Going Nuclear in the Middle East - In search of an European Middle East Policy
Monique CERISIER-ben GUIGA, Senator, Co-author of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Armed Forces Committee's report on the situation in the Middle East - During our trip with Jean François-Poncet, thanks to the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate, between the last quarter of 2008 and first semester of 2009, we asked ourselves several questions. We asked about the latest on al-Qaeda. We had a premonitory opening in Yemen, as it seemed to us that Yemen was obviously the next basis for al-Qaeda. Almost everywhere there was such Byzantine questions about whether it is al-Qaeda, or whether people are now doing bombings and trying to make themselves important by saying it was al-Qaeda bombing. Are they working indirectly for al-Qaeda? Are they becoming important through their affiliation to al-Qaeda? Do they commit terrorist acts on behalf of al-Qaeda in the hope of being taken on board in al-Qaeda?
For today, we have three specialists who are going to give us an opportunity to either answer those questions or reformulate the questions in more detail. The first one is Mr Alain Chouet, who is a man on the frontline. There will be no philosophy from him; he will talk about hard facts. Mr Chouet has just published an article in Marine magazine called, «Afghanistan, the tartar desert?» . Then after hearing stories from the frontline, there will be Jean-Pierre Filiu, a diplomat, currently a visiting Professor of Political Sciences at Georgetown (USA). He has published several books on al-Qaeda, the latest was called The Nine Lives of Al-Qaeda ; it reads almost like a novel. Lastly, we have François Heisbourg, special advisor at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique. A year ago, he published a book called After Al-Qaeda . After the detailed explanation of Jean-Pierre Filiu, we will ask him to give us a conclusion on what can be expected in the near future.
Alain CHOUET, Former Chief of the Security Intelligence Service, French Foreign Intelligence Service - You may not all be familiar with the French Security Intelligence Service: we are responsible for collecting intelligence and implementing active security measures outside of our territory. We deal with counter-criminality, counter-espionage, counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism, amongst other things. We work abroad and obviously illegally and it is all very secret. It gives you quite a strange specialized vision of the world. I am not going to say ineptly what Jean-Pierre Filiu, and François Heisbourg, are going to say much more aptly later on. I am just going to give you the «intelligence» perspective of the issue.
I hesitated, first of all, in accepting the invitation to take part in this type of necromancy exercise as I think that the questions considered as Byzantine are less Byzantine than they seem at first sight. Like many other professionals around the world, I think on the basis of crosscutting information that al-Qaeda is operationally dead since the Tora Bora operations in 2002. The Pakistani Secret Services continued to make us believe that al-Qaeda was still alive between 2003 and 2008 in exchange for generosity and indulgence.
Out of the 400 active members in the organisation recorded in 2001, there are less than 50 of them, mostly sidekicks, apart from Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who are not operational, that we feel are now living hidden in inaccessible areas and they have very rustic means of communication. There is a very good description of terrorist networks in Marc Sageman's book Understanding Terror Networks . With only that skeletal head group left, how can they organize a global-scale network of political violence? Now we had attacks in Bali, Bombay, Sharm al-Sheikh, London, Madrid, Casablanca, Djerba and so on. It is obvious that none of the post-September 11 terrorists ever have had contact with the head of the organization of course. Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri do sometimes claim that they masterminded these attacks. However, even if they could be authenticated, there cannot be any functional or operational links between these terrorists and the remains of the organization.
However, we still say that al-Qaeda is behind any act of violence committed by a Muslim or when there are Muslims in the wrong place at the wrong time. For example, when there was a chemical plant explosion in Toulouse, or when there are attacks that do not involve Muslims like the anthrax attacks in the US, we keep on saying that Muslims are behind all these attacks, that al-Qaeda is behind all these attacks. I think that we are giving it strength just by saying so. It is a bit like Amédée in the Eugène Ionesco play, who does not exist, but you keep talking about it, and in the end you do not know how to get rid of it.
We keep mentioning this mythical terrorist organisation, qualified as «hyper-terrorist»; it is mythical not because it was powerful, but because it went against the «hyperpower». This has had some adverse and counter-productive effects. For example, any person in the Muslim world, whatever their political place on the spectrum, if they want to undertake a violent action, they have to say that they are with al-Qaeda if they want to be taken seriously, to have their action legitimated by others and recognised internationally.
In addition, all Muslim Governments around the world, they are not all virtuous, have understood that their opponents should be labelled as belonging to Bin Laden's network, and they sometimes get help from Western powers when doing this. There are so-called designated, or self-designated, forces reportedly working for al-Qaeda in Pakistan, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb and elsewhere on the Arabian peninsula.
That has been a very stupid move because the effect it has had is to reinforce the idea that al-Qaeda is omnipresent, that all Muslims belong to al-Qaeda and that al-Qaeda is lying in wait to attack the West, and the United States more precisely.
That sort of vision is the result of a number of judgement and perspective errors, and this also leads to responses that do not work. If al-Qaeda does not exist, the Islamic political violence does exist and the West is just an indirect and collateral victim. The ideologues of Islamist violence are not «crazy for God»: they have some specific aims. Their objective is not to spread Islam everywhere in the world without any intervention of the West, a bit like the approach of Hassan Turabi in Sudan. Now, perhaps, we as Westerners will feel our ego is weakened but we must admit that the first victims of Islamic violence and the main and most numerous ones, are the Muslims themselves.
The epicentre of the Islamic violence is neither in Afghanistan, nor in Iraq, it is in Saudi Arabia. It is that country that was the first target of the «Manifesto against the Jews and Crusaders», which was the founding text of the Bin Laden organisation at the end of the 1990s. It also targeted the Saudi royal family before it targeted Jews and «Crusaders» and as said by Antoine Sfeir, it is the only country in the world with a family name.
