 So welcome everyone to New America. I'm Douglas Olivant, I'm an ASU senior fellow in the future of war project here at New America. On behalf of Anne-Marie Slaughter, our president, and Peter Bergen, the vice president, and the chair of the International Security Program, with which we're both affiliated. Thanks for coming today to listen to our book event. We have with us Brian Fishman, who is a research fellow in the International Security Program here at New America. And he has just written the master plan, ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the jihadi strategy for final victory. Which, you know, if you really want to be a friend to Brian, you will go out and buy, whether at your virtual or brick and mortar bookstore, because good friends buy friends books, even if they don't actually read them. So we'll do this as follows. We'll let Brian talk for about 30 minutes. Brian and I will have a conversation about his book for about the same amount of time. And then we'll turn to our audience here today so that you can ask questions of our author. So, well, further ado, Brian, tell us about your book, tell us why you wrote it, how you came to the place of writing it, and then summarize what it actually says. Yeah, Doug, thank you first off for hosting to New America, which is a place that I used to work here full time and am now affiliated with remotely, but it's a place that's sort of very special to me. Thanks to Peter Bergen, in particular, David Sturman, who organized. The master plan, the history of the master plan goes back to when I was teaching at West Point in the Combating Terrorism Center, which is a research center up there at West Point. And in the spring of 2008, I taught a seminar about what was then called the Islamic State of Iraq, which was a jihadi political entity declared by what had been previously known as al-Qaeda in Iraq. And the core question of this seminar was, what does it mean when a jihadi organization declares a state and attempts to govern? And so, you know, I've mentioned that for two reasons. One, that was the sort of kernel that led to the book, ultimately. But two, I think it shows that the discussion about our present problem of the Islamic State is often framed in events that have happened in the last two years, maybe the last three years. But we were discussing this in 2008. There's a syllabus that raises these questions that I put together in 2008. This question is a lot older and a lot longer. And I think we need to recognize, first off, that our sort of general conception of the way the Islamic State has evolved is different than the way that people in the Islamic State think it has evolved. They think they have a longer tenure than we tend to think they have. And they think that that tenure gives them strength and resilience. And we should be aware of that as we think about how they are going to try to respond to the pressure that they are currently under. So, the core of the book began with the syllabus for that class, the research. And I wound up, I wanted to write the book, a book about the sort of history of the Islamic State of Iraq in 2011, 2012, didn't really get around to it. And then actually in the fall of 2014, I happened to hear from two of my old cadets that had been in that class in 2008. Both of whom said, hey, did you ever update the syllabus for that class? It would be really useful right about now. And to be totally honest, that was the sort of kick in the butt that I needed to really make this happen. So, that's where this came from. The core argument of the master plan is that there is this longer duration. And it's structured around a document that was developed in late 2004. You know, what is the master plan? The master plan is a document that was developed in late 2004 by Al Qaeda, primarily by Al Qaeda's security chief, Saif al-Adal. Saif al-Adal was under house arrest at the time living in an apartment or a villa, depending on how you describe it, on an Iranian military base where a number of Al Qaeda folks were contained. He had regular access to visitors. One of whom was an old Palestinian friend of his that had been imprisoned with him in Egypt years before. That person carried a document 42 pages long to the Jordanian journalist Fawad Hussein who then published it. There are two core elements of what he published. One was Saif al-Adal's history of Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, the godfather of the Islamic state and the founder and emir of Al Qaeda in Iraq. His history of Zarkawi's original engagement with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in 1999 through 2001. And also the master plan, which was a seven-stage plan running through 2020. Now, what was interesting about this quote-unquote master plan? There's a number of things. One is that it predicted correctly that in the fifth stage, which was going to last from 2013 to 2016, that the caliphate would be redeclared in Syria. The caliphate was redeclared in Syria in 2014. It also said that during that same time period, the British would reject the rising unity of Europe, which also sort of happened. So I pointed those two things as sort of a hook. Now, this is a little bit of sort of Nostradamus, right? We can select the things that he got right. And I actually don't make the argument that this plan really served as the strict blueprint for the development of the Islamic state. That's not the implication in my mind of what was in the master plan. But I do think it was awfully prescient. It was a very clear prediction. And he clearly understood some social and political and demographic dynamics that would offer the jihadi movement some opportunities. And that's what I think is most powerful about that prediction. Now, why Syria? And I think that is the key question. What did they see about Syria in 2004? This is the smartest thing that Saif al-Adhaal recognized in 2004. In 2004 at a time when Abu Musab al-Zarkawi in Iraq is swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden. And the master plan in many ways is the work plan, is the strategic plan for these two movements when they finally come together. Now, if you remember previously, when we teach a class about al-Qaeda, we say, well, they were founded in 1988. The original operational model was that they would be a sort of a special forces brigade that would bind together the various jihadi organizations that popped up after the Soviet Union left Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda was going to bind those together and train them and plus them up when necessary. In the mid to late 1990s, they shifted. And they said, the local regimes in the Middle East and the Muslim world that we want to overthrow will never be able to overthrow them because the United States is propping them up. Therefore, we as al-Qaeda must attack the United States and prevent them from propping up those local regimes. That's the theory. That's the story we tell about al-Qaeda's strategy. What happened in 2004 is that Saif al-Adhaal recognized that there were exceptions to that geopolitical assumption that al-Qaeda had been making. The most obvious was in Iraq. Clearly, we were not just going to prop up local regimes because we would just knock one over in Iraq. And so there is this reassessment of that strategy that had been the core al-Qaeda strategy from the sort of mid-late to 1990s forward. And what Saif al-Adhaal looked around and says, okay, where's another regime that the United States is not going to prop up? Because he looks and he says, you know what? The demographics in Iraq are actually not well-disposed for us to sort of re-declare the caliphate there. And there's this prophecy about Syria too. There are some sort of prophetical arguments as well. But what Saif al-Adhaal says is the United States is not going to back the regime that governs Syria. That's the place where we attack it, the U.S. won't prop it up, and we may be able to establish a caliphate in its place, re-declare the caliphate in its place. Because the demographics there actually favor us a lot more than they do in Iraq. That was pretty smart in 2004. That's the smartest thing about the master plan. Was the recognition that there was a geopolitical and demographic opportunity in Syria that didn't exist anywhere else in the world and that the jihadis could exploit it. Now, what's important about that is that this represented a joint vision among the Zarkawiists, who ultimately created the Islamic State, and among a key leader in al-Qaeda. And so there's a lot of implications that you might want to draw from this, but one of them I think that is important is to recognize that the Islamic State is not the only organization that has sort of caliphal visions and recognizes the opportunity in a place like Syria. Al-Qaeda sees that as well and has seen that for more than a decade. We should keep that in mind even as we worry about the Islamic State primarily as these al-Qaeda-aligned elements now under the guise of Jabhat Faqt al-Sham are working to build sort of political engagement. Now, why did this fail? The great failure of the master plan is that it was built for an alliance that no longer exists. The Islamic State and al-Qaeda are now very much at odds with one another. So what's the sort