On Dec. 17, 2010, Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire in a show of public protest. The self-immolation triggered unrest in Tunisia and ultimately the resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. This was followed by unrest in a number of Arab countries that the global press dubbed the “Arab Spring.”

The standard analysis of the situation was that oppressive regimes had been sitting on a volcano of liberal democratic discontent. The belief was that the Arab Spring was a political uprising by masses demanding liberal democratic reform and that this uprising, supported by Western democracies, would generate sweeping political change across the Arab world.

It is now more than six months since the beginning of the Arab Spring, and it is important to take stock of what has happened and what has not happened. The reasons for the widespread unrest go beyond the Arab world, although, obviously, the dynamics within that world are important in and of themselves. However, the belief in an Arab Spring helped shape European and American policies in the region and the world. If the assumptions of this past January and February prove insufficient or even wrong, then there will be regional and global consequences.

It is important to begin with the fact that, to this point, no regime has fallen in the Arab world. Individuals such as Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak have been replaced, but the regimes themselves, which represent the manner of governing, have not changed. Some regimes have come under massive attack but have not fallen, as in Libya, Syria and Yemen. And in many countries, such as Jordan, the unrest never amounted to a real threat to the regime. The kind of rapid and complete collapse that we saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 with the fall of communism has not happened in the Arab world. More important, what regime changes that might come of the civil wars in Libya and Syria are not going to be clearly victorious, those that are victorious are not going to be clearly democratic and those that are democratic are obviously not going to be liberal. The myth that beneath every Libyan is a French republican yearning to breathe free is dubious in the extreme.

Consider the case of Mubarak, who was forced from office and put on trial, although the regime — a mode of governing in which the military remains the main arbiter of the state — remains intact. Egypt is now governed by a committee of military commanders, all of whom had been part of Mubarak’s regime. Elections are coming, but the opposition is deeply divided between Islamists and secularists, and personalities and ideological divisions in turn divide these factions. The probability of a powerful democratic president emerging who controls the sprawling ministries in Cairo and the country’s security and military apparatus is slim, and the Egyptian military junta is already acting to suppress elements that are too radical and too unpredictable.

The important question is why these regimes have been able to survive. In a genuine revolution, the regime loses power. The anti-communist forces overwhelmed the Polish Communist government in 1989 regardless of the divisions within the opposition. The sitting regimes were not in a position to determine their own futures, let alone the futures of their countries. There was a transition, but they were not in control of it. Similarly, in 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown, his military and security people were not the ones managing the transition after the shah left the country. They were the ones on trial. There was unrest in Egypt in January and February 2011, but the idea that it amounted to a revolution flew in the face of the reality of Egypt and of what revolutions actually look like.

Shaping the Western Narrative

There were three principles shaping the Western narrative on the Arab Spring. The first was that these regimes were overwhelmingly unpopular. The second was that the opposition represented the overwhelming will of the people. The third was that once the unrest began it was unstoppable. Add to all that the notion that social media facilitated the organization of the revolution and the belief that the region was in the midst of a radical transformation can be easily understood.

It was in Libya that these propositions created the most serious problems. Tunisia and Egypt were not subject to very much outside influence. Libya became the focus of a significant Western intervention. Moammar Gadhafi had ruled Libya for nearly 42 years. He could not have ruled for that long without substantial support. That didn’t mean he had majority support (or that he didn’t). It simply meant that the survival of his regime did not interest only a handful of people, but that a large network of Libyans benefitted from Gadhafi’s rule and stood to lose a great deal if he fell. They were prepared to fight for his regime.

The opposition to him was real, but its claim to represent the overwhelming majority of Libyan people was dubious. Many of the leaders had been part of the Gadhafi regime, and it is doubtful they were selected for their government posts because of their personal popularity. Others were members of tribes that were opposed to the regime but not particularly friendly to each other. Under the mythology of the Arab Spring, the eastern coalition represented the united rage of the Libyan people against Gadhafi’s oppression. Gadhafi was weak and isolated, wielding an army that was still loyal and could inflict terrible vengeance on the Libyan people. But if the West would demonstrate its ability to prevent slaughter in Benghazi, the military would realize its own isolation and defect to the rebels.

It didn’t happen that way. First, Gadhafi’s regime was more than simply a handful of people terrorizing the population. It was certainly a brutal regime, but it hadn’t survived for 42 years on that alone. It had substantial support in the military and among key tribes. Whether this was a majority is as unclear as whether the eastern coalition was a majority. But it was certainly a substantial group with much to fight for and a great deal to lose if the regime fell. So, contrary to expectations in the West, the regime has continued to fight and to retain the loyalty of a substantial number of people. Meanwhile, the eastern alliance has continued to survive under the protection of NATO but has been unable to form a united government or topple Gadhafi. Most important, it has always been a dubious assertion that what would emerge if the rebels did defeat Gadhafi would be a democratic regime, let alone a liberal democracy, and this has become increasingly obvious as the war has worn on. Whoever would replace Gadhafi would not clearly be superior to him, which is saying quite a lot.

A very similar process is taking place in Syria. There, the minority Alawite government of the Assad family, which has ruled Syria for 41 years, is facing an uprising led by the majority Sunnis, or at least some segment of them. Again, the assumption was that the regime was illegitimate and therefore weak and would crumble in the face of concerted resistance. That assumption proved wrong. The Assad regime may be running a minority government, but it has substantial support from a military of mostly Alawite officers leading a largely Sunni conscript force. The military has benefited tremendously from the Assad regime — indeed, it brought it to power. The one thing the Assads were careful to do was to make it beneficial to the military and security services to remain loyal to the regime. So far, they largely have. The danger for the regime looking forward is if the growing strain on the Alawite-dominated army divisions leads to fissures within the Alawite community and in the army itself, raising the potential for a military coup.

In part, these Arab leaders have nowhere to go. The senior leadership of the military could be tried in The Hague, and the lower ranks are subject to rebel retribution. There is a rule in war, which is that you should always give your enemy room to retreat. The Assad supporters, like the Gadhafi supporters and the supporters of Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, have no room to retreat. So they have fought on for months, and it is not clear they will capitulate anytime soon.

Foreign governments, from the United States to Turkey, have expressed their exasperation with the Syrians, but none has seriously contemplated an intervention. There are two reasons for this: First, following the Libyan intervention, everyone became more wary of assuming the weakness of Arab regimes, and no one wants a showdown on the ground with a desperate Syrian military. Second, observers have become cautious in asserting that widespread unrest constitutes a popular revolution or that the revolutionaries necessarily want to create a liberal democracy. The Sunnis in Syria might well want a democracy, but they might well be interested in creating a Sunni “Islamic” state. Knowing that it is important to be careful what you wish for, everyone seems to be issuing stern warnings to Damascus without doing very much.

Syria is an interesting case because it is, perhaps, the only current issue that Iran and Israel agree on. Iran is deeply invested in the Assad regime and wary of increased Sunni power in Syria. Israel is just as deeply concerned that the Assad regime — a known and manageable devil from the Israeli point of view — could collapse and be replaced by a Sunni Islamist regime with close ties to Hamas and what is left of al Qaeda in the Levant. These are fears, not certainties, but the fears make for interesting bedfellows.

Geopolitical Significance

Since late 2010, we have seen three kinds of uprisings in the Arab world. The first are those that merely brushed by the regime. The second are those that created a change in leaders but not in the way the country was run. The third are those that turned into civil wars, such as Libya and Yemen. There is also the interesting case of Bahrain, where the regime was saved by the intervention of Saudi Arabia, but while the rising there conformed to the basic model of the Arab Spring — failed hopes — it lies in a different class, caught between Saudi and Iranian power.

The three examples do not mean that there is not discontent in the Arab world or a desire for change. They do not mean that change will not happen, or that discontent will not assume sufficient force to overthrow regimes. They also do not mean that whatever emerges will be liberal democratic states pleasing to Americans and Europeans.

This becomes the geopolitically significant part of the story. Among Europeans and within the U.S. State Department and the Obama administration is an ideology of human rights — the idea that one of the major commitments of Western countries should be supporting the creation of regimes resembling their own. This assumes all the things that we have discussed: that there is powerful discontent in oppressive states, that the discontent is powerful enough to overthrow regimes, and that what follows would be the sort of regime that the West would be able to work with.

The issue isn’t whether human rights are important but whether supporting unrest in repressive states automatically strengthens human rights. An important example was Iran in 1979, when opposition to the oppression of the shah’s government was perceived as a movement toward liberal democracy. What followed might have been democratic but it was hardly liberal. Indeed, many of the myths of the Arab Spring had their roots both in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and later in Iran’s 2009 Green Movement, when a narrow uprising readily crushed by the regime was widely viewed as massive opposition and widespread support for liberalization.

The world is more complicated and more varied than that. As we saw in the Arab Spring, oppressive regimes are not always faced with massed risings, and unrest does not necessarily mean mass support. Nor are the alternatives necessarily more palatable than what went before or the displeasure of the West nearly as fearsome as Westerners like to think. Libya is a case study on the consequences of starting a war with insufficient force. Syria makes a strong case on the limits of soft power. Egypt and Tunisia represent a textbook lesson on the importance of not deluding yourself.

The pursuit of human rights requires ruthless clarity as to whom you are supporting and what their chances are. It is important to remember that it is not Western supporters of human rights who suffer the consequences of failed risings, civil wars or revolutionary regimes that are committed to causes other than liberal democracy.

The misreading of the situation can also create unnecessary geopolitical problems. The fall of the Egyptian regime, unlikely as it is at this point, would be just as likely to generate an Islamist regime as a liberal democracy. The survival of the Assad regime could lead to more slaughter than we have seen and a much firmer base for Iran. No regimes have fallen since the Arab Spring, but when they do it will be important to remember 1979 and the conviction that nothing could be worse than the shah’s Iran, morally or geopolitically. Neither was quite the case.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t people in the Arab world who want liberal democracy. It simply means that they are not powerful enough to topple regimes or maintain control of new regimes even if they did succeed. The Arab Spring is, above all, a primer on wishful thinking in the face of the real world.

On Dec. 17, 2010, Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian street vendor, set himself on fire in a show of public protest. The self-immolation triggered unrest in Tunisia and ultimately the resignation of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. This was followed by unrest in a number of Arab countries that the global press dubbed the “Arab Spring.”

The standard analysis of the situation was that oppressive regimes had been sitting on a volcano of liberal democratic discontent. The belief was that the Arab Spring was a political uprising by masses demanding liberal democratic reform and that this uprising, supported by Western democracies, would generate sweeping political change across the Arab world.

It is now more than six months since the beginning of the Arab Spring, and it is important to take stock of what has happened and what has not happened. The reasons for the widespread unrest go beyond the Arab world, although, obviously, the dynamics within that world are important in and of themselves. However, the belief in an Arab Spring helped shape European and American policies in the region and the world. If the assumptions of this past January and February prove insufficient or even wrong, then there will be regional and global consequences.

It is important to begin with the fact that, to this point, no regime has fallen in the Arab world. Individuals such as Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak have been replaced, but the regimes themselves, which represent the manner of governing, have not changed. Some regimes have come under massive attack but have not fallen, as in Libya, Syria and Yemen. And in many countries, such as Jordan, the unrest never amounted to a real threat to the regime. The kind of rapid and complete collapse that we saw in Eastern Europe in 1989 with the fall of communism has not happened in the Arab world. More important, what regime changes that might come of the civil wars in Libya and Syria are not going to be clearly victorious, those that are victorious are not going to be clearly democratic and those that are democratic are obviously not going to be liberal. The myth that beneath every Libyan is a French republican yearning to breathe free is dubious in the extreme.

Consider the case of Mubarak, who was forced from office and put on trial, although the regime — a mode of governing in which the military remains the main arbiter of the state — remains intact. Egypt is now governed by a committee of military commanders, all of whom had been part of Mubarak’s regime. Elections are coming, but the opposition is deeply divided between Islamists and secularists, and personalities and ideological divisions in turn divide these factions. The probability of a powerful democratic president emerging who controls the sprawling ministries in Cairo and the country’s security and military apparatus is slim, and the Egyptian military junta is already acting to suppress elements that are too radical and too unpredictable.

The important question is why these regimes have been able to survive. In a genuine revolution, the regime loses power. The anti-communist forces overwhelmed the Polish Communist government in 1989 regardless of the divisions within the opposition. The sitting regimes were not in a position to determine their own futures, let alone the futures of their countries. There was a transition, but they were not in control of it. Similarly, in 1979, when the Shah of Iran was overthrown, his military and security people were not the ones managing the transition after the shah left the country. They were the ones on trial. There was unrest in Egypt in January and February 2011, but the idea that it amounted to a revolution flew in the face of the reality of Egypt and of what revolutions actually look like.

Shaping the Western Narrative

There were three principles shaping the Western narrative on the Arab Spring. The first was that these regimes were overwhelmingly unpopular. The second was that the opposition represented the overwhelming will of the people. The third was that once the unrest began it was unstoppable. Add to all that the notion that social media facilitated the organization of the revolution and the belief that the region was in the midst of a radical transformation can be easily understood.

It was in Libya that these propositions created the most serious problems. Tunisia and Egypt were not subject to very much outside influence. Libya became the focus of a significant Western intervention. Moammar Gadhafi had ruled Libya for nearly 42 years. He could not have ruled for that long without substantial support. That didn’t mean he had majority support (or that he didn’t). It simply meant that the survival of his regime did not interest only a handful of people, but that a large network of Libyans benefitted from Gadhafi’s rule and stood to lose a great deal if he fell. They were prepared to fight for his regime.

The opposition to him was real, but its claim to represent the overwhelming majority of Libyan people was dubious. Many of the leaders had been part of the Gadhafi regime, and it is doubtful they were selected for their government posts because of their personal popularity. Others were members of tribes that were opposed to the regime but not particularly friendly to each other. Under the mythology of the Arab Spring, the eastern coalition represented the united rage of the Libyan people against Gadhafi’s oppression. Gadhafi was weak and isolated, wielding an army that was still loyal and could inflict terrible vengeance on the Libyan people. But if the West would demonstrate its ability to prevent slaughter in Benghazi, the military would realize its own isolation and defect to the rebels.

It didn’t happen that way. First, Gadhafi’s regime was more than simply a handful of people terrorizing the population. It was certainly a brutal regime, but it hadn’t survived for 42 years on that alone. It had substantial support in the military and among key tribes. Whether this was a majority is as unclear as whether the eastern coalition was a majority. But it was certainly a substantial group with much to fight for and a great deal to lose if the regime fell. So, contrary to expectations in the West, the regime has continued to fight and to retain the loyalty of a substantial number of people. Meanwhile, the eastern alliance has continued to survive under the protection of NATO but has been unable to form a united government or topple Gadhafi. Most important, it has always been a dubious assertion that what would emerge if the rebels did defeat Gadhafi would be a democratic regime, let alone a liberal democracy, and this has become increasingly obvious as the war has worn on. Whoever would replace Gadhafi would not clearly be superior to him, which is saying quite a lot.

A very similar process is taking place in Syria. There, the minority Alawite government of the Assad family, which has ruled Syria for 41 years, is facing an uprising led by the majority Sunnis, or at least some segment of them. Again, the assumption was that the regime was illegitimate and therefore weak and would crumble in the face of concerted resistance. That assumption proved wrong. The Assad regime may be running a minority government, but it has substantial support from a military of mostly Alawite officers leading a largely Sunni conscript force. The military has benefited tremendously from the Assad regime — indeed, it brought it to power. The one thing the Assads were careful to do was to make it beneficial to the military and security services to remain loyal to the regime. So far, they largely have. The danger for the regime looking forward is if the growing strain on the Alawite-dominated army divisions leads to fissures within the Alawite community and in the army itself, raising the potential for a military coup.

In part, these Arab leaders have nowhere to go. The senior leadership of the military could be tried in The Hague, and the lower ranks are subject to rebel retribution. There is a rule in war, which is that you should always give your enemy room to retreat. The Assad supporters, like the Gadhafi supporters and the supporters of Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, have no room to retreat. So they have fought on for months, and it is not clear they will capitulate anytime soon.

Foreign governments, from the United States to Turkey, have expressed their exasperation with the Syrians, but none has seriously contemplated an intervention. There are two reasons for this: First, following the Libyan intervention, everyone became more wary of assuming the weakness of Arab regimes, and no one wants a showdown on the ground with a desperate Syrian military. Second, observers have become cautious in asserting that widespread unrest constitutes a popular revolution or that the revolutionaries necessarily want to create a liberal democracy. The Sunnis in Syria might well want a democracy, but they might well be interested in creating a Sunni “Islamic” state. Knowing that it is important to be careful what you wish for, everyone seems to be issuing stern warnings to Damascus without doing very much.

Syria is an interesting case because it is, perhaps, the only current issue that Iran and Israel agree on. Iran is deeply invested in the Assad regime and wary of increased Sunni power in Syria. Israel is just as deeply concerned that the Assad regime — a known and manageable devil from the Israeli point of view — could collapse and be replaced by a Sunni Islamist regime with close ties to Hamas and what is left of al Qaeda in the Levant. These are fears, not certainties, but the fears make for interesting bedfellows.

Geopolitical Significance

Since late 2010, we have seen three kinds of uprisings in the Arab world. The first are those that merely brushed by the regime. The second are those that created a change in leaders but not in the way the country was run. The third are those that turned into civil wars, such as Libya and Yemen. There is also the interesting case of Bahrain, where the regime was saved by the intervention of Saudi Arabia, but while the rising there conformed to the basic model of the Arab Spring — failed hopes — it lies in a different class, caught between Saudi and Iranian power.

The three examples do not mean that there is not discontent in the Arab world or a desire for change. They do not mean that change will not happen, or that discontent will not assume sufficient force to overthrow regimes. They also do not mean that whatever emerges will be liberal democratic states pleasing to Americans and Europeans.

This becomes the geopolitically significant part of the story. Among Europeans and within the U.S. State Department and the Obama administration is an ideology of human rights — the idea that one of the major commitments of Western countries should be supporting the creation of regimes resembling their own. This assumes all the things that we have discussed: that there is powerful discontent in oppressive states, that the discontent is powerful enough to overthrow regimes, and that what follows would be the sort of regime that the West would be able to work with.

The issue isn’t whether human rights are important but whether supporting unrest in repressive states automatically strengthens human rights. An important example was Iran in 1979, when opposition to the oppression of the shah’s government was perceived as a movement toward liberal democracy. What followed might have been democratic but it was hardly liberal. Indeed, many of the myths of the Arab Spring had their roots both in the 1979 Iranian Revolution and later in Iran’s 2009 Green Movement, when a narrow uprising readily crushed by the regime was widely viewed as massive opposition and widespread support for liberalization.

The world is more complicated and more varied than that. As we saw in the Arab Spring, oppressive regimes are not always faced with massed risings, and unrest does not necessarily mean mass support. Nor are the alternatives necessarily more palatable than what went before or the displeasure of the West nearly as fearsome as Westerners like to think. Libya is a case study on the consequences of starting a war with insufficient force. Syria makes a strong case on the limits of soft power. Egypt and Tunisia represent a textbook lesson on the importance of not deluding yourself.

The pursuit of human rights requires ruthless clarity as to whom you are supporting and what their chances are. It is important to remember that it is not Western supporters of human rights who suffer the consequences of failed risings, civil wars or revolutionary regimes that are committed to causes other than liberal democracy.

The misreading of the situation can also create unnecessary geopolitical problems. The fall of the Egyptian regime, unlikely as it is at this point, would be just as likely to generate an Islamist regime as a liberal democracy. The survival of the Assad regime could lead to more slaughter than we have seen and a much firmer base for Iran. No regimes have fallen since the Arab Spring, but when they do it will be important to remember 1979 and the conviction that nothing could be worse than the shah’s Iran, morally or geopolitically. Neither was quite the case.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t people in the Arab world who want liberal democracy. It simply means that they are not powerful enough to topple regimes or maintain control of new regimes even if they did succeed. The Arab Spring is, above all, a primer on wishful thinking in the face of the real world.

In the wake of the July 22 Oslo attacks, as I have talked with people in the United States and Europe, I have noticed two themes in the conversations. The first is the claim that the attacks came from an unexpected source and were therefore impossible to stop. The second theme is that detecting such attacks is the sole province of dedicated counterterrorism authorities.

As discussed in last week’s Security Weekly, even in so-called “unexpected” attacks there are specific operational tasks that must be executed in order to conduct an operation. Such tasks can be detected, and unexpected attacks emanating from lone wolf actors can indeed be thwarted if such indicators are being looked for. Alleged Oslo attack perpetrator Anders Breivik reportedly conducted several actions that would have made him vulnerable to detection had the authorities been vigilant and focused on those possible actions.

This is why it is critical to look at the mechanics of attacks in order to identify the steps that must be undertaken to complete them and then focus on identifying people taking such steps. Focusing on the “how” rather than the “who” is an effective way for authorities to get on the proactive side of the action/reaction continuum.

Considering this concept of focusing on the how, one quickly reaches a convergence with the second theme, which involves the role and capabilities of dedicated counterterrorism resources. The primary agency tasked with counterterrorism in most countries tends to have limited resources that are stretched thin trying to cover known or suspected threats. These agencies simply do not have the manpower to look for attack-planning indicators — especially in a world where militant actors are increasingly adopting the leaderless-resistance model, which is designed to avoid detection by counterterrorism forces.

When these factors are combined they highlight the fact that, as the threat posed by militants adhering to the leaderless-resistance model (whom we frequently refer to as “grassroots militants”) increases, so does the need for grassroots defenders.

