TERRORIST NETWORKS: Advanced Topics

The media term "amorphous terrorist network" doesn't provide much for us to work with. That changes when you apply advanced network theory to the topic. A recent paper by the student Mitch Stripling called, "Embodying Terror Networks: How Direction Creates Structure" (PDF) is a great example of this. The paper starts with a strongly written review of how network theory has been applied to this topic. This review starts with the early work by Arquilla and Ronfeldt (Networks and Netwars) and their simplistic chain, star, and all-channel network topographies and continues to the highly connected hubs (which embodies both the vulnerability and resilience of this type of network topology) and power-law distributions of scale-free networks (for more, read the brief: "Scale-Free (Terror) Networks" from May 2004).

Directed Scale-Free Networks

The real insight in Mitch's paper comes from the realization that terrorist networks aren't merely generic scale-free networks, but more likely an important subset: directional scale-free networks. Scale-free networks are typically depicted by a set of nodes that are symmetrically connected (I link to you, you link to me). The dynamic flows that travel through those networks, whether they be information/fluids/electricity/contagion, can travel in both directions across symmetric links. However, that doesn't actually happen in many real world networks. In these networks, links have direction (I link to a major hub, and it doesn't link back to me). Directional networks, in contrast, have links that are asymmetric and offer only unidirectional flows. A good visualization of this can be seen in Albert-Laszlo Barabasi's diagram (inset, from "Linked"). It depicts the directional flow of connections (from the left to the right):

• a central core of highly connected (via bidirectional links) nodes,
• an IN continent (links in), an OUT continent (links out),
• and various other structures (a Tube of connections between IN/OUT continents, Tendrils that feed into each continent, and islands that are clusters of affiliated but unconnected nodes).

AlQaeda.net

When you apply the directional scale-free network model to al Qaeda, you see a fairly good fit, particularly when you assume that the al Qaeda of today is more of a movement than a cohesive organization (Mitch provides some historical analysis to back this up). Here's how it works. Al Qaeda's flow starts in connections from the feeder networks within the IN continent that instill a common animating narrative (Madrasahs, etc.). This common narrative drives social clusters to seek connections with the central core (bin Laden and associates) which will eventually transition them to become operational assets (terrorist cells) in the OUT continent. Here's the likely path of al Qaeda's evolution, some of which has already been seen, given this 'movement' model:

• al Qaeda's leadership will increasingly ask groups to act on their own, without seeking direct connections to the central leadership. This will be accomplished through the production of global media messages that contain targeting recommendation (which is essentially a low bandwidth command link). If this works, recruits within the IN continent can transition (FLOW) quickly to the OUT continent without ever directly connecting to the central core.
• IF this transition can be made, al Qaeda's central leadership would become relatively immune to disruption. Nearly all of the central core could be knocked out without damaging its ability to message those groups in the operational OUT continent. In the words of Valdis Krebs, al Qaeda could look very much like a doughnut and still be able to operate.
• Finally, local groups that enjoy a level of operational success within the OUT continent can and will go international autonomously, in that they will create/distribute media messaging and operationally manage attacks on a global scale. Zarqawi's efforts and the recent plea by al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia for attacks on global oil infrastructure are good examples of this. Within the network model, these groups would be seen as clusters on the periphery that can catalyze the operation of the entire network (by acting not just as feeders and operators, but as mirrors of the central core).

Comments

[donburko]

John,
What about the danger of loss of control for al-Qaeda? Using the open source metaphor, how do they avoid splintering of the project? I suppose the obvious answer is that they don't really care, as long as western interests are damaged, but that gets tricky if you get a situation in which the local interests of a group are not in line with, or are counter-productive to al-Qaeda's. You can see this in the rebuke issued by al-Zawahiri to al-Qaeda in the Land of the Two Rivers and Abu Zarqawi over the 2005 hotel bombing in Jordan.

The periphery groups that adopt al-Qaeda's message are all primarily motivated by local issues, so while they may find it useful to act as 'mirrors' for the core and gain some form of legitimacy through association with al-Qaeda, it cannot be assumed that the relationship will remain that way. For instance, as you wrote in The Open-Source War, if the goal of an open source community is removed, the community dissolves. So if the local issues are resolved, these periphery clusters may lose the motivation to act as 'mirrors' for al-Qaeda. Being that al-Qaeda has shifted from operational toward motivational, it might make more sense to try to break the network from the periphery inwards, instead of trying to disrupt the core.

Just a thought...

