Here’s the interview with Putzel.

In two years, will regional insurgent groups and local, upstart terror groups continue to brand themselves as AQ affiliates? (See this link for the full results.)

Respondents overwhelming believed, “Yes, groups will re-brand as al Qaeda, but will have no direct connection with AQ”.  In the West, we grow concerned if this prophecy proves true as it points to the unstoppable growth of al Qaeda’s social movement and an enduring terrorist threat after more than a decade of war.

The expansive description of al Qaeda and the amorphous process for joining the organization was seen by many CT pundits as the terror group’s greatest strength – the construction of a social movement where extremists from all walks of life could join al Qaeda’s call and pursue global jihad under core ideological principles outlined by al Qaeda’s central leadership.  Some professors and pundits flocked to social movement theory promoting every AQ wannabe executing a bungled, ill-conceived plot as a symbol of al Qaeda’s strength.  These same theorists would note how al Qaeda’s flat structure makes the terror group resilient and difficult to counter.

Ironically, while social movement professors rustled through their closets searching for their wrinkled Che Guevara t-shirt from graduate school, al Qaeda became increasingly worried about their social movement – specifically their loss of operational control and dilution of their brand. Lacking a formal process for integrating all new members and affiliates joining al Qaeda, the terror group’s senior leaders could not vet the quality of new joiners. The amateurish failed plots of AQ wannabes and the expansive, reckless violence of AQ affiliates slowly began to erode popular support for AQ globally calling AQ leaders to ask, “Who are these guys in our organization?”.

The Abbottabad documents released last weak reveal that Bin Laden and his top leadership struggled with the issue of membership and control.  In document SOCOM-2012-0000006-HT, a document potentially written by Zawahiri (although unconfirmed) to Bin Laden in December 2010, Zawahiri (or some high level AQ leader) notes:

“concerning controlling the affairs in general, membership and the affiliation in particular. There is no secret to you that, in the past, there were a lot of advantages and faults. However, what I would like to emphasize in this letter is the issue of individuals, those who pledge allegiance, and the affiliates. Therefore, from the last experience it showed great figures with high quality have emerged, and also some figures have emerged did not benefit any groups by their affiliation, yet some kind of bragging and boasting appeared by joining Al-Qa’ida. And, the formulation of specific titles have been published by their owners in the network of information.”

So it appears by 2010, AQ Central was becoming increasingly concerned about its unknown “volunteers” as a liability tarnishing its brand name.  Likewise, local start-ups with little or no connection to AQ were creating their own groups and appointing themselves titles previously hard won on jihadi battlefields – annoying veteran AQ members with more experience.  I can hear it now, “Hey, How did Habis get to be an Emir?  He just joined 6 months ago and all he did was start his own group… he’s never done anything!”  So much for a flat, horizontal “let’s all get along” AQ.  Zawahiri (or some high AQ leader) continues on:

“Anyways, the important thing, honorable sir, is that the issue needs to be controlled, to know who is member of Al-Qa’ida, what his function is, what side he follows, what is the way to impeach him, so as not to increase the friends of desire and greed and seclude those friends of religion and morals.”

Contextual translation: Some of these recruits don’t deserve to be al Qaeda.  We need to determine who is in and who is out.  Zawahiri (or some senior AQ leader), concludes by recommending three standards, all quite subjective, by which membership in al Qaeda might be evaluated.

“Therefore, starting from now please think about controlling the matter with a system that deals with people, each according to his religion, piety and contribution.”

By Zawahiri’s standard, one must be subservient, prove their religious credentials, and contribute – either on the battlefield or for a certain “nominal fee” one might be able to buy their way into al Qaeda.

It appears Zawahiri (or some senior AQ leader) wanted to know who was in al Qaeda, and even within al Qaeda, who was in charge of who.  Very interesting, I wonder how Zawahiri’s desires have played out in the past year as he has assumed command – assuming he can actually communicate and command anything from his current location.   I also wonder, how Zawahiri’s desires for control and structure are being received by affiliates who appear to have had a relatively free reign to pursue objectives as they wished during Bin Laden’s rule.

Two closing notes:

Last summer, I helped J.M. Berger launch a survey asking CT enthusiasts “What is al Qaeda?”. The results (Part #1 & Part #2) were quite interesting and the conclusion was that we in the West don’t really know what organizations or individuals really constitute al Qaeda.  I wonder how al Qaeda members would answer the same survey?  I bet the results would be quite similar.

Lastly, if you haven’t voted already, please take three minutes and cast your opinions here on the fate of al Qaeda one year after the death of Bin Laden.  The questions follow up on posts from last year’s survey I linked to above and will hopefully open up some good discussion in the coming weeks about the current state of al Qaeda.

