[Infowarrior] - A Not Very Private Feud Over Terrorism

[Richard Forno]

June 8, 2008
The Nation
A Not Very Private Feud Over Terrorism
By ELAINE SCIOLINO and ERIC SCHMITT

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/weekinreview/08sciolino.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

WASHINGTON — A bitter personal struggle between two powerful figures  
in the world of terrorism has broken out, forcing their followers to  
choose sides. This battle is not being fought in the rugged no man’s  
land on the Pakistan-Afghan border. It is a contest reverberating  
inside the Beltway between two of America’s leading theorists on  
terrorism and how to fight it, two men who hold opposing views on the  
very nature of the threat.

On one side is Bruce Hoffman, a cerebral 53-year-old Georgetown  
University historian and author of the highly respected 1998 book  
“Inside Terrorism.” He argues that Al Qaeda is alive, well, resurgent  
and more dangerous than it has been in several years. In his corner,  
he said, is a battalion of mainstream academics and a National  
Intelligence Estimate issued last summer warning that Al Qaeda had  
reconstituted in Pakistan.

On the other side is Marc Sageman, an iconoclastic 55-year-old Polish- 
born psychiatrist, sociologist, former C.I.A. case officer and scholar- 
in-residence with the New York Police Department. His new book,  
“Leaderless Jihad,” argues that the main threat no longer comes from  
the organization called Al Qaeda, but from the bottom up — from  
radicalized individuals and groups who meet and plot in their  
neighborhoods and on the Internet. In his camp, he said, are agents  
and analysts in highly classified positions at the Central  
Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

If Dr. Hoffman gets inside organizations — focusing on command  
structures — Dr. Sageman gets inside heads, analyzing the terrorist  
mind-set. But this is more important than just a battle of ideas. It  
is the latest twist in the contest for influence and resources in  
Washington that has been a central feature of the struggle against  
terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001.

Officials from the White House to the C.I.A. acknowledge the  
importance of the debate of the two men as the government assesses the  
nature of the threat. Looking forward, it is certain to be used to win  
bureaucratic turf wars over what programs will be emphasized in the  
next administration.

If there is no looming main Qaeda threat — just “bunches of guys,” as  
Dr. Sageman calls them — then it would be easier for a new president  
to think he could save money or redirect efforts within the huge  
counterterrorism machine, which costs the United States billions of  
dollars and has created armies of independent security consultants and  
counterterrorism experts in the last seven years.

Preventing attacks planned by small bands of zealots in the garages  
and basements just off Main Street or the alleys behind Islamic  
madrasas is more a job for the local police and the F.B.I., working  
with undercover informants and with authorities abroad. “If it’s a  
‘leaderless jihad,’ then I can find something else to do because the  
threat is over,” said Peter Bergen, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan  
New America Foundation, who puts himself in Dr. Hoffman’s camp.  
“Leaderless things don’t produce big outcomes.”

On the other hand, if the main task can be seen as thwarting plots or  
smiting Al Qaeda’s leaders abroad, then attention and resources should  
continue to flow to the C.I.A., the State Department, the military and  
terror-financing sleuths.

“One way to enhance your budget is to frame it in terms of terrorism,”  
said Steven Simon, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign  
Relations. “But the problem is that ‘Al Qaedatry’ is more art than  
science — and people project onto the subject a lot of their own  
preconceptions.”

The divide over the nature of the threat turned nasty, even by the  
rough standards of academia, when Dr. Hoffman reviewed Dr. Sageman’s  
book this spring for Foreign Affairs in an essay, “The Myth of Grass- 
Roots Terrorism: Why Osama bin Laden Still Matters.” He accused Dr.  
Sageman of “a fundamental misreading of the Al Qaeda threat,” adding  
that his “historical ignorance is surpassed only by his cursory  
treatment of social-networking theory.”

In the forthcoming issue of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Sageman returns fire,  
accusing Dr. Hoffman of “gross misrepresentation.” In an interview,  
Dr. Sageman said he was at a loss to explain his rival’s critique:  
“Maybe he’s mad that I’m the go-to guy now.”