of core strategic and ideological difference? I would make the argument actually that a lot of that is just personality. People just don't like each other. There is a struggle over power. But setting that question aside for a minute, what are sort of the ideological differences here? Well, I would argue that there are two primary ideological differences between these organizations. One is how these groups define the Ummah. The Ummah is the sort of global community of Muslims. Al-Qaeda, you actually all agree with Al-Qaeda on something. You all probably agree that there are about 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. The reason why you believe that and why I believe that is that that's what the Pew Foundation said and they studied this. And so that's generally about right. Al-Qaeda agrees with that statement. They think a lot of those people are lapsed. They think they perhaps are apostates. But Al-Qaeda wants to try to reach out to those people and drag them back to their sort of revanchist vision and very violent vision of Islam. The Islamic State disagrees with that at a basic level. Zarkawiis disagree with that at a basic level. They think that they are maybe 1.6 billion people that call themselves Muslims in the world. But that a very large percentage, probably most of those people are apostates and they deserve to die. Not to be reformed to die. There's no good to come from them. They actually define the community of what they would consider true Muslims as much, much smaller. This is a major difference between these organizations. The other key difference that I think is worth pointing out between the sort of Zarkawiist worldview and Al-Qaeda is that Al-Qaeda, while rejecting the political hierarchies that have existed in the Middle East, rejecting the clerical hierarchies that have existed in the Middle East, they try to stand up their own. They believe in the idea of expertise, they believe in the idea of leaders that are not right on the battlefield engaged in violence and in their wisdom. The Islamic State does not. The Islamic State from the beginning, as Zarkawiis have said, the highest form of worship, of religious commitment is to fight. And if you are a religious scholar that is not on the battlefield fighting, then you actually don't understand your religion very well. This has major implications because what it has led to within the Zarkawiist worldview is the devolution of tremendous ideological authority to low-level people. It's fundamentally a populist movement. And what that has contributed to in the Islamic State is that elements within that movement turn on one another. Because if Doug and I are fighters in the Islamic State and Doug thinks, well, let's cut a deal with this other organization over there even if it's just tactical. And I disagree. Then I have the ability to just sort of declare that Doug is a cover, that he is not Muslim. If he's not willing to declare that those other people are not a true Muslim, as the Islamic State defines it, then that is grounds for me to excommunicate him from the community and therefore attack him. You can imagine this is a very poor basis on which to build a cohesive organization in a cohesive state. It really is. Obviously the Islamic State has tried to build a cohesive organization in a cohesive state. What I would argue to you is there is a fundamental tension in that from the very beginning it's never really going to work. You cannot combine this notion of ideology. And let's take the word ideology out because it's so loaded. That organizational culture with the kind of organization that they have tried to build. They've essentially, there's this sort of Klaus Witzian notion of the culminating point of victory. The culminating point of victory is the point at which an army is on the defensive even if it doesn't know it yet. You get to a point and you're sort of overextended. The Islamic State has been overextended since probably September 2014, if not sooner. They've been losing since then and they are losing on the battlefield today. Now the final sort of message that I'll bring to you in description of this is that those ideological elements that I think of that organizational culture that is ill-disposed, that is a problem for them in terms of building a state will be very helpful for them as they try to be a resilient organization moving forward. I don't think we are going to be able to defeat them anytime soon. I think we will be able to weaken them. I think they are on the defense right now. I think they are going to be around for quite a while. Why do I think that? One of the major reasons I think that is that I look at the period when we were fighting them before. And I look at the time period where we thought we had them defeated. We say they're militarily defeated. Doug and I have argued about this over years before. We said they were militarily defeated after the surge in the awakening in Iraq, 2008 to 2010, 2011, depending on how you want to define it. And it's true. When the Islamic State of Iraq was declared in 2006, they said they had 12,000 men under arms and another 10,000 that were ready. They're probably exaggerating some, so call it 10 to 15,000 maybe. In 2011, in August 2011, the Department of Defense held two things in its hands at the same time. One is that we'd militarily defeated that organization, and the other was that it had 800 to 1,000 operating members. Now it's true. 800 to 1,000 members, it was a lot less than what they had two or three years earlier. They didn't control territory in the same way that they had. They didn't have the same resources. They weren't as violent. But between 2008 and 2010 in Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq committed more suicide attacks than any other terrorist organization in the world. It was still one of the most dangerous terrorist organizations on the planet. We weren't paying attention to it. And one of the reasons we weren't paying attention to it, if you ask me, is that we had a model for what kind of organization it was. As an insurgency in a proto-state at that time, we didn't think about it as an organization that could evolve into a terrorist network very quickly. And if you think about that organization as a sort of proto-state during that time period, it does look weak. If you think about it as a terrorist organization, it looks strong. 800 to 1,000 members is four to five times the number that al-Qaeda had on 9-11. Now al-Qaeda had only fewer than 200 members by design. It wasn't that it wanted to be a small organization. The Islamic State had a very different model. But my point is that I think we need to be very careful as we move forward from here about taking specific kinds of intellectual models for assessing this organization. One of the great lessons from the modernity of our communications revolution, of the ability for human beings to move around the globe more quickly, is that these organizations scale up and scale down more quickly than they have in the past. And so if we use one intellectual model to try to understand what they are, I worry that we will misunderstand persistent and dangerous threats. So what does that mean going forward? Where do I think we're going to go? I think we're going to get to a point where the Islamic State is going to lose much of its territory in Syria and Iraq. It's plain defense now. I don't think that it will be eliminated. I think it will be able to create alliances with local tribal and political networks. I think it will make money off those. It will operate like a mafia in those kinds of settings. And the reason why I think this is because that's what it did before. Between 2008 and 2010, when frankly we weren't paying attention. One of the reasons why we weren't paying attention is that our collectors were no longer there. And by collectors in this sense, in a policy sense, I mean the journalists. Journalism organizations started to leave Iraq during that period because it wasn't as much of a focus. We weren't getting the same kind of reporting. I think we didn't see the sort of danger that they posed over time. And I worry that we will make that same mistake again. People say, well, that's crazy. How could we ever get to a point where we would underestimate this organization in the future? We think about them so much today. And I would just say we went through a tremendous intellectual shift from 2006 to 2009 in the way we thought about this. And a relatively short three-year span. And we could do that again. We could take our eye off of it again. And so I warn us not to do that. So how do I think this group is going to evolve? I think it will maintain its ability to be a vibrant terrorist organization with a global reach. I think that the diaspora from this organization is going to be a problem for the globe for the next 25 years. I think that they're not going to be able to demonstrate as much dramatic power on the ground in Syria and Iraq. And they're going to have to try to replicate the notion of a caliphate in other ways. They're going to do that by falling back on some of the arguments that they made when they were weaker the first time. So in 2006 they were very clear they didn't need to hold territory in order to be understood as a legitimate Islamic state. They