Grassroots Threats

As we noted last week, Breivik’s concept of self-appointed and anonymous “Justiciar Knights” who operate as lone wolves or in small phantom cells is not a unique concept. Breivik was clearly influenced by the militant-group case studies he outlined in his manifesto. In recent decades, governments have become fairly efficient at identifying and gathering intelligence on known groups that pose a threat to conduct violent attacks. This is especially true in the realm of technical intelligence, where dramatic increases have been made in the ability to capture and process huge amounts of data from landline, cellphone and Internet communications, but governments have also become quite adept at penetrating militant groups and recruiting informants. Even before 9/11, government successes against militant groups had led white supremacist groups and militant animal-rights and environmentalist groups to adopt a leaderless resistance model for their violent and illegal activities.

In the post-9/11 world, intelligence and security services have dramatically increased the resources dedicated to counterterrorism, and the efforts of these services have proved very effective when focused on known organizations and individuals. Indeed, in recent years we have seen a trend where jihadist groups like al Qaeda and its franchises have encouraged aspiring militants to undertake lone wolf and small cell activities rather than travel to places like Pakistan and Yemen to link up with the groups and receive training in terrorist tradecraft. For several years now, STRATFOR has emphasized the nature of this decentralized threat.

We see no sign of this trend toward leaderless resistance reversing in the near future, and our forecast is that the grassroots threat will continue to grow, not only from the jihadist realm but also from far-right and far-left actors.

Stretched Thin

As noted above, most counterterrorism intelligence efforts have been designed to identify and track people with links to known militant groups, and in that regard they are fairly effective. However, they have been largely ineffective in identifying grassroots militants. The focus on identifying and monitoring the activities of someone connected to a known militant group is understandable given that operatives connected to groups such as Hezbollah or al Qaeda have access to much better training and far greater resources than their grassroots counterparts. In general, militants linked to organizations pose a more severe threat than do most grassroots militants, and thus counterterrorism agencies focus much of their attention on the more potent threat.

That said, grassroots operatives can and do kill people. Although they tend to focus on softer targets than operatives connected to larger groups, some grassroots attacks have been quite deadly. The July 2005 London bombings, for example, killed 52 people, and Breivik was able to kill 77 in his twin attacks in Norway.

One problem for most counterterrorism agencies is that counterterrorism is not their sole (and in some cases even primary) mission. Often, such as the case with MI5 in the United Kingdom, the primary counterterrorism agency also has substantial foreign counterintelligence responsibilities. In the case of the FBI, it has not only counterterrorism and foreign counterintelligence missions but also a host of other responsibilities such as investigating bank robberies, kidnappings, white-collar crime, cyber crimes and public corruption.

The resources of the primary counterterrorism agencies are also quite finite. For example, the FBI has fewer than 14,000 special agents to fulfill its many responsibilities, and while counterterrorism has become its top mission in the post-9/11 era, only a portion of its agents (estimated to be between 2,500 and 3,000) are assigned to counterterrorism investigations at any one time.

Counterterrorism investigations can also be very labor intensive. Even in a case where a subject is under electronic surveillance, it takes a great deal of manpower to file all the paperwork required for the court orders, monitor the surveillance equipment and, if necessary, translate conversations picked up from the surveillance efforts and run down and or task out additional investigative leads developed during the monitoring. Seemingly little things like conducting a “trash cover” on the subject (sifting through the trash a subject places out on the curb for evidence and intelligence) can add hours of investigative effort every week. If full physical and electronic surveillance is put in place on a subject, such a 24/7 operation can tie up as many as 100 special agents, surveillance operatives, technicians, photographers, analysts, interpreters and supervisors.

Again, given the potential threat posed by known or suspected al Qaeda, Hezbollah or, currently, Libyan government operatives, it is understandable why so many resources would be devoted to investigating and neutralizing that potential threat. However, the problem with this focus on known actors is that it leaves very little resources for proactive counterterrorism tasks such as looking for signs of potential operational activities such as preoperational surveillance or weapons acquisition conducted by previously unknown individuals. Indeed, this is a huge undertaking for agencies with limited resources.

Furthermore, in the case of a lone wolf or small cell, there simply may not be any clear-cut chain of command, a specific building to target or a communication network to compromise — the specialties of Western intelligence agencies. The leaderless-resistance organization is, by design, nebulous and hard to map and quantify. This lack of structure and communication poses a problem for Western counterterrorism agencies, as Breivik accurately noted in his manifesto. Also, since this grassroots threat emanates from a large variety of actors, it is impossible to profile potential militants based on race, religion or ethnicity. Instead, their actions must be scrutinized.

Grassroots Defenders

All grassroots militants engage in activities that make their plots vulnerable to detection. Due to the limited number of dedicated counterterrorism practitioners, these mistakes are far more likely to be witnessed by someone other than an FBI or MI5 agent. This fact highlights the importance of what we call grassroots defenders, that is, a decentralized network of people practicing situational awareness who notice and report possible indications of terrorist behavior such as acquiring weapons, building bombs and conducting preoperational surveillance.

Clearly, the most important pool of grassroots defenders is ordinary police officers on patrol. While there are fewer than 14,000 FBI agents in the entire United States, there are some 34,000 officers in the New York City Police Department alone and an estimated 800,000 local and state police officers across the United States. While the vast majority of these officers are not assigned primarily to investigate terrorism, they often find themselves in a position to encounter grassroots militants who make operational security errors or are in the process of committing crimes in advance of an attack, such as document fraud, illegally obtaining weapons or illegally raising funds for an attack.

In July 2005, police in Torrance, Calif., thwarted a grassroots plot that came to light during an investigation of a string of armed robberies. After arresting one suspect, Levar Haney Washington, police searching his apartment uncovered material indicating that Washington was part of a small jihadist cell that was planning to attack a number of targets. Hezbollah’s multimillion-dollar cigarette-smuggling network was uncovered when a sharp North Carolina sheriff’s deputy found the group’s activities suspicious and tipped off the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives, thus launching the massive “Operation Smokescreen” investigation.

Traffic stops by regular cops also have identified several potential grassroots jihadists. In August 2007, two Middle Eastern men stopped by a sheriff’s deputy for speeding near Goose Creek, S.C., were charged with possession of a destructive device. Likewise, a traffic stop by a police officer in September 2001 in Alexandria, Va., led to an investigation that uncovered the so-called Virginia Jihad Network. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the operation’s leader, Mohamed Atta, was the subject of an outstanding bench warrant for failing to appear in court after being stopped for driving without a license. More recently, in May 2011 we saw the New York Police Department disrupt an alleged jihadist plot. Then in June, the Seattle Police Department detected a plot that it thwarted with the cooperation of the FBI. Both of these plots were disrupted during the weapons-acquisition phase.

In some countries, networks have been established to promote this concept of heightened local-police vigilance and to provide training for officers and crime analysts. The U.S. government has established something it calls the National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, which is an attempt to provide local police with training to optimize their situational awareness and to help them collect and analyze information pertaining to potential terrorist-planning activity and then to share that information with other agencies enrolled in the program. However, the initiative has only a handful of state and local law enforcement agencies participating at the present time.

But police are not the only grassroots defenders. Other people such as neighbors, store clerks, landlords and motel managers can also find themselves in a position to notice operational planning activities. Such activities can include purchasing bombmaking components and firearms, creating improvised explosive mixtures and conducting preoperational surveillance. On July 27, 2011, an alert clerk at a gun store in Killeen, Texas, called the local police after a man who came into the store to buy smokeless powder exhibited an unusual demeanor. They located the individual and after questioning him learned he was planning to detonate an improvised explosive device and conduct an armed assault against a local Killeen restaurant popular with soldiers from nearby Fort Hood. The clerk’s situational awareness and his decision to call the police likely saved many lives.

And it’s important to remember than an alert street vendor was the first person to sound the alarm in the failed May 2010 Times Square bombing attempt, and it was a concerned family member who provided authorities with the information to thwart a planned November 2010 attack against a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon.

Ordinary citizens exercising situational awareness can and have saved lives. This reality has been the driving force behind programs like the New York Police Department’s “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign. This program was subsequently adopted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as a means of encouraging citizens to report potential terrorist behavior.

There is one other factor to consider. As we have previously discussed, counterterrorism spending comes in a perceptible boom-and-bust cycle. Next month will mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Since those attacks there has not been a successful large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil. This, along with the budget problems the United States is facing, will increase the current downward trend of counterterrorism funding in the United States and accentuate the need for more grassroots defenders.

In the wake of the July 22 Oslo attacks, as I have talked with people in the United States and Europe, I have noticed two themes in the conversations. The first is the claim that the attacks came from an unexpected source and were therefore impossible to stop. The second theme is that detecting such attacks is the sole province of dedicated counterterrorism authorities.

As discussed in last week’s Security Weekly, even in so-called “unexpected” attacks there are specific operational tasks that must be executed in order to conduct an operation. Such tasks can be detected, and unexpected attacks emanating from lone wolf actors can indeed be thwarted if such indicators are being looked for. Alleged Oslo attack perpetrator Anders Breivik reportedly conducted several actions that would have made him vulnerable to detection had the authorities been vigilant and focused on those possible actions.

This is why it is critical to look at the mechanics of attacks in order to identify the steps that must be undertaken to complete them and then focus on identifying people taking such steps. Focusing on the “how” rather than the “who” is an effective way for authorities to get on the proactive side of the action/reaction continuum.

Considering this concept of focusing on the how, one quickly reaches a convergence with the second theme, which involves the role and capabilities of dedicated counterterrorism resources. The primary agency tasked with counterterrorism in most countries tends to have limited resources that are stretched thin trying to cover known or suspected threats. These agencies simply do not have the manpower to look for attack-planning indicators — especially in a world where militant actors are increasingly adopting the leaderless-resistance model, which is designed to avoid detection by counterterrorism forces.

When these factors are combined they highlight the fact that, as the threat posed by militants adhering to the leaderless-resistance model (whom we frequently refer to as “grassroots militants”) increases, so does the need for grassroots defenders.

Grassroots Threats

As we noted last week, Breivik’s concept of self-appointed and anonymous “Justiciar Knights” who operate as lone wolves or in small phantom cells is not a unique concept. Breivik was clearly influenced by the militant-group case studies he outlined in his manifesto. In recent decades, governments have become fairly efficient at identifying and gathering intelligence on known groups that pose a threat to conduct violent attacks. This is especially true in the realm of technical intelligence, where dramatic increases have been made in the ability to capture and process huge amounts of data from landline, cellphone and Internet communications, but governments have also become quite adept at penetrating militant groups and recruiting informants. Even before 9/11, government successes against militant groups had led white supremacist groups and militant animal-rights and environmentalist groups to adopt a leaderless resistance model for their violent and illegal activities.

In the post-9/11 world, intelligence and security services have dramatically increased the resources dedicated to counterterrorism, and the efforts of these services have proved very effective when focused on known organizations and individuals. Indeed, in recent years we have seen a trend where jihadist groups like al Qaeda and its franchises have encouraged aspiring militants to undertake lone wolf and small cell activities rather than travel to places like Pakistan and Yemen to link up with the groups and receive training in terrorist tradecraft. For several years now, STRATFOR has emphasized the nature of this decentralized threat.

We see no sign of this trend toward leaderless resistance reversing in the near future, and our forecast is that the grassroots threat will continue to grow, not only from the jihadist realm but also from far-right and far-left actors.

Stretched Thin

As noted above, most counterterrorism intelligence efforts have been designed to identify and track people with links to known militant groups, and in that regard they are fairly effective. However, they have been largely ineffective in identifying grassroots militants. The focus on identifying and monitoring the activities of someone connected to a known militant group is understandable given that operatives connected to groups such as Hezbollah or al Qaeda have access to much better training and far greater resources than their grassroots counterparts. In general, militants linked to organizations pose a more severe threat than do most grassroots militants, and thus counterterrorism agencies focus much of their attention on the more potent threat.

That said, grassroots operatives can and do kill people. Although they tend to focus on softer targets than operatives connected to larger groups, some grassroots attacks have been quite deadly. The July 2005 London bombings, for example, killed 52 people, and Breivik was able to kill 77 in his twin attacks in Norway.

One problem for most counterterrorism agencies is that counterterrorism is not their sole (and in some cases even primary) mission. Often, such as the case with MI5 in the United Kingdom, the primary counterterrorism agency also has substantial foreign counterintelligence responsibilities. In the case of the FBI, it has not only counterterrorism and foreign counterintelligence missions but also a host of other responsibilities such as investigating bank robberies, kidnappings, white-collar crime, cyber crimes and public corruption.

The resources of the primary counterterrorism agencies are also quite finite. For example, the FBI has fewer than 14,000 special agents to fulfill its many responsibilities, and while counterterrorism has become its top mission in the post-9/11 era, only a portion of its agents (estimated to be between 2,500 and 3,000) are assigned to counterterrorism investigations at any one time.

Counterterrorism investigations can also be very labor intensive. Even in a case where a subject is under electronic surveillance, it takes a great deal of manpower to file all the paperwork required for the court orders, monitor the surveillance equipment and, if necessary, translate conversations picked up from the surveillance efforts and run down and or task out additional investigative leads developed during the monitoring. Seemingly little things like conducting a “trash cover” on the subject (sifting through the trash a subject places out on the curb for evidence and intelligence) can add hours of investigative effort every week. If full physical and electronic surveillance is put in place on a subject, such a 24/7 operation can tie up as many as 100 special agents, surveillance operatives, technicians, photographers, analysts, interpreters and supervisors.

Again, given the potential threat posed by known or suspected al Qaeda, Hezbollah or, currently, Libyan government operatives, it is understandable why so many resources would be devoted to investigating and neutralizing that potential threat. However, the problem with this focus on known actors is that it leaves very little resources for proactive counterterrorism tasks such as looking for signs of potential operational activities such as preoperational surveillance or weapons acquisition conducted by previously unknown individuals. Indeed, this is a huge undertaking for agencies with limited resources.

Furthermore, in the case of a lone wolf or small cell, there simply may not be any clear-cut chain of command, a specific building to target or a communication network to compromise — the specialties of Western intelligence agencies. The leaderless-resistance organization is, by design, nebulous and hard to map and quantify. This lack of structure and communication poses a problem for Western counterterrorism agencies, as Breivik accurately noted in his manifesto. Also, since this grassroots threat emanates from a large variety of actors, it is impossible to profile potential militants based on race, religion or ethnicity. Instead, their actions must be scrutinized.

Grassroots Defenders

All grassroots militants engage in activities that make their plots vulnerable to detection. Due to the limited number of dedicated counterterrorism practitioners, these mistakes are far more likely to be witnessed by someone other than an FBI or MI5 agent. This fact highlights the importance of what we call grassroots defenders, that is, a decentralized network of people practicing situational awareness who notice and report possible indications of terrorist behavior such as acquiring weapons, building bombs and conducting preoperational surveillance.

Clearly, the most important pool of grassroots defenders is ordinary police officers on patrol. While there are fewer than 14,000 FBI agents in the entire United States, there are some 34,000 officers in the New York City Police Department alone and an estimated 800,000 local and state police officers across the United States. While the vast majority of these officers are not assigned primarily to investigate terrorism, they often find themselves in a position to encounter grassroots militants who make operational security errors or are in the process of committing crimes in advance of an attack, such as document fraud, illegally obtaining weapons or illegally raising funds for an attack.

In July 2005, police in Torrance, Calif., thwarted a grassroots plot that came to light during an investigation of a string of armed robberies. After arresting one suspect, Levar Haney Washington, police searching his apartment uncovered material indicating that Washington was part of a small jihadist cell that was planning to attack a number of targets. Hezbollah’s multimillion-dollar cigarette-smuggling network was uncovered when a sharp North Carolina sheriff’s deputy found the group’s activities suspicious and tipped off the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives, thus launching the massive “Operation Smokescreen” investigation.

Traffic stops by regular cops also have identified several potential grassroots jihadists. In August 2007, two Middle Eastern men stopped by a sheriff’s deputy for speeding near Goose Creek, S.C., were charged with possession of a destructive device. Likewise, a traffic stop by a police officer in September 2001 in Alexandria, Va., led to an investigation that uncovered the so-called Virginia Jihad Network. At the time of the 9/11 attacks, the operation’s leader, Mohamed Atta, was the subject of an outstanding bench warrant for failing to appear in court after being stopped for driving without a license. More recently, in May 2011 we saw the New York Police Department disrupt an alleged jihadist plot. Then in June, the Seattle Police Department detected a plot that it thwarted with the cooperation of the FBI. Both of these plots were disrupted during the weapons-acquisition phase.

In some countries, networks have been established to promote this concept of heightened local-police vigilance and to provide training for officers and crime analysts. The U.S. government has established something it calls the National Suspicious Activity Reporting Initiative, which is an attempt to provide local police with training to optimize their situational awareness and to help them collect and analyze information pertaining to potential terrorist-planning activity and then to share that information with other agencies enrolled in the program. However, the initiative has only a handful of state and local law enforcement agencies participating at the present time.

But police are not the only grassroots defenders. Other people such as neighbors, store clerks, landlords and motel managers can also find themselves in a position to notice operational planning activities. Such activities can include purchasing bombmaking components and firearms, creating improvised explosive mixtures and conducting preoperational surveillance. On July 27, 2011, an alert clerk at a gun store in Killeen, Texas, called the local police after a man who came into the store to buy smokeless powder exhibited an unusual demeanor. They located the individual and after questioning him learned he was planning to detonate an improvised explosive device and conduct an armed assault against a local Killeen restaurant popular with soldiers from nearby Fort Hood. The clerk’s situational awareness and his decision to call the police likely saved many lives.

And it’s important to remember than an alert street vendor was the first person to sound the alarm in the failed May 2010 Times Square bombing attempt, and it was a concerned family member who provided authorities with the information to thwart a planned November 2010 attack against a Christmas tree lighting ceremony in Portland, Oregon.

Ordinary citizens exercising situational awareness can and have saved lives. This reality has been the driving force behind programs like the New York Police Department’s “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign. This program was subsequently adopted by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as a means of encouraging citizens to report potential terrorist behavior.

There is one other factor to consider. As we have previously discussed, counterterrorism spending comes in a perceptible boom-and-bust cycle. Next month will mark the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Since those attacks there has not been a successful large-scale terrorist attack on U.S. soil. This, along with the budget problems the United States is facing, will increase the current downward trend of counterterrorism funding in the United States and accentuate the need for more grassroots defenders.

On the afternoon of July 22, a powerful explosion ripped through the streets of Oslo, Norway, as a large improvised explosive device (IED) in a rented van detonated between the government building housing the prime minister’s office and Norway’s Oil and Energy Department building. According to the diary of Anders Breivik, the man arrested in the case who has confessed to fabricating and placing the device, the van had been filled with 950 kilograms (about 2,100 pounds) of homemade ammonium nitrate-based explosives.

After lighting the fuse on his IED, Breivik left the scene in a rented car and traveled to the island of Utoya, located about 32 kilometers (20 miles) outside of Oslo. The island was the site of a youth campout organized by Norway’s ruling Labor Party. Before taking a boat to the island, Breivik donned body armor and tactical gear bearing police insignia (intended to afford him the element of tactical surprise). Once on the island he opened fire on the attendees at the youth camp with his firearms, a semiautomatic 5.56-caliber Ruger Mini-14 rifle and a 9 mm Glock pistol. Due to the location of the camp on a remote island, Breivik had time to kill 68 people and wound another 60 before police responded to the scene.

(click here to enlarge image)

Shortly before the attack, Breivik posted a manifesto on the Internet that includes his lengthy operational diary. He wrote the diary in English under the Anglicized pen name Andrew Berwick, though a careful reading shows he also posted his true identity in the document. The document also shows that he was a lone wolf attacker who conducted his assault specifically against the Labor Party’s current and future leadership. Breivik targeted the Labor Party because of his belief that the party is Marxist-oriented and is responsible for encouraging multiculturalism, Muslim immigration into Norway and, acting with other similar European governments, the coming destruction of European culture. Although the Labor Party members are members of his own race, he considers them traitors and holds them in more contempt than he does Muslims. In fact, in the manifesto, Breivik urged others not to target Muslims because it would elicit sympathy for them.

Breivik put most of his time and effort into the creation of the vehicle-borne IED (VBIED) that he used to attack his primary target, the current government, which is housed in the government building. It appears that he believed the device would be sufficient to destroy that building. It was indeed a powerful device, but the explosion killed only eight people. This was because the device did not bring down the building as Breivik had planned and many of the government employees who normally work in the area were on summer break. In the end, the government building was damaged but not destroyed in the attack, and no senior government officials were killed. Most of the deaths occurred at the youth camp, which Breivik described as his secondary target.

While Breivik’s manifesto indicated he planned and executed the attack as a lone wolf, it also suggests that he is part of a larger organization that he calls the “Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici (PCCTS, also known as the Knights Templar,) which seeks to encourage other lone wolves (which Brevik refers to as “Justiciar Knights”) and small cells in other parts of Europe to carry out a plan to “save” Europe and European culture from destruction.

Because of the possibility that there are other self-appointed Justiciar Knights in Norway or in other parts of Europe and that Breivik’s actions, ideology and manifesto could spawn copycats, we thought it useful to examine the Justiciar Knights concept as Breivik explains it to see how it fits into lone wolf theory and how similar actors might be detected in the future.

An Opening Salvo?

From reading his manifesto, it is clear that Breivik, much like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, believes that his attack is the opening salvo in a wider campaign, in this case to liberate Europeans from what Breivik views as malevolent, Marxist-oriented governments. These beliefs are what drove Breivik to attack the Norwegian Labor Party. As noted above, it is also clear that Breivik planned and executed his attack alone.

However, he also discusses how he was radicalized and influenced by a Serbian living in Liberia whom he visited there. And Breivik claims to have attended a meeting in London in 2002 to “re-found the Knights Templar.” This organization, PCCTS, which was founded in 2002, is not related to the much older official and public chivalric order also known as the Knights Templar. According to Breivik, the PCCTS was formed with the stated purpose of fighting back against “European Jihad” and to defend the “free indigenous peoples of Europe.” To achieve this goal, the PCCTS would implement a three-phase plan designed to seize political and military power in Europe. In his manifesto Breivik outlines the plan as follows:

• Phase 1 (1999-2030): Cell-based shock attacks, sabotage attacks, etc.
• Phase 2 (2030-2070): Same as above but bigger cells/networks, armed militias.
• Phase 3 (2070-2100): Pan-European coup d’etats, deportation of Muslims and execution of traitors.

As outlined in Breivik’s manifesto, the 2002 meeting was attended by seven other individuals, two from England and one each from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece and Russia. He also asserts that the organization has members from Serbia (his contact living in Liberia), Sweden, Belgium and the United States who were unable to attend the meeting. Brevik states that all the members of the PCCTS were given code names for security, that his code name was “Sigurd,” and that he was mentored by a member with the code name “Richard the Lionhearted” (presumably a Briton). Breivik claims that after meeting these individuals via the Internet he was carefully vetted before being allowed to join the group.

The diary section of Breivik’s manifesto reveals that during the planning process for the attack Breivik traveled to Prague to obtain firearms and grenades from Balkan organized-crime groups there (he had hoped to obtain a fully-automatic AK-47). Breivik was not able to procure weapons in Prague and instead was forced to use weapons he was able to obtain in Norway by legal means. It is interesting that he did not contact the Serbian member of the PCCTS for assistance in making contact with Balkan arms dealers. Breivik’s lawyer told the media July 26 that although Breivik acted alone in conducting his attack, he had been in contact with two terror cells in Norway and other cells abroad. Certainly, Norway and its partners in EUROPOL and the United States will try to identify these other individuals, if they do in fact exist.

In phase one of the PCCTS plan, shock attacks were to be carried out by individuals operating as lone wolves or small cells of Breivik’s so-called Justiciar Knights, which are self-appointed guardians who decide to follow the PCCTS code outlined in Breivik’s manifesto and who are granted the authority to act as “a judge, jury and executioner until the free, indigenous peoples of Europe are no longer threatened by cultural genocide, subject to cultural Marxist/Islamic tyranny or territorial or existential threats through Islamic demographic warfare.”

Breivik’s manifesto notes that he does not know how many Justiciar Knights there are in Western Europe but estimates their number to be from 15 to 80. It is unclear if this is a delusion on his part and there are no other Justiciar Knights or if Breivik has some factual basis for his belief that there are more individuals like him planning attacks.

While some observers have noted that the idea of Justiciar Knights operating as lone wolves and in small cells is similar to the calls in recent years for grassroots jihadists to adopt lone wolf tactics, it is important to understand that leaderless resistance has been a central theme of white supremacist groups in the United States since the early 1990s. While Breivik did not express any anti-Semitism in his manifesto (something he has been heavily criticized for on U.S. anti-Semitic websites), clearly the anti-immigration and anti-Marxist ideology of the PCCTS has been influenced more by white hate groups than by al Qaeda.

Moreover, the concept of a self-identified Justiciar Knight is quite similar to the idea of a “Phineas Priest” in the leaderless resistance model propagated by some white supremacists in the United States who adhere to “Christian Identity” ideology. In this model, Phineas Priests see themselves as lone wolf militants chosen by God and set apart to be his “agents of vengeance” upon the earth. Phineas Priests also believe that their attacks will serve to ignite a wider “racial holy war” that will ultimately lead to the salvation of the white race.

Leaderless resistance has also been advocated by militant anarchists as well as animal rights and environmentalist activists who belong to such groups as the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front. So it is not correct to think of leaderless resistance merely as a jihadist construct — it has long been used by a variety of militant actors.

Lone Wolf Challenges

One of the great strengths of our enemies, the Western European cultural Marxist/multiculturalist regimes is their vast resources and their advanced investigation/forensic capabilities. There are thousands of video cameras all over European major cities and you will always risk leaving behind dna, finger prints, witnesses or other evidence that will eventually lead to your arrest. They are overwhelmingly superior in almost every aspect. But every 7 headed monster has an Achilles heel. This Achilles heel is their vulnerability against single/duo martyr cells. — Anders Breivik

As STRATFOR has long discussed, the lone wolf operational model presents a number of challenges for law enforcement, intelligence and security officers. The primary challenge is that, by definition, lone wolves are solitary actors and it can be very difficult to determine their intentions before they act because they do not work with anyone else. When militants are operating in a cell consisting of more than one person, there is a larger chance that one of them will get cold feet and reveal the plot to authorities, that law enforcement and intelligence personnel will intercept a communication between conspirators, or that the authorities will be able to insert an informant into the group.

This ability to fly solo and under the radar of law enforcement has meant that some lone wolf militants such as Joseph Paul Franklin, Theodore Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph were able to operate for years before being identified and captured. Indeed, from Breivik’s diary, we know he took several years to plan and execute his attack without detection.

As the Breivik case illustrates, lone wolves also pose problems because they can come from a variety of backgrounds with a wide range of motivations. While some lone wolves are politically motivated, others are religiously motivated and some are mentally unstable.

In addition to the wide spectrum of ideologies and motivations among lone wolves, there is also the issue of geographic dispersal. As we’ve seen from past cases, their plots and attacks have occurred in many different locations and are not confined just to Manhattan, London or Washington. Lone wolf attacks can occur anywhere.

Furthermore, it is extremely difficult to differentiate between those extremists who intend to commit attacks from those who simply preach hate or hold radical beliefs (things that are not in themselves illegal in many countries). Therefore, to single out likely lone wolves before they strike, authorities must spend a great deal of time and resources looking at individuals who might be moving from radical beliefs to radical actions. This is a daunting task given the large universe of potential suspects.

Vulnerabilities

In spite of the challenges presented by lone wolf operatives, they are vulnerable to detection at several different stages of their attack cycle. One of these vulnerabilities comes during the planning stage when weapons are acquired. From reading Breivik’s diary, it is clear that he felt exposed as he tried to purchase the chemicals he needed to build his IED. Because of this vulnerability, Breivik created an extensive cover story that included renting a farm in order to explain his purchase of a large quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. The farm also provided a private, spacious place for him to construct his IED.

Breivik also exposed himself to potential detection when he traveled to Prague to attempt to purchase weapons. One of the criminals he contacted could have turned him in to authorities. (In June 2011 we saw a jihadist cell in Seattle detected and arrested while attempting to buy guns from a criminal acquaintance. Another small cell was arrested in New York in May 2011, also while attempting to obtain weapons.) Even if Breivik had succeeded in purchasing weapons in Prague, he would still have been vulnerable as he smuggled the weapons back into Norway in his car (though it is important to remember that EU countries have open borders so security checks would not have been too stringent).

Breivik also exposed himself to detection as he conducted surveillance on his targets. Interestingly, in his diary, Breivik goes into excruciating detail discussing how he manufactured his device based on information he was able to obtain from the Internet, but he mentions very little about how he selected specific targets or how he conducted surveillance on them. He mentions only that he visited the sites and programmed the locations into his GPS. He also discusses using a video camera to record his attack but does not mention if he used still or video cameras in his target surveillance. How Breivik specifically chose his targets and how he conducted surveillance on them will be important for the Norwegian authorities to examine.

Finally, Breivik mentions several times in his diary that the steps he was taking would be far more difficult if he were a foreign-born Muslim instead of a Caucasian Norwegian. This underscores a problem we have discussed with profiling suspects based on their ethnicity or nationality. In an environment where potential threats are hard to identify, it is doubly important to profile individuals based on their behavior rather than their ethnicity or nationality — what we refer to as focusing on the “how” rather than the “who.”

Not All Lone Wolves are Equal

Finally, in the Breivik case we need to recognize that Norwegian authorities were dealing with a very capable lone wolf operator. While lone wolf theory has been propagated for many years now, there have been relatively few successful lone wolf attacks. This is because it takes a special individual to be a successful lone wolf assailant. Unlike many lone wolves, Breivik demonstrated that he possessed the intelligence and discipline to plan and carry out an attack that spanned several years of preparation. For example, he joined a pistol club in 2005 just in case he ever needed to buy a gun through legal means in Norway, and was able to rely on that alternate plan when his efforts to purchase firearms in Prague failed. Breivik was also driven, detail-oriented and meticulous in his planning. His diary documents that he was also extremely patient and careful during the dangerous trial-and-error process of manufacturing explosives.

It is rare to find a lone wolf militant who possesses all those traits, and Breivik stands in stark contrast to other European grassroots operatives like Nick Reilly or Bilal Abdullah and Kafeel Ahmed, who made amateurish attempts at attacks. Breivik appears to have been a hard worker who claims to have amassed some 500,000 euros by working a variety of jobs and selling a communications company. After some unsuccessful speculation on the stock market he still had enough money and credit to rent the farm and the vehicles he used in the attack and to buy the required bomb components, weapons and body armor. In his diary he says that he began his two tasks — writing the manifesto and conducting the attack — with a war chest of 250,000 euros and several credit cards.

Breivik also is somewhat unique in that he did not attempt to escape after his attacks or become a martyr by his own hand or that of the authorities. Instead, as outlined in his manifesto, he sought to be tried so that he could turn his trial into a grandstand for promoting his ideology beyond what he did with his manifesto and video. He was willing to risk a long prison sentence in order to communicate his principles to the public. This means that the authorities have to be concerned not only about other existing Justiciar Knights but also anyone who may be influenced by Breivik’s message and follow his example.

There is also the possibility that individuals who do not adhere to Breivik’s ideology will seek to exploit the loopholes and security lapses highlighted by this incident to conduct their own attacks. Breivik’s diary provides a detailed step-by-step guide to manufacturing a successful VBIED, and the authorities will be scrutinizing it carefully to address the vulnerabilities Breivik exposed before those instructions can be used again.

On the afternoon of July 22, a powerful explosion ripped through the streets of Oslo, Norway, as a large improvised explosive device (IED) in a rented van detonated between the government building housing the prime minister’s office and Norway’s Oil and Energy Department building. According to the diary of Anders Breivik, the man arrested in the case who has confessed to fabricating and placing the device, the van had been filled with 950 kilograms (about 2,100 pounds) of homemade ammonium nitrate-based explosives.

After lighting the fuse on his IED, Breivik left the scene in a rented car and traveled to the island of Utoya, located about 32 kilometers (20 miles) outside of Oslo. The island was the site of a youth campout organized by Norway’s ruling Labor Party. Before taking a boat to the island, Breivik donned body armor and tactical gear bearing police insignia (intended to afford him the element of tactical surprise). Once on the island he opened fire on the attendees at the youth camp with his firearms, a semiautomatic 5.56-caliber Ruger Mini-14 rifle and a 9 mm Glock pistol. Due to the location of the camp on a remote island, Breivik had time to kill 68 people and wound another 60 before police responded to the scene.

(click here to enlarge image)

Shortly before the attack, Breivik posted a manifesto on the Internet that includes his lengthy operational diary. He wrote the diary in English under the Anglicized pen name Andrew Berwick, though a careful reading shows he also posted his true identity in the document. The document also shows that he was a lone wolf attacker who conducted his assault specifically against the Labor Party’s current and future leadership. Breivik targeted the Labor Party because of his belief that the party is Marxist-oriented and is responsible for encouraging multiculturalism, Muslim immigration into Norway and, acting with other similar European governments, the coming destruction of European culture. Although the Labor Party members are members of his own race, he considers them traitors and holds them in more contempt than he does Muslims. In fact, in the manifesto, Breivik urged others not to target Muslims because it would elicit sympathy for them.

Breivik put most of his time and effort into the creation of the vehicle-borne IED (VBIED) that he used to attack his primary target, the current government, which is housed in the government building. It appears that he believed the device would be sufficient to destroy that building. It was indeed a powerful device, but the explosion killed only eight people. This was because the device did not bring down the building as Breivik had planned and many of the government employees who normally work in the area were on summer break. In the end, the government building was damaged but not destroyed in the attack, and no senior government officials were killed. Most of the deaths occurred at the youth camp, which Breivik described as his secondary target.

While Breivik’s manifesto indicated he planned and executed the attack as a lone wolf, it also suggests that he is part of a larger organization that he calls the “Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici (PCCTS, also known as the Knights Templar,) which seeks to encourage other lone wolves (which Brevik refers to as “Justiciar Knights”) and small cells in other parts of Europe to carry out a plan to “save” Europe and European culture from destruction.

Because of the possibility that there are other self-appointed Justiciar Knights in Norway or in other parts of Europe and that Breivik’s actions, ideology and manifesto could spawn copycats, we thought it useful to examine the Justiciar Knights concept as Breivik explains it to see how it fits into lone wolf theory and how similar actors might be detected in the future.

An Opening Salvo?

From reading his manifesto, it is clear that Breivik, much like Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, believes that his attack is the opening salvo in a wider campaign, in this case to liberate Europeans from what Breivik views as malevolent, Marxist-oriented governments. These beliefs are what drove Breivik to attack the Norwegian Labor Party. As noted above, it is also clear that Breivik planned and executed his attack alone.

However, he also discusses how he was radicalized and influenced by a Serbian living in Liberia whom he visited there. And Breivik claims to have attended a meeting in London in 2002 to “re-found the Knights Templar.” This organization, PCCTS, which was founded in 2002, is not related to the much older official and public chivalric order also known as the Knights Templar. According to Breivik, the PCCTS was formed with the stated purpose of fighting back against “European Jihad” and to defend the “free indigenous peoples of Europe.” To achieve this goal, the PCCTS would implement a three-phase plan designed to seize political and military power in Europe. In his manifesto Breivik outlines the plan as follows:

• Phase 1 (1999-2030): Cell-based shock attacks, sabotage attacks, etc.
• Phase 2 (2030-2070): Same as above but bigger cells/networks, armed militias.
• Phase 3 (2070-2100): Pan-European coup d’etats, deportation of Muslims and execution of traitors.

As outlined in Breivik’s manifesto, the 2002 meeting was attended by seven other individuals, two from England and one each from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece and Russia. He also asserts that the organization has members from Serbia (his contact living in Liberia), Sweden, Belgium and the United States who were unable to attend the meeting. Brevik states that all the members of the PCCTS were given code names for security, that his code name was “Sigurd,” and that he was mentored by a member with the code name “Richard the Lionhearted” (presumably a Briton). Breivik claims that after meeting these individuals via the Internet he was carefully vetted before being allowed to join the group.

The diary section of Breivik’s manifesto reveals that during the planning process for the attack Breivik traveled to Prague to obtain firearms and grenades from Balkan organized-crime groups there (he had hoped to obtain a fully-automatic AK-47). Breivik was not able to procure weapons in Prague and instead was forced to use weapons he was able to obtain in Norway by legal means. It is interesting that he did not contact the Serbian member of the PCCTS for assistance in making contact with Balkan arms dealers. Breivik’s lawyer told the media July 26 that although Breivik acted alone in conducting his attack, he had been in contact with two terror cells in Norway and other cells abroad. Certainly, Norway and its partners in EUROPOL and the United States will try to identify these other individuals, if they do in fact exist.

In phase one of the PCCTS plan, shock attacks were to be carried out by individuals operating as lone wolves or small cells of Breivik’s so-called Justiciar Knights, which are self-appointed guardians who decide to follow the PCCTS code outlined in Breivik’s manifesto and who are granted the authority to act as “a judge, jury and executioner until the free, indigenous peoples of Europe are no longer threatened by cultural genocide, subject to cultural Marxist/Islamic tyranny or territorial or existential threats through Islamic demographic warfare.”

Breivik’s manifesto notes that he does not know how many Justiciar Knights there are in Western Europe but estimates their number to be from 15 to 80. It is unclear if this is a delusion on his part and there are no other Justiciar Knights or if Breivik has some factual basis for his belief that there are more individuals like him planning attacks.

While some observers have noted that the idea of Justiciar Knights operating as lone wolves and in small cells is similar to the calls in recent years for grassroots jihadists to adopt lone wolf tactics, it is important to understand that leaderless resistance has been a central theme of white supremacist groups in the United States since the early 1990s. While Breivik did not express any anti-Semitism in his manifesto (something he has been heavily criticized for on U.S. anti-Semitic websites), clearly the anti-immigration and anti-Marxist ideology of the PCCTS has been influenced more by white hate groups than by al Qaeda.

Moreover, the concept of a self-identified Justiciar Knight is quite similar to the idea of a “Phineas Priest” in the leaderless resistance model propagated by some white supremacists in the United States who adhere to “Christian Identity” ideology. In this model, Phineas Priests see themselves as lone wolf militants chosen by God and set apart to be his “agents of vengeance” upon the earth. Phineas Priests also believe that their attacks will serve to ignite a wider “racial holy war” that will ultimately lead to the salvation of the white race.

Leaderless resistance has also been advocated by militant anarchists as well as animal rights and environmentalist activists who belong to such groups as the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front. So it is not correct to think of leaderless resistance merely as a jihadist construct — it has long been used by a variety of militant actors.

Lone Wolf Challenges

One of the great strengths of our enemies, the Western European cultural Marxist/multiculturalist regimes is their vast resources and their advanced investigation/forensic capabilities. There are thousands of video cameras all over European major cities and you will always risk leaving behind dna, finger prints, witnesses or other evidence that will eventually lead to your arrest. They are overwhelmingly superior in almost every aspect. But every 7 headed monster has an Achilles heel. This Achilles heel is their vulnerability against single/duo martyr cells. — Anders Breivik

As STRATFOR has long discussed, the lone wolf operational model presents a number of challenges for law enforcement, intelligence and security officers. The primary challenge is that, by definition, lone wolves are solitary actors and it can be very difficult to determine their intentions before they act because they do not work with anyone else. When militants are operating in a cell consisting of more than one person, there is a larger chance that one of them will get cold feet and reveal the plot to authorities, that law enforcement and intelligence personnel will intercept a communication between conspirators, or that the authorities will be able to insert an informant into the group.

This ability to fly solo and under the radar of law enforcement has meant that some lone wolf militants such as Joseph Paul Franklin, Theodore Kaczynski and Eric Rudolph were able to operate for years before being identified and captured. Indeed, from Breivik’s diary, we know he took several years to plan and execute his attack without detection.

As the Breivik case illustrates, lone wolves also pose problems because they can come from a variety of backgrounds with a wide range of motivations. While some lone wolves are politically motivated, others are religiously motivated and some are mentally unstable.

In addition to the wide spectrum of ideologies and motivations among lone wolves, there is also the issue of geographic dispersal. As we’ve seen from past cases, their plots and attacks have occurred in many different locations and are not confined just to Manhattan, London or Washington. Lone wolf attacks can occur anywhere.

Furthermore, it is extremely difficult to differentiate between those extremists who intend to commit attacks from those who simply preach hate or hold radical beliefs (things that are not in themselves illegal in many countries). Therefore, to single out likely lone wolves before they strike, authorities must spend a great deal of time and resources looking at individuals who might be moving from radical beliefs to radical actions. This is a daunting task given the large universe of potential suspects.

Vulnerabilities

In spite of the challenges presented by lone wolf operatives, they are vulnerable to detection at several different stages of their attack cycle. One of these vulnerabilities comes during the planning stage when weapons are acquired. From reading Breivik’s diary, it is clear that he felt exposed as he tried to purchase the chemicals he needed to build his IED. Because of this vulnerability, Breivik created an extensive cover story that included renting a farm in order to explain his purchase of a large quantity of ammonium nitrate fertilizer. The farm also provided a private, spacious place for him to construct his IED.

Breivik also exposed himself to potential detection when he traveled to Prague to attempt to purchase weapons. One of the criminals he contacted could have turned him in to authorities. (In June 2011 we saw a jihadist cell in Seattle detected and arrested while attempting to buy guns from a criminal acquaintance. Another small cell was arrested in New York in May 2011, also while attempting to obtain weapons.) Even if Breivik had succeeded in purchasing weapons in Prague, he would still have been vulnerable as he smuggled the weapons back into Norway in his car (though it is important to remember that EU countries have open borders so security checks would not have been too stringent).

Breivik also exposed himself to detection as he conducted surveillance on his targets. Interestingly, in his diary, Breivik goes into excruciating detail discussing how he manufactured his device based on information he was able to obtain from the Internet, but he mentions very little about how he selected specific targets or how he conducted surveillance on them. He mentions only that he visited the sites and programmed the locations into his GPS. He also discusses using a video camera to record his attack but does not mention if he used still or video cameras in his target surveillance. How Breivik specifically chose his targets and how he conducted surveillance on them will be important for the Norwegian authorities to examine.

Finally, Breivik mentions several times in his diary that the steps he was taking would be far more difficult if he were a foreign-born Muslim instead of a Caucasian Norwegian. This underscores a problem we have discussed with profiling suspects based on their ethnicity or nationality. In an environment where potential threats are hard to identify, it is doubly important to profile individuals based on their behavior rather than their ethnicity or nationality — what we refer to as focusing on the “how” rather than the “who.”

