Brookings: Topics - Intelligence

Obama’s National Security Speech and Pakistan

Bruce Riedel — Wed, 22 May 2013 10:22:00 -0400

On Thursday, President Obama plans to deliver a speech on national security and counterterrorism issues. The speech comes at a particularly awkward time in Pakistan, the epicenter of the global jihad for more than a decade. Nawaz Sharif has just been elected for an unprecedented third term in a nation extremely unhappy with America's counterterrorism policies, especially the drone war fought in its skies from bases in Afghanistan.

President Obama faces the challenge of defending his policies and explaining why they are needed. He must do this without further alienating an angry Pakistan and its newly elected civilian government which is struggling to find its own way to deal with the terror Frankenstein that threatens the world and Pakistan itself. It may be mission impossible. Despite years of drone attacks and the death of Osama bin Laden, Pakistan remains the base for the top three most wanted terrorists on the U.S. Most Wanted list: al Qaeda leader Ayman Zawahiri, Taliban chief Mullah Omar and Lashkar e Tayyiba (LeT) boss Hafez Saeed.

In fact, Omar and Saeed enjoy the patronship and protection of Pakistan's army. More global terror plots have originated in Pakistan than anywhere else since 9/11. Without the drones, there would be little or no pressure on the terror infrastructure in Pakistan. Despite over $25 billion in American economic and military aid since 9/11, the Pakistani authorities cannot be relied on to fight the danger posed by al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, or LeT. Obama recognized that fact when he sent the SEALs to kill bin Laden without telling any Pakistani official that we had found him hiding inside the highly secure Pakistani city of Abbottabad.

But Pakistan is also a victim of the terror monster it has coddled for decades. Over 45,000 Pakistanis have died in terror-related violence since 9/11, and dozens more died in the election campaign just ended. Sharif has pledged to seek a political solution to the violence. He has campaigned against the drones and faces a national consensus that wants them to end. His main opponent Imran Khan promised to shoot them down if elected (probably with American supplied F-16s).

Obama significantly expanded drone attacks in 2009 and many dangerous terrorists have been eliminated by them. The price has been to further alienate the Pakistani people. His speech this Thursday is not likely to please many in Pakistan. The already very difficult U.S.-Pakistan bilateral relationship is at a crucial juncture with the first ever transition from one elected Pakistani civilian government to another in the country's history after a full term in office. Reconciling our counter-terror mission with our interest in promoting democracy in Pakistan will not be easy. If it is impossible, then the fate of U.S. relations with the most dangerous country in the world is headed toward an even more deadly outcome.

Authors

Bruce Riedel

Image Source: © Larry Downing / Reuters

Pentagon Paying China — Yes, China — To Carry Data

Noah Shachtman — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The Pentagon is so starved for bandwidth that it’s paying a Chinese satellite firm to help it communicate and share data.

U.S. troops operating on the African continent are now using the recently-launched Apstar-7 satellite to keep in touch and share information. And the $10 million, one-year deal lease — publicly unveiled late last week during an ordinarily-sleepy Capitol Hill subcommittee hearing — has put American politicians and policy-makers in bit of a bind. Over the last several years, the U.S. government has publicly and loudly expressed its concern that too much sensitive American data passes through Chinese electronics — and that those electronics could be sieves for Beijing’s intelligence services. But the Pentagon says it has no other choice than to use the Chinese satellite. The need for bandwidth is that great, and no other satellite firm provides the continent-wide coverage that the military requires.

“That bandwidth was available only on a Chinese satellite,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Space Policy Doug Loverro told a House Armed Services Committee panel, in remarks first reported by InsideDefense.com. “We recognize that there is concerns across the community on the usage of Chinese satellites to support our warfighter. And yet, we also recognize that our warfighters need support, and sometimes we must go to the only place that we can get it from.”

The Apstar-7 is owned and operated by a subsidiary of the state-controlled China Satellite Communication Company, which counts the son of former Chinese premier Wen Jiabao as itschairman. But the Pentagon insists that any data passed through the Apstar-7 is protected from any potential eavesdropping by Beijing. The satellite uplinks and downlinks are encrypted, and unspecified “additional transmission security” procedures cover the data in transit, according to Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a Defense Department spokesperson.

“We reviewed all the security concerns, all of the business concerns with such a lease,” Loverro said. “And so from that perspective, I’m very pleased with what we did. And yet, I think the larger issue is we don’t have a clear policy laid out on how do we assess whether or not we want to do this as a department, as opposed to just a response to a need.”

Every new drone feed and every new soldier with a satellite radio creates more appetite for bandwidth — an appetite the military can’t hope to fill with military spacecraft alone. To try to keep up, the Pentagon has leased bandwidth from commercial carriers for more than a decade. And the next decade should bring even more commercial deals; in March, the Army announced it was looking for new satellite firms to help troops in Afghanistan communicate. According to a 2008 Intelligence Science Board study (.pdf) — one of the few public reports on the subject — demand for satellite communications could grow from about 30 gigabits per second to 80 gigabits a decade from now.

The Chinese are poised to help fill that need — especially over Africa, where Beijing has deep business and strategic interests. In 2012, China for the first time launched more rockets into space than the U.S. – including the Chinasat 12 and Apstar-7 communications satellites.

Relying on Chinese companies could be a problematic solution to the bandwidth crunch, however. U.S. officials have in recent years publicly accused Chinese telecommunications firms of being, in effect, subcontractors of Beijing’s spies. Under pressure from the Obama administration and Congress, the Chinese company Huawei was rebuffed in its attempts to purchase network infrastructure manufacturer 3Com; in 2010, Sprint dropped China’s ZTE from a major U.S. telecommunications infrastructure contract after similar prodding. Last September, executives from the Huawei and ZTE were brought before the House intelligence committee and told, in effect, to prove that they weren’t passing data back to Beijing. “There’s concern because the Chinese government can use these companies and use their technology to get information,” Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, said at the time. The executives pushed back against the charges, and no definitive links to espionage operations were uncovered. But the suspicion remains. And it isn’t contained to these two firms.

“I’m startled,” says Dean Cheng, a research fellow and veteran China-watcher at the Heritage Foundation. “Is this risky? Well, since the satellite was openly contracted, they [the Chinese] know who is using which transponders. And I suspect they’re making a copy of all of it.”

Even if the data passing over the Apstar-7 is encrypted, the coded traffic could be used to give Chinese cryptanalysts valuable clues about how the American military obfuscates its information. “This is giving it to them in a nice, neat little package. I think there is a potential security concern.”

And even if the Chinese don’t intercept the data, there’s always the danger of them suddenly deciding to block service to the American military.

For his part, Loverro says the Department of Defense will be reviewing its procedures to ensure that future satellite communications deals both let troops talk and let them talk in private. The Pentagon will get another opportunity shortly: the Apstar-7 deal is up on May 14, and can be renewed for up to three more years.

Authors

Noah Shachtman

Publication: Danger Room (Wired)

These Classy Defense Contractors Are Already Looking to Cash In on Boston

Noah Shachtman — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The newly-limbless victims from the Boston Marathon attack are still being treated, and the alleged bomber has only been in custody for a few days. But for a handful of defense and intelligence contractors, it’s never too early to start pimping their products as the solution to the next terrorist strike.

“The Boston Marathon bombing has proven the need for real time video and data analysis from all types of cameras, including user mobile devices, surveillance cameras, and network footage,” Chris Carmichael, CEO of Ubiquity Broadcasting Corporation, says in a press release. As it happens, his company offers an intelligent video system that does just that.

Piggybacking on big events a long-standing trick of the PR trade. It’s a way to garner attention for products that might ordinarily get ignored. So dress-makers jump on the Oscars. Social media monitors issue “analysis” of Twitter’s reaction to the Presidential debates. And the night after the Boston bombings, an explosive detection outfit called Implant Sciences emailed reporters to say that its “quantum sniffer” was the kind of “technology needed to prevent attacks like this… It is the most sensitive detection system ever created and it can save lives.”

Not to be outdone, a publicist from a facial recognition firm, FaceFirst, boasted to reporters a few days later that “this technology can identify individuals with prior arrests, terrorists and persons of interest in a matter of seconds.” He also sighed that “the last few month [sic] have been pretty hectic for due to the use of face recognition in the finding of the Boston Marathon Bombers and other high profile cases.”

One small problem: facial recognition wasn’t used to catch Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the accused attackers.

Thankfully, some of the companies boasting of their roles in the bombing response actually did help in that response.

During its quarterly earnings call this week, iRobot CEO Colin Angle was happy to let reporters know that, yes, one of the firm’s PackBot machines certainly was used to investigate a car driven by one of the bombing suspects. ”The company’s response to the Boston Marathon bombings continues a long tradition of iRobot’s responsiveness in a time of crisis and speaks to our values and commitment as an organization,” he crowed.

The Emergency Communications Network firm not-so-humble bragged in a statement that ”on Monday alone, more than 228,000 calls, tens of thousands of texts and emails, in addition to 700 CodeRED Mobile Alert app notifications kept citizens informed of critical public safety messages specific to their areas… On Tuesday, ECN client Massachusetts Institute of Technology used the CodeRED system to notify students, faculty and staff of a suspicious package on campus. More than 20,000 calls were launched in 11 minutes and 18,000 text messages were sent in three minutes, allowing MIT to proactively communicate with their campus community during a time of heightened awareness and vigilance.”

Others trying to ride the attack’s media wave had, at best, tangential connections to the tragedy. Afront group set up by outdoor advertising companies to promote billboards in Los Angeles decided that the bombing was a perfect excuse to renew its call for digital signs alongside L.A.’s freeways. An anti-Islam outfit pounced on the attack to demand that Muslims be stripped of their Constitutional rights. And when the news broke that bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev purchased hundreds of dollars’ worth of fireworks, the American Pyrotechnics Association quickly issued a statement defending its industry.