Today, I give my first shout out in the the law enforcement arena to Dr. Jerry Ratcliffe of Temple University.  Jerry is both an academic and practitioner of criminal justice.  As a former member of the Metropolitan Police in London, Jerry has spent time on the street resulting in his research being particularly effective at putting theory into practice.  Jerry was one of the first to explore the application of intelligence processes in law enforcement jurisdictions leading to his seminal book Intelligence-Led Policing.  Unfortunately, revelations of the NYPD’s intelligence operations have ruined the term intelligence-led policing.  Jerry’s research does not advocate spying but instead provides a business management approach to increase the use of informants and surveillance empowering analysis that targets prolific offenders – an approach better described under the more current moniker of “smart policing”.  Jerry’s research successes with the Philadelphia Police department are noteworthy. Highly trained in Geographic Information Systems, Jerry’s work with mapping crime hotspots is outstanding.

I highly recommend Jerry’s website where he provides top notch, free resources.  Lastly, Jerry’s one of the best instructors around keeping the audience engaged and providing real world examples for all of his proposed techniques

So to kick off my law enforcement posts, I highly recommend Dr. Jerry Ratcliffe for those seeking the best in law enforcement education and research.

Meanwhile, I wanted to point out an excellent new bit of research examining ‘influence’ in social media. Jared Keller of The Atlantic reported last month on a new study:

Competition Among Memes in a World With Limited Attention, Indiana University researchers Lillian Weng, Alessando Flammini, Alessando Vespignani, and Filippo Menczer analyzed 120 million retweets connected to 12.5 million users and 1.3 million hashtags.

For the last several years, businesses and narcissists have been trying to capture a measure for assessing individual influence in social media as a means to monetize the new information highway paved by Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.  The goal for developing these measures of influence is to connect with consumers and specified populations in a streamlined, customized way with pinpoint ads.   National security types might call these  “Surgical Advertising Strikes” that efficiently and effectively use key (identified) influencers to further disseminate messages to target audiences.  Well, the simple quantitative metrics relied on thus far (friends, followers, tweets, posts, re-tweets, etc.) may in fact not be that effective in assessing influence.  This excellent study finds that:

“Influence” doesn’t necessarily mean what you think it does. In the age of the social-media celebrity, a glut of Twitter followers or particularly pugnacious sampling of pithy updates are often the hallmarks of an influencer. But new research suggests that influence is situational at best: as people compete for the attention of the broader online ecosystem, the relevance of your message to the existing conversation of those around you trumps any innate “power” a person may have.

I’m sure these findings will make some folks at Klout and Topsy angry as their models appear to rely very much on simple quantitative metrics.

The messages that achieve longevity aren’t just the ones that have the right phrasing but those that are most relevant to the existing conversation of the people near them in the ecosystem….

According to co-author Vespignani, having millions of followers does not denote an important message. Rather, the messages with the most immediate relevance tend to have a higher probability of resonating within a certain network than others. Think of it as “survival of the fittest” for information: those tweets that capture the most attention, whether related to a major geopolitical or news event or a particular interest, are likely to persist longer.

The article concludes:

The research suggests that it doesn’t fully matter who you are or how many connections you have, but what you’re saying relative to the existing conversation is what really matters in spreading knowledge online.

So, much like we’ve seen in almost every influence arena, it’s the quality of content, not the volume of content that matters.  I’ve recently heard some say they need to “increase the social media presence” of something to increase its influence.  I’ve heard this repeatedly in Washington, DC.  That’s true to an extent, social media has taken on a new place in influence.  However, key influencers not participating in social media still do and always will remain in our society.  For example, I often ask the overzealous “where is VP Dick Cheney’s Twitter account at?”  or “what did the J.P. Morgan CEO’s Facebook page say this morning?”  BLUF: Influence can still exist outside of social media as well.

Focus on content rather than contacts if you want to assess influence – competition models are the best for studying this as seen here by this excellent example from NewsPatterns.

In closing, I’m glad to hear that it’s “what you say and when you say it” that matters.  A enduring lesson for us all.

Speaking of last year, for those that did not see last year’s survey and are curious about where this past week’s survey questions originated from, see this survey from last April 2011 (al Qaeda Strategy 2011-2012) and this survey launched the day of Bin Laden’s death.  These questions were the basis for last week’s assessment survey.

For those also interested in what respondents thought about al Qaeda’s strategy and state the week before and the week after Bin Laden’s death in 2011, I’ve compiled a list of results and links from a year ago with respect to each question.  I thought a quick post showing the output of last year’s survey might be useful for those interested in what comes out of these surveys.  I’ll post the links in the order in which they were analyzed last spring/summer 2011.  Again, thanks for voting on this year’s survey and please feel free to forward the survey link (https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/UBLayearlater) to anyone you think might be interested.  The more votes the better!

