when I started the Combating Terrorism Center up at West Point, it
was shockingly easy to become somebody that was looked at as an expert, and I am the walking
proof of that.
[Laughter]
MR. FISHMAN: It was shockingly easy. It's not so easy today. We have come a long
way. When you run around and talk to intelligence analysts and people in the research
community in Washington, the amount of base knowledge that exists on these groups is much,
much better. It really is. We've come a long way in our understanding, but what we have got to
do is not get complacent. We need to ask some of these provocative questions, and we can't be
afraid to be wrong, because we are the ones that need to be wrong, so our guys in the intelligence
community can be right, so they can learn from our mistakes. We've got to have the aspiration to
do that.
And so I'll end there.
MR. ZARATE: Fantastic, Brian. Thank you for the provocative questions.
[Applause.]
MR. ZARATE: It's a great baseline for the rest of the panelists. I think I've got a
number of questions for you, but I am sure that the audience does as well, but let's move to Dr.
Saipov, and then we'll go from there.
DR. SAIPOV: Thanks so much for inviting me and the generous support of the National
Defense University to host my stay in the United States, and thank you, everyone, for being here
this morning for all of the thought-provoking presentations that you have been witnessing during
this path-breaking and course-setting 9/11 conference. That changed the world as we knew it. It
was a decade ago.
The late professor of Columbia University's School of International and Public Affairs,
Edward Allworth, the author of the book "The Modern Uzbeks," the great academic venue where
a great fortune smiled on me and set on my shoulder to do my master's degree in international
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affairs, as an Edmund Muskie Fellow wrote that Central Asia is not inarticulate, but to search for
its voice often faces complex tasks and systematic resistance.
Recognizing the first half of the distinguished Professor Allworth's premise that we, the
Central Asians, are not inarticulate, let's still hope that the second half of the foremost insightful
assertion may not be realized.
In this paper, I will try to shed light on five main research questions. They are the
following. What is the conceptual framework to understand Central Asia at all? Because
Central Asia is a part of the world that the United States is interested in, and this part of the
world is not theorized.
The second issue is the so-called "KJs," key judgments, on Uzbek elements of
counterterrorism know-how.
The third issue is how to relate Uzbekistan to current counterinsurgency and civil
religious discourse.
The fourth issue is implications for the United States’ policy in Uzbekistan and wider
adjacent regions.
The fifth, the main purpose of our gathering here today, yesterday and today, what should
be the focus of our common studies for the future?
Let's start with the first issue to what is great about the conceptual framework. At first
glance, speaking about the announced topic of my presentation may seem a futile endeavor,
given the fact that the United States International Commission on Religious Freedom has
designated my sunny republic as the country of particular concern (CPC). But virtually
unpredictable in our steady nature, Uzbek policy towards Islam overall and a grievous violation
of rights, I guess, as a matter of fact, have their own logic and inner laws that sustain their
regularity follows a systematic pattern, has the potential for a durable occurrence for the years to
come.
Careful study of the sureness of the established Ulamas, fatwas, weekly outline reports of
the Muslim work in Uzbekistan, government statements, laws, rules, and regulations on religion,
masking the outlets, including online articles, reports, as well as my personal reflections.
Personal observations and in-depth interviews helped me to formulate the following key
reflections, judgments on current discourse on government strategies to counteract unofficial
Islam in Uzbekistan.
In general, this paper tries to shed light towards charting a certain meaningful conceptual
framework or perhaps creating a steady typology to understand and explain the relationships
between the state and religion in Uzbekistan, taking into account that literature on Central Asian
countries are untheorized.
First, let me briefly elucidate the term "strategy" in unofficial Islam used in this paper. I
am sure that this audience is well aware about existence of numerous definitions of strategy
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originating from Sun Tzu to Clausewitz and the modern heirs of the School of Realist Thought
and certainly, and less advantage, a remote from the idea of turning this presentation into a
standard Army War College lecture on intertwined relationships of ends, ways, and means.
However, for the clarity of all present here and the future readers of this paper, I refer to
the work of Linda Haas' [ph] construction of strategy. That is, an Object A uses X, Y, and Z
instruments in order to exert influence on the actions and behavior pattern on Object B, a group
of objects.
By "unofficial Islam," I mean the practice and set of Islamic norms and patterns of
expected ritual behavior, unsanctioned by the core government and its physical territory and
those of its citizens residing abroad.
For clarity, because repetition is the mother of all learning and knowledge, I will return,
because it is the main redline of my paper. Unofficial Islam, I mean, as I understand the policy
of my government, is the practice and set of Islamic norms and patterns of expected ritual
behavior unsanctioned by the core government, in these case studies, Uzbekistan and its physical
territory and those of its citizens residing abroad.
It should also be mentioned that the word "strategy" itself is not commonly and widely
used in formal national security documents adopted into space. Instead, these kind of documents
are called "consult papers" and doctrines, but strategy is still used here as different cult namings
do not contradict the contents of each other.
Let's go to the second: key judgment on Uzbek counterterrorism know-how. Religious
extremism is seen as a force of destabilization of everything that was meticulously put in place
for the past years. It can be further argued that events that took place in Ramadan in December
of 1991, the starting point of analysis in understanding the state and religious relations in
Uzbekistan -- the date is December 1991 --left an indelible trace on President Karimov's psyche,
ferocious calls to announce Uzbekistan as the Islamic state by the raged crowd of thousands of
people chanting "Allahu Akbar," and the city's mayor office has not forgotten probably.
So the following measures that the government is applying are the products of those
uncured scars that are still fresh in the government's mind-set when they deal with the Muslims
overall. So, well, here we are following Egypt to explain and understand the Uzbek
government's counterterrorism know-how, strategies to combat unofficial Islam in particular and
its overall attitudes towards Islam in general.
The first, however inconsistent it might sound, but the first and foremost end that
Uzbekistanis tries to attain is working against fragmentation of its fellow Muslim residents
within its territory. It proposes the following movements, (IMU) Islamic Movement in
Uzbekistan, Turkistan Islamic Movement, Hizb-e Harak Islami, [?], Jamaat-e Tablighi, [?], who
have been active in the region.
To attain these long-term ultimate end result, policies mobilizing, enhance its firm -- the
government is firm and decisive to further enhance all of its national power, expertise, and
infrastructure.
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The second KJ, Uzbekistan is a sect of a multinational and multiconfessional state. It is
legally required that though freedom of religion is guaranteed, that profession of religion can be
restricted in a degree to provide national security, public order of their citizens' life, health, moral
norms, rights, and freedom. Thus, in complicated issues like religion, as in all other fields, the
government acts as a chief reformer, an agent of socioeconomic change.
The third, an enlightened and moderate form of Islam will be further propagated to
achieve a [?] goal of preserving both religious and national unity, to maintain an everlasting
general line of generational cohesiveness. In Uzbekistan, at the root of this enlightened Islam
will be the moderate teachings of Hanafi school of thought.
Fourth, Uzbekistan is immensely proud of its glorious past, rich Islamic heritage.
The fifth, consequently, Uzbekistan considers itself as an integral part of the Muslim
world. It is a member of the Organization for Islamic Cooperation, formerly the Organization of
Islamic Conference until the end of July of this year.
The next, internationally, the government takes an active part in counterterrorism
measures. It is implemented on a bilateral and multilateral basis and within international
organizations like the United Nations, Chahi [ph] Corporation Organization, CIS, OSC, and et
cetera. Uzbekistan signed corporate agreements and treaties with a number of major global and
regional partners on mutual extradition and return of convicted people or persons suspected of
religious extremism and terrorism. So, when we said earlier that people residing within the
territory and abroad, we really meant that, that still the people -- this issue should be kept in mind
when trying to understand Uzbekistan.
Uzbekistan is among one of the few countries in the world to raise the importance in
battle against terrorism and religious extremism. In 1993, when there were only 2 years for the
independence of Uzbekistan, using the United Nations' generally -- general [?], the country
stated that the need to pay attention to unabated issued of terrorism in Afghanistan.
The seventh, while combating all forms of religious extremism at home and abroad, [?]
opposes the ever-increasing trends of Islam, some phobia around the world.
Eighth, the main focus in the battle against the forces of violent movements is, and will
be, attached to the training and retraining of imams. In Uzbekistan, there are 11 religious
educational institutions is Tashkent.
Five minutes. Thanks.
The ideological battle is carried out under various motives with concrete purposes in
mind. The government's counter-radicalization strategy includes running campaigns; for
example, under the models of idea versus ideal, enlightenment versus ignorance, protect your
own neighborhood, to love your motherland is a deed of the faithful, be vigilant. These kinds of
workshops and seminars are held at schools, colleges, and neighborhood communities.
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The tenth, it fights fire with fire and attacks the center of Islam's gravity. The
government fully cooperates with religious institutions in the country.
The Uzbek program on spirituality and enlightenment is an alpha and an omega of the
overall street approach towards Islam and all of the moral values that it wants to see in society.
Uzbekistan does not consider it appropriate to sit idle in the coming storm. It acts proactively
many times and learns from experiences and mistakes in neighboring states, within CIS states
and in Western Europe, and is ready to spend any amount possible to safeguard public order and
stability.
After the bombings in London, Madrid, and Moscow subways, the government took a
complex set of measures inside and outside the adjacent territory of its Tashkent metro station.
