Perhaps radical Islam...isn't

Again, my friend and fellow Army officer Mike Ford has a great post in American Thinker.  Enjoy. 

Perhaps radical Islam...isn't 

By Mike Ford 

When Donald Trump opined that we should stop all Muslim immigration "until we can figure out what is going on," perhaps he stumbled on something we have yet to recognize: that radical Islam...isn't.  Much is being made (with good reason) of President Obama's failure to use the words "radical Islamic terrorism" when describing the horrific act in Orlando and other terror attacks here in the U.S.  Even yesterday's atrocity, the brutal murder of at latest count 80 civilians, who were run over by a French citizen of Tunisian descent, using a 5-ton cargo truck, has yet to elicit those words from President Obama. 

However, our focus may be a bit off here.  Perhaps the problem isn't radical Islam.  Perhaps the problem is Islam in its entirety.  As horrific as this brutal mass murder was, at what point does a radical politico-religious extreme become a mainstream religious belief? 

There are some interesting surveys out there regarding Muslim attitudes by the Pew Research Center.  The findings were interesting, especially when we examine them against a definition of "radical" or "extreme" that presupposes a locus at the end of a politico-religious spectrum and a population of less than 1 percent of the total population surveyed.  

Here are some of the findings 

As of 2010, there were 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide, or 23% percent of the population. 

Latest estimates put Muslims at just under 1% of the U.S. population at 2.75 million, 63% percent of whom are immigrants. 

Pew projects that by 2150, U.S. Muslims will outnumber American Jews, becoming the second most populous religion at 2.1% of the U.S. population, a little more than double today's share.   

Extrapolating forward, we are talking over 5.5 million Muslims in the U.S. 

Taken by themselves, those numbers would cause little concern.  However, Muslim attitudes both in the U.S. and worldwide should give us all pause.  A Washington Post article regarding Muslim attitudes toward homosexuality ("Here are the ten countries where homosexuality may be punishable by death") notes that Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, all U.S. allies, have death penalty statutes regarding the practice of homosexuality.  Abhorrent to Americans as that may be, it's difficult to paint that viewpoint as "extreme," when it is the legal position of duly constituted governments, some of which are U.S. allies in the war on "radical Islamic terrorism." 

Closer to home, the Pew study looked at the opinions of Muslims residing in the United States.  One interesting finding: 

More generally, Muslims mostly say that suicide bombings and other forms of violence against civilians in the name of Islam are rarely or never justified, including 92% in Indonesia and 91% in Iraq. In the United States, a 2011 survey found that 86% of Muslims say that such tactics are rarely or never justified. An additional 7% say suicide bombings are sometimes justified and 1% say they are often justified in these circumstances.

Using these percentages, coupled with the current Muslim population, that's 25,000 U.S. Muslims who believe violence in the form of suicide bombers is often justified in support of Islam. 

Polls may show that a clear majority of Muslims abhor ISIS violence, but until they actively do something to reform the clear plurality of Muslims who support it, innocent men, women, and children will continue to be murdered by this theocratic terrorist element that is by no means looked at as "extreme" by a goodly part of the Muslim world. 

Whatever happens, our Republic, with its protections for individual liberty, especially religious liberty, will have to come to grips with this, sooner rather than later.  Maybe Trump is right.  Maybe we should halt all Muslim immigration until "we figure out what is going on," and those so-called, "moderate Muslims" nudge their politico-military-religious construct towards meaningful reformation. 

Mike Ford is a retired infantry officer with experience in counterterrorism in Central America, Southwest Asia and as an instructor at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Ft. Bragg, N.C.

Security Weekly: Countering a Shapeless Terrorist Threat, September 10, 2015

By Scott Stewart

Last week's Security Weekly discussed how the digital revolution has allowed terrorist operatives employing leaderless resistance methods to act as their own media. For groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State, this ability greatly enhances the effectiveness of propaganda. At the same time, however, the information disseminated benefits authorities by providing valuable insight into the planning and execution of attacks.

Three weeks ago I countered the misconception that leaderless resistance always means that assailants act alone. Terrorists can also organize small cells, which can prove more dangerous than individual attackers. Unlike lone wolves, the members of these cells can combine their skills and resources to launch more effective attacks, although operational security becomes more difficult.

Building on these two themes, this week I will focus on how operatives carry out attacks. This is key — understanding the process can help authorities identify operatives not directly connected to a terrorist organization who would otherwise go unnoticed.

The Terrorist Attack Cycle

Counterterrorism agencies and programs are very good at targeting known groups and individuals — this is what they were designed to do. But they struggle with the ambiguity of leaderless resistance. This is, of course, why the jihadist movement and others have adopted this strategy.

