Photo Credit: Flickr/White House

In his national security speech on 23 May, President Obama may have focused on the specific issues of the Guantanamo detention centre and drone strikes, but he also used the speech to set out a new approach to national security and counter-terrorism that his administration has been working towards for the past four years.

This speech could mark the point at which the US government begins to shift away from a counter-terrorism approach that has become excessive and unsustainable, towards one that enables resources to be redirected towards more salient national-security issues. Obama noted that the United States could not remain at war forever and needed an exit strategy; the threat from terrorism was now from ‘lethal, yet less capable, al-Qaeda affiliates, threats to diplomatic facilities and businesses abroad, homegrown extremists’.

A new drones policy

Part of this shift is a new policy for drone strikes. In his speech, Obama defended their utility, but announced new presidential guidance for their use, in which drone strikes would only be deployed against those who pose an imminent threat to the security of the United States, and would be subject to ‘clear guidelines, oversight and accountability’. Obama emphasised that Congress had been briefed on all such attacks conducted outside Iraq and Afghanistan, and said he was receptive to the possibility of a special court or independent oversight board to provide greater levels of assurance about the legitimacy of these activities. He did not mention the transfer of primary responsibility for drone attacks from the CIA to the US military, but there is an expectation that this is likely to happen in due course.

The Obama administration has been laying the groundwork for a change in drone policy for some time, despite the CIA’s objections. In January 2012, Obama acknowledged in an online discussion that drone attacks were taking place in the tribal areas of Pakistan. In May 2012, Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan – who made it clear that he was speaking with the president’s authorisation – publicly acknowledged that the US government used drone attacks to target al-Qaeda, and set out some of the legal, ethical and practical issues associated with these strikes. This occurred during a growing international concern not only about their legality, but questions about whether they were an appropriate method of combatting terrorism.

The legal dimension

Since 2002, drone strikes have played an ever larger role in US counter-terrorism efforts. To date, some 425 such attacks have resulted in 3,500 fatalities, an unknown percentage of which are acknowledged to be civilian casualties. These attacks have largely destroyed al-Qaeda’s senior ranks and substantially constrained its ability to plan and execute terrorist attacks against Western targets.  The US’ legal justification for such attacks – that it is at war with a globally deployed transnational organisation which makes no secret of its intention to attack the US; that the US has the right to pre-emptive self-defence; and that the targets of US drone attacks are not justiciable – is broadly in accordance with international legal principles, although there are growing doubts about whether the threat from al-Qaeda is still sufficiently serious, and imminent, to justify a pre-emptive military response.

Of greater concern is the failure of the US government to make public the criteria for determining when such attacks can take place, and what steps are taken to minimise the risks of civilian casualties. Such criteria do exist and are rigorously applied, but as UN rapporteur Philip Alston has pointed out, in the absence of publication it is impossible to reach an objective independent view on legality. Part of the problem has been that the CIA has carried the responsibility, and that under US domestic law this effectively precludes such transparency – which will however be possible once the military take control.

The other consideration affecting drone strikes has been that of public perception in the Islamic world, particularly Pakistan and Yemen. It is clear that the governments of both countries have been complicit in US drone strikes. Pakistan’s former president, Pervez Musharraf, has publicly acknowledged this, while documents uncovered by Wikileaks confirm former Yemeni President Saleh’s complicity.  But the governments of both countries have to contend with the reality that such attacks are profoundly unpopular, generate growing levels of anti-US sentiment, and are likely to increase radicalisation.

Guantanamo

The use of drones to target operatives is linked with another contentious issue: the question of detainees and the closure of Guantanamo, a campaign promise that Obama has been unable to achieve – partly because human-rights legislation prevents many of the detainees from being sent back to their home countries.

The controversy over detainees, extraordinary renditions and the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ does not only continue to cast a shadow over US counter-terrorism operations, but has also had the perverse effect of making it possible for the US government to legitimise killing terrorists through drone strikes as an alternative to capturing and detaining them. Obama’s speech implicitly recognised this fact. Meanwhile, Guantanamo serves no useful counter-terrorism purpose, and the damage it does to the United States’ international reputation demands urgent attention – which it may now receive.

