The terrorist shootings in Paris have brought a new round of attention to issues of immigration, political polarization, religious discrimination and threats to global security. Scholars at Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies are following the developments and talking about the attacks.
Cécile Alduy, is an associate professor of French literature writing a book on France’s far-right National Front political party and is an affiliated faculty member of FSI’s Europe Center. She is in Paris, where she wrote an opinion piece for Al Jazeera America and spoke with KQED’s Forum.
David Laitin is a professor of political science and also an affiliated faculty member of The Europe Center as well as FSI’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. His co-authored book, Why Muslim Integration Fails: An Inquiry in Christian-Heritage Societies, examines Muslim disadvantages and discrimination in Europe.
Christophe Crombez is a consulting professor at TEC specializing in European Union politics. And Martha Crenshaw, a senior fellow at FSI and CISAC, is an expert on political terrorism.
How are Parisians reacting to the tragedy?
Alduy: The mood here is of grief, disgust, anger, and fear. We were all in a state of shock: a sense of disbelief and horror, as if we had entered a surreal time-space where what we hear from the news happening in far away places—Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nigeria—had been suddenly catapulted here, on our streets, in our everyday. The shock has given way to mourning. Lots of crying, swallowed tears and heavy hearts. But there’s also revolt and determination to not let that get to us and to not let it succeed in reviving internal wounds.
I was surprised by the spontaneous quiet demonstrations and collective mourning happening all over France: that people would go out rather than hide in spite of the fact that two heavy armed gunmen were on the loose. It was such a naturally humane, human, compassionate response. It was a real consolation to witness this getting together, this flame of humanity and solidarity braving the fear and silencing the silencers.
What can we say about the brothers who allegedly carried out the attack?
Crenshaw: Apparently they are French citizens of Algerian immigrant origin, who had moved into the orbit of French jihadist networks some years ago. They were both known to French and American authorities, just as the 7/7 London bombers were known to the British police. One had spent time in a French prison for his association with a jihadist network that sent young men to fight in Iraq, and the other is said to have recently trained in Yemen. In that case, he would almost certainly have come into contact with operatives of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (known as AQAP). AQAP is an extremely dangerous organization in Yemen and abroad. The U.S. has regarded it as a number one threat for some time – this is the group that sent the infamous Christmas or underwear bomber on a flight to Detroit in 2009. Its chief ideologue, the American Anwar al-Awlaki, was killed in an American drone strike in 2012. The fact that the terrorists were two brothers also brings to mind the case of the Tsarnaev brothers and the Boston Marathon bombing.
What are the cultural and societal implications of the shooting?
Alduy: The event highlights a menace that had been rampant, and duly acknowledged by the French government: that of French-born radicalized Muslims going to Syria, Afghanistan or Iraq to be trained as jihadist and then coming back to conduct terrorist attacks on French soil (this was already the case for Mohammed Merah, but he was not part of an Al-Qaeda cell and acted all alone, as did the man who attacked the Jewish Museum in Bruxells). The cultural and societal implication is that we are now talking of being a country at war, with al-Qaida recruiting among us our potential enemies. In other words, France has to come to terms with the fact that its own values, its own political system, and its own people have been shot execution style in the name of the jihad by our own children.
Explain the extent to which Muslims are disenfranchised and discriminated against in France.
Laitin: Our book documents that Muslims, just for being Muslims, face rather significant discrimination in the French labor market. We sent out CVs to employers, comparing two identically qualified applicants, one named Khadija Diouf and the other Marie Diouf. Both were from Senegalese backgrounds but were French citizens and well educated. Marie received a significantly larger number of “call backs.” From a survey, we know that controlling for race, for gender, and for education, Muslims from one of the two Senegalese language communities we study have much lower household income than matched Christians. We connect this finding to that of the discrimination in the labor market. In our book, we search for the reasons that sustain discrimination against Muslims in France. Here we find that the rooted French population prefers not to have Muslims in their midst, and not to have a lot of Muslims in their midst. Tokens are O.K.
Meanwhile, Muslims exhibit norms concerning gender and concerning public displays of religious devotion that are threatening to the norms of the rooted French. We therefore see a joint responsibility of both the French and the immigrant Muslim communities in sustaining what we call a “discriminatory equilibrium”.
Can these shootings be attributed to those inherent tensions?
Laitin: There is no evidence that this discriminatory equilibrium is in any way responsible for the horrendous criminal behavior exhibited in the offices of Charlie Hebdo. There is a viral cult that is attractive to a small minority of young Muslims inducing them to behavior that is inhuman. The sources of this cult are manifold, but it would be outrageous to attribute it to the difficulties that Muslims face in fully integrating into France.
How will the shootings affect the standing of right-leaning political parties that have been gaining traction?
