New America, the Center on the Future of War and McCain Institute of Arizona State University (ASU), the Global SOF Foundation, and the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College are pleased to extend to you an invitation to attend the Special Operations Policy Forum, to be held at New America’s offices in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, September 18, 2019 beginning at 8:45AM.
The purpose of the invitation-only Forum is to convene senior U.S. government leaders, leading academics, and national security policy professionals on how to confront the unconventional threats facing Special Operations Forces and how the U.S. military and U.S. government should respond to these threats as well as the provision of SOF in support of foreign nations’ forces.
Confirmed speakers this year include, but are not limited to: H.E. Roya Rahmani, Afghan Ambassador to the United States; Admiral (Ret.) William McRaven, Former Commander, United States Special Operations Command; Representative Adam Smith, Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee and representative of Washington’s 9th district; Brigadier General Matt Easley, Director of Army Artificial Intelligence, Army Futures Command; Azadeh Moaveni, author and 2018 ASU Future of War Fellow at New America; Nicholas Rasmussen, Senior Director of the McCain Institute’s Counterterrorism Program and former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center; David Spirk, Chief Data Officer, Special Operations Command; Nelly Lahoud, Senior Fellow, New America; Linda Robinson, Senior International/Defense Researcher at RAND Corporation; and Peter W. Singer, Strategist & Senior Fellow, New America.
A formal invitation with our schedule will follow in the coming weeks.
Special Operations Policy Forum 2019
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
8:45 AM – 5:00 PM ET
740 15th Street NW, Suite 900
Washington, DC 20005
Kirstjen Nielsen had the toughest job in the government, CNN.com
Kirstjen Nielsen had the toughest job in the government
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State University and the author of “Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for bin Laden from 9/11 to Abbottabad.” View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)Running the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may be the toughest job in the federal government.
The DHS is a sprawling giant of 22 agencies that merged together in the wake of 9/11. The department’s 240,000 employees handle everything from hurricanes to cyber security to border security to terrorism.
As secretary of homeland security, a lot of things can happen on your watch: A botched response to a hurricane, or a serious cyber attack, or a major terrorist assault, or rising numbers of migrant families trying to cross the southern border.
That’s why in the past the top job at DHS has gone to a party elder skilled in politics, such as the former governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano, who served in the role during President Obama’s first term or, the former governor of Pennsylvania, Tom Ridge, who served under George W. Bush.
If it wasn’t a skilled politician who took the top DHS job, it went to officials who had served at the highest levels of policy-making or the US military such as the Bush-appointed Michael Chertoff, who ran the criminal division at the Department of Justice where he oversaw the investigation of the 9/11 attacks.
During his second term Obama appointed Jeh Johnson, who had been the top lawyer at the Pentagon, while Trump appointed Gen. John Kelly, the former four-star general in charge of Southern Command, which is responsible for all US military operations in Latin America.
Kirstjen Nielsen was neither a political heavyweight nor had she served in senior policy or military roles when she took over DHS.
Nielsen had worked at the George W. Bush White House in a relatively junior role for three years and then had gone into the private sector for more than a decade. When Kelly was tapped by Trump to run DHS, Nielsen was appointed to be his “sherpa” during his confirmation process.
Kelly was impressed and made Nielsen his chief of staff at DHS. When Kelly moved to the White House to serve as Trump’s chief of staff, Kelly brought Nielsen over to be his deputy. Kelly then pushed for Nielsen to take over DHS.
Like so many other top Trump officials, Kelly was eventually forced out and in December he left the White House. Kelly had served as a heat shield for Nielsen, who sometimes bore the brunt of Trump’s ire. The President blew up at her at a Cabinet meeting last spring because she was hesitant to sign a memo ordering migrant children to be separated from their parents, according to the New York Times.
In October, Kelly and national security adviser John Bolton had a curse-laden shouting match at the White House about the rising number of migrant crossings at the southern border. Bolton told Kelly that Nielsen needed to do her job, which led to the heated argument in which Kelly defended his former deputy, according to CNN.
With Kelly gone, Nielsen no longer had an advocate at the White House. She became Trump’s scapegoat for the rising number of migrant families trying to cross the southern border in recent months.
