Two-barrels from Clint Watts

A double offering from Clint Watts this week.

First a well reviewed article 'The Microsoft of Terrorism: Al Qaeda Loses Touch' in Foreign Affairs, alas behind a free registration "wall". So here is his opening paragraph:

Quote:

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If al Qaeda were a corporation today, it would be roughly equivalent to Microsoft: A big name but an aging brand, one now strikingly out of touch with the 18–35-year-old-demographic. The group made its way back into the headlines this past January, after its affiliate—al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP—took credit for a deadly attack on the Paris offices of the French magazine Charlie Hebdo. But the claim of responsibility came a week after the fact, and lacked the sort of insider accounts or video footage that typically accompany such announcements, leading some to conclude that al Qaeda may not have known about the attackers’ intentions.

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Link:http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articl...t-of-terrorism

Second, a shorter piece 'Countering ISIL’s Ideology: Keep It Limited, Focused, and in Tune with Lessons Learned' for a WINEP conference this week Taking the Fight to IS. A counter-ideological programme is presented after dissecting why CVE / PVE efforts have failed:https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/...nt20150202.pdf

Ok Guys I have been off the SWJ forum grid for a while due to an OCONUS NDA, but this paper Countering ISIL’s Ideology: Keep It Limited, Focused, and in Tune with Lessons Learned made me come out of the shadows. to comment

It is interesting in that his seven points of lessons learned to counter the ISIL narrative seems to track directly with not only with Abu Yahyah al-Libi's 'Six ways to destroy al-Qaeda' written in 2007 but seems to riffs off my al-Libi based 12 recommendations of my 2010 book on counter-ideological warfare An End to Al Qaeda: Destroying Bin Laden's Jihad and Restoring America's Honor and damaging al-Qaeda's narrative (pgs 217-251). I had a minimum of 51 sources refs in just that chapter so where are his? :confused:

I know he was XO at the WP CTC for a while but I would hope that if these ideas or lessons learned came out of the CTC's "Stealing al Qaeda's Playbook", Will McCant/Jarret Bachman's brilliant "The Militant Ideology Atlas" or sources like Jihadica or from al-Qaeda's own ideologues that as a scholar FPRI would go back and quickly attribute the origin of the ideas in his online postings at their website.

It also surprises me that like much of the news media he seems to think ISIL is something new as opposed to a regional evolution of AQI ideologically they are identical. Please ref the CIA NCTC, Iraqi Intelligence, Abu Ibrahim al-Baghdadi and the 2nd edition of The Terrorists of Iraq: Inside the Strategy and Tactics of the Iraq Insurgency 2003-2014.

I'll go back under my rock, for now.