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| West Point Center Aims to Know the Enemy |
| 2007-02-16 |
| Jarret Brachman recently told a class of West Point cadets that many Americans had an unsophisticated image of Islamic terrorists - that they live in caves, "you know, beating the women over their heads." On the contrary, the U.S. is fighting a far more technologically savvy enemy - one adept at both propaganda and Power Point - said Brachman, the director of research at the United States Military Academy's Combating Terrorism Center. "This is a war of information," he said. The enemy distributes video games in which players shoot down American soldiers with President Bush's face, he said. The enemy also produces the "Mujahedeen World Cup" for the Web, complete with a U.S. troop vehicle exploding as announcer shouts: "Goooaaalll!" When they are not teaching cadets, the small group of academics at the Combating Terrorism Center, known as the CTC, publish analytical papers on al-Qaida and other terror networks that have landed on newspaper front pages and the desks of U.S. policy makers. The group's central tenet is as old as war itself: Know your enemy. "We have not been focused on the power of ideas, or been as sensitive to the power of ideas as much as they have," said Brachman, a former CIA analyst. "So how do we move forward from that? It starts with knowing who our enemy is, what they're saying." Brachman's reading list touches on everything from the Quran to captured al-Qaida documents to angry postings on jihadi Web sites. Such readings are grist for CTC reports that interpret the operations and intentions of terror networks. In November, for instance, CTC fellow William McCants edited the Militant Ideology Atlas, which ranks the most influential thinkers in the jihadi movement. The most cited figure is not Osama bin Laden, but Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian executed in 1966 who is a sort of intellectual godfather to modern terrorists. The list is rounded out by other thinkers, many of them not well known to the public. This sort of opposition research is already done by jihadists, who have studied U.S. homeland security bureaucracy down to the number of FBI branch offices and special agents. The CTC's research portrays the jihadi movement as rife with internal fractures and intellectual inconsistency. Brachman said the question for the U.S. is how to expose the internal fractures. The CTC's report "Stealing Al-Qa'ida's Playbook" argues that direct engagement with the U.S. has been good for the jihadi movement because it rallies locals and drains American resources. The report, written by Brachman and McCants, suggests the U.S. work indirectly through groups with more credibility in the Middle East. The government could, for example, fund a media campaign that broadcasts images of attacks that killed Muslim children. Meanwhile, Brachman can take solace in making an impression on the West Point cadets who will soon lead patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan. "In Iraq, it's not about kicking doors down," senior cadet Matthew Hubbard said after a recent class. "It's about seeing the same faces day after day." The CTC has captured the attention of terrorists. Brachman said one jihadi site warned that the center was compiling "a frightening amount of information." A paper by the CTC's Brian Fishman on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was posted on a Web site in Arabic, along with Fishman's picture and a description of him as a "cursed infidel." "I took it as a compliment," Fishman said. --- On the Net: http://www.ctc.usma.edu/default.asp |
| Posted by:trailing wife |
| #2 Every West Point cadet should be required to read "The Management of Barbarism" (Al Qaeda's instruction manual on how to take over the world). Al |
| Posted by: Frozen Al 2007-02-16 12:25 |
| #1 Oh joy. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2007-02-16 11:19 |