State Dept’s Initiative to Counter al-Qaeda Propaganda

Several months ago, President Obama signed an executive order establishing an interagency center to coordinate the US government’s public messages against terrorist organizations. A major component of this Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications (CSCC) was in the news lately for its clever campaign against AQAP on Yemeni tribal forums.

Because the center is new, most people are unfamiliar with its mandate or how it operates. More broadly, people are unaware of the complexities of government messaging against terrorist organizations. To shed light on these subjects, the first coordinator of the CSCC, Ambassador Richard LeBaron (now retired), has given me permission to post his recent remarks on what he learned during his tenure. It’s very instructive for anyone interested in counter-propaganda and how the US government is coping with the new information environment.

On Elephants and Al-Qaeda’s Moderation

Over the past several days, Leah Farrall and I have been debating on Twitter about her recent blog post on the killing of Abu Yahya al-Libi by a US drone. In her post, Leah argues that the US policy of killing senior al-Qaeda Central leaders is wrongheaded because those leaders are “a moderating force within a far more virulent current that has taken hold in the milieu.” Leah compares these strikes to the practice of killing older elephants to thin a herd, which leaves younger elephants without any respectable elder to turn to for guidance as to how to behave. By analogy, killing senior al-Qaeda Central leaders means there will be no one with enough clout to rein in the younger generation of jihadis when they go astray.

As a measure of the moderating influence of al-Qaeda Central’s senior leaders, Leah contends that those leaders are very discriminating about the kinds of physical targets they choose to attack when seeking to affect the behavior of their intended audience. If you kill these leaders, she argues, the next generation will not be as discriminating, presumably meaning that they will widen their scope of physical targets and methods of attack in the West.

There might be good reasons not to kill al-Qaeda Central’s senior leaders with drones but their potential moderating influence is not one of them. Here’s why:

1. AQ Central Senior Leaders Are Not Discriminating When Choosing What Kinds of People to Target in the West: Although AQ Central’s senior leaders have expressed concern about killing Muslim non-combatants, they have expressed no concern about indiscriminately killing people who are citizens of non-Muslim majority countries they do not like. Thus in the 1998 joint fatwa:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it…

This basic targeting guidance has not changed in the ensuing years. Like any terrorist organization, al-Qaeda attacks civilians to create fear in its intended audience for the furtherance of its objectives. But unlike a lot of terrorist organizations, al-Qaeda has not focused on a particular category of civilian from Western countries (e.g. political leaders, the bourgeoisie, officials, businessmen).  Any citizen living in the United States or a non-Muslim majority country aligned with the United States is a potential target. That’s a lot of folks.

2. AQ Central Senior Leaders Discriminate When Choosing How To Kill Civilians in the West But They Do Not Seek Low Body Counts: When Leah argues that al-Qaeda Central is discriminating in its external operations, she means that they choose physical targets and methods of attack very carefully to elicit the desired response from their audience. She might also mean that they do not seek large body counts (she’s been unclear on this point).

It is certainly the case that al-Qaeda Central senior leaders have expressed a variety of opinions on how to kill civilians in the West and prioritized some means over others. And in their actual attack planning, tactics like bombing planes and subways  are preferred because they are more terrifying than other tactics. But al-Qaeda senior leadership has also supported more indiscriminate, high-casualty attacks like exploding a nuclear weapon and unleashing chemical or biological agents. They’ve also advocated the low-tech tactic of lone al-Qaeda supporters in the West buying a gun and going on a shooting spree. On the latter point, as recently as 2011 Adam Gadahn, Abu Yahya al-Libi, and Atiyya made a long video encouraging AQ supporters in the West to acquire handguns and shoot civilians indiscriminately (pt 1, pt 2). If Bin Laden differed with the other senior members of AQ over the use of this tactic in the West, I haven’t seen evidence of it.

It’s important to note that when AQ Central deliberates about attacks in the West, they prefer attacks that 1) they can successfully carry out and 2) will have the maximum impact on policy. Body count only factors into the discussion as a measure of impact (the greater the body count, the greater the impact), not as an inhibitor to action. Again, if there is a memo or statement fretting about killing too many non-Muslims, I haven’t seen it.

3. Abu Yahya al-Libi is Not a Moderating Force: It’s true that Libi is a very influential voice in al-Qaeda and that he might be able to take al-Qaeda in a less violent direction if he moderated his positions. But there was nothing in his career to suggest he would moderate al-Qaeda’s 1998 targeting guidance for Western countries. Even for ops in the Muslim world, he was more of a hardliner than other members of the senior leadership like Atiyya. For example, see Libi and Atiyya’s disagreement over over the status of former regime officials in Libya (Libi took a harder stance that Atiyya).