“Could these consumer fireworks devices be used to produce a pipe bomb or pressure cooker bomb like the bombs involved at the Boston marathon? Perhaps; however, it would take a significant volume of these small aerial shells to extract the volume of chemicals necessary to create a significant blast,” reads the press release. “Contrary to media reports, consumer fireworks have rarely been used in such destructive activities.”

Book publishers were also quick turn the awful attack that left three people dead into a marketing opportunity.

“This terrorist event left millions of citizens concerned about their family’s personal safety and wondering what they should do to plan and protect themselves,” notes one press release. ”Those answers are at your fingertips,” said Rob Stern, principal of Defense Research LLC, developer of the ‘Citizens’ Emergency Response Guide.’

“Can the reasons for the Boston Marathon bombing be understood by reading a 39 page book?” asks another press release, this one from a publisher hawking a novel from some guy named Morris Matthews.” Revered by America’s traveling carnival community, he brings a blend of ancient Ayurvedic wisdom and ‘Middle American’ horse sense to his writings.

If only he had used that horse sense to stop this press release before it was issued.

– with Spencer Ackerman

Authors

Noah Shachtman

Publication: Danger Room (Wired)

Image Source: © Jim Bourg / Reuters

Syria's Use of Chemical Weapons: The Ball’s in Your Court, Mr. President

Bruce Riedel — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 09:18:00 -0400

The news that Washington and London finally believe Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian regime has used chemical weapons against its own people is both an opportunity and a series of traps. Both the opportunity and the traps are huge, and President Obama needs to tread carefully to quickly exploit the first and avoid the second.

Credible observers of Syria like my colleague at the Brookings Doha Center, Salman Shaikh, have been reporting since December on the evidence that Assad’s forces have used small quantities of chemical weapons in the civil war that has been raging in Syria for more than two years. Like almost everything else in Syria, Assad’s arsenal of missiles and chemical weapons are a legacy of his father Hafez Assad. After the Syrian army and air force was defeated by Israel in Lebanon in 1982, Hafez ordered development of a chemical arsenal to provide a deterrent against the Israelis. Syrian scientists developed an effective chemical weapons program using the nerve agent sarin, a substance 500 times more toxic than cyanide. In 1988, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein used sarin in his war against the Iranians and in attacks on Iraqi Kurds with devastating impact.

Syria mated the nerve agent with Scud missiles acquired from the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. When Israeli learned of the Syrian program, it considered military action to destroy it but concluded the program was too developed and too disbursed to be susceptible to air attacks without an unacceptable risk that Syria would respond by firing chemicals into Tel Aviv, potentially killing thousands. The Syrian arsenal remains disbursed in numerous facilities making it a complex military challenge.

By using chemical weapons Assad has crossed not only an American red line but an international consensus against the use of chemical weapons that goes back to the First World War. He has given Obama the opportunity to break the Russian and Chinese diplomatic support for Syria that has paralyzed the United Nations from imposing harsh sanctions on Syria as well as a total arms embargo on the Assad regime. Washington is right to demand an immediate UN-led inspection on the ground in Syria with a very short deadline.

Read the full article »

Authors

Bruce Riedel

Publication: The Daily Beast

Lessons of the Syrian Reactor

Bruce Riedel — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:01:00 -0400

The office of the assistant to the president for national-security affairs in the West Wing of the White House is a spacious, well-lit corner room in a building where space is at a premium. It contains not only the national-security adviser’s large desk but also a table for lunch discussions and other small meetings as well as a couch and easy chairs for more relaxed discussions. In April 2007, this commodious setting was the scene of a remarkable meeting. Stephen Hadley, the national-security adviser at the time, welcomed Meir Dagan, head of the Mossad, who came with a special briefing for his American host. Dagan revealed a secret nuclear reactor in the final stages of construction in the Syrian desert, developed with the help of North Korea. Knowledge of this project constituted a stunning intelligence coup for Israel.

Later that year, on September 6, 2007, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Syria’s nuclear facility at Al Kibar along the Euphrates River. The mission emerged from more than two decades of comprehensive intelligence collection and analysis by American and Israeli intelligence services targeting Syria’s development of weapons of mass destruction. It was a dramatic demonstration of intelligence success—all the more so given the ongoing civil war that has devastated Syria since 2011. The world does not need to worry about a Syrian nuclear reactor under threat of capture by Islamic radicals. Israel took that concern off the table.

But the incident also demonstrated that once a policy-intelligence feedback loop becomes dysfunctional, as happened to the George W. Bush administration after it exaggerated and distorted intelligence estimates to justify the Iraq War, there are serious policy implications. Israel wanted America to take out the reactor, but Bush was constrained by an intelligence community unwilling to cooperate with another major military operation based primarily on intelligence data.

Read the full article »

Authors

Bruce Riedel

Publication: The National Interest

Image Source: © Ho New / Reuters

Organizing and Managing Intelligence Analysis to Fight Terrorism

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:00:00 -0400

Event Information

April 22, 2013
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EDT

Saul/Zilkha Rooms
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20036

Register for the Event
A discussion with Philip Mudd on his new book, "Takedown: the Hunt for al Qaeda" (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)

I made a mistake. I thought we were fighting al Qaeda. What we were fighting was al Qaedism, and al Qaeda itself, the group, was only a subset of that. - Philip Mudd

Listen to this engaging conversation between Bruce Riedel, director of the Brookings Intelligence Project and a former CIA officer, and Philip Mudd, a former CIA and FBI counter-terrorism official. The two intelligence veterans had a provocative, wide-ranging coversation about how the U.S. intelligence community does its work, touching on the Boston Marathon bombings, the investigation of the two Tsarnaev brothers suspected of commiting the act and their origins in Chechnya, and comparison to the 2006 plot to blow up jumbo jets flying between Britain and North America. The conversation also considered to free speech rights and the potential conflict with extremist actions.

The elder of the two brothers who are accused of being responsible for the attack on the Boston Marathon, Tamerlan, traveled to Russia sometime in the last year. He seems to fit a pattern that we've been seeing more and more frequently. Radicalized Americans, Muslims, who seem to have a fairly normal life the United States, and then something changes dramatically. - Bruce Riedel

If you look at the 7/7 attacks in the UK in 2005, if you look at the attempt that was well publicized in Canada—I'm going to guess that was about three-four years ago—to blow up the Parliament, you will often find somebody in that circle, psychologically, who plays the role of an older brother or father figure. Someone who has the respect of younger folks. - Philip Mudd

As an outside, nongovernment commentator, I would say the likelihood of a terrorist group conceiving, plotting, organizing, training, executing a 9/11 style attack, it's hard for me to imagine that. - Philip Mudd

On April 22, the Intelligence Project at Brookings, hosted a discussion with Philip Mudd on his new book, Takedown: the Hunt for al Qaeda (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), which examines how the intelligence community collects, analyzes and employs data to combat terrorism, and details the challenges still ahead in the war against al Qaeda. Mudd served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center, the deputy director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Security Branch and as the FBI’s senior intelligence adviser.

Brookings Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.

Video

Four Reasons Sens. Graham and McCain are Wrong about Military Detention for Dzhokar Tsarnaev

Benjamin Wittes — Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:00:00 -0400

Sens. Lindsey Graham and John McCain were quick out of the box last night in declaring that the Obama administration should hold Dzhokar Tsarnaev in military detention for his role in the Boston bombing:

Now that the suspect is in custody, the last thing we should want is for him to remain silent. It is absolutely vital the suspect be questioned for intelligence gathering purposes. We need to know about any possible future attacks which could take additional American lives. The least of our worries is a criminal trial which will likely be held years from now.

Under the Law of War we can hold this suspect as a potential enemy combatant not entitled to Miranda warnings or the appointment of counsel. Our goal at this critical juncture should be to gather intelligence and protect our nation from further attacks.

We remain under threat from radical Islam and we hope the Obama Administration will seriously consider the enemy combatant option.

We will stand behind the Administration if they decide to hold this suspect as an enemy combatant.

Bobby quickly explained why this is both unnecessary and a bad idea; this very fine Wall Street Journal blog sketches out why it would pose legal problems as well. But the idea has had legs on Twitter, so I want to bring together in one place and explain the several distinct but overlapping reasons why it would be not merely ill-advised but absolutely nuts to try to treat Tsarnaev as an enemy combatant.

Broadly speaking, there are four reasons:

First and most important, Tsarnaev may not be an enemy combatant. Graham and McCain warn that “The accused perpetrators of these acts were not common criminals attempting to profit from a criminal enterprise, but terrorists trying to injure, maim, and kill innocent Americans.” That’s certainly true. But not every terrorist with a bomb is an enemy combatant whose military detention is authorized by law. Some are just killers with bombs. Under the AUMF as interpreted by the courts, and under the NDAA as passed by Congress, the administration is authorized to hold in military detention only those who are “part of” or “substantially supporting” Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or associated forces. Nothing that has come to light publicly has shown that Tsarnaev was operating as part of any group covered by the AUMF. Unless and until such evidence arises, military detention is not merely a bad idea. It is simply not legally available. Particularly for those of us who support military detention in appropriate circumstances and have argued for its propriety and legality, it is absolutely essential to reject it where the facts do not support it. Military detention does not flow legally from the fact of someone’s being more than just a common criminal. It flows from the fact of someone’s being a part of a military enemy’s fighting cadre. Calling for detention of people who don’t meet—or may not meet—that threshold comes perilously close to calling for a roving power to lock up nasty people.

