SPEAKERS CONTENTS INSERTS
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23–695PDF
2005
EVOLVING COUNTERTERRORISM STRATEGY
HEARING
BEFORE THE
SUBCOMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL TERRORISM AND NONPROLIFERATION
OF THE
COMMITTEE ON
INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
SEPTEMBER 29, 2005
Serial No. 109–90
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Printed for the use of the Committee on International Relations
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/international—relations
COMMITTEE ON INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS
HENRY J. HYDE, Illinois, Chairman
JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa
CHRISTOPHER H. SMITH, New Jersey,
Vice Chairman
DAN BURTON, Indiana
ELTON GALLEGLY, California
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida
DANA ROHRABACHER, California
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California
PETER T. KING, New York
STEVE CHABOT, Ohio
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado
RON PAUL, Texas
DARRELL ISSA, California
JEFF FLAKE, Arizona
JO ANN DAVIS, Virginia
MARK GREEN, Wisconsin
JERRY WELLER, Illinois
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MIKE PENCE, Indiana
THADDEUS G. McCOTTER, Michigan
KATHERINE HARRIS, Florida
JOE WILSON, South Carolina
JOHN BOOZMAN, Arkansas
J. GRESHAM BARRETT, South Carolina
CONNIE MACK, Florida
JEFF FORTENBERRY, Nebraska
MICHAEL McCAUL, Texas
TED POE, Texas
TOM LANTOS, California
HOWARD L. BERMAN, California
GARY L. ACKERMAN, New York
ENI F.H. FALEOMAVAEGA, American Samoa
DONALD M. PAYNE, New Jersey
ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
SHERROD BROWN, Ohio
BRAD SHERMAN, California
ROBERT WEXLER, Florida
ELIOT L. ENGEL, New York
WILLIAM D. DELAHUNT, Massachusetts
GREGORY W. MEEKS, New York
BARBARA LEE, California
JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York
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EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon
SHELLEY BERKLEY, Nevada
GRACE F. NAPOLITANO, California
ADAM B. SCHIFF, California
DIANE E. WATSON, California
ADAM SMITH, Washington
BETTY McCOLLUM, Minnesota
BEN CHANDLER, Kentucky
DENNIS A. CARDOZA, California
THOMAS E. MOONEY, SR., Staff Director/General Counsel
ROBERT R. KING, Democratic Staff Director
Subcommittee on International Terrorism and Nonproliferation
EDWARD R. ROYCE, California, Chairman
PETER T. KING, New York
THOMAS G. TANCREDO, Colorado
DARRELL ISSA, California, Vice Chairman
MICHAEL McCAUL, Texas
TED POE, Texas
JERRY WELLER, Illinois
J. GRESHAM BARRETT, South Carolina
BRAD SHERMAN, California
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ROBERT MENENDEZ, New Jersey
ROBERT WEXLER, Florida
JOSEPH CROWLEY, New York
BETTY McCOLLUM, Minnesota
DENNIS A. CARDOZA, California
DIANE E. WATSON, California
TOM SHEEHY, Subcommittee Staff Director
DON MACDONALD, Democratic Professional Staff Member
MALIK M. CHAKA, Professional Staff Member
GENELL BROWN, Staff Associate
C O N T E N T S
WITNESSES
The Honorable Tim Roemer, President, The Center for National Policy
Mr. Arnaud de Borchgrave, Senior Advisor and Director, Transnational Threats Project, Center for Strategic and International Studies
Bruce Hoffman, B. Phil., D. Phil., Director, Washington Office, RAND Corporation
Major Dana Dillon, USAR [Ret.], Senior Policy Analyst, Asian Studies Center, The Heritage Foundation
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LETTERS, STATEMENTS, ETC., SUBMITTED FOR THE HEARING
The Honorable Tim Roemer: Prepared statement and material submitted for the record
Mr. Arnaud de Borchgrave: Prepared statement
Bruce Hoffman, B. Phil., D. Phil.: Prepared statement
Major Dana Dillon: Prepared statement
EVOLVING COUNTERTERRORISM STRATEGY
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 29, 2005
House of Representatives,
Subcommittee on International Terrorism
and Nonproliferation,
Committee on International Relations,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 1:09 p.m. in room 2172, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Edward R. Royce (Chairman of the Subcommittee) presiding.
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Mr. ROYCE. This hearing on evolving counterterrorism strategy will come to order.
The transnational terrorist threat facing the United States is rapidly evolving since 9/11 as a result of unrelenting U.S. military pressure. Al-Qaeda has had to drastically reconfigure. Many now characterize it as a movement or an ideology rather than a formal organization. Some have described the loose alliance of extremist networks targeting us as what they call a ''globalized insurgency.''
Some have suggested that United States counterterrorism strategy does not match this evolving threat. While we have had good success in dismantling the former al-Qaeda network, not enough attention has been paid to countering the ideology fueling the movement.
I see this radicalism spreading throughout Asia and through Central Africa, West Africa, and North Africa. Whenever I have had an opportunity in any country on the African Continent or in Central Asia to ask the heads of state or parliamentarians what is the key concern they have, it has been this issue. It has been the funneling of Gulf State money into fuel, additional madrassahs and recruitment and the long-term consequences of that.
Others lament the lack of a sharp strategy along the lines of the Containment Doctrine that guided the U.S. during the Cold War. The Administration has begun a comprehensive review of its counterterrorism strategy. Some reports speak to this issue that they intend to update the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism released in 2003, so what we are doing today is a step in looking at the Administration's missions and seeing how we can impact that.
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Much discussion has focused on how to define the enemy. During the summer months, some commentators pointed to a shift in language by senior Administration officials as indicating a new approach toward counterterrorism. For a short time, the global war on terror was replaced by the awkward global struggle against violent extremism. Some expressed regrets that the new phrasing still made no mention of Islamist terrorism.
To my mind, the 9–11 Commission got it right when it reported:
''But the enemy is not just terrorism, some generic evil. This vagueness blurs the strategy. The catastrophic threat at this moment in history is more specific. It is the threat posed by Islamist terrorism, especially the al-Qaeda network, its affiliates and its ideology.''
I think to us this is not just an issue of semantics. Language choices can have a big impact on U.S. policy, as well as how the American people perceive the threat our nation faces. If the enemy is not clearly identified, then strategies to defeat it are bound to fail.
I do not know if the U.S. foreign policy apparatus is comfortable contending with religion though. For instance, in the National Security Strategy for Combating Terrorism, Islam is barely mentioned, and of course all terrorism is not Islamist terrorism, but in this particular struggle most is.
Today we will hear about the quickly evolving terrorist threat. The 9–11 Commission usefully observed that our enemy is twofold, the embattled al-Qaeda network and those who have embraced al-Qaeda's message. The first enemy is weakened, as they say, but continues to pose a grave threat. The second enemy is gathering and will menace Americans and American interests long after Osama bin Laden and his cohorts are killed or captured.
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This is a war on many fronts. Some fronts can be pointed to on a map of Africa with its vast ungoverned areas to Western Europe with its disaffected Muslim youth. This is an informational technology front where the enemy has excelled, rallying troops and winning converts to their cause. As Arnaud de Borchgrave pointed out, there now exists a virtual caliphate that exists in cyberspace.
In the battle of ideas, unfortunately, we are not even in the arena. We are going to need all the tools of work, including a much improved public diplomacy product. Despite the evolving and sophisticated threat, there has been no terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11. This is evidence of some success. On the other hand, major al-Qaeda attacks are often years in the planning.
I think most everyone agrees that this will be a long confrontation as the root causes of terrorism are spreading and they are deep. Some may suggest that a recalibration of our counterterrorism strategy indicates failure or weakness, but with vision, given the changing nature and complexity and relative newness of the threat, it is understandable. It is required. Mistakes are bound to be made.
We should not be afraid to listen either, as we plan on doing today, because no one has all of the answers. However, given the proliferation of WMD technology, coupled with terrorists' desire to kill, the window for developing and executing the right counterterrorism strategy may be closing, requiring urgent efforts on all our parts.
Let me turn now to Mr. Sherman, our Ranking Member, for his opening statement. Thank you.
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Mr. SHERMAN. Thank you, Chairman Royce, for holding these hearings on the U.S. counterterrorism strategy. This hearing and the planned follow-up hearing with the new State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator is especially timely given the recent confirmation of a critical State Department official.
I note that this position, one of the most important sub-Cabinet level posts in the Federal Government, has been staffed since last November by people appointed on an interim basis, and I am sure that they were fine public servants, but it is about time, after 10 months, to have that position filled on a permanent basis rather than someone filling it on an interim or transitional basis, so we look forward to hearing from Henry Crumpton sometime in the months ahead.
You are right, Mr. Chairman. Terrorism is a tactic. This is a global war, a war or a conflict against Islamic extremism. The battle is twofold. One is ideology where we need to do a better job of explaining our position and broadcasting that position, but that ideological world is not just one of getting our message out. It is also recognizing that the extremist message is being financed by states and by those closely connected with states from the Gulf.
Every time we build a radio station, they build or fund 100 extremist madrassahs. We must turn off the ideological offensive of Islamic extremist by cutting its funding, particularly its state-sponsored funding.
Not only is this an ideological battle, it is also a military/paramilitary battle where we again need to cut off the flow of funds from the Gulf to those who actually are in arms against us.
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The number one concern has got to be a terrorist organization obtaining nuclear weapons. We have to do a much better job vis-a-vis Iran. The North Korea deal is either a deal or it is not. I am concerned that a desperate North Korea could sell its nuclear weapons.
Our failure to fund Nunn-Lugar is just part of the problem. Our failure to work more cooperatively with Russia on other issues so that Russia will really allow Nunn-Lugar to be effective, our failure to allow Russian inspection of our nuclear program so that Russia will feel like a co-equal partner in the Nunn-Lugar process, is as much a problem as our funding.
We ought to be more realistic and prepare our population on how to deal not just with hurricanes, but with small nuclear weapons. When most of us in this room were children—most of the bald folks in this room—we ducked under our desks in bomb drills. Kind of silly perhaps then because we were preparing to survive a thermonuclear war with the Soviet Union, and I am not sure that hiding under our desks would have been sufficient.
Now is when very such bomb drills might actually not be laughable in that we are probably dealing with a much smaller nuclear weapon or perhaps even a dirty bomb. The fact that we do not have iodine in every medicine cabinet, the fact that we do not have bomb drills in our schools and in our offices and places of work illustrates the fact that we want to hide from an era in which we do not face the thermonuclear destruction from the Soviet Union, but we also do not face a world where we are free from nuclear threat.
When it comes to a war of ideas, obviously broadcasting and getting our message out is important. There are those who say that the way to win the ideology war is to make concessions. I cannot think of a worse idea.
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We could abandon Israel. Are we ready to concede Spain? What about those who bombed Madrid, who talked about reversing the outcome of the battle in which the Moors were not allowed to conquer France? Is there anything that would be a greater boost to al-Qaeda recruitment than an announcement by the United States that we were abandoning this or that in response to and concession to such terrorism?
I look forward to hearing from our witnesses and figuring out what our Government is doing not only to win the military battle, the infiltration of organizations, the intelligence battle, but also to win the ideological battle and to get our friends in the Gulf to join us completely on the right side.
I yield back.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, Mr. Sherman.
We are joined by our former colleague, Congressman Tim Roemer. He is President of the Center for National Policy and a Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. While in Congress, Tim served as a Member on the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. He was a key author of the legislation to establish the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Of course, he served as a key member of the 9–11 Commission, which was of great value to us in Congress and to the American public. It is good to see you, Tim.
Mr. Arnaud de Borchgrave is the Senior Advisor and Director of the Transnational Threat Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He also serves as Editor-at-Large at the Washington Times and at the United Press International. He served as Senior Editor of Newsweek, a position held for 25 years. He served as President and CEO of the United Press International from 1999 to 2001. He has been a member of the Council on Foreign Relations now for three decades. He has won many awards, including the George Washington Medal of Honor for Excellence and Published Works. We are particularly glad that you had the time to join us today as well.
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Dr. Bruce Hoffman is Director of RAND's Washington, DC, office and holds the RAND Corporate Chair in Counterterrorism and Counterinsurgency. He is one of the leading experts on terrorism in the country.
We also have Major Dana Dillon, who is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Asian Studies Center of The Heritage Foundation. After spending 20 years in the Army, Major Dillon now focuses on terrorism and the progress of democracy across Southeast Asia. He is the author of numerous articles, including ''Good Riddance, Afghanistan,'' and a frequent commentator on major news networks.
Congressman Roemer, we understand that you have another engagement shortly, so if we could begin with your testimony, and we certainly will understand when you have to leave.
I will remind the witnesses we would ask you to make a 5-minute opening statement, and then we will go to questions.
STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE TIM ROEMER, PRESIDENT, THE CENTER FOR NATIONAL POLICY
Mr. ROEMER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. It is my honor to be back in the distinguished place that I called home for so many years, the House of Representatives. I am delighted to be with such an honored panel of expertise witnesses.
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Mr. ROYCE. Mr. Roemer, make certain that you push that button.
Mr. ROEMER. The light is on, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, Tim.
Mr. ROEMER. I am honored to be with this panel. It is nice to be back in the House of Representatives, Mr. Chairman, and with Congressman Sherman and colleagues on both the Republican and the Democratic side.
I would ask unanimous consent that my entire statement be entered into the record, Mr. Chairman, and I would also ask, going to Congressman Sherman's point about the nuclear threat, I have an Op Ed piece that I authored in the Indianapolis Star that I would ask be entered into the record, and then a piece, ''Securing America in the 21st Century,'' where the Center for National Policy just did a full day conference with New York University on trying to find answers to this war on Jihadist terrorism, and I would ask that both documents be entered into the record.
Mr. ROYCE. Without objection.
Mr. ROEMER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am going to try to briefly present the threat environment and how it has changed, responses to date, and a comprehensive strategy for a recalibration, a review and a rethinking of this war on global Jihadist terrorism.
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While we may have smashed the center of al-Qaeda and its Afghan layer, it has scattered like mercury on the mirror to the four corners of the world. We are fighting a very different enemy than we calculated before 9/11.
This is not the triangle, top down hierarchical structure of Osama bin Laden at the top with his lieutenants underneath, and therefore the metric cannot be calculated that when we catch a No. 2 or a No. 3 al-Qaeda operative that we are truly making success in this war on Jihadist terrorism.
The threat is changing. It is a global threat, a global movement, and we must have a global response. It needs to be a political/military strategy with a balanced tripod of attacking the terrorists, protecting the homeland, and preventing the rise of future terrorists.
To simply say the enemy is in Iraq and this is a military struggle in Iraq will be simply to play checkers when the real struggle is a three-dimensional chess match with the dimensions being: (1) how do we more effectively target the terrorists and efficiently capture and kill them?; 2) how do we more wisely invest with limited resources in our Government today, how do we more wisely invest in prudent homeland security?; and 3) how do we begin—I am not sure we have even begun—to calculate and review how to stop the rise of future terrorists?
The metric that you, Mr. Chairman, Congressman Sherman, and your capable staffs have put together might be framed in the following: We can pretty effectively capture and kill many of the terrorists, but we cannot capture and kill them more effectively than they can create them and put them out of the wellsprings of Jihadism, onto the conveyor belt of suicide bombers and into the cities of Madrid and London and Washington, DC. We have to do a much better job of understanding the enemy in order to attain victory and world peace.
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With respect to the responses to date, the Administration's response to the attacks of September 11 so far have been to implement a strategy of fighting them in Baghdad so we will not have to fight them in Boston. The Administration's counterterrorism strategy has really led to the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which has led to the occupation of Iraq by about 150,000 United States troops, which has led to Iraq really becoming the central front in the war on terror.
I submit to you, Mr. Chairman, you said it very accurately in your opening statement. America's counterterrorism strategy has them filling the swamp rather than us draining the swamp, and we have one hand tied behind our backs. It is high time for a serious review, recalculation, and rethinking to reform the current war on Jihadist terrorism.
I applaud you for holding this hearing, Mr. Chairman and Congressman Sherman, and I think this is the paramount—it is the paramount—national security question for our country and for our policymakers.
First of all, how do we more efficiently target and effectively attack the terrorists? 1) I think we need to make sure that the DNI, the Director of National Intelligence, has the budget authority, the power, the jurisdiction, to coordinate sharing of information and make decisions in turf battles in Washington; 2) that we dramatically reform the environment and the culture in the FBI so that we have a system, a computer system there that works so we can find out if al-Qaeda is in the country, and we have not spent $200 million on a virtual case file system that has been completely restructured, redone and thrown away, and we are back at ground zero with the FBI on communication internally when we know al-Qaeda is trying to get into our country and put cells together and attack us; 3) we need to put more emphasis on our special operations forces; and 4) we need to see a real transformation in our defense. We need to make sure that we are buying the weapons to help us fight the Jihadists rather than the Cold War.
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Again, I know that you are struggling with budget decisions. The F–22, parts of which were made in my former congressional district, is a weapons system with technology devised 30 years ago to fight and evade the Soviet Union and not be detected by the Soviet Union's radar. That cost several hundred million dollars apiece.
How many special operations people could we put out there for that kind of money? How many new Global Hawks or Predators to fight the next generation of terrorists? We have to transform defense so that we have the weapons systems in place to engage in this war.
The second part, in addition to attacking the terrorists, is to protect the homeland. Mr. Chairman, I cannot stress enough how we need to make prudent, wise decisions here. Congressman Sherman has talked very, very adroitly and very articulately about the need to make sure weapons of mass destruction are not used in America.
On page 116 of the 9/11 Report, Osama bin Laden has said—we picked up intelligence of him instructing al-Qaeda—that it is a religious obligation and duty to get a nuclear weapon and use it on the United States of America to create a Hiroshima-type of activity.
We know where these weapons are. There are softballs of material, manmade, that are scattered around the world. We know where they are. We know how to secure them. We are not doing enough to do that.
We have secured outside the former Soviet Union about nine different devices or parts of radioactive material. We have 100 to go—100 to go—9 acquired, 100 to go. We need to do much more in terms of protecting the homeland from any kind of nuclear, chemical or terrorist attack.
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We also need to make sure we are investing in a prudent national strategy with metrics. How many nuclear power plants do we have in the United States? Approximately 104. What 10 metrics should we use to better protect those nuclear power plants? How has the Department of Homeland Security told us how to protect the oil refineries, the chemical and petro plants, our landmarks at Wall Street or in Washington, DC?
Years ago a national strategy was supposed to be proposed by Homeland Security. Four years after 9/11, we still do not have that national plan, that strategy. Instead, with all due respect, we are trying to protect the homeland like we put together transportation bills. Too much on the politics of scratching each other's backs, not enough on investing wisely and protecting the homeland and vulnerable sources. We have to do a better job there.
Mr. Chairman, you mentioned that I have to go soon. I am going to Mr. Upton's Subcommittee to testify on the need to provide public radio spectrum for our first responders. After 9/11, after Katrina, we lost lives because our first responders cannot talk to one another.
Four years after 9/11, after the towers came down, police and fire department officials did not know that the towers had even collapsed because they could not talk on radios. A month after Katrina, when our people in helicopters could not communicate with our boats in New Orleans to rescue people, we still do not have the public radio spectrum provided to our first responders and emergency personnel to have them communicate.
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Just as our troops in Iraq need the right equipment to communicate and have good intelligence, our first responders on our streets need the same kind of commitment and good intelligence and communication. They do not have them today.
Mr. Chairman, this war on Jihadism is not over there. It is right here, and our first responders need the equipment to protect us and themselves. They still do not have it.
Lastly, with respect to better preventing the rise of future terrorists, this is an area, Mr. Chairman, with all due respect, I am not sure we have even begun the fight here. The population in the Arab world right now is 280 million, about equal to the United States of America. Over half of the entire Arab world is 24 years of age and younger. This is a whole generation of people forming their views on America.
A Distinguished Ambassador at the Baker Institute said, ''Hostility toward the United States has reached shocking levels.'' We are losing this battle. These Jihadists are getting on the conveyor belt, trying to sign up as suicide bombers with simple radio equipment in Iraq to kill our soldiers, our brave men and women in Iraq. We need to do a much better job of stopping the conveyor belt.
