Happy New Year!

Hope everyone has a safe, enjoyable New Years Eve and 2010!

Are Retaliatory Strikes in Yemen Prudent?

Given the mounting evidence (and the public proclamation by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula) that there was a strong connection between the underwear bomber and Qaeda operatives in Yemen, the US is almost certainly set to bomb selected targets in retaliation. 

But is sending multi-million dollar missiles to strike Yemen the answer? 

Recall the 1998 embassy attacks: Almost simultaneously, terrorists bombed US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing hundreds and wounding thousands.  After US intelligence determined that Al Qaeda was the perpetrator of the heinous acts, the Clinton administration responded with missile strikes on key suspected Al Qaeda facilities in Sudan and Afghanistan — two of the world’s poorest countries. Neither attack was successful; the al Shifa factory in Sudan turned out to be a pharmaceutical facility and the strikes in Afghanistan missed their intended target of bin Laden and his top associates. 

Overnight, Al Qaeda was legitimized and aggrandized across the world.  Bin Laden exploited the failed strikes as invaluable propaganda and formulated a highly effective media campaign that garnered recruits, funding, and respect.  In other words, our retaliatory strikes did much more to strengthen Al Qaeda in every aspect than it could have ever done on its own. 

One could argue that if the strikes had been successful in killing senior leaders, it would be a completely different story.  Maybe.  But these guys aren’t dumb, they know retaliation is imminent and are not just sitting around waiting for bombs to land on their heads.  Unless we (either the US or Yemen) have very high quality intelligence that would enable potential strikes to decapitate some portion of AQAP’s leadership, our strikes will probably be ineffective at best and counterproductive at worst. 

So what should the US do?

In the short-term, any overt operations – especially missile strikes – should be the primary responsibility of the Yemenis, conducted by the Yemenis, with US assistance if necessary.   The US can also further increase covert operations and special forces raids (as they already have been recently). 

In the long-term, the US must continue to bolster Yemen’s capability to combat the threat using both kinetic and non-kinetic means. 

Any thoughts, disagreement, or questions on this issue — as always —  are welcomed and encouraged.

Wack-a-Mole Strategy Doesn’t Keep the US Safe

A mole shows up at the airport with explosives hidden in his shoes — the US wacks it and makes taking off shoes at security checkpoints mandatory.  A bunch of moles attempt to detonate liquid explosives aboard 10 jets traveling to the US — the US/Britain wack them all and enforce new regulations limiting the amount of liquids in carry-ons.  Another mole makes an extended trip to the bathroom and subsequently attempts to initiate a PETN explosive, and the US wacks this mole too by instituting a no-bathroom break rule within 1 hour of arrival. 

In a NY Times Op/Ed, Clark Kent Ervin sums up TSA’s wack-a-mole strategy and why it is idiotic: 

Perhaps the biggest lesson for airline security from the recent incident is that we must overcome our tendency to be reactive. We always seem to be at least one step behind the terrorists. They find one security gap — carrying explosives onto a plane in their shoes, for instance — and we close that one, and then wait for them to exploit another. Why not identify all the vulnerabilities and then address each one before terrorists strike again?

DHS/TSA will ever be able to identify and address every possible vulnerability.  However, instituting reactionary rules and regulations will do little to prevent future attacks.  At the same time, even a detailed understanding of all potential vulnerabilities does not mean that every threat can be eliminated — resources, training, and privacy issues are just some constraining factors. 

Nevertheless, as I have mentioned before, I do believe many of our national security policies are knee-jerk reactions, often failing to thoroughly analyze the relevant problems and issues in a more comprehensive manner.  As a result, policies not all that unlike the one below are often instituted as the solutions to much more convoluted issues:

I am waiting for a terrorist to take out false teeth to try to blow up a plane that results in a security response of taping shut the mouths of the passengers for the duration of a flight.

 

CT v. COIN – Round III

Although the President’s strategy review for Afghanistan is over, the debate over the most appropriate, efficient, and practical approach for countering US national security threats emanating from the region continues.  Bernard Finel refers to a recent article in the NY Times, arguing that a more focused CT approach could have worked in Afghanistan at a much lower cost:

Elite U.S. Force Expanding Hunt in Afghanistan

Secretive branches of the military’s Special Operations forces have increased counterterrorism missions against some of the most lethal groups in Afghanistan and, because of their success, plan an even bigger expansion next year, according to American commanders.

