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Expert Commentary
The Post-Caliphate Counterterrorism Challenge
January 3, 2017 | John McLaughlin
The Cipher Brief spoke with network member and former Acting Director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, about the current U.S. counterterrorism strategy, as well as what to expect from the terrorist threat in the coming year. According to McLaughlin, under President Barack Obama, the U.S. has been “highly successful” at eliminating terrorist leaders, but has been “less successful” at denying terrorists safe havens. Further, McLaughlin explained that as ISIS is beaten back in its self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq, he anticipates “the greatest post-caliphate danger is likely to be in Europe.”
The Cipher Brief: How has U.S. counterterrorism policy developed in the eight years under President Obama?
John McLaughlin: U.S. counterterrorism policy under President Obama has a mixed record tending toward positive. There are aspects of it that have been very successful and aspects of it that have been less successful and that have left problems in their wake.
TCB: What were some of the strongest elements of President Obama’s CT policy? What were the weakest?
JM: I always think of terrorism as requiring at least three things if we try to think about it systematically. In order to destroy a terrorist movement, you need first to destroy the leadership; second you need to deny it safe haven; third you need to change some of the conditions that gave rise to the phenomena that created it.
On the first one, destroy the leadership, what the Obama Administration has done has been highly successful. Obviously, it was under President Obama that Osama bin Laden received his justice. But in addition to that, the drone program in particular has been highly effective at destroying layers of leadership in al Qaeda, and, to a degree, in ISIS. So much so that al Qaeda – with some exceptions like its Yemen branch and the group that survives in Syria – has been disrupted and thinned to the point where their bench of replacement leaders is now quite spare.
Less successful has been the second thing, which is the need to deny terrorists’ safe haven. The Obama Administration succeeded in this regard up until about 2012 or thereabouts, say in the first term, but after that the Administration was late to recognize that several things were contributing to the opening of a much larger safe haven than the terrorists have had in at least a decade. The critical things were the drawdown in Iraq beginning in 2011 and the announcement, ill-advisedly in advance, that a similar withdrawal would proceed in Afghanistan.
Those two things signaled to terrorists that in those two places, there would be more opportunities. Moreover, by drawing down, it was harder to maintain the granular appreciation we had of the terrorist phenomenon in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. It opened up space for terrorists to plot and plan, in places that formerly had been controlled and monitored closely by American forces and American intelligence.
The second big trend in that period was, beginning in early 2011, the Arab Spring, which by virtue of creating a lot of chaos in countries that had traditionally been partners both in an intelligence and diplomatic sense, opened up space that was both physical and strategic. In countries like Egypt and Libya for example, and of course Syria is in a separate category, you had authoritarian regimes that had intelligence services with the capability of monitoring the streets and understanding what was going on throughout their societies. This is not to endorse them, but to say just as a simple fact that authoritarian regimes tend to do that.
So, those intelligence services went through a readjustment to figure out their place in society as it evolved, and therefore they inevitably paid less attention to problems and had less ability to maintain that same granular focus that the U.S. had in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. In the period roughly between 2011 and today, vast spaces in the Arab world became available as safe havens for terrorists to plot, plan, and train. It’s hard to hold the Obama Administration responsible for this, but they did seem to come slowly to a realization that this was rejuvenating the terrorist movement.
The third task, changing the conditions that give rise to the phenomenon, is the hardest job and no administration is going to accomplish that overnight. But in the case of the Obama Administration, the slowness of reacting to the Syrian situation, coupled with the continuing disenchantment of Sunnis - who comprise about 70 percent of Syria and about 20 percent of Iraq – with regimes that were either dominated by Shia or by sects like the Alawites. This gave Sunnis a sense of persecution and unfairness that has been the underlying engine for recruitment in the ISIS movement. So, a combination of the deliberateness with which we approached the Syria problem and the continuing festering of the Sunni-Shia divide is something that the Obama Administration may not have been able to control, but which by virtue of happening on its watch, retarded its ability to score terrorist successes.
TCB: Were there any CT issues that President Obama failed to address or dealt with inadequately, perhaps counter messaging on social media or combatting recruitment?
JM: I don’t think we know exactly, as private citizens, what the Obama Administration has done on the social media front. It may be that they are combatting some of what ISIS has been able to do in the cyber realm. We simply don’t have access to that information or to knowledge that would tell us how successful or unsuccessful they have been.