Many of those families are fleeing the violence and economic travail of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and there isn’t much that any DHS secretary can do to try to stem the flow of migrants willing to leave everything behind to seek a better future in the United States.
Almost a century ago one such desperate migrant, Mary Anne MacLeod, left the Outer Hebrides islands of Scotland, one of the most poverty-stricken parts of Europe, to find work as a servant in New York. Mary later married Fred Trump. They had five children, including a son named Donald.
Trying to dissuade migrants such as Mary Anne MacLeod from leaving countries where they see no future to seek their fortune in the United States is likely beyond the ken of any secretary of homeland security.
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.” View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)ISIS has suffered a momentous blow with the defeat of its last physical stronghold, according to an announcement Saturday by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces.
At the height of its power four years ago, ISIS controlled an area in Iraq and Syria that was the size of Portugal and lorded over almost 8 million people — a population larger than that of Bulgaria. ISIS also ran a quasi-state that taxed and extorted its millions of subjects, enabling it to field a terrorist army with a large war chest.
While ISIS once attracted an estimated 40,000 people around the world to join its so-called caliphate, that number has since plummeted, as it seems no one wants to join the losing team.
While Trump, who took a premature victory lap last month, certainly contributed to ISIS’ demise, the conditions are still ripe for similarly dangerous terrorist groups to form and multiply.
What credit should be given to Trump?
The Trump administration did make a substantial shift in the fight against ISIS in Syria by arming Kurdish forces and increasing the US military presence there.
But it was the Obama administration that initiated the operation in 2016 to take back Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, where ISIS first declared its “caliphate.” Under Obama, ISIS also lost key Iraqi cities including Fallujah, Ramadi and Tikrit.
The Obama administration, however, was so concerned about “mission creep” in Syria that it capped the number of US troops there to 500.
In the waning months of Obama’s second term, his Cabinet debated whether to arm Syrian Kurds, who would be key to taking back cities like Raqqa — which served as ISIS’s headquarters. But the US would risk angering Turkey, which considers the Syrian Kurds to be closely aligned with a terrorist group in Turkey.
The Obama team debated this option for so long that it eventually ran out of time to implement it. When it finally approached the incoming administration with the plan to do so, former national security adviser Michael Flynn reportedly rejected it on the grounds that the Trump team wanted to conduct its own assessment of the situation.
After Trump entered office, he approved a plan to arm the Kurdish forces in Syria and dramatically increased the number of US troops there from 500 to 2,000. He also gave his ground commanders greater authority to take military action against ISIS without consulting with the White House.
Days before Raqqa was liberated from ISIS in October 2017, President Donald Trump lauded himself in an interview and said, “I totally changed rules of engagement. I totally changed our military, I totally changed the attitudes of the military….” He also claimed ISIS hadn’t been defeated earlier because “you didn’t have Trump as your president.”
Trump can certainly take credit for hastening the demise of ISIS, but ultimately, the US’ strategy was remarkably similar under both presidents. Instead of relying heavily on large numbers of US troops, both presidents used US Special Forces to train and advise local forces. The ground fight against ISIS was almost entirely conducted by Iraqi and Syrian soldiers.
Trump tends to define any course of action that he takes as being markedly different from Obama, but in the case of the anti-ISIS campaign, there were more similarities than differences between the two presidents.
Will ISIS live on?
ISIS has lost its physical territory in Iraq and Syria, and is significantly weaker without a base from which it can train thousands of militants. But it is likely to continue to inspire attacks around the world as a virtual caliphate.
And the real problem is that the conditions in the Middle East that gave rise to ISIS still exist and are likely to produce similar jihadist groups. Those problems include deep sectarianism, fragile or failed governments, and weak economies. Throw in the fast-growing population of the Middle East, and you have a toxic mix that will continue to produce the kind of anger upon which groups such as ISIS feed.
We should be ready for an offshoot of ISIS to form in places like Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, or any other weak state in the region. It may not grow to be as powerful or widespread as ISIS, but the truth remains that there will be a successor group.
It would be dangerous for Trump to celebrate the fall of ISIS without keeping this in mind. To do so would be to commit the same mistake that President Obama made in January 2014, when he dismissed the group that would soon morph into ISIS as a “junior varsity” team.