The government also both uses sticks and carrots in counteracting unofficial Islam.
Uzbekistan uses mahala, so-called "neighborhood communities," to take preliminary, first
precautionary measures to assist law enforcement bodies to guarantee safety and security. They
keep a register of youth to be [?] to military conscript, and for safety reasons, unspecified and
unusual gatherings of people, they check vacant buildings, identify people visiting the particular
neighborhood.
To understand Uzbekistan, I proposed in my paper to refer to the works of Robert
Bellah's "Civil Religion in America," concept in the "Counterinsurgency," a concept of David
Kilcullen. You are well aware that David Kilcullen proposes to delink the local Islamists from
global, so Islamists understand that what Uzbekistan is doing is it is doing the same thing as
David Kilcullen wrote. Uzbekistan is delinking all kinds of global or other regional Islamist
networks from assembling with the local Islamist networks.
Implications for the U.S. policy. Uzbekistan is -- it is worth recalling that during the
period of Soviet Union, Tashkent set as the central region liaison help among others for two
main reasons. First, religious brought Central Asian Muslims, SADUM, known for its Russian
abbreviation, are situated in the center of Uzbekistan. Secondly, the Turkistan military district
was headquartered in Tashkent; in other words, both the military and spiritual lives of all Central
Asian people kind of was administered where and from Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
Central Asia plays a vital role in Afghanistan's strategy, and Northern Distribution
Network is called as a first major push to expand U.S. engagement in the region. There are
reports of CSIS about these issues, also.
To sum up my presentation, through this paper, I have argued that Uzbekistan's
counterterrorism measures supplant the current policy of the United States in countering the
force of religious extremism in its own territory.
Thank you for your attention.
[Applause.]
MR. ZARATE: Thank you, Dr. Saipov.
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Ms. Stenersen?
MS. STENERSEN: Thank you very much. So the topic of my presentation is dealing
with the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Taliban. In my paper, I specifically conduct a
case study of the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda; that is, the period I am looking at is from 1996
until 2001.
So the first question that might come to your mind now is why am I on this panel. We
are supposed to talk about the future. Well, I believe there are at least two important reasons for
why this topic is of current interest today.
We must remember that al-Qaeda, of course, is an organization that has no homeland,
and in order to operate -- and also, we have seen this, of course, these developments since 2001
-- that in order to operate, al-Qaeda is dependent on local groups to survive. After 2001,
al-Qaeda has tried to establish local branches in the Middle East and in North Africa and is still
relying on that. That is where one of the threats come from, in addition, of course, to other types
of threats like solo terrorism, Internet radicalization, perhaps, and so on. But one threat will
definitely be coming from the sanctuaries, the terrorist sanctuaries.
I believe that there is much to learn in the case study of the al-Qaeda/Taliban relationship
from the past to understand why does a local group host a foreign terrorist network, even when it
seems like it is against their interests, you know, how do we approach that question.
Another reason why this is relevant has, of course, to do with the future of Afghanistan,
the future of U.S. policy in Afghanistan, because although we don't like to admit it, I would say
it is very likely that Islamic fundamentalists will be a part of the future Afghan government.
Maybe they will call themselves the Taliban; maybe it will be another name. But, you know, the
phenomenon of the fundamentalist regime, that's likely to come back, if not in all of
Afghanistan, so at least in parts of it. Those of you who follow Afghan politics, you know that it
has already been developing in that direction.
And we are talking about peace negotiations with the Taliban. It is becoming more and
more the only viable option in order to stabilize Afghanistan, now that NATO and U.S. forces
are pulling out. We need to understand or we need to be prepared what to do in the case we have
a fundamentalist government or a fundamentalist entity within Afghanistan that proved to be
unwilling to deal with foreign terrorists on their territory, like the Taliban were in the 1990s.
Then, what should you do? What policy should you have towards that entity? I believe
that a good way to start answering that question is to try and understand why the Taliban
government hosted al-Qaeda in the past, because I believe that 10 years later, today, we have not
probably understood this question.
I mean, we think we know the answer, but when we look at the debates about this that
have occurred in recent years, there is a very diverse debate. On one hand, you have people who
argue that al-Qaeda and the Taliban had a relationship because of mutual interests, because of
material interests of the Taliban, and in return, they provided al-Qaeda with sanctuary, but it was
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a pragmatic relationship. That is a common argument. On the other hand, you have those who
say that, no, it was an ideological relationship, it was based on a common ideology, and
implying, of course, that the relationship has been continuous until today and that it is not
possible to break it.
So, whether their relationship was pragmatic or ideological, that is actually what I am
going to focus on a bit in this presentation. My argument is, of course, like any academic. I
would say they are not mutually exclusive. It is a little bit of both, but it was also more than that.
There are aspects of this relationship that have been overlooked, and I will come back to that.
Fundamentally, I think we are not really asking the right question. Instead of asking,
what was the basis for the al-Qaeda-Taliban relationship, we need to first ask what was the basis
of Taliban's decision-making.
There has been a tendency to look at Taliban's policies toward al-Qaeda in a vacuum, as
sort of something that was separate from Taliban regime policies in other areas, which I believe,
and I have assumed in my study that there is a pattern, and it was followed both in relationship to
al-Qaeda and in relationship to other issues.
This is maybe a controversial thing to say, because conventional wisdom says that the
Taliban had no decision-making procedures. Decisions were taken by the Taliban leader, Mullah
Omar, personally, and a lot of time, they were random and they made no sense. That is how we
have explained many of the seemingly irrational decisions that were made by the Taliban regime,
that they followed no apparent logic because it was random.
It has been very hard to confirm or deny this assumption, because we don't have any data
about the Taliban's inner decision-making procedures. We know that it was a very secretive and
closed movement. Power was vested in a small group of leaders in Kandahar. This was not
transparent, and it still is not. I mean, even after 2001, little has been revealed about the Taliban,
because the documentation has simply not been there.
Here is where the new primary sources come in, and especially the captured records here
at the CRRC. I have been using these records specifically to look at -- I mean, most of us use
these records to understand al-Qaeda and how al-Qaeda looked upon us. I use these records with
a different perspective. I am using them to see the Taliban through the eyes of al-Qaeda, and the
significance of that is that al-Qaeda, we look at it as an international terrorist network and all, but
it was in the context of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda was one of the actors that was dealing directly
with the Taliban leadership and was directly affected by their political decisions. So that
documentation is an extremely important source that can help us understand the Taliban, and
that's what I have been doing in this paper.
So what do the captured records tell us? Well, first of all, those of you who are familiar
with these documents, you know that they say a lot about al-Qaeda's military contributions to the
Taliban. Many of the records deal with or they comprise reports from the front lines, from the
Commander al-Qahtani, an al-Qaeda commander outside of Kabul who was commanding the
Arabs who were fighting for the Taliban and writing reports about their achievements, sending
them back to Abu Hafs, al-Qaeda's military leader in Kandahar.
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These reports reveal things that have been -- it has already been argued, but it sort of
reinforces that argument that, in fact, the Arabs were not important to the Taliban. The Arabs
were a small group. They had some military skills, but they were not really vital to the Taliban's
war effort against the Northern Alliance. That, of course, raises questions as to -- at least
questions the hypothesis that the Taliban hosted al-Qaeda because they were dependent on
al-Qaeda's fighters and financial contributions and all of that. It questions that.
The documents also revealed that al-Qaeda, from their side, they had two reasons to be at
the Taliban's front lines. One reason was, naturally, to help the Taliban and to get goodwill from
the Taliban, reinforcing their sanctuary. But another and equally important reason was to train
their own -- to train their own people, to give them battlefield experience, and in order to use
them in their global project, this was a very important reason for why al-Qaeda contributed to
Taliban forces.
But the topic I would like to discuss in more detail now is not about al-Qaeda and the
Taliban, their military relationship, but it is the paradox in the history of al-Qaeda/Taliban
relations that is not well known, but it comes to light through this documentation. I will discuss
that paradox and then give an interpretation of it based on my own studies.
So captured records, they confirm that from around 1999, the Taliban regime sought to
impose a stricter control on the foreign fighters in Afghanistan, especially the Arab militants that
these documents talk about. They did this through issuing I.D. cards, for example, to foreigners.
They did it through closing down several militant training camps. We know that at the time
when the Taliban closed down a training camp, from a U.S. perspective or in the West, we sort
of didn't really believe it. We thought it was just a show in order to ease the pressure, the
massive pressure from the international community, to close the camps, but in reality, which was
observed as well, maybe they closed down one camp, but they opened another camp or they
opened the same camp shortly afterwards, so they didn't really take this process seriously.
What the documents reveal is that the Taliban had different reasons to close down these
camps. There was a logic to it that I'll explain shortly, but first of all, what happened was that
the training camps were closed down. Foreign militants had to register when they entered the
country. The Taliban left a few camps open, and one of them, and the most important one, was
the al-Farouq Camp in Kandahar that was run by bin Laden and al-Qaeda.
So why did the Taliban do this? It is very tempting now to draw the conclusion that if I
do this, the Taliban empowered al-Qaeda and bin Laden, because, obviously, this is what
al-Qaeda wanted. Al-Qaeda wanted to control the influx of foreign recruits coming to
Afghanistan, because they wanted to be able to have this pool of recruits and select the best ones,
to recruit them into al-Qaeda, and to take part in their global agenda. And the Taliban allowed
this to happen.
