Previous IFPA-Fletcher Conferences

The 33rd IFPA-Fletcher Conference
on
National Security Strategy and Policy

October 16-17, 2002
The Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
Washington, D.C.

Transcript Session 1: Security Challenges in the New Reality

The Global and Regional Challenge of Islamic Extremism
Address by Mr. Steven Emerson, Executive Director of The Investigative Project and Author of Jihad in America

Dr. Pfaltzgraff: … what I'd like to do then is to begin with Steve Emerson and to say that Steve Emerson is someone who is very familiar to you. He is head of what is called the Investigative Project, which he founded in, I believe, 1995. He is the author of several books. Once of his most recent books, which has received a great deal of interest and publicity is called Jihad in America. Steve is well known on the talk shows and on the media.

He has done extensive work on terrorism in the last decade and is a person I have come to know in the last few months especially and to respect greatly his work. So, it is with great pleasure that I welcome Steve Emerson to speak at this time. I have asked our panel members to speak for up to 15 minutes each so that we will have time for discussion. We will try to get all of these panel presentations in before we take a break if that is doable and if the members keep within their timeframe that will be indeed possible.

And then we will have a good deal of time also for discussion. So I would like to begin by offering the podium to Steve Emerson.

Emerson: Thank you, Dr. Pfaltzgraff. I think as we assemble here today, the fact that the Al Qaeda network has apparently resurrected its ugly head in Bali, Southeast Asia, indicates that the challenges that we realized are facing us in the aftermath of 9/11, in particular following successes that U.S. government had in interdicting the Islamic Militant networks of Al Qaeda and other organizations, has not gone away.

Certainly the attack in Bali, following the series of smaller attacks in Kuwait and elsewhere and attempted attacks in Singapore and Malaysia indicates that the second jihad front is alive and well in Southeast Asia. The Jemaah Islamiyah, which is the pan-Islamic group headquartered of centered in Indonesia, which aspires to create an Islamic state, an Islamic calipate or mini-calipate in the Southeast Asian area, certainly is directly linked to Al Qaeda but not necessarily commanded and controlled.

And I think as we look at the networks of militant Islam, particularly those networks that have carried out violent attacks, I think we can segregate the different challenges we face, first regionally and then globally. First of all, we face the challenges we just witnessed so horrifically in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, even Australia, elsewhere. The Jemaah Islamiyah definitely has training camps. It has supporters. Malaysia was the site of a seminal meeting of two of the bombers connected to the 9/11 conspiracy who were also connected and involved in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole.

Secondly, the network continues even though displaced largely from Afghanistan, still has operational linkages in Afghanistan, certainly in Pakistan. The fact the Ramsey Bin Al-Shibh and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, one of the top Al Qaeda leaders, recently gave interviews to Al Jazeera from Karachi, although Bin Alshibh was arrested. As for Mr. Mohammed, it is believed to the best of our intelligence, that he is still in Pakistan.

So the network of Al Qaeda still exists, still operates from Pakistan, despite the fact that President Musharraf has tried, with some success, to interrupt that network, working with U.S. forces. The larger problem in that area still concerns the Persian Gulf in terms of the ability of Al Qaeda and its like-minded support groups to carry out attacks in Kuwait, Oman, United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia.

The situation in Saudi Arabian situation is complex and replete with self-contradictions. Because of the authoritarian nature of the regime, Saudi Arabia has much more control over the level of potential insurrection by Al Qaeda. However, and this is an important point, because Saudi Arabia continues to sponsor financially, directly and indirectly, many of the Al Qaeda oriented groups and many of the Islamic fundamentalist groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Islamic groups that have promoted, championed, or carried out acts of terrorism, it is all but certain that the nexus between funding and operational linkages is present in Saudi Arabia.

Thus, it would not take much for a network to emerge much more violently on Saudi soil, leading to attacks on U.S. forces despite the fact that U.S. forces have largely been insulated and protected in recent years as a result of defensive security measures taken in response to the to the attacks in Khobar and Daharan. In the Middle East, the continued influence and reach of Hezbollah is a very lethal problem, a problem that is not just affecting Israel but also affecting the security of the United States. In fact, up until 9/11/01, the group largely responsible for more attacks and more lethal attacks against all American troops and American citizens around the world was not Al Qaeda but rather Hezbollah.