Why terrorists kill: The striking similarities between the New Zealand and Pulse nightclub shooters, CNN.com
CNN.com
March 18, 2019 Monday 1:29 PM EST
Why terrorists kill: The striking similarities between the New Zealand and Pulse nightclub shooters
BYLINE: By Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst
SECTION: OPINIONS
LENGTH: 1183 words
The decision to kill innocent civilians who are strangers — whether you are a jihadist terrorist or a white nationalist militant — can never be easily explained, but there does seem to be a common profile for “lone actor” Western terrorists today, irrespective of their ideology.
First, they are radicalizing because of what they read online. ISIS created a vast global library of propaganda that influenced terrorists such as Omar Mateen, who killed 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016. Mateen never met with anyone in ISIS and never traveled to Iraq or Syria where ISIS was headquartered. His radicalization was entirely driven by what he viewed on the internet.
Similarly, Brenton Tarrant, the terrorist who allegedly carried out the New Zealand attacks, killing 50 people, tapped into a large library of white nationalist material from around the world on the internet, according to the document that Tarrant posted about his motivations for the attacks.
Tarrant’s heroes were right-wing terrorists from around the West: Darren Osborne. who killed a Muslim man near a mosque in North London two years ago; Dylann Roof. who killed nine African-Americans in a church in South Carolina in 2015, and, above all, Norwegian neo-Nazi Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in 2011.
Just as school shooters in the United States model themselves and learn from other school shooters, so too do aspiring terrorists learn from and emulate other terrorists.
Nothing in Tarrant’s manifesto suggests that he was indoctrinated in-person or was trained by a white nationalist group. Like Mateen, he radicalized because of what he saw online.
Second, both Mateen and Tarrant seem to have been drifting through life while they shopped for an ideology that justified acts of violence.
Mateen flirted first with the Shia militant group Hezbollah and then with the Sunni militant group al Qaeda, according to co-workers, before he finally settled on the ultra-violent Sunni group, ISIS.
According to his manifesto, Tarrant embraced anarchism, communism and libertarianism before finally settling on white nationalism.
Mateen nurtured dreams of becoming a policeman but instead was working as a security guard at a golf community, which was not his heroic self-conception of his proper role in life.
As he carried out the attack on June 12, 2016, Mateen told a 911 operator, “My name is ‘I pledge allegiance to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.” Baghdadi is the self-styled caliph of ISIS, which quickly claimed Mateen as a “soldier of the caliphate.” Mateen was no longer a security guard at a golf community, now, in his own eyes and those of ISIS, he was a real soldier.
Similarly, according to Tarrant’s account in his manifesto, he was going nowhere fast in life. Tarrant “did not attend university” because he “had no great interest in anything offered in the universities to study.” Instead, Tarrant, an Australian, was drifting around the world as a tourist in France, Spain and Portugal and eventually New Zealand.
Just as Mateen was a “soldier” for ISIS and pledged his allegiance to the caliph, Tarrant said in his manifesto that before he carried out his attacks he contacted the “reborn Knights Templar for a blessing…” The Knights Templar were crusaders against Muslim rule in the Middle East during the Middle Ages. Tarrant’s hero, Breivik, claimed they had reconstituted in the 21st century.
In both cases, the terrorists were no longer merely zeros, they were now heroes in their own minds, acting either as a soldier of the caliphate or with the blessing of the Knights Templar.
Third, just as the adherents of other murderous ideologies that preceded them believed, Mateen and Tarrant felt that utopia here on earth could only be achieved by the removal of “the Other.” For Stalinists it was the kulaks. For the Nazis it was, of course, the Jews. For ISIS, it is the Shia and other “infidels.” For violent white nationalists it is non-whites, and particularly immigrants.
As we saw with the globalization of ISIS’ ideology, which led to outbreaks of terrorism across the West, the increasing prevalence of white nationalist ideas around the globe has provided fertile ground for acts of violence.
Political leaders in several Western countries feel no compunction about staking their careers on white nationalist themes that are typically anti-immigrant, often anti-Muslim and sometimes anti-Semitic.
A few years ago these ideas were on the fringes of politics in the West, but they have now entered the mainstream.
