 Thank you all very much for coming. My name is Brian Fishman. I'm a counter-terrorism research fellow here at the New America Foundation And I really have the pleasure today of hosting three of our leading scholars looking at terrorism Centered around the release of Jake Shapiro's new wonderful new book the terrorist dilemma Jake is a assistant professor assistant professor at Princeton University He's the co-director of a project called the empirical studies of conflict project This brings together a range of research of academics from around the country that are doing empirical work And what's really powerful about this empirical academic work They're doing is that they have managed to do rigorous academic empirical work that is also policy relevant And that is no small task And and Jake really is the leading edge of a community of scholars that is doing this All three of these people too. I have quite a bit of history with We all in various ways were deeply involved in the early days at a place called the Combating Terrorism Center At West Point Which is a place certainly deep in my heart. Some of the early reports there you may not know Jake's name, but a lot of the early work there the conceptual work that drove You know the the early harmony reports harmony and disharmony That involved the release of of previously classified documents and really gave us insight into al-Qaeda as an organization You'll see sort of a chain of custody of some of those ideas I think through to Jake today and the work in this book and that has certainly been influential on me personally for quite a long time So Jake, thank you very much for being here. I Barely need to introduce Bruce Hoffman who is here as a discussant Bruce leads the Center for Security Policy at Georgetown and the security studies program there He is one of the nations and has been one of the nation's leading scholars on counterterrorism really one of our top experts and and one of the few people I think that had a perspective on on al-Qaeda on 9-11 that was an informed perspective. So Thank you very much Bruce for being here last we lastly will McCants who has a new title He's a new fellow at the Brookings Institution, which is an organization. I don't know if you've heard of the he's also the director of US interaction with the Islamic world and Which is close at least And there's also somebody that had a sort of a deep influence on the thinking of the Combating Terrorism Center So It's very much a a fun day for me to bring those folks together Around the great work that Jake has done. So without further ado Jake, please start us off So, so thank you guys for hosting this. It's really kind of great to be here with you guys and Bruce Thank you very much for for coming to talk with us what I want to do today is start off by discussing a few I guess puzzling observations About what goes on inside terrorist groups and kind of motivate these with some of the documents that Brian was talking about from the Harmony database and then give try and give you in a relatively brief way a Way to think about these documents and put them in perspective that I think is also useful for thinking about why we see such a broad range of organizational models among terrorists, right? You see everything from kind of Relatively loosely organized what what Lewis Brehm a white a white nationalist leader in the United States called leaderless resistance We have one person who's advocating a particular ideology and ideas lots of people independently do what they want to groups like Al Qaeda which at points in its history was very much trying to become What we would think of as a normal bureaucratized organization? So we see this big range and I want to try and give you a way to think about that And then the last thing I want to do is discuss some of the implications of this for policy and for thinking about What should be done to deal with groups and also how serious of a problem are they? How should we rank them in the set of national security threats? and so that's the agenda and The the starting observations so they're kind of too I want to start with is that there's a tremendous amount of disagreement and strife and disorder within many terrorist organizations So going back to Narodny Evolia in Russia in the 1880s terrorist groups have frequently had lots of internal disputes and this follows through to to Al Qaeda today And I want to show you a couple examples of this So sometimes the disputes are over things like how to spend money So so this is a letter that was first published in the Atlantic Monthly Alan Cullison Wall Street actually in the Wall Street Journal Wall Street Journal reporter happened to break his laptop as he's covering the invasion of Afghanistan and went to the market in Kabul to buy used laptop and miraculously Fortuitously ended up buying Zawa. Here. He's laptop And in the couple hours before John and Mike showed up at his door to say hey We'd like to take that away for a little while he and his colleagues downloaded a whole bunch of the materials on it This is one of the letters that Zawa. Here he had written to folks in Yemen in 1999 And in this letter he kind of castigates them for 11 points on how they're spending money including like you bought a used Fax machine we bought a new fax machine when there's a perfectly good used one and the recipient of this letter writes back That was also in the files Cullison and his colleagues found to say look if you're going to micromanage me that way I quit and So it's maybe not surprising that you would have disagreements over money in these groups because maybe their resource constraint Maybe budgets are tight and so on and so forth But you also see disagreements over tactics So this is a letter that actually I think Brian found or at least wrote about first in a report for the the Combating Terrorism Center Which was picked up on a pen drive on an al-Qaeda in Iraq fighter in 2006 and it was written in 2005 It's a Abu Usama who led a QI cell in Ramadi and One of the guys I went to grad school with served in Ramadi in late 2005 and remembers going out on raids to try and get this guy But basically in this letter more senior leaders in al-Qaeda in Iraq are writing to him and saying look We agree with you on the people that you're killing they need killing and that's good But you need to stop doing it in this really gruesome way in the town square because you're pissing off the locals And they're going to start to fight us All right, and and that's that that highlights a point Which is sometimes doing too much violence or doing violence in the wrong way is just as damaging to the political causes doing too little And I'll come back to that later What I think is particularly kind of interesting is the response that was also on the pen drive That Abu Usama gets back and this guy basically writes back and says or that Abu Usama since back And he basically writes back and says look every time one of you senior guys gets killed I get a new set of orders or rules for how I should do my job So can I please get this in writing so it's a little bit consistent and standard and you know for those of you who've worked in Organizations where leadership is changing over a lot right requesting standard operating procedures That seems like a very normal thing right totally reasonable thing to do in this context though There's there's a little something here that's interesting which is notice the solution here is We want to have a meeting in person Right now for you know folks here at New America or for me at Princeton when I bring my people together And we want to have a meeting that's pretty costless Right for a secret army fighting a very militarily competent foe. This is a huge risk right? We're going to bring everyone together in one place and you know There's a reasonable chance the Americans will drop a bomb on it So they're taking a lot of risk here to make sure that this guy uses violence in the right way And so so we'll talk a little bit more about that. So that's the first observation The second observation is that groups seem to write a lot of stuff down Given that they're mostly supposed to be covert armies. So this isn't unique to al-Qaeda I'm going to show you some examples from al-Qaeda in Iraq You know the the Mao Mao the Kenyan insurgency in the in the 1950s against the British in Kenya They required people to fill out receipts and duplicate For for the supplies that they were taking from villages surrounding the areas they were operating in But in al-Qaeda in Iraq, and this is another set of documents that Brian has worked with They were they recorded a bunch of things. They had people sign statements. And so this is an oath statement Written by a suicide bomber on his way into Iraq This was in a cache of documents that was picked up near the border between Iraq and Syria in a town called Sinjar in 2007 Brian and 2007 and you know this guy is he's agreeing to some things that are sensible, right? You might want to include have people attest to the fact that they're there voluntarily But you know, we've got his picture and his thumbprint. That's kind of useful stuff for the people who are going after this guy This is an oath statement from that same cache of documents of basically what someone's attesting to before they can go abroad for medical treatment And again the various points here are sensible, right? I'm going to listen and obey the orders of the emir during my trip I'm not going to come back to Iraq without orders This gentleman has nicely given us his thumbprint and no no picture But it's a standardized form that was routinely used so they're operating at a scale where they're sending enough people That it's worth printing off a bunch of these things for them to sign So that that might not be that weird, you know, here's here's one for someone who's leaving the group permanently This gentleman nicely gave his pictures thumbprint his signature and his cell phone number and look, you know There's a lot of this stuff is reasonable You know al-qaeda can't be held responsible for my leaving Iraq if I leave without permission. I forfeit my benefits It's my decision like look I'd like my I'd like my graduate students to agree to some of this stuff But the thing is 700 of these documents were found in one place Right, so for a secret army to have these kinds of things which have pictures and cell phone numbers and signatures for 700 of their guys floating around in one place that seems odd and This is not unique to al-qaeda in Iraq. So al-qaeda in the 1990s did similar things So so this is a translated version of a standard form That you were supposed to fill out when you showed up at one of the training camps that Abu haf's ran in Afghanistan And we have this because when he was killed during the invasion and folks went to his house They found a box with I think it was 75 CDs I don't remember the exact