The ‘reset’ of US counter-terrorism strategy laid out in Obama’s speech is not without risk.  Many of his political opponents would not accept the premise that a lighter US footprint offers better assurance of security from terrorism, nor that the threat has diminished to the degree he claims, and any subsequent mass-casualty attack in the United States could reverse this new strategy. On the other end of the spectrum, US civil liberties groups are unlikely to be satisfied by the actual and proposed changes to the approach.

However, on balance the proposals set out by Obama would seem to be a credible option for rebalancing US strategic priorities to match present realities.

By Nigel Inkster, Director, Transnational Threats and Political Risk

On 12 October 2012, US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta said that cyberattacks could inflict more damage on the US than 9/11. Shortly afterwards, British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the United Kingdom suffers from thousands of cyberattacks – mostly criminal – each day.

Our vulnerability to cyberattacks is increasing as we become dependent on ICT-networked systems for almost all aspects of daily life, and in particular for the smooth operation of global trading and financial systems.

At a conference on cybernorms that I attended last month at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a key takeaway was that governments were starting to repatriate the Internet within the confines of national sovereignty. And, at the Budapest Cyber Conference, I found myself chairing a session of non-governmental speakers addressing the reality that cyberspace was becoming militarised.

Over 30 states have the capacity and the doctrine to conduct offensive operations in cyberspace. Any state with a national telecommunications agency also has a signals intelligence capacity, giving it an intelligence collection and covert action reach previously available to only a handful of big powers. These developments are taking place in a context lacking any rules of the road or clear definitions of what constitutes a cyberattack and what might be a proportionate response, much less any commonly agreed conceptual models for de-escalating a cybercrisis.

Before getting too panicked, we should recall that no one has yet died as a result of such activity in the cyber domain. And physical damage from cyberattacks is still rare. Stuxnet was an exception, but deployed on the back of a meticulous intelligence analysis and not easily replicated.

But, a much more immediate threat is the massive amount of cyberespionage and malicious criminal activity taking place on a daily basis. The networks of all Fortune 500 companies have been penetrated and many private sector companies may not even have realised that this is happening. Left unattended such activities could lead to a catastrophic collapse of confidence in online services and erode the economic well-being of nations.

The private sector has been slow to recognise and adapt to the threat and governments have been equally slow to educate companies. Risk can be substantially reduced – though never eliminated – through good cyberhygiene. The private sector needs not just strong security, but also a counter-intelligence culture to mitigate the risk from cyberattack.

Related material and supporting data

• On 25 October, after indications of a wide-scale cyberattack, Israeli police ordered every district and officer under its jurisdiction to disconnect their computers from the Internet and advised officers to be careful when using police computers or software
• In its annual Security Threat Report for 2011, anti-virus firm Symantec revealed an 81% increase in the number of malicious attacks.
• The Nuclear Security Enterprise experiences up to 10 million ‘security significant cybersecurity events’ each day.

This article originally appeared in the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Survey 2012 ‘Global Issues’ section.

Senator Joseph Lieberman urges his Senate colleagues to pass the Cybersecurity Bill 2012

By Nigel Inkster, Director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk

The recent failure of a major cyber security bill in the Senate shows just how complicated it is going be to properly protect the United States’ infrastructure from hackers and online spies. With the nation’s power grids, transportation and water supply all heavily dependent on computer networks, national security officials have long argued that regulation and minimum security standards will be necessary to guard against cyber attacks. But there is political resistance to introducing these, because of privacy concerns and questions over the role of government.

An estimated 85% of US infrastructure is owned and operated by private companies.

According to National Security Agency (NSA) Director and Head of US Cyber Command General Keith Alexander, there was a 17-fold increase in cyber attacks on critical infrastructure between 2009 and 2011. He has rated America’s ability to cope with a major attack at three out of ten.

