The Cipher Brief spoke with network member and former Acting Director of the CIA, John McLaughlin, about the current U.S. counterterrorism strategy, as well as what to expect from the terrorist threat in the coming year. According to McLaughlin, under President Barack Obama, the U.S. has been “highly successful” at eliminating terrorist leaders, but has been “less successful” at denying terrorists safe havens. Further, McLaughlin explained that as ISIS is beaten back in its self-declared caliphate in Syria and Iraq, he anticipates “the greatest post-caliphate danger is likely to be in Europe.”
The Cipher Brief: How has U.S. counterterrorism policy developed in the eight years under President Obama?
John McLaughlin: U.S. counterterrorism policy under President Obama has a mixed record tending toward positive. There are aspects of it that have been very successful and aspects of it that have been less successful and that have left problems in their wake.
TCB: What were some of the strongest elements of President Obama’s CT policy? What were the weakest?
JM: I always think of terrorism as requiring at least three things if we try to think about it systematically. In order to destroy a terrorist movement, you need first to destroy the leadership; second you need to deny it safe haven; third you need to change some of the conditions that gave rise to the phenomena that created it.
On the first one, destroy the leadership, what the Obama Administration has done has been highly successful. Obviously, it was under President Obama that Osama bin Laden received his justice. But in addition to that, the drone program in particular has been highly effective at destroying layers of leadership in al Qaeda, and, to a degree, in ISIS. So much so that al Qaeda – with some exceptions like its Yemen branch and the group that survives in Syria – has been disrupted and thinned to the point where their bench of replacement leaders is now quite spare.
Less successful has been the second thing, which is the need to deny terrorists’ safe haven. The Obama Administration succeeded in this regard up until about 2012 or thereabouts, say in the first term, but after that the Administration was late to recognize that several things were contributing to the opening of a much larger safe haven than the terrorists have had in at least a decade. The critical things were the drawdown in Iraq beginning in 2011 and the announcement, ill-advisedly in advance, that a similar withdrawal would proceed in Afghanistan.
Those two things signaled to terrorists that in those two places, there would be more opportunities. Moreover, by drawing down, it was harder to maintain the granular appreciation we had of the terrorist phenomenon in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. It opened up space for terrorists to plot and plan, in places that formerly had been controlled and monitored closely by American forces and American intelligence.
The second big trend in that period was, beginning in early 2011, the Arab Spring, which by virtue of creating a lot of chaos in countries that had traditionally been partners both in an intelligence and diplomatic sense, opened up space that was both physical and strategic. In countries like Egypt and Libya for example, and of course Syria is in a separate category, you had authoritarian regimes that had intelligence services with the capability of monitoring the streets and understanding what was going on throughout their societies. This is not to endorse them, but to say just as a simple fact that authoritarian regimes tend to do that.
So, those intelligence services went through a readjustment to figure out their place in society as it evolved, and therefore they inevitably paid less attention to problems and had less ability to maintain that same granular focus that the U.S. had in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. In the period roughly between 2011 and today, vast spaces in the Arab world became available as safe havens for terrorists to plot, plan, and train. It’s hard to hold the Obama Administration responsible for this, but they did seem to come slowly to a realization that this was rejuvenating the terrorist movement.
The third task, changing the conditions that give rise to the phenomenon, is the hardest job and no administration is going to accomplish that overnight. But in the case of the Obama Administration, the slowness of reacting to the Syrian situation, coupled with the continuing disenchantment of Sunnis - who comprise about 70 percent of Syria and about 20 percent of Iraq – with regimes that were either dominated by Shia or by sects like the Alawites. This gave Sunnis a sense of persecution and unfairness that has been the underlying engine for recruitment in the ISIS movement. So, a combination of the deliberateness with which we approached the Syria problem and the continuing festering of the Sunni-Shia divide is something that the Obama Administration may not have been able to control, but which by virtue of happening on its watch, retarded its ability to score terrorist successes.
TCB: Were there any CT issues that President Obama failed to address or dealt with inadequately, perhaps counter messaging on social media or combatting recruitment?
JM: I don’t think we know exactly, as private citizens, what the Obama Administration has done on the social media front. It may be that they are combatting some of what ISIS has been able to do in the cyber realm. We simply don’t have access to that information or to knowledge that would tell us how successful or unsuccessful they have been.
