David Ignatius has a good column about a new CNAS report that explores a case of non-Muslim terrorism, the 1995 attack by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo using sarin gas on the Tokyo subway:

Danzig and his co-authors make the essential point: In dealing with these extremist groups and cults, the world is playing Russian roulette: 'Many chambers in the gun prove to be harmless, but some chambers are loaded.' Another bullet was fired last Friday, and we are surely clicking toward more. The surprise is that we're still surprised."

By Matthew Irvine
Best Defense bureau of keeping your eye on the ball

The Obama administration rolled out the unclassified version of its long-awaited counterterrorism strategy document on Wednesday.

Put simply, this is a war plan against al Qaeda. The document is al Qaeda-centric to the point of being al Qaeda-obsessed. What is striking about the strategy is not so much what it says about al Qaeda or its repeated mentions of killing Osama bin Laden (5 of them), but what it left out about counterterrorism more broadly:

Terrorists who aren't AQ: The document mentions "other terrorist concerns requiring focus and attention" such as Hamas, Hizballah, the FARC, and Lashkar-e-Taiba. However, the document does not address these groups in a substantive way.

State-sponsors of terror: While recognizing that some states (Iran and Syria) support terrorist organizations, the strategy does not spell out what this means for broader foreign policy towards these countries. Pakistan is notably absent from this list despite its established ties to the Haqqani Network, Afghan Taliban, and Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Mexico: The growing violence in Mexico did not make the cut in the new strategy. With more than 35,000 dead over the last five years, including numerous government officials, kidnappings, and car bombings, Mexico is emerging as a principal security question for folks on both sides of the border.

The Internet: Cyberterrorism and the increasingly active use of the internet as a virtual safe haven got only lip-service in the unclassified version of the White House report. As Spencer Ackerman at DangerRoom points out, this is not an adequate treatment of what is a growing problem. Domestic Terrorism: Despite DHS calling attention in 2009 to the resurgence in right wing extremism, the new CT strategy does not address this very distinct threat. You don't have to go too far back in time to see the Unabomber, Tim McVeigh, the rise of right-wing militias as a pre-eminent counterterrorism concern.

Pakistan: The President's counterterrorism advisor John Brennan argued on Wednesday that "there's no alternative to us or to the Pakistanis to ensuring that we continue engaging with them." I'm left asking: What happens if the United States and Pakistan don't make up? The United States and Pakistan suffered a bitter divorce in the 1990s. What's to stop that from happening again?

Lastly, what comes next? Brennan also declared "al Qaeda is in its decline," but went on to warn of an adapting enemy and AQ network that will pose a persistent threat. The 9/11 Commission cited a failure of imagination as one of the primary faults in U.S. counterterrorism thinking ten years ago. After reading the 2011 CT strategy, (and the 2003 and 2007 documents) I am left asking the question: What comes next? What are we missing? What are we failing to imagine?

The other day my CNAS colleague Soriana Crisan wandered over to the National Press Club to see what the terrorism big thinkers are thinking. She came back all gloomy, but what did you expect? I think next time we should send her to a Lady Gaga concert.

Here is her report:

By Sorina I. Crisan
Best Defense terrorism punditry bureau

Hey Tom, as you requested, here are some "high points" from the Jamestown Foundation's 4th Annual Terrorism Conference, held on Thursday, Dec. 9.

• Bruce Hoffman, director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, kicked off the proceedings by arguing that there is no "understanding of what terrorism strategy is." Today, al Qaeda is a networked transnational movement that is just "a shadow of its former self" but has been able to survive "because it has managed to adapt to a changing environment." He said we should employ a dual strategy of capturing terrorists and breaking the recruitment cycle by better reaching the youth demographic.
Read on

Counterterrorism without counterinsurgency is alluring -- it seems cheaper and easier -- but it is usually pretty meaningless and in fact can be very counterproductive. People who advocate just doing counterterror generally don't understand that. This is one of the best explanations I've read of why the short, easy way just doesn't work, from a friend who can't be identified, but who is in a position to understand this.

If you work at the White House, please read this slowly.

By Mr. XYZ
Best Defense terrorism columnist

To avoid killing the wrong people, you need intelligence. Good intelligence demands you have very close contact with, and cooperation from, the very constituency the Terrorists are seeking to mobilize. These folks won't cooperate unless they have security of person and property AND believe you won't abandon them after the next presidential election. That means that you can't CT without COIN.

Oh you can try. Clinton made a sport of it -- firing several hundred million dollars worth of cruise missiles into the deserts of North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Predictably, fire weapons and fire weapons alone not only did not compel the enemy to surrender, it caused them to multiply.

