Center for a New American Security

If you are like me, you mostly avoided the television and the op-ed pages today. I am not sure it is entirely healthy that we force ourselves, as a society, to grieve anew ten full years after a traumatic event like the September 11th attacks. Surely the best rebuke to an organization like al-Qaida would have been to have simply gone about our business as a nation, worshipping with our neighbors in the morning, watching football in the afternoon at the local bar, and in the evening preparing for a new workweek. Although my own path in life was in part set in motion by the attacks in 2001, I believe the best American response to the anniversary would have been to have simply enjoyed one another while hoping and planning toward tomorrow rather than mourning anew those lost in yesteryear.

But the tenth anniversary of the September 11th attacks does, I must say, give us a moment to pause and reflect on what lessons, if any, we have learned over the past decade. So while dining with Norwegian expert-on-all-things-jihadi Thomas Hegghammer in Oslo last week, I came up with the idea of asking him to participate in a special interview with the blog for the anniversary.

How much do I respect Thomas and his scholarship? I even changed the way I normally spell al-Qaeda al-Qaida for this post because honestly, who the heck am I to tell Thomas what's what?

A few years ago, you wrote a great essay in the Times Literary Supplement arguing that the trauma of the September 11th attacks retarded the development of dispassionate scholarship on jihadi movements. 10 years after the attacks, how are we doing? Has the field of study evolved in the United States? (While you’re at it, explain to us why it seems as if every tenth Norwegian has published peer-reviewed scholarship on al-Qaida.)

First of all, thank you for inviting me to contribute to your blog on this special day. Allow me also to take off my “dispassionate scholar hat” and extend my sympathy to the families of those killed on 9/11 and of the many who fell in the wars that ensued.

Ten years after 9/11, I am sorry to report that the academic study of jihadi movements is still underdeveloped. Things have improved a little bit since I wrote the TLS piece in 2008. There is a core of specialists who continue to do fantastic work, and we see some new recruitment to the field. But the community is still very small and populated mostly by people who are on the fringes of the academy, institutionally speaking (and that includes myself).

The fundamental problem is still the same, namely that the incentive structure in the universities, especially in America, is set against people specialising in the study of jihadi gorups. Studying al-Qaida usually involves qualitative methods and requires high-level skills in Arabic or some other oriental language. Graduate students with an interest in jihadism thus work against two strong biases: the quantitative methods hegemony in the social sciences and the skepticism in American Middle East Studies toward the study of hard security issues. These biases affect hiring decisions and have some striking aggregate effects: for example, there are virtually no tenured faculty specialising in terrorism (let alone jihadism) in any Ivy League school or in any Middle East Studies department in America. Rational graduate students with academic ambitions see this and wisely stay clear of the topic.

A related problem is that jihadism studies in the US lack an institutional home. The Combating Terrorism Center at West Point has partly filled this role, but even the CTC has rarely had more than one or two Arabic-speaking al-Qaida specialists based at West Point at any one time; several of the CTC’s best reports were written by off-site contractors. Another potential hub for al-Qaida studies was the Centre on Law and Security at New York University, but it recently scaled down its activities and looks set to close down. How America – with its huge academic workforce and enormous counterterrorism budget – in ten years has failed to produce a research institution with more than two permanent jihadism specialists is beyond me. As far as Norway is concerned, we actually only have around five scholars focusing on al-Qaida, but we have put them all in one place – the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) – and given them stable working conditions. By having 3-4 academics working on closely related subjects and interacting every day you get tremendous synergy.

Our friend Will McCants has been arguing that the Arab Spring is a disaster for al-Qaida. Do you agree?

The Arab spring is certainly bad for al-Qaida, but I would not call it a disaster, because the uprisings have so far only affected parts of the Muslim world. Important countries like Pakistan remain largely unaffected, as do the conflicts in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kashmir, and elsewhere. In some places such as Yemen and Libya, jihadi groups arguably have more opportunities now than before the Arab spring. The short and mid-term security implications of the Arab spring are highly unpredictable. At the moment we see a decline of al-Qaida central, but it is difficult to disentangle the effect of the Arab spring from the effect of the concurrent tactical breakthroughs, such as the killing of top al-Qaida commanders and the capture of internal AQ documents. That said, I do think the overall net effect of the Arab spring is negative for the jihadi movement in the long term.

The United States has enjoyed some stunning successes against al-Qaida’s senior leadership in 2011. In Oslo, we discussed the possibility that al-Qaida Central might in fact collapse with a speed that could surprise us all. Sketch out a scenario by which that might happen. What does the rapid collapse of al-Qaida Central look like, and under what conditions might we expect it?

