 He holds a master's and a PhD from the University of Chicago. We're very thrilled to have Seth here this afternoon or this evening to talk about his book Waging Insurgent Warfare and also to just give us his perspective on contemporary events and I was lucky enough to sit down this afternoon with Seth and grill him on his views about a range of issues relating to terrorism insurgency, which unfortunately is in the news a little all too often at the moment. We're running over, so I'll leave it at that and let Seth come up and begin his talk. Please welcome him. Thank you for those overly kind words. It's a pleasure to be here. Walking around campus earlier today and seeing such a lovely campus did bring me back to my PhD days at the University of Chicago with a slight difference. For those of you who have been to University of Chicago, you may have seen the t-shirts that go around campus on the front. It says University of Chicago and on the back. It says where fun comes to die. I'm pretty sure that same motto is not actually used here on campus. Such a beautiful place. And then one other comment actually before I begin, I realize we're sort of at an after dinner hour. So if you do feel the need to close your eyes and concentrate on my words, I'll take that as a sign actually of concentration and we'll do this together this evening. Before I begin, I just at least wanted to let you know in case you were not aware that since October of 2014 ran and I direct the International Security and Defense Policy Center there, has an office here. We do an increasing amount of work in Australia. I have a base here in Canberra and look forward to continuing to engage on multiple topics. About 50% of Rand's work is on national security. The rest of it is on a range of other issues, health, education, population, economic issues. So we are proud to be a broader member of the community here and look to continue to grow. So we consider us a neighbor in the city. My talk today is going to focus more on, I'm going to use the term Islamic State. I realize we have lots of terms, Daesh, ISIL, ISIS. I'm happy to go into that later. I'll use for the purposes of this talk Islamic State. I'm going to focus mostly on that aspect. I can go into other aspects of the book. I look at 181 insurgencies in that book. And the book really focuses on a whole range of issues of how, when insurgent groups have succeeded, why have they succeeded? What strategies have they used? Tactics, organizational structures, information operations, how they get insurgencies going from the beginning and look at how they end. The book includes a range of methodologies from primary source work to a large end regression analysis that looks at how insurgencies end and what factors contribute to it. I'm happy to go into a lot of that on the Q&A side, but I'm going to really focus on issues related to the Islamic State and some of the implications in part because it has such an important policy impact today, including in Australia and what we see going on in other parts of the world, including recent attacks in France. But I wanted to start out with a little bit of an anecdote because I think it gives us a sense of what we're dealing with. I'm going to start with a woman named Mina Justice. She was a mother, still is a mother down in Florida in Orlando, Florida. And she was asleep on the night of June 12, 2016. She receives a text from her son. Her son's name is Eddie. Eddie was inside a nightclub that many of you probably know now called Pulse in Orlando. He had taken refuge. Eddie had taken refuge in the bathroom as Omar Mateen who had just pledged allegiance to the Islamic State starts his shooting spree. And his first text that he sends to his mother is, Mommy, I love you. It was 206 AM. And then he texts in the club, they shooting. She tries to call him. There's no answer. He had turned off the ringer on his cell phone for obvious reasons, for security reasons. And then she taps, she taps out a response to him. This is all by text. She says, are you okay? At 207, he responds a minute later that he's trapped in the bathroom. She asks which club he responds. Pulse, downtown, call the police. Then at 208 AM, two minutes after the first text, he writes what is probably the most horrifying part of the whole texting. And he says to his mother, I'm going to die. He writes that he's in the bathroom. And then the next couple of texts, he's coming. I'm going to die. She asks her son if anyone was hurt, in which bathroom he's in. He says, lots. Yes. This is now 242, so about 40 minutes after the first text began. And then his last text is a 250. He says, he's a terrorist. Then there's no more response. Eddie Justice 30 was killed along with 48 others that night by Omar Mateen, who had pledged allegiance. Various forms of texts like that have occurred in Istanbul, in Paris, in Brussels, in Ottawa, in Garland, Texas, in Australia, in Jakarta. Individuals that have either been inspired by or, in a few cases, have been organized by the Islamic State. The talk that I'm going to give tonight, though, looks at trends. And the question is, in part, trying to set aside straight-up policy issues. Analytically, what do we see going on with the Islamic State? The data sources that I'll use in making the argument are, look at writings and captured documents of the Islamic State, some field visits that I've been into the Middle East, Asia, including South Asia and Africa. So you'll see where I bring those in as part of the talk. And then a look at the 181 insurgencies, these that I've coded since 1945 to give a sense of what factors have contributed to the defeat of groups. My outline will consist of three parts. I'm going to start off with the current struggle and future trends. Then I'll get into lessons from past counterinsurgencies. And then I'll end with a note of caution. Let me start off with the struggle and what we see now. For those of you who pay close attention to this, there's been considerable debate about the strengths and weaknesses of the Islamic State. Some argue that the Islamic State poses little or no threat. John Mueller, a good friend of mine as a political scientist in the US, argues that its numbers are small. He argues that the annual risk of dying in a terrorist attack or at one point recently was 1 in 3.5 million, according to his calculations. Much, one is much more likely to die in traffic