4. Even If al-Qaeda Central Senior Leaders Moderate, It Doesn’t Mean the Affiliates Will: The interplay between the affiliates and AQ Central is complicated and well researched by others, including Leah, so I don’t want to belabor this point. But just one well-known example of how hard it is to moderate the behavior of an affiliate: AQ Central failed to rein in AQ in Iraq after trying repeatedly.

Again, regardless of whether some in the senior leadership are trying to moderate the affiliates when it comes to targeting Muslims, they have not budged on the operational guidance given in the 1998 fatwa. Any new affiliate that joins accepts that guidance as foundational to their membership (of course, not all of them can act on it).

In summary, al-Qaeda Central’s senior leaders seek to kill as many citizens as possible in the non-Muslim majority countries they don’t like, particularly the United States and its Western allies. AQ Central’s senior leaders choose their physical targets and means of attack overseas based on opportunity and policy impact. High body counts are welcome. They sanction these attacks for a variety of strategic reasons, the main one being that they want to pressure the US and its Western allies to reduce their influence in Muslim-majority countries so that it will be easier to establish Islamic states.

It is hard to imagine a more virulent current in the jihadi movement than that of al-Qaeda Central’s senior leaders. Anyone with a desire or capability of moderating that organization was pushed out long ago. AQ Central may have moderated in how it conducts itself in Muslim-majority countries, but it certainly hasn’t moderated toward the United States, which is what has to be uppermost in the minds of US government counter-terrorism policymakers.

For a host of reasons, the US should take a hard look at the efficacy of its drone program. But the potential moderating influence of the current crew of old bull elephants leading al-Qaeda Central isn’t not one of them.

Update: Daveed weighs in.

Shumukh Forum Reacts to Abbottabad Docs

The al-Qaeda supporters on the Shumukh forum have mixed reactions to the Abbottabad documents released by the CTC. Here’s a summary of the main thread (159824) that discusses the documents:

• These documents are not real. They are designed to sow discord among jihadis and create tension b/n al-Qaeda and the online jihadi forums.
• The documents are real and show normal disagreements between a commander and his subordinates. No big deal.
• We need to wait for Sahab (AQ’s media wing) to validate the documents.
• Even if the documents are false, most outside analysts agree they show the sincerity of AQ and its seriousness.
• Each of the documents contains an element of truth but the CTC has also mixed in falsehood, such as the bits about divisions between AQ leadership and the affiliates
• We need to see all of the Bin Laden documents to really know what’s going on. This is just a slice of the whole, intended to manipulate us.
• The documents were chosen very carefully. We should believe the nice parts and ignore the rest.
• We can actually benefit from the documents. There’s a lot of good advice for the jihadi movement in them. They cast Bin Laden in a good light.

One Year Later

While you wait patiently for the CTC’s release of a few Bin Laden documents tomorrow, here are three articles I’ve written recently on what’s happened since Bin Laden’s death (plus a video):

• A Brookings memo explaining why many of Egypt’s Salafis have embraced party politics after railing against it for decades
• An update to my Foreign Affairs piece
• An exploration of the implications of al-Qaeda holding territory in Yemen and Somalia
• A panel discussion on al-Qaeda’s status with Stephen Tankel and Mary Habeck

Countering Violent Extremism, Pt. 3 (Final): Programs & Measuring Effectiveness

As I’ve said in the two previous installments, how you define and scope CVE will affect program design and implementation. The most important questions to ask are:

• Which population along the spectrum is the focus of the program?
• Who is best suited to implement the program?
• What laws and human rights principles come into play?
• How do you know if you’re succeeding?

A Tangled Net Assessment of al-Qaeda

Yesterday, Mary Habeck posted a net assessment of al-Qaeda’s fortunes. After I said something uncharitable about it on Twitter, Mary was understandably annoyed. In the spirit of fairness, I will give her argument a full airing here and respond.

