I recently finished reading Steve Coll’s newest book, Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Directorate S is Coll’s sequel to his excellent 2004 book Ghost Wars: The Secret History Of The Cia, Afghanistan And Bin Laden, From The Soviet Invasion To September 10, 2001, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize in 2005. Ghost Wars covered US support to the mujahideen groups who fought the Soviets, the rise of the Taliban, and CIA operations against al-Qaeda. It was also great fun to read. Coll writes extremely well, and he created a compelling narrative history of the key events leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

Directorate S continues Ghost Wars‘ focus on the CIA, but it also focuses heavily on the State Department and the military, which makes sense. After 9/11, Afghanistan was no longer a sideshow in US policy so the CIA was no longer the most important agency involved. Another change is that Directorate S focuses more on Pakistan than Ghost Wars did, precisely because the country has been so central to the Afghan conflict.

Directorate S was written in the same style as Ghost Wars, yet I found it a bit of an arduous read. This might just represent personal changes: I was much less busy back when Ghost Wars came out, and I was newer to reading things in this area. However, I think this also reflects how much this area of intellectual inquiry has changed.

Back in the mid-2000s, Ghost Wars sat on my bookshelf alongside the few other comparable books at the time, such as Jason Burke’s Al-Qaeda: Casting a Shadow of Terror. There seemed to be no other book at the time providing such a detailed account of the covert side of US policy in Afghanistan. Many of the events that it covered were not in the media headlines when they happened.

Today, there’s much more writing available on al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and US military and foreign policies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many of the events covered in this book were reported while they were happening, in the news media, academic outlets, and think-tank reports. Many were also covered by specialist blogs at the time, such as the now-inactive Ghosts of Alexander and Registan, or Foreign Policy‘s similarly inactive AfPak Channel, or the still-running Small Wars Journal and Long War Journal. So Directorate S conveys less new and groundbreaking information than Ghost Wars did.

Nonetheless, I recommend it. There is still a great deal of new information in the book (Ghost Wars set a high standard), and Coll ties it all together coherently and insightfully.

The book’s core argument is convincing. In short, it argues that the misalignment of interests between the US, Afghan and Pakistani governments led to the failure of America’s war in Afghanistan after 9/11.

Most importantly, the way the US government saw the war differed greatly from how it was seen by Pakistan’s government, particularly by its powerful spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and by its subsection Directorate S.

As you might imagine from the title, the ISI’s subsection Directorate S is the book’s key focus. Through Directorate S, the Pakistani state supported (but never controlled) the Afghan Taliban movement’s war against the US and Afghan governments. At the same time, Pakistan was itself at war with the Pakistani Taliban movement and al-Qaeda. These are the sorts of contradictions that the book navigates us through.

Coll does not ignore the many potential reasons for America’s failure in Afghanistan, such as the diversion of resources to the Iraq War, the resiliency and local embeddedness of the Taliban, military misconduct, or the hubris of attempting to build on a strong centralised state in a society where that had not been the norm. But he suggests that Pakistani government support for the Taliban, via Directorate S, was likely the core reason behind the failure. As mentioned, I find this argument compelling. However, I would want to read a lot more on the topic before judging whether I find it fully convincing.

It isn’t the book’s overarching argument that makes me recommend it though. Instead, I found the book’s greatest value lay in all the smaller stories that make up its detailed narrative of how the conflict played out from 2001-2016.

The book shows how US leaders and officials constantly wrestled with conflicting policy aims, and how US operatives on the ground tried to achieve policy-makers’ often amorphous goals. The book also looks into how Afghan and Pakistani officials tried to make sense of (and respond to) US actions, but to a much lesser extent as it mainly focuses on the US.

Through this narrative, the lack of coherence in US policy comes out clearly. The story contains example after example of divisions between government agencies, within government agencies, and between individuals with strong personalities (such as Richard Holbrooke) who operated across multiple agencies. Coll shows in great detail how individuals within the US government maneuvered against other individuals and how this shaped the resulting policy efforts and impacted people at other levels of government, officials of other governments, and many Afghan and Pakistani civilians.

This dramatic and people-focused narrative approach is a strength of Coll’s decades of work as a journalist, which is an approach often lacking in academic books I read. What I most valued was how well it conveyed the unrelenting uncertainty faced by everyone involved.

For every important fact that US policy-makers needed to know, the information was always unclear. Understanding the intentions of their nominal partner, the Afghan government, was never easy as the relationship was frayed by distrust. America’s intelligence services routinely intercepted Afghan government communications, but Afghan officials often assumed this was happening and spoke with their American audience in mind.

