Hoffman vs. Sageman: Myth of Grassroots Terrorism
Bruce Hoffman comes out with a brutal review in Foreign Affairs of Dr. Marc Sageman's new book: Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the 21st Century.
Basically he argues that Sageman radically underestimates al-Qaeda Central's organizational strength and reach, and thinks that Sageman's methods lead him incorrectly to focus entirely on spontaneous jihadists inspired by rather than controlled by al-Qaeda. Hoffman believes that the main terrorist threat remains al-Qaeda and its associated organizations, rather than Sageman's theory of a disassociated movement of individual and small groups.
I haven't read Sageman's book, but Hoffman has him dead to rights on the historical inaccuracies (according to Hoffman, Sageman apparently believes that Gavrilo Princip was part of a 'leaderless' movement of anarchists, while the PIRA began life in a New York City bar). Thoughts?
A Not Very Private Feud Over Terrorism
NYT, 8 Jun 08: A Not Very Private Feud Over Terrorism
Quote:
A bitter personal struggle between two powerful figures in the world of terrorism has broken out, forcing their followers to choose sides. This battle is not being fought in the rugged no man’s land on the Pakistan-Afghan border. It is a contest reverberating inside the Beltway between two of America’s leading theorists on terrorism and how to fight it, two men who hold opposing views on the very nature of the threat.
On one side is
Bruce Hoffman, a cerebral 53-year-old Georgetown University historian and author of the highly respected 1998 book
“Inside Terrorism”. He argues that Al Qaeda is alive, well, resurgent and more dangerous than it has been in several years. In his corner, he said, is a battalion of mainstream academics and a
National Intelligence Estimate issued last summer warning that Al Qaeda had reconstituted in Pakistan.
On the other side is
Marc Sageman, an iconoclastic 55-year-old Polish-born psychiatrist, sociologist, former C.I.A. case officer and scholar-in-residence with the New York Police Department. His new book,
“Leaderless Jihad”, argues that the main threat no longer comes from the organization called Al Qaeda, but from the bottom up — from radicalized individuals and groups who meet and plot in their neighborhoods and on the Internet. In his camp, he said, are agents and analysts in highly classified positions at the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation.....
The most accurate summary ...
may be this:
Quote:
“The danger of this ‘either-or’ argument could lead us to the mistakes of the past,” said Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s leading antiterror investigatory magistrate. “In the ’90s, we saw atomized cells as everything, and then Al Qaeda came along. And now we look at Al Qaeda and say it’s no longer the threat. We’re making the same mistake again.”
(From the same article.)
I'm having one of those moments
Hi Tom,
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Tom Odom
I worked aniti-terror in the early 90s and soon discovered that it was a cottage industry on the cusp of going global, meaning that we did not do solutions. We did threats. Threats by definition had to grow and they always had to be a surprise. Therefore we could only speculate about those threats and how they were growing around us.
A number of years ago, I looked at the welfare system in Ontario and realized that it was set up to keep people on welfare in part as a way of increasing the demand for social workers (and growing government departments budgets). This has a very familiar ring to it :cool:.
Al-Qaeda’s continued core strategy and disquieting leader-led trajectory
Hat tip to a Tweet. A new article by Professor Bruce Hoffman and his Spanish colleague / analyst Fernando Reinares, on a Spanish website (in English) and entitled 'Al-Qaeda’s continued core strategy and disquieting leader-led trajectory'.
Their conclusion:
Quote:
Conclusions: Today the conventional wisdom argues that, much like bin Laden’s killing, the Arab Spring has sounded al-Qaeda’s death knell. However, while the mostly non-violent, mass protests of the Arab Spring were successful in overturning hated despots and thus appeared to discredit al-Qaeda’s longstanding message that only violence and jihad could achieve the same ends, in the years since these dramatic developments commenced, evidence has repeatedly come to light of al-Qaeda’s ability to take advantage of the instability and upheaval across these two regions to re-assert its relevance and thereby attempt to revive its waning fortunes.
The final chapter of al-Qaeda’s long and bloody history has yet to be written. Since the September 11 attacks to the killing of bin Laden in 2011, it has proved to be a highly resilient organisation capable of adaptation and adjustment that, despite grievous leadership losses and diminished resources, was still able to harness the energy of its constituent parts and marshal the powerful narrative and ideology that sustains the collective movement, to carry on the struggle proclaimed by bin Laden in 1988. These characteristics ensure both that the final battle against al-Qaeda has not yet been fought and in coming years the movement may assume new and different forms that could not have previously been anticipated or predicted and that therefore will require an entirely different approach and means to finally eliminate it.
Link:http://www.realinstitutoelcano.org/w...ed-trajectory/