Crombez: I think the shootings in Paris will provide a further boost to the electoral prospects of France's extreme-right, anti-immigrant party, the National Front. Opinion polls in recent months already showed that it could emerge as France's largest political party at the departmental elections in March – as far as vote share is concerned – and that the Front's candidate for the Presidency in 2017 is likely to make it into, but lose, the second round run-off with the candidate of the moderate right, as was the case in 2002. The shootings will only have improved the Front's chances. Even if the election results are consistent with the polls taken prior to the shootings, and the Front doesn't do even better than the polls predicted, the dramatic results are likely to be attributed to the shootings.
And the long-term political fallout?
Crombez: The effects will reverberate throughout Europe. But as time passes and the shootings become but a distant memory, the effects will disappear. I would draw a parallel here with what happened after the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster in Japan in 2011. In the following months Green parties did very well in elections in Europe at various levels, but after a year or so that effect seems to have dissipated. I would expect this to be the case with the shootings also, except if there are more such incidents to follow.
China is building more nuclear power plants than any other country today, with 21 plants up and running, 28 under construction and another 58 planned for development. The world’s most populous country is anxious to reduce its reliance on air-polluting fossil fuels and focus on alterative sources for a growing middle-class that is consuming more energy.
This rapid expansion in the number of nuclear power plants and associated nuclear fuel-cycle operations, such as fuel fabrication, possible fuel recycling and waste disposal, pose enormous nuclear safety and security challenges. Safety concerns were exacerbated by the 2011, tsunami-induced Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.
Security concerns also stem from the fact that nuclear materials must be safeguarded to stay out of the hands of non-state actors and the facilities protected from potential terrorist attacks. These issues are of great concern to Chinese and Americans, so it stands to reason that China and the United States should want to join forces.
Four CISAC scholars – including veterans of Track II diplomacy, Siegfried Hecker and Chaim Braun – are working behind the scenes trying to get both sides to do just that.
The four traveled in October to China for meetings with Chinese scientists and policy analysts to discuss new approaches to nuclear security at a weeklong conference in Hangzhou and a one-day workshop in Beijing. The conference hosted top international nuclear energy and security experts. It was one in a continuing series featuring CISAC scholars and colleagues from several Chinese nuclear institutes and think tanks.
“We’re certainly back on a very positive slope with the Chinese,” said Hecker, a senior fellow at CISAC who first began visiting his counterparts in China in 1994 as head of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “They are very keen to foster continued cooperation on all things nuclear. It’s important in terms of national security – and it’s of great benefit to both sides.”
The Chinese have been a nuclear weapon state for decades, but are relative latecomers to nuclear electricity. While it only produces some 3 percent of the world’s nuclear energy today, China is on its way to become a world leader in nuclear power production and technology exports by 2020.
“The Chinese are taking a really pragmatic view of nuclear power,” said Jason Reinhardt, a MacArthur Nuclear Security Fellow at CISAC and national security systems analyst at Sandia National Laboratories. He traveled with Hecker and Braun to attend the conference, along with Larry Brandt, a visiting scholar at the center.
“All of us are better off if countries like China and Russia and the U.S. work together on nuclear proliferation and terrorism issues,” Reinhardt said. “So part of that is just going over there and seeing what they want to do and how they want to collaborate.”
Reinhardt is working on his Ph.D. at Stanford in decision and risk analysis with advisor Elisabeth Paté-Cornell, a professor of engineering and CISAC affiliated faculty member. He believes systems analysis can provide insights to improve capabilities to counter nuclear terrorism, facilitate nuclear agreements and reduce the risks of nuclear accidents.
“I think that the way policies are formed and the way technical information is used to inform policies is very different in China, as a matter of history and culture,” Reinhardt said. “So I’m trying to create a compelling story as to why systems analysis is a great way to collaborate between countries.”
Reinhardt said China and the United States have different priorities and approaches to nuclear security, with Beijing placing a high priority on preventing radiological and power plant attacks. The United States has done much since 9/11 to protect its nuclear power plants. Washington’s concerns are focused more on terrorist attacks with nuclear bombs and the potential of radiological, dirty bomb attacks.
What is systems and risk analysis with regard to nuclear security?
Systems analysis is a structured scientific approach to tough problems, used to inform decision-making, Reinhardt said. One of the best sets of tools available – particularly when there is a lot of uncertainty – is decision and risk analysis.
And nuclear security is rife with uncertainty. What might an attack look like? Who are the attackers? What would the consequences be? How might the attackers change their strategy given our investments in countermeasures?
The questions are many and the connections complex. Risk analysis can borrow from probability theory, game theory and economics to bring some order to this chaos and provide insights that can inform policymakers.
“Systems analysis is using science and engineering techniques to answer policy questions for government,” said Reinhardt, whose work at Sandia includes projects with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security focusing on countering nuclear terrorism, promoting international engagement, and strengthening border security.
“We talk about concepts and taxonomies and ways to organize thinking, then mathematical models to help explore trade-offs – and then there are physical models and we go out in the field and experiment to try and get smarter,” Reinhardt said. “All of these help us understand the implications of proposed policies.”