These officials were themselves were deeply divided, so the Karzai government itself didn’t necessarily have coherent intentions (just like the Pakistani and US governments). Karzai himself was prone to changing his mind, and CIA analysts devoted resources to trying to understand his mental state. Any illusions US agencies might have had that either their Afghan or Pakistani counterparts could be easily manipulated would not have lasted long.

Similarly, when the White House tried to find answers to pressing questions, such as how many provinces the Taliban controlled or what explained the surge in insider attacks (when Afghan soldiers turned on their international trainers), it never turned out to be simple. Different government agencies held different data, gathered it in different ways, and disagreed over how to interpret it. Outside analysts (such as Marc Sageman) were sometimes brought in to disentangle the competing claims, but their reports often become another weapon in the intra-bureaucratic battles.

Some of the most interesting chapters are the ones about the Obama Administration’s attempts to negotiate with the Taliban, and they similarly show the constant uncertainty government officials faced. The negotiation efforts were slowed by the difficulty the White House faced simply when trying to figure out who actually represented the Taliban, and how to know whether their interlocutors were genuinely acting on behalf of the Taliban’s leadership.

These negotiation attempts persisted awkwardly for years. Miscommunication was a constant risk in each interaction. One supposed Taliban representative turned out to be a fraud. The Afghan and Pakistani governments often heard about these plans and, seeing themselves as the rightful brokers, objected to being left out.

One major initiative ended up being derailed when a planned opening of Taliban political offices in Qatar collapsed, because the Taliban’s representatives used a different flag to the one agreed on. Qatari officials had trouble believing that the US, as a superpower, did not have control of the minor details. But the book helps show why these sorts of problems are are an unavoidable part of the process.

So while I enjoyed Directorate S less than Ghost Wars, it’s definitely worth reading.

Coll’s overall argument, that the failure to find a solution to the misalignment of Afghan, Pakistani and US governments’ interests doomed the war effort, is compelling. The book shows how the inability to prevent Pakistan’s support for the Taliban lies behind much of the war’s ultimate failure. The smaller stories that woven into the narrative are both interesting and informative, and also help to convey the human tragedy.

The book won’t leave readers feeling very optimistic. The final chapter outlines potential lessons, much as the final chapter of Ghost Wars did. However, the stronger take-away might be the complexity of the conflict, the futility of ambitious goals, and the inherent dangers of trying to shape events in unfamiliar societies and dealing with political actors who don’t conform to outside views of what their interests should be.

I wanted to share a new journal article I’m excited about: Ideology and Armed Conflict by Jonathan Leader Maynard in the Journal of Peace Research.

I’ve mentioned the increasing crossover between civil war studies and terrorism studies a few times on this blog (the newly-released Oxford Handbook of Terrorism is another example). This new article, Ideology and Armed Conflict, sits within this trend but goes even further. It encompasses civil war studies, terrorism studies, and also international relations, by helping make sense of a concept that’s crucially important for all these fields.

Civil war studies has only relatively recently been interrogating the concept of ideology, something that terrorism studies has been grappling with for decades. However, this article does so with greater theoretical rigour than some approaches within terrorism studies (which sometimes either takes ideology as a given, or alternatively expresses excessive scepticism that ideology matters).

Maynard explicitly conceptualises four mechanisms (commitment, adoption, conformity and instrumentalisation) through which ideology can exert a strong influence on armed conflict even when the proportion of “true believers” is remarkably small. He also proposes ways to understand when and how ideological change does, and does not, occur.

The article covers a wide scope, using examples from the Cold War:

Groups may, for example, stick with existing ideologies out of fear of membership defection, loss of public legitimacy and credibility, or the withdrawal of patron support (Drevon, 2017; Gutiérrez Sanín & Wood, 2014: 220). Even as sincere faith in orthodox communist ideology declined among Soviet elites in the 1980s, for example, ‘hardliners’ feared that abandoning the ideological struggle against global capitalism would weaken the militarized party–state apparatus, and so bitterly opposed reforms (English, 2002: 72–78, 83–87).