Mary first states the facts that she believes most AQ experts agree on:

1. “al Qaeda is primarily the small “core” located somewhere in Afghanistan-Pakistan”
2. “the affiliates have an ambiguous relationship with this core and are generally focused on local concerns”
3. “the objective of the core is to attack the U.S. and its allies”
4. “because of our excellent counter-terrorism (CT) efforts, we have thwarted all such attempts on the U.S. since 9-11”

Joas’ Oeuvre

Those of us who parse Islamist and Jihadi-Salafi texts “like Talmudic scholars poring over a manuscript” are familiar with Joas’ meticulous work on Maqdisi and others of his ilk. But since I’ve never seen Joas invited to give a single talk in this part of the world, I have the feeling that his work has not gotten the full airing it deserves outside the academy. So over Joas’ protests (sorry brah!), here’s a quick rundown of what he’s been up to since 2009:

• “Legitimizing Pragmatism: Hamas’ Framing Efforts from Militancy to Moderation and Back?” Terrorism and Political Violence, 22, no. 3 (2010): 358-378 (article on Hamas’ efforts to legitimize its changing policies vis-à-vis Israel over the years while staying true to their original rhetoric)
• “Protecting Jihad: The Sharia Council of the Minbar al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad,” Middle East Policy, 18, no. 2 (2011): 148-162 (explains the rise of the now well-known Shari’a Council of the Minbar al-Tawhid wa-l-Jihad and puts it in context)
• “Reclaiming Scholarly Authority: Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi’s Critique of Jihadi Practices,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 34, no. 7 (2011): 523-539 (on al-Maqdisi’s supposed ideological revisionism and his criticism of other jihadis)
• “Al-Qa‘ida’s Editor: Abu Jandal al-Azdi’s Online Jihadi Activism,” Politics, Religion & Ideology, 12, no. 4 (2011): 355-369 (deals with the ideology of Abu Jandal al-Azdi, one of the chief ideologues of Saudi’s al-Qa’ida on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and shows that Saudi AQAP was more of an anti-Saudi organisation than has been known until now)
• “The Enduring Legacy of the Second Saudi State: Quietist and Radical Wahhabi Contestations of al-Wala’ wa-l-Bara,’” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 44, no. 1 (2012): 93-110 (on the continuing importance of the Saudi civil war in the 19th century to the development of al-wala’ wa-l-bara’ concept)
• “An Inquiry into Ignorance: A Jihadi-Salafi Debate on Jahl as an Obstacle to Takfir,” in Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort, Kees Versteegh & Joas Wagemakers (eds.), The Transmission and Dynamics of the Textual Sources of Islam: Essays in Honour of Harald Motzki (Leiden: Brill, 2011): 301-327 (on avoiding takfir on the grounds that someone is ignorant he or she is sinning)
• ‘Seceders’ and ‘Postponers An Analysis of the ‘Khawarij’ and ‘Murji’a’ Labels in Polemical Debates between Quietist and Jihadi-Salafis,” in Jeevan Deol & Zaheer Kazmi (eds.), Contextualising Jihadi Thought (London: Hurst & Co., 2012): 145-164 (deals with the frequent accusations by Jihadi-Salafis that quietist Salafis are “neo-Murji’a” and, vice versa, the accusation by quietist Salafis that Jihadi-Salafis are “neo-Khawarij”)

Countering Violent Extremism, Pt. 2: Scope

In my previous post, I proposed a minimal definition of Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) as reducing the number of terrorist group supporters through non-coercive means. I also suggested that the spectrum of support ranges from those who are vulnerable to becoming supporters to those who are engaged in criminal activity.

There are pros and cons associated with intervening in each group. The three groups at the far right of the spectrum are the easiest to identify because they have either consistently voiced their support for a terrorist organization or taken action on its behalf. Although they are extremely difficult to dissuade, focusing on them risks less blow back from the broader communities of which they are a part. There is also less risk of straying into the policing of thought crimes.

Conversely, the two other groups, “vulnerable” and “radicalizing,” are theoretically easier to dissuade than the others but they are far, far harder to identify. Because they are harder to identify, focusing on them risks alienating the broader communities of which they are a part and can easily stray into the policing of thought crimes.

Countries will focus on different groups for non-coercive intervention depending on the nature of the terrorist threat they face and their perceptions of risk. In the United States, AQ supporters generate the most concern and the government’s CVE focus is on the vulnerable and radicalizing populations, whose size it hopes to shrink by building community resilience. U.S. government officials believe this approach is more holistic than law enforcement alone. By comparison, white hate groups generate far less concern and the CVE focus, if any, is on turning around their law-abiding and incarcerated supporters.