Saudi Arabia is, relatively speaking, in the same situation as France was in the first half of the 1789. A family took power in 1926, whose legitimacy is based on religion. They usurp the guard of holy places of Islam to their historic guardians who belonged to the Hachemite family. This is the Saud family, who comprises about 3000 Princes. It concentrates all power, and also concentrates in its hands all the revenue from oil exploration of the most hydrocarbon-rich subsoil in the world. Therefore, the Saud family has blocked the way to any expression of democracy or pluralism in order to maintain its legitimacy faced with any contestation. It propagates a fundamentalist type of Islam as widely as it can in order not to be upstaged. It is simply stepping to the fore, a bit like the Soviet Union, they did not want any enemies or any competitors, and the Saudi family is acting in the same way.
However, oil revenues have dropped, and this has lead to the development of trade and industry. Of course the princes could not keep their hands away from that, and this means that the arena is now open to non-royal blood, entrepreneurs from other countries that were of course Muslims, mostly from Yemen, and broadly from Syria, the Levant, Lebanon, and Palestine. Some of these entrepreneurs underscore, quite rightly, just like the bourgeoisie in 1789, that they are the ones who are actually doing all the work and laying the ground for the country's future. And, therefore, they should be treated fairly and included in the exercise of power or should also benefit from the revenue of the oil industry, that until recently went straight into the personal pockets of the royal family.
Now how can these claims be heard in a country where there is no pluralist democratic speech? How can you legitimize a power that says it is in its place by divine right? How can you exert pressure on a royal family who has been enjoying since 1945, after the personal pact of Quincy between Ibn Saud and Roosevelt, the political protection and the military support of the US in exchange of the monopoly on the exploitation of their oil industry?
Opponents to this theocracy can only use a good sprinkling of revolutionary violence and of fundamentalist escalation against the ruling power and also external protectors of the country who avoid the power to collapse. It is not surprising that you find amongst the most violent Muslim activists a significant number of the children of the so-called bourgeoisie I mentioned that cannot participate actively in governing the country but that does not lack of money or ideas. That is how you found Bin Laden, that is how he was propelled into violent activity, into fundamentalism, by the Saudi royal family. They thought that it was quite expedient to have the external interests of the royal family be defended by people outside of the royal family, instead of themselves. That is a classical error made by social climbers.
There were many adventures, of course, and the children of this bourgeoisie met the wrong people, came under the wrong influence, and they came back to bite their masters on the hand. That is how in the mid-1980s this permanent escalation of religious fundamentalism and struggle for control of the Islamic world started between the Saud family and its rivals, or opponents, within and outside. The Iran-Saudi Arabia conflict was largely responsible for escalating this Muslim fundamentalist spiral.
That spiral, because there were not enough human resources, because there were no skills in external interventions, was made possible only because there was so much money in Saudi Arabia. That money is being squandered and being given to lots of countries in the Islamic world and to immigrant communities. And of course it went straight into the pockets of a structured international terrorist organisation like the Muslim Brotherhood and its violent arm, the Jamia Islamia. That is to say Islamist groups, of which the al-Qaeda of Bin Laden is only one of the components.
Everywhere jihadist violence is expressed, it is always in the weaker parts of the Muslim world, and it is always based on three components. Firstly, this ideological and financial spiralling of the Saudi regime and of its local opponents or rivals. Secondly, a strong local presence of the Muslim Brotherhood or the Jamia Islamia. They profit from this spiral, they use all political and economic and social contradictions to set public opinion against local powers and to dissuade the Western world from supporting the country or intervening. The Muslim world benefits from being hated from the outside world. For the third component, we are partly to blame. It is diplomacy. Western and US diplomacy, and intelligence services have supported, often military, the most reactionary and religious fundamentalist regimes against the Soviet Union up to the 1990s and there was the Iran containment policy in the 1980s.
For very different reasons linked to unresolved local disagreements or badly mastered external interventions, it is that cocktail, with those three ingredients, that produces the same effects in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Yemen, Somalia, the Maghreb, the Sahel countries, Iraq, and the lawless areas amongst Muslim communities in Western countries. I will not go into the details, but you have to realise that if they all develop in the same way, it has to be admitted that they correspond to very different local realities, and the players, those responsible, do not really communicate between themselves. However, if they are all agitating the same flags and claiming that they are with al-Qaeda it is because it serves their purposes against the West and particularly the US; it strengthens them. They are all supposed to be able to support even the most controversial States.
Of course you might object that jihadi violence does exist, and is spreading everywhere along the same patterns. Does it matter that it is called al-Qaeda? This could be taken as the generic label of a globalized Jihad violence. A certain number of more cautious journalists do not talk about al-Qaeda, they talk about the al-Qaeda cloud, but that is very cloudy. However, it is because of that confusion in the language that there cannot be a proper solution or response.
Of course, there are two ways of moving into political terrorist violence: either you set up a structured political military group with agenda, objectives and clear leadership, which is like an army with professionals. Then, of course, you enter into pseudo-military clashes, which was the case of most revolutionary terrorist or independent movements in Europe, in South America, and in the Middle East, up until the end of the 20 th century.
There is also the lone wolf solution, which is to say that you are both within the mainstream and with the rebellion. You rally to your side the weakest parts of society, you encourage people to undertake lone acts and strike where they can, when they can, as they can, it does not matter as the act is signed and claimed by the movement and belongs to its general strategy. The lone wolf technique is not new, it is called lone wolf because it is well known in the US. Mr William Pierce wrote a theory on it in his Turner Diaries , which stayed a bestseller throughout the 1990s. It is inspirational, in fact, to most white supremacists and Christian fundamentals. I will mention only the Atlanta and Okalahoma City bombings, and other individual attacks that resulted in a larger number of dead than 9/11.
