JD Week3: Assignment
Please see attachments
Application: Ungoverned Areas and Safe Havens
Terrorist groups often thrive in ungoverned areas and safe havens, where the ability of states to extend the rule of law is weak or non-existent. Ungoverned areas and safe havens range in their geographic locations within state and government boundaries. They are not only remote locations like the Philippine Archipelago, an ungoverned area characterized by rugged terrain used by terrorist groups such as Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). They can also be located in both urban and suburban areas such as Pakistan’s cities. In addition to these locations, there is evidence showing that terrorist groups also use cyberspace and the Internet to recruit and train terrorists and plan terrorist attacks. Ungoverned areas and safe havens provide terrorists groups with a location in which they can promote, train, and educate followers, protect their leaders, and plan future terrorist activities and movements.
To prepare for this assignment:
- Review the Chapter 4 article “The Ultimate Organization” in the course text Terrorism in Perspective. Reflect on the potential use of ungoverned areas for terrorist recruitment and training.
- Review online “Chapter 5: Fragile States and Ungoverned Spaces” from the Institute for National Strategies Studies. Consider how ungoverned areas are used to promote and sustain terrorism.
- Review the PBS video segment The Challenge Just Over the Border. Think about the influence of Afghanistan tribal, ungoverned areas, and safe havens have in promoting terrorism.
- Reflect on examples of ungoverned areas and safe havens.
- Consider how ungoverned areas and safe havens might sustain and promote terrorism.
The assignment (1–2 pages):
- Briefly describe and provide an example of an ungoverned area.
- Briefly describe and provide an example of a safe haven.
- Explain the roles of ungoverned areas and safe havens in sustaining and promoting terrorism. Be specific and use examples to illustrate your explanation.
9 7G LO BA L ST R AT EG I C A SSESSM E N T 2 0 0 9
A Squeeze Play on Sovereignty?
Everywhere, it seems, the nation-state is un-
der siege. Once the primary actors in the post-
Westphalian world, states no longer have the stage
to themselves. Throngs of nonstate entities clamor
for a share of the limelight. From below, aggrieved
national groups press upward, at times violently, in
defiance of status quos decried as unfair or repres-
sive. Meanwhile, from above, international bodies,
regimes, or global advocacy groups press down on
states, demanding greater accountability on every-
thing from product safety and environmental protec-
tion to human rights, often conditioning assistance
on domestic performance. And then there is the
sideways squeeze: from global society’s empowered
private actors—both licit (for example, multinational
corporations and trading and investment firms
)
and
illicit (such as narcotraffickers, criminal gangs, and
transnational terrorists)—who test the capacity of
Chapter 5
Fragile States and Ungoverned Spaces
governments to control their own borders, arguably
the first requirement of territorial sovereignty.
Why is state weakness such a glaring problem now,
in the opening decades of the 21st century? After all,
the accretion of state authority has never been very
smooth or predictable over the course of history.
In places such as China, Egypt, and Mesopotamia,
civil administrative practices date back thousands
of years, while in many other parts of Asia, Africa,
and the Americas, the growth of civic governance
is comparatively recent. Correspondingly, nonstate
actors are hardly novel: whether plying the waters of
the Barbary Coast, Shanghai, or lawless seaports in
premodern Europe, these actors too have left their
mark throughout history. That said, widespread
anxiety over the quality and durability of national
governance in our current era is not at all misplaced.
Three factors help to explain why.
January 2009 capture of rebel leader Laurent Nkunda in Rwanda could increase chances for peace and stability in
Democratic Republic of Congo
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9 8 I N ST I T U T E F O R N AT I O N A L ST R AT EG I C ST U D I ES
A D A P T I N G T O e I G h T G L O B A L C h A L L e N G e S
First, more than a generation later, global society
is still coping with the aftereffects of 20th-century
decolonization. From the Ottoman Empire’s dissolu-
tion to the post–World War II eclipse of Europe’s
imperial dominions, the ranks of independent states
more than tripled: from 43 in 1900 to 135 by 1970.1
Although this trend was justified in terms of advanc-
ing human freedom, its startling speed came at the
price of political stability, especially in cases where
independence was accompanied by artificial borders,
inexperienced or capricious leaders, incipient faction-
alism, or socioeconomic and political dispensations
that could not hold in the absence of colonial patrons.
Second, the Cold War’s onset in the late 1940s
and its rapid subsidence nearly four decades later
posed its own set of challenges. Without question,
the superpower rivalry of that era had a stultifying
effect on political development and modernization
within certain regions situated along postimperial
frontiers—in the western Balkans, Middle East,
and Central and South Asia, most notably—and it
provided a crutch more generally to those elites in
the developing world who saw the benefits of trad-
ing loyalty to Washington or Moscow in return for
support and assistance. Subsequently, as superpower
disengagement began to pick up speed in the late
1980s, the retrenchment of foreign aid and proxies
exerted far-reaching, albeit uneven, influence: in
southern Africa, Central America, and Indochina,
the disengagement on balance helped to bring stale-
mated conflicts to closure, while elsewhere the result
was greater instability as erstwhile beneficiaries of
the Cold War dispensation gained greater room for
malign maneuvering (for example, Saddam Hussein
vis-à-vis Kuwait) or simply foundered on ebbing
external support (such as Siad Barre in Somalia).
A third, more contemporary challenge to state
governance is the quality of interconnectedness that
now extends to even the most underserved parts of
human society. Again, the impacts defy easy charac-
terization. Take communications: if fishermen, say,
in the Bay of Bengal can use their cell phones to alert
Bangladesh coast guard units to pirates who are loot-
ing their nets, that is a boost to local policing. It also
helps the local economy if those same fishermen can
get price quotes on their catch from local markets
before they make landfall back in port. Yet if social
agitators in Kenya, for example, can send text mes-
sages to incite their supporters, their efficiency is also
improved; surely protests or mass violence can be
targeted much more quickly than in the days when
printed flyers, couriers, or radio broadcasts served
that catalyzing role. And speed of communications
is not the only metric here. Public health profession-
Children harvest potatoes in Nicaragua, the second poorest country in Latin America
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9 9G LO BA L ST R AT EG I C A SSESSM E N T 2 0 0 9
Fragile States and ungoverned Spaces
als the world over are well aware that the global air
transportation network can deliver a disease-carry-
ing passenger to almost any destination in the world
before symptoms present themselves.
Faced with unresolved legacies of bygone eras
and a quickening pace of social interactions in many
spheres of life, it is no wonder that many govern-
ments should feel beleaguered. Even where political
elites may have the will to govern well, the way to do
so may still be extraordinarily difficult. But lest all
this anxiety inspire nostalgia for strong governance
capacity, it is worth remembering how much state
strength has contributed to humanity’s burdens
in the past. As a response to war, revolution, and
economic depression, the 20th century’s shift toward
stronger centralized states, as Francis Fukuyama
reminds us, brought with it both extreme experi-
ments in left- and right-wing totalitarianism, and
continuing struggles over how to balance the pursuit
of economic growth and public welfare.2 The lesson
for 21st-century state-building, as Richard Cooper
has argued, is that both the state and civil society are
fragile structures—too little authority brings chaos
and the loss of legitimacy; too much can crush the
civil society that state institutions are intended to
protect and nurture.3
Parsing the Problem
While many observers understandably regard doz-
ens of struggling states spanning several continents
as an unnerving specter, policymakers need to look
objectively at the stresses and strains that state fragil-
ity places upon global society when answering the
“why should we care” question. There is, to be sure,
the plight of the immediately affected populations to
be considered; the fact that over a billion people live
in the shadow of pathologies that could be avoid-
able with the kinds of core services that functioning
governments elsewhere normally provide—for ex-
ample, public security, defense, basic social welfare,
the rule of law/dispute resolution, natural resource
management, and economic opportunity—poses a
huge challenge in its own right. But what other issues
must the global community confront beyond simply
alleviating the humanitarian dimensions of the weak
governance phenomenon?
There is, unfortunately, no easy answer to this
problem. To start with, the quality of “weakness” or
“strength” that a given state exhibits should not be
measured against some abstract standard—it de-
pends very much on the level of demand for service
delivery or regulation that societies generate. If, for
instance, a largely rural country is already endowed
with some of the requisites for good economic per-
formance, such as a fair distribution of arable land, a
decent educational system, and sea- or airports that
connect it to the global trading system, demands for
state intervention into the economy may be less than
in a case where a society is polarized by inequitable
distribution of resources or educational opportunity.
Likewise, states with relatively homogeneous popula-
tions and no persecuted or disaffected minorities
may face less demand for affirmative governmental
activism on political participation than in divided
societies where such initiatives act as shock absorb-
ers for managing pent-up social resentments.
Second, even when gaps are clearly evident be-
tween demand for good governance performance in
a given sector and its supply, cross-sectoral dynam-
ics make it difficult to postulate how “weak” a state
really is. Thus, for example, we have an expanding
public policy literature that analyzes the attributes
or indicators of state weakness and, increasingly,
attempts to rank countries according to those
measures.4 As indicated in the strategic atlas in this
chapter, there is widespread agreement on who
the worst performers are; those states toward the
bottom rungs are invariably low-income countries
also engulfed in conflict or emerging from it, and
face all the familiar pathologies associated with
the aftereffects of mass violence. Where the indices
begin to diverge are in cases where a state may have
resource wealth or other endowments that give it a
measure of economic viability—for example, Angola,
Bangladesh, and Lebanon—while its political system
may be crippled by deep-set factionalism or soft
authoritarians. Whether that socioeconomic viability
tends on balance to inoculate a governing elite from
unrest with which it would otherwise have to deal, or
actually dampens the pressures that otherwise might
press factionalized elites from working together—or
both—is hard to say.
Toll-takers, Hitchhikers, Incubators?
As for the kinds of perils that weak states pose
for their neighbors and the global community
more generally, here too one must tread with care.
Oversimplifying cause-and-effect relationships
between weak states as a group and the universe
of “spillover” threats often attributed to them is, as
Stewart Patrick has argued, a poor basis for public
policy decisionmaking.5 That said, looking across
various sectors, it is possible to discern several types
of perverse functionalities that, to varying degrees
1 0 0 I N ST I T U T E F O R N AT I O N A L ST R AT EG I C ST U D I ES
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and in various places, fragile states may aid and
abet. One is a toll-taking role: instances where state
weakness has the effect of imposing costs upon the
global trade network. Sea piracy is an apt example:
at critical nodes along global shipping lanes—for
example, the Straits of Malacca, the Gulf of Aden,
or the Gulf of Guinea—piracy threats heighten the
insurance and related costs of transregional shipping.
In the same vein, rebel groups in the Niger Delta or
violent jihadists operating in Saudi Arabia’s eastern
provinces can pose threats to the flow of oil or gas
to already stressed global energy markets, spiking
prices as a result.
Along with taxes on licit trade, state weakness
aids and abets the phenomenon of illicit hitchhiking.
These are cases where trafficking in illegal commod-
ities—most notably, drugs, small arms, undocu-
mented migrants or slaves, and ill-gotten gains from
transactions in these commodities—spans out across
global society, often using existing trade routes and
infrastructure to turn a profit. As Moisés Naím
has observed, these trade networks may overlap at
critical points and are driven by unsatisfied demand
in the private sectors of wealthy states (or wealthy
rebel groups, in the case of small arms), buoyed in
turn by huge international price differentials for the
services or commodities in question and the cost
advantage of illicit production that acts as a magnet
for potential suppliers.6 At various points along these
well-trodden routes, whether West Africa, the West
Balkans, or along the U.S.-Mexican border, one finds
ill-equipped law enforcement agencies working
under the shadow of physical threats, poor coordina-
tion across borders, and the corrupting influences of
the trade in question.
Finally, there is the incubating function that
weak states may serve. Spanning the economic and
sociopolitical worlds, incubating environments
provide fertile ground, sometimes literally, for the
growth and maturation of a particular transnational
phenomenon or commodity. Again, not all weak
states are equally complicit as incubators. Andean
Ridge countries account for most of the world’s co-
caine harvest, while poppy fields in Afghanistan now
account for the bulk of the world’s opium; traditional
sources for human trafficking include South and
Southeast Asia, Africa, and former Soviet lands; and
persistent conflict provides its own form of incuba-
tion, whether in the form of fleeing refugees or the
growth of groups seeking to advance political agen-
das through violent means. When Soviet forces in-
vaded Afghanistan in 1980, they triggered an influx
of mujahideen fighters from throughout the Muslim
world, as well as support from wealthy Middle East
oil producers and the United States. After the Soviets
withdrew in 1989, a chaotic, Taliban-dominated
Afghanistan and adjoining areas of Pakistan became
hospitable venues for the continued training,
recruitment, indoctrination, and team-building of
violent jihadist groups whose resentments would be
focused elsewhere. To cite George Tenet’s memorable
formulation: “Afghanistan was less a state sponsor of
terrorism than a state sponsored by terrorism.”7
While the 9/11 terrorist attacks dramatized the
potential hazards of state weakness for a global audi-
ence, the search for remedial solutions has been chal-
lenging. Indeed, the fact that the Iraqi and Afghan
stabilization campaigns so thoroughly dominate the
landscape poses a huge dilemma for policymakers.
Just as each highlights the imperative of striving for
good governance as a requisite for success, they also
command the lion’s share of attention and resources.
That fact, plus growing public fatigue in the United
States over the burdens of long-duration commit-
ments and the lingering memories of Vietnam and
Somalia, makes the task of identifying and mobiliz-
ing support for broader priorities a daunting one.
As the following discussion makes clear, the United
States and the international community more gener-
ally are still in the early stages of developing the
kinds of tools necessary to turn the corner on this
pernicious problem.
Ungoverned Areas: Who’s in Charge?
From the Andean Ridge to the Celebes Sea, the
existence of territories located within the formal
boundaries of a state but beyond its effective control
is an age-old problem. Governments everywhere
have struggled for centuries against the use of law-
less areas as sanctuaries from which unruly tribes,
criminals, and rebels could organize and launch raids
on neighboring settled zones. Thus, the most acute
manifestation of state weakness is found not only in
its dysfunction but also in its complete absence from
places where it should be.
With the resources afforded by globalization and
modern technology, terrorists or other groups are
able to take advantage of law enforcement vacuums
to organize, train, plan, command, and launch opera-
tions at far greater range and exponentially greater
destructive effect than the bandits and brigands of
the past. For example, a number of major terrorist
plots have been planned and coordinated from the
ungoverned areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan
1 0 1G LO BA L ST R AT EG I C A SSESSM E N T 2 0 0 9
Fragile States and ungoverned Spaces
border, including one in 2006 that would have
destroyed seven transatlantic airliners had it not
been thwarted by British police. Extremists have
used these sanctuaries to launch attacks against
government and coalition forces in Afghanistan and
to carry out a wave of suicide terror bombings in
Pakistan itself.
Underlying the sanctuary problem is another
drama: the contest for local loyalty. Organizations
that are either actually affiliated or simply ideologi-
cally aligned with those who launch attacks against
outside targets exploit the lack of public services in
ungoverned areas to establish rival political struc-
tures that enhance their credibility as alternatives
to the status quo. The mere deficiency of services in
these areas, combined with the hostility that often
exists between local populations and neighboring
groups or state authorities, generates grievances that
radical propagandists can use to mobilize violent ac-
tion. Indeed, the existence of disorder in significant
portions of any country undermines the credibility of
the recognized government. At best, this erosion of
legitimacy jeopardizes political reform and economic
development; at worst, it can aid and abet transna-
tional criminals, pique anxieties over public health,
and threaten the survival of the state itself.
Beware the Stereotypes
When people hear the term ungoverned area, they
usually think of an isolated region of inhospitable
terrain, where a weak central government lacks
the wherewithal to enforce its writ. The prototypes
would be tribal territory along both sides of the
Pakistan-Afghanistan border, or former Khmer
Rouge areas in northwestern Cambodia, or the
eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of the
Congo. This concept is, however, at once too narrow
and too broad. Ungoverned areas exist not only in
fragile, failing, and failed states but also in inacces-
sible border regions of fundamentally well-governed
states. For that matter, many places that are far from
remote—some of them in the hearts of capital cities
and in the migrant- and immigrant-populated slums
that sometimes surround them—are also effectively
ungoverned.
At the same time, it is essential to realize that not
all areas of land outside the effective control of the
nominal, internationally recognized state authori-
ties are truly ungoverned. Few inhabited areas of the
world are absolutely without some kind of govern-
ment. It is entirely possible for the de facto possessors
Migration: A Symptom of Conflict . . .
or a Cause?
Social friction arising from the migration of mostly poor job-
seekers from the developing countries of the global South to
better-off nations of the South or to the industrialized countries
of the global North is already a source of conflict in many parts
of the world, and is likely to become even more so as environ-
mental change begins to boost the number of “climate refugees.”
Although the arrival of affluent, well-educated migrants does not
usually provoke widespread hostility, opposition is growing in
both developed and underdeveloped countries to the inflow of
poor and destitute newcomers, who are often seen as threatening
the jobs and livelihoods of native workers. This, in turn, has led in
some cases to spontaneous mob violence against migrants, the
rise of ultranationalist organizations that have periodically target-
ed immigrants for violent attack, popular demands for intensified
patrolling of borders and coastal waters, and other moves that
impinge on the mission, structure, and activities of law enforce-
ment and military organizations—a trend that is certain to gain
momentum with time.
Although precise data are often hard to come by, it is evident
that the world is witnessing a mammoth flow of human beings
from the poorest lands of the global South to less impoverished
nations in the same areas and to the global North. According
to the World Bank, the developing world now houses approxi-
mately 74 million “South-to-South” migrants. Outside of the
developing world, there are another 82 million “South-to-North”
migrants—some residing legally in their adopted countr y, some
not. While many considerations no doubt play a role in spurring
this extraordinar y human current, the allure of higher paying
jobs in the destination countr y is probably the overriding factor.
In Haiti, for example, per capita income in 2006 was $430, while
in the neighboring Dominican Republic it was $2,910—a power-
ful magnet for cross-border migration, much of it illegal. Like-
wise, per capita income in Morocco—itself a lure for migrants
from sub-Saharan Africa—was $2,160; across the narrow Strait
of Gibraltar in Spain, it was $27,340. Similar income gaps can be
found around the world, prompting poor and destitute individu-
als to leave their homes and, in many cases, face considerable
hardship and risk in the search for better paying jobs.
Along with exploitation and abuse by unsavor y employ-
ers and human traffickers—coyotes, as they are called on the
U.S.-Mexican border—these migrants face an increased risk
of violence at the hands of poor and unemployed residents in
destination and transit countries. The fact that the migrants are
often of a different race, ethnicity, or religion than those of their
adopted countr y often adds to the hostility they face from na-
tives. In some cases, the violence they experience is provoked
by fears that migrants will claim jobs that are already in short
6 Continued on p. 103
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supply; in others, that they will somehow jeopardize
the racial or religious “purity” of the homeland. A
May 2008 outbreak of anti-immigrant violence in
South Africa, for example, was evidently sparked
by resentment among impoverished slum dwell-
ers over high unemployment rates and rising food
prices—with destitute migrants from Malawi, Mo-
zambique, and Zimbabwe chosen as scapegoats.
Whatever the cause, at least 42 people were killed
and tens of thousands forced from their homes be-
fore then-President Thabo Mbeki ordered the army
to reinforce overstretched police forces and restore
public order.
Militar y and paramilitar y forces are also be-
ing called upon to play an ever-increasing role as
defenders of borders and coastal areas perceived
as being under assault by economic migrants and
“boat people” from areas less fortunate. In the Unit-
ed States, for example, Army National Guard units
have been deployed along the U.S.-Mexican border
to assist Border Patrol forces in stemming illegal mi-
gration from Mexico. In Europe, the European Union
has formed a joint naval patrol in the Mediterra-
nean, dubbed Operation Ulysses, to prevent small
ships carr ying illegal migrants from North Africa
from reaching Spain, Portugal, and Italy. Although
characterized as militar y operations other than war,
such endeavors often employ equipment employed
in low-level combat operations, such as aerial sur-
veillance systems and coastal patrol craft.
These migrator y pressures—and the resulting
points of friction—are sure to persist as long as the
gap in income levels between neighboring coun-
tries remains so wide. But the global flow of human-
ity is destined to acquire flood-like proportions as
global temperatures rise and many once-habitable
areas become uninhabitable due to persistent
drought, recurring crop failures, and sea-level rise.
“We judge that economic refugees will perceive
additional reasons to flee their homes because
of harsher climates,” Dr. Thomas Fingar, Deputy
Director of the National Intelligence Council, told
the House Select Committee on Intelligence on June
25, 2008. “Besides movements within countries,
especially to urban areas, many displaced persons
will move into neighboring developing countries,
sometimes as a staging ground for subsequent
movement onward to more developed and richer
countries with greater economic opportunities.”
More often than not, he continued, likely receiving
countries “will have neither the resources nor inter-
est to host these climate migrants.”
The increase in migrator y pressures as a result
of global climate change—and what is sure to be
a corresponding rise in anti-immigrant sentiment
in receiving countries—will be felt throughout the
world, but is likely to be especially pronounced
along the southern boundaries of both the United
States and Western Europe. “[T ]he United States
will need to anticipate and plan for growing im-
migration pressures,” Dr. Fingar testified in 2008.
Although climate change is a slow-moving and
long-term development, “extreme weather events
and growing evidence of [coastal] inundation will
motivate many to move sooner rather than later.”
This is particularly a concern for the United States,
he noted, because “almost one-fourth of the coun-
tries with the greatest percentage of population in
low-elevation coastal zones are in the Caribbean”—
a relatively short distance by boat from American
shores.
Europe faces a similar challenge, according to Na-
tional Security and the Threat of Climate Change, a
2007 study by the CNA Corporation that notes, “The
greater threat to Europe lies in migration of people
from across the Mediterranean, from the Maghreb,
the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa.” Environ-
mental stresses may not be the only factors driving
migration to Europe, but “as more people migrate
from the Middle East because of water shortages
and loss of their already marginal agricultural lands
. . . the social and economic stress on European na-
tions will rise.” A greater reliance on quasi-militar y
means to stem the human tide and an increase in
anti-immigrant violence are likely results.
The violence arising from increased human mi-
grator y pressures may be small-scale and sporadic,
but it is growing in volume and frequency and is
extending to more and more areas of the world.
With the divide between rich and poor expected to
remain wide and more regions being rendered un-
inhabitable by global warming, the impetus among
affected peoples to move across international
boundaries can only grow in intensity—despite the
risk of meeting an increasingly hostile reception.
Migrator y conflict will, therefore, become an ever
more significant problem in national and interna-
tional security affairs.
1 0 3G LO BA L ST R AT EG I C A SSESSM E N T 2 0 0 9
Fragile States and ungoverned Spaces
of what Edmund Burke called the “quantum of
power” in a community beyond the reach of the
recognized government to govern the territory under
their control almost as well if not better than the de
jure authorities in their own part of the country. This
applies especially not only to areas ruled on a practi-
cally permanent basis by secessionist or autonomist
movements, such as Iraqi Kurdistan under Saddam
Hussein or Transnistria and South Ossetia today, but
also to less formally defined zones under the effective
control of tribes or even organized crime gangs.