Generally, we explain this by saying, yeah, because bin Laden was able to influence
Mullah Omar, he had great power in Afghanistan. He was a personal friend of Mullah Omar;
that's why he managed to work his way into the inner decision-making of the Taliban and
influence their decisions.
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I believe this is not true, because there are other sources also that's been published in
recent years saying that bin Laden didn't really have any influence over the Taliban's
decision-making. He was not married to Mullah Omar's daughter. There was no family relation.
He did not go fishing with him.
[Laughter.]
MS. STENERSEN: These things that were rumored, I mean, Afghanistan was full of
rumors, and there were rumors about, for example, bin Laden and Mullah Omar being very close
friends. But looking at the sources, this is not true. So then how do we explain that the Taliban
wanted to give this power to al-Qaeda?
I believe that the Taliban's actions need to be interpreted in light of the domestic and
regional context. This is what I am doing in this study, and I will just continue just explaining
this one example with closing down the camps, why the Taliban did that, and afterwards argue
that that can be also transferred to other questions, like why did the Taliban not expel bin Laden.
Well, that was also because -- I believe because of domestic pressures to keep it in Afghanistan.
But back to the closing down of the camps, it is very important to understand that the
Arab community in Afghanistan was very diverse. Al-Qaeda was only one group out of many
groups, and there were a lot of differences between them. And there was a lot of conflicts and, at
times, also infighting between the various Arab militants.
A crucial part of this conflict, it was not about bin Laden's global agenda, although there
were Arabs that were criticizing bin Laden for wanting to attack the United States, but that's one
thing. Much more important from the Taliban's point of view was that there was a battle going
on or a discussion among the Arabs, a very tense discussion going on about whether it is legal to
fight for the Taliban or not, whether the Taliban's fight against the Northern Alliance is a true
Jihad. This was very important for the volunteers who came to Afghanistan and who were
encouraged to fight on the Taliban's fronts, because there were elements in Afghanistan among
the Arabs that were trying to convince them that if you did that, you go to hell, because they are
not doing a real Jihad and they are not a real government.
This was of direct concern to the Taliban, because it challenged their legitimacy as a
state, and more importantly, it was a security issue. The Taliban were afraid of spies that would
infiltrate the state. There was an assassination attempt against Mullah Omar in 1999. These
environments, these radical takfiri environments, they were a perfect environment to plant spies
by Iran, by other foreign governments, the Taliban thought. So they needed to get these guys
under control, and that is why they used bin Laden for that purpose -- that is my hypothesis -because bin Laden was supporting the Taliban.
Bin Laden was encouraging people to fight for the Taliban, and besides that, he was a
famous person, because he had been participating in the war against the Soviet Union. He was a
charismatic leader. He was a guy that could curb the differences in the environment. I think that
is why the Taliban decided to give the camp to al-Qaeda, the camp that received new volunteers,
and I talk more about that in my thesis.
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But for now, I suppose the conclusion is that I believe it is important when we interpret
the relationship between global militants and a local group supporting them, it is important to
have an open mind and to remember that this group is operating in a local context. It is the local
context more than the international context that is deciding their policies, and if we manage to
understand that, then we could also understand what it would take for them to ban the foreign
fighters. That is something that will continue. I mean, it is a debate today, and it will continue
as long as al-Qaeda is finding sanctuaries.
Thank you.
[Applause.]
MR. ZARATE: Thank you, Anne. Very interesting, and a good segue in particular with
respect to bin Laden and his role to Dr. Lynch's paper.
Dr. Lynch, over to you.
DR. LYNCH: Great. Thank you, Juan. Thank you to all of my fellow panelists, and let
me offer a personal thanks here not only to my colleagues at the CRRC for hosting this panel but
also for Johns Hopkins University and the Army Center of Military History for their strong and
crucial role in hosting this very topical and very, I think, important amongst the many dozens of
other important commemoratives that have gone on around this town and around the country in
the last year.
I think this is an opportune time, whether we do our counting from the tragic date of 9/11
or maybe if we start looking seriously at the interactive engagement of al-Qaeda, that although it
began prior to October of 2011, it really only began in earnest in Kandahar on a date that will
come as an anniversary date in several weeks here, on October 7th, when we finally sent a U.S.
human effort in there with our Rangers, and then the date of October 19th, which is the date
recorded for the 5th Special Forces as their first insert south of Mazur-e-Sharif to participate with
the Northern Alliance.
It is in that context I want to discuss my major thesis here today, which is "The 80%
Solution," the death of bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and South Asian security, because it was at those
moments, much more so than our attempted cruise missile strike against bin Laden after the
Africa bombings of 1998, to our efforts of diplomatic engagement with the Taliban to try to
dislodge bin Laden in the late 1990s, where we really engaged in what has become a war, a war
that has not looked like war as we got used to in the 20th Century, but a war.
And it is that war and that war in context of South Asia that I think is important to discuss
today from a frame of reference of outside-in. The outside-in is what we kind of know about
al-Qaeda, what we kind of have known but forgotten about some of the complexities of the
relationships between those interacting in the Jihadi movement in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and
South Asia.
And then also what we have perhaps never known but need to discover pretty quickly if
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we are not going to have more difficult challenges going forward about the dynamics of South
Asian security and how basically in 2001, in the effort to eliminate this metastasized and serious,
if not existential terrorist threat, we became a player in a local conflict that indeed is a regional
conflict with elements of a civil war in Afghanistan superimposed and impressed upon by a
proxy war between now two nuclear-armed states, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
So it is in that frame of reference that I want to discuss kind of the outline of the paper I
am going to publish next month, which talks about bin Laden's death on the important
dimensions, the global dimensions of al-Qaeda, which I will argue to you here in a second. We
have known for a long time. We massage on the margins and we want to hedge our bets, but we
have known for a long time.
Second, the implications of that death for the things that matter most in the context of
Afghanistan and Pakistan, and then the things that matter in South Asia that we need to
understand more, need to do more research on -- and I'll argue needs to be one of those things of
analysis and research that Brian highlighted and I think Anne has extended here -- about how the
workings between al-Qaeda and Salafi Jihadists and in particular the government institutions in
Pakistan have mattered and will continue to matter going forward, and what it means for us, I
think, in terms of policy debates for Afghanistan and Pakistan policy.
So, with that as a set-up, let me just take off and talk those three clusters. It would be my
premise here that with the death of bin Laden in May of 2011, the United States and western
governments scored a major but still underappreciated victory in this decade-old -- this
decade-and-a-half war against al-Qaeda that became truly interactive 10 years ago.
Bin Laden's death, as many of our panelists have said here, did not eliminate all of the
features of al-Qaeda that make it dangerous and a factor of terrorism internationally. And I think
there is a growing consensus around that point, but perhaps a tepid reluctance to explore the
regional and local implications of that, which is where I want to take us right now.
And therefore, al-Qaeda's role in assisting local Jihadi terror groups in strikes against
domestic governments and efforts to either inspire or claim the inspiration for inspiring lone wolf
terrorists and would-be martyrs in tragic acts of violence will certainly remain with us for many
years to come. Indeed, I am going to describe that here as the 20-percent residual of what
al-Qaeda has represented and tried to manage over the last 15 to 23 years of its existence,
depending on when you start tracking it, either from Peshawar in 1988 or from the fatwas and
edicts of 1998.
Yet, I am going to argue here that the manner in which U.S. intelligence and military
operatives found and eliminated bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, was devastating; indeed, an
80-percent solution to three of the five most critical elements of al-Qaeda. Those elements are
its core efforts to energize truly catastrophic terrorism against the West; second, its branding
rights as the ultimate victor should any of its loosely affiliated Salafi Jihadi regional movements
ever achieve successful open insurgency, especially the one in Afghanistan; and third, its ability
to claim victory, much less reestablish a credible and unfettered training area for global Jihadists
in an area that is most critical to its own mystique in war, Afghanistan and Western Pakistan.
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I am going to offer that those three are subtexts and sub-elements of kind of one of the
five major categories that I would argue to you based upon not only my research experience here
over the last 14 months but also my time as kind of a policy conduit working in uniform my last
6 years either for U.S. ambassadors or four-stars in charge of commands trying to filter in a lot of
what you all, and now I, produce in terms of policy relevance in what we're looking that.
In that context, I harken back to 2004 working at CENTCOM and noting that back at that
time, a report published by The Century Foundation, with a lot of illuminaries who really
understood Jihadi terrorism in the late 1990s, called "Defeating the Jihadists: A Movement for
Action," kind of got basically right what al-Qaeda was about. And in their framing and their
reference, I think they accurately defined al-Qaeda as having kind of an embedded bull's-eye
effect on the wider set of Islamic, but not Islamist, issues and identifications; indeed, the wider
sphere being the 1.2 billion Muslims worldwide, a vast majority of which are concerned for their
own future and their children's future and are struggling, and continue to struggle, with what
modernity means and what progress means and how the West either influences either positively
or negatively that, but aren't inclined toward radicalism or violence against their own
governments, nationally or internationally.
