 Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. We're going to start momentarily here. Welcome to New America. We're here on the 16th anniversary of the 9-11 attacks. The purpose of this panel is to kind of describe where we are and where we might be going. We have an absolutely outstanding group of panelists, David Gaudenstein Ross, who is at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who's written multiple books related to jihadism and is one of the leading figures in the field. Josh Gelzer to his right, your left. Josh was a senior director of counterterrorism at the National Security Council. Before that, he worked at the Department of Justice in a senior position in the National Security Division. He's also actually written a book about al-Qaeda, which was the fruit of his defil at King's College in London, and to his right and to your left, Nadia Wadeat, who has a defil in Oriental Studies from Oxford, who is a fellow at New America, as is Josh, and is writing a book about kind of essentially the alternative voices to ISIS in the Arab world, whether they're secular, liberal, comedic, or any other flavor. So we're going to start with Josh, reflecting a little bit about continuity and change between the Obama and Trump administration. Then Nadia's going to talk a little bit about what she's seeing in the Arab world. Then David is going to talk, try and meld the domestic and the international discussion. I may say a couple of things as well. This has been carried by C-SPAN Live. So when we come to the Q and A, please wait for the mic so your question can be heard not only in this room, but also by the audience. And thank you for coming today. Yeah, wherever you're comfortable. Thanks very much, Peter. Thank you for having me. This is truly, at least in my view, a dream team to be a part of for this discussion and obviously a meaningful day to do it as we talk about important policy issues. It's also a day to reflect on kind of the emotional elements of terrorism and counter-terrorism. And so I'm grateful for the chance to be part of this discussion. As you indicated, I thought I might set the table a little bit with a few elements of continuity between how, in my view, the last administration, in some cases the last couple of administrations, approached counter-terrorism and how the current administration is approaching it. And then offer a few elements that strike me as elements of change. When it comes to continuity, perhaps at the top of the list is the critical campaign to take back physical territory from ISIS in Iraq and in Syria. If ISIS is the preeminent terrorist threat of the moment at least, depriving that group of safe haven, of fighters, of numbers strikes me as critical and I see a lot of continuity in how this administration is approaching that. There was a basic campaign plan drawn up really a couple of years ago at this point. It involved Mosul, which has now been largely cleared of ISIS. It involved clearing Raqqa of ISIS, which is underway. It involved a push into the Euphrates River Valley and continuing work that needs to be done there. But in terms of the amount of territory the group controls and the way that number is being shrunk over time and the pressure that's being applied to the group along the way, I see a lot of continuity in that. And that strikes me as largely a good thing. A second element of continuity, speaking more broadly here, is a basic sense of where terrorist threats to the United States come from in this world and how to prioritize among them. One could have imagined a new administration, especially one that in some ways branded itself as being different in many respects, including national security elements from its predecessor, coming in and seeing things quite differently. One never knew exactly what America first meant for counter-terrorism, but one could see looking at places like Somalia and al-Shabaab, looking at places like Yemen and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, as well as ISIS, which is active in both those places, and either seeing the threat as much more severe, such that the US might want to dramatically increase its involvement or as not really a problem worth the United States dealing with. And neither has happened. Instead, there's been some recalibration of authorities and policy approvals, but fundamentally what I see about eight months in is largely an acceptance of where the threats are and how to rank them from the US perspective. And finally, a third element of continuity is the idea that often, not always, but often US counter-terrorism is going to be a partner-driven affair. I think this is something the Bush administration and the Obama administration came to and increasingly emphasized over time that there will always be some threats so imminent and so dire that the US needs to act itself against them, but that dealing with the range of threats in all their varied form and all the geographies in which they're cropping up is simply too much to do alone. And so in various ways, through training, through funding, through actual military partnerships, through other forms like intel sharing, there would need to be a reliance on and at times a building up of partners. And again, eight months in, there's a recalibration on the margins of maybe which partners where, but that seems to be another element of continuity. Let me say three things that seem to be different and I'll preview by saying I find the difference a little bit concerning on all three and maybe we can get into why. One is the ideological dimension, especially of the counter-ISIS fight of this counter-terrorism effort more broadly, which is somewhat ironic for a new administration that some of whose voices came in criticizing the Obama and the Bush teams for dealing with only the surface problem and not getting at the ideological roots, and this is their words, of this problem, it seems to me there's actually been a stepping back and in particular from some of the structures that were built specifically to deal with the ideological dimension. So domestically you had the relatively new countering violent extremism task force, focused overseas, you had the State Department's Global Engagement Center, and what you've seen is key leadership leaving those places, you've seen a hesitation to accept and use funds already allocated in the task force's case for certain grants focused on right-wing extremism, which looks even more concerning to me after the events of Charlottesville, for the GEC and initial disinclination to take money already offered by Congress, that seems to be changing, although there's been a limit to how much is being asked of the Defense Department, which is something else Congress allowed for, and to roll back the very structures built to get at that part of the problem that strikes me as concerning. A second element, and this is in a sense ideological but more about us than about external actors, is the idea of resilience in the U.S. public and politics and society. I think again from the Bush administration into the Obama administration, there was an effort increasing over time to take seriously the very real fear that terrorism generates. But at the same time to try to cultivate, inculcate a certain ability not to let that fear drive policy and to minimize how much that fear spread. And to me at least one of the more surprising, the fuddling new elements is almost 180 on that. And of course we saw the president criticizing the mayor of London for trying to reassure the public there after an attack and seeming to stoke fear rather than build resilience. And it seems to me whatever one's view of counter-terrorism strategy, if you're doing what your adversary wants you to do, you may need to rethink what you're doing. And that seems to me to be one element that's new and concerning here. And one more element of some change, though I'm not sure it should be called change yet. I think we're in kind of a watch and see is how quickly, how aggressively and just how the United States is approaching al-Qaeda in Syria. I mentioned before that ISIS may be today's preeminent terrorist threat, but al-Qaeda in Syria is worrisome. It is al-Qaeda's largest global affiliate at this point. It has key figures. And in the last administration there was an escalating effort to take on that challenge, take on that threat. Perhaps most notably on the president's last full day in office actually. I think it was Thursday, January 19. There was a sizable strike against about 100 al-Qaeda in Syria figures. And that was kind of a trend line that seemed to be going in one direction. There was a notable strike in mid-February against a key al-Qaeda in Syria leader. But as reports come out of al-Qaeda in Syria, consolidating its control in Idlib province, eliminating some of the other extremist groups either by getting them off the battlefield or absorbing them. And with discussion of a de-escalation zone there, de-escalation overall seems a very good thing given the humanitarian catastrophe that continues to unfold. But what all of that means for getting at a group that seems to me to be exercising both tactical and strategic patience and how they're approaching themselves and the Syrian context in which they find themselves. I worry about anything other than a increasing focus and perhaps an increasing aggressiveness to disrupt that group. So let me pause there. Thank you. Josh, brilliant summation. Nadia. So I just came back from three months in the Middle East, the Winfield Research for my book that Peter mentioned. So it's really troubling in the region as your comprehensive paper talks about the Sunni-Shia rivalry. And it is troubling beyond any words can describe because it has direct relations to the war on terrorism because terrorists happen to be Sunni extremists. And a lot of Sunni governments are more than happy to turn the other side when these militants serve Sunni agenda, including on the borders, including ideologically. In Saudi, for example, Al-Qarani, one of the most popular Twitter stars, Wahhabi stars, pro-Jihad in Syria, just got detained. But it's not for urging young people to go to war in Syria, it's for being a sympathizer with Qatar. So you could perpetuate all the hate you want, you could urge people to go kill other Muslims, but, and you have complete freedom. And this is actually really significant because it shows people who can actually take on terrorism are not only have adversarial powers in government in these Sunni governments, but also even companies like Google and Facebook, unfortunately are shutting down