number that had all his work correspondence going back to 1993 This was the basis of some of the reports we did on so al-qaeda's work in Somalia in the 1990s But you're asking people to basically fill out really sensible information if you're bringing these guys in for training Right, you've got your freedom of information act statement In there. So this has been translated the formatting is maintained And and again you're collecting sensible information. When did you arrive? Can you return without problems? What's your security status all things that I would want to know and at one if I were managing these guys And at one point in the 1990s one of haf's colleagues writes a memo to him that was in the in the harmony documents that says look We're collecting all this information on the guys who come through our camps. We know what happens to them So let's put this in an Excel spreadsheet and figure out the profile of a good Mujahideen So that's being a good HR manager, right? That's just kind of managing your people well But again in this context you have to wonder what's going on Why are you putting all this stuff down on paper that could compromise your operatives and reveal what they're doing to other people? so that's kind of the motivating puzzle and What I think is going on and what I described in the book is that terrorist organizations need to they basically need to use what We think of in the economics literature as agents, right? They need to hire people to do jobs because you can't do it all yourself Even if you wanted to and for various reasons having to do with security and the kind of ability of the organization to sustain losses You might want to create layers of hierarchy and organization But when you do that when you bring people in to do a job You inevitably have disputes, right? So for a few different reasons, right? One is you're operating underground So it's inherently hard to know what to do How will people respond to what you're doing politically and Jay Boyer Bell wrote about this starting in the 1970s looking at Northern Ireland groups You know, this is kind of this is kind of bin Laden's take on it in 2010 so this is from one of the documents that was found after the Abadabad raid and Again, this is also written about in a great CTC report So bin Laden, this is an excerpt from a letter in which he is writing about The doctrine of and will I apologize for the pronunciation here? Tata roots basically when is it appropriate to kill Islamic civilians Muslim civilians in the course of advancing the jihad and Bin Laden kind of goes on for about 14 pages on this But the point he's making is we're losing political support from people Because we're doing things like attacking Shia in mosques Right or going after people who are targeting for assassination on holidays And so we're using violence again in this kind of way that is problematic and in this letter He's not saying you don't understand the mission. We don't agree about what to do He's just saying you guys are making bad choices because you don't properly understand the political impact of your actions And so we need to do things differently Sometimes so you think about this and There are a couple ways you could kind of head this kind of thing off So you've got these disputes, but all of those things and tell security risks So for example, you can push your people to To basically bring people in who sit within familial networks So you bring people in that you kind of pre-screened to want to do things the way you want to do This is what Jamal's Lamia did in Indonesia The problem with that is when you recruit everyone from a small marriage network Or you require them all in Jamal's Lamia's case to have connections to this one religious school In in one particular town you make it really easy for the authorities to track through the network So that doesn't work Maybe what you want to do is you want to kind of keep some records, right? So you want to you want to ask people to fill out paperwork So that they a get a signal of what do you want them to do right because what I require you to report on Tells me something about what you care about, but then if they report the wrong thing you can take actions against them So, you know, this is an example of that so This is a series of letters again in the Harmony data between Abu Hafs there on the left and on the right and Abu kebab on the left kebab was a Jihadi who ran a set of training camps that were independent from Al Qaeda's until some point in the very late 1990s And there's a series of correspondence between them in the Harmony database in which they disagree about a lot of stuff But part of the disagreement right is Hafs is complaining about kebab's Ability to follow record-keeping requirements basically to submit the expenses that he's supposed to and do it on time and in the right way Now imagine you have this going on so immediately, right? This is obviously a security risk because you've got these communications, but now think about the challenge So let's say Hafs gets that and he finds something sufficiently untoward that he wants to punish kebab in some way Well, then he's got this problem kind of two problems actually one is kebab is in the group because he is a Murderous violent person who's really good at hurting people and so what are you going to do to punish him? Right, you have this inherent problem and Davey Irvine a leader in the Ulster volunteer force a loyalist paramilitary in Northern Ireland described this to me once is saying Look, we had really heinous counterproductive things going on in the group But we couldn't punish them and the reason we couldn't punish them is that we had to worry that when people Got off watch when they got done doing their job They would come after us and so we couldn't stop them from doing stuff more over people can go to the government So Jamal Ahmed al-Fadal Notice junior who testifies for the US. He's like the key. He's the key prosecution witness in the 1998 Africa Embassy bombing trials He had gotten caught stealing money from al-Qaeda Went on the run and after the bombings basically approaches the US government and says look these guys are coming after me to punish Me for what I did I might have some information that's useful to you and I hear you have this thing called the witness protection program Right, and so you you have this problem managing discipline managing and kind of organizing your people So so now you've got disputes you have problems disciplining them and so you get this range of organizational structures now What would be useful is to have a way to think about why do we sometimes see loose hierarchy and why do we sometimes see more and So what I want to kind of put out is is to suggest that there are some really clear Predictors of that that let you think about what the mapping is going to be from ideology and operational environment into how you're structured so the first is Simply how much preference divergence do you have in the group? So are you recruiting everyone from a pre-screen population? That's been selected to agree on how to use violence and to be kind of financially careful So I in you know in one case are you kind of Hamas where you have this big social services infrastructure that lets you screen out people? Or are you the Mao Mao trying to figure out how to run urban operations in Nairobi in 1953? Where you have to recruit a bunch of criminals to run kind of guns and steal things and finance and go after informers who then end up doing a lot of Things in the name of the revolution that are really about lining their pockets and ultimately destroy your credibility So if you're in the situation where you're recruiting people who think differently you have incentives to grant down and exercise control So that's the first the second is kind of is is uncertainty Basically, how hard is it for your guys in the absence or girls in the absence of information and Direction from leadership how hard is it for them to figure out what should be done? What will advance our political goals? If that's easy, there's no need to talk to them You don't need to do any of this stuff But if it's hard to know what's right if you're like bin Laden sitting in a bot-a-bot saying God you guys are you're screwing this up? Then you need to reach out and communicate and that creates links right and the last thing is Discrimination and this is where ideology really comes in and this is like what's your theory of political change? right, how are you thinking about violence as advancing what you're doing and A terrorist groups going you know at least as far back as I've looked to the 1880s They really often struggle with this right they think about okay What's the right use of violence that will get people just and riled up enough that they'll do what we want But not so much that we turn them off So for example if you think about terrorists in Northern Ireland right the provisional IRA had this really tricky job Right, they needed to do enough violence that they convinced the British that was too costly to stay But they couldn't do so much that people in London would say my god We can't leave because then look at what those savages will do to our Protestant brethren, right? So you had this really tricky calibration task for the loyalist paramilitaries You were trying to deter the IRA from attacking people and you were trying to convince the British back in the rest of the The United Kingdom that you really wanted to stay and so for that It didn't much matter who you attacked as long as you attacked in response to kind of violations of what you thought was the right use of the right way of political contestation on the on the nationalist side and so for those two groups There's much more value in controlling how violence is used on the the the IRA side And you saw a much more structure in that organization many more efforts to exert control so So at this point, hopefully some of you are thinking well like That's nice, but you're giving these groups way too much credit right because lots of people have written about how in lots of instances participation in terrorism is kind of Episodic or it's driven by psychological trauma or a need to feel like you belong And I think that's totally right if what we want to explain is why does this person or that person get involved in this? Yeah, this is totally the wrong way to think about it But if you want to think about why are organizations producing certain outputs and for almost all the groups that have ever done anything Significant there's a lot of organization behind it if you want to think about that Then I'm going to argue. This is really the way you should be thinking about it And so I want to show you two examples of this and then and then we can have a discussion So the first example, this is a quote from the trial transcripts of the Africa Embassy bombings trial And this is