 Well thank you so much for joining us Seth, it's a privilege to have you here, we know that you've done some excellent work at Rand and that you have a forthcoming book coming up through Oxford University Press and we're just delighted that you're here to be able to impart some knowledge to us on all matters in Surgency and Terrorism which unfortunately seems to be in the news a lot more these days. So I think we'll get straight into that while we have you here and what I wanted to ask you is with everything that's been happening, the shrinking of Islamic State and political developments in the Middle East, how do you see the terrorist milieu evolving as al-Qaeda and ISIS are fighting it out and what do you think is going to happen in the short term? I think one of the developments we're already seeing is the control and the territory that the Islamic State holds is shrinking, it's shrunk a little bit in Libya, it's shrinking even more significantly in Iraq and Syria as forces are pushing against it, Iraqi forces in Iraq, US and other allied forces including Kurdish ones in Syria, it's shrinking in Afghanistan a little bit but at the same time we're seeing an increase in violence levels so it is becoming less of an insurgent group that controls territory, has an emirate, has an organizational structure that is state like and more of a terrorist group that has a much smaller self structure doesn't control much territory but becomes increasingly involved in strikes outside of its area, into Europe, into Turkey, into North America, into the Pacific, into Australia as they try to inspire individuals to conduct attacks and I think al-Qaeda is not out of it yet, I think we still see an al-Qaeda that has strength in Syria, in Jabhat al-Nusra, in Yemen with al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, though it's mostly focused for the moment on the war in Yemen but does have an ability to I think resurge at some future period, we may see more fighting in a few places including Syria but I think for the moment the Islamic State has taken the lead in inspiring attacks in a range of places and that's what we've seen concerning in Orlando, if what we've seen concerning in France with Nice including attacks that don't require weapons per se but can use trucks and I think that's more of what I expect to see as the territory of the Islamic State in particular shrinks is these kinds of of unconventional style attacks. I think it's really interesting that we're seeing that in the West and how that's playing out, you've just completed book-studying insurgencies so I'd be interested in how you see the insurgent environment perhaps not in the West and how the Islamic State might be seeking to perhaps destabilize countries or build up insurgency in those countries as a way of perhaps finding alternative territory or just creating mayhem as it seems want to do. Is there anything in your book in terms of that that you can help shed some light on what might happen in the future? I think there are a couple things of possible interest. One is that we saw for a 40-year period during the Cold War from the late 1940s until around 1989 an increasingly larger chunk of insurgencies that were a Marxist-Leninist and in part that was because the Soviets were providing assistance to insurgencies in Latin America and Asia and Africa and other locations. After the end of the Cold War the percentage of insurgencies that had some Marxist-Leninist or broader communists bent to it had declined marketably. What we've seen around the same time a little bit later than 1989 closer to the end of the 90s is a notable increase in the number of extremist Islamic insurgencies and in the early stages it was mostly coming from places like Afghanistan and Pakistan but we've seen it spread and we've seen a particularly notable increase in light of the Arab uprisings as governments have weakened in several places and groups have pushed in resources into those places. So we've seen a notable rise in the percentage of insurgencies across the globe that have an extremist Islamic bent to them and I think what we're looking at is potential for increased spreading in Africa. So we've seen it a little bit in North Africa, Libya has now I think threatened Tunisia which is really the poster child for the Arab uprisings. We've seen insurgencies become more Islamic State involved in with Boko Haram in West Africa, in East Africa. We still see very weak governments in Somalia and so we see Salafi jihadist insurgencies particularly one led by al-Shabaab. So I think what I'd expect to see is potentially the spreading of that into the Pacific region so I think we'll keep our eye on whether we see an increase in Mindanao for example in the Philippines where most of that insurgency started to decline in the 2000s. So I think again the trends where they've come from have been an increase in extremist Islamic insurgencies including an increase in scope and so I think again the Africa that's really West, North and East Africa parts of the Middle East and in the Persian Gulf and I think including in the Pacific Rim we may see more insurgencies start to spread as material fighters and money are pushed into some of those places. You've written some things on nation building as well in your time in insurgency so I'd like to ask you to perhaps draw all this together in terms of you'd obviously have some ideas about what strategies and policies are working and what haven't worked in the past. Given that we know that a footprint on the ground can cause even further radicalization how are we going to counter this spread of instability that we could reasonably forecast might be coming and what would you be suggesting? What's your research and your book showing and what things can be done that aren't being done? Well I think one of the issues that looks like it is it's not productive in fact it's counterproductive is the use of large numbers of external foreign outside forces particularly conventional forces to defeat insurgent groups in countries. It's been counterproductive it was I would say counterproductive in Iraq the whole invasion was counterproductive but the large numbers of forces there are counterproductive. I think over time counterproductive in Afghanistan as well but what looks like it has been more successful in the 181 insurgencies I looked at when an outside power was involved is very small numbers more special operations types of forces intelligence assistance to governments on the ground and then your non-military types of assistance diplomatic assistance and trying to help negotiate settlements and deal with some of the political causes of conflict because after all most insurgencies are political first military second so groups actually