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Reinhardt gave a presentation in China in which he proposed a joint study to develop a common framework. Moving forward, the study would primarily be academically focused in an effort to inform policymakers – not to set policy.
“I said that building a common framework for analysis and exercising those together would be a really powerful tool for creating collaboration at a very high level,” he said. “The United States and China have cooperated in areas of nuclear security in the past. These new efforts will build on that success and take them to a new cooperative level.”
He suggested they begin to work together to create a model that would:
Develop a list of potential attack scenarios, compile a list of potential perpetrators, and estimate probabilities of attack;
Compare the efficacies of different types counterterrorism measures to ward off radiological terrorism attacks;
Determine which countermeasures can and should be the focus of collaborative technical research;
And determine the next steps to develop Chinese and U.S. collaborations on countermeasures.
The CISAC team will follow up with their Chinese colleagues during a visit in February and work to bring a young Chinese researcher to the center during the first half of the academic year.
“They’re trying to understand what they can implement to reduce internal and regional nuclear risks,” he said. “This requires that you first consider how to understand, assess, and measure these risks. Doing that together, I think we can come up with some answers that are valuable to both countries.”
A Growing Focus on Nuclear Power and Climate Change
The meetings in China came just as Washington and Beijing announced a landmark pact to significantly cut greenhouse gas emissions by the world’s two largest consumers of energy. China is increasingly turning to nuclear power to address the adverse consequences of fossil fuels. As China expands its research and dependence on nuclear power – which in turn will cut down on greenhouse gas emissions – CISAC intends to help the Asian powerhouse protect its nuclear energy resources from potential accidents and deliberate attacks.
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Braun, a consulting professor at CISAC and an expert on nuclear proliferation smuggling rings and power plants around the world, also attended the conference and was invited along with Hecker to visit the Qinshan Nuclear Station about 50 miles southwest of Shanghai.
“For me, the visit to Qinshan’s Phase 3 plant was especially exciting, as I worked on the early phases of the construction of Qinshan Phase 3 while at Bechtel,” said Braun, who earlier in his career belonged to the Bechtel Power Corporation’s Nuclear Management Group and led studies on plant performance and maintenance.
Braun said Qinshan Phase 3 is now used as an experimental station to explore reprocessed uranium recycling and experiment with an alternate nuclear fuel, namely thorium.
According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, China leads the global clean-energy race, and last year attracted $54.2 billion in investment for alternative energies. That includes exporting safe, reliable nuclear technology to other countries that want to do the same.
“Russia and China are the two most important technological relationships we should be building right now,” Reinhardt said. "Any prospects for the future of arms control and reductions are all predicated on continued relationships with Russia and China.”
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A view shows the 4th unit of Tianwan Nuclear Power Plant under construction after its ground-breaking ceremony in Lianyungang, Jiangsu province Sept. 27, 2013.
Betsy Cooper is the founding Director of the Aspen Policy Academy. A cybersecurity expert, Dr. Cooper joined the Aspen Institute after serving as the Executive Director of the Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity at the University of California, Berkeley.
Previously, Dr. Cooper served at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as an attorney advisor to the Deputy General Counsel and as a policy counselor in the Office of Policy. She has worked for over a decade in homeland security consulting, managing projects for Atlantic Philanthropies in Dublin, the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit in London, and the World Bank, and other organizations.
In addition, Dr. Cooper has clerked for Berkeley Law professor and Judge William Fletcher on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (where she currently is a nonresident affiliate), as well as a Yale Public Interest Fellowship. Dr. Cooper has written more than twenty manuscripts and articles on U.S. and European homeland security policy. She is also a Senior Advisor at Albright Stonebridge Group.
Dr. Cooper earned a J.D. from Yale University, a D.Phil. in Politics from Oxford University, an M.Sc. in Forced Migration from Oxford University, and a B.A. in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. She speaks advanced French. She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Abstract:The hundreds of young Westerners who have gone to fight with the group Islamic State in Syria/ Iraq have caused alarm among security practitioners and policy makers.
Data on Western fighters in past conflicts indicate that a little more than ten percent later turned to terrorism. The rest did not. The unprecedented and growing number of Western fighters in Syria/Iraq threatens to overwhelm the resources of the security agencies of smaller European countries. They can hardly afford to risk pushing returnees, who would otherwise have disengaged, back into the arms of extremist groups. But how to shape countermeasures so they do not work at cross-purposes with the natural disengagement processes, that appear to be at work?
This talk is based on a comprehensive review of case studies, which document voluntary disengagement from violent extremism in a Western context. It identifies broad patterns in terms of how and why individuals disengage, discusses the applicability of these insights to the returnees and discusses policy implications in terms of how to handle the homebound fighters.
About the Speaker:Anja Dalgaard-Nielsen served as an executive director at the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) from 2008 to 2014. Her areas of responsibility comprised intelligence fusion and strategic terrorism threat analysis, preventive efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism, exit-interventions, and protective security efforts.
