Transcripts For CSPAN2 Counterterrorism Strategies In North

CSPAN2 Counterterrorism Strategies In North Africa Panel 4 December 27, 2017

Vice president at the program. One of the Great Stories of being in washington is sometimes written in the environment. Sometimes being the smartest guy in the room, thats the dumbest guy at the panel. The people we have talking now, we envision this as a way to capture some of the strategic wisdom or just three people for whom i have tremendous respect. Lieutenant general mike nagata. Your title, it is the most difficult title, the director of the directorate of Strategic Operational planning. But the job is incredible. He was the commander of the special forces, special Operations Forces in the us central command. And now hes with the National Counterterrorism center. Thinking all of these strategic thoughts weve been struggling with in many ways from day one. We are very grateful for you to take the time to be with us. John mclaughlin as many of you know was the acting director of central intelligence, Deputy Director for intelligence at the cia. I have grown reliance on him as a person who comes to our small meetings and is able to distill the strategic points that everybody has been struggling to articulate and he manages to capture it in a way that i just find breathtaking. Christine wormuth, former undersecretary of defense and an old and valued colleague of mine, whenever we had the internal things to work through, having christine on my team was always a sign that we were going to be successful. Shes currently directing the adrian arched center for resilience at the atlantic council. So what we have our people with tremendous intellectual ability and government experience to help us think about where is all this, where are we trying to take it . Where is all this going when we talk about counterterrorism in north africa. How much should we care about it . What should we be doing about it . When should we stop focusing on it and when should we start focusing on it . Because its easy to take something small, to say this is the problem but what we have is a panel of people who have fought and acted worldwide. And i think they can help us contextualize whats happening in north africa and think about what it is that we are all trying to do. So i think people start with general nagata if we can work down. Do you have any benchmarks for strategic success or failure . And we can see those benchmarks for strategic success or failure when we are thinking about a problem what fighting terrorism in west africa. First of all, thank you for inviting me to be here today. I think you should always start with me because whatever i say is going to be improved on by the other two panelists hereand unfortunately i will start with , ill demonstrate with the way im going to answer your question. In order to describe a benchmark, you have to actually know where you are going. Otherwise you dont know whether or not what you are looking at is a benchmark on the road to your destination. I know that we are here to speak principally about the monogram but what im about to say, i think you can conflate virtually everything he confronts it comes to countering terrorism both as the United States and as a member of theInternational Community. I was recently asked another panel a similar question. It wasnt asked about benchmarks, i was asked a more simple question about what are we winning . I would argue that in order to know you are waiting you have to get your benchmarks so heres my basic answer. I would argue the world is still struggling with inconsistency about what our goals are. The United States does articulate certain goals when it comes to countering terrorism, countering violent extremism. The problem is in many cases our definition of what constitutes sufficient success is very different from what other actors, other nations, other communities are describing as their and so long as that is true, the search for benchmarks is going to be pretty elusive. Ill so that i dont completely, and dodge your question, i will float a couple ideas. That may be of some utility to you or the people that are observing this event. One might make the argument that our goal is as the United States, specific to the United States is to avoid another 9 11. Its a commendable goal and so far we havent had a repeat of that awful event. If that is our goal, then i could potentially describe some benchmarks for this part of africa that help us pursue that goal but the real problem is having a repeat of 9 11 as our goal is we will have to do that forever. Theres no end to preventing another 9 11 unless theres other things we are willing to do that dont involve preventing a catastrophic attack but avoid the creation of the ability and desire for that castoff contact. Another way to define our goals is by characterizing the capability that we think we need. An example, ill use as an example because its what im most familiar with but, should the United States throw our partners in this particular part of the world have the ability to identify a danger, a threat, a malign actor who intends to harm, trap that individual or group of individuals and ultimately use the appropriate capability to arrest, detain or if necessary take military action against those actors . Sure, thats necessary and weve done a lot of that with our partners around the world but it has the same basic problem that preventing another 9 11 has and that is youre going to have to do it forever. Where this really drives us to and i would argue this is appropriate for a conversation about africa is should our goal be undoing of the root causes that there are many different descriptions you can do publicly and privately about this but its basically removing the causes , the drivers that propel vulnerable individuals and vulnerable groups into the path of radicalization and ultimately mobilization to violence. I would argue thats the best goal. But identifying the benchmarks for that journey is actually much harder than the benchmarks for taking physical action because this have to do with what people believe. This have to do with what people perceive. This have to do