It is difficult for me to say, because academics like myself know precious little about the current inner workings of al-Qaida Central. The only people who have a chance of knowing what is going on are in the intelligence community, and whatever I say about the subject is sure to make someone in that community laugh. My overall impression, though, is that al-Qaida central has been severely weakened over the past six months.

Your award-winning book on al-Qaida and Islamism in Saudi Arabia has been justly praised. Tell us about your thesis, and also why al-Qaida’s insurgency was such a failure in Saudi Arabia in 2004 and 2005.

The book is basically a history of violent Islamism in Saudi Arabia after 1979. It tries to explain the ebbs and flows of militant activism in the Kingdom, focusing on the 2003-2006 terrorism campaign by al-Qaida on the Arabian Peninsula. I show that the campaign was not an organically developed domestic rebellion, but rather the work of an foreign-trained network of militants who had returned to Saudi Arabia after al-Qaida’s eviction from Afghanistan in late 2001. The rebels never enjoyed much popular support and failed to recruit outside a closed network of jihad veterans and their acquaintances. This made them an easy prey for the Western-supported security services.

A key argument in the book is that we have tended to overestimate the level of political opposition to the Saudi regime, because we have equated Islamism with anti-government activism. Observers have assumed that because Saudi Arabia has many Islamists, anti-regime sentiment must run very deep. But there are different types of Islamism and not all have regime change as their priority. The Kingdom has produced a lot of jihadists over the years, but most have been what I call extreme pan-Islamists rather than revolutionaries; that is, they preferred to fight non-Muslims rather than fellow Muslims. In fact, the normative barriers to revolutionary violence appear to be higher in Saudi Arabia than in the Arab republics. The non-revolution in Saudi Arabia earlier this year seems to bolster this hypothesis.

One of the more horrifying things I have seen recently was at your house: a DVD of jihadi propaganda and music sitting alongside a Norwegian children’s DVD. Tell us about your latest project examining jihadi culture. And please, also assure my readership (and your wife) that you do not sometimes get your DVDs confused and show your children jihadi propaganda.

Well, the two worlds are closer than you think. Some children’s entertainment is so bad it must be the work of al-Qaida. I have reason to suspect that Abu Mus‘ab al-Suri created the Teletubbies to destroy Western society from within.

The project you are referring to is about jihad culture, or “the things jihadis do when they don’t fight.” It is inspired by the observation that militants in the underground spend a lot of time doing things that appear to serve no immediate military purpose, like singing songs, reciting poetry, or discussing dreams. They also do unexpected things like weep on a regular basis, notably when reciting the Qur’an. The infamous Abu Mus‘ab al-Zarqawi, for example, was known among fellow militants as both “the butcher” (al-dhabbah) and “a weeper” (baki). All this “soft matter” of jihadism remains virtually unstudied; one reason, I think, is that it has been considered less consequential than the hard stuff of terror, such as attacks, resources, organizational structures and the like. My hypothesis is that jihad culture is not inconsequential at all; instead I think it may shed important new light on the processes by which jihadi groups recruit, exercise organizational control and make tactical decisions. I am sure that the military men and women reading this blog will find all this rather intuitive, because they have experienced the important role of music and rituals in their own organization.

As a first step in the inquiry, I am currently working with a great team of scholars on an edited volume that will explore various dimensions of jihad culture. I have recruited subject specialists – including a musicologist, an Arabic poetry expert, and an anthropologist of dreams – to help document and decipher al-Qaida’s internal culture. We are only scraping the surface of this vast topic but hopefully it will inspire others to dig deeper. Eventually I hope to write a monograph on some aspect of this topic, but that’s a few years down the line.

I usually end these Q&A’s with a list of the interviewee’s favorite drinking holes. And I imagine it must be depressing to be such a leader in your field of study yet still be only the second-brightest scholar in your own home. This, perhaps, explains your excellent taste in spirits. Tell us the best places to sip a gin-and-tonic from Princeton to Oslo to, er, Riyadh.

Princeton: The Triumph Brewing Company – a decent microbrewery and the least bad place in town for a drink.

Cambridge: The Conservatory in the Harvard Faculty Club – extremely preppy, but that is the whole point.

Oslo: For beer, I prefer Olympen, a 120-year old beer hall on the city’s east side. For G&Ts, I guess I would go for the deep leather couches of the Bristol Bar.