Consider that Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, has built his political career on anti-immigrant stances. Orban has also made a central part of his platform the denigration of the Jewish American-Hungarian billionaire, George Soros, as a “puppet master.” A common anti-Semitic slur is that Jews are the secret puppet masters controlling the world.
Poland’s ruling nationalist Law and Justice Party is led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, who has variously said that immigrants carry “all sorts of parasites and protozoa,” that they have imposed sharia law in parts of Sweden and that they use churches in Italy as “toilets.”
Geert Wilders was once a marginal figure in Dutch politics but in 2017, his party came in second in parliamentary elections.
Wilders has long espoused a wide variety of anti-Islamic views.
Similarly, Marine Le Pen in France was also once at the margins of French politics. In 2010, Le Pen compared Muslims praying on the street to the Nazi occupation of France. Seven years later, Le Pen lost the French presidential election to Emmanuel Macron, but she still garnered a third of the votes.
In 2017, the anti-Muslim party Alternative for Germany (AfD) became the third largest party in the German parliament even though it was only founded four years earlier.
President Donald Trump’s views about Mexican immigrants are, of course, well known, as was his campaign promise to ban Muslims from entering the United States. On Friday, Trump referred to immigrants on the US’ southern border as part of an “invasion.”
Similarly, Tarrant described Muslim immigrants in his manifesto as “invaders.”
The man who killed 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue last October repeatedly referred to immigrants from Mexico and Central America as “invaders” and blamed a Jewish organization that helps refugees.
Of course, merely espousing white nationalist views doesn’t make you a terrorist any more than merely espousing views about jihadism make you a terrorist. But these ideas are a necessary feature of acts of white nationalist terrorism of the kind that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, on Friday, or for the acts of jihadist terrorism that have plagued the West for many years.
Both Mateen and Tarrant needed the ideologies of ISIS and white nationalism to give them the justification to murder dozens of innocent strangers. Both radicalized online and felt that they were carrying out heroic missions that would help set the conditions for some utopian future. Of course, all they achieved was to create a hell here on earth for their victims and their families.
The Terrorist Threat to Multinational Corporations: Challenges and Opportunities, New America DC
The Terrorist Threat to Multinational Corporations: Challenges and Opportunities
Event
Multinational corporations have long been a target of terrorism, yet the threat has also changed as multinational corporations increase their reach, terrorism and resilient insurgencies diffuse across multiple regions, and new technologies change the potential for attacks. What are the main terrorist threats to multinational corporations today, and what methods are in use to provide security?
To discuss these issues New America’s International Security Program welcomes Dr. Richard J. Chasdi, a Professorial Lecturer in the Department of Political Science at The George Washington University and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University. Dr. Chasdi holds a Ph.D. in political science from Purdue University, and is the author of four books on terrorism studies and counterterrorism.
Participant:
Richard J. Chasdi
Adjunct Senior Fellow, International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research
Professional Lecturer, George Washington University
“Long Game or Long Gone? Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the State of U.S. Counterterrorism.” CSIS, DC
DC Daybook – Policy & News Events
March 26, 2019 Tuesday 02:00 PM GMT
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) – Discussion
SECTION: WAGEN; Foreign Affairs
LENGTH: 106 words
STATUS: New
TIME: 14:00
EVENT: The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) holds a discussion on “Long Game or Long Gone? Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the State of U.S. Counterterrorism.”
PARTICIPANTS: Peter Bergen, vice president for global studies at New America; Bruce Hoffman, senior fellow for counterterrorism and homeland security at the Council on Foreign Relations; and Seth Jones, director of the CSIS Transnational Threats Project
DATE: March 26, 2019
LOCATION: CSIS, 1616 Rhode Island Avenue NW, Washington, D.C.
Trump’s Taliban Negotiations: What it Means for Afghanistan, New America DC
Trump’s Taliban Negotiations: What it Means for Afghanistan
On February 25th, the United States and the Taliban are scheduled to hold the next round of peace talks aimed at ending the now 17-year-old conflict, America’s longest war. Yet, the negotiations are occurring in a period of Taliban strength and with the Afghan government expressing concern that they are being left out of the dealmaking process. What are the prospects for the U.S.-Taliban negotiations, and what do they mean for Afghanistan and the current Afghan government?