Hezbollah stands ready to step into any operational vacuum created by any type of impediment imposed on Al Qaeda. Hezbollah operatives have extensive, far-flung networks around the Middle East. Certainly the ability to inflict major damage on Israel, with 40-mile Katusha rockets with deadly accuracy, essentially able to reach one-third of the northern population of Israel. Hezbollah has an ability to inflict damage, as they have in the past in attacks as they carried out in Khobar in 1996 and has demonstrated its reconnaissance abilities and targeting abilities around the world.

Hezbollah has a vast intelligence network directly responding to orders from Iran. Hezbollah operatives, together with Iranian intelligence operatives have collected video and other types of human intelligence on potential targets not just in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf but in Southeast Asia, Europe, the United States, South America and Canada.

Recent trials in the last few years in Canada and arrests of Hezbollah operatives have indicated and revealed the extent of their modus operandi, which is that they are tasked with video taping potential targets and then sending back those video tapes to Teheran or to Lebanon, which are then transferred to Lebanon in order to provide a mosaic and a targeting list for Iranian terrorist organizational leaders.

Beyond the Middle East, beyond Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad are very deadly groups, obviously, that although have not demonstrated a willingness at this point to target Americans and have focused most particularly on attacking Israelis; new intelligence has shown linkages with other Islamic fundamentalist networks. And they have showed the ability, particularly in the United States and in Europe to co-mingle financing and co-mingle operational linkages.

For example, in 1993, in the second World Trade Center related plots, involving the attempts to blow up U.S. landmarks, bridges and tunnels, there was a constellation of different Islamic groups involved in the planning of that failed plot which was interdicted by the intelligence of an informant following the initial bombing plot on February 26th, 1993 that killed "only" six people..

And I say "only" because, frankly, if had that resulted in greater death in 1993, chances are we would have not been facing a 9/11 challenge of the magnitude that we did. Having said, what we learned, belatedly, from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the subsequent plot to blow up landmarks, was that the fundamentalist Diaspora works on the ad hoc basis overseas, often in cahoots with one another, denying us the ability to compartmentalize each group and to track each group separately in a linear basis..

What we saw in 1993, that groups as disparate as the Jemaah Islamiyah from Egypt, the Nationalist Islamic Front from the Sudan, the Al Fuqra Group, which is a black American/Pakistani group, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas. Five different organizational representations all were involved in the plotting and planning of the first and second series of attacks in New York.

That showed an operational ad hoc networking that we had never seen before. And we have continued to see that operational mish-mash get together in fundraising networks throughout Europe, the United States and Southeast Asia. The question that remains is to what extent the militant Islamic networks are going to be able to reconstitute themselves, either acquire weapons of mass destruction and carry out the same type of attacks if not greater attacks than they achieved in 9/11/01.

From my perspective, it is clear that right now, if we look at Al Qaeda's modus operandi, it appears as if they take from one to two to two and a half years between attacks, each one trying to surpass the previous one in the scope of its damage. We can assume, although I have no direct intelligence evidence, that there are cells being instituted right now or that are in place that are tasked with or will be tasked with carrying out a future attack on American soil that will be more devastating than the 9/11 attacks and that this future attack would probably take place within the next year to two.

Again, I have no raw intelligence indicating that such cells have been tasked with carrying out any attack. However, with the arrests and announcements of prosecutions in Buffalo, in Detroit, and Portland and Seattle, and certainly the indictment, a week and a half ago of the head of an NGO, the Benevolent International Foundation, in Chicago, on charges of operating a racketeering enterprise on behalf of Al Qaeda and militant Islamic groups, it is clear that some elements of the Al Qaeda infrastructure is still intact in the United States.

Moreover, the decentralized nature of the network means that we have a situation were local initiated cells without being tethered to a command-and-control in the traditional linear way are able or willing to carry out attacks without any instructions or commands from above.

Like the notion a of a leaderless resistance, we have seen sort of the same type of paradigm erupt and develop throughout the world in response to the calls of jihad by Osama bin Laden and other militant Islamic leaders. Let me be very clear in the beginning here that I do not refer to all Muslims as terrorists but rather refer to the concept and phenomenon of militant Islam as a problematic security problem for the United States and for the rest of the world.