that gentleman Jamal Ahmed al-Fadal who had Got caught stealing money from the group and went on the run And so during the direct examination of al-Fadal the lawyer for the prosecution is trying to get out Every source of disputes between him and the group so that nothing comes out on cross-examination that might discredit his testimony And so he asks Fadal about this time when he and bin Laden got in an argument over over al-Fadal salary and This is what al-Fadal says bin Laden said back and so to put this in kind of HR terms or econ terms What bin Laden saying is look Jamal Your outside option is terrible, so I don't need to pay you very much to meet your reservation wage These other guys they have good opportunities if they leave the group, so I have to pay them more to keep them in right, this is exactly what a kind of rational Human resources manager would do right you pay people their reservation wage So that's one example from al-Qaeda the second example is Problems with graft in al-Qaeda in Iraq, and so this is a graph I just like to show because it pins down where the set of documents that I'm going to show you next was found so this is a corner in in Tuzla Iraq and And there a set of coalition forces were going out on a raid They had a military working dog with them it alerted on something They called the OD guys in dug it up and they found a drum and in the drum were some AK-47 some explosives and some pen drives And on the pen drives were the spreadsheets for the al-Qaeda in Iraq administrative Amir for Mosul for late 2007 And so this is a screenshot of his income tracking spreadsheet and his expense tracking spreadsheet and each tab Was a different subsidiary unit, and then he had some tabs that rolled up the expenses across units It was kind of nicely hyperlink, so it was fairly quick for him to do this stuff This is kind of what it looks like translated And so you know he records a unique identifier for each person Because there are lots of kind of people of various names in the group and then he records the marital status number of children Number of women in each household That's nice, right? He's he's doing this because he really cares about them No, he's doing this because their pay structure was one where you got a flat fee or at least this is what their Articulated pay structure was was you got a flat fee for participating? That was a really really bad salary for a rock in that point in time And then you got an increment for each child in your house and an increment for each spouse that you had for each wife Okay, and so he's tracking this because what's happening is his units are saying look I have five fighters Who are active five deceased fighters? They have so many women and children and so he could calculate what he had to send them each month So they could make their salary payments to the fighters So this is this is August 2007 This is a spreadsheet from December 2007 found in a different setting and it's hard to see But there's this set of names over here where this person has made some notes and so we can zoom in on that a little bit and What he's basically saying since I don't think anyone can read this is Abu Nasir had these names. He deleted them. I don't know if these guys are real So he's got a set of payments to people that he's worried are fake So let me jump ahead to February 2009 So on a raid to target the ISI Islamic State of Iraq administrative of a mirror for northern Iraq in February 2009 Spreadsheet is picked up that has about 700 salary payments on it This is the last page of the spreadsheet. No, that's in Arabic And this is what it looks like translated and so this this administrative a mirrors recording for each unit How many people do they have? How many kids they have how many women do they have and then he's got his deceased soldiers Right, so they would pay the families of deceased fighters their salary And so he's recording those and then he's done this calculation down at the bottom And what he's given us here is he's given us statistical evidence of graft in his organization Because notice the number of average number of children for active fighters is about twice the average number of children for dead fighters and So unless you think what's going on as people here who have kids and join the group are like Distracted when they're setting up the ambush and so aren't as good at it Right. What's going on probably is we know they had a problem with graft And so now if I'm the leader of a cell and I don't feel I'm paid well enough So I want Al Qaeda to give me a little more money If I claim extra people for one of my fighters who's active My boss can call that guy up or reach out to him and check up on me Right. If I claim it for someone who's deceased. That's much harder Right. So what this gentleman has given us is he's given us both a demonstration of how rational they can be in managing people Right and kind of statistical evidence that he's consistently getting ripped off by his by his his local cell leaders so So I want to stop there and just say say a few words about policy implications The first is one thing this tells you is that terrorism is inherently self-limiting in the sense that if you want to use Violence in a careful efficient way to achieve your political ends. You need this structure. You need this bureaucracy But all of this stuff kicks off an intelligence signal that can be exploited by government All right, so as long as kind of counter-terrorism forces remain vigilant This is a self-limiting phenomenon because as you grow in scale so you can do more attacks You need more management. It's just the nature of running anything with human beings. And so you're going to be capped in that way So that's the that's kind of the first thing the second thing is what you need in terms of a safe haven Something that's useful for managing this is not an ungoverned territory Right because that's kind of useless because people can go into that territory and extract this kind of information What you need is a territory that's governed by someone sympathetic to you who can exclude others from it Because then you can run kind of your bureaucracy in there and that's useful And the third thing and I think this is the most important is in thinking about strategies to combat groups You need to think about the endgame right? How are you going to bring this organization this political movement back into normal politics often? And in most cases that happens through negotiation right, but one criteria for negotiations to work is That you be able to have the person on the other side live up to the commitments They make at the negotiating table and so if you're the British and you're negotiating with the IRA You need it to be the case that when they agreed to the Mitchell principles which said look We're going to ultimately decommission all our weapons They have enough cohesion as an organization to follow through on that If you put as much pressure as you possibly can on the organization They can't maintain that core cohesion right because you're going to that pressure is going to force them to kind of give up Some of this control and give up the ability to manage their people And so in the Northern Ireland context right the British could have picked up the leaders of the provisional IRA and most of their deputies at any point in time between 1990 and 1997 they knew exactly who they were Where they were and we're deep we know now deep into the internal security bureaucracy of the organization But they didn't right they put pressure on the group But they gave them enough space that when it came time to come in from the coal They could actually bring the group in and so as we think about strategies against the Taliban or against militant groups in various places That ultimately are going to be part of the political process We can think of kind of two options one is calibrating the pressure against them enough so they can come in from the cold So to speak and the other is really clamping down But if you do that as intensely as you can you may leave yourself with no option other than to kind of In jail everyone who believes in the cause or kill them and that can be very costly So I'll stop there and maybe we can talk about this a little bit Is I'm going to turn it over to will for a few minutes and then to Bruce and then we'll turn it over to Q&A with the audience Just trying to figure out the right way to sit in the chair. Yeah, right? You do one of these deals or all the way back Yeah, it's a it's a fascinating book if you haven't looked at it. I I mean, it's one of the more interesting books on on terrorism that I've read over the last 10 years Besides from Bruce's of course But there were there were a couple things that struck me and some of some of which Some of which have to do with with my own interests But I'll kind of tick through them and can I get Jake to respond to sure. Okay. Yeah, cuz I So one one of the things that that Jake you you touch on a bit in your book You don't flesh out too much because it's not your main interest, but one of the things you touch on is terrorist recruitment which is Has been an interest of mine And you make some observations in there that I I'd like you to tease out a little bit if you could one of the interesting things Jake talks about is is the need for these groups, of course when they're doing recruitment to engage in some sort of screening process and and Jake frames it in terms of Preference convergence and preference divergence, but mainly what he's talking about is you need to make sure that the people coming on Border are as dedicated to the cause as you and see things the same way you do in terms of targeting and handling the Administration so forth. So for example Al Qaeda Was able to do this by setting up training camps in Afghanistan And they could watch people cycling through the camps and see who was going to be on board in terms of ideology skills and so forth The RAF the Red Army faction was able to do this by by getting potential recruits to engage in bank robberies to see how How committed they were going to be? One one interesting observation that hadn't occurred to me But but it makes a lot of sense is that Hamas does this with their charitable Organizations because they're able to see there who's willing to make sacrifices and give volunteer their time to engage in the work And they're also able to gauge their their ideology And there there are some other ways to to go about doing it But it was it was interest it was interesting to me to see this emphasis on on finding people that were going to share your preferences and What interested me about Al Qaeda is that they seem to do a lot of that right for for Al Qaeda Central and some of the affiliate organizations but they also make Repeated calls for lone wolf attacks and this is something you talk about a lot in your book is as For an organization