Second, assuming for a moment that the facts as they emerge would support an enemy combatant designation, there’s the small matter of Tsarnaev’s citizenship. Tsarnaev is reportedly a naturalized American citizen, and the government’s appetite for the detention of American citizens under the laws of war has waned—and rightly so. This began under the Bush administration, which tried twice—in the early cases of Yaser Hamdi and Jose Padilla—to detain U.S. citizens under the laws of war and ultimately backed down both times. The question of whether such detention is legally appropriate for a U.S. citizen captured by law enforcement remains an open one. But it’s an open question that no sane executive would want to test in the presence of a viable alternative—like, say, an open-and-shut prosecution in federal court. As a matter of policy, it was informally off the table long ago, and the Obama administration made that informal policy formal. John Brennan, in a speech at Harvard Law School, declared:

when it comes to U.S. citizens involved in terrorist-related activity, whether they are captured overseas or at home, we will prosecute them in our criminal justice system. There is bipartisan agreement that U.S. citizens should not be tried by military commission.

Third, even if the reports of Tsarnaev’s citizenship prove erroneous, he was certainly captured in the United States, and the military detention of domestic captures is problematic for many of the same reasons that the detention of the citizen poses difficulties. Again, whether it is or is not legally available is an open question of law; this was the issue in the Al Marri case. But this is not a question of law that any administration should be eager to test. And just as it has adopted a policy of not testing the citizen detention question, the Obama administration has taken military detention off the table for domestic captures. As Brennan put it,

it is the firm position of the Obama Administration that suspected terrorists arrested inside the United States will—in keeping with long-standing tradition—be processed through our Article III courts. As they should be. Our military does not patrol our streets or enforce our laws—nor should it.

Fourth, even if all of these legal and policy problems could be overcome, as Bobby explained last night, military detention offers no clear advantages in this case and has several big disadvantages. The public safety exception to Miranda means the FBI has a considerable degree of flexibility in conducting this interrogation, so there’s no particular reason to expect the Bureau will be unable to glean from Tsarnaev the answers to the critical questions at stake right now: Are there accomplices still at large, and to what extent was the bombing the work of any foreign group? On the other hand, military detention would gravely complicate the longer-term interest in punishment and in Tsarnaev’s legitimate long-term incarceration. In the Hamdi and Padilla and Al Marri cases, the consequence of military detention was a substantially shorter sentence than the suspect’s conduct would have supported.

In short, there is simply no case for military detention here. By pushing for it, Sens. Graham and McCain risk bringing into disrepute the one avenue realistically open to those who want answers and justice.

***

This was reposted from Lawfare, where Wittes and others have been following the situation surrounding the Boston bombing. You can read more on the Lawfare Blog »

Authors

Benjamin Wittes

Image Source: © Lucas Jackson / Reuters

Al Qaeda is Probably Pleased with Boston Bombing

Bruce Riedel — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 17:40:00 -0400

The two Chechen immigrants apparently responsible for the terror attack on the Boston Marathon may never have had any contact with al Qaeda—or even a single member of al Qaeda—but they are likely soon to be lauded as “heroes” of the global jihad.

It is much too soon to come to any hard conclusions about the motives and intentions of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the alleged perpetrators, but it is not too soon to understand how al Qaeda and associated jihadists see the Chechen struggle against Russia in the context of their own ideology and narrative. Al Qaeda has long seen the Chechen struggle as part of the global war between Islam and its enemies. For the extremists who run al Qaeda and related movements, Russia’s actions in Chechnya are no different than Israeli actions in Gaza, French actions in Mali, or American actions in Afghanistan. All are allegedly part of a global conspiracy against Islam that ranges from the Caucasus to Kashmir to Bali.

In an audio message issued less than two weeks ago, Ayman Zawahiri, the Egyptian leader of al Qaeda and its chief ideologue, said the greatest enemies of Islam are the “biggest criminals in Washington, Moscow and Tel Aviv.” Thus Zawahiri lumped American, Russia and Israel together as the enemies of Muslims everywhere.

For Zawahiri and his predecessor, Osama bin Laden, this argument that Islam is under siege by a global conspiracy is nothing new. Zawahiri and bin Laden began their careers fighting in Afghanistan against the Russians. The Chechen struggle against Russia is for them only a continuation of that war and indeed of the Central Asian and Caucasian Muslims’ struggle against Tsars, Commissars, and now Putin that goes back to the 18th century. Zawahiri himself was briefly arrested in Russia in the mid-1990s, apparently while he was actively assisting the Chechen insurgency. Bin Laden encouraged Saudis to go to Chechnya to fight Russia.

For angry young Muslims radicalized by what has happened in their own homeland, the al Qaeda narrative provides an explanation for a bigger struggle that involves not just their own country but the entire Muslim world. At the same time it also gives them more targets for their anger. If an angry Chechen cannot attack a Russian target, then a soft target in his own city in America or Europe—a marathon or another public space—is an easier target.

Al Qaeda has been encouraging just such attacks for the last several years. The Yemeni American Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed by a drone strike in 2011, articulated it in the English language web magazine he helped create, called Inspire, that also printed simple manuals for how to build a bomb in your family kitchen. The attempt by a Pakistani American, Faysal Shahzad, to blow up a car bomb in Times Square in May 2010 (which was foiled by NYPD at the last minute), was an early example of this kind of small but devastating attack. Shahzad has now become a hero in the al Qaeda narrative even though he failed in his attempt.

Whether al Qaeda had any role – direct or indirect by the internet – in the radicalization of these two men, it is likely to revel in the results of their attacks in Boston. While the attack was nowhere near the magnitude of 9/11, it has consumed the American media and political scene for almost a week so far, led to the unprecedented lockdown of an entire American city, and sent the White House itself into enhanced security.

Americans have every right to ask: Why do they hate us? Americans are not responsible for the ugly civil war in Chechnya, or the horrendous terrorist attacks carried out by Chechen terrorists in Moscow and other Russian cities. Unfortunately the global jihadist movement and its violent ideology doesn’t see the differences that we rightly see. For according to the narrative of Ayman Zawahiri, Islam is under attack from every direction, and the jihadist answer is to strike back in New York, Madrid, London, Toulouse—and now Boston.

Authors

Bruce Riedel

Publication: The Daily Beast

Image Source: © Shannon Stapleton / Reuters

How U.S. Cities Can Protect Themselves Against Bombing Attacks

Michael E. O'Hanlon — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Roughly a decade ago, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, FBI director Robert Mueller predicted that the United States would soon face the kinds of frequent small-scale bombings perpetrated frequently abroad by Hamas and Hezbollah. He considered the attacks nearly certain.

For a decade, Mueller was wrong--and I’m sure he was more than happy about it. Boston, however, has sadly and belatedly proven him right, at least to a degree. But how can we lower the odds of similar attacks in the future?

Of course, other attacks big and small have occurred in the western world during the past 10 years—above and beyond the very frequent ones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and now Syria. There was the train attack in Spain in 2003, and then the London subway bombings in 2005. There have been various attempted attacks in the United States, particularly during the past five years, most of them thwarted—the Zazi New York subway attempt of 2009, and the “underwear” bomber" later that year on a plane approaching Detroit; the 2010 Times Square bombing; the printer-cartridge attempted bombing on cargo aircraft. And of course we have had numerous mass shootings, America’s own form of large-scale terroristic violence. Of these, the Ft. Hood shootings in 2009 were linked to al Qaeda but others generally were not.

So terrorism and large-scale violence have never really gone away. But the Boston bombings are still somewhat unusual for their lethality and success in America. In scale they are nothing like Oklahoma City, of course, but they were worse than the infamous 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing. And it has been quite a while since those two tragedies, as well as the first World Trade Center attacks of the same time period and of the 9/11 attacks themselves. So there is a certain surprise in a successful bombing on U.S. soil, even though after we think about it for a while, most of us are probably not that shocked that it could happen again.

Despite all the efforts since 9/11 and before on the intelligence and homeland security fronts, some attacks will get through (even if we also stop a lot of them before they happen). This is not because anyone has let down their guard; it is because the materials needed to make bombs (or shoot up public places) are not that hard to access.

While we do not need another big push to harden the country and beef up internal defenses--we continue to spend three to four times as much per year on such efforts as we did prior to 9/11—some targeted improvements are in order.

A number of specific vulnerabilities can still be identified in U.S. homeland defenses that could be addressed without busting the bank or infringing excessively on American liberties. I would rank greater protection for toxic chemical plants, better security for cargo airplanes as well as large private jets, and even more random inspections including with K9 dogs on trains and subways and at stadiums and large theaters near the top of any list.

But given the specifics of this attack in Boston, one particular issue should perhaps come to the fore—whether most local police departments are doing enough against terrorism. I do not mean in any way to suggest the Boston police were lax, or that the Patriot’s Day attacks could have necessarily been prevented by any reasonable change in procedures. But it remains a fact that few cities have done even proportionately as much as New York to introduce counterterrorism into the routine workings of their police departments.

Gotham has hundreds of officers assigned to this job. They do things like figure out which high-profile streets to close and which buildings to protect with extra effort (including asking building owners to use shatterproof glass in lower floors, monitor cars parking in below-ground garages, and elevate air intakes above street level so they cannot be easily accessed by the wrong people).

But beyond that, New York’s finest try to sniff out specific crimes, and specific groups or individuals, before they strike. They develop intelligence information on suspicious groups within their jurisdiction and, at times and with reasonable cause, investigate their actions or dealings or associations. They often roll up plots before they can be hatched. And in the end, this is the only way to do business—the only method by which the odds work in our favor, rather than against us.

The FBI has joint terrorism task forces in numerous cities around the country but these are not enough. Only police forces really know their cities and can really use their instincts to determine when a shady actor or character is more likely a terrorist than a regular criminal. We need to make the counterterrorism mission more a part of their regular work than is often the case in America today.