Previously, she worked as a research manager and Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS). In this capacity she was embedded with Danish armed forces in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan in 2006.
Dalgaard-Nielsen is a non-resident fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). She serves on the board of advisor of the Global Center on Cooperative Security, Washington DC and on the Board of Advisors of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the National Defence College in Sweden.
She holds a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University SAIS, an MA in political science from the University of Aarhus, and an executive MA of public management and governance from Copenhagen Business School and the University of Copenhagen. She has published widely on topics such as terrorism, radicalization, homeland security, peace-keeping operations, and transatlantic relations.
"Promoting Exit from Violent Extremism: Themes and Approaches,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, 36:3, 99-115
The heated debate over the line between liberty and national security took center stage as Gen. Michael Hayden, former director of the National Security Agency and CIA, defended government surveillance programs at Stanford’s launch this week of “The Security Conundrum” speaker series.
If such surveillance methods were further restricted, “that smaller box, in my professional judgment, would make the job of the NSA harder and would probably make you less safe,” Hayden told a packed audience at the event co-sponsored in part by the university’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI) and the Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC).
Hayden admitted to being “prickly” as he discussed privacy concerns over NSA’s collection and storage of phone and email metadata covering billions of calls and messages by American citizens. The surveillance programs, which were exposed last year by leaks from NSA contractor Edward Snowden, were only used after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, given “the totality of the circumstances,” Hayden explained.
Hayden was director of the NSA from 1999 to 2005. He then led the CIA from 2006 to 2009.
The metadata collection “is something we would have never done on Sept. 9 or Sept. 10. But it seemed reasonable after Sept. 11,” he said. “No one is doing this out of prurient interests. No, it was a logical response to the needs of the moment.”
Amy Zegart, CISAC’s co-director and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, led the conversation with the four-star general. She pointed out that a majority of Americans distrusts the NSA and believes the agency is lying.
Hayden stressed that the phone records were similar to billing statements – detailing who made the calls and when. “There is no content. It is not electronic surveillance. Not at all.”
CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart leaders a talk with former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden at the inaugural "Security Conundrum" speakers series on Oct. 8, 2014.
Though he understands why the operation is “theoretically frightening,” in reality, it’s designed to aid in the capture of terrorists within the United States, Hayden said.
“To listen to the content of the calls would violate the laws of the United States. It would violate the laws of physics,” he said. He challenged if anyone could offer “concrete evidence” of harm stemming from the phone data collection.
In defining the right to privacy, Hayden cited his philosophy behind the balancing act between security and liberty.
“Privacy is the line we continually negotiate for ourselves as unique creatures of God and as social animals,” he said. “There are some things that the community has the right to know – and there are other things that they clearly do not have the right to know.”
The debate is over where that line is drawn, between “what is mine” and “what is owed the collective,” he said.
Hayden noted that the phone and email metadata collection programs are only a small part of the larger issues the nation faces as it deals with increasingly adept enemies and the surveillance abilities of other nations.
“I’m just simply saying – who knows more about you? One of the least of your worries is the government,” he said, half-jokingly. He noted that Google knows more about Americans than does the U.S. government, and the Silicon Valley company uses that data for commercial purposes.
Addressing how tech companies are becoming more reluctant to cooperate with government requests for email communication data, Hayden said he didn’t have an answer about how to address the relationship.
There is a call for transparency of what the government is doing, but Hayden said “translucency” might be the better option, so as to not reveal all that the U.S. does for foreign intelligence.
“This is an enterprise that’s based on absolute secrecy,” he said of the NSA.
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“We have to give American people enough information to be at least tolerant, if not supportive, of what the American government is doing.”
But to achieve that, “it’s not transparency,” he said. “We actually have to be translucent … where you have the glass … and you get the broad patterns of movemen
The danger of not being able to target emails, Hayden said, would be that emails become a safe haven for enemies. “If we don’t’ do it, if you’re not going to let us do this stuff … over the long term, it puts your liberty at risk because bad stuff will happen.”
“The Security Conundrum” speaker series looks behind and beyond the headlines, examining the history and implementation of the NSA operations, the legal questions generated by them, the media’s role in revealing them, and the responsibility of Congress to oversee them.
Each guest speaker, in conversation with Stanford scholars, will probe the problems from different vantage points to explain the political, legal and technological contours of the NSA actions, as well as outline ways to preserve the nation’s security without sacrificing our freedoms.
On Nov. 17, journalist Barton Gellman will be the featured speaker. He is known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning reports on the 9/11 attacks and has led the Washington Post's coverage of the NSA. On April 10, Reggie Walton, the former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, will take the stage as the speaker on April 10.
Along with FSI and CISAC, the series is also co-sponsored by the Hoover Institution, Stanford Continuing Studies, Stanford in Government, and the Stanford Law School.
FSI's Francis Fukuyama and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, write in the Financial Times that President Barack Obama's stance on ISIS is "overpromising" and that the United States should follow lessons from British history and pursue a more sustainable strategy known as "offshore balancing."
