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A Failure of Imagination (Intelligence, WMDs, and “Virtual Jihad”)

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10576100600564166

1521-0731

Scott Atran,

Health and Conflict Studies

Intelligence estimates based on models keyed to frequency and recency of past occurrences make people less secure even if they predict most harmful events. The U.S. presidential commission on WMDs, the 9/11 commission, and Spain's comisión 11-M have condemned the status quo mentality of the intelligence community, which they see as being preoccupied with today's "current operations" and tactical requirements, and inattentive to tomorrow's far-ranging problems and strategic solutions. But the overriding emphasis in these commissions' recommendations is on further vertically integrating intelligence collection, analysis, and operations. Such proposals to further centralize intelligence and unify command and control are not promising given recent transformations in Jihadist networks to a somewhat "leaderless resistance" in the wake of Al Qaeda's operational demise. To defeat terrorist networks requires grasping novel relations between an englobing messianic moral framework, the rootless intellectual and physical mobility of immigrant and diaspora communities, and the overarching conceptual, emotional, and logistical affordances of the Internet. Britain's WWII experience provides salutary lessons for thinking creatively with decentralized expertise and partially autonomous approaches. Summary of ranges for significant effects (in meters)Yield (kt)(a) a a Range for 50% mortality from air blast (m). (b) b b Range for 50% mortality from thermal burns (m). (c) c c Range for 4 Gy initial nuclear radiation (m). (d) d d Range for 4 Gy fallout in first hour after blast (m) (downwind). 1275610790550010590180012009600 a Range for 50% mortality from air blast (m). b Range for 50% mortality from thermal burns (m). c Range for 4 Gy initial nuclear radiation (m). d Range for 4 Gy fallout in first hour after blast (m) (downwind). For information, comments and criticisms, the author thanks Robert Axelrod, Isaac Ben Israel, Noam Chomsky, Baruch Fischhoff, Richard Garwin, Pervez Hoodbhoy, Todd Laporte, Edwin Meese, Marc Sageman, Simon Wessely, and Richard Wilson. Notes 1. Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, online release 29 March 2005; available at (www.wmd.gov/report) (herein "Presidential Commission"). 2. "US intelligence 'dead wrong' on Iraqi weapons: panel," Agence France Presse, 1 April 2005; accessed (April 1, 2005) at (http://sg.news.yahoo.com/050331/1/3rm6p.html). 3. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, online release 22 September 2004; available at (www.9-11commission.gov/report/index.htm) (herein "9/11 Commission"). 4. Aaron Clauset andMaxwell Young, "Scale Invariance in Global Terorism," Physics and Society, online release 3 February 2005; available at (http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0502014). 5. Lars-Erik Cederman, "Modeling the Size of Wars: From Billiard Balls to Sand Piles," American Political Science Review 97(203), pp. 135–150. 6. Presidential Commission, p. 37. 7. Bob Grogin and Greg Miller, "'Cureveball' Debacle reignites CIA Feud," Los Angeles Times, 2 April 2005. 8. Remarks to the U.N. Security Council. Secretary Colin Powell, New York City, 5 February 2003; available at (www.state.gov/secretary/former/powell/remarks/2003/17300.htm). 9. Reginald V. Jones, The Wizard War: British Scientific Intelligence, 1939–1945 (Cowan, McCann & Geoghegan, 1978), pp. 74, 161, 334. 10. Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses (Random House, New York, 1950), Discourses, ch. 31. 11. Isaac Ben-Israël, Philosophie du renseignement, Logique et morale de l'espionnage (Éditions de l'Éclat, Paris, 2004), and personal communication, 14 February 2005. 12. This suggests that intelligence analysts might profitably employ both "blue" and "red" teams that compete to knock out one another's suppositions, and that teams should range far and wide (employing people with or without security clearances, working on classified and open sources, and even bringing in—unwittingly—real enemies and adversaries to work on parts of a problem). 13. Karl Popper, Conjectures and Refutations: The Growth of Scientific Knowledge (New York: Harper, 1968). For an interesting discussion of intelligence failures as going beyond mere induction fallacy and involving, more critically, a failure of imagination, see Isaac Ben Israel, "Philosophy and methodology of military intelligence: Correspondence with Paul Feyeraband," Philosophia 28(2001), pp. 71–102. 14. Robert Axelrod, Risk in Networked Systems, Prepared for the Office Assistant Secretary of Defense for Networks and Information Integration, 20 October 2003, available at (www-personal.umich. edu/∼axe/). "It is worse than random if the other side is 'mistraining' you." 15. For an unofficial but widely current view in defense and intelligence circles, see LTC Joseph Myers, "Proliferation terror: Time for a new deterrence strategy," online release at World Tribune.Com, 9 March 2005; accessed at (www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/05/breaking2453439.html): "Needless to say a nuclear detonation in a major U.S. city would have incalculable far-ranging global reverberations…. If you are a state sponsor of terror, with or without a WMD research base; or are an avowed enemy of the U.S., and you have a public policy that espouses the hope and bent for the destruction of the U.S.; you clandestinely proliferate (buy or sell) WMD technologies outside international arrangements and inspection regimes, then you are subject to immediately being held strategically culpable should there be a catastrophic WMD event inside the U.S." 16. According to Harvard physicist Richard Wilson, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were deliberately exploded at 500 feet to avoid radiation, so that 99 percent of the 300,000 or so casualties came directly from the bomb blasts (personal communication, 10 February 2005). 