will go back to those arguments. They will make the argument that the caliphate is built on a set of feudal relationships between local emirs to the caliph. And that it's not dependent on territory. They will make the argument that as long as people believe in the caliphate and that the fight continues, that it is legitimate. They will make the argument that the Prophet Muhammad's first Islamic state built in Medina was very small. And that they actually control more territory than he did. And if you're going to criticize them, you're criticizing the Prophet. Now I think the overwhelming majority of Islamic scholars around the world would laugh at that argument. But it's going to be compelling for the small minority, for the fringe that's actually susceptible to it. And so the other thing that I think we're going to see them do is work on what I refer to as their earned media strategy. In a domestic political context we talk about earned media, paid media and owned media. Earned media is when you go out, you do a big event or you create some splashy YouTube video that gets picked up by regular media outlets. We have to recognize that much of what the Islamic state does in terms of its propaganda is an earned media strategy. It's not that they want their propaganda to be ingested directly. They want international media to pick it up and amplify it for them. This is real and that is a strategy and I think the journalists need to understand that the Islamic state is attempting to manipulate them in that way. They're going to try to do this. That's why you see ever bloodier video tapes. That's why you see the most awful recent one of people hanging on meat hooks and things like that in Syria and Iraq. They're not going to have the ability to develop those kinds of set pieces once they lose territory. They're going to have to be creative about how they do this and generate new ways of demonstrating brutality going forward. It's going to be things like very brutal stuff all of the James Foley video and the Beheading videos, but perhaps taking place in other places outside of Syria and Iraq in an apartment in Paris, those sorts of things. They're going to live tweet stuff. They will attempt to stream things live. They will do those kinds of things in order to generate and pursue their earned media strategy going forward. And that is how they are going to try to maintain the perception of power and global authority that will, in my mind, enable them to maintain the perception of a caliphate. I think they will be able to maintain that argument among a smaller set of people. They're not going to get the number of recruits they've had in the last couple of years, but it will be enough. It will be enough that if a new opportunity arises, they will be able to seize it. Those opportunities could come in a variety of different forms. I think one of the great elements here that they have not been able to achieve that's laid out in the master plan is a series of effective attacks on Israel. I think they would take that if they could get it for sure. Obviously, one of the sort of ironically one of the challenges for them in doing that is that they have to get through Hamas and Hezbollah in order to do it, neither of which to allow the Islamic State in on their game. But those are the kinds of things they're going to try to do. You know, I think we need to be very, very supportive of our friends in Lebanon, friends in Jordan that are very much at risk in these kinds of scenarios. Friends in Saudi Arabia, even though they're not always as friendly as we might like. But destabilization in those places is the kind of opportunity that they are going to be looking for and trying to foster because that's how you get off the mat. That's how they got off the mat last time. So with that, I think I'll wrap it up and Doug and I can chat a bit. Great. Thanks so much, Brian. We'll start with the easy stuff. You talked about the master plan in your book. You've talked about it here. You list the seven stages of the master plan. Can you just run through those briefly to give the audience both here and elsewhere exactly what you're talking about and what this is and how it's unfolded? Yeah. Now I'm terrified that I'm going to forget one. I've got the book right here. You can borrow it. I'll do my best. I just may get a name wrong. So the first, they start with what they call the awakening stage. Remember, this plan was developed in 2004. So some of this is justification after the fact. So they start with the awakening stage, which they said last from 2000 to 2003. Really, the hallmark being the 9-11 attacks. Now, they talk about that as a very good thing. But remember, this is drafted by Saif al-Adal, who we know was one of the al-Qaeda members that actually opposed the 9-11 attack. And that's why I say it's sort of an exposed fact of justification. The second goes from 2003 to 2006, the stage of standing upright, if I remember correctly. And that essentially is draw the United States and the West into a fight in Iraq. And most importantly, try to get governments in the Middle East to choose. Are you going to back the U.S., in which case you're going to alienate and anger your populations? Or are you going to stand with resistance to an invasion by a Crusader army? The third stage is the big setback for them, 2007 to 2010. This is the stage where they said we're going to start a fight in Syria between that time period. We're going to start a fight in Lebanon and we're going to be able to strike Israel during this time period. Now, actually, if you go back, there were attacks in Syria by these kinds of folks in the 2006 timeframe, including by folks that were connected to al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Islamic State of Iraq. But they were relatively low level. They weren't sustained. There was an uprising by Fatah al-Islam in Lebanon, which is a group that the Syrian government had backed previously and sort of turned on them. 2004 is the sort of consolidation of those gains. The idea there is to really build out an electronic force to be able to project your power and messaging prowess globally. They say that the U.S. economy would take a huge nosedive in the 2010 to 2013 period and that that would force them to back off support for local regimes in the Middle East that many of those local regimes would fall. The mechanism they describe is very, very different than what happened in the Arab Spring. I think it would be a mistake to draw a parallel there. That said, many of the regimes in the Middle East did fall during that time period. 2013 to 2016 is the stage of establishing the caliphate, establishing the state in Syria. This is the part where I think the prediction at least was most accurate. That was to be followed by sort of two stages that are very closely intertwined. The stage of absolute confrontation, the hallmark of which was to be a campaign of global terrorism unlike the world had ever seen. I think we can argue that that has happened. And then ultimately final victory. Final victory being defined as the West and the United States pulling out of the Middle East abandoning Israel and the Israeli government falling. As those 1.5 billion, they say 1.5 not 1.6. 1.5 billion Muslims unite behind this new caliphate. Obviously that's not going to happen. The final victory is not going to happen. The Islamic State is not going to take over the world. Neither is al-Qaida. Both of them, even though they have different ideologies, are anathema to the overwhelming majority of Muslims around the world. We talk sometimes about 30, 40, 50,000 fighters that have gone to fight with the Islamic State in Syria and that's true. But 10 million people have been displaced from their homes in that fight and 5 million people, most of the Muslims have fled the Islamic State. Not all of them in the Islamic State, many of them in the Assad regime. But I think it's important to keep the scale of this even as it's a larger jihadi migration and a larger jihadi organization than we've ever seen in history and that's really scary and dangerous. But also recognize the scale at which this is happening within a population that is extraordinarily large and overwhelmingly ill-disposed to these people. We did a study, a colleague of mine did a study in 2009 and I really want somebody to do this again. I don't have the time. Looking at the percentage of al-Qaida's victims that were Muslim, in 2009 it was 84%. Much of that was the work that al-Qaida and Iraq did in Iraq. I would argue that the Islamic State members, as violent as they've been attacking in the West, their ratio is going to be even higher. And I think it's really incumbent on us to remember that their war is against Muslims as much as it is against us. In your book you talk a lot about Zarkawism and contrast that with al-Qaida. On the other hand, is Zarkawism a sufficient explanation of what the Islamic State is? Can we equate the two or are there other strains? So where does Zarkawism fit both within the Islamic State, and if it's all of it just say so and we move on. And then how do you contrast it with the al-Qaida ideology? So I think two of it is one is the definition of the Ummah and one with Zarkawi is his populism. And I think that there is a tension there