Finally, from a practical point of view, it is neces-
sary to pick and choose which ungoverned areas are
sufficiently problematic to demand urgent interna-
tional attention and action, and among those requir-
ing attention, which ones are primarily challenges
to human development and which are clear and
present security dangers. As outside powers consider
whether to get involved in dealing with the multitude
of ungoverned areas, they will inevitably find them-
selves having to differentiate between them by decid-
ing whether the risk of “ungovernedness” is mainly
to the people living in the area, to other citizens of
the country concerned, or to other states. With this
requirement to differentiate and prioritize in mind,
policymakers should be careful to avoid setting un-
realistic goals or creating inflated public expectations
that all ungoverned areas, or even all terrorist use of
such ungoverned areas, can be eliminated.
Evaluating Strategic Options
Regardless of how well a de facto power structure
may control a particular territory, the fact that it is
neither connected nor accountable to the nominally
sovereign authorities can create certain problems for
the international community. The international state
system is predicated upon the assumption that each
sovereign state is capable of wielding effective power
in the territory it purports to govern. Each state is
obliged to keep its territory from being used to attack
other states, and in particular to prevent its use for
purposes of terrorism. If some states are unable to
fulfill these obligations because they do not, in fact,
wield effective power throughout their territory, there
will be considerable pressure on others, whose people
are targeted by terrorists enjoying sanctuary in un-
governed areas, to take matters into their own hands.
Perhaps equally important, especially in the post-
9/11 context, is that the problem of ungoverned areas
serving as terrorist safe havens is inextricably tied to
the wider globalized insurgency, rooted in a radical
interpretation of Islamic political theory, that rejects
the legitimacy of the international state system itself.
Anything that calls into question the willingness and
ability of the members of that system to provide for
5 Continued from p. 101
Nomads watering camels in Sudan
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human needs within their respective territories is
potential fodder for this extremist campaign. All of
these considerations imply a rebuttable presumption
that the best way to deal with ungoverned areas is to
bolster the will and enhance the capacities of the de
jure state so that it can extend control over the terri-
tory in question. It is precisely this approach that is
embedded—apparently uncritically—in most exist-
ing strategy and policy on ungoverned areas.
Clearly, many countries do suffer from weak state
institutions, so a policy of strengthening state capacity
makes a great deal of sense as a general proposition.
Actual ungoverned areas, however, do not exist as
general propositions but as unique geographic, eco-
nomic, social, and, above all, political environments,
each characterized by a set of facts that may well rebut
the presumption underlying the general policy. Thus,
before setting out to help the recognized government
establish better control over an ungoverned area, we
must ask ourselves three questions.
Why is the area ungoverned? Ungoverned areas
are ungoverned for a reason, but not all of them for
the same reason. Governance deficits may exist be-
cause an area is physically hard to reach, or because
criminal gangs have seized control against the wishes
of the local population, or because state authorities
in the area have been co-opted, corrupted, or intimi-
dated. In all these cases, a strategy of strengthening
and expanding governmental capacity would be a
sensible response to the governance deficit. By con-
trast, some areas are ungoverned because the state’s
ruling elite has, for one reason or another, chosen to
disregard the interests and welfare of the inhabitants.
Finally, some are ungoverned because the people
who live there like it that way. This obviously applies
to many of the most problematic cases, such as the
tribal areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border
and in the Yemeni countryside. In these areas, trying
to introduce central government control may well
increase, rather than decrease, popular support for
insurgent and terrorist groups, perhaps even turning
latent insurgencies into active ones.
What kind of governance would central authori-
ties impose? While ungoverned areas create many
problems, they affect the international community
most severely in the context of the struggle between
competing visions of political legitimacy. Ulti-
mately, therefore, how an area is governed matters
just as much as the fact that it is governed. Assist-
ing a police state to establish repressive authority
over additional elements of its population might
be effective in preventing an area’s use as a terrorist
sanctuary in the short term, but at a long-term cost
of alienating people who might otherwise be neu-
tral or even potential allies in the struggle against
extremism. This is particularly true when dominant
segments of the country’s population see inhabit-
ants of the ungoverned area as inferior or alien, or
when governance is weak because inhabitants prefer
not to be ruled by outsiders.
Will outside involvement make things better
or worse? As difficult as it can be to extend state
authority into a previously ungoverned area without
alienating the local population, the problems may be
multiplied exponentially if that authority is imposed
under foreign pressure. Recent experience in Paki-
stan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) is
a case in point. Again, whether outside involvement
is productive or counterproductive depends on the
case at hand, the type of assistance provided, and the
strategy being pursued by the central government.
In the best case, the provision of technical assistance,
training, and equipment may enable the central
authorities to compete more effectively for the hearts
and minds of the contested population. In the worst
case, outside involvement can stoke the fires of in-
surgency, reinforce popular sympathy with terrorist
ideology, and undermine the legitimacy of the very
regime the policy is intended to bolster.
The answers to these three questions may well
lead to the conclusion that direct encouragement
and assistance to the central government in extend-
ing control over the ungoverned area are the best
course of action. If so, the process is still far from
simple. Political consensus for action must be cre-
ated in the host state. Institutional capacities that
are often inadequate even to meet the needs of the
relatively well-governed areas of the country must
be enhanced. Above all, it is essential to develop
detailed, up-to-date intelligence on the geographic,
social, economic, military, and political realities in
the area to be controlled. Depending on the situation
on the ground, the financial outlays and commit-
ments of expertise can be substantial, well exceeding
those involved in traditional development assistance
programs, and requiring much closer integration of
a wide range of skills from various departments and
agencies of the countries providing assistance.
If, on the other hand, the answers to the questions
above lead to the conclusion that direct extension
of state authority into the ungoverned area would
be counterproductive, then a range of other options
must be considered. These might include:
1 0 5G LO BA L ST R AT EG I C A SSESSM E N T 2 0 0 9
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n Working with leaders in both the central
government and the ungoverned area to regularize
the area’s status within the larger state. For example,
in exchange for external economic development
assistance or political concessions, local leaders may
be open to limited but sufficient cooperation with
government officials to curtail criminal or terrorist
activity.
n Pursuing deals with the de facto power structure
in the ungoverned area independently of the de jure
central authorities. The development of coopera-
tive relations between U.S. forces and Sunni tribal
sheikhs in Iraq’s Anbar Province may provide a
rudimentary model. In the long run, this course
may lead to support for formal independence for the
(formerly) ungoverned area.
n Internationalizing the issue under the auspices
of the United Nations (UN) or a regional security
organization. Britain’s Lord Robertson and Lord
Ashdown specifically referred to the possibility of
UN-mandated action to deal with ungoverned areas
when they advocated the creation of more effective
military forces under the auspices of the European
Union in June 2008.
None of these courses is without peril. Past
reliance upon locals to police themselves without ef-
fective incentives to do so effectively is, in some mea-
sure, the reason why areas such as Pakistan’s FATA
are practically ungoverned today. Choosing the
wrong local power brokers to work with runs the risk
of empowering warlords and creating what amounts
to a giant protection racket. Clumsy attempts to buy
off local populations by trading economic incen-
tives for compromises on highly charged cultural or
political issues can easily backfire by sparking moral
outrage. Supporting independence for populations
in formerly ungoverned areas will certainly create
enemies in the rest of the country, probably provoke
international condemnation on grounds of interfer-
ence in the host country’s internal affairs, and poten-
tially lead to irredentist conflict in the future.
Ultimately, the degree of danger posed by the
continuing lack of governance in the area in question
will determine whether these risks are worth taking.
If the area is being actively used by terrorist groups
with global agendas and global reach, outside players
may well judge that getting effective control in place
is paramount to any other objective. If so, the choice
may come down to which side to back: the official
central authorities or the people in the region itself.
If we truly believe, as our rhetoric would have it, that
governing people fairly and in a way consistent with
their own desires and expectations is the surest path
to preventing the use of their territory by terrorists
or other illicit actors, then the choice will become
that much clearer.
Pandemics: State Fragility’s Most
Telling Gap?
A nation-state’s capacity to govern effectively faces
no stiffer test than its ability to manage infectious
disease crises. Pandemics require unprecedented
multidisciplinary and multi-agency communication,
expertise, and collaboration at the state, regional,
and international levels, all of which are crucial for
containment of the disease and mitigation of its
consequences. Andrew Price-Smith has argued that
“as disease intensity grows it will correspondingly
reduce state capacity, increase economic deprivation,
and deplete the reservoir of human capital within
seriously affected states.”8 A strong correlation also
exists between a population’s health, as measured by
life expectancy and infant mortality rates, and that
state’s capacity to govern. Disease management is a
critical element in this equation.
Countries beset by poor governance and low
levels of state capacity have failed in today’s world
to contain and manage the spread of a contagion
and mitigate its economic and political toll. The data
Indian health officials cull birds to curb spread of bird flu
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here are compelling: 75 percent of epidemics during
the last three decades have occurred in countries
where war, conflict, and prolonged political violence
have crippled their capacity to respond, leaving
their neighbors and the world vulnerable. Gaps in
state capacity are defined as the protective public
health infrastructure (water, sanitation, food, shelter,
fuel, and health) and the systems that support and
manage this infrastructure on a daily basis as being
either insufficient, absent, not maintained, denied, or
politically influenced, interfered with, or vulnerable
to corruption.
Disease and State Weakness: A Vicious Cycle
Epidemics and pandemics are always public health
emergencies. They easily elude a compromised
health system and can rapidly cause confusion, fear,
and chaos, and send populations fleeing across un-
protected borders. An estimated 6.4 million people
die each year from AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.
An additional 1.3 million children die from diseases
preventable by vaccine. AIDS, a pandemic whose
spread and morbidity are directly fueled by (though
by no means limited to) weak states and ungoverned
spaces, has demonstrated how an infectious disease
can “disrupt and destabilize” governance, becom-
ing a major issue in national security debates. It
has taught us how quickly an infectious disease can
spread worldwide, and how poor and unrepresented
populations are most affected.
In 2003, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome
(SARS) highlighted the importance of broad out-
break control measures and information-sharing
for mitigation and prevention efforts, when China’s
initial failure to disclose the epidemic resulted in
its spread to over 40 countries around the globe. It
required the World Health Organization (WHO) to
aggressively expand advisories, real-time informa-
tion-sharing, and broad outbreak control measures.
This was an unprecedented measure, which in turn
prompted a World Health Assembly resolution to
revise old International Health Regulations (IHR)
initially used to control smallpox, cholera, plague,
and yellow fever decades before. The dated regula-
tions had limitations such as a restricted surveillance
capacity and inadequate mechanisms for swift assess-
ment and investigation within sovereign countries
that, if not revised, would fail to contain modern-day
diseases across land borders and via air and sea travel
and trade.
In 2005, WHO authority and surveillance capacity
expanded when human rights principles were added
to the criteria for measuring public health interven-
tions to stop pandemics. These changes represent a
major development in the use of international law for
public health purposes. The resulting international
treaty of June 2007, which applies to “public health
emergencies of international concern,” ensures
maximum security against the international spread
of diseases, while addressing the need to minimize
interference with trade and travel to mitigate the
economic tragedy that prevails with any pandemic.
The management of the deadly avian influenza
A virus (H5N1) outbreak that followed the SARS
pandemic and that occupies our concerns today
confirms that well-governed countries do have
the capacity and will both to eliminate SARS and
contain H5N1. Yet poorly governed countries remain
endemically threatened by newly emergent and re-
emergent bacteria and viruses. While the H5N1 virus
is of global concern because it mutates incessantly
and gains resistance the longer it remains unchecked,
countries with poor governance tend to resent mea-
sures, even if designed by treaty to protect state and
global populations, that appear to threaten their own
national sovereignty. This can be a deadly combina-
tion: hidden repositories of disease may occur in any
country, but fragile states and ungoverned spaces,
with massive migration and displacement of human
populations, represent an “ideal home” for any future
viral mutation and propagation, and would elude
the best intentions of the WHO and IHR. These
diasporic populations are at risk for the transmission
of disease and resistant organisms that are poorly
identified and controlled, while they also jeopar-
dize the global surveillance required under current
international mandates. Finding a means to optimize
global surveillance and to contain highly lethal and
aggressive diseases remains a global priority.
AIDS, SARS, and H5N1 viruses and drug-resistant
tuberculosis underscore how important it is to
transcend conventional concepts of sovereignty if
global pandemics are to be prevented or at least
contained. The 2005 IHR is already under threat
from trade, political, and social inequity concerns. In
late 2006, Indonesia chose not to share with WHO
live H5N1 virus samples from new cases; WHO
hoped to carry out a genome study to determine
whether a more lethal mutation had occurred, which
is necessary for successful vaccine development.
Fearing that expensive patented vaccines produced
in rich countries would be less accessible to poorer
countries, Indonesia suspended the transfer of live
virus samples, claiming sovereign ownership of the
1 0 7G LO BA L ST R AT EG I C A SSESSM E N T 2 0 0 9
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virus itself. Other countries threatened the same
action, challenging WHO authorities, the World
Health Assembly, and the global health community
to guarantee every country access to vaccines and
equal protections and coverage.
Globalization, which has provided great eco-
nomic gains in many Asian countries, has also
increased discrepancies in health outcomes between
the “have” and “have not” populations in the same
country. A paradox of globalization is that state
resources are often directed toward building private
capacity resources at the expense of maintenance
for public hospitals, health facilities, and systems,
on the grounds that when the economic situation
improves, health security will follow. Yet popula-
tions have increasingly seen their access to health
care and medications diminish, and for many, health
has become a major security concern. Megacity
populations—most of whom are under age 25, poor,
uneducated, and discontent—often occupy dense
and disaster-prone areas in the developing world,
devoid of public health infrastructure and protec-
tions, including surveillance capacity. Pandemics
may prove to be the politically catalyzing event that
exposes such vulnerabilities in otherwise promising
economic globalization initiatives. The current crisis
of insufficient health care workers in 57 poor African
and Asian countries severely impairs their ability to
provide even the most essential daily and lifesaving
interventions. This crisis will make state sovereignty
a moot point when an undetected epidemic in a
fragile nation-state accelerates into a continent-wide
pandemic.
Engaging the Problem
The existing 2005 IHR is not without legal dis-
agreements and controversy, especially as it relates to
fragile states and ungoverned spaces. David Fidler,
who has led efforts to strengthen global capac-
ity through international law, reminds us of more
desperate legal limitations for fragile states and states
with ungoverned spaces, beginning with the fact
that neither the IHR nor other international legal
instruments applicable to public health defines the
terms fragile state or ungoverned space. International
law does not recognize the right of a state, directly or
indirectly, to infringe on another’s sovereignty simply
because it is “weak and experiencing difficulties effec-
tively governing all parts of its territory.” The fact that
a state is weak or “fragile,” or has less effective gover-
nance in some parts of its territory, does not dilute its
rights as a sovereign state under international law.9
Rights and obligations under the 2005 IHR with
respect to fragile and ungoverned spaces are unclear
because the terms’ lack of definition fails to inform
such provisions under the existing law. The surveil-
lance provisions in the 2005 IHR nevertheless are
relevant:
n First, they require all state parties to report to
WHO all events within their respective territories
that may constitute a public health emergency of
international concern (Article 6.1). This includes
governments of fragile states or those with ungov-
erned territories.
n Second, the provision (Article 9.1) allows WHO
to receive reports of disease events from sources
other than governments, such as nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs) or the media, and to seek veri-
fication of these reports. The expansion of WHO’s
ability to collect, analyze, and pursue epidemiologi-
cally significant information would allow WHO to
raise surveillance awareness about disease events in
fragile and ungoverned areas.
n Third, the IHR (Article 9.2) requires a state
party to report within 24 hours evidence that it
receives of a disaster event occurring within the
territory of another state party, which could produce
reports of “a public health risk” occurrence in fragile
and ungoverned areas.
Taken together, these three surveillance provisions
in the IHR serve to increase transparency and the
flow of information where governance has broken
down. The IHR does not, however, grant any state
party or WHO the right to intervene without the
affected state’s permission. Put bluntly, international
law presently gives a state the right to let its people
die even when help is at hand—a grim reality high-
lighted when Cyclone Nargis devastated Myanmar’s
Irrawaddy Delta area in May 2008, leaving more than
140,000 people dead or missing.
Short- and Long-term Solutions
Ultimately, the IHR is only as strong as its weak-
est link, and those weakest links worldwide clearly
belong to infected populations from fragile states
and ungoverned spaces. Peace-building that opens
the door to improved governance requires sustained
initiatives that move beyond rhetoric to strengthen
nation-state institutions and modernize a country’s
political system.
A first step can come from building capacity in
public health (surveillance and proven community
1 0 8 I N ST I T U T E F O R N AT I O N A L ST R AT EG I C ST U D I ES
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containment and mitigation strategies) as an incen-
tive for fragile states to accept improvements in basic
governance. Such successes occurred through the
“Health as a Bridge to Peace” initiatives that were
implemented by WHO in conflict and postconflict
zones, and are now being re-explored by WHO as
possible models elsewhere. Another means is to
link the guarantee of trade opportunities, security,
surveillance, and public health infrastructure and
systems development to values that speak to a com-
mon respect for global protection and security.
The IHR is far from perfect. In fact, from a clinical
perspective, the IHR falls miserably short of what is
responsibly required to control a pandemic, especial-
ly one that is aggressive and lethal to the human host.
Additionally, decisionmakers rarely consider how
indecision on health insecurity and the transmission
of disease undermines their responsibility to global
health. Fragile states and ungoverned spaces by
definition have little or no public health protections.
Strengthening the IHR would best come in incre-
mental ways that ensure appropriate language, guar-
antees, and individual nation-state buy-in. The right
to sovereignty does not come without the responsi-
bility to protect one’s population, a correlation that
is currently being promoted under the “Responsibil-
ity to Protect (R2P)” initiative’s guiding principles,
which hold that a state is entitled to full sovereignty
so long as it abides by norms established by the
international community. The R2P concept, however,
is restricted to cases involving large-scale, violent
atrocities, such as genocide and crimes against
humanity.10 In June 2008, the Indonesian health min-
ister decided to restrict his office’s reporting on avian
influenza in humans to every 6 months, leading to
concerns that such a delay could lead to a pandemic
if important mutations are not detected in a timely
manner. Indonesia’s action challenges both the IHR
and the R2P, leading experts to question whether the
IHR can stand up to such pressure.
Yet a cognitive link can be made between a poten-
tial pandemic of global genocidal proportions and
the R2P, especially if many of the worst outcomes are
preventable. By incorporating emerging disease con-
trol as part of an international “right to health,” the
IHR can help ensure that infectious disease control
becomes a human rights issue.
In the long term, the global community’s disaster
diplomacy must strengthen and leverage this unique
opportunity in international law, as an initial step
toward an expanded IHR, or as a model for fur-
ther global health initiatives under existing United
Nations Children’s Fund (for example, vaccine
initiatives) and other accepted health mandates (for
example, U.S. International Partnership on Avian
and Pandemic Influenza). A retooled globalization
model must address the world’s worsening health
discrepancies and include a mandated health security
requirement under future UN Charter reform. The
worldwide health care worker crisis is arguably mak-
ing all the good intentions of the IHR debatable. The
protective shield begins with the global community,
which has the responsibility to promote and support
both short- and long-term nation-state and regional
education and training infrastructure, and provide
incentives for health care workers that emphasize
public health, preventive medicine, and primary care.
State Failure: Devising Effective
Responses
Since the 9/11 attacks, American policymakers
have highlighted fragile and failed states as the central
security challenge of our time. In fact, many Western
countries have begun to address these situations, as
it has become clear that some of the principal threats
to their vital national interests—such as terrorist
networks, illicit arms markets, counterfeiting, human
trafficking, money laundering, and narcotics cartels—
are drawn to failed states where these activities can
Armed Somali pirates aboard MV Faina observed from U.S. Navy ship after
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operate with impunity, in the absence of state struc-
tures to control them. Many developed countries have
begun to make structural and programmatic changes
in their foreign policy apparatus to address the chal-
lenges they face from the consequences of these failed
states. These changes are still in their infancy and
appear to be inadequate to the task: poorly funded and
staffed, with uncertain authority.
Within the United States, policy advocates
frequently invoke the centrality of defense, develop-
ment, and diplomacy as the primary instruments of
power needed to address the challenge from mar-
ginal or failed states. Yet a profound discontinuity ex-
ists between the bureaucratic position, organizational
strength, size, budget, and staffing of these three
instruments of national power, and their relationship
to the threat of fragile and failed states, which are
principally caused by a failure of development. Sadly,
it is the developmental instrument that is compara-
tively the weakest in the U.S. arsenal, and yet it is the
one most needed to address the problem.
Setting aside these discontinuities of organiza-
tional power within the United States and other
governments, what do we know about the nature of
state fragility and state failure? While no two situa-
tions are precisely alike, failed states do tend to share
five characteristics:
n collapse of the authority of the central govern-
ment, particularly outside the capital city, mani-
festing in a breakdown in the provision of public
services, the efficacy of the criminal justice system,
and the enforcement of law and order
n macroeconomic collapse with double-digit un-
employment, high rates of inflation, a deterioration
in the value of the currency and its convertibility, and
a decline in the gross domestic product
n widespread civil conflict and human rights
abuses
n mass population movements into refugee or in-
ternally displaced camps, to escape the civil conflict
n rising morbidity and mortality rates from
malnutrition and sickness as food security and access
to water break down and communicable disease
spreads among the general population.
Devising effective responses to these interconnect-
ed problems is a daunting task for outside would-be
interveners. The immediate temptation is to tackle
all of these at once—an understandable reaction, but
one that risks squandering scarce resources. Where,
then, should priority be placed?
Emergency Response: The Humanitarian
Imperative
The most visible and most immediate set of chal-
lenges these states face is humanitarian in nature:
food insecurity, disease epidemics, and population
displacement. During the 1990s, the humanitar-
ian response systems through which the United
States, other donor governments, and international
institutions reacted to the crisis of state failure went
through a profound evolution in doctrine, manage-
ment, structure, and standard setting. Spending
increased for emergency response to what aid agen-
cies were calling complex humanitarian emergencies,
their term for the crises that occur as a result of state
failure. An extensive body of academic research and
practitioner study has developed over the past two
decades that analyzes the architecture of the humani-
tarian response system, its weaknesses, its strengths,
what works well and what does not, and how it might
be reformed or improved.
To start with, authority in the international
response system is very diffuse: clusters of institu-
tions have developed with increasingly defined roles,
but with no clear hierarchy for unified decision-
making. Decisions tend to be made by consensus,
a cumbersome and inefficient process. While the
UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs, charged with the coordination function in
the international system, has improved its leadership
UN personnel help displaced persons return to homes in Pristina, Kosovo
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capacity and technical competence in providing a
management framework since its creation in 1991,
it neither controls funding, nor can it give orders to
other actors even within the UN system, including
the five specialized agencies where humanitarian re-
sources are concentrated: the World Food Program,
UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UN High
Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Children’s
Fund, and the UN Development Program. The sec-
ond institutional cluster is composed of international
NGOs, of which perhaps two dozen dominate the
system, in addition to three international organiza-
tions not formally part of the UN family: the Interna-
tional Committee of the Red Cross, International
Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societ-
ies, and International Organization for Migration.