Earlier this month, a Republican filibuster blocked the revised Cybersecurity Act of 2012 (CSA), which was introduced by Senators Joseph Lieberman and Susan Collins with White House backing. Despite further support from leading national security officials, the bill failed to gain the necessary two-thirds majority, securing only 52 votes in favour, instead of the 60 needed. Many Senators have promised to push on with the 200-page bill when they return in September from the recess. However, it is unlikely to be reintroduced until after the presidential elections in November.

Instead, President Barack Obama is said to be considering an executive order to protect critical computerised infrastructure.

The CSA bill has already involved compromises. In its original form, it mandated federal government investment in cyber security; provided for information sharing between the private sector and government agencies; mandated minimum security standards for private operators of critical infrastructure; and made provisions for private companies to take action against cyber threats – for example by disrupting Internet traffic.

However, in the face of strong opposition from the powerful US Chamber of Commerce (representing the private sector), the provision for mandatory minimum security standards was watered down to proposals for voluntary compliance and government incentives. These changes did not, however, satisfy the business community, nor did they placate Republican senators ideologically opposed to greater government regulation, and who are loath to grant the White House any legislative successes in an election year.

The US civil-liberties community was also concerned about the bill, because of the data-privacy implications of Internet companies such as Google and Yahoo sharing information with government agencies, whether on a mandatory or voluntary basis. The bill’s failure gives them a slight reprieve, but the question of regulation won’t go away.

The dilemma facing the US, or any country that provides some critical services through the private sector, is that citizens will look to the government for a response in the event of a serious cyber malfunction or discontinuity, when the government will not have a direct remedy.

The risks of such a discontinuity appear remote to the private sector, and the financial implications of investing in greater levels of security unacceptably high. The private sector also argues that excessive regulation will inhibit its ability to generate the kind of technical innovation most likely to combat threats. And while this is a self-serving argument, there is a case to be made that measures like the cyber security bill could turn out to be a legislative straitjacket – providing insufficient flexibility to cope with the speed of technical innovation and imposing a high level of bureaucratic compliance, at the cost of a truly effective risk-management culture.

Civil-liberties campaigners  – who tend to dismiss talk of cyber threats as overblown – called the bill ‘a surveillance bill in disguise’, although the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) acknowledged that amendments to the original draft represented an improvement. These amendments included provisions restricting information-sharing to civilian agencies – excluding, for example, the NSA – and stipulated that such agencies must provide annual reports on what information had been received, and how it has been used.

The United States is not the only country grappling with the complex set of problems posed by cyber threats, although its pre-eminence in the field does mean that countries will watch carefully any legislation it enacts. The European Union is also reported to be on the brink of introducing binding legislation designed to enable member states to achieve a common minimum level of cyber security. Although details of this legislation have not yet been made public, they are thought to include proposals that oblige private companies to notify governments of cyber-security breaches, incidents and attacks – something many companies are reluctant to do because of the reputational and financial implications.

For the foreseeable future, it seems probable that any progress towards greater levels of cyber security will be incremental. It may take a major incident to spur attitudes and behaviours towards more radical measures.

Israel has blamed a deadly bus bombing at Burgas airport in Bulgaria on Iran and Hizbullah, but local authorities say they are still investigating who’s responsible

By Nigel Inkster, Director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk

Both under pressure, Iran and Hizbullah seem to be involved in a ‘shadow war’ with Israel. Iran’s economy is suffering from international sanctions imposed because of concerns over its nuclear programme, and the risk of an Israeli military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, possibly before the US presidential election, remains a real possibility. Its ally Hizbullah, the powerful Lebanese Shia group founded in the 1980s with Iranian backing, is also concerned about the possible demise of the Syrian regime of President Bashar al-Assad, which could cut off vital supply lines to Iran.

Iran has linked Israel (and the United States) to the deaths of five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007. Meanwhile, Iran and Hizbullah have been implicated in more than half a dozen incidents targeting Israeli, Saudi Arabian and US interests.