To discuss these issues New America’s International Security Program welcomes Ioannis Koskinas, a senior fellow with New America’s International Security Program who has been based in Afghanistan for the past seven years, and Peter Bergen, Vice President of New America. The discussion will be moderated by Awista Ayub, Director of New America’s Fellows program, author of Kabul Girls Soccer Club, and previously Director of South Asia Programs at Seeds of Peace.
Participants:
Ioannis Koskinas
Senior Fellow, New America’s International Security Program
CEO, Hoplite Group
Peter Bergen
Vice President, New America
Co-Editor, Talibanistan
Moderator:
Awista Ayub
Director, New America’s Fellows Program
Author, Kabul Girls Soccer Club
Coast Guard officer’s alleged massacre plot is terrifying echo of our politics, CNN.com
Coast Guard officer’s alleged massacre plot is terrifying echo of our politics
Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice president at New America and a professor of practice at Arizona State University. He is the author of “United States of Jihad: Investigating America’s Homegrown Terrorists.” The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion articles at CNN.
(CNN)Coast Guard Lt. Christopher Paul Hasson of Silver Spring, Maryland, was arrested nearly a week ago on weapons and drug charges by authorities who said he was planning to commit mass murder. They said Hasson had a hit list, which included Democratic politicians and anchors at CNN and MSNBC.
A month before his arrest, Hasson performed Google searches such as “what if trump illegally impeached,” the court documents say.
Hasson was influenced by Anders Breivik, a neo-Nazi who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, according to the court filing. Breivik had written a manifesto about the necessity of targeting political and media leaders. Hasson made a list of prominent media personalities he seemed to be planning to target, including Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo of CNN and Joe Scarborough and Chris Hayes of MSNBC, authorities said.
The Hasson case is the latest reminder of the risks posed by lone terrorists, whose anger can be directed at journalists and politicians. Often, such terrorists have unresolved grievances in their lives and then find an ideology that allows them to commit violence, according to J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who researches lone terrorists.
Those terrorists can be inspired by any number of things, but inflated political rhetoric is a potential contributing factor.
Take the case of Robert Bowers, who is accused of killing 11 Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue in October. Bowers appears to have been inspired by rhetoric about migrant caravans in Mexico heading toward the United States being “invaders.” Bowers repeatedly called them “invaders” when he posted to the website, Gab, and blamed Jewish organizations for purportedly enabling these migrants.
In a similar vein, Hasson wrote — in a draft email from 2017 found in his deleted file, authorities said — that “Liberalist/globalist ideology is destroying traditional peoples esp white. No way to counteract without violence.”‘
Hasson’s case may suggest that President Donald Trump’s repeatedly calling the media “the enemy of the people” can have consequences.
And in October explosive devices were mailed to leaders of the Democratic Party and to CNN. Cesar Sayoc, a Trump supporter and DJ living out of his van in Florida, was identified as the suspect in the case.
Most presidents haven’t loved their press converge, but Trump’s demonization of the media simply doing their jobs is at another level of magnitude than previous US leaders.
The architect of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, retired Adm. William McRaven, had it right when he said that “the President’s attack on the media is the greatest threat to our democracy in my lifetime. When you undermine the people’s right to a free press and freedom of speech and expression, then you threaten the Constitution and all for which it stands.”
Trump’s latest “enemy of the people” is The New York Times for an article it published this week about Trump’s attempts to influence investigations into, among other things, payoffs to women who claim to have had sex with him.
Trump resorts to the slogan “fake news” and the Stalinist appellation “enemy of the people” when he doesn’t like the stories that are written about him. Yet he rarely engages on the substance of these stories. Rather he tries to create a miasma of doubt around what the proper role of the press is.
Trump’s verbal assaults on the media are just one more example of his assaults on the institutions of American life, such as the FBI and the Department of Justice.
This will all come to a head in the coming weeks as special counsel Robert Mueller prepares to deliver his final report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Despite the likely efforts of the Trump administration to bury the report, since we live in an open society, it will likely eventually leak.
Should that happen, the press should be prepared for a Vesuvian eruption from Trump about how the media are the enemy of the people, intent on promoting fake news.
FEATURED BOOK
The Cost of Chaos: The Trump Administration and The World:
