The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (15 page)

As the U.S. Intelligence and Law Enforcement communities document the details of the connections between terrorists, drug dealers, money launderers, and traffickers in human beings, it adds to our arsenal against them, both in terms of law enforcement and the ideological war. Exposing such unsavory connections gravely undermines the Radical Islamists’ claim to piety and moral standing. It is difficult for them to argue that Allah has blessed the efforts of drug dealers and the like. As the common criminals among them are rounded up and imprisoned, we should publicly point out there is very little religious virtue involved in such activities. As of the end of 2015, the Islamic State was primarily funded by such activities: extortion, oil smuggling, kidnapping, and so on.

There is a lot to be done, but there are signs of progress. There is now an international counter-ISIS group, and its first meeting was held in March 2015, jointly chaired by Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Italy. Perhaps the members will benefit from a viewing of a recent documentary—
From Russia with Cash
—on the massive flows of cash into London, New York, and Miami. A lot of it gets invested in luxury real estate:

The numbers are staggering. Annually, $1 trillion is stolen by corrupt officials from countries around the globe. That money needs to be spent, or laundered, and much of it goes into big anonymous real estate deals in the United Kingdom, which is seeing £1 billion in unrecorded capital inflows per month. The main source of that money? Russia.
(
www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/from-russia-with-cash-dirty-money-unchecked-in-london#.VnnrUJ1Ov8g.twitter
)

It is impossible to say with confidence how much of that cash (£1 billion per month in the U.K. alone) is involved in terror finance, but with a trillion dollars a year stolen by and from corrupt countries, it’s safe to assume the numbers are significant.

There is also a lot to do in the digital universe. Earlier, I wrote about my beliefs of what the social media giants should be doing. We have long known that al Qaeda uses the Internet to distribute recruiting videos, send messages to its followers, criticize and intimidate its rivals, and distribute coded instructions to terrorists. Al Qaeda set a precedent for the other jihadis, and ISIS seems to have moved the bar even higher. The rapid expansion of the Islamic State is unprecedented, and its success is due at least in part to its skills online.

According to the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, the territory controlled by ISIS now ranks as the place with the highest number of foreign fighters since Afghanistan in the 1980s, with recent estimates putting the total number of foreign recruits at around 20,000, nearly 4,000 of whom hail from Western countries. Many of these recruits made initial contact with ISIS and its ideology via the Internet. Other followers, meanwhile, are inspired by the group’s online propaganda to carry out terrorist attacks without traveling to the Middle East.
(
www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/from-russia-with-cash-dirty-money-unchecked-in-london#.VnnrUJ1Ov8g.twitter
)

ISIS and al Qaeda use the full array of digital technology, from Web sites and chat rooms to slick video productions and effectively encrypted messaging. It was only at the end of last year, to take perhaps the most recent deadly example of the use of text messaging to organize terrorist attacks, that French authorities revealed to
Le Monde
that the frightful slaughter in Paris on November 13, 2015, was coordinated from a single cell phone in Belgium, used solely for that purpose. The Belgian phone was activated the day before, at 10:24 p.m., and at 9:21 on the evening of the 13th it received a short text message from the Paris group headed for the concert to begin their attack: “We’re on our way, it’s starting.” Within two minutes, the phones were shut off.

The French phone was found in a garbage can outside the concert hall where an American group, Eagles of Death Metal, was featured. The concert hall attack as well as two others that same evening in Paris were coordinated via text from the same phone in Belgium. As of this writing in April 2016, the user has still not been identified.

Even the best technology can’t save us from well-organized killers. Unless there were other communications leading up to the 13th of November, there’s no digital technology that would have alerted Parisian authorities to the operation. We’d have had to infiltrate the group and known in advance about the attacks. Since we still don’t know who was on the line in Belgium, this obviously didn’t happen.

Nor should you believe that intercepts of terrorists’ communications are necessarily reliable guides to their real intentions. In the War on Terror, for example, some of our top analysts came to believe that the Iranians were deliberately sending us misleading messages via what we believed to be real phone calls. Since the Iranians thought we were listening to most all of their conversations, it would have been to their advantage to muddy the intelligence waters. Technology will only take you so far; a trained and cunning mind is always necessary in these matters.

Some believe that if we could thoroughly map the ISIS and al Qaeda digital networks, we would be able to monitor all the potential terrorists, but even this is overly optimistic. Oddly, in the United States it is not illegal to recruit or indoctrinate online; we have to wait until some “real” crime, such as traveling (or organizing a trip) from a Western country to terrorist training camps overseas, is committed. Our law enforcement agencies have done quite well at coping with such restrictions.

Moreover, there’s an ongoing dispute within the intelligence community about the best use of the digital information. It’s similar to the kind of disagreements that inevitably crop up on the battlefield and in traditional espionage: some will always want to destroy any clearly identified enemy target, or arrest known hostile agents, while others will feel that the intelligence value of watching our enemies at work exceeds the gain from temporarily putting some of them out of business. Hostile digital operations are extreme cases of this dilemma, since it is so easy to create new sites online.

My own view is that, once again, the truth is the most lethal weapon against Radical Islam. While some of this digital warfare (breaking their codes, identifying some of their sites in the so-called dark web, and tracking terrorists’ communications) must be done secretly, the bulk of it, the part that has to do with the ideological conflict, is best defeated by exposure. When potential followers and recruits become aware that we are watching sites to which they are attracted, many of them will be scared off. Knowing or believing that the Radical Islamists are under constant observation undercuts their appeal and sabotages their prestige.