Finally, the bilateral response agencies of donor gov-
ernments are also major actors in the system, since
they provide over three-quarters of the total funding
spent in humanitarian operations; these donor agen-
cies usually have a field presence as well.
The response agencies have developed a set of
principles or norms that are widely, but not univer-
sally, accepted: aid should be allocated by emergency
based on need, separate from the political interests
of donor and recipient governments and those of the
contestants in the conflict; aid should be distributed
to the population without respect to political ideol-
ogy, position in the conflict, race, ethnicity, religion,
or gender; aid should be used to encourage the rapid
recovery of the population from the crisis and avoid
the dependency syndrome; aid should be provided
in a way that allows the population to have some
control over its own recovery and that helps resolve
rather than exacerbate local conflicts; and aid is pro-
vided in a way that respects the culture and values of
the people receiving it.
In the 1990s, a coalition of European and Ameri-
can NGOs and international organizations developed
a set of technical standards in the major emergency
disciplines (food and nutrition, water and sanitation,
shelter, and public health and emergency medical
care) called the Sphere Project standards, which the
signing organizations agree to follow in their pro-
gramming.11 It is not clear to what degree NGOs in
practice conform to these standards, as the enforce-
ment mechanisms, which rely on peer pressure and
self-reporting, are relatively weak. But the standards
have existed now for more than a decade. While
efforts have been made within aid agencies to bridge
the operational and programmatic gap between
emergency response and long-term development
programs, known as the relief-to-development con-
tinuum, these efforts have achieved limited results
at best. A greater focus on finding means to achieve
success in this area would speed the recovery of
failed states in the reconstruction phase.
The U.S. Government’s humanitarian aid functions
continue to be divided organizationally between the
Department of State and the U.S. Agency for Inter-
national Development (USAID). Within State, the
Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration and
the Bureau of International Organizations mainly
provide block grants to multilateral bodies and have
no operational capacity. Within USAID, the Democ-
racy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance Bureau’s
various units—including the Office of Foreign Disas-
ter Assistance, the Office of Transition Initiatives, the
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Office of Conflict Mitigation and Management, Food
for Peace, and the Office of Military Affairs—possess
the capability to deliver money, commodities, and
programming into crisis areas that the international
aid system sometimes avoids. Problems are com-
pounded in the United States when Congress and the
Office of Management and Budget (OMB) earmark
humanitarian response funding by office, program,
and sector. A consequence of conflicting approaches
and earmarks is that frequently too much money is
provided for some programs and emergencies, while
others are underfunded.
Obstacles to Reconstruction and Development
As difficult as emergency response may be, in the
United States it has traditionally been much better
and more consistently funded over sustained periods
of time than recovery and reconstruction, which are
usually funded in supplemental budgets proposed by
OMB and approved by Congress. The regular alloca-
tion for these emergency response accounts in the
State Department and USAID budgets totals nearly
$3 billion. By contrast, efforts to resource the follow-
on phase through the regular budget of the State
Department’s Office of the Coordinator for Recon-
struction and Stabilization (S/CRS) have been unsuc-
cessful thus far, as Congress has refused to fund fully
either the President’s budget for S/CRS or the civilian
reserve corps. Continuing tensions between S/CRS
and the regional bureaus of the State Department,
where policy and bureaucratic authority have tradi-
tionally been concentrated in the department, have
exacerbated the difficulty.
Even with more resources, the conceptual issues
are staggering. Oxford professor and former World
Bank director Paul Collier, whose book The Bottom
Billion has drawn much international acclaim, has
identified four so-called traps that his empirical
research suggests are all too common among the
poorest performing states, complicating recovery
and reducing the chances for success of international
state-building efforts.12 Collier proposes some rem-
edies to these traps, and describes the results of his
research on the efficacy of various interventions. His
diagnosis and prescriptions are telling.
The conflict trap. Collier reports that 73 percent
of the 1 billion people who live in fragile or failed
states have “recently been through a civil war or are
still in one.” Conflict is more likely in the absence of
economic growth, and it has a significant depressive
effect on growth. Civil wars typically cut growth rates
on average by 2.3 percent per year. Destitute, unem-
ployed young men can be recruited into criminal
gangs or rebel groups. The more instability there is in
a country, the less foreign or domestic investment it
will attract, and the less investment, the less growth,
which leads to more instability and conflict. Accord-
ing to Collier, “There is basically no relationship
between political repression and civil war” or, for
that matter, income inequality and war, based on a
number of empirical studies. What does make a large
difference in the risk of war and its duration is the
country’s income at the onset of conflict: the poorest
countries have the highest risk. Additionally, much
research has shown that countries that end civil
wars through political settlements have a 50 percent
chance for relapse, depending on how quickly eco-
nomic conditions improve. The economy matters.
The natural resource trap. Dependence on primary
commodity exports such as oil, diamonds, and
timber “substantially increases the risk of civil war.”
Democracy and natural resource dependency do not
mix well: resource rents undermine checks and bal-
ances because the influx of money increases the pro-
pensity for corruption. Only when there are powerful
constraints on abuse (competitive bidding of public
projects, for example) do the economies of resource-
rich democracies grow. This does not mean, however,
that autocracies flourish and democracies do not.
Neither grows absent strong oversight, which is why
natural resource wealth can be a serious impediment
to growth in either case.
The location trap. Geography counts a great
deal, in Collier’s view. Being landlocked does not
condemn a country to poverty, he reports, but 38
percent of the people in the bottom billion live in
countries that are. If a landlocked country has good,
unfettered access to a port that gives it an opening to
international markets, the negative effects of being
landlocked disappear. But without that access, and
especially if hostile or uncooperative neighbors con-
tribute to the problem, the economies of landlocked
countries do not grow.
The bad governance/small size trap. Poor gover-
nance has long been recognized as a poverty trap in
poor countries, but it is the most destructive, in the
Collier analysis, in small countries. The three factors
that increase the chances for a turnaround in a failed
state are: if a country has a large population; if a large
portion of the population has a secondary educa-
tion; and, counterintuitively, whether the country
has recently emerged from a civil war (after which
entrenched vested interests are possibly broken up
long enough to allow a reform process to take root).
1 1 2 I N ST I T U T E F O R N AT I O N A L ST R AT EG I C ST U D I ES
A D A P T I N G T O e I G h T G L O B A L C h A L L e N G e S
How can countries break free of these disabling
traps? Collier’s prescriptions lay great stress on cred-
ible long-term commitments from external actors for
a peace-building presence; aid in the form of technical
assistance to build skills among the depleted ranks
of government professionals and service providers;
reconstruction of critical infrastructure such as roads
and trade corridors that help landlocked countries
connect to the outside world; and the negotiation of
charters between a recovering country’s government
and its international backers to foster greater transpar-
ency and acceptable norms of behavior in everything
from business investments to budgeting, and the
disposition of revenues generated by oil or mineral
wealth. Collier’s recommendations are both ambitious
and innovative. Unfortunately, the U.S. Government is
poorly postured to step up to the task at hand.
Getting Our House in Order
Reforming U.S. Governmental structures and
processes is never easy, but it is essential if the United
States is to improve its capacity for responding to
state failure and postconflict recovery. The overarch-
ing goal must be to better integrate the political,
humanitarian, economic, military, and develop-
mental instruments of national power in a fashion
that increases the effectiveness of U.S. Government
responses. Several priorities should guide this effort:
n The initial emergency phase of humanitarian re-
sponse should be structured in a way that facilitates
economic reforms in the country at the grassroots
level. At present, the response system does not rigor-
ously, effectively, or consistently integrate economic
interventions into its programming. A more system-
atic set of programs to stimulate economic activity
and strengthen markets is a fundamental part of
recovery.
n Food aid, under the USAID Food Aid and Food
Security Policy (Title II), makes up nearly half of the
U.S. Government’s budget for emergency response,
but is the least flexible of all the sources of funding.
One action the executive branch should consider is
to urge congressional support for reform of U.S. food
aid policies, most notably a provision that would
allow up to 25 percent of Title II aid to be bought
in developing countries. If used effectively, this new
purchasing authority would be a powerful tool that
aid officers could use to help stimulate local agricul-
tural markets and increase economic activity.
n More than any other element, economic growth,
particularly early in reconstruction, appears one of
the most important factors in a country’s success-
ful recovery. While growth can be stimulated by the
careful investment of foreign aid resources, this av-
enue is not sufficient in itself. The reduction of trade
barriers between a recovering state and developed
economies can have a profound effect on growth
rates if other factors are taken into account. A func-
tional road and highway system, connection to ocean
ports, and other infrastructure are important. Infra-
structure and external aid must be combined with
the lowering of trade barriers and the integration of
a recovering state into the international economic
order in the early stages of reconstruction. Finally,
donors must contribute both funds and expertise
to the creation of a favorable legal and regulatory
framework for business development.
n Reform must come from within; it cannot be
successfully imposed by external actors if there is no
local will or leadership to carry it through. Inter-
national and bilateral efforts at state-building have
limits. Consequently, international agencies should
try to search for, embrace, and fund the indigenous
change agents or reform-minded leadership in fragile
or failed states on the road to recovery, as these are
the people who will increase the chances for their
states to succeed. This means making an active effort
to identify and support the work of reform-minded
ministers and community leaders.
Beyond these specific steps is the paramount need
for sustained funding. While funding over a long pe-
riod of time (10 to 15 years) may not ensure success,
a 2007 RAND study demonstrated that the absence
of sustained funding ensures the failure of state-
building.13 The creation of a permanent, predictable
reconstruction and recovery account in the USAID
budget for conflict countries would be a useful first
step. Absent this reform, making the emergency re-
sponse accounts of the State Department and USAID
more flexible, so that funds can be used for recon-
struction, might be a more politically realistic option.
Either way, real improvement in U.S. performance
will be hard to achieve without a resource base on
which to build.
Complex Contingencies: Can They
Restore Governance?
In contemporary parlance, armed interven-
tions aimed at quelling conflict in fragile or failing
states are often framed in remedial terms. The core
objective, we are told, is to “export stability” into
war-torn regions. But what does that really mean?
1 1 3G LO BA L ST R AT EG I C A SSESSM E N T 2 0 0 9
Fragile States and ungoverned Spaces
Past interventions have aimed variously at giving
peace a chance by interposing peacekeepers between
warring factions that begrudgingly consent to their
intrusion, or at delivering emergency aid to desper-
ate populations, or at toppling capricious dictators
who threaten their fellow citizens or neighboring
countries. If, however, durable stability is the real
focus, even if only as part of the exit strategy, then
an additional ingredient needs to be factored in:
reconstituted governmental structures that people
accept as legitimate.
Building or rebuilding governments amid the
tumult of complex civil-military operations is an
enormously difficult proposition. The operations
themselves may involve elements of warfare, coun-
terinsurgency, mediation, and capacity-building,
all within the same venue. Often, as seen in places
such as Sarajevo or Baghdad, the initial jolt of the
intervention itself may trigger an onset of prob-
lems—looting, retributive violence, a spike in street
crime—that need mitigation. Moreover, even when
the governance issue is squarely on the table, practi-
tioners will bring their own biases when the question
of how best to proceed is raised.
Competing Strategies and Critical Tradeoffs
In their initial phases, many complex operations
are afflicted by a dearth of basic information when
it comes to daily patterns of local governance. The
first and most obvious question is: who is really
in charge? Even in a failed state, power abhors a
vacuum; is it filled by tribal councils, family oli-
garchs, key religious leaders, warlords who extort
others for a living, rebel leaders who fight for a cause,
or figureheads sitting in some faraway national
capital? Second, what keeps these leaders in charge:
seniority, tribal loyalty, electoral sanction, a widely
feared praetorian guard, wealthy outside patrons, or
locally exploitable resources? And third, and most
important, how are these leaders viewed by their
constituencies: as revered masters, defenders of
their rights, predators, or self-aggrandizers? It can
be a great benefit when a recovering or transitional
country has a national unifying figure in its midst,
such as a Norodom Sihanouk, Nelson Mandela, or
Xanana Gusmão, but these cases are very much the
exception, not the rule.
The next challenge is to fit the strategy to the
socio-political context. Broadly, outside interven-
ers may favor either stability- or reformist-oriented
strategies. The former tend to be ex ante–focused—
that is, recovery of prewar stability—and attach over-
riding importance to achieving short-term priorities,
such as reestablishing a modicum of security, restor-
ing traditional elites, and providing vital services
in whatever ways those were delivered previously.
The latter strategies, by contrast, are more ambi-
tious and forward looking. They aim at cultivating
and empowering civil society in ways that promote
human rights and build the rule of law, and thereby
create greater demands for accountable government;
not surprisingly, democracy promotion is often a key
component of this approach.
Ideally, one would want a blend of the two, but
achieving this mix is difficult. Stabilizers are often
criticized for acting with excessive expediency and
for accepting unfair status quos or corrupt leaders
in the interests of pursuing other goals (for example,
counterterrorism), thereby sacrificing longer term
improvements in governance. Reformers, on the
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1 1 4 I N ST I T U T E F O R N AT I O N A L ST R AT EG I C ST U D I ES
A D A P T I N G T O e I G h T G L O B A L C h A L L e N G e S
Afghan police destroy opium poppies during eradication operations
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other hand, invite criticisms for purported indiffer-
ence or hostility to the issue of cultural acceptance,
while pursuing civic initiatives that can polarize local
communities (such as schooling for women in patri-
archal societies) or create the fact of political winners
and losers (for example, through electoral processes),
thereby introducing a new set of instabilities even as
old ones are resolved. Controversy can also attach to
each strategy’s sectoral choices. Stabilizers typically
concentrate on building capacity in the military or
police organizations, primarily to ease the opera-
tional burdens on the outside interveners. Reformers
tend to focus on civil governance reforms, but they
worry the governance structures may not be able to
control the empowered security apparatus they may
someday inherit.
Finally, there is an important “vertical” dimen-
sion to choices about governance-building strategy.
Outside interveners, not surprisingly, tend to focus
on the national level initially, with the aim of find-
ing ways to consolidate legitimate state authority
and extend its writ into the country’s hinterlands.
In such diverse capital cities as Kabul, Baghdad,
Port au Prince, Monrovia, or Phnom Penh, post–
ColdWar era interveners have sought to strengthen
or rebuild national ministries and to regularize
their budgets, thus both cutting down on corrup-
tion and boosting the skills of their staff cohorts.
Even provincial level reconstruction activity, such
as that carried out in Colombia, Afghanistan,
or Iraq, has a writ-extending focus. Yet all these
“top-down” approaches coexist uneasily with a
“bottom-up” imperative in which the search for au-
thority starts at the municipal level and may involve
empowering local groups, such as Sunni militias in
Iraq’s Anbar Province, in the interests of counter-
ing or marginalizing locally based insurgents who
feed upon the population’s resentment of a national
government whose legitimacy they contest.
Can’t We All Just Get Along?
However the strategy is crafted, a basic ques-
tion for any complex contingency is how well the
interveners themselves can work together, not only
at the inception of the operation but also through
unit or personnel rotations that occur over long-
duration missions. Especially in the governance
arena, the civil-military character of these operations
requires more than just the deconfliction or loose
coordination of activity, but a full integration of
effort between professionals from different insti-
tutional cultures with their own operating styles.
Not surprisingly, stereotypes on each side abound;
diversity within each community is often missed as a
result. Just as civilians can be put off by the military’s
penchant for rigid operational routine, military
1 1 5G LO BA L ST R AT EG I C A SSESSM E N T 2 0 0 9
Fragile States and ungoverned Spaces
personnel are frequently frustrated by what they see
as a haphazard or less-than-focused routine among
their civilian colleagues. Somewhat ironically, it is in
the more dangerous operating environments where
civilians and military cadre tend to get along the
best; there is no choice but to do so. As the setting
becomes more permissive, internal coalition man-
agement becomes a more demanding task.
As the foregoing discussion on strategy suggests,
the drama of capacity-building for governance usu-
ally unfolds on two levels. At the national level, the
prime venue is found in the various ministries—
interior, defense, trade, education, finance, and
so forth—where policies are set, civil servants are
recruited, and resources are matched to service
delivery requirements across critical sectors (such
as security, health, and commerce). For outside
interveners, the key objective is to provide techni-
cal assistance and oversight, usually attained via
the technique of embedding personnel directly into
various ministries. These embedded personnel may
have physical challenges such as getting to and from
their ministries safely, but it is the cognitive domain
that is the most difficult to penetrate. Learning how
a given institution really works—its budgeting, per-
sonnel, and programmatic activities—and know-
ing how to be most effective in assisting positive
growth in capacity, while challenging fraud, waste,
and abuse, are daunting tasks, even for personnel
who are already schooled in the local language and
culture.
Generally, the civil-military dynamics at the na-
tional capital level are most likely to play out in terms
of critical choices over security sector reform and its
funding. The job of aligning policing and military
tasks between the key ministries can be a contentious
one, especially where the government faces an active
insurgency and a huge demand for the protection of
critical facilities (such as the energy grid). Beyond
that, funding delays and program management
shortfalls for civil police training, equipping, and
advisory programs have been sore points for military
commanders who find themselves hard pressed to
staff their own training elements—a traditional arena
for special operations forces pre-9/11—without the
added complication of “mission creep” pressures they
may find difficult to fend off. However, these chal-
lenges may pale in comparison to civil-military chal-
lenges at the second level of governance capacity-
building, the provincial level.
Provincial governance challenges are often seen
as the Achilles’ heel of complex operations, and
not without reason. The political terrain can be rife
with local power brokers and their armed loyalists,
corrupt or unpaid civil servants, and dilapidated
infrastructure, all amidst public expectations for
improvement that the intervention itself has inflated
to unrealistic levels. To meet these expectations,
military commanders will seek to mobilize quick-
impact programs with contingency funding explicitly
intended for this purpose. What they have lacked,
and chronically so, are rapidly employable technical
experts who could advise them, say, on how best to
fix a local irrigation system with longer term devel-
opmental priorities in mind, or what steps need to
be taken to ensure that rebuilt community schools or
health clinics will actually have teachers or doctors
and nurses to staff them. The dearth of expertise and
agile funding to bridge quick-impact programs and
long-term recovery has been a huge challenge for
complex operations.
Improving Field Performance
Without question, the array of challenges facing
complex contingencies is enormous. Perhaps the big-
gest challenge, to embellish upon Reinhold Niebuhr’s
prayerful plea, is to somehow muster the courage to
overcome those obstacles that can be surmounted,
the skill to discern those that are impervious to rem-
edy and work around them, and the wisdom to know
one from the other.
Which obstacles can be overcome? In brief, it
would be those that appear most responsive to infu-
sions of greater knowledge, resources, or the right
mix of skills. Four steps are critically important.
Fill information and analytic deficits. Despite
recent improvements, U.S. agencies still have a
long way to go in building a better knowledge base
for likely operating venues. Improved situational
awareness will help shape the terms of entry (for ex-
ample, for forceful or negotiated entry) and generate
better estimates of how interventions will reshape
conflict dynamics within the country or region in
question. That in turn will help to recapture the
concept of ripeness as part of the U.S. Government’s
calculus for targeting expeditionary operations.
Moreover, once they are deployed, information-
sharing between military and civilian elements
remains difficult. Procedures should be developed
that enable the humanitarian and developmental
data collected in stabilization missions to default
into “common user space” unless affirmatively
sorted into a classified channel for counterterrorism
or counterinsurgency.
1 1 6 I N ST I T U T E F O R N AT I O N A L ST R AT EG I C ST U D I ES
A D A P T I N G T O e I G h T G L O B A L C h A L L e N G e S
Enhance self-knowledge. Though it is often paid
lip service, good analysis of lessons learned remains
hard to do. Within the defense community, despite
recent improvements in the joint arena, after-action
reporting remains the preserve of specific commands
and the military Services, while on the civilian side,
the endeavor is still in its infancy. What is needed is a
well-honed interagency lessons learned process that
can cull out and review incoming assessments from
a growing array of sources—blogs, commissioned
studies, debriefings, and so forth—using an agreed
methodology. Such a process could be a valuable cor-
rective against the risk of “over-learning”—proffering
up one experience in one venue as a best practice
with broad applicability—as well as a good means to
sort out instrumental from environmental expla-
nations in determining the factors behind a given
success or failure.
Improve capacity-building at the retail level. Since
their unveiling in the early phases of the Afghan
campaign, provincial reconstruction teams have
proved their worth as useful vehicles for small-scale
reconstruction projects, as well as for capacity-
building for village- and district-level governance
and police reform. They still remain constrained,
however, by a lack of diversified expertise across
all the areas—rule of law, engineering, agriculture,
and police, among others—to which they could
potentially contribute, and the task of identifying
priorities across the sectors of governance, security,
and development remains idiosyncratic. A fourfold
approach is needed: clearer interagency guidance for
the planning and execution of projects; new funding
streams for civilian-led stabilization comparable to
those already available to military commanders; less
reliance on contractors for key assignments where lo-
cal engagement requires a U.S. Government presence
on the expeditionary team; and more extensive team-
building opportunities prior to deployment, so that
the break-in time for newly arriving staff is as tightly
compressed as possible.
Address equipment and service shortfalls. Meeting
the equipment needs for expeditionary elements in
nonpermissive field settings is an ongoing challenge,
as is ensuring comparable support for the medi-
cal and other needs of civilian field personnel and
contractors deployed by various agencies. Complex
operations tend to draw heavily on areas where the
United States has traditionally found it hard to match
supply to requirements, most notably with respect
to armored vehicles, nonlethal weapons, rapidly
deployable explosive ordnance disposal, air defense
countermeasures, and improvised explosive device
countermeasures that work in multinational settings.
And for those obstacles that must be worked
around? Broadly, they fall into an area characterized
by differing institutional equities that drive predi-
cable patterns of behavior and create friction along
the way.
Resolve tensions between diplomatic mediators and
expeditionary planners. Whenever the United States
takes the lead role in negotiating the terms of entry
for expeditionary forces into an operational arena,
such as Bosnia (the Dayton process) or Afghanistan
(the Bonn process), there is going to be an inherent
tension between those who negotiate a settlement
and those who plan and resource the subsequent
operation. This is perfectly understandable. Media-
tors must zealously guard their talks from malign
outside influence; they therefore tend to be exclusive.
Planners by contrast need every available player with
legal authority and funding at the table; they perforce
must be inclusive. The problems are predictable:
planning is delayed; the quick onset of an agreement
produces pressures for near-instantaneous decisions
on forces and resource commitments; and imple-
menters then begin to pick apart the agreement at its
weakest points. The best way to contain these ten-
sions is to insist that the negotiation team be seeded
with a few capable planners who can advise on the
practicality of settlement provisions before the final
deal is cut.
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1 1 7G LO BA L ST R AT EG I C A SSESSM E N T 2 0 0 9
Fragile States and ungoverned Spaces
Balance the stabilizers and reformers. When it
comes to managing tensions between short-term
and long-term priorities, complex operations plan-
ners have no choice: they need both perspectives.
The question is how to ensure those tensions have
a creative rather than a destructive result. Faced
with initial stabilization imperatives, the opera-
tion’s leadership should insist on capacity-building
programs that keep pace with operational needs.