[Valdis]

To get more of the doughnut metaphor, look at this actual on-line community [this is NOT aQ, nor any terror group]. People are all attracted to this site/group because of a common interest/affiliation. The real active part of the net are the red nodes in the middle, the blue nodes are the distant edges -- the lurkers, passive interest/support. This general picture probably describes any emergent community -- whether good or bad.

http://orgnet.com/emergent_community2.png

Suppose al Qaida looked something like this, and we took out most of the middle/core in the Afghan War? That leaves mostly a doughnut, that can not function well globally, but may be effective locally.

[John Robb]

Here's an example of a local network, in southern Spain:

http://www.jamestown.org/terrorism/news/article.php?articleid=2370249

[loki547]

the beauty, or nightmare is in the splinters. the lurkers/sympathizers, will carry on in their own interpretation of, and essentially provide non-afiliated screening for activities of the core. Leaving the core to not only carry out its own agenda, it allows for others to filter in as supply/demand. Very effective.

[striplingmitch]

part of complex networks is integrating time, right? to do that, the doughnut needs a narrative. it would be a doughnut in motion with periphery always becoming central and (maybe) vice versa.

so, if you see a directed motion in the network, even if you destroy the center, the connections reaching out from the lefthand nodes would still be reaching out; still deeply desiring to connect to the vanished center.

all i mean is that i don't think they would stay tendrils or islands long. i think the nodes would find a way to re-hub and create some core. to that extent, the hydra is a good metaphor, except that instead of growing heads, the monster is growing hubs.

that means i'm less worried about currently active cells than about those ideological, financial and supportive feeder networks--the ones with the internal-moving connections. that's the soul of re-generation. and those are grey areas, mostly legal and not "hearts and minds" that can be "won", i don't think.

[Kotare]

I agree that the peripheral cells pose danger: their activities distract the security forces and divert their resources, allowing the active cells (those closer to the centre) to plan the next big one in relative safety and obsurity.

British General Sir Rupert Smith describes terrorist command structures as 'rhizomatic' - rhizomatic command systems are difficult to attack as a rhizomatic plant is difficult to eradicate. It's a good, easy to understand analogy. Leadership, motivation, expertise and resources are diffused throughout the system, rather than being concentrated and vulnerable at the core.

Once the system has propagated sufficiently it is enough for the centre to issue general directions in line with the overall aim - e.g., attack oil infrastructure, kill US troops and so on - and allow the cells to carry on.

http://kotare.typepad.com/thestrategist/2007/01/the_rhizome_the.html

[french swede the rootless vegetable]

Valdis: "That leaves mostly a doughnut, that can not function well globally, but may be effective locally."

The "hole" becomes an empty niche; won't a peripherical network take over it?

[Isaac Daniel Russell]

(my third typekey account! what gives?!)

Good paper, Mitch. (Old English teacher here - do a close edit for typos and sentence structure, though)

I think the model you lay out works very well. Your emphasis on preventing the 're-hubbing' of peripherals is important. While 'take out' kinetic activity is going on towards major nodes in the core, diplomatic/civic activity must be concurrent to provide for the conditions to facilitate that end. This is good COIN. This is SysAdmin. This work wouldn't represent a counter-doctrine (antagonistic), but rather a parallel narrative which would be attractive and appeal to the proclivity to hub. Ideally, this would re-assign lurkers, tendrils, etc., to positive networks making AQnet all the weaker and diminished. As such, both of these vectors: destroying the AQnet core and re-directing the periphery, are more readily pursued.

[Valdis]

Yes, the hole may not remain a hole over time... especially if bits and pieces of the core remain. They will form new links and try to re-weave the network -- maybe in a way more appropriate for the curent time.

In Nature, vacuums are quickly filled. In human relationships holes/spaces are filled iff there is a payoff/advantage. Taking out the center of a large community/organization may lead to one of the following outcomes...
1) destroying the community/organization.
2) re-organizing the group, re-configuring the ties & structures.
3) dispersing the remaining groups. Some of the remaining fragments may form new communities/organizations similar to the original, while others may chose to remain small/local -- with invisible ties to each other because they came from the same source/parent.

Both 2) and 3) above are not good news. We have gone from an enemy we know to an enemy we don't know. It is like in the middle of a war, somebody changed the terrain, and no one printed the new maps.

[Duncan Kinder]

According to the paper, these directional scale-free networks all have an animating narrative and a shared vision. In other words, they are teleological - they exist to accomplish some shared goal.

The apparent goal of Al Qaeda apparently is to re-establish the Caliphate upon Salafist lines.

That gives rise to the question about whether this is, in fact, Al Qaeda's actual goal and not something else.