We do know, from what the U.S. military has said publicly, that ISIS’ use of Twitter has declined by a substantial margin – I believe around 40-45 percent. We do know that their recruitment is down from 1,000 per month to somewhere around 100 per month, and that still may need adjustment. But the record is hard to confidently ascertain at this point.
But it is certainly the case that ISIS got the jump on everyone in the world with their domination of social media as a recruitment tool. This is one way in which they differed a lot from al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was the VHS era terrorist group. If you recall, it was a big deal when an al Qaeda leader would smuggle out a VHS tape or a flash drive or something with a video on it to an Arab network like Aljazeera, and then we would all wait to see what it had to say and we’d all analyze it. That was an era ago.
ISIS quickly understood that they could circumvent all of that and go directly to their intended recruits via social media avenues that no terrorist group had used to that same degree before. They just got the jump on everyone there. Eventually, the Obama Administration came to understand that, and I have to assume has been combatting it.
TCB: Under President Obama, we’ve seen the decline of al Qaeda, the rise of ISIS, the decline of ISIS, and more recently the rise of al Qaeda. What should we expect moving forward in the next year?
JM: The Obama Administration will be able to take some satisfaction from having started offensives that promise to eventually throw ISIS out of Mosul and they have laid the groundwork, at least, for a similar assault on ISIS’ de facto capital in Raqqa, Syria. Obviously, they won’t get this done before January 21st, but they have created a foundation for ultimately destroying what ISIS has called the caliphate.
What’s likely to happen after that is a dispersal of ISIS fighters that will be more varied and dangerous than the dispersal we saw of al Qaeda after chasing them out of Afghanistan a dozen years ago. They had no place to go but to hide in major cities and the remoter parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Middle East.
ISIS has reasonably well-established nodes in several other countries - at one point, you could say maybe nine. By virtue of having a global infrastructure that has developed to different degrees in different parts of the world - in some cases simply sympathizers and in other places formal affiliates - they have alternatives once they are chased out of their caliphate.
The second thing ISIS has that al Qaeda never had is a degree of access to targets outside of the Middle East because they drew so many foreign fighters in - something like 6,000 or so from the U.S.-Eurasian landmass, including in that number the ones they drew from Russia. Congress’ Homeland Security Committee put out a report that said about 1,900 of them have already gone back to Europe. So I just take those figures at face value and say that if that is true – and all counterterrorism data deserves some skepticism – but if that is even partially true, that means that they are probably able to lay the groundwork for future operations in Europe where the intelligence services are small and stretched very thin. I would anticipate the greatest post-caliphate danger is likely to be in Europe.
As everyone says, there are fewer Americans who have gotten involved, so presumably the danger is somewhat smaller to us. But given that al Qaeda seems to be rebranding and rejuvenating to a degree that is hard to estimate, and al Qaeda has always had the United States in its sights, it’s much too soon for us to relax and assume that we have neutralized this danger.
I think the future holds the likelihood of remnants of ISIS and some portion of al Qaeda seeking to carry out operations both in the region of their origin and outside of that region, but operating from a less secure base then they’ve had since 2013 when ISIS began taking over territory.
In some ways, that’s good news and bad news. The good news when they have territory is that you have a lot of targets because they have to maintain infrastructure. Once they don’t have territory, then they have to be much stealthier, hide out and blend in, and therefore they are harder to find.
Another point to think about on Mosul and Raqqa is that these won’t be real victories unless we have a post-conflict stabilization plan. Stability operations are something that have acquired greater currency in the Pentagon in the aftermath of Iraq. So presumably someone is thinking about who moves into Mosul, how’s it governed, and how we suppress potential ethnic rivalries there that would turn it into yet another violent confrontation. All of that has to be thought through.
TCB: How might the Trump Administration approach CT differently than the Obama Administration?
JM:* We just don’t know. We won’t really know for sure until they have their national security portfolio filled out and confirmed.
Clearly in the Secretary of Defense-designate General James Mattis, they have an individual with vast experience in this part of the world and who takes a very tough approach. So one can assume that our future approach will be no less vigorous. Whether it will be more inventive is another question. We’ll have to wait and see.
Also, some of this, particularly in the Syria case, will turn on what relationship we decide to have with the Russians and what would be the objectives of any agreements we come to with the Russians. Would the objective be primarily to destroy ISIS? Would we be trying at the same time to walk the line between destroying ISIS and also moving the Assad regime out of power? All of those things remain to be determined. Over to President-Elect Trump.**
The Author is John McLaughlin
John McLaughlin is a distinguished practitioner in residence at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.**He served as the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2000-2004 and Acting Director of the CIA in 2004.
