Al Qaida: Entrapaneurship and Modular Terrorism
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Version/ Public Release 0.8.8 posted on Monday, April 17, 2001. Version/ Public Release 1.0.2 posted on Friday, September 14, 2001 and scored 50 % by graduate professor with academic experience (“incorrect understanding of al-Qaida (the freedom fighter)” and “not having correct understanding of freedom fighter and terrorist.”) Version/ Public Release 1.1.3 posted on Monday, February 18, 2002. Version/ Public Release 1.7.3 being approved and edited for post by Thursday, May 27, 2006 (unknown and approval is no longer being tracked.) In Place Of started on Thursday, October 8, 2009.
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Al Qaida: Entrapaneurship and Modular Terrorism
Roy Mitsuoka
General Staff
Summer 2005
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License.
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The announcement of Al-Qaida’s new leadership, to plug the hole left by the assassination of Osama bin Laden, may be more than just a changing of the guard. Tapped to be the new leader, according to mainstream media sources and experts is Ayman al-Zawhiri.
The appointment has not been confirmed by al-Qaida and it’s unclear whether this is an interim move. Longtime al-Qaida No. 2 Ayman al-Zawhiri remains the figure many consider likely to assume control of the terrorist group. Even so, Saif al-Adel appointment should not be dismissed in spite of being at times strongly critical of bin Laden’s style and choices, including the 9/11 attacks. Questions also remain about his alleged capture by Iran, and whether the Islamic regime may still have him in custody or under their control.
In al-Adel, al-Qaida has someone experienced in terrorist operations with a hint of a pragmatic side.
“We must completely halt all external actions until we sit down and consider the disaster we caused,” al-Adel wrote about the 9/11 assault in 2002. “During six months, we only lost what we built in years.” His effort to move al-Qaida forces over land to Iraq, would lead to his presumed ‘capture’ by the Iranian government, despite his continued operational efforts for the organization.
Al-Adel was anything but the peace-loving counter to bin Laden, according to a chapter of “Al-Qaida’s (Mis)Adventures in the Horn of Africa,” a report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. A former colonel in the Egyptian army, al-Adel was convicted in 1987 for his role in trying to recreate Egyptian Islamic Jihad [EIG] and to destroy the local parliament with a truck bomb and hijacked airplane. When al-Adel somehow left Egypt in 1988, he was on his way to Pakistan to join the nascent al-Qaida movement.
He distinguished himself from other al-Qaida leaders, through both his soldierly professionalism and independent thinking. Appointed as al-Qaida’s explosives and military trainer in 1991-92, he criticized the “lack of practical experience” and “over-enthusiasm” that EIG had exhibited in its campaign to change Egyptian society.
Al-Adel was also a key player on a number of al-Qaida fronts. After training the group’s activists in Pakistan and Afghanistan, he joined the 1993-94 effort to form training camps in Somalia and the ethnic Somali region of Ogaden, Ethiopia. In letters to al-Qaida leadership from the time, he advised how to expand operations in the area and recommended that Somalia become a home for the movement.
From Somalia, al-Adel travelled to Yemen where Khalid Sheikh Muhammad claimed to have met him, and later ended up back in Afghanistan. On his return to al-Qaida’s primary home, Khalid Sheikh Muhammad claimed that al-Adel was “assisting them with computer and media projects,” as well as offering an advanced commando training course there in 1999.
Like Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, a close contact for whom he would later write a posthumous biography, al-Adel understands the importance of jihadi media. After the creation of Mu’askar al-Battar [Camp of al-Battar], an al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula publication, al-Adel contributed articles for the ‘Security and Intelligence Operations’ section. His contribution of the above-mentioned biography, revealed critical details about both his and Zarqawi’s lives, and also showed the strong role he has played throughout al-Qaida’s development.
Although al-Adel criticized the 9/11 attacks, he participated in its planning and many international terrorist acts. He communicated with an al-Qaida cell in Saudi Arabia which carried out the bombings of the Dorrat al-Jadawel compound in 2003 in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. In early 2000, Australian investigators said that Saif was involved in a plot to assassinate local mining magnate and orthodox rabbi Joseph Gutnick. He also carried out attacks in Somalia and led the early resistance against invading American forces in Kandahar.
Attacks like these show that he is no softie. “Al-Adel is a killer. He will use violence for the sake of violence,” said Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Center for Political Violence and Terrorism Research in Singapore. “He is the most ruthless leader in al-Qaida. When he was head of security intelligence, he rounded up so many of the spies and executed them.”