For the reformist camp, that means some measure
of compromise—that is, accepting programs that
might not make the cut if long-term development
were the only goal. By the same token, the leader-
ship’s injunction to the stabilizers should be that
quick-impact projects that fail to achieve their
promised results—for example, a schoolhouse with
no teachers—are not a good investment, and that
individual projects should be accompanied wherev-
er possible by a transition plan that keeps long-term
sustainment in sight. This is especially challenging
in the governance arena, where the institutions that
cushion the shocks of electoral alternation need to
be put in place.
Tolerate differences between partisan and impar-
tial actors. Certain civilian actors in the expedi-
tionary environment, especially humanitarian
relief providers, regard neutrality as a key to their
operational effectiveness, so there is always going to
be some level of tension between them and U.S. or
coalition personnel whenever the latter are seen as
partisans on the political landscape. The challenge
here is to keep a good two-way dialogue, so that
each knows what the other is doing and, where pos-
sible, to create agreed rules of the road. It remains
the case, however, that the factors encroaching on
NGO impartiality are numerous and are broader
than simply guilt by association with the U.S.
military. If NGOs cannot secure their protection by
standing out as neutrals, as UN peacekeepers try
to do, they must either blend in or armor up. Both
options have their drawbacks in terms of gaining
access to populations in need that are scattered
across a dangerous landscape.
Manage competing lines of authority. In complex
operations, it is a fact of life that the mission’s lead-
ing civilian official and military commander will
work up through their respective chains of com-
mand. Even in cases where the former has presiden-
tially conveyed chief-of-mission authority, the latter
can and will submit a reclama on decisions deemed
risky, unwise, or wrong. This pattern has always
been the case in multinational operations, where
assigned national units cross-check directives com-
ing down the operation’s chain of command against
guidance from their own capital. There is no way
around this fact of life; what we can reasonably aim
to achieve is a greater unity of effort, if not a com-
plete unity of command, forged by a shared view
of core policy objectives, the strategies to achieve
them, and the efforts of compatible personalities.
This places an absolute premium on the need to
build leadership teams.
In the end, policymakers have good reason to
be wary of launching complex contingencies into
weak or failing states, given how polarizing nation-
building and counterinsurgency missions have been
over the past half-century. Nevertheless, prevailing
strategic conditions are not likely to let U.S. policy-
makers off the hook of tough decisions on whether
to lead or support these kinds of missions in the
future, given the mix of national security, political,
diplomatic, and humanitarian interests that may be
at stake. For this reason, the United States must do
what it reasonably can to prepare for such missions.
Greater preparedness in this area need not be seen
as a license for wasteful, ill-advised interventions,
but rather as a safeguard against them. gsa
N o t e s
1 Statistics Finland, “World in Figures,” June 2008,
available at
2 Francis Fukuyama, State Building: Governance and
World Order in the Twenty-first Century (London: Profile
Books, 2005).
3 Robert Cooper, The Breaking of Nations: Order and
Chaos in the Twenty-first Century (New York: Atlantic
Monthly Press, 2003).
4 For an informative review that compares and con-
trasts the various measures, see Susan E. Rice and Stewart
Patrick, Index of State Weakness in the Developing World
(Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2008), 5–7.
5 Stewart Patrick, “Weak States and Global Threats:
Fact or Fiction?” The Washington Quarterly 29, no. 2 (Spring
2006), 27–53.
6 Moisés Naím, “The Five Wars of Globalization,”
Foreign Policy, no. 134 (January-February 2003).
7 George J. Tenet, “Written Statement for the Record,”
Joint Inquiry Committee, Senate Select Committee on Intel-
ligence, October 17, 2002.
8 Andrew Price-Smith, The Health of Nations (Cam-
bridge: MIT Press, 2002).
9 See the following publications by David P. Fidler:
“Developments involving SARS, International Law,
and Infectious Disease Control at the Sixth Meeting of
the World Health Assembly,” The American Society of
1 1 8 I N ST I T U T E F O R N AT I O N A L ST R AT EG I C ST U D I ES
A D A P T I N G T O e I G h T G L O B A L C h A L L e N G e S
International Law Insights (June 2003), available at
national Law, and Global Health Diplomacy,” Emerging
Infectious Diseases 14, no. 1 (January 2008), 88–94; and
“Globalization, International law, and Emerging Infectious
Diseases,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 2, no. 2 (April-June
1996), available at
10 United Nations General Assembly, “2005 World
Summit Outcome,” October 2005, available at
11 For background on Sphere standards and its collabo-
rating organizations, see
12 Paul Collier, The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest
Nations Are Failing and What Can Be Done about It (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
13 James Dobbins et al., The Beginner’s Guide to Nation-
Building (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2007), xxi.
Contributors
Dr. James A. Schear (Chapter Editor) is Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense for Partnership
Strategy and Stability Operations. Previously, he
served as Director of Research in the Institute
for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at National
Defense University (NDU). Dr. Schear also
served as an advisor to the United Nations on
field missions in Cambodia and the Former
Yugoslavia and held research appointments
at Harvard University, Carnegie Endowment,
Henry L. Stimson Center, Aspen Institute, and
International Institute for Strategic Studies.
Dr. Frederick M. Burkle, Jr., is a Senior Public
Policy Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Interna-
tional Center for Scholars and a Senior Fellow
in the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at Har-
vard University. Dr. Burkle also holds academic
appointments at Johns Hopkins University and
the Uniformed Services University of the Health
Sciences. He has served as a Deputy Assistant
Administrator for the U.S. Agency for Interna-
tional Development (USAID) and has worked
in numerous complex emergencies, including in
northern Iraq, Somalia, Liberia, and the Former
Yugoslavia.
Dr. Michael T. Klare is the Five College Profes-
sor of Peace and World Security Studies, a joint
appointment at Amherst, Hampshire, Mount
Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the Universi-
ty of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is the author
of Resource Wars (Owl Books, 2001), Blood
and Oil (Metropolitan Books, 2004), and Rising
Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of
Energy (Henry Holt and Company, 2008).
Joseph McMillan is Principal Deputy Assistant
Secretary of Defense for International Security
Affairs. Previously, he served as Senior Research
Fellow in INSS at NDU. A specialist on regional
defense and security issues in the Middle East,
South Asia, as well as transnational terrorism,
Mr. McMillan has more than two decades of ex-
perience as a civilian official in the Department
of Defense, and he also has served as academic
chairman of the Near East South Asia Center
for Strategic Studies.
Andrew S. Natsios is Distinguished Profes-
sor in the Practice of Diplomacy in the Walsh
School of Foreign Service at Georgetown
University. From May 2001 to January 2006,
he served as Administrator of USAID. During
this period, he managed USAID reconstruc-
tion programs in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Sudan,
which totaled more than $14 billion over 4
years. President George W. Bush appointed him
Special Coordinator for International Disaster
Assistance and Special Humanitarian Coordina-
tor for Sudan.
154 TERRORISM IN PERSPECTIVE
O
ne of the surprises of September 11 was
that some of the suicide bombers had
been living and studying in the West for
years. We like to think that our way of life and
the freedoms we enjoy are so attractive that any-
one who lives among us will inevitably become
pro-Western. The globalization of Al Qaeda—its
recruitment of locals to participate in attacks—
and its careful grooming of operatives, were dis-
cussed by the terrorists themselves in a New
York City courtroom, where four of the 1998
African-embassy bombers were tried a year and
a half before September 11. It is too bad that the
terrorists’ revelations, including about the orga-
nization’s vast business holdings, its detailed
planning of operations, its emplacement of
sleepers, and its attempts to acquire weapons of
mass destruction, didn’t receive more attention.
If they had, perhaps we would not have been so
astonished by Al Qaeda’s ability to operate inside
America.
This chapter begins with a discussion of a ter-
rorist who participated in the bombing of the
U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in
August 1998. His story is important for two rea-
sons. First, he was a sleeper. A “talent scout”
noticed that he attended a radical mosque regu-
larly, and that he was increasingly agitated about
the plight of Muslims around the world. Told
that he would have to be trained at a camp to
earn the trust of his new Islamist friends, he
spent his own money to travel to Afghanistan.
The real purpose of his training was to assess his
potential. He was found to be barely educated,
with few skills. But he had something else criti-
cally important to Al Qaeda at the time: lan-
guage skills and Tanzanian citizenship. This is
exactly the kind of operative that Americans are
beginning to fear—a confused young man who
thinks he is helping Muslims by serving as a
sleeper for a terrorist group, whose principal
value to the terrorists is his country of residence.
Now we fear that the terrorist sleepers may be
our next-door neighbors.
The second reason this operative’s story is
important is that he comes from Africa, an area of
the world that may well become an enclave of
Islamist extremism and anti-American sentiment
in the future. Americans tend to fixate on enemies
that can be fought with military might. We have a
much harder time seeing failing states, where ter-
rorists thrive, as a source of danger. We need to
assess why bin Laden’s and other extremists ideas
spread. And we need to look for clues globally,
not just in the Middle East.
America has had the luxury of ignoring
countries at far geographic remove throughout
most of its history. This is no longer possible. Nor
is it sufficient to concentrate exclusively on one or
two villains in a given decade. We have to be alert
to the possibility that the villain may be a seduc-
tive, hateful idea about Us versus Them, rather
than an individual; and that the hateful idea may
be taking hold—in seemingly obscure or remote
locations. The growing availability of powerful
weapons, porous borders, and the communica-
tions revolution make it possible for smaller and
smaller groups to wreak havoc almost anywhere
on the globe.
In the spring of 2000 two American defense
attorneys contacted me to ask whether I would
be willing to serve as an expert witness in the
trial of Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, an Al Qaeda
operative who was involved in the bombing of
The Ultimate Organization
Networks, Franchises, and Freelancers
Jessica Stern
❖
SOURCE: Chapter Nine “The Ultimate Organization” pp. 237–280 from Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious
Militants Kill by Jessica Stern. Copyright © 2003 by Jessica Stern. Reprinted with permission of HarperCollins
Publishers.
04-Mahan-45295.qxd 8/8/2007 12:39 PM Page 154
4 �� Terrorist Tactics Around the Globe 155
the U.S. embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in
August 1998. That attack, and the simultaneous
bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi,
Kenya, killed 224 people, most of them Africans,
and injured thousands.
Mohamed had already admitted his guilt at
the time his lawyers called me. He had told the
FBI that he had rented the house where the
bomb was built, bought the truck used to trans-
port components, bought a grinder for grinding
the explosive, and ground some of the TNT
himself. After the bombing, he fled to South
Africa with a new identity, a new passport, and
$1,000 in cash, this last procured for him by Al
Qaeda.
After a worldwide manhunt lasting longer than
a year, South African authorities found Mohamed
in Cape Town, working at an Indian fast-food
restaurant called Burger World. The South African
government extradited him to the United States.
The U.S. government wanted him executed for
his crimes. Mohamed’s lawyers wanted my help
in arguing that his punishment should be to spend
the rest of his life behind bars in a maximum-
security federal prison, but that he should not be
put to death.
Khalfan Khamis Mohamed was born in 1973
on the island of Pemba and grew up in the vil-
lage of Kidimni on Zanzibar Island. His twin sis-
ter, Fatuma, was born in the evening, but he
didn’t arrive until morning, giving his mother a
lot of trouble, she recalls. But from that point
on, she says, “He was just an ordinary child who
went to school. . . . After school he performed
the normal domestic chores and liked playing
football, like all youth. He didn’t indulge in any
antisocial behavior.”1
The family was poor. They lived in a mud
hut with a thatched roof. His father died when
Mohamed was six or seven years old. People on
Zanzibar don’t pay close attention to dates, and
Mohamed’s mother doesn’t recall exactly when
her husband died. After the death of his father,
Mohamed helped his mother support the family
by working on the farm, harvesting fruits that
grow wild in the forest, and taking care of a
neighboring farmer’s cows.
Mohamed comes from a very different sort of
place than many of the terrorists—a place that,
ironically, benefited from globalization long
before the term become popular. Zanzibar con-
sists of two islands: Zanzibar (known locally
as Unguja) and Pemba. The islands are in the
Indian Ocean, twenty-five miles off the coast of
Tanzania, six degrees south of the equator.
Clove, jackfruit, mango, and breadfruit grow in
the valleys of Pemba Island. Coconut trees,
brought by Indian traders centuries ago, now
grow wild. Monkeys, civets, bushpigs, and mon-
gooses thrive in the forests. Some one hundred
species of birds live in Tanzania, and thirteen
species of bats have been identified on Pemba.
The islands are also famous for their butterflies
and the great variety of game fish found in the
waters between them. Fishing and agriculture
are Zanzibar’s main industries.
Today, Pemba and Zanzibar are largely iso-
lated from the rest of the world. Foreign visitors
tend to be adventurers attracted by the lush,
undisturbed reefs or the profusion of game fish
found in Pemba Channel. Visitors describe an
extraordinarily friendly people who seem utterly
mesmerized by their foreign looks and ways.
They write of the remarkable melee of cultures—
African, Arab, Persian, and Indian—magnificent
Arabic architecture, abundant fruits and fishes,
but also poverty and squalor, with the scent
of spices rising above the stench of sewage and
rotting fish.
Although it is relatively isolated today, Zanzibar
was once the trading center for all of Africa, with
trade links to Arabia, China, India, Persia, and
Southeast Asia. The nineteenth-century English
explorer Richard Burton described Pemba as an
“emerald isle” in a “sea of purest sapphire.” The
scent of cloves, he said, was enticing even from
the sea. The people were a mixed race who had
retained, despite their conversion to Islam, the
skills of divination and other “curious practices
palpably derived from their wild ancestry.”2 The
traditional dhow, a single-masted ship with a
lateen sail, used by Arab merchants for two mil-
lennia to sail on the monsoon winds, is still in
use today and is still built in the same way—with
a hull of mangrove or teak, and ribs of acacia—
with no nails.
A succession of invading powers left rem-
nants of their cultures and languages. Shirazi
Persians, who settled on the coast of East Africa
in the tenth century, intermarried with the locals,
giving rise to an Afro-Persian race.3 Omani
Arabs, who settled on Zanzibar some six cen-
turies later, have had the largest influence on the
culture and language. The name Zanzibar is the
Arabic expression for “land of blacks.” Kiswahili,
Tanzania’s official language, contains a substan-
tial fraction of Arabic, Farsi, and Hindi words, as
well as some Portuguese and English ones.
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Tanzania was formed as a sovereign state
in 1964 through the union of Tanganyika, on
the African mainland, and Zanzibar. Zanzibar
and Pemba Islands have a separate govern-
ment administration from the rest of Tanzania.
Zanzibaris are seeking greater autonomy for
their archipelago. They would like to reap more
of the profits of the export of cloves, which the
central government taxes heavily, and to control
more of the tourist trade.
Tanzania’s ruling party, and Tanganyika itself,
are predominantly Christian. The ruling party
refers to any threat to its rule as motivated by
Islamism, which, ironically, may incite precisely
the kind of extremism the ruling party fears.
During the last decade, elections have been
declared fraudulent by multiple international
observers, and protests have been met with
violence perpetrated by the police, who are pre-
dominantly Christian, against Zanzibaris, who
are predominantly Muslim. To the extent that
Islamism is indigenous in the region, it is found
more on the mainland than on the islands, as
well as in neighboring Kenya, although this
could change. Zanzibaris are deeply disap-
pointed that the United States did not protest
Tanzania’s tampering with the election results
of 1995 and 2000 or the violence that ensued,
although the government’s crimes were pub-
lished widely.4 Although the region is remark-
ably tolerant historically, stimulated by its
long-time exposure to multiple cultures, anti-
Western Islamist sentiment could easily take
root here if democracy fails and state repression
continues.5
Muslims represent 97 percent of the popu-
lation of Zanzibar, most of them Sunni. Shia
represent 12 percent of the population. As in
Indonesia, Islam coexists with Zanzibar’s tradi-
tional religions, including animism. Zanzibar is
famous for its sorcerers, seers, and witch doctors.
Spells often involve Arabic texts, and witches
often dress in traditional Arab garb. Evelyn
Waugh wrote that novices came to Pemba from
as far away as Haiti to study magic and voodoo.
A cult of witches “still flourishes below the sur-
face,” he wrote, expressing his frustration that
“everything is kept hidden from the Europeans.”6
Zanzibar is the home of a secret sect known as
the Wachawi, who practice their arts even today.
They are said to be able to take on the shapes
of animals and birds. Haitian voodooists learned
to animate corpses for labor in the fields by
studying with the Wachawi, who reportedly
developed the technique to escape their masters’
notice when they fled bondage. The Wachawi
are said to be able to bring the recently deceased
back to life, with personality and memory intact.
Locals describe their neighbors returning from
midnight meetings in the bush, pale and speech-
less, having seen their recently deceased loved ones
restored to life. Early-twentieth-century visitors
said that natives told them of powerful witch
guilds, which required prospective members to
offer up a near relation—a spouse or a child—to
be eaten by other initiates.8
As a child, Mohamed attended a madrassah
in the afternoons. The family described him as
serious and quiet—more observant than his sib-
lings, but also a better student. When he was in
the middle of tenth grade, his older brother,
Mohamed Khalfan Mohamed, asked Mohamed
to come to live with him and his family in Dar es
Salaam on the mainland to help out in the
family dry-goods store. Mohamed intended to
complete his schooling in Tanzania, but his
time was taken up with his work at the shop and
attending mosque. He had always been some-
what of a loner, his siblings recounted, but he
became even more isolated after dropping out of
high school, spending time only with his family
and people he met at the mosque.9
The mosques in Dar es Salaam were more
political than the one Mohamed attended in
Zanzibar. There was a great deal of discussion
about the plight of Muslims in Chechnya and
especially in Bosnia. Worshipers were told that it
was their duty to help fellow Muslims around the
world in any way they could.10 One of Mohamed’s
new friends was a man named Sulieman. Sulieman
was from Zanzibar, but he worked on a fishing
boat based in Mombasa, Kenya, owned by a man
whom Mohamed knew only as “Mohamed the
Fisherman.” Mohamed the Fisherman turned out
to be Mohamed Sadiq Odeh, a Saudi of Palestinian
origin who was a member of Al Qaeda. Odeh
would play an important role in the embassy-
bombing conspiracy.11
Sulieman introduced Mohamed to Fahid, who
would also participate in the bombing, who vis-
ited Dar es Salaam only occasionally. Mohamed
started spending much of his free time with Fahid
and Fahid’s friends, who were very religious.
Sometimes they met in Dar es Salaam, and some
times in Mombasa, Kenya. Mohamed says that
they mainly talked about how to help Muslims
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around the world. Often, he said, they would
meet in cars.12
By 1994, Mohamed began to despair at his
own life, family members said. He spent more
and more time at the mosque. He was radical-
ized in that mosque, his sister-in-law recalled.
Mohamed told Fahid he wanted to go to
Bosnia to fight against the Serbs. Fahid told him
that you cannot become a soldier for Islam with-
out training. Fahid also told Mohamed that he
did not trust him, and that he could earn Fahid’s
trust only if he went to Afghanistan to be
trained. Mohamed saved his earnings from the
dry-goods shop and in 1994 traveled with
Sulieman to Pakistan. Fahid had given them a
contact in Karachi, who arranged for their trip
to the camp. Fahid had been at the camp for
around a month when Mohamed and Sulieman
arrived. Mohamed told FBI investigators that the
camp was called Markaz Fath, and that it was
run by a Pakistani Jihadi group called Harkar-
ul-Ansar. He said his teacher was a Pakistani
named Abu Omar. Mohamed said that he met a
lot of people at the camp, one of whom was an
American known as Sulieman America. The
people he met were interested in helping
Muslims around the world, Mohamed said, and
in waging a Jihad against America and against
conservative Muslim states. He said he had never
heard the name Al Qaeda.13
During the first two months at the camp,
the group was trained to use light weapons
(handguns and rifles), launchers, and surface-to-
air missiles. Mohamed and his friends Sulieman
and Fahid were selected for advanced training,
which included learning how to manufacture
explosives and how to join detonators and wires.
Mohamed was not trained in the use of chemical
weapons, although he said that other members of
his group were. Afternoons were taken up with
Islamic studies—including films of atrocities per-
petrated against Muslims in Chechnya and
Bosnia—and sports. Mohamed stayed at the
camp for nine or ten months, he says.14 At the end
of his training, Mohamed wanted to go to Bosnia,
but he was not selected. He was told to leave a
number in case he was needed at a later date.
Mohamed went back to Dar es Salaam, bitterly
disappointed that he had not been allowed to join
the fight against the Serbs.15
Mohamed continued to spend time with the
“brothers” he had met in the mosque or had got-
ten to know at the camp. He went to Somalia
twice in 1997—once to teach Somali fighters
what he had learned in Afghanistan, and once
for a meeting with the men who would ulti-
mately bomb the American embassy.16 Just
before his first trip to Somalia, Fahid introduced
him to a man named Hussein, who would later
lead the group that bombed the U.S. embassy
in Dar es Salaam. Fahid told Mohamed that
Hussein is our brother, that he is a good man
who had been trained to be a mujaheed. Odeh,
explaining how Mohamed fell under Hussein’s
influence, described Hussein as “persuasive,
authoritarian,” and “a very strong leader, a man
of compelling personality.” Mohamed was
impressed by Hussein’s knowledge of Islam.
Some time after this meeting, Hussein moved to
Dar es Salaam with his family. They stayed with
Mohamed in a small flat.17
Three years after he returned from Afghanistan,
Hussein approached Mohamed to invite him to
participate in a “Jihad job.” Mohamed said that he
would like to participate, although he was not
informed about what the “Jihad job” would entail.
Eventually Hussein asked Mohamed to take cer-
tain actions. He instructed him to buy a truck,
which Mohamed did in his own name. He paid
for the truck, a white Suzuki, with cash that
Hussein gave him. Fahid accompanied him and
drove the truck because Mohamed did not know
how to drive. The group used the truck to trans-
port equipment needed for the bomb, including
cylinder tanks, detonators, fertilizer, and TNT.
Hussein also asked him to rent a house, large and
private enough to conceal the group’s activities.
Mohamed remembered Hussein telling him that
he wanted the house to be hidden from the street,
but that it should also be “nice.” Mohamed found
a house with a high wall, which he rented in his
own name. The owner insisted that Mohamed pay
a year’s rent in advance, which he did, with money
Hussein gave him.18
Mohamed, Hussein, and Hussein’s family
moved into the house in the Ilala district of Dar
es Salaam. Other team members came to the
house, but no one ever discussed his role in the
plot. Hussein instructed Mohamed to remain in
the house most of the time, so that if any neigh-
bors came by, there would be someone who could
speak to them in Swahili. Other team members
arrived soon before the bombing: an engineer
named Abdul Rahman, whom Mohamed
described as working with “all confidence”; and
“Ahmed the driver,” whom Mohamed thought
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was Egyptian. Ahmed was the suicide bomber
who would drive the truck into the embassy.