An internal core of Salafi Jihadi Movements that, as we have discussed here now -- and I
think quite lengthy, because I harken back to 2004 when working for CENTCOM, and my boss,
then General Abizaid, and a guy named Doug Lute, who was the operations officer, and a couple
of the rest of us would travel to places in Saudi Arabia and UAE, and even uttering the phrase
"Salafi" or "Jihadi" was met with absolute approbation and reluctance to discuss, and there was a
parallel reluctance to discuss that here in a western society.
They continued onward all the way through the next 4 years, and indeed, I need to do a
shout-out here to a couple of people who have spoken as panelists and whose works in 1998,
"The Terrorist Perspectives Project," Mark Stout and Jessica Huckabey, I thought were
path-breaking in terms of their willingness to call out what in fact this wider set of movements
was, which was Salafi-Jihadi, not all Salafi-Jihadi, but the Salafi-Jihadi brand, which was
conspicuously oriented around the fact that violence and only violence, indeed radical change,
could be the only change, was indeed the breadth or the internal hub of what al-Qaeda was
geared to, one, exploit and then, two, to help try to facilitate into this wider vision of far enemy
versus near enemy.
So, in that context, I would offer to you that we have known for a long time kind of what
the center elements are of al-Qaeda. Indeed, it is this core that is trying to personally brand and
carry out global terrorism of a spectacular nature. It's particularly geared to try to shock and
appall the West and drive it out of Muslim lands where, of course, the thesis that I think still, as
Brian indicates -- although there are some tweaks that Zawahiri may be making here recently,
either intentionally or perhaps with an ulterior agenda -- is that meaningful change can't come
other than by violence.
And indeed, this is a trait, I would argue to you, as this work did and as Mark Stout and
his co-authors did back in 2008, and then Mark and I wrote about in 2009 in a piece published
out of here, is a particular trait of radical ideologies, indeed the history of ideologies and radical
ideologies. There is this trait that you can have groups like communists talk about change
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through the ballot box or talk about it through social revolutions, but the real characteristic of a
radical, core, metastasized group is that it is inherently and unalterably wedded to violence. And
here, I think the core of al-Qaeda is in fact wedded to that. Indeed, expanding that circle,
Salafi-Jihadi groups at localized levels, to include the Algerians which we discussed back in the
early 1990s, as well as all of the other local branding groups are also wedded to the notion that
violence against governments is what matters and what is critical.
It is that wider pool in which they swim that I think is where we need to be more critical
in thinking about al-Qaeda and what the end of bin Laden means and indeed what ultimately the
end of Zawahiri would mean as well for the movement, because radical ideological movements
that have a core and that have a vanguard aspiration to knit together the other similarly based
agendas from regional levels or that look to inspire what we now call "lone wolves" or
individuals to acts of violence and then claim credit for them tend to be very charismatically
oriented.
Here my argument is -- and it's not unique and it's been made for a long time, but I want
to endorse it here as part of the thesis I will advance -- is that bin Laden was unique in bringing
together these elements, these three kind of organizing elements. And Zawahiri brought not only
what was later published as the "Knights Under the Prophets Banner," overarching ideology to
this thesis -- indeed, there were others before him that did a much better job of this, but he
brought together the organizational zeal and the capability of a hard-core network of Egyptians
and Libyans that once fused with seriously an Afghanistan and Pakistan, bin Laden's financial
and kind of ethereal mystical qualities, put together al-Qaeda in the pernicious form we have
known since 1998.
The question, that is, after the death of bin Laden, does that form still exist, or is it likely
to exist moving forward? Here my argument is we have to understand the form, kind of refined.
The three elements are critical. I have already addressed those. Let me just review them
quickly.
First, the core element, which is to train and try to do the activity involved in spectacular
catastrophic global terrorism, and it has been discussed throughout this conference and is in my
paper. There have been no conspicuous successes of this element of al-Qaeda since 7/7/2005.
Okay? There have been lots of plots and plans, but there have been no successes. Now, a lot of
that goes to better defenses and better offensive networking and work, but it also goes to the fact
of just how hard it is to find vanguard guys of the level of those that we have captured or taken
off of the battlefield to really plan, plot, and work successfully, especially in an environment
where wider intelligence networks and wider persistent unblinking surveillance is present.
Secondly, a slightly larger notion of a vanguard with a somewhat wider network of
affiliated Sunni/Salafi groups, but here I think the panel has also brought out a critical element,
which is al-Qaeda is parasitic. Right? It desires to agglomerate successes at local levels and
indeed has fought battles, verbally and others, with some of these local groups about what the
priority should be, how the priority should be met. Indeed, if you go back and study the Algerian
insurrection, you will see the now-infamous and recently deceased Atiyah Abd al-Rahman as a
failed effort to go and try to corral violence in Algeria and indeed try to co-opt an Algerian
revolution, conspicuous in its own nature, to the proto al-Qaeda, the al-Qaeda before the '96 or
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'98 fatwas and before EIJ was brought in, as a first effort, but I guess it kind of goes to the point
here that if you sit back and disaggregate from the personalities of bin Laden particularly, but
also Zawahiri, you have guys like Rahman and others who in the 1990s couldn't fuse this stuff
together. What makes us believe that going forward from now, absent these particular
personalities, we are going to see that ability going forward?
And then finally, this notion of inspiration for a broader terrorist network, I mean, this
could be claimed by many others, and as Brian, I think, has correctly pointed out, there are many
rich research questions here about just how much that inspiration means to those who would
conduct terror attacks, or a more critical question in the policy arena, just how relevant that is
compared to other lone wolves who may be energized by other causes and are equally violent.
And of course, we now have the sad example of Anders Breivik in Norway to remind us of our
own Timothy McVeigh in showing us that compared to those types of actions and activities, is
$53 billion of a homeland security structure primarily geared toward an al-Qaeda spectacular
strike or the potential underwear bomber in an airplane or aircraft carrying UPS-based printer
cartridges, is that relevant and equal in importance to some of these other tasks and foci that we
may want to look at.
But with those three elements -- the core, the vanguard, and the inspiration -- I think there
are two others that I need to discuss before moving on to implications of bin Laden's death, the
three areas, and that is, a fourth element that has occurred and accrued from al-Qaeda, especially
since 9/11, is its branding element. Indeed, this kind of notion that it, above all else, matters and
is the most relevant to the wider Salafi-Jihadi construct, which again is a minority construct in
Sunni Islam -- and we need to keep that in mind, I think, all the times we discuss this, but also,
what led to this war.
Now, I think here, testimony by a guy who I always watch carefully for what he says,
Steven Kull, because of his background and expertise in this area, he testified in front of the
House in early 2010 that this brand-name element of al-Qaeda really oriented around a couple of
things; first, the spectacular success of 9/11, which has fast faded in terms of mythology and lore
over time, and indeed also faded as that in the Muslim world got supplanted by the images of
carnage and devastation inspired by Zarqawi in Iraq, which al-Qaeda tried to claim credit for in
other places.
Second, the ability of bin Laden, particularly, and Zawahiri here also to remain folk
heroes, because they survived for so many years outside the ability of westerners to take them
down, indeed that, in my personal experience in living in Qatar and Saudi Arabia and spending a
lot of time in Pakistan and Afghanistan -- that, indeed, was a lot of the lore behind bin Laden. It
was this notion that, hey, 'Here's this Robin Hood. Here's the greatest escape artist since
Houdini, and the West can't get him," also has led to some conspiracy theories in Pakistan as I
travel in and out of there now since about how he must have been dead already and was never
there, because otherwise America would have gotten him years ago. But indeed, much of this
lore has now vanished, the brand-name lore with his death. My argument to you is that if we
look carefully, and I think we need to look carefully at Zawahiri, how much more of that brand
name would attrit if he were dead.
And the fifth and final thing which I want to then touch base off of to go into implications
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for U.S. policy for bin Laden's death in Afghanistan and Pakistan is this notion of al-Qaeda's
mystical affiliation with the state of Pakistan. Indeed, we know they were founded and created
there. We know that al-Qaeda was inspired out of the success of the Soviet Jihad. We also
know that even though al-Qaeda wandered and drifted away toward Sudan, Somalia, trying to
inspire revolution and insurrection in Algeria with no success, trying to put its foot in the water
in Bosnia with no success, trying to inspire a revolution in Azerbaijan and the IMU and
Uzbekistan in the '90s with no success, they then returned to find that even though they had this
little outpost manned by Abu Hafs and some of the other trainers, that bin Laden was welcomed
back in by the persona not as Osama bin Laden but as Yunis al-Khalis, another Mujahideen
figure from Afghanistan invited back there, who really tried to get up on the horse of success that
became the Afghan Taliban, again trying to graft and co-op that success as the most critical
success, the first ever at the first proto caliphate, but to claim it for its own.
Here, the schisms and the splits of claiming it for its own, I think we need to go back and
revisit now, because the other thing that bin Laden did in the late 1990s was he effectively
milked relationships that he, I would argue to you and indeed the records and the evidence kind
of suggest -- he alone had or was capable of having with a number of the key players in the
Afghan Taliban Revolution. Critical amongst those were the aforementioned Yunis Khalis, who
has been a critical figure in Eastern Afghanistan, Jalaluddin Haqqani, who with his son we all
know and very few of us knew about a few years ago, run the Haqqani network, as well as Omar
himself, albeit much more at distance.