That is the way of acting of several groups in the third world like the Grey Wolves in Turkey, or the Muslim Brotherhood elsewhere. There are local acts of violence in the Muslim world that correspond to the first model, but the second model explains the Jihadi violence in the West and elsewhere in Arab countries.
All intelligence services know that you cannot fight the lone wolf technique using military material means, armoured cars or increased indiscriminate security measures. The only way you can fight the lone wolf methodology is through targeted actions that are underpinned by political, social, economic, educational, and cultural measures that will cut off the perpetrators of violence from the sources that finance them and inspire them.
There have been no real serious measures that have targeted the source of funding and ideology of Jihadi violence. Al-Qaeda was considered to be the permanent enemy and there have only been inappropriate military and security responses. It is a bit like using a machine gun to kill a mosquito, you miss the mosquito but there is huge collateral damage, as can be seen in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen.
The first effect of that unproductive crusade was to boost and to provide more credence to the terrorists, to legitimize that form of violence and to make it the only possible frame of reference for affirmation. Let us not forget that the Muslim world has been traumatized as Muslims are often suspected, it has been under attack and massive, lasting and blind military occupation year after year. For nine years now, the Western world has been attacking the tribal areas in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, also Somalia and Palestine. Why not Yemen? Why not Iran? For Muslims, Bin Laden is still mocking the rest of the Western world by running free from the largest army in the world and the Islamist regime of Saudi Arabia is still under complete protection of the US.
To conclude, and to provide my input to this panel, what is the latest with al-Qaeda? It died sometime between 2002 and 2003, but before dying it was reinforced and strengthened by the Westerners' mistakes and by the mistakes of some Muslim regimes as well. It has actually disseminated. The question is whether we will make the same mistakes again, we will feed a spiral of violence. We hope that with partners, both Arab and Muslim, we will be able to prevent the proliferation of rhinoceroses, to refer again to Ionesco.
Monique CERISIER-ben GUIGA, Senator, Co-author of the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Armed Forces Committee's report on the situation in the Middle East - This goes to show that field experience in difficult conditions really is food for interesting thoughts. Consider the decorations Alain Chouet has received in his career and all that experience. He expressed very original ideas that are very interesting and somewhat unusual. Jean-Pierre Filiu will now look through the various lives of al-Qaeda that he eluded to in a recent book of his, to try and answer this question, i.e., where does al-Qaeda stand now?
Jean-Pierre FILIU, Professor, Middle East Chair at Sciences Po Paris, Visiting Professor at Georgetown University - Thank you very much, Madam Senator. Thank you to Minister François-Poncet, and also thank you to the Senate Committee for providing us with this report that sheds so much light on matters. The conclusions on Yemen were very interesting, and forward-looking. We see that you have a forward-looking view. On Christmas Eve, various manipulations going on in the lower part of a passenger seat, all of a sudden meant that Yemen came to the headlines internationally. This was well after Yemen should have been in the headlines. We can say that in the past month, up until London a few days ago, there has been a great deal of media attention, everybody all of a sudden has become worried once again about safety. I think that makes this morning's panel discussion become ever more imperative. We must never give in to fascination or amazement when we are looking at al-Qaeda.
I do not have Alain Chouet's experience from the field and I will take a different tack. I will be more basic whereas he has more of a theoretical overview that I could not make any claim to myself. Al-Qaeda did not die between 2002 and 2004. Al-Qaeda is an organisation that was established in August of 1988 by one person, Osama Bin Laden, who is the Emir, the Commander of this organization. All of its members have to pledge personal and absolute allegiance. The chief is still active, he reminded us this on Sunday by claiming the rights to the fiasco in Detroit.
However, it is interesting that Alain Chouet talks about the death of al-Qaeda, because actually this is something I have been saying in The Nine Lives of Al-Qaeda . The idea in my book is that al-Qaeda keeps being reborn in a different form. There is something striking, and this is a real intellectual challenge - and is, therefore, an operational challenge, a political challenge and so forth. This organization is a very limited organisation actually: Alain Chouet talked about 400 members at the time of September 11, and now there are between 1,000 and 2,000. So one-in-one million Muslims, that is a very limited proportion. This limited organization has had this incredible ability to regenerate itself, to undergo metamorphosis and to count on the mistakes of their proclaimed enemies or overinvestment, turning them into public enemy number one, and Bin Laden into the chief of some supposed international organization that just looks like an international organization virtually through the Internet. It was transformed into a rallying point and many people who otherwise would have had nothing to do with the organization, ended up within it, or identifying with it.
Al-Qaeda is highly unusual and very different, not in the methods it has used, though there was a change of scale, but it is especially different when you look at its view of jihad. This will be the first and the last organisation of its type, an incredible aberration in the history of Islam, which has been here for 14 centuries already. It is the first organisation to call for a global jihad, this is something entirely new. The idea that you are disconnecting the jihad from a people or a territory, and saying the front is a global front is totally new. In addition the global jihad is targeting individuals, and not groups or communities, as opposed to the tradition, and Islamic jurisprudence. This makes it possible to establish a link with the lone wolves that could fall into these traps.
Therefore, this global jihad is based on a dialectic which is very strong. Alain Chouet told us that the vast majority of al-Qaeda victims are Muslims and, he said, the victims in the West were «collateral» victims, that was his adjective. This is the dialectic between the remote enemy and the near enemy. The remote enemy is America and its allies, including France among others. Remember, we have gone up a couple of ranks recently in terms of potential targets for al-Qaeda. Several rungs in fact, our country's situation has become fairly disquieting if you look at the various al-Qaeda press releases.
Then you have the closer enemy, who is the strategic enemy. It is the Muslim enemy: al-Qaeda feels it is a bogus Muslim. Al-Qaeda wants to bring him under control. It is a revolutionary organization like the Japanese Red Army, or the Red Army Faction were revolutionary organisations about 30 years ago. Just like them, al-Qaeda knows it does not have a way of actually combating the near enemy. So it is trying to combat the distant enemy, that way it can destabilize the near enemy, and at the same time generate such chaos that it is possible to use this wave of national sentiment to sometimes gain new recruits, being less and less attracted otherwise to the global jihad program.