I have outlined a series of different prospective policies that the United States can look at, including alternatives to the madrassahs, alternative education to the madrassahs that teach young Muslim Arab men to go out and kill Jews and Americans.
We need to base this on the metrics of the Millennium Account and our foreign assistance program where we measure the success of other countries helping us in the war on radical Jihadism, and we can measure what countries are doing and maybe gear that aid, that assistance, that national security assistance that we have, and invest that money in countries that are helping us with schools, economic investments in different countries around the world that will help us win this long-term war.
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We need other countries on our side in this effort; not simple partnerships, but grand alliances as Churchill talked about, grand alliances of other countries working with us to put together economic and educational alliances to help with the European Union and the Japanese and other Arab and Muslin countries to ensure that these young people do not sign up and come to kill Americans or Europeans or other people around the world.
Let me close, Mr. Chairman. You have been very kind with your gavel. Let me close on something that John Adams once said as one of our founding fathers. He said, I think very appropriately, the challenge before you as a policymaker and before my former colleagues on the Democratic and Republican side, he said, ''We cannot guarantee success. We can do something better. We can deserve it.''
We can deserve success in the war on radical Jihadist terrorism if we work hard, work together to rethink and recalibrate what we have done wrong so far and make it right, work in a bipartisan way as the 9–11 Commission did, Republicans and Democrats, to correct the mistakes in the past and move forward into the future.
This is the best way for Americans to do our foreign policy and our national security. I hope that this Committee can be one of the leaders in taking this recalibration and this reform forward.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Roemer follows:]
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PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE HONORABLE TIM ROEMER, PRESIDENT, THE CENTER FOR NATIONAL POLICY, AND ADDITIONAL MATERIAL SUBMITTED FOR THE RECORD
''WINNING THE WAR ON RADICAL JIHADIST TERRORISM''
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Sherman, thank you for the opportunity to appear before you and the Committee today on what I consider to be the paramount challenge to U.S. national security for this generation: the threat of radical Jihadist terrorism.
Today I would like to briefly discuss the threat environment as I see it, our responses to date, and then put forward a comprehensive strategy that has as its objective the defeat of radical Jihadist terrorism and the protection of the United States from the threat of catastrophic terrorist attack.
To know the path to victory we must see and understand the enemy. Since the fall of Kabul, Jihadists have carried out dozens of terrorist attacks from Bali to Istanbul, Riyadh to London. Osama Bin Ladin, his chief planner Ayaman Zawahiri and the Taliban's leader Mullah Omar still remain at large. Credible threats of terrorist action against the United States and our allies are received regularly.
I believe there are strong indications that pre-9/11 Al-Qaeda has morphed from a top down terrorist organization with a command and control operation run by Bin Ladin, to a loose network of terrorist cells who receive inspiration from Bin Ladin but have taken the initiative and have adopted a ''fire at will'' approach to Jihadist terrorism. While we may have smashed the center of Al-Qaeda in its Afghan lair, it has scattered, like mercury on a mirror, to the four corners of the earth ready to strike at any time.
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There are also strong indications that radical Jihadism is taking on aspects of a movement, with an accompanying ideology that can recruit new adherents faster than we can kill or capture them. We can look no further than Iraq to see the potential for this dangerous development. Zarqawi has skillfully manipulated Sunni resentment to his benefit so that two and a half years after the fall of Baghdad, Al-Qaeda carries out hundreds of bombings in Iraq, operates with near impunity and is successfully recruiting the next generation of terrorists in what is the largest live fire training exercise for Jihadists since Afghanistan.
The Administration's response to the attacks of September 11th to date has been to focus on the strategy of ''fighting them in Baghdad so we won't have to fight them in Boston''. The Administration's counter-terrorism strategy has led us in the pursuit of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which in turn led to the occupation of Iraq by 150,000 U.S. troops, which in turn has led to Iraq becoming ''the central front in the war on terror.'' I submit to you Mr. Chairman that America's current counter-terrorism strategy has them ''filling the swamp'' rather than us ''draining the swamp'' of terrorists and while having one hand tied behind our back. It is high time for a serious re-calculating and re-thinking of the war on terrorism.
As we move forward to fight this foe, we must always remember the complex challenge before us. For victory in the war on Jihadism will not take place with the capture of a capital city or the destruction of an army. It will not take place by announcing we have captured ''the number two'' Al Qaeda leader. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission stressed a broad political-military strategy that rests on a stable tripod of policies. Winning the war on terror will require America to effectively deploy a three part strategy, with balance, calibration and strength; attack the terrorists, protect the homeland and prevent the rise of future terrorists.
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Any other approach opens us up to a long twilight struggle against radical Jihadism in which we are increasingly isolated, the Islamic world becomes more unstable and Americans feel more vulnerable to attack.
Attack the Terrorists: First, we must efficiently target and effectively attack the terrorists. We must bring together every element of national power to identify, isolate and destroy radical Jihadism. I believe we should turn to the wisdom of former General and President U.S. Grant who said, ''The art of war is simple enough. Find out where the enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike him as hard as you can and keep moving.'' To accomplish this mission we must continue the upgrade of our Intelligence Community by encouraging the development of a strong Director of National Intelligence with budgetary powers and demand a dramatic reform in the culture at the FBI to encourage a stronger role for domestic intelligence collection and analysis. We should strengthen the Directorate of Operations at the CIA by encouraging the recruitment of officers and sources with detailed knowledge of Arabic and Islamic culture. We should also greatly expand the capability and reach of U.S. Special Forces so that we have the ability to project lethal force across the globe, any time, anywhere in the pursuit of the terrorists. Equally important, we must have the weapons and means to fight the enemy. We must have true ''defense transformation'' at the Department of Defense that has us developing and deploying the military weapons of the new ''Hot War,'' not the old Cold War. F–22 fighter planes built for avoiding the Soviet Union's radar and costing hundred of millions of dollars apiece are not appropriate investments for our new century or our new challenge.
Protecting the Homeland: Second, we must wisely invest in protecting the homeland. Mr. Chairman, Hurricane Katrina showed us very clearly that with 48 hours warning we could not avoid chaos and confusion in the face of a catastrophic event. We must place as our highest homeland security priority the ability to prepare ourselves to prevent and respond to a catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil. We must focus on the probability that such an attack could involve chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons against an American city.
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To keep a catastrophic attack from taking place on American soil we should first act with great speed to secure stockpiles of vulnerable fissile material that can currently be found from Nigeria to Siberia. The Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, or the bi-partisan Nunn-Lugar legislation, is planned to plug along until 2012 after which it is Congressionally mandated to cease operation. Another program, the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, has secured loose nuclear material at nine sites outside Russia. More than one hundred vulnerable sites remain. Let me repeat; we have secured nine sites while 100 remain vulnerable to terrorists. We must place as our highest homeland security priority the securing and removal of vulnerable nuclear bomb making material across the globe.
At home, we must ensure that first responders can communicate with one another at a disaster site. Four years after 9/11, we still do not have this capability. That requires immediate resolution of the interoperability issue, something that is within the power of this Congress to solve. Congress must immediately provide radio spectrum for first responders, and not wait until 2009. We should also make sure that first responder grants are conditioned on participation in regional planning and exercises designed around response to a catastrophic attack. We must also require local communities to implement a unified incident command system.
In the event that local first responders are overwhelmed by a catastrophic terrorist attack involving WMD, we should work on updating and improving the 1878 Posse Comatatis law which was passed to address Union troops in southern states during reconstruction. What is the appropriate role for the National Guard? We should consider designating the U.S. Armed Forces to take the lead on coordinating the response and rescue operations in a national emergency involving a nuclear or biological attack. And, we must develop and implement a national security strategy based on risk and intelligence—not on pork barrel spending. Metrics need to be more effectively developed and tracked. What are the priorities? How many nuclear power plants have been protected? How many oil refineries? How do we know? Today, we do not know because the Department of Homeland Security has not developed or approved this plan.
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Preventing the Rise of Future Terrorists: Third, preventing the rise of future terrorists from joining the Jihadist movement must be a higher priority. As World War II drew to a close, President Franklin Roosevelt said, ''It is useless to win a war, only to lose a peace.'' Our troops can prevail on the battlefield, our intelligence agencies can identify terrorist cells and our defensive measures can foil plots, but the long term key to our national security is isolating the extremists and radical terrorists by helping to create a competing and more powerful vision of the future of the Middle East and the Muslim world. It must be a vision built in partnership with the people of the Middle East and Muslim world and supported by a global alliance.
The population of the Arab world right now is 280 million, approximately equal to that of the United States. Over half of the entire Arab world is under 24 years of age. While a whole generation forms its world view, opinion of the United States across the Arab and Muslim world is at an all time low. Former Ambassador Edward Djerejian currently at the Baker Institute at Rice University has said that, ''hostility toward the United States has reached shocking levels.'' This situation cannot stand, for if current trends continue, we risk losing tens of thousands of Arab youth to the siren song of suicide bombers.
It is essential to the long term success of our efforts to protect America from the threat of terrorism that we engage in a long term effort to support the voices of moderation in the Islamic world. To date, effective long-term initiatives have been piecemeal and have paled in comparison with the resources dedicated to attacking terrorists and protecting the homeland.
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I believe that the United States should be part of an international ''grand alliance'' to support the expansion of alternative public education for the youth of the Islamic world. The parents and children of the Islamic world need to have practical options and acceptable curriculum to the radical madrassas which sow the seeds which Jihadism later reaps.
The United States, the European Union, Middle East and Muslim countries and Japan should work together to ensure that economic development assistance is strengthening an emerging middle class in the Islamic world that has a stake in prosperity and stability. Through non-governmental sources we can provide the resources and investment necessary to support the moderate voices of Islam and the empowerment of women. Again, we need to carefully consider various international intelligence metrics to better understand who is able to help us and how they are doing this.
The United States should also expand, with appropriate security safeguards and balances, student exchanges and cultural visits. The numbers of reviewed exchanges should expand dramatically over current levels of participation. It is crucial for our economy and our higher education system as well as our economic security.
Patience and persistence will be required in the encouragement of the growth of civil societies and democratic institutions in the Islamic world. True success will not be measured by the reports of spin doctors, but measured in the number of children who receive a better education in the Islamic world and the growth of opportunities for Arab and Muslim citizens that eventually demand civil rights and accountable institutions.
To secure America in the 21st Century and protect us from the threat of Jihadist attack, we must adopt a more ambitious and comprehensive strategy to counter-radical Jihadist terrorism. I believe we must have a vigorous but balanced approach: attack the terrorists, protect the homeland and prevent the rise of future terrorists. We must pursue all three missions simultaneously, aggressively and with coalition support from partners to prevent the rise of future terrorists. These efforts cannot be viewed separately but practiced together as in a three dimensional chess match.
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At another time of national challenge, Harry Truman said, ''America was not built on fear. America was built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand.'' Mr. Chairman, this will be a long struggle, one fraught at times with peril, for our foes strike from the shadows. Our response must be one founded on the path of our great American successes—imagination, determination and courage. Thank you.
MY VIEW: TIM ROEMER
CONGRESS CAN'T AFFORD TO DELAY ACTION ON REAL NUCLEAR OPTION
May 10, 2005
The U.S. Senate has been debating a ''nuclear option,'' a proposal related to the confirmation process of judicial nominations. While this is an explosive issue and certainly has consequences for the Supreme Court, there is a more critical nuclear option we should be focusing on: the chilling reality that terrorists are constantly working to acquire nuclear weapons.
The United States has the tools to stop a potential nuclear 9/11, but Congress is not taking the steps needed to protect us from what Osama bin Laden has promised, a ''Hiroshima-type event'' on American soil.
There is motive and opportunity for this nightmare to occur. In February 1998, bin Laden issued a religious order that called the murder of any American ''the individual duty for every Muslim who can do it.'' Three months later, he added, ''We do not differentiate between military and civilian. As far as we are concerned, they (Americans) are all targets.''
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Disturbingly, the opportunity for al-Qaida to acquire the materials for construction of a crude nuclear weapon is just as great as the motive. Today, some 20 tons of highly enriched uranium exist at 130 civilian research facilities in 40 countries, many of which have no more security than a chain-link fence and a night watchman. The International Atomic Energy Agency reports that there have been 16 thefts involving highly enriched uranium and plutonium. This loose nuclear material represents the source of a potential al-Qaida bomb.
The unraveling of Pakistani scientist A.Q. Khan's nuclear smuggling network has exposed a dirty secret—that the knowledge to build a bomb is up for sale. Taliban sympathizers were part of the team that worked with Khan to develop Pakistan's illicit nuclear weapons program. A well-funded al-Qaida has the opportunity to get the knowledge to build a bomb from sympathetic nuclear scientists and smugglers who are willing to sell their wares to the highest bidder.
Recent revelations that Pakistani nuclear knowledge made its way to such places as North Korea and Libya should serve as an alarm for the possibility of the world's worst terrorists linking up with the world's worst weapons.
In order to prevent the proliferation of these weapons and accelerate their collection, the 9/11 commission made specific recommendations to Congress. Much remains to be done.
First, counter-proliferation efforts must be strengthened by the United States working with the international community to develop laws and an international legal regime with the universal jurisdiction to enable the capture, interdiction and prosecution of those who smuggle, hide or fail to disclose the presence or location of these materials.
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Second, there must be an expansion of the Proliferation Security Initiative to interdict weapons materials by air, land and sea. The PSI will be more effective if it utilizes the intelligence and planning resources of the NATO alliance. It also must be open to non-NATO countries, including Russia and China.
Third, there must be stronger bipartisan support for the Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, known as the Nunn-Lugar program, which is the U.S. government's main instrument for securing the loose fissile materials that are still scattered around the former Soviet Union. Currently, Nunn-Lugar is in need of expanded authorities and funding to operate outside the former Soviet Union and a reduction of repetitive reporting requirements that delay critical work to secure nuclear materials.
Finally, the commission recommended that the U.S. encourage international support, including funding, in order to prevent the catastrophic costs the world would face should such weapons find their way into the hands of terrorists.
Even with the knowledge we have and the recommendations made, tons of weapons-grade nuclear material remain at unsecured locations across the globe. Regimes such as North Korea and Iran continually expand their nuclear weapons potential while U.S efforts to clean up loose nuclear material are under-funded, mired in administrative requirements and years away from keeping the world safe from the threat of an al-Qaida bomb.
As a partisan Senate wrestles over the politics of deploying a judicial ''nuclear option'' this week, the immediate order of business should be a civil and constructive debate about a terrorist nuclear option.
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SECURING AMERICA IN THE 21ST CENTURY
A Conference Sponsored by the Center for National Policy and New York University's Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response
September 9, 2005
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The Center for National Policy, in partnership with New York University's Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response, recently held a conference on the requirements of U.S. national security in the post-9/11 world. The conference, ''Securing America in the 21st Century'', gathered a diverse group of scholars, career national security officials and former Cabinet and White House officials who have collectively served the last four Presidents of the United States.
The goal of the conference was to ask and find answers to two main questions relating to the protection of the United States from terrorist attack; ''Have we done what we promised?'' and ''What more can we do?'' To address these questions, CNP assembled three main panels which reflect a comprehensive approach to counter-terrorism. Here are some of the results, with a more comprehensive report to be issued in the weeks to come.
I. TARGETING THE TERRORISTS
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Assessment:
Reforms in the Intelligence Community have had too little time to yield the kind of results that will be necessary for the United States to effectively identify, track and target terrorists threats to the nation. Despite restructuring efforts at the FBI, we do not have a competent domestic intelligence collection and analytic capability at this point. While the creation of the office of a Director of National Intelligence promises improved coordination in the Intelligence Community, great efforts will be required to develop a common set of tools, techniques and analytical methods that can be shared within the Intelligence Community.
Recommendations:
Create system wide educational opportunities at mid-career and senior levels of Intelligence agencies to achieve the information sharing promised with the creation of the office of Director of National Intelligence (DNI).
Develop extensive partnerships between the Intelligence and scientific communities in order to keep current in fields such as biotechnology, nano-technology and computer science.
Recruit and hire more analysts at the office of DNI from outside the Intelligence Community. The DNI and the Intelligence Community generally should be open to breaking out of a bureaucratic culture and encouraging out of the box thinking by recruiting short-term hires from the private sector and academia.
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II. PROTECTING THE HOMELAND
Assessment:
Hurricane Katrina showed that four years after the attacks of September 11th, the United States is unable to effectively respond to a catastrophic terrorist attack on a major city. First responders are still, in many cases, unable to talk with one another due to problems of interoperability of communications equipment. First responder funding formulas are still based on political patronage and not threat/vulnerability assessment. In terms of prevention of a catastrophic attack, the U.S. is failing to move as fast as it should to secure hundreds of tons of vulnerable nuclear material scattered across the globe.
Recommendations:
Dedicate radio spectrum, explore the deployment of wi-fi technology and upgrade equipment to ensure that first responders achieve communications interoperability.
Reprogram first responder grants to be based on a comprehensive threat vulnerability assessment. Link the acceptance of homeland security grants to participation in regional planning and exercises for response to catastrophic events.
Speed up international efforts to secure vulnerable nuclear material across the globe to reduce the likelihood of nuclear and radiological terrorism.
III. PREVENTING THE RISE OF FUTURE TERORISTS
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Assessment:
It is essential to the long term success of our efforts to protect America from the threat of terrorism that we engage in a long term effort to support the voices of moderation in the Islamic world. To date, initiatives have been piecemeal and paled in comparison with the resources dedicated to targeting terrorists and protecting the homeland.
Recommendations:
The United States should maintain an open door policy, with appropriate safeguards, regarding student exchanges and cultural visits. Numbers of exchanges should expand dramatically over current levels of participation.
A massive international effort should be undertaken to support the expansion of secular public education for the youth of the Islamic world.
Democratic transformation in the Middle East may not yield immediate pro-American sentiments. Patience and persistence will be required in the encouragement of the growth of civil society and democratic institutions.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, Mr. Roemer. So do we.
Next we are going to go to Mr. de Borchgrave and then to Dr. Hoffman and then to Major Dillon.
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STATEMENT OF MR. ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, SENIOR ADVISOR AND DIRECTOR, TRANSNATIONAL THREATS PROJECT, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I submitted an 11-page statement, which I hope can be inserted in the record.
Mr. ROYCE. Not only is it inserted in the record, but we have read it, sent it out to our colleagues, and I thought it was particularly insightful.
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Thank you, sir.
I just want to begin by saying there is an understandable reluctance to recognize that Iraq has served as a recruitment poster for al-Qaeda and for the Iraqi insurgency. The global network of Islamist terrorists and its seldom mentioned support group have been energized by events in Iraq.
The Dutch intelligence service, AIVD, says radical Islam in the Netherlands now encompasses a multitude of movements, organizations and groups. Much of the same can be said about angry young Muslims all over Europe.
In London, authorities believe that as many as 3,000 veterans of al-Qaeda training camps over the years were born or based in Britain. A study of 1,160 recent French converts to Islam found that 23 percent of them identified themselves as Salafists, a Muslim sector associated with violent extremism.
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There is a fascinating, well-documented article I recommend on this phenomenon by Dr. Robert Leiken of the Nixon Center in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. Most of Europe's Muslim extremists carry EU passports incidentally that do not require United States visas.
Osama bin Laden is one of the principal beneficiaries of the Iraqi crisis. What is widely seen throughout the world as unprovoked American aggression against Iraq and the mistreatment of Iraqi civilians have radicalized many in the Arab world and elevated bin Laden from a fringe figure to a global leader opposed to American hegemony in the Middle East.
As erroneous as this portrayal strikes us in the United States, it is nonetheless believed by countless millions from Berlin to Bangladesh and from Mexico to Malaysia. Perception long ago supplanted reality.
Bin Laden's stated geopolitical objective is to bleed the United States into bankruptcy the way the mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan bled the Soviet Union into bankruptcy in 1989. Bin Laden is convinced the Afghan Arabs he helped recruit played a key role in collapsing the Soviet empire. The last Soviet soldier withdrew from Afghanistan on February 15, 1989, and the Berlin Wall crumbled November 9, 1989, less than 9 months later.