Riyadh: If I could sneak in a bottle of gin, I would drink it in either on the bridge of the Mamlaka Tower or in the golden ball of the Faysaliyya Center.

Takk! I knew there was a reason I went to school in Philadelphia (with its excellent bars and pubs) rather than New Jersey! (Or Riyadh -- not entirely sure which would be worse, honestly.) As for the rest of you, go buy the man's book here.

While Pakistan's most immediate disasters (floods, an aircrash, wikileaks, diplomatic squabbles etc) have taken up the headlines, the political killings in Karachi haven't gotten the attention they deserve. Most of the news reporting is focused on tallying up the tit-for-tat death toll. But yesterday, the interior minister said he suspected militant outfits could have assassinated a key Karachi politician in an effort to kick of sectarian warfare in the already volitile city.

People dying in any circumstances is a bad thing. But the idea that militants could be manipulating the situation rachets up the possibilty of it all getting much, much worse. (About 70 people have already died in two days of mob violence) So, I was glad to see that Syed Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan bureau chief of the Asia Times and one of the most insightful journalists working in Pakistan today, did some digging on what's going on in Pakistan's largest city and commerical hub. What Saleem found out sounds really troubling.

"Asia Times Online investigations lead to the conclusion that al-Qaeda desires to jack up tensions in Karachi, open up a front in central Punjab and exploit the flood-affected situation in restive Khyber Pakhoonkhwa. The belief among al-Qaeda leaders is that NATO's combat operations will have to be abandoned by the end of this year."

A Pakistani counter terrorism official tells Saleem that militants seem to be planning a big attack on Lahore. Saleem's sources are usually pretty good. In Saleem's analysis, al Qaeda's plans are to force the Pakistani military to overstretch itself by having to deploy across the country.

"in al-Qaeda's view, Karachi, with its multi-national corporations, major banks and stock exchanges, is the weakest link and chaos in this city would be most detrimental to Pakistan - as well as to the war in Afghanistan as a major casualty would be NATO's supply lines. A chaotic and paralyzed Karachi, a disturbed Punjab and a crisis-hit Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa would effectively block all supply routes."

Again, read the whole thing here and keep an eye on Karachi.

Currently watching President Obama speak to the UN General Assembly. Of note to readers of this blog, he reiterated his stance about not allowing al-Qaeda the use of any safe havens from which they can plot attacks. "We will permit no safe-haven," the president said, "for al Qaeda to launch attacks from Afghanistan or any other nation."

I have written on safe havens before, and I'm still not sure if the president realizes the ambition of what he's saying. Are we going into Yemen next? The Horn of Africa? What does this mean for U.S. operations abroad? Will we use commando raids? Drone strikes? Indirect approaches? Again, because I'm not a real strategist and tend to think operationally, when I hear him say stuff like this I wonder how, exactly, we're going to execute the polcy he is articulating. There is a big difference between disrupting al-Qaeda activities in safe havens and denying them the use of safe havens to begin. And -- and here's a bone for all you realists out there -- it's not as if we have unlimited resources to do all this with.

In other news, I apologize for the Afghanistan-centric nature of this blog of late (there are better Afghanistan blogs out there), but here are some quick-hit links to some recent pieces of note:

1. Fred writes a typically smart piece in Slate
2. Blake interviews Khalilzad
3. Laura notes a backlash to the McChrystal report
4. Robert crunches some numbers on troops
5. Though this blogger was against the AP's decision on the dying Marine, this historical reflection offers a great counterargument
6. And finally, Rep. Ike Skelton -- a man always worth listening to on defense issues -- and his letter to the president on Afghanistan and the need for a properly-resourced counterinsurgency strategy.

Skelton Letter to President AFG 22Sept09

The Sun is the most effective instrument of what passes for allied information operations. That's really sad. (Thanks, Mitch.)

If you haven't been scared to death recently, by all means click on this link (.pdf). 11 of these dudes were in Gitmo. The Saudis are asking for help finding these guys. For those of you who already have trouble sleeping, there is probably no need to read any of this.

Is anyone out there surprised that Osama bin Laden is an Arsenal supporter? It just figures.

When Abu Muqawama first saw this article in the New York Times about U.S. efforts to adopt a deterrence strategy toward terror groups, he thought it was the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard. But as he read more, it became clear that some smart folks have thought hard about this, and it sounds less crazy the more he reads about it.

But over the six and a half years since the Sept. 11 attacks, many terrorist leaders, including Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, have successfully evaded capture, and American officials say they now recognize that threats to kill terrorist leaders may never be enough to keep America safe.