their accounts because they are secular and they're offending essentially the Taliban's of these countries. So they are facing it from both ends. And unfortunately, this is the best hope for really winning the war. This is a war of ideas, essentially. It cannot be won militarily. Yes, ISIS had a lot of weapons, a lot of training when they were on one side or another, but it's ideological at the end of the day. What all of these terrorists have in common is that ideology, which we have not done anything to counter. Our allies, while they say that they are our allies, do not take down the accounts of these people that have sometimes followings in the millions that perpetuate these ideas. So the war of ideas is still, we haven't yet thought that idea. We haven't yet really taken on or confront our allies and say you have to stop this stream of ideological river of hate that is destabilizing the entire world. Security has become a concern all over Europe. Even though it's really the greatest casualty is people in the Middle East, millions have, their lives have been wrecked, not to nation the victims. So I'm gonna keep it here and then I'll just question you later. W. So if it were 16 years ago and your friend had a crystal ball, they might tell you that in 2017 we would have experienced a number of rapid victories against the Jihadist movement. You would of course see that as a good thing. Then when you hear what those victories are, your view might change. We took Mosul back from the Jihadists. We took Raqqa back from the Jihadists and we're about to launch a major offensive in the Euphrates River Valley to take back more territory that they control. It would be obvious that something has gone wrong. I strongly agree with what the other panel has said that this is a great panel. It's really an honor to be here with Peter, with Josh and with Nadia, all of whom I respect greatly. I think that there's two things I wanna talk about. One is the posture of al-Qaeda, which is something I've spilled a lot of ink over over the past several years. And the other is why is it that we get this problem wrong? Why is it that we appear to be moving backwards? With respect to al-Qaeda itself, this is an organization whose obituary has been written a large number of times. More times even than the various fighters who keep showing up alive and then dead, the Mokhtar, Balmokhtar, and the like. The organization itself seems to have more lives than a cat. Within the past six years, originally the Arab uprisings were supposed to be the end of Jihadism by discrediting its narrative. Then ISIS was supposed to be the end of al-Qaeda. ISIS had come along, according to a lot of views of the topic. It had displaced al-Qaeda as the premier Jihadist organization. It was certainly aggressively trying to peel off al-Qaeda branches and succeeded in a few cases. Ansar-Bait al-Muqtis in Egypt and Boko Haram, which was an undeclared al-Qaeda affiliate, did go over. But I think al-Qaeda has emerged from both of these as a much stronger organization than it was in 2010. On the one hand, it skillfully played itself off of ISIS to portray its organization as being the moderate Jihadists, people who you might not like, but you can be business with. And really the degree to which you can operate openly, and I'm certain, Nadia, that you saw this in the region, it's shocking compared to what we would have expected five years ago, four years ago. In Jordan, you have figures like Abu Muhammad al-Muqtisi and Abu Qatada, major al-Qaeda ideologs who've been released from prison, in part because they're anti-ISIS, not just released from prison, but also able to appear on television. And the Jordanians are no dummies. To them, they consider ISIS to be the more important threat. And so they're doing part of what the Hashemite kingdom has always done, which is playing things to muddle through in the immediate term, and then they'll deal with the longer term consequences when they get there. But on al-Qaeda's part, being more restrained than ISIS has been very helpful. And in their propaganda, very explicitly said, one of the advantages of ISIS's rise is now everyone knows who the true Khawar-e-Jahr, the derogatory name referring to an early Islamic sect that is universally despised as being too extreme. Then the second thing they've played off of is what Nadia talked about, the Sunni-Shia competition where al-Qaeda is, in some cases, the de facto ally of the Sunni-GCC states. That's clearly the case in Syria, where al-Qaeda's branch, now known as Hayat-Tahrir Hashem, but it's gone through a couple of name changes recently, had gotten state support. This is in the open. It's been discussed in multiple sources. Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia have provided support to that organization. Al-Qaeda leaders now have de facto safe haven in parts of Turkey. Joby Warwick wrote about this in the Washington Post in July of last year, with major figures being able to transit between Syria and Turkey and operate openly in Istanbul. In Yemen, al-Qaeda's branch has become a de facto ground force for the GCC offensive to push back the Iranian-backed faction there. All of this is very bad news. I don't think we've really thought through how difficult it's going to be to disentangle al-Qaeda's new ability to operate openly. The Abadabad documents that were recovered from bin Laden's compound talk very clearly about how bin Laden saw that in the wake of AQ's defeat in Iraq, they had a real branding problem. He wanted to change the way that they were perceived. And I think that between 2011 and now, they have done so within the region. So why do we get these things wrong? I think one answer is just misperceptions on our part. If you look at, our own policies have, of course, at times made this problem worse as opposed to better. I would say that two of our foreign misadventures have been a real problem, the Iraq War and the Libya War. In both of those, I think that there were clear misperceptions on our part. For Iraq, the assessment about Iraqi WMD is very well known. I think in Libya, we've put less attention on our own misperceptions that helped to contribute to that conflict. Specifically, I think that if we'd appreciated the degree to which jihadism was going to be able to benefit from the Arab uprisings, we would have been far more hesitant to go to war in a country that stood in the middle of two others who had just experienced revolutions. I think there's no question that the fall of the Qaddafi regime has made things harder for Tunisia. Both of the major terrorist attacks that occurred there in 2015 had their origins in Subrata, Libya. It's made things harder for Egypt. It contributed directly to the fall of Northern Mali to an Al Qaeda branch. Obviously, they no longer control it, but you currently have an insurgency raging there. The second thing I'd say is technology. ISIS's use of social media is well known. We can see how ISIS has deployed drones in its fight to hold its territory in Iraq. Technology is sometimes ambiguous when it comes to the jostling between state and non-state actors. One really good study done a few years ago by Jacob Shapiro and Nils Weidman talks about how in Iraq, during the course of the Iraqi insurgency, if you look at the placement of cell phone towers and the incidence of insurgent violence, it was very clear that cell phone towers decreased insurgent violence. It's because they increased the flow of information from people to counterinsurgent forces. That's an example of technology helping the counterinsurgents. It seems to me that very definitively, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, and for the past few years, violent non-state actors have been benefiting from technology rather than being hurt by this. We can see this in one of the things that's made ISIS's attacks on the West so much more frequent and so much more deadly. It's a model that I refer to as the virtual planner model. Others have a different name for it, but it was basically ISIS taking advantage of two converging trends, social media and their ability to reach out and talk to operatives much more easily, and end-to-end encryption, the ability to make those communications invisible to government forces trying to surveil them. Virtual planners have been able to fill in and do all the things that physical terrorist networks once did, scouting for operatives, encouraging them to take action, helping them to conceptualize the timing of an attack and the target, providing technical assistance, bomb-making skills, for example, where it's much more effective than the old terrorist manuals to talk with an operative, get on an encrypted video chat, and have them walk you through how you can build a bomb. In some cases, the virtual planner is with the operative right until the moment that they detonate themselves. That was the case in a suicide attack that occurred in Ansbach, Germany last year where the Germans released this chat transcript where the operative was getting cold feet. He was supposed to carry out a suicide bombing at a concert and saw that there was security there, and so he's saying to his virtual planner, like, there's guards there, I can't go in. Virtual planner says, look, forget about the concert, go to a restaurant, and the operative says, pray for me, brother, you have no idea what's going on right now. The virtual planner says, hey man, what's going on with you? Even if I could kill just two people, I would do it. Forget about the concert, trust in God and go to the restaurant. And that's just what the operative did. Had the virtual planner not been there, from reading that chat transcript, I have no doubt that he would not have followed through. Having someone there to chat with up until the very moment of detonation helped him to carry it out. So technology has been a factor, but then the final thing I'll point to quickly is one analogy I use a lot to describe our conflict with these violent non-state actors is startup firms against legacy industries. To me, if you look at that competition in the economic sphere, in many ways, violent non-state actors are the startup organizations of the political organizing space. And they're able to, like startups, be deburocratized, shift their strategy very quickly, and incorporate the latest technology into their plans, while governments often look like legacy firms, too bureaucratized, too slow-moving, often unable to even recognize the strategy that their competitors are undertaking. I think part of the future of this competition is us thinking more about the design of