Uncle Sam can incentivize this kind of effort with steps like offering matching funds to police departments that wish to create counterterrorism units. More generally, we need to use a moment like this to reopen the debate and ask if there is a bit more we can realistically do to lower the odds of the next attack happening soon—and being even worse, perhaps, than the Boston one.

Authors

Michael E. O'Hanlon

Publication: The Daily Beast

The Boston Marathon Bombing and Our Post-Terrorist Incident Drill

Paul R. Pillar — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Reactions to the bombs at the Boston Marathon have quickly fallen into a familiar pattern. It is as if there were a manual that politicians, journalists and others involved in the reacting pull off the shelf after any terrorist attack to help them script their comments and their questions. There are, first of all, ritual denunciations that use a well-worn vocabulary. Every terrorist attack is labeled as “cowardly,” as President Obama labeled this one, even though that is one of the less appropriate of a plethora of negative adjectives that could be applied to terrorist attacks. Different terrorist operations require different degrees of moxie or courage, but with most of them cowardice on the part of the perpetrators is not a dominant characteristic, or even a characteristic at all.

Also in the early hours after a terrorist incident there are aggressive efforts in the media to offer explanations that ought to await a thorough investigation, even though the real investigation is barely getting under way. Of course, journalists gotta do what they gotta do on any story with high public salience. And there is some informative analysis that is offered despite the paucity of early hard information, especially comments about how, in general, investigations of terrorist incidents tend to proceed. Much of the quickly generated commentary in the media, however, consists of speculation that outruns the available facts. It is over-analysis, which is not helpful to public understanding.

Some of the over-analysis concerns the presumed significance of the particular target. Some perplexity has been expressed about Monday's attack by those who cannot figure out why the Boston Marathon in particular would be a target of terrorists. Such musing overlooks how many terrorist targets are targets of opportunity, with little if any symbolic significance attached to the chosen target. For terrorists whose objective is to harm as many people as possible of a particular nationality (which may or may not be true of the perpetrators of the Boston bombing), any well-populated gathering will do.

Similar over-emphasis is placed on the date of an attack and on what it might be the anniversary of. This also overlooks the opportunism involved in most terrorist operations, in terms of when, as well as where, it might be most feasible to mount an attack. In general, western analysts and commentators on terrorism devote more attention to anniversary dates than terrorists do.

The particular method of operation used, including the design of a bomb, is often seized upon in the early hours for much public speculation about who the perpetrators might be. A frequent comment is that such-and-such method of attack or bomb design is a “hallmark” of a particular group. Such observations fail to take account of how one group may copy the methods of another, or of how variation in methods can have advantages for a terrorist group.

There is a strong appetite for inferring patterns. One incident does not make a pattern, but with at least two incidents in close succession the urge to draw patterns is irresistible. The revelation on Tuesday of a letter tainted with ricin poison that was sent to Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi is sure to stimulate the pattern-drawers, even though senators were told there is no apparent connection between the letter and the bombs in Boston.

Also early in the process there is usually a focus on the domestic political implications of an incident. We have had a bit of that already in connection with this week's incident, with people taking special note of how the White House pinned the “terrorism” label on the event. The subtext for such observations was the folderol last year over the incident in Benghazi, Libya, in which some people tried to place great importance on whether and when the White House called something “terrorism.”

Expect also that there will be the usual recriminations about how government agencies failed to prevent the attack. We haven't heard much of that yet, but we will. We can expect that, also as usual, the recriminations will be based on hindsight and will pay little heed to what is or is not realistically preventable.

After a perpetrator is identified, the over-analysis takes a new turn. Major implications are extracted from that identity, even though it may say little about the shape and severity of any underlying threat. Terrorist attacks are rare public events, interrupting extended times without attacks, that are not necessarily representative of any continuing hidden reality.

Imagine that the perpetrator of the bombing on Monday turns out to be a lone individual with personal, nonpolitical and even trivial motivations—such as a runner disgruntled about not getting into the race. The public reaction likely would be one of relief, with the incident then being seen as a one-off involving a bizarrely motivated individual and not indicative of a larger threat. But this development actually would not say anything one way or another about any larger threats that do exist.

The converse of this is represented by the habitual emphasis on whether or not there are “links,” especially to the now-vaguely-defined radical Sunni phenomenon to which we append the label “al-Qaeda.” The tendency is to get alarmed if there is such a “link,” and to be more relaxed if there is not. But actually the presence or absence of such links tells us little about the chance of another bomb going off in an American city next week, next month or next year.

Instead of trying to extract more lessons and implications than are genuinely extractable from a single incident, such an event would be better used as an occasion for thinking about broader issues involving terrorism. To the extent threats from abroad are involved, the thinking should be about how developments overseas and especially U.S. policies abroad may affect the number of those disposed to resort to terrorism. The thinking also should fit anti-U.S. terrorism into a context in which it can be compared and contrasted with other forms of material harm to U.S. interests and with the physical harm that America's own actions may cause or exacerbate elsewhere.

Editor's note: This article was originally published by The National Interest.

Authors

Paul R. Pillar

Publication: The National Interest

A Discussion About Drones

Peter W. Singer — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: In an interview with Charlie Rose, Peter W. Singer joins Michael Boyle of LaSalle University, Rosa Brooks of Georgetown University, and Scott Shane of The New York Times to discuss the revolutionary nature of drone technology as well as the dilemmas—strategic, ethical, political—that they present. Read an excerpt below.

Charlie Rose: Peter Singer, put this in the context of warfare overall.

Peter Singer: Well you have a revolutionary change that’s happening in the technology of war. Now, the question here is, are we talking about war or counterterrorism—we’ve got things conflated. But when you look at the technology of drones, it’s a gamechanger in war. It’s something along the level of the introduction of gunpowder or the steam engine or the airplane. By that I mean it gives you a series of capabilities that we didn’t imagine we’d have a generation ago, but also it’s giving us a series of dilemmas that we also didn’t imagine we’d be having a generation ago. And they’re dilemmas that are political, strategic, tactical, all the way down to ethical and legal.

Now one thing that’s happening here I think that’s a challenge is that we’re seeing things conflated. So, just as the example that Scott gave of the conflation between the JSOC kill list and process—the Joint Special Operations Command on the military side—and the one that the CIA is doing, both of which are taking place in the shadow wars that are out there.

Peter Singer: Signature strikes is an illustration of this, where on one hand we’ve seen administration officials say either “we don’t do that,” and other times we’ve heard them say “we do do that, but this is why.” But then we also have a variety of tactics beyond signature strikes that, for example, in an overt military operation you would never utilize.

One’s called a 'double tap strike,' which is where you strike at a target and then you wait for the rescuers to come about and you strike again. Now that’s been something that we’ve pointed out that if adversaries did that in Afghanistan or Iraq we would say “how dare you, this is evidence of how bad they are.” Yet there have been reports that we may have conducted strikes in a similar manner. Don’t know whether they’re confirmed or not.

But what I’m getting at here is that a civilian, political appointee lawyer, operating under a very different set of laws and priorities, looks at that issue and the question of what tactics you might bring, what rules of engagement you operate under, very differently from how a military lawyer would. And that’s part of the importance of whether these do shift from intelligence agency to military, but also whether they stay in the complete black ops world or whether we own up to the fact that these are not covert operations anymore, they’re frankly not so covert, and we need to stop running away from them and embrace the fact that we are doing them and these are the rules we’re going to operate under and actually stick and follow those rules.

Authors

Peter W. Singer

Publication: Charlie Rose

Image Source: © KCNA KCNA / Reuters

Intelligence and Public Perceptions of It

Paul R. Pillar — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

Editor's note: This article was originally published by The National Interest.

A common current piece of advice to U.S. intelligence agencies, coming from many places including reportedly from official advisory panels, is that those agencies ought to de-emphasize whacking terrorists and redirect some of that effort to traditional functions of collecting and analyzing intelligence, lest the United States be blind-sided by something in China or the Middle East or elsewhere. Just about everyone who comments on what U.S. intelligence agencies ought to be doing seems to be saying something along that line; we don't need to turn to any official panels with privileged access to hear that. The message has an appealing, back-to-basics ring to it, as well as having the appeal of sounding forward-looking. And the message is substantively sound; intelligence agencies ought indeed to focus on the core missions of collecting and analyzing information about the world outside the United States.

Sound though this particular message is, it is another illustration of publicly expressed conventional wisdom about intelligence that exists as a sort of parallel universe, separate from what the intelligence agencies are actually doing—of which, given the classified nature of that activity, the public commentators know little. Without access to the real thing, purveyors of conventional wisdom feed on each other's output until the conventional wisdom gets treated as if it were hard fact. When the conventional wisdom says something about how the intelligence community has been devoting too much attention to one topic and ought to shift attention to something else, this is really much more a reflection of where the public commentary itself has been devoting attention. The same is true of what counts as a “surprise”; this often has less to do with what intelligence agencies were or were not telling their official customers behind closed doors than with what the public had or had not been conditioned to expect, based on public statements and discussion.

Amid pronouncements coming from the parallel universe, several realities about the actual world of intelligence ought to be noted.

One is that disproportionate public attention to certain subjects or activities does not reflect the actual allocation within the agencies of resources and priorities. What is controversial or receives much public attention does necessarily seize the attention of senior managers who have to deal with Congress. But that is not true of the large majority of the work force, most of which has always been focused on the core missions of collecting and analyzing intelligence, or directly supporting those who do.

Another reality is that the swing of the pendulum of attention from one topic to another in the actual world of intelligence is not nearly as exaggerated as swings in the parallel universe. This gives rise to myths, such as that during the Cold War the intelligence community devoted nearly all of its attention to matters involving the Soviet Union.