Al-Adel’s criticism of Egyptian terrorist organizations may show where he wants to lead. “Moreover, they lacked the necessary expertise, a short-term and long-term plan in advance, and a vision to employ the nation’s human resources at the highest level,” al-Adel stated in Zarqawi’s biography. “Change required an ideology, human resources, funds, and sincere, experienced, and seasoned leadership that possessed a vision and a plan, which would define its goals and means. The banner of such leadership should be clear.”
Al-Adel’s vision remains up for debate, but he may push the organization beyond scattered attacks and to the military precision for which he became known. “It is important for me to clarify that Al-Qaeda and its leader never said that they were going to defeat the Americans on their own,” he wrote in a recent article translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). “Rather, they are working to inspire the ummah, incite it [to wage war], and act as a vanguard for it in this blessed jihad, to weaken the greatest idol. From there on, the ummah will rise up and liberate itself from the idols that weigh heavily on its soul [i.e., the Arab rulers].”
That statement came after 10 years of post-9/11 experience. In general, al-Adel’s recent article is much less critical of bin Laden’s leadership than his comments in 2002, even going so far as to say, “The attacks on the Pentagon and the American homeland, or Al-Qaeda’s theory of attacking the U.S… will be studied in military academies alongside Sun Tsu’s book and the idea of the Trojan Horse.”
“Wasn’t Western culture altogether prepared for collapse, with the collapse of the World Trade Center towers? Wasn’t the attack on this economic symbol an indication for anyone with eyes to see, of the importance of economic attrition,” he writes. “Isn’t the threat on the new Silk Route, the oil lines, an indication of what the Western world is destined to suffer should it lose them, and of the right of those who control [the oil] to decide its appropriate price?”
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Terror as Coercion: The Major Stumbling Block in a New Subject for Social Network Analysis
Since the notorious events of September 11th, 2001, the study of suicide terrorism and the strategic logic behind large-scale acts of extremism has taken off in a variety of disciplines. As readers of the national news, we receive a predominantly qualitative analysis of terrorist cells, how they are organized, recruit and sometimes cooperate. Without reference to a lot of numerical data or statistics and seemingly without the goal of precise and generalizable measurements, news casters present footage of interviews with Iraqis and Americans that get at the “why” of the issue but not exactly the “how.” Qualitative research on terrorism isn’t confined to the realm of media but extends into academia as well. In this context, a large and enlarging body of literature traces the rise and fall of various terrorist campaigns while commenting on the history of terrorism in general. Such studies are extremely beneficial to our understanding of, for instance, the transformation of an ideology into a formidable terrorist organization. However, given that terrorist groups are uniquely decentralized, diffuse, dynamic and constituted by clusters of dense networks that are otherwise isolated or weakly linked to other clusters[1], it is unreasonable to hope that qualitative methods will produce a sufficiently thorough and dependable explanation for how terrorists function or a reliable framework for predicting future terrorist attacks. Qualitative research, which requires a considerable amount of time to execute under the best of circumstances cannot fully and quickly address the “how” of terrorism and when it comes to the systematic use of terror, time is of the essence. A much more practical approach is that of social network analysis—a set of techniques, theories, models and applications that have proven themselves remarkably valuable to the studies of interaction, interdependency, sustained and truncated relational ties, opportunities for and constraints upon individual action, and structures of the social, economic and political sort.
Social network analysis conceives of relationships, contacts, affiliations, friendships and other web-like structures in terms of “nodes” and “edges,” best defined by the below graphic[2]:
In this example, which depicts a pattern of email communication among employees of Hewlett Packard, the nodes (red dots) represent the individual employees and the edges (gray lines) between them represent their email exchanges. It is easy to see how we might map a terrorist network in this way, allowing nodes to represent terrorist suspects and edges instances contact between them. It is also easy to see how the resulting graph would aid our understanding of how terrorist organizations operate and solve problems, as well as how disaggregated (or centralized!) they really are.
In addition to possessing the attributes described above, the study of terrorism also lends itself to social or dynamic network analysis since it is associated with massive volumes of information that need to be synthesized and disseminated in an efficient way. According to Patrick Keefe, when still engaged in wiretapping, the National Security Agency intercepted some 650 million communications on a daily basis. Furthermore, the National Counterterrorism Center’s database of suspected terrorists currently contains over 325,000 names.[3] Network analysis can help to make sense of this wealth of data by giving it a form and shape that can be more easily appreciated than an interminable list of names and dates.
However, in light of these statistics and intimidatingly large numbers, it is no surprise that productive network analysis is often hindered by an overabundance of information, the bulk of which is frequently extraneous and of limited relevance. Valdis Krebs, the first person to diagram the network of terrorist cells associated with the 9/11 hijackings, notes that the nodes (people, potential terrorists) present in the existing body of information often have “fuzzy boundaries” between them, making it difficult to determine who and who not to include in the mapping of a particular terrorist network.[4] False leads are inevitable but not always immediately apparent and therefore represent a debilitating time waster.[5] The question is, then, how can this profusion of information be gathered, managed and propagated in an efficient way? Assuming we can surmount some major roadblocks—such as this baffling quantity of data—the answer may be contained in the relatively new but burgeoning field of social network analysis.
The Next Generation of the Web: Semantics
As many readers of this article will already know, as the number of pages grows in the World Wide Web, so do the number of search engines, portals and directories, all of which are designed to facilitate the location of useful information. Indeed, much of the information amassed and used by government officials has its origins in the Internet. So what if there was a way to organize and integrate all of this feedback into a single model while also selectively removing unusable or worthless data? This may in fact be feasible through a tool called the Semantic Web, a group of methods and technologies that allows users to build vocabularies or “ontologies” that enrich data with additional meaning and therefore increase opportunities for effective use of said data.[6] Put succinctly, the purpose of the Semantic Web—an intelligent technique for information categorization, extraction and search—is to make the Web “smarter” and better able to perform useful services for users by adding semantic annotation to Web documents and other resources so that knowledge, rather than unstructured material, is consistently accessed. Through Semantic Web methods and technologies, machines can understand the semantics, the meaning of information, text and data and subsequently create connections for those who take advantage of it, thereby relieving them (at least partially) of the laborious task of consolidating and making sense of various bits and pieces of dispersed information.
Traditional Web portals, those with which the average Internet user is most familiar, are websites that collect information and links to pages and usually operate around a specific theme or topic. Semantic Web portals instead “collect URIs of files on the Semantic Web, and allow users to interact with…statements,” statements being carefully crafted descriptions of URIs that are eventually translated into Resource Description Framework (RDF) graphs in which each resource is represented by a node and each statement—conveying a property—represents an edge. For example, we could take the sentence “Wali Zazi is the father of Najibullah Zazi” (the two were arrested in 2009 for conspiring to execute domestic terrorism) and endow it with machine-readable meaning. With the help of eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and an RDF graph, the Semantic Web would identify “Wali Zazi” as the sentence’s subject, “is the father of” as the sentence’s property, and “Najibullah Zazi” as the sentence’s object. In order to more fully comprehend the names in the sentence and the relationship between them, the Semantic Web would use uniform resource indicators or URIs—series of characters that identify names or resources on the Internet and generally begin with “http”—to associate each element of the sentence with a resource describing its nature, a resource that might not necessarily be a part of the Web. For example, it might associate “Wali Zazi” and “Najibullah Zazi” with a list of suspected terrorists that is not accessible by Web to the general public. After this and many other such meaning-enriched sentences have been entered into the RDF graph, our hypothetical machine can start drawing inferences, eventually making connections between the Zazi men and others who may have helped them to develop their terrorism scheme. A significant implication of this structure is that it allows users of a given RDF graph to navigate through it based on their personal interests, following statements to relevant information that reflects individual objectives and areas of curiosity. In plainer language, although the Semantic Web cannot make computers self-aware, intelligent or sensible, it can make the Web “readable” to machines so that they are able to find and, to a certain degree, decipher information.
Consider the following example: You want to buy “The Lord of the Rings” boxed set online but you have a few specifications: You want widescreen DVDs and you want only those with the extended versions and bonus material. You are willing to buy a used set but only if the quality of the DVDs is still classifiably excellent and while you don’t want to wait too long for delivery, you also don’t want to pay an excessive amount for shipping. Rather than asking you to compare the items available at Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, DVDEmpire.com, etc., the Semantic Web would allow you to input your preferences into a computerized agent that, in addition to searching the Web and finding the best option for you, could also record the amount you spent in the financial software on your computer and mark your computer calendar with the date your DVDs should arrive.[7]
The above is but a synopsis of the constituent elements behind and capabilities of the Semantic Web, whose attributes cannot be fully explored here. Rather, applying the basic knowledge presented, the remainder of this essay will try to demonstrate its potential usefulness for ongoing analyses of terrorist networks.