our own government and the way we approach these questions and having something that is better suited internally to 21st century competitions. It'd be a lot easier to understand what is happening in the Middle East if we think of these terrorist groups as state militias. These are, if these GCC countries decide to really cut the supply in ideology and platform, you can be killed for mocking the ISIS God as happened with Nahid Hattar in Jordan, or tweeting one liberal census against religious extremism and end up jailed, but you can preach jihadism for years on end, on TV, without any problems. So these are very much state militias, state actors. They are not non-state actors. I don't disagree about the intersection of the state, as I'm very much on the same page with you in terms of what you outlined in how the constructs of the legal system and mores feed into these groups. I definitely do call them non-state actors, though, in the sense that we can see what's happening in the Middle East is actually paralleled in other areas, and not just in the sphere of jihadism. In Latin America, I think it's no exaggeration to say that MS-13 poses an existential threat to El Salvador and Honduras. When you look at Mexican cartels, they've been able to adapt quickly the way that major transnational businesses do. And if you look at the uptick in violence in Mexico where over 80,000 people have been killed since 2006, you can see the damage that's been done there. So the intersection of the state, I absolutely agree. But I also think that looking across non-state actors, there's commonalities. Let me ask both of you, Ann Josh, and because this is actually a rather important point. So you use the word state support when you talked about al-Qaeda in Syria, and you said the state support came from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. Now, is it, in fact, something a little bit more complicated and has become more complicated over time, which is initially, perhaps, acquiescence, state acquiescence. And now, you know, a fairly active, I mean, Qatar has sort of been put on notice and I think tried to clean this act up. Turkey, maybe, certainly the idea that the Saudi government is supporting al-Qaeda in Syria doesn't make a lot of common sense. I mean, after all, al-Qaeda's principal goal is the overthrow of the Saudi government. So let's try and drill down on that before we move on, because I think it's an important question and not one where we're gonna settle very easily on this stage, because it's complicated, but state support seems over-drawn. The Syria threat is seen as existential in GCC countries. It is, and in Yemen, it is seen as Syria's conflict. Is it seen as the Syria threat or the Iran threat or both? I mean, I don't think there's much distinction honestly, at least in the media, in the mouthpieces of these Gulf states, which dominate the Middle East. So I'm not sure there is, I mean... So Josh, you were in charge of this effort for the US government to rather be recently. So what's your view? In some ways, as David mentioned, threat, misperceptions or broader misperceptions when it came to Iraq and Libya and the, in particular, terrorist problems that flowed from those. I do wonder if Syria deserves to be in that bucket too, right? You had countries that perhaps should be considered to include our own that looked at what was breaking out there as something that with, maybe not a little push, that might be a bit of a character, but with some element of a push could lead to the ouster of Assad, who I think should be universally accepted as a terrible and brutal person. And in fact, whatever that assessment relied on, it didn't prove quite so easy. And from a counter-terrorist perspective, what flowed, and probably from a humanitarian perspective, what flowed of this just persistent safe haven for the terrorist groups, recruitment capacity for the terrorist groups, and just humanitarian disaster after humanitarian disaster on that side of things, may be in some ways the worst of all possible worlds, especially if we don't know the way out from it. And so, I think that does lead countries to be viewing the actors there differently now from how they may have viewed things a few years ago, but it leaves things in, I admit, a worrisome place. And then I would stick by my statement that they have received state support. As all of you know, one way that al-Qaeda fought in Syria was through coalitions. And all of you, of course, are familiar with the ways that al-Qaeda was funded prior to 9-11 attacks. They were anti-Saudi then, and they got a great deal of support from some Saudi organizations that were quasi-governmental, where there's- You used to once work for one of them. Al-Qaeda man was one example of that. And did they get state support pre-9-11? I think the answer, ultimately, if you break down the way the state functions is yes, though there were degrees of vagary and deniability built in. I think in Syria, it's less vague. I think that it went to umbrella organizations that were dominated by Jabhat al-Dusra, and that these states knew what was happening. Now- But it's just indicating the context was sort of changed. So early in the war against, I mean, the description you've just made seems very true several years ago. Is it true today? It's not true in the same way today. I mean, like- So what's changed? Well, I believe that the words I used were that they have received state support, that there was actually, it was carefully worded. I think that today there's a question mark. I think for some, it's less so. But in Turkey, AQ figures definitely, I haven't seen any evidence that they're less able to operate in Turkey. And in fact, the evidence seems to suggest that the opposite is happening. They're more able to operate openly. For Qatar, I mean, if you look at the designation of Muhammad al-Nuami, right? It's very specific as to what he was channeling money to. He's still an advisor to the- For those who don't know him, who is he? Muhammad al-Nuami is a designated financier who's been an insider within the Qatar Royal family for quite some time. He serves as an advisor. At times he had ministerial posts, at times he's been out of favor. At one point he was jailed, but now he seems to again be an advisor from what we can tell, given the opacity within Qatari society. And all of that indicates to me that, look, for figures who are ideologically committed to supporting jihadism, it's not so much of them doing like a team America and saying Dorka Dorka Muhammad jihad, but rather if you could, you ever seen a team America? Okay, so, but instead you can frame these things in terms of national interest, right? That we have a national interest for Qatar or Saudi Arabia in making sure that Iran doesn't dominate Syria as indeed it's coming to do. And so these groups may not like them, but we should channel support there. And so it might be for a different reason depending on who's undertaking the policy, but we can see the policies. But I think that's a very helpful distinction for the people in the room and also the audience, which is because when you say they're state supporting al-Qaeda, we have a certain vision of what that means. But what you're saying is they're supporting groups that happen to be in the al-Qaeda ecosystem that we're trying to get rid of Assad, which are also will be. I mean, I think that it kind of helps kind of clarify a little bit better. Oh, no, I agree 100% there, that one should understand what that means contextually, but it's still a problem. And that's where what Nadia says, I think is very important, that the regional context and the way in which things like blasphemy laws tend to favor people who want to support these groups. I think that's a real problem that Nadia is right. We don't address that enough. I think we're very timid in talking about that. I'd like to drill down on that, but just before that sort of zoom out a little bit and go back to Davies' crystal ball and say here's another version of the crystal ball. If you had been looking at the crystal ball in 2002 and said there would be no attack on the United States by a foreign terrorist organization in the next 16 years, that succeeded. And that 95 Americans would have been killed by jihadist terrorists on average, you know, six a year. That would have seemed like a totally absurd, a little optimistic prediction. But that is actually what has happened. And there's a whole range of reasons for that, including the work of many people in this room, which is our defensive capabilities, our offensive capabilities and the fact that the public is attuned to this as an issue. And so without getting into more details, we have put up a pretty strong defense and the terrorists have not succeeded, which isn't to say that they couldn't. But so that brings you to the question of what is the threat? And there's been a lot of sort of vaporization on this question by various people. Some of them used to work in the Trump administration and now don't. But the threat is clearly a homegrown threat. And New America releases a paper today based on a kind of fairly comprehensive look at the data that was written by David Sherman, Albert Ford, Lisa Sims, myself, with an assistant from Chris Mellon. And the data is very clear. The every lethal attack in the United States since 9-11 is being carried out by an American or a legal permanent resident. More than half of these folks, if you look at the 413 cases of jihadist terrorism since 9-11, more than half of the people, the perpetrators were born in the United States. Refugees are basically a totally non-issue. There are 12 refugees in the data set. Many of them accused of readily trivial crimes in the grand scheme of things compared to carrying out a plot. And also these things happened a long time ago. And so you're looking at a very American problem and you're looking at a very internet-based problem. And so, for instance, of the 129 people that we found on the public record who have traveled to Syria, attempted to travel to Syria, or helped others who were trying to do so, 129 militants, 101 were very active online, meaning not just sending emails, but downloading jihadist material, swapping jihadist material. In some cases, as David has laid out, communicating with virtual recruiters in Syria and Iraq and people within ISIS. So this is a very internet-based phenomenon. Of the 129 cases, we found no cases of in-person recruitment, no radical cleric, no attendance at a mosque where suddenly you're bored into a plot. So a lot of the old ideas about recruitment, in-person