Militant Islam seeks to impose its will on the rest of the world even on moderate Islamic regimes. The fact of the matter is, members of militant Islamic networks, as disparate as some of them may appear, are tethered by one common denominator, that being: one, a willingness to impose the sharia, the code of Islamic law, and two: an utter and categorical rejection of western influence or western hegemony.

Militant Islamic groups are seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. We know form intelligence gathered in Afghanistan as well as intelligence gathered from debriefings of Guantanamo Bay prisoners, as well as other intelligence, that Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas, have been involved in experimenting or planning to use biological or chemical weapons.

We also know at this point that we don't have a situation where we have caught anyone with large stores of chemical or biological toxins, so we are not really aware of the extent to which these groups have the present capability. But certainly in their future strategic planning it is something that has to be taken into account.

The question is whether we can interdict and prevent these acts of terrorism from occurring, whether they occur on U.S. troops, U.S. institutions overseas, which remain at high risk, or whether we remain at high risk merely here in Washington. We see what one sniper can do to an entire metropolitan area. We saw 9/11, how this entire country was devastated, how an attack that caused $500 thousand dollars induced and caused nearly $100 billion dollars worth of damage.

Do the math. You see the multiplier effect. A low-tech operation, relatively low cost, inflected thousands of times worth its damage on the American and world economies. A similar type of attack that killed 5 thousand people, 10 thousand people or even a simple car bomb or a suicide bomb in a shopping market or in a bus station or anyplace else in a metropolitan area, could have a ripple effect in terms of multiplying fear and hysteria around the United States, resulting in a much greater economic loss.

Similarly, the deleterious impact on the tourist industry worldwide—just recently buffeted by the attack in Bali,--has had a ripple effect in terms of curbing the flow and travel of American and other western tourists.

Since 9/11, the United States, embarked on a campaign to attack Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan; that military campaign has largely been successful. The second tier of the post-9/11 response involved the disruption of financial networks. In this regard, the US Treasury seized $34 million dollars of assets in the US and $112 million dollars worldwide, working with our European partners and Middle Eastern partners.

Some of those seizures will be effective. But others won't because in the end Al Qaeda doesn't depend upon high ticket items or major bank accounts but rather on operatives who are very low-level who simply have a desire to either carry out a jihad or martyrdom on their part or to induce their colleagues to do so.

One suicide bomber in the US could induce major economic damage and have a multiplier effect around the world. The United States is the leader of the anti-terrorist campaign and will continue to remain in the lead. But the success of interdicting Islamic militant networks depends upon a word that you have heard over and over again, intelligence. Since 9/11, we have heard the mantra We need better intelligence." Better intelligence, what does that mean?

It means one, connecting the dots. So far in the 9/11 hearings, what we have learned pretty sadly, is that the FBI did collect a vast amount of data including more than 30 specific warnings from 1996 to 2001, specifically warning about efforts to use U.S. aircraft as bombing targets or as vehicles to carry out bombings.

There are other pieces of information collected at different FBI field offices as well as the CIA that simply were not married up. Could they have prevented 9/11? I don't know. That is a question we will be dealing with for the rest of our lives, much as we continue to deal with the question of whether Pearl Harbor could have been prevented.

But I do know this much. Unless we are able to insinuate ourselves into positions of offensive intelligence acquisition, unless we are able to connect the dots in a much more integrated, logical and comprehensive way, and unless we are willing to use that intelligence, not just collect it, but use it operationally, we will always be in a defensive mode. Counter-terrorism theories have been defined in many ways. I will give you my spin on it.

I define effective counter-terrorism by a series of concentric circles. You draw a circle around yourself. That is the most effective circle in preventing yourself, your personal self from being attacked. You can hide yourself in your home. You can build a perimeter wall around your community. The second concentric circle is around the larger community. It can be better security at airports, it can be better security at land postings, whatever, in terms of stopping people from coming into the United States.

The third concentric circle is the circle that interdicts and impedes the ability of terrorists to operate. It is the offensive circle. That is where we need to put the terrorists on the same defensive mode as they have put us. Unless and until we are able to achieve that level of capability, we are permanently going to be responding to terrorist threats.