Authorities have had their successes. There have been numerous cases in which these actors, practicing poor operational security, have reached out to outsiders (most often a government informant) to seek help conducting an attack. In other instances, they have even identified themselves on social media. These amateurish mistakes have made these particular operatives easy pickings for investigators, but more skilled operatives have shown themselves adept at hiding in the murky ambiguity of society. These are often identified too late, only after they have conducted an attack.

These more sophisticated grassroots operatives know how to operate under the radar, but this does not mean they are not vulnerable. This is because regardless of ideology or operational model, anyone planning a terrorist attack must follow the steps of the terrorist attack cycle. This is underscored by the 14th edition of Inspire magazine, released Sept. 9, in which al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula provided a step-by-step tutorial on how to plan assassinations that highlighted the terrorist attack cycle.

This cycle will always vary at least slightly based on the specific circumstances. A simple pipe bomb attack, for example, will require less surveillance than an assassination or kidnapping, and a suicide attacker needs no escape plan. Despite these variations, certain steps will need to be taken, meaning there will be windows when planners are unavoidably vulnerable to detection. Operatives are most open to detection during the pre-operational surveillance, weapons acquisition and deployment phases of the attack cycle.

Sophisticated terrorist organizations understand this and will attempt to minimize this risk of detection by using different cells for specific functions. The Provisional Irish Republican Army, for example, used separate cells for surveillance, weapons acquisition, bombmaking and launching the attack itself. Sophisticated jihadist attacks have followed a similar strategy, including the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and David Headley's surveillance of targets prior to the Mumbai attacks.

Grassroots operatives working alone are particularly weak in this regard because they must conduct every step of the terrorist attack cycle by themselves. They therefore expose themselves to detection multiple times before they can even launch an attack. Even grassroots cells, however, are limited — they rarely have the manpower or membership needed to conduct multiple tasks. On top of this, grassroots operatives have limited terrorist tradecraft in areas such as surveillance, planning and bombmaking.

Because they have limited resources, authorities normally deploy countermeasures such as surveillance detection only at hard targets. For this reason, grassroots operatives tend to focus on soft, poorly defended targets. And there are always soft targets. No government can protect everything, even with a massive security budget or powerful internal security service. When authorities shift their focus to protect one class of targets, terrorists can switch to more vulnerable alternatives. But the operatives must still follow the same cycle — and this behavior is evident if someone is paying attention.

The How

The terrorist attack cycle is extremely vulnerable during the pre-operational surveillance phase. Most operatives are particularly bad at surveillance tradecraft. They tend to behave suspiciously, look out of place and lurk — what we refer to as bad demeanor. The only reason they are able to succeed is that in general nobody is watching for these signs.

Many people think that the government is all-powerful, but nothing could be further from the truth. In the United States, the FBI has fewer than 14,000 special agents to investigate all of the criminal statutes it is responsible for enforcing. This includes counterintelligence, white-collar crime, bank robbery and kidnapping. At any one time there are only around 2,000 or 3,000 FBI special agents assigned to work counterterrorism across the entire United States, which includes transnational responsibilities. By way of comparison, there are more than 34,000 police officers in the New York Police Department alone.

These limited counterterrorism resources are mostly focused on monitoring people with known terrorist training and connections, who tend to be the most dangerous. The chance of a grassroots operative being caught in an operational act by an FBI agent or even a police officer assigned to a Joint Terrorism Task Force is fairly small unless he makes an egregious operational security blunder.

Especially with a soft target, a grassroots operative has a far greater chance of being observed conducting an operational act such as surveillance by an ordinary citizen or regular police officer. Indeed, this is why we have long stressed that police officers and citizens play an important role as grassroots defenders in helping provide the last line of common defense against the grassroots terrorist threat.

This has worked several times already. In July 2011, an alert gun store clerk notified police after a man behaved suspiciously while purchasing smokeless powder. The authorities investigated and learned that the man, an Army deserter, had planned to construct a pressure cooker bomb and attack a restaurant frequented by U.S. Army personnel. A device constructed with the same plans from Inspire magazine was later used in the Boston Marathon bombing.

There are other telltale signs. Attackers will frequently test bomb components they have manufactured. This will often result in small, unexplained explosions. Other indicators of bombmaking activity include the presence of unusual quantities or unexplained presence of chemicals such as acetone, acid, peroxide and methyl alcohol, or metallic powders such as aluminum, magnesium and ferric oxide. Beyond chemicals, bombmakers tend to use laboratory implements such as beakers, scales, protective gloves and masks — things not normally found in a hotel room or residence. (Some of this same equipment is associated with the manufacture of methamphetamines.)

Additionally, although electronic devices such as cellphones or wristwatches may not seem unusual in the context of a hotel room or apartment, signs that such devices have been disassembled or modified and have wires protruding from them should raise a red flag because these devices are commonly used as initiators for improvised explosive devices.

Obviously, not every person lurking suspiciously outside of a shopping mall is a terrorist, and not every container of nitric acid will be absolute confirmation of bombmaking activity, but reporting such incidents to the authorities will give them an opportunity to investigate and determine whether the incidents are innocuous or sinister.

That said, it is important to note that grassroots defenders should not be vigilantes, and this is not a call to institute the type of paranoid informant network that existed in East Germany. It is also not a call to Islamophobia — the Muslim community itself is an important component of grassroots defense, and many plots have been thwarted based upon tips from inside this community. Indeed, it is the children of Muslim families who are being recruited by jihadists to serve as shock troops or human smart bombs, and Muslims have suffered terrible losses at the hands of the jihadists. Grassroots defenders are just citizens who take responsibility for their own security and for the security of those around them. In an era when the threat of attack comes from increasingly diffuse sources, a good defense requires more eyes and ears than the authorities possess.

Countering a Shapeless Terrorist Threat is republished with permission of Stratfor.

Security Weekly: The Lives of Jihadist Leaders Drop in Value, August 6, 2015

By Scott Stewart

Much has been written since the July 30 confirmation that the Taliban's longtime leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, died two years ago. Most of the discussion has focused on the future of the Taliban movement, the impact of his death on the al Qaeda core — which had pledged allegiance to Mullah Omar as Amir al-Mu'minin, or "commander of the faithful," — and of course, the Islamic State's efforts to take advantage of Mullah Omar's death.

Certainly, the announcement has caused existing rifts among the various factions of the Taliban to become more pronounced. But these divisions have always existed, and the Taliban have long been anything but a cohesive, unified organization. The announcement also became fodder for a massive Twitter campaign by the Islamic State "Twitteratti," who are seeking to exploit the intentional deception of the Taliban cadres who sought to hide Mullah Omar's death. The Islamic State had publicly challenged the Taliban to publish proof of life for Mullah Omar, suggesting that word of the Talban leader's death had leaked. This likely forced the Taliban to admit that he was dead.

Islamic State gloating aside, I personally doubt we will witness the same scale of defections from the al Qaeda orbit of the jihadist universe that we did after the declaration of the caliphate last year. This is because the battle lines in the al Qaeda vs. Islamic State fight for the heart of the global jihad have become well established, and much of the shine has worn off the Islamic State's claim to be an inexorable force.

From my perspective, the more interesting aspect of the announcement of Mullah Omar's demise is that he had been dead since April 2013, but nobody really missed him. Concealing someone's death for one "Weekend at Bernie's" is one thing, but maintaining such a ruse for two years is quite another.

Low-Profile Leaders

Despite losing their commander-in-chief in April 2013, the Taliban have been making steady progress in their military campaign against the Kabul government. During the 2014 and 2015 fighting seasons, the Taliban not only worked to solidify their hold in their traditional areas of control in parts of Helmand, Paktika and Zabul provinces but also focused on the country's northern provinces, a marked departure from their previous emphasis on traditional strongholds in the south and east. The Taliban also continued to conduct high-profile attacks in Kabul, though it is noteworthy that Afghan security forces have responded quite effectively to such attacks over the past few months.

The Taliban made these advances while engaged in negotiations with the government in Kabul to try to find a political solution to the violence. The negotiations have been deadlocked, and the Taliban hope to use gains on the battlefield to bolster their negotiating position. Continuing attacks in Kabul against targets including the national parliament also enable the group to make its presence felt at the very heart of Afghanistan's government.

The Taliban accomplished all this without Mullah Omar's direct leadership. One reason for this is that changes in the way the United States and its allies conduct their campaigns against militant groups such as the Taliban have caused a dramatic shift in how those groups operate. The use of Predator and Reaper strikes and commando raids to target militant leaders — supported by robust signals intelligence efforts — have forced militant leaders to dramatically decrease their profiles and curtail their communications. Most leaders now eschew electronic communications and rely on couriers to bring information to them and dispatch orders.

The insulation required to protect jihadist leaders from the relentless efforts to hunt them down means that subordinates rarely have direct interaction with senior leadership. Instead, instructions and guidance are passed via intermediaries. The intermediaries themselves are often isolated from the leaders, communicating with them only via courier. When leaders do come out of hiding to interact with their troops, they put themselves at risk of being killed, as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula Emir Nasir al-Wahayshi was when he left his hideout to visit his triumphant followers after the capture of the Yemeni city of Mukalla.

Even showing your face on camera can come with a steep price, as seen by the number of al Qaeda and al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula talking heads who have been killed by U.S. airstrikes, including U.S. citizens Adam Gadahn, Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula also lost spokesman Harith bin Ghazi al-Nadhari in January, along with Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaish (the group's mufti) and Nasir bin Ali al-Ansi in April.

This reality reinforces the need to maintain a low profile. It unsurprising that some time has passed since al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri or Islamic State Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi were last seen in person or on video. Yet the low-profile approach to jihadist leader survival also comes with a cost: This method of operation leaves apex leaders isolated and slightly behind the information curve. To offset this disconnect and time lag, more autonomy is being delegated to operational leaders in the field.

This delegation works well in a situation like Afghanistan where many elements of the Taliban movement, such as the Haqqani network, are more or less politically aligned with the Taliban leadership but militarily independent. But the situation is far from unique to the Taliban. We know from ample evidence, such as the correspondence recovered when Osama bin Laden was killed, that al Qaeda also functioned in this manner, and also that the Islamic State central core delegates a great deal of autonomy down to emirs at the wilayat, or provincial, level in Syria and Iraq.

In such a detached and decentralized system, it is easy to see how an intermediary could hide the death of an apex leader if the leader's death were only known to a handful of people. The commanders receiving instructions would not really perceive a noticeable difference in communication since they always hear from the intermediary. Such a ruse could be used if the intermediary — or others working with the intermediary — wanted to usurp the apex leader's authority. Obviously, such a ploy could cause considerable blowback once it is discovered.

But there are other, less sinister explanations for the employment of such a ruse. A major one ties back to the relentless campaign to hunt down jihadist leaders: If U.S. and allied intelligence are focused on looking for a ghost, they will not be able to use those same assets to search for the still-living jihadist leader or leaders now in charge.

Tip of the Iceberg?

One of the more interesting responses to the announcement of Mullah Omar's death and the naming of his replacement, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, was that one of the statements of support for Mansoor was allegedly given by Jalaluddin Haqqani, patriarch of the Haqqani clan. Soon after this statement of support was issued, reports began to surface that Haqqani had also died more than a year ago, although members of his family denied the report. His son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, has been appointed by Mansoor as the operational commander for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. This suggests the Haqqanis are indeed firmly behind Mansoor, but even so, this has not quieted the rumors that Jalaluddin is dead. And he is not the only jihadist leader rumored to be no longer among the living.

Islamic State fanboys on social media are often keen to criticize al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri for being disconnected and essentially invisible, and some even claim al-Zawahiri is dead. But Islamic State Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi himself has also maintained an extremely low profile since declaring the establishment of the caliphate at the beginning of Ramadan last year in a speech at a mosque in Mosul, and there have been persistent rumors that al-Baghdadi was later either wounded or killed in a U.S. airstrike. The Islamic State has vehemently denied such rumors but has failed to produce any credible proof of life other than an audio recording released last November.

Similar rumors are swirling around Abubakar Shekau, the leader of the Islamic State's Wilayat al-Sudan al-Gharbi, the Nigerian jihadist group formerly known as Boko Haram. Shekau has been repeatedly declared dead by the Nigerian government only to release videos mocking those claims, but he has not appeared in recent videos, and widespread rumors of his demise continue.

Operationally, such rumors will have very little impact on the battlefield even if proved true. Apex leaders can be important figureheads, skillful managers who can unify factions or raise funds and recruit new fighters. But in the end, very few of them are frontline warriors running their group's day-to-day military or terrorist operations. Although Abu Musab al-Zarqawi became widely celebrated in jihadist circles as the "prince of slaughterers," an outtake video released by U.S. forces showed how the man portrayed as vicious and powerful in al Qaeda in Iraq videos was actually wearing unfashionable white sneakers instead of combat boots and couldn't even clear a malfunction from the M-249 light machinegun he awkwardly handled.

Such figures are important symbols, but as seen in the case of Mullah Omar, bin Laden or al-Zarqawi, jihadist groups will continue to function after their leader has been killed. This is not only because the jihadist ideology embraces and even celebrates martyrdom but also because jihadists tend to create decentralized, robust organizations that can survive the loss of the apex leadership. As long as the ideology of jihadism retains its strength and appeal, jihadist groups will continue to recruit new members faster than they can be killed.

COPYRIGHT: STRATFOR.COM

Security Weekly: Jihadism in 2014: The Grassroots Threat, January 22, 2015

By Scott Stewart

When I was planning this series I had originally intended to cover jihadist franchise groups before grassroots jihadists, but the events of the past few weeks have compelled me to change the order and discuss grassroots jihadism first.

As noted in the second installment of last year's Gauging the Jihadist Movement series that dealt with terrorist theory, jihadist ideologues such as Abu Musab al-Suri have publicly endorsed the leaderless resistance model since 2004. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula repeated those calls in 2009, and the al Qaeda core followed suit in 2010. Most recently, the Islamic State made the call in 2014. While these high-profile groups have drawn attention to the threat of lone wolf terrorism, the reality is the grassroots jihadist threat that springs from the leaderless resistance operational model goes back much further.