So American officials have spent the last several years trying to identify other types of “territory” that extremists hold dear, and they say they believe that one important aspect may be the terrorists’ reputation and credibility with Muslims.

Under this theory, if the seeds of doubt can be planted in the mind of Al Qaeda’s strategic leadership that an attack would be viewed as a shameful murder of innocents — or, even more effectively, that it would be an embarrassing failure — then the order may not be given, according to this new analysis.

Abu Muqawama immediately thought of a conversation he recently had with his anonymous Pashtun flatmate (in our local, no less) about a very specific instance -- related in Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine-- in which al-Qaeda apparently called off a terror attack. The article references the same instance:

George J. Tenet, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote in his autobiography that the authorities were concerned that Qaeda operatives had made plans in 2003 to attack the New York City subway using cyanide devices.

Mr. Zawahri reportedly called off the plot because he feared that it “was not sufficiently inspiring to serve Al Qaeda’s ambitions,” and would be viewed as a pale, even humiliating, follow-up to the 9/11 attacks.

And that's the dominant explanation for why Zawahiri called off the attacks, echoed by Suskind -- that it wasn't big enough. The alternate explanation -- the one Abu Muqawama believes and the one that gives this whole deterrence theory a sliver of hope -- is that such an attack would have been perceived as stepping over the line. Al-Qaeda strategists seem to be split between those who agree with attacks on civilians within non-Muslim states -- attacks such as 9/11 -- and those who would prefer to limit their attacks to attack in occupied Muslim territories such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

So far, the gang who supports attacks on civilian targets in non-Muslim lands has carried the day, swept along by the wave of popular support that seems to accompany attacks like the 9/11 and 7/7 bombings. But can such terror acts be discredited and deterred? That's the million-dollar question asked by the article.

One thing Abu Muqawama has not mentioned yet is how deterrence theory might apply to designated terror groups like Hamas or Hizbollah which are less transnational actors and are more or less rooted in local constituencies. Abu Muqawama's feeling is, if a group depends on a constituency for its popular support, it can be trusted to act more rationally than a transnational actor like al-Qaeda which owes its allegiance to no one. And thus, you'll have more success deterring such an actor. Does that make sense? Any dissenting voices? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

WASHINGTON — An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al Qaida terrorist network.

The Pentagon-sponsored study, scheduled for release later this week, did confirm that Saddam's regime provided some support to other terrorist groups, particularly in the Middle East, U.S. officials told McClatchy. However, his security services were directed primarily against Iraqi exiles, Shiite Muslims, Kurds and others he considered enemies of his regime.

The new study of the Iraqi regime's archives found no documents indicating a "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.

Official cover worked well for the duration of the Cold War, when holding a job at a U.S. Embassy enabled American spies to make contact with Soviet officials and other communist targets.

But many intelligence officials are convinced that embassy posts aren't useful against a new breed of adversaries. "Terrorists and weapons proliferators aren't going to be on the diplomatic cocktail circuit," said one government official familiar with the CIA's cover operations.

The Los Angeles Times has a good article on the way in which the CIA's post-9/11 spy program has been, well, a bust.

The front companies were created between 2002 and 2004, officials said, and most were set up to look like consulting firms or other businesses designed to be deliberately bland enough to escape attention.

About half were set up in Europe, officials said -- in part to put the agency in better position to track radical Muslim groups there, but also because of the ease of travel and comfortable living conditions. That consideration vexed some CIA veterans.

"How do you let someone have a white-collar lifestyle and be part of the blue-collar terrorist infrastructure?" said one high-ranking official who was critical of the program.

Abu Muqawama just saw this picture (top) of an Iraqi tribal militiaman -- one of America's allies in Iraq (for the moment) -- training on Danger Room. Notice the guy's hat? Yeah, he's an FC Barcelona supporter. This development, of course, answers Abu Muqawama's question about that notorious al-Qaeda video of Iraqi kids training to be terrorists, released last week, and why all of the kids seemed to be wearing black Real Madrid away kits. We have our answer now: the Spanish Civil War and the Franco years were no aberration, folks. Apparently Barca really and truly is the team of freedom.

P.S. Abu Muqawama just noticed something hilarious (read: incredibly depressing). Al-Qaeda gave those little kids actual firearms to train with. And our guy? Well, he's got to just hold his hands in the air and pretend he has a weapon either because we trust him less than a 17-year old private in basic training or because his buddies sold the M-4s we gave them on the black market. That's. Just. Awesome.