a terrorist organization that's keen on achieving political objectives Encouraging lone wolves can be a bad idea Right because lone wolves are not necessarily going to share your preferences. You don't have any commanding control over them So my my question to you is um How common is it that we have terrorist groups that that on the one hand are very careful about selecting recruits But on the other hand also make these calls for lone wolves and and in Al Qaeda's case Why do you think that they do that? What why have both strategies because they seem to be working at cross-purposes? So so I think that's I think that's right that they work at cross-purposes sometimes and it my sense is I Think Bruce might have a better sense here But my sense is there's it's pretty rare that you see this what I think has happened with Al Qaeda is the group is basically so Capacity constrained at this point because they're under such security pressure that this was kind of an One of the few options for actually getting things done and it's a real change from early on So one of the things that first got me interested in this was in 2002-2003 looking at actually some of the kind of Al Qaeda training manuals that were being posted on the internet Or had been posted on the internet and a lot of them were kind of redacted versions of US Army Field manuals That had lots of information on things like if you wanted to blow up a bridge. Where should you put the explosives? All right, but they didn't have things that my friends who'd been an EOD told me were in many of the training manuals They were quoting on like how to fuse them or where to put them or kind of how to make Homemade options and so what was interesting is it looked a lot like the strategy that cartels use to maintain control over Businesses in which you withhold key technical information from your business partners to make sure that they have to come back to you So this was manuals these were manuals that were kind of put online in 99 2000 2001 So before the group came under so much pressure Right and so that was in a sense Not giving people the ammunition they needed to do long wolf attacks right being actually a little bit restricted In what you provided so my best guess is this is something that's changed over time as the group has found that it really is Pretty much unsuccessful at centrally coordinating attacks, but they still I mean you still have them attempting external attacks Even even out of the Pakistan region. So I mean they seem to be it seems to be dual track And I guess the point would be that it's a bad Management strategy on their part right well, and I think it's a sign of kind of desperation Right if you could if you could handle it all yourself. That's clearly first best But maybe you can so you encourage this kind of activities Can I ask more questions? The other thing you you make a sharp distinction Between insurgent groups and terrorist groups and it's kind of the setup for the for the book and looking at terrorist groups But the the main distinction you point out Of course is that insurgent groups control some sort of territory So they can be a little bit more open in what they do and then you kind of segue into talking about the terrorist dilemma The dilemma arises from the fact that they have to be secret And in going about what they do But one of the main groups that you focus on is al-Qaeda in Iraq Which you know, I think a lot of people would argue is more Properly seen as an insurgent group at least in the in the period that you study it So I I just I know it's a continuum But I want to understand a little bit better from you how how Why frame it as a terrorist organization? in your book, but but also How do any of your insights about how terrorist groups operate? Do they map on to insurgent groups at all or is these just two completely different animals? So so I think a lot of this does map on to insurgent groups very well The key distinction is do you have that territory where you can safely manage your organization? Right or to what extent do you have that and so al-Qaeda in Iraq is pretty unusual as insurgencies go in the sense that Because of who their enemy was and because kind of there were so many coalition forces in Iraq for most of the war They were under risk at any point in time in space throughout the war Right and this is very different than insurgencies operating in say rural Africa where the state literally doesn't have the capacity to go certain places Right or for example the FARC in Columbia where until you know the middle of the the current century There were places the Colombian government just couldn't get its forces The Taliban is kind of somewhere in between and so when you're in that setting Where any piece of information that goes to the folks you're fighting can allow them to target you Right, then you have a really high premium on security and secrecy and a very high cost to pay for the kinds of managerial activities They engaged it and now the fact that they still did that kind of stuff Suggest that there's real value to it on their part It's a clear kind of preference as an organization and that operating in other ways that might have kicked off less of an intelligence signature We're just distinctly Less useful from the perspective of advancing the political goals Bruce I'm still squirreling actually. Yeah, okay. I guess I have to speak Well, I like the book too in fact when Brian first invited me to be a discussant only a couple of weeks ago I told him well I'm happy to do it because all academics are happy to talk and sort of pontificate But I said I wouldn't have the opportunity given various other things to actually read the book But then Jake was actually speaking at Georgetown at the Security Study Center a couple of weeks last week I guess and I couldn't make make his presentation and from our discussion. I thought gosh this book is fascinating I've got to go and read it and that's basically what I spent the weekend doing and Like well, I think like many people, you know, I liked it a lot. I think it's it's a very important book It's important first and foremost because it looks at the timelessness of terrorism I think too often most of the work that's been coming out recently believes that The era of terrorism began on September 11th, 2001 and not two millennia ago with the Sakari for example A lot of the work today is very afraid to draw any historical parallels or even lessons in terms of countermeasures So the lessons learned or unlearned with historical terrorist groups And I think this is really a tremendous a tremendous strength of Jake's Jake's work Let me make just a few comments generally about the work itself and Some of his materials and then of just a very few comments to jump off on discussion on the work itself Reading the book I think one thing that left out at me and something that I've always been interested in and I think Jake in is His research and analysis goes a far way to discussing But I think it could still be taken a step further is you know How large can a group become before it becomes inefficient? I think this is an enormously important question Historically most terrorist groups weren't large the Red Army faction Never had more than perhaps three dozen actual trigger pullers and bomb throwers that are larger support network But it was not a large group In Palestine the stirring gang for example only had maybe a couple of hundred people I think is another excellent case because the leaders of the IRA or when I'm saying IRA I mean the provisional Irish Republican army the modern-day variants are not the older one They could have certainly had you know thousands of fighters potentially They might have even had the weaponry to arm them given some of the cashers that were uncovered But it's interesting that the IRA in terms of its actual soldiers never went more than four or five hundred persons And I think this was a conscious decision on the part of leadership that they couldn't control them a discipline Of course as Jake points out and I'll come back to is enormously important So one has to ask. What's the tipping point? When does it become too difficult to exercise any kind of meaningful command and control and communication and when you have? Let's say a hybrid phenomena. That's both lone wolves bunches of guys as it's been called and more Directed deployed People capable of receiving and carrying out orders type of Contrary in my view, I think that's what we've been seen with al-Qaeda and that's one of the things that makes al-Qaeda unique I mean the other thing that makes al-Qaeda unique in which Jake does bring out I think very clearly even in just the case study of al-Qaeda in Iraq It's just how large al-Qaeda was compared to many previous terrorist organizations and the kinds of challenges that introduced and to me This is a story that's still being written and we will see because al-Qaeda I think has had to adapt and adjust of course to many of our countermeasures To its own operational style to avoid Serially replicating many of the mistakes that have eroded the core Secondly and what I thought was Fascinating about Jake's work and was part of the focus of an article I wrote this summer in studies in conflict and terrorism is the pedigree of the sources Which are extremely important and these are many of the released documents and harmony and other other categories by the US government But we have to be careful And I'm not accusing you of it all over exaggerating or misrepresenting them But the documents that scholars and analysts of hitherto had access to is Infantesimal compared to what's out there. I mean it's infantesimal to the point that it's not ludicrous because I think these Documents as Jake proofs provide an enormously important window and insight onto the terrorist organizations But this is at best a second draft of history if journalism is the first draft This is the second trip because until those documents are declassified and released in greater volume Really only have a snapshot. They're only the tip of the iceberg and you know The ludicrousness of this this was the 17 documents that were released on the first anniversary of being london's killing that that in Anyway can be regarded as representative of al-qaeda I think is just laughable given that there were literally 30,000 and that's probably a conservative estimate of how many documents there are and having worked Extensively in archives for 30 years on terrorist and counter terrorist groups You never get the complete picture anyway But if you want to get the complete picture you've got to as mass as many of those sources is Possible and that I think is both one of the triumphs and strengths of Jake's book but also I think a cautionary note for others because firstly he's raised everyone's game He's raised the stakes to actually do serious research on terrorist groups in the future