Iran has been accused of masterminding an assassination plot against the Saudi Ambassador in Washington DC, while Hizbullah has been reportedly involved attempts to attack US diplomats and other targets in Azerbaijan, the possession of a huge stash of bomb-making chemicals, as well as car bombings aimed at diplomatic officials in Georgia and India (the latter of which injured the wife of an Israeli diplomat seriously).

Several of those captured after an apparently accidental explosion in Bangkok carried Iranian passports, while the recent bombing of a bus in Burgas, Bulgaria, which killed five Israeli tourists (and the Bulgarian bus driver) and injured more than 30, has been variously blamed on Iran and/or Hizbullah. The Bulgarian authorities say they are still investigating who’s responsible.

From its beginning, Hizbullah has been associated with terrorist activities inside and outside Lebanon. After 9/11, the Hizbullah leadership made a conscious effort to reduce the movement’s involvement in transnational terrorism, conducted via its External Security Organisation arm, and to focus more on Lebanese internal politics. The 2006 war with Israel did nothing to minimise Hizbullah’s hostility to Israel but did in the short term reduce its appetite for direct confrontation.

What principally reactivated Hizbullah’s engagement in transnational terrorism was the assassination in Damascus, of one of its military leaders, Imad Mugniyeh, on 12 February 2008. Mugniyeh had been responsible for many of Hizbullah’s most prominent attacks, including the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, and an attack two years later on a Jewish centre in the same city.

Although Israel formally denied responsibility for Mugniyeh’s death it was widely assumed that the assassination had been carried out by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad. Speaking at Mugniyeh’s funeral Hizbullah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah proclaimed an ‘open war’ on Israel, saying that ‘Mugniyeh’s blood will lead to the elimination of Israel’. It is noteworthy that several recent attacks attributed to Hizbullah since then including have coincided with the anniversary of Mugniyeh’s death, or the anniversary of the major attacks he masterminded.

Though initially financed by Iran and still dependent on Iranian support for the heavy weaponry which has established as a strategic player in the region, Hizbullah has had a nuanced relationship with the Iranian regime and has always put its own interests ahead of those of its patron. But Hizbullah’s renewed willingness to engage in transnational terrorism has coincided with a seemingly renewed appetite by Iran to undertake terrorist attacks against Israel, the US and Saudi Arabia.

For Iran the catalyst appears to have been the assassinations of its nuclear scientists. These attacks have been attributed to the Iranian Baloch separatist group Jundullah with support from Israel. (One report even suggests that Mossad ‘false-flagged’ itself as the CIA while recruiting Jundullah for this task.) On Sunday, Iran state TV broadcast ‘confessions’ by 14 Iranian suspects, some of whom claimed they had received training in Israel.

Although the US has charged two men in relation to the plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, there been some scepticism about Iran’s claimed role in the affair, particularly the idea that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps might have links to Mexican drug cartels. However, Hezbollah’s links to such groups were revealed by the US Treasury’s investigation into the Lebanese Canadian Bank in 2010, which showed Hizbullah to be deriving substantial sums from the Latin American cocaine trade.

Other sceptics have queried whether such often amateurish and incompetent operations – from the failed Azerbaijani plot to the disabled car bomb in Tbilisi and the ‘own goal’ explosion in Bangkok – could be the work of Iran and Hizbullah. Clearly, the transnational terrorist capacities of both have atrophied from lack of use. But the Burgas attack suggests that, as is so often the case with terrorist organisations, performance improves with practice.

Thus far, Hizbullah and the IRGC’s crack ‘Quds’ force appear to have acted largely independently of each other and to have focused their efforts on locations where each enjoys a relative advantage. Whether under continuing pressure they will be driven to combine forces and attempt more ambitious attacks remains to be seen.

Nigel Inkster, the IISS’s Director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk, has a piece in Foreign Policy examining the failure of the drugs war in Afghanistan. The article – which draws on Drugs, Insecurity and Failed States: the Problems of Prohibition, a recent Adelphi book Inkster co-authored with Virginia Comolli – looks at the failure of eradication programmes, the limited quantities of trafficked drugs seized, and the largely fruitless efforts to persuade Afghan farmers to grow less profitable or less hardy crops.