recruitment, are not matched by the data. Now, the situation in Europe, and there's a reason, therefore, that the attacks in the United States that we are seeing are people like Omar Mateen, who was born in Queens, New York, not far from where our president was born, who was also born in Queens, New York. So a very American person, or Major Nadal Hassan, who was born not far from where we're talking, in Arlington, Virginia, who was a major in the U.S. military, a psychiatrist. It doesn't get any more part of the American story. And luckily, because of geography, where you can drive from Paris to Damascus, you can't drive from Washington to Damascus, the United States is insulated from these ideas for two big reasons. One is physical and one is metaphysical. The physical is geography. They were separated by two big oceans. But secondarily, the American dreamers worked very well for American Muslims, as it's worked for every other generation of American immigrants. American Muslims are on average, as well educated as the average American. Their on average, have the same incomes. They don't live in ghettos, except with one exception, which is the very disadvantaged, Somali American population in Minneapolis, who lives in one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States, or see the Riverside neighborhood. But this is the exception that proves the rule. So everything I've just said, you can reverse in Europe, where most of all European Muslims do live in ghettos. They are discriminated against. You're two and a half times less likely to be asked back to a job interview with the same qualifications if you have a Muslim name, as opposed to a Christian sounding name. It is not an accident that every single one of the Brussels and Paris attackers have been through the effectively universities of Jihad that are the Belgian and prison, a Belgian and French prison system. 8% of the French population is Muslim. 60% and estimated 60% of their prison population is Muslim. An enormously helpful fact to understand how discriminated against this group is in countries like France and Belgium. So we have a very different situation here. And so it's not only our defenses, but also our ideology has allowed us to accept Muslim immigrants in a way that makes them part of society, rather than not part of society. But so, and that's all the good news. But the bad news is the following. I mean, I was part of one of the people who was writing Al Qaeda's obituary. In fact, Wolf Litzer leaned over to me as just after Bin Laden, you know, President Obama's 12 minute speech, Wolf Litzer says, well, what do you think? And you don't have to, you have no time to prepare. And I said, well, the war on terror is over. And I didn't mean terrorism was over, but I meant the war on terror as the organizing principle of American national security, surely with this death and also the destruction of almost all the leaders of Al Qaeda Central and the Arab Spring in which Al Qaeda's ideas and personnel were totally absent. That surely this would be it for this and that terrorism would become a second order problem. I was completely and utterly wrong. And since we're here with a bunch of very smart people in the room and also listening to this on C-SPAN, I'm gonna make a political science observation which is Hobbes wrote Leviathan in 1651 and as the English Civil War was winding down and why did he write it? He wrote it because he just saw the catastrophe of the English Civil War inflicted on his country. And what did he say, so what he said essentially was the only thing worse than the potato is anarchy and this is why the first thing we need is order. So we ran a huge political science experiment in Iraq in 2003 and decapitated the state and the army with the result that anybody knows what happened. And then we did the same thing in Libya. It's like we didn't even pay attention. And we made, and as I think Josh sort of explained, we made the United States makes sins of omission and commission. So we made sins of commission with Libya and Iraq and then we made a sin of omission because the situation in Iraq, surely if we'd intervened in some way earlier, which would have had its own problems, could it have been any worse than what we see? So, but that raises then the question of where do we go from here? And I think, you know, one point, I think it's very important that we've all said, look, al-Qaida's doing pretty well. What does that mean for American national security? What does it mean for Europe? What does it mean for the Middle East? Because I think it's important to rank these issues. So we, the United States are insulated from this for the reasons I've already laid out. And here's the evidence for that as opposed to the assertion. Seven American militants who've been trained in Iraq and Syria have returned to the United States as far as we can tell from the public record. There may be one or two that are sort of, we don't know about. The French Interior Ministry said publicly in July that 271 French militants have returned. And believe me, the French do not have really a good capacity, as we now know, to track all these things. And obviously, when you've had 7,000 Europeans go, you know, France is just one country of a couple of dozen in Europe facing this problem. So the problem in Europe is much more profound. And we don't know what's gonna follow ISIS, but we can almost guarantee whether it's al-Qaida merging with a Rump ISIS, bits of al-Qaida and ISIS merging, a son of ISIS, whatever, there are gonna be other iterations of this. And that is because there are nine big drivers. There is the regional civil war between the Sunni and Shia that Nadia referred to. There is obviously the social media that amplifies all the negative trends. There is the collapse of Arab governments in Libya and Iraq and Syria and Yemen. There was the collapse of the Arab economy. There was the massive population bulge in the Arab world. The Arab and North Africa regions are the fastest growing regions in the world other than the sub-Saharan Africa. Their populations will double in the next 50 years. Then there was the massive wave of Muslim immigration into Europe, which does not have the capacity to take the most importantly, the ideological capacity to make these people French. There is no French dream, German dream, EU dream. And then there's the rise of ultra-nationalist European parties that are gonna increase the alienation of Muslims in Europe because they're basically anti-immigrant parties, and very strongly so. And these were in Hungary and Poland and France and Britain. These were all very marginal parties, but now they are key players, if not they're actually running the government. And so if you accept that all these big drivers are gonna be out there, because ISIS is a European phenomenon and a Middle Eastern phenomenon. It's not an American phenomenon. It's been quite the same to any meaningful degree. If you accept that these drivers are out there, then you kind of come to a rather pessimistic, non-obituary kind of writing prediction, which is we're gonna have this problem for a long time. But at the end of the day, it's a big problem for the Middle East, and it's a medium-sized problem for Europe, and it's a relatively small problem for the domestic United States, except insofar as we are the leader of the free world. And it is our responsibility to kind of try and get our hands around this. And I think this is a good segue to the question of how do we win the ideological war, because Nadia has raised it, and we hear a lot of this as like, we gotta win the ideological war, which is a really easy thing to say, but it turns into just a slogan, because how do you actually operationalize that? And I'd like to get your opinion, all three panelists about the GEC State Department, which I think did have a kind of pretty good answer to this, what Google and Jigsaw are doing, and if you can reflect the government and the social media companies, I think have done, in my view, a relatively good job in the last three years and Josh, you led the effort on the government side. You helped Google, I think, to think through some of these issues, David has been writing about it. So let's start with this question, because in a way it's the hardest question, which is what has been done, what is working, what is not working, what could be done, and is this a fool's errand anyway? Yeah. So first of all, there doesn't seem to be that I can really see a discernment of just how important the virtual space is. It is real. It is as important as the physical space anymore. So if we have thousands of Jihad-e-Math pieces, that is troubling. That is as good as having them physically. So this really needs to be addressed. So even though this is not an American problem, because this is really a Middle East-generated problem, a GCC-generated problem, in fact, at its inception point. GCC for people who don't know as well. Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, Emirates, so Qatar. So even though this is not an American problem, per se, but it is American platforms that are being used to either help Jihadists or help liberals, people who actually espouse liberal ideas like freedom of conscious, freedom of expression, democracy, et cetera, et cetera. And I did, as you mentioned, help with a Google project. And Google, I know a lot of these companies have very good intentions. And their focus is... Are you able to say more detail of what you did for Google? What I can say is Google is targeting the people that are interested in going to join Jihad and exposing them to an alternative view, maybe pictures from, or people who are returning or barely escaped with their lives after joining the Islamic State, or to see what it's really like. But it's not an Islamic haven, it's actually a very authoritarian, brutal, you'll be enslaved, essentially. So just put an alternative story right next to somebody who's interested in going to Jihad in Syria, literally Googling, going to Jihad in Syria. So, but the thing is, before it gets there, there's a huge lack of context. There's a huge lack of understanding and the nuances because somebody, for example, who preaches freedom of conscious, there may not be a discernment that there's a direct relationship between having freedom of conscious. We here in America, what you believe is your business, what I believe is my business, it's very personal. Not in Muslim countries. And there's a direct relation. If you wanna counter ISIS, you have to allow freedom of conscious in Muslim countries because if the thesis that we as