It pains me to say this but Robert Fox has actually come up with a decent article at The Guardian, Virtually combating real terror. It’s essentially off the back of Daniel Kimmage’s work at RFE/RL [e.g. PDF] and his recent op-ed in the International Herald Tribune (and prior to that at the New York Times, Robert), but I’ve got no problem with bringing Daniel’s basic hypothesis to a new audience. Fox:

With their relentless message of blood and hate al-Qaida are not keen on getting back chat. Socratic dialogue is not their thing, and nor are laughs, apparently. In the more open channels and forums like YouTube images of Bin laden and al-Zawahiri get reactions from approval to explicit and virulent condemnation.

Attempts to run their own dialogues through their chosen media, like al-Sahab, have not been that successful, either. Last December Ayman al-Zawahiri asked for questions online. The questions weren’t produced until last [sic] April “due to security problems” according to bin Laden’s counsellor and guide. The dullness of the material suggests a different story.

Web 2.0-style social networking through the internet is now taking off in the Arabic world, Iran, and further east into southwest Asia. Even the wild lands of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier province are getting increasingly online (new mobile phone acquisition there is currently running at 170% per month). The social networking phenomenon is still frowned on by the most conservative states, however. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria try to block them, and internet traffic is held under tight intelligence surveillance in Libya and Yemen. Now here’s a coincidence: according to repeated US military surveys of origins of foreign jihadi fighters in Iraq most come from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen [see CTC Sinjar report - PDF].

It seems simplistic to say the answer to the preachers of international terror lies in YouTube. But empowering the right of reply would be a good beginning. It would be a salutary experience, too, for the lords of cyber terror and their closet patrons and sponsors in the conservative Arab world and the darker reaches of Pakistan’s military oligarchy.

I’m really not going to pick holes in Fox’s piece. I’m even going to give him the benefit of the doubt for using the phrase ‘Web 2.0-style‘ and take it that he dislikes the 2.0 tag as much as I do. This piece mainly preaches to the choir, but for anyone else it’s worth reading for a lowdown on Kimmage’s research.

I’ve gibbered about Kimmage’s ideas before:

Daniel Kimmage at the ICSR [CTLab]

Daniel Kimmage at the ICSR [Ubiwar, see comments too]

The new issue of Strategic Insights from the Center for Contemporary Conflict contains an article by Kathleen Meilahn, The Strategic Landscape: Avoiding Future Generations of Violent Extremists:

Psycho-social and political factors play an important role in radicalization. Where Islamist Violent Extremist Organizations (VEO) are concerned, these factors play a significant role in recruitment—versus just theology. However, once recruited, theology becomes the justification for violent actions. In the initial stages of al-Qaeda’s ascendancy, theological values that became politically radicalized were a driving factor motivating the core actors. As al-Qaeda (AQ) and other VEOs aim to increase in size, their recruitment process has become more oriented toward—or broadened to include—political issues, and those foot soldiers who volunteer are often psycho-socially motivated. Yet, in effect, AQ is “engaged in an unprecedented exercise of corrupting, misinterpreting and misrepresenting the word of God to generate support for their political mission.” [PDF]

I’m not given to anniversaries or other attendant numerology, but it caught my eye that it’s exactly 12 years since the Khobar Towers truck bombing of 25 June 1996 in Saudi Arabia.

From the FBI indictment of the 14 men charged with offences relating to the bombing:

At about 10:00 p.m. on June 25, 1996, a tanker truck loaded with at least 5,000 pounds of plastic explosives was driven into the parking lot in front of the Khobar Towers residential complex in Dhahran. Moments later a massive explosion sheared the face off of Building 131, an eight-story structure which housed about 100 U.S. Air Force personnel. Although rooftop sentries were immediately suspicious of the truck - parked some 80 feet from the building - and attempted an evacuation, few escaped. Comparable to 20,000 pounds of TNT, the bomb was estimated to be larger than the one that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City a year before, and more than twice as powerful as the 1983 bomb used at the Marine barracks in Beirut.

The attacks were attributed to Hizballah Al-Hijaz (Party of God in the Hijaz), with alleged links to al-Qaeda, presumably before the factional Shia/Sunni split. The 9/11 Commission report alleges that Osama bin Laden was seen being congratulated on the day of the bombing, and perhaps acted as a facilitator for the group. Iran has repeatedly been fingered by the US as the state sponsor behind the attacks. None of these allegations has been substantiated by publicly available evidence.