It's going to have to be almost an all-source form of research. That's going to use declassified or Document sees from the terrorist groups that eventually get declassified by the government court transcripts which we showed saw Jake Evidence in memoirs. That's actually one of the triumphs of Jake's book I've never seen any work or any study on terrorism that actually sat down and systematically took a look I think it's 108 memoirs from around the world. I mean is a treasure trove of information. That's enormously Important as well as various other accounts that you're going to have to come to terrorism from all these Perspectives and the question one has to ask. I mean, I don't think any of us can answer it But I'll give you four hypotheses You know, why aren't these materials? Being made more available. I mean, it's not a sources and methods issue We know many of the documents were seized by our ground forces in some cases More than a decade ago in Afghanistan and nearly a decade ago in Iraq So the source we know the method that they were obtained is no secret These were the documents that were left behind by al Qaeda by the Taliban or by a QI But yet we find that these documents there's absolutely no interest in no priority in their release And this is really a shame not just I think for the damage that it does to scholarship but also to our understanding of our adversary today and Also, I think these would be tremendously useful tools in public diplomacy that we would have the rope to hang these groups By actually having their own materials to hold them to account to and that would reveal their cynicism their manipulation of religion and theology their Their cynicism and attacking their their own co-religionists and so on But it seems there's you know four reasons that have stood in the way of this And I'm happy to say that Carolyn Mack is standing in the back the bipartisan policy organization I was one of the minor authors Peter Bergen of the New America Foundation was the lead author our report That was released last month one of our recommendations was that to hasten this process But I think the reasons why they're not being released is control That old adage and intelligence that knowledge is power and that knowledge is bureaucracy Prevents their release is various agencies squabble over one another and believe that holding them and clutching them tighter Makes them more important Obviously the whole betting process especially when our government has been shut down when there's not the money There certainly isn't the time there's fewer personnel and there's a low priority You can see why there's not a lot of attention Attached to it. Those are kind of understandable what I find less understandable and I think also motivates this is sort of an A historical view to terrorism which jakes book commendably pushes us back against When I've raised this issue in the intelligence community I've been told many times that they're irrelevant to today's threats that they don't mean anything This obviously is something jakes book very much demonstrates the power of this information even years and then I think there's a political reason I mean if you go around saying that al-qaeda has been strategically defeated if you believe in things that you know as I heard a very senior official once say that That the main terrorism problem we face is that it's the same that happened in England in 2005 when four guys Just decided on their own to get on a train and leads and come down to London Well, right there is an example of not understanding history because if there was ever any Centrally core al-qaeda directed terrorist attack in the last decade It was the London attack and then of course, you know I think a lot of these documents raised lots of questions about our relations with very sensitive allies and You know the Russian those 17 documents to exonerate Pakistan of harboring bin Laden. Perhaps that's true I mean it may well be I have no idea But the point is I think I'm going to remain agnostic until I see something more than a thimble full of Documents and I think the problem is that because of the 21st century because of the information age the divergence now between classified material open source material is greater than It's ever been just because of this volume of material that's sitting there that no one really has Has has access to Very briefly just to wrap up and to focus a little bit more on the book as I said I think one of the real strengths of Jake's work is that he demonstrates The timelessness of terrorist organizations and as I always tell my students not everything was invented on September 10th 2001 and implemented the following day a lot of what Jake talked about Immediately reminded me of a classic book that's that's almost completely unknown Peter Hart's Seminole the IRA and its enemies where he similarly had access to Also the IRA. This is the original IRA not the current one the one from the 1910s in the 1920s kept You know much like a qi meticulous documents of the demographic patterns the jobs the ages of its inheritance It's fascinating because it cuts against all the sort of the conventional wisdom of prejudices Actually the men people who joined the IRA and County Cork at least were better educated and wealthier than most of the other fighters Where is it our image is often of you know itinerant farmhands or people from the the underclass? The average age of the recruits was 24 Interestingly that happens to be the average age of the 199 11 hijackers the average age of Palestinian Suicide bombers has been 21 the average age of his the law fighters 23 So we see that there's enormous continuity Then if you recall just a few years ago a lot was made about entire soccer teams and both in Hebron and Saudi Arabia Becoming suicide bombers what Peter Hart found is very common for entire soccer teams or Hurling teams in Ireland to join these groups Secondly, I think Jake points out very rightly how terrorists themselves live in a In a fantasy world that they believe in their own propaganda and that is Part of the reason why the leaders try to exert so much control over organizations And I think the one thing that the book really brings out clearly which bears constant repeating is that terrorist groups aren't monolithic and a lot of the discussion in Washington a lot of the Reportage seems to pick our enemy to portray our enemies or depict our enemies as somehow much more politically Homogeneous than we are that somehow there's not leadership rival or personality rivalries There's not disputes over tactics or over policies and what Jake's book brings out very clearly is that they're a very powerful centrifugal forces Operating within undergrounds and I would argue that one of the reason that the minutiae of bureaucracy and budgets is so important It's because of way. This is the way that the leadership can say we're the boss It's a form of domination and control when they don't have much domination or control over far flung Far-flung operatives. I think the book is also especially interest interesting When it talks about the challenges terrorist groups face in calibrating violence And it was something that we all knew but he really brings it out so sharply and provides so many different empirical justifications I mean in essence terrorist leaders have to choreograph their violence for in essence almost at least three and perhaps there's more than I Haven't thought of different or audiences firstly their enemy the governments who they're attacking who they want to Terrorize sufficiently and put enough pressure on but not trigger or provoke the kind of backlash that will completely stomp on them In other words terrorist groups want to use just enough violence But not enough that that it provokes some massive counter-response and again terrorist groups live in a fantasy world and believe their own Propaganda you can see how they often get these types of things Types these types of things wrong. They also want to use a level of violence. That's tolerable to their constituents This was one of the most famous phrases from the IRA troubles when Willie Whitelaw who was the home secretary in the early 1970s Said the goal on the government's part was to drive the violence down to a tolerable Level and I think that still remains the policies of governments The world over I think no one's under the illusion that will completely eliminate Terrorists but also the terrorists on the other hand have to think whether their violent violence will be tolerated by their constituents And I think that's very much the heart of the dispute over killing of Shia and especially a QI and Abu Musab al-Zarkawi And then of course as Jake very ably points out is members of the organization Because there are always going to be the young hotheads and people don't join terrorist organizations to sit on their hats They join them because they're action-oriented and one of the main challenges of the leadership is to sort of Deploy those people when they're going to be most useful for a strategic purpose But also to hold them back when it doesn't serve The the strategic purposes of the organization Finally, I would say where though. I mean, I'm not sure I'm necessarily in disagreement But perhaps we can discuss this more but but I also found this in the book is the policy implications because Here I think there's lot I think what what Jake is arguing is quite sound But I think it raises lots of lots of questions. I mean I agree terrorism is inherently to an extent self-limiting But I think the other dimension that we have to study of terrorist groups is innovation and creativity I mean most terrorist groups are not terribly you know Brian Jenkins very famously 40 years ago said terrorists are more Imitative than innovative that basically he's still right, but that's the problem. What happens when you come across in my own, you know, scientific jargon the so-called evil geniuses, you know, the people who are few and far between Ramsey Ahmed Yusuf who didn't just want to kill a handful of people wanted to topple one tower on to another and kill 60,000 people in 1993 or his uncle college shake Muhammad who cooked up the 9-11 attacks or even Ibrahim el-asiri with his various sorts of bombs the secret in people's bodies So it may be that most terrorists are imitative and not innovative But you know when those come around when those evil geniuses come around that they scare the bejesus out Of out of us and in that sense it may not be terribly self-limiting Also, how do we account for the longevity of terrorist groups if they're self-limiting? David Rappaport very famously 20 over 20 years ago said 90% of most terrorist groups don't last a year This has been some of the some of the work that Audrey Kurth Cronin has done True, but you know, I don't care about that 90% that don't last more than a year I mean there, you know floats them in