17. Richard Garwin, paper presented to 32nd Session, International Seminars on Planetary Emergencies, World Federation of Scientists, Erice, Sicily, 20 August 2004; available at (www.fas.org/rlg/040820-sani.pdf). 18. Former Defense Secretary William Perry estimates at 50 percent the probability of a catastrophic nuclear terror attack on American soil in the next 10 years, Philipp Bleek, Anders Corr, Micah Zenko, "Nuclear 9/11: What if Port is Ground Zero?" The Houston Chronicle, 1 May 2005. 19. See Pervez Hoodbhoy, "Can Pakistan Work? A Country in Search of Itself," Foreign Affairs, November/December 2004; available at (www.foreignaffairs.org/20041101fareviewessay83611/pervez-hoodbhoy/can-pakistan-work-a-country-in-search-of-itself.html). 20. Such a "gun-type" device, weighing over 500 kg, consists of four elements: a "gun" that shoots a "uranium bullet" from one end of a "rail" to a "uranium target" at the other end. Neither the bullet nor target have enough Uranium-235 to generate a chain reaction, but when slammed together a "critical mass" is achieved sufficient for a nuclear explosion. The minimum "fizzle bomb" needed to do serious damage is estimated to be about one kiloton. According to Richard Garwin, the effective distances within which (roughly speaking) all the people die and all those outside survive are shown in the following table: A Failure of Imagination (Intelligence, WMDs, and "Virtual Jihad")All authorsScott Atranhttps://doi.org/10.1080/10576100600564166Published online:19 August 2006Table Download CSVDisplay Table Although a country would not be destroyed by such an explosion, it could ruin itself by its reaction. a Range for 50% mortality from air blast (m). b Range for 50% mortality from thermal burns (m). c Range for 4 Gy initial nuclear radiation (m). d Range for 4 Gy fallout in first hour after blast (m) (downwind). 21. For a fictional portrayal—but realistic summary—of anarchist suicide bombers in 1905, see J. Conrad, Secret Agent (London: Penguin, 1983). Beginning in the late 1870s, a loosely-connected worldwide terrorist movement arose, egalitarian in principle and dedicated to elimination of the power of the state and international capital. State reaction to anarchism played a formative role in creating national police and intelligence (FBI, Scotland Yard, Russian Okhrana; see David Rapoport, "The 4 Waves of Terror," Anthropoetics 8, Spring /Summer 2002). The world community of nations considered anarchism to pose the greatest threat to the internal political and economic order, and to international stability. While policies of the U.S. and European states to combat anarchism were often based on the assumption of fighting a well-organized international terrorist network, in fact there was little international or centralized terrorist planning (and in the case of U.S. President McKinley's assassination, no organized plot at all). Rather, as with current Jihadist operations, anarchist attacks were usually carried out by peer groups (mostly friends, sometimes kin) who organized themselves in operational cells of a few people. As with Jihadism, anarchist ideology and operations often parasitized pre-existing local ethnic and national aspirations and organizations, such as the Serbian "Black Hand," which plotted the assassination of Austria's Archduke Ferdinand, sparking WWI. Following WWI, Bolshevism co-opted militant anarchism as a world political force—a process that culminated with Stalin undermining the anarchist role on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. Then, with Communism's demise, came Jihadism's rise. 22. Hoodbhoy does not restrict his concern to the former Soviet Union or to Jihadist students; "I have had the opportunity of meeting top people associated with nuclear weapons in Pakistan and India. These include retired and serving generals, air marshals, senior defence analysts, and also the current president of India. I am always struck by their blanket denial of risks, not just of an intentional or accidental use of nukes against the other but also of any kind of leakage or theft of materials. One could call this posturing, but these people have assiduously worked to lull themselves, as well as others, into this supremely comfortable position. This is really disturbing." [Personal communication, 10 March 2005.] 23. For earlier figures on relative spending by U.S. Departments of State and Defense, see supplementary online materials for Scott Atran, "Individual factors in suicide terrorism," Science 304(2004), pp. 47–49; available at (www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/304/5667/47/DC1). Currently, of the five divisions of the Department of Homeland Security, the largest is the division handling borders and interdiction, with 150,000 people, and the smallest is the one dealing with science and strategy, with 300 people, a few of which are directly concerned with understanding terrorist networks. 