Khawaarij and Jihad: Is Al-Qaida's Network in Iraq Doomed to the Fate of the GIA? ( Algeria ....)

Over the past six months, there has been a remarkable twist in the larger war on terrorism that has received only middling public attention. For arguably the first time since the contemporary "war on terrorism" began in 2001, the tension between and among various armed jihadist factions and their supporters has begun to erupt into ugly public disputes, awkward confrontations--and even murder. The tendency towards quarreling has reached the most senior levels of Al-Qaida, with Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri himself firing off blistering public accusations against the Palestinian Hamas movement, charging it with cowardly abandoning the cause. But of all places, and against all odds, it is the conflict in Iraq which has resulted in the most serious clashes between opposing ranks of mujahideen. Unlike Dr. al-Zawahiri's dressing-down of Hamas, the infighting in Iraq has not merely been limited to fractures between the Muslim Brotherhood and the more extreme Salafi-jihadists of Al-Qaida. Indeed, native Iraqi Salafists (i.e. the Islamic Army of Iraq, IAI) with a long history of brutality, and who remain vocal supporters of Usama Bin Laden, were among the first of their kind to publicly accuse Al-Qaida's network in Iraq of serious transgressions that were harming the greater cause of jihad.

To better understand the present situation in Iraq, it is helpful to turn to a rather unusual source: an English-language book written by former Finsbury Park Mosque cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri titled "Khawaarij and Jihad." Though the book is divided into various sections, it is largely focused on explaining the reasons behind the disastrous collapse of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA) in Algeria during the mid-1990s, as understood through the Islamic concept of "Khawaarij."

Found another decent reading....

International Herald Tribune Transcript: Charlie Rose interview with David Kilcullen

**********************EXCERPT*******************

Monday, October 8, 2007

From broadcast on October 5, 2007

CHARLIE ROSE, HOST: Welcome to the broadcast. Tonight, insights into Iraq with David Kilcullen. He has been a senior adviser to General Petraeus. He is one of the leading counterterrorist experts in the world.

CHARLIE ROSE: Joining me now is David Kilcullen. He is a reserve lieutenant colonel in the Australian army. He has a doctorate in political anthropology. This year, he was the senior counter insurgency adviser to General David Petraeus, the top commander for the United States in Iraq. His ideas are about how to fight Islamic extremism worldwide are changing the way the United States military functions and thinks. He has written a guide for officers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's called "28 Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency." He is in New York to participate in the annual "New Yorker" festival. I'm pleased to have him here for the first time.

And here I am sitting with a young 40-year-old from the Australian army, who has been advising General Petraeus. Tell me what it is you know that they all want to understand.

DAVID KILCULLEN: I'm not entirely sure what it is, actually, Charlie. I think it's more about a certain freedom that comes from being a little bit outside the system and the ability to say things that I think everyone is thinking.

CHARLIE ROSE: What is that?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Well, you know, to look at the environment and to understand what it is that we're dealing with, and to -- to express issues that it's difficult for somebody inside the system who has a career in the U.S. government, which I don't .

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

DAVID KILCULLEN: . to say. Let me say, though, I think being the senior counterinsurgency adviser to General Petraeus is probably a serious misnomer. You know, I mean .

CHARLIE ROSE: He is the senior adviser.

DAVID KILCULLEN: Yeah, if anybody ever less needed a counterinsurgency adviser, it's him. I was more just kind of helping around in the field. And he was -- he is the guy, I think, that has really put together what you just described, the new way of thinking about the environment, more so than, you know, anything any of us have done.

CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me what has influenced your thinking the most? What experiences, what books, what conversations?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Let me tell you this sort of -- the story of how I came to see this in the way that I see it now, which I think illuminates that a little bit.

I was 20 years in the Australian army. And unlike the American Army, which has conventional forces who do -- the general purpose forces do conventional warfare, and the special forces do unconventional warfare.

In the Australian system, it's a little bit reversed. Most people do low- intensity conflict, irregular warfare, as some people call it in the United States. Our special forces do the type of conventional work. They also are very good at unconventional.

But if you go through the Australian system, you sort of live and breathe counterinsurgency and warfare against non-state actors, if you want to put it that way, throughout your time. And I did the normal training that everybody does in the Australian military, and was selected for language training and was sent to do some work in Indonesia, where I became aware of an insurgency that had been fought in the '50s and '60s, a group called Dar al-Islam, which was very comprehensively defeated by the Indonesian military using some very innovative methods in the 1950s and '60s. Not very well known in the West, when I first started doing this in the mid- 90s.

And people used to say to me, Islamic insurgency, what are you studying that for? It's of purely historical interest. And I wish I could say that I had some kind of premonition that it would become useful, but I didn't. I was just kind of following what I was interested in.