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Expert Commentary
A Problem Larger than Terrorism
January 3, 2017 | Patrick Skinner
As the calendar approaches January 21st and President-elect Donald Trump prepares to take office, the Cipher Brief sat down with Patrick Skinner of the Soufan Group to discuss the successes and failures of the Obama Administration’s counterterrorism policy and how the next administration might approach the same issues. According to Skinner “There might be slightly different rhetoric or messaging, but I don’t think we are going to see a fundamental shift [in policy].” Skinner also emphasized a need to more effectively counter ISIS’ message, saying, “every government on the planet has a problem countering the extremist narrative. No one’s figured that out.”
The Cipher Brief: How has U.S. counterterrorism policy developed in the eight years under President Obama?
Patrick Skinner: It’s really difficult to say because the issues now are so far beyond counterterrorism. Some of the problem is that we are taking a counterterrorism approach to what is far greater than any counterterrorism challenges or any tactics that you can use.
There have been a lot of successes – certainly the Osama bin Laden raid - if you look at it in the traditional counterterrorism manner. But again, I can only stress that what we’re seeing now is far beyond counterterrorism - at least the way we used to think about it from post-9/11 until 2014.
We’ve done well in the traditional way – decapitation strikes and eliminating the eternal al Qaeda “number three.” It used to be a joke - from 2002-2008 that was the most dangerous job – and it is still dangerous to be a senior leader of any of these groups. Certainly ISIS now.
In many ways, the counterterrorism effort has been successful– we haven’t had a significant, multi-phased planned attack in the U.S. since 9/11 and that’s because of a lot of good intelligence. It’s always been harder to hit America than anywhere else, but the success also comes from the FBI’s approach – which is the opposite of that of Europe. Europe detects and then they monitor. We don’t do that. We detect and immediately disrupt. They place informants with terrorist groups, and once they cross the threshold of material support, the FBI arrests and moves on. We’ve done that hundreds of times per year for a long time. It’s been very effective.
But the problem is that the things that are driving terrorism are persistent threats. It’s impossible to overstate how large these problems are. The counterterrorism approach was never designed for these kinds of problems.
TCB: What are some of the main issues U.S. counterterrorism policy has failed to address?
PS: It’s obvious - and this is not just the Obama Administration - that every government on the planet has a problem countering the extremist narrative. No one’s figured that out.
There are a lot of reasons why. It’s complicated. [We’re dealing with] individuals, and the messages are appealing. It’s not just that ISIS is the best at messaging; the U.S. has Hollywood - we can do messaging. But governments are not nimble and they are not good at nuance.
As we’ve seen, media in the U.S. has gone from propaganda to what they now call “fake news” and misleading narratives or outright lies. We can’t even combat that in our own politics and our own societies. The same thing that’s happening with terrorist extremism is the same kind of social media phenomenon we see with everything else. It’s really difficult to counter that when everybody can write whatever they want and it’s done at the speed of light.
I wish that the Obama Administration had done at a better job, but, to be honest, I don’t know what that is. I don’t think anyone does yet. There are a lot of people trying to figure that out right now.
The mistake was actually just hoping that the counterterrorism strategy that we put in place, which was effective at a certain level, would continue to be effective once it was clear that the sheer level of bad trend lines made it impossible. We’re sticking only with a counterterrorism strategy rather than adapting.
Now, again, I’m not calling for a military intervention. The thing is: there are no easy answers. We’ve run out of those. We’ve had a lot of those answers from 2001-2006 where we tried new things such as drones and surges. Those were part of a golden age, but there were also a lot of mistakes; the Iraq war was just a travesty and a tragedy.
We have, in a way, run out of innovation in counterterrorism. We are stuck with human intelligence and ISR with drone support. But basically – and I remember this from Afghanistan and Iraq – it’s really difficult to do human intelligence and counterterrorism in a war zone, and we have war zones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and other places. It’s just too big for counterterrorism.
TCB: When you say counterterrorism strategy, does that refer to a combination of drone strikes and U.S. Special Forces conducting operations and training foreign militaries?
PS: Exactly. Basically the Obama counterterrorism doctrine is airstrikes combined with foreign liaisons where we train, equip and partner with host nations. We empower them, and that works really well. The Obama Administration has been consistent with that endeavor.
