Entries Tagged 'Western Analysts' ↓

Yaman Mukhaddab, a Jihadi pundit who’s appeared on this blog several times, has translated the summary of the new RAND study, How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa’ida. It’s a fast turnaround for a translation, given that the existence of the study was first reported in Western media on July 28 and Yaman finished his work on July 30.

Yaman says he has rushed to translate the document for two reasons. First, he believes that it is dangerous. RAND, he says, has finally understood that the reason al-Qaeda attacks the U.S. is to provoke it into a direct military conflict in the Middle East, which will strengthen and consolidate the mujahids and bring about greater losses for the U.S. and its allies.

Second, RAND is the go-to contractor in the U.S. for crafting the government’s response to al-Qaeda. Past RAND studies have had a huge influence in this regard and most of their recommendations have been implemented.

Yaman further argues that the next administartion will follow the plan outlined in this study. Both Republicans and Democrats want to end direct engagement with mujahids in the Middle East and use proxies and clandestine operations instead.

Since RAND’s recommendations for correcting the U.S. response to al-Qaeda derive from a scientific study of past terrorist groups, the mujahids would do well to read them so as to not fall into the enemy’s new traps. Moreover, RAND studies are public and provide an early warning of what the U.S. will do next, so the mujahids would be foolish to ignore them.

After posting his translation of the summary, Yaman offers five thoughts:

1. The enemy has finally begun to understand.
2. There is much in this study that torpedoes the propaganda of the enemy, which will help the mujahids.
3. How can the enemy’s new strategy be thwarted?
4. The RAND study is not an exercise in disinformation. But it still has some major holes that its authors haven’t perceived.
5. The study will be implemented. Indeed, there are signs of this happening already.

In the coming weeks or months, Yaman plans to flesh out the five points above. He also intends to translate the fifth section in the complete study called “Military Force and al-Qa’ida in Iraq” since it contains much of benefit to the mujahids. Finally, Yaman hopes to translate the entire 225 page document. I’ll keep you posted.

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If you only have time to read one article on the current state of al-Qaeda, read the new special report in the Economist.  Not only does the author, Anton La Guardia, have great taste (Jihadica and some CTC products I worked on are listed in the sources), but he has done a masterful job of tying together a lot of conflicting trends.

(Note that the links for all of the articles in the report are on the right-hand side of the screen.)

In a new Jamestown article, Michael Scheuer has refined some of the arguments he made in May in response to the al-Qaeda-is-almost-defeated meme that has been going around since April. He and I had a brief exchange about it here (look in the comments), so I won’t reprise all of it.  But I do want to offer a counterpoint to his remarks on Saudi Arabia and Salafis.

In his new article, Scheuer asserts that the Western press has bought the idea that al-Qaeda is near defeat. Journalists, he says, have bought it because some Islamist ideologues who previously supported al-Qaeda have criticized the organization.  (Scheuer calls these criticisms “recantations,” but only a few of the people he mentions have recanted.) These criticisms, Scheuer says, “are part of a bigger project conducted by several Arab states–led by Saudi Arabia–to make the United States and its allies believe Islamism’s strength is ebbing.” This idea has been picked up by the Western media because people in the West “desperately wants to believe such claims.”

Why is Saudi Arabia conducting this campaign? To divert attention from the real problem, Salafism, which Scheuer calls “Saudi Arabia’s state religion.” The Saudis have even gone so far as to reach out to the pope and to consider the building of a church in the kingdom, all in the hopes that the West will forget that its religious ideology is the “engine of contemporary jihad.”

The West has a lot to be worried about, Scheuer says (quoting an al-Ahram article by Khalil El-Anani), because Salafism is gaining ground:

• Salafis won a majority of parliamentary seats in Kuwait
• A Salafi is the head of the Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan
• Salafis are running the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt
• Hamas hawks have more power than Hamas pragmatists

Al-Qaeda will be defeated, Scheuer concludes, when Salafism is removed “from schools and missionary activities.”

As I said in my earlier exchange with Scheuer, I agree with him that al-Qaeda is not near defeat, but I don’t think the al-Qaeda-is-near-defeat meme is a bad thing. The U.S. wins against al-Qaeda when it is no longer able to recruit or when the morale of its members becomes too low. One of the ways to achieve this is to create the public perception that al-Qaeda is losing. As long as the analytical community does not let this public perception cloud its judgment, I’m all for it. (Incidentally, I do think 2007 and 2008 have been rotten years for al-Qaeda in the Middle East proper.)

Scheuer’s assertion that the Saudis are leading a “project” to push this idea and to distract the West from its support for Salafism is too conspiratorial. The U.S. stands to gain as much as the Saudis do from exposing al-Qaeda setbacks to public view. Moreover, I would look a little closer to home for the idea’s origin. Finally, what in the world is wrong with Saudi leaders reaching out to the pope and considering the building of a church in the kingdom?

As for Salafism and its spread, there is less coherence to the movement than Scheuer makes out. Salafism is an ecumenical, originalist, Protestant-like movement in Sunni Islam whose followers reject adherence to the four traditional schools of law. But under this wide rubric, you find a great deal of variety. Wahhabis (a better term for the followers of the official religious ideology of the Saudi state) and the Ahl-e Hadith in Pakistan are Salafis under my definition, but they have very different attitudes toward politics. And it’s the attitude toward politics that should concern analysts the most.