I was struck when Ambassador Boris Boillon in the previous panel said «the Americans were leaving and therefore security is improving». That is an objective observation, but we have to carefully mull this over and think it through to understand it. It is true, the arrrival of the distant enemy destabilises the near enemy, and helps al-Qaeda among others. In Iraq before the surge, General Petraeus was smart enough to accept a reality he had not created: the national and anti-American jihad. The nationalist guerrilla had identified al-Qaeda as its strategic enemy after two or three years of tactical alliances. The global jihad was in contradiction in terms of the objectives and practices, with the aims of the national jihad restricted to the territory of Iraq.
That contradiction between the national jihad and the global jihad will always be fatal to the global jihad. This is the case in Iraq where al-Qaeda was reduced to what it is today. It has not disappeared entirely from Iraq, where it continues to act under the label of «Islamic State». This is a sad irony. In October of 2006, it proclaimed a caliphate on the Internet. It is its eighth life that I call the «caliphate of the shadows». Of course, it did not work, but when you are a totalitarian organization, it is hard to accept a return to reality. We can be, strategically speaking, fairly grateful to the Iraqi guerrilla warfare to have done the bulk of work against al-Qaeda, the Americans then completed it through General Petraeus enlightened work. We can learn some lessons from this for the future.
Where does al-Qaeda stand today? It is at the end of a life, maybe a cycle, there are many arguments which would speak in favour of that. Or al-Qaeda may be preparing a 10 th life, a rebirth. In that case, I think we have many sources of concern, even if we do not want to cry wolf, whether it is a lone wolf or not. Now the main trends that I am trying to describe over the 21 years of al-Qaeda's existence would speak in favour of its irreversible decline. Firstly, because it is unable to get a territorial base where it always encounters forces that are not democratic or moderate, or good. But they are active in a national framework and they try to eliminate the missile being shot at them at their operational theatre, which can disturb their own plans regarding that territory.
We can see that there is an absence of a territorial base and an inability to influence the Muslim world. What impact has al-Qaeda had on a crisis in the Muslim world, since its beginning? They had an impact on our society, but in the Muslim world they have not had any impact. Al-Qaeda has not had an impact, except as Alain Chouet said, it has just served as something that could speak out against in order to weaken some regimes.
We have seen it weakening as well, because there is a deeper discrepancy between the reality and the virtual world and al-Qaeda is using the Internet too much. Most importantly, I think al-Qaeda is condemned, not terminated, but condemned, due to its vitiated and vicious relation with Islam. I talked about the global Jihad, this is a way of very much getting off track, it is like a sect. There is a charismatic guru expressing himself from time to time; there is his Egyptian deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri; they have a speech about the Jihad. From an Islamic point of view, this is heresy; their conclusion is that the person doing the Jihad is in direct relationship with his creator, and no longer needs the mediation of the clergy. They are just conveying bits on their Internet site, and it is doing well. I will come back to that later.
These main trends would speak for weakening but at the same time, al-Qaeda can adapt very easily because it is such a lightweight organization and it is not anchored anywhere. The 10 th life, which may come about in the near future, is fairly simple but nevertheless terrifying. First of all, it would be related to a direct Western aggression. We can see very well provocations are accumulating. They are meant to attract the Americans to Yemen, or maybe to Pakistan, or to Iran as Zawahiri has said several times. A conflict between the United States and Iran would really be a dream for al-Qaeda as it would weaken the Arab states of the Gulf. It would lead to religious sedition and it would lead to such chaos in the region that al-Qaeda would manage to make a go of it. Therefore, there is this aggression that could take place if triggered by various provocations, and we have to carefully analyse this possibility.
The 10 th life, ideally, for al-Qaeda, would be a «Pakistanization.» It is already fairly advanced if you look at al-Qaeda's references. Basically it can no more talk about any sheik, even Salafist or Jihadist and so it talks about Pakistan or Afghan sheiks who are unknown in Arab states. It contributes to the fact al-Qaeda is getting more exotic. Next, the Pakistani Taliban has grown up with the al-Qaeda ideology of the post September 11. These are fairly young executives and anti-tribal people who came about through the elimination of hundreds of tribal personalities and chiefs in border areas of Afghanistan. We see very well that though Alain Chouet continues talking about the centrality of Saudi Arabia, there is another pan-Islamism where you can withdraw, that is the pan-Islamism of a Republic which was created historically to welcome Muslims from the Indian subcontinent. It is a battle for the destiny of Pakistan and its identity. The power play is to the detriment of al-Qaeda.
But we can remind us Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was the most determined enemy of Bin Laden. During his stay in Paris in 2001, he was saying that, «Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are the glue holding together the Afghan Taliban». I would tend to say, today, the glue holding together the heteroclite coalition of the Pakistani Taliban, and the various Jihadist groups from Punjab and Pakistani Kashmir, is al-Qaeda, with the waves of terrible attacks, and bombings, we saw in recent months in the cities of Pakistan.
Today, therefore, towards the end of its ninth life, al-Qaeda would appear to bide its time through all provocations mentioned in the media. Their hope is there will be a breakthrough in Pakistan for the revolutionary Jihad and their allies. Thanks to which in that 10 th life, they will be able to find a new area to anchor themselves. Now, a provocation might just be a mental construct but it would probably be around India. Recently people talked a lot about the Indian Airlines bombing, and renewed provocations as in November 2008 in Bombay. It would more be in that area where al-Qaeda may become active.