But it doesn’t work in places where the government is basically a shell or it’s collapsing. With unlimited money and unlimited time, we haven’t done very well in Afghanistan. Training, equipping and liaising doesn’t really work because the problems are so much bigger.
TCB: Under President Obama, we’ve seen the supposed decline of al Qaeda, the rise of ISIS, the decline of ISIS, and more recently the rise of al Qaeda. What should we expect moving forward in the next year?
PS: Next year is going to be a challenge. Even if the war in Syria ends somehow on paper, the fighting is not going to stop. Al Nusra is very powerful and they can change their name all they want, but it’s still al Qaeda. So al Qaeda is one of the strongest elements in the opposition, and they are not going away.
Al Qaeda as a group, they took their licks but they’re doing really well. The thing is, even when we hurt them right now, like in Yemen when we beat them back a little bit, they are still more powerful in Yemen then they ever have been. And they are still more powerful in Syria than they ever were.*
ISIS, as much as we’re crushing them, and make no mistake, they are getting crushed, is still one of the strongest terrorist groups in the history of the planet. It might not be a proto-insurgency anymore, but these problems still persist.
The most optimistic option is that we beat them down back to where a counterterrorism strategy works. Right now we are basically conducting a pseudo-war to get ISIS back to where human intelligence, joint raids, and drone strikes can keep them off balance. We’re not there yet. There are so many people involved – foreign fighters especially - some will get through the cracks.
We’re as good as we’ve ever been, but we don’t know if that’s good enough.
TCB: As ISIS is pushed out of its stronghold in Mosul and possibly its headquarters in Raqqa, will the group concentrate more of its efforts on conducting attacks abroad?
PS: That’s the big question: what is going to happen now? Social media wasn’t around to the same extent when they were getting hammered in 2008-2009.
Everyone is wondering, once ISIS is kicked out of Raqqa and Mosul, where will they go? They’re not going to go anywhere; they just won’t have control of the city. They’ll lose thousands of people but they will still be a menace in Iraq.
The real question is if ISIS will maintain its external operations capabilities or intent. If you just play the numbers, it’s certain that ISIS has people in Europe. I don’t subscribe to the idea that they are waiting for some mythical date - that they are ready but are just waiting. Plots are easy to unravel, people can get arrested. So if they have the capability they tend to do it; the longer you are operational, the more you can get disrupted and detected.
TCB: Aside from ISIS and al Qaeda, do you see other terrorist threats emerging next year?
PS: Both those groups still have bandwagon appeal even though ISIS is a damaged brand. They are still the Coca-Cola and Pepsi in international jihadist terrorism.
I don’t know of a change that you can just point to and say, “Ok if we do this it will cut down the risk dramatically.” For example, if you just put people on a registry or if we just close things off - none of those are actual, feasible counterterrorism approaches in a democracy and they wouldn’t even work if you could pull them off.
What we’re doing, especially domestically – fostering community relationships, a very busy FBI, a lot of liaisons – that’s a sustainable, even though it’s an exhausting approach.
TCB: How might the Trump Administration approach counterterrorism differently than the Obama Administration?
PS: When it comes to strictly counterterrorism efforts, President Obama might have criticized President George W. Bush’s Administration during his campaign, but once the Obama Administration started, they realized there is a limited tool set and took a similar approach, with dramatically more drone strikes.
Once the Trump Administration gets into office the rhetoric will fade into reality and they will realize that there are limited options. There is no magic plan. That doesn’t exist.
It will be more of the same. There might be slightly different rhetoric or messaging, but I don’t think we are going to see a fundamental shift. We support these countries as much as we can. That’s going to continue. The airstrikes will continue in the places that we are allowed to. There might be more Special Operations raids, but the problems in Syria and Iraq are too large. It’s like fighting a wildfire with a fire extinguisher. We need to get it down to a smaller fire, and then we can use our tools. Right now we are fighting a forest fire with a very exhausted fire extinguisher.
I don’t see big changes because there aren’t magic options. You can do slightly more or slightly less of a certain thing, but there are finite resources - more airstrikes here, mean less somewhere else.
Overall, the big change may be in attitude - but in the day-to-day dealings, we are in a pattern that’s not going to break.*
The Author is Patrick Skinner
Patrick Skinner is the Director of Special Projects for The Soufan Group. He is a former CIA Case Officer, with extensive experience in source handling and source networks, specializing in counter-terrorism issues. In addition to his intelligence experience, he has law enforcement experience with the US Air Marshals and the US Capitol Police, as well as search and rescue experience in the US Coast Guard.