can start insurgencies because they're able to they're they're able to latch on to grievances that local populations have so again one of the big pictures I think I've seen in looking at at the 181 insurgencies is that if you're going to assist in some of these countries whether they're there's east africa north africa the pacific the middle east is to work with local partners on the ground not try and do it for them the challenge though is what do you do with countries like Somalia which has a very limited government and no government in key areas let's say in the juba river area in the south and there are some interesting solutions we've seen in that case it was building an african union force what's called amazon to deal with most of the military activity in those areas because Somalia is not strong enough so there are some interesting and so the western component is assisting amazon with train advise assist and equipping them and helping them with some direct action some intelligence surveillance so that they can provide that information to amazon forces so we have seen in even in cases where the government is is virtually non-existent some solutions temporary solutions to weakening groups and we've seen al shabaab even in the Somalia context go from controlling about 55 percent of the territory of Somalia in 2010 to about five percent or so today with this kind of a solution so i i think it's those kinds of solutions like footprint uh dealing with political and economic issues that are the way we can make inroads and into some of these countries how do you see the challenge evolving for europe uh dealing with what's happening in Syria i know your country and my country in particular having some some interesting and and very heated conversations about immigration at the moment um and obviously that's involving a lot of very desperate people trying to flee a war zone but it's also involving the trafficking of humans there's been some dreadful reports about young women ending up in slavery how do you see i suppose you could say there's that there's that intermingling of transnational crime within surgencies taking place on an unprecedented scale now as well with the facilitation of of these movements of people and in slavery as well what can we do about that type of thing is the united nations for example the best avenue or do we need to be having a stronger footprint to prevent uh you know the inroad of transnational crime as well well look i think there are multiple organizations that are helpful i think the united nations and various components of the united nations are important i think there are elements of the world bank and some of the economic packages that the bank or the international monetary fund can put together that are important but one of the things i think that's helpful is uh and it is uh is to make sure that that steps in the european case steps that governments are taking are not making the problem worse so you know the the the issue with refugees for example is a is a good one and and that is that the there's a lot of domestic opposition to having refugees in when you look though at radicalization including at terrorist activity the refugee population for the most part is not the biggest area of concern what what countries like france have had to deal with with the paris attacks were french citizens or those from belgium they weren't refugees that were coming in so i think you know that my concern is an overreaction in ways that alienate populations that already exist in these areas um some of the things that that i've been most concerned about is um uh so is finding some of the key uh countries turkey is probably the best example where we see a lot of movement of fighters of weapons of money going through turkey and i think one of the things that we we collectively can do a better job is finding the key nodes like turkey and working collectively together to try to minimize a lot of the movement of material and radical groups and organized criminal groups coming from places like syria up into europe and then back so we do see a couple of key transit routes turkey being one where i think we can put more resources into monitoring borders conducting intelligence surveillance reconnaissance dealing with communities in in places like turkey that i think actually help out and have second and third order uh effects in places like europe how how do you think when we're looking at the evolution of insurgencies and and also you know we're discussing the terrorist threat how important do you think it is for the youth demographic we're seeing a lot of young people that from the west from australia or america that just wanted to go and fight but yet when we look say at the paris attacks we're seeing 28 29 year olds being involved what's your sense of where we're heading with the general milieu because to me that seems like we're up to generation three or four now since 9 11 and i know you've been doing work in this field uh since then as well so what's your take on where we're headed with these people that are already i suppose vulnerable to radicalization or in the milieu what can we be doing better in that space to try and dampen down the the tendency to want to go to these areas that's a very good question or uh not just go to some of these cases but as we've seen uh in some instances conduct attacks in the countries where they're already operating i mean one of the areas uh that is most concerning without a doubt and i think the the islamic state has taken advantage of this is the use of social media uh and we see pretty active pushes of information out to the younger generation teens 20 somethings via twitter via facebook and via a whole range of other social media platforms what we don't often see in those platforms is coordinated narratives from legitimate individuals pushing back there is some uh what i think is particularly missing is uh messages to those same individuals from people that have either lived under uh the islamic state in areas like syria and iraq that can tell from firsthand experience what life was like under this group or second individuals that have defected from the organization that can talk about what life was like as members of the group so what we've seen is in successful cases uh if we take saudi rabbi in the early 2000s uh it never actually made it to an insurgency saudi rabbi was able to dampen um in 2002 bin laden pushed a number of cells into saudi rabbi to start an insurgency it never got going it's an interesting example of an insurgency that never happened but one of the saudi soft power approaches was uh encouraging a range of individuals from al-qaeda in the arabian peninsula that had defected from the organization and getting their stories