Some five days before the attack, Hussein told
Mohamed that the target of the bombing would
be the American embassy. Mohamed helped load
the tanks, boxes of TNT, and sandbags into the
back of the truck. When the truck got stuck in the
sand behind the house, Mohamed helped the
driver dig it out.19
Hussein and the rest of the team left several
days before the bombing. Most of them said
they were going to Mombasa, without specifying
their final destination. In fact, they had been
instructed to return to Afghanistan before the
bombing took place. Hussein asked Mohamed to
remain in Dar es Salaam, to help the driver with
any last-minute details, and to remove incrimi-
nating evidence from the house. Mohamed did
as he was told, with one exception. He did not
like the idea of throwing away the food grinder
he had used to grind the TNT, since it was still
usable. So he gave it to his sister Zuhura, asking
her to clean it well and to pass it on to his
mother.20
When he was captured by the FBI in October
1999, Mohamed told investigators he was not
sorry that Tanzanians were killed, which he said
was part of the business. He said he had bombed
the embassy because it was his responsibility,
according to his study of Islam. He said he
thought the operation was successful because
the bomb worked, it sent a message to America,
and because it kept American officials busy
investigating it. He also said that if he had not
been caught, he would continue participating in
the Jihad against America or possibly against
Egypt, and that if the U.S. government were to
release him from custody, he would bomb
Americans again. He told his investigators that
he thought about Jihad all the time. He told
them he wants Americans to understand that he
and his fellow warriors are not crazy, gun-wield-
ing people, but are fighting for a cause.21
I travel to New York to watch Mohamed’s
trial. Security is tight. The taxi drops me several
blocks from the entrance to the courthouse
because the street is blocked to traffic. You must
pass through several layers of security before
you get to the room where the trial is being held.
There are metal detectors and guards on the first
floor, and you have to show identification and
sign in outside the courtroom. A guard is suspi-
cious about why I am here. I explain that I am a
defense-team visitor, and an agent instructs me
to sit in the third wooden bench on the right.
I can see from the back of the room that the
bench is already full. When she sees that I mean
to sit there, a woman pulls a child onto her lap
and slides closer in toward her neighbor on the
hard wooden bench. This is Mohamed’s family,
I realize. The women wear bright Zanzibar cot-
tons. The boys and men wear prayer caps. The
little boy immediately to my right is wearing
pressed white cotton. He stares at me with vel-
vety eyes, not at all shy, seemingly delighted
with the opportunity to examine such a strange
foreign creature, whom good fortune has
brought conveniently near at hand. His mother
is too distracted to notice his staring and he
is free to inspect every inch of me, which he
does with obvious pleasure. It is a hot day. I
notice the smell of anxiety in my benchmates’
sweat, but also the pleasant scent of spices. I see
Mohamed’s mother at the far end of the bench.
She sits tall, with dignity, but she looks modest
and kind. She appears surprisingly calm, at least
for now. There are brothers, sisters, children, and
spouses also sharing the bench, as well as the
family with whom Mohamed lived when he fled
to South Africa.
A social worker has been called up to the wit-
ness stand to provide Mohamed’s social history.
She has traveled to Zanzibar twice and shows the
court pictures of Mohamed’s school, the neigh-
borhood where he grew up, and the take-out
restaurant where Mohamed worked as chef in
Cape Town. When she is done, various members
of Mohamed’s family are called up to the stand.
Each is asked what they remember about Mohamed.
An older brother remembers him as good in
school and good at soccer. Mohamed was kind
and peaceable, he said, and would always try to
break up fights. A younger sister recalls him help-
ing her with her schoolwork. Another says that
Mohamed played games with her children, his
nieces and nephews. The mother of the family for
whom he worked in Cape Town recalled how
patient and kind Mohamed had been with her
children and her elderly parents. He even taught
her elderly mother to read the Koran. She said that
she would gladly have given up her daughter in
marriage to Mohamed. All but one of Mohamed’s
family members said it was their first time travel-
ing by airplane or traveling abroad.
The last witness was Mohamed’s mother,
whose name is Hidaya Rubeya juma. There was
a hush in the room as a large lady dressed in
bright cottons and a turban took the stand. I saw
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Mohamed looking down as his mother took her
seat. It seemed to me that Mohamed had a
harder time facing his mother than he did facing
his victims or accusers. There was jolt of pain in
the room, as though the air had been ionized
with terror—his and ours. Not a fear of death,
but the recognition of evil. The recognition that
this person who had killed so many has a mother
who loves him, despite his crimes, and that he is
afraid to look her in the eye. That despite his evil
actions, he is human, just like us. It is one thing
to understand this intellectually. It is another to
see a mother face her killer son, with his many
victims looking on, seeing her fear, her agony,
and her loss. The loss of her son—first to evil,
and maybe to death.
Mohamed’s attorney, Mr. David Ruhnke,
asked Mohamed’s mother, “After you leave and
return to Africa next week, do you know whether
you will ever see your son again?”
“I don’t even know,” she answered quietly.22
“Do you know what this is about, and that
the people here have to decide whether your son
is to be executed or put in prison for life? And I
want to ask you a very difficult question, which
is, if your son were executed, what would that do
to you?”
“It will hurt me. He is my son.”23
Soon after this, the court was adjourned.
Hidaya Rubeya Juma was the last witness to
appear in the penalty phase of Mohamed’s trial.
Closing arguments began at the next session.
In his closing arguments, the prosecutor,
Mr. Fitzgerald, emphasized what he referred to
as Mohamed’s two-sided personality. “I submit
to sit before you and tell you that Khalfan
Mohamed’s personal characteristics as an indi-
vidual human being include the following: one,
Khalfan Mohamed has exhibited responsible
conduct in other areas of his life; two, Khalfen
Mohamed has shown himself to be a person
capable of kindness, friendship, and generosity;
and three, Khalfan Mohamed lost his father at an
early age and worked to help his family, which
struggled financially after the death of the major
breadwinner.” Mohamed can be very kind,
Fitzgerald adds. “You want him to marry your
daughter. You wouldn’t think he would hurt an
ant. The next day he is in custody, saying ‘Yeah, I
bombed people and I’ll do it again.’ That’s what
he is. He’s got two faces. . . . He fooled his
family. . . . He is capable of savagery.”24
Jury members concluded that, if executed,
Mohamed would be seen as a martyr and that
his death could be “exploited by others to justify
future terrorist acts.” He received a life sentence
without parole.
When authorities interrogated Mohamed
Sadiq Odeh in Pakistan, where he had flown on
the day of the bombing, he admitted that he was
a member of Al Qaeda and gave his interroga-
tors the names of some of the Al Qaeda
members involved in the plots. He also referred
to “two or three locals,” whose names he
appeared not to know, who had been left behind
in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi to finish the job.
One of those expendable locals was Mohamed.
According to several Al Qaeda members who
testified at the trial, Al Qaeda is highly “tiered,”
and for the most part, Africans were not admit-
ted to the upper ranks. Mohamed was recruited
as a sleeper because he had a passport, language
skills, and would not stand out as a foreigner in
Dar es Salaam. Odeh explained to the FBI that
there are several types of Al Qaeda operatives:
sophisticated operatives who are involved in
intelligence collection, choosing targets, surveil-
lance, and making the bombs. But another cate-
gory of operatives includes “good Muslims” who
“are not experts in anything that would have a
long-term benefit to the rest of the group.”25 The
main thing they have to offer is their knowledge
of the local languages and customs.
These dispensable young men, recruited to
act only in the implementation phase of an
attack, are unlikely to join Al Qaeda in a formal
sense. They are often identified in the mosque,
Odeh said. Atrocities against Muslims—
anywhere in the world—help to create a climate
that is ripe for recruiting young men to become
soldiers for Allah. It is not even necessary to
mention the name Al Qaeda to recruit them,
Odeh told Jerry Post, a psychiatrist who inter-
viewed him.26 It is possible that many of the
American, British, and Southeast Asian sleepers
that law-enforcement authorities continue to dis-
cover all over the world were recruited to play a
similar role. Like Mohamed, the group of Yemeni
Americans taken into custody in September 2002
apparently went to Afghanistan for a relatively
short course of training. In the camp, potential
recruits’ skills and commitment can be closely
observed so that trainers can funnel them into
the appropriate tier of the organization. Because
of Al Qaeda’s strict policy of sharing information
only on a need-to-know basis, sleepers—who
serve as a kind of reserve army in the targeted
country—are unlikely to know precisely for what
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they have been recruited until immediately
before an attack.
Some of the most important revelations of the
trial were contained in an Al Qaeda instruction
manual called the “Declaration of Jihad against
the Country’s Tyrants,” which was entered into
evidence. The manual makes clear that intelli-
gence and counterintelligence (avoiding detec-
tion by the enemy intelligence agencies) are a
priority for Al Qaeda. It instructs sleepers in the
art of disappearing in enemy territory by shaving
their beards, avoiding typical Muslim dress or
expressions, not chatting too much (especially
with taxi drivers, who may work for the enemy
government), and wearing cologne. Sleepers are
urged to find residences in new apartment
buildings, where neighbors are less likely to know
one another. Found by the Manchester (England)
Metropolitan Police during a search of an Al
Qaeda member’s home, the manual was located
in a computer file described as “the military
series” and was subsequently translated into
English.27 In the “first lesson,” the manual
describes the “main mission for which the
Military Organization is responsible” as “the
overthrow of the godless regimes and their
replacement with an Islamic regime.”28 The sec-
ond lesson spells out the “necessary qualifications
and characteristics” of the organization’s members,
which include a commitment to Islam and to the
organization’s ideology, maturity, sacrifice, lis-
tening and obedience, keeping secrets, health,
patience, “tranquillity and unflappability,” intelli-
gence and insights, caution and prudence, truth-
fulness and counsel, ability to observe and analyze,
and the “ability to act,”29 Subsequent “lessons”
teach the trainee how to forge documents,
establish safe houses and hiding places, establish
safe communications, procure weapons, and
gather intelligence. A large number of training
manuals have been discovered in Afghanistan and
elsewhere.30
Witnesses at the trial explained the structure
of the organization in some detail. Bin Laden was
known as the “emir,” or leader. Directly under
him was the Shura Council, which consisted
of a dozen or so members.3 The Shura oversaw
the committees. The Military Committee was
responsible for training camps and for procure-
ment of weapons. The Islamic Study Committee
issued fatwas and other religious rulings. The
Media Committee published the newspapers.
The Travel Committee was responsible for the
procurement of both tickets and false-identity
papers and came under the purview of the
Finance Committee. The Finance Committee
oversaw bin Laden’s businesses.32 Al Qaeda had
extensive dealings with charitable organizations.
First, it used them to provide cover and for
money laundering. Second, money donated to
charitable organizations to provide humanitarian
relief often ended up in Al Qaeda’s coffers. Finally,
and perhaps most importantly, Al Qaeda
provided an important social-welfare function.
It was simultaneously a recipient of “charitable
funds” and a provider of humanitarian relief, a
kind of terrorist United Way.
In this sense, Al Qaeda is similar to Pakistani
and Indonesian Jihadi groups. Al Qaeda has a
clear hierarchy. There are commanders, man-
agers, and cadres; and cadres consist of both
skilled and unskilled labor. Foot soldiers are
likely to be found in schools or mosques, and
only the best and brightest make it to the top.
Some midlevel operatives are paid enough
inside the organization that they may find it
difficult to leave, while for others—generally
those who come from wealthier families—the
spiritual and psychological attractions of Jihad
are sufficient. Information is shared on a need-
to-know basis, as in an intelligence agency.
Several Al Qaeda functions are worth dis-
cussing in somewhat more detail: planning
operations, relations with states, recruitment,
training, developing the mission, and weapons
acquisition.
PLANNING OPERATIONS
Some Al Qaeda operations take years to plan
and implement, and sometimes the group reat-
tempts attacks that failed the first time around.
The idea to attack the World Trade Center
appears to have originated well before the 1993
attack. Ramzi Yousef, who spent three years in a
safe house provided by bin Laden prior to his
arrest,33 made clear to the FBI that he intended
to knock the two buildings down, but that lack
of funds had prevented him from achieving his
ambitious goals. He had also plotted, together
with his right-hand man, Abdul Hakim Murad,
as well as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, his uncle,
to destroy eleven American airplanes midair, a
plot that was successfully tested on a Philippine
airliner in December 1994, killing one passenger
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and injuring at least six others.34 The plot
became known as the Bojinka Plot, which is
Serbo-Croat for “the explosion.”35 Numerous
reports have emerged that Al Qaeda had consid-
ered using airplanes as weapons before, includ-
ing the widely reported plot to attack the CIA
headquarters. Bin Laden admitted on videotape
that he had not expected the Trade Center build-
ings to collapse, but that he had rejoiced in the
surprising effectiveness of the attack.
For some operations, leaders are involved in
detailed planning. Ali Muhammad, an Egyptian-
born naturalized U.S. citizen who admitted con-
ducting photographic surveillance of the U.S.
embassy in Nairobi, told American investigators
that bin Laden himself had looked at surveil-
lance photographs and selected the spot where
the suicide truck should explode in the 1998
attack.36 But not all plots receive this level of
oversight. Members of Al Qaeda in Jordan, for
instance, who were arrested while preparing for
attacks to be carried out during the millennium,
were providing for themselves, rather than
receiving lavish sums. Ahmed Ressam testified
that he had been given what amounted to seed
money for his planned attack in Los Angeles
during the millennium. During the trial of
Mokhtar Haouari, a coconspirator in the “mil-
lennium plot,” Ressam testified that he had had
to raise most of the funds on his own, which he
did by making use of his long-standing expertise
in credit-card, immigration, and welfare fraud;
as well as other criminal activities such as theft
and robbery.37
The attack on the USS Cole was originally
planned on another U.S. destroyer, The Sullivans.
The suggested target date for the attack on The
Sullivans had been January 3, 2000, at the height
of Ramadan. This first attempt to sink a U.S.
warship failed when the explosives-laden boat
sank.38
Al Qaeda is patient. A senior counterterrorism
official of the FBI observes, “They plan their oper-
ations well in advance and have the patience to
wait to conduct the attack at the right time. Prior
to carrying out the operation, Al Qaeda conducts
surveillance of the target, sometimes on multiple
occasions, often using nationals of the target they
are surveying to enter the location without suspi-
cion. The results of the surveillance are forwarded
to Al Qaeda HQ as elaborate ‘ops plans’ or ‘target-
ing packages’ prepared using photographs, CAD-
CAM (computer-aided design/computer-aided
mapping) software, and the operative’s notes.”39
This sophistication, coupled with a wealth of
financial and material resources, allows bin
Laden’s terrorist network to stage spectacular
attacks.
RELATIONS WITH STATES
Jihadi groups build up strong relationships
with individual politicians, intelligence agencies,
or various factions of divided governments. The
Pakistani Jihadis were long sustained by Pakistan’s
ISI and are still assisted by former ISI agents, who
serve as trainers at terrorist-training camps. It is
likely that some current ISI agents still support the
Jihadi groups, even after President Musharraf ’s
post-September 11 promise to force pro-Jihadi
elements out.40 Active-duty military personnel
helped to train Laskar Jihad mujahideen in
Indonesia and have had a long-standing relation-
ship with the leader of Jamaah Islamiyah,
now closely associated with Al Qaeda.41 Saddam
Hussein offered cash payments to the families of
Palestinian suicide bombers, and Saudi charities,
purportedly unconnected to the government, do
the same. Iran provides funding to a variety of
Jihadi groups around the world including Sunni
ones, as well as safe haven. Ali Mohamed, a witness
for the U.S. government in the African-embassies
bombing trial held in 2001, testified that Al Qaeda
maintained close ties to Iranian security forces.
The security forces provided Al Qaeda with
bombs “disguised to took like rocks,” he said, and
arranged for the group to receive training in
explosives at Hezbollah-run camps in Lebanon.42
But bin Laden went beyond cooperating with
states and state agents. He made himself so
indispensable to leaders willing to provide him
sanctuary that the assets of the state became his
to use. He built a major highway in Sudan. Bin
Laden’s businesses became major employers of
Sudanese citizens. For example, Al-Damazine
Farms, which manufactured sesame oil and
grew peanuts and corn, employed some four
thousand people.43
Bin Laden established a close personal rela-
tionship with Hassan al-Turabi, leader of the
National Islamic Front in Sudan and a leading
Islamist intellectual who was educated in the
West. Al-Turabi was trying to establish an Islamic
state in Sudan based on a strict interpretation of
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lslamic law. Bin Laden also worked closely with
Sudan’s intelligence agency and military. As a
result of these relationships—and Sudan’s finan-
cial dependence on bin Laden—he was able to
build training camps, establish safe houses, and
plan terrorist operations from Sudanese terri-
tory. The National Islamic Front supplied bin
Laden with communications equipment, radios,
rifles, and fake passports for his personnel.
Bin Laden made important foreign contacts
while living in Sudan. During an Islamic People’s
Congress in Sudan in 1995, he met leaders of
other radical Islamist groups, including Hamas
and PIJ (Palestinian Islamic Jihad), as well as
extremist organizations from Algeria, Pakistan,
and Tunisia. Al Qaeda further extended its
worldwide network of contacts through training,
arms smuggling, or providing financial support
to groups based in the Philippines, Jordan, Eritrea,
Egypt, Yemen, and elsewhere.
After the U.S. government pressured Sudan to
expel bin Laden in mid-May 1996, he moved his
operation to Jalalabad, Afghanistan. He report-
edly lost $300 million in investments that he was
forced to leave behind. Despite these losses, soon
after his arrival in Afghanistan, bin Laden began
buying the services of the Taliban. He offered up
members of his elite unit, the 055 Brigade, to
assist the Taliban in its efforts to destroy the
Northern Alliance.44 Over five years, he gave the
Taliban regime some $100 million, according to
U.S. officials.45 In return, he received the Taliban’s
hospitality and loyalty. According to Mohammed
Khaksar, who served as the Taliban’s chief of
intelligence, then as deputy minister of the
interior prior to his defection to the Northern
Alliance in 2001, “Al Qaeda was very important
for the Taliban because they had so much
money. . . . They gave a lot of money. And the
Taliban trusted them.”46
Does Al Qaeda need the services of a state to
continue to function as it did prior to September
11? I think the answer is that it probably does.
But there is no reason to think that Al Qaeda
and the International Islamic Front (IIF)47 can’t
change their way of functioning so that the
services of a state are no longer as critical. The
IIF is a learning organization. The movement is
encouraging resisters, virtual networks, and
lone-wolf avengers. The IIF is also increasingly
relying on what I will call franchises—groups
that have their own regional agendas, but are
willing to contribute (including financially) to
Al Qaeda’s global, anti-American project when
invited; and groups or individuals who may not
be formal members but were trained at Al Qaeda’s
camps and are willing to work as freelancers.
WEAPONS ACQUISITION
Conventional
The Al Qaeda body responsible for the procure-
ment of weapons is the Military Committee—one
of four committees that are subordinate to the
Shura Majlis, the consultative council of the net-
work. Apart from being responsible for the devel-
opment and acquisition of both conventional and
unconventional weapons, the Military Committee
is also in charge of recruitment and training, as
well as the planning and execution phase of Al
Qaeda’s military operations.48
Al Qaeda acquires weapons and explosives
from a variety of sources, depending on the type
of operation and its location. The 055 Brigade, for
instance—Al Qaeda’s guerrilla organization that
fought alongside the Taliban against the Northern
Alliance—used weapons left behind by the Red
Army. It also received weapons from the Taliban
and the Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI.
During the 1990s, many of Al Qaeda’s pro-
curement officers obtained weapons in Western
countries. During bin Laden’s stay in Sudan,
from 1991 to 1996, the establishment of busi-
nesses in the East African country provided
much of the cover for the network’s procurement
of weapons.49 Al Qaeda’s global reach has
enabled it to establish a worldwide network of
procurement officers. One of them, according to
terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, was bin
Laden’s personal pilot, Essam al-Ridi, a U.S. citi-
zen who obtained communication equipment
from Japan; scuba gear and range finders from
Britain; satellite phones from Germany; night-
vision goggles, .50-caliber sniping rifles, and a T-
389 plane from America.50 Al Qaeda has also
procured weapons from Russian and Ukrainian
organized criminal rings. Al Qaeda’s and the IIF’s
links with organized criminal groups are likely to
grow stronger in the aftermath of September 11,
as many Western states are stepping up the pres-
sure against Al Qaeda cells operating in some of
these countries.
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Unconventional Weapons
Bin Laden has repeatedly made clear his desire
to acquire unconventional weapons. In January
1999 he told a reporter, “Acquiring weapons for
the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I
have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank
God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to
acquire these weapons, I am carrying out a duty.
It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess
the weapons that would prevent the infidels from
inflicting harm on Muslims.”51 After September
11, he pronounced that he already possessed
chemical and nuclear weapons.52 Bin Laden’s
deputy Ayman Zawahiri wrote in his memoirs
that “the targets and the type of weapons must be
selected carefully to cause damage to the enemy’s
structure and deter it enough to make it stop its
brutality,” probably in reference to unconven-
tional weapons.53
Chemical and Biological Weapons. Iraqi chemical-
weapons experts shifted some of their opera-
tions to Sudan after the Gulf War, according
to CIA assessments released to the press. Bin
Laden moved to Sudan at about the same time.
Beginning in 1995, the CIA began receiving
reports that Sudanese leaders had approved bin
Laden’s request to begin production of chemical
weapons to use against U.S. troops stationed in
Saudi Arabia.54 Khidhir Hamza, the director
of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program from 1987
to 1990, claimed that bin Laden’s agents had
contacted Iraq agents with the aim of purchas-
ing weapons components from Iraq. Sad dam
Hussein reportedly sent Ansar al-Islam, the ter-
rorist group that attempted to assassinate the
prime minister of the Kurdistan Regional
Government, Barham Salih, to train in Al Qaeda
camps.
Ahmed Ressam, one of the Al Qaeda opera-
tives apprehended in the millennium plots,
described crude chemical-weapons training at
camps in Afghanistan, including experiments
on animals.55 In December 2000, special units of
the Italian and German police arrested several
Al Qaeda agents based in Milan, Italy, and
Frankfurt, Germany, who had plotted to bomb
the European Parliament building in
Strasbourg, France, using sarin, a nerve agent.56
Other evidence of the group’s interest in chemi-
cal and biological weapons includes a manual
that provides instructions for using chemical
weapons;57 a manual that provides recipes for
producing chemical and biological agents
from readily available ingredients;58 and inter-
cepted phone conversations between Al Qaeda
operatives who were discussing unconventional
agents.59
In August 2002, CNN bought a cache of Al
Qaeda videotapes in Afghanistan that showed Al
Qaeda’s gruesome chemical-weapons experi-
ments, substantiating earlier reports about
experiments on animals. On one of these video-
tapes, several men are seen rushing from an
enclosed room, shouting at each other to hurry;
they leave behind a dog. After the men leave, a
white liquid on the floor forms a noxious gas.
The dog is seen convulsing and eventually dies.
A large cache of documents and other mate-
rials was found during the raid that led to the
capture of Al Qaeda’s operational planner,
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, in March 2003. The
seized documents revealed that Al Qaeda had
acquired the necessary materials for producing
botulinum and salmonella toxin and the chemi-
cal agent cyanide—and was close to developing
a workable plan for producing anthrax, a far
more lethal agent. Mohammed had been staying
at the home of Abdul Quoddoos Khan, a
member of Jamaat-i-Islami. Khan is reportedly a
bacteriologist with access to production materi-
als and facilities.60
The greatest worry, however, is that the
International Islamic Front, possibly working
together with Hezbollah or other terrorist groups,
will acquire assistance from persons who have
access to a sophisticated biological-weapons pro-
gram, possibly, but not necessarily, one that is
state run.
Nuclear Weapons. The U.S. government has
been concerned about Al Qaeda’s interest in
acquiring nuclear weapons since the mid-
1990s. In early February 2001, Jamal Ahmad al-
Fadl admitted that one of bin Laden’s top
lieutenants ordered him to try to buy uranium
from a former Sudanese military officer named
Salah Abdel Mobtuk. The uranium was offered
for $1.5 million. Documents described the
material as originating in South Africa. Al-Fadl
received a $10,000 bonus for arranging
the deal. He testified that he does not know
the outcome.61
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U.S. government officials reportedly believe
that Al Qaeda successfully purchased uranium
from South Africa.62 Mamdouh Mahmud Salim,
a senior deputy to bin Laden, was extradited
from Germany to the United States in 1998. The
U.S. government accuses Salim of attempting to
obtain material that could be used to develop
nuclear weapons.63
Numerous reports have emerged that bin
Laden has forged links with organized criminal
groups based in the former Soviet Union,
Central Asia, and the Caucasus in his attempts to
acquire nuclear weapons.64 Russian authorities
suspect the August 2002 murder of a nuclear
chemist may have been linked to a clandestine
effort to steal the country’s nuclear technology.65
They also report that they had observed terror-
ists staking out a secret nuclear-weapons storage
facility on two occasions, and that they had
thwarted an organized criminal group’s attempt
to steal 18.5 kilograms of highly enriched ura-
nium.66 This last claim is unusual and alarming,
in part because of the quantity—enough to make
several nuclear weapons—and in part because
the material was actually weapons-usable. Most
press reporting about nuclear thefts turn out,
after investigation, to refer to caches of low-
enriched uranium or radioactive but not
nuclear-weapons-usable materials.
American officials are suspicious about
the activities of two Pakistani nuclear scientists,
Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood and Abdul
Majid, who reportedly met with bin Laden,
Ayman Zawahiri, and two other Al Qaeda offi-
cials several times during August 2001. Pakistani
officials insist that despite Mahmood’s experi-
ence in uranium enrichment and plutonium
production, the two scientists had “neither the
knowledge nor the experience to assist in the
construction of any type of nuclear weapon.”67
The two scientists, who were eventually released,
reported that during one meeting. Osama bin
Laden declared he possessed “some type of radi-
ological material” and was interested in learning
how he could use it in a weapon.68
If Al Qaeda builds a nuclear weapon or
already has one, it is probably a relatively crude
device. An extensive study conducted by the
Institute for Science and International Security
in Washington found “no credible evidence that
either bin Laden or Al Qaeda possesses nuclear
weapons or sufficient fissile material to make
them,” but that if Al Qaeda obtained sufficient
nuclear-weapons-usable material, it would be
capable of building a crude nuclear explosive.69
RECRUITMENT
In the years following the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, Al Qaeda’s recruitment was con-
ducted by the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK—
Services office). Osama bin Laden and his spiritual
mentor, the Palestinian head of the Muslim
Brotherhood, Abdullah Azzam, established
the MAK in 1984. The MAK recruited young
Muslims to come to Afghanistan to fight the
Soviet infidels. With branches in over thirty
countries, including Europe and the United
States, and a sizable budget, the MAK was
responsible for propaganda, fund-raising, and
coordinating recruitment. While bin Laden cov-
ered the costs for transporting the new recruits,
the Afghan government provided the land, and
training camps were soon established.70
Most Al Qaeda operatives appear to have been
recruited by Islamist organizations in their home
countries. A Spanish investigation in November
2001, for example, concluded that a group known
in Spain as Soldiers of Allah gradually assumed
control over the Abu Bakr mosque in 1994. It
had financial ties with Al Qaeda and regularly
sent volunteers for training in Bosnia, Pakistan,
and the Philippines.71 Surveillance of a key
recruitment officer based in Italy, Abu Hamza,
revealed a tightly linked network of Al Qaeda
recruitment officers in Europe, which included
Abu Hamza and Sami Ben Khemais in Italy,
Tarek Maaroufi in Belgium, and Abu Dahdah in
Spain.72 In Germany, in addition to recruitment
through mainstream Islamic associations and
charitable agencies, Al Qaeda recruiting officers
used amateur videos of fighting in Chechnya to
attract recruits.73 One two-hour-long recruiting
video that was probably produced in the summer
of 2001 showed a mock assassination of former
president Clinton, along with footage of training
bases in Afghanistan. Methodically, the film
moves from picture frames of Palestinian
children killed or wounded by Israeli soldiers
and Muslim women being beaten, to pictures of
“great Muslim victories” in Chechnya, Somalia,
and against the USS Cole. The video concludes
with a call for Muslims to embark on the hegira,
or migration, to Afghanistan.74
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In Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia, semi-
naries are often fertile ground for recruitment.
Many of them promote the excitement of joining
the Jihad as much as they do the horror stories of
atrocities against Muslims. In Malaysia, a school
associated with Al Qaeda issued brochures
exhorting young radicals to forgo Palestine for
Afghanistan, where they were promised three
thousand kilometers of open borders and the
friendship of many like-minded colleagues, who
had made Afghanistan the international center of
Islamic militancy. Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, the spiri-
tual leader of Jamaah Islamiyah, a Southeast
Asian terrorist group closely affiliated with Al
Qaeda, championed bin Laden and exhorted
students in Indonesia and Malaysia to carry on a
“personal Jihad” following bin Laden’s lead.75
The way Khalfan Khamis Mohamed was
recruited is typical for foot soldiers. Recruiters
locate raw talent in a seminary or a mosque.
The raw talent is then sent to a camp, where it is
assessed on various dimensions: commitment to
Islam, psychological reliability, intelligence, and
physical prowess. Identifying reliable recruits
is considered the most difficult job. Among
Al Qaeda’s most well-known and successful
recruiters of elite operatives are Muhammad
Atef, who was reportedly killed by U.S. bombs
in November 2002, and Abu Zubaydah, a
Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, now in U.S.
custody.
TRAINING
Osama bin Laden provided training camps and
guesthouses in Afghanistan for the use of Al
Qaeda and its affiliated groups beginning in
1989. Western intelligence agencies estimate that
by September 11, 2001, between 70,000 and
110,000 radical Muslims had graduated from Al
Qaeda training camps such as Khalden,
Derunta, Khost, Siddiq, or Jihad Wal.76 Of those,
only a few thousand graduates—who distin-
guished themselves spiritually, physically, or
psychologically—were invited to join Al Qaeda.
The difficulty of making the cut as a full-fledged
recruit meant that Islamists from all over the
world regarded joining Al Qaeda as the highest
possible honor, Gunaratna explains.77
The exact number of training camps in
Afghanistan that are associated with Osama bin
Laden is unknown, and estimates range from
one dozen to over fifty such camps.78 In the mid-
1990s, Al Qaeda shifted its headquarters to
Khartoum and established or assisted in the
establishment of an estimated twenty training
camps in Sudan. Other training camps have
been identified in lawless corners of Somalia,
Yemen, Indonesia, Chechnya, and other
countries. The camps serve a variety of purposes
in addition to training members and reserves.
They create social ties, so that operatives feel
committed to the cause on both ideological and
solidarity grounds. Specialists then funnel
recruits into the right level of the organization
and into the right job: public-relations officer,
regional manager, trainer, sleeper, or other.
John Walker Lindh told investigators that the
camp he attended near Kandahar offered both
basic and advanced training. After the basic
training course, trainees can select different
tracks to follow, one involving battlefield train-
ing and the other “civilian warfare training.” The
battlefield course includes “advanced topogra-
phy, ambushes, tactics, battlefield formations,
trench warfare . . . practicing assassinations with
pistols and rifles, and shooting from motorcycles
and cars.” The civilian warfare course includes
“terrorism, forgery of passports and documents,
poisons, mine explosions, and an intelligence
course which teaches trainees how to avoid
detection by police.” Most of the trainees were
Saudi, he said. He also said that the leader of the
camp approached all foreign trainees to recruit
them for “foreign operations.” The foreign
recruits were instructed not to discuss the con-
versation about foreign operations with their fel-
low trainees, and they were not given any details
about what the foreign terrorist operations
might entail.79 Trainees were also asked whether
they were willing to work in their own country.
Lindh said that the leader of the camp, Al Musri,
interviewed him personally.
Tapes reportedly captured by the U.S. army in
Afghanistan show Al Qaeda members training
to carry out operations in the West. The tapes
show a level of professionalism that suggests that
Al Qaeda had received significant assistance
from a professional military, according to an
analyst who read the army’s assessment and
viewed the tapes himself. On one tape, opera-
tives are trained to carry out an ambush near a
six-lane high-way similar to those that are found
in the United States and Europe. Hostage sce-
narios include raids of large buildings with
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many occupants. Trainees playing the role of
terrorists dictate commands to the hostages in
English, and the trainees playing the hostages
respond in English. Operatives are trained to
determine whether soldiers or other armed per-
sonnel are among the hostages so that those
with weapons can be segregated from the rest.
The armed hostages are then executed in front
of television cameras. Another scenario prepares
operatives for assassinating dignitaries—possibly
national leaders—on a golf course. It is clear
from the tapes that Al Qaeda is training its oper-
atives to maximize media coverage, according to
the army’s assessment.80
The most important aspect of training, how-
ever, is mental training and religious indoctrina-
tion. Religious indoctrination includes Islamic
law and history and how to wage a holy war. The
story that recruits must learn is about identity—
it is about who we are as distinct from them, to
whom Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, refers to as
the “new Crusaders.”81
Most importantly, camps are used to inculcate
“the story” into young men’s heads. The story is
about an evil enemy who, in the words of
Zawahiri, is waging a “new Crusade” against the
lands of Islam. This enemy must be fought mili-
tarily, Zawahiri explains, because that is the only
language the West understands. The enemy is
easily frightened by small groups of fighters, and
trainees learn how to function in small cells.82
THE MISSION OF
TERRORIST ORGANIZATIONS:
THE TERRORIST “PRODUCT”
A professional terrorist chooses his mission
carefully. He is able to read popular opinion and
is likely to change his mission over time. Astute
leaders may find new missions—or emphasize
new aspects of the mission—when they realize
they can no longer “sell” the old one to sponsors
and potential recruits, either because the origi-
nal mission was achieved or, more commonly,
because the impossibility of achieving the mis-
sion has become obvious.
Terrorism grows out of seductive solutions to
grievances. When revolutions succeed, which
happens occasionally, the imperative to address
the problems of the aggrieved group comes to
be accepted by a wider population. But the
techniques of terror—the deliberate murder of
innocent civilians—are counter to every main-
stream religious tradition. This is why the
mission—the articulation of the grievance—is
so important. It must be so compellingly
described that recruits are willing to violate
normal moral rules in its name.
The people on whose behalf the terrorists
aim to fight must be portrayed as worthy of
heroic acts of martyrdom. In his memoir,
Zawahiri says that an alliance of Jihadi groups
and “liberated states” is anxious to seek retri-
bution for the blood of the martyrs, the grief of
the mothers, the deprivation of the orphans, the
suffering of the detainees, and the sores of the
tortured people throughout the land of Islam.
He says that this age is witnessing a new phe-
nomenon of mujaheed youths who have aban-
doned their families, countries, wealth, studies,
and jobs in search of Jihad arenas for the sake
of God.83
The enemy must be portrayed as a monstrous
threat, Zawahiri warns his followers that the new
Crusaders respect no moral boundaries and
understand only the language of violence. The
enemy is characterized by “brutality, arrogance,
and disregard for all taboos and customs.” He
urges Jihadis to choose weapons and tactics
capable of inflicting maximum casualties on the
enemy at minimal cost to the mujahideen. He
warns followers that the enemy makes use of a
variety of tools and proxies, including the
United Nations, friendly rulers of the Muslim
peoples, multinational corporations, interna-
tional communications and data exchange sys-
tems, international news agencies and satellite
media channels. The enemy also uses interna-
tional relief agencies as a cover for espionage,
proselytizing, coup planning, and the transfer of
weapons.84 John Walker Lindh told interrogators
that he had decided to “join the fight of the
Pakistani people in Kashmir” when he was in a
madrassah in Pakistan, where he heard reports
of “torture, rape, and massacre of the Pakistani
people by India.” He said that he was over-
whelmed by the “guilt of sitting idle while these
atrocities were committed,” and he volun-
teered for training, first in Pakistan, then in
Afghanistan, ultimately ending up fighting with
the Taliban.85 A trainer for HUM who was inter-
viewed for this book said that he decided to join
the Jihad when he was in eleventh grade, after
hearing about two Muslim women who were
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raped by Indian forces.86 Ironically, the enemy’s
existence—and even his atrocities—help terror-
ist groups prove the importance of their mis-
sion. The Lashkar e Taiba public-affairs director
told me he felt “happy” about the growth of the
Hindu extremist group Bajrang Dal, the arch-
nemesis of the Pakistani militant groups. It pro-
vides a raison d’etre for Islamic fundamentalism
in Pakistan, he said. “What is the logic for stop-
ping the Jihadi groups’ activities if the Indian
government supports groups like Bajrang Dal?”
he asked.87
Peter Verkhovensky, a character in Dostoyevsky’s
1871 novel The Demons, claims to be a socialist
but is ultimately exposed as a cheat and a fraud.
But the real villains in the novel are the bad ideas
that seduced young men to join revolutionary
movements. Leaders, who may have been true
believers in their youth, cynically take advantage
of their zealous recruits, manipulating them
with an enticing mission, ultimately using these
true believers as their weapons. Joseph Conrad
described terrorists as “fools victimized by ideas
they cannot possibly believe. . . . While they
mouth slogans or even practice anarchist beliefs,
their motives are the result of self-display, power
plays, class confusion, acting out roles.”88
Both Dostoyevsky and Conrad understood
that the prospect of playing a seemingly heroic
role can persuade young men to become ruth-
less killers in the service of bad ideas, but the bad
ideas must be seductively packaged. Terrorist
groups have to raise money by “selling” their
mission to supporters—including donors, per-
sonnel (both managers and followers), and the
broader public. Selecting and advertising a mis-
sion that will attract donations—of time, talent,
money, and for suicide operations, lives—is thus
critically important to the group’s survival.
Zawahiri observes that the New World Order
is a source of humiliation for Muslims. It is
better for the youth of Islam to carry arms and
defend their religion with pride and dignity than
to submit to this humiliation, he says.
Violence, in other words, restores the dig-
nity of humiliated youth. This idea is similar
to Franz Fanon’s notion that violence is a
“cleansing force,” which frees the oppressed
youth from his “inferiority complex,” “despair,”
and “inaction,” making him fearless and restor-
ing his self-respect.89 Fanon also warned of the
dangers of globalization for the underdevel-
oped world, where youth, who are especially
susceptible to the seductive pastimes offered by
the West, comprise a large proportion of the
population.90
Part of the mission of Jihad is thus to restore
Muslims’ pride in the face of a humiliating New
World Order. The purpose of violence, according
to this way of thinking, is to restore dignity and to
help ward off dangerous temptations. Its target
audience is not necessarily the victims and their
sympathizers, but the perpetrators and their sym-
pathizers. Violence is a way to strengthen support
for the organization and the movement it repre-
sents. It is a marketing device and a method for
rousing the troops.
In this regard, Zawahiri is conforming also
with the views of Sayyid Qutb, whom Zawahiri
describes as “the most prominent theoretician of
the fundamentalist movements” and Islam’s
most influential contemporary “martyr.” Qutb’s
outlook on the West changed dramatically after
his first visit to America, where he was repulsed
by Americans’ materialism, racism, promiscuity,
and feminism. Americans behave like animals, he
said. They justify their vulgarity under the ban-
ner of emancipation of women and “free mixing
of the sexes.” They love freedom, but eschew
responsibility for their families.91 He saw the
West as the historical enemy of Islam, citing the
Crusades, European colonialism, and the Cold
War as evidence. Qutb emphasized the need to
cleanse Islam from impurities resulting from its
exposure to Western and capitalist influence.
Western values have infiltrated the Muslim
elites, who rule according to corrupt Western
principles. The enemy’s weapons are political,
economic, and religio-cultural. They must be
fought at every level, Qutb warned.92 The twin
purposes of Jihad are to cleanse Islam of the
impurifying influence of the West, and to fight
the West using political, economic, and religio-
cultural weapons—the same weapons the West
allegedly uses against Islam.
ADVERTISING THE MISSION
Like more traditional humanitarian relief
organizations, terrorists have to advertise their
mission to potential donors and volunteers, and
they tend to use similar techniques. As we have
seen, they hold auctions, fund-raising dinners,
and press conferences. They put up posters and
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put out newspapers. They cultivate journalists
hoping for favorable press coverage. They
openly solicit donations in houses of worship, at
least where the state allows it. They send leaders
on fund-raising missions abroad and arrange
for private meetings between leaders and major
donors. They make heavy use of the mail, the
telephone, and the Internet, often providing
their bank account numbers and the bank’s
address. They demonstrate their effectiveness
with sophisticated Web sites, often including
photographs or streaming-video recordings of
successful operations and of the atrocities per-
petrated against the group they aim to help. All
of these techniques are practiced by humanitar-
ian organizations. Terrorist groups also adver-
tise the kind of weapons that recruits will learn
to use, in some cases including cyberwar.
Person-to-person contacts, however, remain a
critical component of fund-raising and recruit-
ment drives.93
CHANGING THE MISSION
Astute terrorist leaders often realize that to
attract additional funding, they may need to give
up their original mission. The original mission of
Egyptian Islamic Jihad, for example, was to turn
Egypt into an Islamic state. By the late 1990s, the
group had fallen on hard times. Sheik Omi Abdel
Rahman was imprisoned in the United States for
his involvement in a plot to bomb New York City
landmarks in 1993. Other leaders had been killed
or forced to move abroad. Zawahiri reportedly
considered moving the group to Chechnya, but
when he traveled there to check out the situation,
he was arrested and imprisoned for traveling
without an entry permit.94 After his release in
May 1997, Zawahiri decided that it would be
practical to shift his sights away from the “near
enemy,” the secular rulers of Egypt, toward the
“far enemy,” the West and the United States.
Switching goals in this way would mean a large
inflow of cash from bin Laden, which the group
desperately needed. Islamists see Egyptian presi-
dent Hosni Mubarak, who is supported by the
United States, as a traitor to Islam on numerous
grounds. He has continued his (assassinated)
predecessor’s controversial policy of appeasing
Israel at the expense of the Palestinians. His
administration is widely viewed as corrupt and
repressive. He has expelled or imprisoned most
members of the Islamic resistance to his rule.
Egyptian human rights organizations estimate
that some sixteen thousand people with sus-
pected links to Islamic organizations remain
jailed in Egypt.95
The alliance between Zawahiri and bin Laden
was a “marriage of convenience,” according to
Lawrence Wright. One of Zawahiri’s chief assis-
tants testified in Cairo that Zawahiri had con-
fided in him that “joining with bin Laden [was]
the only solution to keeping the Jihad organiza-
tion alive.”96 “These men were not mercenaries,
they were highly motivated idealists, many of
whom had turned their backs on middle-class
careers. . . . They faced a difficult choice: whether
to maintain their allegiance to a bootstrap orga-
nization that was always struggling financially or
to join forces with a wealthy Saudi who had long-
standing ties to the oil billionaires in the Persian
Gulf,” Wright explains.
After Zawahiri shifted his focus away from
Egypt, some of his followers left in protest,
forming a splinter faction named Vanguards of
Conquest (Talaa’ al-Fateh), which was weakened
as a result of the Egyptian government’s clamp-
down on Islamists. In return for bin Laden’s
assistance, Zawahiri provided him some two
hundred loyal, disciplined and well-trained fol-
lowers, who became the core of Al Qaeda’s lead-
ership. Zawahiri describes the new mission as a
“global battle” against the “disbelievers,” who
have “united against the mujahideen.” He adds,
“The battle today cannot be fought on a regional
level without taking into account the global hos-
tility towards us.”
Another example of a group that changed its
mission over time to secure a more reliable
source of funding is the Islamic Movement of
Uzbekistan. Its original mission was to fight the
post-Soviet ruler of Uzbekistan, Islam Katimov,
whose authoritarian rule is characterized by cor-
ruption and repression.97 When Juma Namangani,
leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan,
was forced underground, together with his
followers, they eventually made their way to
Afghanistan, where they made contacts with
Al Qaeda. Abdujabar Abduvakhitov, an Uzbek
scholar who has studied the group since its incep-
tion, explains that the group found that by adopt-
ing Islamist slogans it could “make more money
and get weapons.”98 The IMU shifted its mission
from fighting injustice in Uzbekistan to inciting
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Islamic extremism and global Jihad, thereby gain-
ing access to financial supporters in Turkey, Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan, and Iran, Abduvakhitov explains.
The group’s new literature promoted the Taliban’s
agenda, reviling America and the West, but also
music, cigarettes, sex, and drink. Its new slogans
made the movement repulsive to its original sup-
porters in Uzbekistan, however.99
When the IMU terrorists returned to
Uzbekistan in 2000, they had medical kits, tacti-
cal radios, and night-vision goggles. “All of this
speaks to better funding, it speaks to better con-
tacts,” an unnamed intelligence officer told the
New York Times. “They made an impression on
bin Laden.”100
In the spring of 2001 the group entered into
an agreement with Mullah Omar, the leader of
the Taliban, to delay its Central Asian campaign
and to fight the Northern Alliance. Namangani
became commander of the 055 Brigade, bin
Laden’s group of foreign fighters. After September
11, Namangani found himself at war with
America. He had alienated his original supporters
in his country, and the financial backers he
attracted with his turn toward Islamism were no
longer able to fund him because they were dis-
persed and largely broke. He was killed during the
war in Afghanistan in November 2001.101
Changing the mission can cause a variety of
problems. Volunteers may be wedded to the orig-
inal mission and may resent the need to kowtow
to donors, rather than focusing on the needs of
the beneficiaries, as happened with the part of
Egyptian Islamic Jihad that refused to join forces
with bin Laden. Managers are vulnerable to the
charge of mission creep. From the viewpoint of
the original stakeholders in the organization,
there is a principal-agent problem if the group’s
mission shifts. An important example of this
is when a state (or agencies within in a divided
state) fund insurgent groups in the belief that
they will have total control over the groups’
activities. But if a group diversifies its revenue
stream, the state may find itself losing control.
This is the case with regard to the militant and
sectarian groups in Pakistan, which were largely
created by the ISI. Now that a significant fraction
of these groups’ income comes from other enti-
ties, the groups are increasingly engaging in
activities that are counter to the state’s interests.
Similarly, Indonesian Jihadi groups that raise
money from sources in the Gulf are slipping out
of the control of their original backers in the
Indonesian military. (In both these cases, it is
important to point out again that the state is not
a monolithic entity and that individual agents, or
even agencies, may be acting in violation of state
policy.)
