Awlaki Takes it Up a Notch
Yesterday Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) launched a new English-language online magazine, Inspire, designed to incite domestic homegrown terrorism in Western countries. The Daily Beast quotes terrorism expert Bruce Riedel in their article on the launch:
First, the audience here is clearly the aspiring jihadist in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia who is not really fluent in Arabic or Dari but who wants to know more about jihad—and this is a way of getting it out to that audience and radicalizing it and inspiring future Fort Hood murders and future Times Square bombers who are already living in the United States…
Riedel said that despite a sophisticated and sustained program by the National Security Agency’s smartest technical people “to knock jidahist websites off the Internet,” al Qaeda’s operatives are equally brilliant, resourceful, and resilient.
As we mention in our recent report on Yemen and the al Qaeda threat, AQAP has long had a very professional and effective media apparatus, having first published their bi-monthly online news magazine Sada al-Malahim (The Echo of the Battles) in 2007. This new publication presents the next logical progression; inciting others to violence against Western targets, a core tenet of global jihadist ideology, was destined to make a significant, public jump across the language barrier eventually, it makes perfect sense that Awlaki and AQAP would be the ones to make that happen.
Awlaki’s popularity and well-publicized track record of successful “inspiration” efforts gives this targeted incitement venture huge potential for success. Unfortunately, as Riedel points out, the NSA’s virtual whack-a-mole, much like the real whack-a-mole being conducted in Waziristan and elsewhere is not likely to significantly degrade this type of effort over the longterm.
U.S. operations in South Asia, Yemen, Iraq and elsewhere, which Awlaki and others purposefully portray as deliberate attacks on Muslims, are unlikely to slacken in the near future and, as recent reports suggest, may intensify. Though killing Awlaki or shutting down extremist websites might help in the short run, it obviously won’t prevent others from picking up where they left off, inciting Westerners and other to violence using the same material.
There is obviously no easy solution to the problem, but clearly it will have to involve more than NSA “internet wars” or trying to kill the guy who is talking the loudest. The faster we start putting energy into coming up with that solution, whatever it is, the better off we’ll be. The alternatives are either accepting radicalization as a cost of doing business or playing whack-a-mole in perpetuity, solutions that I imagine few Americans, especially as attempts become more and more frequent despite these tactical efforts, will be willing to accept.