We do know, from what the U.S. military has said publicly, that ISIS’ use of Twitter has declined by a substantial margin – I believe around 40-45 percent. We do know that their recruitment is down from 1,000 per month to somewhere around 100 per month, and that still may need adjustment. But the record is hard to confidently ascertain at this point.
But it is certainly the case that ISIS got the jump on everyone in the world with their domination of social media as a recruitment tool. This is one way in which they differed a lot from al Qaeda. Al Qaeda was the VHS era terrorist group. If you recall, it was a big deal when an al Qaeda leader would smuggle out a VHS tape or a flash drive or something with a video on it to an Arab network like Aljazeera, and then we would all wait to see what it had to say and we’d all analyze it. That was an era ago.
ISIS quickly understood that they could circumvent all of that and go directly to their intended recruits via social media avenues that no terrorist group had used to that same degree before. They just got the jump on everyone there. Eventually, the Obama Administration came to understand that, and I have to assume has been combatting it.
TCB: Under President Obama, we’ve seen the decline of al Qaeda, the rise of ISIS, the decline of ISIS, and more recently the rise of al Qaeda. What should we expect moving forward in the next year?
JM: The Obama Administration will be able to take some satisfaction from having started offensives that promise to eventually throw ISIS out of Mosul and they have laid the groundwork, at least, for a similar assault on ISIS’ de facto capital in Raqqa, Syria. Obviously, they won’t get this done before January 21st, but they have created a foundation for ultimately destroying what ISIS has called the caliphate.
What’s likely to happen after that is a dispersal of ISIS fighters that will be more varied and dangerous than the dispersal we saw of al Qaeda after chasing them out of Afghanistan a dozen years ago. They had no place to go but to hide in major cities and the remoter parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Middle East.
ISIS has reasonably well-established nodes in several other countries - at one point, you could say maybe nine. By virtue of having a global infrastructure that has developed to different degrees in different parts of the world - in some cases simply sympathizers and in other places formal affiliates - they have alternatives once they are chased out of their caliphate.
The second thing ISIS has that al Qaeda never had is a degree of access to targets outside of the Middle East because they drew so many foreign fighters in - something like 6,000 or so from the U.S.-Eurasian landmass, including in that number the ones they drew from Russia. Congress’ Homeland Security Committee put out a report that said about 1,900 of them have already gone back to Europe. So I just take those figures at face value and say that if that is true – and all counterterrorism data deserves some skepticism – but if that is even partially true, that means that they are probably able to lay the groundwork for future operations in Europe where the intelligence services are small and stretched very thin. I would anticipate the greatest post-caliphate danger is likely to be in Europe.
As everyone says, there are fewer Americans who have gotten involved, so presumably the danger is somewhat smaller to us. But given that al Qaeda seems to be rebranding and rejuvenating to a degree that is hard to estimate, and al Qaeda has always had the United States in its sights, it’s much too soon for us to relax and assume that we have neutralized this danger.
I think the future holds the likelihood of remnants of ISIS and some portion of al Qaeda seeking to carry out operations both in the region of their origin and outside of that region, but operating from a less secure base then they’ve had since 2013 when ISIS began taking over territory.
In some ways, that’s good news and bad news. The good news when they have territory is that you have a lot of targets because they have to maintain infrastructure. Once they don’t have territory, then they have to be much stealthier, hide out and blend in, and therefore they are harder to find.
Another point to think about on Mosul and Raqqa is that these won’t be real victories unless we have a post-conflict stabilization plan. Stability operations are something that have acquired greater currency in the Pentagon in the aftermath of Iraq. So presumably someone is thinking about who moves into Mosul, how’s it governed, and how we suppress potential ethnic rivalries there that would turn it into yet another violent confrontation. All of that has to be thought through.
TCB: How might the Trump Administration approach CT differently than the Obama Administration?
JM: We just don’t know. We won’t really know for sure until they have their national security portfolio filled out and confirmed.
Clearly in the Secretary of Defense-designate General James Mattis, they have an individual with vast experience in this part of the world and who takes a very tough approach. So one can assume that our future approach will be no less vigorous. Whether it will be more inventive is another question. We’ll have to wait and see.
Also, some of this, particularly in the Syria case, will turn on what relationship we decide to have with the Russians and what would be the objectives of any agreements we come to with the Russians. Would the objective be primarily to destroy ISIS? Would we be trying at the same time to walk the line between destroying ISIS and also moving the Assad regime out of power? All of those things remain to be determined. Over to President-Elect Trump.