From jihadist movements:

Similarly, Salafi-Jihadism has become an attractive ideological framework for armed groups in part because it allows them to call upon the support of powerful transnational networks of jihadist activists and sympathizers (Adamson, 2005; Bakke, 2014; Hegghammer, 2010/11; Owen, 2010: ch. 7; Walter, 2017).
…
Ideologies are not static features of individuals, groups, organizations or societies, but change before, during, and after conflict. The consequences of such change can be profound: Hegghammer (2010/11), for example, suggests that ideological changes within transnational Islamist networks are crucial in explaining the rise of Muslim Foreign Fighters from the 1980s onwards (see also Bakke, 2014)…

And from the 2003 invasion of Iraq:

Ideological effects often arise, therefore, from networked interdependencies of different sorts of actors guided by different mechanisms, with the largest scale effects emerging from mutually reinforcing internalized and structural dynamics. For example, neoconservative justifications of the Iraq War – as an exercise in rapid democracy-promotion which would positively transform Middle Eastern regional security – were, in many respects, dramatic breaks from previous US policy assumptions and appear puzzling and dangerous from conventional strategic perspectives (Flibbert, 2006: 310–311; Gilpin, 2005: 5–6, 17). These justifications proved so consequential, however, because they were simultaneously longstanding commitments for key members of the Bush administration, provided a plausible roadmap of action for broader sympathetic constituencies after 9/11, were successfully institutionalized within the administration (as critics of the war were sidelined) in ways that created strong pressure for officials to support an emerging ideological consensus, and were instrumentally effective in mobilizing public support and legitimating the administration’s priorities (Flibbert, 2006).

It’s unfortunately behind a paywall, but if you can access it and are interested in ideology and conflict in any way, I recommend it. And I highly recommend it if you follow terrorism studies but want to see how the concept of ideology is used in other fields.

This is another quick post for a few updates.

I recently had a chapter published in the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Counterterrorism Yearbook 2019, looking at counter-terrorism developments in Australia during the past year. You can read the chapter here or my Strategist post on it here.

I recently spoke to David Wroe for this article about the United States urging the Australian government to “take responsibility” for Australian Islamic State fighters captured in Syria. At some point I want to write a post on this issue, either on this blog, or AVERT, or elsewhere, to make clear how much of dilemma counter-terrorism authorities (not just in Australia) are facing. Leaving these Australians in hands of the Syrian Democratic Forces carries a whole range of risks, but my own preference (that the government make more efforts to prosecute them here) entails serious risks as well.

In other terrorism-related news, the Independent National Security Legislation Monitor has announced a review into the citenship-stripping legislation, which is a great idea.

Finally, there are several terrorism trials currently underway in Sydney (according to the NSW Courts Registry app) which should be incredibly interesting, but I’ve seen absolutely no media reporting of them so I am guessing that there are loads of suppression orders. Hopefully some of it becomes public soon.

Articles examining the state of terrorism studies are quite common, but last year saw some really excellent and constructive assessments of the field. Three of these deserve to be much more widely read.

First example: Mark Youngman, “Building ‘Terrorism Studies’ as an Interdisciplinary Space: Addressing Recurring Issues in the Study of Terrorism“, Terrorism and Political Violence, published online 9 October 2018.

Abstract: Over the years, there have been many debates regarding the state of research into terrorism and whether “terrorism studies” constitutes an academic discipline in its own right. Such reflections, coupled with the natural evolution of what is still a relatively new area of research, have arguably led to significant improvements in quality and rigour. At the same time, the status of terrorism studies itself remains somewhat ambiguous: it is both discussed as a distinct field and simultaneously evades criticism by pointing to the difficulties of defining its boundaries. There are undoubtedly a number of advantages to forming a separate discipline, which would go some way to helping the field address some of the recurring problems that terrorism research faces. However, this article ultimately argues that scholars are better served by deliberately moving in the other direction and developing the field as a space for interdisciplinary engagement.

Mark Youngman’s article is outstanding and I strongly agree with many of its points. Youngman begins by discussing how the field straddles several different disciplines and therefore lacks a secure foothold in academic institutions. However, he argues that the field should emphatically not try to become a discipline in itself and that terrorism scholars should instead critically engage more with their home disciplines. Hegghammer made a similar argument a few years back, which I concurred with.

Youngman’s article also has a valuable section on the field’s need for greater methodological sophistication, which does not simply repeat the constant calls for more empirical research. Terrorism studies is often accused of lacking empirical data and of failing to talk directly to terrorists, but in my view these critiques are no longer well-founded and they tend to miss the point. There is no shortage of empirically-based datasets, but there are valid critiques of how some datasets are constructed. Similarly, many terrorism scholars conduct interviews with terrorists, though there are legitimate questions over whether such interviews are always conducted with sufficient rigour and methodological transparency.