It also begs the question of why its members have come to share this goal rather than some other - say instead to fantasize about sex with the late Anna Nicole Smith.

Finally, it gives rise to the question of how this goal can be sustained if either a) confronted with a competing goal diverting the attention of its members or b) confronted with substantial frustration or failure.

In short, this suggests Al Qaeda's opponents consider the following:

1) Actively investigate, without preconceptions, what Al Qaeda actually is trying to accomplish. Relevant factors would include what they actually are saying, what they actually are doing.

2) Actively investigate who they actually are and how they came to join.

3) Determine if we could accomplish any of Al Qaeda's objectives ourselves in a manner that we can at least live with.

4)Promote environmental factors tending to make Al Qaeda look, to its own members and not to us, foolish or futile.

[enigma_foundry]

Al Qaeda's flow starts in connections from the feeder networks within the IN continent that instill a common animating narrative (Madrasahs, etc.). This common narrative drives social clusters to seek connections with the central core (bin Laden and associates) which will eventually transition them to become operational assets (terrorist cells) in the OUT continent.

Two comments:

1. Unidirectional flows imply different methods of disruption. They are particularly susceptible to poisioning, for example.

2. The implications of this, and nearly all of the posts here at GG is that the way to remove AQ is to defeat its plausible premise, that is that the West (in particular the US) is a dangerous to Islam and must be destroyed. You cannot invade Iraq and not feed that premise. You cannot invade Iraq and not feed that premise. So the US must embark on a course of always taking the moral high ground, and work for Justice and pay very major attention (with deeds as well as words) to issues such as Global Warming, Poverty, Income Inquality, to remove that plausible premise.

That course of action will NOT have effects in the short term. In the mid-term to long term, eventually the support for AQ will subside. That is, clearly, the worlds best hope for avoiding all-out War.

[enigma_foundry]

"...1) Actively investigate, without preconceptions, what Al Qaeda actually is trying to accomplish. Relevant factors would include what they actually are saying, what they actually are doing..."

Well, one way to investigate is who they are trying to recruit, and the news is not good. They are looking for people with genomics, biology backgrounds, from PhD's to lab techs.

[AE]

"They are looking for people with genomics, biology backgrounds, from PhD's to lab techs."

That's a very good point.

I really enjoyed Stripling's article--it does offer a solution in disrupting networks. But I think that Al-Qaeda may ultimately be moving in the direction of "lone wolf" terrorism--the Jamestown Foundation's reports note that the new jihadists theorists are moving towards increasing decentralization and DIY tactics.

http://simulatedlaughter.blogspot.com/2007/02/lone-wolves-and-al-qaeda-grand-strategy.html

[adam]

Al Quaedas aims are a little complicated.

The first thing to recognise is that Al Quaeda is an alliance or patchwork of organisations, rather than a single group. In some respects Al Quaeda is more closely a martial philosophy based around the arguments of Bin Laden and Zawahiri than a organisation as such. The phrase "Al Quaedaism" or Bush's "Al Quaeda-like" is applied to the overall group of those who independently and separately conduct terrorism through political sympathy to al Qaeda ideology or methods.

The basic part of the philosophy is Sunni, broadly within the Salafist tradition of Sunni-Islam, but there are elements of Bin Ladens thinking that have been influenced by Wahabism. Salafism is a very traditional "back to basics" form of religious thinking based on the thinking of the first 3 generations of Islam. Its very anti-Shi'ite which is why the latest US charges of Al Quaeda and Iran working together is so much marsh gas.

Salafism came out of 19th Century British occupied Egypt and so its also got a lot of reaction to Western values - mainly as it argues that these are hypocritical tools used to justify whatever the West wants that day. Salafism incidentally is also the creed of the Muslim Brotherhood of which Zawahiri was a member.

In very broad terms Al Quaeda is the vanguard element for a defensive Jihad against Western influence in the Middle East, with specific emphasis on Saudi Arabia, Palestine, Iraq, and the various Western backed dictatorships (Uzbekistan, Jordan, Egypt, etc.) in the region.

Now here's where it gets a bit sticky. The infidel thing is overblown. Bin Laden has mentioned it once between 1994 and 2004; specifically he uses the word in a letter written on or around November 3rd 2001 during the US invasion of Afghanistan. The key section runs "We cannot ignore the emnity between the infidels and ourselves since it is a doctrinal one." Theres a couple of run on sentences but the bottom line is that Bin Laden is making the not unreasonable point that US and Bin Ladens philosophies disagree. Infidel incidentally applies to those without faith, in its slang phrase it means non-Muslim, but it is pretty much similar to the Jewish word gentile or the US "rag-head".