I personally first encountered grassroots jihadism in December 1990, when the district attorney for Manhattan approached a colleague of mine in the Diplomatic Security Service's New York Field Office seeking assistance in his investigation of the Nov. 5, 1990, assassination of Jewish Defense League founder Meir Kahane. An Egyptian-born American citizen named El Sayyid Nosair killed Kahane, but the FBI declared that the assassination was not terrorism because he acted alone. Therefore, it would not assist the Manhattan district attorney and the New York Police Department with the international aspects of the case. My office was asked to step in to assist, and we investigated many leads in Egypt and throughout the region. Immediately, the Nosair case illustrated the complex nature of grassroots jihadists and the web of relationships they can have.

The FBI would eventually open an investigation into the odd assortment of characters who formed a network to support Nosair's defense efforts. Many of them were tied to the al-Khifa Refugee Center — also known as the Brooklyn Jihad Office.

The Spectrum

While the grassroots jihadist threat is not by any means new, recent events in the United States, France and other parts of Europe highlight the varying types of grassroots jihadists and the different threats they pose based on training and connections to professional terrorist cadres. The spectrum of grassroots jihadists ranges from rank amateurs to trained operatives who work independent of a core or franchise jihadist group.

A good example of an unskilled amateur is Christopher Cornell, who was arrested by the FBI on Jan. 14 in Cincinnati. Cornell was a self-radicalized Muslim with a history of problems who had no training in terrorist tradecraft or even in small-arms and small-unit tactics. While reaching out for contacts within the jihadist realm, Cornell unknowingly established contact with an FBI informant who was able to monitor his intent and efforts toward launching an attack against the U.S. Capitol.

While people frequently poke fun at individuals such as Cornell and liken them to the awkward television character Kramer from the television show Seinfeld, it must be recognized that when they become connected with genuine terrorist trainers or facilitators instead of government informants, they can pose far more danger than they would have on their own. A prime example of this is Richard Reid, who attempted to destroy a Miami-bound American Airlines flight over the Atlantic Ocean with a shoe bomb in December 2001. Many dismissed Reid as a bumbling amateur, but when provided with a professionally manufactured shoe bomb and instructions on how to bypass airport security, he came very close to destroying the aircraft and killing all 197 people aboard.

Another example of amateurs becoming extremely dangerous when directed by professionals is the case of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. A highly trained al Qaeda operational leader, Abdel Basit (also known as Ramzi Yousef), was able to take a ragtag band of amateurs associated with the Nosair case and work with them to construct and detonate a 1,200-pound truck bomb in the parking garage beneath the North Tower. Indeed, Basit made a career of working with grassroots jihadists in places as diverse as the United States, the Philippines and Pakistan. He was only captured after one of the grassroots jihadists he was training refused to become a suicide bomber and shared his location with Diplomatic Security Service special agents, who then worked with Pakistani authorities to capture him in Islamabad.

There are various degrees of coordination, capability and threat presented by jihadists. In some cases, individuals have contact with a jihadist group that helps in their radicalization process, but they receive little or no operational assistance. A good example of this is Ft. Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, who corresponded with Anwar al-Awlaki via email, but received no training from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Sometimes, amateurs can have limited or no contact with professional terrorist operatives but receive the training they need via the Internet. The Tsarnaev brothers learned to make the pressure cooker bombs they used in the Boston Marathon attack using instructions from al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula's Inspire magazine.

The next step on the continuum is when a grassroots jihadist receives some training from a jihadist group, then returns home to conduct a self-motivated and self-planned attack. The 2009 Little Rock shooting, the Jan. 7 attack in Paris against Charlie Hebdo and the 2009 Najibullah Zazi case are all examples.

While more training often makes an operative more dangerous, this does not exclusively determine the threat level an individual poses. Personal capability and access to soft targets are also important factors. For example, Little Rock shooter Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad attended a training camp run by al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in Yemen and received small-arms training there, but he only killed one soldier in his attack. Conversely, Maj. Nidal Hasan, who had received no jihadist training, succeeded in killing 13 and wounding 30 in an attack that became the most deadly on U.S. soil since 9/11.

Other plans where jihadist groups in Pakistan trained grassroots jihadists to carry out attacks in the West have also seen mixed results. For example, while Mohamed Sidique Khan and his confederates were able to kill 52 victims in their July 7, 2005, bombings in London, Faisal Shahzad was not able to build a viable improvised explosive device and instead left a large, conspicuous dud at Times Square in May 2010.

Trends

Al Qaeda has a history of sending operational commanders to organize and mentor grassroots jihadists in conducting major attacks. They used this model for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and several other plots. However, counterterrorism measures taken following the 9/11 attacks have made this operational model more difficult to implement, and we have not seen such an attack in several years. Instead, jihadist organizations are increasingly turning to the leaderless resistance model because even using fighters returning from training or combat in the Middle East to carry out attacks has become more difficult.

