Center for a New American Security

National security analysts will immediately note the ways in which the massive U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia is part of the administration's strategy to reassure Gulf allies of a continued U.S. commitment to the region as the nation shifts its focus to Asia while dealing with the Iranian nuclear weapons program. This is also, though, about U.S. jobs. Boeing* had been manufacturing F-15s on its St. Louis assembly line for the past few years without a firm assurance those aircraft would ever be sold. Cancelling the deal with Saudi Arabia would have been a tremendous blow to both Boeing and the people of St. Louis. I am not among those who argue we should keep U.S. defense spending high in order to support the U.S. economy, but in this case, I think it is naive to assume U.S. domestic politics did not play at least a small role in this sale. I'm sure the congressional delegation of Missouri, for example, is enjoying a late Christmas present today.

Note: the president barely lost Missouri in 2008.

*Continuing a tradition of transparency on the blog and at CNAS in general, I should note that Boeing was a corporate sponsor of CNAS in 2011. A full list of CNAS donors can be found here. (I do not understand why all think tanks do not similarly publish a list of their donors so that consumers of their products can make more informed judgments.)

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.

A few things need to be said about Michael Doran's essay in Foreign Affairs:

1. The idea that the Bush Administration was entirely populated with people who knew nothing about the Arabic-speaking world is false and ugly. Doran was teaching at Princeton and had published widely on the Arabic-speaking world before joining the administration. He is a first-rate scholar of the peoples and history of the Middle East.

2. I was emailing with Parag Khanna this morning and told him I think it's too early for him or anyone else to be making broad claims about what these events mean for the Arabic-speaking world as a whole. As Doran correctly notes here (and Lisa Anderson notes elsewhere in the same issue of Foreign Affairs), this is hardly the first time the Arabic-speaking world has been swept up in revolutionary fervor in the past century. And as Anderson notes, the challenges of a state like Libya and a state like Egypt going forward are completely different.

3. Doran is correct, in my estimation, to be worried about current and future violent non-state actors in the Arabic-speaking world and the ways in which Iran might support them. This is something that would have worried a responsible policy maker as much in December 2010 as today -- and I don't just say that as a guy who wrote his dissertation on Hizballah.

4. Let us not be so blinded by what Iran may or may not do that we fail to take the opinions and preferences of Arabs seriously. Doran writes:

Faced with the accountability of the democratic process, Egypt's new rulers will not feel nearly as free as Mubarak did to side with Washington and Jerusalem when the next round of conflicts involving Israel erupts. In the post-Mubarak era, the resistance bloc has a new weapon: the Egyptian crowd, which is now freer than before to organize on its own. Renewed violence will undoubtedly spark massive street demonstrations, not only in Egypt but also in Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. But it is in Egypt where the bloc will concentrate its energies, providing the Muslim Brotherhood and similar groups with a pretext for organizing the mob and casting themselves as the conscience of the Egyptian people. They will demand that the military sever all ties with Israel and the United States -- and it is far from certain whether Egypt's insecure army officers will have the mettle to withstand the campaign.

I have no big problem with much of what Doran writes here. I do have a problem, though, with his emphasis on what he calls "the resistance bloc" -- Iran and Syria together with violent non-state actors like Hamas and Hizballah. Iran and its allies aside, Egyptians do not very much like Israeli policy toward the Palestinian people. Iran, Syria, and Hizballah could disappear off the face of the Earth tomorrow and that would still be the case. So when Egyptian leaders do not respond with the same timidity to the next Israeli incursion into Gaza as Hosni Mubarak did, those leaders will likely be reflecting the genuine policy preferences of the Egyptian electorate -- not creeping Iranian influence.

5. Issandr, in an epic rant on Arabist, wrote the following:

If things do come to a head between Saudi Arabia and Iran, I know which one I'll be rooting for: Iran, while its current regime is awful, is at least a sophisticated civilisation. Its current regime will hopefully one day fall. Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, represents one corrupt family and its alliance with the most fanatical, retrograde interpretation of Islam in the world. Their downfall cannot come soon enough.

I'm not sure I would go that far (in fact, I know I would not), but the focus on Iran and Iranian influence in the Middle East is indeed a little curious considering the fact that Saudi-sponsored radical Sunni extremism has killed a lot more American citizens than Iran ever thought about. Saudi Arabia, with its oil reserves and spare refining capacity, is an exceptional case in terms of U.S. policy, I realize. But it's puzzling to me how Doran can take such a "black" view of Iran and Iranian influence and such a "white" view of Saudi Arabia and Saudi influence. To paraphrase one of my favorite works by the noted orientalist Robert Earl Keen, in the Middle East, we surely live and die by shades of gray.