Osama bin Laden himself has changed his
mission over time. He inherited an organization
devoted to fighting Soviet forces and turned that
organization into a flexible group of ruthless
warriors ready to fight on behalf of multiple
causes. His first call to holy war, issued in 1992,
urged believers to kill American soldiers in Saudi
Arabia, the Horn of Africa, and Somalia. There
was virtually no mention of Palestine. His
second, in 1996, was a forty-page document list-
ing atrocities and injustices committed against
Muslims, mainly by Western powers. His third, in
February 1998, for the first time urged followers
deliberately to target American civilians, rather
than soldiers. Although that fatwa mentioned the
Palestinian struggle, it was only one of a litany of
Muslim grievances. America’s “crimes” against
Saudi Arabia (by stationing troops near Islam’s
holiest sites), Iraq, and the other Islamic states of
the region constituted a clear declaration of war
by the Americans against God, his Prophet, and
the Muslims . . . By God’s leave, we call on every
Muslim who believes in God and hopes for
reward to obey God’s command to kill the
Americans and plunder their possessions wher-
ever he finds them and wherever he can,” bin
he wrote.102 On October 7, 2001, in a message
released on Al Jazeera television immediately
after U.S. forces began bombing in Afghanistan,
bin Laden issued his fourth call for Jihad. This
time he emphasized Israel’s occupation of
Palestinian lands and the suffering of Iraqi
children under UN sanctions, concerns broadly
shared in the Islamic world. While most Muslims
reject bin Laden’s interpretation of their religion,
he felt the moment was ripe to win many over to
his anti-Western cause. Bin Laden was compet-
ing for the hearts and minds of ordinary
Muslims. He said that the September 11 “events”
had split the world into two “camps,” the Islamic
world and “infidels”—and that the time had
come for “every Muslim to defend his religion”
(echoing President Bush’s argument that from
now on “either you are with us, or you are with
the terrorists”103).
Bin Laden’s aim was to turn America’s
response to the September 11 attack into a war
between Islam and the West. With this new
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fatwa, bin Laden was striking at the “very core of
the grievances that the common Arab man in
the street has toward his respective govern-
ment, especially in Saudi Arabia,” Nawaf Obaid,
a Saudi analyst, explained.104 John Walker
“Lindh told U.S. investigators that Al Qaeda had
come to believe that it, was more effective to
“attack the head of the snake” than to attack sec-
ular rulers in the Islamic world.
EXPANDING THE NETWORK
Al Qaeda and the IIF are not only changing their
mission over time in response to new situations
and new needs, but also their organizational
style. With its corporate headquarters in shatters,
Al Qaeda and the alliance are now relying on an
ever shifting network of sympathetic groups and
individuals, including the Southwest Asian Jihadi
groups that signed bin Laden’s February 1998
fatwa; franchise outfits in Southeast Asia; sleeper
cells trained in Afghanistan and dispersed abroad;
and freelancers such as Richard Reid, the con-
victed “shoe bomber,” who attempted to blow up
a plane. Lone wolves are also beginning to take
action on their own, without having been for-
mally recruited or trained by Al Qaeda.
The Al Qaeda organization is learning that
to evade law-enforcement detection in the West,
it will need to adopt some of the qualities of the
virtual network style. Coordination of major
attacks in the post-September 11 world, in which
law-enforcement and intelligence agencies have
formed their own networks in response, will
be difficult. Al Qaeda is adapting by communicat-
ing over the Internet and by issuing messages
intended to frighten Americans and boost
the morale of followers. The leadership of Al
Qaeda appears to be functioning less as a group
of commanders and more as inspirational
leaders. A Web site that appeared after September
11 (but is no longer available) offered a special
on-line training course that teaches the reader
how to make time bombs and detonate enemy
command centers. The site invited visitors to read
a chapter on the production of explosives, saying,
“We want deeds, not words. What counts is
implementation.” Other sites made reference to
the Encyclopedia of Jihad, which provides instruc-
tions for creating a “clandestine activity cell,”
including intelligence, supply, planning and
preparation, and implementation.105 In an article
on the “culture of Jihad,” a Saudi Islamist urges
bin Laden’s sympathizers to take action on their
own. “I do not need to meet the Sheikh and ask
his permission to carry out some operation, the
same as I do not need permission to pray, or to
think about killing the Jews and the Crusaders
that gather on our lands.” He accuses the enemies
of Islam of attempting to alter the Saudi educa-
tion system to describe Jihad as a way of thinking
rather than as mode of action. Nor does it make
any difference whether bin Laden is alive or dead.
“If Osama bin Laden is alive or God forbid he is
killed, there are thousand Bin Ladens in this
nation. We should not abandon our way, which
the Sheikh has paved for you, regardless of the
existence of the Sheikh or his absence.”106
An anonymous article in another Islamist
forum, “The lovers of Jihad,” argues, “The Islamist
view of the confrontation with the United States
is settled. Furthermore, it is going to be the new
ideology of the second generation of the Jihadi
movements around the world. They do not need
the existence of bin Laden, after he fulfilled his
role in the call and agitation for this project.”107
As with any network, the challenge for the Al
Qaeda network of groups is to balance the needs
for resilience and for capacity. Resilience refers to
the ability of a network to withstand the loss of a
node or nodes. To maximize resilience, the
network has to maximize redundancy. Functions
are not centralized. (This decreases the efficiency
of the organization, but terrorist networks are
unlikely to optimize efficiency as they do not
have to answer to shareholders and they tend
to view the “muscle” as expendable.) Capacity—
the ability to optimize the scale of the attack—
requires coordination, which makes the group
less resilient because communication is required.
Effectiveness is a function of both capacity and
resilience.
Network theorists suggest that a network of
networks is a resilient organization. Within each
cluster, every node is connected to every other
node in what is known as an “all channel” net-
work. But only certain members of the cluster
communicate with other clusters, and the ties
between clusters are weak, to minimize the risk
of penetration.
The strength of ties is not static, however; it
varies over time. Training together in camps
establishes trust, the glue that holds a network
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together. (Recall Fahid’s claim that he would not
be able to trust Mohamed unless he trained in
Afghanistan.) But task ties, the term network
theorists use for relationships needed to accom-
plish particular tasks, are likely to be weak or
even nonexistent until a leader brings a group
together to carry out an operation.
In a law-enforcement-rich environment, the
most effective terrorist organization probably
consists of many clusters of varying size and
complexity held together by trust and a shared
mission rather than a hierarchical superstruc-
ture. Individual clusters may find their own
funding through licit or illicit businesses, dona-
tions from wealthy industrialists, wealthy diaspo-
ras, or the relationships they develop with states
or state agents. Individual groups may even com-
pete for funds in what is known as a chaordic
network.108 They may recruit and arm their
groups separately. Innovation—such as attempts
to acquire or use unconventional weapons—is
promoted at all levels. Some of the clusters will
remain dormant until a concrete operation is
being planned. Those that are active in failing
states where the state either supports them or
cannot fight them will be able to remain active
full-time. The only thing the sub-networks must
have in common is a shared mission and goals.
In this network of networks, leadership style
will vary. Complex tasks require hierarchies—the
commander cadre-type organization. For very
small operations, of the kind that are carried out
by the Army of God, little coordination or lead-
ership is required: small cells or lone wolves
inspired by the movement can act on their own.
Individual operatives can have a powerful effect,
as the sniper in suburban Washington in the fall
of 2002 made clear. As more powerful weapons
become available to smaller groups, virtual net-
works will become more dangerous.
The use of sleepers can make an organiza-
tion significantly more resilient. Sleepers are
informed of their tasks immediately before the
operation. They are likely to be told only what
they need to know: information is strictly com-
partmentalized.109
Technology has greatly increased the capacity
of networks. Networks can now be decentralized
but also highly focused. Members can travel
nearly anywhere and communicate with one
another anywhere. Money is also easily shipped.110
This is especially true for organizations like Al
Qaeda, which utilize informal financial transac-
tions and convert their cash into gems or gold.
Since September 11 and the war in Afghanistan,
Al Qaeda and the IIF have been forming the
kind of network of networks connected by weak
ties that network theorists argue is the most
effective style of organization, and making use
of sleepers and freelancers, which increases the
resilience of the alliance.
SOURCES OF FUNDS
As is the case for many terrorist groups, Al Qaeda
raises money in four ways: criminal activities,
businesses, financial or in-kind assistance from
states or state agents, and charitable donations.
Businesses
Al-Fadl testified that bin Laden set up a large
number of companies in Sudan, including
Wadi-al-Aqiq, a corporate shell that he referred
to as the “mother” of all the other companies: Al
Hijra Construction, a company that built roads
and bridges; Taba Investment, Ltd., a currency
trading group; Themar al-Mubaraka, an agricul-
ture company; Quadarat, a transport company;
Laden International, an import-export business.
Al-Fadl said the group controlled the Islamic
bank al-Shamal and held accounts at Barclays
Bank in London as well as unnamed banks in
Sudan, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Cyprus, the United
States, and Dubai.111 According to the U.S.
indictment, “These companies were operated to
provide income and to support Al Qaeda, and to
provide cover for the procurement of explosives,
weapons, and chemicals, and for the travel of Al
Qaeda operatives.”112
Like many terrorist groups, Al Qaeda is
involved in both licit and illicit enterprises.
Bin Laden attempted to develop a more potent
strain of heroin to export to the United States and
Western Europe, in retaliation for the 1998 air
strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan. He provided
protection to processing plants and transport for
the Taliban’s drug businesses, which financed
training camps and supported extremists in
neighboring countries, according to the United
Nations.113 Al Qaeda used informal financial
transactions known as hawala, which are based
largely on trust and extensive use of family or
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regional connections,114 and a network of honey
shops, to transfer funds around the world.115 It is
now converting cash into diamonds and gold.
Charitable Donations
Charities, purportedly unaffiliated with the
terrorist groups, seek funding for humanitarian
relief operations, some of which is used for that
purpose, and some of which is used to fund ter-
rorist operations. Many Jihadi groups use chari-
ties for fund-raising abroad or as a front for
terrorist activities. Al Qaeda members testified
that they received ID cards issued by a humani-
tarian relief organization based in Nairobi called
Mercy International Relief Agency. The organi-
zation was involved in humanitarian relief
efforts, as its name suggests, but it also served as
a front organization for operatives during the
period they were planning the Africa embassy
bombings.116
By soliciting charitable donations abroad,
groups draw attention to the cause among
diaspora populations. The Gulf States, North
America, the United Kingdom, and European
countries are important sources of funding for
terrorist groups. The U.S. government looked the
other way when the IRA engaged in fund-raising
dinners in the United States, but began to see the
downside to such a policy when the groups being
funded began killing American citizens.
But perhaps even more importantly, by solic-
iting money from the people, a terrorist organi-
zation (or terrorist-affiliated organization) can
establish its bona fides as a group devoted to the
interests of “the people.” While much of the
group’s money may actually come from criminal
activities, business operations, or government
assistance, charitable donations are important as
a “defining source of revenue,” a point made in
regard to more traditional NGOs by Mark Moore,
a specialist in non-profits at Harvard University.
In my interviews, leaders tend to emphasize char-
itable donations as the most important source of
revenue for their groups; while operatives, pre-
sumably less attuned to the public-relations
implications of their words, admit that smuggling,
government funding or large-scale donations by
wealthy industrialists are the main sources of
funding.117 Money flows into Jihadi groups
through charities; but money also flows out to the
needy. Sophisticated Jihadi organizations function
very much like the United Way.
LEADERLESS RESISTERS,
FREELANCERS, AND FRANCHISES
The New World Order and its instruments—Al
Qaeda’s new foes—are attractive targets to a sur-
prising array of groups. By emphasizing the New
World Order as its enemy, Al Qaeda will be able
to attract a variety of groups that oppose Western
hegemony and international institutions.
White supremacists and Identity Christians
are applauding Al Qaeda’s goals and actions and
may eventually take action on the Al Qaeda
network’s behalf as freelancers or lone-wolf
avengers. A Swiss neo-Nazi named Huber, who is
popular with both Aryan youth and radical
Muslims, is calling for neo-Nazis and Islamists to
join forces. Huber was on the board of directors
of the Al-Taqwa Foundation, which the U.S. gov-
ernment says was a major donor to Al Qaeda.118
The late William Pierce, who wrote The Turner
Diaries, the book that inspired the Oklahoma
City bombing, applauded the September 11
bombers. Pierce’s organization, the Alliance
Nahad, urged its followers to celebrate the one-
year anniversary of September 11 by printing out
and disseminating flyers from its Web site. One
of the flyers included a photograph of bin Laden
and the World Trade Center and the caption,
“Let’s stop being human shields for Israel.”119
Matt Hale, leader of the World Church of the
Creator, a white supremacist organization one of
whose members killed a number of blacks and
Jews, is disseminating a book that exposes the
“sinister machinations” that led to September 11,
including the involvement of Jews and Israelis, in
particular, the Mossad.120
Horst Mahler, a founder of the radical leftist
German group the Red Army Faction, has moved
from the extreme left to radical right. He too
rejoiced at the news of the September 11 attacks,
saying that they presage “the end of the
American Century, the end of Global Capitalism,
and thus the end of the secular Yahweh cult, of
Mammonism.” He accuses the “one-World
strategists” of trying to create a smoke screen to
prevent ordinary people from understanding the
real cause of September 11, which America
brought on itself through its arrogance. “This is
war,” he says, “with invisible fronts at present,
and worldwide.” September 11 was just the first
blow against the Globalists, whose true aim is to
exterminate national cultures, he says. “It is not
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a war of material powers,” he says. “It is a
spiritual struggle the war of Western civilization,
which is barbarism, against the cultures of the
national peoples. . . . The oncoming crisis in
the World Economy—independent of the air
attacks of 11 September 2001—is now taking the
enchantment from ‘The American Way of Life.’
The absolute merchandisability of human exis-
tence—long felt as a sickness—is lost, along with
the loss of external objects, in which human
beings seek recognition and validation—but
cannot find them.”121
The racist right is also applauding the efforts
of other “antiglobalists” in addition to bin Laden.
Louis Beam, author of a leaderless-resistance
essay, is urging all antiglobalists, from all political
persuasions, to join forces against the New World
Order (NWO). He applauds the participants of
the Battle of Seattle, who, he says, faced, “real
invasion of black booted, black suited” thugs,
while the racist right continued talking endlessly
about the impending invasion of foreign troops
in United Nations submarines.
“Mark my words,” Beam says, “this is but the
first confrontation, there will be many more
such confrontations as intelligent, caring people
begin to face off the Waco thugs of the New
World Order here in the United States. The New
American Patriot will be neither left nor right,
just a freeman fighting for liberty. New alliances
will form between those who have in the past
thought of themselves as ‘right-wingers,’ conser-
vatives, and patriots with many people who have
thought of themselves as ‘left-wingers,’ progres-
sives, or just ‘liberal.’ ”122
Perhaps the most articulate proponent of
forming an anti-NWO coalition is Keith
Preston, a self-described veteran of numerous
libertarian, anarchist, leftist, labor, and patriot
organizations and an active anarchist. He argues
that the war between the “U.S. and the Muslim
world” is one front in a larger war, “namely, the
emerging global conflict between those interests
wishing to subordinate the entire world to the
so-called ‘New World Order’ of global gover-
nance by elite financial interests in the advanced
countries on one side and all those various
national, regional, ethnic, cultural, religious, lin-
guistic, and economic groups who wish to
remain independent of such a global order.” He
believes that the rapid drive to create this NWO
must be reversed or it will likely produce a
system of totalitarian oppression similar to that
of the Nazi and Soviet regimes of the twentieth
century only with infinitely greater amounts of
economic, technological, and military resources.
All forces throughout the world seeking to resist
this development must join together, regardless
of their other differences, and provide mutual
support to one another in the common struggle.
The current U.S.-led ‘coalition’ against so-called
‘terrorism’ is simply a cover for continuing the
process of global consolidation of power and
crushing all efforts at resistance. Islamic funda-
mentalists, he says, are fighting the same global
interests seeking to impose “global government,
international currency systems, firearms confis-
cation, international police forces, NAFTA, and
other regressive economic policies on the
American people.” He proposes joining forces
even with Jewish fundamentalist sects, “such as
the Neturei Karta, who have condemned Israeli
imperialism and expansionism.” He urges the
“bandits and anarchists” to join together with
the “tribes, sects, warlords, and criminals” to
assert themselves forcefully.123
While the threat these groups pose is
nowhere near as significant as that of current
members of the Al Qaeda alliance, some of
their members may decide to support Al Qaeda’s
goals, as lone wolves or leaderless resisters,
giving it a new source of Western recruits.
The tri-border area where Argentina, Brazil,
and Paraguay meet is becoming the new Libya:
The place where terrorists with widely disparate
ideologies—the Marxist groups FARC and ELN,
American white supremacists, Hamas, Hezbollah,
and members of bin Laden’s International Islamic
Front—meet to swap tradecraft. Authorities
worry that the more sophisticated groups could
make use of the Americans as participants in their
plots, possibly to bring in materials.
Perhaps the best example of a freelancer—an
individual trained by Al Qaeda who takes action
largely on his own—is Richard Reid. In October
2002, Richard Reid pled guilty to the charge that
he tried to blow up a plane with a bomb hidden
in his shoe in December 2001. He also admitted
that he was trained at an Al Qaeda camp and
said that he was a member of Al Qaeda, a state-
ment that some experts suspect is not literally
true. Reid gave in to his interrogators almost
immediately, suggesting that he had not under-
gone the kind of rigorous psychological training
that is typical for Al Qaeda members. Magnus
Ranstorp, a terrorism expert who has studied
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the Islamist community in London, from which
Reid was apparently recruited, argues that Reid
is most likely a fringe amateur inspired by what
he saw in Afghanistan and by the movement in
general. Others point out that Reid was in con-
tact with Al Qaeda members by e-mail.124
Jamaah Islamiyah—The Franchise
The group known as Jamaah Islamiyah grew
out of Islamic opposition to Soeharto’s regime.
Its goal was to establish an Islamic community,
jamaah Islamiyah, throughout Southeast Asia. Its
spiritual leader, Abu Bakar Ba’asyir, founded and
runs a pesantren (seminary) called Ngruki near
Solo, Java, close to the pesantren we discussed in
chapter 3. Ba’asyir and his closest followers fled
to Malaysia in 1985 to escape Soeharto’s suppres-
sion of the group. Some members returned after
Soeharto’s resignation in 1998, and some
remained in Malaysia. Although some members
of Jamaah Islamiyah (JI) have clear links to Al
Qaeda, JI is the violent wing of a broader move-
ment that supports Ba’asyir. The movement,
known as the Ngruki network, named after
Ba’asyir’s school, includes a broad range of
prominent individuals, some of whom are active
in the Indonesian government. Many Indonesians
are deeply concerned that the war on terrorism,
and the U.S. push to arrest suspects without
clear evidence, could radicalize the Muslim
community.125
THE POST-INDUSTRIAL-AGE
TERRORIST ORGANIZATION
Mobilizing terrorist recruits and supporters
requires an effective organization. Effectiveness
requires resources, recruits, hierarchies, and
logistics. It requires adopting the mission to
appeal to the maximum number of recruits and
financial backers.126 As we have seen, contestants
often choose to call competition for natural
resources or political power a religious conflict
when they believe it will make their grievances
more attractive to a broader set of potential
fighters or financial backers. (Governments may
do the same by labeling opposition groups reli-
gious extremists to win international support
for crushing them.)
Money—used to buy goods and services—is a
critical component of what distinguishes groups
that are effective from those that disappear or fail
to have an impact. The terrorists discussed in
these pages raise money in a variety of ways. They
run licit and illicit businesses. They auction off
“relics.” They run their own informal banks,
which take a “charitable donation” in lieu of inter-
est. They solicit donations on the Internet, on the
streets, and in houses of worship. They appeal to
wealthy industrialists, sympathetic diasporas, and
to governments or their agents. By functioning as
a foundation that provides social services, the
groups spread their ideas to donors as well as the
recipients of their largesse. Recipients of charita-
ble assistance may be more willing to donate their
sons to the group’s cause.
But terrorist organizations need to balance
the requirements for optimizing capacity with
those of resilience. Resilience (the ability to
withstand the loss of personnel) requires redun-
dancy and minimal or impenetrable communi-
cation, making coordination difficult absent
cutting-edge encryption technologies. The most
resilient group discussed in this book is the
save-the-babies group Army of God, a virtual
network whose members meet only to discuss
the mission, not concrete plans. The drawback
from the terrorists’ perspective to this maximally
resilient style organization is that it requires
individuals or small groups :to act on their own,
making large-scale operations difficult.127
The best way to balance these competing
objectives is to form a network of networks, which
includes hierarchical structures (commanders and
cadres); leaderless resisters who are inspired
through virtual contacts; and franchises, which
may donate money in return for the privilege of
participating.128 The networks are held together
mainly by their common mission (although some
may be pursuing multiple missions, including
local agendas of little interest to the rest of the net-
work). By expanding his mission statement, bin
Laden was able to expand his network to include
most of the Islamist groups. Groups that are not
Islamist but oppose globalization may be willing
to donate money or operatives to the anti-New
World Order cause.
The Al Qaeda network of networks is at
the cutting edge of organizations today. Law-
enforcement authorities will continue to discover
new cells or clusters, but they will not be able to
shut down the movement until bin Laden, his
successors, and his sympathizers’ call to destroy
the New World Order loses its appeal among
populations made vulnerable by perceived
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humiliation and violations of human rights, per-
ceived economic deprivation, confused identities,
and poor governance.
There is a trade-off for policy makers between
the need to destroy the adversary that is about to
strike and the need to fight the movement over
the long term. Our military action becomes the
evidence our enemies need to prove the dangers
of the New World Order they aim to fight. It cre-
ates a sense of urgency for the terrorists seeking
to purify the world through murder.
It is part of the human condition to lack cer-
tainty about our identities; the desire to see our-
selves in opposition to some Other is appealing
to all of us. That is part—but only part—of what
religion is all about. One of our goals must be to
make the terrorists’ purification project seem
less urgent: to demonstrate the humanity that
binds us, rather than allow our adversaries to
emphasize and exploit our differences to pro-
vide a seemingly clear (but false) identity, at the
expense of peace.
NOTES
1. Hidaya Rubea Juma, mother of Khalfan
Khamis Mohamed. Quoted in “Special Assignment,”
SABC Africa News, date unavailable.
2. R. F. Burton, Zanzibar: City, Island,
and Coast (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1872), 117.
The monsoon between December and February
blows north, northeast from the Arabian peninsula
and the west coast of India, then reverses
direction in April. This remarkable pattern of
winds made oceangoing trade possible before
overland commerce was possible. Michael
F. Lofchie, Zanzibar: Background to Revolution
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1965), 21.
3. Lofchie, Zanzibar, 24. Lofchie explains the
Persians mingled completely with the Africans and
were no longer detectable as a separate group. Arabs,
who arrived later, became the upper classes in
Zanzibar, while immigrants from the Indian
subcontinent were traders, and the Africans
became the lowest class.
4. Nathalie Arnold, telephone conversation
with the author, 14 October 2002. Bruce McKim,
telephone conversation with the author, 16 October
2002; Human Rights Watch, “Tanzania: ‘The Bullets
Were Raining’—The January 2001 Attack on
Peaceful Demonstrators in Zanzibar.” Human Rights
Watch Report, 14, no. 3 (A) (April 2002), last
accessed 16 October 2002, www.hrw.org/
reports/2002/tanzania/ zanz0402 .
5. Arnold, telephone conversation. McKim,
telephone conversation.
6. Quoted in “Pemba Island,” All About
Zanzibar Web site, last accessed 16 October 2002,
www.allaboutzanzibar.com/indepth/guidebook/
pb00–01–11.htm.