that in his vision, Zarkawi talked about the caliphate. But his whole ethos was this populist rejection of established authority including the established authorities within the jihadi movement. People talk a lot and some of you will find this interesting and some of you will find it arcane. Many folks talk about Zarkawi's relationship with his one-time mentor, a Jordanian Salafi jihadi named Abu Muhammad al-Muqtisi. Talk about Muqtisi's influence on him. And I think sometimes we hold out hope that Muqtisi because he one time had influence on Zarkawi could have influence on the Islamic State. I worry about those assumptions. I worry about that because Muqtisi's, you know, what was more important for Zarkawi was not his good relationship with Muqtisi. It was his split with Muqtisi. It was his split and rejection of the established leaders in the jihadi movement. And they fell apart in 2004 and 2005 in part because Muqtisi's son was recruited by Zarkawi and ultimately held in Camp Buka and then killed. And Muqtisi didn't know what happened, right? And so there was this real tension between them in 2004 and 2005 as Zarkawi defines an ideology that is in opposition not just to the established political hierarchy in the Middle East and the established sort of government clerics, but even the jihadi clerics that aren't willing to endorse his level of violence. So I think that's important. I think there are other strains of thought that have come into play in the Islamic State that have been built on top of that. One is sort of packaged together in a text that many of you will know called The Management of Savagery, which was written by a Sudananist. I'm not going to be able to pronounce it. And somebody calling himself Abu Bakr Naji. One of the things that I talk about in the book is that Abu Bakr Naji is almost certainly a man named Muhammad Khalil al-Hakimah, who was an Egyptian fighter, who was killed in 2008 in Pakistan. And what Hakimah was describing in The Management of Savagery was both Zarkawi's strategy of provoke people, create chaos, I mean really create chaos as best you can so that you can replace that chaos and try to build up a new political hierarchy in its place. But he also talks about how do you build institutions, right? That there is a real need to go out and recruit doctors, recruit bureaucrats, that you need to send people to Western business schools so that they get management experience, that you need to get people that have real technical media experience. And I think that those ideas, Zarkawi certainly understood some of that, but he was not a builder in an institutional way in my mind. And so I think some of that came and was developed more thoroughly by folks that came after him. Okay. So you're expecting this question. So when, you know, I wasn't quite in, I came to Iraq shortly after ISI declared that they were a state, you know, and we all thought that was rather quaint, you know. Essentially it's, you know, as we saw it, as the West read it, it's like, well, we don't have any of the traditional characteristics of a state, but our hearts are pure, therefore we're a state. Right. And while we might find that a, not particularly convincing argument, at least it's internally consistent. Right. Internally to itself, it makes sense. This, of course, is in contrast to the Al-Qaeda view, which is the state, the caliphate is somewhere in the future, you know, exactly right, amorphous future. But I think we both agree the Islamic State or ISIS or ISIL or Daesh will soon find itself in the position where it has declared the caliphate, and now it's having to go back to something else, you know. And as our mutual friend, David, has said in a phrase I wish I'd said first, you know, it's hard to be the once in future caliphate. Yeah. So how does, Sounds like something you would say. I really wish I had. Well, I do say it often, I just didn't say it first. How does ISIL survive having, you know, going, having declared the caliphate and actually had, you know, many of us called a proto-state or, you know, some, you know, and Cochle actually said it really is a state. Let's not worry about the external definitions. But having then lost that and having to go back to this underground, insurgent, terrorist proto-group, how does it lose, how does it win the argument essentially then, how do you not say, well gee, Al-Qaeda was right all along. You guys, you guys got this wrong. How do they survive going back, you know, seemingly going backwards to this earlier stage? Yeah. So I think, so I, so Doug and I in, I forget exactly when we published the piece in 2014. 2014. So I went to Baghdad for the conference in March of 14. Yeah. So Brian and I are not only friends, we're co-authors. So I went to Baghdad in 2014 and was invited to this anti-terrorism conference that then Prime Minister Maliki put on. And there I ran into a bunch of the CTS guys, the Golden Division, and they're like, yeah, we're fighting for our lives out there in Fallujah. These ISIS guys are the real deal. I came back and saw Brian and he's like, well, yeah, I know all about these guys. So we published a short piece in April. And we said they are a de facto state, and everybody thought we were crazy until they took over Mosul, right? Right. So and what I would, so the way I would respond to your initial question is that I think in 2006 it's true that they weren't able to develop the bureaucratic institutions that they developed later on, but they did have a real structure that they were trying to build a state around. And I think their inability to do so was a function of weakness rather than intent, right? They wanted to build what they ultimately built in the last two or three years in 2006. They just couldn't because they were getting scrunched on all the time, right? By soft conventional forces, Iraqi tribes, the Iraqi army, all of the above. But even in 2006 they were stealing garbage trucks in Ramadi to pick up trash. They were setting speed limits in places that they did control. They had different speed limits in 2006 in town versus on highways outside of town. They had a set of cabinet structures that included a ministry of fisheries and agriculture, which bragged that they did low level public works projects like building irrigation systems and those sorts of things. So I guess it's true that they weren't able to create the structure that they ultimately did, but I think they tried and I think that they did make more headway in that regard than we give them credit for. The other thing I would say is that they had a really organized structure at the time and especially during the 2008 to 2010 period that helped them survive and it's worth mentioning because I think it'll help them. Well, actually I think there's an open question and for folks that might be in the sort of intelligence world, this is a question that I think you guys should be wrestling with. I don't have the data to answer. During that time period, one of the reasons why they were able to survive is because they operated in a very cellular way. They had a central structure and then they had district and sector leaders and those different bureaucratic entities were responsible for their own fundraising, they were responsible for bringing in their own personnel and so we could kill one of them and others would survive and operate distinctly. This is sort of classic cellular terrorist organization 101. I think it's a really fascinating question whether they still operate that way today. You can see some of the propaganda that comes out that shows these great hierarchies but the question and the metric that I would really look at here is what percentage of funding are the actual local units of the Islamic State today getting from the top versus the bottom? How much are they extracting from the population so that they sustain themselves versus being dependent on sort of a trickle down function? I would argue based on what you can see in sort of the public realm around this is that they still get a very large percentage of their funding that they're extracting from the population where they are. They're getting it from gas stations, they're getting it from taxation, those sorts of things. I think that breeds resilience down the road. I think it's an open question though and I think that the data that is in the public, in the case where data that is only some folks in government are going to have is going to be a lot better than what you can get in the public. Some people say open source is everything. This is one of those questions that would be a lot easier to answer on the inside. That's one. How do they deal with the sort of larger ideological setback of losing the territory that is the caliphate? I think there are a couple things. One is that it's not like their argument that they are the caliphate has been hugely successful already. It's gotten a lot of attention, but what percentage of people around the world actually believe it's the caliphate? It's criticized by every major Islamic scholar, including many of the jihadis that have backed al-Qaeda. It's not as if the sort of jihadi community is rallied behind what the Islamic State is doing and said, oh, yeah, yeah, this is definitely the caliphate. It's been the sort of rebel younger clerics