In Europe, would-be Jihads continue to volunteer to fight in Iraq. An unknown number have already returned from Iraq with newly acquired terrorist skills, the ability to form sleeper cells and encourage others to sign up for holy war.
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Europe's large Muslim communities, with a total population of almost 20 million, offer support networks in which Iraqi veterans can blend with little difficulty. Unlike the United States and Canada where most immigrants from Muslim countries are scattered throughout society in relatively small assimilated groups, Muslim communities in Europe exist in large concentration and usually in the poorer suburbs of major cities.
Overlooked in the global scheme of things is a virtual Islamist caliphate already exists in cyberspace. Some 4,000 plus pro al-Qaeda Web sites, chat rooms, message boards with seemingly innocuous coded messages, coupled with state-of-the-art encryption techniques, reflects the sizeable number of computer engineers and scientists at the service of transnational terrorism.
Untraceable e-mails organize terrorists across continents. Jihadi recruits use the Internet to learn how to make bombs from chemicals bought in stores. They also learn the names of mosques in Syria and Jordan that can hide and protect a Jihadi making his way into Iraq and then to learn different locations in Iraq where Jihadis should report for training and combat assignments.
The world of on-line Jihadism is not something imaginary, theoretical or conceptual. It is here, and it is real. The caliphate's many fanatics, participants and supporters toil toward the day when the removal of secular Arab leaders in the Middle East and beyond transform the virtual caliphate into a political reality.
Many intelligence analysts are puzzled by Osama bin Laden's popularity in the Muslim world, but I can remember when millions of Europeans and some Americans pledged allegiance to Joseph Stalin, history's most murderous dictator, with the blood of some 40 million innocent victims on his hands.
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Before World War II, in the 1930s, which I well remember, in my native Belgium large numbers of Europeans, embittered by the fallout of the Great Depression and the apparent weakness of democratic leaders, succumbed to the totalitarian temptation of extreme left and extreme right. Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini enjoyed fanatical followers throughout Europe. Witness the two sides in the Spanish Civil War when 1 million people were killed in the run-up to World War II.
Today bin Laden and Islamo-fascism are experiencing the same surge of popularity. At the beginning of the 20th century, no one had ever heard of Nazism or fascism, and a Communist was simply a socialist without a sense of humor.
At the beginning of the 21st century, or 5 years ago, no one had ever heard of the new ideology, al-Qaedaism. What used to be a small, tight-knit group of terrorists is now a global politico-religious, ideological, and spiritual movement that recruits and trains extremists in many of the same spawning grounds used by the Communist parties the world over during the Cold War.
I have often asked Muslim leaders, moderate Muslim leaders, that is Muslim heads of state and government but in moderate countries, how many extremists they believe are living in their countries. The answer is usually 1 percent, and the number of fundamentalists broadly speaking, the support group, is estimated at 10 percent.
Extrapolating those figures for 1.3 billion Muslims in the world, we get 13 million extremists and 130 million fundamentalists. By way of comparison, the IRA never had more than 300 guerrillas deployed against the Brits in Northern Ireland, but they still managed to pin down half the British Army for a quarter of a century.
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The outlook is uncertain on many critical fronts. What is clear is that we are facing a long, protracted ideological conflict that could last for several decades, or at least until Islam is persuaded by a latter-day Martin Luther or a Martin Luther King that modernity is the better part of valor.
Wherever one scans the geopolitical horizon, much turmoil clearly lies ahead as the forces of nationalism, fundamentalism, globalism, and increasingly transnationalism sort themselves out.
There is no magic bullet called democracy. What took several centuries to evolve in Europe from the Reformation to the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Discovery to democratic capitalism, cannot be transplanted in countries that have known nothing but dictatorship, authoritarian regimes and/or absolute monarchies. Turkey is an exception, but even Turkey's democracy was imposed by dictatorial edict.
Three years into Operation Iraqi Freedom, anti-Americanism is now deeply entrenched in much of the world, so much so that in 14 out of 16 countries polled in a new Pew Foundation survey China is now viewed more favorably than the United States, even among traditional United States allies in Europe.
By way of conclusion, let me just say before we can readjust our sights and recalibrate strategy, we should consult those who do not agree with us, but who have had long experience in dealing with transnational terrorism.
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This should be a time for listening carefully to current and former officials whose countries have been victims and who abhor Islamist extremism as much as we do.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. de Borchgrave follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF MR. ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE, SENIOR ADVISOR AND DIRECTOR, TRANSNATIONAL THREATS PROJECT, CENTER FOR STRATEGIC AND INTERNATIONAL STUDIES
There is an understandable reluctance to recognize that the Iraq war has served as a recruitment poster for Al Qaeda and for the Iraqi insurgency. The global network of Islamist terrorists, and its seldom-mentioned support group, have been energized by events in Iraq. The war has turned Iraq into the world's most effective terrorist training camp.
Iraq today increasingly resembles Lebanon shortly before that country descended into a 15-year civil war in 1975. Iraq has also become an incubator for a particularly noxious form of Shiite radicalism, one that could turn against those who liberated them from Saddam Hussein's bloody tyranny.
Osama Bin Laden is one of the principal beneficiaries of the Iraqi crisis. What is widely seen throughout the world as unprovoked American aggression against Iraq, and the mistreatment of Iraqi civilians, have radicalized many in the Arab world and elevated Bin Laden from a fringe figure to a global leader opposed to American hegemony in the Middle East.
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As erroneous as this portrayal strikes us in the United States, it is nonetheless believed by countless millions from Berlin to Bangladesh and from Mexico to Malaysia. Perception long ago supplanted reality.
Bin Laden's stated geopolitical objective is to bleed the United States into bankruptcy the way the mujahideen guerrillas in Afghanistan bled the Soviet Union into bankruptcy in 1989. He is convinced the Afghan Arabs he recruited played the key role in collapsing the Soviet empire. The last Soviet soldier evacuated Afghanistan Feb. 15, 1989. The Berlin Wall crumbled Nov. 9, 1989, less than nine months later.
For Bin Laden, Iraq was a signal from Allah. It became an unexpected opportunity to bleed the U.S. economically, militarily, and diplomatically, and to paint the superpower as reckless and aggressive.
The degree to which this global struggle is still misunderstood and miscast becomes clear each time we hear that ''we have to fight them over there so they don't come over here.''
In Europe, in countries that have been members of NATO since the beginning of the Cold War, would-be jihadis continue to volunteer to fight in Iraq. An unknown number have already returned from Iraq with new terrorist skills and the ability to form sleeper cells and encourage others to sign up for jihad.
An Islamic underclass is developing across Europe that is increasingly in tune with the extremist ideologies—Wahhabi and Salafist—of radical Islam. France's prison population is already 60% Muslim.
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Europe's large Muslim communities—with a total population of almost 20 million—offer support networks in which returning jihadis from Iraq can blend with little difficulty. Also, they have the protection of several layers of insulation between themselves and the intelligence agencies assigned to track them down.
When French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was Interior Minister he asked for an intelligence assessment of what was happening in France's 1,000 principal mosques. It turned out that only three percent of the imams preaching in France were French citizens and 40% of them had no religious background whatsoever. They preached with material they were getting from pro-Al Qaeda websites.
This week's TIME magazine has a lengthy article on what it calls ''Generation Jihad''—restive, rootless young European-born Muslims who find themselves alienated from their societies and the policies of their governments.
A study of 1,160 recent French converts to Islam found that 23% of them identified themselves as Salafists—a Muslim sect associated with violent extremism. In the Netherlands, Dutch intelligence believes as many as 20 different hard-line Islamic groups are operating in the country. And in London, authorities believe as many as 3,000 veterans of Al Qaeda training camps over the years were born or based in Britain.
Unlike the United States and Canada, where most immigrants from Muslim countries are scattered throughout society in relatively small groups, Muslim communities in Europe exist in large concentrations, usually in the poorer suburbs of major cities.
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In addition, Europe has long been a destination of choice for dissident Muslim activists and militants from the Middle East and South Asia. Some of these dissidents provided the benefit of their experiences and contacts to new generations of jihadists.
Until early 2004, the jihadists flourished in the European environment and refrained from attacks against U.S. allies except to put their network at the disposal of those planning these attacks.
The 1996 terrorist operation against the U.S. military at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, and the USS Cole in Aden in Oct. 2000, were all major attacks, but they failed to achieve any real impact on U.S. policy.
This is what led to Al Qaeda's conclusion that only large scale attacks targeting civilians in the heart and lungs of America could demonstrate that the world's only superpower was vulnerable.
This, of course, led to 9/11, which triggered the invasion and liberation of Afghanistan, which Bin Laden, from all accounts, had not anticipated. The great big kick in the terrorist hornet's nest scattered Al Qaeda's Afghan-based resources to many different parts of the world—the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Sahara Africa, even Latin America, and, of course, Europe, from the Balkans to Scandinavia.
I recently toured six African countries with NATO Supreme Commander Gen. James L. Jones who is also commander of all American forces in Europe and whose command encompasses 91 countries, including most of Africa. Each head of state and chiefs of intelligence, security and defense talked about the proliferation of Al Qaeda-type cells in the failed or failing states of Africa, particularly those with large Muslim populations, such as Nigeria.
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The Pan-Sahel region of Africa offers sanctuary to Islamist extremists, smugglers and insurgent groups. Coastal areas provide havens for smuggling, piracy, and oil bunkering. Vast expanses are ungoverned or ungovernable. As much of Afghanistan was under Taliban rule, which enabled Al Qaeda to set up its training camps, the same phenomenon is now taking root in some parts of Africa.
The U.S. presently gets 17% of its fuel supplies from West Africa and Angola. This will soon rise to 21% and then 40% by 2020. These are the only oil producers outside of the Americas that have direct access to U.S. ports without having to squeeze through choke points, such as the Strait of Hormuz.
Social and economic problems are driving chronic instability, inhibiting economic development and squandering human capital, which lead to failing states and fertile ground for extremism. Twenty-five percent of some 400 foreign fighters captured in Iraq came from Africa.
As a result of 9/11, America became a much harsher environment for militant Islamists, and Europe offered networks and operatives already in place. Which led to Madrid on March 11, 2004, and London last July 7 and 21.
Now Britain, Italy and Germany are enacting much tougher anti-terrorist laws. France already had them in place. This new legal climate is bound to impact jihadi plans. Hence, my belief Al Qaeda will now aim at soft targets that could still bring the world economy to a jarring—if only temporary—halt.
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Many experts believe Al Qaeda is waiting for a period of momentary U.S. weakness—such as the twin drains of Katrina and Rita on top of Iraq—to inflict a CBRN attack on the U.S. In the light of the immediate post-Katrina chaos, they must have determined we are not prepared to deal with a CBRN catastrophe, such as the explosion of a so-called dirty bomb in lower Manhattan, or an unsuspecting smaller city in the Middle West.
There is no doubt in my mind they would attempt it if they had the capability.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies first warned about cyberterrorism in a report published in 1997. Long before 9/11, Al Qaeda was using the Internet to plan and execute its 1998 attacks against U.S. Embassies in Africa and the bombing of the USS Cole two years later.
Today, there exists a ''virtual caliphate'' in cyberspace. Some 4,000 plus pro-Al Qaeda websites, chat rooms, message boards with seemingly innocuous coded messages, coupled with state-of-the-art encryption techniques reflect the sizeable number of computer engineers and scientists at the service of transnational terrorism.
In his book ''SMART MOBS,'' the Internet visionary Howard Rheingold says mobile phones will soon morph into tiny multimedia terminals, the kind of disruptive technology that changes every aspect of society, including intelligence and counter-intelligence. This new era, says Rheingold, will enable ''people to act together in new ways and in situations where collective action was not possible before.'' Al Qaeda's computer-literate terrorist geeks were among the first to get there.
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Untraceable e-mails organize terrorists across continents. Jihadi recruits use the Internet to learn how to make bombs from store-bought chemicals; learn also the names of mosques in Syria and Jordan that can hide and protect a jihadi on his way into Iraq; and to learn different locations in Iraq where jihadis should report for duty.
The world of on-line jihadism is not something imaginary, theoretical or conceptual—it is here and it is real. The caliphate's many fanatics, participants, and supporters toil toward the day when the removal of secular Arab leaders in the Middle East and beyond transforms the virtual caliphate into a political reality.
Many intelligence analysts are puzzled by Osama Bin Laden's popularity in the Muslim world. But I can remember when millions of Europeans—and some Americans—pledged allegiance to Joseph Stalin, history's most murderous dictator, with the blood of some 40 million victims on his hands.
In the 1930s, a group of Oxford University students pledged that under no circumstances would they fight to save England. And both Oxford and Cambridge were the pre-World War II recruiting grounds for some of the most notorious Soviet spies in the U.S. after the war.
Between the end of World War II in 1945 and Stalin's death in 1953, Communist parties in France and Italy, blindly loyal to the Kremlin, consistently garnered 25% of the electoral vote. In 1948, the Italian Communist Party would have won the elections and taken over the government if the United States had not covertly bankrolled anti-Communist parties.
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Before World War II, in the 1930s, which I can well remember, large numbers of Europeans, embittered by the fallout of the Great Depression and the apparent weakness of democratic leaders, succumbed to the totalitarian temptation of extreme left and extreme right. Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini enjoyed fanatical followers throughout Europe—witness the two sides in the Spanish civil war when one million were killed in the run-up to World War II.
Today, Bin Laden, and Islamo-fascism, are experiencing the same surge of popularity. At the beginning of the 20th century, no one had ever heard of Nazism or fascism, and a Communist was simply a socialist without a sense of humor.
At the beginning of the 21st century, or five years ago, no one had ever heard of the new ideology Al Qaeda-ism. What used to be a small, tight-knit group of terrorists is now a global politico-religious, ideological, spiritual movement that recruits and trains extremists in many of the same spawning grounds used by Communist parties the world over during the Cold War.
Disenfranchised, unemployed Muslim youth, living in the poorer neighborhoods of major European cities, heavily influenced by propaganda depicting the U.S. and Israel on a crusade against Islam, are easy pickings.
The Jihadists' notion of a Pan-Islamic Ummah, or nation, as explained by Olivier Roy, one of Europe's leading scholars of modern Islamism, recalls the Trotskyst idea of the proletariat: namely an imaginary and therefore silent community that gives legitimacy to the small group pretending to speak in its name. The triumph of Islam is then held to be, as the triumph of socialism once was, ''inevitable.''
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The extent of the real danger posed by jihadi extremists is political, in which terror is not an end in itself. The broader aims of these organizations are not significantly different from those of Lenin and the Bolsheviks 100 years ago or Hitler and the German National Socialist party 80 years ago.
The aim this time is to establish some form of regime or regimes steeped in the teachings of radical Islam with access to Saudi money and one quarter of the world's oil reserves and Pakistan's nuclear arsenal—with the broader objective of spreading their religion worldwide.
Gen. Hamid Gul, a former head of Pakistani intelligence, who hates America with a passion, is ''strategic adviser'' to the six-party coalition of politico-religious extremists that governs two of Pakistan's four provinces. He described the caliphate to me quite bluntly: Saudi oil and Pakistani nukes levels the playing field with the United States. Gul is also close to Pakistan's popular hero, Dr. Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of his country's nuclear capability, who ran an international nuclear black market for the benefit of America's enemies—North Korea, Iran and Libya.
The U.S. relationships with Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are critical. Pervez Musharraf presides over a country where the overwhelming majority of people regard Bin Laden trustworthier than George W. Bush. Musharraf, as Army chief of staff, constantly seeks to defuse U.S. pressure to act and domestic pressure to avoid acting.
Earlier this month, I was in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province and in Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. Responding to U.S. pressure, Musharraf ordered the deployment of 80,000 troops along a 1,300-mile unmarked border of mountains and flatlands with Afghanistan. Several hundred Pakistani soldiers have been killed or wounded in anti-Al Qaeda operations. But Taliban guerrillas who go back and forth to harass U.S. forces are left unmolested.
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Resistance to U.S. influence has been both passive and active with Pakistani intelligence agents telling local police and village chiefs not to cooperate with any U.S. unit that crosses into Pakistan. Ranking members of Pakistan's militant Islamist movements have been declared off-limits to security forces, thus leaving key segments of the international militant network unmolested.
From time to time, responding to U.S. pressure, Gen. Musharraf orders offensives against militant extremists. But calculated moves by influential figures at the middle and lower echelons of Pakistan's intelligence and security apparatus manage to blunt the impact of the orders.
Some of these countermoves reflect Islamabad's resentment against American attempts to push the limits of security agreements with the Pakistanis. However, it is also an indication that Musharraf's regime does not have tight control over its own intelligence and security services. For some, it comes down to sheer survival. Islamist militants—Musharraf himself estimates their number at 1.5 million, or 1% of the population—have made several attempts on the president's life.
For Islamabad, jihadists have long been both an internal threat to military/civilian rule as well as a useful form of leverage in its traditional geopolitical objectives, e.g., gaining strategic depth in Afghanistan and waging its proxy war against India in Kashmir (now on hold).
Despite constant U.S. pressure and $130 million in U.S. funding for the reform of single discipline, boys only madrassas, where only Arabic and the Koran are taught, along with multiple reasons to hate America, Israel and India, very little has been done. Since the mid-1980s, almost ten million young men, including the entire Taliban leadership, have graduated from these free schools, financed mostly by Saudi Arabia and Libya.
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The politico-religious parties control some 12,500 madrassas. This month they finally dropped their opposition to a government order to register the schools by the end of this year. In return, the government agreed not to expel the foreign students that attend them.
There is a recognition in Islamabad among present and former ranking government officials, albeit off the record, that Pakistan's importance as a ''major non-NATO ally'' likely will gradually dissolve if Bin Laden is killed or captured. As the Bush Administration strengthens its new strategic ties with India, these Pakistani officials say, Musharraf's geopolitical importance to the U.S. is bound to diminish.
So the outlook is uncertain on many critical fronts. What is clear is that we are facing a long protracted ideological conflict that could last for several decades, or at least until Islam is persuaded by a latter-day Martin Luther, or a Martin Luther King, that modernity is the better part of valor.
The stakes are enormous, which is what prompted the retiring chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Richard Myers, to say this week that defeating the Iraqi insurgency is as important to the United States as winning World War II. The defeat in Vietnam did not have any dire geopolitical consequences. Our Cold War opponents were themselves defeated in the end. But a full-fledged civil war in Iraq would leave us little choice but to withdraw.
The police chief in Basra, Iraq's second largest city, told an interviewer last week he could only count of the loyalty of one policeman out of four. The other three, he said, owed their allegiance to Shia militia funded by Iran. In Baghdad, government officials have admitted that Saddam loyalists had also penetrated the ranks of the national army, security police and intelligence service. Al Qaeda in Iraq, meanwhile, has officially declared all-out war against Iraq's Shiites.
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We quickly forget there are Imams in Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States, Egypt, Jordan and Syria who preach every Friday it is a Muslim's sacred duty to resist the Americans in Iraq.
Wherever one scans the geopolitical horizon, much turmoil clearly lies ahead as the forces of nationalism, fundamentalism, globalism—and, increasingly transnationalism—sort themselves out.
In order to prevail in this global struggle, we must adopt comprehensive—and not narrow—solutions to the major problems facing us. That means, for example, we must move decisively to resolve the profoundly difficult conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Gaza was but one small step on that road. A viable Palestinian state has to be midwifed by the U.S. without further delays. If this proves impossible, and Intifada III breaks out over the West Bank, this crisis, coupled with an ongoing insurgency in Iraq, could spell geopolitical disaster for the U.S.
If a radical government emerges in Baghdad, either because we falter in the effort to democratize, or because Iraq falls into terrorist chaos, the entire Islamic world will find itself in turmoil. Countries with substantial Islamic minorities, such as India, Russia and the Philippines, will become embroiled in the chaos, as would European countries with large Muslim communities.
There is no magic bullet called democracy. What took several centuries to evolve in Europe—from the Reformation to the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Discovery to democratic capitalism—cannot be transplanted in countries that have known nothing but dictatorship, authoritarian regimes and/or absolute monarchies. Turkey is the exception that proves the rule—and Turkey's democracy was imposed by dictatorial edict.