24. See discussion in "Epilogue" to S. Atran, The Strategic Threat from Suicide Terrorism, Related Publication 03-33, AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Study, December 2003; available at (www.aei-brookings.org/admin/authorpdfs/page.php?id=311). 25. Introduction to National Security Strategy of the United States, White House, Washington, DC, September 2003, available at (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html). 26. Estimates range from about 30,000 in the continuously updated Iraq Body Count report (www.iraqbodycount.net/database/) to well over 100,000 [see survey by Johns Hopkins University researchers Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, Gilbert Burnham, "Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Cluster sample survey," The Lancet 364 (2004), pp. 1857–1864; available at (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15555665) 27. See Pew Global Attitudes Survey, 16 March 2004; available at (http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=206); Angela Woodall, "Global opinion: Let Europe lead the world," Washington Times, 7 April 2005. Nevertheless, most people surveyed in the Muslim world express a desire for democracy, Pew Global Attitudes Survey, 3 February 2005; available at (http://people-press.org/commentary/display.php3?AnalysisID=107). 28. Base Structure Report Fiscal year 2004, U.S. Department of Defense, Washington, DC, September 2004; available at (http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/dod33/). This represents a net reduction of over 100 domestic bases and a net increase of over 200 foreign bases from the previous year. 29. "Over 100 nations benefit from U.S. military training, education," online release by Lincoln Bloomfield, Assistant Secretary of State, December 2004; available at (http://usinfo.state.gov/sa/Archive/2004/Dec/09-685591.html). 30. "DoD Responses to Transnational Threats, Vol. 2: DSB Force Protection Panel Report to DSB," U.S. Department of Defense, Washington, DC, December 1997, p. 8, (www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/trans2). 31. Introduction to National Security Strategy of the United States, White House, Washington, DC, September 2003, available at (www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html). 32. For an extreme example of convergence, compare Ayman al-Zawahiri's Knights Under the Prophet's Banner [trans. Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, London, 2 December 2001, available at (www.fas.org/irp/world/para/ayman_bk.html) and the works of White Supremacist ideologue William Pierce: for example, The Turner Diaries (Washington, DC: National Alliance, 1978), which ends with the hero ploughing his jet into the Pentagon on a successful suicide mission; also Pierce's analysis of the 9/11 attacks being carried out for the right reasons by the wrong people, Free Speech 7, November 2001, available at (www.natvan.com/free-speech/fs0111c.html). 33. Arguments by outsiders that militant Islam can be undermined by showing it does not reflect the religion's "truth" or "essence" are likewise vacuous, for there is no "essence" or fixed content to any religion. [Scott Atran, In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion [New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2002].) Nevertheless, debates among Muslims about—for example—whether killing children is acceptable, are critical to how their religion will be interpreted and applied. 34. Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 35. Michael Scheuer, Imperial Hubris: How the West is Losing the War on Terror (Potomac Books, Dulles, VA, 2004). 36. Reuven Paz, "The First Islamist Fatwah on the Use of Weapons of Mass Destruction," PRISM Special Dispatches on Global Jihad 1(1) (May 2003); available at (www.e-prism.org). 37. Changing the "policy of the White House… [is] the ideal way to prevent another Manhattan," Osama Bin Laden, "Address to Americans," Al Jazeera, 30 October 2004. Consider also "the final piece of advice" to Americans on forestalling future disasters by Al-Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Jazeera, 28 November 2004: "What matters to us is the way in which the United States behaves towards Muslims." 38. Scott Atran, "The Moral Logic and Growth of Suicide Terrorism," Washington Quarterly 29(2006), pp. 127–147. 39. Scott Atran, "The Emir: An Interview with Abu Bakr Ba'asyir, Alleged Leader of the Southeast Asian Jemaah Islamiyah Organization," Jamestown Foundation Spotlight on Terrorism, September 15, 2005, available at (http://jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2368782). To be sure, instrumental cost-benefit calculations often prevail within one's own moral and cultural framework. Most would-be martyrs and Jihadist religious leaders the author interviewed, like Ba'asyir, also say that if a roadside bomb can produce the same damage (i.e., without causing the deaths of any members of the group), then it is preferable. In Knights under the Prophet's Banner, al-Zawahiri highlights instrumental concerns that lead to: "the need to concentrate on the method of martyrdom operations as the most successful way of inflicting damage against the opponent and the least costly to the mujahedin in terms of casualties." 