Not All Lone Wolves are Equal

Finally, in the Breivik case we need to recognize that Norwegian authorities were dealing with a very capable lone wolf operator. While lone wolf theory has been propagated for many years now, there have been relatively few successful lone wolf attacks. This is because it takes a special individual to be a successful lone wolf assailant. Unlike many lone wolves, Breivik demonstrated that he possessed the intelligence and discipline to plan and carry out an attack that spanned several years of preparation. For example, he joined a pistol club in 2005 just in case he ever needed to buy a gun through legal means in Norway, and was able to rely on that alternate plan when his efforts to purchase firearms in Prague failed. Breivik was also driven, detail-oriented and meticulous in his planning. His diary documents that he was also extremely patient and careful during the dangerous trial-and-error process of manufacturing explosives.

It is rare to find a lone wolf militant who possesses all those traits, and Breivik stands in stark contrast to other European grassroots operatives like Nick Reilly or Bilal Abdullah and Kafeel Ahmed, who made amateurish attempts at attacks. Breivik appears to have been a hard worker who claims to have amassed some 500,000 euros by working a variety of jobs and selling a communications company. After some unsuccessful speculation on the stock market he still had enough money and credit to rent the farm and the vehicles he used in the attack and to buy the required bomb components, weapons and body armor. In his diary he says that he began his two tasks — writing the manifesto and conducting the attack — with a war chest of 250,000 euros and several credit cards.

Breivik also is somewhat unique in that he did not attempt to escape after his attacks or become a martyr by his own hand or that of the authorities. Instead, as outlined in his manifesto, he sought to be tried so that he could turn his trial into a grandstand for promoting his ideology beyond what he did with his manifesto and video. He was willing to risk a long prison sentence in order to communicate his principles to the public. This means that the authorities have to be concerned not only about other existing Justiciar Knights but also anyone who may be influenced by Breivik’s message and follow his example.

There is also the possibility that individuals who do not adhere to Breivik’s ideology will seek to exploit the loopholes and security lapses highlighted by this incident to conduct their own attacks. Breivik’s diary provides a detailed step-by-step guide to manufacturing a successful VBIED, and the authorities will be scrutinizing it carefully to address the vulnerabilities Breivik exposed before those instructions can be used again.

Something extraordinary, albeit not unexpected, is happening in the Persian Gulf region. The United States, lacking a coherent strategy to deal with Iran and too distracted to develop one, is struggling to navigate Iraq’s fractious political landscape in search of a deal that would allow Washington to keep a meaningful military presence in the country beyond the end-of-2011 deadline stipulated by the current Status of Forces Agreement. At the same time, Saudi Arabia, dubious of U.S. capabilities and intentions toward Iran, appears to be inching reluctantly toward an accommodation with its Persian adversary.

Iran clearly stands to gain from this dynamic in the short term as it seeks to reshape the balance of power in the world’s most active energy arteries. But Iranian power is neither deep nor absolute. Instead, Tehran finds itself racing against a timetable that hinges not only on the U.S. ability to shift its attention from its ongoing wars in the Middle East but also on Turkey’s ability to grow into its historic regional role.

The Iranian Position

Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said something last week that caught our attention. Speaking at Iran’s first Strategic Naval Conference in Tehran on July 13, Vahidi said the United States is “making endeavors to drive a wedge between regional countries with the aim of preventing the establishment of an indigenized security arrangement in the region, but those attempts are rooted in misanalyses and will not succeed.” The effect Vahidi spoke of refers to the Iranian redefinition of Persian Gulf power dynamics, one that in Iran’s ideal world ultimately would transform the local political, business, military and religious affairs of the Gulf states to favor the Shia and their patrons in Iran.

From Iran’s point of view, this is a natural evolution, and one worth waiting centuries for. It would see power concentrated among the Shia in Mesopotamia, eastern Arabia and the Levant at the expense of the Sunnis who have dominated this land since the 16th century, when the Safavid Empire lost Iraq to the Ottomans. Ironically, Iran owes its thanks for this historic opportunity to its two main adversaries — the Wahhabi Sunnis of al Qaeda who carried out the 9/11 attacks and the “Great Satan” that brought down Saddam Hussein. Should Iran succeed in filling a major power void in Iraq, a country that touches six Middle Eastern powers and demographically favors the Shia, Iran would theoretically have its western flank secured as well as an oil-rich outlet with which to further project its influence.

So far, Iran’s plan is on track. Unless the United States permanently can station substantial military forces in the region, Iran replaces the United States as the most powerful military force in the Persian Gulf region. In particular, Iran has the military ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz and has a clandestine network of operatives spread across the region. Through its deep penetration of the Iraqi government, Iran is also in the best position to influence Iraqi decision-making. Washington’s obvious struggle in trying to negotiate an extension of the U.S. deployment in Iraq is perhaps one of the clearest illustrations of Iranian resolve to secure its western flank. The Iranian nuclear issue, as we have long argued, is largely a sideshow; a nuclear deterrent, if actually achieved, would certainly enhance Iranian security, but the most immediate imperative for Iran is to consolidate its position in Iraq. And as this weekend’s Iranian incursion into northern Iraq — ostensibly to fight Kurdish militants — shows, Iran is willing to make measured, periodic shows of force to convey that message.

While Iran already is well on its way to accomplishing its goals in Iraq, it needs two other key pieces to complete Tehran’s picture of a regional “indigenized security arrangement” that Vahidi spoke of. The first is an understanding with its main military challenger in the region, the United States. Such an understanding would entail everything from ensuring Iraqi Sunni military impotence to expanding Iranian energy rights beyond its borders to placing limits on U.S. military activity in the region, all in return for the guaranteed flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and an Iranian pledge to stay clear of Saudi oil fields.

The second piece is an understanding with its main regional adversary, Saudi Arabia. Iran’s reshaping of Persian Gulf politics entails convincing its Sunni neighbors that resisting Iran is not worth the cost, especially when the United States does not seem to have the time or the resources to come to their aid at present. No matter how much money the Saudis throw at Western defense contractors, any military threat by the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council states against Iran will be hollow without an active U.S. military commitment. Iran’s goal, therefore, is to coerce the major Sunni powers into recognizing an expanded Iranian sphere of influence at a time when U.S. security guarantees in the region are starting to erode.

Of course, there is always a gap between intent and capability, especially in the Iranian case. Both negotiating tracks are charged with distrust, and meaningful progress is by no means guaranteed. That said, a number of signals have surfaced in recent weeks leading us to examine the potential for a Saudi-Iranian accommodation, however brief that may be.

The Saudi Position

Not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia is greatly unnerved by the political evolution in Iraq. The Saudis increasingly will rely on regional powers such as Turkey in trying to maintain a Sunni bulwark against Iran in Iraq, but Riyadh has largely resigned itself to the idea that Iraq, for now, is in Tehran’s hands. This is an uncomfortable reality for the Saudi royals to cope with, but what is amplifying Saudi Arabia’s concerns in the region right now — and apparently nudging Riyadh toward the negotiating table with Tehran — is the current situation in Bahrain.

When Shiite-led protests erupted in Bahrain in the spring, we did not view the demonstrations simply as a natural outgrowth of the so-called Arab Spring. There were certainly overlapping factors, but there was little hiding the fact that Iran had seized an opportunity to pose a nightmare scenario for the Saudi royals: an Iranian-backed Shiite uprising spreading from the isles of Bahrain to the Shiite-concentrated, oil-rich Eastern Province of the Saudi kingdom.

This explains Saudi Arabia’s hasty response to the Bahraini unrest, during which it led a rare military intervention of GCC forces in Bahrain at the invitation of Manama to stymie a broader Iranian destabilization campaign. The demonstrations in Bahrain are far calmer now than they were in mid-March at the peak of the crisis, but the concerns of the GCC states have not subsided, and for good reason. Halfhearted attempts at national dialogues aside, Shiite dissent in this part of the region is likely to endure, and this is a reality that Iran can exploit in the long term through its developing covert capabilities.

When we saw in late June that Saudi Arabia was willingly drawing down its military presence in Bahrain at the same time the Iranians were putting out feelers in the local press on an almost daily basis regarding negotiations with Riyadh, we discovered through our sources that the pieces were beginning to fall into place for Saudi-Iranian negotiations. To understand why, we have to examine the Saudi perception of the current U.S. position in the region.

The Saudis cannot fully trust U.S. intentions at this point. The U.S. position in Iraq is tenuous at best, and Riyadh cannot rule out the possibility of Washington entering its own accommodation with Iran and thus leaving Saudi Arabia in the lurch. The United States has three basic interests: to maintain the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, to reduce drastically the number of forces it has devoted to fighting wars with Sunni Islamist militants (who are also by definition at war with Iran), and to try to reconstruct a balance of power in the region that ultimately prevents any one state — whether Arab or Persian — from controlling all the oil in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. position in this regard is flexible, and while developing an understanding with Iran is a trying process, nothing fundamentally binds the United States to Saudi Arabia. If the United States comes to the conclusion that it does not have any good options in the near term for dealing with Iran, a U.S.-Iranian accommodation — however jarring on the surface — is not out of the question.

More immediately, the main point of negotiation between the United States and Iran is the status of U.S. forces in Iraq. Iran would prefer to see U.S. troops completely removed from its western flank, but it has already seen dramatic reductions. The question for both sides moving forward concerns not only the size but also the disposition and orientation of those remaining forces and the question of how rapidly they can be reoriented from a more vulnerable residual advisory and assistance role to a blocking force against Iran. It also must take into account how inherently vulnerable a U.S. military presence in Iraq (not to mention the remaining diplomatic presence) is to Iranian conventional and unconventional means.

The United States may be willing to recognize Iranian demands when it comes to Iran’s designs for the Iraqi government or oil concessions in the Shiite south, but it also wants to ensure that Iran does not try to overstep its bounds and threaten Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth. To reinforce a potential accommodation with Iran, the United States needs to maintain a blocking force against Iran, and this is where the U.S.-Iranian negotiation appears to be deadlocked.

The threat of a double-cross is a real one for all sides to this conflict. Iran cannot trust that the United States, once freed up, will not engage in military action against Iran down the line. The Americans cannot trust that the Iranians will not make a bid for Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth (though the military logistics required for such a move are likely beyond Iran’s capabilities at this point). Finally, the Saudis can’t trust that the United States will defend it in a time of need, especially if the United States is preoccupied with other matters and/or has developed a relationship with Iran that it feels the need to maintain.

When all this is taken together — the threat illustrated by Shiite unrest in Bahrain, the tenuous U.S. position in Iraq and the potential for Washington to strike its own deal with Tehran — Riyadh may be seeing little choice but to search out a truce with Iran, at least until it can get a clearer sense of U.S. intentions. This does not mean that the Saudis would place more trust in a relationship with their historical rivals, the Persians, than they would in a relationship with the United States. Saudi-Iranian animosity is embedded in a deep history of political, religious and economic competition between the two main powerhouses of the Persian Gulf, and it is not going to vanish with the scratch of a pen and a handshake. Instead, this would be a truce driven by short-term, tactical constraints. Such a truce would primarily aim to arrest Iranian covert activity linked to Shiite dissidents in the GCC states, giving the Sunni monarchist regimes a temporary sense of relief while they continue their efforts in trying to build up an Arab resistance to Iran.

But Iran would view such a preliminary understanding as the path toward a broader accommodation, one that would bestow recognition on Iran as the pre-eminent power of the Persian Gulf. Iran can thus be expected to make a variety of demands, all revolving around the idea of Sunni recognition of an expanded Iranian sphere of influence — a very difficult idea for Saudi Arabia to swallow.

This is where things get especially complicated. The United States theoretically might strike an accommodation with Iran, but it would do so only with the knowledge that it could rely on the traditional Sunni heavyweights in the region eventually to rebuild a relative balance of power. If the major Sunni powers reach their own accommodation with Iran, independent of the United States, the U.S. position in the region becomes all the more questionable. What would be the limits of a Saudi-Iranian negotiation? Could the United States ensure, for example, that Saudi Arabia would not bargain away U.S. military installations in a negotiation with Iran?

The Iranian defense minister broached this very idea during his speech last week when he said, “the United States has failed to establish a sustainable security system in the Persian Gulf region, and it is not possible that many vessels will maintain a permanent presence in the region.” Vahidi was seeking to convey to fellow Iranians and trying to convince the Sunni Arab powers that a U.S. security guarantee in the region does not hold as much weight as it used to, and that with Iran now filling the void, the United States may well face a much more difficult time trying to maintain its existing military installations.

The question that naturally arises from Vahidi’s statement is the future status of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain, and whether Iran can instill just the right amount of fear in the minds of its Arab neighbors to shake the foundations of the U.S. military presence in the region. For now, Iran does not appear to have the military clout to threaten the GCC states to the point of forcing them to negotiate away their U.S. security guarantees in exchange for Iranian restraint. This is a threat, however, that Iran will continue to let slip and even one that Saudi Arabia quietly could use to capture Washington’s attention in the hopes of reinforcing U.S. support for the Sunni Arabs against Iran.

The Long-Term Scenario

The current dynamic places Iran in a prime position. Its political investment is paying off in Iraq, and it is positioning itself for negotiation with both the Saudis and the Americans that it hopes will fill out the contours of Iran’s regional sphere of influence. But Iranian power is not that durable in the long term.

Iran is well endowed with energy resources, but it is populous and mountainous. The cost of internal development means that while Iran can get by economically, it cannot prosper like many of its Arab competitors. Add to that a troubling demographic profile in which ethnic Persians constitute only a little more than half of the country’s population and developing challenges to the clerical establishment, and Iran clearly has a great deal going on internally distracting it from opportunities abroad.

The long-term regional picture also is not in Iran’s favor. Unlike Iran, Turkey is an ascendant country with the deep military, economic and political power to influence events in the Middle East — all under a Sunni banner that fits more naturally with the region’s religious landscape. Turkey also is the historical, indigenous check on Persian power. Though it will take time for Turkey to return to this role, strong hints of this dynamic already are coming to light.

In Iraq, Turkish influence can be felt across the political, business, security and cultural spheres as Ankara is working quietly and fastidiously to maintain a Sunni bulwark in the country and steep Turkish influence in the Arab world. And in Syria, though the Alawite regime led by the al Assads is not at a breakpoint, there is no doubt a confrontation building between Iran and Turkey over the future of the Syrian state. Turkey has an interest in building up a viable Sunni political force in Syria that can eventually displace the Alawites, while Iran has every interest in preserving the current regime so as to maintain a strategic foothold in the Levant.

For now, the Turks are not looking for a confrontation with Iran, nor are they necessarily ready for one. Regional forces are accelerating Turkey’s rise, but it will take experience and additional pressures for Turkey to translate rhetoric into action when it comes to meaningful power projection. This is yet another factor that is likely driving the Saudis to enter their own dialogue with Iran at this time.

The Iranians are thus in a race against time. It may be a matter of a few short years before the United States frees up its attention span and is able to re-examine the power dynamics in the Persian Gulf with fresh vigor. Within that time, we would also expect Turkey to come into its own and assume its role as the region’s natural counterbalance to Iran. By then, the Iranians hope to have the structures and agreements in place to hold their ground against the prevailing regional forces, but that level of long-term security depends on Tehran’s ability to cut its way through two very thorny sets of negotiations with the Saudis and the Americans while it still has the upper hand.

Something extraordinary, albeit not unexpected, is happening in the Persian Gulf region. The United States, lacking a coherent strategy to deal with Iran and too distracted to develop one, is struggling to navigate Iraq’s fractious political landscape in search of a deal that would allow Washington to keep a meaningful military presence in the country beyond the end-of-2011 deadline stipulated by the current Status of Forces Agreement. At the same time, Saudi Arabia, dubious of U.S. capabilities and intentions toward Iran, appears to be inching reluctantly toward an accommodation with its Persian adversary.

Iran clearly stands to gain from this dynamic in the short term as it seeks to reshape the balance of power in the world’s most active energy arteries. But Iranian power is neither deep nor absolute. Instead, Tehran finds itself racing against a timetable that hinges not only on the U.S. ability to shift its attention from its ongoing wars in the Middle East but also on Turkey’s ability to grow into its historic regional role.

The Iranian Position

Iranian Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi said something last week that caught our attention. Speaking at Iran’s first Strategic Naval Conference in Tehran on July 13, Vahidi said the United States is “making endeavors to drive a wedge between regional countries with the aim of preventing the establishment of an indigenized security arrangement in the region, but those attempts are rooted in misanalyses and will not succeed.” The effect Vahidi spoke of refers to the Iranian redefinition of Persian Gulf power dynamics, one that in Iran’s ideal world ultimately would transform the local political, business, military and religious affairs of the Gulf states to favor the Shia and their patrons in Iran.

From Iran’s point of view, this is a natural evolution, and one worth waiting centuries for. It would see power concentrated among the Shia in Mesopotamia, eastern Arabia and the Levant at the expense of the Sunnis who have dominated this land since the 16th century, when the Safavid Empire lost Iraq to the Ottomans. Ironically, Iran owes its thanks for this historic opportunity to its two main adversaries — the Wahhabi Sunnis of al Qaeda who carried out the 9/11 attacks and the “Great Satan” that brought down Saddam Hussein. Should Iran succeed in filling a major power void in Iraq, a country that touches six Middle Eastern powers and demographically favors the Shia, Iran would theoretically have its western flank secured as well as an oil-rich outlet with which to further project its influence.

So far, Iran’s plan is on track. Unless the United States permanently can station substantial military forces in the region, Iran replaces the United States as the most powerful military force in the Persian Gulf region. In particular, Iran has the military ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz and has a clandestine network of operatives spread across the region. Through its deep penetration of the Iraqi government, Iran is also in the best position to influence Iraqi decision-making. Washington’s obvious struggle in trying to negotiate an extension of the U.S. deployment in Iraq is perhaps one of the clearest illustrations of Iranian resolve to secure its western flank. The Iranian nuclear issue, as we have long argued, is largely a sideshow; a nuclear deterrent, if actually achieved, would certainly enhance Iranian security, but the most immediate imperative for Iran is to consolidate its position in Iraq. And as this weekend’s Iranian incursion into northern Iraq — ostensibly to fight Kurdish militants — shows, Iran is willing to make measured, periodic shows of force to convey that message.

While Iran already is well on its way to accomplishing its goals in Iraq, it needs two other key pieces to complete Tehran’s picture of a regional “indigenized security arrangement” that Vahidi spoke of. The first is an understanding with its main military challenger in the region, the United States. Such an understanding would entail everything from ensuring Iraqi Sunni military impotence to expanding Iranian energy rights beyond its borders to placing limits on U.S. military activity in the region, all in return for the guaranteed flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and an Iranian pledge to stay clear of Saudi oil fields.

The second piece is an understanding with its main regional adversary, Saudi Arabia. Iran’s reshaping of Persian Gulf politics entails convincing its Sunni neighbors that resisting Iran is not worth the cost, especially when the United States does not seem to have the time or the resources to come to their aid at present. No matter how much money the Saudis throw at Western defense contractors, any military threat by the Saudi-led Gulf Cooperation Council states against Iran will be hollow without an active U.S. military commitment. Iran’s goal, therefore, is to coerce the major Sunni powers into recognizing an expanded Iranian sphere of influence at a time when U.S. security guarantees in the region are starting to erode.

Of course, there is always a gap between intent and capability, especially in the Iranian case. Both negotiating tracks are charged with distrust, and meaningful progress is by no means guaranteed. That said, a number of signals have surfaced in recent weeks leading us to examine the potential for a Saudi-Iranian accommodation, however brief that may be.

The Saudi Position

Not surprisingly, Saudi Arabia is greatly unnerved by the political evolution in Iraq. The Saudis increasingly will rely on regional powers such as Turkey in trying to maintain a Sunni bulwark against Iran in Iraq, but Riyadh has largely resigned itself to the idea that Iraq, for now, is in Tehran’s hands. This is an uncomfortable reality for the Saudi royals to cope with, but what is amplifying Saudi Arabia’s concerns in the region right now — and apparently nudging Riyadh toward the negotiating table with Tehran — is the current situation in Bahrain.

When Shiite-led protests erupted in Bahrain in the spring, we did not view the demonstrations simply as a natural outgrowth of the so-called Arab Spring. There were certainly overlapping factors, but there was little hiding the fact that Iran had seized an opportunity to pose a nightmare scenario for the Saudi royals: an Iranian-backed Shiite uprising spreading from the isles of Bahrain to the Shiite-concentrated, oil-rich Eastern Province of the Saudi kingdom.

This explains Saudi Arabia’s hasty response to the Bahraini unrest, during which it led a rare military intervention of GCC forces in Bahrain at the invitation of Manama to stymie a broader Iranian destabilization campaign. The demonstrations in Bahrain are far calmer now than they were in mid-March at the peak of the crisis, but the concerns of the GCC states have not subsided, and for good reason. Halfhearted attempts at national dialogues aside, Shiite dissent in this part of the region is likely to endure, and this is a reality that Iran can exploit in the long term through its developing covert capabilities.

When we saw in late June that Saudi Arabia was willingly drawing down its military presence in Bahrain at the same time the Iranians were putting out feelers in the local press on an almost daily basis regarding negotiations with Riyadh, we discovered through our sources that the pieces were beginning to fall into place for Saudi-Iranian negotiations. To understand why, we have to examine the Saudi perception of the current U.S. position in the region.