out onto uh television into newspapers radio and then onto internet and our our our treatment of these kinds of individuals i think in general is to arrest them and throw them in prison we don't give these people an outlet so what i would suggest one of the things we think about is giving a voice finding ways to give voices to people who have been there can talk from a firsthand perspective about the downsides of life under groups like this and i think that is missing from the debate governments are trying to do it for uh to tell the narrative they're not always the best kinds of organizations they're not the most legitimate but i'd like to see us reach out to people who have uh who are what i would call primary source individuals that's missing right now i agree i agree and i think it's very challenging to do that when you've got a credibility issue if someone's prosecuted for example or then you've also got the issue of how to structure that in a way that it's effective which brings me to a slightly related issue um one of my colleagues sent me an email today that suggested that the french are thinking of pushing back against media reporting and scaling back on the reporting of names and photographs of people that are involved in terrorism and we've been having some discussions here about do we need to have another conversation about the impact of contagion in media reporting you've been covering terrorism and insurgency for a long time what's your sense on the whole amplification problem with media and and do you think that because we're seeing a less strategic coordination of terrorism now and and these young men going off and doing that that we do need to be more careful with how we're reporting and commenting on these issues uh i i think it's worth thinking about uh how these kinds of terrorist attacks are being committed and then the report the media reporting that goes with it i i think the issue though is at least one issue is i i think in many of the countries we live in it's going to be very hard if not impossible to uh put together laws to govern what media can or cannot report i mean i think to take the us for example i just don't see any kind of future scenario where the media is going to is going to operate under these sorts of guidelines uh with with one or two caveats um one of the things that still concerns me is the use of all of these social media platforms by a range of groups um for strategic messaging and recruitment and financing but also operational and tactical and there's real-time involvement in attacks and then tweeting it as they're conducting attacks how do we let that go on i i i think you know it is worth it may be worth uh putting laws in place or putting more constraints on companies that have these social media platforms and finding ways to make sure that these kinds of terrorist groups aren't able to use these kinds of social media platforms for their strategic operational and tactical level uh efforts and that may mean clamping down on on companies like google in the us uh and uh penalizing them if we see groups repeatedly using their platforms for activity and they are unable to stop it uh i mean they're conducting criminal and terrorist activity using their platforms there are ways to start to monitor and shut that stuff down i i actually don't think they have done as good of a job in shutting down this kind of terrorist propaganda as they could and i think so i think we the those areas are probably more like more likely to see some movement than um trying to put constraints on our media which i think many of our you know media networks are just not going to not going to abide by that do you see the threat extending to media eventually if we start doing that type of activity and say you know twitter's issued with things periscope facebook live messaging are we going to see target changes do you think towards you know if if if those avenues are closed down there has been a lot of talk recently about media personalities being targeted along with law enforcement and a range of areas um which leads me to a more general question about what can we expect moving forward with targeting up are we going to see that squeezing of the balloon effect that if we shut off one avenue of high visibility action or the use of a tool that it will spread or yeah it's unclear i mean i think again if you look at um the social media forums that uh a number of these groups particularly islamic state use it's not that they're they're not using that large of a number they're a finite number of platforms they use i think if you squeeze them there they will try to go elsewhere but i think they'll have a harder time communicating with the teenagers and the 20-somethings that they're trying to recruit and either conduct attacks in their countries or to go to places like iraq or syria or new battlefields maybe we'll see afghanistan rear up again or libya um but i think as as i look towards the future again what i what i would am sort of most concerned about with the inspirational style attacks is less the kind of attacks that may focus at say media and more um really easy attacks uh that target individuals without having to buy a gun so one of the things that struck struck me about niece the niece attacks they've been talking about that kind of attack for some period i mean we've seen it in uh islamic state magazines and we've seen it in al qaeda the arabian peninsula magazines including inspire but what's been different is that people have actually been doing it now and so we can see we've seen plots where individuals have bought ingredients and mix them together and trying to put together crude bombs and put them in public places we've seen people use machetes and knives to kill priests as we've just as we've seen recently in france so i think it's the very unsophisticated style of attacks that uh i think we'll see more of um law enforcement military forces and government officials of the prime target but the secondary targets are just the public writ large and i think that's my biggest concern is not specific focuses like media it's everybody it's public locations it's trains it's buses it's public squares it's parades uh and celebrations like what we saw in niece i think that's where a lot of this is is trending towards right now one last question for you um obviously a lot of this has to do with with the influence of of the senior leadership of daesh and what they're instructing young men to do and if if they're not directly taking instruction obviously they're being influenced in their choice of targets by the reading material you've mentioned what do you see happening when that top level of leadership is eventually taken out um and and what might we expect it's a good question