Muslims have the right to force our Islam, regardless of its Shia, Sunni, whatever, that one that has power on the rest of humanity, that is very troublesome. And that thesis has not been even, nobody really has challenged it in the Muslim world and it has to be done in the Muslim world and it is being done in the Muslim world by a lot of educated people but they are being silenced either by authoritarian states or sometimes their profiles are being shut down because they are offensive to Taliban-like figures in the Arab countries. So there has to be a discernment that the values that make America and Europe a beacon for freedom of thought and expression, the very same values need to be applied to everybody who uses the internet, whether it's in the Middle East and Muslim countries or America, there shouldn't be two standards. So there was a scandal about Facebook helping the government identify blasphemous people. I mean, we would Pakistan. So should Facebook or YouTube or really help these governments crack down on people who don't wanna believe in jihadism or as they see it. So American companies need to actually be... They are already part of this war. They can't say, well, we cannot interfere. You are already in the midst of it. You are the playground and they really can play an enormous role in content. In fairness, I mean, Twitter has closed down hundreds of thousands of accounts and Facebook has thousands of people now working in part either to get rid of fake news or Russian trolls or, I mean, so... But it's this level, as opposed to the thing you need before you get to the fruit. It's like they're taking the poisonous fruit, but not the tree. You raise a very tricky point which Josh had to deal with a lot with when he was in government, which is that... Okay, so Anwar Al-Aki, he made hundreds and hundreds of hours of speeches. Probably 90% of them are pretty anodyne, but 10% were all about jihad or so. A, would you really wanna take down Anwar Al-Aki's speeches? Really, could you do that anyway? Is that the solution? Because it's a slippery slope. You say, I mean, what form of speech is... Because for the social media companies, it's things that are against their terms of use, which is, anybody who encourages violence can't be on the site, whether you're a neo-Nazi or some other flavor of extremists or whatever. So, but you seem to be advocating something slightly different, which is like, even people, because talking about jihad is not necessarily, you know, there's all sorts of ways you can talk about jihad without it necessarily inciting people to violence, potentially, right? I mean, it depends. It depends, that's right. So, Josh. It's all in the translation, or... Yeah. My overall take, first of all, is to start from the same place as Nadia, that what happens in the virtual space is tremendously important. Both in terms of its reach, terrorist entry into the United States seems to me to happen as your study reflects, not physically, thankfully, terribly often, so much as virtually. They enter every day, every hour, through the wires, but also because of its persistence, because even as territory gets taken back from groups like ISIS, it says, figures get eliminated, that virtual component persists. It's not unrelated to events in the real world, but it persists. So, I start from the same place, that it's a very serious aspect of this continuing problem. I think the tech companies have done some serious work to do more in this space, and they still have some serious work to do, from my perspective. In December, they announced that they would share MD5 hashes, the digital signatures, among four big companies, of particular pieces of content that anyone deemed to violate its terms of service on these grounds, so that other companies could assess whether it also violated their terms of service. And there was a sense, that's how far the companies are willing to go. Particular pieces of content, the signatures will get shared. Then more bad things happened, and earlier this year they announced, well, those same companies will share the tools, so the way that they are finding those pieces of content, will share the tools with each other too. But again, I think there was a sense of that's how far we're willing to go. It's not clear to me that that's gonna be where this ends. One could imagine other things these companies could do that would go further. One could imagine them sharing not just the piece of content, but information associated with the account that posted that content. On the idea that another company might wonder whether it had accounts with similar identifying information that had content that violated their terms of service. There are reasons the companies haven't gone that far, and I understand those reasons. It's not clear to me that the lines now will hold forever. It's also not clear to me that putting aside how the companies relate to each other, how the companies relate to the government will remain where it is now, which is largely to see this as work that they do in forcing their own terms of service, and with a reluctance to share. What do you think government? I mean, there are governments here because the German government may take a very different line than the American government on this issue, right? That's right, and there are other governments that have themselves oriented differently towards these companies. So the first IRU, Internet Referral Unit, was stood up by the UK, CTIRU, and the Brits have full-time government employees identifying content and sharing it with the companies relevant to that content, saying, we think this violates your terms of service. And as I understand it, they are often, the Brits, often not always right, but of course, even though there are different laws in the UK, thus far the CTIRU has operated largely, if not exclusively, on a non-enforced basis, purely voluntary, and when they get back an answer that says, thanks for sharing that one, but actually, we're fine with that one. As I understand it, there's a dialogue and some learning on both sides to come out of that. So now there's an EU IRU. There are a couple other European countries standing up their own. We have a different system of laws and a different culture that have made some reluctant to go in that route. On the other hand, there seems to be an effectiveness in what that allows between companies and governments as a way of relating to each other on these issues. I also think it's interesting to compare the speed at which the companies have moved in the wake of Charlottesville on some of the issues flowing from that to the speed of some of these developments when it relates to ISIS and other groups like it. And in fairness, I thought there was some very interesting writing done by the CEO of Cloudflare, Matthew Prince, a very interesting guy. He thinks very hard about these issues. He wrote, I think, a blog post and then a Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he said, well, we moved pretty quickly. We had Cloudflare on this and now I'm beginning to worry if we were right. And that's interesting. I don't share all. Just for clarity, so after Charlottesville, the social media companies moved pretty quickly against neo-Nazi platforms and neo-Nazi material on their platforms. That's right. So that if you're Cloudflare, you're not offering the content delivery service, which is sort of protection for a site that you would otherwise offer. There were entities related to financial transactions online that moved quickly. And this sort of content stuff, looking for this content and to the extent it's deemed a violate terms of service, taking it down. And that I think has to do with sort of domestic politics and what strikes me as the absolutely right denunciation of those groups. But it is interesting to note the differing speed at which that occurred from some of the developments on the ISIS. One other point to make on the tech side is I think the company that's spent a lot of time in particular on ISIS material. Al Qaeda in Syria, their material looks a lot more increasingly like ISIS's material in its slickness and savviness than Al Qaeda's senior leadership, where every so often, Aiman al-Zawahiri pops up with a video that looks like it could have been 16 years ago of him sitting and droning on for a while. And that's not where Al Qaeda in Syria is. And I don't think the companies have moved as quickly on that and other developments in the space as they might move in coming months and years. So Zawahiri has that in an editor. Right, like he used to- 40 minutes to 25 minutes. No, no, he's releasing five minute videos now. It's obvious that he has an editor, which is a new development for Al Qaeda. I think the tech company's involvement is extremely important. And Peter, I worked on the same jigsaw project that you mentioned that Nadia had worked on. It actually has been made public. So yeah, what they did was fairly clever. It was using ad space in YouTube. When someone's on YouTube and they ran two different tests of this, they called it the redirect method. When someone was searching for pro-ISIS material, this ad would come up. They'd use their ad space. And it was a very ISIS feeling ad. If you're familiar with ISIS's propaganda, it has a certain cinematic feel. It would end with something like learn the truth about the caliphate. And if you click through, it took you to a playlist. And Nadia and I both did research for videos that were used in these playlists in both English and Arabic. It would take you to a playlist where the videos appeared to be very neutral but actually gave people a different perspective on ISIS. And to me, it was a clever way to do this, but the main reason why I think it was important is it showed there's internal struggles within these companies, which are enormous creatures about how involved they should be. And I think this showed Google that they could be involved and the world wouldn't hate them and would actually see this in a positive light. They got very good press for that. I think having tech companies involved is important because there's so many different creative things that they're able to do when they have use of the platform. Now, in the longer term, I think that one of the most important trends in this area is going to be something that Nadia touched on. There's a piece I wrote earlier this year in foreign affairs called the coming Islamic culture war. And actually, I've known Nadia since December of 2014. We actually met at a New America event where she yelled at me because she thought I was too soft on al-Qaeda