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Veteran geopolitical luminaries have pointed out time and again that the war on terror is a misnomer. Terrorism is a weapons system. From time immemorial it has been the weapon of the weak against the strong. The real war on terror is about culture, ideas, and perceptions as much as roadside bombs and suicide bombers.
Al Qaeda's breeding grounds stretch from the madrassas of Mindanao in the Philippines to identical Koranic schools in Indonesia and Pakistan, to the shantytowns on the outskirts of Casablanca. Everyone now seems to have access at the village level to 24/7 satellite television. Mullahs and imams tell their illiterate flocks they are poor because of what the heathen Christians and Jews have stolen from them in their war to destroy Islam.
Three years in to Operation Iraqi Freedom, anti-Americanism is now deeply entrenched in much of the world, so much so that in 14 of 16 countries polled in a new Pew Foundation survey, China is now viewed more favorably than the U.S., even among traditional U.S. allies in Europe. The U.S. is more isolated than ever before in history, with more people in public polls in Muslim countries voting for Bin Laden than President Bush. Nowhere does a majority believe the war in Iraq has made the world safer.
The damage done by the Abu Ghraib pictures—used as anti-American posters the world over—is incalculable. Unfortunately for all of us, the world we project through satellite TV is one of sitcoms and risqué one-man talk shows that are seen as depraved in a Muslim household. One hears time and again from friends in those countries that we have long lost our moral compass and the moral high ground. Lecturing the Islamic world on American values rings both hollow and shallow when filtered through global television.
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Before we can readjust our sights and recalibrate our strategy, we should consult those who do not agree with us, but who have had long experience in dealing with transnational terrorism. This should be a time for listening carefully to current and former officials whose countries have been victims and who abhor Islamist extremism as much as we do.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. de Borchgrave.
We will now go to Dr. Hoffman and then Major Dillon.
STATEMENT OF BRUCE HOFFMAN, B. PHIL., D. PHIL., DIRECTOR, WASHINGTON OFFICE, RAND CORPORATION
Mr. HOFFMAN. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, for this opportunity to speak before the Subcommittee today on this very important topic. I would be grateful as well if my written statement could be submitted into the record.
Four years after the 9/11 attacks stunned the nation and indeed the entire world, we face an enemy different than that we confronted at the start of the ongoing global war on terrorism. Beyond any doubt, the successes achieved by the United States and its allies during the initial operations of the war on terrorism account for this change.
But where these successes in the war on terrorism have indeed forced our adversaries to change, our adversaries have also demonstrated that they are both capable and able to effect such changes and thus adjust and adapt to even our most consequential countermeasures.
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Since 9/11, al-Qaeda has already shown itself to be a nimble, flexible and adaptive entity. Perhaps al-Qaeda's greatest achievement though has been the makeover it has given itself since 2001. The current al-Qaeda therefore exists more as an ideology and has become a vast enterprise, an international franchise with like-minded local representatives loosely connected to a central ideological or motivational base, but advancing the remaining center's goals at once simultaneously and independently of one another.
Hence, unlike the hierarchical, pyramidal structure that typified terrorist groups of the past, the current al-Qaeda movement in the main is flatter, more linear, and organizationally networked. The result is that today there are many al-Qaedas other than the single al-Qaeda of the past.
Al-Qaeda's operational durability thus has enormous significance for U.S. counterterrorism strategy and policy. Because it has this malleable resiliency, it cannot be destroyed or defeated in a single tactical military engagement or series of engagements, much less ones exclusively dependent on the application of conventional forces and fire power.
Winning the war on terrorism, as many observers agree, will take decades, not years, to accomplish. Our ability to achieve that victory will depend fundamentally on the ability of American strategy to adjust and adapt to changes we see in the nature of character of our adversaries.
At the foundation of such a dynamic and adaptive policy must be the ineluctable axiom effectively and successfully countering terrorism, as well as insurgency, not exclusively a military endeavor but involving fundamental parallel political, social, economic and ideological activity.
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Although explicitly recognizing the importance of all these diverse elements of national power in the struggle against terrorism, in practice America's counterterrorism strategy appears predominantly weighted toward the tactical kill or capture approach and metric, assuming that a traditional center of gravity exists whether the target is al-Qaeda or the insurgency in Iraq and that this target simply needs to be militarily destroyed so that global terrorism or the Iraqi insurgency will end.
Moreover, what worked well for the United States and coalition during the initial operations and phases of the war on terrorism when we faced a differently configured and structured al-Qaeda, for instance, will likely not prove as effective given the deliberate changes affected by al-Qaeda and its associates precisely to obviate American countermeasure and the evolution in both terrorism and insurgency that we have seen.
In so fluid an environment, our strategy must accordingly change and adopt as well. In the final analysis, al-Qaeda's ability to continue to prosecute this struggle is a direct reflection of its capacity to attract new recruits and replenish expended resources.
The success of U.S. strategy will therefore ultimately be based on our ability to counter al-Qaeda's ideology and message effectively and thereby break the cycle of recruitment and regeneration that continues to sustain the movement.
In addition, crafting and implementing such a strategy will ineluctably depend on our capacity to think like a networked enemy in anticipation of how they may act in a variety of situations, aided by different resources. To do so, we first need to better understand the al-Qaeda movement's evolution and thus more effectively anticipate changes in radical international Jihadism and also better assess the implications of those changes.
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''If you know the enemy and know yourself,'' Sun Tzu wrote centuries ago, ''you will not fear the results of a hundred battles.'' Four years into the war on terrorism, however, we do not really know nor fully understand our enemy.
During the Vietnam conflict, for example, a quarter of a century ago, tremendous efforts and resources were devoted to understanding Viet Cong morale and motivation and the ideological and psychological mindset of our enemy. Today, no such program is evident with attention seemingly focused exclusively on identifying high-value targets, obtaining other tactical intelligence or ensuring military force protection, but critically, not also in fully understanding our adversary.
Second, we must systematically and thoroughly overhaul our communications and create a more positive impression of the United States in the Muslim world, but, most importantly, special efforts need to be devoted to effectively countering the messages of hate and intolerance and the calls for violence and bloodshed that now permeate the Internet.
The coarsest most base conspiracy theories are regularly peddled on the Internet with a frequency that have endowed them with the veracity through mere repetition and ubiquity that nonetheless is completely divorced from reality. Accordingly, this war of words needs to be fought most critically on and through the Internet, an arena where American and allied efforts have been particularly anemic while those of our enemies have been active, voluminous and indeed effective.
Finally, the United States must enunciate a clear policy for countering terrorism given the changes in our enemy's organization and operation that have occurred since 2003 and from that policy develop a comprehensive strategy.
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In the confrontation with communism following World War II, the United States did not only declare a war on communism. Rather, we also articulated the policy of containment and within that intellectual framework developed a clever, comprehensive, multifaceted strategy that was based on, but did not rely exclusively on, the military option.
This statement should not be interpreted as an argument in favor of some new containment strategy, but rather for similar clarity of thought and focus to guide and shape our thinking and direct our efforts to the subsequent phases of what will likely be a long struggle.
In sum, new times, new threats and new challenges ineluctably make a new strategy, approach and new organizational and institutional behaviors necessary. The threat posed by elusive and deadly irregular adversaries emphasizes the need to anchor changes that will more effectively close the gap between detecting irregular adversarial activity and rapidly acting to defeat it.
The key to success will be in harnessing the overwhelming kinetic force of the United States military as part of a comprehensive vision to transform capabilities across government in order to deal with irregular and unconventional threats.
A successful strategy will therefore also be one that thinks and plans ahead with a view toward addressing the threats likely to be posed by the terrorist and insurgent generations beyond the current one.
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Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Hoffman follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF BRUCE HOFFMAN,(see footnote 1) B. Phil., D. Phil., Director, Washington Office, RAND Corporation
Mr. Chairman: I appreciate the opportunity to speak before your Subcommittee today on this important topic. Four years after the 9/11 attacks stunned the nation and indeed the entire world, we face an enemy different from that we confronted at the start of the ongoing global war on terrorism (GWOT). Beyond any doubt, the successes achieved by the U.S. and its allies during the initial operations of the GWOT account for this change. The remarkable accomplishment effected by a combination of U.S. air power and Afghan militiamen led and directed by American Special Operations Forces (SOF) and clandestine service agents (members of the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division) during the GWOT's initial operations completely routed the Taliban and its al Qaeda patrons. Subsequent operations in the GWOT expanded to involve conventional as well as unconventional joint military operations. During this phase, Afghanistan was liberated, the Taliban was crushed, and al Qaeda's command and control headquarters, training camps and operational bases in that country were overrun and destroyed. Simultaneously, the global counterterrorism efforts by the U.S. and its allies resulted, as President Bush has frequently described, in the death or capture of upwards of three-quarters of al Qaeda's senior leadership, the arrests of some 4,000 al Qaeda operatives worldwide, and the identification and seizure or ''freezing'' of more than $140 million of terrorist assets. And, during a subsequent phase of the GWOT, Iraq was invaded and liberated, the Ba'athist regime destroyed, and Saddam Hussein and his most important henchmen were systematically hunted down and either killed or captured. Subsequent, equally clear and unambiguous successes, however, have arguably eluded the U.S. Perhaps the most important reason for the current stasis is the paradox whereby our successes in the GWOT have indeed forced our adversaries to change, but our adversaries have also demonstrated that they are capable and able to effect such changes and thus adjust and adapt to even our most consequential countermeasures.
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THE AL QAEDA MOVEMENT TODAY: ADAPTIVE, RESILIENT, AND STILL FORMIDABLE
Since 9/11 al Qaeda has clearly shown itself to be a nimble, flexible, and adaptive entity. In retrospect, the loss of Afghanistan does not appear to have affected al Qaeda's ability to mount terrorist attacks to the extent we had perhaps hoped when ''Operation Enduring Freedom'' began.(see footnote 2) In fact, al Qaeda had rebounded from its Afghanistan setbacks within weeks of the last set-piece battles that were fought in the White Mountains along the Pakistani border at Shoh-e-Kot, Tora Bora and elsewhere between December 2001 and March 2002. The attacks in Tunisia in April 2002 and in Pakistan the next month provided the first signs of this movement's resiliency. These were followed in turn by the attacks in Bali, Yemen, and Kuwait the following October, and then by the coordinated, near-simultaneous incidents against an Israeli hotel and charger passenger jet in Kenya that November and the two near successes the movement had in assassinating the president of Pakistan, General Pervez Musharraf, the following month.
Al Qaeda's capacity to continue to plan and execute new terrorist strikes despite the loss of Afghanistan as a base shouldn't come as a surprise. Previous ''high-end'' attacks, for example, predated its comfortable relationship with the Taliban in Afghanistan and had already demonstrated that the movement's strength is not in geographical possession or occupation of a defined geographical territory, but in its fluidity and impermanence. The activities of the peripatetic Ramzi Ahmad Yousef, reputed mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and his uncle, Khalid Shiekh Mohammed (KSM), during the former's sojourn in the Philippines during 1994 and 1995 is a case in point. Their grand scheme to bomb simultaneously 12 American commercial aircraft in mid-flight over the Pacific Ocean (the infamous ''Bojinka'' plot),(see footnote 3) for example, did not require extensive operational bases and command and control headquarters in an existing country to facilitate its planning and execution.
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Perhaps al Qaeda's greatest achievement, though, has been the makeover it has given itself since 2001.(see footnote 4) On the eve of 9/11, al Qaeda was a unitary organization, assuming the dimensions of a lumbering bureaucracy. The troves of documents and voluminous data from computer hard disks captured in Afghanistan, for example, revealed as much mundane bumf as grandiose plots: complaints about expensive cell-phone bills and expenditures for superfluous office equipment(see footnote 5) as well as crude designs for dreamt-about nuclear weapons.(see footnote 6) Because of its logistical bases and infrastructure in Afghanistan, that now-anachronistic version of al Qaeda had a clear, distinct center of gravity. As we saw in the systematic and rapid destruction inflicted during the military operations as part of ''Operation Enduring Freedom'' during the global war on terrorism's first phase, that structure was not only extremely vulnerable to the application of conventional military power, but played precisely to the American military's vast technological strengths. In the time since 9/11, however, bin Laden and his lieutenants have engineered nothing short of a stunning make-over of al Qaeda from a unitary organization to something more akin to an ideology that is true to its name and original mission—the ''base of operation'' or ''foundation'' or, as other translations more appropriately describe it, as the ''precept'' or ''method.'' Al Qaeda in essence has transformed itself from a bureaucratic entity that could be destroyed and an irregular army that could be defeated on the battlefield to the clearly less powerful, but nonetheless arguably more resilient, amorphous entity it is today.
The al Qaeda movement therefore is now best described as a networked transnational constituency rather than the monolithic, international terrorist organization with an identifiable command and control apparatus that it once was. The result is that today there are many al Qaedas rather than the single al Qaeda of the past. The current al Qaeda therefore exists more as an ideology that has become a vast enterprise—an international franchise with like-minded local representatives, loosely connected to a central ideological or motivational base, but advancing the remaining center's goals at once simultaneously and independently of each other. Hence, unlike the hierarchical, pyramidal structure that typified terrorist groups of the past, the current al Qaeda movement in the main is flatter, more linear and organizationally networked. Nonetheless, it still retains some important characteristics and aspects of a more organized entity: mixing and matching organizational and operational styles whether dictated by particular missions or imposed by circumstances.
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Al Qaeda can perhaps be usefully conceptualized as comprising four distinct, but not mutually exclusive, dimensions. In descending order of operational sophistication, they are:
1. Al Qaeda Central.
This category comprises the remnants of the pre-9/11 al Qaeda organization. Although its core leadership includes some of the familiar, established commanders of the past, there are a number of new players who have advanced through the ranks as a result of the death or capture of key al Qaeda senior-level managers such as KSM, Abu Atef, Abu Zubayda, and Hambali, and most recently, Abu Faraj al-Libi. It is believed that this hardcore remains centered in or around Pakistan and continues to exert some coordination, if not actual command capability, in terms of commissioning attacks, directing surveillance and collating reconnaissance, planning operations, and approving their execution.
This category comes closest to the al Qaeda operational template or model evident in the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and 9/11 attacks. Such high value, ''spectacular'' attacks are entrusted only to al Qaeda's professional cadre: the most dedicated, committed and absolutely reliable element of the movement. Previous patterns suggest that these ''professional'' terrorists are deployed in pre-determined and carefully selected teams. They will also have been provided with very specific targeting instructions. In some cases, such as the East Africa bombings, they may establish contact with, and enlist the assistance of, local sympathizers and supporters. This will be solely for logistical and other attack-support purposes or to enlist these locals to actually execute the attack(s). The operation, however, will be planned and directed by the ''professional'' element with the locals clearly subordinate and playing strictly a supporting role (albeit a critical one, though).
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2. Al Qaeda Affiliates and Associates.
This category embraces formally established insurgent or terrorist groups who over the years have benefited from bin Laden's largesse and/or spiritual guidance and/or have received training, arms, money and other assistance from al Qaeda. Among the recipients of this assistance have been terrorist groups and insurgent forces in Uzbekistan and Indonesia, Chechnya and the Philippines, Bosnia and Kashmir, among other places. By supporting these groups, bin Laden's intentions were three-fold. First, he sought to co-opt these movements' mostly local agendas and channel their efforts towards the cause of global jihad. Second, he hoped to create a jihadist ''critical mass'' from these geographically scattered, disparate movements that would one day coalesce into a single, unstoppable force. And, third, he wanted to foster a dependency relationship whereby as a quid pro quo for prior al Qaeda support, these movements would either undertake attacks at al Qaeda's behest or provide essential local, logistical and other support to facilitate strikes by the al Qaeda ''professional'' cadre noted above.
This category includes groups such as: al-Ittihad al-Islami (AIAI), Abu Musab Zarqawi's al Qaeda in Mesopotamia (formerly Jamaat al Tawhid wa'l Jihad), Asbat al-Ansar, Ansar al Islam, Islamic Army of Aden, Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), Jemaah Islamiya (JI), Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC), and the various Kashmiri Islamic groups based in Pakistan—e.g., Harakat ul Mujahidin (HuM), Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), Laskar-e-Tayyiba (LeT), and Laskar I Jhangvi (LiJ).
3. Al Qaeda Locals.
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These are amorphous groups of al Qaeda adherents who are likely to have had some prior terrorism experience, will have been bloodied in battle as part of some previous jihadist campaign in Algeria, the Balkans, Chechnya, and perhaps more recently in Iraq, and may have trained in some al Qaeda facility before 9/11. They will therefore have had some direct connection with al Qaeda—however tenuous or evanescent. Their current relationship, and even communication, with a central al Qaeda command and control apparatus may be equally tenuous, if not actually dormant. The distinguishing characteristic of this category, however, is that there is some previous connection of some kind with al Qaeda.
Specific examples of this adversary include Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested in December 1999 at Port Angeles, Washington State, shortly after he had entered the U.S. from Canada. Ressam, for instance, had a prior background in terrorism having belonged to Algeria's Armed Islamic Group (GIA). After being recruited to al Qaeda, he was provided with a modicum of basic terrorist training in Afghanistan. In contrast to the professional cadre detailed above, however, Ressam was given very non-specific, virtually open-ended targeting instructions before being dispatched to North America. Also, unlike the well-funded professional cadre, Ressam was given only $12,000 in ''seed money'' and instructed to raise the rest of his operational funds from petty thievery. He was also told to recruit members for his terrorist cell from among the expatriate Muslim communities in Canada and the U.S.(see footnote 7)
4. Al Qaeda Network.
These are home-grown Islamic radicals—from North Africa, the Middle East, and South and South East Asia—as well as local converts to Islam mostly living in Europe, Africa and perhaps Latin America and North America as well, who have no direct connection with al Qaeda (or any other identifiable terrorist group), but nonetheless are prepared to carry out attacks in solidarity with, or support of, al Qaeda's radical jihadist agenda. They are motivated by a shared sense of enmity and grievance felt towards the United States and the West in general and their host-nations in particular. In this case, the relationship with al Qaeda is more inspirational than actual, abetted by profound rage over the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and the oppression of Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya, and elsewhere. Critically, these radicals are neither part of a known, organized group nor even a very cohesive entity unto themselves.
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Examples of this category, which comprises small cells of like-minded locals who gravitate towards one to plan and mount terrorist attacks completely independent of any direction provided by al Qaeda, include the group of mostly Moroccan Islamic radicals based in Spain who carried out the March 2004 Madrid bombings and their counterparts in the Netherlands responsible for the November 2004 murder of Theo Van Gogh, as well as perhaps the perpetrators of the July 2005 attacks on London's transit system.
The most salient threat posed by the above categories, however, continues to come from al Qaeda Central and then from its affiliates and associates. However, an additional and equally challenging threat is now posed by less discernible and more unpredictable entities drawn from the vast Muslim Diaspora in Europe. As far back as 2001, the Netherlands' intelligence and security service had detected increased terrorist recruitment efforts among Muslim youth living in the Netherlands whom it was previously assumed had been completely assimilated into Dutch society and culture.(see footnote 8) Thus, representatives of Muslim extremist organizations had already succeeded in embedding themselves in, and drawing new sources of support from, receptive elements within established Diaspora communities. In this way, new recruits could be drawn into the movement who likely had not previously come under the scrutiny of local or national law enforcement agencies.
This new category of terrorist adversary, moreover, also has proven more difficult for the authorities in these countries to track, predict and anticipate. They comprise often previously unknown cells whom it is otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to effectively profile. Although the members may be marginalized individuals working in menial jobs from the lower socio-economic strata of society, some of whom with long criminal records or histories of juvenile delinquency; others may well come from solidly middle and upper-middle class backgrounds with university and perhaps even graduate degrees and prior passions for cars, sports, rock music and other completely secular, more ethereal interests. What they will have in common is a combination of a deep commitment to their faith—often recently re-discovered; admiration of bin Laden for the cathartic blow struck against America on 9/11; hatred of the U.S. and the West; and, a profoundly shared sense of alienation from their host countries. These new recruits are the anonymous cogs in the worldwide al Qaeda enterprise and include both long-standing residents and new immigrants found across in Europe, but specifically in countries with large expatriate Muslim populations such as Britain, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Belgium.
