Thought #33                                                              June 2009
Author: Bill Thurston

 

How International Terrorism Works / How We Combat It

 

This will be the third and the last Thought on terrorism at least for a while. After learning about the Taliban (#30) and al-Qaeda (#31), I thought knowing how they worked and how we combat them would be important.

 

The Terrorists’ Basic Structure

 

The Terrorist Leadership

The terrorist leadership provides the overall direction and strategy that breathes life into a terror campaign. The leadership becomes the catalyst for terrorist action. The loss of the leadership can cause many organizations to collapse. Some groups, however, are more resilient and can promote new leadership should the original fall or fail. Still others have adopted a more decentralized organization with largely autonomous cells, making our challenge even greater.

The Terrorist Organization

The terrorist organization is its structure, its membership, its resources, and its security. These factors determine its capabilities and reach.

The Terrorists’ Base of Operate

Nation states around the world still offer havens, both physical (e.g., safe houses, training grounds) and virtual (e.g., reliable communication and financial networks), that terrorists need to plan, organize, train, and conduct their operations. Once entrenched in a safe operating environment, the organization can begin to solidify and expand.

The Underlying Conditions

Conditions such as poverty, corruption, religious conflict and ethnic strife create opportunities for terrorists to exploit. Some of these conditions are real and some manufactured. Terrorists use these conditions to justify their actions and expand their support.

 

The Terrorists’ Area of Influence

 

The international environment defines the boundaries within which terrorists’ strategies take shape. As a result of freer, more open borders, this environment provides access to havens, capabilities, and other support to terrorists.

The al-Qaida network is a multinational enterprise with operations in more than 60 countries. Al-Qaida exemplifies how terrorist networks have twisted the benefits and conveniences of our increasingly open, integrated, and modernized world to serve their destructive agenda.

Its camps in Afghanistan/Pakistan provided sanctuary and its bank accounts served as a trust fund for terrorism. Its global activities are coordinated through the use of personal couriers and communication technologies like cellular and satellite phones, encrypted e-mail, Internet chat rooms, videotape, and CD-roms. Like a skilled publicist, Bin Laden and al-Qaida have exploited the international media to project Bin Laden’s image and message worldwide. Members of al-Qaida have traveled from continent to continent with the ease of a vacationer or business traveler. In an age marked by unprecedented mobility and migration, they readily blend into communities wherever they move. They pay their way with funds raised through front businesses, drug trafficking, credit card fraud, extortion, and money from covert supporters. They use charitable organizations and non-governmental organizations for funding and recruitment. Money for their operations is transferred through numerous banks, money exchanges, and alternate remittance systems.

Terrorists can now use the advantage of technology to disperse leadership, training, and logistics not just regionally but globally. Establishing and moving cells in virtually any country is relatively easy in a world where more than 140 million people live outside of their country of origin and millions of people cross international borders every day. In addition to finding sanctuary within the boundaries of a state sponsor, terrorists often seek out states where they can operate with impunity because the central government is unable to stop them.

 

Our Strategy on Terrorism

 

The intent of our national strategy is to stop terrorist attacks against the United States, its citizens, its interests, and our friends and allies around the world and ultimately, to create an international environment inhospitable to terrorists and all those who support them.

To accomplish these tasks we will simultaneously act on four fronts. The United States and its partners will do the following:

         

Defeat terrorist organizations of global reach by attacking their sanctuaries, leadership, command, control and communications, material support, and finances. This approach will have a cascading effect across the larger terrorist landscape, disrupting the terrorists’ ability to plan and operate. As a result, it will force these organizations to disperse and then attempt to reconsolidate along regional lines to improve their communications and cooperation. As this dispersion and organizational degradation occurs, we will work with regional partners to implement a coordinated effort to squeeze, tighten, and isolate the terrorists. Once the regional campaign has localized the threat, we will help states develop the military, law enforcement, political, and financial tools necessary to finish the task.

 

Deny further sponsorship, support, and sanctuary to terrorists by ensuring other states accept their responsibilities to take action against these international threats within their sovereign territory. United Nations Security Council Resolution NSCR 1373

 

 http://www.un.org/Docs/journal/asp/ws.asp?m=S/RES/1373(2001)

establishes high standards that we and our international partners expect others to meet in deed as well as word. Where states are willing and able, we will reinvigorate old partnerships and forge new ones to combat terrorism and coordinate our actions to ensure that they are mutually reinforcing and cumulative. Where states are weak but willing, we will support them vigorously in their efforts to build the institutions and capabilities needed to exercise authority over all their territory and fight terrorism where it exists. Where states are reluctant, we will work with our partners to convince them to change course and meet their international obligations. Where states are unwilling, we will act decisively to counter the threat they pose and, ultimately, to compel them to cease supporting terrorism.

Diminish the underlying conditions that terrorists seek to exploit by enlisting the international community to focus its efforts and resources on the areas most at risk. We will maintain the momentum generated in response to the September 11 attacks by working with our partners abroad and various international forums to keep combating terrorism at the forefront of the international agenda.

 

Defend the United States, our citizens, and our interests at home and abroad by both proactively protecting our homeland and extending our defenses to ensure we identify and neutralize the threat as early as possible.

 

When will there be Victory over Terrorism?

 

Victory against terrorism will not occur as a single, defining moment. It will not be marked by the likes of the surrender ceremony on the deck of the USS Missouri that ended World War II. However, through the sustained effort to compress the scope and capability of terrorist organizations, isolate them regionally, and destroy them within state borders, the United States and its friends and allies will secure a world in which our children can live free from fear and where the threat of terrorist attacks does not define our daily lives. Victory, therefore, will be secured only as long as the United States and the international community maintain their vigilance and work tirelessly to prevent terrorists from inflicting horrors like those of September 11, 2001.

 

Conclusion

 

We cannot choose to disengage from the world, because in this globalized era, the world will engage us regardless. The choice is really about what kind of world we want to live in. In waging this war, therefore, we will be resolute in maintaining our commitment to our ultimate objective. The defeat of terror is a worthy and necessary goal in its own right. But ridding the world of terrorism is essential to a broader purpose. We strive to build an international order where more countries and peoples are integrated into a world consistent with the interests and values we share with our partners’ values such as human dignity, rule of law, respect for individual liberties, open and free economies, and religious tolerance. We understand that a world in which these values are embraced as standards will be the best antidote to the spread of terrorism. This is the world we must build today.

 

Note:  All this information came from a CIA document dated February, 2003. Our new president and staff may make some changes in the future.

 https://www.cia.gov/news-information/cia-the-war-on-terrorism/Counter_Terrorism_Strategy.pdf

Final Thought

In order to accomplish these goals, the CIA must create national security intelligence by having the proper tools to follow the terrorists’ money, people, and communications. This intelligence is part of our President's Daily Brief. He and his staff must then take appropriate action to secure the citizens’ safety and accomplish our goals with regard to terrorism.

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