accidents, routine homicides, natural disasters, industrial accidents, and even, surprisingly, drowning in a bathtub. One is more likely to die than a terrorist attack. Others have argued, David Kilcullen, that what we see with both the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda that the West more broadly faces in David's words, quote, a larger, more unified, capable, experienced, and savage enemy than we have ever seen. So how do we find an answer here? Which one of these or some combination is it with the Islamic State? Is it weaker? Is it stronger? What I'd like to look at is what is some of the data that we have compiled suggest? But before I do it, I do want to talk for a moment briefly about ideology, because I do think it's worth looking at when you note the ideology of the group. Its goal has been very clearly since 2014, I would argue, expansion. Expansion not just in the Al-Sham area, but more broader into West, North, East Africa, into South Asia, and into the Pacific. And if you go back to the days of the taking of Mosul in 2014, we see in Islamic State spokesman issuing a proclamation calling for, Baghdadi has done this as well, a Pan-Islamic caliphate. And he says, at that point, that the son of Jihad has risen, the glad tidings of goodness have shown forth, triumph looms on the horizon, the signs of victory have appeared, hear the black flag of the Islamic State, the flag of monotheism rises and flutters. It is a dream that lives in the depths of every believer. It is a hope that flutters in the heart of every Mujahid monotheist. It is the caliphate. Now the caliphate has returned. We see this push for expansion. And I think what we see, and why I would, at least at various points, call this an insurgent group, is territory becomes an important component for the Islamic State. It's important to establish a state like apparatus. It's important to collect money, finances. If you look at the way the Islamic State has collected money in areas they control, territorial control is absolutely critical. Unlike groups like Al-Qaeda that have received funds from wealthy donors in the Gulf, the Islamic State has used its control of territory to establish the vast majority of funds, whether it's oil refineries, whether it's smuggling operations, whether it's a range of other ways, including kidnapping that they have gotten money. So territory is important. But as we look across several different indicators, how do we measure their strength and weakness, and what does that tell us about trends going forward? I'm going to look today at four different aspects of trying to gauge strength or weakness of the Islamic State. And what you'll see is a mixed picture. But I do think it's important to lay this out. The first one is expansion of branches. So I would say as we look at the Islamic State today, we see four rough components of the group. First, we see the core area in Iraq and Syria. The central part, it's the Al-Sham. It's where it has created its primary organizational structure to control territory, including its general governing committee, and its state-like structures of Diwan's or ministries and Bulaia's or administrative districts that span both Iraq and Syria. It's Diwan's issue directives and are organized into such areas as war-fighting, agricultural, finance, justice, health, education, natural resources. You haven't taken a look at them. We've seen over the past few years much more primary source information on the organizational structure of the Islamic State that have come out and it's been declassified as former capture documents and put online through the counterterrorism centers at West Point. It's Harmony Database, which provides now very large amounts of primary source information on the Islamic State. So you can see spreadsheets of how they have organized themselves, how they kept track of money. So that Syria-Iraq region has become important, certainly important as the core. Second, we see a series of formal branches today. And I think what we're seeing when you look at this is an expansion over the past two years. In 2014, we saw formal branches and when I use this term, I'm talking about these organizations that pledge Bayat allegiance to the Islamic State to Baghdadi and Baghdadi in return. And this becomes important, formally accepts their pledges. So in 2014, we saw Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria with the formal Bayat and then the receipt. And then in 2015, caucuses, the AFPAC region, Nigeria with Boko Haram. So we're seeing an expansion of formal branches. We also see a number of aspiring branches and those are areas where some of these groups seen it with Abu Sayyaf as well, pledged Bayat to Baghdadi, but we don't have a formal response yet. And it looks like the Islamic State has at least back in Syria and Iraq has made a range of decisions in some cases not to accept at least for the moment formal pledges. So we see elements in Somalia, the Philippines, Turkey, Bangladesh, Mali, Tunisia and other areas of more informal branches. But again, over the past two years we've seen an expansion of both formal and informal branches. And then a fourth category of what I would call inspired individuals and incipient networks. These are networks that have no connection other than their involvement in social media. And in particular, we've looked at the role of Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Telegram, ask.fm and Twitter as among the most important social media outlets for reaching to these inspired individuals and networks. And we've seen growing numbers of attacks from these kinds of individuals, again with no direct connection at all. We've seen a formal push to establish more of these from the Islamic State's Directorate of Remote Provinces which indicates that I do have a formal way of doing this. But I would say as I sort of try to summarize first area we have seen an expansion in their informal and formal structures over the past two years since 2014, which brings me to a next category. So if we're seeing an expansion in those cell structures and groups, both formal and informal, what about control of territory? It's an important part of the Islamic State as I noted earlier. Where do we see freedom of movement? Where do we see control of territory or freedom of movement? We've looked at various ways to code this. The term I'm gonna use instead of control, which I think is probably an overreaching what they're doing in certain areas, is freedom of movement. I would define it as areas in which Islamic State fighters are permanently or mostly permanently garrisoned in villages or cities or at least nearby and operate freely during most or all times of day and night, building off of some of the work that Stathis Kalevis at Yale and several others have done on freedom of movement and control. To assess that, we've done site visits to a number of these countries. We've looked at geographic terrain and used GIS coding. We've also used the gridded population of the world GPW dataset prepared by NASA's socio-economic data and application center to look at population numbers. Why do I say this? Because then the question is starting in 2014, in each of these areas, what are we seeing in terms of freedom of movement in some of the key places? The areas that I'll talk a little bit about where they have controlled or tried to control territory include Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Libya and Nigeria. So what do we see trends? The big takeaway as we look at it is a decline in territorial control or freedom of movement. But we're seeing an increase in that first category of branches and informal branches. We're seeing a decrease in territorial control. They're losing their control of territory. By our account in Syria and Iraq, the core area, about a 36% decline in square kilometers between 2014 and the spring of 2016 and a 49% decline in population in those areas. So 36% in territory, 49% in population. Those are pretty decent size numbers in Iraq. It's pretty serious declines in Sinjar, Beji, Tikrit, Ramadi, Fallujah more recently to a combination of local and allied forces including airstrikes by Australian forces as well as local Sunni, Shia, Kurdish militia groups on the ground. Syria, we also see a similar decline, particularly in northern Eastern Syrian provinces of Raqqa and Aleppo in large part due to airstrikes and Kurdish and Arab, including Assad ground force efforts. In Afghanistan, we also see a pretty notable decrease in territorial control from 2015 numbers in particular where they had some territory in Helmand and Farah provinces and they've largely lost it, largely due to Taliban efforts against them. And we now see a shrunk into mostly in Nangahar province in the East. Nigeria, we've seen a decrease in control or freedom of movement. This is Boko Haram, thanks in part to military operations by Nigerians, Chad, Cameroon, Niger and some locals. They've Boko Haram forces have retreated up into areas like if you've been up in there in the Mandara Mountains along the Nigerian Cameroon border. And then finally in Libya and Egypt, we've seen in Libya probably a slight decline, insert where they have lost some neighborhoods recently. Egypt, it's very small. Anybody who's been to the Sinai areas around where the Islamic State has the checkpoints there are mostly Egyptian government run anyway, but there is what was unsurpassed by Dalmatis. Now the Sinai, Islamic State Sinai has does have some freedom of movement in the area around Arish and then a few other places near the Gaza Strip, but it's pretty small. I think overall on the control or freedom of movement, we've seen a pretty notable decline of territory. Again, in particular in the Iraq and Syria contexts. Third is pattern of violence. And this is gonna be very interesting because we see a range of different things on patterns of violence. And then I'll try to summarize it in a moment. So Islamic State's primary means to expand its freedom of movement is the use of violence. And there are a couple of trends that I wanted to highlight. One is that we've seen different types of uses of violence. In the early phases in 2014, it was largely conventional strategies and tactics that shifted when airstrikes started occurring to more guerrilla tactics. And it's increasingly shifted to terrorist targeting that is targeting of civilians. Second, the aggregate number of attacks by the Islamic State's core and its branches has increased somewhat markedly between 2014 and 2016, which brings me to kind of the irony here is that what we see is a decline in territorial control but an increase in violence levels. There may be many reasons why this is occurring. Historically insurgent groups have often ramped up terrorist attacks for several reasons to attempt to coerce foreign forces by punishing civilians in their home countries, which is why we may see greater numbers of attacks in Europe, for example, to bait foreign governments into overreacting, to enact revenge against governments that are adversaries. And in some cases, just because it's easier to conduct some of these terrorist attacks against civilians than it is conventional operations against better equipped and better armed forces. In terms of numbers, 2015 was a banner year for the Islamic State. The number of attacks exploded. And this is sort of the third important issue on violence levels, is we've seen an expansion and the scope of violence. So not just numbers, but areas with growing numbers of attacks across Europe into France, obviously Denmark, Turkey, Russia, the US, Australia, and I'm including inspired attacks of people who are doing this in the name of, though even if the organization wasn't done out of Iraq or Syria, including the Orlando attack that I mentioned earlier. So again, it's sort of an interesting pattern here, higher levels of violence at the same time that their territorial control is declining. And then a fourth area is popular support. What we're seeing in popular support, data is not great in some of these countries, but with the available evidence, at least that I've looked at, in general, by far the most important conclusion from available polling data is the overwhelmingly negative and increasingly negative views of the Islamic State in the Arab world, declining almost across the board in countries where polling is taking place. And it's being done for a number of reasons. So again, we see some interesting combinations. We see declining control of territory would appear to be declining popular support in areas they are operating in, but we see increasing numbers of attacks and increasing areas where they're conducting attacks. So what I would say overall to conclude the group is changing before our eyes from an insurgent group that