Where I would agree entirely with Alain Chouet is, in this second heat, so to speak, of the winter of 2001/2002, when al-Qaeda was on the verge of disappearing but did not. What we are seeing right now will be decisively important in terms of the future of global terrorism and its aftermath.
Since we do have to give some advice, I would just mention how we could contend with this threat, which I continue to view very carefully, and feel it is a very worrisome threat. In my book's conclusion I talked about the «three D's.» First, there is de-globalization; I think there is agreement. We have to stop constantly helping al-Qaeda by acting like they were some sort of global leaders orchestrating some local crisis. It does not mean that the crises are not important and serious, it does not mean that these are careful leaders of Montesquieu works, but it means we are talking about generally local crisis, which generally call for local solutions in terms of territory, politics, power sharing and so on. Usually when you do see an expression of this, like General Petraeus in 2007 with guerrilla warfare with the Sunni, then we can say that al-Qaeda's approach has been emptied of its contents.
The second D is detoxifying. We have to stop mixing everything up. We know the differences between Islam, Islamism, Jihad, Jihadist, terrorism, Islamo-fascism, etc. We have to stop mixing up all these terms, because that is just helping the most extremist elements, and consequently al-Qaeda. Another way of reducing this toxic atmosphere is acting and using the Internet. Today, al-Qaeda has a free hand on the Internet, and it can continue spouting its messages of hatred and its calls for murder. It is a risk of one in a million, but if these calls trigger the acts of a lone wolf, then I would say this is not an acceptable risk. If there is a relationship between the information that you can draw by monitoring these sites, and the risk of letting these sites continue operations, then I think it is clear we must not be reluctant to wage war on these sites, there is no technical impediment there. We could not actually state this publicly, but we could wage an all out technical war against these Internet sites.
Then my third point, contradictory with the virtual war I talked about, is the third D, which is demilitarization. Far too often, we have used the war vocabulary which tended to increase the prestige of the martyrs and mujahideen of al-Qaeda. It is a criminal organization, these are common law criminals, and in Spain there were precedent civil rulings against al-Qaeda members. I can say that I have spent some of my time monitoring these Jihadist sites, and we can say that we have never seen pictures of the Jihadists on their websites when they are brought before the courts, whereas there were lots of pictures from Guantanamo, and military courts, and that has assisted them. I know that in this respect I am very much in agreement with my neighbour to my right, I will be only too happy to give him the floor. Thank you for your attention.
François HEISBOURG - Special Advisor at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique in Paris - It is a delight to be with you this morning, and just like Jean-Pierre Filiu, I would like to pay tribute to the work done by the Commission. It is really an outstanding piece of work that they have done.
The good news is that al-Qaeda, a global transnational terrorist organisation, is still alive, but it is not in good shape. Organizations like individuals have a limited life cycle. Al-Qaeda did not exist 20 years ago, and there will come a time when it will no longer exist. Let me say something about that bit of good news further on, but what I wanted to focus on more is the fact that al-Qaeda is in bad shape but it does not necessarily matter that much. What matters is a number of other things, though not necessarily good news, sometimes bad.
We have already talked about the fact that al-Qaeda is not in good shape. I, in this respect, just want to pick up on a few measures. I know one should not over quantify things too much when we are talking about complex areas where things are often not quantifiable but all the measurable indicators can be useful as well. The operational record of al-Qaeda as a global organisation is in a decline, and has been for some time. There has been no successful attack by al-Qaeda in the industrialised world since 7 July 2005 in London, apart of the Fort Hood incident in the United States, and when I say al-Qaeda, there are different definitions that one might use for that. Secondly, the human toll of those attacks - and that is an important factor, of course, apart from the theatre of operations in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the Indian subcontinent - cannot be considered positive by al-Qaeda. Apart from those parts of the world that I just mentioned, the last attack that killed 100 people or more was Madrid 2004 and the latest to kill 1,000 or more was 11 September. Now obviously such metrics are not the only yardstick for measuring al-Qaeda, but it is still important.
Operational successes by al-Qaeda - those that can be considered like successes for it - concentrate now in its native territory. To quote Mr Filiu's recent article, he said al-Qaeda «does well near home».
On a political and ideological record it is hardly better. Total failure of al-Qaeda in Iraq. In the Maghreb countries, it can hardly be said that politically and ideologically speaking, they have had much success. In the Arabian Peninsula, perhaps there is some positive outlook in Yemen for them, but across the board they have not been doing that well. There I would agree with Mr Filiu when he said that they do not seem to have much clout, in terms of changing things around the world.
The reasons are well known. However, let me briefly go through them because if this is a Middle East symposium, so one tends to talk about the Middle East, which makes sense but we are perhaps missing a few other things. Why is al-Qaeda's track record necessarily disappointing for them? Firstly, a very ideological reason, al-Qaeda has a global ambition but it conveys such an exclusive message of purity that it becomes counterproductive and turns off just about everybody. The «world of non-belief is one», to quote something that al-Qaeda would say a few years back but now «non-belief» is virtually everybody. al-Qaeda has now turned against the Muslims, and brought in measures and steps that have produced hundreds of thousands of victims, which did not make al-Qaeda popular in the Muslim world. And above all al-Qaeda is responsible for fitna , the total disorder to quote the title of a book by Gilles Kepel.
The second main reason for the decline of Al Qaeda is the maybe inevitable but very real strategic error to go into Iraq. It was probably too tempting because as Jean-Pierre Filiu said the distant enemy has suddenly come close to your door, they were within range of bombs, grenades, and all the rest of it. It looked wonderful, and they got off to a very good start from 2003-2007. However, as Jean-Pierre said, the upshot has been that the Iraqi counter insurgence undermined Al Qaeda and so it failed in its attempt to re-establish a territorial basis, following the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The third cause for Al Qaeda's decline is that all services contributing to repression, from intelligence to law enforcement and policing services did quite good work. I understand why Alain Chouet did not want to make a pro domo appeals. 12 Jihadist attacks that have been prevented in France over the last 13 years are listed, including those on the White Paper on terrorism. If those services had not done their job, then some of those attacks would have been a success for their perpetrators. The reason they did not succeed is because there are people working out there to stop them. I would like to pay tribute to these people whose job it is, who are paid to do it, maybe they are not paid that much, but they have done a very good job. In France, Germany, and elsewhere Al Qaeda has achieved zero success, not because they did not try but to a large extent because of counter-terrorism.