with deep seated emotional psychological, cultural , societal drivers that often are big governments are not in a good position to generate a lot of skill. So at the end, it probably does look like ive got your question but identifying benchmarks without a consistent definition of what were trying to do, that has never struck me as a useful endeavor and frankly it ends up being futile. One of the problems with trying to prevent economics in the world is doing it as the Us Government for 70 years. With current success. [inaudible] im glad we switched to game of thrones here, i feel good about that. Thank you for inviting me and thispanel. Im going to, you gave us about 10 questions and im going to take a look at maybe four of them. One of them is the one you just asked, the benchmarks. The others have to do with what priorities you have in policy. Whether the rights, number one, whether the right structuresare in place. What is the trajectory of terrorism in this part of the world. And whether, well , whether the right benchmarks are there. Let me start by saying that listening to the panelists today and thinking about the problems, i think this area and this set of problems deserves the highest priority in us attention to counterterrorism. And i think its because there are at least four characteristics here that i dont see present in the same measure in any other part of the world. First, you have linkages among these groups that are very pronounced. I would go back to that with a case study. Second, they have very weak orders. Third, you have something that reinforces that problem which is vast ungoverned spaces or loosely governed spaces. And finally, you have what i think general nagata was referring to at his remarks which is instead of a socioeconomic cultural condition that is challenging, to say the least when it comes to the formation of attitudes. We were both on a panel to advice a Norwegian Oil company, statoil, with regard to a terrorist attack that it had experienced in algeria where they were managing a natural gas facility in conjunction with the al gearian oil company and bp. So three of them. This occurred in 2013, and to refresh your memory, this facility which is about 40 kilometers as i recall inside of the gearian border from libya was attacked by a gang of terrorists led by mukhtar el mukhtar. Close to 40 hostages decide. This was a really major event which was briefly noted in the International Press but not given the kind of attention that it deserved as a kind of benchmark if you will for a variety of things. And among the things i took away from it was the first point i made about linkages among these groups because when we looked at the terrorists who attacked us under mukhtar i counted eight nationalities involved. I dont know that i can list them all. There were tunisians, egyptians, canadians, believe it or not, at least two canadians. Maliians, say again . Niger. Niger. There were at least eight. What i took from that was, you can assemble a pretty strong terrorist group that crosses a lot of lines here very easily in tart past world and move across the border. When i looked at that border between libya and algeria, i said some one not to make a joke about terrorists attacks, give me a land rover, i could probably control a group to go go to go attack something. I didnt see any visible border from space. That sort of affected my perception of the problem in this area, and that takes me to my second point i wanted to talk about which is, the first point a lot of things combined to to this a more fertile environment for terrorist development, plotting, and activity than most parts of the world and part of the first point again, i think it makes classicic counterterrorism much harder than anywhere else. Getting to jenna gaut at generalnagatas point, my way of thinking about counterterrorism, a little simpleminded, sometimes you have to be, you need to do three things to defeat a terrorist phenomenon. You have to destroy the leadership, you must deny it safe haven, you must change the conditions that gave rise to the phenomenon. But what general nagata was talking about is number three, i think. One thing to attack the leadership. It is another to deny it safe haven. By the way, i dont think weve done those two things in this part of the world, attacked leadership to a degree, but certainly havent denied it safe haven though there are pockets that might be true. For example, along the algerianmoroccan border. But that third one, change the conditions, thats something that my old profession, intelligence, cant do by itself. We can work the first two, but changing conditions means on all of government approach but really all of government multilateral, multinational approach. I will leave it at that. The dimensions of that are impressive. The second point, are the right solution, the right structures in place . Given that terrorists can cross boundaries so easily in this part of the world, and clearly share logistics and other things, and are all as one of the earlier panelists mentioned entwined with other phenomena, organized crime and smuggling, i cant think that the right structures are in place to substantially attack the problem. In part because, here im just drawing on my own experience in our hemisphere and in europe. The key to this is fusion of data. Not just fusion of kinetic capability but fusion of data. That requires informationsharing, at a sophisticated level, and that is hard for to us do here. Were dramatically better than we were we were at the time of. But i see our european counterparts with much longer history of working this still struggling with it as they attempt to cope with the kind of attacks weve seen in europe over the last several years. So i am not familiar enough with the innards of this area to know how hard it is but i suspect it is very difficult because to do it successfully you need trust, you need Information Technology that is multilateral, you need joint operations to build that trust, andyou need ways of what we call sanitizing information to pass it without revealing sources. That is all hard stuff to do. So i think that some things are underway. The Sahel