seizes and holds territory to a increasingly active terrorist group that holds little ground, but is more active in targeting civilians. And again, how this plays out in the future will be quite interesting, that's kind of, it looks like, based on a range of those factors, what we see. Now, a couple of things that I wanted to note in looking at historical cases about the Islamic State is what factors have contributed to the defeat of insurgent groups and what does this mean? So based on that assessment of where we sit right now, what are some of the factors? I'm gonna highlight three here on factors that have contributed to the defeat of insurgent groups, including ones like the Islamic State. First, and I'll go to Mao because I think he was right here, is that political considerations overseas have generally driven successful counterinsurgency efforts. Klausovitz himself argues, I think, quite rightly that the political object will be the standard for determining the aim of the military force and also the amount of effort to be made. Just as relevant for counterinsurgency warfare as it is for conventional warfare. Mao said, without question, the fountainhead of guerrilla warfare is in the masses of the people. The focus, I think then, and a major focus moving forward should then be addressing the political and other grievances that have allowed the Islamic State to secure support in areas that we are talking about. And this is one of the most significant concerns I think we have is that the military efforts to degrade their territorial control in virtually all the areas I spoke about are moving much faster than political efforts to address grievances. Iraq is one of the many cases in point where we have declining territorial control but virtually all of the reasons that Sunnis either tacitly or strongly supported either the Islamic State, JRTN, or any of the groups operating in Anbar, those grievances have not been adequately addressed. There are still deep seated concerns about a government that they believe is too closely tied to Iran, that is too closely tied and too closely supportive of Shia and a whole range of other grievances that those of you who are Iraq experts I'm sure can expound on. We can talk about similar issues in Syria, in Libya and in other areas. The point being that until political considerations are dealt with more effectively, it is hard to see success against this group staying entrenched. A second issue is ideology in virtually all cases where we have seen insurgent groups defeated on the battlefield. The ideology has been significantly countered, successfully countered to the degree where they just don't have people effectively supporting them. And one of the statistically significant findings from at least the quantitative data we looked at is one variable that does appear to be correlated with insurgent defeat is the use of what I would call a punishment strategy and punishment tactics. This is, we've seen groups in the past, GIA in Algeria, target large numbers of civilians. The Islamic State is one of the most violent organizations that has targeted civilians that we have seen. This is likely based on past cases, is likely a very serious problem for the Islamic State in the future. It has not been willing to change this, its use of these kinds of strategies and tactics punishment. And I think over the long run we have seen that an effective campaign we saw with Algeria to highlight these issues can severely undermine popular support for groups that use this. But I think I would just, I'm gonna highlight a few things that I think have not been done particularly well across many of our governments, including here in Australia. And I think we have collectively done a poor job of highlighting injustices done by this organization, done by the Islamic State, by primary source individuals. I am not convinced and look in our analysis on the debates that happen on Twitter and other social media forums that governments doing this has much legitimacy at all. But what we do see in past cases is some of the most effective counter ideological efforts come from defectors that were members of the organization or those who had to live under these type of organizations. So populations that lived in villages in this case that were under the control of the Islamic State that can talk about what life was like publicly on television in newspapers. And we all collectively live in a society that how do we treat individuals that defect from these organizations? We put them in jail. We may recruit a small number of them but we generally put them in jail. I would say we have got to think of ways of allowing people to speak about their time under Islamic State control or in some cases defectors to talk about what life was like as they were members of the organization. There are interesting examples from people that have defected from gangs and the willingness to do that. But I don't think we have effectively put together a campaign that deals with that. And then finally on military efforts. And I think we have learned lessons collectively in dealing with groups like this. You don't do it with large numbers of conventional forces in general, if you're gonna assist, you're gonna assist legitimate local partners and you generally do it with small numbers, mostly special operations type forces and intelligence units and you're basically building capacity at a local level on the military side. We've had challenges, but I wanted to point to one, one challenge in Somalia, a place where I've been recently just to note some interesting strategies used with governments, in this case the Somali government that is very limited in its ability to function anywhere, even in Mogadishu. And on the military side, I mean the focus of many Western governments was to build a regional capacity. It's what it's the African Union mission in Somalia, Amazon that has been at the focal point of taking back territory from Al Shabaab. So even in cases where the government is relatively weak, there have been interesting solutions, including from regional organizations like the African Union to try to take back on the military side territory from these organizations. But again, you don't deal with the ideology and the political aspects of it. These are only short-term solutions and I think we may be seeing that with a return in territorial control from Al Shabaab. Let