So it was great to see Youngman’s article did not simply repeat the common calls for more fieldwork. He instead points out that holding interviews with terrorists (particularly in conflict zones) up as the gold standard is both unwarranted and creates currently unaddressed risks. He argues that it reflects poorly on the field when one research method is treated as inherently superior to all others, instead of a more pluralistic approach based on detailed discussions about which methods are best suited for different types of questions.

Youngman’s article makes many other good points. He critiques the recurrence of strawman arguments in the field, such as when the argument that terrorism is “not all about ideology” is presented as being counter to conventional wisdom, yet almost nobody actually contends that it is all about ideology. He points out the ethical risks involved in engaging the media, policy-makers and practitioners, but rightly adds that “[w]e cannot criticise state policies for being ill-informed and at the same time turn away those who seek to make them better informed”. He also notes the potential for productive engagement with civil war studies, which has increased in the past couple of years and was long overdue. However, Youngman adds an ethical argument in support of such crossover, as civil war studies appears to have “a greater emphasis on the victims and social consequences of violence” than terrorism studies has.

Second example: Bart Schuurman, “Research on Terrorism, 2007–2016: A Review of Data, Methods, and Authorship“, Terrorism and Political Violence, published online 1 March 2018.

Abstract: Research on terrorism has long been criticized for its inability to overcome enduring methodological issues. These include an overreliance on secondary sources and the associated literature review methodology, a scarcity of statistical analyses, a tendency for authors to work alone rather than collaborate with colleagues, and the large number of one-time contributors to the field. However, the reviews that have brought these issues to light describe the field as it developed until 2007. This article investigates to what extent these issues have endured in the 2007–2016 period by constructing a database on all of the articles published in nine leading journals on terrorism (N = 3442). The results show that the use of primary data has increased considerably and is continuing to do so. Scholars have also begun to adapt a wider variety of data-gathering techniques, greatly diminishing the overreliance on literature reviews that was noted from the 1980s through to the early 2000s. These positive changes should not obscure enduring issues. Despite improvements, most scholars continue to work alone and most authors are one-time contributors. Overall, however, the field of terrorism studies appears to have made considerable steps towards addressing long-standing issues.

Bart Schuurman’s article updates earlier quantitative assessments of terrorism studies conducted by Andrew Silke, which covered research published in the journals Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism (and their predecessor journals) up until 2007. In doing so, Schuurman’s article does the field a great service.

When I first started reading this article I was concerned that it categorised research that isn’t based on primary sources under what I saw as the somewhat dismissive term “literature review method” (similarly Silke refers to studies that aren’t based on new data as “essentially rehashing knowledge that was already there”). After all, it can be within such work that the all-important conceptualisation and theorisation can occur. Such work is crucial and it should not be automatically looked down on. It should be judged for how well it advances (or fails to advance) the field by consolidating current knowledge, creating conceptual clarity, developing new theoretical propositions (to later be tested), and ensuring contestation. So I was worried that Schuurman’s article might make the sort of assumptions that Youngman’s article warned about, but my concern turned out be misplaced. Instead, Schuurman noted near the end of his article:

The emphasis on how a lack of primary sources in particular has had a detrimental influence on the field for decades, is not a dismissal of the value of non-empirical work. Many authors who base themselves on the secondary literature have made stellar contributions by bringing together insights from a diverse range of scholarly, governmental, journalistic, and NGO-based works. Others have analyzed existing data in novel ways, presented findings from the non-English literature, or drawn attention to countries, case studies, and historical periods that have been undeservedly neglected. Similarly, the use of primary data is not a guarantee for high-quality work; some articles use only the barest of such sources or fail to study them in depth.

The result is a nuanced and utterly indispensable article, because it finally provides an up-to-date quantitative assessment of the popularity of different research methods within terrorism studies, superseding many of the earlier assessments. The field has needed this for some time. It’s particularly valuable because it focuses not just on Terrorism and Political Violence and Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, the two journals traditionally considered as the field’s core journals, but also on Perspectives on Terrorism, the Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Dynamics of Asymmetric Conflict: Pathways Toward Terrorism and Genocide, Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression, the Journal of Terrorism Research  and the Journal for Deradicalization. And I agree with its conclusion, that “[r]esearch on terrorism has not stagnated; it has begun to flourish”.