so you know one of the interesting things is to look at some of the patterns say with al-qaeda so after the death of usama bin laden in 2011 he was replaced by i mean also ahri so ahri has been uh not a very charismatic leader uh he has had a very difficult time inspiring people to conduct attacks in the name of al-qaeda if there are al-qaeda inspired attacks they tend often to be individuals like anwar al-olaki uh and there are a lot of people who will still listen to his sermons um much more than the al-qaeda leadership and i so i think we've seen al-qaeda uh inspired attacks go down significantly over the past few years what would be interesting to see is if baghdadi for example were to be captured or killed in the iraq syria front and we're we were to see a decline in key leaders of daish or the the islamic state is whether we'd have a charismatic um replacement that would be able to do it that's hard hard to know because uh because baghdadi's replacement would be generally a committee decision so there'd probably be two or three people that would have a serious possibility of taking that one or two of them might be charismatic but not necessarily so i think part of the question is is for us to do analysis now on who would be a potential leader in place of baghdadi and and what the organization would look like uh i think it'd be hard to replicate what baghdadi has done over the past several years in leveraging social media and reaching out into uh computers and homes across australia new zealand and and north america and other places so i think you know if the al-qaeda lesson is any indication uh it's hard to get a leader in place that inspires people i think like what we see in baghdadi bin laden had it to some degree but we haven't seen it with predecessors i don't even see it even if you're to go down a few levels in al-qaeda's leadership today i just don't see it happening i think the same is is also true with with daish and just to follow up on that one really last question so what might that mean in terms of if there was uh a split or some infighting do you see the splintering of the insurgency even further or do you think that it's likely that because of perhaps the ideological basis for some of this activity that that the group will remain in some form or another essentially congealed well i think there are a couple of options one is uh is is is a group like the islamic state or daish that's been able to recover from uh effective targeting of its leadership able to put people in place that keep keep the networks in africa and the middle east and south asia and the pacific largely together second would be a real serious decentralization uh there are a lot of salafi jihadist groups that either are formal branches that as they've pledged by yacht and it's been reciprocated by back daddy in multiple locations and informal so there may be a pledging of buyout but it's not been reciprocated yet uh we see that with abus hayaf group in the philippines so in that second scenario we'd see a uh decentralization of the salafi jihadist groups and so you might see ansar al sharia's in libya in other places uh you might see other taliban in afghanistan and so you'd get this this collection of groups that just weren't very well coordinated um there are other people who've looked at what it would take for uh a merger between daish and al qaeda they come from very similar ideologies obviously in fact uh daish came from uh from al qaeda itself they tend to have a bit more of an anti-shia uh tendency and a little bit more grotesque uh level of violence of beheadings than al qaeda has generally been comfortable with but there might be depending on some key wild cards and factors the potential at some point down the road for a merger of groups so i think we could see we could see still some scenarios where i'd see two major movements daish and al qaeda some where we see sort of decentralization of that and some potentially with uh with a merger of of those organizations i think those are all possible scenarios for the future one really last question with those scenarios in mind do you think the islamist state experiment is essentially come to an end as daish is starting to constrict and uh it's losing territory do you see that the i suppose uh you know the high level of gloss that it had say 12 14 months ago do you think that will ever be able to be replicated or is that group on the decline in terms of the prestige of a state look i think it's on a decline for now uh in some key areas i think it's certainly possible and we've seen it resurge in the future i think one of the things that gives me most concern right now is uh the military steps against this organization are moving much faster than political and economic ones and so if you take a rock uh that uh the group has already lost territory in anbar parts of feluja and ramadi uh not mosul yet uh but some of the key political grievances that have caused sunnis to support groups like daish uh like jr tn um have not been fixed yet we still have a lot of animosity directed at a government and bag data is viewed as too close to iran that's too pro shia uh some territory that's already been taken back by shia mobilization groups uh in these areas and so i mean i would certainly see at some point if if these factor if these uh political and other economic issues aren't fixed and and there are a whole range of other ones in in countries like syria where we have uh very serious political economic problems that haven't been fixed is you could get a 2.0 uh i don't know what the name of that group would be but it would take advantage uh for example of serious sunni grievances in anbar and other heartlands and it comes back with a vengeance at some future period so i think if the last couple of years have showed us anything it is uh we can take military steps against these groups take territory back from them but if we aren't dealing effectively with the political economic social grievances that are that that are causing the grievances in the first place uh that what we may do is just see various forms of this reemerge in the future and i yeah there are plenty of countries that fit into this mix if the west withdraws too quickly from afghanistan i think you've got issues i think if if you don't see that kind of progress in libya right now you see potential issues there so i think by no means are we out of this and i i would say by no means um is this trend line going to continue of uh decline territorial control for the for the uh interminable future we may see a resurgence at some point well that's slightly depressing though i think we might call it uh quits but thank you very much for your time today sir that's been really interesting thank you very much