that have done much of this sort of, you know, created much of this sort of quote-unquote theological backing for that argument to begin with. And so I don't think they have as much to lose, I guess, as some folks do. What they have to lose is the sense of political momentum, right? And the reason why that is meaningful is that I think a lot of folks are signing up for this because they believe it is a pathway to restore a sense of dignity that for whatever reason they have lost. And it helps to join a winning team if that's what you're looking for, right? And right now they are not a winning team in the way that they were. But the scale is totally different from the way we've assessed it in the past. So in 2006, 2007, when I was at West Point, we looked at what a cache of incoming foreign fighter records, the Sinjar records, right? And what we found is that during that time period, at the most, there were maybe 110, 120 foreign fighters joining the Islamic State of Iraq in any one month. Now, at the most in the last couple of years, maybe it was 1,000 to 2,000. But the estimates today are that it's still 100 to 200, right? And so the scale in which we are assessing this problem is just shifted. We're kind of on a different scale today. And I think this is really important, and I think it leads to some of the disagreement that we wind up having around these issues and whether we think they're on the degree to which we're on offense or defense, right? So in 2015, President Obama came out and said, we are now on offense. And this time of year, in 2015, Obama comes out and says, we're on offense against the Islamic State. And he was right. The offensive and the pushback on the ground against the Islamic State was well underway at that point. But there was obviously, if you step back one sort of one notch, then you had the downing of Russian airliner, major attacks by the Islamic State in Beirut, and the Paris attacks. And so President Obama gets pilloried for saying, well, they're on defense, we're making progress. But he was right for the scope of what he was talking about. You step back one bit more, and it doesn't look so rosy. You step back one step further. And I think we really have to think hard about the trajectory we're on. If we had sat down in this room, I moved to Washington D.C. after I graduated from college on September 10th, 2001. 9-11 was literally my first morning in Washington. And if we had had a conversation here two months later and said we're going to get back together, if we had this conversation on this date in 2001, and said then we're going to come back together in 15 years, and we're going to be on offense, we're going to take back Mosul and Raqqa. We think we've got a good plan to take back Mosul and Raqqa from the Jihadis. If you take it out of the Al Qaeda ISIS framework and just say the Jihadis, we all would have said, if I'd said that then, everybody in the room would have laughed me out. They would have said, you are crazy. They're never going to take Mosul and Raqqa. That's nuts. And so I think that there is a, how you assess our progress and where we are depends on the sort of aperture and the lens and what you think about it. And I think it's absolutely correct to say they are, they are on the defensive right now. They are. We are making major progress and it's going to hurt them. Denying them safe haven is going to hurt them. It's going to limit their ability to train. It's going to limit the willingness of people that are attracted to a quote unquote winner to join it. I don't think we're going to be able to defeat them. I think it's very difficult to imagine Northeastern Syria being governed in an effective way in the next five years by anybody in a way that actually denies a group like the Islamic State the ability to operate as a very powerful sub-state actor and sort of mafia organization. And one of the reasons why I think that is because they succeeded in doing that as a strong, powerful sub-state actor between 2008 and 2011. Now that's not to say that the sort of the advances that we're making now aren't important. That they're, that they don't improve our security. I think they do. I just, I warn us that I think that they're limited. That they're not going to be sufficient and that we are still in for a longer duration fight than any of us want to have. Alright, Brian. My last question to you. So on page 259, the last page of your book, you say effectively while trying to thwart the Islamic State prejudicial Western policymakers do its bidding. So let's say tomorrow you get a call from Trump Tower and you're saying, hey, we need you to run this. Do you want to be the U.S. Ambassador to the Anti-Islam Coalition or the Senior Director for Counterterrorism or the Assistant Secretary for Soulake, whichever of those you think is the best platform for you to use. What are you going to do now that you're in charge as the Western policymaker, what needs to be done to combat both this specific group and the larger jihadi movement that doesn't fall into this trap that you so easily, that you so glibly throw out in one sentence. Can't we just talk about the history? Come on. Okay. I think the short answer is I don't have a great answer. But I'll do my best. I think we, I think the advice I would give to President-elect Trump is the same advice I would have given to Hillary Clinton. It is that a group like the Islamic State makes many enemies. But it is not always true that the enemy of our enemy is our friend. And the fundamental challenge that we face now in both Iraq and Syria is one that I, you know, especially in Iraq, you know those politics far better than I do. But the fundamental challenge is not the military one. It's not can we take Mosul, can we take Raqqa. The Islamic State, for all of the credit it's gotten, has proven to be a dangerous military actor, but when there is organized resistance, it has not always proved successful militarily. But it is holding together this very tenuous coalition that strikes me as the most tricky thing over the long run because of the innumerable almost fractures in that coalition. And so one of the things that I would say is that the military progress has been slower than I think a lot of folks have liked. But there actually is this coalition that seems to be functioning right now. And doing everything that we can to hold that together strikes me as priority number one. That's not going to be easy. And again, Doug, I think you understand some of the details there, especially in Iraq better than I do. But that's got to be number one. I think we have to make sure that we distinguish between al-Qaeda and the Islamic State when we think about counter-messaging. The sorts of things that we want to do to those groups are different. When we're thinking about al-Qaeda, getting sort of senior criticism from Muslim leaders and the notion of political leaders can even be effective voices against al-Qaeda because al-Qaeda doesn't reject the notion of social hierarchy. The Islamic State does at a cultural level, not necessarily within their bureaucracy, but at a cultural level they do. And so the best messengers against them are going to be the formers that have defected. They're going to be the victims. It's going to be the stories of corruption within the Islamic State, that this entity is not actually what it says it is. And making the theological argument against them, in my mind, is a waste of time. It's kind of the practical argument against them because they're just too well-disposed. They've got too much sort of lineage and ethos built to just brush aside theological criticism. I just don't think it's going to be that effective. I think we have to make sure that we respect the alliance structures so that we can maintain our information sharing and our intelligence sharing, which means that we need to sort of communicate directly and discreetly with the folks that we have engaged to date. One of the most dispiriting things in my mind about the sort of fight in Syria is that many of the countries that seemed like they had gotten on board with real intelligence sharing and real information sharing that had understood the risk of trying to instrumentalize jihadis sort of forgot that. And now people seem to recognize, at least my perception is they seem to recognize that. Overcome by hatred of the Assad regime. Overcome by hatred of the Assad regime, right. People seem to have recognized to an extent that error. You know, building on that re-recognition seems very important. So those are the things that I would think about. None of that is a solution for the long run, which means getting governance again in northeastern Syria and northwestern Iraq. I don't know what that answer is, but it's hard for me at this point to imagine it within the existing political structures as we think of them today. I don't know what the new structures are. We've talked about this a lot. How much do you back the Kurds at the expense of Baghdad? I think you still continue to back, or at the expense of Turkey. Or at the expense of Turkey. I don't know what the answer there is. I don't have a great answer, especially in Syria. In Iraq it's a bit easier because you do have a government. You are making progress on the ground. But northeastern Syria, who's