Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al-Qa'ida's Organizational Vulnerabilities

Combating Terrorism Center

Harmony and Disharmony: Exploiting al-Qa'ida's Organizational Vulnerabilities

Published by Good Press, 2022

goodpress@okpublishing.info

EAN 4064066452032

Table of Contents

Executive Summary

Foreward

Introduction

The Challenges of Organizing Terror

Introduction

The Terrorists’ Challenge

Why Preference Divergence?

Preference Divergence over Spending

Preference Divergence Over Tactics

How Groups Respond to Preference Divergence

The Difficult Challenge of Balancing Security with Efficiency and Control

Al-Qa’ida: Back to the Future - The Vanguard and Muslim Brotherhood Operations in Syria

The History of the Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

The Lessons of the First Generation: Strategic Failure

The Third Generation: Applying Syria’s Lessons to Iraq

Ideological and Religious Indoctrination

Alliances of Necessity with Untrustworthy Arab Regimes

Command Structure

Zarqawi: Building an Ideology of Isolation

Zarqawi and al-Tali’a: Side by Side Comparison

Organizational Vulnerabilities and Recommendations to Exploit Them

rand

Concluding Remarks

Executive Summary

Table of Contents

This study, conducted by the faculty and research fellows of the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point, serves multiple purposes, the most important of which is contributing to the depth of knowledge about the al-Qa’ida movement. Evidence supporting the conclusions and recommendations provided in this report is drawn from a collection of newly-released al-Qa’ida documents captured during recent operations in support of the Global War on Terror and maintained in the Department of Defense’s Harmony database. In the text of these documents, readers will see how explicit al-Qa’ida has been in its internal discussions covering a range of organizational issues, particularly regarding the internal structure and functioning of the movement as well as with tensions that emerged within the leadership.

In the first part of the report, we provide a theoretical framework, drawing on scholarly approaches including organization and agency theory, to predict where we should expect terrorist groups to face their greatest challenges in conducting operations. The framework is informed as much as possible by the captured documents, and provides a foundation upon which scholars can build as more of these documents are declassified and released to the public. Our analysis stresses that, by their nature, terrorist organizations such as al-Qa’ida face difficulties in almost any operational environment, particularly in terms of maintaining situational awareness, controlling the use of violence to achieve specified political ends, and of course, preventing local authorities from degrading the group’s capabilities. But they also face problems common to other types of organizations, including private firms, political parties, and traditional insurgencies. For example, political and ideological leaders—the principals—must delegate certain duties to middlemen or low-level operatives, their agents. However, differences in personal preferences between the leadership and their operatives in areas such as finances and tactics make this difficult and give rise to classic agency problems.

Agency problems created by the divergent preferences among terrorist group members present operational challenges for these organizations, challenges which can be exploited as part of a comprehensive counterterrorism strategy. Thus, the theoretical framework described in this report helps us identify where and under what conditions organizations can expect the greatest challenges in pursuing their goals and interests. Understanding a terrorist organization’s internal challenges and vulnerabilities is key to developing effective—and efficient—responses to the threats they pose and to degrade these groups’ ability to kill. The captured al Qa’ida documents contribute significantly to this type of understanding.

The experiences of the Moslem Brotherhood and The Fighting Vanguard (al-Tali’a al-Muqatila) in Hamah, Syria are examined as a particularly relevant case study. The lessons learned from these groups’ efforts during the 1970s—based on the actual internal assessments of senior jihadi ideologues themselves—are summarized here. Many of the jihadi experiences in Syria have striking parallels to current al-Qa’ida sponsored operations in Iraq, and we highlight several that we believe are especially relevant. This case study not only expands our understanding of the al-Qa’ida network and how it operates under pressure from the government, it also provides a useful model for other researchers to follow in applying a similar theoretical framework to the study of other terrorist organizations and their potential vulnerabilities.

Leveraging our framework and historical context from the Syrian case, we assess al-Qa’ida’s emerging organizational challenges, internal divisions, and places where the network is most likely vulnerable to exploitation. Our analysis emphasizes that effective strategies to combat threats posed by al-Qa’ida will create and exacerbate schisms within its membership. Members have different goals and objectives, and preferred strategies for achieving these ends. Preferences and commitment level vary across specific roles performed within the organization and among sub-group leaders. Defining and exploiting existing fissures within al-Qa’ida as a broadly defined organization must reflect this intra-organizational variation in preferences and commitment in order to efficiently bring all available resources to bear in degrading its potential threat. While capture-kill options may be most effective for certain individuals—e.g., operational commanders—we identify a number of non-lethal prescriptions that take into account differences in al-Qa’ida members’ preferences and commitment to the cause. Many of our prescriptions are intended to induce debilitating agency problems that increase existing organizational dysfunction and reduce al-Qa’ida’s potential for political impact.

To achieve long-term success in degrading the broader movement driving terrorist violence, however, the CTC believes the United States must begin aggressively digesting the body of work that comprises jihadi macro-strategy. We therefore also seek to apply our model to the ideological dimension of al-Qa’ida revealed in numerous instances in these documents, the goal being to identify ways to facilitate the ideational collapse of this body of thought. The included documents provide insights into the points of strategic dissonance and intersection among senior leaders that must be better understood in order to be exploited.

In sum, this theoretically informed analysis, along with assessments of the individual captured documents themselves, contributes to existing bodies of research on al-Qa’ida. It provides several tools for identifying and exacerbating existing fissures as well as locating new insertion points for counterterrorism operations. It presents an analytical model that we hope lays the foundation for a more intellectually informed approach to counterterrorism. And perhaps, most importantly, this assessment demonstrates the integral role that scholars can play in understanding the nature of this movement and in generating smarter, more effective ways to impede its growth and nurture the means for its eventual disintegration.

The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and not of the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. Government.

Foreward

Table of Contents

In war, traditional nation-states have specific attributes, such as territory, military forces, governmental structures, and economic capacity that can be the objectives of grand strategy and resulting military campaigns. Non-state actors, such as al-Qa’ida, do not have these same centers of gravity. Al-Qa’ida has non-traditional strengths and weaknesses reflecting its own unique human personalities, structure, organization, processes, and procedures. The purpose of this study is to examine the internal characteristics of al-Qa’ida so that policymakers and analysts can develop strategies to focus on their key vulnerabilities and degrade their effectiveness in supporting the global Salafist insurgency.