and we've been good friends ever since. That is actually exactly what happened. But she was the first person in the field I'm in to see the same trend which I'm seeing, which is you have this burgeoning debate, which I've described as the most foreseeable black swan event possible about Islamic identity in most of the majority countries. And it's actually, to me, inherent to the logic of online communication. So if you look back to the 1990s, as a social scientist, I'm a skeptic of social science, but if you look back to the 1990s, work being done on computer-mediated communication could not have been more on point about the impact it would have. The studies on what's called identity demarginalization have correctly anticipated so much of what came later. And what they found was that when people communicated in the online space and were able to express identities that are both marginalized and also concealable, that they would express them more in the offline space. So by concealable, I mean if you're an ethnic minority or if you have a physical handicap, if you're overweight, someone can see that by looking at you. If you are gay, if you're a neo-Nazi, if you're a jihadist, if you're all three, someone can't necessarily tell by looking at you, right? And the reason I point to this is that's what, other than jihadism, that's what the early studies were done on. If you look at, you know, we're talking about, we're referring to neo-Nazis and obviously, look there's been a resurgence in the overt nature of this movement, which is fundamentally related to the online space. And what social scientists were finding in the 1990s was that people who could communicate online find people who believed as they did, find these online communities, if they're neo-Nazis, would be more willing to make it a part of their lives. They found the same thing for LGBT identity. And actually, we've had a very quick revolution in the United States in LGBT rights. Right, 1996, a Democratic president passed into law the Defense of Marriage Act. 2008, running for president, Barack Obama said that he defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman. Then by 2016, not only would it be unthinkable in the future that a Democratic candidate would be anti-gay marriage, but Trump, whatever else you might say about him, was the most pro-LGBT Republican nominee that we've had, without question. And so you've had this reversal much faster than the previous civil rights movement, and that's related to how fast things move in the online space. Same thing for jihadism, identity de-marginalization applies. But now what Nadia's talking about is a broader debate, and it's gonna happen. It's already happening. When I say it's gonna happen, I mean, it's gonna happen in a way that people will recognize it as a strategic issue, and they're not there yet. Right now, I see it, Nadia sees it. I had a friend, Abdul Basit Kasim, who's a scholar at Rice, and he's Nigerian. He just went back to the region, and he actually wrote a very long Facebook post talking about how he read my piece, didn't believe it, and then went back to the region, and it's clearly happening. Okay, just so everybody understands, what is the it that we're talking about? Just got to explain that, because otherwise I hadn't. It was one of those things where there's a bigger feeling. Where these different, so the different voices, atheist voices, extreme secularist voices, voices that have a different view of Islamic identity are coming to the fore. And in our own society, that's happened, right? If you go back 100 years ago, it'd be very typical to refer to the West as the Christian world. If you see someone calling the West a Christian world today, you'll either think they're like a member of the alt-right or else just probably very old. Whereas we refer to Muslim majority countries as the Muslim world, we take some level of Islamic identity for granted coming out of those societies. And below the surface, there are people who are not happy with that. There is going to be a debate about identity and that's the logic of the online space. Atheist views, anti-religious views, extreme secularist views. All of these are marginalized and concealable and the online space brings them out. And actually we can start to see some of the leading edge of this, for example in Bangladesh. Where if you look at who Al Qaeda was targeting, it's atheist bloggers, LGBT bloggers. And the more time I engage in the online space and in the region, I see that this is, it's clearly already there. It's already recognized, but it hasn't risen to the level yet where we think of it as a big issue. And one of the reasons why Nadia mentioned it, sometimes these secularist accounts get pulled down, is because I think we have this very narrow frame of reference for them. What's happening is a debate about identity in these societies. Right, well and so it's put in the Islamophobia box. Whereas a better box to put it in is a debate about identity. So in Bertrand Russell's book, Why I Am Not A Christian, right, I'm certain there's many people in here who are devout Christians. Probably none of them think that this is a book that should be censored or that is deeply offensive to them. It's a debate about what our religious identity is within Western society. Ibn Warah, an atheist, polemicist, wrote a book, Why I Am Not A Muslim. And that's very edgy. This raises a good question, because I mean, you've mentioned it, the blasphemy thing in Pakistan. I mean, you know, to even be seen as defending somebody who might possibly have blasphemed somebody is a potential death sentence in Pakistan, as we saw with the interior minister. To, in Islam, apostasy is like much worse than anything else because you're leaving the religion. So, and it comes with a potential death penalty. So, the costs of having this discussion in certain countries are enormously high. And how do you, and by the way, they're often happening in countries where public opinion is very hard to gauge. So, your assertion that this is happening, I don't disbelieve it, but let's unpack that. And then, what are the risks of having this discussion in a lot of these countries? But the thing is, the new ones that the West needs to understand, because the West is part of this, whether it wants to be or not, is that as long as there are blasphemy laws, you don't even dream about countering terrorism. Because the very people who can take on these violent ideas from within, people who know the Quran by heart, people who went to school all their lives in the Middle East, are people who would be blasted as blasphemous. So, there is no countering terrorism without freedom. But just to push back on that for a minute, Nadia, I mean, we are not, the United States government, correct me if I'm wrong, Josh, is not in the business of telling the Pakistani government or the Saudi government, there are some laws on your books that we just don't like. No, but you control the virtual space. That's the most important space because that space is actually what's fueling this debate. Okay, well, explain more, what do you mean? How would this work? How this, let me just say something that this is not actually very theoretical debate in the Arab world. Most of the personal status laws in most of the Arab countries is based on Sharia. So, the reason why I have practically no agency in Jordan is because of Sharia. So, it's not something like, oh, you know, it's a theological issue. It is very much governing my everyday life, me and millions and millions of others, which is why reform of Islamic thought is a very, it's a legal issue. These people are changing for fighting for civil laws, are fighting for human rights, for the, you mentioned in your paper, governance, that is such an enormous issue. We have a massive governance problem. In fact, you could argue that the governance problem is the major seed for all of this. So, the online space is allowing people who are educated, who want to see essentially liberal values that govern the United States in the Middle East, where they can be free. Why should we have to migrate to have freedom? People are risking their lives to leave. Why is it unlivable? Because it's very authoritarian, because it's very violent. Because violence is seen, especially religious violence, as holy in one way or another. So, these people are using the online, the liberal people who espouse liberal values. The only space they have to educate in liberal values, educate in secularism, is the virtual space. And we need to hold that sacred. As David mentioned, when there's an edgy book that, I don't know, somebody in... Let me mention that most of the content is in Arabic, not in English. So, you can imagine companies, American companies in Silicon Valley having to deal with an enormous amount of text in Arabic. And you get a lot of complaints from conservative Muslims that this is offending me, because it's preaching secularism, and I would like Sharia Allah. So, this is... So, what do you recommend? I recommend that American companies become defender of these secular voices, because what they want is separation of religion and state. They do not want to deprive people of being Muslim or Christian or Shia. They want separation where the state or some cleric do not have the right to kill you, or force on you a version you don't want to believe. Sure. I would recommend that Nadia's thoughts go to the point... The question you asked earlier, which I'm not sure I gave you a satisfactory answer on, of what does it mean, whether it's for a tech company or the U.S. government, to do better at this stuff. And I think that actually goes back to how you use the technology to try to be not just a source of challenge, but also a source of trying to mitigate that challenge. So, the fundamental philosophical reorientation that the Global Engagement Center was meant to instantiate was to acknowledge, probably later than it should have been, that the U.S. government is not going to be a good messenger for conveying any of the issues that Nadia is flagging. If so, only rarely and only for certain limited audiences. And instead, to figure out how to empower voices that did offer credible messages without painting those voices, which is the worst result in the world, is part of the challenge. It's a challenge that companies, to their credit, are also grappling with as they try to offer training sessions and try to figure out how to lift up those voices. But in some ways, the reason that technology seems maybe more on the challenge ledger right now is I just got to this quickly