At the moment, various governmental entities are engaged in the creation of a coherent strategy to defeat the jihadis in the digital universe. These entities include U.S. Cyber Command, Homeland Security, the State Department, the FBI, operating under a plethora of legal authorities under Titles 10 (Armed Forces), 50 (War and National Defense), and 22 (Foreign Relations). Each will have its own reading of the relevant statute, and each will attempt to accumulate control over as much bureaucratic turf (and federal money) as they can. This must cease and we must operate as one cohesive team focused on a single goal—winning the global war against Radical Islam and its allies
(
www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/12/us-needs-someone-run-effort-defeat-isis-online/124664/
).

Digital war necessarily involves the private sector as well. No doubt many citizens were surprised to learn that the metadata collected by the National Security Agency is actually held by private companies, and we can’t possibly have an effective campaign against Radical Islamic ideology without the cooperation of the likes of Google, Facebook, and Twitter.

Our cyber army therefore contains governmental and private forces, along with others from the military and civilian sectors. What are all these guys doing? Nobody should be surprised to learn that many of them are doing the same as many of the others, and, inevitably, they sometimes make embarrassing mistakes.

For instance, at the end of 2015, Twitter, following a false claim in the
New York Post
, suspended the account of Iyad el-Baghdadi, a popular blogger and leader of the Arab Spring. Twitter and the
Post
had confused him with the caliph of the Islamic State. The blunder was quickly corrected, and, while certainly embarrassing, I rather suspect that it may well have had a positive effect—to cause more serious understanding of the enemy we face.

With such a large body of major players, we badly need effective organization—otherwise the organizations will constantly bump into one another—and skilled leadership. Somebody’s got to define the basic mission and decide who does what. As I said earlier, find an effective leader, place that person in charge and if the person doesn’t work out, get rid of him or her and find another who can do the job. Abraham Lincoln’s Civil War model is probably the best historic example. He kept relieving his generals until he found Ulysses S. Grant, who went on to win the war (and eventually became our eighteenth president). Lincoln was one of our very best presidents—wish we had leaders like him today.

A serious question that must be answered is, Do we want to shut down the most radical Web sites or concentrate our efforts at exposing them, and then challenging their doctrines?

The multiplicity of actors involved further complicates the situation. Shutdown of the [enemy] networks and Web sites and takedown of [their] propaganda and material for example, will involve the private sector including social media and Internet service providers (ISPs).… The idea would be to encourage nongovernmental entities to hunt and gather pertinent information that could be turned over to ISPs, thereby helping them to marginalize the most egregious content.… The EU’s [European Union] new Internet Referral Unit refers potential terms of service violations to providers in order to reduce the amount of extremist content online.
(
www.defenseone.com/ideas/2015/12/us-needs-someone-run-effort-defeat-isis-online/124664/
)

Defeating messianic mass movements was our mission for most of the twentieth century. We had to fight them at all levels and by all means. We had to defeat their armies, the better to demonstrate that their defeat was inevitable, and that the power of the master race, and the laws of history, weren’t good enough against the United States of America. We displayed our economic, military, and political superiority. So complete was our victory that some very smart people believed—at least for a while—that history itself had come to an end, that the superiority of the American model was so complete that a frontal challenge was unimaginable, and that henceforth war itself would be limited to economic competition.

The Radical Islamists and their allies did not believe that history had come to an end, nor did they think that the American model was destined to dominate the world. Indeed, at the end of the Cold War, at the very moment the Soviet Empire was headed toward defeat, they were organizing what they believed would be our inevitable defeat at their hands. Al Qaeda was the first major global jihad organization, and Osama bin Laden believed that we could be eliminated as a superpower in a single stroke. Now there are so many of these organizations—notably ISIS—that only an expert with near-total recall can keep track of them all. They are well-funded, well-armed, well-trained, and confident that they can do us in. It would be foolish for us to wait until they pose an existential threat before taking decisive action. Doing so would only increase the cost in blood and treasure later for what we know must be done now.

Not surprisingly, the recent congressional draft Authorization for Use of Military Force, or AUMF (a minor component of a still-required comprehensive strategy), signals that we are willing to wait for them to become existential. Again, this is irresponsible and dangerous thinking.

Instead, this authorization should be broad and agile, with clearer and more decisive language and unconstrained by unnecessary restrictions. These restrictions cause not only frustration in our military and intelligence communities but they also significantly slow down the decision-making process for numerous fleeting opportunities. If this is due to a lack of confidence in our military and intelligence leadership, get rid of these leaders and find new ones.

If there is not a clear, coherent, and comprehensive strategy inclusive of all elements of national power forthcoming from the administration, there should be no new authorization at all; simply leave the existing one in place.

There are solutions to this problem. However, solving tough, complex problems such as eliminating Radical Islam from the planet will require extraordinary intellect, courage, and leadership. Leadership that isn’t obsessed with consensus building; instead, leadership that is tough-minded, thoughtful, patriotic, and, when it matters, decisive.

We will have to shed some of the feel-good doctrines that have constrained us in recent years. One of the most unfortunate of these is known as the Powell Doctrine, named after General Colin Powell. According to this view, we should never use military power unless there is a strong domestic consensus in its favor. This, General Powell hoped, would greatly reduce the possibility of a large antiwar movement that would inevitably shackle our war effort.

Colin Powell is a great American, but the doctrine is backwards. The consensus that matters is not the one that exists at the beginning of fighting, but the one at the end of the war. If we win, our leaders will be hailed, while if we lose, they will be despised. Things have not changed much since Machiavelli told his prince “if you are victorious, the people will judge what ever means you used to have been appropriate.” Winners are always heroes and losers are almost always … losers.