Here’s last year’s results from surveys launched immediately prior and immediately after UBL’s death:

• AQ Strategy & Post UBL Poll Overview (Background Summary on Voters)
• Voters say Zawahiri 1 to 2 years from capture
• Chief Consequence of UBL’s Death
• AQ Leadership After Bin Laden
• Financial Impact on AQ Post Bin Laden
• AQ Donor Support Before & After UBL
• UBL’s Death & The Afghanistan Mission
• AQ Affiliates After Bin Laden
• AQ Affiliate Targeting Focus
• Crowd Considered AQ Central Top Affiliate After UBL’s Death
• Will AQ foreign fighters return home to fight?
• What will al Qaeda do?
• Keys to AQ’s Survival & Resurgence
• Western CT Main Efforts Against AQ
• Academics are confident – before & after Bin Laden’s death
• International Perspectives Increase Confidence
• Listen To Your Friends, Read Academic Publications, Build Your Confidence
• The Strength of al Qaeda’s Name: Stronger or Weaker?

Before delving into an analysis of the documents, it is critical to address the academic limitations of studying declassified captured battlefield documents. Such a study is fraught with risks, not least because the academic community is not involved in the process of declassification and is therefore unaware of the larger classified corpus of documents.

In my own experience working on the Harmony Program years back, I found similar issue with small document sets from which research would later be generated.  Primary source al Qaeda material always and always will be quite limited.  @intelwire remarked just yesterday about how little reporting on al Qaeda there’s been this past year, comparatively, and how that has likely shaped and limited our understanding of al Qaeda today.

As I start to read the new declassified documents, I began thinking of when good al Qaeda analysis and weak al Qaeda analysis arises from the limited primary source material of the Harmony Program. As @will_mccants noted, most will pluck quotes from the documents to support whatever theory they’ve wed themselves to with regards to al Qaeda.  However, the best analysts will avoid several traps.

1. Senders and Receivers:  With the exception of some Harmony documents related to Somalia, almost all of the documents lack the perspective of one party in the sender-receiver relationship.  One can see the message that was sent, but the corresponding response is absent.  Thus an analyst, using only a single document, will not know if the response to the message may have later changed the thinking of the sender.  Understanding how a message was received is equally important to knowing the message that was sent.
2. Context:  Some analysts will try to write entire dissertations with sweeping conclusions off one or two documents.  These dissertations will suck!  Good analysts will take their time and use other openly available sources to put the letters in context.  The best analysts will take it one step further and use the documents to generate an informed research plan that creates additional information (field research, interviews) placing the primary source material in context.  The folks at FFI in Norway may be the best at this.  Vahid Brown did an outstanding job of this in his work – Cracks in the Foundation.
3. Combine Regional/Subject Expertise with New Information: Many will rush to get the first analysis of the documents out the door trying to lump all nifty Bin Laden quips into one large piece.  The insights will be thin.  However, the best analysis will come from those with regional/subject expertise that can interpret certain portions of the documents related to their particular strength. The analysis from the documents should be focused on specific topics rather than an aggregate whole.  For example, I think the most intriguing research topic might be AQ’s relationship with Iran.  Analysts who really understand the Iran/Pakistan relationship will use their knowledge, other open source material, their own research and new bits from the Harmony documents to properly dissect this one issue.  Essentially, the Harmony docs will accentuate the analysis of the best analysts rather than being the central part of analysis by weak ePundits.
4. See old AQ documents as representative of current AQ:  One of my greatest fears is that some will see AQ’s operations and Bin Laden’s mindset in these documents as indicative of how al Qaeda currently operates.  All of these docs are at least a year old and most are even older.  Much like those that analyzed AQ in 2009 with a mental framework built on AQ’s structure in the 1990′s, I fear these documents will convince some they understand how al Qaeda is operating now.  Hence, why I launched the crowdsourcing poll yesterday asking “What has happened to al Qaeda since Bin Laden’s death?“.  I’m more interested in how al Qaeda is operating today.  If you have 3 minutes, take this challenge and see what you think now having heard reports on the UBL docs or read them yourself.

Vote Here: AQ After UBL 

What will be the chief consequence of Usama Bin Laden’s (UBL) death for the global jihadi movement?

Five months later, on May 2, 2011 (one year ago today), U.S. forces killed Bin Laden in Pakistan.  His death triggered a crowdsourcing experiment which re-issued the same question above gathering several hundred responses from terrorism experts and enthusiasts around the world.  My thanks to all participants as your inputs generated significant insights not only about UBL, al Qaeda and the future of terrorism, but provided the basis for today’s assessment:

One year after Usama Bin Laden’s (UBL) death, what has happened with respect to terrorism and al Qaeda?

