Assessing Al-Qaeda (merged thread)

[SWJED]

Hat tip to Douglas Farah of The Counterterrorism Blog for the pointer to this study.

Farah's post on this study:

It is encouraging to see new signs that the military intelligence community is actively pursuing new, critical analysis both of al Qaeda's operational structure and ways of improving counterinsurgency stategies, particularly in Iraq. Given the recent British intelligence assessment that al Qaeda has a 50-year plan of attack, these developments are important.

The West Point CTC project called "Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al Qaeda's Organizational Vulnerabilities"-written about by Andrew Cochran earlier-analyzing documents seized from al Qaeda and declassified from the Harmony database, is particularly enlightening on al Qaeda thinking. It shows the new trend in U.S. intelligence-finding exploitable vulnerabilities in the enemy structure. Prior to 1999 there was no overall assessment of al Qaeda's organizational or financial infrastructure. In the post-9/11 world, survival and insurance against another attack led to little real emphasis being placed on al Qaeda's internal organizations, and even less was known about ways to excert pressure on the organization because vulnerabilities were not clearly identified.

Now it is clear that al Qaeda is a decentralized organization that spends considerable time, perhaps more time than our own intelligence community and armed forces, on studying "lessons learned" from unsuccessful operations, both of itself and others (i.e. the Muslim Brotherhood experience in Syria). It has, or at least has had, a coroporate structure that deals with everything from salaries to vacation schedules. It has internal discrepanies over tactics, targets and resource allocation.

[Jedburgh]

...another new paper from the same source: Stealing Al-Qa'ida's Playbook

There's no ExecSum in this one, but I'll quote from the Foreward, which is by GEN (Ret) Wayne Downing:

As the Defense Science Board observed two years ago, an essential element of U.S. combating terrorism efforts must involve strategic communications composed of coordinated public diplomacy, public affairs, open military information operations (which include psychological operations), and classified operations.

The United States government reached a significant stage in the fight against jihadi inspired terrorism this past year when it decided to place a greater emphasis on fighting its ideological roots. Yet despite this appropriate course adjustment, the U.S. government and its Western allies generally do not know the main producers of this ideology and the significant issues that unite and divide the movement—information that is key to defeating it.

Our authors suggest ways to address this significant shortfall. Not only do they attempt to answer the who and what sort of questions in plain language; they also outline a highly original method for discerning the answers to these questions that has, up to now, been ignored or poorly used.

One of the best places to look for information regarding the strengths and weaknesses of the jihadi movement, Brachman and McCants argue, is in texts written by jihadi ideologues. Of course, a number of analysts inside and outside the U.S. government read texts like these for insight into al Qa`ida’s strategic thinking. But it has been my experience that many of the most useful texts have not received attention. And of those that do, there are often useful pieces of information that get overlooked. There are two reasons for this:

• First, there is an overabundance of texts. Since there is no metric yet for determining which works are important within the jihadi movement, text selection tends to be a very subjective process and minor thinkers sometimes receive more attention than they deserve. Moreover, the overabundance of texts and the paucity of analysts mean that the latter must often scan texts rapidly for important information, which is sometimes predetermined by their initial assumptions. Time and resources are not available for looking for information that challenges these assumptions.

• Second, useful pieces of information are overlooked because many analysts who are new to this literature do not know what to look for. As Brachman and McCants observe, jihadi leaders are remarkably open and blunt when discussing who their biggest competition is and what their PR vulnerabilities are. This is precisely the sort of information needed for crafting effective counterterrorism strategies. The authors of this article have given several concrete examples of what type of information to look for, making it easy for others to use their method.

If the jihadis are right in their assessment of geopolitics and the situation in the Middle East, overt U.S. military action or diplomacy can often be more harmful than helpful in the fight against jihadi inspired terrorism. Indeed, the jihadi ideologues surveyed in the article focus most of their attention on psychological operations to exploit our actions rather than on large scale, direct military action.

Understanding the vulnerabilities of the jihadi movement is the necessary prelude to defeating it. In this article, Brachman and McCants give us the tools and some recommendations to do just that.

Note that the authors are using similar methodology to that used by the author of the recent ICG paper I linked to in an earlier thread - that of exploiting the material openly published by the bad guys for insights that could potentially drive the development of effective operational measures against them.

[SWJED]

24 Feb. Washington Times commentary - Jihad With All the Medical Benefits by Austin Bay.

Al Qaeda's "bylaws" -- describing the medical and holiday benefits package -- is one of two-dozen recently declassified documents available at West Point's "Combating Terrorism Center".

Most of the documents were translated during 2002, which suggests coalition forces acquired them in Afghanistan. I'm certain the Defense Department would not have released the documents if they had any remaining operational utility. Their instructive value, however, is extraordinary. The documents provide detailed -- if at times jarring -- insight into al Qaeda's goals, its penchant for meticulous planning, its use of propaganda and its intent to use weapons of mass destruction.

Still, the Defense Department needs to declassify more documents like these. If Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld thinks al Qaeda has an "information warfare" advantage -- and he said so last week -- one way to erode that advantage is exposing al Qaeda's vicious ambitions, calculated plans and manipulative intents. These documents do that...

[Jedburgh]

The Jamestown Foundation, 28 Feb: Al-Qaeda's Insurgency Doctrine: Aiming for a "Long War", by Michael Scheuer.

Conventional national militaries train, think, and fight according to their doctrine. To date, however, America and the West have not sufficiently appreciated that al-Qaeda, too, is fighting the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan according to a doctrine of its own. That doctrine has been developed from the group's experiences during the Afghan war against the Red Army, and has matured through each of the insurgencies in which bin Laden's fighters have since been involved, from Eritrea to Xinjiang to Mindanao. In presenting their doctrine, al-Qaeda's strategists also have tipped their turbans to the significant lessons they have learned from Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Mao, General Giap, and even Ahmed Shah Masood, as well from the training manuals of the U.S. and UK Marines and Special Forces. Ironically, al-Qaeda strategists have discussed all of these matters for years in their Internet journals, but this discussion has garnered little interest in Western essays.

The corpus of al-Qaeda's writings on the development and application of its insurgency doctrine is too diverse and voluminous to discuss in a single article. For present purposes, it will suffice to look at some of the insurgency-related work of five of the group's strategists: the late Abu-Hajer Abd-al-Aziz al-Muqrin, Abu Ubyad al-Qurashi, Abu-Ayman al-Hilali, Abd-al-Hadi, and Sayf-al-Din al-Ansari. These writings discuss the need to conduct the political and military facets of an insurgency in tandem. They are especially worth reviewing now because of the success al-Qaeda is having in using its doctrine against U.S.-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, a success that has prompted U.S. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld to rename the Global War on Terror as the "Long War" and to publicly lament that al-Qaeda is beating the U.S. in the political war being fought in the media. The essays used herein to analyze al-Qaeda's insurgency doctrine were published between January 2002 and February 2004 in the al-Qaeda Internet journals al-Ansar, al-Neda, and Mu'askar al-Battar...