Afghanistan is the source of around 60% of the planet’s illicit opium and 80% of illegal heroin, he writes. ‘The United Nations recently reported there had been a 61% rebound in opium production in 2011, and prices were soaring. This is a worrying trend, which seems set to continue after NATO troops leave.’

But with so many vested interests in the trade inside Afghanistan, and global demand for this highly profitable, highly transportable commodity remaining strong, can there ever be a solution? Maybe, suggests Inkster, ‘but not while current conditions of high insecurity and pervasive corruption persist’…

Read more in Foreign Policy

By Nigel Inkster, Director of Transnational Threats and Political Risk

The United Kingdom justice and security bill published yesterday has been widely criticised by lawyers and civil-rights campaigners for allowing courts to hear evidence in closed sessions in cases of national security. They argue that this erodes a long-established right to open justice. Even UK Justice Secretary Kenneth Clarke (above, left) has acknowledged that the bill is ‘less than perfect‘. However, since a Green Paper was introduced last year for discussion, the bill has undergone substantial modifications to try to assuage some of its critics.

The final bill only applies to civil cases involving national security, instead of all cases dealing with sensitive information. Judges, rather than ministers, will determine whether the national-security argument is valid, and whether the use of ‘Closed Material Proceedings’ (CMP) offers the best option for balancing national security and justice. Coroners’ inquests dealing with classified material will never be held in camera.

Under the new bill, the government will be able to use the CMP mechanism to defend civil actions where its defence relies on the use of classified material. The plaintiff’s counsel will not be able to attend the closed hearing in which the judge takes the classified evidence. This means plaintiffs never get to see the material on which the government’s defence is based. Instead, plaintiffs’ interests will be represented by ‘special advocates’ with high security clearance. This already happens with cases heard by the Special Immigration Appeals Commission (SIAC) involving intelligence material.

The reasons for this proposal date back to 2010 when the British government made a ‘without-prejudice’ out-of-court settlement to Binyam Mohamed and 15 other former Guantanamo inmates who sued the UK security and intelligence services for alleged collusion in rendition and torture by foreign intelligence services. The decision to settle was not because MI5 and MI6 were reluctant to defend the cases; indeed, their inability to do so caused much anger and frustration within the ranks. However, without an appropriate mechanism for safely handling classified material in the civil courts, ministers were obliged to prevent the risk to national security that the use of such material in open court might have precipitated.

Earlier in the Mohamed case, classified US material was put into the public domain against the wishes of the American and British governments. Afterwards, Washington threatened to review the basis for US–UK intelligence cooperation unless it was given assurances that no further such breaches of trust would occur.

Mohamed, who was detained by the US as a terrorist suspect after 9/11 and subjected to ill-treatment, sought to use classified US documents in his lawsuit against the British government. With no prospect of obtaining this material from the US authorities, Mohamed’s lawyers filed a ‘Norwich Pharmacal’ order. This is a legal device whereby an innocent third party with information relating to unlawful conduct can be compelled by a court to make that information available to the person suffering damage from such conduct. The device has been widely, and almost exclusively, used in intellectual-property cases. Mohamed’s case, in which the court ruled the British government must make the evidence public, was the first use of a Norwich Pharmacal application in a security and intelligence context.

Section 13 of the new bill seeks to limit Norwich Pharmacal proceedings, by prohibiting courts from forcing the disclosure of ‘sensitive information’ (which it defines widely). The government and intelligence community wish to be able to offer intelligence partners – which in today’s world could mean almost any intelligence service – solid assurances that shared material will be protected, and not in future shared. In a world in which closer intelligence cooperation is needed to address a wide range of security challenges, such a diminution of trust could prove detrimental to UK national-security interests.