Yet another reality is that the intelligence community devotes much effort on its own to keeping its priorities well-grounded and up-to-date, applying the dual criteria of what is of long-term importance to the country and what the policy-makers of the day most want to hear about. Here the mistaken myth is that it takes kicks in the pants from outsiders such as advisory panels to make priorities up to date.

It is true—and here is where the two otherwise parallel universes intersect—that some of what the intelligence agencies do in reallocating resources is in response to shifting public demands. The agencies certainly expanded work on terrorism greatly after 9/11. This was not because the nature of the terrorist threat had suddenly changed (it didn't) or because before 9/11 the intelligence community did not understand that threat (it did). It was because with the sudden and enormous change in the public mood and public concerns, intelligence managers had to show Congress and others on the outside that they were beefing up work in this area.

What does not get nearly as much public attention in such circumstances is what trade-offs are involved in any such reallocation. With resources always limited, responding to public demands on one thing may increase the chance of genuine surprise in the future on something else—something that inhabitants of the parallel universe probably are paying scant attention to today.

Authors

Paul R. Pillar

Publication: The National Interest

Image Source: © Handout . / Reuters

Brookings Launches the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence (21CSI)

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:40:00 -0400

Washington, D.C. — The Brookings Institution announced today the establishment of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence (21CSI). The new center will be unique in addressing defense, cybersecurity, arms control and intelligence challenges in a comprehensive manner, seeking not just to explore key emerging security issues, but also how they cross traditional fields and domains.

“With the launch of the Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence, Brookings will be at the forefront of research and public debate on the critical security issues of our time,” said Strobe Talbott, president of the Brookings Institution. "21CSI will bring together the extraordinary array of scholars already working on defense and security issues at Brookings, along with adding new experts in fields that range from cyber to intelligence policy."

The Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence will be housed in the Foreign Policy program at Brookings and Peter W. Singer will serve as its founding director. One of the world’s leading experts on modern warfare and author of the New York Times bestseller, Wired for War (Penguin, 2009), Singer has founded and managed two previous projects at Brookings, the Project on U.S. Relations with the Islamic World and the 21st Century Defense Initiative.

The center will encompass four key focal points of policy research on security and defense issues:

A Defense Policy team will be led by Michael O'Hanlon, one of the most influential and widely published defense scholars in the world, who also serves as director of research in the Foreign Policy program. He will be joined by other resident and nonresident scholars including Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown, a leading expert on counterinsurgency and illicit networks, and Senior Fellow Stephen Cohen, a pre-eminent expert in South Asian security issues. The team will also comprise the Federal Executive Fellows (FEFs), career officers from each military service and the Coast Guard, who spend a year in residence researching and writing on defense topics.
The new Intelligence Project, focusing on the nexus of intelligence and policymaking, will be led by Senior Fellow Bruce Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the intelligence community who also served on the National Security Council staff for three presidents. Riedel will be supported by a team of resident and nonresident scholars, including Paul Pillar and John McLaughlin, as well as career officers seconded from the intelligence community, and an advisory group of distinguished former senior intelligence officials and policymakers. The Intelligence Project is the first of its kind to be established at a major research institution.
The Arms Control Initiative will combine a focus on existing challenges of nuclear and conventional disarmament with new policy research on the Iranian and North Korean challenges to the nuclear nonproliferation regime. It is led by Senior Fellow Steven Pifer, a former special assistant to the president with substantial arms control experience. Robert Einhorn, currently the State Department’s special adviser for Nonproliferation and Arms Control, is expected to join later this spring as a Senior Fellow. The Initiative will also house a new program designed to cultivate and mentor the next generation of arms control and nonproliferation scholars.
The new Cybersecurity project will bring together the work of Visiting Fellow Ian Wallace, a former senior official at the British Ministry of Defence, who helped develop British cyber strategy, as well as its cyber-relationship with the United States, and a team of nonresident fellows, including Noah Shachtman, national security editor at Wired magazine, recently named one of the top 10 cybersecurity writers in the world; Ben Hammersley, a war journalist, noted technology writer, and author of the upcoming book Approaching the Future: 64 Things You Need to Know Now for Then; and Ralph Langner, the cybersecurity expert credited with “decoding” Stuxnet.

21CSI will focus on cutting-edge, in-depth, policy-relevant research and programming, designed to help shape the public policy debate and inform policy-makers. Bringing together a diverse group of experts and scholars, it will seek to promote collaboration across the various policy domains, in order to better understand the rapidly evolving, increasingly complex 21st century battlefield.

“We’ve created 21CSI in response to the enormous changes playing out in the global security environment,” said Martin Indyk, vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. “To address the diverse range of issues in this field, we’ve assembled a world-class team of researchers, who are some of the leading voices on the current challenges driving security policy today, as well as how we should think about tomorrow.”

The Danger of Groupthink in the Obama Administration

Paul R. Pillar — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: This article was originally published by The National Interest.

David Ignatius has an interesting take on national security decision-making in the Obama administration in the wake of the reshuffle of senior positions taking place during these early weeks of the president's second term. Ignatius perceives certain patterns that he believes reinforce each other in what could be a worrying way. One is that the new team does not have as much “independent power” as such first-term figures as Clinton, Gates, Panetta and Petraeus. Another is that the administration has “centralized national security policy to an unusual extent” in the White House. With a corps of Obama loyalists, the substantive thinking may, Ignatius fears, run too uniformly in the same direction. He concludes his column by stating that “by assembling a team where all the top players are going in the same direction, he [Obama] is perilously close to groupthink.”

We are dealing here with tendencies to which the executive branch of the U.S. government is more vulnerable than many other advanced democracies, where leading political figures with a standing independent of the head of government are more likely to wind up in a cabinet. This is especially true of, but not limited to, coalition governments. Single-party governments in Britain have varied in the degree to which the prime minister exercises control, but generally room is made in the cabinet for those the British call “big beasts”: leading figures in different wings or tendencies in the governing party who are not beholden to the prime minister for the power and standing they have attained.

Ignatius overstates his case in a couple of respects. Although he acknowledges that Obama is “better than most” in handling open debate, he could have gone farther and noted that there have been egregious examples in the past of administrations enforcing a national security orthodoxy, and that the Obama administration does not even come close to these examples. There was Lyndon Johnson in the time of the Vietnam War, when policy was made around the president's Tuesday lunch table and even someone with the stature of the indefatigable Robert McNamara was ejected when he strayed from orthodoxy. Then there was, as the most extreme case, the George W. Bush administration, in which there was no policy process and no internal debate at all in deciding to launch a war in Iraq and in which those who strayed from orthodoxy, ranging from Lawrence Lindsey to Eric Shinseki, were treated mercilessly. Obama's prolonged—to the point of inviting charges of dithering—internal debates on the Afghanistan War were the polar opposite of this.

Ignatius also probably underestimates the contributions that will be made to internal debate by the two most important cabinet members in national security: the secretaries of state and defense. He says John Kerry “has the heft of a former presidential candidate, but he has been a loyal and discreet emissary for Obama and is likely to remain so.” The heft matters, and Kerry certainly qualifies as a big beast. Moreover, the discreet way in which a member of Congress would carry any of the administration's water, as Kerry sometimes did when still a senator, is not necessarily a good indication of the role he will assume in internal debates as secretary of state. As for Chuck Hagel, Ignatius states “he has been damaged by the confirmation process and will need White House cover.” But now that Hagel's nomination finally has been confirmed, what other “cover” will he need? It's not as if he ever will face another confirmation vote in the Senate. It was Hagel's very inclination to flout orthodoxy, to arrive at independent opinions and to voice those opinions freely that led to the fevered opposition to his nomination.

Nevertheless, Ignatius is on to something that is at least a potential hazard for the second Obama term. The key factor is not so much the substantive views that senior appointees bring with them into office. As the cliché goes, a president is entitled to have working for him people who agree with his policies. The issue is instead one of how loyalty—not only to the president, but collective loyalty as part of the president's inner circle—may affect how senior officials express or push views once they are in office.

In this regard it is useful to reflect on the meaning of “groupthink.” The term has come to be used loosely as a synonym for many kinds of conventional wisdom or failure to consider alternatives rigorously. But the father of research on groupthink, the psychologist Irving Janis, meant something narrower and more precise. Groupthink is pathology in decision-making that stems from a desire to preserve harmony and conformity in a small group where bonds of collegiality and mutual loyalty have been forged. It is the negative flip side of whatever are the positive attributes of such bonds. LBJ's Tuesday lunch group was one of the original subjects of Janis's writing.

With this in mind, the second term appointment that becomes even more interesting regarding Ignatius's thesis is that of John Brennan. Ignatius has Brennan well-pegged, including a comment that he “made a reputation throughout his career as a loyal deputy.” One might expand on that by observing that among Brennan's talents—and they are considerable—is a knack for what is often called managing up. Earlier in his career he was a protégé of George Tenet, and during the past four years he appears to have forged a similar relationship with Barack Obama.

One ought to ask what all of this might mean for Brennan's ability and willingness to speak truth not only to power, but to his patron—and to do so especially at politically charged times when his patron may be under pressure or may have other reasons for wanting to move in a particular direction in foreign policy. This is more of a question with Brennan than it would have been with David Petraeus if he were still the CIA director. Petraeus was very conscious of the truth-to-power issue, and more generally of the importance of objectivity, when he was appointed. As he himself observed, on matters relating to Afghanistan he might find himself “grading my own work.” Because the issue was recognized and involved obvious matters such as the Afghanistan War, and because there was nothing even remotely resembling a patron-protégé relationship between Petraeus and Obama, the issue was not destined to be a significant problem. The intimate, cloistered nature of the patronage involved in the Obama-Brennan relationship is something quite different.