The Saudis cannot fully trust U.S. intentions at this point. The U.S. position in Iraq is tenuous at best, and Riyadh cannot rule out the possibility of Washington entering its own accommodation with Iran and thus leaving Saudi Arabia in the lurch. The United States has three basic interests: to maintain the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, to reduce drastically the number of forces it has devoted to fighting wars with Sunni Islamist militants (who are also by definition at war with Iran), and to try to reconstruct a balance of power in the region that ultimately prevents any one state — whether Arab or Persian — from controlling all the oil in the Persian Gulf. The U.S. position in this regard is flexible, and while developing an understanding with Iran is a trying process, nothing fundamentally binds the United States to Saudi Arabia. If the United States comes to the conclusion that it does not have any good options in the near term for dealing with Iran, a U.S.-Iranian accommodation — however jarring on the surface — is not out of the question.

More immediately, the main point of negotiation between the United States and Iran is the status of U.S. forces in Iraq. Iran would prefer to see U.S. troops completely removed from its western flank, but it has already seen dramatic reductions. The question for both sides moving forward concerns not only the size but also the disposition and orientation of those remaining forces and the question of how rapidly they can be reoriented from a more vulnerable residual advisory and assistance role to a blocking force against Iran. It also must take into account how inherently vulnerable a U.S. military presence in Iraq (not to mention the remaining diplomatic presence) is to Iranian conventional and unconventional means.

The United States may be willing to recognize Iranian demands when it comes to Iran’s designs for the Iraqi government or oil concessions in the Shiite south, but it also wants to ensure that Iran does not try to overstep its bounds and threaten Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth. To reinforce a potential accommodation with Iran, the United States needs to maintain a blocking force against Iran, and this is where the U.S.-Iranian negotiation appears to be deadlocked.

The threat of a double-cross is a real one for all sides to this conflict. Iran cannot trust that the United States, once freed up, will not engage in military action against Iran down the line. The Americans cannot trust that the Iranians will not make a bid for Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth (though the military logistics required for such a move are likely beyond Iran’s capabilities at this point). Finally, the Saudis can’t trust that the United States will defend it in a time of need, especially if the United States is preoccupied with other matters and/or has developed a relationship with Iran that it feels the need to maintain.

When all this is taken together — the threat illustrated by Shiite unrest in Bahrain, the tenuous U.S. position in Iraq and the potential for Washington to strike its own deal with Tehran — Riyadh may be seeing little choice but to search out a truce with Iran, at least until it can get a clearer sense of U.S. intentions. This does not mean that the Saudis would place more trust in a relationship with their historical rivals, the Persians, than they would in a relationship with the United States. Saudi-Iranian animosity is embedded in a deep history of political, religious and economic competition between the two main powerhouses of the Persian Gulf, and it is not going to vanish with the scratch of a pen and a handshake. Instead, this would be a truce driven by short-term, tactical constraints. Such a truce would primarily aim to arrest Iranian covert activity linked to Shiite dissidents in the GCC states, giving the Sunni monarchist regimes a temporary sense of relief while they continue their efforts in trying to build up an Arab resistance to Iran.

But Iran would view such a preliminary understanding as the path toward a broader accommodation, one that would bestow recognition on Iran as the pre-eminent power of the Persian Gulf. Iran can thus be expected to make a variety of demands, all revolving around the idea of Sunni recognition of an expanded Iranian sphere of influence — a very difficult idea for Saudi Arabia to swallow.

This is where things get especially complicated. The United States theoretically might strike an accommodation with Iran, but it would do so only with the knowledge that it could rely on the traditional Sunni heavyweights in the region eventually to rebuild a relative balance of power. If the major Sunni powers reach their own accommodation with Iran, independent of the United States, the U.S. position in the region becomes all the more questionable. What would be the limits of a Saudi-Iranian negotiation? Could the United States ensure, for example, that Saudi Arabia would not bargain away U.S. military installations in a negotiation with Iran?

The Iranian defense minister broached this very idea during his speech last week when he said, “the United States has failed to establish a sustainable security system in the Persian Gulf region, and it is not possible that many vessels will maintain a permanent presence in the region.” Vahidi was seeking to convey to fellow Iranians and trying to convince the Sunni Arab powers that a U.S. security guarantee in the region does not hold as much weight as it used to, and that with Iran now filling the void, the United States may well face a much more difficult time trying to maintain its existing military installations.

The question that naturally arises from Vahidi’s statement is the future status of the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet in Bahrain, and whether Iran can instill just the right amount of fear in the minds of its Arab neighbors to shake the foundations of the U.S. military presence in the region. For now, Iran does not appear to have the military clout to threaten the GCC states to the point of forcing them to negotiate away their U.S. security guarantees in exchange for Iranian restraint. This is a threat, however, that Iran will continue to let slip and even one that Saudi Arabia quietly could use to capture Washington’s attention in the hopes of reinforcing U.S. support for the Sunni Arabs against Iran.

The Long-Term Scenario

The current dynamic places Iran in a prime position. Its political investment is paying off in Iraq, and it is positioning itself for negotiation with both the Saudis and the Americans that it hopes will fill out the contours of Iran’s regional sphere of influence. But Iranian power is not that durable in the long term.

Iran is well endowed with energy resources, but it is populous and mountainous. The cost of internal development means that while Iran can get by economically, it cannot prosper like many of its Arab competitors. Add to that a troubling demographic profile in which ethnic Persians constitute only a little more than half of the country’s population and developing challenges to the clerical establishment, and Iran clearly has a great deal going on internally distracting it from opportunities abroad.

The long-term regional picture also is not in Iran’s favor. Unlike Iran, Turkey is an ascendant country with the deep military, economic and political power to influence events in the Middle East — all under a Sunni banner that fits more naturally with the region’s religious landscape. Turkey also is the historical, indigenous check on Persian power. Though it will take time for Turkey to return to this role, strong hints of this dynamic already are coming to light.

In Iraq, Turkish influence can be felt across the political, business, security and cultural spheres as Ankara is working quietly and fastidiously to maintain a Sunni bulwark in the country and steep Turkish influence in the Arab world. And in Syria, though the Alawite regime led by the al Assads is not at a breakpoint, there is no doubt a confrontation building between Iran and Turkey over the future of the Syrian state. Turkey has an interest in building up a viable Sunni political force in Syria that can eventually displace the Alawites, while Iran has every interest in preserving the current regime so as to maintain a strategic foothold in the Levant.

For now, the Turks are not looking for a confrontation with Iran, nor are they necessarily ready for one. Regional forces are accelerating Turkey’s rise, but it will take experience and additional pressures for Turkey to translate rhetoric into action when it comes to meaningful power projection. This is yet another factor that is likely driving the Saudis to enter their own dialogue with Iran at this time.

The Iranians are thus in a race against time. It may be a matter of a few short years before the United States frees up its attention span and is able to re-examine the power dynamics in the Persian Gulf with fresh vigor. Within that time, we would also expect Turkey to come into its own and assume its role as the region’s natural counterbalance to Iran. By then, the Iranians hope to have the structures and agreements in place to hold their ground against the prevailing regional forces, but that level of long-term security depends on Tehran’s ability to cut its way through two very thorny sets of negotiations with the Saudis and the Americans while it still has the upper hand.

Three explosions were reported in Mumbai on July 13 in the crowded Opera House, Zaveri Bazaar and Dadar areas of the city. The explosions began around 7:10 p.m. and occurred within minutes of each other. There are reports that a fourth bomb, likely at the Roxy Theater, failed to detonate. Current casualty estimates indicate five people have been killed and 100 injured thus far.

This marks the first major attack in India since the November 2008 Mumbai attacks. Though the magnitude of these explosions has yet to be determined, this attack does not appear to be as sophisticated as the 2008 attacks, which involved an assault team consisting of a number of militants that coordinated 10 shooting and bombing attacks across the city. The July 13 attack, by contrast, appears to have not involved suicide attackers but consisted of explosives placed in a taxi, a meter box and locations where they could be remotely detonated. This tactic is much more in line with those used by more amateurish groups, such the Indian Mujahideen, who have targeted crowded urban areas before.

Nonetheless, the attack comes at a critical juncture in U.S.-Pakistani relations as the United States is trying to accelerate a withdrawal of its military forces in Afghanistan. The 2008 Mumbai attacks revealed the extent to which traditional Pakistan-based Islamist militant groups, such as elements from the defunct Lashkar-e-Taiba, had collaborated with transnational jihadist elements like al Qaeda in trying to instigate a crisis between Islamabad and New Delhi. Such a crisis would complicate U.S.-Pakistani dealings on Afghanistan, potentially serving the interests of al Qaeda as well as factions within Pakistan trying to derail a negotiation between the United States and Pakistan.

Three explosions were reported in Mumbai on July 13 in the crowded Opera House, Zaveri Bazaar and Dadar areas of the city. The explosions began around 7:10 p.m. and occurred within minutes of each other. There are reports that a fourth bomb, likely at the Roxy Theater, failed to detonate. Current casualty estimates indicate five people have been killed and 100 injured thus far.

This marks the first major attack in India since the November 2008 Mumbai attacks. Though the magnitude of these explosions has yet to be determined, this attack does not appear to be as sophisticated as the 2008 attacks, which involved an assault team consisting of a number of militants that coordinated 10 shooting and bombing attacks across the city. The July 13 attack, by contrast, appears to have not involved suicide attackers but consisted of explosives placed in a taxi, a meter box and locations where they could be remotely detonated. This tactic is much more in line with those used by more amateurish groups, such the Indian Mujahideen, who have targeted crowded urban areas before.

Nonetheless, the attack comes at a critical juncture in U.S.-Pakistani relations as the United States is trying to accelerate a withdrawal of its military forces in Afghanistan. The 2008 Mumbai attacks revealed the extent to which traditional Pakistan-based Islamist militant groups, such as elements from the defunct Lashkar-e-Taiba, had collaborated with transnational jihadist elements like al Qaeda in trying to instigate a crisis between Islamabad and New Delhi. Such a crisis would complicate U.S.-Pakistani dealings on Afghanistan, potentially serving the interests of al Qaeda as well as factions within Pakistan trying to derail a negotiation between the United States and Pakistan.

The war in Libya has been under way for months, without any indication of when it might end. Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s faction has been stronger and more cohesive than imagined and his enemies weaker and more divided. This is not unusual. There is frequently a perception that dictators are widely hated and that their power will collapse when challenged. That is certainly true at times, but often the power of a dictator is rooted in the broad support of an ideological faction, an ethnic group or simply those who benefit from the regime. As a result, naive assumptions of rapid regime change are quite often replaced by the reality of protracted conflict.

This has been a characteristic of what we have called “humanitarian wars,” those undertaken to remove a repressive regime and replace it with one that is more representative. Defeating a tyrant is not always easy. Gadhafi did not manage to rule Libya for 42 years without some substantial support.

Nevertheless, one would not expect that, faced with opposition from a substantial anti-regime faction in Libya as well as NATO and many other countries, Gadhafi would retain control of a substantial part of both the country and the army. Yet when we look at the situation carefully, it should be expected.

The path many expected in Libya was that the support around Gadhafi would deteriorate over time when faced with overwhelming force, with substantial defections of senior leaders and the disintegration of his military as commanders either went over to the other side en masse, taking their troops with them, or simply left the country, leaving their troops leaderless. As the deterioration in power occurred, Gadhafi — or at least those immediately around Gadhafi — would enter into negotiations designed for an exit. That hasn’t happened, and certainly not to the degree that it has ended Gadhafi’s ability to resist. Indeed, while NATO airpower might be able to block an attack to the east, the airstrikes must continue because it appears that Gadhafi has retained a great deal of his power.

The International Criminal Court

One of the roots of this phenomenon is the existence of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which became operational in 2002 in The Hague, Netherlands. The ICC has jurisdiction, under U.N. mandate, to prosecute individuals who have committed war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity. Its jurisdiction is limited to those places where recognized governments are unwilling or unable to carry out their own judicial processes. The ICC can exercise jurisdiction if the case is referred to the ICC prosecutor by an ICC state party signatory or the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) or if the prosecutor initiates the investigation him or herself.

The current structure of international law, particularly the existence of the ICC and its rules, has an unintended consequence. Rather than serving as a tool for removing war criminals from power, it tends to enhance their power and remove incentives for capitulation or a negotiated exit. In Libya’s case, Gadhafi’s indictment was referred to the ICC by the UNSC, and he was formally indicted in late June. The existence of the ICC, and the clause that says that it has jurisdiction where signatory governments are unable or unwilling to carry out their own prosecutions, creates an especially interesting dilemma for Gadhafi and the intervening powers.

Consider the case of Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia. Milosevic, like Gadhafi, was indicted during a NATO intervention against his country. His indictment was handed down a month and a half into the air campaign, in May 1999, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a court that was to be the mold, to a large extent, for the ICC. After the intervention, Milosevic clung to power until 2001, cracking down on the opposition and dissident groups whom he painted as traitors during the NATO air campaign. Milosevic still had supporters in Serbia, and as long as he refused to cede his authority, he had enough loyalists in the government who refused to prosecute him in the interest of maintaining stability.

One of the reasons Milosevic refused to cede power was the very real fear that regime change in Serbia would result in a one-way ticket to The Hague. This is exactly what happened. A few months after Serbia’s October 2000 anti-Milosevic revolution, the new and nominally pro-Western government issued an arrest warrant for Milosevic, finally sending him to The Hague in June 2001 with a strong push from NATO. The Milosevic case illustrates the inherent risk an indicted leader will face when the government falls in the hands of the opposition.

The case of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, is also instructive in showing the low level of trust leaders like Gadhafi may place in assurances from the West regarding non-prosecution. Serbian authorities arrested Karadzic in July 2008 after being on the run for 12 years. He claimed in court proceedings at the ICTY that he was given assurances by the United States — denied by Washington — that if he were to step down and make way for a peace process in Bosnia, he would not be prosecuted. This obviously did not happen. In other words, the likely political arrangements that were arrived at to initiate a peace process in Bosnia-Herzegovina were wholly disregarded by the ICTY.

Gadhafi is obviously aware of the Balkans precedents. He has no motivation to capitulate, since that could result in him being sent to The Hague, nor is there anyone that he can deal with who can hold the ICC in abeyance. In most criminal proceedings, a plea bargain is possible, but this is not simply a matter of a plea bargain.

Regardless of what a country’s leader has done, he or she holds political power, and the transfer of that power is inherently a political process. What the ICC has done since 2002 — and the ICTY to an extent before that — is to make the political process moot by making amnesty impossible. It is not clear if any authority exists to offer and honor an amnesty. However, the ICC is a product of the United Nations, and the authority of the United Nations lies in the UNSC. Though there is no clear precedent, there is an implicit assumption that the UNSC would be the entity to offer a negotiated amnesty with a unanimous vote. In other words, the political process is transferred from Libya to the UNSC, where any number of countries might choose to abort the process for their own political ends. So the domestic political process is trumped by The Hague’s legal process, which can only be trumped by the UNSC’s political process. A potentially simple end to a civil war escalates to global politics.

And this is not simply a matter of a leader’s unwillingness to capitulate or negotiate. It aborts the process that undermines men like Gadhafi. Without a doubt, most of the men who have surrounded him for years are guilty of serious war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is difficult to imagine anyone around Gadhafi whose hands are clean, or who would have been selected by Gadhafi if their hands weren’t capable of being soiled. Each of them is liable for prosecution by the ICC, particularly the senior leadership of the military; the ICC has bound their fate to that of Gadhafi, actually increasing their loyalty to him. Just as Gadhafi has nothing to lose by continued resistance, neither do they. The ICC has forged the foundation of Gadhafi’s survival and bitter resistance.

It is not a question only of the ICC. Recall the case of Augusto Pinochet, who staged a coup in Chile against Salvador Allende and presided over a brutal dictatorship. His support was not insubstantial in Chile, and he left power in a carefully negotiated political process. A Spanish magistrate, a minor figure in the Spanish legal system, claimed jurisdiction over Pinochet’s crimes in Chile and demanded that he be extradited from Britain, where Pinochet was visiting, and the extradition was granted. Today the ICC is not the only authority that can claim jurisdiction in such cases, but under current international law, nations have lost the authority to negotiate solutions to the problem of transferring power from dictators to representative democracies. Moreover, they have ceded that authority not only to the ICC but also to any court that wants to claim jurisdiction.

Apply this to South Africa. An extended struggle took place between two communities. The apartheid regime committed crimes under international law. In due course, a negotiated political process arranged a transfer of power. Part of the agreement was that a non-judicial truth commission would review events but that prosecutions would be severely limited. If that transfer of power were occurring today, with the ICC in place and “Spanish magistrates” loose, how likely would it be that the white government would be willing to make the political concessions needed to transfer power? Would an agreement among the South Africans have trumped the jurisdiction of the ICC or another forum? Without the absolute certainty of amnesty, would the white leadership have capitulated?

The desire for justice is understandable, as is the need for an independent judiciary. But a judiciary that is impervious to political realities can create catastrophes in the name of justice. In both the Serbia and Libya cases, ICC indictments were used by Western countries in the midst of bombing campaigns to legitimize their humanitarian intervention. The problem is that the indictments left little room for negotiated settlements. The desire to punish the wicked is natural. But as in all things political — though not judicial — the price of justice must also be considered. If it means that thousands must die because the need to punish the guilty is an absolute, is that justice? Just as important, does it serve to alleviate or exacerbate human suffering?

Judicial Absolutism

Consider a hypothetical. Assume that in the summer of 1944, Adolph Hitler had offered to capitulate to the allies if they would grant him amnesty. Giving Hitler amnesty would have been monstrous, but at the same time, it would have saved a year of war and a year of the holocaust. From a personal point of view, the summer of 1944 was when deportation of Hungarian Jews was at its height. Most of my family died that fall and winter. Would leaving Hitler alive been worth it to my family and millions of others on all sides?

The Nuremberg precedent makes the case for punishment. But applied rigorously, it undermines the case for political solutions. In the case of tyrannies, it means negotiating the safety of tyrants in return for their abdication. The abdication brings an end to war and allows people who would have died to continue to live their lives.

The theory behind Nuremberg and the ICC is that the threat of punishment will deter tyrants. Men like Gadhafi, Milosevic, Karadzic and Hitler grow accustomed to living with death long before they take power. And the very act of seizing that power involves two things: an indifference to common opinion about them, particularly outside their countries, and a willingness to take risks and then crush those who might take risks against them. Such leaders constitute an odd, paradoxical category of men who will risk everything for power, and then guard their lives and power with everything. It is hard to frighten them, and harder still to have them abandon power without guarantees.

The result is that wars against them take a long time and kill a lot of people, and they are singularly indifferent to the suffering they cause. Threatening them with a trial simply closes off political options to end the war. It also strips countries of their sovereign right to craft non-judicial, political solutions to their national problems. The dictator and his followers have no reason to negotiate and no reason to capitulate. They are forced to continue a war that could have ended earlier and allowed those who would have died the opportunity to live.

There is something I call judicial absolutism in the way the ICC works. It begins with the idea that the law demands absolute respect and that there are crimes that are so extraordinary that no forgiveness is possible. This concept is wrapped in an ineluctable judicial process that, by design, cannot be restrained and is independent of any moderating principles.

It is not the criminals the ICC is trying who are the issue. It is the next criminal on the docket. Having seen an older dictator at The Hague earlier negotiate his own exit, and see that negotiation fall through, why would a new dictator negotiate a deal? How can Gadhafi contemplate a negotiation that would leave him without power in Libya, when the Milosevic case clearly illuminates his potential fate at the hands of a rebel-led Libya? Judicial absolutism assumes that the moral absolute is the due process of law. A more humane moral absolute is to remove the tyrant and give power to the nation with the fewest deaths possible in the process.

The problem in Libya is that no one knows how to go from judicial absolutism to a more subtle and humane understanding of the problem. Oddly, it is the judicial absolutists who regard themselves as committed to humanitarianism. In a world filled with tyrants, this is not a minor misconception.

The war in Libya has been under way for months, without any indication of when it might end. Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s faction has been stronger and more cohesive than imagined and his enemies weaker and more divided. This is not unusual. There is frequently a perception that dictators are widely hated and that their power will collapse when challenged. That is certainly true at times, but often the power of a dictator is rooted in the broad support of an ideological faction, an ethnic group or simply those who benefit from the regime. As a result, naive assumptions of rapid regime change are quite often replaced by the reality of protracted conflict.

This has been a characteristic of what we have called “humanitarian wars,” those undertaken to remove a repressive regime and replace it with one that is more representative. Defeating a tyrant is not always easy. Gadhafi did not manage to rule Libya for 42 years without some substantial support.

Nevertheless, one would not expect that, faced with opposition from a substantial anti-regime faction in Libya as well as NATO and many other countries, Gadhafi would retain control of a substantial part of both the country and the army. Yet when we look at the situation carefully, it should be expected.

The path many expected in Libya was that the support around Gadhafi would deteriorate over time when faced with overwhelming force, with substantial defections of senior leaders and the disintegration of his military as commanders either went over to the other side en masse, taking their troops with them, or simply left the country, leaving their troops leaderless. As the deterioration in power occurred, Gadhafi — or at least those immediately around Gadhafi — would enter into negotiations designed for an exit. That hasn’t happened, and certainly not to the degree that it has ended Gadhafi’s ability to resist. Indeed, while NATO airpower might be able to block an attack to the east, the airstrikes must continue because it appears that Gadhafi has retained a great deal of his power.