The Consequences of the Semantic Web for Terrorist Network Analysis
Today, for better or for worse, the U.S. government and its various representatives in the intelligence community are constantly monitoring travelers’ behavior in a surreptitious but large-scale search for mal-intentioned voyagers. Regardless of whether it is consistent with the Constitution, analysts have access to information about what individuals are denied entry into what countries, where suspects stay when they are in transit, the origin of those who visit them at their hotels, etc. Sometimes, by following the movements of two or more suspects simultaneously, they try to determine if collaboration is at work. Semantic Web technologies can facilitate these related processes of pursuit and decision-making by allowing analysts to draw on stored information about the individual suspects in question, such as where they have traveled in the past, if ever they have been in the same location, if they have in common an affiliation with a specific (religious) organization, and so on. Here, the results of initial behavioral scrutiny are essentially input factors into the Semantic Web, which instantaneously links them to relevant available files, allowing analysts to engineer a comprehensive picture of what is going on and to respond to it in a suitable and timely manner without being delayed by the distractions of superfluous information.
The careful plotting of a terrorist network or organization is no modest task but instead requires an onerous series of steps, including collecting data, harmonizing data, and accurately pinpointing relationships between data points. As this process is continually repeated for the sake of completeness, irrelevant data is inevitably accumulated in discouragingly large quantities. Google, the most prominent and most used of traditional search engines, only exacerbates this crisis of immaterial information through its PageRank link analysis algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the Web that assigns a numerical weighting to hyperlinks for the purpose of determining their relative importance in comparison with other links. PageRank is, essentially, a vote, by all the other pages on the Web, about how important a page is, where a link to a page counts as a vote of support. In the end, the more times a page is linked to and the more times it is linked to by frequently cited pages, the greater its numerical weighting and the more likely it is to appear at the top of search results. Inevitably, this algorithm will consider any frequently or habitually cited page as “relevant,” regardless of whether that page’s content truly reflects, from the user’s perspective, the query that caused it to surface. A Google search for “Abu al Zarqawi,” a close associate of Osama bin Laden, and “Israel,” into which Zarqawi has been accused of smuggling terrorists, generates approximately 148,000 results; however, only a handful of these, scattered throughout, offer information about the connection between Zarqawi and Israel. Most are Web pages that include both the words “Zarqawi” and “Israel” in them, but only coincidentally. The Semantic Web, by contrast, is more discriminatory and would allow researchers to endow the search phrase “Zarqawi+Israel” or “Zarqawi and Israel” with a specific meaning—perhaps related to Zarqawi’s smuggling activity in Israel—so that only the most appropriate information is retrieved and entered into the Web portal.
Additionally, standard search engines can only return data formatted in words and numbers, despite the fact that images, pictures and photographs often convey linkages as well. Fortunately for intelligence case officers, the Semantic Web makes it possible to associate notes, theories and other facts and messages with these forms of information so that no stone is left unturned. For instance, terrorists sometimes communicate through graffiti on the walls and building sides of urban spaces in a way that signifies a “secrete cable of ‘others’ who could strike without warning.”[8] Images of this crafty means of interchange could undoubtedly be helpful as intelligence officers shadow prospective human threats and establish their relationship to other terrorist network insiders.
The Semantic Web is also valuable when aliases, pseudonyms, monikers and other kinds of assumed names come into play. MSNBC.com provides a list of basic information on at-large al Qaeda operatives, including their nicknames when these are known. Some on the list, such as Ayman al Zawahiri, have upwards of twelve known aliases. Fazul Abdullah Mohammed boasts more than 15. Others, including Midhat Mursi, have only one but these can be drastically different from the individuals’ actual names (Mursi’s is Abu Khabab). What is more, MSNBC accentuates that some of its spellings/transliterations “may vary from what has been published elsewhere since different Arab countries use different spellings of even the most common names,”[9] compelling us to acknowledge that illicit activity has probably gone unnoticed in the past because of the failure of traditional search instruments to encode the relationship between, for example, Uday and Oday or Khaddafy and Ghaddafi. A Google search using “Ghaddafi” does not return results with the name “Khaddafy”—a fairly common alternative spelling—nor does it offer the latter as a suggestion for a related search. The Semantic Web represents a way in which to equate multiple alternative spellings and/or to recognize aliases such as “The Doctor” or “The Manager,” making it less easy to unintentionally overlook constructive information.