A year ago, I presented a complex set of questions to the crowd in hopes of teasing out a collective prediction on many different aspects of al Qaeda’s future without its founder.  Today, I ask you to respond to a survey assessing what has happened to al Qaeda over the past year.  If you have the interest and the time, please click the button here to cast your opinions on the current state of al Qaeda:

Click here to take survey
 
Again this year, all interested in the topic are welcome to participate.  No experience, education or knowledge is required. Nor do you need to have voted last year. With crowdsourcing, the more the better! What do you get for your contributions? The collective insights of all voters and analytical comparison to last year’s collective predictions.

Unlike last year’s survey, this year’s survey consists mostly of dichotomous questions that directly assess the component questions I asked respondents last year.  I believe this year’s survey will be easier for respondents to answer and much faster to complete (Probably 3-5 minutes). Additionally, After many of these questions, I’ll ask you how confident you are in your response. The goal with the confidence questions is to identify a) what issues we are collectively confident about and b) what questions we are collectively less confident about – suggesting the need for further research.

Lastly, if you know of people interested in terrorism studies and al Qaeda, please forward this link to them.
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/1yearpostBinLaden
 
Thanks to all who contribute and I’ll begin publishing the results in the coming weeks.  Here’s a sample question for those that are curious:

8. Since Usama Bin Laden’s death, has al Qaeda inspired recruitment around the world increased or decreased?

Increased

Decreased

McCants notes:

Al Qaeda’s gains warrant serious attention, but they do not represent a shift away from the group’s “far enemy” strategy targeting the United States to a “near enemy” strategy targeting local regimes. For al Qaeda, the two are not mutually exclusive.

McCants uses analysis of an al Qaeda work he translated years ago, Naji’s The Management of Savagery, to explain how AQ might pursue nation building alongside terrorism operations.  Before alarming the world of al Qaeda’s next impending rise, McCants goes on to point out two reasons why the strategy put forth by Naji and contemplated in this article may be doomed to fail.  McCants explains:

The first is the problem visited on the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 2001. How do you protect a new emirate if you incite a foreign power to invade it?

He continues with:

 The second problem is that the only land that can be “conquered” is in countries where the state is weak and tribal politics are paramount. Controlling land and governing people requires greater involvement in local politics than merely securing a safe haven.

McCants paints an excellent portrait of al Qaeda’s current state one year after Bin Laden, and I encourage everyone interested in the topic to read his conclusion as to why we shouldn’t panic about al Qaeda again, at least not yet.

First, @robertcaruso jumped into the analytical game beyond Twitter a couple weeks back with an article he co-authored with @stcolumbia on “Defense Intelligence Reform“. A nice bit of work by two members of the #STRATPACK. Next, @robertcaruso stepped it up another notch by launching his own blog this week (Rock Shoals), which discusses the bureaucratic processes and politics of the U.S. intelligence, military and counterterrorism communities.  In his first post, he helps navigate the defense and intelligence bureaucracy:

 Unsurprisingly, in the last 96 hours, many tears have been spilled over the Defense Clandestine Service. Let’s address some of these half-truths and outright falsehoods.

I’m looking forward to the Caruso-style enhancing the debate on how the U.S. government architecture works.

Second, I’m excited to see Kevin Jackson (@alleyesonjihad) jumping into the blogosphere.  He’s been dropping some serious knowledge about al Qaeda the past year on Twitter and now he’s opened up his new blog at AlleyesOnJihad.  He starts off revealing a mystery player in the original AQ propaganda video. In doing so, he cites a document that’s been needing analysis for a long time – the biography of Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, which he cites here:

This confusion made me want to share an anecdotical, but quite interesting story I read in Harun’s autobiography involving the other Abu’l Husayn, the Egyptian one. He was an al Qa’ida member who having been part of a small team of operatives whose mission was to explore and find alternative hiding places for the organization leadership. To be more precise, Harun recounts that during the course of the year 2000, as the preparation for the 9/11 attacks was on its way, he was chosen by the leader of the mission, Sayf al Adl, a Shura council member and head of the security committee, to accompany him for a « very secret trip » to Jalalabad, to the point that the Comorian operative was not informed of the purpose of the mission. He then learned that it was meant to find new suitable safe havens into which the high command could hide if « things go wrong » (in expectation of the forthcoming big attack and the troubles it might get al Qa’ida into). Those who joined were Shaykh Abu’l Husayn al Misri, « a specialist in the relations with the tribes » and a fluent Farsi speaker, according to Harun, as well as an unnamed « Algerian brother », married to a woman of Waziristan. In Jalalabad, the crew payed a visit to Yunus Khalis, a well-known and powerful Afghan mujahid commander, who assured his foreign guests of his unfailing support (the Khalis’ protection granted to al Qa’ida would turn out to be critical during the organization’s escape in eastern Afghanistan following the US invasion).

I’m already looking forward to the second post.  Nice work on the first!