Joshua Woody’s Memorial Site.

Despite accusations that the UK is going to hell in a handcart following the release of “Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man in Europe”, Abu Qatada, and the delightful Jordanian’s subsequent renewal of the call to violent jihad, there are signs that the British judiciary at least retains a semblance of common sense.

On Tuesday 17 June 2008, the UK Court of Appeal quashed the conviction of Samina Malik, the “lyrical terrorist”, for possession of information useful for terrorist purposes under Section 58 of the Terrorism Act 2000. Originally convicted on 6 December 2007, Malik was handed a nine-month suspended sentence, partly one suspects because the judge felt under obligation to do something. Judge Peter Beaumont confessed that Malik was an “enigma” to him and that her offence was “on the margins of what this crime concerns.”

The Crown Prosecution Service will not seek a further retrial despite their obvious feeling that she’s guilty as charged, so Samina Malik can return to her life in West London an innocent person under the law. This being Britain, the press will probably hound her until her dying day - this is the country in which paediatricians are harassed for being child molesters, lest we forget. Apparently, the perpetrators of this act of staggering ignorance thought her ‘job title’ was paedophile. They should just have googled her:

I digress, and flippantly at that. The judiciary is evidently having some problems enforcing recent ‘terror’ legislation, at the appeal stage at least. In February 2008, five Muslim students’ convictions for possession of extremist material were also overturned. The ruling in both cases determined that prosecution must show intent to commit terrorism arising from possession of extremist literature. Malik owned a service manual for a 7.62mm semi-automatic Dragunov sniper rifle, but no weapon. Nor had she shown any attempt to obtain one. Ergo, not guilty on that charge. You can download the manual as a PDF if you wish, or indeed the Mujahideen Poisons Handbook [PDF], Essential Provision of the Mujahid [PDF, h/t Marisa], OBL’s “Declaration of War” (take your pick), or any number of other seditious documents in Malik’s house.

Malik may have been heading down an undesirable path, but she had to be acquitted. It might be true that her arrest and subsequent remand halted her progress along the track of radicalisation, but there is the problem of evidence, which in her case and others simply did not qualify as such. Of more concern should have been her relationship with Sohail Qureshi, who at least admitted preparing for terrorism under Section 5 of the Terrorism Act. Intelligence apparently showed that Qureshi had ‘previous’, through his attendance at jihadist training camps, and seemed to be actively gearing up to commit a terrorist offence. Malik allegedly supplied information about Heathrow Airport security procedures to Qureshi, although I’ve seen nothing in this vein that wasn’t publicly available. Qureshi is currently serving a 4½-year sentence in a British prison.

Malik’s acquittal is a mixed bag. Her defence’s argument that her (dreadful) poetry was akin to Wilfred Owen’s WWI complex horrors seems not to have been challenged by the Appeal judge as a spurious legal tactic, let alone a gross miscarriage of literary criticism. Her release helps curtail frivolous and desperate uses of the 2006 legislation, and may strengthen the central provisions of the Act. It also avoids the creation of another martyr, and the British legal system avoids another accusation of being a recruiting sergeant for violent extremists. Will it deter further abuses? Undoubtedly not, but as long as the Appeals Court continues to do its job, hopefully this will create in time a body of sensible applications of the law. If the evidence does not exist, drop the charges, and ramp up your intelligence and policing activities. Don’t bully the judiciary to cover up evidential inadequacies.

Proper commentary on Regina vs. Malik can be found at the following:

NEFA: TerrorWatch on Fatah al-Islam and Samina Malik Powerpoint - Evan Kohlmann at CT Blog

R v Malik [2008] All ER (D) 201 (Jun) - CyberLaw Blog

CPS Response to Salima Malik Appeal - Crown Prosecution Service press

Is It Safe to Download Al Qaeda Manuals Yet? - The Register

‘Lyrical terrorist’ wins appeal - BBC Online

I’ve got a new post up at Complex Terrain Lab:

On Wednesday 11 June 2008 the Frontline Club in London hosted a discussion evening, Media Talk: Assassination and Insurgency - Are the Taliban Winning? Moderated by Nazanine Moshiri of Al Jazeera, the panel brought together Alastair Leithead (BBC), James Fergusson (journalist and author), James Appathurai (NATO spokesman), John D. McHugh (photojournalist) and, via Skype from Kandahar, Mawlavi Abdulsalam Zaeef (ex-Taliban ambassador to Pakistan).