In the end, a terrorist network is the outcome of hundreds of personal connections. Understanding the relationships and links between the members of this category of network is critical to preemptively deterring terrorist plans or at least to interrupting them. Thankfully, the Semantic Web gives us a way in which to exhaustively describe these relationships, using our knowledge of various members’ hometowns, workplaces, residences, communal affiliations, involvement in certain events, etc. An excellent example of the Semantic Web in action comes from a dataset known as Profiles in Terror (PIT). Developed at University of Maryland, College Park, this resource contains counter-terrorism intelligence information collected from various publicly available real-world sources such as federal court indictments and news reports.[10]
This diagram[11], generated using a PIT demo, acts as a visual representation for the arguments presented above. As we can see, it contains both events (Passover Massacre, Taher calls Sayyed, Driver recruited, etc.) and names (Mohammed Taher, etc.) so that a complete or near complete picture is revealed to the analyst, unlike in the case of conventional Web portals, whose graphs simply cannot contain such a range of information.
The Obstacles that Remain: Making the Web a More Understandable (Mine-able) Place
At the foundation of the Semantic Web are machine-understandable Web pages (this characteristic is essential since it allows for the creation of expansive portals of highly applicable, congruous information). Continuing with our example of terrorism, we may want to extract from various Web pages newspaper articles, video clips, etc. about terrorist activity. These resources and the information contained in them must undergo a process of data mining, during which patterns are extracted from data, so that they become sensible to the machines directly responsible for pulling together and coherently arranging information and therefore indirectly responsible for informing analysts of potential terrorist threats.
Yet establishing a robust Web mining capacity in the context of the Semantic Web is not without its challenges. As noted by Syed Ahsan and Abad Shah, employing the technology behind data mining is difficult when it comes to matters of terrorism because much of the information pertaining to it exists in disparate databases scattered among numerous federal, provincial and local entities that often cannot or simply do not swap knowledge.[12] Nonetheless, the inadequacy of traditional Web portals as compared to the Semantic Web has been fully exposed and unless maximum efficiency and accuracy are not the goals of the CIA and U.S. Government, a concerted effort must be made to make the transition. Rather than forsake the possibilities inherent in the Semantic Web, we should work to achieve greater intergovernmental transparency and correspondence.
[1] Sara Amin and Tanya Trussler, “Terrorist Network Structures: A Dynamic Analysis of Cellular Durability,” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology, November 14, 2007, http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/2/0/1/2/7/p201276_index.html.
[2] David Easley and John Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World, Cambridge University Press (2010), p. 3, http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/.
[3] Patrick Keefe, “Can Network Theory Thwart Terrorists?,” The New York Times Magazine, March 12, 2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/magazine/312wwln_essay.html?_r=1.
[4] Valdis Krebs, “Uncloaking Terrorist Networks,” First Monday, vol. 7, no. 4 (April 2002), http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/941/863.
[5] Robert Baer quoted in Jennifer Goldbeck, Aaron Mannes and James Hendler, “Semantic Web Technologies for Terrorist Network Analysis.”
[6] “Semantic Web,” W3C, http://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/.
[7] Tracy V. Wilson, “How Semantic Web Works,” How Stuff Works: A Discovery Company.
[8] Rene Larche, “Global Terrorism Issues and Developments,” Nova Science Publishers, Inc., 2008, p. 37.
[9] “Al-Qaida Leaders, Associates,” MSNBC.com.
[10] Lise Getoor, Prithviraj Sen and Bin Zhao, “Entity and Relationship Labeling in Affiliation Networks,” Conference on Machine Learning, 2006.
[11] profilesinterror.mindswap.org
[12] Syed Ahsan and Abad Shah, “Data Mining, Semantic Web and Advanced Information Technologies for Fighting Terrorism,” IEEEXplore, 2008, p. 3. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4547644&userType=inst&tag=1.
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Should we prepare for big wars or small ones? After Afghanistan and Iraq, the answer might seem obvious, but the truth is harder and more expensive: both.
Great armies and navies are always tempted to fight the last war, especially if they won it. The British Army entered World War I wedded to the “up and at ‘em” infantry advances of Waterloo—even though by the turn of the century the Maxim gun had made such tactics tantamount to suicide. Truly fearsome militaries prepare to fight the next war. Think of how the German Army used planes and tanks in a coordinated blitzkrieg to outmaneuver the Allies at the outset of World War II.