Based on the incredibly low numbers of AQ supporters in the United States (see Charlie Kurzman’s recent study), the United States should treat the problem of AQ support like it treats supporters of white hate groups. It should focus on turning around law-abiding and incarcerated supporters rather than reaching out to the broader communities of which they are a part. This approach may not suit law enforcement (which prefers to build cases), the administration (which wants to increase the resilience of US Muslims against al-Qaeda propaganda), civil libertarians (who worry about infringing on personal freedoms), or large swathes of the public (who are terrified of fifth columns). But it is commensurate with the threat; its success can be measured; it carries less risk of alienating communities from which terrorists arise; it undermines the narrative that these communities are potential threats; and it is far less threatening to civil liberties than the current approach.

All of that said, I am not sanguine about the possibility of turning around law-abiding or incarcerated supporters of terrorist groups. It is incredibly difficult, particularly given the intractable nature of larger political problems that drive some forms of terrorism. But if counter terrorism is to involve more than just locking people up, it should not stray too far from stopping bomb throwers into social engineering and thought policing. (As an experiment, read this excellent study of Zachary Chesser‘s radicalization and consider how the U.S. might have dealt with him differently.)

Recommending that the U.S. government should reorient its domestic CVE policy toward dissuading law-abiding and incarcerated AQ supporters does not mean that the government is the best suited to do it. Neither does it imply a certain way to go about it nor that this approach will work in every country. In my next (and final post), I’ll survey a range of CVE programs and explore who is best suited to carry them out and how effective they are.

Update: J.M. Berger kindly spiffed up and clarified my graphic.

Countering Violent Extremism, Pt. 1: Definition

At Jihadica, we usually don’t weigh in on policy debates. I’m reluctant to break that tradition but I have a few thoughts on countering violent extremism that I’d like to workshop with Jihadica readers before turning them into something more.

The United States and its allies devote considerable financial and human resources to countering violent extremism (CVE). Nevertheless the definition of CVE is unclear, ranging from fighting bad guys to creating good guys. This lack of precision makes it hard to design, execute, and evaluate CVE programs and makes it easy to slap the CVE label on all manner of initiatives, including many that seem to have little to do with stopping terrorism and might otherwise be cut by Congress. The lack of precision also inhibits thinking about whether the CVE enterprise is worthwhile and what should constitute it.

In the interest of clarifying the activities covered by CVE and encouraging debate on their relative merits, I propose the following definition: Reducing the number of terrorist group supporters through non-coercive means. (I might also propose a new label and acronym for this activity but “CVE” is so bland and prevalent that it’s not worth jettisoning.)

This definition has several things to recommend it:

1. It is broad enough to cover most of what people describe as CVE (or, in UK parlance, “Prevent”).
2. It is narrow enough to exclude insurgent organizations and gangs that don’t primarily attack civilians for larger political objectives (an activity usually called “terrorism”).
3. It suggests a metric: reducing the number of a terrorist group’s supporters. The focus is not on reducing support for ideas, which is difficult to judge, but rather support for specific organizations that embody those ideas and seek their realization, which is easier to document and more closely related to criminal behavior.
4. It excludes coercive kinds of “countering” activity that are better left to law enforcement and militaries (e.g. arresting, killing).
5. It acknowledges that there is a spectrum of support, ranging from lone wolves to bona fide members of a terrorist group. Moreover, support does not necessarily imply criminal behavior. The “supporter” label applies to anyone who expresses uncritical enthusiasm for a terrorist group’s program and actions.

To operationalize this definition of CVE, two questions must be answered. First, what terrorist groups deserve programmatic attention? Typically, they are those deemed to pose the greatest threat to a country. Second, what kinds of supporters deserve programmatic attention? Is it people vulnerable to becoming supporters? People who are becoming supporters? Law-abiding supporters? Criminal supporters? Incarcerated supporters?  Answers to these second set of questions vary from country to country, resulting from differing assumptions about who is amenable to positive change and how they are identified; unique laws, national security priorities, and political culture; and competing interests and missions of the country’s institutions. For the U.S. government, CVE programming focuses on people who are vulnerable to becoming supporters of al-Qaeda. (In a follow-up post I will explain why a narrower focus on law-abiding supporters might be more useful.)

There is at least one objection to the definition above: Its resulting programs would not cover terrorists like Anders Breivik or the Unabomber, who did not profess loyalty to, or common cause with, any terrorist group. But ideologically-independent and socially-reclusive lone wolves like these are extremely rare and extremely difficult to detect. If a CVE definition were crafted to cover them, it would be so broad as to be useless, which is the current state of play.