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Al Qaeda's ''operational durability'' thus has enormous significance for U.S. counterterrorism strategy and policy. Because it has this malleable resiliency, it cannot be destroyed or defeated in a single tactical, military engagement or series of engagements—much less ones exclusively dependent on the application of conventional forces and firepower. In sum, al Qaeda has not only survived the military onslaught directed against it in Afghanistan during 2001 and 2002, but it has re-configured itself from the unitary organization that was once vulnerable to the application of U.S. military power to a more diffuse and amorphous ideological movement inspiring like-minded affiliates and associates. The new al Qaeda thus poses new, different, and more complex challenges than its previous incarnation did.
THE ONGOING INSURGENCY IN IRAQ AND THE GWOT
The other reason for the current stasis in progress regarding the GWOT is the escalating insurgency in Iraq and the new, and perhaps unanticipated operational challenges and requirements it has imposed on U.S. military capabilities and forces that were not present in the initial operations of the GWOT. What U.S. military commanders optimistically described in late 2003 as the jihadist ''magnet'' or terrorist ''flytrap'' orchestrated by the U.S. invasion of Iraq is viewed very differently by al Qaeda. ''We thank God,'' bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri declared on the occasion of the second anniversary of the 9/11 attack, ''for appeasing us with the dilemmas in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Americans are facing a delicate situation in both countries. If they withdraw they will lose everything and if they stay, they will continue to bleed to death.''(see footnote 9) On the attacks' third anniversary, he issued a slightly different version of the same statement, now proclaiming that U.S. defeat in Iraq and Afghanistan ''has become just a question of time. . . . The Americans in both countries are between two fires,'' Zawahiri explained. ''[I]f they continue, they will bleed until death, and if they withdraw, they will lose everything.''(see footnote 10)
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For al Qaeda, accordingly, Iraq has likely been a very useful side-show: an effective means to preoccupy American military forces and distract U.S. attention while al Qaeda and its confederates make new inroads and strike elsewhere. On a personal level, it may have also provided bin Laden and al-Zawahiri with the breathing space that they desperately needed to further obfuscate their trail. But most importantly, Iraq has figured prominently in al Qaeda and jihadist plans and propaganda as a means to reinvigorate the jihadist cause and sustain its momentum as well as engage U.S. forces in battle and thus perpetuate the image of Islam cast perpetually on the defensive with no alternative but to take up arms against American and Western aggressors. In addition, the ongoing violence in Iraq coupled with the inability of U.S. and coalition and Iraqi security forces to maintain order and the Abu Ghraib revelations along with other disadvantageous developments, have all doubtless contributed to America's poor standing in the Muslim world.
Nonetheless, whatever the outcome of the current conflict in Iraq, its consequences will likely be felt for years to come. Much like Afghanistan after the struggle against the Soviet occupation ended in that country, the surviving foreign jihadists who fought in Iraq will eventually return to their home countries or the émigré communities that they came from. Having been blooded in battle in Iraq, they will possess the experience, cachet and credibility useful for both jihadist recruitment and operational purposes elsewhere. Moreover, in contrast to the mujahideen who returned home from Afghanistan a decade and a half ago who were mostly trained in rural guerrilla warfare, this new generation of jihadists will have acquired in Iraq invaluable first-hand experience in urban warfare—including the construction of vehicular and roadside IEDs, the use of stand-off weaponry like mortars and similar remote-control fired devices, assassination and kidnapping techniques, and sniper and ambush tactics.(see footnote 11) The application of these newly learned capabilities to urban centers in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and elsewhere could result in a precipitous escalation of bloodshed and destruction, reaching into countries and regions that hitherto have experienced little, if any, organized jihadist violence. While the threat to Europe is perhaps the most serious, the danger may be greatest in Saudi Arabia: the country from which the overwhelming majority of jihadists (61 percent) fighting in Iraq hail.(see footnote 12) We may thus be on the cusp of an even bloodier and arguably more sustainable campaign of al Qaeda and al Qaeda-inspired violence in the years to come. What can and what should the U.S. do to counter it is the subject of the next, concluding section of this testimony.
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REALIGNING AMERICAN COUNTERTERRORISM STRATEGY WITH THE THREAT(see footnote 13)
Winning the GWOT, as many observers agree, will take decades, not years, to accomplish. Our ability to achieve that victory will depend fundamentally on the ability of American strategy to adjust and adapt to changes we see in the nature and character of our adversaries. At the foundation of such a dynamic and adaptive policy must be the ineluctable axiom that effectively and successfully countering terrorism as well as insurgency is not exclusively a military endeavor but also involves fundamental parallel political, social, economic, and ideological activities. Although explicitly recognizing the importance of all these diverse elements of national power in the struggle against terrorism,(see footnote 14) in practice America's counterterrorism strategy appears predominantly weighted towards the tactical ''kill or capture'' approach and metric: assuming that a traditional center of gravity exists whether the target is al Qaeda or the insurgency in Iraq and that this target simply needs to be destroyed so that global terrorism or the Iraqi insurgency will end. Both the adversaries and the threats that they pose, however, are much more elusive and complicated, as the previous discussion has argued. Moreover, as also was noted earlier, what worked for the U.S. and coalition during the initial operations of the GWOT—when we faced a differently configured and structured al Qaeda, for instance, and before the intensification of the insurgency in Iraq—will likely not prove as effective given the deliberate changes effected to obviate American countermeasures and the evolution in both terrorism and insurgency that we have seen. In so fluid an environment, our strategy must accordingly change and adopt as well. What will be required today and in the future to ensure continued success, therefore, is a more integrated, systems approach to a complex problem that is at once operationally durable, evolutionary and elusive in character. The U.S., in sum, cannot rest on the past laurels of success during the opening phases of the GWOT, but will need instead to adjust and adapt its strategy, resources, and tactics to formidably evolutionary opponents that, as we have seen, are widely dispersed and decentralized and whose many destructive parts are autonomous, mobile, and themselves highly adaptive.
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That the above description conforms as much as to the current insurgency in Iraq as to the new form that al Qaeda and the radical jihadist threat has assumed, says volumes about the challenge this operational environment poses to U.S. national security. An effective response will thus ineluctably be predicated upon a strategy that effectively combines the tactical elements of systematically destroying and weakening enemy capabilities (the ''kill or capture'' approach) alongside the equally critical, broader strategic imperative of breaking the cycle of terrorist and insurgent recruitment and replenishment that have respectively sustained both al Qaeda's continued campaign and the ongoing conflict in Iraq. Accordingly, rather than viewing the fundamental organizing principle of American national defense strategy in this unconventional realm as a GWOT, it may be more useful to re-conceptualize it in terms of a global counterinsurgency (GCOIN). Such an approach would a priori knit together the equally critical political, economic, diplomatic, and developmental sides inherent to the successful prosecution of counterinsurgency to the existing dominant military side of the equation.(see footnote 15) Although this desideratum is explicitly cited as the third ''D'' of the National Strategy For Combating Terrorism's ''Four Ds''—to ''defeat terrorist organizations of global reach through relentless action''; ''deny terrorists the sponsorship, support, and sanctuary they need to survive''; to ''win the war of ideas and diminish the underlying conditions that promote the despair and the destructive visions of political change that lead people to embrace, rather than shun terrorism''; and, to ''defend against terrorist attacks on the United States, our citizens, and our interests around the world''(see footnote 16)—it is precisely in this critical third dimension of diminishing underlying conditions where the U.S. strategy and efforts to date has proven particularly wanting.
For instance, despite the damage and destruction and losses of key leaders and personnel that al Qaeda has suffered over the past three-plus years, it stubbornly adheres to its fundamental raison d'etre: continuing to inspire and motivate the broader radical jihadist community. The principle of jihad is the ideological bond that unites this amorphous movement: surmounting its loose structure, diverse membership and geographical separation. The requirement to engage in jihad is relentlessly expounded in both video- and audio-tapes of bin Laden and al-Zawahiri and other senior al Qaeda personalities, on myriad jihadist web-sites, and by radical clerics, lay-preachers speaking in mosques or addressing informal circles of adherents in more private settings. The struggle is cast in narrow defensive terms: extolling the duty of the faithful to defend Islam by the sword. Imitation by example is encouraged through the depiction of the sacrifices of past martyrs (suicide terrorists and others who perished in battle against the infidels) coupled with messages about the importance of continuous battle against Islam's enemies. ''It is no secret that warding off the American enemy is the top duty after faith and that nothing should take priority over it,'' bin Laden wrote in his seminal 1996 declaration of war.(see footnote 17) Such exhortations continue to resonate today when many Muslims harbor a deep sense of humiliation and resentment over the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the continued bloodletting of their co-religionists in Palestine, Chechnya, and Kashmir among other places,(see footnote 18) the ill-treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo alongside the myriad other reasons jihadists have for hating the United States. Indeed, the expostulated theological requirement to avenge the shedding of innocent Muslim blood—and particularly that of Muslim children who have been killed in Iraq and Palestine—has repeatedly been invoked by bin Laden.(see footnote 19) These calls for revenge coupled with the terrorists' own abiding faith in the potential regenerative power of even a single, new dramatic terrorist attack to breathe new life into the jihadist movement, ensure that the war on terrorism will be won neither easily nor soon.
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Terrorist morale is also sustained by propaganda portraying the 9/11 attacks as a great victory and America's involvement in Iraq as a quagmire that will ultimately bring about the U.S.'s downfall. The connection between the destruction of the World Trade Center and the blow struck against the U.S. economy by the 9/11 attacks has been a persistent jihadist theme.(see footnote 20) It was repeated by bin Laden himself in the videotape broadcast on 29 October 2004, when he explained, ''So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah.''(see footnote 21) Parallels are also drawn with the mujahideen's defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan, the alleged chain reaction it set in motion that led to the demise of the Soviet Union and collapse of communism with the current travails the U.S. faces in Iraq and the inevitability of our defeat there at the hands of contemporary jihadists. Indeed, al Qaeda propaganda has long described the U.S. as a ''paper tiger,''(see footnote 22) on the verge of financial ruin and total collapse much as the USSR once was, with the power of Islam poised similarly to push America over the precipice.(see footnote 23) Bin Laden emphasized this very point in his last publicly known address to his fighters in December 2001, when he declared that, ''America is in retreat by the grace of God Almighty and economic attrition is continuing up to today. But it needs further blows. The young men need to seek out the nodes of the American economy and strike the enemy's nodes.''(see footnote 24) And, he repeated it again in the aforementioned videotape released just days before the 2004 American presidential elections. ''This is in addition to our having experience in using guerrilla warfare and the war of attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers, as we, alongside the Mujahideen, bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat. All Praise is due to Allah.''(see footnote 25) This strategy thus continues to guide jihadist target selection and tactics today.
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The al Qaeda movement's ability to continue to prosecute this struggle is also a direct reflection of its capacity to attract new recruits and replenish expended resources. Its survival may also be dependent upon the preservation of some core leadership cadre to champion and lead this campaign. In this respect, al Qaeda appears to retain at least some depth in managerial personnel as evidenced by its ability to produce successor echelons for the mid-level operational commanders who have been killed or captured. But the main challenge for al Qaeda and the wider jihadist movement is to promote and ensure its durability as an ideology and concept. It can only achieve this by staying in the news: elbowing itself into the limelight through dramatic and bloody attack, thereby promoting its continued relevance as the defenders and avengers of Muslims everywhere.(see footnote 26) Violence will thus continue to be key to ensuring its continued presence as an international political force. Hence, al Qaeda and the wider movement's resiliency—if not, longevity—will thereby be predicated on its continued ability to recruit new cadre, mobilize the Muslim masses, and marshal support—both spiritual and practical—for jihad.
The success of U.S. strategy will ultimately be based on our ability to counter al Qaeda's ideology and message effectively and thereby break the cycle of recruit and regeneration that has sustained the movement thus far. To a large extent crafting and implementing such a strategy will ineluctably depend on our capacity to think like a networked enemy, in anticipation of how they may act in a variety of situations, aided by different resources. This goal requires that the American national security structure in turn organize itself for maximum efficiency, information sharing, and the ability to function quickly and effectively under new operational definitions. With this thorough understanding in mind, security and defense planners need to craft an approach that specifically takes into account the following key factors to effectively wage a GCOIN:
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1. Separating the enemy from the populace that provides support and sustenance. This, in turn, entails three basic missions:
a. Denial of enemy sanctuary
b. Elimination of enemy freedom of movement
c. Denial of enemy resources and support;
2. Identification and neutralization of the enemy;
3. Creation of a secure environment—progressing from local to regional to global;
4. Ongoing and effective neutralization of enemy propaganda through the planning and execution of a comprehensive and integrated information operations and holistic civil affairs campaign in harmony with the first four tasks;
5. Interagency efforts to build effective and responsible civil governance mechanisms that eliminate the fundamental causes of terrorism and insurgency.
Greater attention to this integration of American capabilities would provide incontrovertible recognition of the importance of endowing a GCOIN with an overriding and comprehensive, multi-dimensional, policy. Ideally, this policy would embrace several elements: including a clear strategy, a defined structure for implementing it, and a vision of inter-government agency cooperation, and the unified effort to guide it. It would necessitate building bridges and creating incentives to more effectively blend diplomacy, justice, development, finance, intelligence, law enforcement, and military capabilities along with untangling lines of authority, de-conflicting overlapping responsibilities and improving the ability to prioritize and synchronize interagency operations in a timely and efficient manner. Organizations will therefore have to do—or be compelled to do—what they have been reluctant to do in the past: reaching across bureaucratic territorial divides and sharing resources in order to defeat terrorists, insurgencies, and other emerging threats. Clarifying these expectations and processes is a critical step in efficiently addressing contemporary threats to U.S. security, and coherently generating and applying resources to defeat those threats. This would have particular benefit with respect to the gathering and exploitation of ''actionable intelligence.'' By updating and streamlining interagency counterterrorism and counterinsurgency systems and procedures both strategically as well as operationally between the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the intelligence community, actionable intelligence could likely be acquired, analyzed and disseminated faster and operations mounted more quickly. A more focused and strengthened interagency process would also facilitate the coordination of key themes and messages and the development and execution of long-term ''hearts and minds'' programs.(see footnote 27)
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Even the best strategy will be proven inadequate if military and civilian agency leaders are not prepared to engage successfully within ambiguous environments and reorient their organizational culture to deal with irregular threats. Success transcends the need for better tactical intelligence or new organizations. It is fundamentally about transforming the attitudes and mindsets of leaders so that they have the capacity to take decisive, yet thoughtful action against terrorists and/or insurgents in uncertain or unclear situations based on a common vision, policy, and strategy. Arguably, by combating irregular adversaries in a more collaborative manner with key relevant civilian agencies, military planners can better share critical information, track the various moving parts in terrorist/insurgency networks, and develop a comprehensive picture of this enemy—including their supporters, nodes of support, organizational and operational systems, processes, and plans.
CONCLUSION
Given these trends and developments in al Qaeda's evolution, what can the U.S. do given these changed circumstances and this highly dynamic threat? Eight broad imperatives or policy options appear most relevant.
1. The preeminent lesson of 9/11 is not to be lulled into a false sense of complacency or to rest on past laurels: especially in a struggle that our adversaries have defined as a war of attrition. In these circumstances, the main challenge we face is to retain focus and maintain vigilance and keep up pressure on terrorists by adapting and adjusting ourselves—rapidly and efficiently—to the changes unfolding with respect to terrorism. To do so, we need to better understand al Qaeda's operations and evolution and thus more effectively anticipate changes in radical international jihadism and better assess the implications of those changes. ''If you know the enemy and know yourself,'' Sun Tzu argues, ''you need not fear the results of a hundred battles.'' Four years into the GWOT we do neither really know nor fully understand our enemy. During the Vietnam conflict, for instance, tremendous efforts and resources were devoted to understanding Viet Cong morale and motivation and the ideological and psychological mindset of our enemy. Today, no such program is evident with the attention seemingly focused exclusively on identifying high-value targets or ensuring military force protection and not critically also to fully understanding our current enemies.
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2. We must ensure that the new Iraq succeeds. The stakes are enormous. Iraq has become a critical arena and test of America's strength and resolve. That a democratic, stable government takes root in Iraq, that the Iraqi people are united in having a stake in that outcome, and that security is achieved throughout the country have indisputably become among the most important metrics not only for assessing success in Iraq, but inevitably now in the war on terrorism. Failure and/or withdrawal from Iraq by U.S. forces and abandonment of our efforts in that country, will surely be trumpeted by radical jihadists as a victory over America on par with the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan—with even worse and more consequential repercussions. Having set out to establish democracy and stability in Iraq, we cannot waver from achieving that goal lest we hand our opponents a tremendously significant propaganda victory.
3. We must systematically and thoroughly overhaul our communications with, and create a more positive image of, the U.S. in the Muslim world. These communications were already fractured and our efforts both stillborn and maladroit before the invasion of Iraq and the revelations about the treatment of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib surfaced. Fixing these efforts and repairing the damage done has become critical—and indeed is now the focus of rejuvenated State Department efforts—dubbed a SAVE (struggle against violent extremism). This new emphasis on a richer mix of policy options and information operations that specifically seeks to ameliorate Muslim antipathy towards the U.S. by undercutting support for radical Islam—is a positive, though lamentably belated, development. The U.S. today is already increasingly viewed as a malignant force among Muslims throughout the world: thus furnishing al Qaeda propagandists with fresh ammunition and alienating precisely that community which must be our closest allies in the struggle against terrorism. The damage has thus been done and it will take years to repair. Greater resources and more sustained focused efforts will need to be committed to improving our public diplomacy in the Muslim world as well as to develop more effective initiatives to counter the messages of radicalism and hate promulgated with greater fervor by radical jihadists. In particular, special efforts must be devoted to effectively countering the messages of hate and intolerance and the calls for violence and bloodshed that now permeate the Internet. The coarsest most base conspiracy theories are regularly peddled with a frequency that has endowed them with a veracity through repetition and ubiquity that is divorced from reality. Accordingly, this ''war of words'' needs to be fought most critically on and through the Internet—an arena where American efforts have been particularly anemic while those of our enemies have been active, voluminous and indeed effective. Before 9/11, for example, al Qaeda had only one website: www.alneda.com. Today, the movement is present on more than 50 different sites.(see footnote 28) ''The more Web sites, the better it is for us,'' a jihadist statement posted on azzam.com in 2002 proclaimed. ''We must make the Internet our tool.''(see footnote 29) For al Qaeda, the Internet therefore has become something of a virtual sanctuary: providing an effective, expeditious and anonymous means through which the movement can continue to communicate with its fighters, followers, sympathizers and supporters world-wide.
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4. Part and parcel of the above, the U.S. should recognize that we can't compete with al Jazeera and other Arab media simply by creating rival outlets such as the Arabic-language television station, Al Hura, and radio station, Radio Sawa. In addition to those American-backed stations, which will inevitably take time to win their own significant audience share, we must meanwhile find ways to communicate more effectively using precisely media like al Jazeera and other foreign language outlets to get our message across and directly challenge and counter the misperceptions that they foster. Addressing the threat of radical Islam directly and head-on is thus imperative. Even if we maintain that this struggle is not a ''clash of civilizations,'' our enemies regularly define it precisely as that. Indeed, al Qaeda describes its fundamental raison d'etre in terms of the ''clash of civilizations'' religious typology that America and its allies in the war on terrorism have labored so hard to avoid. ''These events,'' bin Laden declared in his 7 October 2001 statement quoted at the beginning of this chapter, ''have divided the world into two sides—the side of believers and the side of infidels. . . . Every Muslim has to rush to make his religion victorious. The winds of faith have come.''(see footnote 30) In a videotaped speech broadcast over al-Jazeera television on 3 November 2001, he reiterated this message stating: ''This is a matter of religion and creed, it is not what Bush and Blair maintain, that it is a war against terrorism. There is no way to forget the hostility between us and the infidels. It is ideological, so Muslims have to ally themselves with Muslims.''(see footnote 31)
5. We must address and conclusively resolve the open-ended legal status of the Guantánamo detainees and others held elsewhere. This is already a growing source of worldwide anger and opprobrium directed at the U.S., especially in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations. Failure to arrive at an acceptable international legal determination regarding the detainees' status and ultimate disposition will remain an open sore in how the U.S. is perceived abroad and especially in the Muslim world.
