Part 2 addresses the question: How do leaders run successful holy war organizations? It looks at several organizational types. The first type is a virtual network, which right-wing extremists call “leaderless resistance.” In a leaderless-resistance network, leaders inspire operatives to take action on their own, without communicating their plans to others. Leaders avoid participating or planning the attacks themselves. We also look at individuals, “lone-wolf avengers,” who act entirely on their own. They are often influenced both by terrorist ideologies and personal grievances. The Internet has greatly increased the impact of virtual networks.
At the opposite end of the spectrum from lone-wolf avengers are terrorist armies or commander-cadre organizations. In this kind of organization, the leader may provide inspiration, but he also commands his followers. He trains them, provides housing and/or salaries, provides for their families in the event that they die as “martyrs,” and, in many cases, punishes them if they disobey his orders. Unlike a virtual network, this type of organization is capable of carrying out massive attacks. It tends to be found only in states that are poorly governed, or where state agencies or their agents promote terrorism. We look first at the leaders and managers of some of the Pakistani jihadi organizations—how they live, and how they see their role; and then move on to assess the cadres and how they are recruited. We then turn to assess hybrid organizations, which combine virtual networks, cadre organizations, franchises, and freelancers.
The most important aspect of the organization is the mission. The mission is the story about Us versus Them. It distinguishes the pure from the impure and creates group identity. The organization’s mission statement—the story about its raison d’être—is the glue that holds even the most tenuous organizations together. Without this mission statement, the organization is little different from an organized criminal ring.
The mission is not static. It can change over time. Its function is not only to attract recruits but also to raise cash, a critically important requirement for running a commander-cadre organization. Leaders change their mission at will sometimes, because the orginal mission was achieved and the operatives wanted to keep their jobs as holy warriors (as was the case for the organization that became Al Qaeda); and sometimes because there is no longer funding to support the original mission (as was the case for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad). When there is money for Islamist causes but not communist ones, Islamist terrorist organizations will rise, and communist ones will begin to fail. Some terrorist groups frequently change their mission, while others have “sticky missions.” They stick with their original objective, even when the cause is no longer fundable, impossible to achieve, or already attained. Organizations with sticky missions are unlikely to last as viable organizations; those with more flexible missions have the potential to persist.
We will find in the pages that follow that the requirements for running terrorist organizations are similar to those of running a firm or a nongovernment organization (NGO). Today’s multinational terrorist leader is an entrepreneur who brings together mission, money, and market share. He hires skilled and unskilled labor and often pays competitive rates. Money is more important for commander and cadre-style organizations that carry out large-scale attacks than for virtual networks, in which participants are expected to fund themselves or raise money on their own initiative. We will study cases in which leaders of commander-cadre organizations abandoned not only their original mission, but even the population they were “serving,” because the organization was cash-starved.
We will learn that commander-cadre organizations raise money on the Internet, through NGOs, from diasporas, and through licit and illicit businesses. We will see some terrorist groups joining forces with organized criminal rings, with both entities benefiting; while other terrorist groups get so involved in making money through kidnapping for ransom or drug running, for example, that they become essentially organized criminal rings in their own right. Many also run licit businesses, including farming, manufacturing, and shipping.
We will see terrorist groups competing for market share in the same way firms or humitarian organizations do. They advertise their mission and accomplishments. They meet with high-level donors. Just like humanitarian NGOs, they may begin to view their donors as the most important entity to please, rather than their clients, as the appearance of accomplishment becomes more important than actually achieving social or religious justice.
One of the requirements for a maximally effective network is the free flow of information between nodes (a node could be an individual operative, or it could be a cell or network), but there is a balance of strong and weak ties between the nodes because too much communication (as in an all-channel network, with each node in communication with every other node) bogs down the network rapidly. I will define effectiveness as the ability to optimize the terrorist “product” (garnering attention, usually through attacks) while minimizing costs in terms of the number of personnel required. The network is held together by a common mission, but power and decision-making are distributed.1 But terrorists and criminals require secrecy, so it is not possible to achieve the ideal of constant communication.
We will learn that terrorist organizations face a trade-off between resilience and capacity. I will use the term resilience to refer to an organization’s ability to withstand the loss of part of its workforce, and capacity to refer to its ability to optimize the scale of attack. Effectiveness is a function of these two attributes. Resilience is improved by secrecy, weak links among operatives and between operatives and management, and redundancy in the organization (perhaps three CFOs rather than one). Maximizing capacity requires recruiting personnel with special skills, including in fundraising, acquiring and using weapons, collecting intelligence, and planning operations. It requires managers, cadres, public-affairs officers, recruiters, and diplomatic personnel responsible for coordinating with government agents, as necessary.2 Maximizing capacity also requires careful coordination, making the group vulnerable to law-enforcement penetration. The group’s effectiveness is a function of its resilience and its capacity. When groups operate in law-enforcement-rich environments, their resilience will make a big difference to their effectiveness.
Most high-capacity, hierarchical terrorist organizations are not resilient. Hierarchies can be penetrated and unraveled. For example, the 1956 Battle of Algiers was essentially won as soon as the French learned that every terrorist-member of the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) organization knew two other members—the person who recruited him and the person that he in turn recruited.
Electronic communication is perhaps the biggest vulnerability. Unless successfully encrypted, law-enforcement authorities can intercept electronic communication. In a June 2002 interview with al Jazeera, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, an Al Qaeda manager, called communications “the dangerous security gap through which the enemy could infiltrate and attempt to foil any operation. Therefore it is imperative to determine the most secure means of communication and determine an alternative means in case this becomes necessary.” Bin al-Shibh was captured by a Pakistani SWAT team on the one-year anniversary of September 11 in his Karachi apartment.3 By the time he was captured, management of the Al Qaeda network was sufficiently dispersed that the loss of a single leader will make minimal long-term difference.
The maximally resilient style of organization is a network with widely distributed leadership and minimal (or successfully encrypted) communication among nodes. Capturing an operative or cell will not help law-enforcement authorities find other cells. In a virtual network (or “leaderless resistance” network, which is not really leaderless), the cells do not communicate with one another or with the leadership. And the leader cannot be captured because he never breaks the law. The organization with the greatest capacity is likely to be a commander-cadre organization.
As we will see in chapter 9, the best way to balance the requirements for capacity and resilience is to develop a hybrid organization that is a network of networks of various types. It will include leaderless resisters, lone-wolf avengers, commanders, cadres, freelancers, and franchises. The leader will be partly inspiring and partly commanding. Like an inspirational leader, he will aim to transform many of his followers into leaders. He will inspire some through appeals to spirit and emotion, but he will also provide tangible rewards, punishment, and coercion. The International Islamic Front is the best example of this type of organization.