It is possible to argue, as some civil-liberties advocates have, that the new measures are an overreaction to a small group of cases borne of exceptional circumstances and unlikely to recur. But in a world where intelligence is pertinent to far more issues than during the Cold War, it is highly probable that one or more individuals will in future seek redress through the British justice system for perceived damage from the actions of the intelligence community. It remains to be seen whether the proposed measures will be adequate to address such concerns.

Finally, the bill proposes a revision of parliamentary oversight mechanisms for MI5 and MI6. Under it, the Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), established in 1994 to oversee the administration and finances of the intelligence and security service, will report to parliament rather than just the prime minister. The committee’s remit will also be expanded to include oversight of operational matters other than current operations – a formal recognition of the broadening ISC role.

Although the British media often assumes that the intelligence and security services are resistant to democratic oversight, the intelligence community itself initiated such oversight; it was not imposed by government. The only concern the intelligence and security community will have is whether sensitive information can remain as well protected under the new arrangements as it has been; the ISC has an exemplary record for not leaking secrets.

Violence related to the illegal drugs trade should prompt a rethink of global drugs policy, IISS Director for Transnational Threats and Political Risk Nigel Inkster and IISS Research Analyst Virginia Comolli said at the US launch of their Adelphi book, Drugs, Insecurity and Failed States: The Problems of Prohibition, at IISS-US last week.

As Inkster and Comolli explained, the prohibition of drugs was originally intended to reduce social ills associated with drug use. However, because drugs fell into the class of goods that were easy to conceal during transport, the global ‘prohibition regime’ had not succeeded in its purpose. Rather, it has only served to create a lucrative and illegal drugs smuggling industry.

Drugs, Insecurity and Failed States focuses on countries where drugs are produced or transported, and Inkster and Comolli summarised their findings for the IISS-US audience. In producer and transit states, drugs dealers were ‘stakeholders in state weakness’; they wanted the state to remain weak, and they infiltrated the state through bribes and intimidation so that their illegal ventures could flourish. When states tried to suppress the drugs trade, criminal gangs in the trade struck back with violence that at times raised the threat of state failure. Such violence had occurred in a growing number of Latin American and West African states. Drugs violence had also complicated US efforts in Afghanistan, the world’s near-monopoly supplier of heroin.

In the face of mounting casualties from the’ war on drugs’, Latin American leaders have grown increasingly vocal in their opposition to the global prohibition regime. At the launch, Inkster and Comolli argued that it was time for such questioning to come to the United States as well. They presented ideas from their book as possible alternative approaches.

The authors advocated that consumer countries shift from waging a ‘war on drugs’ to an approach more focused on public health. As they pointed out, this was the initial intent of US President Richard Nixon when he launched the war on drugs in the early 1970s, since he allocated a majority of the funding for healthcare. Inkster and Comolli also noted that suppression of the international drugs trade was supposed to be counterbalanced with an adequate legal supply of drugs. Yet, today insufficient legal drugs for medical purposes were accessible outside Western countries.

Both speakers called for an end to rigid thinking on the global prohibition regime, especially in the United States. ‘It’s time for the State Department to abolish its knee-jerk response to so-called “harms reduction” policies proposed by other states,’ said Inkster. Instead, the authors recommended that action on the drugs trade be linked to a larger security and development agenda, and that prohibition face an honest cost-benefit analysis.

Watch the US launch of Drugs, Insecurity and Failed States

Yesterday, a small sample of documents seized from Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad was released by the Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point. The 17 documents and notes were found on thumb drives, memory cards or the hard drive of bin Laden’s computer by the US Navy Seals who found and killed the terrorist leader last year.

The 17 documents published are part of a cache of more than 6,000, and the criteria for choosing them have not been made clear. However, it would be a reasonable assumption that the documents not released are in some way of operational use. The earliest letter is dated September 2006, the latest April 2011, and some are undated. Except for those addressed to bin Laden, ‘it cannot be ascertained whether any of these electronic letters actually reached their intended destinations’, the CTC cautions.