Read the full article here.

[Cross-posted from Complex Terrain Lab]

On 21 May, Daniel Kimmage, Regional Analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, spoke to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence at King’s College London. The basis for the talk was his recently published study The Al-Qaeda Media Nexus: The Virtual Network Behind the Global Message [.pdf] which received a fair amount of attention in the blogosphere and beyond. He is also author, with Kathleen Ridolfo, of The War of Images and Ideas: How Sunni Insurgents in Iraq and Their Supporters Worldwide are Using The Media [.pdf].

Kimmage is worth listening to and reading for many reasons, but the principal advantage Kimmage has over most commentators and analysts on the subject is that he is fluent in Arabic. This provides him with real insight into the practical workings of jihadist media, whilst most of us observe from at least one linguistic remove. His sample in this case was 446 outlets identified in July 2007, of which 78% concentrated on Iraq, in particular the Islamic State of Iraq and Ansar al-Sunnah.

In Kimmage’s analysis, jihadist media have developed media products with consistent and systematic branding, using virtual media production and distribution entities (MPDEs) to link a plethora of groups under the global jihadist umbrella. This strategy, mirroring conventional media structures, imparts a degree of legitimacy and credibility to jihadist narratives, as well as facilitating control over the ideological content of the ‘message’.

It is this desire to control media output that Kimmage identifies as the principal reason why jihadist groups are not at the cutting-edge of technology use, in contrast to much of the reporting and analysis to the contrary. The use of ‘web 2.0′ technologies, such as social networks and video sharing sites, threatens message control and is therefore actively discouraged by jihadist groups. As previously noted, this is a fairly traditional approach to media, one that eschews the reflexivity and interactivity of available technology in favour of one-way message propagation. Essentially, it is a propaganda machine.

Kimmage concluded by examining the origin of foreign fighters in Iraq, the majority of which come from media-repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Libya. He posed this speculative question as a result: could a freer, more interactive internet be the secret weapon against al-Qaeda’s ideology? We are reaching a point where virtual claims and kinetic actions are increasingly divergent - advertisement of this trend could reduce internet radicalisation and help stem the flow of online jihadist rhetoric.

My gut feeling is that this would be a sensible move. The challenge of convincing repressive regimes to open up the virtual media space is a difficult one, and there is also no guarantee that a bottom-up, ‘liberalising’ debate would emerge in those societies in which jihadist media flourishes. Jihadist forums are not exactly welcoming of ideological challenges to their chosen stances, and increased access to the internet and the lifting of censorship is unlikely to be met with analagous social reform either. I am reminded of a notice pinned to the wall of a downtown Cairo internet cafe I occasionally visited: “Our patrons are kindly asked not to mention any of these subjects whilst using the internet: sex, religion, politics.”

Kimmage’s study is an interesting one, with undoubted value but, and he freely admits this, is of limited scope. Jihadist internet use is by no means restricted to the Arabic language, and his sample was kept deliberately manageable in size and time. His assertion that the sophistication of jihadists’ use of internet technology is often overstated has some traction, but equally ignores the fact that those wishing to employ counterstrategies have barely even got to grips with the internet as a contestable space. This is changing, particularly in the U.S. military, but there is a long way to go, conceptually and operationally.

I also find myself thinking that there is an opposite underestimation at work here. The nature of the internet is such that - and I believe a lot of insurgents and terrorists know this - once material is on the internet, it tends to take unpredictable paths. This in itself constitutes the exercise of a strategic choice that this study and others miss: a lot of material is deliberately and wilfully produced just so it can be remixed and reworked by whoever chooses to - this is categorically not an attempt to straitjacket the ‘message’ within a normative media framework. The propaganda of the deed thrives in this viral, memetic environment, which might even be a force-multiplier in the global insurgency.

I wish Daniel luck in finding new employment after the recent restructuring of RFE/RL, and look forward to further work in this field. I suspect a new study might back up many of his findings but also, in the ever-changing and dynamic global information ecology, open up unexpected avenues of research into insurgent media.

Andrew Exum has an excellent article over at Arab Media & Society, The Spectacle of War: Insurgent video propaganda and Western response [also as .pdf].