Since the Islamic State called for jihadists to adopt the leaderless resistance model in September 2014, we have seen an uptick in grassroots activity. A month ago, it appeared as if this would be a short-lived trend, but the events of the past two weeks have shown that the trend is continuing. Interestingly, the Charlie Hebdo attackers were acting out of solidarity with al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula while their co-conspirator, Amedy Coulibaly, pledged allegiance to the rival Islamic State. This case not only illustrates the increased frequency of grassroots attacks, but also the complexity of the web of contacts and influences that can motivate them.

Countries are trying to block travel to places such as Syria where grassroots jihadists can receive training and combat experience, but as our grassroots spectrum shows, this will not totally alleviate the problem. Rather, it will only help to limit the small-arms and terrorist tradecraft training provided to grassroots jihadists. If these individuals are not permitted to travel, they may just strike in their home countries ahead of schedule. Such was the case on Sept. 23, when Michael Zehaf-Bibeau killed a soldier at the Canadian War memorial in Ottawa and stormed the Canadian Parliament building after being denied a passport to travel to Syria — presumably to fight with the Islamic State.

Challenges

As designed, the leaderless resistance model employed by grassroots jihadists poses problems for law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Most counterterrorism intelligence efforts have been designed to identify and track people with travel, communication or financial links to known terrorist groups. Such methods have proven effective. Still, one of the many difficulties in identifying grassroots jihadists is that such links may not exist, and the relationship between grassroots operatives and terrorist groups may be ambiguous — and government agencies simply do not fare well in dealing with ambiguous things.

Beyond the lack of links or solid links, another significant problem for security agencies lies in the sheer volume of potential grassroots actors. There are simply too many actors for the authorities to effectively monitor all the time. Monitoring a single individual's actions and communications full time requires an incredible amount of resources, especially if translation is required. When monitoring hundreds or even thousands of individuals, the problem is magnified significantly.

Because of resource constraints, law enforcement and intelligence agencies are forced to conduct quick assessments and prioritize their surveillance efforts. This often means focusing on grassroots operatives who have contact with a terrorist entity and ignoring those who do not because of the severity in the potential threat they pose on the threat spectrum. This prioritization of scarce resources often allows other grassroots operatives assessed as posing a lesser threat to conduct their operational planning without police surveillance detection. Of course, even jihadists who pose a lesser threat can still kill people. Moreover, if they do launch a successful attack, security forces are inevitably criticized for failing to monitor the specific person(s) in the sea of potential attackers.

Furthermore, security agencies can only monitor the suspects they know about. Other people can fly beneath the radar until they strike. It is impossible to identify them all before they attack, and it is impossible to protect every potential target. Despite the best efforts of the security forces, some attacks will eventually slip through and succeed.

As long as jihadists urge radicalized followers to adopt their ideology and conduct attacks using the principles of the leaderless resistance model, grassroots jihadists will continue to pose a broad threat that is difficult to counter. As a result, these kinds of attacks will remain a part of modern life. However, this threat will also continue to be less severe than the one posed by highly trained professional terrorist operatives, meaning that while it is chronic, it is not acute.

COPYRIGHT: STRATFOR.COM

Geopolitical Weekly: A War Between Two Worlds, January 13, 2015

By George Friedman

The murders of cartoonists who made fun of Islam and of Jews shopping for their Sabbath meals by Islamists in Paris last week have galvanized the world. A galvanized world is always dangerous. Galvanized people can do careless things. It is in the extreme and emotion-laden moments that distance and coolness are most required. I am tempted to howl in rage. It is not my place to do so. My job is to try to dissect the event, place it in context and try to understand what has happened and why. From that, after the rage cools, plans for action can be made. Rage has its place, but actions must be taken with discipline and thought.

I have found that in thinking about things geopolitically, I can cool my own rage and find, if not meaning, at least explanation for events such as these. As it happens, my new book will be published on Jan. 27. Titled Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, it is about the unfolding failure of the great European experiment, the European Union, and the resurgence of European nationalism. It discusses the re-emerging borderlands and flashpoints of Europe and raises the possibility that Europe's attempt to abolish conflict will fail. I mention this book because one chapter is on the Mediterranean borderland and the very old conflict between Islam and Christianity. Obviously this is a matter I have given some thought to, and I will draw on Flashpoints to begin making sense of the murderers and murdered, when I think of things in this way.

Let me begin by quoting from that chapter:

We've spoken of borderlands, and how they are both linked and divided. Here is a border sea, differing in many ways but sharing the basic characteristic of the borderland. Proximity separates as much as it divides. It facilitates trade, but also war. For Europe this is another frontier both familiar and profoundly alien.

