One could easily write a book - or at least conduct a major study - on this subject, but for now the following brief observations will have to suffice:
On 31 March 2006 a Spanish court announced its sentence in the case of Ahmed Brahim, a man long accused of involvement with al-Qaida in the role of paymaster and believed to have funded the Hamburg cell of al-Qaida that carried out the attacks of 11 September 2001.
From the website of El Pais
Prior to announcing the sentence (ten years in prison, if we're reading the document correctly), the court provided a statement of facts (Hechos Probados) that included the following:
Así, cuando fue detenido el 13 de abril de 2.002, estaba creando, para difundir en internet, una página web donde enseñar los contenidos del Islam más radical y extremista, aquel que propugna la Yihad en su acepción de guerra contra todos aquellos que no compartan sus creencias, sus prácticas religiosas y su forma de vida en cualquier parte del mundo.
So, in addition to being an al-Qaida paymaster, Brahim also set up a jihadist website on or about 13 April 2002. The court doesn't name the site - almost certain to no longer be online - but for the purpose of our discussion it hardly matters.
That Brahim set up a website reminded us of the following discussion from the report "Harmony and Disharmony" recently published by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point:
The primary cause of preference divergence over spending is a natural selection process that occurs over the course of terrorists’ career paths. Within the population of new terrorist recruits, there is a distribution of commitment to the cause. Even though all may seem quite committed to us, some are always more willing to sacrifice than others. Over the course of many years in the jihad, the most committed members are the most likely to volunteer for risky or inherently fatal assignments. As members of a cohort move into finance and logistics oriented positions, the proportion of less committed members will increase because those more committed remain in comparatively more dangerous assignments and are more prone to be selected out of the population. Note that terrorist organizations typically use individuals who have been around for some time to handle logistical and management tasks. What this career progression means is that, on average, those handling financial and logistical tasks will be more risk-averse and less committed than the leadership or rank-and-file.
A corollary to the process described above is that, as pressure is increasingly applied to the administrators and active users of the websites of the global jihad, we will be weeding out the more risk averse and less committed members of the jihadist community. To put it another way, if we treat the internet as a field of battle, we make combatants of the jihadists we find online, and over time the jihadists we find online will be increasingly from the operational, rather than the logistics, side of the jihadi camp.
We have the opportunity to put the global jihad in a position where it can either abandon the use of the internet - and deprive itself of all the benefits that derive from that use - or it can simply accept that using the internet is a risky undertaking. We are reasonably confident that they will choose the latter course, with obvious benefits accruing to those of us who are actively combatting this global insurgency. While there is no sense in discussing specifics in an open forum such as this, the point - in general terms - is not to try and totally deny jihadists the ability to use the internet, but rather to deny them free and unfettered use of the internet, and to shape their usage in such a way that it benefits us more than them.
Posted on 06 April 2006 @ 09:59