There, I argue in the paper that it is the buy-off, the swear of allegiance between bin
Laden and Mullah Omar that explains a lot of the Taliban persona and unwillingness to really
perhaps tear into some of the Arab approaches to fighting globally or to tear into some of the
slights felt and perceived by the Taliban, indeed as Anne has suggested here, to perhaps stave off
due to this religious overlay of a buyout, a personal buyout between Omar and bin Laden, and
the kind of underpinning notion of Pashtun hospitality, Pakhtunwali, that made it impossible for
Omar to do what perhaps his advisors were saying he should do, which was to jettison the
al-Qaeda and the Arab figures back at that time.
It's that depth that I believe brings to, if not total closure, 80-percent closure, these critical
elements for how we see the global metastacization of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
First and foremost, with the death of bin Laden, the link to Omar is broken. Second, with the
death of bin Laden, the link to Haqqani is broken. It either was partially broken by the death of
Yunis Khalis in 2006 but now critically broken with the death of bin Laden. And we should
expect to see no analogue between Zawahiri and the rest of the Arabs and the Libyans who are
still left in Western Pakistan.
As a consequence of that, our paradigm for intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan and
indeed our paradigm for trying to drive the Taliban into submission, I would argue needs to have
a step-back and a re-look. Armed by information, armed by the documents that can come
forward, step back and have a re-look, and look more critically at what was there before the
birth, what was there before the terror training camps outside of Kandahar. What was there
before that, we will see was a proxy war between Pakistan and India, manifest and fought out
through indirect funding, first by Pakistan. Indeed, I think the record here, and where al-Qaeda
records will help a lot, but they won't be perfect substitutes ever for Pakistani records, is what the
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relative ratio was of inspiration to the Taliban between al-Qaeda support and Pakistani state
security support.
I think here my argument is the balance was skewed. This was a Pakistani-supported
element. The Taliban know this, and even though they have relied upon help from al-Qaeda over
the last several years, they know which side their bread is buttered on. And the death of bin
Laden brings much more into relief, acute relief, that relationship and that matter.
Second, the Northern Alliance folks have long been perceived by the Pakistanis and
indeed the disinfected Pashtuns, who we euphemistically lump under the term "Taliban" -- but
not all Pashtuns are Taliban, although most, if not all, Taliban are Pashtuns -- in the belief that it
was the Northern Alliance -- Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazrats, Turkmens -- who benefitted by American
intervention in 2001. Their puppet creation, Karzai in Kabul, is what needs to be guarded
against in the perspective of Pakistan state security. So it is a greater relief than a more nuanced
picture of that particular element that matters.
Here, I am going to nest quickly in my third element on a couple of the questions that
Brian laid out here, because I think they are essential, which gets to the fact of what are we doing
in Afghanistan right now with our presence militarily, diplomatically, and what are we doing in
our relations with the Pakistanis, as we appear to have this counterterrorism paradigm of driving
al-Qaeda to its knees, an al-Qaeda that by our own government's admission maybe now is a
handful of 10 to 20 real important operatives. And I would argue to you in the Pakistan border
area -- and we can talk about this in Q&A -- probably amounts to no more than Zawahiri and two
or three others that could really lead a credible international organization or even threaten a
return of terror camps into Afghanistan, and then are faced with a question about how much
entity we build up in a region, in an area, where the real reason is how do we inhibit dramatic
proxy war and a civil war from erupting in Afghanistan if we precipitously depart without
getting the right military and diplomatic sinews in place to mitigate against what is already an
in-place and long-standing Arab element there.
And secondly, in Pakistan, do our continuing drone strikes drive animosity up so far that
we compromise our ability with a country that, one, is going to be key to negotiating any kind of
a localized settlement in Afghanistan, and B, is going to be a country we need open lines of
communication with. because it is the fifth largest nuclear state. Internally, it is not going to
collapse tomorrow, but it has its own Islamic radical problems that others may outreach to us
better in the future on. And C, its nuclear weapons program and its animosity to India indicates
it may well look for an opportunity in the not-too-near future to generate some type of a clash on
the border area that could go nuclear and could stay tactical nuclear, given the way the nuclear
profile is developing.
So those questions all matter and tie back into what I think we need to be looking at
going forward in the records. First, I think the trove of al-Qaeda cash that has come out of
Abbottabad is vitally important to determining more about these five critical elements of
al-Qaeda, not only how they apply in the Afghan-Pakistan region, but how they apply more
broadly.
First, we should seek out access to find out whether bin Laden's inspiration and charisma
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and fund-raising ability was as fundamental to al-Qaeda's core as many now believe.
Second, we should find out whether his close confidants face increasingly difficult
challenges in absorbing this world vision, and I think we see some of that already coming out
saying that they were.
Finally, and I think more importantly, it is important for us to look at and understand the
nature in which the fortunes of al-Qaeda in Western Pakistan have altered due to their perception
of Pakistani support or lack of support and in terms of the degree to which the Afghan-Pakistan
crisis is really now a lot more about the Indo-Pakistan proxy war in Afghanistan than it is the
crisis in and of itself.
Let me tag out by just offering a point on perspective and why I think the perspective
here of what we get from al-Qaeda needs also to be balanced with the record of what we can
find, as difficult as it is, from governments like the Pakistani government, which though not
supportive of al-Qaeda has been supportive of elements that are of the same philosophy,
religiously perhaps, as al-Qaeda, and that is to offer you my anecdote about coming out of
Pakistan in late 2009 -- correction, in late 2011 here, in July 2011.
I flew out of Pakistan in the surreal experience of being on an aircraft leaving Islamabad
and going through Beijing to Tokyo en route back to Washington, after just having interviewed a
number of folks about radicalism in Pakistan and Afghanistan and coming to some distinct
conclusions there. Being on an aircraft with mine being the only Caucasian western face, finding
out that we had aircraft challenges in Beijing and then being laid up overnight in Tokyo, and
arriving after a 3-hour bus ride to the hotel for layover to Tokyo, to the television talking about
the explosive terrorist act in Norway.
Sort of a macabre fascination and also out of jet lag and frustration of not being able to
get home for another 24 hours, I sat there with my watch in hand looking at CNN, Al Jazeera
International, BBC, ITV, all of the others that the great Japanese networks provide, and watch in
fascination for an 8-hour period where the only talking heads brought on to that constellation of
networks continued to spin furiously this notion of how what had happened in Norway could be
tied to some comment made by Zawahiri in 2003 or how some fatwa issued in Somalia could
have tied to what this individual was, et cetera. And I'm looking at this, and having looked at
terrorist profiles from 2004, was saying to myself, either this is a brand-new prototype of
Salafi-Jihadi or al-Qaeda terrorism or its got nothing to do with it. Why are we then spending 8
hours, other than the explanation that most of the talking heads are employed to talk about
al-Qaeda -[Laughter]
DR. LYNCH: Why are we spending all of this time doing this? And then to come
around to that, it gets back to my point about where we need to go, I think, in the future of
looking at al-Qaeda.
Without just saying we're going to dump all of our work against al-Qaeda, we need to ask
the wider questions. What else is out there, and how have we got so wedded right now to this
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narrative of al-Qaeda that we could have spent 8 hours on the major international news
networks? And the Japanese had them all, folks, okay? Even the ones that I couldn't speak the
language of. We're so wedded in this thesis of trying to find and pound a square peg of al-Qaeda
nemesis and terror into the round hole of the complexity of a lot of these local engagements that
we miss the reality for mythology.
Thank you very much.
[Applause.]
MR. ZARATE: Thank you, Dr. Lynch. You gave us a lot to think about. I would ask
folks not then to look at the commentary I gave on CBS and BBC at that time.
[Laughter]
MR. ZARATE: Alexander, why don't you bring us home, literally and figuratively.
MR. MELEAGROU-HITCHENS: Thank you. I'm afraid I was also one of those who
made the mistake on BBC.
MR. LYNCH: Present company excepted.
MR. MELEAGROU-HITCHENS: My paper looks a specifically two parts really.
First, I'm going to look at the sort of history and development of the al-Qaeda media strategy as
it relates particularly or specifically to the homegrown Jihadi issue and how that might look in
the future, and also, the second part of that will look at what aspects of the Salafi-Jihadi ideology
appear to be most appealing to Muslims living in the West who have been mobilized.
So, beginning with the first part, as we know really, in the 10 years since 9/11, al-Qaeda
and its affiliates and sympathizers have developed a very sophisticated online media network
which disseminates sort of the ideological, strategic, and tactical works of the movement far and
wide, making them accessible to anyone with an Internet connection. In addition to these widely
available documents, many of which have been either written in or translated into English now, a
number of influential ideologues appear to have tossed themselves over the years since 9/11 as
they were selling the movement to a western audience.
We know that Abu Hafs al-Masri, the well-known hook-handed cleric of North London,
who is still fighting extradition to the U.S., I think, on human rights grounds, I believe, and then,
of course, up to now on Anwar al-Awlaki. These ideologues have through their lectures and
sermons, I believe, successfully translated ideas that were originally meant for South Asian and
Arab audiences, so that they now may appeal to western Muslims. As well as providing western
audiences with the ideological back bone of the movement, global Jihadists have also created a
body of work which outlines their strategy for recruitment and mobilization far and wide.