… while the ponderous American defense bureaucracy has been slow off the mark, the enemy – the insurgent groups against which the U.S. has fought in both Iraq and Afghanistan – have proved more than proficient at the art of propaganda, media manipulation and shaping the way operations and events are perceived by enemy, friendly and neutral populations. In the same way, though the U.S. and its allies talk of the “comprehensive approach”, it is more often than not groups like Hizbullah and Jaish al-Mahdi who best understand military operations as part of a combined effort incorporating “political, military, diplomatic, economic and strategic communication” efforts.

To a large degree, though, the U.S. military cannot be blamed for being caught off-guard by their enemy’s sophistication in managing the way battles and campaigns are perceived. In the past two decades, insurgent, terrorist, and guerrilla groups in the Middle East have grown exponentially more sophisticated in the way they use the media available to them in order to affect the way battles are perceived. From the perspective of someone who studies military innovation, it is a remarkable achievement.

This paper focuses on the evolution of insurgent media operations in support of political-military objectives. Groups like the Taliban and Hizbullah did not start off, from the beginning, as sophisticated manipulators of popular perception. They learned, over time, how to shape the way in which military operations are perceived, and in the process, have taught Western militaries a valuable lesson in the nature of war itself.

Read the rest of the article here.

Similarly, Brigitte L. Nacos writes on Media Power and Terrorists at Complex Terrain Lab, with particular emphasis on Hezbollah:

… modern-day terrorist organizations’ impact on domestic and/or international spheres depends to a large extent on their ability to establish their own means of communications or find alternative modes to communicate their messages directly to friend and foe.

Without taking the centrality of communication in the terrorist calculus into account, counterterrorism cannot succeed.

The burning of TV stations in Beirut (Counterterrorism Blog)

Robert Poe at COMOPS Journal has an interesting post, Do Terrorists Really Believe? in which he outlines the arguments of Slavoj Žižek, the prolific Slovenian psychoanalyst, in addressing the issue of whether jihadists are true Islamic fundamentalists. An answer in the negative would not be unfamiliar to readers of Olivier Roy, for example, and Žižek comes to a similar conclusion:

How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation daily Danish newspaper … To put it simply, a fundamentalist does not believe in something, but rather knows it directly. In other words, both liberal-sceptical cynicism and fundamentalism share a basic underlying feature: the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept these statements as such, while sceptics mock them. What is unthinkable for both is the ‘absurd’ act of a decision which installs every authentic belief, a decision that cannot be grounded in the chain of ‘reason’, in positive knowledge.

As Poe says, ‘[t]his passage illustrates a very important point, namely that fundamentalist terrorists measure themselves by the standards of their secular enemies in the Western world’:

True fundamentalists are not bothered by the lost path being walked by others, nor are they provoked to violence by it. Žižek wonders whether in fighting against the sinful other one is not really just fighting against one’s own temptation to that sinful lifestyle. The violent outbursts of fundamentalist, Islamic terrorists are examples of resentment and envy for Žižek and mark their lack of true conviction/belief.

Žižek is a fascinating character, and Poe’s post adds yet more depth to the growing body of analysis on the true motives of many jihadists, if indeed they are aware themselves. What is clear is that labelling them ‘fundamentalists’ is erroneous. Mind you, we can’t even call them ‘jihadists’ now.

My copy of Žižek’s 2008 book, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, is currently languishing in my antilibrary, so in the meantime I’ll continue reading this op-ed he wrote for the New York Times a couple of years back, Defenders of the Faith.

So (allegedly) went the chant at the Highbury Library a few years back. Abu Muqawama drew attention to this tongue-in-cheek article about bin Laden’s love for Arsenal in the Telegraph archives from 2001. This rang some bells.

Jason Burke wrote in Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam:

Nor, as some have claimed [i.e. Adam Robinson, cited in the Telegraph article], is there any evidence that bin Laden is a fan of north London’s Arsenal Football Club and personally ordered the assassination of David Beckham, the English soccer star.

He adds that “bin Laden does not have a small or deformed penis” either. Bin Laden is unlikely to have ever visited the U.K., let alone been to see the Gooners. I do remember a more reputable source than Robinson (Gilles Kepel? Olivier Roy?) suggesting that bin Laden was swayed by the self-organising power of football crowds, but this was more likely to have been in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, one would think.