Finel argues:

This is a frustrating element of the whole Afghanistan/Counter-insurgency debate. There is a TON of evidence that CT-focused operations work, but the whole COIN intellectual apparatus has spent the last two years trying to deny and tear down those successes in order to promote their nation-building agenda.  The reality is, we can accomplish a lot more than we realized through small-scale, targeted military operations, regardless of how many times the Nagl/Biddle/Kagan/Petraeus crowd tries to sweep the successes under the rug.

Assuming that these successes are sustainable, Finel makes a fair point.  But this is still a highly complex debate, in my opinion, and I don’t see a clear-cut winner either way.  There a plethora of costs and benefits to consider, many of which are not tangible and cannot be easily discerned or quantified.  For example, how do you measure the psychological cost of largely withdrawing forces from Afghanistan and handing Al Qaeda and the Taliban a propoganda bonanza?  On the flip side, how do you measure the extent to which adding more troops will exacerbate Afghan perceptions of occupation and create more insurgents??

I guess the only thing that is unclear to me is why commanders like McChrystal and Patreaus would want to conduct the more difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and taxing approach if they truly believed CT operations would be more efficient and achieve the same overarching goal of disrupting, dismantling, and defeating Al Qaeda?  No commander wants to pick a losing strategy, so why not go with the CT approach if it is indeed more cost-effective, practical, and less risky?  What do McChrystal, Patreaus and the rest of the COINdistas gain by pushing for COIN and deliberately sweeping the successes of CT ops  under the rug?

Our Worst Nightmares Coming True

The uptick in terror plots in the US, culminating most recently with the botched attempt by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to bring down a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, may be the worst nightmares of US security and counterterrorism officials coming true.  Why? I’ll explain more, but first read some of these excerpts from recent NY Times and Washington Post reports:

U.S. Widens Terror War to Yemen, a Qaeda Bastion:

In the midst of two unfinished major wars, the United States has quietly opened a third, largely covert front against Al Qaeda in Yemen.

The country has long been a refuge for jihadists, in part because Yemen’s government welcomed returning Islamist fighters who had fought in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

Yemen’s remote areas are notoriously lawless, but the country’s chaos has worsened in the past two years, as the government struggles with an armed rebellion in the northwest and a rising secessionist movement in the south. Yemen is running out of oil, and the government’s dwindling finances have affected its ability to strike at Al Qaeda.

Meanwhile, there have been increasing Yemeni ties to plots against the United States. A Muslim man charged in the June 1 killing of a soldier at a recruiting center in a mall in Little Rock, Ark., had traveled to Yemen, prompting a review by the F.B.I. of other domestic extremists who had visited the country.

A radical cleric in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, has been linked to numerous terrorism suspects, including Nidal Malik Hasan, the American Army major who faces murder charges in the shooting deaths of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., in November.

In the latest issue of Sada al-Malahim, the Internet magazine of the Qaeda affiliate in Yemen, the group’s leader, Nasser al-Wuhayshi, praised the use of small bombs — not just big ones — to attack an enemy, in an eerie foreshadowing of Friday’s episode on the plane to Detroit.

More Questions on Why Terror Suspect Was Not Stopped

Now that Mr. Abdulmutallab is charged with trying to blow up a transcontinental airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day, some members of Congress are urgently questioning why, eight years after the Sept. 11 attacks, security measures still cannot keep makeshift bombs off airliners.

“This individual should not have been missed,” Ms. Collins said in an interview on Sunday. “Clearly, there should have been a red flag next to his name.”

Al-Qaeda group in Yemen gaining prominence

In January, the Yemeni and Saudi Arabian branches of al-Qaeda merged to create AQAP.

Today, the branch has about 100 core operatives, most in their 20s and 30s. But it has countless sympathizers and immense tribal support in southern and eastern provinces, said Abdulelah Hider Shaea, a Yemeni journalist with close ties to al-Qaeda. Shaea, who interviewed Wuhayshi in an al-Qaeda hideout earlier this year, said he saw several Muslims with Australian, German and French citizenships.

First, Al Qaeda’s strategy is working.  Not only is AQ bleeding the US economically, politically, and militarily in Iraq and the Af/Pak region, but it is opening up new fronts and attracting added attention to hasten its success – most notably now in Yemen and Somalia.  Al Qaeda’s overarching purpose, stated explicitly by Bin Laden, is to inspire and awaken the Muslim ummah to fight the Western enemy themselves.  AQ argues that it is each individual’s duty to wage jihad against the Western infidels.  Therefore, even if Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is only a loose ally of the Al Qaeda core, Bin Laden is achieving his goal. 