me just conclude with two words of caution and then I'll wrap up. First, it is without a doubt likely to be a long war if you look at the number of insurgencies in the Cold War that were Marxist-Leninists supported, Soviet-based, between 1946 and about 1988, between 40 and 60% of all insurgencies were communist, Marxist-Leninist, at least by my data. After the end of the Cold War, they've gone down to very small numbers and we've seen at the same time a major increase in extremist Islamic insurgencies. By 2016, 50% of insurgencies globally have groups that espouse an extremist Islamic component to it. So we have, I don't know if we've peaked, but we're in the middle of that era and I think based on those trends, I think we're likely to see this has lasted for at least 20 years so far, depending on when you count the beginning. I think we're likely to see this to last for at least another decade or two, if not potentially longer. And then again, second, on words of caution, and I mentioned this earlier, I would suspect we've seen this with other groups that as the Islamic State continues to lose territory, it will most likely ramp up its levels of violence. I noted some reasons why groups have done this in the past, so I expect to see that in the future. And we see innovative styles of attacks in the West now. We see the NISA attacks, you don't need to pick up a gun, you can drive a truck through a parade area. We've seen improvised explosive devices using ingredients that one can buy from various stores even in small quantities and putting them together. I think that's the area and the era we're now living in, sadly. So it's likely to get more violent before it calms down. But I think just to end on a positive note, if we can continue to shrink the territory control of this organization, figure out better ways. I've mentioned a few on the ideological front and focus a lot of our efforts on helping to deal with some of the political and economic grievances that are driving it, that we will to steal a phrase from US President Ronald Reagan that will reduce this organization, its ideology, and others like it to the dustbin of history. So I don't know how long that will take, but that is at least my aim. So I think along those notes I will stop and we will hand this over. Thank you for your presentation. I wonder if you could please comment on the initial funding. We saw phenomenal access to finances and resources when ISIS first appeared on the global radar. Could you comment on how they obtained those resources? Good question. And again, with groups like Al Qaeda, we saw a fair amount of money that had come in various years from wealthy golf donors, not necessarily state, but wealthy golf donors. With the Islamic State or Daesh, the funding is, we've seen as a couple of different types of funding. One is its involvement in smuggling operations. So stolen cars, for example, has been an important source of funding. Its seizure of oil and oil fields for some period of time was an important source of revenues of the Beji Oil Refinery, for example. And then taxes that have gone along with the selling of it, of oil. The seizure of banks as the Islamic State took areas including in Mosul, in Fallujah, is literally walking into banks and taking out large amounts of money. We've seen extortion, so that is in return for not blowing up telecommunications infrastructure. That you have to pay a tax on that. We've seen groups like the Taliban in Afghanistan, including in Ruzgan, where Australia operated to do similar things, call that extortion. So it's basically ransom for not blowing up infrastructure by companies. And then some kidnapping money as well. The challenge for them, though, as the territory has shrunk, their ability to tax has gone down, sees money from and make money off of oil has gone down somewhat. So the shrinking of territorial control has meant, and actually the targeting of bulk cash that the Islamic State has controlled, the targeting of bulk cash, I literally in some cases blowing up buildings that have held large amounts of bulk cash. They're trying to disperse that now. That's been, looks like it's been somewhat effective in undermining their amount of money, but they've got a lot of money. And there aren't many groups, I would say, as I look at insurgent terrorist groups that have had as much money. Hezbollah is one of the best examples, I think, of a group that has got a business model for how to make money, including with the drug business. The Islamic State has done pretty well in financing itself locally, though. So that's at least my take on how, we've done a lot of looking at the financing of the Islamic State. That's my take on how it's done it. You said the punitive strategies were highly correlated with ending insurgencies. Would you expand on what you coded as? Punishment strategies. Punishment strategies? So when a group uses a punishment strategy, and by punishment, so I would argue that there are a couple of different types of strategies groups have used, conventional strategies that is defeating their adversary, the government on a battlefield. Gorilla strategy, which is not defeating on the battlefield, but essentially targeting its will by ambushes and raids. And then punishment is it's not, you're not trying to defeat them on the battlefield or targeting their government forces through raids, but it's targeting the civilian population. We've seen conventional forces do this. We saw this in World War II and the targeting of German cities in Japan, including the firebombing in Tokyo. So this is the insurgent use of a punishment strategy. What appears to be the case is, and this is a statistical correlation, is that when groups have used punishment strategies, their odds of winning are negative. They generally lose. So what that tells me is, and there may be many reasons for it, again, correlation, not a causation, but as I've looked at some of these cases, what it looks like it's probably the case is when groups use a punishment strategy and target civilians, it undermines the very important local support that Mao talks about. So people don't like them. When you target large numbers of civilians, you're not building a positive morale and you need to groups. This is why when you look at Mao, Mao talked, he had his seven or so steps. When you go into somebody's house, you have to clean up after yourself. The Islamic