and built a sort of virtual community that people feel at least connected to. It strikes me and I've said in writings that it's a false sense of connection, but they don't feel like lone wolves. They feel not alone at all. They feel like they are part of something bigger and they have something to plug into and how to elevate voices offering a different vision, especially to those who are so vulnerable that ISIS and other messages are compelling. That seems to me where you go to make things better. David? So in terms of your question as to how to, I know this is happening with respect to this identity debate. I'd say, in addition to observational evidence, just the logic of the online space. And it brings out that which is marginalized. And I agree with you about the targeting of secularists or atheists, apostates. But as we know from the past 16 years, it's hard to kill an idea. In terms of what the government should do, that's much, much more difficult. But to me, one of the main things in this area is I just think knowing what's coming is important because I think it's obvious that this is coming and it's going to have profound impact. We can already see it at a level of who jihadists are targeting. But it is going to have an impact within the region. And I think thinking it through is part of anticipating the way that the strategic environment is going to evolve. So that's a kind of optimistic way to begin the question and answer session. Absolutely. Okay. So if you have a question, can you wait for the mic and identify yourself? We'll take the lady in the back first. The lady behind you, I was. Cynthia Schneider from Georgetown University. I want to just delve a little deeper into the kind of topics that Nadia's talking about and particularly with technology and the virtual space. You know, what Google has been doing, as I understand it, is targeting individuals who are susceptible and trying to turn them, literally one by one. But then there's a whole gray space that you were talking about, Nadia, for the war of ideas. Of what, so I'm curious to know more about what kinds of information, what kinds of voices you feel need to be leveraged more in that gray space. An example, I'm working on my Timbuktu Renaissance project in Mali and working specifically in Timbuktu, Northern Mali, which you mentioned, working with the Google Cultural Institute is to provide translations and explanations of the content of the Timbuktu manuscripts, which could have been written in 15th century Florence. It's all about humanism. So I'm curious about the content and the voices that you think should get out and is there, who should be doing that? Who can do that and how? So a great question. The good thing is that there's actually a plethora. So as I'm researching my book, I was actually gonna, I saw that if you look at education, there's also thought entrepreneurs, if you would. Like for example, one young man, an Jordanian living in Dubai, was watching his kids watching children's stories on TV and saw the very intolerant, almost fascist ideas that we are superior because we're Muslim and non-Muslims are practically non-human. So all these ideas that he was not comfortable, even though they're not directly violent, it's that gray area that actually is inevitably makes it very easy for you to get to the next stage, but you have to go through it. So he quit his job and started this platform, children's stories. In beautiful Arabic, he hired top linguists and top vocal actors for these stories, which basically aim at instilling in children curiosity about the other as opposed to animosity about the world in general, tolerance, diversity, confidence in yourself, individualism, these values that he believes that his kids need for the 21st century. So his product now gets a million downloads with zero advertising. So there's also, there's an education in journalism, in music, in film, in short film. There's actually a plethora of talent because people who live in the Middle East, enough of them, enough brilliant people realize it's either us or ISIS. And you know what, Arab state, they really see it. They really see there's no gray area because Arab states are much more comfortable with extremists who allow them to continue to rule than with liberal voices that ultimately mean they have to leave. We have to have real for the first time in our history, have to have actual democratic governments that allow for freedoms. We have never experienced that yet. So they're much more comfortable with Islamist voices than liberal voices, which is why you can tweak one sentence that is pro-human rights and be jailed or killed. So there's plethora of them. So who is to decide? I think if there's an intention, if there's really an intention and recognition that in order to really counter the ideology, you need to populate the virtual space where people go for knowledge with these kind of material that furthers real tolerance and nonviolence, et cetera. You can have a committee, and I think it would not be very hard to identify who can, because there's so much. But if there's intention, if there's a will, there is a way, right? Gentlemen, in front here. I'm an attorney and a veteran of the Army. And 16 years ago, my sister had just left a job in the North Tower, and no one she worked with survived. So I'm particularly touched by what went down on 9-11. And I've tried to understand it, and I've done a lot of work since then on the counter-terrorism problem. Thinking about people and plots, I wonder each of you, if you discuss a little bit as a panel, what you think it says about the counter-terrorism effort that we can't find, either by daddy or as I would hear. And here we are, 16 years into this, and we don't know where the leaders of the organizations that we're fighting even are. And then secondly, I think that both Al-Qaeda and ISIS are looking at WMD, and they have it on a long timeframe, but I'm concerned that if John Brennan indeed thinks that this is a hundred year war that we're embarked on, that time is on the jihadi side, and Peter was very on the money over time saying that the threat was really a low-grade non-existential threat, particularly focused on aviation. Everything's borne out Peter's prognosis thus far. Everyone missed the rise of ISIS. However, I do feel that Zauhiri in particular pays heed to bin Laden's dictum that he will be patient until patience is outworn by patience. And I feel now with Hamza coming to the fore that there is a second or even a third generation of Al-Qaeda that are more professional, better networked, more experienced, more dug into these societies like Mali and Pakistan. And I wonder, A, does it matter that we can't find bin Laden's successors Zauhiri? Does it matter that we can't even tell if Baghdadi is dead or alive? And third and most importantly, what do you think of WMD, is it on their menu and will we see it? Thank you. So in the paper that New America published today, we have a very quite a comprehensive answer to the WMD question, the weapons of mass destruction. In all the jihadi terrorist plots in the West, one thing is quite striking. None of them involved weapons of mass destruction or even attempted. And it's the weapons of mass destruction, misnomer, right? There's only one weapon of mass destruction really, the nuclear bomb, but radiological bombs, chemical bombs, biological bombs. And so in the 413 cases since 9-11 of jihadi terrorists in the United States, not one of the people involved tried to use these kinds of weapons, try to get precursors. So it's sort of a non-issue, which doesn't mean that it couldn't become an issue. Now in this country, 13 people motivated by extreme right-wing ideology, some with idiosyncratic motives have experimented with these weapons in a pretty kind of low level way. These weapons are very hard to, Saddam Hussein had unlimited amounts of money in his search for weapons of mass destruction and never really got to what he wanted, which is nuclear weapons. So these are complicated things to acquire. Now, there's a few caveats, but one more point. When ISIS took Mosul, we know from Joby Warwick's reporting, they had cobalt 60 in there. They'd taken labs at Mosul University that had cobalt 60. They did nothing with it. They had no idea what it was, because the cobalt 60 would have been useful for radiological weapons. Now, ISIS has an al-Qaeda before it in Iraq to deploy crew pouring weapons, but when you blow up a pouring bomb, people die from a blast, not the pouring. I mean, it's a very inefficient way to kill people. So, his or two, most of these groups have not really gone down that route. It's much easier to both kill somebody with a bomb or shoot them or whatever. Now, the big caveat to this, I think is bioterrorism. And the big caveat comes in two flavors. First of all, it was Bruce Ivins who had very idiosyncratic motives to kill five people shortly after 9-11. He was a microbiologist at a very senior level in the U.S. government. Now, to me, the issue is not terrorists trying to become skilled microbiologists. Is microbiologists adopting jihadist ideas or any other kind of extreme idea? Because, you know, and there's a more law in biology where things are becoming easier to do. And so, that, I think, is a reasonable concern. And you could imagine an Indonesian microbiologist who suddenly thinks the ideas of Jamal Saneer are the right ones. Well, that is a big problem. And the secondary problem is gene editing. And I'm not a scientist, as you will, my comments will quickly show. But gene editing takes us into a whole new world. A lot of good things, but like any technological development, a lot of bad things. Could you imagine, for instance, a virus that attacked people with distinctly Jewish heritage or distinctly Irish heritage, or choose your flavor? This is a kind of dystopian future that is not, I think, entirely impossible. But I think for the moment, we don't have to concern ourselves too much with it. And I'm gonna turn it over to the rest of the panel, but, you know, we tend to overthink particular people. It turns out we're kind of over-funct in Laden. In Laden's ideas of surviving death, Anwar al-Laki, 77 people in this country, after the death of Anwar al-Laki, were found to have Anwar al-Laki's videos in their possession at the time of their arrest. So killing ideas, as we've all agreed, is hard. Killing people can be tricky. I mean, Aiman al-Zawari has managed to survive. And you could make the argument, great. I mean, if you were to select the worst person in the world to run al-Qaeda, you would find somebody like Aiman