going to govern Raqqa? I don't know. And if anybody can give us a definitive answer there, you know, be my guest. All right. At this point we will turn to questions from the audience. Let me give a brief outline of how this works. Questions, as we were all taught in third and fourth grade, begin with a who, what, where, when, why, or how. I will entertain brief prefaces to the question, but if you want to give a long, long statement of your views on the issue, then you should write a book and give me a call and I'll schedule 30 minutes to come up here and talk it. When you get a question, please wait for the microphone to come to you, give us your name, any relevant affiliations, and then address your questions to Brian so we can tap into his expertise. We have microphones? Yeah. Ah, excellent. We'll start in the back, standing in the back. Thank you. That's a great presentation. I have a question about... Your name, please. My name's Todd Wiggins, citizen of the district. The bottom line is I would like to know if you think that the Russians know what they're getting into this time. So I think one of the things... You know, one of the things that I think we all need to do a better job of is looking at our own mistakes. I think there's very few people in Washington that are completely blame-free for the rise of the Islamic State. We all need to own a piece of that, including those of us, frankly, that saw some of that coming, but didn't spend the time and effort to yell about it loud enough, and I fall into that category. The... I published a piece in the spring of 2011 called The Fallen Rise of the Islamic State of Iraq before the Syrian Civil War kicked off. I should have done more to force that argument rather than just publish it and put it out on the Internet. So we all need to sort of look at our own mistakes, and the reason why I bring that up is I tell you about one thing I got right, and now let me tell you something I got wrong. I didn't understand the degree to which the Russians were going to invest in the Assad regime when the Syrian Civil War kicked off. I don't think I appreciated that enough, and I think that was a mistake. I think that... I think the Russians are in, but I suspect that in Damascus the calculation is we're going to say we're going to govern all of Syria again, but if we can get Aleppo back and we can control the primary arteries, we're not going to lose everything we have on a very long, drawn-out fight to govern northeastern Syria. I think whatever they say, my instinct is they would accept a sort of suboptimal outcome. Now, the problem there is that suboptimal outcome would leave a gap in governance that will perhaps not be filled by the Islamic State, but will enable the Islamic State to persist and have enough of a safe haven and an ordered plan, the sorts of terrorist attacks that threaten the international order deeply. You're in the front. Ken, my air court world ox. Is the Islamic State engaged in foreign trade or is it out of necessity, self-sufficient? Well, there's a lot of great reporting that they have engaged in some trade, right, both with the Assad regime but also seemingly running, seemingly taxing trade from within their population of resources. Well, the taxing trade that goes to both Turkey and into Iraq. Yeah, so there has been that dynamic. Sure, but every conflict like this has a wartime economy in which resources go across those lines. So that's, I mean, you're right, that is sort of striking, but it's downright traditional. Yeah, I mean, that happens every time. Right next to, with Mike, right here, yeah, in the glasses. Thank you. Hi, I'm Tyler Nussita from the Atlantic Council. So I guess my question is, after this Mosul campaign kind of winds down, it looks like it's going to go pretty well, right? When this is, yeah, fingers crossed, you know, if we don't mess it up. But when this is over, do you see this coalition sort of sticking together after the Kurds kind of don't have, they don't have any more real goals after they've consolidated all this territory? Do you see them, everybody kind of sticking together or do you see things starting to fracture and fight again? Well, I mean, you know, I think we should, we should, you know, ask Doug to opine on this as well. But the, I think it's going to be very difficult to get back to something like normal politics in Mosul. I mean, you know, one of the reasons why the Islamic State of Iraq found Mosul useful last time around is because you've got these very difficult politics. I mean, it's a primarily Sunni city far from Baghdad, a government led by, led by folks that are mostly accountable to people that aren't in Mosul. You know, take it out of the sectarian dynamic. They're just accountable to people that aren't in Mosul. There's also the ethnic dynamic between Arabs and Kurds, which does define some of the politics in that city. And the Islamic State was able to play on that dynamic, not necessarily a sectarian dynamic in previous years. There's also a Christian minority that the Islamic State of Iraq was able to scapegoat pretty effectively the first time around. So it's a place where there are cleavages that are an adaptive organization that is willing to make some compromises. You know, and I sort of defined, you know, I mean, you just heard me explain Zarkawiism and how uncompromising it is, right? When push comes to shove, everybody compromises. And they did the last time. And I think that they will, they will again. So will that coalition hold together? I think it, I'm optimistic that it will hold together at sort of a high level. I'm less optimistic that it will hold together at sort of a working street level. And that's where, you know, the Islamic State will be able to pull off enough tricks in order to sustain itself. I don't, Doug, do you have any thoughts on that? This is your event, I'll make you talk. All right. Over here in the dark seat, yes. My name is Joe Decipio. I'm a junior at the University of Notre Dame. My question is, with the manipulation and earned media strategy in mind, what is the proper way for journalism to cover this conflict in this group? Yeah, it's a great question. I'm sorry about the football team. I went to UCLA. We're not doing much better this year. So the, yeah, I think it's a great question. I think it's obviously journalists are in a very difficult spot, right? They're in a difficult spot any time you've got an organization or people that are very good at generating buzz and doing things that would be traditionally kind of newsworthy, right? And not to mention you've got this sort of, you know, old adage that if it bleeds, it bleeds and the Islamic State, you know, creates a lot of blood, right? So it's tricky. The larger point, though, that I would make is I think that there needs to be a real awareness that this is part of their strategy and that the Islamic State is going to try to do things. They're going to try to, they're going to be forced and they've already done this, right? So the awful James Foley video in the series of the headings that came afterwards. In many ways, those were the most successful, successful terrorist attacks we've seen in years in the sense of, in the traditional definition of terrorism, right, which is relatively limited violence but a lot of people watching and a major political impact as a result of a relatively limited amount of violence. That's how we usually think about terrorism at least before Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, right? You know, terrorists want a few people dead and a lot of people watching. I think they're going to move back to that kind of approach. I've done it already and what I would encourage journalists to do is to, you know, you can see the trick here but don't reward them when they haven't earned it, right? When they've done something that is simply brutal, brutality shouldn't get you on the international news. Brutality is something to be disgusted at but it's not something to rebroadcast. You know, if there is, it should be mentioned, we need to be aware of who these people are, we need to stare right at what they are but an event where single individuals are brutalized is not the same as a peristyle attack that disrupts one of the major cities in the world and I think that one of the things that the Islamic State has done especially by kidnapping and hurting aid workers and journalists is they were speaking to the community directly that they wanted to amplify their message, right? You can imagine if you are a journalist why an attack on a journalist is going to hit very close to home with you and I think that there is definitely more of a recognition now that that is part of their thinking and I hope that coverage reflects that acknowledgment. I think it should. Great. In the very back. Yes, sir. My name is Kamie Burton. I'm at the Pakistani Spectator and my question is, looking forward, how would Trump administration would affect the growth of ISIS given that his ideas are really, I mean he talks big but actually he is for minimum intervention in that part of the world and that's what exactly Obama did. So basically he talks big but practically he is saying that our preference priority is America not to do nation building in those countries so that is