FSI's Francis Fukuyama and former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a William J. Perry Fellow in International Security at CISAC, write in the Financial Times that President Barack Obama's stance on ISIS is "overpromising" and that the United States should follow lessons from British history and pursue a more sustainable strategy known as "offshore balancing."
While there is no one-size-fits-all approach to the war on terror, the United States needs to reconsider its strategy in dealing with these threats, a Stanford scholar says.
"This means that our actions should be justifiable and transparent."
In a chapter of a new book, Crenshaw advocates vigilance against terrorism, while not overreacting. It is not prudent to be complacent about the impact of terrorism on international security, though it is by no means an "existential threat" for developed countries, she wrote.
Crenshaw founded the Mapping Militant Organizations project to identify militant organizations globally and trace how they arise, their root causes and their connections.
In an interview, she said, "We are all fond of saying that there is no military solution to a political problem and that the states that are directly threatened by terrorism, such as Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iraq, should muster the resolve and resources to combat it. But we haven't figured out how to implement these rather abstract prescriptions and admonitions."
She suggested that there is a role for military force and outside powers, but it should be limited and precise in intent.
America's actions against terrorism should not violate democratic norms, Crenshaw said. "And we should not veer erratically between complacency and alarm, but take a middle ground."
She said context is all-important. "It's frustrating, but there is no one-size-fits-all strategy. Similar countries have reacted differently to terrorism yet produced the same overall outcome."
Negotiation and compromise?
One challenge for countries like the United States is to find alternatives in confronting terrorism. For example, governments may need to decide whether to recognize or negotiate with groups they deem as terrorist entities.
"Is compromise possible?" she wrote, citing failures in Sri Lanka and Colombia but success in Northern Ireland on this front. There is no consistent answer, she said.
An approach of realism and expectations of mixed results may define the best way forward, she said.
"Perhaps the most important lesson for the international community is that the process of ending terrorism is likely to be slow and arduous, requiring gradualism, endurance and commitment despite setback," Crenshaw wrote.
She added, "States may not be able to prevent or eradicate terrorism, but they can manage their reactions to it."
She advocates "capacity building," or giving local governments the capacity to deal with terrorism by building more effective security institutions in the broadest sense.
"What happens at the local level is important to overall international security," Crenshaw said. "Terrorism threatens the stability of already weak and fragile states, thus contributing to state collapse, ungoverned spaces, social dislocation, repression and economic decline."
Drone debate
Crenshaw said that the United States increasingly prefers the use of drones rather than large-scale military options in the fighting of terrorism.
"Drones are a highly efficient means of implementing a policy of targeted killings of leaders of militant groups," she wrote.
Drone usage began under the Bush administration, she noted, and peaked in 2010 under the Obama administration. "Future U.S. counterterrorism strategy will rely on the covert use of limited force, utilizing drones and special operations forces," she wrote.
What are the implications of drone warfare? Crenshaw said that questions remain unanswered about how international law applies to drones, as well as issues of accountability and transparency.
"Despite their precision," she said, "drones kill civilians."
Political violence
It is difficult to predict when and where terrorism may strike, she said. Terrorists are innovative and they experiment, especially when faced with adjusting to new obstacles.
"For example, just when hijackings were thought to be a relic of the past, Al Qaeda combined them with suicide missions to achieve the devastating 9/11 surprise," Crenshaw wrote, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on the Pentagon and New York's World Trade Center.
She said that Muslims bear the brunt of terrorism, suffering between 82 percent and 97 percent of all deaths. In terms of trends, suicide missions are increasingly used as a lethal tactic.
From 1991 to 2001, there were 170 suicide attacks causing 2,077 deaths, while since 9/11, there have been 2,130 such attacks resulting in 26,866 deaths. Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are the most common places where terror incidents occur.
Why have terrorists been so unsuccessful in wielding radiological, chemical or biological weapons? So far, the Japanese subway sarin attacks in 1995 remain the only instance of chemical weapons being used by a terrorist group. "Are the acquisition and use of such weapons too difficult? The answers are still elusive," Crenshaw said.
Meanwhile, "cyberterrorism" has largely been conducted by sophisticated state actors – like the Stuxnet virus that damaged the Iranian centrifuges – and not terrorists. It remains to be seen whether terrorists have such capabilities, Crenshaw wrote.
Crenshaw's chapter, "Dealing with Terrorism," will be published by the United States Institute of Peace in the forthcoming new book, Managing Conflict in a World Adrift.
She noted, "Terrorism has been a common strategy for challenging the status quo for quite a long period of time – at least since the European revolutionary and anarchist movements of the late 19th century. There is no reason to think it will disappear."
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Iraq, convulsed with open warfare over its northeastern section, is also among the top countries suffering from terrorist attacks. Here, a militant mans a checkpoint outside an oil refinery as fighting rages between government forces and Islamist forces.