Multilateral Planning Group may be kind of a nascent mod d it involve as number of mediterranean countries on the european side and tunisia. Something like that is needed in greater measure. I will make two other quick points because ive gone on longer than i intended but two other questions i i want to answer were, are military solutions helpful . And, yes, of course. There has to be a military component. Just shorthand this by saying that the danger but in my judgment ought to focus, and general nagata should speak to this, i think it ought to focus on infusion of special operations and intelligence versus what we might call large military. I think when big military gets involved, you run the risk, particularly in part of the world like this of driving moderates underground. So the military component here needs to be stealth think, almost to the point of invisibility, in my judgment. And finally you wanted to talk about the trajectory of terror in this part of the world. I think i would just say in shorthand, i think it is, even though some of the earlier panelists cited data about decreased number of incidents in 2017, i think we cant put too much weight on one years data. If you look at the data over the last, lets say since 2001, in 2001, the data im familiar with, there were over 20 terrorist incidents in north africa, sahel and Subsaharan Africa to a point. In 2016 i think there were 235 depending who is doing the counting i suppose. The trajectory has been up. Given conditions i just walked through, if i were a betting person, turns out i am, i would say that the trajectory is going to continue to be up but with the potential of, it struck me from the panelists speaking earlier that there is acute awareness of the problem and many efforts underway to combat it. So it is not a hopeless situation but it is a, its a tough one. So i would leave it there and, turn to christine. Thank you. It is always fun to bat cleanup at the panel but im also delighted to be here. John, it is really nice to be back. General that gaat at that, great to see you. We had pleasure to Work Together. Difficult Second Quarter stances that was always fun. I want to say a few things, add a little bit to what john had to say about strategy for counterterrorism in the region, had a few thoughts what i think success looks like, and then close with a couple of comments on priority and time frame. I think i had originally envisioned the ct strategy being a threelegged stool. John made me think more of a chair now with four legs. If the one leg is going after leadership, another leg is the denying of physical safe haven. A third leg is one i think i didnt hear john mention which is denying the virtual safe haven where he see so much of the counterradicalization happening, where i think we have seen a lot of these groups develop very Sophisticated Media strategies to get out their narrative to do recruitment, that sadly has been very effective. And then the fourth leg of the chair which i think is arguably the most important one but also the most difficult one to work on is what general nagata was talking about, addressing underlying conditions that can lead to violent extremism and terrorism. That is getting at governance, rooting out corruption, building the capacity of ministries to be able to provide security to provide services, to provide economic opportunities. That is a very, you know, longterm effort, and i think its a critical one that often doesnt get as much attention because i think certainly in my experience, in the last administration there is a tendency to reach for that military tool in the tool kit. It is a very developed tool. It is very proficient tool. It is a very wellresourced tool and so policymakers tend to reach for that very often and really if we really want to be successful i think we need to be reaching for those, for the diplomatic tools, the development tools, the economic and trade tools and, you know, we dont do that as much, i think in part because they arent as wellresourced. Certainly we in the United States government dont have the same amount of capacity there. But also those, you know, using those tools applying those tools, i think the fruits of that labor takes much longer to become evident. And certainly again in the United States i think our public, our politicians, are anxious for results, and want to see things sort of now, now, now. Anyone who has ever had the opportunity to testify in front of Congress Knows that it is all about, you know, show me how this is working now. There is not a lot of patience or appetite forgive us two years, give us five years, and then you will really see this start to take off. But frankly thats a lot of what i think is most needed because otherwise were just going to be playing whackamole and you know, focusing on doing the best we can to prevent the next 9 11, which as general nagata said well be doing a job in perpetuity. I think, you know, when i think about what is success look like, i think of it a little bit as sort of crawl, walk, run. Near term i think success would be you know, are we able to do everything we can to prevent a major attack. And are we able to get much better handle around all of the foreign fighters, where they are now, where theyre going, what their plans are. That to me i think is sort of a starter goal. I think moving more into the mid to longerterm it is about really trying to develop capable and sustainable security institutions, both on the military side, but also on the intelligence side, looking at ministries of interior, looking at counterradicalization programs. I think morocco in particular has done some good work in that area in the Obama Administration. I think in the last couple of years we were making some progress there and getting a little bit smarter about how we were doing that and looking more to the private sector and the Civil Society sector. And my hope is that were not losing ground in that area but frankly im not entirely sure what were really doing there. And i think when you think about what do we need to do to build that capacity in the security sector, a key piece i thin

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