directly related with kind of coming down these kind of terrorist organization so do you think that whatever Obama achieved by calming those people down telling them Islam is a great religion, it's a religion of peace whereas Donald Trump is just talking opposite of that that it's a problem with Islam or a problem with Muslim but actually he is for minimum intervention in that part of the world so do you think it would help American form implementing American policy in terms of calming these terrorist organizations down? Thanks. So I think the first thing I would say is I don't know what Donald Trump's foreign policy is going to look like and I don't know and I think that there is at this point still an open question I hope that the president-elect defines some of that even before he gets into office because I think certainty and some predictability would be a good thing I think that the advice that I would give him again is the same advice I would give any incoming president which is that we very much need to work with allies and that if we conceptualize this as primarily a military problem rather than a governance problem we're going to be back in the same hole in ten years and so governance is really critical governance is slow, it's going to be ugly I think that President Obama there are certainly appropriate ways to sort of criticize he can definitely be criticized for some of the way we've dealt in Syria I think he's actually been more interventionist in certain ways than people realize because he's been very quiet about it about some of those things I think that a president Trump is unlikely to sort of carry a big stick or walk softly it doesn't seem like his disposition so there's probably going to be more alignment between the messaging strategy and whatever the actual strategy is I think that we have to recognize that as Americans whether we're talking about American Muslims or we're talking about the United States and our engagement with countries around the world where lots of Muslims live and their relationships are really critical to defeating the Islamic State and that we can work with a government that I have a lot of criticisms for like the Saudis for example on these counter-terrorism issues and still apply pressure on them around human rights still say there needs to be sort of reformation going forward around the way that government works in these places we can do those things at the same time it's not always going to be perfect but what I would hope is that whoever takes that when President Trump gets into the White House that he recognizes that a bit of ambiguity and a bit of imperfection is the reality of the world so he seems to get that to a certain degree but this is a bit of a muddled answer because I just don't know where we're going and the first thing I would say is that I hope the President-elect clarifies some of that before he's even in office Great, the woman, dark hair, back Hi, I'm Clara, I'm part of the CVE Task Force at DHS My question isn't so much on Trump's actions in the next administration but more so how the international community is reacting around this topic with Trump's presidency I know that's kind of an interesting question but we did see ISIL cheer up in arms and celebrate with Trump's victory so I just wanted to hear about whether you had thoughts around international reaction particular to this topic Yeah, I think there's definitely a real strain of thought in both the Islamic States propaganda going back and in al-Qaeda most prominently in Anwar al-Lukhi an American member of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that the Islamic State actually looks to as a good guide and thinks he was a good guy and they think nobody they're pretty critical of a lot of folks in al-Qaeda they like al-Lukhi and al-Lukhi said part of his pitch and his attempt to recruit western Muslims living in the west was your governments are going to turn on you they're going to put you in camps they're going to do those kinds of things so I do think we need to be very very careful about walking ourselves into a policy scenario where the Islamic State where jihadis in general can say I told you so that's a dangerous road to walk and they have the messaging in place to do that I think the most important thing though right now with our international relationships is that there is a lot of uncertainty I think that is the overwhelming piece of this and that the sooner we can offer some certainty about the direction we're heading the sooner we can figure out where everybody feels comfortable in terms of information sharing and we can move forward and so that to me is the most important thing is providing that sort of certainty as we engage allies allies and sort of in folks where we have a challenging relationship In the yellow tie in the back on the side Hi my name is Jonathan Lord and I work for Congressman Chris Stewart he sits on the intelligence committee and I was wondering do you think that ISIS is trying to get their hands on a weapon of mass destruction whether it be nuclear, chemical or biological to attack a foreign nation like the United States or do you think they're going to continue doing lower level attacks like the tragedy that happened in Paris last year Yeah I think they absolutely would if they had the opportunity I think Al Qaeda would too most of the time Al Qaeda would be a little bit more strategic about it perhaps but the Islamic State absolutely would use a weapon of mass destruction if they could get their hands on one they have used chemical weapons on the battlefield in Syria Iraq and frankly so did the Islamic State of Iraq in late 2006 or early 2007 when they were blowing up tanker trucks with chemical with chlorine in them in sort of very effective or no not very effective ineffective efforts to distribute chlorine into the air and make a chemical attack didn't work very well because the heat of the explosion sort of dissipated and burnt the chlorine they would do this I think the big question is whether they have the capability and that's the piece of it that is very, very difficult to know from where I sit I would say that's one of the things that you can do when you have territory and you have safe haven is you can try things you can experiment you can use the chemical plants you can control to try to come up with stuff you can try to grow a biological weapon that stuff is hard to do it would take trial and error but safe haven and territory help with those sorts of operations and that's one of the benefits of my mind from denying them safe haven it makes it more difficult to get creative when you don't have that ability and the US Army didn't get really good overnight it's because they have these big bases and they run around and they practice and the same thing applies to the Islamic State In the red tie here on the aisle My name is James Blanton I'm a historian and a freelance writer based here in DC and you and a lot of other observers talk about how we're likely to be dealing with ISIS more or another for 25 to 30 years it seems to me that our election cycles inhibit our ability to sustain the kind of effort that we need over that length of time so my question is where are the models or the precedents for doing that successfully I think the obvious one is the Cold War where there was I'm going to give you my answer about the Cold War and then I'm going to tell you why I don't like the analogy I just made the obvious one though is the Cold War and a strategy of containment that persisted from administration to administration from party to party and I think that that sort of approach is possible again but I think that this is a place where countering a terrorist organization that has the ability to conduct strikes on the homeland disrupts our political continuity in a way that even the sort of more indistinct threat of total nuclear annihilation did not that was frightening but we didn't live it people didn't fear for their personal safety as much on a daily basis in a way that my sense is people irrationally terrorism still doesn't kill that many Americans but they still feel it and you want to understand why people feel it and so I think that that makes the sort of political transition more difficult because these attacks and the politicization of those attacks because they really impact Americans directly in the homeland makes that more difficult but I also think the reason why and that's one reason why there's a difference between the war and now but the other reason why I think that analogy is dangerous is that the Islamic State is not the Soviet Union the sort of jihadi movement even though you've heard me make the argument that I actually think the jihadi movement writ large is sort of still there's these ups and downs but there's still sort of the trend line they're on a downswing right now but if they come back up the trend line is likely to continue moving up but they're still not the Soviet Union they don't have the ability to annihilate us with nuclear weapons and we have to be able to have a reasonable discourse about them that recognizes the real danger that they pose but within sort of but right size the discussion and right size that danger and I think that's the most disappointing thing we haven't been able to