The International Criminal Court

One of the roots of this phenomenon is the existence of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which became operational in 2002 in The Hague, Netherlands. The ICC has jurisdiction, under U.N. mandate, to prosecute individuals who have committed war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity. Its jurisdiction is limited to those places where recognized governments are unwilling or unable to carry out their own judicial processes. The ICC can exercise jurisdiction if the case is referred to the ICC prosecutor by an ICC state party signatory or the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) or if the prosecutor initiates the investigation him or herself.

The current structure of international law, particularly the existence of the ICC and its rules, has an unintended consequence. Rather than serving as a tool for removing war criminals from power, it tends to enhance their power and remove incentives for capitulation or a negotiated exit. In Libya’s case, Gadhafi’s indictment was referred to the ICC by the UNSC, and he was formally indicted in late June. The existence of the ICC, and the clause that says that it has jurisdiction where signatory governments are unable or unwilling to carry out their own prosecutions, creates an especially interesting dilemma for Gadhafi and the intervening powers.

Consider the case of Slobodan Milosevic of Yugoslavia. Milosevic, like Gadhafi, was indicted during a NATO intervention against his country. His indictment was handed down a month and a half into the air campaign, in May 1999, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), a court that was to be the mold, to a large extent, for the ICC. After the intervention, Milosevic clung to power until 2001, cracking down on the opposition and dissident groups whom he painted as traitors during the NATO air campaign. Milosevic still had supporters in Serbia, and as long as he refused to cede his authority, he had enough loyalists in the government who refused to prosecute him in the interest of maintaining stability.

One of the reasons Milosevic refused to cede power was the very real fear that regime change in Serbia would result in a one-way ticket to The Hague. This is exactly what happened. A few months after Serbia’s October 2000 anti-Milosevic revolution, the new and nominally pro-Western government issued an arrest warrant for Milosevic, finally sending him to The Hague in June 2001 with a strong push from NATO. The Milosevic case illustrates the inherent risk an indicted leader will face when the government falls in the hands of the opposition.

The case of Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb political leader, is also instructive in showing the low level of trust leaders like Gadhafi may place in assurances from the West regarding non-prosecution. Serbian authorities arrested Karadzic in July 2008 after being on the run for 12 years. He claimed in court proceedings at the ICTY that he was given assurances by the United States — denied by Washington — that if he were to step down and make way for a peace process in Bosnia, he would not be prosecuted. This obviously did not happen. In other words, the likely political arrangements that were arrived at to initiate a peace process in Bosnia-Herzegovina were wholly disregarded by the ICTY.

Gadhafi is obviously aware of the Balkans precedents. He has no motivation to capitulate, since that could result in him being sent to The Hague, nor is there anyone that he can deal with who can hold the ICC in abeyance. In most criminal proceedings, a plea bargain is possible, but this is not simply a matter of a plea bargain.

Regardless of what a country’s leader has done, he or she holds political power, and the transfer of that power is inherently a political process. What the ICC has done since 2002 — and the ICTY to an extent before that — is to make the political process moot by making amnesty impossible. It is not clear if any authority exists to offer and honor an amnesty. However, the ICC is a product of the United Nations, and the authority of the United Nations lies in the UNSC. Though there is no clear precedent, there is an implicit assumption that the UNSC would be the entity to offer a negotiated amnesty with a unanimous vote. In other words, the political process is transferred from Libya to the UNSC, where any number of countries might choose to abort the process for their own political ends. So the domestic political process is trumped by The Hague’s legal process, which can only be trumped by the UNSC’s political process. A potentially simple end to a civil war escalates to global politics.

And this is not simply a matter of a leader’s unwillingness to capitulate or negotiate. It aborts the process that undermines men like Gadhafi. Without a doubt, most of the men who have surrounded him for years are guilty of serious war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is difficult to imagine anyone around Gadhafi whose hands are clean, or who would have been selected by Gadhafi if their hands weren’t capable of being soiled. Each of them is liable for prosecution by the ICC, particularly the senior leadership of the military; the ICC has bound their fate to that of Gadhafi, actually increasing their loyalty to him. Just as Gadhafi has nothing to lose by continued resistance, neither do they. The ICC has forged the foundation of Gadhafi’s survival and bitter resistance.

It is not a question only of the ICC. Recall the case of Augusto Pinochet, who staged a coup in Chile against Salvador Allende and presided over a brutal dictatorship. His support was not insubstantial in Chile, and he left power in a carefully negotiated political process. A Spanish magistrate, a minor figure in the Spanish legal system, claimed jurisdiction over Pinochet’s crimes in Chile and demanded that he be extradited from Britain, where Pinochet was visiting, and the extradition was granted. Today the ICC is not the only authority that can claim jurisdiction in such cases, but under current international law, nations have lost the authority to negotiate solutions to the problem of transferring power from dictators to representative democracies. Moreover, they have ceded that authority not only to the ICC but also to any court that wants to claim jurisdiction.

Apply this to South Africa. An extended struggle took place between two communities. The apartheid regime committed crimes under international law. In due course, a negotiated political process arranged a transfer of power. Part of the agreement was that a non-judicial truth commission would review events but that prosecutions would be severely limited. If that transfer of power were occurring today, with the ICC in place and “Spanish magistrates” loose, how likely would it be that the white government would be willing to make the political concessions needed to transfer power? Would an agreement among the South Africans have trumped the jurisdiction of the ICC or another forum? Without the absolute certainty of amnesty, would the white leadership have capitulated?

The desire for justice is understandable, as is the need for an independent judiciary. But a judiciary that is impervious to political realities can create catastrophes in the name of justice. In both the Serbia and Libya cases, ICC indictments were used by Western countries in the midst of bombing campaigns to legitimize their humanitarian intervention. The problem is that the indictments left little room for negotiated settlements. The desire to punish the wicked is natural. But as in all things political — though not judicial — the price of justice must also be considered. If it means that thousands must die because the need to punish the guilty is an absolute, is that justice? Just as important, does it serve to alleviate or exacerbate human suffering?

Judicial Absolutism

Consider a hypothetical. Assume that in the summer of 1944, Adolph Hitler had offered to capitulate to the allies if they would grant him amnesty. Giving Hitler amnesty would have been monstrous, but at the same time, it would have saved a year of war and a year of the holocaust. From a personal point of view, the summer of 1944 was when deportation of Hungarian Jews was at its height. Most of my family died that fall and winter. Would leaving Hitler alive been worth it to my family and millions of others on all sides?

The Nuremberg precedent makes the case for punishment. But applied rigorously, it undermines the case for political solutions. In the case of tyrannies, it means negotiating the safety of tyrants in return for their abdication. The abdication brings an end to war and allows people who would have died to continue to live their lives.

The theory behind Nuremberg and the ICC is that the threat of punishment will deter tyrants. Men like Gadhafi, Milosevic, Karadzic and Hitler grow accustomed to living with death long before they take power. And the very act of seizing that power involves two things: an indifference to common opinion about them, particularly outside their countries, and a willingness to take risks and then crush those who might take risks against them. Such leaders constitute an odd, paradoxical category of men who will risk everything for power, and then guard their lives and power with everything. It is hard to frighten them, and harder still to have them abandon power without guarantees.

The result is that wars against them take a long time and kill a lot of people, and they are singularly indifferent to the suffering they cause. Threatening them with a trial simply closes off political options to end the war. It also strips countries of their sovereign right to craft non-judicial, political solutions to their national problems. The dictator and his followers have no reason to negotiate and no reason to capitulate. They are forced to continue a war that could have ended earlier and allowed those who would have died the opportunity to live.

There is something I call judicial absolutism in the way the ICC works. It begins with the idea that the law demands absolute respect and that there are crimes that are so extraordinary that no forgiveness is possible. This concept is wrapped in an ineluctable judicial process that, by design, cannot be restrained and is independent of any moderating principles.

It is not the criminals the ICC is trying who are the issue. It is the next criminal on the docket. Having seen an older dictator at The Hague earlier negotiate his own exit, and see that negotiation fall through, why would a new dictator negotiate a deal? How can Gadhafi contemplate a negotiation that would leave him without power in Libya, when the Milosevic case clearly illuminates his potential fate at the hands of a rebel-led Libya? Judicial absolutism assumes that the moral absolute is the due process of law. A more humane moral absolute is to remove the tyrant and give power to the nation with the fewest deaths possible in the process.

The problem in Libya is that no one knows how to go from judicial absolutism to a more subtle and humane understanding of the problem. Oddly, it is the judicial absolutists who regard themselves as committed to humanitarianism. In a world filled with tyrants, this is not a minor misconception.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s younger half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was killed in Kandahar on July 12 during a gathering in his house, Kandahar Governor Tooryali Wesa confirmed.

Initial reports remain sketchy but it is believed that the Afghan leader’s brother was killed by multiple gunshots to the head and chest with a AK-47 fired by Sardar Mohammad, a former bodyguard to Karzai’s older brother Qayyoum. Unconfirmed reports say that the assassin was immediately killed and Ahmad Wali’s body has been taken to Mirwais Civil Hospital. One of the two official spokesmen for the Taliban, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, told the German News Agency Deutsche Presse Agentur that Ahmad Wali Karzai was killed by a Taliban sleeper agent.

This particular Karzai brother has escaped assassination attempts in the past. His death comes as a major blow to President Karzai who depended on Ahmed Wali for creating a social support base for the president in Kandahar province, the homeland of the Taliban. Ahmed Wali’s official position was head of the legislative council in Kandahar, but he wielded a disproportionate amount of influence in the province and the country at large, claiming close relations with a wide array of players including the CIA, local Taliban elements and even drug lords. Despite his close dealings with U.S. intelligence, American officials openly criticized Ahmed Wali in 2009, accusing him of corruption and being involved in the drug trade.

For President Karzai, the death of Ahmed Wali couldn’t have come at a worse time. The senior Karzai was already confronting the fact that U.S.-NATO forces have begun working toward a withdrawal from the country and have engaged in talks with the Taliban as well as neighboring Pakistan. The loss of his influential sibling further weakens President Karzai’s position in the south of Afghanistan and complicates efforts to try and reach a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s younger half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was killed in Kandahar on July 12 during a gathering in his house, Kandahar Governor Tooryali Wesa confirmed.

Initial reports remain sketchy but it is believed that the Afghan leader’s brother was killed by multiple gunshots to the head and chest with a AK-47 fired by Sardar Mohammad, a former bodyguard to Karzai’s older brother Qayyoum. Unconfirmed reports say that the assassin was immediately killed and Ahmad Wali’s body has been taken to Mirwais Civil Hospital. One of the two official spokesmen for the Taliban, Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, told the German News Agency Deutsche Presse Agentur that Ahmad Wali Karzai was killed by a Taliban sleeper agent.

This particular Karzai brother has escaped assassination attempts in the past. His death comes as a major blow to President Karzai who depended on Ahmed Wali for creating a social support base for the president in Kandahar province, the homeland of the Taliban. Ahmed Wali’s official position was head of the legislative council in Kandahar, but he wielded a disproportionate amount of influence in the province and the country at large, claiming close relations with a wide array of players including the CIA, local Taliban elements and even drug lords. Despite his close dealings with U.S. intelligence, American officials openly criticized Ahmed Wali in 2009, accusing him of corruption and being involved in the drug trade.

For President Karzai, the death of Ahmed Wali couldn’t have come at a worse time. The senior Karzai was already confronting the fact that U.S.-NATO forces have begun working toward a withdrawal from the country and have engaged in talks with the Taliban as well as neighboring Pakistan. The loss of his influential sibling further weakens President Karzai’s position in the south of Afghanistan and complicates efforts to try and reach a negotiated settlement with the Taliban.

At about 10 p.m. on June 28, a group of heavily armed militants attacked the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan. According to government and media reports, the attack team consisted of eight or nine militants who were reportedly wearing suicide vests in addition to carrying other weapons. At least three of the attackers detonated their vests during the drawn-out fight. Afghan security forces, assisted by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), needed some eight hours to clear the hotel of attackers. One group of militants even worked their way up to the roof of the hotel, where they fired several rocket-propelled grenades.

The attack resulted in the deaths of 12 people, as well as all the militants. The Taliban had a different take on the attack, posting a series of statements on their website claiming responsibility and saying the assault was conducted by eight operatives who killed 90 people and that the real news of their success was being suppressed. (Initially, the Taliban claimed to have killed 200 in the attack but reduced the toll to 90 in later statements.)

NATO and ISAF spokesmen have noted their belief that, due to the location and use of suicide bombers in the attack, the Haqqani network was involved in the operation. On the evening of June 29, a NATO airstrike killed Ismail Jan, a senior Haqqani leader in Afghanistan who NATO claims was involved in planning the hotel attack.

When viewed in the context of other recent attacks in Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan, the attack on the Intercontinental Hotel was not all that spectacular. It certainly did not kill the 90 people the Taliban claim, although it does have a number of interesting security implications.

Past Attacks

Militants in Afghanistan have conducted several armed-assault style attacks in Kabul in recent years. In April 2011, a group of militants dressed in Afghan army uniforms stormed the Ministry of Defense in Kabul and killed two people in what the Taliban later claimed was an assassination attempt aimed at the visiting French defense minister.

On Jan. 18, 2010, the day that the Afghan Cabinet was sworn in, 11 militants conducted a wave of armed assaults against a variety of high-profile targets in Kabul that included the presidential palace, the Central Bank and the Defense and Justice ministries. The most prolonged fighting occurred at the newly opened Grand Afghan Shopping Center. The shopping center was heavily damaged by a fire apparently initiated by the detonation of a suicide device. In spite of the large number of militants participating in this attack, it resulted only in seven deaths.

In February 2009, eight militants attacked the Justice Ministry, the Department of Prison Affairs and the Education Ministry. The attack killed 21 people and took place the day before former U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke was scheduled to arrive in Kabul.

The Taliban have also targeted hotels in Kabul. In January 2008, the Serena Hotel was attacked by four militants who used an explosive device to breach the front security perimeter and then stormed the hotel. One of the attackers detonated his suicide vest in the lobby and another roamed through the hotel shooting guests. The attack, which resulted in six deaths, occurred while the Norwegian foreign minister was staying there.

In October 2009, three militants attacked a guest house being used by U.N. personnel in Kabul. The attack resulted in the deaths of five U.N. staff members and three Afghans. The Taliban took credit for this attack, which targeted U.N. election workers in an attempt to disrupt the November 2009 Afghan election.

Sending a Message

When STRATFOR began looking at these Kabul attacks from a tactical viewpoint, we were initially surprised by the relatively low death toll considering the number of militant operatives employed. None of the Taliban’s armed assaults in Kabul have produced the high casualty count of the November 2009 Mumbai attacks. However, over time it became quite apparent that the objective of these armed assaults in Kabul was not only to cause carnage. If so, the Taliban would have discontinued conducting such attacks due to the relatively low return on investment they were providing. Instead, the Taliban have shown that they like to use such attacks at strategic times to make sure the threat they pose is not forgotten.

Consider the context of the attacks described above. They all happened in relation to other events that were occurring at the time over which the Taliban wished to voice their displeasure. The attack on the Intercontinental Hotel occurred during a conference to discuss the transfer of security authority from the ISAF to the Afghan government — an event the Taliban certainly wanted to comment on, and did.

These multi-man armed attacks in Kabul were true acts of terrorism — attacks conducted for their symbolic propaganda value — and not acts conducted to be tactically significant from a military standpoint. When taken together, these less than spectacular individual attacks were conducted with enough frequency to cultivate a perception of instability and lack of security in the Afghan capital — an important goal for the Taliban.

In their official statement claiming responsibility, the Taliban said the Intercontinental Hotel attack was intended to disrupt the handover conference. They also claimed their primary goal was to target U.S. and NATO spies and agents who would be staying at the hotel, but that was obviously a red herring since very few Western government employees stay at that hotel, though some do attend meetings there.

This attack also illustrated some other facts about the Taliban movement: First, the Taliban do not appear to have any shortage of men. Despite almost 10 year of war, they have the resources to burn through eight suicide operatives on a mission that did not appear to be strategically significant. Second, they do not appear to be suffering from morale problems. They are able to readily recruit militants willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause. And they are able to make outlandish propaganda claims — that they killed 90 people in the hotel attack, for example — to a target audience that will take their statements at face value.

This brings us to our final point, a discussion of the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel itself.

The ‘Intercontinental’

Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, known widely as the “Intercon,” opened for business in 1969. At that time it was the Afghanistan’s first international luxury hotel and was a part of the international chain of hotels with the same name, now known as the InterContinental Hotels Group. Following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the hotel ceased to be part of the InterContinental Hotels brand, but the hotel’s local ownership continued to use the Intercontinental name.

This is not an uncommon situation, particularly in countries like Afghanistan where it is hard for large corporate hotel groups to enforce their trademarks. One potential downside of this type of arrangement is that it can give an international traveler a false sense of security. Generally, the large hotel chains are very serious about security, and if a chain does not own a specific hotel property, the local owner of the property who wants to use the chain’s name will be forced to adhere to the chain’s stringent security standards. Therefore, anyone seeing the Intercontinental Hotel name would assume that the Intercon in Kabul would adhere to the global chain’s security standards. In this case, they would be wrong.

Most U.S. and Western visitors to Kabul stay at the Serena Hotel rather than the Intercon because the Serena has better security. The Intercon tends to get more local traffic, which belies the Taliban’s claim that the primary reason they attacked the Intercon was to kill U.S. and NATO spies. We have heard rumors that the operation may have been intended to target a specific VIP who was supposed to be visiting the property but have not been able to confirm this. If a VIP was indeed the target, the operation failed to kill him or her.

The false assumption that the Kabul Intercon would adhere to the stringent security standards of the InterContinental Hotels Group illustrates the importance of properly preparing for a trip by thoroughly researching your destination before traveling. This week, STRATFOR began publishing a series of reports on travel security that are designed to assist travelers during the busy summer travel season in the Northern Hemisphere. For a detailed examination of the terrorist threat to hotels and hotel security, please read our detailed special report on the topic, which can be found here.

As U.S. and other international forces begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, we can expect the Taliban and their allies to continue conducting high-profile attacks in the heart of Kabul that coincide with significant events. Such attacks will be a fact of life in the city for the foreseeable future, and people traveling to and from or living in Kabul should pay close attention to events that could trigger Taliban attacks and plan their activities and make personal security arrangements accordingly.

Even the Taliban cannot attack without conducting preoperational surveillance, which highlights the utility of surveillance detection and counterintelligence to uncover Taliban agents who have penetrated facilities in order to turn them into targets.

At about 10 p.m. on June 28, a group of heavily armed militants attacked the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan. According to government and media reports, the attack team consisted of eight or nine militants who were reportedly wearing suicide vests in addition to carrying other weapons. At least three of the attackers detonated their vests during the drawn-out fight. Afghan security forces, assisted by International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), needed some eight hours to clear the hotel of attackers. One group of militants even worked their way up to the roof of the hotel, where they fired several rocket-propelled grenades.

The attack resulted in the deaths of 12 people, as well as all the militants. The Taliban had a different take on the attack, posting a series of statements on their website claiming responsibility and saying the assault was conducted by eight operatives who killed 90 people and that the real news of their success was being suppressed. (Initially, the Taliban claimed to have killed 200 in the attack but reduced the toll to 90 in later statements.)

NATO and ISAF spokesmen have noted their belief that, due to the location and use of suicide bombers in the attack, the Haqqani network was involved in the operation. On the evening of June 29, a NATO airstrike killed Ismail Jan, a senior Haqqani leader in Afghanistan who NATO claims was involved in planning the hotel attack.

When viewed in the context of other recent attacks in Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan, the attack on the Intercontinental Hotel was not all that spectacular. It certainly did not kill the 90 people the Taliban claim, although it does have a number of interesting security implications.

Past Attacks

Militants in Afghanistan have conducted several armed-assault style attacks in Kabul in recent years. In April 2011, a group of militants dressed in Afghan army uniforms stormed the Ministry of Defense in Kabul and killed two people in what the Taliban later claimed was an assassination attempt aimed at the visiting French defense minister.

On Jan. 18, 2010, the day that the Afghan Cabinet was sworn in, 11 militants conducted a wave of armed assaults against a variety of high-profile targets in Kabul that included the presidential palace, the Central Bank and the Defense and Justice ministries. The most prolonged fighting occurred at the newly opened Grand Afghan Shopping Center. The shopping center was heavily damaged by a fire apparently initiated by the detonation of a suicide device. In spite of the large number of militants participating in this attack, it resulted only in seven deaths.

In February 2009, eight militants attacked the Justice Ministry, the Department of Prison Affairs and the Education Ministry. The attack killed 21 people and took place the day before former U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke was scheduled to arrive in Kabul.

The Taliban have also targeted hotels in Kabul. In January 2008, the Serena Hotel was attacked by four militants who used an explosive device to breach the front security perimeter and then stormed the hotel. One of the attackers detonated his suicide vest in the lobby and another roamed through the hotel shooting guests. The attack, which resulted in six deaths, occurred while the Norwegian foreign minister was staying there.

In October 2009, three militants attacked a guest house being used by U.N. personnel in Kabul. The attack resulted in the deaths of five U.N. staff members and three Afghans. The Taliban took credit for this attack, which targeted U.N. election workers in an attempt to disrupt the November 2009 Afghan election.