Physical Safehavens Still Matter

Leah Farrall, over at All Things Counter Terrorism. wrote a compelling response to Scott Atran’s recent Op/Ed in the NY Times, in which she counters some of Atran’s arguments on Al Qaeda.  Below, Farrall makes an especially great point:

• “The threat is home-grown youths who gain inspiration from OBL but little else beyond an occasional self-financed spell at a degraded Qaeda-linked training facility.”

A spell at an al Qaeda linked or al Qaeda run training facility gives people a hell of a lot more than inspiration. It’s the most important element in the entire equation. And a desire to get training is universal. As I have noted repeatedly, going to prepare is a key part of jihadist doctrine and anyone worth their salt will try to do it. Of course there are always exceptions but I can think of only a handful of cases internationally where this hasn’t been one of the defining features of radicalisation (and also operationalisation) and even then its not clear that this wasn’t in the background.

Here I’d note too that most people who seek training don’t actually go with the intention of joining al Qaeda. They want training to fight jihad. Al Qaeda’s skill lies in ‘turning’ them to its agenda. So, I think that minimising this process of training or seeking training is  dangerous. It clouds understanding of the dynamics that are crucial to understanding how plots evolve and people are radicalised in that final stage–when they move from seeking training for armed jihad, to becoming involved with a group and carrying out a terrorist attack on its behalf and at its direction.

There are many analysts who argue that a physical safehaven for Al Qaeda is unnecessary in the age of the internet.  While I agree to a certain degree, the case is overstated and largely overlooks Farrall’s central point. 

The deep, personal bonds that are created when training at these facilities cannot be duplicated in an online chatroom.  The euphoric sense of common commitment, struggle, and cause that is engendered by the austere living conditions, rigorous training regimen, and constant inspirational indoctrination can only be achieved in the distinctive atmosphere of a terrorist training camp — not in a crowded internet cafe.  Omar Nasiri’s book, Inside the Jihad: My Life with Al Qaeda, goes into some detail about these and other factors – unique to the experience of being in a training camp – that intensify the radicalization process and effectively churn the cream of the terrorist crop.

I look at this way, if I were an aspiring terrorist — and I had luxury of choosing — would I want to be trained online at the jihadi equivalent of the University of Phoenix ?

In this digital age, a “homegrown” terrorist surfing the net can indeed get some basic training and skills necessary to carry out a small-scale attack.  But a terrorist training camp is much more than just a place to learn how to construct a bomb.

The “Consensus” on American Muslims Continues to Unravel

Counterterrorism scholar, Lorenzo Vidino, published a new report on the Homegrown Terrorist Threat to the US Homeland.  Vidino has written erudite analyses about the homegrown threat prior to the spate of recent cases in the US and began questioning the consensus on the issue much before many experts recently jumped on the bandwagon.  This analysis only adds to a small, but growing body of literature that challenges the conventional wisdom regarding American Muslims and their susceptibility to radicalism and/or terrorism.  Read a summary of the report posted on the Counterterrorism Blog.

The wave of arrests and thwarted plots recently seen in the United States has severely undermined the long-held assumption that American Muslims, unlike their European counterparts, are virtually immune to radicalization. In reality, argues this policy brief, evidence existed also before the fall of 2009 highlighting how radicalization affected some small segments of the American Muslim population exactly like it affects some fringe pockets of the Muslim population of each European country. After putting forth this argument, the brief analyzes the five concurring reasons traditionally used to explain the divergence between the levels of radicalization in Europe and the United States (better economic conditions, lack of urban ghettoes, lower presence of recruiting networks, different demographics, more inclusive sense of citizenship). While all these characteristics still hold true, they no longer represent a guarantee, as other factors such as perception of discrimination and frustration at U.S. foreign policies could lead to radicalization.

Many readers could misinterpret my emphasis of this issue as fear-mongering.  But I argue that unless we are cognizant of the risks and do not simply subscribe to a comfortable – but flawed — narrative, we will not be adequately prepared and able to take the necessary steps to address the issue in a responsible, productive manner.  This threat can be effectively mitigated if experts and decision-makers weigh policy options through an honest appraisal of the situation — not an unequivocal belief in American Exceptionalism. 

Muslims in America are not the enemy — they are our best defense.  Therefore it would behoove us to actively foster a more positive relationship with and environment for the Muslim community within the US, rather than singularly concentrating our efforts to engage Muslims outside our borders. 

That being said, such efforts will only go so far.  Perceptions of US conduct overseas will continue to evoke powerful sentiment and increase the likelihood that radical messages will resonate with some individuals.