About the Topic:U.S. government leaders are making extraordinary efforts to prevent and protect against cyber-attacks on critical infrastructure. Plans for responding to and recovering from such attacks receive far less attention and are deeply flawed -- especially for catastrophic events when effective plans will be most vital. Given the rapid growth of cyber threats to the power grid and other critical infrastructure, we should not only continue to strengthen prevention and protection measures, but also assume that a catastrophic cyber-attack will occur and ramp up U.S. response plans and capabilities accordingly. I will argue that the Interim National Cyber Incident Response Plan (which governs the U.S. cyber response system) should be replaced by a plan that is better aligned with industry needs and with “traditional” U.S. disaster response plans, especially the National Response Framework. I will also propose how to structure cyber response planning to maximize “deterrence by denial” and reduce the potential attractiveness of attacking U.S. critical infrastructure for state and non-state adversaries.
About the Speaker: Paul N. Stockton is Managing Director of Sonecon, LLC. Before joining Sonecon, Dr. Stockton served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs from June, 2009 until January, 2013. In that position, helped lead the Department’s response to Superstorm Sandy and other disasters, guided the Defense Critical Infrastructure Protection program, and oversaw policies and programs to secure DOD’s domestic installations and personnel against terrorism. In September, 2013, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel appointed Dr. Stockton to co-chair the Independent Review of the Washington Navy Yard Shootings, which recommended major changes to the Department’s security clearance system that are now being implemented. Dr. Stockton’s recent publications include articles on cyber security in the Yale Law and Policy Review and other journals. Dr. Stockton holds a Ph.D. from Harvard University and a BA Summa Cum Laude from Dartmouth College.
Encina Hall (2nd floor)
Paul Stockton
Managing Director
Speaker
Sonecon, LLC
MANILA, Philippines – When Victor Corpus was an idealistic young military officer, he turned on his country to join the communist New People’s Army. He headed for the mountains and would face years of armed struggle, imprisonment and then a sentence to death.
What made the highly trained Philippine Army first lieutenant lead a bold raid to capture the weapons from his own armory at the Philippine Military Academy – one that would go on to make him a living legend and lead to a movie about his life?
“It was my realization that our society at that time was structured like a pyramid, where the wealth of the nation is controlled by about 100 families on top, where less than 1 percent of the population controls everything,” recalls Corpus, who is now 70.
When the Army ordered the 26-year-old officer and his soldiers to train the private militia of a wealthy warlord in the northern Philippines, a trigger was pulled.
“If you are a member of the Armed Forces and you realize that you are just being used as an instrument of the elite, to preserve and protect their interests, it makes you want to rise up and fight for what you believe are the true interests of the people,” he said.
“That is what made me go to the rebel side.”
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It’s still a factor that makes young Filipino men and women pick up arms today: The gap between rich and poor, the government corruption, the dynasties that still rule the impoverished countryside.
By understanding this former rebel’s story – and thousands of others his team of researchers have collected over the last decade – CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter believes he can help scholars dive deeper into the causes of insurgency. He hopes to aid policy makers and military planners in determining how to best curb these conflicts and help reduce casualties and economic devastation.
“You were a real inspiration for me and made me want to learn more about insurgency and then study it and write about it,” Felter told Corpus over a recent breakfast in Manila. “I met Victor soon after I moved to the Philippines for a three-year assignment. It’s such an amazing story, and it captures so many of the challenges I’m researching."
The Southeast Asian nation is home to some of the most protracted insurgencies in the world. Muslim separatist groups on the southern island of Mindanao and Sulu Sea, known collectively as Bangsamoro, have resisted Christian rule since Spanish colonization of the archipelago began after Magellan arrived in the early 1500s. The Communist People’s Party and its armed wing in the New Peoples Army (NPA) continue to wage a classic Maoist revolutionary war across the country; and the extremist Abu Sayyaf Group – known to have links with al-Qaida and other international terrorist groups – is actively conducting terrorist attacks as well as kidnappings for ransom across the country’s restive south.
Felter, a career Army Special Forces officer, was a U.S. military attaché in Manila from 1999-2002. He traveled extensively throughout the Philippines and could see how widespread and debilitating the long-running insurgencies and internal conflicts were. After a spate of kidnappings by the Abu Sayyaf Group in 2000 and 2001 that involved American citizens and other foreign nationals, he helped persuade U.S. authorities to increase its support for America’s former colony and Pacific ally.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks reinforced the U.S. commitment to build the capacity of the Philippine military to prevent their country from becoming a haven for extremists who might use the country to stage and plot another attack against United States’ interests.
Felter helped the Philippine Army Special Operations Command (SOCOM) set up the country’s first counterterrorist unit. That elite Light Reaction Battalion has now been expanded to a regiment of 1,500 soldiers. Felter traveled to the Philippines in February to receive a medal in honor of his work in establishing this force.
His work with the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) as a military attaché, and dozens of trips back since, allowed him to get behind the scenes and make friends in the military and government. Those close relationships provided him unprecedented access to thousands of sensitive documents chronicling in micro-level detail the history of Philippine military and government efforts to combat insurgency and terrorism in the field.