No serious student of strategic aerial bombardment I know of still believes that bombing a civilian population -- short of nuclear weapons -- will do anything more (or less) than awaken a sleeping giant -- Pearl Harbor and 9/11 are perfect examples, but so too are the largely failed terror-bombing campaigns of the Luftwaffe of Britain (1940-41 and ‘44-45) and the British reply to Germany (1942-1945).

The reason terror bombing does not work, is it causes predictable outrage in the survivors. Even if you use precision weapons -- no, especially if you use precision weapons -- killing anyone in my family will make of me an implacable enemy. I say this because if you use precision weapons you purportedly have the ability to avoid killing the wrong people and yet you killed one of mine. Hence, you MEANT to kill my relative. And now, I will have to return the favor -- especially if I am from a Shame Culture.

Used alone, navies and air forces cannot, therefore, win against insurgents. Why? Because they are fire weapons -- and fire weapons alone can never compel the enemy to surrender. The enemy may choose to surrender -- as happened in Serbia in 1999 and Japan in 1945, but the decision is left to the enemy. True decision in war comes from shock forces -- Marines/ infantry. Once shock forces go into action the enemy must repel the attack or leave. If they can't leave or defeat the attack they must surrender.

If you're going to employ shock forces, you are now going to be in and among the population. If you are going to have a population that is at least neutral, if not supporting you, then you will need to understand their language, culture, and aspirations, and help to provide for their needs. You must also be prepared for a long and costly war, in both money and casualties.

Read on

Over the "week-end," Best Defense's British bureau chief went to see Four Lions, about a bunch of jihadi wannabes. It might even make the list of top 10 post-9/11 terrorism films. "It's very, very funny, a bit squirmish at times and oddly sentimental at others, but always sharp," he reports.

(HT to CR and RG of B'ham)

There are certain events that are made for certain reporters. For example, everything in Anthony Shadid's career prepared him to cover post-invasion Iraq. Likewise, if you want to understand the guy who tried to bomb Times Square, you need to read the New Yorker‘s Steve Coll, the only person I can think of who has written books about the South Asian subcontinent, the Taliban and Islamic extremism terrorism, but who also understands New York City, and indeed co-authored a book about Wall Street.

Take it away, Steve:

Last week, before the Times Square incident, I was talking with a former U.S. intelligence officer who worked extensively on jihadi cases during several overseas tours. He said that when a singleton of Shahzad's profile -- especially a U.S. citizen -- turns up in a place like Peshawar, local jihadi groups are much more likely to assess him as a probable U.S. spy than as a genuine volunteer. At best, the jihadi groups might conclude that a particular U.S.-originated individual's case is uncertain. They might then encourage the person to go home and carry out an attack -- without giving him any training or access to higher-up specialists that might compromise their local operations. They would see such a U.S.-based volunteer as a ‘freebie,' the former officer said -- if he returns home to attack, great, but if he merely goes off to report back to his C.I.A. case officer, no harm done.

An Israeli analyst says a disproportionate number of engineers became terrorists because they can't tolerate uncertainty:

What links the following people: the Nigerian who wanted to blow up Northwest Airlines Flight 253 to Detroit on Christmas Day; the two Palestinians arrested at Be'er Sheva's Central Bus Station and who are suspected of reconnoitering for a mass terror attack; Mohammed Abd al-Salam Faraj, leader of the killers of Anwar Sadat; Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, planner of the attack on the Twin Towers; Mohamed Atta, who commanded the attack; and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Answer: all are engineers or students of engineering and applied science.

Tom again: Hmm, I wonder that guy in Austin who had a psychotic gripe against the IRS did for a living (besides play bass in a honky tonk band)? Maybe a software engineer?

This is gonna make my next Thanksgiving fun. Half my male relatives are engineers-civil, mechanical, chemical, you name it. Now I'm gonna have to figure out which of them are most likely to snap or blow up their underwear.

Ol' Pat Lang likes peeing all over CNAS, but no worries, if that's what keeps him ticking. I do like his idea of trying the worst of the 9/11 guys on Governor's Island, smack dab in the New York harbor, not far from the World Trade Center site, and in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. Like the Attackerman says, the city that gave the world gangsta rap and The Godfather shouldn't be afraid of a few dissolute middle class Arab wankers. "I swear, on the souls of my grandchildren...."

Oh yeah, gonna make you an offer . . . .