But what if a military must prepare to fight not one war, but two very different kinds of war? That is the challenge facing the world’s greatest superpower at the beginning of the 21st century. The American military must continue to ready itself for high-tech warfare; it must still be able to fight “big wars” against rising powers like China. At the same time, it must anticipate what military planners blandly term “low-intensity conflict” but what Rudyard Kipling more aptly called the “savage wars of peace”—small, asymmetrical conflicts against determined partisans with wicked low-tech weapons like IEDs, the improvised explosive devices that have cost America so dearly in Iraq.
The tension over which war to prepare for has created a generational divide in the American military, particularly the U.S. Army, between old bulls who want to focus on all-out combat, drowning the enemy in precision firepower, and young upstarts who believe that in today’s messy world of failing states, firepower is not enough—it is necessary to win hearts and minds. Many of the combat veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, who are among the most capable and experienced young officers America has had in a generation, fall into the latter camp. But the uncomfortable fact is that the U.S. military may not have the resources to be able to fight both kinds of war with any assurance of victory. Though political leaders have barely begun to address the problem, the shape, size and funding of America’s armed forces is one of the most pressing issues the next president will face.
The end of the cold war was supposed to give the winning superpower a breather. In 1999, the then presidential candidate George W. Bush spoke of his desire to “skip a generation” of weaponry, to move to a shiny new age of high-tech warfare in which sensors, satellites and computers would replace manpower. Among military planners, phrases like “network-centric warfare,” “digitization” and “the transparent battlefield” were all the rage. The new thinking was given a partial test after 9/11 when the military invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. In fact, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s push to employ a faster, leaner, more-wired force worked well. In Afghanistan, Special Forces working with local warlords used their laptops to call in precise airstrikes and topple the Taliban; in Iraq, Gen. Tommy Franks could boast that “speed kills”—and Baghdad fell in less than three weeks.
Then came disaster. In Afghanistan, American forces and their unreliable allies were not able to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and the Taliban survived to fight another day. The growing insurgency in Iraq overwhelmed U.S. forces and left a good portion of the American people and their elected representatives believing that the war was a lost cause. The military seemed caught by surprise, its high-tech forces unable to defeat a shadow army that wired bombs with garage-door openers and the sort of cheap electronic gizmos that could be purchased from RadioShack.
In retrospect, the military’s unpreparedness seems puzzling. According to the Congressional Research Service, since the end of the cold war in 1990 the U.S. military has been deployed 88 times—to fight in a series of savage little wars of peace from Somalia to the Balkans to Sierra Leone. Didn’t the Army learn anything from the experience?
The answer is yes and no. The older generation of officers—the generals who run the show—were trained to fight the Soviet Army as its tanks powered through the Fulda Gap in Germany. These officers were steeped in tank battles and artillery duels, and although the Big One never came, they did get a chance to fight a conventional armored conflict against the Iraqi Army in 1991, crushing Saddam Hussein’s forces in less than 100 hours. After the gulf war, the Army shrank in size by about 40 percent. The officers who advanced to the top ranks tended to be conventional warriors; the outliers and mavericks—the few who knew other cultures, had trained Third World armies and had studied the small wars of the colonial era—were confined to the ghetto of Special Forces or let go altogether. The men who ran the lightning invasion of Iraq and the long, botched occupation that followed tended to be Desert Storm vets who knew little or nothing about counterinsurgency warfare.
Now, however, a younger generation of officers has been bloodied in the city streets of Iraq, fighting against hidden foes. (Some of these same officers were deployed on nation-building missions to the Balkans or Africa or Haiti in the 1990s.) In Iraq, these young captains and majors and lieutenant colonels have had to desperately improvise, to make up tactics as they go along. Naturally, some are furious at their higher-ups for sending them to war so unprepared. In May 2007, one of them, Lt. Col. Paul Yingling, wrote a blistering piece in Armed Forces Journal called “A Failure of Generalship.” He painted the Army’s high command as a bunch of none-too-bright conformists. The promotions system, he wrote, “does little to reward creativity and moral courage.” On the contrary, to move up, an officer “must only please his superiors.” Yingling pointed out that no one seemed to be taking the fall for failure in Iraq.
