Counterterrorism Beyond Shock and Awe, Part I

December 15, 2007

George McFadden

Almost six years after the September 11 attacks, seven years after the USS Cole attack, nine years after the bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, 14 years after the first World Trade Center attack, 24 years after the Beirut embassy and Marine barracks bombings, and 28 years after the Iranian revolution, we are still groping to come to terms with a set of adversaries that grows increasingly lethal with every passing year. Like Gulliver, we find ourselves held hostage by what policy makers thought were weaker, inferior adversaries. Despite our strength, we have been unable to marshal all the elements of national power – diplomatic, economic, information, and military - effectively, preferring to rely on military strength to defeat seemingly weaker enemies. If using all the instruments of U.S. national power is like conducting an orchestra, we are trying to play a symphony with only the percussion section in executing the war against extremists and terrorists.

Judged in light of achieving strategic and tactical objectives, our primary reliance on hard military power has been a failure by most measurements. Iraq is bringing chaos to the region, Afghanistan is lawless without an effective government, Al-Qaida’s leadership is still out there, and a violent, religious-based ideology is gaining more adherents by the day throughout the world, including in Western countries. This is certainly not to question the significant role and successes of the military in the greater war against the terrorists and extremists we now face. But we are obviously witnessing the limits of military power as we know it.

These limitations were exemplified by the fanfare with which the “shock and awe” doctrine was promoted as the basis of our strategy in the run up to the Iraq war. The term “shock and awe” has become synonymous with the use of overwhelming force, especially massive bombardment, since it was trumpeted as an innovative military strategy at the beginning of the Iraq war. Coming on the heels of an impressive projection of military power in Afghanistan in 2001, it held forth high hopes that the Iraq war could be won quickly and with a minimum of troops on the ground. Harland Ullman, the former naval officer and professor at National Defense University who is a coauthor of the concept along with James Wade, now says that the term was misunderstood and erroneously described by the press at the time. He says that the strategy actually involves doing anything to undermine the enemy’s will and achieve rapid domination and victory. Almost any tactic can be employed, from psychological operations to the rapid seizure of key military, social, communications and commercial targets. In addition to impressive uses of force, the “aim is to convince the majority that resistance is futile by targeting and harming the few.” But even given that clarified definition, this assumes expertise that goes far beyond the military’s core competencies and puts it in a stressful position operationally.

Ironically, Ullman and Wade’s book by the same name that first portrayed the shock and awe concept also explained its weaknesses. In one particularly prophetic passage, the authors described one of its weak points as “its major dependence on intelligence. One must be certain that the will and perceptions of the adversary can be manipulated. The classic backfire is the adversary who is not impressed and, instead, is further provoked to action by the unintended actions of the aggressor.” This brings us to our current impasse in our approach to a war against terrorists and extremists, with its over-reliance on a single instrument of power.

We should make no mistake about the nature of our adversary. Militant radical Islam, foremost amongst the adversaries we now face, is a mass movement of the first order and, as mass movements go, it makes communism look like a parlor game. Communism at least had to meet a set of logic tests that it ultimately failed. While it celebrated the masses and offered a powerful narrative and social critique, it ultimately foundered on delivering real world solutions to survival level needs.

Militant radical Islam is revolution ordained by God and carried out for religious and political gain. As such, it glosses over any lapses of logic by declaring divine mandate. And benefits need not be delivered in this world. By invoking an afterlife with infinite rewards, failure to deliver in this world is easily explained away. By playing to the same survival level needs, militant radical Islam avoids the real world pitfalls of communism and effects a powerful resonance by exploiting the most basic wants and beliefs of its target audiences. Doing so allows it to achieve comprehensive social and cultural depth at all strata of society to advance its political agenda, making it a powerful faith-based mass movement. By manipulating and appealing to religious identity, it transcends the nation-state framework in which we are bound. It involves mainstream believers who otherwise would not share the militants’ aims and promotes resistance identities under the cloak of religion. Once this appeal gains traction, it is only a small step to making the case that a war against Islam is being waged by any number of coalitions of unbelievers led by the West, especially, but not limited to, the United States, as governments in Europe, Africa, and Asia have discovered.

There are those who argue that this adversary presents no real danger as it cannot field enough force to do us real harm, compared with our former Soviet foes. These arguments are usually made by those with a cold war frame of reference who are accustomed to thinking in terms of nuclear megatonnage and orders of battle that can be used to calculate how many Soviet tanks would thunder through the Fulda Gap. They have not fully assimilated the nature of this adversary and what enables the powerful asymmetry it represents. Their former Soviet counterparts probably labor under no similar illusion, having twice been humbled by this “inferior” adversary – once in Afghanistan and again in Chechnya.