Third example: Deven Parekh, Amarnath Amarasingam, Lorne Dawson, and Derek Ruths, “Studying Jihadists on Social Media: A Critique of Data Collection Methodologies”, Perspectives on Terrorism, Volume 12, issue 3, 2018

Abstract: In this article, we propose a general model of data collection from social media, in the context of terrorism research, focusing on recent studies of jihadists. By analyzing Twitter data collection methods in the existing research, we show that the methods used are prone to sampling biases, and that the sampled datasets are not sufficiently filtered or validated to ensure reliability of conclusions derived from them. Alternatively, we propose some best practices for the collection of data in future research on jihadist using social media (as well as other kinds of terrorist groups). Given the similarity of the methodological challenges posed by research on almost all social media platforms, in the context of terrorism studies, the critique and recommendations offered remain relevant despite the recent shift of most jihadists from Twitter to Telegram and other forms of social media.

Social media analysis has become quite a common approach within the field, particularly for scholars focusing on jihadist movements, so it was great to see this article disentangling some of the methodological dilemmas involved. Parekh et al‘s article focuses heavily on authentication, that is, how to know if the accounts being the research classifies as jihadist truly are being run by jihadists. The article shows how some methods currently used entail serious authentication problems, and proposes some ways to help fix this, while being entirely respectful in their critiques of others’ work. If you have even the slightest interest in social media as a research resource for terrorism studies, you should read this.

Read them!

So these three articles were all excellent for many reasons. They did not waste much on the purported gulf between “orthodox terrorism studies” and “critical terrorism studies”. They didn’t repeat outdated arguments about the supposed lack of datasets or field interviews (indeed Schuurman’s article provided a much needed corrective, showing the actual prevalence of such approaches). These articles nonetheless did not champion the field; they instead made well-founded critiques of real and serious problems within terrorism studies, and provided helpful ways forward.

There are some unconvincing assessments of terrorism studies out there, but these three from 2018 are all compelling ones, to be placed alongside excellent earlier assessments such as Richard English’s The Future Study of Terrorism, Thomas Heggammer’s The Future of Terrorism Studies, and Lisa Stampnitzky’s Disciplining an Unruly Field: Terrorism Experts and Theories of Scientific/Intellectual Production.

To end this year I’d like share what books I’ve been enjoying, for any interested readers. This list only includes books I’ve wanted to read from start to end, not books that I’ve just dipped in and out of (usually edited collections), used for reference (such as research methods books), or books that I began but did not feel the need to finish.

Books I finished reading in 2018:

Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom, by Thomas E. Ricks

The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from My Life, by John le Carré

A Delicate Truth, by John Le Carré

What is Military History? by Stephen Morillo with Michal F. Pavkovic

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right, by Angela Nagle

The Navy and National Security: The Peacetime Dimension, by Dick Sherwood

The Secret Pilgrim, by John le Carré

The Navy and the Nation: Australia’s Maritime Power in the 21st Century, by Vice Admiral Tim Barrett

Terrorism in Australia: The Story of Operation Pendennis, by Peter Moroney

Wild Sea: A History of the Southern Ocean, by Joy McCann

In Defence of History, by Richard J. Evans

Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How To Govern, by Laura Tingle

Follow the Leader: Democracy and the Rise of the Strongman, by Laura Tingle

A Little History of Economics, by Niall Kishtainy

Home Fire, by Kamila Shamsie

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy, by Jonathan Taplin

Hugh Stretton: Selected Writings, edited by Graeme Davison

Books I began in 2018 and am keen to finish:

The French Art of War, by Alexis Jenni

Art of Creating Power: Freedman on Strategy, edited by Benedict Wilkinson and James Gow

The Cold War: A World History, by Odd Arne Westad

The Age of Capital: 1848-1875, by Eric Hobsbawm

The Secret World: A History of Intelligence, by Christopher Andrew

On Grand Strategy, by John Lewis Gaddis

Recommendation:

I would recommend most of the books in this list, but if I had to choose one must-read it would be Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire.

Just a quick post to share this image I noticed in the latest ASIO annual report, presenting their view of what constitutes “foreign interference” and what distinguishes it from mere influence:

Countering foreign interference has explicitly been part of ASIO’s mandate at least since the 1986 update to the 1979 ASIO Act, which defined it in the following way:

acts of foreign interference means activities relating to Australia that are carried on by or on behalf of, are directed or subsidised by or are undertaken in active collaboration with, a foreign power, being activities that:

                     (a)  are clandestine or deceptive and:

                              (i)  are carried on for intelligence purposes;

                             (ii)  are carried on for the purpose of affecting political or governmental processes; or

                            (iii)  are otherwise detrimental to the interests of Australia; or

                     (b)  involve a threat to any person.