When I was in Tampa last week it was for a meeting on the Anbar Awakening sponsored by CNAS and the College of William & Mary, with the support of Lt. Gen. John Allen of Centcom. It was a great meeting, but most of it was off the record, or at least "not for attribution." (There's a difference.) The meeting was part of a larger research project being conducted by Dr. Mitchell Reiss on why and how states negotiate with terrorist and insurgent groups. It's an interesting project, so I asked him for a summary.

By Ambassador Mitchell B. Reiss

Best Defense chief diplomatic correspondent 

Governments typically come into office swearing they will never talk to their enemies, yet within a matter of months or years often find themselves sitting across a table from the very people they had previously vilified. For example, Vice President Cheney remarked that "We don't negotiate with evil. We defeat it." Yet the Bush Administration talked with both Iran and North Korea, even after the President had labeled them as part of an "axis of evil." 

Talking with terrorist or insurgent groups poses even greater challenges, especially for democratic societies. Governments need to explore whether these groups have limited grievances that might be addressed through a political process or whether they harbor maximalist, millennial, nihilist or apocalyptic goals that cannot be. The risk of miscalculation is high -- governments, and lives, depend on these determinations. 

Read on

I watched the documentary Weather Underground with my wife. (Yes, she's a saint.) It was a pretty good film, but these chumps barely qualified as terrorists. The Black Panther quoted in the film was correct to denounce them. 

A striking moment of irony of comes near the end of the film when a former Weatherman talks about how nutty the 9/11 attacks were. To his credit, he makes it clear that has reached some remorseful moral clarity about believing your cause so noble or holy that you knowingly use violence against innocents.

Bottom line: This one is better filed under "Morons from Chicago Film Festival," along with Wayne's World and The Blues Brothers.  

In other Terrorism Film Festival news, some of youse are lobbying to include The Siege. I saw it when it came out, thought it was OK but very predictable. Anyone wanna vote for it to make the top 10 list?

Also, I haven't seen Avatar, and don't plan to.

Good recommendation, Mr. "FrustratedinDC." My wife and I continued our Terrorism Film Festival by watching Bloody Sunday the other night. It isn't about terrorist acts so much as it is about how hamfisted government actions can create terrorists and encourage popular support for them. It would make a good if exhausting double bill with Battle of Algiers. On its own, Bloody Sunday would make a great final exam for officers studying counterinsurgency doctrine: Watch it and then write a plan to do it differently. It is harder than it looks. 

Btw, the final report of the most recent British government inquiry into the events of  the "Bloody Sunday" of 1972 is scheduled to be published in three months.

Bonus fact: General Sir Mike Jackson, who got in a squabble with Gen. Wesley Clark over Kosovo and later was chief of the British general staff, was a company XO in the paratrooper regiment in Derry during the Bloody Sunday events. 

We also watched Arlington Road, which I found kind of weird-more a festival of paranoia then an insightful look at terror, and so it doesn't make my list. Next up: Paradise Now, recommended by many readers, and Weather Underground, suggested by the intrepid Michael Totten.  

I think terrorism may be the dominant theme of the history of our era, so I am surprised there aren't more thoughtful movies that grapple with it.

Responding to our recent discussion of the best movies ever about terrorism, Marine Lt. Col. William Seely, who has been there and done that, writes to suggest another movie that wouldn't have occurred to me:

You blogged the other day about terrorist movies, all of which are great films for teaching about terrorism, so I thought I would throw one your way: "Fight Club" starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt (1999)??At the time of its release -- the plot was seen as an absurdity in terms of how or why social outcasts could form a group (a fight club) and eventually seek to usher "chaos" through terrorism in order to "reset" the existing social and economic system.  After 9/11,  and the numerous events throughout this past decade--nothing is off the shelf regarding terror plots, methods or procedures. ??I have used the film to teach my Marines about personal motivations, the idea of social outcasts and the consequences, group formation, control, and organization, group cohesion and asymmetric targeting. ??I invite you to watch (or re-watch) it through the lens of a terrorism analyst.? ?Warning -- admittedly, the film is a little odd; has a point -- the ending is great.  There's no hiding that.  

Susan Glasser, who was there, says that one of the biggest mistakes of the last 10 years was letting Osama bin Laden escape from Tora Bora:

The disaster flowed from one bad idea: that the United States could win in Afghanistan without a "big footprint," using locals who wouldn't trigger the renowned Afghan hostility to foreign invaders. Not to mention that deploying a small contingent of special forces armed with cash would prove Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's ideological point about the need to transform the U.S. armed services from a lumbering Cold War conventional force into a leaner, meaner, high-tech military capable of lightning strikes.