We have not yet come to a clear calculation of the new orders of battle in this new type of war. Our adversaries are clearly ahead of us in this regard for they know us better than we know them. This is evidenced by public pronouncements by Osama bin Laden and his fellow executives of Al-Qaida, Inc. and subsequent results on the ground. They have taken the measure of the United States and other Western powers, and they know the greatest weaknesses that they can use, like jujitsu masters, to make us defeat ourselves.

In 1996, in an interview with Abdel Bari Atwan, the managing editor of the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Qods Al-Arabi, bin Laden made a telling remark. “We want to bring the Americans to fight us on Muslim lands,” he said. “If we can fight them on our own territory we will beat them, because the battle will be on our own terms in a land they neither know nor understand.”

In another example, articulated more recently in his pronouncement released before the presidential elections in November, 2004, bin Laden speaks of the “bleed until bankruptcy” strategy. “And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujahidin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan…” This part of the adversary’s strategy seems to be working as the total costs of the war now approaches $1 trillion. But this approach involves more than defense expenditures.

The most serious challenge to our wellbeing is Al-Qaida’s repeated threat to use “the oil weapon” against the West by attacking oil facilities. In a statement issued on February 8 of this year in an on-line publication by Al-Qaida in the Arabian peninsula, the threat was expanded from attacking oil facilities in Saudi Arabia to attacking facilities internationally, including in the western hemisphere. This, coupled with the Ahmedinajad government’s stated intent to attack oil shipping going through the Straits of Hormuz in the event of war, and the ongoing instability in Nigeria, now makes national energy policy inseparable from national security policy. A wholesale and sustained disruption of oil supplies would change life as we know it. And Sunni militant radical Islamic groups, their Iranian fellow travelers, Nigerian nationalists, and grandstanders such as Hugo Chavez know this. It is at this intersection and others that these disparate groups of adversaries find common cause. Yet we have lived under this same sword of Damocles since the 1970’s. After the fall of the Shah, shipping disruptions in the Straits of Hormuz were also a danger, and earlier oil embargoes hobbled the U.S. and Europe. We have done little about it in the intervening years so it is no wonder bin Laden and company target our energy addiction as part of their grand strategy. Their return on investment would be phenomenal.

Some of the same social and economic issues that drove communism are now more effective grist for our current adversaries’ mill. There has been considerable debate during the past decade, for example, about the relationship between poverty and terror. A number of researchers and social scientists have been quick to point out that the 911 hijackers and other high-profile terrorists came from middle class families and had been raised among the best social classes in their societies. Many held advanced degrees and had benefited from Western educations. Mohammad Atta, for example, studied urban planning in Germany, and Aymin Al-Zawahiri, Al-Qaida’s second in command, was a successful middle class pediatrician in his native Egypt.

This argument ignores other terrorists, such as the Moroccan suicide bombers who struck in May 2003 and again in March 2007, all of whom came from Sidi Moumen, the largest shantytown in the country. Similarly, many Moroccan militants involved in the Madrid bombings and numerous suicide bombings in Iraq came from a ten-block area of the poor Jamia Mezouak quarter in the northern Moroccan town of Tetouan.

One of the most cynical examples of this type of equal opportunity terrorist exploitation of the poor also occurred in Morocco in 2003 when police arrested two 13 year-old twin girls, Sanaa and Imane Laghrissi, who were planning to undertake suicide bombings in Rabat. One sister planned to blow herself up in the liquor department of a large supermarket and the other aimed to kill King Mohammed VI as he entered parliament to give that year’s opening day’s address. Recruited for these operations in the slum where they lived in desperate poverty, they went to an imam of a local mosque to get his blessing. Though no shrinking violet himself as he was reported to have recruited volunteers to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, he saw the excess in this case and called the police. The twins were tried and sentenced to five years in prison. In 2005, they received a royal pardon from the king, who saw no wisdom in further punishing two obvious victims of circumstance.

Four suicide bombings in the center of Algiers in April and December 2007 that targeted the Algerian prime minister’s office, the country’s highest court, other governmental and UN offices, were also carried out by operatives who emerged from the underclass in that country. In the most recent December attacks, one of the suicide bombers was 64 years old, showing Al-Qaida’s multigenerational appeal and its ability to adapt and evolve, thus working around security profiles. Indeed, the pan-Arab news daily Asharq Alawsat ran a news item earlier that prophetically described a fatal flaw in Algeria’s amnesty program for Islamic militants that was part of a larger national reconciliation effort undertaken by that country’s government to stem the violence. The militants who accepted the offer, and others who were earlier imprisoned and released as part of the initiative, sat idly unemployed as jobs programs for them failed to materialize. Some of these experienced militants are now heeding Al-Qaida’s siren song as it franchises in North Africa under a new umbrella organization, Al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb – the organization that claimed responsibilities for the April suicide attacks.