“All counterinsurgency is local,” says Felter. “You need to study it at the local level to really understand it. And the Philippines is like a Petri dish for studying both insurgency and counterinsurgency because you have multiple, long-running insurgencies, each with distinct characteristics, and with an array of government and military responses to address these threats over time.”
Felter was in the Philippines in 2004 conducting field research as part of his Stanford Ph.D. dissertation when he was first able to gain access to what would become a trove of detailed incident-level data on insurgency and counterinsurgency in this conflict prone country. After bringing back the data and meeting with his faculty advisors – Stanford political science professors David Laitin and James Fearon – he realized the extensive incident-level data could be coded in a manner that would make it a tremendous resource for scholars studying civil wars, insurgencies and other forms of politically motivated violence.
“This comprehensive conflict dataset, when it becomes public later this year, is going to be the Holy Grail of micro-level conflict data,” Felter says. “It promises to be an unprecedented resource for scholars and policy analysts studying the foundations and dynamics of conflict. It has the potential to drive a significant number of publications, reports and analyses, and enable conflict researchers to develop insights and test theories that they would not have been able to do before.”
They also hope to help journalists do a better job of analyzing conflict.
Jim Gomez, the AP’s chief correspondent in the Philippines, says there is little access to detailed data about the conflicts he has been covering for two decades.
“There is a natural contradiction between military, police, intelligence and other security agencies which, by nature, operate in secrecy,” says Gomez, who has been on the front lines of many battles in his homeland. “The database is one step toward satisfying the need of journalists to be able to write stories with more accurate and in-depth detail and context. It allows for better comparative analysis and can give insights to emerging patterns like those found in the southern Philippines. Better access to information, to my mind, is always a boon to better security policies.”
CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.
Coding Out the Data
Felter coordinated with senior leaders in the Armed Forces of the Philippines to gain approval to access and code the unclassified details from tens of thousands of individual conflict episodes reported by Philippine military units in the field dating back to 1975. Most of data were gleaned from the original hand-typed records maintained by the Philippine Army. Felter worked with contacts in the Philippine military to build a team of military and civilian coders to scan and input data from the only existing copies of these original incident reports.
In 2009 – while a National Security Affairs Fellow at the Hoover Institution prior to his final deployment in Afghanistan – Felter invited his colleague, Navy veteran Jake Shapiro, an assistant professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, to join him as ESOC’s co-director. Shapiro and Felter were graduate school classmates and worked together at West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center where the vision for ESOC was first articulated. Felter and Shapiro formally established the Empirical Studies of Conflict (ESOC) project and began to build comprehensive databases on multiple political conflict cases around the world.
Eli Berman, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, joined the team soon after. Today he is research director for international security studies at University of California Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation and professor of economics at UC San Diego.
“I'm fascinated by how economic development is best achieved in places where property and people are insecure. Unfortunately, that's true of many Philippines communities,” Berman said. “Joe is the perfect partner for that research. He brings insights that come from years of thoughtful experience and local knowledge. The team he has assembled and the data they bring are a joy to work with.”
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ESOC members also include David Laitin, James Fearon and Jeremy Weinstein, all from Stanford’s political science department, as well as affiliates and a growing cadre of current and former post-doctoral fellows.
The Empirical Studies of Conflict Project website was launched last year. It highlights some of the key initial findings from ongoing data collection efforts in the Philippines as well as Afghanistan, Colombia, Iraq, Mexico, Pakistan and Vietnam. The site includes geospatial and tabular data as well as thousands of documents, archives and interviews. Ultimately, nearly all of the releasable data Felter is compiling on the Philippines case will be made available via the ESOC website. The non-digitize materials such as hardcopy records and taped interviews will be housed in the Hoover Institution’s Library and Archives.
“This will be the gold standard for micro-level conflict data. The planets aligned for us in many cases,” Felter said. The team also has had unprecedented access to data sources in Iraq and to some degree from Afghanistan, Columbia, and Mexico.
“What’s unique about ESOC is that we’re trying hard to make it easier for others to study conflict by pulling together everything we can on the conflicts we’ve studied,” says Shapiro. “On Iraq, for example, the ESOC website provides data on conflict outcomes, politics, and demographics, in addition to maps, links to other useful information sources, and all the files ESOC members have used in their research on Iraq.”
Shapiro says researchers working for the Canadian Armed Forces, the World Bank and the U.S. military have already turned to ESOC as a resource for data on Iraq “because it’s so useful to have everything in one place.”
The West Point Connection
Many of these documents, some dating back to 1975, were withering in the heat and humidity of an old building at army headquarters before Felter and his Philippine military team arrived to scan and record them.
Felter’s chief Filipino partner in compiling and analyzing the data is another West Point grad, Lt. Col. Dennis Eclarin, an Army Scout Ranger commander who led many of the counterinsurgency missions that he would later come to analyze. Eclarin conducted 1,500 hours of videotaped interviews with rebels who gave up their arms and surrendered.