Against this backdrop—and given how the Obama administration appears to have signed on to the conventional wisdom about unacceptability of an Iranian nuclear weapon—one ought to look more closely at a troubling line in Brennan's statement submitted to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for his confirmation hearing. In listing some of the national security challenges that require “accurate intelligence and prescient analysis from CIA,” the statement said: “And regimes in Tehran and Pyongyang remain bent on pursuing nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missile delivery systems rather than fulfilling their international obligations or even meeting the basic needs of their people.” Two countries, Iran and North Korea, get equated in this statement even though one already has nuclear weapons (and recently conducted its third nuclear test) while the other forswears any intention of building any. There are other related differences as well, including ones having to do with international obligations: North Korea renounced the Nonproliferation Treaty in 2003 and has been a nuclear outlaw for ten years, while Iran is a party to the treaty and conducts its nuclear work under IAEA inspections.

The judgment of the U.S. intelligence community is that Iran has not to date decided to build a nuclear weapon and, as far as the community knows, may never make such a decision. One would think that senators would be making better use of time if, instead of asking for the umpteenth time for still more information about the Benghazi incident, they would ask instead why the nominee to be CIA director, by saying that Tehran is “bent on pursuing nuclear weapons,” disagrees with a publicly pronounced judgment of the intelligence community.

If a crunch comes that is related to this issue, perhaps the rest of the intelligence community will play a beneficial role. I have been quite critical of the intelligence reorganization of 2004 as being a poorly thought-out response to the post-9/11 public appetite to do something visible that could be called “reform.” The rapid turnover in the job of director of national intelligence is a symptom of the problems the reorganization has entailed. The current director, James Clapper, deserves the public's thanks for taking a thankless job and performing it with distinction. But maybe in the face of certain types of personal relationships and certain decision-making patterns, the new arrangement can have some payoffs. If Clapper—who does not figure into Ignatius's discussion of Obama's inner circle—becomes, on Iran or any other issue, a counterweight to any White House-centered groupthink that might emerge in that circle, he will have earned even more thanks.

Authors

Paul R. Pillar

Publication: The National Interest

Image Source: © Jason Reed / Reuters

A Killing Court

Paul R. Pillar — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: This article was originally published by The National Interest.

In John Brennan's confirmation hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, committee chair Diane Feinstein (D-CA) said she would explore with Congressional colleagues the possible creation of a special court to review candidates for assassination by armed drones. The idea is worth exploring. Such a judicial mechanism could be a way of meeting the well-justified concerns of many that the drone program is too much a matter of executive discretion. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can serve as a successful model of how such a court might work. If we are to involve the judiciary before tapping a person's telephone (even when the target of the tap is a foreigner), why shouldn't we involve courts before killing the person?

Even if a drone court does not materialize, Congressional consideration of one would give a healthy boost to the hitherto insufficient discussion and debate about applying the rule of law to aerial assassination. Before establishing any such court, however, Congress should carefully weigh one other thing such a court would do and some things it would not do.

Creating the court would further institutionalize—in an even more prominent way than “playbooks” used within the executive branch—assassination of individuals overseas as a continuing function of the United States government. Is that something Americans really want to do, and is it consistent with what Americans think they stand for?

A court would not weigh the pros and cons of either individual killings or the entire program on any criteria other than those that could be made justiciable. Presumably the court would make judgments regarding whether evidence presented to it shows that a given individual is willing and able to participate in anti-U.S. terrorist attacks. One could not expect a court to weigh whether on balance the killing program is reducing the terrorist threat to the United States more than it is increasing it by stimulating more angry individuals to resort to terrorism. That troubling question has been hanging around now for years, going back to before armed drones were the heavily relied upon tool they have become and to when Donald Rumsfeld ruminated aloud about whether we were creating more terrorists than we were eliminating. We still lack a satisfactory answer to that question that would constitute a justification for the drone program. (It is presumably this lack that leads David Brooks to suggest creating, in addition to a court, “an independent panel of former military and intelligence officers issuing reports on the program’s efficacy.”)

A court also would not consider other damage (or conceivably benefits) to U.S. policy and interests that goes beyond terrorism and the creation of more terrorists. We were reminded of the broader consequences when the Pakistani ambassador complained publicly this week that drone strikes were a clear violation of international law and her nation's sovereignty and threatened U.S.-Pakistani relations. Of course, we need to apply many grains of salt to such a complaint from the envoy of the country where Osama bin Laden was living under official noses and where other reporting suggests that at least some of the drone strikes have been privately welcomed by Pakistani leaders even though they publicly complain about all of them. Nonetheless, widespread negative reactions to the strikes and their collateral damage affect popular attitudes, in Pakistan and elsewhere, toward the United States and ipso facto affect the posture of governments toward the United States.

A couple of years ago I gave testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in which I mentioned the two-faced Pakistani approach on this subject, with private attitudes not always matching the public rhetoric. The one point on which the committee chairman, John Kerry, differed with my testimony was that he believed, based on his own conversations with Pakistani officials, that genuine attitudes toward the drone strikes were more strongly negative than I may have suggested. I take his comment then as a good sign that the new secretary of state will give proper attention to the broader consequences of the aerial assassinations.

Authors

Paul R. Pillar

Publication: The National Interest

The Endless War

Paul R. Pillar — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's note: This article was originally published by The National Interest.

John Brennan, unlike Chuck Hagel, does not appear to have said things publicly that the Israel lobby has taken as a call to arms. Also unlike Hagel, he is not seen as a turncoat by diehard supporters of the Iraq War who are unwilling to admit a mistake. And so this week we will not see a repetition of last week's farcical circus that posed as a confirmation hearing. But there can be legitimate reasons for members of Congress to use a confirmation hearing to dwell on issues other than the nominee's fitness to fill the office for which he has been nominated. One such reason is that Congress and the public have been given no other good opportunity to examine the basis and rationale for a major program or policy, especially a controversial one. That is the situation regarding the use of armed drones to kill people.

A Justice Department white paper—leaked, not officially released by the administration—is the closest thing to an authoritative public look we have been given regarding the legal justification for the drone campaign. Despite repeated requests from members of Congress, the administration refused, until the evening before Brennan's hearing, to share with Congressional committees the more formal underlying legal memoranda. Some excellent critiques of the strained reasoning in the white paper have been written, including by James Joyner in these spaces and by Rosa Brooks. They have pointed out the vagueness and shakiness that characterizes the paper on matters ranging from what constitutes an imminent threat to who has the authority to issue an order to kill.

Without repeating the excellent points in the critiques, I would only note one of the implications about which Americans do not seem to be aware: that accepting this rationale for the campaign means signing up for a war that is endless in both time and scope.

The white paper returns again and again to the notion that the United States is “in an armed conflict with al-Qa'ida and its associated forces.” The idea, in other words, is that the United States is fighting a war against a supposedly coherent, identifiable enemy, just as when it fought wars against Nazi Germany or Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Without that concept of a war, the whole legal case and everything it says about due process and rights of accused citizens and all the rest falls apart.

But whatever is represented by the term “al-Qa'ida and its associated forces” isn't anything like Germany or Iraq. It is a will-o'-the-wisp of an enemy. The original al-Qa'ida that Americans came to know and fear after 9/11 is a decimated residue in South Asia. Various other violent groups in other regions have, for various reasons of their own, decided to adopt the al-Qa'ida brand. That brand name represents not a coherent, identifiable enemy but instead an ideology, which isn't even necessarily the main driver of behavior for many of those who use the brand name. Al-Qa'ida is a variable and inchoate set of ideas that involve a mixture of Sunni radicalism and violence as political action, with a transnational tinge. Americans ought to be concerned about how—with the white paper stating that targets of the drones do not need to be directly involved in any known terrorist plots—the killing program comes close to the handing down and carrying out of death sentences, even on U.S. citizens, without any involvement of a court and at the say-so of “an informed, high-level official,” for holding a set of ideas.

Americans ought to be concerned as well about other things regarding the drone campaign; the endless and limitless nature of the program that is implied by the legal rationale for it is certainly one of those things. More groups can and probably will adopt the al-Qa'ida brand. Some of those groups may not have yet come into existence. And terrorism, which has been used for millennia, will be around indefinitely. Of course, most Americans did not think they were signing up for an endless war. But unless the basis for it is circumscribed and justified with more precision than it has been so far, an endless war is what they got.

The American public, and its habits of thinking about terrorism, deserve much of the blame for getting in this situation. Thinking of counterterrorism as a “war” is the original mistake. There were more parochial political interests that pushed this idea, but it resonated with the Jacksonian fibers in the American public, which readily adopted it especially after 9/11. The problems with the counterterrorism-as-war notion have been on display with the handling of suspects who are captured and incarcerated. They are also on display, as reflected in the Justice Department memo, with suspects who are to be killed.

Another unfortunate habit of public thought is the zero-tolerance outlook toward terrorism, which has motivated officials to push legal and moral envelopes, and to incur other costs and international political damage, in order to insure that even if they cannot prevent all terrorist incidents on their watch they at least can say afterward that they did everything possible to avoid them. Witness the uproar even after a non-fatal near-miss, such as the attempted attack by the underwear bomber in December 2009. This week's nominee was the principal official who after that incident had to go before the cameras and issue a mea culpa on behalf of himself and his colleagues.

Although public attitudes laid the groundwork for a limitless killing program, public attitudes are doing little or nothing to help impose better limits. This involves another respect in which the drone program is different from traditional wars: there are no direct American casualties (and even the monetary costs are very small compared to those traditional wars). Therefore, whatever concerns about the program get expressed at this week's confirmation hearing, they will not involve political forces anywhere near as strong as those associated with either the Israel lobby or cognitive dissonance about the Iraq War.