al-Zawari, a kind of charisma-free boar who is disliked by people within his own organization. So, you know, from a real politics thing, great. I mean, Aiman al-Zawari continues to run al-Qaeda central into the ground. So, but we get too hung up on that. I mean, if Baghdadi died tomorrow, clearly they thought this one through. And they, so, Josh, you had to deal with this to the extent that you can talk about it publicly. What can you say? Let me say maybe a word on each, just on the WMD issue. This strikes me as one of the reasons why addressing safe havens held by terrorists remains important. You can never please everyone category. There's been, over the past couple of months, some commentary, well, how much did it matter that ISIS held Mosul or Raqqa or whatever anyway? Well, it seems to me it matters for various reasons, including some of the messaging that is more credible if you have territory to hold and point to. But another is because WMD work doesn't necessarily take a certain amount of space, but it sure is easier if you're insulated from law enforcement, intelligence collection, et cetera. So, as a problem that I admit, seems not thankfully to have been acted on in any of the plots you mentioned, Peter, but I think the point about Tobi's reporting on the issue is they didn't, if it became a locus of expertise, or expertise was not very big because right in the University of Mosul, they had materials they could have deployed which they didn't use. But it's still quite worrisome when they have a University of Mosul in that control there. So, I think I'm agreeing with that. The other, on the other front, individuals, I tend to be where Peter is, in part, and this goes back to our discussion of the role of the virtual world, there's a leadership capacity organizationally that, especially ISIS with all of its planning, I suspect has figured out a succession strategy, hopefully with less talented folks, so far as I'm concerned, but I'm sure they've thought it through. Then there's the kind of inspirational element to leadership, and I'm all for decapitating the leadership of terrorist groups. I think that's part of, it's not sufficient, but part of a thorough approach to counterterrorism, but when those voices do live on to the extent that the inspirational piece is about how they articulate a message and something distinctive about the way they speak to that message and are able to galvanize, perhaps a very small part of the global population to act on it, but still a worrisome part, when you do have a lot of these still inspiring, a lot of themselves still inspiring, it doesn't go away when the person goes away. Nadia. You know, psychologically, there are some people in the Middle East who have heard these stories, like if they really wanted to kill them, they would kill them. In America, they put a man on the moon, right? So why can't they do this? So are they in some shape or form complacent in this? But at the same time, from the US perspective, again, like to invest so much resources in killing one person when that one person may or may not have an impact, especially when the big inspirations definitely can impact. So I'm with Peter on this. And by the way, just to sort of sign out, I mean to pick up on something Josh says, I mean, according to General Raymond Tony Thomas, who's the head of Special Operations Command, who spoke publicly in July, we, the United States led coalition, have killed 60,000 to 70,000 ISIS fighters. So it's not like we just, you know, I mean, when you're taking out that a number of people, I think the UN, we quote this figure in the paper we just published, UN now last month estimated there was maybe 12,000 to 20,000 ISIS fighters left. My guess is the 12,000 is a much more accurate. And you know, the foreign fighters that we concerned about, many of them were dying in place according to, there was a lot of concern that they would come back. Yes, some did come back to the West, but the ones that are staying, you know, either they're volunteering to die or they're just dying because they're been killed to be. I would just add that one of the enduring lessons of the past 16 years is the difficulty of finding and killing an individual person who has good operational security. David, do you have a question? Okay. Thank you. David Sturman here at New America. I want to take the conversation back a little bit to the question of state support and ask about what I think are two highly unlikely roots to an end to the current Jihadist terrorist threat, but ones that I'd like to get your sense of is there a possible route regardless of likelihood and some sense of how likely you would see that. And those two are that Al Qaeda and other Jihadist groups continually see their efforts to take over territory, getting smashed and instead retreat to local terrorism and not attacking the far enemy. And the second is that Gulf states or other states in the region via funding various ecosystems actually succeed in taking over the radical groups and forcing them to increasingly have to counter to their demands that may or may not be within the international system. And I think everyone here agrees those are quite unlikely compared to the eight drivers of the Jihadist threat but do you think those are possible conditions, especially given that in some of its propaganda this seems to be the ISIS claim about why Al Qaeda is not a legitimate conveyor of Jihadist ideology or Jihadist politics in the future? We'll go down the road. All right, so I dare say that most Arab states are not interested in uprooting the tree but just taking the poisonous fruits when convenient because it used to be that the government, look at the Arab world a few decades ago, look at TV a few decades ago, there's women are very Western looking, it was a very liberal place, cinema and Cairo, a very different place. And then you see the rise of Islamism with government blessing and the choice was us or the Islamists, what would you like? And of course people would rather vote for secular states than Islamists until they became so authoritarian that people said, you know what, we'll take the Islamists, you're unbearable. So now the choice is us or ISIS, what would you like? So ISIS is actually important or its sisters as we say in Arabic. So ISIS under any name, whether it's Al Qaeda, Fath-Hashan, et cetera. So the choice that the Arab states, many of them like is us or them, so what would you like? They don't want an actual liberal voice, an actual viable democratic competition. That is way worse scenario than actually dealing with terrorists that they basically can fund. They have the, you know, almost a remote control cut funding allow a little bit, you know, it's they're totally in charge because they're in charge of liberal voices down to a week, to a sentence, as opposed to opening the borders for thousands to pour into Syria or, so until in the West, there is again really understanding and appreciation for soft power, authentic local soft power, because it's the only power that can really root fresh, you know, very liberal values in the Middle East. I don't see this as going anywhere and I don't see states becoming part of, the right part of history in the Arab world. So as you were walking through those two scenarios, I was reminded of that line from the ex files, I want to believe. I would love to see those things come true. I share a sort of skepticism that that's the way it plays out. Nadia spoke pretty well to the second scenario, so maybe just to say a word or two on the first scenario. Part of what's challenging about the ideological component of taking on what is itself an ideologically driven phenomenon is that it's non falsifiable, right? These, what's been cultivated, first by Al-Qaeda, now by ISIS, it's able to integrate into its message, but I think it's in some ways a sincerely believed message, whatever happens. So if you hold territory, that's a sign of victory and things to come. If you lose territory, well that's a sign that you're in one of those periods where you need to regroup and you'll come back stronger and the message is able to incorporate world events with more or less credibility in that matter and still sort of forge ahead. And so the idea that a group that has sort of tasted the big screen as much as ISIS or Al-Qaeda would voluntarily resort to pursuing only more local grievances, I think it would be useful for that to happen and we do see affiliates or splinter groups pop off. So it's not really a yes or no question, but big picture, it would seem to me difficult for them to either believe or make the deliberate recruitment strategy of trying to get new folks to sign on to something that sounds less exciting and less ambition. That's sort of a hard sell. So that's my inclination, though I wish it were. I wish either of those scenarios were to unfold and the quicker the better. W, the final word for you. So the final word is, I actually agree with both Nadia and Josh. I'd actually be very interested in seeing a rigorous take on under what conditions a jihadist group is purely local. Because this debate comes up a lot, that this group is local, they're not actually transnational. It's almost never true when it said though in the sense that we can see the flow of foreign fighters, the flow of technical assistance across groups and almost always that exists even in groups that are really described in the literature almost always as being nationalist in outlook like the East Turkistan Islamic Movement slash Turkistan Islamic Party, which is the Uyghur group. Like if you look at their rhetoric it's very standard AQ rhetoric plus they're in battlefields like Syria and Afghanistan. So the idea that they're just purely local I don't think is borne out by the evidence. It would be really interesting to see but the trend is definitely against pure localization because both of the interconnected world that we live in were just easier to be transnational. And B, by the fact that you have so many Jewish victories across so many different areas that these groups benefit by being interconnected and then C, based on the fact that their ideology is inherently a transnational ideology it tends to make local groups the exception rather than the norm. Although of course every group does have some local aspirations. I don't think you'd find any that is only transnational and has no local focus. Peter, I really want to thank you for inviting us to be here. Thank you. Great discussion. Thanks for coming and thank you for the C-SPAN production team and it was really a wonderful discussion. Thank you.