State has done, the GIA in Algeria has done exactly the opposite. So that appears to be why those quantitative findings mean a punishment strategy generally leads to defeat in the end. That's all I'd argue. We've seen a very large effort in Saudi Arabia and Singapore at trying to de-radicalize members from IS and kind of bring them back from the threshold. How would you rate the kind of US efforts in the same kind of fields? Okay, the reason that's a hard question to answer is the data for answering that question is actually not very good. So one of the challenges is, I think as in Australia, there's been an increasing amount of funding that's gone into CVE programs. But I mean, I think this is where the academic community has a lot of value and the analytical community has a lot of value to add. What is the framework we're using to measure the effectiveness of these kinds of programs? I don't think we're collectively there yet. So we are spending money and we have programs along these lines. I don't think we have a good framework for measuring the effectiveness of the money we're spending on CVE programs. So the US is doing a range of things as part of its CVE efforts. How effective are they? It's really, I would say it's hard to gauge. The data is really unclear right now. One of the things that is a bit concerning is according to the Director of National Intelligence, Clapper, his testimony earlier this year in 2016, he noted that the FBI arrested 10 individuals that were either inspired or directly linked to the Islamic State for plotting attacks in 2014. That number jumped to 60 in 2015. We don't have a count yet for 2016, but it looks like it's gonna be 80, 90. So at the very least, what we're seeing is an increase in the number of plots linked directly or inspired by the Islamic State. Does that tell us that the programs are ineffective? I don't know, but it's not a good sign. So I mean, I do think in general that we don't see most of the communities in the limited polling that's been done in the US, most of the communities appear pretty happy in general, integrated, they vote, including some of the communities in Dearborn, Michigan, where there's been concern about radicalization as well as in some cities like New York. Most of the populations are, I think, much more integrated than what we see in areas of Europe, for example. So I think, the data's not real clear on giving you a good answer. So there does appear to be some contentment with life in the US, but we do see growing numbers of plots. So I don't entirely know how to square the circle. What I'd like to see is just better analytical work that looks at how effective these programs are to give us a better sense. Thanks. Can I ask you to look into the crystal ball a little bit with the continuing shrinkage of territory and population under Islamic State's control? Is the caliphate going to collapse completely, do you think? And if so, what do you think happens to the foreign fighters who've been there supporting it? Does that atomize the risk around the world as they all return home and wreak destruction in their home countries? And if I can push my luck with just one last one, please. Does Islamic State itself, can it survive without an Islamic State? And if not, what then happens to the group, its ideology and its followers, please? Okay, a couple of issues there. I'm not convinced, so I'm not on your first question about the caliphate. I'm not convinced we're close to a defeat of the caliphate right now. I think we have enough challenges in places like Libya where we are far from a political agreement. And in that case, then we will have opportunities for the group to at least hold some territory in some areas. Your foreign fighter question, can you remind me? So the question was if we were to see a significant decline in territorial control, what would we do, what we see with forward fighters? I mean, one of the interesting things actually, and I think many of us that have been asked to weigh in to the current Obama administration on Afghanistan, for example, and US numbers there. One of the issues that we have noted is that a worsening situation in some countries, Afghanistan would be one, Libya might be another, could act as new battlefields in the future. So my point is that we've already seen a decline quantitatively in foreign fighter flows to Iraq and Syria. I think that has now been pretty well established in late 2015 and early 2016, we saw that peak, probably 2015, we saw it peak, and we're seeing a decline in number of foreign fighters to those areas. But I would say if we get new opportunities for battlefields, whether it's Afghanistan, whether it's Libya, Somalia, if we see a resurgence of al-Shabaab, Philippines, I mean, for a while it looked like Abu Sayyaf and a range of groups had been largely defeated a couple of years ago, but I think there are now concerns in Indonesia and Malaysia and Philippines itself. So I do think there are opportunities for foreign fighters to go if they start to lose Iraq and Syria. And I think that challenge maybe we may get multiple battlefields and multiple opportunities for these groups to go. Can the Islamic State survive? Your last question, I would say this, if the political and economic and social issues that are driving conflicts in many of the countries we're seeing are not addressed, I think what we'll end up with is a 2.0 or a 3.0. I just find it hard to believe that if we can shrink the territory in Iraq and Syria, but we don't effectively address either the grievances of the Sunnis in Anbar or a number of folks in Syria that are not happy with the Assad government will have plenty of opportunities for militancy in those regions. So I think in that sense that the Islamic State or some successor organization could certainly survive. And I think that's the case I would argue in Libya, potentially in East Africa in various places in Yemen, certainly, so I don't see this one ending soon. Again, whether you have the overarching Islamic State that we have or it fractures into a range of decentralized organizations, that's a hard one to know. You know, people have, Bruce Hoffman in foreign affairs has argued, looked at the possibility of an Islamic State al-Qaeda merger at some point and what it might take for that to happen. You probably have Baghdadi die. I mean, you'd have to have change in successors, but there may