A further problem with the label “Salafi” is that it says little about a group’s beliefs or political orientation.  Many Sunni groups call themselves “Salafi” because the word signals that their beliefs are derived from Islam’s “pious founders” (Ar. salaf).  But that’s almost like of a Sunni calling himself an “authentic Muslim,” which doesn’t give you a good idea of his religious or political attitudes (Thomas Hegghammer has made this point elsewhere).  Take the Muslim Brothers in Kuwait for example.  They sometimes call themselves Salafis, but they are usually at odds with self-described Salafi political parties in that country.

As an aside, Salafis in Kuwait did not win a majority of seats in that country’s recent parliamentary elections, as Scheuer’s al-Ahram source asserts. They took 7 seats by my count.

Scheuer took this point and several others from op-eds written by Arab secularists. For someone who berates the Western media for accepting ideas from Arabs who have agendas, he might view his own sources with a little more skepticism. Lumping every Islamist into the same Salafi stew may make a complex phenomenon more digestible or satiate the reading public’s appetite for ubiquitous doom, but it is neither analytically accurate nor politically useful.

That’s how the New York Times sets up the Sageman/Hoffman argument today: Two powerful academics are feuding over whether al-Qaeda is a leaderless movement (Sageman) or a hierarchical terrorist organization (Hoffman). There are billions in federal dollars hanging in the balance. And best yet, the two guys can’t stand each other.

There’s a lot more agreement between Sageman and Hoffman than the Times piece portrays. Both men accept that there are grassroots Jihadi groups popping up without any operational connection to AQ and both men believe that AQ Central (Bin Laden, Zawahiri, et al) is alive and well in the FATA region of Pakistan. The main difference is over how strong AQ Central is and what relationship it has to those who fight in its name. In his latest book, Sageman says AQ Central is not that strong outside of Pakistan/Afghanistan and that it doesn’t have any operational links with groups or individuals outside the region. Hoffman disagrees, arguing that AQ Central does have these links and that it is planning and financing global operations again. My money is on Hoffman’s thesis; Abu Ubayda’s shenanigans should be proof enough.

The problem with Sageman’s thesis is that it is four years too late. It works very well in 2004 when AQ Central was on the run and grassroots groups were popping up. But it is incomplete today when we have both grassroots activism and a powerful AQ Central. What makes things difficult now is that the grassroots groups are reaching out to the mother ship.

As for Sageman’s why-me? posture in the Times article, puh-lease. In his books, Sageman dismisses entire fields of study with a flick of the pen, excoriating colleagues for their lack of scientific rigor. His fulminations would be tolerable if his own scientific practice were rigorous, but it’s not–his datasets are not easy to obtain, his coding of the data is idiosyncratic, and some of his strongest conclusions rest on weak evidence. This is what Hoffman is reacting to in his review of Sageman’s latest book and it is long overdue.

Sageman has a lot of very useful ideas, but they are hard to talk about when he is standing in the way:

Maybe he’s mad that I’m the go-to guy now.

Blech.

The meme going around the past few weeks is that al-Qaeda is on the ropes. One of the first places I saw it in the mainstream press was an LA Times story from April, the main themes of which have been echoed recently in the Bergen/Cruickshank and Wright pieces. The main evidence offered is that several hard-line religious scholars that used to support AQ have now renounced the organization. Awda (Saudi cleric), Hamid al-Ali (Kuwaiti cleric), Sayyid Imam (former head of Egyptian al-Jihad), and the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia are the most commonly cited personalities.

Michael Scheuer dissents (of course!), arguing that these scholars have either been co-opted, have an ax to grind, or are has-beens, so their criticism won’t matter to the Jihadis. In fact, Scheuer argues that the Jihadis are on the march:

these arguments are occurring in the context of the jihadis expanding in North Africa, the Levant, and Europe; effectively resisting U.S.-led military coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan; and winning elections every time one is held in the Arab world — Gaza, Egypt, Bahrain, and most recently in Kuwait.

There is something to the recent meme that Scheuer is missing: these attacks from former prominent supporters or fellow travelers are severely damaging the publics’ opinion of AQ, especially among educated Salafis. The books or letters written by Awda or Sayyid Imam are carefully formulated criticisms of AQ from within the classical Islamic tradition, not silly there-is-no-violence-in-jihad arguments. Moreover, these men have major names in the Jihadi-Salafi community and their earlier works are still much cited, so they have to be dealt with. Although Zawahiri dismisses their attacks in precisely the same way Scheuer does, he wrote a 188-page book in response to one of them, Sayyid Imam. And he released it only two months after Imam’s book came out. You do not write a book of that length and release it that fast if you are not worried. Since Scheuer is all about listening to the enemy, he should not be so quick to dismiss something Zawahiri takes so seriously.

That said, Scheuer is right that there is a little too much optimism about AQ’s impending doom. AQ may be collapsing in Iraq and losing the larger war for public sympathy, but it is still attracting recruits and expanding its operations on the margins of the Middle East–Algeria and Pakistan/Afghanistan.
It is also casting its eye on Yemen, Lebanon, and Gaza (good luck with the last two!).

In short, there are some positive signs that AQ is losing the war of perceptions (i.e. it looks like a loser right now), but it is still quite strong.

One final note: Scheuer’s suggestion that the recent electoral successes of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the Salafis in Kuwait constitute jihadi expansion is wrongheaded. What does the U.S. stand to gain by lumping democratically-elected MB and Salafi candidates in with AQ? The U.S. should be looking for ways to increase the political participation of these groups while identifying local variations between them that can be used to the advantage of the U.S. and to the detriment of AQ.