Islam invaded Europe twice from the Mediterranean — first in Iberia, the second time in southeastern Europe, as well as nibbling at Sicily and elsewhere. Christianity invaded Islam multiple times, the first time in the Crusades and in the battle to expel the Muslims from Iberia. Then it forced the Turks back from central Europe. The Christians finally crossed the Mediterranean in the 19th century, taking control of large parts of North Africa. Each of these two religions wanted to dominate the other. Each seemed close to its goal. Neither was successful. What remains true is that Islam and Christianity were obsessed with each other from the first encounter. Like Rome and Egypt they traded with each other and made war on each other.

Christians and Muslims have been bitter enemies, battling for control of Iberia. Yet, lest we forget, they also have been allies: In the 16th century, Ottoman Turkey and Venice allied to control the Mediterranean. No single phrase can summarize the relationship between the two save perhaps this: It is rare that two religions might be so obsessed with each other and at the same time so ambivalent. This is an explosive mixture.

Migration, Multiculturalism and Ghettoization

The current crisis has its origins in the collapse of European hegemony over North Africa after World War II and the Europeans' need for cheap labor. As a result of the way in which they ended their imperial relations, they were bound to allow the migration of Muslims into Europe, and the permeable borders of the European Union enabled them to settle where they chose. The Muslims, for their part, did not come to join in a cultural transformation. They came for work, and money, and for the simplest reasons. The Europeans' appetite for cheap labor and the Muslims' appetite for work combined to generate a massive movement of populations.

The matter was complicated by the fact that Europe was no longer simply Christian. Christianity had lost its hegemonic control over European culture over the previous centuries and had been joined, if not replaced, by a new doctrine of secularism. Secularism drew a radical distinction between public and private life, in which religion, in any traditional sense, was relegated to the private sphere with no hold over public life. There are many charms in secularism, in particular the freedom to believe what you will in private. But secularism also poses a public problem. There are those whose beliefs are so different from others' beliefs that finding common ground in the public space is impossible. And then there are those for whom the very distinction between private and public is either meaningless or unacceptable. The complex contrivances of secularism have their charm, but not everyone is charmed.

Europe solved the problem with the weakening of Christianity that made the ancient battles between Christian factions meaningless. But they had invited in people who not only did not share the core doctrines of secularism, they rejected them. What Christianity had come to see as progress away from sectarian conflict, Muslims (and some Christians) may see as simply decadence, a weakening of faith and the loss of conviction.

There is here a question of what we mean when we speak of things like Christianity, Islam and secularism. There are more than a billion Christians and more than a billion Muslims and uncountable secularists who mix all things. It is difficult to decide what you mean when you say any of these words and easy to claim that anyone else's meaning is (or is not) the right one. There is a built-in indeterminacy in our use of language that allows us to shift responsibility for actions in Paris away from a religion to a minor strand in a religion, or to the actions of only those who pulled the trigger. This is the universal problem of secularism, which eschews stereotyping. It leaves unclear who is to be held responsible for what. By devolving all responsibility on the individual, secularism tends to absolve nations and religions from responsibility.

This is not necessarily wrong, but it creates a tremendous practical problem. If no one but the gunmen and their immediate supporters are responsible for the action, and all others who share their faith are guiltless, you have made a defensible moral judgment. But as a practical matter, you have paralyzed your ability to defend yourselves. It is impossible to defend against random violence and impermissible to impose collective responsibility. As Europe has been for so long, its moral complexity has posed for it a problem it cannot easily solve. Not all Muslims — not even most Muslims — are responsible for this. But all who committed these acts were Muslims claiming to speak for Muslims. One might say this is a Muslim problem and then hold the Muslims responsible for solving it. But what happens if they don't? And so the moral debate spins endlessly.

This dilemma is compounded by Europe's hidden secret: The Europeans do not see Muslims from North Africa or Turkey as Europeans, nor do they intend to allow them to be Europeans. The European solution to their isolation is the concept of multiculturalism — on the surface a most liberal notion, and in practice, a movement for both cultural fragmentation and ghettoization. But behind this there is another problem, and it is also geopolitical. I say in Flashpoints that:

Multiculturalism and the entire immigrant enterprise faced another challenge. Europe was crowded. Unlike the United States, it didn't have the room to incorporate millions of immigrants — certainly not on a permanent basis. Even with population numbers slowly declining, the increase in population, particularly in the more populous countries, was difficult to manage. The doctrine of multiculturalism naturally encouraged a degree of separatism. Culture implies a desire to live with your own people. Given the economic status of immigrants the world over, the inevitable exclusion that is perhaps unintentionally incorporated in multiculturalism and the desire of like to live with like, the Muslims found themselves living in extraordinarily crowded and squalid conditions. All around Paris there are high-rise apartment buildings housing and separating Muslims from the French, who live elsewhere.