From here on out it gets a little complicated. There are different conceptions of the caliphate, sort of a Sunni papacy, which may or may not have temporal power. Bin Laden mentioned it twice in 10 years. The first time was in an interview in 1996 in an Australian Islamic magazine (and to be honest Bin Laden doesn't actually use the phrase Caliphate - he actually says an Afghan Islamic State, Bin Ladens relations with the Taliban were quite rocky at that time). The second time was also in an interview - this time in October 2001 (aired in 2002) with Taysir Alluni. For this Alluni spent 2 or 3 years in a Spanish prison without trial (as is traditional for show-prisoners a lot of time was in solitary). After a year out he's finally been sentenced to seven years in prison.

However the Caliphate is a very significant thing in Sunni Islam, on the order of the influence of the Roman Empire in the histories of the US and EU, so it doesn't really need mentioning. Certainly re-creating the Caliphate is an aim of the Muslim Brotherhood and of many members of the Islamic community. The Caliphate was the basis of Islam for the Sunnis until 1924 (with a minor interruption in the 1250s due to the Mongols killing the Caliph and everyone near him). Muslims regard themselves as members of the umma, the community of believers, that forms the heart of Islam. And as earthly head of that community, the Caliph is seen as the best form of government.

Naturally it is the US's policy that no Caliphate will be allowed (Bush Speech in Jan 2006). Quite why this is the case is hard to say. Certainly there is the traditional Western divide and rule method here, plus some casual racism. But what is the actual objection? The bad news is that the subtext of the US's announced policy is that as they are sub-human the Sunnis shouldn't be allowed to discuss political dreams of progressa and new forms of government, never mind re-unification. They'll have to be happy with their Western backed dictatorship and like it. This position simply doesn't help the US, so its crazy. It does help Israel though so the people in the US that take Israeli cash are often quite anti-Caliphate and rely on Americans to not know what they are actually talking about.

So what are Al Quaedas aims:

a) Provide training for insurgents around the world. Forget the suicide bomber gibberish that the Wests leaders talk - because that can be done in a bedroom. Al Quaeda were training guerillas in Afghanistan. And not just any guerillas - the intention was to provide combat leaders, trainers and logistics experts. Al Quaeda created a modular set of lessons for military operations (not simply terrorism) that could be carried out separately in dozens of locations, each lesson separate from all the others. In short, Al Quaeda trained guerillas, not terrorists.

b) Provide a vanguard element to lead people towards their thinking. (Bin Laden uses the metaphor of a detonator in his speech of the 14th October 2002). This has certainly happened.

c) Engage in defensive jihad against the West

d) If possible, win the defensive jihad against the West - if not then don't lose it. Sooner or later the West will go bankrupt.

e) Push Israel out of Jerusalem - and further if possible. Israels original victory in the Yom Kippur was responsible for radicalising Bin Laden. Its US support for Israel that sees Bin Laden attack the US.

f) Rebuild Middle Eastern Islamic nations as proud and able to stand on their own two feet against the West (aka the Caliphate).

g) Encourage the spread of Salafism and Sunni Islam and - by implication - work against Shi'ite Islam.

[stevelaudig]

"al Qaeda's leadership will increasingly ask groups to act on their own, without seeking direct connections to the central leadership."

What is the utility for central leadership in a demolition project? It's the old everything looks like a hammer joke with the "state" in the role of the nail.

[Valdis]

> Yes, the hole may not remain a hole over time, especially if bits
> and pieces of the core remain. They will form new links and try
> to re-weave the network...

Looks like the doughnut hole may have been filled:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/19/world/asia/19intel.html

[tbrucia]

Most people think in terms of analogies and images. The concepts of metastasis (cancer) and rhizomatic spread (bamboo) are both borrowed from biology, and biology studies robust systems successfully operating in hostile environments -- sound familiar? Perhaps a vein to mine (another analogy) is to examine how biological systems operate in the real world, and see what limits them (either episodically or permanently) from becoming totally dominant. How does the body defend itself from genes gone awry, and what are the latest strategies to keep cancers from metasticizing? (Sometimes the outcome is fatal, so many of the strategies are ipso facto unsuccessful). Why haven't bamboos spread over the entire planet and displaced all other plant species? And within both cancers and within bamboo groves, what symbiotic processes are taking place? And what parasitic hosts can 'take down' these invasive systems? There is a goldmine of fascinating ideas to be found by bringing the concepts found in biology into the study of global guerrillas and the variants. It would be great if we could enlist the help of some professional biologists in this endeavor. Cross fertilization, so to speak.