After 9/11, in fact, just before 9/11, that particular group that I had studied, and I actually spent about nine months in the field living with villages, talking to people who had been involved in the movement and so on, that organization transformed itself into what is now known as Jemaa Islamiah, which is a terrorist group allied to al Qaeda. And so it rapidly ceased to be an academic pursuit and became highly practical. So, you know, and the rest is kind of history, as they say.

And after 9/11, I think a lot of us who did this before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 felt like suddenly the foundations of the world had shifted a little bit, where the focus on conventional transformation, high technology, rapid maneuver, all these things that were known as the revolution in military affairs, people talked about just before 9/11, seemed to be a little less relevant to the environment than what we've seen now. And some people have described this as a counter-revolution in military affairs, led to a certain extent by David Petraeus.

I don't see it in quite such stark terms. I think we do need powerful and high technology air and maritime forces particularly, but we also need ground forces that can work with diplomats, aid agencies.

CHARLIE ROSE: And we didn't have that when 9/11 hit us.

DAVID KILCULLEN: I think we're often hard on ourselves. When I say we, I'm speaking as an American, of course. We're often a little harder.

CHARLIE ROSE: We've adopted you.

DAVID KILCULLEN: We're often a little harder on ourselves than we need to be. You know, if I look now at the capabilities of the American State Department particularly, people like to say, well, it doesn't pull its weight. You have got to remember, the State Department is about 1/250th the size of the U.S. Department of Defense. It has a very small pool of people, but those people have a very substantial amount of talent. And some of the real expertise in the government on issues like how to deal with the threats in the Middle East and how to work with people from both traditional societies and states with whom we don't necessarily want to do business, that resides in places like the State Department.

And then there's the USAID, the Agency for International Development, which has a highly robust field program and it runs all kinds of activities that are very substantially part of the fight in places like Iraq and Afghanistan.

So you know, we often say, well, we're not very good at this. I think no one is very good at it, you know? And we are actually better than often we give ourselves credit for.

CHARLIE ROSE: We, the United States, is better than -- or as good as anybody that does this?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Yes, I think so.

CHARLIE ROSE: When you mentioned State Department versus Defense, I mean, that was taken away from the State Department and put at the Defense Department. That was an early decision. I mean, after Jay Garner, they sort of gave it to Paul Bremer, who didn't report to the State Department.

DAVID KILCULLEN: You are talking about the CPA, the Coalition Provisional Authority, yes, well, you know.

CHARLIE ROSE: That was the State Department planning this. Their people were supposed to come in there after the fact. Now, we are separating that from counterinsurgency?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Well, yes. I mean, there were some outstanding Iraq experts involved in that initial phase of planning, guys like Tom Warrick, for example. Tom and I flew into Baghdad together two days after the Samarra bombing the 22nd of February last year.

CHARLIE ROSE: Which.

DAVID KILCULLEN: You know, and one of the most illuminating conversations about Iraq that I've ever had with anybody was with Tom in a C-130 flying into Baghdad.

CHARLIE ROSE: Tell me what he said. What was the conversation about?

DAVID KILCULLEN: You know, I don't want to talk on his behalf, but I think the point that most of us would make, who are not in the military, and most -- which most of us made in 2003, the points we made, were that this is not necessarily going to play out in such a neat and conventional fashion as we might like to think. And therefore, we need to remain agile and remember that the society that we are dealing with in Iraq was fundamentally corroded and damaged by 35 years of tyranny. And so, there's a certain psychological or cultural effect that that has on people. And you can't expect a society to sort of drop that and become a sort of Jeffersonian democracy within a reasonably short period of time, particularly when there's an enemy out there.

And I think this is one of the things, you know, that we need to remember, that this is a two-way street. There is an enemy. This stuff that is happening in Iraq didn't happen just because made mistakes. You know, we don't want to be narcissistic about this. This isn't, you know, all our fault. There's two sides here. The enemy deliberately provoked this. If you talk to Iraqis.

CHARLIE ROSE: What do you mean by the enemy deliberately? The enemy being those former Baathists who did not -- who were planning to join the insurgency once they knew the invasion was on and they were not going to be able to withstand it?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Well, it's complicated, and there's a lot of work done on this. But let me just kind of lay it out for you the way that the Iraqis tell it to me. And I've spent a lot of time with the Iraqis in the field over the last seven months or so. And you tend to hear a common theme from them.

And the sort of point of view that they tend to suggest is that the regime made a number of major miscalculations and expected to do better in the initial phase of the fighting than they did. But they always expected that they would ultimately lose the conventional phase and would need to run some kind of guerrilla fight.

And my impression from talking to guys who were there, Iraqis, is that the intention was that Saddam would run that from either a position of exile or sort of hidden headquarters. And he would use Special Republican Guard, Saddam Fedayeen, a variety of other organizations to control the population in different areas and sort of run this against us as an insurgency.

When the regime collapsed suddenly, a lot of those plans didn't come to fruition. And as a consequence, it became, if you like, a headless hydra. You know, a hydra has lots of heads. A headless beast of some kind that just was thrashing around wildly, and eventually disintegrated into lots of local groups that wanted to work to their own interest. And the Iraqis talk about how the -- rapidly, people converted from sort of a Baathist way of looking at the problem to more of a radical Islamist way or a nationalist way. Or.