do that and we need to get better at it we're headed into a new administration and maybe we'll do better in this one right here in the front, you've been very patient my name's Jim Burr, I'm a retired journalist he's done a fair amount of writing about the Middle East I have kind of a minor question for you about your talk and a major one and then one about West Point why is Daesh considered an insult? I've known Arabic speakers ask that question and they don't know it's an implication that they are that they're not a state of God that they are a state of corruption and ill feel not appropriate feel What's the year of the Transnation? I forget off the top of my head to be honest I don't use the word Daesh and the reason why I don't is because I use the word the Islamic State because I think it's really important that we understand how they think about themselves and I think we were talking about we continue to use the term AQI al-Qaeda in Iraq until we didn't actually list the Islamic State of Iraq in the actual State Department Foreign Terrorist Organization designation of the group until 2012 six years after they started calling themselves the Islamic State of Iraq we kept calling them AQI and I think that reflects our broad and I'm not pointing to I'm not certainly not pointing just at the the administration that's on its way out I think that was a failure of the media I think it was a failure of the administration I think it was a failure of the military and the intelligence community I think it was a failure of think tankers like myself that we conceded to the easiness of continuing to call it AQI when that's not how they thought about themselves and what that did was it concealed their true aspirations and what they thought they could be and so that's why I will continue to call them the Islamic State what I call them actually matters a lick to their sense of legitimacy or their sense of legitimacy among their followers You may have covered this in your talk I got here late unfortunately I was very influenced by the cover story in the Atlantic last March where Hechel was quoted at a great length and they made a big deal of that piece not just him but others that not holding land was a real threat to their legitimacy among Muslims what is the significance of losing all this land and with that I'll ask you to return the mic so we can get some questions from some other people I disagree I think well look I think it'll hurt them losing land will hurt their legitimacy with some folks I think it will hurt them with folks that want to join a winner they're front runners and I think there's a lot of those people I think it will hurt their sense of legitimacy among some of supporters but I think when they declared themselves again if you go back to 2006 and if you imagine that the Islamic State of Iraq was a state was intended as a state and you look at how they defined themselves at that time there was a document called informing the people about the Islamic State of Iraq which I sometimes glibly refer to as Federalist Papers of the Islamic State because what it did was run through the arguments for why the state was going to be structured the way it was it talked about how did you do leadership succession these sorts of questions and it took on this question of territory head on and it said what does sovereignty mean in the modern world it said sovereignty means something different today than it used to because territories can be bound digitally because we consider Lebanon a sovereign state even though the Israelis can invade whenever they feel like it and they can overfly it whenever they feel like it what does sovereignty mean and what they wound up doing is defining a political organization based on sort of a set of feudal like relationships to what was then the Emir and what would now be considered the caliph and so local emirs so long as they are have that stated and public tie to the caliph if they control a small amount of territory in different places then that constitutes a functional caliphate now that's the argument I very strongly believe they're going to go back to I think it will be less persuasive for some people but I think it will be enough and persuasive among enough to constitute a critical mass that they will be able to carry themselves forward in a reasonably functional way on this side in the red tie well, you first and then you're going to get the last question stay where you are let him go and then we'll close with the gentleman here he's dangerous though Matt Rice, CV Task Force following up on that question as they lose territory what's the likelihood that they will try to swing to a virtual caliphate and try to just maintain online presence I think that I mean they clearly do this to an extent already right I think that one of the things that without going into a long history of the way that these groups have used the internet over time the idea that there is a you can do a digital hijra has been around for a decade at least digital hijra wouldn't mean a hijra it was the Prophet Muhammad's move from the city of Mecca to Medina to go to a place where he could practice Islam fully that you need to be among a community of people and you need to be able to express yourself and so the notion of hijra when when the Islamic State calls for hijra it's calling for people to come emigrate to the Islamic State here you can actually be a real Muslim so the idea that you can do that in digital space has been around for a decade and I think they probably will continue to emphasize that and perhaps emphasize even more going forward so I think that's real but I do think they will want to demonstrate that even if they don't control as much territory as they do now they do control some territory they will want to make sure everybody knows they continue to have a presence in Iraq and Syria stuff will blow up in Iraq and Syria and I think but they may emphasize some of the places the other places where they have you know, footholds and I think people think about North Africa rightly but I think we really shouldn't forget about Southeast Asia where it seems to me I mean the number of sort of Indonesians and Malaysians and Bangladeshis that have wound up in Syria is pretty striking I mean and the reason, one of the reasons why I say that it's just really far away and yet people have gone there and so that's a part of the world that I hope we don't overlook and last question right here Thanks, I'm Julio Salazar also University of Notre Dame first of all I just want to say the red tie in the blue suit it's a great look but my question is just to bring it back home a little bit you talked about comparing the Soviet Union and ISIS and the American threat so what do you think is the actual threat to Americans at home of ISIS converters or ISIS recruiting in the United States American citizens, American Muslims because we've seen some French people who say they're affiliated with ISIS but they're not really so what do you see the actual threat there? Yeah, I think the most realistic threat are the kinds of attacks that we've seen in San Bernardino and in Orlando there's the Garland, Texas attack where you've got individuals that are individuals are very small groups of people that are heavily armed and find themselves inspired for one reason or another and may have some other grievance that is completely different that it has to do with jobs or society at large or friendships or all sorts of complex motivations like we see in Orlando a series of complex motivations but they'll attach themselves to the Islamic State and the Islamic State will accept them and that's different than Al-Qaeda too Al-Qaeda sort of wanted to make sure people did the right kinds of attacks the Islamic State wants violence the expression of violence in and of itself is the expression of commitment to their vision of what is true Islam which again is not consistent with the vision of the majority of the world's Muslims but I think that that is the primary danger I think it's real I think we will probably see more attacks in the United States I think we will certainly see more attacks in Europe in North Africa and I suspect more in South Asia as well I think they're going to be able to continue to do these kinds of things but in the United States the primary risk is sort of the remote connection people that kind of radicalize maybe not on their own maybe in a group maybe because they've been engaging with people over social media or something along those lines and then they operationalize I think it certainly is possible that people are going to come back from Syria but it's harder to do that here we've thought in traditional conventional military terms how valuable our oceans are on either side they're really valuable in this fight too and you know we shouldn't lose sight of that and shouldn't stop being very confident as a nation that we can sustain ourselves and our values during this fight alright well on that note we're going to close again on behalf of Anne Marie Slaughter our president and Peter Bergen our vice president thank you for coming to New America thanks to Brian and the book is my master plan again go to your favorite online or bricks and mortar book store and get a copy the only way to profit thanks a lot