Abu Musab Zarqawi, who became our chief al-Qaida nemesis in Iraq, was another prominent exception to the “poverty doesn’t cause terrorism” hypothesis. Although his father was a minor civil servant, the circumstances of Zarqawi’s upbringing could hardly be called well-to-do. His youth was spent as a juvenile delinquent who led a life more akin to an L.A. gang member than a militant political extremist. There are other examples as well but we tend to focus on a small group of terror leaders whose background information we have ready access to.

There is little doubt that poverty, political repression, and lack of opportunity form the soil in which violent extremist movements thrive. With swelling urban populations - which now equal rural populations globally for the first time in history according to the UN – and under-25 youth bulges, countries in the Islamic world have well educated young people with little to do. These young people populate Al-Qaida’s waiting room - the fewer the opportunities, the greater their risk. Once ideologies like this take root in these settings, they will be almost impossible to drive out.

The leadership of militant Islamic groups, like other past and contemporary terrorist groups, does draw heavily from the more prosperous segments of society but to characterize these groups and all their supporters as all coming from such backgrounds speaks more to our thought processes than it does to the reality. Even those well-to-do leaders come from societies mired in poverty linked to extreme inequitable distribution of wealth. Susceptible to feelings of “vicarious poverty” (a term suggested by Marc Sageman who has conducted exhaustive research into Islamic terrorists’ backgrounds), they want to do something to improve their own societies, but are checked by the corrupt control exerted by brutal dictatorships and absolute monarchies that hold sway in almost every country in the Islamic world. Many who spend time in Western countries, often as students, are constantly reminded of the inequities in their home regions. In unfamiliar surroundings, disoriented by what they see around them, they gravitate to familiar settings of mosques and Islamic organizations where promoters of radicalism, cloaked as altruists and faith-based activists, look for “cognitive openings,” or chinks in one’s psychological armor, that can be exploited for the recruitment process. Immigrant children in diasporas are similarly vulnerable, as researcher Quintan Wiktorowicz documented in seminal work Radical Islam Rising: Muslim Extremism in the West. Mohammed Atta and many of the 911 hijackers started on this path in Hamburg, Germany and followed it to New York, Washington, and Shanksville.

This primary adversary we face has a long and cherished tradition of systematic organization, agitprop, and activism at all levels. For example, many prominent Islamic militants and their organizations had their origins in the Muslim Brotherhood. Founded by Egyptian schoolteacher Hassan Al-Banna in 1928 in reaction to the decline of Egyptian society under colonial rule, it began as a social activist movement designed to adapt Islam to the modern world as well as provide social services and personal development for its members and their communities. As an answer to secular Western ideologies gaining ground at the time, Al-Banna carefully crafted a system for organizing, setting objectives, and accomplishing goals all in keeping with the tenets of fundamentalist Islamic belief. He devised the organization to be self-funding and emphasized use of the latest in communications technology and organizational theory. The Brotherhood organized at all levels of society by ministering to the poor and organizing professional and trade groups including teachers, doctors, lawyers, and engineers. By doing so, it achieved unprecedented social and cultural depth to advance political goals. The Brotherhood was later used to check atheistic communist influence by governments who believed they could manipulate the religious approach to their own ends.

The Brotherhood organization later grew a militant wing and gradually spawned offshoots and ideologically different splinter groups throughout the Islamic world. The late University of Michigan professor and researcher Richard Mitchell wrote the definitive history of the early Brotherhood in the 1960’s and reading it explains how modern Islamic terror groups can be at once anchored in 7th century fundamentalist interpretations of Islam while using modern technology and organizational skills to utmost advantage in the modern world. It is therefore not surprising that Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden, Aymin Al-Zawahiri, Abu Qatada, Omar Bakri and many other luminaries of modern militant radical Sunni Islam started out in its ranks. They are using a proven system brought to a militant extreme. And it has an added benefit – it has grown and adapted to operating under the most repressive regimes in the world, learning to fly beneath the radar of ruthless security services that have tried unsuccessfully to eliminate it for the past 60 years. Indeed, Al-Banna himself was assassinated by Egyptian secret police. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was hammered by Hafez Al-Assad’s forces in the town of Hama in February 1982 as part of an operation to destroy it that resulted in over 20,000 casualties. The subsequent flight of surviving militants throughout the Islamic world and to Europe was a major factor in the increase and spread of militant radical Islam globally. One of the most fervent advocates of the use of extreme violence in the cause of Islamic resistance and global jihad – Abu Musab al-Suri, the author of the Call to Global Islamic Resistance -- a voluminous body of work on violent global jihad -- is one such refugee of the Hama crackdown who sought safety in Spain and then went on to Al-Qaida’s camps in Afghanistan. The group lives on in both Egypt and Syria - a testament to its ability to adapt and survive.

George McFadden is a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and a former Peace Corps volunteer who served in Morocco