Rumsfeld may have been right about the need for transformation. But Tora Bora was a case study not in innovation but in the arrogance of a superpower that made bad decisions in the face of overwhelming evidence that they wouldn't work.

Peter Feaver, who was on the staff of the National Security Council, responds that she is wrong wrong wrong. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan succeeded, he says, because of the "light" approach used. Losing OBL at Tora Bora was the price of that light approach, he concludes. "We had bin Laden within reach at Tora Bora precisely because we were willing to try the very light-footprint approach they denounce," he writes.

Interesting argument, made all the more so because both Ms. Glasser and Prof. Feaver are friends of mine. Also, both are crackerjack smart.

So who is right: the White House aide turned professor or the foreign correspondent turned bigtime editor? I think Susan is, and not only because she is my boss. My reasoning is that the CIA's Bernsten asked for a battalion of Army Rangers (a light force, Prof. Feaver) to be deployed and was turned down.

But I decided to ask someone who was in the middle of this operation. His bottom line, I think, is that this was indeed a terribly screwed up operation, but that Rumsfeld's philosophy was the least of its problems. So he thinks Glasser's facts are correct but not her conclusion, and Feaver's analysis is correct but it misses what was really the lesson of this operation. 

Here is his response:

A boy runs to his father and breathlessly shouts, "Paw, come quick. The hired man and sis are up in the haymow, and he's a-pullin' down his pants and she's a-liftin' up her skirt. Paw, they're getting ready to pee all over our hay!."

To which the father replies, "Son, you've got your facts absolutely right, but you've drawn a completely wrong conclusion." That is, both authors do have some facts correct, though not necessarily their conclusions.

With respect to Susan Glasser:  Yes, Bin Laden escaped. To make the leap from that fact to the many other tidbits offered, such as it was a bad idea to think that we could win without a big footprint and that this was about proving Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's ideological points tells more than a little about her perspective (from amongst the many journalists who outnumbered the U.S. Forces). Full disclosure, I was not there at Tora Bora. But I was down the road a little at the intersection where the collection of senior leaders from varying organizations collided with modern technology (which as I recall were predominately venerable LST-D's ... forgive me if a wax nostalgic for a moment). As such my recollection of "what really happened" differs some from hers.  I would also argue that she misses the mark with the comment that we are still suffering the consequences of the decision not to fight at Tora Bora. I for one would not be willing to bet that much would be different today regardless of a different outcome there.

With respect to Peter Feaver:  I happen to agree with his assessment of the options available, either deploy now with a light 'more unconventional' force or wait until 2002 with a more conventionally footprint. I also personally believe that we had multiple chances under this construct to capture/kill Bin Laden.

Where I tend to differ from many is that I believe most critical observations to be symptomatic of the command relationships at the time and not the ends unto themselves.  I think that our proverbial Achilles heel was, and perhaps still is, unity of effort. Gary Bernsten and BG Dailey "arguing" describes to a tee what I see as the Achilles heel of the entire war at that point -- unity of effort.  While Gary was the commander on the ground the vast preponderance of resources being utilized at the time were obviously military. When his request for additional resources was denied (Rangers and others) I vaguely recall Gary offering to the military leadership to take over the operation (at that time it wasn't just BG Dailey on deck, but also BG Harrell and RAdm Calland - which no doubt helped simplify the situation immensely). What has forever stuck in my mind was the collective response: "Conditions had not been met for the military to assume responsibility for the operation."

Here CWO2/Gunner Keith Marine questions the system that rewards people who drive into roadside bombs:

Drive slow, and stop rewarding failure.  Out of three units who regularly drove Route 605, the number of IED strikes to finds was significant.  The solution is a training one, not one dealing with luck.  IED strikes are preventable.  If you are driving slow enough (below five miles per hour) you will recognize things like rocks the locals put across the road or a line of foot tracks that suddenly veer off the side of the road or a break in vehicle tracks.  The get back to the FOB mentality, coupled with the sure knowledge that Marines will not get hurt in an MRAP but be rewarded with a Combat Action Ribbon kills us.  Giving a Marine a CAR for screwing up and hitting an IED is one of the dumbest things we have ever done, especially when the guy who finds a dozen IEDs is not "engaged by the enemy" but the asshole that drives like mad and hits one is a hero.  Let's be honest with ourselves and recognize an IED strike for what it is, a failure, and take the time to investigate what went wrong.

Drive slow enough to identify irregularities in your environment.  Log and MRAP Company (Amtrackers turned into an MRAP Company) should be masters at Combat Hunter.  You have to get out of your vehicles and V-Sweep areas that you expect to find IEDs in.