Why is it that this decline that I have just described does not really matter that much, or why does it not have the significance we would like to read into it? It is wonderful, we are winning, but as we know, cats only have nine lives, they do not have ten. I think that once you have killed them nine times, Al Qaeda will go the same way as anarchism 100 years ago, or «Red terrorism» of the 1970s in Western Europe. Why, unfortunately, can we not consider that the decline of Al Qaeda is wholly good news?
Firstly, there are various ways of looking at it. There are failures by Al Qaeda that unfortunately are equivalent to victories, not from their viewpoint, but from ours. Firstly, because, and when I say we, that means in politics, and media, and analysis on both sides of the Atlantic, we report on failures as successes. The failure at Christmas was reported as if it had been a successful attack, but it did not succeed. What did not happen at Heathrow in August 2006, was reported as if it had been an attack using liquid explosive. If it had happened, the effects would have been disastrous but we behave as if the attack had succeeded, it is rather strange.
The second thing is that, largely because of that, we take measures that are those that we would have taken had the attack been successful. In other words, we do things that have a cost that by definition is vastly greater than the non-cost of non-action. I am thinking of what happened about nine years ago, because there was somebody who tried to get through the security barriers with something in their shoes, and now in American airports you have to take off your shoes. You might say it does not matter that much, but the point is, is it useful in terms of anti terrorism? The answer is no, because there is somebody from Nigeria here who had explosives in his underwear. What are we going to do? We are going to have body scanners in all airports, at least for transatlantic flights because this is what America requires. This is going to carry a very high price tag just to deal with a failed attempt, and because terrorists, lone wolf or not, know what they need to do to be successful next time. They might do what drug dealers do, swallow the explosives, but what will happen then? You will have to put everyone on the operating table and cut them open. In other words, we take steps that are reactive but are completely disconnected from what actually happened.
Connected with that, we fail to be proactive by being reactive, I will come back to that later. However, there is another consequence of that, which is of considerable importance in the fight against Al Qaeda, or its future attacks. We still seem to be leaving our adversaries with the strategic advantage. It is the prevented action that determines how we react. It is not we who are deciding on the pace of anti-terrorism, it is the terrorists who dictate our action. We know that from a strategic point of view, that is not the recipe for success if you are playing cards, chess, or fighting against terrorism.
This is one level of analysis. Mr Chouet touched on another one: the Jihad continues. Al Qaeda is not the be all and end all of Jihadist terrorism, there are others out there.
Thirdly, Al Qaeda and Jihadist terrorism in its various forms are not the be all and end all of terrorism. I would remind you, because we are here in France, that out of 400 or so French people killed by terrorist acts over the last 40 years - and this is a figure that is in the database that we produced for the French Interior Ministry - there is a very small minority that was a victim of organisations that could be called ideological Jihadists. Now, one must be careful about the figures, because there are various actions such as the Karachi attack whose origins are perhaps not that clear, to put it mildly. I would also add that in our country, like others, terrorism has had many other different origins, sometimes very dissimilar, but simultaneous. In the 1980s, for example, we had Action directe, ASALA, FARL, Hezbollah and Khadafi against the UTA plane.
Assuming that fighting terrorism is fighting Jihadism, it might have been true at a given point in time, but it is not true over time. We should never forget that. It has been my privilege to take part in the drafting of the White Paper on terrorism a few years ago. There was a lengthy discussion about how one should qualify the terrorist threat. Some said that at the top you should have Jihad and Jihadism, but at that time that option was rejected, not because of political correctness but because the Muslim organisations felt as if perhaps it was not that good an idea to play into the hands of the Jihadists who had want to be called Jihadist, because that is a noble cause for them. However, there was also a reaction from somebody who was directly involved in the choice, who is in very eminent position today, and it was said, «What would I look like if we produced a White Paper on Jihadism and there is a sect like Aum, that then sets off a dirty bomb in the underground?». It is a perfectly understanding reaction by a politician. We should never forget that, especially since this world is populated by a number of lone wolves, not necessarily at the behest of Jihadist organisations.
Also, as Jean-Pierre Filiu said, Al Qaeda might well change.
The last point comes to the consequences of Al Qaeda's decline. Despite everything that might happen to them, including the possibility that they would completely disappear which is not where we are today, is what I recall in various articles, the «aggravation principle» in terrorism. It means that the ability to appropriate increasing violence on the part of individuals or smaller groups at lower cost is growing quite fast, because of IT developments and also other technological developments. This means that the lone wolves can now carry out extremely violent acts, which will be even more violent in the future.
You can talk about the lone wolf responsible for the Anthrax attacks in the United States, in September/October 2001. This was totally disconnected, apparently, from the Jihad, and with no intention to kill. Actually five people died, but that was not the purpose. If the purpose had been to kill with those same resources, it could have killed up to 30,000 people. This means therefore that our societies are not going to assume that if we are lowering the threat of Al Qaeda or the Jihadists, we will be able to be less vigilant in your fight against terrorism.
