21st Century Deterrence

Money:

Our resilience is our deterrence in the 21st century.

POSTED BY Wiggins ON 08.01.07 @ 9:04 am | 1 Comment

Al Qaeda Internal Friction

Working through a backlog of stories I clipped while traveling, Newsweek had a fascinating examination of internal friction between top al Qaeda leaders.

A senior U.S. official involved in counterterrorism policy, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was addressing sensitive matters, agrees that there are tensions between Al Qaeda’s Egyptian and Libyan factions, as well as between Saudi and Central Asian elements. “These guys are not immune to nationalist tendencies,” he says. John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School who closely follows radical Islamist traffic, calls it “the battle for Al Qaeda’s strategic soul. There is a profound strategic debate over whether to focus on overturning the government in Pakistan … because that puts them in control of a nuclear capacity.”

US strategy should seek to create situations that will magnify these non-cooperative centers of gravity in order to disrupt the shared narrative that holds this network together.

POSTED BY Wiggins ON @ 9:04 am | 0 Comments