These killings have nothing to do with poverty, of course. Newly arrived immigrants are always poor. That's why they immigrate. And until they learn the language and customs of their new homes, they are always ghettoized and alien. It is the next generation that flows into the dominant culture. But the dirty secret of multiculturalism was that its consequence was to perpetuate Muslim isolation. And it was not the intention of Muslims to become Europeans, even if they could. They came to make money, not become French. The shallowness of the European postwar values system thereby becomes the horror show that occurred in Paris last week.

The Role of Ideology

But while the Europeans have particular issues with Islam, and have had them for more than 1,000 years, there is a more generalizable problem. Christianity has been sapped of its evangelical zeal and no longer uses the sword to kill and convert its enemies. At least parts of Islam retain that zeal. And saying that not all Muslims share this vision does not solve the problem. Enough Muslims share that fervency to endanger the lives of those they despise, and this tendency toward violence cannot be tolerated by either their Western targets or by Muslims who refuse to subscribe to a jihadist ideology. And there is no way to distinguish those who might kill from those who won't. The Muslim community might be able to make this distinction, but a 25-year-old European or American policeman cannot. And the Muslims either can't or won't police themselves. Therefore, we are left in a state of war. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has called this a war on radical Islam. If only they wore uniforms or bore distinctive birthmarks, then fighting only the radical Islamists would not be a problem. But Valls' distinctions notwithstanding, the world can either accept periodic attacks, or see the entire Muslim community as a potential threat until proven otherwise. These are terrible choices, but history is filled with them. Calling for a war on radical Islamists is like calling for war on the followers of Jean-Paul Sartre. Exactly what do they look like?

The European inability to come to terms with the reality it has created for itself in this and other matters does not preclude the realization that wars involving troops are occurring in many Muslim countries. The situation is complex, and morality is merely another weapon for proving the other guilty and oneself guiltless. The geopolitical dimensions of Islam's relationship with Europe, or India, or Thailand, or the United States, do not yield to moralizing.

Something must be done. I don't know what needs to be done, but I suspect I know what is coming. First, if it is true that Islam is merely responding to crimes against it, those crimes are not new and certainly didn't originate in the creation of Israel, the invasion of Iraq or recent events. This has been going on far longer than that. For instance, the Assassins were a secret Islamic order to make war on individuals they saw as Muslim heretics. There is nothing new in what is going on, and it will not end if peace comes to Iraq, Muslims occupy Kashmir or Israel is destroyed. Nor is secularism about to sweep the Islamic world. The Arab Spring was a Western fantasy that the collapse of communism in 1989 was repeating itself in the Islamic world with the same results. There are certainly Muslim liberals and secularists. However, they do not control events — no single group does — and it is the events, not the theory, that shape our lives.

Europe's sense of nation is rooted in shared history, language, ethnicity and yes, in Christianity or its heir, secularism. Europe has no concept of the nation except for these things, and Muslims share in none of them. It is difficult to imagine another outcome save for another round of ghettoization and deportation. This is repulsive to the European sensibility now, but certainly not alien to European history. Unable to distinguish radical Muslims from other Muslims, Europe will increasingly and unintentionally move in this direction.

Paradoxically, this will be exactly what the radical Muslims want because it will strengthen their position in the Islamic world in general, and North Africa and Turkey in particular. But the alternative to not strengthening the radical Islamists is living with the threat of death if they are offended. And that is not going to be endured in Europe.

Perhaps a magic device will be found that will enable us to read the minds of people to determine what their ideology actually is. But given the offense many in the West have taken to governments reading emails, I doubt that they would allow this, particularly a few months from now when the murders and murderers are forgotten, and Europeans will convince themselves that the security apparatus is simply trying to oppress everyone. And of course, never minimize the oppressive potential of security forces.

The United States is different in this sense. It is an artificial regime, not a natural one. It was invented by our founders on certain principles and is open to anyone who embraces those principles. Europe's nationalism is romantic, naturalistic. It depends on bonds that stretch back through time and cannot be easily broken. But the idea of shared principles other than their own is offensive to the religious everywhere, and at this moment in history, this aversion is most commonly present among Muslims. This is a truth that must be faced.

The Mediterranean borderland was a place of conflict well before Christianity and Islam existed. It will remain a place of conflict even if both lose their vigorous love of their own beliefs. It is an illusion to believe that conflicts rooted in geography can be abolished. It is also a mistake to be so philosophical as to disengage from the human fear of being killed at your desk for your ideas. We are entering a place that has no solutions. Such a place does have decisions, and all of the choices will be bad. What has to be done will be done, and those who refused to make choices will see themselves as more moral than those who did. There is a war, and like all wars, this one is very different from the last in the way it is prosecuted. But it is war nonetheless, and denying that is denying the obvious.

A War Between Two Worlds is republished with permission of Stratfor.