In conclusion, just a few points. Regarding focus of our efforts and resources, I agree with what Alain Chouet said then. All this indicates that we really need to focus on terrorists and the environments that could lead to socialisation of future terrorists and not focus our resources on methods to deal with the innocents. The billions of dollars spent each year within the framework of the Echelon system to listen to all the recorded conversations in the world might be useful but I am not sure that the efficiency is very high. The billions that each of our countries spend on airport security, for example, are billions that are not available for smarter options. I understand Obama's anger when he had to deal with the Mutallab affair last December. The gap between the limited amounts that go into intelligence tracking of potential terrorists, and the vast amounts that go into tracking innocent people, obviously would make anybody angry.
Secondly, I come back to what Jean-Pierre Filiu said. I would say something that might seem strange, we need Eikenberry rather than McChrystal. I am talking about Afghanistan but it is applicable more broadly. What did the American Ambassador in Afghan say, who used to be the Commander of the American forces in Afghanistan? He said, «You should not send more soldiers there». He was not listened to. The demilitarization as applies to foreign soldiers in Afghanistan is something that we need to be very sceptical about.
Thirdly, vocabulary is vocabulary. Terrorism and counter terrorism, it is all about messages, and symbols. The way in which we manage messages, we talk about Jihadism or we talk about non attacks and successive failures of the Jihadists over recent years, all of that is part and parcel of what should be among our priorities.
Monique CERISIER-ben GUIGA, French Senator, Co-author of the Foreign Relations, Defence and Armed Forces Committee's Report on the Situation in the Middle East - All three of our speakers have raised many questions, have really given us lots of food for thought. I would like to open up for Q&A.
Nazih EL-NAGGARY, political councillor, Egypt Embassy in Paris - I have a question, more about the political aspects, and not so much the security aspects of the issue. What is the existing relationship of having to deal with non-resolution of regional political conflicts, especially the Israeli-Palestinian one, and the possible re-launch of Al Qaeda, or some extreme Islamist movement? What is the existing relationship between these conflicts and the weakening of reforming voices embodied in the King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia, or the moderate voices demonstrating in the streets in Iran?
Jean-Pierre FILIU, Professor at Sciences Po Paris, Middle East Chair, Visiting Professor at Georgetown University - About the Palestinian issue, the most recent message by Bin Laden is quite telling in this respect. It was a minute «from Osama to Obama». He was talking about airplanes, and Palestine, using the same expressions to talk about Palestine as he was using in September 2001 in his Al Jazeera interview in the caves, saying «America will only have security when Palestine knows security». It is all just rhetoric. The reality is there is not any Palestinian active in Al Qaeda, there is no relationship between this theatre and the global Jihad, in spite of all the immoderate and repeated efforts that have been made by Al Qaeda to try to establish that link, and exert pressure in this respect.
Actually, the opposite has taken place. We have seen the Hamas and Al Qaeda at loggerheads. Last August, there were even physical elimination not just of some of the partisans, but of some of the Al Qaeda sympathisers on the Gaza Strip. If we go back a year prior, there was that type of appeal by Bin Laden during the Israel offensive in Gaza, calling for vengeance of Gaza martyrs by striking the Americans and their allies everywhere in every location. This was countered by Hamas immediately that said «anyone that listens to that appeal will be the biggest traitor of the Palestinian cause». I do observe that Bin Laden's appeal was not heard.
We have to be very careful. The Palestinian issue needs to be settled for the sake of regional peace, and the Palestinians, not to try to dry up the hot bed of terrorism. There is no need to add to all those reasons the issue regarding Al Qaeda. On the other hand, I really would say there is a disconnect, and it is becoming ever more apparent, and yet another sign, of Al Qaeda's decline.
François HEISBOURG - Special Advisor at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique in Paris- I agree completely with what Jean-Pierre Filiu just said. I would just add two things briefly. First of all, regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the 1990s Al Qaeda became more powerful, and it was during the peace process. Al Qaeda's growth was not prevented, and it was prospering, which would be reason for caution in trying to assess the consequences of what would happen if there were a settlement of an Israeli-Palestinian issue. I do not think that would halt Al Qaeda.
Secondly, Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just one of the motivations of potential Al Qaeda sympathisers, specifically if you think of the Internet, and the virtual community that Al Qaeda is trying to cause. Now it would be better to be peace between Israelis and Palestinians, clearly that would be a substantial motivation element, but it would have more impact in the virtual world than the real one in my mind.
Mohammed BEN MADANI, Maghreb Review - I wanted your view, should we really ignore Al Qaeda's propaganda? Should it be ignored, if so how could we ignore it?
Monique CERISIER-ben GUIGA, French Senator, Co-author of the Foreign Relations, Defence and Armed Forces Committee's Report on the Situation in the Middle East - Do we really have to ignore Al Qaeda propaganda? And if yes, how? Last year I was in Mauritania for my work, and someone put a file in my letterbox at the hotel, it had to do with lectures given in schools. It was amazing to see how they try to recruit people. In the brochure it was saying that when someone from Al Qaeda kills an American in Afghanistan he becomes a great person.
Monique CERISIER-ben GUIGA, French Senator, Co-author of the Foreign Relations, Defence and Armed Forces Committee's Report on the Situation in the Middle East - We can listen to Jean-Pierre Filiu who says on the contrary, we need to fight Al Qaeda's propaganda, and especially Internet propaganda.
Jean-Pierre FILIU, Professor at Sciences Po Paris, Middle East Chair, Visiting Professor at Georgetown University - That is very harmful propaganda so I think it needs to be countered; we must not ignore it but take it very seriously. We have to take the threats very literally, but at the same time, and this has been what we have been saying at the round table, we have to also be realistic. We must stop just accepting a lot of the points that are being bantered about, often they use the same types of phrases. They are so accessible and you are on the Internet they are just a click away to people who do not necessarily have a religious upbringing. It is very important. The Al Qaeda message is targeting people who may never have been taught in Islam and were de-Islamized. They are getting a substitution for true teachings like the ones you are alluding to there. There are buzz words and slogans that they use, but they do not have that religious meaning if you really read Islam.
