Today's Wild Geese: Foreign Fighters in the GWOT

[Bob's World]

Some are mercs, most are simply the "road team" for the hometown insurgency of their homeland.

AQ's message is clear and effective, essentially: "you can't win at home until you break the support of the US to the region and to your government." So they go to where the west is most vulnerable and attempt to hurt them there.

To me the only logical point to target is the perception within each of these states these men travel from that the U.S. stands between them and achieving better governance at home. Simply killing them when they arrive only motivates more to come; the routes they travel will flow to the paths of least resistance; and to target them in their homelands is to only validate AQ's propaganda as we step in to help some fairly unsavory state leaders to suppress the insurgent segments of their societies in the name of "counterterrorism."

My $.02

[davidbfpo]

The German journalist Yassin Musharbash has written before extensively on this "tourism" to the FATA; the 'German colony' had not been detected until the Sauerland (or Saarland) plotters were arrested and made admissions when in custody. Note the 'colony' in South Waziristan is linked to a rather low profile AQ-leaning group the Islamic Jihad Union, for a fuller details (albeit from 2008):http://www.nefafoundation.org/miscel...faijuoct08.pdf

The IJU attracted the Sauerland plotters to a "holiday camp", where it was "fun" and to their surprise asked them to return home, to await the call, not fight in the FATA etc.

In response to Bob's World and I

To me the only logical point to target is the perception within each of these states these men travel from that the U.S. stands between them and achieving better governance at home.

I agree we do need to find messages that undermine the AQ / IJU "offer" at home, that mixture has yet to emerge IMHO. These messages cannot be solely be state responses. That AQ has killed more Muslims than non-Muslims is not said enough. A difficult thing messages.

See this CTC article for analysis on Muslims -v- non-Muslim deaths:http://www.ctc.usma.edu/Deadly%20Van...Complete_L.pdf

[Bob's World]

David,

When I say target perceptions, I do not mean messaging. No mere words mean much, when our actions speak volumes.

What I mean is a holistic top-down assessment of the nature of our entire foreign policy, with a focus on these nations where the populaces seem most inclined to join the foreign fighter band wagon; and then looking past they hyperbole of "Islamism" and "Caliphates" and "terrorism" and looking at things more fundamental such as how the West is perceived in that populace and what goes to shape that perception, and how we can modify our behavior and words to create better perceptions without also compromising critical national interests. Asking ourselves if we are supporting a populace or a government or worst yet, just a particular leader? Have we fallen into a relationship where we can be reasonably perceived by that populace as injecting our will over that of the populace and de-legitimizing their leadership in their eyes?

I hate victim mentality. You see it in individuals, and in groups of individuals. You often see it in governments faced with insurgency. You see it in the West's approach to the terrorist attacks of the past decade. "Oh woe is us, we are innocent and being attack for no reason by evil people." While nothing justifies acts of terrorism, nor absolves those who practice it, it is not healthy to simply think that you are a victim and that everyone else is wrong and must make all of the adjustments so that you can continue with your own destructive behavior. It is a syndrome common to addicts.

The West needs to take a 12-step program. "Hello, I am the West, and I have a problem..." Once we get as serious about our own behavior as we have been about modifying the behavior of others, we can begin to get in front of this.

So yes, we must manage perceptions in these populaces that feel inclined to attack us. But no, that does not mean seeing it as their entire fault and sending them a nice note to please stop.

[Jedburgh]

International Security, Winter 2010/11:

The Rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters: Islam and the Globalization of Jihad

...The purpose of this article is threefold: first, to establish foreign fighters as a discrete actor category distinct from insurgents and terrorists; second, to present new empirical information about Muslim foreign fighters; and third, to propose a plausible hypothesis about the origin of the phenomenon. The analysis is based on a new data set of foreign fighter mobilizations, a large collection of unexplored primary and secondary sources in Arabic, as well as personal interviews with former foreign fighters conducted in Britain, Jordan, Pakistan, Palestine, and Saudi Arabia.

The scope of the article has two important limitations. First, the conceptual focus is on movement formation, not on general mechanisms of foreign fighter mobilization. I do not formulate a universal theory of foreign fighters, predict rates of recruitment, or explain individual recruitment. Second, the empirical focus is on the Muslim world. A study of Muslim foreign fighters arguably has intrinsic value, because Muslim war volunteers are much more numerous and have affected many more conflicts than have foreign fighters of other ideological orientations. In addition, their involvement in major conflicts such as Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as their role in facilitating al-Qaida recruitment, make them a particularly significant challenge to contemporary international security....