He had a point: Gen. George Casey, who presided over the downward spiral between 2004 and 2006, was rewarded by being made Army chief of staff. By contrast, Gen. George Marshall, in his first year as Army chief of staff under FDR in the run-up to World War II, fired 34 generals and 445 colonels from an Army half the size of today’s force. After war came in December 1941, he further relieved 17 division commanders. So why no comparable purge during the Iraq War, which has already lasted longer than World War II? More was at stake during 1941 to 1945, of course, but it is also true that the commanders in Iraq were following the policy decreed by Bush and Rumsfeld. The failure of imagination started at the top. True, more officers should have challenged their civilian bosses, but that is rarely the way in a U.S. military obedient to civilian control.
Under the twin pressures of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has dramatically changed its training for officers and soldiers. Now, at its National Training Center at Fort Irwin in California’s Mojave Desert, infantry units are plunged into a nightmarish theater in the round: a network of a dozen “Iraqi” villages, complete with several hundred “Iraqis”—the leading roles played by a cast of Arabic-speaking extras supplied by a contractor.
But the real test of the Army’s commitment will be whether the military retains and promotes the experienced young officers coming off the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan. “One of the challenges we have as senior leaders is that … we have to change the Army,” says Gen. Raymond Odierno, the former No. 2 in Iraq who was recently named vice chief of staff of the Army. “We have to make sure we don’t lose this.” His boss in Iraq, counterinsurgency guru Gen. David Petraeus, says that the military is beginning to make accommodations for officers who are repeatedly deployed and can’t take the war-college courses needed for promotion. Still, young officers were dismayed to see some of Petraeus’s own “brain trust” of smart colonels passed over for promotion in recent years. The fact that Petraeus was brought back to Washington, D.C., last fall to oversee the most recent promotions board was taken as a sign that the Pentagon leadership recognized those frustrations.
But simply tipping the balance over to small-war fighting isn’t the answer, either. The U.S. Army last week published a critique of the Israeli military’s performance in its fight against Hizbullah in Lebanon in 2006. It concluded that the Israelis, preoccupied with counterinsurgency efforts in Gaza and the West Bank, had neglected training for conventional combat and paid a heavy price. Yet if the U.S. Army needs to prepare for both Big War and Small War and nation-building postwar, how can it juggle the competing demands of each?
Counterinsurgency and nation-building in particular are labor-intensive; there is no substitute for boots on the ground. The current U.S. Army is stretched to the limit: after their third or fourth tours in Iraq, young officers are fretting about their stressed families. Partly because the Army has been decentralized to be able to fight in smaller, more-mobile units, there is a serious shortage of captains and majors. The minimum requirements for enlisting are dropping, allowing in more and more teenagers who never finished high school.
Some experts think that the active Army needs to nearly double to 800,000 or more troops. But where will the money come from? Every soldier now costs, on average, roughly $125,000 a year. At the same time, the centerpiece of the Army’s current plans for the big war out there sometime is the high-tech “Future Combat System,” a $300 billion family of vehicles networked into an all-seeing whole by sensors, UAVs and satellites. It will be up to the nation’s political leaders to decide whether to make some hard choices or try to convince the voters that they need to pay for it all. Too bad this is a topic that is rarely discussed during the presidential campaign.
IN PLACE OF————————IN PLACE OF (Part 4 of Part 4)
This year Al-Qaeda celebrates its 20th birthday, having outlived the Bush administration. It may even outlive the Obama administration as well, despite all the all the manpower and resources that have been allocated to the war in Afghanistan.
Abdel al-Bari Atwan, the editor-in chief of the Al-Quds Al-Arabi, told Arabic News Broadcast (ANB), “Al Qaeda continues to strengthen and expand despite the 8 years of search and destroy, which shows that the US has lost, not al Qaeda”.
Atwan said that Al Qaeda has managed to drag the US into wars of attrition. He explains, “when I met bin Laden in November 1996, he told me ‘I can’t fight America inside America, but if I manage to drag America to Arab and Islamic countries, then I can win because I would be fighting it in our land.’” The US so far has spent $918 billion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq at a time when its economy is in serious crisis.
Osama bin Laden’s latest audiotape message confirms that he views the war in Afghanistan as an opportunity to fight a war of attrition against the US. Bin Laden said in the tape, which was aired on September 13, “If you [Americans] stop the war, then fine. Otherwise we will have no choice but to continue our war of attrition on every front just as we have worn out the former Soviet Union for ten years until it disintegrated.”