Jetson It's the 10% that lasts not only more than one year But go on to last more than two decades that we have to worry about and I think that would be interesting is applying a lot of Your analysis to very long-standing groups how they've adapted and adjusted and managed these these processes and perhaps I mean superficially one can say manage them better than the groups that don't last is long I think ungoverned territory is still important I mean I agree that it's more it's better to have a state sponsor or at least someone who's who's highly permissive But I think border areas are increasingly Especially in the Middle East and North Africa more more important You know is the endgame to bring terrorists into negotiation with the IRA? Yes They were the kind of stereotypical terrorist groups that wanted a seat at the table and Martin McGinnis is of course the first minister in Storm it now But what about those other terrorist organizations like al Qaeda? Let's say that have more apocalyptic views Can we negotiate with them or really do we have to you know realize that probably that kind of threat? Cuz I'm positing this I don't know But you know maybe that's like an LTT type of threat and that the only way the Sri Lankan government who could eliminate the LTT Was to absolutely eviscerate them. I mean in true word that was who knows how permanent will be and also It's a poor. I'm not advocating either in this evisceration that you have these scorched earth policies that that we saw that involved Lots of civilians, but it may be that there isn't that there is a category of terrorist groups You can't negotiate with and therefore how do you approach them? Let me stop there Okay, I'm gonna turn it over to Q&A Directly and then I'm just gonna harass Jake intermittently Please raise your hand wait for the microphone and Introduce yourself in the organization that you're coming from before you ask a question. So any any questions up there? Yes, sir Aaron Aaron Manis University of Maryland So I haven't seen this book yet, but I've read some of your other work great stuff We cited it in a study. We did big data analysis on lashkari Taiba Where we found that the traditional sort of counterinsurgency stuff didn't work That it was not effective. They had bottomless they could recruit from a bottomless well of disaffected Youth so we got interested in the question of sort of getting inside their decision-making in their organization and messing it up And I'm curious we didn't get to that but you talked about policy implications And I guess the policy implications we've talked about so far strategic But maybe you could talk about tactics what kinds of opportunities are there from this kind of study in this kind of data Well, so I think I think that's a great question and I I'd really look forward to reading that I've seen some work on lashkari Taiba where people have basically built data from the martyr biographies That they produce. I think what what's clear from this is in in many groups, although not all There are internal managerial structures that can be exploited So for example in groups where managing finances is closely trapped right that suggests opportunities both in terms of Altering documents so that people kind of lose their ability to maintain a clear picture on the finances And you thereby create opportunities for the perception of graft and thievery between different levels of the organization It also suggests things like if you're thinking about for example seizing funds It could be very useful to have ways to do that where for some period of time after the seizure happens or the freezing happens It is in fact not publicized And so you create a situation where the person responsible for those funds within the organization has to account for why suddenly There is no money available that where it should be available if you immediately go out with press releases on what you've done Then that person has an immediate excuse Right and look there are kind of civil liberties implications there and all kinds of other other things, but the key point is You have these clear Control problems within many groups and you don't need to exacerbate those problems to create tension within the group You just need to exacerbate the perception of those problems and there are lots of kind of sneaky ways You can think about doing that One of one of my old colleagues up at West Point James Forest and sort of tongue-in-cheek one time suggested that When we find one of these actors within a terrorist organization like al Qaeda We ought to send them expensive presents to generate mistrust, right? Which is obviously tongue-in-cheek, but gets at this idea other questions Yes, sir. Good afternoon. My name is Ahmad Bitar One bloop actually I want to ask about The ideology or the cause behind the Islamic group in particular. I'm from Syria. I just arrived we have also two groups like Islamic States in Iraq and Syria is is and al-Nusra both claimed that they are working for al-Qaeda and they are affected by al-Qaeda Thoughts and ideology, but they are fighting now each other and we are happy because they are fighting but actually about The kind of ideology or the cause use you mentioned something about that over violence I must say that Organizations like al-Qaeda or ISIS have this on on Ideology believe that violence is necessary to establish fear or establish justice Let's say that bumping a car or bumping a place. I tried to ask once. Why did they do that and what about the innocence? The there is imams or shoes put fatwas regarding these topics like when they bumping car with civilians Inside the area the fatwa is like this if they are good people We are sending them directly to heaven and if I they are bad people We are we are making the world get rid of get rid of them So we are doing them a favor for the good people and doing the others a favor for the bad people So I want just to make sure that about the ideology because that the organization like Irish Republic it's different than al-Qaeda because they have a cause that can recruit few people But for for al-Qaeda they that causes like they they claim they are representing Islam So what's about the ideology in this organization? How it's what's the percentage? In the crooting when they are crooting people okay and this thank you Jake first Yeah, so so I think when I when I use ideology what I have in mind in this setting and thinking about how groups are going to behave is Is is is actually more of like a theory of political change? So it's what's your theory about how the use of violence is going to lead to change and so I don't Know enough to know what that is for Isis or on news for now for al-Qaeda in Iraq at least from the stuff that kind of I've seen It looks like the theory of change was basically we're going to supplant The existing local power structures and part of the country with ones that we're going to create And we're going to do that by basically intimidating people into not trying to exercise power And then we're going to expand the area that we control over time that is a kind of theory of change That requires that you use violence in ways that compel people to not engage in the political process But not use it so much that they decide to take up arms against you or start cooperating with with in that case coalition forces in the country and as the group Overstep that and as it became clear that they overstep that There are Indications and as Bruce said we don't know how representative this is but there are indications of trying to walk that back and to try and kind Calibrate the level of violence that would be appropriate So my my suspicion is that lots of this the kind of ideological statements that you referred to That is in part a way of getting your fighters to be willing to do stuff But that the leadership has a more so probably has a more sophisticated political vision in terms of how they're thinking about Violence advancing their cause of having an Islamist state in part or all of Syria that they control and The fighting between the two groups I would suspect is fairly standard political competition when you have two groups that want to control a piece of territory And they can't reach a bargain over it for whatever reason they end up fighting To and this kind of brings me to some of the central points in your book. I kept coming back to to ISIS When I was reading your book Because a lot of your argument for why these groups want to tighten things up And thus they make themselves vulnerable because they tighten up is because they want to control the political impact of their violence But I kept thinking of ISIS and ISIS seems to be in many ways Running in the opposite direction or if you want to put it differently going back to a QIs bad behavior in 2006 and they don't seem to have learned the lessons and so does it necessarily follow given that They're not thinking carefully about political impact that they wouldn't want to tighten things up and thus make themselves vulnerable I Don't know if that's quite right because as as you've demonstrated and I think we would find if we found secret troves of documents again They would still be doing the bookkeeping So it's it's not necessarily the case that you have to want to calibrate in order to put these bureaucratic Structures in place. I mean there might be other reasons to do it I think ISIS is a good case for that will can I push you and just throw out another comment to the group which is Perhaps this is evidence of that scale point, right that we're talking about earlier Where ISIS has grown to the point where it can't control the organization anymore I mean I would argue and I think Jake would agree when you look at a QI The central organization did try to control and limit violence in various ways and it had lost control and couldn't communicate I mean that seems less likely in the case of ISIS because it does have more of a safe haven and communicate more securely, but Is it possible that that's what we're seeing there is that we've grown to the point and now they can't control themselves That's I leave it to Jake to answer the other thing the other thing I wanted to raise was you mentioned several times in the book particularly towards the end that that Decentralization of these groups under when they're under pressure of counter-terrorist forces that we should take this as a metric of success but Again looking at the Syria example where you see this fracturing of of al-Qaeda Zawahiri basically unable to control ISIS ISIS very publicly Giving the bird to Zawahiri not playing nice with with this other group Nusrah, which which pledged allegiance directly to Zawahiri It's hard to look at that and and view it as a counter-terrorism Success it looks like it's metastasizing ISIS seems to be Setting itself up as a competitor in many ways to al-Qaeda I mean we may be watching the birth of a new global