It was also effectively part of ASIO’s role before the 1986 legislation. ASIO’s 1979 legislation referred to “active measures of foreign intervention” and “[subversive] activities of foreign origin”. ASIO’s 1949 charter and 1956 legislation did not use the term “foreign interference” but it did use the broad notion of “subversion” which among other things encompasses what is now called foreign interference (particularly because it made a distinction between foreign and domestic forms of “subversion”). It has become a bigger political concern in Australia in the past couple of years, due to the impact of Russian electoral interference overseas, the commissioning in late 2016 of a joint ASIO and ONA report on Chinese covert activities in Australia, and controversies like the Dastyari affair.

Foreign interference is a real threat, but not a new one (here’s an interesting article on old Soviet methods), and not something Western countries are innocent of. I’m wary of how the concept could easily be misused (it’s not hard to imagine political figures casually throwing the term around to discredit opponents) and some aspects of the new legislation. At some point I’d like to write something about the broader politics of national security and how Australia’s political debates about foreign interference share some of the same shortcomings as Australia’s counter-terrorism debates.

Image: © Commonwealth of Australia 2018, Creative Commons BY Attribution 3.0 Australia licence. Taken from the ASIO Annual Report 2017–18, pages 26-27.

I have a new piece out discussing which terror plots in Australia have had a genuine and direct connection to “Islamic State” (IS), what the nature of these connections were, and what this tells us about the threat.

It’s up on the website of the AVERT (Addressing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation to Terrorism) Research Network based at Deakin University. I will be a regular blogger there, posting twelve pieces over the next year. I’m going to use it as a chance to post more regularly than I tend do here, and to keep up with current developments. Please enjoy the first one!

Journalists, scholars and counter-terrorism practitioners have recently drawn attention to a particular strain of Islamic State terror attacks which have been described as “virtually planned”.

This refers to terror plots where the perpetrators are guided through sustained online communication with Islamic State operatives who provided encouragement, instructions or advice. These plots are also characterised by the absence of physical connections that might make them more directly planned than the term “virtual” would imply, such as one of the perpetrators having trained or fought with Islamic State.

Thomas Hegghammer and Petter Nesser appear to be the first authors to note this as a distinctive type of plot. In 2015 they created a six-part typology to categorise jihadist plots in the West, and Type 4 was “remote contact with directives”. From 2016 onwards authors  such as Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, Madeleine Blackman, Nathanial Barr, Bridget Morang, Rukmini Callamachi, Kim Cragin and Ari Weil popularised the term “virtual planning” to describe these plots.

Other authors explored the same concept but used different terms. Thomas Jocelyn and Peter Neumann described them as “remote-controlled” plots, Seamus Hughes and Alexander Melagrou-Hitchens referred to “virtual entrepreneurs” (capturing that Islamic State’s virtual planners also play a number of online roles other than plotting attacks, such as providing advice on how to travel to Syria) while John Mueller used the term “cyber coaching” (to refer specifically to virtual planners teaching the perpetrators which methods to use for their attacks). I tend to stick with “virtual planning”, and explored Australian examples with articles on the 2015 Anzac Day plot and the alleged 2017 Sydney plane plot.

Since then, Katrina Zorzi and I have been doing quite a bit of research on virtual planning, as a side-project, to interrogate and contribute to the further development of the concept. We’re looking at the extent to which such plots are genuinely new, widespread, and significant, and what they tell us about various debates within terrorism studies, such as those over online radicalisation and lone wolves. We also hope to examine how virtual planning has created opportunities for women to be more involved in Islamic State’s external attacks, even during periods when their propaganda appeared to eschew combat roles for women, and if broader contextual factors have helped enable the development of virtually planned attacks. We’re also interested in what aspects of Islamic State’s strategy and military doctrine made it particularly open to adopting this approach, and why other jihadist organisations have so far used this approach far less (which also involves revisiting al-Qaeda’s small number of virtually planned attacks).

We will post some intermittent updates about it on this blog, but first I wanted to share this table summarising existing estimates of how widespread such plots are.

This table lists the number of virtually planned plots various authors have noted in particular regions at particular times, and where possible how large a proportion of all Islamic State-associated attacks they accounted for.  At the end of the table I added my own estimates for Australia.