Some commentators have speculated that the selection of documents published may reflect an effort to portray al-Qaeda and its erstwhile leader in a particular light. There may be some truth in this, but the picture of al-Qaeda that emerges from the correspondence is broadly in line with that discernible from other open-source information – namely of an organisation that is, in the words of US Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan, ‘a shadow of its former self’, struggling largely without success to impose control on affiliated groups and maintain relevance in a rapidly changing world.

Perhaps the most surprising conclusion to emerge from the material is the extent to which, despite his seclusion, bin Laden was able to maintain extensive contacts with a wide range of individuals and affiliated groups, even if his ability to influence their conduct may have been limited. His wishes were invariably expressed in restrained and courteous language – ‘it would be nice if’- but there is little to suggest, either in the documents themselves or in the observable behaviour of those to whom the documents were directed, that those wishes were heeded.

Several key themes emerge from the translated documents. These include:

• An acute awareness of the counter-productive nature of attacks on Muslims and civilians. Such behaviour has ‘cost the mujahideen no small amount of sympathy among Muslims. The enemy has exploited the mistakes of the mujahideen to mar their image among the masses.’ Some al-Qaeda leaders are particularly critical of the indiscriminate violence of al-Qaeda in Iraq and of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (whom they also accuse of poaching al-Qaeda operatives). Bin Laden was dismissive of the so-called ‘tartarrus’ argument excusing the deaths of Muslims seen as shielding the enemy. This is interesting in view of the elaborate theological legitimation of such deaths produced by al-Qaeda ideologue Abu Yahya al-Libi apparently at the behest of Ayman Zawahiri in 2009.
• Fundamental differences of strategic approach between bin Laden and the leaders of affiliated groups. Bin Laden objects to the efforts of Nasir al-Wuhayshi, the leader of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), to establish an Islamic state in Yemen. He characterised this as both premature and counterproductive, arguing that the overwhelming focus of jihadist efforts should be on the ‘far enemy’, namely the United States. Bin Laden expressed an ambition to replicate 9/11 and asked one associate to identify candidates from the Gulf States who could be sent there for aviation training. He also advocated attacking US interests in non-Islamic states such as South Korea.
• A preoccupation with media policy and image. One document written by the late Adam Gadahn, AQ’s US-born former media specialist, discusses in great detail plans to release messages by AQ leaders to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Bin Laden himself wrote of plans to rebrand his movement. He acknowledged that the AQ ideology remained attractive to many young Muslims but also highlighted the credibility gap arising from the movement’s failure to deliver operational outcomes commensurate with its ideological appeal. He also acknowledged that ‘as for jihadist forums, it (sic) is repulsive to most Muslims or closed to them’. He regretted that AQ had missed opportunities to emphasise the movement’s solidarity with the Palestinians.
• Evidence of divisions within the ranks of the AQ leadership. In one document, bin Laden rejected a request from the leader of Somalia’s al-Shabaab movement for a formal relationship with AQ, which had had such a relationship with al-Shabaab’s predecessor, the Islamic Courts Union. A subsequent document from Ayman Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, urged him to reconsider.
• Profound distrust of Iran. The documentation details efforts by AQ to extricate its members, including bin Laden’s son, from what is portrayed as restrictive detention in Iran. This appears to have been achieved through covert al-Qaeda operations against Iranian targets and interests.
• A propensity to micro-manage. Bin Laden corresponds in enormous detail on AQ’s organisational structures, bureaucratic procedures, ethics, religion, operational practices and operational security. Some of his operational proposals come across as no more than vague aspirations, including his suggestions for the assassination of President Barack Obama and General David Petraeus. Guidance on the safe extraction of AQ operatives from Iran, on the other hand, goes into inordinate detail.

It is now clear that bin Laden was able to keep closely abreast of world events during his long period of seclusion, and was well aware of their implications for his movement. He was also much more closely connected with key AQ operatives, not just in South Asia but also much further afield, than had been generally assumed. His ultimate aims had remained largely unaltered, in particular his focus on attacking the USA – even if that meant abandoning secondary targets such as the UK. However, there is a real sense of disconnect between aspirations and outcomes.