So I will look first at the sort of history of that, and the CRRC provides us with a very
useful document, which I believe, though I could stand corrected, is the first real attempt to think
of a media strategy for the Jihadis, which was written by Abu Hafs al-Masri, who has been
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mentioned many times on all of the panels, I believe, and in the spring of 1990 in Peshawar,
Pakistan. Entitled, "On the Jihadi Media: How To Communicate To the Public," this 17-page
document lays out a vision for the future of al-Qaeda's messaging efforts, in particular as they
relate to spreading their ideology and appealing to a wider audience.
Despite his involvement in al-Qaeda, Abu Hafs was beginning to think beyond, already
beyond the constraints of a formal and tightly knit organization. Instead, he saw the entire
ummah, the Islamic nation as they see it, as a recruitment ground and sought to formulate a
strategy which would reach out to as much of that as possible.
Portraying the Jihad as a movement, the essay begins with Abu Hafs' view on the
importance of Jihadi media as a way to communicate with and mobilize followers and potential
recruits. He writes, "The Jihad media is an important communication means between the Jihadi
movement and the Muslim population. It is a part of the political effort of the movement and a
tool to mobilize the population."
He understood that in order to achieve a significant level of mobilization in favor of the
Jihadi Movement, Jihadi media had to play a leading role in elucidating for Muslims, as he puts
it, "the reasons of this war between the Mujahideen and the idol." The idol authority is
obviously, he was much more focused on the Arab tyrannies at that point. He was not really
thinking too much about the foreign enemy, so the reasons for this war between the Mujahideen
and the idol as well as the goal of this war, this is what the media should be able to explain to
people.
And even at this early stage in al-Qaeda's development, Abu Hafs recognized that if the
Jihadi movement was to win its war against secularism and on belief, success on the battlefield
will only be part of the equation. Of equal, if not larger significance was what we commonly
refer to as the "Battle of Ideas," as he puts, again, in the document, "The essence of the conflict
between the Mujahideen and the idol authority is a conflict between atheism and unbelief, and
the spirit and the mind of the people is the real space of this conflict."
So, in addition, it was the role of the Jihadi media to influence, as he puts it, again, "the
Muslim population on the moral, psychological, and intellectual level," convincing them of the
necessity to oust the idol regime and giving the practical example of the possibility to do so.
In social, scientific terms, essentially what Abu Hafs wanted media to do was to offer
followers and potential recruits a diagnosis of the problems that they faced as well as the
prognosis or sort of what the acceptable response should be and the motivations to act, and he
wanted the media to re-offer all of these.
Thus, the Jihadi movement had to create, as he thought, cadres of devoted media
specialists, wholly separate in terms of part personnel from the military leadership while also
working in tandem with military operations, so as to achieve maximum propaganda impact. He
also placed a high premium on this relationship, claiming that, again quoting him, "The success
of the enemy in paralyzing the media action of the Mujahideen is as significant as the capability
of the enemy to paralyze the military action itself."
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Western media was not to be trusted as far as he was concerned. Not only did he deem it
to be working with western governments in order to destroy Islam, but also deliberately
providing false information about the Mujahideen, their tactics and goals, thus recognizing the
importance of creating an alternative media source to the mainstream media. This is actually a
very important aspect of any successful social movement, is the creation of their own media
source that will connect them with potential recruits as well as current followers and strengthen
those relationships.
He also lists in this strategy document what he believes to be the best means of
communication, and of course, this was written before the Internet was one of the world's
primary modes of communication. So he restricted his resources really to technologies like
audio and video cassettes, radio and television. He also envisaged a time when Jihadi groups
would have their own radio stations, and as we know, we have gone far beyond that now.
Moving on to see how this has developed a bit more, with 21 years on now, his vision, I
believe, endures in some way, though it has been transformed somewhat. I think it was updated
and refined by the arch al-Qaeda strategist, Abu Musab al-Suri, who has again been mentioned
quite a few times by many of the panelists, in his 2004 treatise, "The Call of the Global Islamic
Resistance." In this, al-Suri wrote in great detail about the importance of Jihadi media, while
also looking beyond the constraints of formal group organization, echoing much of what Abu
Hafs observed over a decade earlier.
In fact, in his 1,600-page document, al-Suri devotes a paragraph of his work to praise
Abu Hafs along, strangely, with Osama bin Laden, because actually he wasn't very happy with
bin Laden becoming the face of this movement, but he was in praise of Abu Hafs' strategic
vision, writing, and I quote, "These two" -- bin Laden and Abu Hafs -- "believe that the time of
local and regional organizations had passed and would be inappropriate for the coming stage."
They believed that their duty was to mobilize the ummah toward confrontation with the external
enemy, as represented by America.
So the struggle against the West was to be executed, according to al-Suri, on a global
scale, and the Jihad movement required a detailed strategy to address this. Like Abu Hafs, he
sought to include the entire ummah in this fight, and I quote Abu al-Suri again here, "I am
convinced that victory is in the hands of God, and the primary prerequisites for this are working
to transform this confrontation into an ummah-wide battle after the ummah has been ignited by
the Jihadist elite." So, while he maintained that the global Jihad had to keep an intellectual and
operational elite that still had sort of a coherent strategy, it could be done without entirely relying
on a formal organization. Instead, his work called for something of a restructuring of global
Jihadism.
Al-Suri, having observed that the post-9/11 world was distinctly uncharitable towards
organized and hierarchical Jihadi groups, wanted to transform al-Qaeda into a diffused
international movement connected mainly through Islamic solidarity and ideology that
transcended culture, transcended nationality and everything else.
Thus, again, he writes in his treatise, "The call for the global Islamic resistance is not a
political party or an organization or a specific limited group. It is an open call." And of course,
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the definitive work of al-Suri, for anyone who doesn't know, is by Brynjar Lia, Architect of
Global Jihad. That's all you really need to read to know about al-Suri.
Accordingly, he now recommended that al-Qaeda increase its efforts to project its ideas
and solutions around the globe. By encouraging this new decentralized version of al-Qaeda,
al-Suri sought to spark the creation of numerous self-starter individuals and terrorist cells, with
little to no organizational connections to the group. This "School of Individual Jihad," as he
refers to it, was free from the constraints of conventional warfare, could effectively subvert the
military superiority of the West on the battlefield, while also avoiding the dangers of recruits
being arrested while traveling to the epicenters of Jihad in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
Unlike his predecessor, Abu Hafs, al-Suri was operating in the Internet age, which had
opened up avenues far beyond what the Egyptian commander could ever have imagined.
Referring to what he defined as the "informational resistance," al-Suri wrote that
"This element of the conflict must be conducted through the use of modern technology of all
forms, especially in satellite and the Internet to promote the resistance and entice people to
action."
Indeed, it is no coincidence that his treatise first appeared on online Jihadist forums, and
he was among the first, the global Jihadi other than bin Laden, to make effective use of the
Internet. In addition to updating the means of the movement's messaging in the media, al-Suri
also envisioned an expansion in its scope. The "Jihadist resistance," as he puts it, "against idol
worship and western aggression could be implemented by small groups of individuals anywhere
in the world," and the Jihadi Internet media was to be the cornerstone of this approach.
He writes, "The global Jihad considers the battlefield of every Mujahid and combatant to
be where the Mujahid lives, where he moves, where is performance is more productive and more
beneficial and worse for the enemies of God." This also, of course, then applied to Muslims
living in the West, to which al-Suri provided two options: migrate to Muslim-majority countries,
make the Hijra like Muhammad did from Mecca to Medina, or carry out attacks within their host
nations. Al-Suri's preferred option, interestingly, was actually the former. He wanted to see
more Hijra. He wanted to see them going to the battlefields and fighting and helping how they
could there and also so that they may actually practice their religion properly, as you can't
technically do that as far as Salafi-Jihadis are concerned in a secular democracy.
However, for those who did choose to remain in the West, they had to fulfill their Islamic
obligations, as far as he was concerned, to fight Jihad and target military, political, and economic
institutions. Indeed, these Muslims were identified by al-Suri as having an obvious and distinct
advantage over other potential Mujahideen in that they were in the best place to facilitate their
attacks within their host nations.
He wrote that, "The call for resistance reminds every Muslim living in the West, even
those that are authentic western citizens, that the obligation of Jihad against these infidel
governments who are in alliance with America and Israel has a specific obligation upon them,
similar to any other Muslim anywhere." His compliance is easier than that of the Mujahideen
who do not live there and who visit such a country to deter its governments from attacking
Muslims.
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Building on Abu Hafs' idea of small specialist Jihadi media cadres, al-Suri called for the
creation of, and I quote, again, "clandestine and silent brigades made up of one to three members
who are well versed in the Sharia, politics and letters, and possess media expertise, knowledge of
activism, and expertise in using the Internet and electronic communications networks." One of
the main utilities of such a group or individual would be to help ferment the individual Jihad by
providing Jihadi media consumers with the requisite, ideological, strategic, and operational
materials required to carry out the attacks in their host nations.
Working tirelessly to prove that the West is at war with Islam and Muslims, this would
also provide all of the theological justifications for a violent global response, along with the
bomb manuals and other information about weaponry. In addition, each group would tailor its
material based on the region it was targeting for recruitment.