Some terrorism experts find the argument silly — and dangerous.  
“Sometimes it seems like this entire field is stepping into a boys- 
with-toys conversation,” said Karen J. Greenberg, executive director  
of New York University’s Center on Law and Security. “Here are two  
guys, both of them respected, saying that there is only one truth and  
only one occupant of the sandbox. That’s ridiculous. Both of them are  
valuable.”

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, a former director of central  
intelligence, sees merit in both sides, too; he said in Singapore last  
week that Al Qaeda is training European, and possibly American,  
recruits. But, he added, “You also have the development of violent,  
extremist networks.”

One argument for playing down Al Qaeda’s importance — Dr. Sageman’s  
point — has been the public declarations of some prominent Sunni  
clerics who have criticized Al Qaeda for its indiscriminate killing of  
Muslim civilians.

A leading Syrian-born militant theorist believed to be in American  
custody, known by the nom de guerre Abu Musab al-Suri, also has argued  
in favor of leaderless jihad. In his 1,600-page life work, he advises  
jihadists to create decentralized networks of individuals and local  
cells bound by belief, instead of hierarchical structures that could  
be targets of attack. He has referred to Mr. bin Laden as a “pharaoh.”

Dr. Hoffman’s principal argument relies on the re-emergence of Al  
Qaeda, starting in 2005 and 2006, along the Afghan-Pakistan border.  
There is empirical evidence, he says, that from that base, Al Qaeda  
has been “again actively directing and initiating international  
terrorist operations on a grand scale.”

But it has been easy for intelligence agencies to get the analysis  
wrong when faced with piecemeal and contradictory evidence.

One example is the 2004 train bombings in Madrid that killed 191  
people. Declarations by several Spanish officials and experts of such  
a link were undermined by evidence that the group was self-motivated,  
self-trained and self-financed, and that the explosives were bought  
locally.

Other examples are provided by the 2004 plot to attack the London area  
with fertilizer bombs, and the July 7, 2005, transit bombings in  
London. At first, both were thought to support the home-grown  
terrorist thesis: British citizens, most of Pakistani descent, had  
carried out attacks with homemade bombs. Only later did evidence  
surface that in both cases, at least some had trained in Pakistan at  
military camps suspected of links to Qaeda operatives.

So a question remains: Was Mohammad Sidique Khan, one of the suicide  
bombers in the 2005 attacks, a local kid gone wrong, a full-fledged  
Qaeda operative, or both?

“You can argue that if you subtract his travel to Pakistan, there’s no  
7/7,” said Samuel J. Rascoff, an assistant professor of law at New  
York University and a former intelligence official with the New York  
City police. “You can also argue that if you subtract his  
radicalization in Northern England, there’s no 7/7.”

Dr. Sageman’s critics argue that his more local focus plays to a weak  
point in gauging threats: People tend to feel the threat nearest to  
home is the most urgent. In April, for example, the Kansas City office  
of the F.B.I. met with state and local authorities from Kansas and  
Missouri to analyze “agroterrorism,” a big issue in America’s  
heartland. The discussion was about the possibility of terrorists  
causing an outbreak of diseases that could poison cattle or crops,  
crippling the economies of farm states.

Terrorism-weary prosecuting judges and police investigators in Europe  
listen to the debate on the other side of the Atlantic and tend to  
find it empty. They say it is hard to know where radicalization starts  
— among groups of friends, in an imam’s sermon in Europe or at home on  
the Internet — and when operational training by Al Qaeda is a factor.  
They prefer a blended approach.

France, Spain and Italy, for example, pour resources and manpower into  
investigations at home — from studying radicalization and wiretapping  
suspicious individuals to infiltrating mosques and community centers.  
These countries also track movements of suspicious individuals abroad  
and networks with both local and foreign connections. Terrorist- 
related cases fall under the authority of special investigative  
superjudges who have access to all classified intelligence, and can  
use much of the information in trials.

The Europeans say that for them, the argument is not theoretical.  
Somewhere in Europe, just about every week, a terrorist plot is  
uncovered and arrests are made.

“The danger of this ‘either-or’ argument could lead us to the mistakes  
of the past,” said Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s leading antiterror  
investigatory magistrate. “In the ’90s, we saw atomized cells as  
everything, and then Al Qaeda came along. And now we look at Al Qaeda  
and say it’s no longer the threat. We’re making the same mistake  
again.”