Sending a Message

When STRATFOR began looking at these Kabul attacks from a tactical viewpoint, we were initially surprised by the relatively low death toll considering the number of militant operatives employed. None of the Taliban’s armed assaults in Kabul have produced the high casualty count of the November 2009 Mumbai attacks. However, over time it became quite apparent that the objective of these armed assaults in Kabul was not only to cause carnage. If so, the Taliban would have discontinued conducting such attacks due to the relatively low return on investment they were providing. Instead, the Taliban have shown that they like to use such attacks at strategic times to make sure the threat they pose is not forgotten.

Consider the context of the attacks described above. They all happened in relation to other events that were occurring at the time over which the Taliban wished to voice their displeasure. The attack on the Intercontinental Hotel occurred during a conference to discuss the transfer of security authority from the ISAF to the Afghan government — an event the Taliban certainly wanted to comment on, and did.

These multi-man armed attacks in Kabul were true acts of terrorism — attacks conducted for their symbolic propaganda value — and not acts conducted to be tactically significant from a military standpoint. When taken together, these less than spectacular individual attacks were conducted with enough frequency to cultivate a perception of instability and lack of security in the Afghan capital — an important goal for the Taliban.

In their official statement claiming responsibility, the Taliban said the Intercontinental Hotel attack was intended to disrupt the handover conference. They also claimed their primary goal was to target U.S. and NATO spies and agents who would be staying at the hotel, but that was obviously a red herring since very few Western government employees stay at that hotel, though some do attend meetings there.

This attack also illustrated some other facts about the Taliban movement: First, the Taliban do not appear to have any shortage of men. Despite almost 10 year of war, they have the resources to burn through eight suicide operatives on a mission that did not appear to be strategically significant. Second, they do not appear to be suffering from morale problems. They are able to readily recruit militants willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause. And they are able to make outlandish propaganda claims — that they killed 90 people in the hotel attack, for example — to a target audience that will take their statements at face value.

This brings us to our final point, a discussion of the Kabul Intercontinental Hotel itself.

The ‘Intercontinental’

Kabul’s Intercontinental Hotel, known widely as the “Intercon,” opened for business in 1969. At that time it was the Afghanistan’s first international luxury hotel and was a part of the international chain of hotels with the same name, now known as the InterContinental Hotels Group. Following the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the hotel ceased to be part of the InterContinental Hotels brand, but the hotel’s local ownership continued to use the Intercontinental name.

This is not an uncommon situation, particularly in countries like Afghanistan where it is hard for large corporate hotel groups to enforce their trademarks. One potential downside of this type of arrangement is that it can give an international traveler a false sense of security. Generally, the large hotel chains are very serious about security, and if a chain does not own a specific hotel property, the local owner of the property who wants to use the chain’s name will be forced to adhere to the chain’s stringent security standards. Therefore, anyone seeing the Intercontinental Hotel name would assume that the Intercon in Kabul would adhere to the global chain’s security standards. In this case, they would be wrong.

Most U.S. and Western visitors to Kabul stay at the Serena Hotel rather than the Intercon because the Serena has better security. The Intercon tends to get more local traffic, which belies the Taliban’s claim that the primary reason they attacked the Intercon was to kill U.S. and NATO spies. We have heard rumors that the operation may have been intended to target a specific VIP who was supposed to be visiting the property but have not been able to confirm this. If a VIP was indeed the target, the operation failed to kill him or her.

The false assumption that the Kabul Intercon would adhere to the stringent security standards of the InterContinental Hotels Group illustrates the importance of properly preparing for a trip by thoroughly researching your destination before traveling. This week, STRATFOR began publishing a series of reports on travel security that are designed to assist travelers during the busy summer travel season in the Northern Hemisphere. For a detailed examination of the terrorist threat to hotels and hotel security, please read our detailed special report on the topic, which can be found here.

As U.S. and other international forces begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, we can expect the Taliban and their allies to continue conducting high-profile attacks in the heart of Kabul that coincide with significant events. Such attacks will be a fact of life in the city for the foreseeable future, and people traveling to and from or living in Kabul should pay close attention to events that could trigger Taliban attacks and plan their activities and make personal security arrangements accordingly.

Even the Taliban cannot attack without conducting preoperational surveillance, which highlights the utility of surveillance detection and counterintelligence to uncover Taliban agents who have penetrated facilities in order to turn them into targets.

Russia has entered election season, with parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections in March 2012. Typically, this is not an issue of concern, as most Russian elections have been designed to usher a chosen candidate and political party into office since 2000. Interesting shifts are under way this election season, however. While on the surface they may resemble political squabbles and instability, they actually represent the next step in the Russian leadership’s consolidation of the state.

In the past decade, one person has consolidated and run Russia’s political system: former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Putin’s ascension to the leadership of the Kremlin marked the start of the reconsolidation of the Russian state after the decade of chaos that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Under Putin’s presidential predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s strategic economic assets were pillaged, the core strength of the country — the KGB, now known as the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the military — fell into decay, and the political system was in disarray. Though Russia was considered a democracy and a new friend to the West, this was only because Russia had no other option — it was a broken country.

Perceptions of Putin

Putin’s goal was to fix the country, which meant restoring state control (politically, socially and economically), strengthening the FSB and military and re-establishing Russia’s influence and international reputation — especially in the former Soviet sphere of influence. To do so, Putin had to carry Russia through a complex evolution that involved shifting the country from accommodating to aggressive at specific moments. This led to a shift in global perceptions of Putin, with many beginning to see the former KGB agent as a hard-nosed autocrat set upon rekindling hostilities and renewing militarization.

This perception of Putin is not quite correct. While an autocrat and KGB agent (we use the present tense, as Putin has said that no one is a former KGB or FSB agent), he hails from St. Petersburg, Russia’s most pro-Western city, and during his Soviet-era KGB service he was tasked with stealing Western technology. Putin fully understands the strength of the West and what Western expertise is needed to keep Russia relatively modern and strong. At the same time, his time with the KGB convinced him that Russia can never truly be integrated into the West and that it can be strong only with a consolidated government, economy and security service and a single, autocratic leader.

Putin’s understanding of Russia’s two great weaknesses informs this worldview. The first weakness is that Russia was dealt a poor geographic hand. It is inherently vulnerable because it is surrounded by great powers from which it is not insulated by geographic barriers. The second is that its population is comprised of numerous ethnic groups, not all of which are happy with centralized Kremlin rule. A strong hand is the only means to consolidate the country internally while repelling outsiders.

Another major challenge is that Russia essentially lacks an economic base aside from energy. Its grossly underdeveloped transportation system hampers it from moving basic necessities between the country’s widely dispersed economic centers. This has led Moscow to rely on revenue from one source, energy, while the rest of the country’s economy has lagged decades behind in technology.

These geographic, demographic and economic challenges have led Russia to shift between being aggressive to keep the country secure and being accommodating toward foreign powers in a bid to modernize Russia.

Being from groups that understood these challenges, Putin knew a balance between these two strategies was necessary. However, Russia cannot go down the two paths of accommodating and connecting with the West and a consolidated authoritarian Russia at the same time unless Russia is first strong and secure as a country, something that has only happened recently. Until then, Russia must switch between each path to build the country up — which explains shifting public perceptions of Putin over the past decade from pro-Western president to an aggressive authoritarian. It also explains the recent view of Putin’s successor as president, Dmitri Medvedev, as democratic and agreeable when compared to Putin.

Neither leader is one or the other, however: Both have had their times of being aggressive and accommodating in their domestic and foreign policies. Which face they show does not depend upon personalities but rather upon the status of Russia’s strength.

Putin’s Shifts

Putin, who had no choice but to appeal to the West to help keep the country afloat when he took office in 2000, initially was hailed as a trusted partner by the West. But even while former U.S. President George W. Bush was praising Putin’s soul, behind the scenes, Putin already was reorganizing one of his greatest tools — the FSB — in order to start implementing a full state consolidation in the coming years.

After 9/11, Putin was the first foreign leader to phone Bush and offer any assistance from Russia. The date marked an opportunity for both Putin and Russia. The attacks on the United States shifted Washington’s focus, tying it down in the Islamic world for the next decade. This gave Russia a window of opportunity with which to accelerate its crackdown inside (and later outside) Russia without fear of a Western response. During this time, the Kremlin ejected foreign firms, nationalized strategic economic assets, shut down nongovernmental organizations, purged anti-Kremlin journalists, banned many anti-Kremlin political parties and launched a second intense war in Chechnya. Western perceptions of Putin’s friendship and standing as a democratic leader simultaneously evaporated.

Russia was already solidifying its strength by 2003, by which time the West had noticed its former enemy’s resurgence. The West subsequently initiated a series of moves not to weaken Russia internally (as this was too difficult by now) but to contain Russian power inside its own borders. This spawned a highly contentious period between both sides during which the West supported pro-Western color revolutions in several of the former Soviet states while Russia initiated social unrest and political chaos campaigns in, and energy cutoffs against, several of the same states. The two sides were once again seriously at odds, with the former Soviet sphere now the battlefield. As it is easier for Russia to maneuver within the former Soviet states and with the West pre-occupied in the Islamic world, Moscow began to gain the upper hand. By 2008, the Kremlin was ready to prove to these states that the West would not be able to counter Russian aggression.

By now, however, the Kremlin had a new president, Medvedev. Like Putin, Medvedev is also from the St. Petersburg clan. Unlike Putin, he was lawyer trained to Western standards, not member of the KGB. Medvedev’s entrance into the Kremlin seemed strange at the time, since Putin had groomed other potential successors who shared his KGB background. Putin, however, knew that in just a few years Russia would be shifting again from being solely aggressive to a new stance that would require a different sort of leader.

Medvedev’s New Pragmatism

When Medvedev entered office, his current reputation for compliance and pragmatism did not exist. Instead, he continued on Russia’s roll forward with one of the boldest moves to date — the Russia-Georgia war. Aside from the war, Medvedev also publicly ordered the deployment of short-range ballistic missiles to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the Polish border, and to Belarus to counter U.S. plans for ballistic missile defense. Medvedev also oversaw continued oil disputes with the Baltic states. Despite being starkly different in demeanor and temperament, Medvedev continued Putin’s policies. Much of this was because Putin is still very much in charge of the country, but it is also because Medvedev also understands the order in which Russia operates: security first, pragmatism to the West after.

By 2009, Russia had proven its power in its direct sphere and so began to ease into a new foreign and domestic policy of duality. Only when Russia is strong and consolidated can it drop being wholly aggressive and adopt such a stance of hostility and friendliness. To achieve this, the definition of a “tandem” between Putin and Medvedev became more defined, with Putin as the enforcer and strong hand and Medvedev as the pragmatic negotiator (by Western standards). On the surface, this led to what seemed like a bipolar foreign and domestic policy, with Russia still aggressively moving on countries like Kyrgyzstan while forming a mutually beneficial partnership with Germany .

With elections approaching, the ruling tandem seems even more at odds as Medvedev overturns many policies Putin put into place in the early 2000s, such as the ban on certain political parties, the ability of foreign firms to work in strategic sectors and the role of the FSB elite within the economy. Despite the apparent conflict, the changes are part of an overall strategy shared by Putin and Medvedev to finish consolidating Russian power.

These policy changes show that Putin and Medvedev feel confident enough that they have attained their first imperative that they can look to confront the second inherent problem for the country: Russia’s lack of modern technology and lack of an economic base. Even with Russian energy production at its height, its energy technologies need revamping, as do every other sector, especially transit and telecommunication. Such a massive modernization attempt cannot be made without foreign help. This was seen in past efforts throughout Russian history when other strong leaders from Peter the Great to Josef Stalin were forced to bring in foreign assistance, if not an outright presence, to modernize Russia.

Russia thus has launched a multiyear modernization and privatization plan to bring in tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to leapfrog the country into current technology and diversify the economy. Moscow has also struck deals with select countries — Germany, France, Finland, Norway, South Korea and even the United States — for each sector to use the economic deals for political means.

However, this has created two large problems. First, foreign governments and firms are hesitant to do business in an authoritarian country with a record of kicking foreign firms out. At the same time, the Kremlin knows that it cannot lessen its hold inside of Russia without risking losing control over its first imperative of securing Russia. Therefore, the tandem is instead implementing a complex system to ensure it can keep control while looking as if it were becoming more democratic.

The Appearance of Democracy

The first move is to strengthen the ruling party — United Russia — while allowing more independent political parties. United Russia already has been shifted into having many sub-groups that represent the more conservative factions, liberal factions and youth organizations. Those youth organizations have also been working on training up the new pro-Kremlin generation to take over in the decades to come so that the goals of the current regime are not lost. In the past few months, new political parties have started to emerge in Russia — something rare in recent years. Previously, any political party other than United Russia not loyal to the Kremlin was silenced, for the most part. Beyond United Russia, only three other political parties in Russia have a presence in the government: the Communist Party, Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All are considered either pro-Kremlin or sisters to United Russia.

While these new political parties appear to operate outside the Kremlin’s clutches, this is just for show. The most important new party is Russia’s Right Cause launched by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. Right Cause is intended to support foreign business and the modernization efforts. The party at first was designed to be led by Medvedev’s economic aide, Arkadi Dvorkovich, or Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. However, the Kremlin thought that having a Kremlin member lead a new “independent” political party would defeat the purpose of showing a new democratic side to Russian’s political sphere. Prokhorov has rarely shown political aspirations, but he has a working relationship with the Kremlin. He clearly received orders to help the Kremlin in this new display of democracy, and any oligarch who survives in Russia knows to follow the Kremlin’s orders. The Kremlin now will lower the threshold to win representation in the government in an attempt to move these “independent” parties into the government.

The next part of the new system is an ambiguous organization Putin recently announced, the All Russia’s Popular Front, or “Popular Front” for short. The Popular Front is not exactly a political party but an umbrella organization meant to unite the country. Popular Front members include Russia’s labor unions, prominent social organizations, economic lobbying sectors, big business, individuals and political parties. In short, anything or anyone that wants to be seen as pro-Russian is a part of the Popular Front. On the surface, the Popular Front has attempted to remain vague to avoid revealing how such an organization supersedes political parties and factions. It creates a system in which power in the country does not lie in a political office — such as the presidency or premiership — but with the person overseeing the Popular Front: Putin.

So after a decade of aggression, authoritarianism and nationalism, Russia has become strong once again, both internally and regionally, such that it is confident enough to shift policies and plan for its future. The new system is designed to have a dual foreign policy, to attract non-Russian groups back into the country and to look more democratic overall while all the while being carefully managed behind the scenes. It is managed pluralism underneath not a president or premier, but under a person more like the leader of the nation, not just the leader of the state. In theory, the new system is meant to allow the Kremlin to maintain control of both its grand strategies of needing to reach out abroad to keep Russia modern and strong and trying to ensure that the country is also under firm control and secure for years to come. Whether the tandem or the leader of the nation can balance such a complex system and overcome the permanent struggle that rules Russia remains to be seen.

Russia has entered election season, with parliamentary elections in December and presidential elections in March 2012. Typically, this is not an issue of concern, as most Russian elections have been designed to usher a chosen candidate and political party into office since 2000. Interesting shifts are under way this election season, however. While on the surface they may resemble political squabbles and instability, they actually represent the next step in the Russian leadership’s consolidation of the state.

In the past decade, one person has consolidated and run Russia’s political system: former president and current Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Putin’s ascension to the leadership of the Kremlin marked the start of the reconsolidation of the Russian state after the decade of chaos that followed the fall of the Soviet Union. Under Putin’s presidential predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s strategic economic assets were pillaged, the core strength of the country — the KGB, now known as the Federal Security Service (FSB), and the military — fell into decay, and the political system was in disarray. Though Russia was considered a democracy and a new friend to the West, this was only because Russia had no other option — it was a broken country.

Perceptions of Putin

Putin’s goal was to fix the country, which meant restoring state control (politically, socially and economically), strengthening the FSB and military and re-establishing Russia’s influence and international reputation — especially in the former Soviet sphere of influence. To do so, Putin had to carry Russia through a complex evolution that involved shifting the country from accommodating to aggressive at specific moments. This led to a shift in global perceptions of Putin, with many beginning to see the former KGB agent as a hard-nosed autocrat set upon rekindling hostilities and renewing militarization.

This perception of Putin is not quite correct. While an autocrat and KGB agent (we use the present tense, as Putin has said that no one is a former KGB or FSB agent), he hails from St. Petersburg, Russia’s most pro-Western city, and during his Soviet-era KGB service he was tasked with stealing Western technology. Putin fully understands the strength of the West and what Western expertise is needed to keep Russia relatively modern and strong. At the same time, his time with the KGB convinced him that Russia can never truly be integrated into the West and that it can be strong only with a consolidated government, economy and security service and a single, autocratic leader.

Putin’s understanding of Russia’s two great weaknesses informs this worldview. The first weakness is that Russia was dealt a poor geographic hand. It is inherently vulnerable because it is surrounded by great powers from which it is not insulated by geographic barriers. The second is that its population is comprised of numerous ethnic groups, not all of which are happy with centralized Kremlin rule. A strong hand is the only means to consolidate the country internally while repelling outsiders.

Another major challenge is that Russia essentially lacks an economic base aside from energy. Its grossly underdeveloped transportation system hampers it from moving basic necessities between the country’s widely dispersed economic centers. This has led Moscow to rely on revenue from one source, energy, while the rest of the country’s economy has lagged decades behind in technology.

These geographic, demographic and economic challenges have led Russia to shift between being aggressive to keep the country secure and being accommodating toward foreign powers in a bid to modernize Russia.

Being from groups that understood these challenges, Putin knew a balance between these two strategies was necessary. However, Russia cannot go down the two paths of accommodating and connecting with the West and a consolidated authoritarian Russia at the same time unless Russia is first strong and secure as a country, something that has only happened recently. Until then, Russia must switch between each path to build the country up — which explains shifting public perceptions of Putin over the past decade from pro-Western president to an aggressive authoritarian. It also explains the recent view of Putin’s successor as president, Dmitri Medvedev, as democratic and agreeable when compared to Putin.

Neither leader is one or the other, however: Both have had their times of being aggressive and accommodating in their domestic and foreign policies. Which face they show does not depend upon personalities but rather upon the status of Russia’s strength.

Putin’s Shifts

Putin, who had no choice but to appeal to the West to help keep the country afloat when he took office in 2000, initially was hailed as a trusted partner by the West. But even while former U.S. President George W. Bush was praising Putin’s soul, behind the scenes, Putin already was reorganizing one of his greatest tools — the FSB — in order to start implementing a full state consolidation in the coming years.

After 9/11, Putin was the first foreign leader to phone Bush and offer any assistance from Russia. The date marked an opportunity for both Putin and Russia. The attacks on the United States shifted Washington’s focus, tying it down in the Islamic world for the next decade. This gave Russia a window of opportunity with which to accelerate its crackdown inside (and later outside) Russia without fear of a Western response. During this time, the Kremlin ejected foreign firms, nationalized strategic economic assets, shut down nongovernmental organizations, purged anti-Kremlin journalists, banned many anti-Kremlin political parties and launched a second intense war in Chechnya. Western perceptions of Putin’s friendship and standing as a democratic leader simultaneously evaporated.

Russia was already solidifying its strength by 2003, by which time the West had noticed its former enemy’s resurgence. The West subsequently initiated a series of moves not to weaken Russia internally (as this was too difficult by now) but to contain Russian power inside its own borders. This spawned a highly contentious period between both sides during which the West supported pro-Western color revolutions in several of the former Soviet states while Russia initiated social unrest and political chaos campaigns in, and energy cutoffs against, several of the same states. The two sides were once again seriously at odds, with the former Soviet sphere now the battlefield. As it is easier for Russia to maneuver within the former Soviet states and with the West pre-occupied in the Islamic world, Moscow began to gain the upper hand. By 2008, the Kremlin was ready to prove to these states that the West would not be able to counter Russian aggression.

By now, however, the Kremlin had a new president, Medvedev. Like Putin, Medvedev is also from the St. Petersburg clan. Unlike Putin, he was lawyer trained to Western standards, not member of the KGB. Medvedev’s entrance into the Kremlin seemed strange at the time, since Putin had groomed other potential successors who shared his KGB background. Putin, however, knew that in just a few years Russia would be shifting again from being solely aggressive to a new stance that would require a different sort of leader.

Medvedev’s New Pragmatism

When Medvedev entered office, his current reputation for compliance and pragmatism did not exist. Instead, he continued on Russia’s roll forward with one of the boldest moves to date — the Russia-Georgia war. Aside from the war, Medvedev also publicly ordered the deployment of short-range ballistic missiles to the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, on the Polish border, and to Belarus to counter U.S. plans for ballistic missile defense. Medvedev also oversaw continued oil disputes with the Baltic states. Despite being starkly different in demeanor and temperament, Medvedev continued Putin’s policies. Much of this was because Putin is still very much in charge of the country, but it is also because Medvedev also understands the order in which Russia operates: security first, pragmatism to the West after.

By 2009, Russia had proven its power in its direct sphere and so began to ease into a new foreign and domestic policy of duality. Only when Russia is strong and consolidated can it drop being wholly aggressive and adopt such a stance of hostility and friendliness. To achieve this, the definition of a “tandem” between Putin and Medvedev became more defined, with Putin as the enforcer and strong hand and Medvedev as the pragmatic negotiator (by Western standards). On the surface, this led to what seemed like a bipolar foreign and domestic policy, with Russia still aggressively moving on countries like Kyrgyzstan while forming a mutually beneficial partnership with Germany .