be some interesting possibilities in the future. I'm interested in the analysis of writers like Sarah Chayes who would argue that the greatest asset these insurgencies have is the dysfunction of the governments in Afghanistan, in Iraq, which have a record of being tribally partisan, corrupt, and occasionally predatory, which is at the heart of all the grievances that you mentioned. What, if any, leave does the international community have to address these problem? That's a good question. Sarah's a good friend. I, that's a hard question to answer. There have been a lot of things that have been tried. I think some of the more successful, I mean, I'm not an economist or an expert on development, but I know in working this issue in Afghanistan, including with Sarah, the World Bank has tried a number of different levers in providing assistance based on certain conditions. There is a lot of pressure to clean up banking system in Kabul after the Kabul Bank crisis. So, part of the question is if your IMF or World Bank or your government's bilaterally funding, some of these kinds of governments doing it on a conditionality basis. So, various amounts of funding are provided based on demonstrated changes in improving the various issues you have identified. I actually think it's, you know, my own sense, even in Afghanistan, some of this has contributed to a slightly less corrupt government in Kabul. I mean, the, it's not a big change. It's still one of the most corrupt governments in the world, at least by transparency and World Bank data. But I think there may be efforts in providing financial assistance that you can do. Again, I'm not an expert in this area, so there may be banking experts here that have specific ideas along those lines. You know, there is one other issue that has been tried. I mean, there are a range of other issues that have been tried as well. And I know it's one that we looked at in Afghanistan, among others, is then minimizing the amount of money you're putting through at the national government level and pushing it into local levels. So, in about 2009, a lot of the funding from various governments, the percentage that went in through the Afghan government changed and a lot more went into villages, district level, government officials, and even provincial ones. So it escaped the corruption at the national level and just changing percentages. So I think there have been, you know, there are efforts worth taking a look at, but I think the broader issue is this does go to the point and I would agree that a lot of these issues drive insurgencies. And if you don't deal with them effectively, then you're not gonna deal with the problem in the long run. Militaries generally work much faster than our political bodies do. Richard, you said that their territory's decreasing, their violence is increasing, their funding may be decreasing. Is there any correlational data to suggest that they're then transferring more effort to cyberspace, to a remote influence, to spreading their message more electronically than physically? So as one set of conflict tools decreases, they're increasing the other cyberspace tools of conflict? I don't know that I don't see data that indicates an increasing use of cyber, for example, or social media, but I will note that they use that quite extensively. One of the things, if you look at al-Qaeda and the Arabian Peninsula for years had in the establishment of a magazine they called Inspire, had tried to inspire individuals to conduct attacks and did not have much success. After Bin Laden's death, Aiman Al-Sawahiri is not a very charismatic leader. They did not inspire many people to do it, but the Islamic State has been different. Their use of social media has been much more savvy. I don't know that they've increased it, I don't know how to gauge that, but what I will say is what we've looked at is they are very extensively, as I noted earlier, very extensive in their use of multiple social media forums. So we see that in, again, Ask.fm, we see it in Twitter, we see it in Myspace, we see it in a range of different activities. So I think in that sense, what we do see is very active use of social media for recruitment, financing, and general support. And they have definitely been more successful than their al-Qaeda brethren in inspiring people to do what we've seen in France, in Belgium, and other locations. So they are something about what they're doing on this platform is inspiring people to act in ways that we have not seen al-Qaeda, though they have tried to as well. I don't think it's as much of an increase, and I'm not sure we'll necessarily see an increase, but we will see a continuing focus on those kinds of forums. They're gonna have a hard time getting cells into the West, but they can inspire people. Thank you very much. In the last couple of years, we've seen the coalition that consists of over 60 nations around the world conducting severe airstrikes against Daesh or ISIL. However, these airstrikes were unsuccessful to a certain extent. Now, looking at these 60 nations fighting bunch of idiots on the ground and unable to defeat them, what are the alternative options that we can do in order to achieve a resolution where we can actually defeat this terrorist organization? Thank you. Good question. I wish there was an easy answer to that. I mean, I would say to push back a little bit that I think when you look at the reasons for the decline in territorial control, it's mostly been local forces that have done it, not the airstrikes. Airstrikes have, the issue with Daesh has done increasingly a better job of hiding from airstrikes, but where it's lost territory, it's been Kurdish forces in Iraq and Syria or local, the popular mobilization forces, or in some cases, Sunnis and Anbar pushing back against Daesh. So I do think this group wants to hold territory and I think the issue is that using local legitimate forces on the ground is an important component of taking territory away from them. Again, I would emphasize as we've talked about earlier that more focus and effort needs to be spent on addressing the challenges that we face on the political front too. So ideally for them to lose permanently that territory, they lose that territory on the ground to some degree, but the issues that are causing them to rise up are better addressed. Some of that's gonna have to be in Damascus, some of that's gonna have