Not all the figures in these articles match up. For example, Cragin and Weil state that that Islamic State carried out fifty-one virtually planned plots across the world (that is, in countries that did not contain an Islamic State Wilayat) between January 2014 and December 2017, and that seventeen of these were in the West. However, the figure of seventeen seems too low given evidence of six virtually planned plots in Australia, sixteen in Europe and eight in the United States, either within the same time period or within even shorter periods.

Nonetheless, these various sets of figures indicate that Islamic State’s virtually planned terror plots have been quite prevalent, amounting to between a fifth and half of all Islamic State plots depending on the region.

It will be interesting to how Islamic State’s loss of territory inside Syria and Iraq changes that. I’ve previously expressed scepticism that this territorial loss will have much impact on virtually planned attacks, on the grounds that that “virtual encouragement or direction has been provided to plotters in the West by individuals in Somalia, Libya, and the United Kingdom”, but I hope that scepticism turns out to have been misplaced.

[1] For Europe, Nesser, Stenersen and Oftedal’s did not explicitly estimate the number of virtually-planned attacks, but noted that nineteen of their plots involved “involve online instruction from members of IS’s networks”. Three of these nineteen involved returned foreign fighters, but the remaining sixteen fit the criteria for virtually planned plots. See their article here along with Appendix 1 and Appendix 2.

[2] For Australia, my estimate of six virtually-planned plots from January 2014 to December 2017 is based on the February 2015 Sydney plot (NSW JCTT Operation Castrum), the 2015 Anzac Day plot (Vic JCTT Operation Rising), the 2015 Mother’s Day plot (Vic JCTT Operation Amberd), the 2016 Anzac Day plot (NSW JCTT Operation Vianden, but this is an extremely tentative inclusion), the alleged September 2014 Sydney plot (Operation Appleby) and the alleged July 2017 Sydney plane plot (NSW JCTT Operation Silves). My estimate of nineteen total IS-associated plots in Australia during this period is based on the sixteen incidents listed here along with the June 2017 Brighton siege, the alleged July 2017 Sydney plane plot, and the alleged November 2017 Melbourne plot.

Update 1: I have now removed the 2016 Anzac Day plot, which was tentatively included based on reports of possible instructions the perpetrator received from abroad. Last week he was sentenced and it turns out both of the people he was communicating with overseas were undercover police officers (see paragraphs 11-13 of his sentencing). For this reason, it cannot be counted as one of the Islamic State’s virtually planned plots, so my estimate for such plots in Australia during this period has changed from six to five, and I have updated the table to account for this.

One interesting part of Senate Estimates is when the ASIO Director-General testifies before the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee. Ever since the self-described Islamic State siezed territory in Syria and Iraq and became a major security concern worldwide, the Director-General has been sharing ASIO’s estimates of how many Australians are involved with IS and other jihadist groups in the region.

I’ve compiled the official figures from current ASIO Director-General Duncan Lewis’s latest Senate Estimates hearing, as wells as figures from previous hearings (for categories that weren’t covered in the latest one).

Australian jihadists currently in Syria and Iraq:
“ASIO assessed that around 110 Australians are currently in Syria or Iraq and have fought or otherwise supported the Islamic extremist groups.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 24 May 2018, page 100.

Australians killed while involved with jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq:
“At least 78 and possibly as many as 90 Australians have been killed because of their involvement in the conflict.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 24 May 2018, page 100.

Australians subject to travel restrictions:
“Since 2012, around 240 Australian passports have been cancelled or refused and 39 Australian passports have been suspended on ASIO’s recommendation in relation to Syria and Iraq.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 24 May 2018, page 100.

Total number of Australians who traveled and joined jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq during the conflict:
“Since 2012, around 220 Australians have travelled to Syria/Iraq to join the conflict. Although unable to further breakdown these figures for security reasons, ASIO notes that as the conflict continues, fewer individuals are successfully entering the conflict zone.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 27 February 2018.

The groups they joined:
“The vast majority of the Australians who travelled to Syria or Iraq in support of terrorist organisations are assessed to be associated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 27 February 2018.

Other Australians have been involved with Jabhat al-Nusra (which renamed itself Jabhat Fatah al-Sham and then formed the umbrella group Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham) as well as Ahrar al-Sham and some other groups.

Warrants issued for those still overseas:
“In relation to those individuals, the AFP has worked with its partner agencies, ASIO and the state and territory police, and we’ve obtained 21 arrest warrants in relation to those persons.” Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin, 27 February 2018, pages 35-36.