With elections approaching, the ruling tandem seems even more at odds as Medvedev overturns many policies Putin put into place in the early 2000s, such as the ban on certain political parties, the ability of foreign firms to work in strategic sectors and the role of the FSB elite within the economy. Despite the apparent conflict, the changes are part of an overall strategy shared by Putin and Medvedev to finish consolidating Russian power.

These policy changes show that Putin and Medvedev feel confident enough that they have attained their first imperative that they can look to confront the second inherent problem for the country: Russia’s lack of modern technology and lack of an economic base. Even with Russian energy production at its height, its energy technologies need revamping, as do every other sector, especially transit and telecommunication. Such a massive modernization attempt cannot be made without foreign help. This was seen in past efforts throughout Russian history when other strong leaders from Peter the Great to Josef Stalin were forced to bring in foreign assistance, if not an outright presence, to modernize Russia.

Russia thus has launched a multiyear modernization and privatization plan to bring in tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars to leapfrog the country into current technology and diversify the economy. Moscow has also struck deals with select countries — Germany, France, Finland, Norway, South Korea and even the United States — for each sector to use the economic deals for political means.

However, this has created two large problems. First, foreign governments and firms are hesitant to do business in an authoritarian country with a record of kicking foreign firms out. At the same time, the Kremlin knows that it cannot lessen its hold inside of Russia without risking losing control over its first imperative of securing Russia. Therefore, the tandem is instead implementing a complex system to ensure it can keep control while looking as if it were becoming more democratic.

The Appearance of Democracy

The first move is to strengthen the ruling party — United Russia — while allowing more independent political parties. United Russia already has been shifted into having many sub-groups that represent the more conservative factions, liberal factions and youth organizations. Those youth organizations have also been working on training up the new pro-Kremlin generation to take over in the decades to come so that the goals of the current regime are not lost. In the past few months, new political parties have started to emerge in Russia — something rare in recent years. Previously, any political party other than United Russia not loyal to the Kremlin was silenced, for the most part. Beyond United Russia, only three other political parties in Russia have a presence in the government: the Communist Party, Just Russia and the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All are considered either pro-Kremlin or sisters to United Russia.

While these new political parties appear to operate outside the Kremlin’s clutches, this is just for show. The most important new party is Russia’s Right Cause launched by Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov. Right Cause is intended to support foreign business and the modernization efforts. The party at first was designed to be led by Medvedev’s economic aide, Arkadi Dvorkovich, or Finance Minister Alexei Kudrin. However, the Kremlin thought that having a Kremlin member lead a new “independent” political party would defeat the purpose of showing a new democratic side to Russian’s political sphere. Prokhorov has rarely shown political aspirations, but he has a working relationship with the Kremlin. He clearly received orders to help the Kremlin in this new display of democracy, and any oligarch who survives in Russia knows to follow the Kremlin’s orders. The Kremlin now will lower the threshold to win representation in the government in an attempt to move these “independent” parties into the government.

The next part of the new system is an ambiguous organization Putin recently announced, the All Russia’s Popular Front, or “Popular Front” for short. The Popular Front is not exactly a political party but an umbrella organization meant to unite the country. Popular Front members include Russia’s labor unions, prominent social organizations, economic lobbying sectors, big business, individuals and political parties. In short, anything or anyone that wants to be seen as pro-Russian is a part of the Popular Front. On the surface, the Popular Front has attempted to remain vague to avoid revealing how such an organization supersedes political parties and factions. It creates a system in which power in the country does not lie in a political office — such as the presidency or premiership — but with the person overseeing the Popular Front: Putin.

So after a decade of aggression, authoritarianism and nationalism, Russia has become strong once again, both internally and regionally, such that it is confident enough to shift policies and plan for its future. The new system is designed to have a dual foreign policy, to attract non-Russian groups back into the country and to look more democratic overall while all the while being carefully managed behind the scenes. It is managed pluralism underneath not a president or premier, but under a person more like the leader of the nation, not just the leader of the state. In theory, the new system is meant to allow the Kremlin to maintain control of both its grand strategies of needing to reach out abroad to keep Russia modern and strong and trying to ensure that the country is also under firm control and secure for years to come. Whether the tandem or the leader of the nation can balance such a complex system and overcome the permanent struggle that rules Russia remains to be seen.

On June 22 in a Seattle warehouse, Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif pulled an unloaded M16 rifle to his shoulder, aimed it, and pulled the trigger repeatedly as he imagined himself gunning down young U.S. military recruits. His longtime friend Walli Mujahidh did likewise with an identical rifle, assuming a kneeling position as he engaged his notional targets. The two men had come to the warehouse with another man to inspect the firearms the latter had purchased with money Abdul-Latif had provided him. The rifles and a small number of hand grenades were to be used in an upcoming mission: an attack on a U.S. Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) in an industrial area south of downtown Seattle.

After confirming that the rifles were capable of automatic fire and discussing the capacity of the magazines they had purchased, the men placed the rifles back into a storage bag intending to transport them to a temporary cache location. As they prepared to leave the warehouse, they were suddenly swarmed by a large number of FBI agents and other law enforcement officers and quickly arrested. Their plan to conduct a terrorist attack inside the United States had been discovered when the man they had invited to join their plot (the man who had allegedly purchased the weapons for them) reported the plot to the Seattle Police Department, which in turn reported it to the FBI. According to the federal criminal complaint filed in the case, the third unidentified man had an extensive criminal record and had known Abdul-Latif for several years, but he had not been willing to undertake such a terrorist attack.

While the behavior of Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh in this plot demonstrates that they were amateur “wannabe” jihadists rather than seasoned terrorist operatives, their plot could have ended very differently if they had found a kindred spirit in the man they approached for help instead of someone who turned them into the authorities. This case also illustrates some important trends in jihadist terrorism that we have been watching for the past few years as well as a possible shift in mindset within the jihadist movement.

Trends

First, Abu-Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh, both American converts to Islam, are prime examples of what we refer to as grassroots jihadists. They are individuals who were inspired by the al Qaeda movement but who had no known connection to the al Qaeda core or one of its franchise groups. In late 2009, in response to the success of the U.S. government and its allies in preventing jihadist attacks in the West, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) began a campaign to encourage jihadists living in the West to conduct simple attacks using readily available items, rather than travel abroad for military and terrorism training with jihadist groups. After successes such as the November 2009 Fort Hood shooting, this theme of encouraging grassroots attacks was adopted by the core al Qaeda group.

While the grassroots approach does present a challenge to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in that attackers can seemingly appear out of nowhere with no prior warning, the paradox presented by grassroots operatives is that they are also far less skilled than trained terrorist operatives. In other words, while they are hard to detect, they frequently lack the skill to conduct large, complex attacks and frequently make mistakes that expose them to detection in smaller plots.

And that is what we saw in the Seattle plot. Abdul-Latif had originally wanted to hit U.S. Joint Base Lewis-McChord (formerly known as Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base), which is located some 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of Seattle, but later decided against that plan since he considered the military base to be too hardened a target. While Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were amateurs, they seem to have reached a reasonable assessment of their own abilities and which targets were beyond their abilities to strike.

Another trend we noted in this case was that the attack plan called for the use of firearms and hand grenades in an armed assault, rather than the use of an improvised explosive device (IED). There have been a number of botched IED attacks, such as the May 2010 Times Square attack and Najibullah Zazi’s plot to attack the New York subway system.

These were some of the failures that caused jihadist leaders such as AQAP’s Nasir al-Wahayshi to encourage grassroots jihadists to undertake simple attacks. Indeed, the most successful jihadist attacks in the West in recent years, such as the Fort Hood shooting, the June 2009 attack on a military recruitment center in Little Rock, Ark., and the March 2011 attack on U.S. troops at a civilian airport in Frankfurt, Germany, involved the use of firearms rather than IEDs. When combined with the thwarted plot in New York in May 2011, these incidents support the trend we identified in May 2010 of grassroots jihadist conducting more armed assaults and fewer attacks involving IEDs.

Another interesting aspect of the Seattle case was that Abdul-Latif was an admirer of AQAP ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki. Unlike the Fort Hood case, where U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been in email contact with al-Awlaki, it does not appear that Abdul-Latif had been in contact with the AQAP preacher. However, from video statements and comments Abdul-Latif himself posted on the Internet, he appears to have had a high opinion of al-Awlaki and to have been influenced by his preaching. It does not appear that Abdul-Latif, who was known as Joseph Anthony Davis before his conversion to Islam, or Mujahidh, whose pre-conversion name was Frederick Domingue Jr., spoke Arabic. This underscores the importance of al-Awlaki’s role within AQAP as its primary spokesman to the English-speaking world and his mission of radicalizing English-speaking Muslims and encouraging them to conduct terrorist attacks in the West.

Vulnerabilities

Once again, in the Seattle case, the attack on the MEPS was not thwarted by some CIA source in Yemen, an intercept by the National Security Agency or an intentional FBI undercover operation. Rather, the attack was thwarted by a Muslim who was approached by Abdul-Latif and asked to participate in the attack. The man then went to the Seattle Police Department, which brought the man to the attention of the FBI. This is what we refer to as grassroots counterterrorism, that is, local cops and citizens bringing things to the attention of federal authorities. As the jihadist threat has become more diffuse and harder to detect, grassroots defenders have become an even more critical component of international counterterrorism efforts. This is especially true for Muslims, many of whom consider themselves engaged in a struggle to defend their faith (and their sons) from the threat of jihadism.

But, even if the third man had chosen to participate in the attack rather than report it to the authorities, the group would have been vulnerable to detection. First, there were the various statements Abdul-Latif made on the Internet in support of attacks against the United States. Second, any Muslim convert who chooses a name such as Mujahidh (holy warrior) for himself must certainly anticipate the possibility that it will bring him to the attention of the authorities. Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were also somewhat cavalier in their telephone conversations, although those conversations do not appear to have brought them to the attention of the authorities.

Perhaps their most significant vulnerability to detection, aside from their desire to obtain automatic weapons and hand grenades, would have been their need to conduct preoperational surveillance of their intended target. After conducting some preliminary research using the Internet, Abdul-Latif quickly realized that they needed more detailed intelligence. He then briefly conducted physical surveillance of the exterior of the MEPS to see what it looked like in person. Despite the technological advances it represents, the Internet cannot replace the physical surveillance process, which is a critical requirement for terrorist planners. Indeed, after the external surveillance of the building, Abdul-Latif asked the informant to return to the building under a ruse in order to enter it and obtain a detailed floor plan of the facility for use in planning the attack.

In this case, the informant was able to obtain the information he needed from his FBI handlers, but had he been a genuine participant in the plot, he would have had to have exposed himself to detection by entering the MEPS facility after conducting surveillance of the building’s exterior. If some sort of surveillance detection program was in place, it likely would have flagged him as a person of interest for follow-up investigation, which could have led authorities back to the other conspirators in the attack.

A New Twist

One aspect of this plot that was different from many other recent plots was that Abdul-Latif insisted that he wanted to target the U.S. military and did not want to kill people he considered innocents. Certainly he had no problem with the idea of killing the armed civilian security guards at the MEPS — the plan called for the attackers to kill them first, or the unarmed still-civilian recruits being screened at the facility, then to kill as many other military personnel as possible before being neutralized by the responding authorities. However, even in the limited conversations documented in the federal criminal complaint, Abdul-Latif repeated several times that he did not want to kill innocents. This stands in stark contrast to the actions of previous attackers and plotters such as John Allen Mohammed, the so-called D.C. sniper, or Faisal Shahzad, who planned the failed Times Square attack.

Abdul-Latif’s reluctance to attack civilians may be a reflection of the debate we are seeing among jihadists in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and even Algeria over the killing of those they consider innocents. This debate is also raging on many of the English-language jihadist message boards Abdul-Latif frequented. Most recently, this tension was seen in the defection of a Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan faction in Pakistan’s Kurram agency.

If this sentiment begins to take wider hold in the jihadist movement, and especially the English-speaking jihadist community in the West, it could have an impact on the target-selection process for future attacks by grassroots operatives in the West. It could also mean that commonly attacked targets such as subway systems, civilian aircraft, hotels and public spaces will be seen as less desirable than comparably soft military targets. Given the limitations of grassroots jihadists, and their tendency to focus on soft targets, such a shift would result in a much smaller universe of potential targets for such attacks — the softer military targets such as recruit-processing stations and troops in transit that have been targeted in recent months.

Removing some of the most vulnerable targets from the potential-target list is not something that militants do lightly. If this is indeed happening, it could be an indication that some important shifts are under way on the ideological battlefield and that jihadists may be concerned about losing their popular support. It is still too early to know if this is a trend and not merely the idiosyncrasy of one attack planner — and it is contrary to the target sets laid out in recent messages from AQAP and the al Qaeda core — but when viewed in light of the Little Rock, Fort Hood and Frankfurt shootings, it is definitely a concept worth further examination.

On June 22 in a Seattle warehouse, Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif pulled an unloaded M16 rifle to his shoulder, aimed it, and pulled the trigger repeatedly as he imagined himself gunning down young U.S. military recruits. His longtime friend Walli Mujahidh did likewise with an identical rifle, assuming a kneeling position as he engaged his notional targets. The two men had come to the warehouse with another man to inspect the firearms the latter had purchased with money Abdul-Latif had provided him. The rifles and a small number of hand grenades were to be used in an upcoming mission: an attack on a U.S. Military Entrance Processing Station (MEPS) in an industrial area south of downtown Seattle.

After confirming that the rifles were capable of automatic fire and discussing the capacity of the magazines they had purchased, the men placed the rifles back into a storage bag intending to transport them to a temporary cache location. As they prepared to leave the warehouse, they were suddenly swarmed by a large number of FBI agents and other law enforcement officers and quickly arrested. Their plan to conduct a terrorist attack inside the United States had been discovered when the man they had invited to join their plot (the man who had allegedly purchased the weapons for them) reported the plot to the Seattle Police Department, which in turn reported it to the FBI. According to the federal criminal complaint filed in the case, the third unidentified man had an extensive criminal record and had known Abdul-Latif for several years, but he had not been willing to undertake such a terrorist attack.

While the behavior of Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh in this plot demonstrates that they were amateur “wannabe” jihadists rather than seasoned terrorist operatives, their plot could have ended very differently if they had found a kindred spirit in the man they approached for help instead of someone who turned them into the authorities. This case also illustrates some important trends in jihadist terrorism that we have been watching for the past few years as well as a possible shift in mindset within the jihadist movement.

Trends

First, Abu-Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh, both American converts to Islam, are prime examples of what we refer to as grassroots jihadists. They are individuals who were inspired by the al Qaeda movement but who had no known connection to the al Qaeda core or one of its franchise groups. In late 2009, in response to the success of the U.S. government and its allies in preventing jihadist attacks in the West, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) began a campaign to encourage jihadists living in the West to conduct simple attacks using readily available items, rather than travel abroad for military and terrorism training with jihadist groups. After successes such as the November 2009 Fort Hood shooting, this theme of encouraging grassroots attacks was adopted by the core al Qaeda group.

While the grassroots approach does present a challenge to law enforcement and intelligence agencies in that attackers can seemingly appear out of nowhere with no prior warning, the paradox presented by grassroots operatives is that they are also far less skilled than trained terrorist operatives. In other words, while they are hard to detect, they frequently lack the skill to conduct large, complex attacks and frequently make mistakes that expose them to detection in smaller plots.

And that is what we saw in the Seattle plot. Abdul-Latif had originally wanted to hit U.S. Joint Base Lewis-McChord (formerly known as Fort Lewis and McChord Air Force Base), which is located some 70 kilometers (44 miles) south of Seattle, but later decided against that plan since he considered the military base to be too hardened a target. While Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were amateurs, they seem to have reached a reasonable assessment of their own abilities and which targets were beyond their abilities to strike.

Another trend we noted in this case was that the attack plan called for the use of firearms and hand grenades in an armed assault, rather than the use of an improvised explosive device (IED). There have been a number of botched IED attacks, such as the May 2010 Times Square attack and Najibullah Zazi’s plot to attack the New York subway system.

These were some of the failures that caused jihadist leaders such as AQAP’s Nasir al-Wahayshi to encourage grassroots jihadists to undertake simple attacks. Indeed, the most successful jihadist attacks in the West in recent years, such as the Fort Hood shooting, the June 2009 attack on a military recruitment center in Little Rock, Ark., and the March 2011 attack on U.S. troops at a civilian airport in Frankfurt, Germany, involved the use of firearms rather than IEDs. When combined with the thwarted plot in New York in May 2011, these incidents support the trend we identified in May 2010 of grassroots jihadist conducting more armed assaults and fewer attacks involving IEDs.

Another interesting aspect of the Seattle case was that Abdul-Latif was an admirer of AQAP ideologue Anwar al-Awlaki. Unlike the Fort Hood case, where U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan had been in email contact with al-Awlaki, it does not appear that Abdul-Latif had been in contact with the AQAP preacher. However, from video statements and comments Abdul-Latif himself posted on the Internet, he appears to have had a high opinion of al-Awlaki and to have been influenced by his preaching. It does not appear that Abdul-Latif, who was known as Joseph Anthony Davis before his conversion to Islam, or Mujahidh, whose pre-conversion name was Frederick Domingue Jr., spoke Arabic. This underscores the importance of al-Awlaki’s role within AQAP as its primary spokesman to the English-speaking world and his mission of radicalizing English-speaking Muslims and encouraging them to conduct terrorist attacks in the West.

Vulnerabilities

Once again, in the Seattle case, the attack on the MEPS was not thwarted by some CIA source in Yemen, an intercept by the National Security Agency or an intentional FBI undercover operation. Rather, the attack was thwarted by a Muslim who was approached by Abdul-Latif and asked to participate in the attack. The man then went to the Seattle Police Department, which brought the man to the attention of the FBI. This is what we refer to as grassroots counterterrorism, that is, local cops and citizens bringing things to the attention of federal authorities. As the jihadist threat has become more diffuse and harder to detect, grassroots defenders have become an even more critical component of international counterterrorism efforts. This is especially true for Muslims, many of whom consider themselves engaged in a struggle to defend their faith (and their sons) from the threat of jihadism.

But, even if the third man had chosen to participate in the attack rather than report it to the authorities, the group would have been vulnerable to detection. First, there were the various statements Abdul-Latif made on the Internet in support of attacks against the United States. Second, any Muslim convert who chooses a name such as Mujahidh (holy warrior) for himself must certainly anticipate the possibility that it will bring him to the attention of the authorities. Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were also somewhat cavalier in their telephone conversations, although those conversations do not appear to have brought them to the attention of the authorities.

Perhaps their most significant vulnerability to detection, aside from their desire to obtain automatic weapons and hand grenades, would have been their need to conduct preoperational surveillance of their intended target. After conducting some preliminary research using the Internet, Abdul-Latif quickly realized that they needed more detailed intelligence. He then briefly conducted physical surveillance of the exterior of the MEPS to see what it looked like in person. Despite the technological advances it represents, the Internet cannot replace the physical surveillance process, which is a critical requirement for terrorist planners. Indeed, after the external surveillance of the building, Abdul-Latif asked the informant to return to the building under a ruse in order to enter it and obtain a detailed floor plan of the facility for use in planning the attack.

In this case, the informant was able to obtain the information he needed from his FBI handlers, but had he been a genuine participant in the plot, he would have had to have exposed himself to detection by entering the MEPS facility after conducting surveillance of the building’s exterior. If some sort of surveillance detection program was in place, it likely would have flagged him as a person of interest for follow-up investigation, which could have led authorities back to the other conspirators in the attack.

A New Twist

One aspect of this plot that was different from many other recent plots was that Abdul-Latif insisted that he wanted to target the U.S. military and did not want to kill people he considered innocents. Certainly he had no problem with the idea of killing the armed civilian security guards at the MEPS — the plan called for the attackers to kill them first, or the unarmed still-civilian recruits being screened at the facility, then to kill as many other military personnel as possible before being neutralized by the responding authorities. However, even in the limited conversations documented in the federal criminal complaint, Abdul-Latif repeated several times that he did not want to kill innocents. This stands in stark contrast to the actions of previous attackers and plotters such as John Allen Mohammed, the so-called D.C. sniper, or Faisal Shahzad, who planned the failed Times Square attack.

Abdul-Latif’s reluctance to attack civilians may be a reflection of the debate we are seeing among jihadists in places like Afghanistan, Pakistan and even Algeria over the killing of those they consider innocents. This debate is also raging on many of the English-language jihadist message boards Abdul-Latif frequented. Most recently, this tension was seen in the defection of a Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan faction in Pakistan’s Kurram agency.

If this sentiment begins to take wider hold in the jihadist movement, and especially the English-speaking jihadist community in the West, it could have an impact on the target-selection process for future attacks by grassroots operatives in the West. It could also mean that commonly attacked targets such as subway systems, civilian aircraft, hotels and public spaces will be seen as less desirable than comparably soft military targets. Given the limitations of grassroots jihadists, and their tendency to focus on soft targets, such a shift would result in a much smaller universe of potential targets for such attacks — the softer military targets such as recruit-processing stations and troops in transit that have been targeted in recent months.

Removing some of the most vulnerable targets from the potential-target list is not something that militants do lightly. If this is indeed happening, it could be an indication that some important shifts are under way on the ideological battlefield and that jihadists may be concerned about losing their popular support. It is still too early to know if this is a trend and not merely the idiosyncrasy of one attack planner — and it is contrary to the target sets laid out in recent messages from AQAP and the al Qaeda core — but when viewed in light of the Little Rock, Fort Hood and Frankfurt shootings, it is definitely a concept worth further examination.