If a political motivation is to be engaged, it will have to involve senior people in the administration and especially the president himself thinking along a line suggested by Jack Goldsmith, an assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration. In an op ed calling for a newer and sounder statutory basis for activities such as the drone strikes, Goldsmith observes that the absence of such a basis, "is unfortunate for the president, not only because he increasingly acts without political cover, and because his secret wars are increasingly criticized and scrutinized abroad, but also because he alone will bear the legacy of any negative consequences — at home and globally — of unilateral, lethal, secret warfare."

Authors

Paul R. Pillar

Publication: The National Interest

Just Calm Down About that DOJ White Paper

Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Editor's Note: This piece originally appeared on Lawfare.

Okay, everyone, take a deep breath. Chill out. The DOJ’s “White Paper” on targeted killing is no big deal. Really.

You wouldn’t know this from reading the somewhat breathless press coverage of the document, much of which offers a reasonable reader some confusion as to what the White Paper actually is.

The more responsible reporters have been reasonably careful. Michael Isikoff’s original story for NBC News calls the document a “confidential Justice Department memo,” and a “confidential Justice Department ‘white paper.’” Isikoff goes one to say that, “Although not an official legal memo, the white paper was represented by administration officials as a policy document that closely mirrors the arguments of classified memos on targeted killings by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel.” Isikoff then says, rather more tendentiously, that the document authorizes the killing of U.S. citizens who are top operational Al Qaeda figures “even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.” This latter point is, to put it mildly, a stretch.

Charlie Savage and Scott Shane in the New York Times refer to the document as “[t]he unsigned and undated Justice Department ‘white paper.’” They note that,

The paper is not the classified memorandum in which the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel signed off on the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric who was born in New Mexico and who died in an American drone strike in Yemen in September 2011. But its legal analysis—citing a national right to self-defense as well as the laws of war—closely tracks the rationale in that document, as described to The New York Times in October 2011 by people who had read it.

The document, they write, “appears to be a briefing paper that was derived from the real legal memorandum in late 2011 and provided to some members of Congress.”

But to read some of the other stories on the subject, you might think that the Obama administration had crafted and released to the Hill a “White Paper” that staked out bold new ground on killing Americans. It hasn’t. What has happened, rather, is that a document has been leaked that tracks closely previous public statements by the administration and that adds marginal flesh to those statements in some respects.

Let’s start by clearing up what this document is and isn’t. In the wake of the Al Aulaqi strike, there were widespread calls for the release of the OLC memo proclaiming the strike legal. This produced, inside the administration, a discussion regarding what the administration could and could not release about that memo. There were, loosely speaking four possibilities: (1) say nothing, (2) give a speech, (3) release a white paper, and (4) release a redacted version of the memo itself. The interagency process being what it is, the real debate was between the second and third options. And ultimately, the speech idea prevailed. In a speech at Northwestern University last March, Attorney General Eric Holder laid out the case that the killing of a person like Al Aulaqi (though he did not address the case specifically) would be lawful under both international law and the U.S. Constitution—and that it would not violate the targeted person’s due process rights.

The White Paper, however, had been drafted, and while it was never released publicly, it was apparently given to people on the Hill. Like Holder’s speech, it tracks the OLC memo—and it goes into somewhat more detail on certain points than Holder did. But here’s the thing: It’s the same argument. Nobody who has read and understood Holder’s Northwestern speech can reasonably be surprised by anything about this document. The argument is old hat—and we have known for almost a year that this was the administration’s view.

Both Holder and the White Paper set forth three essential conditions for targeting a U.S. citizen in a foreign country, when that individual is a senior operational leader of al Qaeda or its associated forces. Both Holder and the White Paper make clear that there may be other circumstances under which targeting of citizens would be lawful and appropriate. But both argue that targeting is lawful at least if these three conditions are met. Holder elaborates less on each of these conditions, but his speech and the new document track very closely.

First, both Holder and the White Paper argue, the individual must pose an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. Second, capture must not be feasible. And third, the operation must be conducted in a manner consistent with applicable law of war principles.

So what does the White Paper really add to Holder’s speech? The short answer is not all that much, a little bit of flesh on some bones here and there, but nothing—and we mean nothing—that fundamentally changes the argument.

Here’s what’s new:

Holder’s speech, as we noted, includes the condition that “capture is not feasible.” He notes that feasibility is a “fact-specific” and “time-sensitive” question. And according to Holder, the inquiry into feasibility is guided by assessing the window of opportunity to effectuate a capture before a terrorist attack takes place and the ability to do so without “undue risk to civilians or U.S. personnel.” The White Paper elaborates a little bit. It says that “capture would not be feasible if it could not be physically effectuated during the relevant window of opportunity or if the relevant country were to decline to consent to a capture operation” (emphasis added). The White Paper also adds a feature to this condition, noting not only that “capture [must be] infeasible” for a strike to be lawful, but that “the United States [must] continue[] to monitor whether capture becomes feasible.” In other words, capture must not be feasible in the immediate moment, and there must be some ongoing assessment of the potential for capture as time goes on. Later, in discussion of the applicable laws of war, the White Paper also states that the United States would be “required to accept a surrender if it was feasible to do so.” So there’s a little added texture on the feasibility of capture question.

The White Paper adds a little more to Holder’s speech on the imminence requirement. This section of the paper has generated a lot of criticism from commentators like Kevin Jon Heller and Jameel Jaffer. But whether one agrees with these critics or not, the White Paper’s position should, again, come as no surprise. Holder, after all, said back in March:

The evaluation of whether an individual presents an “imminent threat” incorporates considerations of the relevant window of opportunity to act, the possible harm that missing the window would cause to civilians, and the likelihood of heading off future disastrous attacks against the United States. As we learned on 9/11, al Qaeda has demonstrated the ability to strike with little or no notice—and to cause devastating casualties. Its leaders are continually planning attacks against the United States, and they do not behave like a traditional military—wearing uniforms, carrying arms openly, or massing forces in preparation for an attack. Given these facts, the Constitution does not require the President to delay action until some theoretical end-stage of planning—when the precise time, place, and manner of an attack become clear.

This clearly suggests a more relaxed conception of “imminence” than the immediate temporal implications of the word itself might suggest. And that was well understood at the time Holder gave his speech, both by critics and by defenders of the administration’s position. The White Paper fleshes out this point a little, stating clearly that “imminent threat” includes the operational leader who is “continually planning attacks”:

By its nature, therefore, the threat posed by al-Qa’ida and its associated forces demands a broader concept of imminence in judging when a person continually planning terror attacks presents an imminent threat, making the use of force appropriate. In this context, imminence must incorporate considerations of the relevant window of opportunity, the possibility of reducing collateral damage to civilians, and the likelihood of heading off future disastrous attacks on Americans. Thus, a decision maker determining whether an al-Qa’ida operational leader presents an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States must take into account that certain members of al Qa’ida (including any potential target of lethal force) are continually plotting attacks against the United States; that al-Qa’ida would engage in such attacks regularly to the extent it were able to do so; that the U.S. government may not be aware of all al-Qaida plots as they are developing and thus cannot be confident that none is about to occur; and that, in light of these predicates, the nation may have a limited window of opportunity within which to strike in a manner that both has a high likelihood of success and reduces the probability of American casualties.

Given this reality, the White Paper concludes, an operational leader of Al Qaeda may be considered to pose an imminent threat if he,

is personally continually involved in planning terrorist attacks against the United States. Moreover, where the al-Qa’ida member in question has recently been involved in activities posing an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, and there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities, that member’s involvement in al-Qa’ida’s continuing terrorist campaign against the United States would support the conclusion that the member poses an imminent threat.

This is hardly a revolutionary advance over March. Indeed, it’s exactly what a reasonable person would have understood the government’s position to be based on Holder’s speech.

What else is new in the White Paper? Holder’s speech does not go into the War Crimes Act or 18 U.S.C. § 1119(b), forbidding the killing of U.S. nationals abroad. The White Paper devotes a section to each, explaining why the targeting of an American citizen who is an operational leader of Al Qaeda would not violate either. Moreover, Holder doesn’t spend time on the Fourth Amendment issues targeting killing might be said to raise—which the White Paper also treats. And while he talks in broad terms about due process, he does not go into the Matthews v. Eldridge analysis that the White Paper undertakes and that Steve critiqued earlier this evening.

But these are not the issues on which the press, or the administration’s critics, are focusing on. And the truth is that the issues that have grabbed all the headlines over the past 24 hours—the claimed authority to kill U.S. citizens under a very narrow set of circumstances—involve only the most incremental advances over what the administration has previously said.

Authors

Benjamin Wittes
Susan Hennessey

What It Takes to Fight the Terrorists

Ursula Wilder — Sun, 27 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

President Obama has characterized John Brennan, his nominee for CIA director, as “one of our most skilled and respected professionals” and by quipping: “I’m not sure he’s slept for four years.” Mr. Brennan has been the chief adviser at the White House on counterterrorism and homeland security.

I have worked alongside and formally studied the professionals who do the work of counterterrorism, and the president’s comments touched on the dedication, determination, and also the stress, intensity, and exhaustive pace of work that characterizes this cadre of exceptional people.

Despite how they are often portrayed on screen and in fiction, they are ordinary people tackling intransigent problems, against monumental odds, often while in personal danger. In contrast to their terrorist opponents, they are neither grandiose nor deluded and are not emotionally or morally stunted. They do not think they are invulnerable to criticism or that history will guarantee them success. They know they can make terrible mistakes, and they know real failure.