Support from US Muslims is the Key to Homeland Security

In an earlier post, I pointed out that support from Muslims in the US was our best defense against homegrown terrorism.  As a result, it is crucial that we continue to engage Muslims in the US and maintain, build, and/or cultivate their support. 

According to a report in the NY times, however, the opposite may be occurring. 

Since the terror attacks of 2001, the F.B.I. and Muslim and Arab-American leaders across the country have worked to build a relationship of trust, sharing information both to fight terrorism and to protect the interests of mosques and communities.

But those relations have reached a low point in recent months, many Muslim leaders say. Several high-profile cases in which informers have infiltrated mosques and helped promote plots, they say, have sown a corrosive fear among their people that F.B.I. informers are everywhere, listening.

“There is a sense that law enforcement is viewing our communities not as partners but as objects of suspicion,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, who represented Muslims at the national prayer service a day after President Obama’s inauguration. “A lot of people are really, really alarmed about this.”

And some law enforcement experts warn of a farther-reaching consequence: the loss of a critical early-warning system against domestic terrorism.

This is a startling trend.  And, unfortunately, this negative trajectory will be very difficult to reverse.  But without re-doubled efforts to ameliorate the situation and address the Muslim community’s concerns, the potential for terrorism in the US will only increase. 

Declining support from the Muslim community undermines the effectiveness of the so-called “early warning system” , further complicating US intelligence and law enforcement’s already complex and painstaking efforts to thwart terrorist attacks before they materialize.  Hopefully, the FBI will take this trend seriously and deal with it in a responsible, effective, and efficient manner. 

If you haven’t already, read some of the other posts on this blog about homegrown terrorism.

Update: Also read a blog post by Dawud Walid, a prominent Muslim leader in Michigan.

Wow…

The Wall Street Journal reports that insurgents in Iraq bought over the counter software for $26 and used it to intercept live video feeds coming from US drones. (Yes, you read it right). 

WASHINGTON — Militants in Iraq have used $26 off-the-shelf software to intercept live video feeds from U.S. Predator drones, potentially providing them with information they need to evade or monitor U.S. military operations.

U.S. officials say there is no evidence that militants were able to take control of the drones or otherwise interfere with their flights. Still, the intercepts could give America’s enemies battlefield advantages by removing the element of surprise from certain missions and making it easier for insurgents to determine which roads and buildings are under U.S. surveillance.

The stolen video feeds also indicate that U.S. adversaries continue to find simple ways of counteracting sophisticated American military technologies.

Some of the most detailed evidence of intercepted feeds has been discovered in Iraq, but adversaries have also intercepted drone video feeds in Afghanistan, according to people briefed on the matter. These intercept techniques could be employed in other locations where the U.S. is using pilotless planes, such as Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, they said.

The U.S. government has known about the flaw since the U.S. campaign in Bosnia in the 1990s, current and former officials said. But the Pentagon assumed local adversaries wouldn’t know how to exploit it, the officials said.

Terrorists and insurgents are remarkably adaptive enemies, but this is just incredible.  I am not talking about the sophistication, but more so the fact that nobody at the Pentagon thought that local adversaries would be able to exploit it…!?

Just another example of why technology, while a necessary tool, is never going to solve our terrorism or insurgency problems.

Why are the Taliban not Sharing the Wealth?

The American Security Project has recently released its annual report tracking progress across key metrics in the fight against Al Qaeda. You can find the document on the ASP’s website here.  Interesting read. 

One of the key points ASP makes in this report is that Al Qaeda’s finances — as well as its global appeal — are in big trouble.  It looks like even Bin Laden has been hit by the global financial crisis.  Although we have no way of knowing just how much cash is sitting in Al Qaeda’s piggy bank, one of the indicators analyst cite as evidence of AQ’s financial woes is stepped up pleas for money by AQ’s senior leadership. 

Still, if AQ has the operational capacity to strike the US homeland, getting enough money to carry it out is not going to be the show-stopper.  As the ASP report outlines, most of the successful attacks amounted to just tens of thousands of dollars — pocket change for a wealthy Gulf donor. 

But the fact that Al Qaeda is allegedly so poor while the Afghan Taliban (by most accounts) is making upwards of a hundred million dollars a year – just from opium alone — is intriguing to say the least.  If AQ and the Taliban remain closely knit, what accounts for such a stark difference in the financial health of these two groups?  Is it a cultural, religious, or jihadi no-no to ask for a little piece of the pie? OR, is this evidence that AQ and the Afghan Taliban are not as great of friends as some may argue?