jihadist group. That's that's in competition with Zawahiri So am I thinking about it incorrectly in terms of the the framework in your book? No, no I think you're thinking about it, right, but it's it's kind of it. They're two different things here, right? There's the What do you see when you have an organization that's coming under pressure and voluntarily giving up control? versus what do you see when you have an organization that? Develops deep internal political disagreements and so falls apart and separates into competing factions and What I what you've described in Syrian what I think is going on is more of a ladder, right? So it's not that al-Qaeda saying oh man the Syrian government is getting really good at figuring out who's who and tracking through our lines of communication to particular cells So we better let them let them go their own way and as a result you get the split. It's much more that they're kind of presumably competing leadership groups on each side and I Strongly suspect that each leadership group if they could would like to have a really tight control over their part of the organization So in that sense I think there's you want to Think about those as slightly separate things I think you know the other thing to to keep in mind and thinking about this is when you see Changes in groups right oftentimes groups will and this goes to Bruce's point about technology Oftentimes groups will think take a period of time and think very hard about how to organize and then shift and there can be kind of discontinuous improvements in how they operate But within each kind of era in which they're set up in a particular way The changes I think are very important of that how well The government is doing What should we think if we if we are at a point where we've got Nusrah on one side with a closer affiliation to al-Qaeda and ice is sort of Growing out of an al-Qaeda affiliate in the sort of follow-on to the Islamic State of Iraq Which in turn was the follow-on to al-Qaeda in Iraq And having that direct lineage What should we expect from competition between these groups? How are they going to compete? Is that a recipe for more violence? Is it a recipe for a more civil service provision? What's is you know, what can we look at from the historical record about what we might expect there? I mean so so if I I think in a few historical examples We have multiple groups competing on the same side of an issue You have seen both patterns So you've seen both competition over kind of how much violence can you produce? And you've seen points in time where one group makes a decision to back down So in the competition between Fata and Hamas in the occupied territories in 2002 2003 Most people think that there was a dynamic there where there was competition over who could do more and that was how the political competition was expressed Going back to the 1905 1906 revolutions in Russia you had a period in time where The social Democrats Lenin's group and the party of the socialist revolutionaries the kind of other more extreme left-wing terrorist group Competed over how much terrorist violence they could do how many people that Russian leaders they could assassinate But around mid 1906 on the side of the social Democrats They reached a decision that politically that was becoming counterproductive And so they switched and they stopped trying to compete on violence and actually tried to get all their local units to back down What happened at that point is something that maybe is happening in Syria is some of those units when they got the order to kind of Stand down and stop doing so much said no no we like this We think we're attacking enemies that we should be attacking and so now we're going to join the socialist revolutionaries And so you can have these these things change over time. I don't think there's a common pattern Other questions from the audience, you know, let's start there and then here Mike Brown's with booze Allen retired FBI So taking into account all of your research and what you wrote and I guess this is for the three of you If you had five minutes with the current national security team and the counterterrorism practitioners and policy makers What one or two takeaways? Would you want each of them to have as they start to formulate policy going forward particularly as we're looking at at times We're probably going to see diminished resources and diminished budgets That's a that's a great question. I think the I Think there were two things that I would want to emphasize one is that the to the extent that it can be the strategy of leadership targeting should be continued because by all kind of By most evidence that you see It is putting a serious dent on the ability of groups to coordinate and manage activities and Gain the economies of scale that they would like to from having operatives in multiple places around the world So I think that's the first. I think the second would be to engage in much more aggressive public diplomacy about the costs of these Organizations activities for civilians in the places. They're operating So one of the things I've found in in a series of public opinion research. I've been doing in Pakistan for the last four or five years is that people generally really dislike militant groups But they really really dislike them if you tell them about the cost those groups have imposed on their society And then ask them how they feel and that's a really light treatment right all it is as someone comes in your house tells you You know they've done this bad stuff. How do you feel about them? that's not even having a flashy news program or something and If that is having big effects on how people feel about them then you kind of think what we could achieve if we more aggressively worked to get kind of All the badness these folks impose on their society is more publicized. So those would be the two two messages. I Guess one of the things I would look at Because my head is filled with serious stuff these days is looking a little bit more closely at Some of the new funding patterns that we're seeing I Don't think we've quite entered a new era of of terrorist financing, but we're inching close Because of social media Just watching the situation in Syria. It is really surprising To see groups, you know public making very public appeals For for funding for you know certain Kinds of kits and weapons and so on and so forth very specific dollar amounts And then on the flip side to see private citizens in the Gulf very publicly raising money to meet these requirements that are being generated in in Syria and They're raising millions and millions of dollars. I mean someone in the intel community Told the Washington Post that it was hundreds of millions have been raised through these private charities in the Gulf For Syria and it's being brought over the border in Turkey primarily on brown bags or suitcases and What got me to thinking about this a lot recently was was Jake's book just looking at the ways that money has Traditionally moved from funders to organizations and out in the field and if you cut out the middle man If if you enable money to be passed to these groups more easily if they get more sophisticated about Using online kinds of currencies rather than just moving Money around over the border where you can track some couriers, you know, are we going to see new kinds of terrorism? created That is not as calibrated precisely because you have cut out this middle man that might or the organizations that might exercise Some sort of control and a lot of this money is being sent to Syria to fuel the sectarian war I I don't think as I said, I don't think we're quite there yet in terms of a major Innovation in financing, but I think we're inching closer based on what I've seen in Syria. So that's what I would flag up Well, that used to be a kind of a hard question I don't think it's so hard anymore, but you can see why no one's gonna ask me to answer Stop saying the war on terrorism is over because it's not and I think that has even it is Much as we may want to focus on domestic issues the much as much as we've spent the past decade I mean, it's not a struggle that's over I'd say, you know, stop talking about resiliency as a substitution for the war on terrorism because I don't think we're resilient You know tragically three people lost their lives in Boston It's not the same as 3,000 people being killed in 9-11 people have drawn all sorts of also sorts of comparisons I don't think we're that different either because of course we closed down the entirety of Boston including Logan Airport So the third thing which will be equally poorly received is don't artificially differentiate between core al-Qaeda and the affiliates and associates there are differences But there's also similarities, but it's not an either or I think al-Qaeda's strength and the reason for its resiliency and long jevities Because it's an idea as well as an entity and we have to view it as such In turn, we have to focus on both individuals and organizations. I would argue that for most of the past Decade plus we focused more on individuals You know the ex-list the president Bush had the deck of cards in Iraq now the high-value targeting we have to focus and I think this is one of the arguments of Jake's book is that you focus on individuals, but you also have to focus on the organizations as well I agree completely about the middleman issue. In fact Kim Kragen and I in a 2002 report argued exactly that but like many reports It's you know moldering somewhere and then finally I mean I would agree with Will and Jake about you know the public diplomacy or in my view, you know Fighting as much against al-Qaeda ism as al-Qaeda the ideology that I think unfortunately still resonates in Certain corners of the world that unfortunately after the Arab Spring probably has more traction than it had in the 2009 or 2010 And that also means accepting that the war on terrorism isn't over in that this most I'd say Low priority or under prioritized arm has to become amongst you know amongst the most important now Okay here Thank you very much I mean Tom Sanderson from CSIS great comments today Jacob I'm wondering as you look across the countries that are undergoing the dramatic political change in the Middle East and North Africa When you think about Bruce's comment about in imitative versus innovative. What do you see as the most innovative? organizational elements or activity by the groups represented there today. Oh that's a great question and I'm actually going to defer on that because I Since the since the Arab Spring I haven't closely followed Individual groups in the countries in that region. So a lot of the work I've been doing in that period has been Finishing finishing this off which would kind of predated that But I know a couple of my co-panelists have done so very carefully. So I'll defer that one I think one of the more