Take for example the now iconic photograph of the president and his cabinet watching events unfold during the raid in Abbottabad in May 2011 in pursuit of Osama bin Laden. We now know how that raid would end. At the time the photo was taken, however, these world leaders did not know how the story would end, and it shows in their faces. You do not see hubris or vanity in this shot, but tense, tired, mature people with stress in their eyes. The president is seated on a folding chair; the vice president and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff hold rosaries; the room is too small; coffee cups are strewn on the table. This image has become iconic among the thousands available surrounding that historic raid because this scene was not staged; it shows the world’s most powerful political leaders at their most vulnerable, doing the job of countering terrorism together.

In the course of my research on the psychology of those engaged in countering terrorism, policymakers from various administrations described the politics they must manage in the counterterrorism arena as particularly challenging and ethically demanding. Political misjudgment, the errors of others, unforeseen outcomes, or even simple bad luck can result in catastrophe and haunting personal second-guessing on the part of a politician, with a crushing sense of personal responsibility.

They also described to me how their mental energies can be wholly colonized by terrorism, how shifting attention from the daily terrorist “threat stream” to concentrate on other important political priorities—or even to simply enjoy daily life, or to get a good night’s sleep—takes an effort of active will. For all that, the policymakers said that in countering terrorism, they are using their talents and living out their political vocations at a peak of intensity and significance.

As with the politicians, the field professionals in counterterrorism—those who physically go where the terrorists operate “on the ground”—also report exerting their talents to the maximum. Their fieldwork is physically dangerous, as exemplified by the September 2012 killing of a U.S. ambassador and three of his colleagues in Benghazi, Libya; the killing in December 2009 of seven CIA officers in Khost, Afghanistan; and the many thousands of deaths and wounding of U.S. military since 9/11. Field professionals measure their personal courage while also facing psychologically harrowing conditions.

Consider for example the psychological experiences of personnel whose jobs take them to the scenes of terrorist bombings to secure the site, succor the wounded, recover the dead, or conduct forensic investigations and deal with desperate and bereaved loved ones who come to the site. I was told by several such personnel that you never forget the distinct smell of the site of a terrorist bombing. Yet these field professionals described their job as intensely rewarding and themselves as privileged to perform them.

Another vital class of counterterrorism officials—often caricatured in fictional treatments—are the intellectuals. Intelligence analysts, targeting officers, and other “brain workers” immerse their minds daily in the malevolent worldviews of terrorists. As a result their own worldviews can become more somber. They experience frustration and anxiety when their hard-won insights are not acted on. They fear analytic failure, dread missing something critical. Their successes are anonymous and often secret. Every successful terror strike is an opportunity to experience guilt, self-doubt, and failure. Yet they are passionately dedicated to their work and believe it is vital.

One terrorism analyst described to me working at his desk inside the Pentagon on 9/11, running out of the building after the plane struck, then pushing his way back into the burning building with some colleagues over the strenuous objections of first responders. They needed to get back to their desks and assist in the frantic analytic efforts to understand what was happening to the nation that day. He said that for him and many other terrorism analysts, “every day after that was 9/12.” I suspect that the new CIA director, if confirmed, shares these sentiments.

Authors

Ursula Wilder

Publication: The Daily Beast

Separating Facts from Fiction In Zero Dark Thirty, Hollywood’s Take on the Death of Osama bin Laden

Benjamin Wittes — Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

After nearly ten years of diligent CIA intelligence work, U.S. Navy SEALs tracked 9-11 mastermind, Osama bin Laden to his compound in Pakistan and killed him. It was an attack that resonated around the world and is now portrayed in the movie, Zero-Dark-Thirty. Senior Fellow Benjamin Wittes discusses the facts and the myths in Hollywood’s telling of the fateful events leading to the death of the notorious al Qaeda leader.

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Separating Facts from Fiction In Zero Dark Thirty

Authors

Benjamin Wittes

New Al-Qaeda Generation May Be Deadliest One

Bruce Riedel — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The dramatic attack in Algeria this month on a natural gas facility underscores the emergence of a new generation of al-Qaeda across the Arab world, "al-Qaeda 3.0" or the movement's third generation.

Despite Osama of bin Laden's death, al-Qaeda has exploited the Arab Awakening to create is largest safe havens and operational bases in more than a decade across the Arab world. This may prove to be the most deadly al-Qaeda yet. And at the center of the new al-Qaeda remains the old al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri still hiding in Pakistan and still providing strategic direction to the global jihad.

The first generation of al-Qaeda was the original band in Afghanistan created by bin Laden in the 1990s. The second emerged after 9/11 when the group re-emerged in Pakistan, Iraq and then across the Muslim world. Now a third iteration can be discerned in the wake of bin Laden’s killing by U.S. Special Forces and the Arab Awakening.

The fastest growing new al-Qaeda is in Syria. Using the cover name Jabhat al-Nusrah, al-Qaeda has become perhaps the most lethal element of the opposition to Bashar al-Assad’s brutal dictatorship. For al-Qaeda, Assad and the Alawis are a perfect target since many Sunnis believe Alawis to be a deviationist sect of Islam that should be suppressed. While al-Qaeda is only a part of the opposition in Syria, it brings unique skills in bomb making and suicide operations. Every week it gets stronger and better armed.

Now jihadist websites are reporting every day that new al-Qaeda "martyrs" from Saudi Arabia, Palestine and Egypt have died in the fighting in Damascus and Aleppo. Reliable reports from journalists speak of bands of jihadists operating in Syria with a loose affiliation to al-Qaeda and composed of Muslim fanatics from as far away as Pakistan, Bangladesh and elsewhere.

The Syrian al-Qaeda franchise has sought to learn from the mistakes of the earlier al-Qaeda generations. It avoids open association with the brand name and seeks to work with other Sunni groups. It is well armed, uses bases in Iraq for support and supply, and benefits from weapons supplied by Qatar and Saudi Arabia to the opposition. Its leader uses the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al Golani, a reference to the Israeli-occupied Syrian Golan Heights

The longer the civil war in Syria goes on, the more al-Qaeda will benefit from the chaos and the sectarian polarization. It will also benefit from the spillover of violence from Syria into Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Jordan that is now inevitable.

Like the rest of the world, al-Qaeda was surprised by the revolutions that toppled dictators in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. Its ideology of violence and jihad was initially challenged by the largely nonviolent revolutionary movements that swept across North Africa and the Middle East. But al Qaeda is an adaptive organization and it has exploited the chaos and turmoil of revolutionary change to create operational bases and new strongholds.

In North Africa, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) — originally an Algerian franchise of the global terror organization — has successfully aligned itself with a local extremist group in Mali named Ansar Dine, or Defenders of the Faith, and together they have effectively taken control of the northern two-thirds of Mali. When they tried to march on the capital, Bamako, France finally intervened with jets and troops.

AQIM is also at work in Libya, especially around Benghazi. A faction of al-Qaeda led by Mokhtar Belmokhtar staged the Algerian attack from Libya. Belmokhtar is a first-generation al-Qaeda leader who has survived. He began his career in Afghanistan with the legendary jihadist thinker Abdullah Azzam in the late 1980s. He is an avowed admirer of the Jordanian founder of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who took Iraq to the edge of civil war in 2006.

In Egypt, another third-generation al-Qaeda jihadist stronghold is in the desert of the Sinai Peninsula. Long a depressed and angry backwater in Egypt, after the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak, disaffected Bedouin tribes in the Sinai cooperated with released jihadist prisoners to begin attacks on security installations and the Egypt-Israel gas pipeline. The jihadists in the Sinai have pledged their allegiance to Zawahiri and Zawahiri has repeatedly endorsed their attacks on Israeli targets.

In Yemen, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) exploited the fall of Ali Abdullah Saleh’s dictatorship to take over remote parts of the south and east of the country. It lost control of several towns to government counterattacks last summer but it struck back with deadly attacks on security targets in Sanaa, Aden and other major cities. Increasingly drones are attacking AQAP in the deserts of Yemen, most famously killing its American-born operative Anwar al Awlaki, but group is resilient.

Iraq’s al-Qaeda franchise is the essence of resilience. The 2007 surge was supposed to destroy al-Qaeda’s franchise, the Islamic state of Iraq, but it didn’t. Despite enormous pressure and the repeated decapitation of its senior leadership, the group has survived and recovered. It appeals to the Sunni Arab minority which feels oppressed by the Shiite-dominated government. Al-Qaeda in Iraq has rebuilt its sanctuaries in some Sunni regions and its leader, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, has promised more attacks in Iraq and in the United States.

The third generation of al-Qaeda's success in capitalizing on revolutionary change in the Arab world comes despite a lack of broad popular support. Al-Qaeda 3.0 remains an extreme movement that appeals only to a small minority, but terrorism is not a popularity contest. Al-Qaeda today is stronger at the operational level in the Arab world than it has been in years.

Back in Pakistan, the old al-Qaeda leadership, what jihadists call al Qaeda al Um or "mother al-Qaeda" is rebuilding. Since President Barack Obama came to office in 2009, there have been almost 300 lethal drone strikes in Pakistan flown from bases in Afghanistan, most of which targeted al-Qaeda operatives. Along with the raid on Abbottabad that killed bin Laden in 2011, the offensive has put it on the defensive.

But it is not dead, nor alone. Al-Qaeda’s allies in Pakistan, such as Lashkar-e Tayyiba — the group that attacked Mumbai in 2008 — and the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, are under little or no pressure and are helping the mother ship recover. Zawahiri regularly issues statements ordering the faithful to go to Syria or Mali to fight. His orders are obeyed as there is no challenger to his authority.

AQ 3.0 is a complex and decentralized enemy that requires strategies tailored to each franchise. There is no one answer to each challenge. There is no "strategic defeat” of al-Qaeda in sight.

Authors

Bruce Riedel

Publication: Al Monitor

Brookings: Topics - Intelligence

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New Al-Qaeda Generation May Be Deadliest One

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