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6. We must continue our concerted effort to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Neither Americans nor anyone else should be under any illusion that resolving this conflict will magically end global terrorism. Bin Laden and al Qaeda in fact took root and flowered in the late-1990s—precisely at a time when Palestinian-Israeli relations were at their zenith as a result of the Oslo Accords. But, it is nonetheless indisputable that being seen to play a more active and equitable role in resolving this conflict will have an enormously salutary effect on Middle Eastern stability, global Muslim attitudes towards the U.S., and America's image abroad.
7. We must more instinctively regard our relations with friends and allies in the war on terrorism as a perishable commodity: not taken for granted and regularly repaired, replenished and strengthened. Notwithstanding the sometimes profound policy differences that surfaced between the U.S. and even some of its closest allies over the war in Iraq, working-level intelligence and law enforcement cooperation in the war on terrorism has remained remarkably strong. However, these critically important relationships should neither be taken for granted nor be allowed to fray. This will entail repeated and ongoing sharing of intelligence, consultation and consensus and continued unity of effort if we are to prevail against the international jihadist threat. Moreover, for the war on terrorism to succeed, enhanced multilateral efforts will need to be strengthened to accompany the already existent, strong bilateral relations.
8. Finally, as previously argued, the U.S. must enunciate a clear policy for countering terrorism and from that policy develop a comprehensive strategy. In the confrontation with communism following World War II, the U.S. did not only declare a ''war on communism.'' Rather, we also articulated the policy of containment and within that intellectual framework developed a clever, comprehensive, multi-faceted strategy—that did not rely exclusively on the military option—to serve that policy. This statement should not be interpreted as an argument in favor of some new containment strategy, but rather for similar clarity of thought and focus to guide and shape our thinking and direct our efforts through the subsequent phases of what will likely be a long struggle.
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In sum, new times, new threats, and new challenges ineluctably make a new strategy, approach and new organizational and institutional behaviors necessary. The threat posed by elusive and deadly irregular adversaries emphasizes the need to anchor changes that will more effectively close the gap between detecting irregular adversarial activity and rapidly defeating it. The key to success will be in harnessing the overwhelming kinetic force of the U.S. military as part of a comprehensive vision to transform capabilities across government in order to deal with irregular and unconventional threats. A successful strategy will therefore also be one that thinks and plans ahead with a view towards addressing the threats likely to be posed by the terrorist and insurgent generations beyond the current one.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, Dr. Hoffman.
Major Dillon?
STATEMENT OF MAJOR DANA DILLON, USAR [RET.], SENIOR POLICY ANALYST, ASIAN STUDIES CENTER, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
Major DILLON. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Committee for inviting me to speak today on the evolving counterterrorism strategy. I have to begin my testimony with the disclaimer that my statements are my personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Heritage Foundation.
Mr. ROYCE. That is all right. Without objection, we are going to put them in the record anyway.
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Major DILLON. The question before us is whether or not the current national strategy for the war on terrorism is sufficient to defeat the evolving terrorist threat. The short answer is yes, but with a change in emphasis from direct military action to a more indirect method.
The introduction of the February 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism calls for direct and continuous action against terrorist groups. This operational approach has dislocated al-Qaeda from its base in Afghanistan, destroyed more than two-thirds of its leadership, and disrupted its ability to plan attacks against the United States.
However, al-Qaeda's global following is at least as strong today as it was on September 11, 2001, probably stronger, and if this ability to regenerate itself is not neutralized then no amount of military action will prevent further attacks against the United States and its allies.
On the other hand, successes against terrorism in South and Southeast Asia may point to a new approach in the war on terrorism. Major terrorist groups have been either destroyed or neutralized in this region with little direct American participation.
Three of the most important achievements in the war on terrorism in Asia since 9/11 are the cease-fire agreement between India and Pakistan, the negotiated peace settlement between the Government of Indonesia and the separatist Free Aceh Movement, also known by its Indonesian acronym GAM for Gerakan Aceh Merdeka, and the neutralization of the al-Qaeda affiliated Jemaah Islamiyah. All three of these victories resulted from local solutions involving tough military or security measures combined with a political process.
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It is well known that before 9/11, Pakistan was a state sponsor of terrorism, particularly against India. Since 9/11, however, President Musharraf has diligently worked to put a lid on the terrorist groups in his country. On April 18 of this year, President Pervez Musharraf and India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed a declaration heralding a peace process that they announced was irreversible.
Since then, cross border terrorist attacks from Pakistan into India declined by 60 percent. An Indian-built anti-infiltration fence along the border also contributed to the reduction in the cross border access by terrorists. Although final resolution between the two countries seems distant, there appears to be little desire for return to military confrontation or sponsorship of terrorism.
Peace between Pakistan and India is an important key to the war on terrorism, and in order to achieve this outcome, letting India and Pakistan develop the peace process at a pace that they are comfortable with is the best possible solution. In Southeast Asia, a comprehensive strategy of military muscle and political compromise defeated a chronic insurgency linked to regional terrorists.
Although the devastation of the tsunami in Aceh is often credited with bringing the Indonesian Government and GAM to the negotiating table, the peace agreement is actually the result of a number of activities started long before the tsunami struck.
Two years before the tsunami, the Indonesian military had launched a comprehensive campaign in Aceh that not only attacked GAM's military, but also sought to win over the Acehnese people. The strategy was successful because of the ongoing reforms to the Indonesian military to reduce its human rights abuses, as well as the inability of the GAM military to restrain the abuses of its military forces or its tax collectors. By the time the tsunami struck, GAM's military was suffering from combat fatigue, and its civilian base had been severely eroded.
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More importantly, but complementary to the military campaign, was Indonesia's democratic transition. In 1998, Indonesia was an authoritarian government propped up by the military. By 2004, Indonesia was a full democracy, and the military was finally, albeit not absolutely, accountable to its elected civilian leadership.
President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had national and international credibility not enjoyed by any of his predecessors. In one stroke, GAM's reputation transformed from an insurgency fighting an authoritarian government to a terrorist group with ties to al-Qaeda.
When the tsunami struck, GAM was already on the ropes and ready to compromise. The subsequent peace agreement between GAM and the Indonesian Government put a hole in the regional terrorist network and provided a good example of successful anti-terrorist strategy.
The most dangerous al-Qaeda linked terrorist group in Southeast Asia was Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), responsible for the Bali bombing in 2002, the Marriott bombing in 2004, and suspected of a host of other bombings across Southeast Asia. In September 2005, Gareth Evans, President of the International Crisis Group, declared that JI was effectively smashed and no longer constituted a serious threat.
This remarkable change of fortune for JI came about because of good police work and the democratic transition in Indonesia. The United States, Australia and the international community invested heavily in the training and equipping of Southeast Asia's police forces, prosecutors and judiciaries.
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Although the Indonesian and much of Southeast Asia's legal system are still rife with corruption, understaffed and subject to political influence, these reforms have shown notable results in the capture of terrorists. Additionally, while the police have arrested and convicted active JI members, the democratic transition in Indonesia has apparently dried up the recruit pool.
Jemaah Islamiyah originally was founded to oppose Indonesia's authoritarian government. With former dictator Suharto out and a democratically-elected President and legislature in, the armed struggle had lost its point to many of its supporters.
The lessons for America's evolving national security strategy are that reasons and motivations behind the actions of terrorist groups are complex. As much as possible, local solutions must be found and supported.
As the terrorists move underground, military operations increasingly will be replaced with police work and intelligence sharing. The evolving national counterterrorism strategy should emphasize an indirect approach by supporting democracy, the rule of law and economic development.
Thank you very much.
[The prepared statement of Major Dillon follows:]
PREPARED STATEMENT OF MAJOR DANA DILLON, USAR [RET.], SENIOR POLICY ANALYST, ASIAN STUDIES CENTER, THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION
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Thank you Mr. Chairman and members of the committee for inviting me to speak today on the evolving counterterrorism strategy. I must begin my testimony with the disclaimer that the following statements are my personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heritage Foundation.
The question before us is whether or not the current national strategy for the war on terrorism is sufficient to defeat the evolving terrorist threat. The short answer is yes, but with a change in emphasis from direct military action to more indirect methods.
The introduction of the February 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism calls for, ''direct and continuous action against terrorist groups.'' This operational approach has dislocated Al Qaeda from its base in Afghanistan, destroyed more than two-thirds of its leadership and disrupted its ability to plan attacks against the United States. However, Al Qaeda's global following is at least as strong today as it was on September 11, 2001. If this ability to regenerate itself is not neutralized, then, no amount of military action will prevent further attacks against the United States and its allies.
On the other hand, successes against terrorists in South and Southeast Asia may point to a new approach in the war on terrorism. Major terrorist groups have been either destroyed or neutralized in this region with little direct American participation. Three of the most important achievements in the war on terrorism in South and Southeast Asia since 9/11 are the ceasefire agreement between India and Pakistan; the negotiated peace settlement between the government of Indonesia and the separatist Free Aceh Movement, also known by its Indonesian acronym GAM for Gerakan Aceh Merdeka; and the neutralization of the Al Qaeda affiliated Jemaah Islamiyah in Southeast Asia. All three of these victories resulted from local solutions involving tough military or security measures combined with a political process.
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It is well known that before 9/11, Pakistan was a state sponsor of terrorism, particularly against India. Since 9/11, however, President Musharraf has diligently worked to put a lid on the terrorist groups in his country. On April 18, 2005, President Pervez Musharraf and India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed a declaration heralding a peace process that they announced was irreversible. Since then, cross border terrorist attacks from Pakistan into India declined by 60 percent. An Indian-built anti-infiltration fence along the border also contributed to the reduction in cross border access for terrorists. Although final resolution between the two countries still seems distant, there appears to be little desire for a return to military confrontation or sponsorship of terrorism. Peace between Pakistan and India is an important key to the war on terrorism, and in order to achieve this outcome, letting India and Pakistan develop the peace process at a pace that they are comfortable with is the best possible solution.
In Southeast Asia, a comprehensive strategy of military muscle and political compromise defeated a chronic insurgency linked to regional terrorists.
Although the devastation of the tsunami in Aceh is often credited with bringing the Indonesian government and GAM to the negotiating table, the peace agreement is actually the result of a number of activities started long before the tsunami struck.
Two years before the tsunami the Indonesian military had launched a comprehensive campaign in Aceh that not only attacked the GAM military, but also sought to win over the Acehnese people. The strategy was successful because of the ongoing reform in the Indonesian military to reduce human rights abuses, as well as the inability of GAM to restrain the abuses of its military forces and its ''tax collectors.'' By the time the tsunami struck, GAM's military was suffering from combat fatigue, and its civilian base was severely eroded(see footnote 32)
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More important, but complimentary to the military campaign, was Indonesia's democratic transition. In 1998, Indonesia was an authoritarian government propped up by the military. By 2004, Indonesia was a full democracy and the military was finally, albeit not absolutely, accountable to an elected civilian leadership. President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono had national and international credibility not enjoyed by any of his predecessors. In one stroke, GAM's reputation transformed from an insurgency fighting an authoritarian government to a terrorist group with ties to Al Qaeda.
When the tsunami struck, GAM was already on the ropes and ready to compromise. The subsequent peace agreement between GAM and the Indonesian government put a hole in the regional terrorist network and provided a good example of a successful anti-terrorist strategy.
The most dangerous Al Qaeda linked terrorist group in Southeast Asia was Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), responsible for the Bali bombing in 2002, the Marriot bombing in 2004 and suspected of a host of other bombings across Southeast Asia. But in September 2005 Gareth Evans, President of the International Crisis Group, declared that JI was ''effectively smashed'' and ''no longer constituted a serious threat.''
This remarkable change of fortune for JI came about because of good police work and the democratic transition in Indonesia. The United States, Australia and the international community invested heavily in training and equipping Southeast Asia's police, prosecutors and judiciaries. Although the Indonesian and much of Southeast Asia's legal system are still rife with corruption, under staffed and subject to political influence, these reforms have shown notable results.
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Additionally, while the police have arrested and convicted active JI members, the democratic transition has apparently dried up the recruit pool. Jemaah Islamiyah originally was founded to oppose Indonesia's authoritarian government. With former dictator Suharto out and a democratically elected President and legislature in the armed struggle had lost its point to many of its supporters.
The lessons for America's evolving national security strategy are that the reasons and motivations behind the actions of terrorist groups are complex. As much as possible, local solutions must be found and supported. As the terrorists move underground, military operations increasingly will be replaced with police work and intelligence sharing. The evolving national counterterrorism strategy should emphasize an indirect approach by supporting democracy, the rule of law and economic development.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, Major Dillon.
Let me begin here with Dr. Hoffman because you say we need a public affairs campaign to win the hearts and minds, so let me ask you if you are going to boil that message down to one message, maybe you can do it in a sentence. What would that message be?
Then I will ask if Mr. de Borchgrave agrees that should be our message.
What should our message in the West be, in your view, to change those hearts and minds?
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Mr. HOFFMAN. Well, I cannot give you the bumper sticker answer, but I think saying that the default is often that we are not at war with Islam and that this is not a clash of civilizations, and I think that is precisely the problem because our adversaries have defined this as a clash of civilizations and believe that we are.
I think that we have to listen more to what they say and then craft our response in ways that will reach them more effectively. To do that I think we have to separate a policy that is directed toward preventing moderates from becoming radicals, which I think is what we have embarked upon now with the struggle against violence extremism.
But, equally, I think we need to have a separate policy that prevents radicals from becoming violent extremists. That, I think, is the aspect that we have not devoted sufficient attention to.
Mr. ROYCE. That prevents the radicals themselves from taking up arms.
Mr. HOFFMAN. Right. I do not think the clash of civilizations will work. They have already bought that.
Mr. ROYCE. Pardon?
Mr. HOFFMAN. Saying that we are not at war with Islam unfortunately will not work because they fundamentally believe that we are. This is why I argued we have to understand our adversary much better than we do now.
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Mr. ROYCE. Mr. de Borchgrave?
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Mr. Chairman, the Abu Ghraib prison pictures have done incalculable harm all over the world. I was in Pakistan 2 weeks ago, and you still see those horrible pictures everywhere, even on kiosks selling newspapers.
I think that the message is going to be very hard to get across as long as we are flooding as we presently flood, through no fault of our own, because this is freedom of the media, freedom of the airwaves, the unbelievable amount of soft porn and even hard porn coming into the Muslim homes all over the Middle East, certainly in Pakistan when I was there.
I am not going to mention the names of the shows, but I think we are very familiar with them in this country. We know how to take these things and how to discard them. In that part of the world they conclude that we are literally cruising the lower circles of Dante's inferno.
How one overcomes that, I have no idea, but I have seen some things here in Washington on TV during children's watching hours that are unbelievably pornographic.
Mr. ROYCE. So part of the drawback is the popular culture and how do you address those in the West who make the decisions about disseminating those shows and that culture and get them to understand that they need to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Is that what you are raising as a point here?
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Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Absolutely, sir. I have been trying to explain this until I am blue in the face in Middle Eastern countries, Pakistan, Afghanistan.
I did the only interview with Mula Omar 3 months before 9/11, which was published in the Washington Times. I asked him, ''Why can you not have television in this country?'' He said, ''Well, we are living roughly in the 15th or 16th century compared to where you are living. Imagine if I were to open up the airwaves. It would be just as if your country in the 1700s had been suddenly subjected to what you have on your own airwaves today. There would be a terrible culture shock.''
Mr. ROYCE. Have you had an opportunity to dialogue with Senator Lieberman on this issue? He might be one with an entre into some of the decisionmakers who could make that decision on calibrating or pulling back.
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. I have in the past, Mr. Chairman, but not for the past 3 years.
Mr. ROYCE. Let me ask a question again of Dr. Hoffman. Dr. Hoffman, you say 61 percent of Jihadists in Iraq come from Saudi Arabia.
We are all familiar with all the difficulties, the problems, the way in which we put pressure on the Saudis to try to address this issue, as well as the funding of the madrassahs, but, the three of you, do you have any other concepts that we could put in play to try to curtail this methodology where the money goes to a new madrassah, whether it is in West Africa or Europe or Central Asia, with a new imam who teaches Jihad and sets up a new madrassah?
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How do we convince the Saudi Government that it can play a role in choking off those kinds? Mr. de Borchgrave?
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Well, Mr. Chairman, we go back to 1979 when that compact was agreed between the Wahabi clergy in Saudi Arabia and the Royal Family in effect saying to the clergy after—it was a famous scene breaking into Mecca by revolutionaries on the far extreme of the Wahabi movement saying that they had really compromised their whole religion by the excesses of the Royal Family.
In any case, with French assistance they got the revolutionaries out of Mecca, but there was a very interesting compromise at that time which said in effect: You, Wahabi clergy, do whatever you want to spread Wahabism around the world, but inside our own country you do not touch the Royal Family.
It is amazing how much was already known by the CIA, especially the people who represented the CIA in Ryhad at the time. I happened to know them. Langley was just not interested in listening to these stories about Wahabism being spread around the world or the compromise with the Royal Family. Of course, all that hit us on 9/11.
In Pakistan recently the madrassahs, about 12,500 of them, are still receiving Saudi money and Libyan money, and they still have not registered as they were ordered to by Musharraf a couple of years ago. We have, I think, a total of $130 million to try to improve the madrassahs situation. Nothing has changed.
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President Musharraf has to be very careful about treading too heavily on the MMA coalition of six political religious parties. That is, they are all pro-Osama bin Laden, pro-al-Qaeda, and they are the ones who control the madrassahs, so we really have not gotten to first base yet, and this is 4 years after 9/11, in terms of reforming the madrassahs and helping them reform the madrassahs.
Mr. ROYCE. And as you say, we put $130 million in. I am going to ask Dr. Hoffman: Is it worth continuing that effort, or is there a way to continue that effort but make certain we have results?
Mr. HOFFMAN. Well, addressing the madrassah problem is only part of the dynamic. It certainly helps, but I think, fundamentally, when we think about addressing why there is this profound enmity to the United States, we are not listening to our adversaries. As bin Laden said last October 29 just before our Presidential election, it is what we do, not who we are.
In that respect, I think there is a positive story to be told. I think that this relief that the United States provided and championed to the tsunami victims earlier this year was demonstrably central to changing and creating positive impressions of the United States amongst Muslims in Southeast Asia, so I think the more we can actually be seen to be doing positive things rather than just talking or rather than attempting to influence media is enormously important.
But all of this, I have to say, and I go back to both my written and oral testimony, all of this is guesswork because we do not understand our enemy. We are flying blind. We do not understand how to seek to change the minds of the people we have imprisoned, for example, because we have not made any effort to understand them.
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This, I think, is a fundamental challenge. In Abu Ghraib prison now there are 9- to 15-year-olds. That is why I say this is going to take generations. The children of the world are already inculcated with this. We are not stopping and pausing to understand their mindset.
I am not saying we should embark on a campaign to reform or rehabilitate terrorists, but I am reminded of how in the 1980s when the Italian authorities were stymied in their efforts to get intelligence about the Red Brigades. They instituted the repentance program, not to reform or rehabilitate terrorists, but rather to use the insight they got into the terrorist mindset to gather intelligence that could be used against their organization.
That is what I see as the disconnect, is we have not made any effort to understand the people that we have in prison either in Iraq or at Guantanamo or elsewhere, and that is where it has to start. Then we can fashion effective messages, effective public diplomacy and effective means, but we are flying bind until we do that.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, Dr. Hoffman.
I am going to go to Mr. Sherman, and then we will come back later to questions for Major Dillon.
Mr. SHERMAN. Mr. Hoffman, to follow up, you are saying that we have all these guys in Guantanamo, they are a perfect subset of Jihadists, and we have not taken the opportunity to talk to them enough to learn what makes them tick?