interesting developments In terms of the jihadi movement or is the emergence of all of these Ansar groups in in North Africa In the Middle East If you were to look back at Islamist militancy In the late 80s and then in the 1990s You would see a pretty heterogeneous group in terms of ideologies Where they wanted to target near enemy far enemy? You didn't really have a global jihadi scene much except for al-Qaeda That was the great victory of al-Qaeda over the past decade is putting this notion of a global jihad to the fore and Al-Qaeda central persists albeit in a weakened state some of the affiliates are quite strong others are weak But you've also had the emergence of these Ansar groups and they are flying al-Qaeda's black banner This is al-Qaeda's particular design of the black banner that emerged in Iraq with a qi in 2006 It's their representation of the Prophet's flag, but it's there. It's the al-Qaeda flag And these groups are flying it, but they have no organizational type strong in terms of command and control ties with al-Qaeda central Yet they're willing to share operatives with the al-Qaeda groups. They're willing to share Funding and and resources they speak the language of the global jihad They all share the same name, but no real strong command and control links between them to me This is one of the most interesting and frustrating Phenomena to emerge since the Arab Spring because it's it's very difficult I think for for policymakers to think about these groups because on the one hand they they Look like al-Qaeda. They sound like al-Qaeda, but they're not strongly linked with al-Qaeda to what extent does the authorization of the use of Military force extend to going after those groups and do you want to? Or do you risk kind of pushing them into really acting on their global jihadist rhetoric whereas now? They're quite focused more locally Three categories for that prize Best overall would have to be al-Qaeda and Arabian Peninsula just because it was founded in January 2009 and by the end of the year at its stage Too highly successful and immensely challenging terrorist attacks the attempted assassination of the Saudi and terror and well the Saudi Deputy Interior Minister are responsible for counterterrorism and then of course the Christmas Day plot Then I would divide best into tactics and strategies Tactically, I would still say a QAP is probably the most innovative and that's largely down to the evil genius You bring a lot serial a series. I would say though for the strategic award They would have to go to a Jabhat al-Nusra Again another group and a remarkably short Span of time that has been become consequential if not threatening and used to take terrorist groups years if not decades or No qaeda's case a decade before it could actually become consequential and threatening now They've gone from soup to nuts fairly quickly not as quickly as a QAP did But I think what's so worrisome about Jabhat al-Nusra and the influence they also have over ISIS is that they seem to be You know this type of learning organization. We always talked about they're not making the same stupid mistakes that a qi Or they're trying to avoid making the same stupid mistakes that a qi made in Iraq At least even if they are doing that at least they have a good public relations Machine, you know with the free ice cream for example in the tug of wars and undercutting the price of bread for instance You know making bread affordable in the territory they control to me That's the most worrisome development and terrorism You know it was Peter Bergen has often said al-Qaida is sown You know the seeds of its own defeat because it killed more Muslims than it did Zionists and crusaders You know that was the old stupid al-Qaida that we could constantly really count upon to make some egregious mistakes I worry in Syria that these groups have learned learned much better Jabhat al-Nusra also controls its Public relations or its information operations much better than groups have had in the past and that we may see al-Qaida You know affiliates and associates that are out al-Qaidaing al-Qaidaing I guess the original al-Qaida in being you know just as just as blood thirsty and lethal But also demonstrating this other side that that that Creates much more of a political movement that that had ever existed in the past I would argue that Jabhat al-Nusra learned a lot of that Watching a QAP and just as done it on a broader scale, but I actually I Agree with Bruce. I think though. I would frame it a little bit differently that in Syria We've seen almost the semi-legitimized Legitimization of al-Qaida in much of the world right and even here in in the States among opposition groups and folks talking about Syria and There was pushback when we designated Jabhat al-Nusra as an al-Qaida affiliate and In the Gulf people are openly fundraising for groups affiliated with al-Qaida And we haven't seen that dynamic in a decade And and probably never on the scale that we see it today. And so I think that context is Is what I would point to let's take their two questions in the back Let's let's take those quickly because we're already over time Everyone most of you are still sitting here, which is a good thing But I do have to get these guys out of here. So hi Jess Sadik I'm an independent Middle East consultant, but I previously was a terrorism analyst at state and at the FBI My question is about this point about groups not being monolithic And I started thinking when Bruce mentioned that I started thinking about Hamas and how amazingly Together it's remained Even this I can't really recall of any instance of you know There's always rumors about the political and the military branches feuding and the externals and internals But look how unified they are even in this given evidence of this current moment when Hamas is under Pressure from Egypt and it's on the relationships with Iran is on the ice It's still, you know, where is where their voice is coming out saying there's a problem internally So any thoughts about how Hamas has managed to stay so unified in its approach? It's great. Let's take the last question in the back row there as well Michael Ryan from the Jamestown Foundation. I really really love this Conversations and so all the people on the on the on the days are my heroes so But I thought that that perhaps looking at some of these some of these new groups that perhaps You know looking back at but Victor with his book in 2004 Islamic Activism and looking at you have all these different Organizations and the background noises they're going to compete with one another They're gonna they're gonna they're gonna develop some we're gonna develop rapidly some of them are gonna die out They're gonna change names that they're gonna We should be maybe looking at it as as as a as a social movement Fueled by an ideology which is a new kind of social movement because it goes across, you know cultures and geography and and these little groups the problem is that there's so many of them that that that the issue could be that you Know out of the Ansar as of the various type, you know You get you know a dozen of them and maybe four of them become really powerful and Alan Cullison told me that you know He thought that that the only the only reason that Al Qaeda stayed together was because they they were able to invent the United States as As an enemy, you know because it was so fractious But but we were the enemy and they couldn't they didn't have to do much to invent So I mean that social movement theory which have organizations that are part of this I think might be another opening to to look at So let me briefly address those two so with respect to Hamas It seems pretty clear that in during the Oslo period There was a really clear difference of opinion within Hamas leadership about whether what they should be pushing for is basically Participation in Oslo and kind of a multi-generational truce by which their superior governance would eventually win out over the Palestinian population at which point you could reopen the issue and People on the outside who didn't like who disagreed the control over the military wing was never in question though And so it acted more or less At at the you know kind of following the political theory of the people on the outside since then how Hamas is seems to have maintained such cohesion is Because they have such a large social service provision system They're just very good at picking people right and they have lots of opportunity to evaluate people before they ever come in and lots of places where you can go once your utility is an active Operative has gone and and that's given them a level of cohesion that when they came into government they brought with them And so we're able to we're able to hold things together fairly well. I think with respect to With respect to the the second question. I think the There have been times in history before when we have seen theological movements that spark violence on a worldwide scale and Spark lots of groups that kind of flock to the broad banner of that movement and they burn themselves out after 20 or Years or so unless they get a large state supporting them. So if you think about the anarchist movement They killed many many more political leaders than The Jihadist movement has done in many more countries around the world in the kind of 30 years that they were active from 1890 to 1920 But they kind of faded out right the left-wing revolutionary movement lasted much longer But part of that was because you had the Soviet Union Which was funding it and providing kind of a sense that it could work and then you had the anti colonial revolutions in which kind of You had the utility of this movement Re-emphasized in lots of places around the world. I think we should be careful though in Assuming that groups which flock to the banner of a movement are doing so because they actually believe it Right if the anti-colonial movement were happening now Surely many of the organizations would call themselves Islamist not because they actually believe in the doctrine because that was a way You could get money in the same way calling yourself Marxist was a way you could get money in the 1960s and 70s and so I think it's I Guess it's a way of saying this is not I think something unprecedented and in the past It's just tragically taken a long time for these things to burn out Okay with that we will end this Jake thanks very much for being here Bruce will we really appreciate taking the time It's a great book You should buy it and read it and last the last one I want to make is that I just think it's really important that We here in the policy community in Washington reach out to academics like Jake that are not Directly part of this community, but that are doing really good relevant work and so I encourage everybody to sort of look to those sources For guidance and ideas and thank you all for coming