Faisal Devji, in Landscapes of the Jihad, writes:

… the event itself is compared to a soccer match, which is to say a game, a televised spectacle, and not to some unmediated form of reality. As it turns out, comparing the attacks of 9/11 to televised football games, or to karate tournaments, is common in Al-Qaeda circles. This suggests that its jihad is conceived of in sporting rather than, say, apocalyptic terms, as a rule-bound contest in which survival and indeed community of both parties is assumed. Perhaps such comparisons indicate callousness, or even a loss of reality in their makers. They certainly do represent acts of the jihad as performances which are ethical because they are self-contained.

He goes on to relate the story of a colleague of bin Laden’s in whose dream his fellow jihadis were playing soccer against the Americans, but in which his team turned into pilots, the very same pilots who manned the planes on 9/11. ‘Terrorism as theatre’ is a well-trodden analytical course, but the relationship between the jihad and football, both agents of globalisation, is an interesting one.

Bin Laden has of course been banned by the Arsenal. Anyway, I have evidence that BL is a scouser of the red persuasion, so the whole argument is null and void:

Although, come to think of it, this photo reminds me of an acquaintance of mine who used to head off down to Highbury dressed as a rabbi and sit in the Clock End…

GrandMasta Splash at Arabic Media Shack responds to Phillip Seib’s article The Al-Qaeda Media Machine in the new edition of Military Review (see my original response here).

1. Internet speed sucks in most parts of the Middle East. Streaming video is therefore largely impossible.

That is indeed true, but not all internet activity is video-based. IRCs and many forums use far less bandwidth than reading this post, as do emails and many news sites (especially if Flash, etc, is disabled).

2. Governments can easily block internet sites. The Syrian government recently blocked Facebook. Does anyone think they can’t do the same to Jihadist websites?

I’m not commenting from a position of authority here but I suspect that governments are not blocking websites effectively, if at all. Also, websites do close and reopen elsewhere with some frequency, deliberately to keep ahead of the game.

3. For a scholarly article, the author needs to make some attempt to provide evidence supporting the last point - “With the stirring music and graphic images of an action movie, the videos fortify the resolve of the Al-Qaeda faithful and, even more important, capture the attention of 15-year-olds in cyber cafes”. It’s not enough to just say this is happening, especially when the whole thesis of the article is that AQ’s media apparatus is highly influential in the Middle East.

I’ve seen plenty of AQ-affiliated output that fits Seib’s description, as well as any number of jihadist video communiques. Perhaps a few examples would be good though.

4. Internet use is much less pervasive than this article seems to assume:

The Internet in Egypt dates back to 1993. Egypt was one of the first Arab states to establish itself within the Information Age. Until the end of the 1990s the number of Internet users was limited and did not exceed 400,000 users. In 2001, 1.55% of the Egyptian population had personal PCs. This percentage is the sixth highest amongst Arab States but still considerably lower than the world average of 8.42%. For every 1000 people in Egypt, there are 0.028 computers with access to the Internet, as compared to the world average of 23.27 connected PCs for every 1000 people. When measured against Arab states, Egypt ranks fifth, preceded by the Emirates, Kuwait, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.

The significance of AQ’s media network lies not with the machine itself, rather with whether it really is reaching its target audience. Could it be that its most loyal viewers are American scholars of terrorism? If a tree falls in a forest and noone is there to see it fall, did it actually fall?

Although the figures cited are at least four years out of date (extracted from this 2004 article on the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information website) I take GrandMasta’s point about the digital divide. I’d like to see more recent figures though. Personal observations suggest that internet cafés are springing up everywhere in Egypt and are pretty busy at all times of day and night. They are almost exclusively occupied by young men (and tourists, of course, in the bigger towns). It’s also worth remembering that Egypt is the most populous Arab country in the world, with significantly upwards of 70m citizens.

Of course, the problem with using Egypt as an example misses the point about internet use. The internet is a global and globalising technology and the nature of the global jihad is precisely that - it is global. Al-Qaeda know this perfectly well, which is why the internet is proving such a valuable tool on many levels.

Finally, I take issue with the last point GrandMasta makes, although I suspect it is very much tongue in cheek. I would agree that some takes on the e-jihad are overstated but to suggest that no-one is listening is patently absurd.

Having said all that, I read Arabic Media Shack every day and find it a useful source of information and comment. It’s added to the blogroll.