The overall picture emerging from the CTC material appears to be a vindication of US counter-terrorism policy, which has succeeded in eroding AQ’s central leadership and organisation to a point where it risks falling below critical mass. Meanwhile the affiliated groups, whose relationship with AQ central appears to be of variable quality, come across as largely preoccupied with their own local conflicts and uninterested in pursuing bin Laden’s global vision and agenda.

Worse, both authors said, banning drugs had fuelled violence and instability in the developing world, through the creation of a global black market dominated by powerful criminal groups. In some countries there had been ‘state capture’, or subversion of institutions, by criminal networks. Other nations, where drugs now overshadowed legitimate businesses, were surviving on ‘junkie economies’.

Inkster said that the IISS was ‘not an organisation that engages in advocacy’, but that the nearly two years of research behind the book led the authors to conclude that a fundamental rethink of drugs policy was necessary. To significantly disrupt the trade through law-enforcement strategies alone, it was estimated that some 70% of drugs supplies had to be interdicted. It was unlikely that a greater crackdown on drugs would succeed.

‘Yes’, he admitted to one questioner, ‘we are vulnerable, I suppose, to accusations of defeatism, but if one adds up the amount of resources over the past 50 years that have been devoted to creating what [a UN General Assembly Special Session] has called a ‘drugs-free world’ it’s not obvious to me that these efforts have been notably successful.

‘At the end of the day what we are dealing with here is the iron laws of supply and demand. When there is a demand for a commodity, there will always be someone who seeks to meet that demand, particularly when the profits entailed are enormous – mark-ups of thousands of per cent between farm gate and retail sales (see graphic, above).

‘Any first-year medical student will tell you that the first thing they are taught when they step through the door is: “don’t just double the dose”. If your initial diagnosis doesn’t seem to be working, don’t just keep on doing the same thing and hope that something different will eventuate, because it probably won’t.’

Drugs, insecurity and failed states focuses on the effects of the cocaine trade in Colombia and of heroin production in Afghanistan, but also covers the spill-over of violence into transit regions such as Mexico, Central America and West Africa.

At the launch, Comolli put some figures on the deleterious consequences of the drugs trade for these countries. Although Colombia, for example, had recently managed to contain the threat from FARC narco-traffickers, that success had come at an enormous cost: the country had suffered about 2-3% lost GDP growth during the 30 years of insurgency and still had a defence budget accounting for 4.5% of GDP. Populations had been displaced.

Afghanistan was ‘a monopoly supplier’ of illicit heroin to the world, providing 85% of global output. This benefited not only powerful warlords who had become part of the Kabul government, but members of the Taliban, who were thought to derive $125 million a year from the drugs trade.

In Mexico in the past four years, there had been 47,000 drugs-related deaths, and ‘a pervasive culture of intimidation by narcotics traffickers’. This violence had now spread to Central America, ‘which has taken over from the Caribbean as the principal smuggling route from drugs destined for the United States’, Comolli said.

‘Between 2007 and 2010, the amount of cocaine trafficked to the USA via Central America went from 1% to 95%, and levels of drugs-related violence rose correspondingly. In El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras – the so-called ‘northern triangle’ – drugs-related homicides are now four times higher than in Mexico. Even more shockingly, they are higher than during the civil-war periods of the 1980s.’

The authors stressed that, clearly, drugs were not the only element fuelling conflict in the developing world, and that it was essential to distinguish between cases of causation and correlation, where states had already experienced high levels of violence before drugs entered the picture.

However, they argued that there was need for an open, informed debate about alternatives to the current prohibition regime, based on empirical evidence.

Said Inkster: ‘Supporters of the status quo have for too long sought to squash such debate, without really offering convincing argumentation for their stance. The issue of drugs needs to be brought out of the specialist silo it currently occupies; it needs to be brought into the mainstream of debate on international security and economic development to a much greater degree.’

Watch both authors at the launch