Alain CHOUET, Former Chief of the Security Intelligence Service within the French Foreign Intelligence Service - I will just add a brief word. We must monitor Al Qaeda's propaganda as you said and come up with counter arguments. Al Qaeda's propaganda is on the Internet and is widely used. They are particularly targeting populations that do not view it very critically, and this is the spearhead of a type of inclusive Sunni Islamist propaganda.
This is something you can get free of charge, you find it in any cultural centre or mosque in Paris. It is a beautiful little book entitled «What every Muslim should know about the Shi'ite». It is similar, of course, to «The Protocols of the Elders of Zion». It says they eat little children and do some human sacrifices, etc. All this is funded by Saudi institutions in Europe, but I will not give the names as I do not want any lawsuits for slander. But it is given to you free of charge, and this can be the basis of the development of lone wolf techniques as François Heisbourg was saying. We have to be attentive to this type of propaganda as well, it is not Al Qaeda's, but it sort of paves the way for Al Qaeda propaganda.
Myra DARIDAN, former member of the Social and Economic Committee - I wanted to come in first of all on the little booklet you just showed us. Even the title is mistaken there, because Muslims also include the Shi'ite.
I have several comments in terms of the societal aspects of issues we are looking at today. I thank Alain Chouet for making the distinction and for saying that the main enemy of Al Qaeda is not found in the West, but among moderate Muslims. I thank Mr Filiu for continuing with that idea, and saying that we have to stop the disinformation and to detoxify the speech.
In social debates, and some of the debates we see nowadays in France, are we not precisely causing some disinformation, some of the toxification of this subject? There are some subjects that require action, but not that much lengthy pointless discussion.
Second point, though I am not an expert I am familiar with the region. I make a distinction between the influence of local conflicts and development of Islam in Muslim countries, and particularly Arab countries, which dates back to the 1970s. I wanted to establish a link between the 1970s and a loss of face in the Middle East in 1967. We must remember there is probably a relationship between the two. We can say that a big defeat can lead to lone wolves.
Third point, talk about the Internet. Is it not already too late to try to limit Internet or access to Internet, considering the lone wolves are already here? If you go to Cairo, you can see there are many women in burqas, and men in djellabas, and they have a direct influence, they do not need the Internet anymore.
Alain CHOUET, Former Chief of the Security Intelligence Service within the French Foreign Intelligence Service - There is no doubt about it, that any conflict, any dispute that is not settled, any humiliation necessarily will lead to some violent acts. Therefore, obviously, yes, the defeat in 1967 led to some resentment. However, regarding increased political Islamism, I would say this really began mainly from 1978, at a time when there was a fight for legitimacy between two Islamic worlds, Iran and the Sunni world, and they were outbidding each other all the time. Back in the 1990s I wrote an article called the «Confiscated Islam», trying to demonstrate how each of the parties was trying to use Islam as an instrument to increase its own legitimacy and fight off the others.
I would agree about regulating the Internet but I do not know if it is possible. You talk about lone wolves, saying they already exist. But you can end up creating further lone wolves, it is not necessarily a good thing. I do not know technically though if this would be possible.
As to the burqa, and other attire, I do not say anything about that. I do not have the political stance to do that and would not want to. Countries where people who are or were in charge of special services have a political legitimacy are dictatorships, so I do not want to say anything about that type of things.
General Christian QUESNOT, president of QA International - There is one point that was not raised, that I think is very important when we are talking about terrorism, that is the destruction of Western society through drugs, that come from Afghanistan, feed the Pashtun society and go through Dubaï. This traffic represents a billion dollars for domestic production, $4 billion at the borders, $200 billion when it gets to Antwerp and St. Petersburg. Turkish and Chechen gangs are involved, as well as some banks that are well known. Since there has been intervention in Afghanistan, drug production has increased tremendously. Is that not the number one danger that we are confronting and that we need to be counting? What are we doing to counter this?
François HEISBOURG - Special Advisor at the Fondation pour la Recherche Stratégique in Paris - I have two different points on that. The first one, will not surprise you, it is that I agree with you of course. Clearly, this is a major factor in every respect. One of the major shortcomings that is the least acceptable for the NATO strategy since NATO took charge of the Afghan matters starting in 2003, has been its inability to agree among member states on what their strategy should be regarding drugs in Afghanistan. There was some hesitation, and there were three possible basic strategies. One, let things just take place to avoid the opposition of the drug lords who could then turn to Taliban. The second possibility was to eradicate the drugs, and the third one would have been either to buy drugs or develop through subsidiary other alternative crops. There was some hesitation and no decision was made, and of course the effects are the ones you have described. I am not a specialist in that, but I do know if you do not set out one single clear strategy in this area, you continue failing.
I would tend to view more favourable the development of alternative crops that would be highly subsidised, so common Afghan agricultural policy with the requisite resources. The Afghan farmers, who are at the wrong end of the chain so to speak, are getting quite little from drug crops. It is estimated that around $500 to $600 million per annum are necessary to meet the Afghan farmers' expenses. $500 million/$600 million is equal to five days of the cost of American operations in Afghanistan. It just gives you an idea as to the «incredible» effort that would have to be made.
My second and last point is something that, as an analyst, worries me. I do not know what the specialists of the relevant services would say. There's a de facto convergence between what may be going on in terms of drugs, and what might go on in terms of biological threat. You have seen a couple of things in the newspapers. In the UK, around eight heroin users died in recent weeks because it was contaminated heroin, containing anthrax. Several other people are being treated. Maybe we would have to ask the Pasteur Institute if that could happen by accident or is this a deliberate action that has taken place? It is fairly sinister new light being shed on the narco component in this subject during our panel discussion..
Monique CERISIER-ben GUIGA, Moderator - Thank you very much to our speakers, our panellists, as well as our entire audience, which has listened so carefully with baited breath.