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Mr. HOFFMAN. To my knowledge, not to the extent that we did systematically, for instance, in Vietnam with the Viet Cong with a specific morale and motivation study that would probe that. This information may be gleaned tangentially, but there is no focus on building up a picture.
Mr. SHERMAN. Because the longer they are there the less tactical information they have, and yet their ideological makeup remains just as valuable today or virtually as valuable today as it was then, then being when they were captured.
I have a few comments that perhaps you could respond to, and then I will go to a few questions. One is that there is always a discussion as to whether we are going to win this thing militarily and through paramilitary efforts or through ideological efforts.
I would point out that movements fail when they fail to be successful. One way to destroy a movement ideologically, or drain the swamp, is to deny it military success. Whether the movement be one that perhaps has some merit like the efforts of Native Americans to avoid the encroachment of the United States, or whether we are dealing with Naziism, when the movement fails it wanes. It was not all that easy to find a Nazi in 1929, and I am told you could not find one in 1949.
Men are willing to die if they have a reasonable likelihood or believe—excuse me; if they believe—they have a reasonable likelihood of changing the world in some reasonable or unreasonable way. One example of this is that there is massive talk among Jihadists and others about rejecting Russian control of the Caucuses area because there is a real prospect of driving the Russians out of the Caucuses area.
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You look at Chinese control of, I think it was the northwest part of China, and you see much less talk simply because there is much less likelihood of success.
I would think that if this Islamic extremist movement fails to achieve any geopolitical means in the next 10 or 15 years—and that is a long time to endure this threat of terrorism—but if it fails to achieve those goals one would expect it to wane just as so many other movements waned. Communism did not wane for a while in part because it was geopolitically successful.
The question I have, and I forget which of our panel brought up the Internet. You would think this is one area where we ought to be able to prevail. Do we have, in every relevant country, laws that call for the dismantling of Jihadist sites and the imprisonment of those who create them? And are those laws sufficient to cover coded sites where you look at the site and no one without Jihadist software would know what the site says at all? And are those laws being enforced and are we doing the technical research?
I mean, if Microsoft cannot beat guys in Afghan and Pakistani caves, then we are in big trouble. Are we doing the technological research to know how to shut down Jihadist Web sites?
Mr. HOFFMAN. I brought up the Internet, so let me respond first. But also, before I move to the Internet, pick up on I think another important point that you had made in your opening remarks.
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You asked the question whether we will win this militarily or ideologically, but I agree with you entirely that we have to win it in both dimensions. I think that is part of the problem.
I mean, as Mr. de Borchgrave described, if there are 130 million admitted Salafists out there in the world, we arguably do not have enough bullets to kill all of them, so I do not think we can win this war strictly militarily.
Indeed, 50 years ago, Gerald Templar, in the context of Malaya, had said fundamentally defeating terrorism or insurgency, that only 25 percent of this, to paraphrase him, is the shooting business. Seventy-five percent of it is giving one's opponents in the broader populace, the pool that they attempt to recruit from, a reason not to engage in violence. That is, I think, what we have to work toward.
I agree with you that without political gains this conceivably could reign, but the problem is, I think, our opponents are very adept and every effective, exactly as Mr. de Borchgrave described, in seizing upon any opportunity they have to blacken the reputation of the United States and besmirch our image.
That is, I think, one of our problems. In the United States, for example, in politics, one of the tools of the trade is immediately to seize upon what an opponent says, drown out the opponent, and even shift the debate to something else or else to negate that opponent's message.
Just this morning listening to the radio I was hearing that there was more discussion about the prosecutor in Texas, for example, than about Congressman Delay. That is part of the shift that we are very effective at doing in information management in this country, but I cannot understand when we confront our opponents on the Internet or in the media, we do not do that at all. We give them an open field to broadcast, as I said, the most coarsest and base messages of hate.
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That brings me to the Internet. Here I think the laws are very uneven about dismantling Jihadist sites. We know how, in fact, our closest ally in the United Kingdom now is moving precisely to dampen down these messages. We know very easily the Netherlands in fact has introduced very stringent legislation.
That is part of it. It is like the madrassah is part of it. We have to counter that, but we have to realize these people are way ahead of us. We close down these sites, and they open them up immediately.
I will give you a classic example. On 9/11, al-Qaeda had one Internet site, Al-Neda.com. We closed that down a year later. Today al-Qaeda's message is on at least 400 different sites throughout the world. Certainly closing that down, closing sites down, and legally restricting these messages is part of it, but it is almost like the Dutch boy trying to plug holes in the dike.
What we have to do as well, as I described, is have a very robust and aggressive policy that takes on these messages immediately, that does not allow, for example, if you read in the Washington Post 2 days ago, al-Qaeda to set up a news channel and have their own information on the Internet, and we just watch it and listen to it and shake our heads, but do nothing to combat it and to take it on directly and to deflate precisely the messages that they convey.
Mr. ROYCE. We will go to Mr. Tancredo of Colorado.
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Mr. TANCREDO. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Could you help me understand what you think the implications are, anybody—Dr. Hoffman in particular I suppose, but not exclusively—with the Islamification of Europe?
What do we expect to be the case in terms of how we react to Europe, how its foreign policy may be affected by this phenomena; what, if anything, we can do in order to prepare for either a change in our relationship with the EU or the European community based upon the Islamification of their society?
The next question I guess I have is you know, Dr. Hoffman, you mentioned that Sun Tzu—I think you referenced him and said that you have to know yourself and you have to know your enemy, and then you can fight 1,000 battles. I think I am paraphrasing it correctly.
I certainly agree with your express concern about our inability or our lack of knowledge of our enemy. Maybe not an inability to obtain it, but a lack of knowledge of our enemy, who they really are.
Sometimes, I must tell you, I also wonder, however, about the other side of his admonition. About whether we know who we are in this process, and what it is we would say if we were to actually construct this ideological battle or engage in an ideological battle on the Internet or any place else about who we are and what are the ideas that we have established for ourselves upon which we can all agree, for instance.
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Are they there? Do we know? Have we become so frightened to actually express that kind of opinion of ourselves or express a point of view that says there is something of value here, something that is commendable in who and what we are and what we do? Have we become so frightened to say that that may be one reason we have chosen not to enter into this ideological battle?
Mr. HOFFMAN. Let me take your second question first and then move back to the Islamification of Europe.
I think the problem is that we do not listen to our opponents enough. For example, reading the newspaper today about the Under Secretary of State's visit to Saudi Arabia. Well, yesterday rather. Reading the paper about her visit to Saudi Arabia where she very rightly, and of course the United States can be tremendously proud not only of our own record in promoting freedom and democracy throughout the world, but in actually achieving that.
I think that is a message that in fact for our opponents, as we saw in some of the push back there, where many of the women said we feel perfectly free. We do not need to have the same treatment that you necessarily have in the United States.
That is what I was referring to earlier where our enemies constantly define us as a clash of civilization and as a war. And that is, I think, the most important message that we can get to them is, not so much, although I am not saying this should not be a part of our support of freedom and democracy, but we have to convince our opponents or the pool that they draw their support from that we are not waging a predatory aggressive campaign against Islam because that is their fundamental message.
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As I said, I spent the summer in Southeast Asia speaking with militants there, and I was just amazed how United States policy throughout the world is constantly used to justify even their local conflicts.
They see this inevitably as the clash of civilization, and that is why I was so heartened by some of the push back we were able to achieve with the tsunami relief, where I said earlier our deeds actually demonstrate that we are not waging the struggle against Islam. That puts into actions exactly what the President said shortly after September 11.
Mr. TANCREDO. Before you go onto that, what other things can we do besides wait for the next tsunami in order for us to become proactive in this regard?
I mean, what do you do in this case in the world that exists today and the situations that exist around us? How do you express that altruistic aspect of our society?
Mr. HOFFMAN. Certainly I think developmental aid, aid to building schools, things that are designed to more critically help people, but that seem to be less like pushing them along the lines of American values, which they tend to resent.
I think it is very much a matter of altering the standard of living and being committed to improving lives rather than necessarily following what they see as a very strict and narrow policy to impose on them.
That actually leads to the point about the Islamification of Europe because you are right in saying that this is an enormously significant problem. It is one that has been germinating for many years.
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Just after the London bombings in July, the Commissioner of Police for London said that the authorities there have known for many years—in fact, when I lived in the United Kingdom in the 1990s I was told this at the end of the decade—that the British authorities knew that some 3,000 British Muslims during that latter part of that decade had left the United Kingdom and gone to train in al-Qaeda camps in either Afghanistan or the Sudan or in the Yemen, which gives you some idea of the dimensions and depth of the problem that I think is just coming to the surface now. In other words, there is a trained, prepared, committed cadre that already exists in Europe.
Here, I think, the realm of less may be more is enormously important, and where behind the scenes, I think we can continue as we have been doing to assist host nation countries in building the capacity and building the means to counter terrorism, but not be seen as overtly as pushing fundamental changes.
I think remaining in the background, as we have seen in the Netherlands where the Dutch authorities on their own have enacted very serious legislation precisely to dampen down the sentiment, is exactly the right way to go to be behind the scenes, but not be seen out there pushing it.
Mr. TANCREDO. Mr. de Borchgrave, did you have a comment?
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Well, there were several points that came up, Congressman.
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Back to the Internet. I think I was the one who suggested that there already is a caliphate in cyberspace. I remember in the late 1990s we had something called Moonlight Maze, and NSA, with all its capabilities, nobody could figure out who was downloading everything there is to know about the water systems in the United States.
It was all open source information, but it was sort of the whole country was targeted—canals, water flows into New York City, et cetera. To this day they still do not know where all of this originated.
At one point they thought it might be the Russian Academy of Sciences that had been subcontracted to do that by the Russian NSA. There was also speculation that it might be coming from Iran. Today the conventional wisdom is that it was probably al-Qaeda that was doing all of this already in advance.
So there is no way really of shutting all of this down. There is no way. If there is a cyber attack, there is no way of pinpointing immediately where that attack came from or even several hours later. The technology is not there yet. We hope it is getting there, but it is not there yet.
Another thing that I think could be said about our enemy, our self-avowed enemies around the world on the extremist Islamic side, is that these people live to die. We live to live in freedom. For them, dying is liberation. They look forward to it. How you cope with that, I do not think we have figured that one out yet.
On Eurabia, which is what Europeans are beginning to call it. Eurabia. They say by the year 2020 there will be 40 million Muslims in Europe. My deputy at CSIS and I toured Europe and North Africa last spring on a project we are working on at CSIS on open source information being the missing dimension of classified intelligence, and we saw all the former heads of intelligence, current heads of intelligence and security, and all of them complained about the elephant in the room that the politicians did not want to cope with. They pretended the elephant was not there. By the elephant, they meant of course their growing Muslim minorities, especially the extremists among them.
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Of course, there was the wake-up call of 3/11/04 in Spain, and that did not really seem to change the picture that much. Then came July 7 in London. That apparently has been much more of a wake-up call.
I would say the French today have the toughest laws on dealing with terrorism, the toughest counterterrorism laws. The Dutch have done, as you just heard from Dr. Hoffman, a very good job. The French just do not care. They just expel them.
When Mr. de Villepin, who is now the Prime Minister, but when he was Interior Minister following his stint as Foreign Minister, he asked for a survey of what was going on in the 1,000 most important mosques in France. He was appalled to discover that only 3 percent of the imams practicing in these mosques were French citizens. Forty percent of them had no religious background whatsoever, but they were getting their information for their Friday sermons from pro-al-Qaeda Internet sites.
All of this has gone much further than anyone realized until quite recently. Why? Because they were not listening to their security and intelligence chiefs who were trying to remind them over time that this was something they had to cope with and urgently. It is really not until quite recently they finally decided to do something about it. Witness what is going on in the Netherlands.
Mr. TANCREDO. Thank you.
The Chairman has indicated that we have time if you have any comments.
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Major DILLON. I did want to comment on the education issue. Last year I visited a school in Central Indonesia, and the leader of the school admitted that he was taking Saudi Arabian money, but his argument to me was that was because it was the only money available.
If he had other monies, he was kind of interested. He had heard that there was a Bush program to give more money to schools in Indonesia, and he was very interested in expanding where he could get his income from.
Most of these countries that have these Muslim educations are poor countries such as Pakistan and Indonesia where getting public education above the sixth grade just is not affordable at least under the way they manage their money.
If we can make money available to them, whether it is American money or through other things, they would gladly accept it. If you look at Indonesia, for example, only five of the religious schools there are involved in those terrorist groups that were there. Most of the rest of the thousands of schools are moderate schools that try to teach writing and reading and arithmetic.
One of the altruistic things we can do is help the education in these countries and provide for public education or provide for private schools for that matter.
Mr. ROYCE. Mr. Issa?
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Mr. ISSA. Thank, Mr. Chairman. I apologize on the name, but Mr. de Borchgrave?
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Yes, sir?
Mr. ISSA. Mr. de Borchgrave, in your testimony you talked about 1975 Lebanon in comparison to Iraq, and I am a little confused only in that I had the luxury of being in Lebanon in the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s. What makes it similar to Lebanon in the 1970s rather than in some ways after the direct beginning, after it was no longer about Palestinian camps and became more about various factions later in that time, and would you say that maybe that is a little bit more the period that you think Iraq is in?
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Congressman, I was also in and out of Iraq for a long time beginning in 1952, as a matter of fact, as a journalist.
The Lebanese Civil War, which lasted 15 years, if we had had the same amount of people killed on a per capita ratio, there would have been 11 million Americans killed. That civil war ended without vanquished or victors. In other words, the geopolitical shoe, the other shoe has not dropped.
Mr. ISSA. The Taif Accords was an interesting———
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. I am sorry, sir?
Mr. ISSA. The Taif Accords were a pretty interesting finesse of an unsolvable problem.
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Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. That is correct. In Iraq today you have the same phenomenon between the Shiites and the———
Mr. ISSA. Do you propose the same solutions, a Rafi Carerri equivalent or an equivalent of Rafi Carerri's tie up accords with the Saudis and other groups coming in to help?
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Well, sir, I think that political forecasting has made astrology look respectable for a long time, but I would not care to forecast. I obviously hope that———
Mr. ISSA. If you do not call it a plan perhaps it could succeed.
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. I feel that we are descending into civil war in Iraq right now, and I know many people who have been there recently who feel the same way.
One of the best informed men I know in Iraq, and he has not given me permission to use his name, is an Iraqi-born multinational corporation Chairman, and he is in very close touch with all the players. He said it is not a question of ''if.'' It is already happening. The civil war has started. He told me that last Saturday.
Mr. ISSA. I always liken what happened in Lebanon to a forest fire. You know, you have fires, and then you have fires that are feeding on themselves, creating their own environment around wind and thus they are unstoppable until they burn up a certain amount. I am not sure that I can answer that. I am not that close to Iraq, but I certainly see where somebody might feel that way.
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Dr. Hoffman, there really are, I would say, three distinct groups that we are dealing with in terrorism. We are certainly dealing with countries which are state sponsors of terrorism that either overtly or covertly are participants in it, Iran being one that it is pretty overt regardless of the left-hand/right-hand approach.
We are certainly dealing with a true military type element. We have a battlefield in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I think we could look at that as more conventional military, and then of course we have, as Major Dillon would probably be better to talk about, we have sort of the extended Muslim world primarily outside the Arab world like Indonesia where we have a problem, and for that matter the Philippines and so on, where we have problems but no government sponsorship, nor is it necessarily military backed, and I might lump England and France and other countries that could easily be in that way.
Dr. Hoffman, specifically though on the military side, places in which military involvement, in your opinion, is appropriate. What is it that the U.S. military should be tasked to do in the war on terrorism? Obviously we can talk about guns, but beyond guns what is the military role?
I think that would include areas in which there presently are troops and areas in which you think it would be appropriate to have troops as part of that process because I am interested in dealing with these three separate areas with some differences in approach, if appropriate.
Mr. HOFFMAN. Well, obviously I think with the state sponsors, that the military that we have that is predominantly conventional military against, in essence, the conventional militaries of the established nation states are appropriate.
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In the other two dimensions you talk about, the battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan and even the extended Muslim world where there is an involvement of the military, I think the burden falls very heavily on the shoulders of our Special Operations Forces, who, as we know, do not just do a credible but a heroic job, because we also know they are stretched enormously thin.
I think this is a very significant problem in two respects. They are stretched thin in what might be called ''black special operations,'' which is the direct action, the high value target commando attack. But one has to also realize that Special Operations Forces have other critical missions, one of which is what they describe as unconventional warfare, but in essence it is training indigenous forces.
The reason that Special Forces are so invaluable for that is that they are culturally sensitive. Their commands are organized around geographic regions of the world. They are taught the languages. They are taught how to work very closely with indigenous forces.
This is a capability that I think—at least I observed when I was in Iraq briefly working with the coalition provisional authorities that our Special Forces were there and engaged in commando-like operations, but we really deprived ourselves of this tremendous capacity. They were not there training the Iraqis.
The problem here is not to criticize our own military, but we do have an overwhelmingly conventional military. The danger is mirror imaging, training the Iraqi forces in conventional tactics against an entirely irregular adversary. That, I think, is again where Special Operations Forces have such a vital role to play.
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What we have seen in the past and I think we are learning now in Iraq, but from Vietnam for example, is that when American trainers were able to spend prolonged periods of time with the indigenous forces they were training, and to actually not only train them, but co-command them with their indigenous counterparts, those units invariably performed the most effectively.
Very slowly, very belatedly now, but nonetheless I think significantly, General Casey is precisely embedding these units with Iraqi units, but we have already lost 2 years.
This is the direction we need to move more in, but that, I think, is fundamentally dependent on increasing the number of Special Operations Forces———
Mr. ISSA. I appreciate that.
Mr. HOFFMAN [continuing]. And putting as much effort there.
Mr. ISSA. I appreciate that, and I would actually love to go deeper into it. If you want to supplement in writing, I would appreciate it because I know I am going to run out of time.
Major Dillon, staying along that line in a sense, and perhaps both of you would weigh in on this. In many ways I personally would liken that the situation we are in now is the next Cold War; that what we have in Indonesia and the Philippines are governments that are with us, but underlying enemies.
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What we have in Iraq is a government that is with us, but a presence of an enemy fighting, much as we had in South America during the Communist times. What we have in Iran is an enemy that we cannot bomb, or at least I believe we cannot bomb, and yet they are able to arm and finance our enemy.
Particularly, and perhaps if we are running out of time some of it could be in writing, but particularly when it comes to those areas of your expertise in Southeast Asia and so on, how do we deal with it?
Dr. Hoffman, I know I am going to run out of the indulgence of the Chairman, but if you could give us a little more answer, both of you, on how we could use our ability to train those militaries in those countries to be participants in this too, which has also been during the Cold War a big part of how we dealt with countries who were friendly to us, but had underlying problems within their countries that might destabilize it, but particularly on Southeast Asia if the Chairman will allow you to answer.
Major DILLON. Actually, I think that our policy in Southeast Asia has been very good, and I think the results that we have seen there. Part of the policy to some extent is negligence. I mean, we have pretty much not looked at Southeast Asia except for the Philippines, and the Philippines is the only place where the terrorists continue to thrive.
Mr. ISSA. And prior to September 11, I was there. We were not looking at it. We would not even give them resupplies for their helicopters.
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Major DILLON. Right. In Indonesia, again when Congress cut off military aid to the Indonesia armed forces and the country went through a democratic transition and we started focusing on the security forces and police forces, that is when things really started changing in Indonesia, and I think that has been to their benefit very much.
Frankly, I think the policy that we have developed, perhaps by accident, but the policy developed in Indonesia has worked out pretty well.
In the Philippines, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front has been a problem. It was a problem for the Spanish when they were there. It was a problem for us when we were there. Now they are a problem for the country.
As I understand, the leadership of the MILF is not really—they cannot sign something because no one will necessarily follow them; that a lot of the disagreements are among clans, and so the Philippine Government needs to take control of the situation and show some strength down there.
The Philippines, as you said, we are helping them a lot, but there is a lot of other things we could do. For example, their military is actually bigger than their police force. If we spent more time on law enforcement, got a larger police force in the Philippines and reduced the law and order problems there, the fallout would be a reduction of terrorism in the region.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, Mr. Issa.