For al-Suri's strategy to work in the West, it really required an effective interpreter, and I
argue that perhaps whether he intentionally wanted to our not, al-Awlaki may represent that
required interpreter for western mobilization.
So I'll briefly look at a selection of his work, al-Awlaki's work, aimed at mobilizing
western Muslims and offer a couple of case studies of individuals radicalized in part, at least, by
the ideologue's output.
The question in many cases is not whether al-Awlaki has successfully conveyed both his
supposed reality of a war on Islam and the religious imperatives with violence, but rather how he
has achieved this. And along with U.S.-born Samir Kahn, he has overseen the creation and
publication of what we discussed before, Inspire Magazine. Its effect and its importance is
debatable, of course, but it is not a coincidence that Inspire regularly reprints passages from
al-Suri's work, particularly those that relate to the School of Individual Jihad.
And of course, in one of al-Awlaki's seminal works, "44 Ways to Support a Jihad," he
continues in a similar vein to Abu Hafs and al-Suri when he stresses the importance of Jihadi
media and offering alternatives to the mainstream western media and, as he puts it, "spreading
the writings of the Mujahideen and their scholars."
Although not a pure strategist in the mold of al-Suri and Abu Hafs, al-Awlaki is perhaps
the embodiment of the type of Islamic preaching ideologue that they had envisioned, using Jihadi
media to effectively spread the Salafi-Jihadi ideology as well as offering convincing explanations
to the problems faced by the ummah and the correct solutions or responses.
One of the most important things you have to do if you are going to try to mobilize a
western Muslim is to convince them really that the supposed war on Islam is real, that it is
happening, and it is happening on their doorstep. It is not just happening miles away in
Afghanistan and Iraq, being beamed by the news corporations. It is happening right next door,
right in their own cities, right in their own countries, and you have to figure out ways to frame
certain events in order to convince them. So I am not going to look at al-Awlaki's stuff about
Afghanistan and Iraq. I will look at what other ways he tries to sort of make this more of an
Islamic reality for his audience.
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In a 2008 talk he gave, called “"he Battle of Hearts and Minds," again appropriating
western political discourse and talk for his own means -- "hearts and minds" has become a very
famous term post Iraq -- he gave an online lecture where he referred to two reports by the RAND
Corporation entitled "Building Modern Muslim Networks" and "Civil Democratic Islam," in
which the authors, Angel Rabasa and Cheryl Benard, respectively, offer a number of basic
criteria for what they considerate to be moderate Islam as well as recommendations for how to
empower it.
Their criteria included belief in democracy, acceptance of the non-sectarian law,
respectful rights of women and religious minorities, and the opposition to terrorism and
legitimate violence. Al-Awlaki's response to these four criteria were the following: "So from
what you see, a moderate Muslim to them is in reality a non-Muslim, because according to these
four definitions, the definitions that they gave, this is kufr, this is non-Islam. So, from now on, I
am not going to call it a moderate Muslim, but I think a more appropriate term would be 'RAND
Muslim.'" And this is a term that he coined, "RAND Muslim" or "RAND Islam." "The U.S. is
trying to change Islam itself," he says. "Without any shame, they are openly stating that we have
a desire not only to influence the Muslim societies, but we want to change the religion itself." So
really what we are talking about here is that these efforts, according to al-Awlaki, are just yet
another facet of this war on Islam, which amount to nothing more than attempts by the Crusader
West to alter the true meaning of the religion and prevent it from spreading or gaining power.
Another real hot point for a lot of Muslims in the West, and, of course, not just Western
Muslims, but particularly for those in the West, is the Muhammad cartoon fiasco or controversy,
whatever you would like to call it. Again, in May 2008, just after his release from prison, he
gave a sermon on Pal Talk, quite a well-known chat forum for Jihadi-Salafis at least and
Salafi-Jihadis. It was entitled, "The Dust Will Never Settle Down." It addressed the ongoing
Muhammad cartoons controversy in Europe and the U.S. and in particular the cartoons drawn in
Sweden. The depictions of Muhammad are framed as yet another aspect of the war on Islam,
which involved defaming and ridiculing Muslims. The publicity for the sermon, which appeared
in a number of Islamic forums, promised that al-Awlaki would give listeners the required
information on, and I quote, "What is the ruling of Sharia on such incidents insulting the Prophet,
and how did the Sahabah deal with such people, and what do our scholars say about it?"
The talk focused on figures from Islamic history who had shown great devotion to the
Prophet, and al-Awlaki held them up as great examples for western Muslims to follow, this usual
juxtaposition of the early years of Islam onto the modern current political climate being a real
trademark of his work.
Referring to the original fiasco triggered by the Danish cartoons, he proudly stated that
the Muslim world was on fire, yet the reactions to the subjects in the Swedish cartoons was
unacceptably sanguine or lethargic because, as he puts it again, "Our enemies have successfully
desensitized us."
Unlike the Sahabah before them, western Muslims were not displaying sufficient love
and devotion for Muhammad, and this had to change. The prognosis, his solution, "Let's go back
to the time of the Prophet," as most any Salafi will tell you to do, "and see how things were then.
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This is the way we should follow, the way of the Sahabah."
Retelling the story from Sahih Bukhari Hadith, from one of the Sahih Bukhari Hadith's,
rather, about Ka'ab ibn al-Ashraf, a poet and Jewish tribal leader in pre-Islamic Mecca who
wrote poems insulting the Prophet and lamenting the victory of Muslims in the Battle of Badr,
al-Awlaki informed listeners that Muhammad had sanctioned this man's murder. Muhammad
ibm Maslamah, the follower and man tasked with Allah's assassination, was praised by
al-Awlaki for his zeal and devotion. "But what of modern-day western Muslims?" he asks,
"How concerned are you? How concerned are we when it comes to the honor of our soul, when
it comes to the honor of Islam, when it comes to the Book of Allah? How serious do we take it?
We want the spirit of the Sahabah."
It is very difficult to read this message as anything else than an enjoinder to kill anyone
deemed to have insulted or ridiculed the Prophet.
And I was going to give a couple of case studies, but I think I've probably gone over my
time, so maybe I will discuss those later.
Thank you.
[Applause.]
•-•-•
Ten Years Later: Insights on Al-Qaeda's
Past and Future Through Captured Records
"A Call for Further Research and Analysis"
Remarks by
Suzanne Spalding, Counsel Bingham McCutchen;
Executive Director, National Commission on Terrorism;
former Assistant General Counsel, CIA; and
Former Minority Staff Director,
House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Audio File Entitled "110917-closing-remarks"
[Being at Audio Counter 00:01:20 and end at 00:20:13.]
MS. SPALDING: Thank you very much, Dean, and thank you, Dr. Fenner. I'm really
pleased to be here, and I want to start with an apology for not being
Congresswoman/now-President Jane Harman, who would loved to have been here, not only to
share her thoughts and ideas with you but to have heard the fascinating presentations over the
last day and a half. It really has been a real privilege, and I've really enjoyed listening to the
panels.
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So I thought what I would do, is in the spirit of kind of a wrap-up, reinforce and underline
some of the themes that you've already heard but from the perspective of a consumer. That's the
perspective that Congresswoman Harman would have brought. Despite her new role now as
leading a research team, she spent most of her career being a consumer of the kind of intellectual
product that we heard about over the last 2 days, both from the intelligence community and from
academic, and so that's kind of the perspective that I'd like to bring. And I'm going to try to
make it coherent, but I also was taking notes as I went through the last day and a half, and I'm
pulling from a lot of those threads, so forgive me if it comes out a little bit less cohesive than I
would like.
But I think the first point that I want to stress -- and again, it's one that you've heard and
it's one that the Dean talked about in terms of bringing the academia and the practitioners
together -- is be relevant. These issues are so critical today that it's really important not to just
pursue things that are intellectually interesting and leave it at that, but to be relevant. And I
understand the tension there. Having spent years, again, working in the intelligence community
and with the folks in the intelligence community, I understand how important it is for the kind of
intellectual thinking and research and analysis that you all are doing to be independent, to not be
linked directly to a desired policy outcome, for the credibility and legitimacy of the work that
you're doing.
And in the intelligence community, they're very much aware of that. The analysts are
very aware that they are not policy-makers. They are informing policy-makers, and that's a line
that is very important to observe very carefully.
Having said that, I think it's really a role that outside academia can play in a way that the
intelligence analysts can't, which is having done that independent work, letting the facts lead you
where they lead you and doing an independent analysis, think about how that applies to the
challenges that policy-makers face today, particularly helping to identify what is still relevant
about the historical perspective that you've brought to bear, what is different about the
environmental the policy-makers face today, and what are the implications of that for how this
should influence decision-making by policy-makers.
So, for example -- and there were lots of examples over the last day and a half -- Anne
Stenersen talked about -- you know, has done a lot of work, looking at the relationship between
the Taliban and al-Qaeda over the years. At the end, she makes the pivot then to how is this
relevant to safe havens, al-Qaeda's ability to find safe havens today, and that's the kind of pivot
that I think is critically important.