40. Robert Leiken, Bearers of Global Jihad? Immigration and National Security after 9/11, Nixon Center Monograph, 25 March 2004, p. 6; available at (www.nixoncenter.org/publications/monographs/Leiken_Bearers_of_Global_Jihad.pdf). 41. Oliver Roy, Globalized Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004). 42. The last successful attack by Bin Laden's Al-Qaeda organization was in Djerba, Tunisia in October 2002. Websites, such as the Zarqawi-associated Global Islamic Media Front (http://online2005.100free.com/) that host Jihadist chat rooms and tracts (for example, "Iraqi Jihad: Hopes and Risks," which the Madrid train bombers downloaded and acted on) have become the new organiztaional agents that "govern" Jihadist networks. These sites increasingly control the distribution of knowledge and resources as physical agents like Bin Laden once did (and can be modeled and monitored as such). Although websites are assuming central actor, hub, and bridge positions in the network, the network itself is shifting profoundly to an acephalic "leaderless resistance." See the online musings of Mustafa Setmariam Nasar (aka Abu Mus'ab al-Suri), the new global Jihad "web star" and principal theoretician of what Marc Sageman has aptly dubbed "leaderless jihad." Al-Musri's 1600-page tract, Da'wah lil-Muqawamah al-Islamiyyah al-'Alamiyyah (A Call for the Islamic Global Resistance, available at (www.fsoa.com/vw/index/php?subject=7&rec=27&tit=tit&pa=0)), contains essential elements of a short 1983 treatise on "Leaderless Resistance," available at (http?//reactor-core.org/leaderless-resistance.html) by Louis Beam, a former Aryan Nations and Klu Klux Klan leader. Leaderless Jihad has now looped back into the Aryan Nation's new doctrine of "Aryan Jihad," available at (www.aryan-nations.org/about.htm). 43. Marc Sageman, paper presented to the colloquium series, "Cultural Values and Terrorism," University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 11 February 2005. 44. Paul Resnick and Richard Zeckhauser, "Trust among Strangers in Internet Interactions," in Michael Baye (ed.), Advances in Applied Microeconomics, Vol. 11 (Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, 2002), available at (www.si.umich.edu/∼presnick/papers/ebayNBER/RZNBERBodegaBay.pdf). 45. "Internet dating much more successful than thought," online press release, University of Bath; available at (www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-02/uob-idm021305.php). 46. Scott Atran, "The Jihadist Mutation," Jamestown Terrorist Monitor 2(2004), pp. 1–4; available at (http://www.jamestown.org/publications_details.php?volume_id=400&&issue_id=2929). 47. Comisiones de investigación sobre el 11 de marzo de 2004, Congreso de los Deputados, Madrid, Session 13, 19 July 2004 and Session 30, 15 November 2004; available at (www.losgenoveses.net/11M/CI_007.pdf and www.losgenoveses.net/11M/CI_017.pdf). Testimony before Spain's 11-M commission reveals failures of intelligence and imagination similar to those involved in 9/11. 48. Global Intelligence Challenges 2005: Meeting Long-Term Challenges with a Long-Term Strategy. Testimony of Director of Central Intelligence Porter J. Goss before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Washington DC, 16 February 2005; available at (www.cia.gov/cia/public_affairs/speeches/2004/Goss_testimony_02162005.html). 49. Glen Segell, "Intelligence Methodologies Applicable to the Madrid Train Bombings, 2004," International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 18 (2005), pp. 221–238. The author's discussion of the respective shortcomings of the three methodologies is good, but not the combination. 50. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). The notion of "paradigm change" has, of course, become hackneyed through popular misuse, but still applies here in many of its core philosophical senses. 51. Todd Laporte, paper presented to the Critical Incident Analysis Group (CIAG), University of Virginia, Charlottlesville, 6 April 2004. 52. Geerat Vermeij, Nature: An Economic History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). 53. Lu Hong, Scott Page, "Problem solving by heterogeneous agents," Journal of Economic Theory 97(2001), pp. 123–163. 54. Edgar Jones, Robin Woolven, Bill DurodiÉ, and Simon Wessely, "Civilian morale during the Second World War: Responses to air raids re-examined," Social History of Medicine 17(2004), pp. 463–479. 55. Emilio Moria, "Psychiatric Experience in the Spanish War," British Medical Journal 1(1939), pp. 1217–1220. 56. Robert Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press, 1996). 57. There is support for this argument in the observation that British soldiers panicked after the first German gas attack in 1915, but not after subsequent attacks. 58. Similarly, following the Chernobyl Disaster, according to physicist Richard Wilson who was in Pripyat investigating at the time, "of the 1000+ bus drivers in Kiev asked to take evacuees from Pripyat (where they had to drive through a short stretch of over 100 Rems per hour) only 3 declined" (personal communication, 27 April 2005). 59. Kathleen Tierney, "Not Again! Recycling Disaster Myths in the Aftermath of 9-11," paper presented to the Special Session of the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Chicago, 17 August 2002. 60. Edwin Meese, Remarks to the Critical Incident Analysis Group (CIAG), University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 3 April 2005; and personal communication, 6 April 2005.