Counter terrorism

Al Qaeda may not yet be ready to completely abandon the outsourcing of terrorism operations to individuals and groups over which it has little control. However, this deployment of actual Al Qaeda operational planners to Syria may indicate its senior leadership recognizes the limits of its network structure and is taking steps to return to a more centrally directed organization focused on attacking the United States and Europe.

Medical staff at Guantanamo Bay work under pseudonyms drawn from the plays of Shakespeare. This article explores the implications of this odd identity game, and speculates why no-one took the name of one of the four named doctors in Shakespeare's oeuvre.

This research project is intended to explore and create knowledge on the phenomenon of lone wolf terrorism. A case study approach is used to explore and reveal common themes across three different incidents of lone wolf attacks. The research results revealed what has been termed as rhetoric shifts that act as markers in the evolution of a lone wolf terrorist. Based on the results of case study, an analytical method is explored and proposed for the identification of lone wolf terrorist from within the broader population they exist.

Since 2006, counterinsurgency (“COIN”) doctrine has revolutionized the way the U.S. military thinks about war. While COIN literature has proliferated in this period, relatively little legal scholarship has examined the relationship of COIN to international law. The legal scholarship that has engaged with COIN is overwhelmingly positive and assumes that the doctrine follows the dictates of the law of war. In espousing human rights and civilian protection as its core principles, COIN provided a common discourse that appeared to bridge the conceptual divide between legal humanitarians and neo-pragmatists. However, the rhetorical success of COIN has come with significant, and as yet unrecognized, costs. This article argues that COIN’s influence on the law of war has had counterintuitive consequences that should give both COIN proponents and humanitarians pause. In particular, COIN inverts the core tenet of the law of war – the civilian-combatant distinction – in order to achieve its tactical objective of greater civilian protection. While legal scholars have celebrated COIN for its purported alignment with the law of war’s humanitarian goals, I show how COIN lends itself equally to the sort of jus ad bellum/jus in bello conflation that many scholars rebuke as violative of these same goals. COIN is aligned with law only insofar as it seeks to exclude insurgents/terrorists from the law of war’s discursive terrain. In refusing to engage insurgents’ ad bellum objectives, COIN perpetuates international law’s liberal statist bias. Rather than progressively developing the law of war, as legal scholars argue, COIN is profoundly conservative. I suggest that a more responsible approach would admit insurgents as legitimate parties to war, in order that their political objectives could be substantively engaged with.

Traditionally immigrants have been made responsible for a rise in a country’s crime rate, a state’s employment market or a nation’s cultural identity. However, since the events of 9/11 immigrants have evolved into a new kind of security concern. As a result of the terrorist attacks in 2001 by nineteen foreigners, the issue of immigration has become a central aspect in counter-terrorism as nations around the world scrambled to implement policies in reaction to the unprecedented situation. However, one has to question the validity and effectiveness of using immigration measures in the fight against terrorism. Is there an error in current counter-terror policies? The paper will critically discuss whether immigration policies are a useful means of addressing the global threat of terrorism.

"After the end of the Cold War, along with the emergence of the Contemporary Security and Human Security agenda, the discourse on the effects of globalization on the nature of warfare and irregular warfare (e.g. terrorism) has acquired much prominence. Within this context some scholars adopted the word “new” as a way of characterizing what they perceived as the result of the impact of globalization – and the post-Cold War international order – on wars and terrorism for example; thus, theses such as “New Wars” or “New Terrorism”.

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"By James M. Dorsey

If the killing of US-Yemeni jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki highlights the increasing marginalization of Al Qaeda, it also weakens embattled Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh’s effort to cling to power despite six months of anti-government protests that have brought his country to the brink of civil war.

Mr. Saleh, who returned to Yemen last week from three months of treatment of severe wounds he suffered during an attack in June on his presidential compound, has sought to portray himself as the only obstacle to Al Qaeda grapping power in the Red Sea geo-strategic country straddling Red Sea. In recent interviews, he has asserted that his departure would bring the Muslim Brotherhood and with it Al Qaeda to power in Yemen.

Mr. Awlaki’s death compounds the major body blows Al Qaeda has suffered in the past ten months with the killing in May by US Navy Seals of Al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden and the Arab revolt sweeping the Middle East and North Africa.

It also significantly reduces Mr. Saleh’s controversial role in the fight against an increasingly weakened Al Qaeda.

US diplomatic cables disclosed by Wikileaks detail the president’s willingness to allow the US to conduct a military campaign against Al Qaeda on its territory as long as he could maintain plausible deniability because of overwhelming public opposition to foreign operations on Yemeni territory.

At the same time, the cables discussed Mr. Saleh’s failure to provide agreed anti-terror training to Yemeni airport officials, permitting of cargo to pass through x-ray machines unchecked and refusal to act on US suspicions that several Yemeni Islamic institutions were Al Qaeda recruiting grounds.