Related to that is not just answers for policy-makers, but a critical function for analysts
both of the intelligence community and in academia, is to not just answer the questions that are
being asked by the policy-makers, but to help them think about what are the right questions, what
questions have they not thought about yet that they should be asking. And frankly, I will tell you
this was a function of intelligence analysts that came under intense pressure since 9/11 where
there was a huge emphasis on simply answering the questions that policy-makers asked and not
wandering off and spending resources outside that narrow realm. The emphasis on looking over
the horizon, on looking peripherally, and thinking about the questions that haven't been asked
and aren't being asked that should be asked, it was something that I think really atrophied in the
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intelligence community. And I hope it is something that will be very much on your minds in
academia as yo pursue these issues.
We were talking at the break about how do you avoid this group-think that particularly in
the bureaucracies of government tends to take over, and one of the ways you do that is by
encouraging thinking outside the box, encouraging outliers, and one of the folks speaking said
they thought that young people were particularly well suited, having not yet been captured by the
bureaucracy, to be thinking in these terms. And one of the ways to encourage that without
putting their careers too much at risk is to encourage them to think about the questions that
should be asked. As I say, on the outside, you're in the best position to do that.
And asking the right question is sos important, and I will just relay one story from my
own experience that really drove this home for me. When I was on the House Intel Committee
with Congressman Harman, we went out to the CIA -- this was in early 2004 -- to talk to the
authors of the Iraq NIE, Iraq WMD National Intelligence Assessment, trying to figure out what
went wrong there, what went right, what went wrong ,how did this develop the way it developed.
We met with the leaders in each of the fields, nuclear, chemical, biological, who
supervised the writing of this NIE. You may not remember the history, or some of you will, of
the NIE, but it was originally prompted by a question from Congress. As Congress was trying to
consider whether anticipating a decision whether to authorize the use of force, they asked for this
NIE, trying to understand what was the nature of the WMD threat in Iraq.
What was fascinating was what we heard from the drafters of the NIE. They did not view
themselves as answering this question from Congress. In the interim, they had gotten a question
from the executive branch to write this. They were answering a different question from the
executive branch. This is what they told us. The decision to go to war had basically been made
already. The question they were answering was should our commanders be prepared to face
chemical, biological, nuclear weapons when they go in.
Think about the dramatic difference. I mean just in terms of the burden of proof. If
you're in doubt, which way are you going to come down? So one question is does Iraq have
WMD, because this will inform the decision to go to war. Well, you're going to be pretty darn
careful before you say, yeah, they have a nuclear program or chemical or biological weapons,
because yo know the consequences are so huge.
Now think about the question they thought they were answering: Should our
commanders be prepared to face? Well, you're going to be pretty careful before you say, "No,
they don't have it," and send people in who are not prepared to encounter those kinds of
weapons. So you're going to err on the other side. It makes a dramatic difference how you ask
the question and whether you're asking the right questions, so that's a point that I think is
critically important.
Asking the right questions is important for challenging consensus, and Juan Zarate and
Brian Fishman and others have talked about, for example, looking at China as a target for
terrorist activity based on their changing role in the world. Those are the kinds of questions that
aren't getting serious consideration in the government and need to be asked.
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Another question that I think needs to be asked -- and I think this conference set it up
beautifully -- is again looking over the horizon. We've heard from Panetta and Petraeus talk of
strategic defeat of al-Qaeda being within sight. We've had a lot of debate going on. It prompted
a lot of debate in Washington, "Oh, that's an exaggeration," "Oh, no, it's not."
Beyond the debate, somebody needs to be thinking, okay, if strategic defeat of al-Qaeda,
then what? Then what? What's next? Where does terrorism fit in the constellation of national
security for the United States and of the United States' interests?
Another point is that it's not really about predicting the future. Jeff Cooper over at SAIC
talks about how he thinks trying to predict the future, which I see analysts are asked to do all the
time. It's really a fool's errand and can't be done, and you should focus instead on being able to
really understand your current environment, sensing and sense-making of what's going on today,
and how you can be agile enough to adapt to changing circumstances as you sense them, so the
key is have all your senses out there, sense what's happening, and understand, as different
scenarios develop, how you should be moving and have the agility to do that.
So part of that is choosing the future you want. Analyze the possible outcomes, but
important for policy-makers particularly -- and they need help in fleshing this out from
academics -- is figuring out what future do we want, what future best moves us toward our
objectives.
Again, I would cite Juan Zarate and his colleagues, Tom Sanderson and Dave Gordon at
CSIS who have just come out with a very interesting study of al-Qaeda and associated
movements, playing out five or six possible outcomes, scenarios for what might look like in
2025 and the factors that will drive, again, not trying to predict which of these outcomes will
ultimately emerge but what are possible scenarios, what are the factors that will drive them, so
that then as we are sensing and sense-making of our current environment, making sense of our
current environment, we can better understand which of these outcomes we may be closest to,
and again, envisioning the last one which is envisions the kind of outcome we'd like to see. If
that's the future we want, how do we get from here to there, and how can we evaluate where we
are on that pathway?
I'm trying to keep track of where I am here. Choose the future you want, sense and
sense-making.
Oh. And part of that is to focus not just -- we tend, particularly in the practitioner
community, to focus on threats and risks. Equally important is to focus on opportunities, and
again, an area that I would encourage you to really consider delving into, what are the
opportunities that present themselves today and in terms of where events might go, how events
are developing today. And along those lines, I would encourage those of you who haven't yet
seen it to read what's sort of been called the "Mr. Y article." If you google that, you will pull it
up. It was done by a couple of really smart guys who had been asked to sort of step out of their
day-to-day world and do some intellectual thinking for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, but it is
very sort of unconventional thinking, and they couldn't quite get it pushed out of the Pentagon.
And they took it to the Wilson Center, Woodrow Wilson Center, and they published it at the
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Woodrow Wilson Center. But one of the things it talks about is this notion of thinking about
opportunities and thinking about the world in a very different way, so I would really encourage
you to look at that.
Cindy Storer. Another theme that I want to emphasize that was mentioned during the last
day in a half is this notion of the trees and the forest. Cindy Storer talked about it yesterday
when she was talking about one of the reasons why she thinks women tended -- the analysts in
this area tended to be women, but she talked about the importance of being able to see both the
trees and the forest.
And one of the areas where I -- and this is important, obviously, across the board in so
many of the areas that have been discussed in the last day and a half. One of the areas where I
think it's critically important is analyzing the Arab Spring, the impact, the implications, the
potential outcomes, te cetera, looking on a very granular basis how various players, emerging
groups, emerging individuals, trends, forces, et cetera, looking very carefully at each of those,
what are their objectives, how will they drive home their agendas, how will they try to do that,
who are their enemies, et cetera, in a very granular way looking at those trees.
But then equally important, obviously, is to step back and say now we've looked at those,
and how are the broader trends going to affect those individual players, how will those broader
trends disrupt what's happening, how will they reinforce the kinds of things that we are
concerned about, the opportunities that are presented, both for us and for our adversaries. So this
notion again -- and I think it's one that particularly as academics -- and I've sensed this from
some of the folks who have made their presentations and with access to these very fascinating
documents, one of the things that you're very good at is to bore in, really get down into the
granularity and the details and get sort of absorbed in that worked around those documents. So,
again, the importance of stepping back then and thinking about how does this fit into the broader
global trends, I think is really important.
And a couple of little people areas that I would encourage somebody to kind of look at,
one is the specific impact. And Brian talked about this, alluded to this a little bit, of our actions
and policies that are perceived as infringing on civil liberties or notions of equality, freedom,
justice.
I have argued for years since before 9/11 that this notion we traditionally have, this
concept of balancing national security and civil liberties is fundamentally misleading, because it
implies they're mutually exclusive objectives on opposite sides of the scale, and if you take away
from one, you add to the other and vice versa. And my own view is that in fact, they're mutually
reinforcing, and everybody sort of intuitively understands why security is essential for the
preservation of civil liberties.
But less obvious is to understand the ways in which preservation of civil liberties in our
system of checks and balances reinforces our national security and is essential to our national
security. An example that I use most often is that relationship of trust with communities, that
relationship between the governed and the government that is so essential for both sustaining
public support for policies, but today with concerns about threats that will emerge from our
communities, having that relationship of trust with those initial sensors is really important.
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Having said that, I haven't seen any evidence of it. I have seen no empirical studies. I've
seen no serious academic efforts to substantial that. Again, like so many of the things that were
talked about over the last day and a half, there were a number of references to things that we sort
of intuitively know. Brian talked about this the most, that we take as received wisdom, we think
we know. This is one of those things I think I know, but I would really love it if somebody out
there would take that on as a question, whether that's valid or not.
And then lastly, I would say find ways to interact with the intelligence community and
with policy-makers. For those of you in academia, it's such an important interaction, for all the
reasons that I've talked about and that others talked about over the last day and a half.
Again, I understand the sensitivity, particularly for academics, to interact with the
intelligence community, but again, I would comment some of the work that CSIS has done with
their Trusted Information Networks, or TIN projects, where they have been able to bring in
academia to work on some of these issues and act in a way as sort of a go-between, between
academia and the intelligence community, but really find ways to reach out, to help folks who
are struggling with these issues day in and day out, to understand the relevance of your work and
the implications of it.
And I want to thank you again very much for a great day and a half and for your interest
in work on these issues.
[Applause.]
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