... Saudi Arabia and the UAE more or less invaded Bahrain. Just thought you would want to know.

The New York Times has assembled a really smart crew of scholars to weigh in on Saudi Arabia, by the way: Bernard Haykel, Toby Jones, Chris Boucek, Rachel Bronson and more. I wish I knew more about the Gulf states, but the first two trips I took to Saudi Arabia came last year. It was fascinating, but I have the feeling that to really say something of consequence about Saudi Arabia, you need to have spent more time there than just a few weeks.

Aside from being a great Caitlin Cary album, that phrase is as good a way as any to break the news that Saudi Arabia is now bombing Yemen. 

The Saudi air force has bombed strongholds of Houthi fighters in northern Yemen, officials have said. The attack on Thursday came a day after Saudi authorities accused the fighters, who want autonomy from Sana'a, of killing at least one of their soldiers on the countries' border. The Reuters news agency reported Saudi officials as saying that the air force had attacked fighters who had seized a border area, killing about 40 Houthis.

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.

This NYT article is a good follow on from the academic paper in the last post.

Now, Londonstani has always been more than a little skeptical about Saudi and Egyptian de-radicalisation efforts. Mainly because it has seemed mostly political in its objectives. ie. to convince Western allies that they are part of the solution and not the problem. Also, there's the huge elephant-shaped question of the Saudi government's own domestic policies. These de-rad schemes usually happily bypass this by blaming "deviant" ideology.

However, this scheme touches on what we were discussing in the last post; psychological issues.

"Though the Saudi government tends to explain its rehabilitation program in purely Islamic terms, as an effort to correct theological misunderstandings, the new program also addresses the psychological needs and emotional weaknesses that have led many young men to jihad in the first place."

and..

"Though the exact nature of the role that religious belief plays in the recruitment of jihadists is the subject of much debate among scholars of terrorism, a growing number contend that ideology is far less important than family and group dynamics, psychological and emotional needs. “We’re finding that they don’t generally join for religious reasons,” John Horgan told me. A political psychologist who directs the International Center for the Study of Terrorism at Penn State, Horgan has interviewed dozens of former terrorists. “Terrorist movements seem to provide a sense of adventure, excitement, vision, purpose, camaraderie,” he went on, “and involvement with them has an allure that can be difficult to resist. But the ideology is usually something you acquire once you’re involved.”

Psychological factors are not exclusive to young men from poor backgrounds. And, there's no suggestion that "mental deficiencies" are the only factor. Rather, there is an underlying thought processes going through a young man's mind when he's getting fired up listening to someone talk about the need to fight to protect weak Muslims. Does it give him a sense of self importance that was otherwise lacking? Is he willing to absorb with relative passivity the ideology being presented to him because the rhetoric is fulfilling a more personal need?

The motivating factors for radical extremism are different in different societies. Although, in Londonstani's experience the psychological aspect is similar, to some degree, amongst British born/raised and Saudi Muslims, who both come from relatively affluent societies.

First, thanks to Troy for his continuing coverage of all things South-ish Asia. And don't miss the Stateside coverage of the recently leaked NIE draft. One bit from the NYT story that caught Charlie's eye:

The classified report finds that the breakdown in central authority in
Afghanistan has been accelerated by rampant corruption within the government of
President Hamid Karzai and by an increase in violence by militants who have launched increasingly sophisticated attacks from havens in Pakistan....Beyond the
cross-border attacks launched by militants in neighboring Pakistan, the
intelligence report asserts that many of Afghanistan’s most vexing problems
are of the country’s own making, the officials said.

That struck this blogger as plausible...but she's no expert. What say you?

Second, Charlie got a request via email for some Saudi resources this week. Seems prudent to post the replies for the collective readership to review:

First from AM:

I am no expert on Saudi Arabia. But Thomas Hegghammer is the brightest young
scholar on jihadi movements in Saudi Arabia. Many of his articles can be learned
monograph on Saudi succession.

And from Carlos:

The chapter in Judith Miller's God has Ninety-Nine Names is good, and with
the rest of the book there might be a shot at other context.

I happen to think the opening stuff in The Age of Sacred Terror is pretty
good, though the context is a little wider than Saudi Arabia.