“Continue to fight for as long as you wish,” bin Laden warned. “You are fighting a desperate war that you can’t win.” He also observed that Obama was “powerless” to halt the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and must rethink his policy on Israel.
Dia Rashwan an Egyptian expert at the Al Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies told Al Jazeera English that Al Qaeda became an enfranchised enterprise after the war in Afghanistan. Radical Islamic groups – such as the Algerian Salafi Group for Combat and Islamic Call, and the Tawhed and Jihad group of Abu Musab Al Zarqawi in Iraq — joined Al-Qaeda by simply declaring allegiance to the organization.
Atwan agreed with that assessment. He said before the war in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda was confined to “a cave in Tora Bora,” but now has presences in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Europe, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and North Africa. And the list is growing.
This makes it extremely difficult to defeat Al-Qaeda because it requires defeating many Al-Qaeda-franchised groups on many war fronts, Rashwan said. While Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were weakened in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, other Al-Qaeda groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan and North Africa were strengthened.
Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Asia Times bureau chief, told Al Jazeera English that “Al Qaeda is no longer an Arab organization. Now it is more of a South Asian organization because a big number of men from this region [“Tribal area”, in Pakistani] joined the organization”.
Therefore, defeating Al-Qaeda can only be achieved by defeating its ideologies.
Atwan said that Western media, and even some Arab media, have mistakenly concluded that Al-Qaeda was weakened because it failed to carry out attacks inside in the West in recent years. Rather, it is a new strategy by Al-Qaeda, which no longer considers carrying out attacks inside the West and the US a priority, especially after the election of Barack Obama.
Atwan told ANB, “without a doubt the election of Barack Obama put Al-Qaeda in a very awkward position. So far Obama’s policies have deprived Al Qaeda from many justifications that Al-Qaeda was using to fight the US.” He added, “Obama is an American president that wants to reconcile with the Muslim world. His father was a Muslim. He gave a speech in Cairo in which he spoke about mutual respect and interests.” Obama, in effect, has managed to pull the rug from under Al-Qaeda by his reconciling speeches.
Atwan added, “this was like an earthquake that shook all Al-Qaeda’s plans, and ideologies.” This explains the change of Al-Qaeda strategy, which was evident in Bin Laden’s latest audio recording.
Osama bin Laden said in the audiotape, which was aired on Al Jazeera English on Sep 13, that he wanted Americans to stop their support for Israel. Bin Laden said, “Are your children, money, jobs, homes, economy and reputation more important to you than the security of the Israelis, their children and their economy? Should you choose your security and stopping war, this would require you to hold accountable those who are meddling in our security on your behalf. We are ready to respond positively to this option on solid and fair bases.”
This is a big change from bin Laden’s previous messages, in which he threatened bloody attacks against western and Arab countries.
Bin Laden even had an intellectual suggestion to the American people, urging them to read books by professors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt to find out for themselves about the influence of the pro-Israel lobby in the US.
Dia Rashwan also saw a dramatic change in tone. He told Al Jazeera English, “I think that Osama bin Laden changed his speech compared to previous speeches. For example, Osama bin Laden spoke about September 11 attacks without saying ‘Ghazwa’ which means conquest; he only said 9.11. He never mentioned his 19 martyrs, his heroes. For the first time, he is making a distinction between bad and good American administrations.” In this case, the bad administration was that of former President George Bush’s.
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Vice President of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, saw it in another way. He told Al Jazeera English, “Bin Laden referenced John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and their assassinations. He argued that once a train is on its tracks, it can’t leave those tracks. His argument is that if Obama deviates too much from the Bush administration, then he can get assassinated. In essence… regardless of if you like [Obama] more than Bush, the nature of the US is not going to change. That is a very defensive stance vis-a-vis Obama.”
Bin Laden’s focus on the Palestinian plight in his latest speech may have also been intended to offer a new image of Al-Qaeda in contrast to the bloody one that has been imprinted in the minds of Muslims worldwide. Al-Qaeda-affiliated groups were responsible for a great deal of bloodshed not only in western countries but also in Arab and Muslim countries, including Iraq and Algeria.
Giving up its rhetoric about using violence against Arab regimes, and confining its armed attacks against American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan at least temporarily makes Al-Qaeda appear less extremist. Bin Laden hopes this will reestablish its legitimacy, clearly eroded after Obama’s election.
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