to be in Baghdad. It's hard for me to gauge how much we collectively are doing, but it's clearly not working in getting Baghdad to change its policies and how it deals with Sunni communities and provinces like Anbar. There's still a great degree of animosity. My concern is until those issues are dealt with, there are still ripe opportunities for territory to come back. One interesting example along these lines is Somalia where Amazon forces, Ethiopians, Kenyans, Ugandans, have taken back territory from Al-Shabaab. There have been virtually no efforts to deal with the social and economic grievances down in Southern Somalia. And now we see Al-Shabaab going from controlling 55% in 2010 to about 5% last year, probably up to eight or 9% this year, gives you a sense that we move in waves if we don't address these problems. So again, I'm gonna come back to this issue and you could look at Libya and say the same thing about the political negotiations. So again, my point would be to identify the grievances in these countries that are causing people to support, even if they're low numbers or at least angry and deal with them just as we're dealing on the military side. But I think they are losing ground. I just worry they're gonna regain it or someone will regain it at some point if we don't address these issues. One more. After this, we have time for one more. Okay, one more question after this. Thanks. Better be good. Just quickly, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit more about that polling. You mentioned levels of support. I guess it comes out of the sort of political point you're making, but yeah, in the countries where the branches are and the like. So what's the question is? So just if you could talk a bit more about that polling, you sort of mentioned it, but then you said the data wasn't that great, but you didn't sort of elaborate a lot more. Maybe who's conducting the polling? What's it sort of the questions they're asking? So we've looked at data from, for example, Pew Research in a range of various questions that have been asked over time about support for the Islamic State. And here's the issue. Is Islamic State support in a number of countries does appear to be declining where we have data? That the caveat is we don't have it in the number of the countries I'm talking about in key parts of Anbar. I haven't seen good recent polling data, so there are areas where we don't have it. But what we have is it looks like declining support for the Islamic State or Daesh in a number of areas, but we still have angry people on the ground. So again, I would also be a little careful in taking too much from the polling data because on the one hand, declining support for a group where people believe that it has not governed effectively in areas that it has controlled and it uses too much violence and targets too many civilians. But at the same point, we still do see large amounts of unhappiness with local governments and that continues to be the case. So it may be interesting to see whether we see support for Daesh at some point go back up if some of these issues aren't addressed. But the data I'm talking about is, so according to the Pew data I'm talking about, this is an April 2016 poll, support for Daesh is declining with nearly four and five. That is 78% rejecting the group outright, even if it were to change its tactics. Just 13% of young Arabs in a couple of these countries looked at, say they could see themselves supporting Daesh compared to 19% last year. So that's for the decline 19 to 13. According to Pew data, which looked at 11 countries with significant Muslim populations, we saw declines, firstly all of Lebanon, 99% of respondents expressed a very unfavorable opinion of the group and that included across the board, Sunni Muslims in Lebanon, Shia and obviously in Lebanese Christians as well. Jordan 94% were strongly opposed to the Islamic State and those numbers were stronger this past time that they conducted the poll from the time before. So most of these trends look like decreasing support. Again, with caveats that I have not seen good, maybe you have, pulling data in Syria. There's been some, I don't know how reliable it's been. So there are some gaps in pulling data. Hi, sorry, and thank you for the talk. Just you mentioned an interesting point about the Kurdish forces being far more successful in gaining territory. So I was just curious if you- And generally those are in Kurdish areas though. All right. I was just curious if you could elaborate on how do you see the question of Kurdish and Ben's evolving as a situation player in the near future. Kurdish independence. I am not an expert on Kurdish independence. What I will say though is it's been interesting to watch the effectiveness of Kurdish forces both in Syria and Iraq and a number of governments including the US willing to provide assistance to effective Kurdish forces on the ground. I suspect that probably adds to a desire at some point for greater independence, certainly if not autonomy. But the more effective they are as a military force in taking back territory, I suspect the more some Kurds are gonna want independence. So I mean, I'm not the best person to be talking about Kurdish issues. There are far more experts than I am, but I just seeing the effectiveness of some of their forces on the ground makes me believe that and the fragmentation of the region makes me suspect that sooner rather than later we'll be having a deal seriously with this question of Kurdish independence. It's complicated, but good question. Maybe that's the next talk. Seth, we'd like to thank you very, very, very much for that talk. It was very informative. And for those of you who are interested to remind us, Seth books out in November. I think it is through Oxford University Press where you can get hold of some of that data. So this is just a small gift for us to say thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much. For those of you who are interested if you'd like to have a talk to Seth we've now got some drinks outside in the foyer and a friendly reminder too that on the 8th of August we have Richard Fontaine coming from a center from a new American security to discuss foreign policy post-Obama whichever way the election goes and you escape. There were no questions. But no one asked me a Trump question by the way. I was ready for a Trump question. Please thank Seth.