Few doubt that Mr. Saleh has repeatedly manipulated the terrorist threat in Yemen and played both ends against the middle to curry US and European favor. Powerful dissident military commander Brigadier-General Ali Mohsen al-Ahmar, the head of the first armored brigade who defected to the protesters in March, has gone as far as charging that Al Qaeda’s Yemeni affilitate to which Mr. Awlaki belongs was a creature of Mr. Saleh’s making to secure Western military and economic support.

From a US perspective, Al Qaeda has been weakened to a degree that it can risk Mr. Saleh being succeeded by a government that at worst would be as unreliable and duplicit an ally as he was.

The peaceful mass anti-government protests that toppled Egyptian and Tunisian presidents Hosni Mubarak and Zine el Abedine Ben Ali, brought the autocratic regimes of Syrian president Bashar al Assad and Mr. Saleh to the brink of demise, and only morphed into a civil war in Libya after ousted Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi employed his armed forces highlight the rejection of Al Qaeda’s militant Islam and indiscriminate violence by a majority of Middle Easterners and North Africans.

Mr. Awlaki’s death may well strengthen a growing belief that Al Qaeda has been reduced to a local threat in the three areas where it still retains a presence of any significance: Yemen with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) that suffered a serious blow with the departure of the Yemeni-American cleric, Somalia where Al Qaeda affiliate Al Shabab has been forced to surrender territory in recent months and Algeria where Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) has largely limited itself to harassing Algerian forces.

Increasingly, western counterterrorism officials and analysts are coming to the conclusion that the body blows dealt to Al Qaeda render it incapable of launching large scale, dramatic attacks of the kind it perpetrated in the last decade such as the 9/11 targeting of the World Trade Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, the 2005 and 2007 attacks on public transport in London and Madrid and the bombings of multiple targets in Casablanca, Amman and Saudi Arabia. The attacks in Arab cities moreover played a key role in diminishing Al Qaeda’s public appeal in much of the Muslim world.

Western counterterrorism officials stop short of declaring victory in their more than a decade-old fight against Al Qaeda. Yet, the organization they are fighting today is but a shadow of what it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks.

Mr. Saleh’s inability to leverage his cooperation in the hunting down of Mr. Awlaki to reduce US, Western and Saudi pressure for his resignation after 33 years in office was evident with the Obama administration’s reiteration of its insistence that he step down in the same breath as acknowledging his part in the death of the Yemeni-American.

US and European diplomats are nudging Mr. Saleh behind closed doors to agree to a transition plan under which he would step down within a maximum of 30 days in exchange for immunity from prosecution for himself and members of his family.

Mr. Saleh’s contribution to the killing of Mr. Awlaki may amount to little more than standing aside and letting the US do the dirty work.

In doing so, he may have highlighted his increasing irrelevance rather than his importance. Mr. Saleh’s successors will not need the perception of a terrorist threat to secure international assistance in rebuilding their crisis-ridden country.

James M. Dorsey is a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and the author of the blog, The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer.

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For U.S. security policy, the threat of nuclear terrorism against Western urban centers is both a strategic and moral issue.  What is, then, the morally appropriate and strategically feasible policy response to this threat?  On the one hand, the US might consider adapting nuclear deterrence policies – in particular, expanding the official threat of nuclear reprisal to include terrorist networks that have publicly signaled their interest in conducting nuclear attacks on American and/or allied cities.  On the other hand, the US and its allies might reserve nuclear deterrence for state-based nuclear threats, and instead respond to a nuclear terrorist incident by means of the relevant international tribunals.  The panelists debate these two competing courses of action, John Mark Mattox for the first option, and Thomas Doyle for the second option.

Using response typologies, this thesis describes differences in evidentiary requirements when using the criminal justice system to prosecute individuals who plan terrorism before an attack occurs. It describes how Sweden and the U.S. use traditionally recognized responses to terrorism differently. It also explores how this difference potentially affects the status of Sweden as a Visa Waiver Program country. The findings show that differences in requirements for evidence used against a suspect in a trial reveal that each country prefers to respond to terrorism planning differently. A review of the implications of this difference suggests that authorities in the U.S. may have grounds to interpret this difference as a reason to terminate Sweden from the Visa Waiver Program. The study concludes with a discussion of the importance of focusing on more than written law when drafting international laws that intend to increase international cooperation and security drafting.

This article discusses counter-terrorism strategies which would constitute a constructive and cost effective response to al Qaeda inspired terrorism. It begins with a review of al Qaeda’s development as a terrorist group and its organizational structure. A critique of the overall effectiveness of the current US strategies is followed by a discussion of al Qaeda’s religiousand cultural grievances as well as more constructive and cost-effective counter-terror strategies. It concludes with a summary of some counter-terrorism strategies that represent a constructive and cost effective way to utilize a combination of hard and soft power counter-terrorism tactics.