And there is Sandra Mackey, The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom. Dated, but still good basics.

Finally Charlie apologizes for being largely MIA over the last couple weeks. She's been crushed with work and obsessed with the financial crisis / election (actually much more the former than the latter). The long term impact of the budget crunch, liquidity crisis, and likely erosion of American economic power has serious implications for our foreign and defense policies. She just hasn't figured them all out quite yet.

But if you think the American public is fickle and short-sighted in the best of times, you ain't seen nothing yet. It's going to be increasingly hard to justifying long-term occupations overseas...not to mention Army and Marine plus-ups (that budget money is going to go to big ticket hardware items like ships and planes, the kinds of things that create jobs in congressional districts).

Londonstani is struggling to decide whether he really likes this long article on al-Qaeda by Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the Independent (which was originally printed in The New Republic).

The pondering has already gone on over a cup of tea and two marmalade toast and instead of coming nearer to a conclusion, Londonstani has just come up with new points to put in his "pro" and "con" columns.

One of the things that really gets up Londonstani's journalistic nose is a media tendency to indulge in what he calls "snapshot explanation". This is where a quick look at any given situation is afforded miles of tortured explanation - manipulating historic events to show how they could never have led to any other conclusion except the one encapsulated by the snapshot in question. A good example resides in the lakes of ink wasted by British newspapers writing long-winded explanations of Obama's political triumph and revolutionary methods just before Hillary's win at the New Hampshire primary in January. Really, it was rather amusing to see the papers have to talk up Hillary's win to justify their premature exaltations. Londonstani boycotted comment and analysis for a whole week after that.

This article seems to fall into the same bracket. And looks like it's behind the curve at the same time. Yes, AQ looks like its suffering in Iraq. AQ or AQ-inspired attacks in the UK have been foiled and their perpetrators put on trial. While the group hasn't put on a major attack elsewhere for quite a while. A few people - officials and analysts - have been saying that the downturn in the group's fortunes is due to fatigue amongst its intended audience - Sunni Muslims - for its hyper violent methods.

Now, this might be the case but it is at very best an extrapolation from what we see around us and not a fact. It doesn't take into account what's happening on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, whether the group is shifting tactics, evolving or changing focus. At least one new development that makes Londonstani think it's too soon to consign AQ to history are new reports that suggest its ideas and rhetoric are spreading to a new "self radicalising" audience in the West.

The writers also take as fact information released by the Egyptian authorities that Sayyid Imam el Sherif "recanted" his violent ideology in jail. Sherif - a former mentor of Ayman al Zawahiri - was jailed by Yemen shortly after 9/11 and then shipped to Egypt. The Egyptians said they convinced him to write a book recounting his views and trumpeted the result as an achievement of their type of "deradicalisation". In fact, Sherif had fallen out before 9/11 with the men that went on to found AQ over the use of violence. Londonstani was also told by a very good source in London that Sherif had published a book in Arabic in the late 1990s in London which laid out his position and was basically the same as the book the Egyptians said proved their persuasive powers a decade later.

However, having said all that; in Londonstani's view, this article's real contribution is its explanation of the conflicting currents in the jihadi world. And its suggestion that Western support for brutal regimes in the Arab world is a key motivating factor for AQ's stance.

In the post 9/11 world, regimes like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen etc have climbed onto the terror band wagon and made common cause with Western governments by presenting terrorism as a common enemy. Western officials have been convinced that a little blind eye turning when it comes to human rights abuses is worth it if it keeps AQ types from assuming power in a major, or even minor, Arab state.

But Londonstani can't help wondering if a little historical perspective - as provided by this article - wouldn't contribute greatly to the discussion. Reading between the lines, it suggests that the men who thought it was justified to fight their oppressive governments were marginalised by those who decided the conflict needed to be escalated by attacking those who supported their governments.

In Londonstani's experience, the "swamp" of support that AQ types draw on is reduced when the US is seen to be pressuring its Arab allies to hold free elections, free political prisoners, free the press and repeal emergency laws.

When Western officials suggest that they will not let terrorists dictate foreign policy, they are thinking about Israel. But their policies have already been affected by terrorists. Our governments now offer more diplomatic and material help to abusive regimes than before 9/11, and this plays to AQ's message and contributes to our problem.

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — With the price of oil hitting record highs, President Bush will use a private visit to King Abdullah’s ranch here Friday to make a second attempt to persuade the Saudi government to increase oil production so that American consumers can get some relief at the gasoline pump.