7. Alice Werner, Myths and Legends of the Bantu
(London: Cass, 1968). See chapter 16, “Doctors,
Prophets, and Witches,” available in the book’s on-line
version at the Najaco Web site, last accessed 16 October
2002, www.najaco.com/books/myths/bantu/16.htm.
8. Werner, Myths and Legends. See also John,
E. E. Craster, Pemba: The Splee Island of Zanzibar
(London: T. F. Unwin, 1913). Werner believes that
some of these stories reflect the prejudices of white
Christians.
9. United States of America v. Usama bin
Laden, et al., S(7) 98 Cr. 1023 (27 June 2001), 8321.
10. Ibid., 8324–25.
11. This material summarizes Federal Bureau
of Investigation, FD-302a, of Khalfan Khamis
Mohamed, 10/5–7/99 at Cape Town, South Africa.
Marked “particularly sensitive.” This document was
entered into evidence at Mohamed’s trial.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. United States of America v. Usama bin
Laden (27 June 2001), 8327–28.
16. Ibid., 8329.
17. Ibid., 8328.
18. This material summarizes Federal Bureau
of Investigation, FD-302a.
19. United States of America v. Usama bin
Laden, (2 May 2001), 5437.
20. This material summarizes Federal Bureau
of Investigation, FD-302a.
21. Ibid.
22. United States of America v. Usama bin
Laden, (28 June 2001), 8431.
23. Ibid., 8431–32.
24. Ibid., (3 July 2001), 8740.
25. Quoted in Benjamin Weiser and Tim
Golden, “Al Qaeda: Sprawling, Hard-to-Spot Web of
Terrorists-in-Waiting,” New York Times, 30
September 2001, 1B4.
26. Testimony of Jerrold Post, United States of
America v. Usama bin Laden (27 June 2001), 8311–62.
27. Excerpts of the Al Qaeda training manual are
available at the Web site of the U.S. Department of
Justice, last accessed 14 January 2003, www.usdoj
.gov/ag /trainingmanual.htm.
28. See the Web site of the U.S. Department of
Justice, last accessed 11 October 2002, www.usdoj
.gov/ag/manualpart1_1 , “Declaration of Jihad
(Holy War) against the Country’s Tyrants—Military
Series,” First Lesson, p. 13 (translated version).
29. Ibid., Second Lesson, pp. 15–20 (translated
version).
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30. Copies of the more extensive Encyclopedia of
the Afghan Jihad were found from Al Qaeda members
arrested in Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. The
Encyclopedia covers tactics, security, intelligence,
handguns, first aid, explosives, topography, land
surveys and weapons, and has been compiled since
Soviet troops withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989.
Originally designed as a record of the Afghan fighters’
knowledge and experience in guerrilla warfare, it
gradually came to include terrorist tactics, as Al
Qaeda developed into a terrorist organization. A work
of several thousand pages written and translated over
five years, the Encyclopedia also appeared in CD-ROM
in 1996. For more information on the Encyclopedia of
the Afghan Jihad, see Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al
Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2002), 70.
31. Well-known members of the Shura Council
include Muhammed Atef, an Egyptian who served as
military commander and was reportedly killed in
Afghanistan in late 2001 and Ayman al-Zawzhiri, a
surgeon who runs the Egyptian Islamic Jihad,
responsible for the 1981 assassination of President
Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt. For other members of the
council, see testimony of Jamal Ahmad al-Fadl, United
States of America v. Usama bin Laden (6 February
2001), 204–07.
32. Ibid., 204–214.
33. Bruce R. Auster et al., “The Recruiter for
Hate,” U.S. News & World Report, 31 August 1998, 48.
34. The explosion blew a hole in the fuselage,
and only an extraordinary flight performance by the
pilot enabled an emergency landing at Naha airport
in Okinawa. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 175.
35. For more on the Bojinka Plot—also known
as Oplan Bojinka—see Simon Reeye, The New
Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the
Future of Terrorism (Boston, Mass.: Northeastern
University Press, 1999), 71–93; and Gunaratna,
Inside Al Qaeda, 175–77.
36. Judy Aita, “U.S. Completes Presentation of
Evidence in Embassy Bombing Trial: Defense
Expected to Begin Its Case April 16,” The Washington
File, Office of International Information Programs,
U.S, Department of State, April 2002, last accessed 2
October 2002, www.usinfo.state.gov/regional/af/
security/a1040558.htm.
37. See, for example, United States of America v.
Mokhtar Haouari, S(4) 00 Cr. 15 (3 July 2001),
630–35 (www.news.findlaw.com/cnn/docs/
haouari/ushaouari70301rassamtt ).
38. Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the
Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free
Press, 2001), 185.
39. Statement for the Record of J. T. Caruso,
Acting Assistant Director, Counter-Terrorism Division,
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), on Al-Qaeda
International Before the Subcommittee on International
Operations and Terrorism Committee on Foreign
Relations, United States Senate, Washington, D.C., 18
December 2001. Available on the Web site of the FBI,
last accessed 2 October 2002, www.fbi.gov/congress/
congress01/carus0121801.htm.
40. For a summary of President Musharraf ’s 12
January 2002 speech, see “Musharraf Declares War on
Extremism,” BBC News Online, 12 January 2002, last
accessed 18 October 2002, www.news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/
world/south_asia/1756965.stm. See also “Pakistan’s
Leader Comes Down Hard on Extremists,” CNN.com,
12 January 2002, last accessed 18 October 2002,
www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapef/south/01/12/
pakistan.india/.
41. See, for example, “Confessions of an
Al-Qaeda Terrorist,” Time, 23 September 2002, 34.
42. Kit R. Roanet, David E. Kaplan, Chitra
Ragavan, “Putting Terror Inc. on Trial in New York,”
U.S. News & World Report, 8 January 2001, 25.
43. See, for example, Bergen, Holy War, Inc., 80.
44. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 58–59.
45. Peter Baker, “Defector Says bin Laden Had
Cash, Taliban in His Pocket,” Washington Post, 30
November 2001, Al. See also Molly Moore and Peter
Baker, “Inside Al Qaeda’s Secret World; bin Laden
Bought Precious Autonomy,” Washington Post, 23
December 2001, A1.
46. Baker, “Defector Says bin Laden Had Cash,” Al.
47. Osama bin Laden established the
International Islamic Front in a statement calling for
a Jihad against the Jews and Crusaders on 23 February
1998. Signatories other than Osama bin Laden were
Ayman al-Zawahri, leader of Egypt’s Jihad group,
Rifai Taha, head of Egypt’s Gama’s al-Islamiya, Mir
Hamza, secretary general of Pakistan’s Ulema Society,
and Fazlul Rahman, head of the Jihad Movement in
Bangladesh. Other organizations whose membership
in the IIF has been publicized include the Partisans
Movement in Kashmir (Harkat ul-Ansar), Jihad
Movement in Bangladesh, and the Afghan military
wing of the “Advice and Reform” commission led by
Osama bin Laden, last accessed 21 March 2003,
http://ww.satp.org/satporgtp/usa/IIF.htm.
48. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 57–58.
49. United States of America v. Usama bin
Laden (4 June 2001), 7007.
50. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 60.
51. “Exclusive Interview: Conversation with
Terror,” Time, 11 January 1999, available on-line at
Time Asia last accessed 8 October 2002, www.time.com/
time/asia/news/interview/0,9754,174550–1,00.html.
52. Pamela Constable, “Bin Laden Tells
Interviewer He Has Nuclear Weapons,” Washington
Post, 11 November 2001, A32.
53. Ayman al-Zawahirl, Knights under the
Prophet’s Banner, chap. 11. Excerpts of the book were
translated by FBIS. See “Al-Sharq al-Awsat Publishes
Extracts from Al-Jihad Leader Al-Zawahiri’s New
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Book,” Al-Sharq al-Awsat (London), 2 December
2001, in FBIS-NES-2002–0108, Document ID
GMP20020108000197.
54. James Risen, “Question of Evidence: A
Special Report: To Bomb Sudan Plant, or Not: A Year
Later, Debates Rankle,” New York Times, 26 October
1999, A1.
55. Testimony by Ahmed Ressam, United States
of America v. Mokhlar Haouari (5 July 2001), 620–22.
56. See, for example, Peter Finn, “Five Linked
to Al Qaeda Face Trial in Germany; Prosecutors
Focus on Alleged Bombing Plans,” Washington Post,
15 April 2002, A13.
57. This manual was found in the house of a
Libyan Al Qaeda member who lived in Manchester,
England. Benjamin Weiser, “A Nation Challenged:
The Jihad, Captured, Terrorist Manual Suggests
Hijackers Did a Lot by the Book,” New York Times,
28 October 2001, A8.
58. The manual was part of the so-called
Encyclopedia of the Afghan Jihad, a seven-thousand-
pages-long collection, which used to consist of ten
volumes, of guidelines for terrorist attacks against
targets worldwide. See Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda,
70. See also Mark Boettcher, “Evidence Suggests Al
Qaeda Pursuit of Biological, Chemical Weapons,”
CNN.com, 14 November 2001, last accessed 8
October 2002, www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/
asiapcf/central/11/14/chemical.bio/.
59. On 13 March 2001, Italian authorities
bugged a conversation in which a Milan-based Al
Qaeda cell led by a Tunisian, Essid Sami Ben
Khomais, spoke of “an extremely efficient liquid that
suffocates people” and that was to be “tried out” in
France. The liquids, one cell member was overheard
saying, could secretly be placed in tomato cans and
would be dispersed when the cans were opened. See
Peter Finn and Sarah Delaney, “Al Qaeda’s Tracks
Deepen in Europe; Surveillance Reveals More Plots,
Links,” Washington Post, 22 October 2001, Al. See
also “Disturbing Scenes of Death Show Capability
with Chemical Gas,” CNN.com, 19 August 2002, last
accessed 8 October 2002, www.cnn.com/2002/US/
08/19/terror.tape.chemical/index.html.
60. Barton Gellman, “Al Qaeda Near
Biological, Chemical Arms Production,” Washington
Post, 23 March 2003, A1.
61. United States of America v. Usama bin
Laden, (7 February 2001), 357–365.
62. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 36.
63. United States of America v. Usama bin
Laden (19 June 2001), 7464.
64. “Report Links bin Laden, Nuclear
Weapons,” Al-Watan al-Arabi, 13 November 1998;
available from FBIS, Document ID
FTS19981113001081. Quoted in Kimberly McCloud
and Matthew Osborne, “CNS Reports: WMD
Terrorism and Usama bin Laden,” Web site of the
Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Monterey
Institute of International Studies, last accessed 8
October 2002, www.cns.miis.edu/pubs/
reports/binladen.htm. The November report in
Al-Watan followed that in another Arabic newspaper,
the London-based Al-Hayat, which declared that bin
Laden had already acquired nuclear weapons. “An
Aide to the Taliban Leader Renews His Refusal to Give
Information on Nuclear Weapons to bin Laden from
Central Asia,” Al-Hayat, 6 October 1998, quoted in
McCloud and Oshorne, “CNS Reports.” See also
Joseph, “Chemical Labs Show Al Qaeda Still Active.”
65. Joseph, “Chemical Labs Show Al Qaeda
Still Active.”
66. Steven Erlanger, “Lax Nuclear Security in
Russia Is Cited as Way for bin Laden to Get Arms,”
New York Times, November 12, 2001.
67. Kamran Khan and Molly Moore, “2 Nuclear
Experts Briefed bin Laden, Pakistanis Say,” Washington
Post, 12 December 2001, Al. See also Peter Baker and
Kamran Khan, “Pakistan to Forgo Charges Against 2
Nuclear Scientists; Ties to Bin Laden Suspected,”
Washington Post, 30 January 2002, A1.
68. Ibid.
69. David Albright, Kathryn Buchler, and Holly
Higgins, “Bin Laden and the Bomb,” Bulletin of the
Atomic Scientists, January/February 2002, 23.
70. ICT, “Al-Qa’ida (The Base),” International
Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT),
Herzliyya, Israel, last accessed 9 October 2002, www
.icr.org.il/inter_ter/orgdet.cfm?orgid=74.
71. “Bin Laden’s Martyrs for the Cause:
Thousands of Terrorists. Dozens of Cells, One
Mission,” Financial Times, 28 November 2001, 17.
72. The information about the European
recruiters is taken from The Recruiters, produced by
Alex Shprintsen, edited by Annie Chartrand, June
2002, CBC News, Canada. A summary of the
documentary is available on the Web site of the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, last accessed 10
October 2002, www.cbc.ca/national/news/
recruiters/network .html/.
73. “Bin Laden’s Martyrs for the Cause,” 17.
74. Michael Powell, “Bin Laden Recruits with
Graphic Video,” Washington Post, 27 September
2001, A19.
75. “Alliance Says It Has Found a School Run
by a Tiran of Terrorism,” New York Times, 1
December 2001: Jane Perlez, “School in Indonesia
Urges ‘Personal Jihad’ in Steps of Bin Laden,” New
York Times, 3 February 2002.
76. The German Bundeskriminalamt, the
Federal Criminal Agency, estimates the number of
militant Islamic trainees at Al Qaeda training camps
at 70,000. See “Bin Laden’s Martyrs for the Cause,” 17.
The CIA estimates the number at 110,000. Quoted in
Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 8. Of the 6–7 million Al
Qaeda supporters, some 120,000 are willing to take up
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arms. Estimates of the Central Intelligence Agency,
quoted in Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 95.
77. Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 8.
78. Walter Pincus and Vernon Locb, “Former
Recruits Provide Best Knowledge of Camps;
Intelligence on Targeted bin Laden Training Sites
Sketchy,” Washington Post, 8 October 2001, A16.
79. Department of Defense, Interrogation
Report of John Walker Lindh, JPWL-
000389–000407, 402–03. Declassified 5 March 2002.
80. Bryan Preston, “Inside Al Qaeda’s
Training Camps,” National Review, 1 October
2002. Available at the Web site of National Review
Online, last accessed 19 October 2002, www
.nationalreview .com/comment/
comment-preston100102.asp.
81. “Al-Sharq al-Awsat Publishes Extracts.” Parts
one through eleven of serialized excerpts from
Egyptian Al-Jihad Organization leader Ayman al-
Zawahiri’s book, “Knights under the Prophet’s Banner”
(FBIS translated text, henceforth: Ayman al-Zawahiri,
“Knights under the Prophet’s Banner Part: 1).
82. Ibid. Part I
83. Ibid. Part XI
84. Ibid. Part XI
85. Department of Defense, Interrogation
Report of John Walker Lindh.
86. Interview with HM-1, Pakistan, 2002.
Interviewer: Muzamal Suherwardy.
87. Lashkar e Taiba public affairs officer,
interview with the author, 3 August 2001. This
interview was attended by a Pakistani journalist who
writes under a pseudonym for tehelka.com, an
electronic newspaper published in India. He wrote an
article that highlighted this surprising admission.
88. Frederick R. Karl, Introduction to Joseph
Conrad, The Secret Agent (New York and London:
Penguin, 1983 edition).
89. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
(New York: Grove Press, 1963), 94.
90. Ibid., 195–97.
91. See John Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in
the Name of Islam (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002), 43.
92. Ibid.
93. Based on interviews in the United States,
Lebanon, Gaza, Israel, Pakistan, and Indonesia,
1998–2001.
94. Andrew Higgins and Allan Cullison, “Saga
of Dr. Zawahiri Sheds Light on the Roots of Al
Qaeda Terror: How a Secret, Failed Trip to Chechnya
Turned Key Plotter’s Focus to America and bin
Laden,” Wall Street Journal, 2 July 2002.
95. Neil MacFarquhar, “Islamic Jihad, Forged
in Egypt, Is Seen as bin Laden’s Backbone,” New York
Times, 4 October 2001, B4.
96. Lawrence Wright, “The Man behind bin-
Laden,” New Yorker, 16 September 2002, 77.
97. See, for example, Ahmed Rashid, “The
Taliban: Exporting Extremism,” Foreign Affairs,
November/December 1999; Ahmed Rashid, Jihad:
The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002); and
Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, 168–72.
98. C. J. Chlvers, “Uzbek Militants Decline
Provides Clues to U.S.,” New York Times, 8 October
2002, A15.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid.
102. Bernard Lewis, “License to Kill,” Foreign
Affairs, November/December 1998, 15.
103. John F. Burns, “Bin Laden Taunts U.S. and
Praises Hijackers,” New York Times, 8 October 2001,
A1. A transcript of President Bush’s 20 September
2002 speech is available at the Web site of the White
House. “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and
the American People,” United States Capital,
Washington, D.C., 20 September 2002, Last accessed
19 October 2002, www.whitehouse.gov/news/
releases/2001/09/20010920–8.html.
104. Judith Miller, “Bin Laden’s Media Savvy:
Expert Timing of Threats,” New York Times, 9
October 2001, B6.
105. “UK-Based Paper Notes Al-Qa’ida Military
Training on internet Site, Encyclopedia in Al-Sharq
al-Awsat (London), 16 February 2002. Available in
FBIS-NES-2002–0216, Article ID
GMP20020216000057.
106. Thaqafat al-Jihad, placed by “OBL2003.”
http://members.lycos.co.uk/himmame/vb/printthrea
d.php?threadid=1881. Printed (in translation) in
Reuven Paz, editor. The Project for the Research of
Islamist Movements (PRISM), Occasional Papers,
Volume 1 (2003), Number 3 (March 2003).
107. Bayan U-Taliban yu’akid an bin Laden
taliq walam yu’takjal (A statement by Taliban
confirms that Bin Laden is free and has not
been arrested). See on-line In: http://www
.o-alshahada.nct/vb/printhead .phb?s=&
threadid=82. Printed (in translation) in Reuven
Paz, editor. The Project for the Research of Islamist
Movements (PRISM), Occasional Papers, Volume 1
(2003), Number 3 (March 2003).
108. Dec Hock, Birth of the Chsordic Age
(San Francisco: Barrott Koehler Publishers, 1999).
109. Virtual networks of leaderless resisters make
sense for groups that will be satisfied with the kind of
attacks that can be carried out by small groups or
individuals acting on their own. The mission is openly
communicated, but detailed plans are not discussed
with the leadership of the movement or among
groups. The need for secrecy and the need for
inspirational leaders to be able to plausibly deny their
knowledge of past or present plots distort the
communication flow.
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110. Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network
Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers,
1996). Quoted in Joel Garreau, “Disconnect the
Dots,” Washington Post, 17 September 2001, C1.
111. Richard Wolfe, Carola Hoyos, and Harvey
Morris, “Bin Laden’s Wealth Put in Doubt by Saudi
Dissidents,” Financial Times, 24 September 2001, 5.
112. Paul McKay, “The Cost of Fanatical
Loyalty,” Ottauid Citizen, 23 September 2001, A8.
113. Barry Meler, “ ‘Super’ Heroin Was Planned
by bin Laden, Reports Say,” New York Times, 4
October 2001, B3.
114. For more information on the remittance
system of hawala, see the Web site of Interpol, last
accessed 7 January 2003, www.interpol.inr/Public/
FinancialCrime/MoneyLaundering/hawala/default
.asp#2.
115. Douglas Frantz, “Ancient Secret System
Moves Money Globally,” New York Times, 3 October
2001, B5. See also Judith Miller and Jeff Gerth,
“Business Fronts: Honey Trade Said to Provide
Funds and Cover to bin Laden,” New York Times, 11
October 2001, A1.
116. United States of America v. Usama bin
Laden (26 February 2001), 1415.
117. Interviews with Laskar Jihad, Jakarta, 9
August 2001, and Yogyakarra, 11 August 2001;
questionnaires administered in Pakistan.
118. Mark Hosenball, “Terror’s Cash Flow,”
Newsweek, 25 March 2002, 28.
119. See for example, “Hate Literature Blitz
Planned by Neo-Nazi Groups to Coincide with
Jewish Holidays and 9/11,” Anti-Defamation League
(ADL) press release, 27 August 2002. Available at the
ADL Web site, last accessed 13 January 2003,
www.adl.org/ PresRele/ASUS_12/4148_12.asp. The
flyer can be viewed at the National Alliance Chicago
Web site, last accessed 13 January 2003,
www.natallchicago.com/ Human-Shields2 .
120. See the Web site of the World Church of
the Creator, last accessed 13 January 2003, www
.creator.org/.
121. The article can be found in German at
www.cleutsches-reich.de, last accessed 17 March 2003.
122. Louis Beam, “Battle in Seattle: Americans
Face Off the Police State,” last accessed 14 January
2003, www.louisbeam.com/seattle.htm.
123. See Web site of the American
Revolutionary Vanguard, last accessed 14 January
2003, www.attackthesystem.com/islam.html.
124. Thanassis Cambanis and Charles M.
Sennott, quoting Magnus Rarustorp et al., “Fighting
Terror: Going After the Network Cells; Qaeda Seen
Still Dangerous,” Boston Globe, 6 October 2002, A17.
125. In December 2001, Singapore authorities
arrested fifteen Islamist militants who had plotted to
bomb U.S. targets, including naval vessels in
Singapore. The commander of the group was an
Indonesian based in Malaysia named Ruduan
Lamuddin (known as Hambali), whom Senior
Minister Lee Kuan Yew referred to as Bashir’s “right-
hand man.” The same group was accused of planning
to bomb U.S. embassies in Southeast Asia on the
anniversary of September 11. Details of the plot, and
the relationship of Jamaah Islamiyah to Al Qaeda,
were revealed to U.S. investigators by Al Qaeda’s
regional manager in Southeast Asia, Omar al Faruq.
Jamaah Islamiyah has been involved in a series of
failed attempts to attack Western targets in
Singapore, and information about its planned
attacks led the Untied States to shut embassies in
Southeast Asia on several occasions. The group has
also attempted several times to assassinate
Megawati. Singaporean investigators have learned
about how JI functions from the operatives they
took into custody in December 2001 and August
2002. Several JI members had been trained in Al
Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. Others were trained in
Mindanao by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. JI
leaders were instructed by Al Qaeda to stay away
from mainstream Muslim life in Singapore to avoid
drawing attention to themselves. They were not
active in madrassaht.
126. A good example of a broad mission
statement is the one that was used to mobilize
participants in the Battle of Seattle. Groups opposed
the World Trade Organization (WTO) for multiple
reasons. American unions, supporters of Ralph
Nader, and environmentalists were on the same side
for completely different reasons. They demanded
that WTO members adopt mandatory standards
regarding pollution and protecting workers—in the
case of the unions, because it would help them
compete with their third-world rivals, and in the
case of the environmentalists and “Naderites”
because it would reduce worldwide emissions and
promote workers’ health. Developing countries
opposed the WTO because they feared it would
impose precisely those standards, which would help
rich companies in the West at the expense of the
poor in the third world.
127. The Battle of Seattle is perhaps the best
example of an operation that succeeded despite
the inherent difficulties of surmounting this
problem. Individuals came to Seattle for their own
reasons.
128. Ronfeldt and Arquilla argue, in contrast, that
swarming is the ideal approach for networked terrorist
organizations. But I argue that the requirement for
secrecy will make large-scale swarming difficult for
terrorist organizations, absent impenetrable
communication systems. For their argument, see
David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, “Networks,
Netwars, and the Fight for the Future,” last accessed
15 August 2002, www.firstmonday.dk/issues
.issue6_10/ronfeldt/.
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