CHARLIE ROSE: Who precipitated that?

DAVID KILCULLEN: It was a natural falling out of just losing control. And I think what that tells you is that focusing the campaign on how to defeat one particular enemy is perhaps not the best way to approach it.

Conventional warfare is binary. Right? It has two sides. And its enemy- centric. What you're trying to do is figure out what the enemy is trying to do and defeat the enemy by, you know, outmaneuvering them or removing their war-making power, basically.

Counterinsurgency is not like that. It's not enemy-centric. It's actually population-centric. And I think we have found over the last three or four years of evolution of the conflict in Iraq that the more we focus on the population and protecting them, the easier it is to deal with the enemy. The more we focus on the enemy, the harder it is to actually get anything done with the population.

Would you like me to expand on that? Because you're frowning.

CHARLIE ROSE: No, no, I'm fascinated by it and I'm trying to -- I'm asking all questions, as you say, like, you know, is the surge about getting at the population?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Absolutely.

CHARLIE ROSE: Is that what the surge is about?

DAVID KILCULLEN: That's fundamentally what the surge is about. And I know you had General Petraeus on the program recently.

CHARLIE ROSE: Right.

DAVID KILCULLEN: So I don't think I need to go over what he said in detail, but the point is, we have 28,500 extra troops in country. That is a tool. That's not the strategy. Once getting them in, the strategy was to start protecting the population and focusing on marginalizing the enemy from the population.

CHARLIE ROSE: Because the population would eject the insurgents, the Islamists?

DAVID KILCULLEN: It's actually -- yes. It's actually a function of the nature of guerrilla warfare, and it's actually rather independent of whether you are talking about Islamists or communists or, you know, it's a functional thing. And the reason is that in counterinsurgency, the enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed, right? So when you fight a conventional enemy, you have to go in there and sort of attack something that he must defend. And then you use that as a fulcrum around which to maneuver. That's how we do conventional warfare, amongst other -- it's a caricature.

But in counterinsurgency, you can't do that, because there's nothing the enemy has to defend. They can just run away if you push them too hard. And if you get there and you're doing things that are just making it too hard for them, they can just go quiet and stay in the environment.

CHARLIE ROSE: You know that's one of the arguments made against the surge.

DAVID KILCULLEN: Absolutely.

CHARLIE ROSE: That's all you were going to do, is push them somewhere else. They'll go somewhere else and they'll wait.

DAVID KILCULLEN: Right. Making that argument against the surge, this speaks a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of what the surge is trying to do. And let me sort of expand on this issue.

The enemy is fluid, but the population is fixed. OK? That's the key point. The enemy can run away. The population can't. They have houses, relatives, businesses. They live there. They can't move. And so you can't defeat an insurgency by fighting the insurgents, because they'll just run away and you chase the guy around. And it's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but you're actually destroying the haystack to find the needle. So you do this damage to the population, which alienates the population, creates a recruitment base for the insurgents, and it just creates a cycle of destruction.

The way to do it -- and you know, we've been doing this for a long time and there's a very solid body of understanding on how to do it -- is, if you like, to comb the flees out of the dog. OK? So you get in there and you work with the population. You drive the enemy off, and then you focus on the population and you try to restructure the environment so that the insurgent can't come back when you leave.

And that involves things like counterintelligence work, where you look for those little sleeper cells that stayed behind when you left. It involves most importantly partnering in a real partnership with the local community, where they feel their needs are being met. They make choices that they then are required to stick to, in terms of driving out extremism, or -- in the case of Iraq particularly -- and in terms of defending themselves. You make the population self-defending, so that the terrorists can't or the insurgents can't intimidate them.

That's the fundamental activity of counterinsurgency. Because the insurgents require the enemy. The insurgents require the population to act in a certain way -- support, sympathy, intimidation, sometimes just reaction to provocation, you know? And if you can take that reaction of the population away from them, it's extremely difficult for them to achieve anything.

That's why the surge is not only a matter of putting extra troops into the country, it's what they do when they get there. And what they're doing is going into areas and not leaving. And they sit with the population, partner with them, help them defend themselves. Keep the enemy away. Prevent them from coming back. And if you like, restructure the environment to hard-wire the insurgent out of it.

CHARLIE ROSE: This begs two questions. One is the future. If you want to do that, how many years does it take to go neighborhood by neighborhood, community by community, city by city, province by province, region by region?

DAVID KILCULLEN: The way you lay that out, it's not exactly how it works. But.

CHARLIE ROSE: How does it work?

DAVID KILCULLEN: . there's two issues. One is a territorial issue. The other one is time. Let me talk time. There has never been a successful counterinsurgency that took less than 10 years.

CHARLIE ROSE: Less than 10 years?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Successful.

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