Those who returned:
“The other figure which is always of interest to this committee is those who have returned from the Middle East. That still sits at around 40. And, as I’ve said on several occasions before this committee, the overwhelming majority of them returned to Australia before ISIL was actually declared as this so-called province—this caliphate.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 24 October 2017, page 132.

Those suspected of providing support from within Australia:
“Furthermore, ASIO is investigating around 190 people here in Australia who are actively supporting extremist groups in Syria and Iraq through recruiting, fundraising and in some cases seeking to travel to join these groups themselves. This number includes our investigation into about 40 Australians who have returned from the conflict zone.” ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 18 October 2016, page 177.

The children involved:
“Of further concern are up to 70 children of Australians, that we are aware of, who have been exposed to extremist groups in Syria or Iraq. These children either travelled to the conflict zone with their Australian parents or, indeed, have been born there.”
ASIO DG Duncan Lewis, 18 October 2016, page 177.

I’ve often written about Australians who have joined jihadist groups abroad, but have rarely come across evidence of Australians fighting in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Intuitively, you could expect that some Australians were involved in fighting against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The 1979 Soviet invasion prompted tens of thousands of Muslims across the world to travel to Afghanistan and join the fight throughout the 1980s. This was the world’s largest jihadist foreign fighter mobilisation until the Syrian civil war.

Given Australians have joined jihadist groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere since the 1990s, it would be surprising if there had been no Australians involved at all in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Yet I have only occasionally come across indications of Australian involvement, such as a section in Irfan Yusuf’s book Once Were Radicals, where he states that in the 1980s a friend of his, Kamal, “seemed to know a lot of what was happening there [in Afghanistan], and he also knew people who had gone from Australia to fight in the jihad” (page 151).

Another example is that an Australian woman, Rabiah Hutchinson, travelled to Pakistan in 1990 and based herself in the village of Pabbi (near the Afghan border). She stayed under the auspices of Abdul Rassul Sayyaf (who trained many Jemaah Islamiyah terrorists) and interacted with Osama bin Laden. But this was after the Soviets withdrew, and bin Laden was (according to Hutchinson’s biography, The Mother of Mohammed) surprised to encounter an Australian. He reportedly said “Australian – that must be a first!” (page 191). This anecdote suggests that Australians were absent during the 1980s, but we can’t read too much into it. The story might not be true, and Bin Laden was not then the central figure he would later become, so we can’t assume he would have known the nationality of each of the thousands of volunteers who traveled to join the conflict.

So there has generally been extremely little information around on any Australians fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan.

However, Thomas Hegghammer recently sent me some interesting things he has found.

He found that “there were people in Australia reading al-Jihad and writing letters to the editor”. Al-Jihad was the magazine produced by Abdullah Azzam’s Services Bureau. Hegghammer provided this image of al-Jihad’s 18th issue, page 41:

He added that the “same guy is mentioned in the next issue (p.45) as having sent money.”

Hegghammer also showed that the book Jihad in Afghanistan Against Communism refers explicitly to Australians among the mujahideen at the time:

Hegghammer helpfully adds to the extremely small body of public information on any Australian involvement in the 1980s foreign fighter mobilisation against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

It wouldn’t be surprising if a few Australians had been fighting the Soviets, but information on it is hard to come across, and I will let readers know if I hear of anything else.

Update 1: (added 29 March 2018) Anthony Davis from IHS-Jane’s has sent the following example. As with the examples above, I am not personally in a position to verify it, but I greatly appreciate it for adding to the small and fragmentary body of information on this topic:

l met a young Australian fighter called Yusuf while working in the northern Kunduz-Khanabad area in the late summer of 1982 with a group of mujahideen of the Jamiat-i-Islami party. He had served in the ADF and later married a Muslim woman from Malaysia and converted to Islam. He was actually less interested in killing communists than in fulfilling his duty as a Muslim to perform jihad. He took his religion extremely seriously rather to the amusement of his Afghan comrades-in-arms not all of whom prayed five times a day and many of whom enjoyed the odd joint of good local hash. They nick-named him “Sheikh” in a back-handed compliment to his religious rectitude. But with a full beard, long hair and turban, he otherwise fitted in well enough. At the end of the year he turned in his AK and joined me on the three week trek back to Pakistan. As far as I’m aware, he then returned to his wife in a kampong in northeastern Malaysia, having successfully ticked the ‘jihad’ box.