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Let us go back to the concept. Dr. Hoffman said it is not possible to put this on a bumper sticker. Certainly al-Qaeda has it on a bumper stick. Slight infidel is something that is easy to explain.
But there are countries who have been successful. India has 150 million Muslims. There is not one al-Qaeda operative that we know of to date that is of Indian origin.
Algeria, after 170,000 of their citizens were slain, the Algerians figured out counterinsurgency, and they shuttered the main Wahabist mosque that the Saudis had asked for in Algiers, claiming that was the fountainhead of the information that was being used. And once closed, sort of closed down the access to that information.
In Chad we have seen the Trans-Sahara Counterterrorism Initiative where we are training special indigenous brigades to go after al-Qaeda and Salafis and other Islamist terrorists effectively.
Getting over to Dr. Hoffman's point, we do not understand this culture. Women in this culture say they do not see the problem. I have a friend who has a Muslim wife. Recently he was in one of the Gulf States. They came upon a stoning of a woman. The mosque had just let out, and clearly the parishioners did not see the problem because they were picking up stones and participating in this.
Now, certainly his wife saw the problem, and certainly the victim saw the problem, but I guess part of the question is: Did people in Soviet Russia understand the nature of a problem of lack of freedom until we had an effective Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty?
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Is part of the answer in changing hearts and minds to get into a methodology of disseminating information not from our standpoint, but from emigrates from those societies? Because that is the only time it started to work in Poland or in Russia, is when we got those voices that had just left those societies.
Not West Germans. When we got East Germans who had an understanding of the culture and had a feeling on the pulse. We got them up talking about what was lacking in that society and what they found in this society.
We have to find something that works. I laid out what I perceive at least as some societies that have found a way to, at least for now, deal with this problem. I would like your thoughts, starting with Mr. de Borchgrave and then going to Dr. Hoffman and Major Dillon.
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I keep coming back to Pakistan and the madrassah problem. The Philippines have been mentioned. I was there about a year ago in Mindanao. They have about 8,000 madrassahs there also paid for by Saudi Arabia and by Libya. They admit it quite openly.
In Pakistan you have had about 10 million people now turned out, 10 million young men turned out since 1989, turned out by these madrassahs trained not only to recite the Koran by heart in Arabic, but trained to hate America, hate Israel and hate India. That is a huge amount.
I pity President Musharraf because he is forced to say one thing to his extremists, the MMA Coalition, another thing to the United States. He has sort of developed the Jekyl and Hyde personality. He has no alternative. They have tried to kill him not twice, but eight times. There have been a total of eight plots.
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Why can't they do something about their educational system? Because they spend 60 percent of the budget on the military. Why? Because of India. We desperately need that settlement between India and Pakistan, which would enable these people finally to run down how much they are devoting to the military and get on with the problem of developing a national educational program.
You keep seeing it every day. Things track back to Pakistan, whether it is in England, France even. The French are the ones who picked up the first advance intelligence on what happened in London on July 7, 2 weeks before they notified the Brits. Yet the Brits lowered their state of alert at roughly the same time as getting this information from the French. I still have not resolved what really happened there.
I always come back to the imperative necessity to do something about Pakistan's educational system and to spend more than the $130 million we are devoting to this major, urgent problem.
Mr. ROYCE. Up the amount, but bring accountability with it?
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Absolutely, sir.
Iran has come up. I know it is fashionable to beat up on Iran all the time, but surely we go back to the days of the Shah when he told me—already in early 1973 when he became the guardian of the Gulf under the Nixon doctrine and following of course the Brits in 1968 who decided to opt out of all their responsibilities east of Suez—the Shah fully intended Iran to become a nuclear power, and when he finally went into exile there were about 20 nuclear reactors on order from the United States and from Western Europe.
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Today if you look at the situation, surely whether the Mullahs are in power or anybody else in power or democrats in power, Iran has legitimate security concerns. They have four of the world's eight nuclear powers in their vicinity—Russia to the north, Israel to the west, and Pakistan and India to the east, the United States fleet to the south, 140,000 American troops on their left flank and 20,000 Afghanistan on their right flank.
It seems to me that it would behoove us to sit down and talk to these people.
Mr. ROYCE. Dr. Hoffman?
Mr. HOFFMAN. Congressman, you are asking very tough questions. I think they are exactly the right ones. I think probably, though, there are officials in the State Department that would be better placed than myself to answer them.
The reason I say that is because I think you are absolutely right about the effectiveness of Radio Europe and Radio Liberty that was based on emigrates, but that was also only part of the equation.
They were also enormously successful because we could draw on a huge pool of military officers and personnel that had been trained in the United States, British, other Western militaries during World War II who were competent psychological warfare officers and understood how to conduct precisely these kinds of campaigns.
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I go back to my Special Operations Forces parallel because we know that the Psychological Operations Units are within the Special Operations command, and until recently they have been starved in essence.
I mean, this is not a capability that we have continued from the Cold War but that we have allowed to atrophy and now we are in difficulties in why we come up with approaches like selling and marketing the United States overseas, which we attempted right after 9/11, which did not succeed.
I think it is partially developing within our own military a cadre within also our intelligence and diplomatic communities, people that are well versed in psychological operations and information operations and not just in marketing and selling.
I think part of the key in this area, and it is something that I believe we also neglect, is that this is fundamentally, at least in our adversaries' eyes, a theological conflict. They use and they justify—they legitimize—violence with theological and religious arguments.
To effectively counter that we need to deliberately harness theological counter-arguments. In this respect we see our allies like in Singapore, for example, as part of their effort, again as I said earlier not necessarily to rehabilitate the al-Qaeda or Jihadist terrorists in their prisons, but to understand their mindset, have actively enlisted moderate clerics as a way to get insight and then to use the information from that cleric, those clerics, to construct very effective information and psychological operations.
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That is an element that we have not, I think, paid sufficient attention to.
Mr. ROYCE. Thank you, Dr. Hoffman.
We are going to go to Major Dillon's response and then Mr. Sherman's questions.
Major DILLON. I think along with what Dr. Hoffman is saying, listening to the enemy also goes to the point of local solutions.
Many of these countries have good ideas, and the governments have been fighting these problems for a long time. They just, for whatever reason, are unable to execute or unwilling to execute, or we have been financing bad policies.
I think we should look to see what kind of local solutions they can come up with and listen to what they have to say not only to the governments, but to the other elements that are involved in the fight and try to find solutions that they can live with. Because ultimately, they are the ones that have to live with the problem.
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. If I could just add, Mr. Chairman, last June I was invited to four African countries with General Jones, the NATO supremo, who as EUCOM Commander is also responsible for 91 countries and for most of Africa except for the Horn of Africa.
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Everywhere we went there were complaints from the heads of intelligence and security, even from the head of state, about these proliferating al-Qaeda type cells.
We have been offering them, as you know, Special Forces to cope with these problems. We need more Special Forces, and we certainly need more than that. When I toured with him he had $52 million for all of Africa at his disposal. I think that has been doubled now to $100 million.
Mr. ROYCE. I have carried the legislation for the initiative. I not only agree with you, but the other footprint to that is we have to choke off those funds from the Gulf States that fund those imams, who are always Gulf State imams, interestingly enough.
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Well, it happened in our own country too, as you well know, across the river in Virginia.
Mr. ROYCE. Yes. Mr. Sherman?
Mr. SHERMAN. Thank you.
A number of comments. One is that our intelligence agencies have not taken advantage of the opportunity to hire people who were born in Middle East countries and to particularly recognize that those who are Christians, Jews or Zoroastrians and Bahais are highly unlikely to be infiltrating Islamic terrorists.
We can send somebody to a language institute for half a decade. They still are not going to speak Arabic or Farsi as well, and if they understand the language a lot they will understand the culture perhaps only a little.
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We ought to do the technological research to be able to scramble and shut down from the United States coded Web sites and other al-Qaeda Web sites and have the ability to know who is logged onto them or at least create the image that we can know that, so that you cannot with impunity log down from, especially, a coded Web site and think that Big Brother Uncle Sam is completely unable to know what is going on.
Certainly we could create the image that we control the cyberspace even if we cannot control the space within certain neighborhoods of Baghdad.
I will mispronounce your name. Mr. de Borchgrave?
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Yes, sir.
Mr. SHERMAN. The point I wanted to make was about your comment about our pornography, et cetera. I do think it is an important domestic issue what we broadcast and when and what we put on cable and when, but suffice it to say, even if everything, every broadcast in the United States was Brady Bunch reruns, we are known in the Middle East not by what we broadcast to our children here, but what discs and videos they choose to buy there. They buy only sex and violence, and it is their culture. We provide this huge buffet. They buy only a couple of dishes.
I would like to put forward the idea that we should pay to print textbooks for all these Middle East countries with teacher guides, with audio-visual materials in all of the right languages and dialects and idioms, and that when we do so we avoid making that material so politically correct for all American interest groups that it will be unacceptable for the host governments.
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To be up against an adversary with petro dollars providing billions of dollars of ideological attacks against us, importantly through schools, in countries that cannot pay for their own secular education or government-provided education, here without any risk of money being diverted—you know, if you write a big check to the Government of Chad maybe it will be spent well. Maybe it will not.
If you provide the books, you at least know they cannot be diverted to terrorist purposes. At worst case they will be wasted. Best case they will be used, and you have described countries' educational systems that do not have this. By the way, with the audio-visual materials, I think we could create help for teachers that go way beyond what they have now.
I have a couple of questions. The first is, you have al-Qaeda in Iraq trying to kill as many Shiites as possible. Have we done enough to provide information to Shiite Muslims about how al-Qaeda is their enemy and to provide information to Suni Muslims about the evils of Iran, or have we let these two otherwise disparate groups cooperate harmoniously in the ideological area?
Mr. de Borchgrave, you would probably be the best.
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. No, not necessarily the best. I have not been to Iraq recently, but I am listening to a lot of people who go in and out all the time.
Mr. SHERMAN. This is not just an Iraq question. I mean, I wonder whether broadcasts that reach Algeria or Iran bring to the attention of people how the other brand of Muslim fanatics are engaged in internecine warfare.
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Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. This would require a leader, Congressman—I suggested earlier some Martin Luther figure or a Martin Luther King figure—to lead them out of the wilderness where they are presently stuck and to lead them into the modern age. That person is not on the horizon.
Mr. SHERMAN. I am asking a far less—Martin Luther or Martin Luther King comes along perhaps only once a century. I am asking a question about just selling discord between these two natural enemies that have become united against us.
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Well, what I hear everywhere of course is the problem of Israel, which has not even been mentioned today.
I have been in and out of the Arab world for the last 50 years, and every time Israel comes up, I tell them it is about time you understood that Israel is an integral part of the American body politics whether you like it or not. You have to get used to it.
Hopefully we are now on the path to something beyond Gaza and that within the next couple of years we can come up with a viable Palestinian State, but that comes up time and again in every conversation I have had on all my trips that the United States is doing in Iraq exactly what Israel is doing against the Palestinians.
That is how Al-Jazeera has been playing it, as you well know, throughout the Iraq war, always juxtaposing what the Israelis are doing against the Palestinians and what we are doing against the Iraqis. That is very hard to overcome.
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Mr. SHERMAN. One more Iraq question. The Baathists who are running this insurgency against us and have seemed, as you say, to have put the country on the road to civil war, do they have as their sole objective Suni Arab Baathist control of the united Iraq as the only victory they are seeking in that civil war? Or do they have, as Plan B, a civil war that leads to the breakup of Iraq so that they, a group of former Saddam-supporting Baathists, could at least control a new country of South Syria or whatever they want to call it?
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Well, I think it is very hard to generalize between the Suni insurgency, what al-Qaeda is up to, on which specific problems do they agree. It seems to me, Congressman———
Mr. SHERMAN. I think the vast majority of insurgents are home-grown and can best be described as Baathists, unless you reach a different conclusion.
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. Well, yes. Of course you can describe them that way. There were 50,000 members in the Mukabarat, which was Saddam's secret police, the worst element of that regime. They disappeared, and they are presumably working with the insurgency. Again I come back to my figure of 300 IRA versus several thousand in Iraq.
Mr. SHERMAN. Yes. Do you have any insight though as to what the geopolitical objective of the Baathist is? Is it a united Iraq under their leadership as their sole goal, or have they created a civil war? Do they have Iraq on the road to a breakup that they would think was a good thing because at least they could control one-third of it?
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Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. I would agree with the latter. I have never seen a federation, incidentally, work in the Middle East for the last half century.
You have had these sort of one night stands, instant marriages between Morocco and Libya, between Syria and Egypt and Libya. It has never lasted very long, and yet we have in this new Constitution a confederal or Federal system emerging.
The Sunnis are terrified obviously of losing everything since the Kurds in the north have the oil and the Shiites in the south have the oil, and they have nothing in the middle.
Mr. SHERMAN. So even if they were able to create a Baathist state, it would be a Baathist state without oil. It would be South Syria in many ways.
Mr. DE BORCHGRAVE. That is correct, sir. I am convinced that down the line we are going to have to face up to the fact that the country can only be kept together with a very strong figure at the center, a very authoritative figure.
Mr. SHERMAN. It does not sound like the Human Rights Bureau and the State Department will be endorsing that particular outcome.
I believe my time has expired, although I could drone on longer if you would like.
Mr. ROYCE. Mr. Sherman, we have a meeting at 3:00, so we are going to have to adjourn.
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I thank Dr. Hoffman, I thank Mr. de Borchgrave, and I thank Major Dillon for coming down here today to share their thoughts with us. It was a particularly good panel. I appreciate your time, gentlemen.
We stand adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 2:58 p.m. the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
(Footnote 1 return)
The opinions and conclusions expressed in this testimony are the author's alone and should not be interpreted as representing those of RAND or any of the sponsors of its research. This product is part of the RAND Corporation testimony series. RAND testimonies record testimony presented by RAND associates to federal, state, or local legislative committees; government-appointed commissions and panels; and private review and oversight bodies. The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit research organization providing objective analysis and effective solutions that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors around the world. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.
(Footnote 2 return)
See, for example, Associated Press, ''Expert Warns of al-Qaida-Linked Groups,'' 7 January 2004; Ellen Nakashima, ''Thai Officials Probe Tie To Al Qaeda in Attacks,'' Washington Post, 9 January 2004; Associated Press, ''Saudis Discover al-Qaida Training Camps,'' 15 January 2004
(Footnote 3 return)
See the particularly knowledgeable account of this plot in Maria A. Ressa, Seeds Of Terror: An Eyewitness Account of al-Qaeda's Newest Center of Operations in Southeast Asia (New York: Free Press, 2003), pp. 1–5 & 21–44.
(Footnote 4 return)
This point is also made in International Institute for Strategic Studies, Strategic Survey 2003/4 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 6, where the authors note: ''The Afghanistan intervention offensively hobbled, but defensively benefited, al-Qaeda. While al-Qaeda lost a recruiting magnet and a training, command and operations base, it was compelled to disperse and become even more decentralized, 'virtual' and invisible.''
(Footnote 5 return)
See Alan Cullison, ''Inside Al-Qaeda's Hard Drive,'' The Atlantic Monthly, vol. 294, no. 2, September 2004, pp. 63–64.
(Footnote 6 return)
Presentation by CNN correspondent Mike Boetcher, at the ''Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence Symposium on Islamic Extremism and Terrorism in the Greater Middle East,'' University of St Andrews, St Andrews, Scotland, 7–8 June 2002.
(Footnote 7 return)
See 1734HA01, United States District Court, Southern District of New York, United States of America v. Mokhtar Haouri, S4 00 Cr. 15 (JFK), 3 June 2001, pp. 538, 548, 589, 622, 658, & 697.
(Footnote 8 return)
See General Intelligence and Security Service, Recruitment for the jihad in the Netherlands: from incident to trend (The Hague: Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations, December 2002).
(Footnote 9 return)
Quoted in Anonymous, Imperial Hubris: Why The West Is Losing The War On Terror (Dulles, VA: Brassey's 2004), p. xxi.
(Footnote 10 return)
Quoted in Walter Pincus, 'Al Qaeda Releases Tape Predicting U.S. Defeat,' Washington Post, 10 September 2004.
(Footnote 11 return)
See Douglas Jehl, 'Iraq May Be Prime Place for Training of Militants, C.I.A. Report Concludes,' New York Times, 22 June 2005.
(Footnote 12 return)
Followed by Syria (10 percent) and Kuwait seven percent). See Reuven Paz, 'Arab volunteers killed in Iraq: an Analysis,' PRISM Series of Global Jihad, vol. 3, no. 1 (March 2005), p. 2 accessed at www.e-prism.org/pages/4/index.htm.
(Footnote 13 return)
The witness is grateful to Colonel Fred T. Krawchuk, U.S. Army Special Forces for his helpful comments, advice, and contributions to this section of the written testimony.
(Footnote 14 return)
See National Strategy For Combating Terrorism, February 2003, p. 29, but also pp. 2 & 11–12.
(Footnote 15 return)
This ineluctable principle of countering insurgency was first defined by Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer in Malaya more than 50 yeas ago. ''The shooting side of the business is only 25% of the trouble and the other 75% lies in getting the people of this country behind us,'' Templer famously wrote in November 1952, responding to a communist directive from the previous year that focused on increase appreciably ''cajolery'' of the population. Quoted in John Cloake, Templer: Tiger of Malaya—The Life of Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer, (London: Harrap, 1985), p. 262.
(Footnote 16 return)
See National Strategy For Combating Terrorism, February 2003, p. 29, but also pp. 11–12.
(Footnote 17 return)
''Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,'' in Yonah Alexander and Michael Swetnam, Usama bin Laden's al-Qaid: Profile of a Terrorist Network (Ardsley, NY: Transnational, 2001), Appendix 1 A, p. 19.
(Footnote 18 return)
See, for example, 'Text of Bin Laden Remarks: ''Hypocrisy Rears Its Ugly Head'',' Washington Post, 8 October 2001.
(Footnote 19 return)
Ibid. See also, Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America (Dulles, VA: Brassey's 2002), pp. 47 & 197.
(Footnote 20 return)
Paul Eedle, ''Terrorism.com,'' The Guardian (London), 17 July 2002.
(Footnote 21 return)
Al Jazeera.Net, 'NEWS: Arab World—Full Transcript of bin Laden's speech,' 1 November 2004 accessed at http://Englishaljazeera.net/NR/exeres/79C6AF22-98FB-4A1C-B21F-2BC36E87F61F.htm.
(Footnote 22 return)
Quoted in John Miller, 'Interview; Osama Bin Laden (May 1998)' accessed at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/interview.html.
(Footnote 23 return)
Anonymous, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, p. xix.
(Footnote 24 return)
Translation by, and personal communication with, Eedle, 31 July 2002.
(Footnote 25 return)
'Transcript: Full Text From The 18 Minute Tape Released By Al-Jazeera From Osama Bin Laden.'
(Footnote 26 return)
Bin Laden's 29 October 2004 also evidenced this understanding. See Ibid.
(Footnote 27 return)
Facilitating this would doubtless go well beyond DoD's purview, necessarily involving the National Security Council or the emerging National Counterterrorism Center and would likely entail the development of an ''operational arm'' with the authority of the President to de-conflict, synchronize, and task the various agencies of the government involved in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations.
(Footnote 28 return)
Gabriel Weimann, Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Institute of Peace, forthcoming), p. 64.
(Footnote 29 return)
'Information Security News: Militants wire Web with links to jihad,' InfoSec News, 11 July 2002 quoted in Ibid., p. 27.
(Footnote 30 return)
'Text of Bin Laden Remarks: ''Hypocrisy Rears Its Ugly Head'',' Washington Post, 8 October 2001.
(Footnote 31 return)
Neil MacFarquhar with Jim Rutenberg, 'Bin Laden, in a Taped Speech, Says Attacks in Afghanistan Are a War Against Islam,' New York Times, November 4, 2001, p. B2.
(Footnote 32 return)
Schulze, Kirsten E., ''The Helsinki Peace Process: Reaching Understanding in Aceh in the Wake of the Tsunami. Not yet published.