Eclarin recalls being a lieutenant fresh out of West Point and negotiating the surrender of 20 communist rebels.
“I got the chance to interview the rebel commander of this very elite group, against whom I had been fighting in 2000, and when I interviewed him he said: `You know what? If you had just given us one water buffalo each, we would not have been fighting you, we would have just gone out and tilled our land,’” Eclarin recalls.
He would go on to interview hundreds of rebels and their commanders, such as the Islamic militant chief who talked tactics with him, then revealed that his greatest tool was his men’s belief that Allah was waiting for them on the other side.
There was the Roman Catholic nun who was running guns and money for the communists and the young college freshman recruited with the promise of $40 a month to support her family. Eclarin heads up the team of coders supporting ESOC in the Philippines. Erwin Agustin, a Staff Sergeant in the Scout Rangers, does data entry – when he’s not out fighting rebels.
“The interviews and the coding has changed me – and it’s changed the perception of the Armed Forces, too,” Eclarin says. “We just appreciate data; we see it in a new light. We were just thinking short term, but the data allows us to look long-term and more strategically. Where are the hot zones we must avoid? What time of day are they likely to attack?”
Eclarin heads up the team of coders supporting ESOC in the Philippines. Erwin Agustin, a Staff Sergeant in the Scout Rangers, does data entry – when he’s not out fighting rebels.
“One time I was coding and was amazed to see the records of some of our comrades who had been ambushed and killed,” Agustin says. “Being a member of the Scout Rangers and seeing those who are missing – you hurt. But you must push through because you’re giving them a voice. They gave their lives for the Army, they sacrificed their lives for their families – and we are going to give them a voice.”
Erwin Olario, a civilian and the lead coder of Eclarin’s team, says the data is agnostic.
“We don’t take sides; we’re not out to prove anything. But, hey, if we could possibly contribute to bringing about peace one day – that would be something.”
The coders are now doubling back over the dataset from 1975 to 2012, to make sure it’s accurate and cleaned of classified details before it goes public. The data are the basis for two of Felter’s ongoing book projects and multiple journal articles, including a recent article in the American Economic Review entitled, “Aid Under Fire: Development Projects and Civil Conflict.”
Another of Felter’s longtime Filipina friends is Corazon “Dinky” Soliman, cabinet secretary for the Philippine government’s Department of Social Welfare and Development. They go back to 1997, when the two were classmates working on their master’s in public administration at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
The two caught up on classmate gossip during a recent meeting in her Manila office. She was on a rare break from her work in the south, where Typhoon Haiyan had claimed more than 6,200 lives in November.
Soliman tells Felter she used a study based on ESOC data to help demonstrate the efficacy of her department’s conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. This flagship development program attempts to reduce poverty by giving cash to families falling under poverty thresholds, conditional on enrolling kids in school and getting them regular medical checkups and vaccines.
Soliman and her staff used the study conducted by Felter – and Benjamin Crost at the University of Illinois and Patrick B. Johnston at the RAND Corporation – in which they took an existing World Bank experiment in the Philippines that separated villages into those that would receive the cash transfers and those that would not. The scholars incorporated measures of violence from the ESOC data to estimate the effect of the CCT program on conflict intensity. They found cash transfers caused a substantial decrease in conflict-related incidents and, using their data on local insurgent influence, they determined the program significantly reduced insurgent influence in the villages that received the cash transfers compared with those that did not.
“Your results were very, very important and it had such a strong impact with the legislators, and in particular the budget, because they saw the program is not just about education and health,” Corazon tells Felter. “They saw it even has impact on peace and security.”
“That’s just great,” Felter says. “That’s what motivates our team to engage in this type of work and really what you want to hear. It’s such a privilege for us to support you in this capacity.”
A Rebel’s Redemption
Felter led the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT) in Afghanistan, reporting directly to Gens. Stanley McChrystal and David Petaeus, before becoming a senior research scholar at CISAC and retiring from the military in 2012.
While he misses his time on active duty and the sense of purpose that comes with serving in combat, he believes his ESOC research will make a difference and have an impact in stabilizing conflict areas and setting conditions for development and governance efforts to be effective.
“In the last decade, the United States and the international community have devoted tens of billions of dollars towards rebuilding social and political order in troubled countries,” Shapiro says. “Thousands of families today are mourning loved ones lost in those efforts. ESOC is devoted to learning from that experience, and to making it easier for others to do so as well, so that we can all do a better job helping such places in the future.”
Traveling back to the Philippines often to meet with Eclarin and his coders keeps him tied to the men and women who are on the ground. And close to old colleagues such as Corpus, who was pardoned by President Corazon Aquino and went on to become the nation’s head of intelligence.
“Here’s the irony: The intelligence service was one of the organizations that was running after me, and then I was eventually assigned to head this very organization. Only in the Philippines,” says Corpus, whose counterinsurgency plan drafted in 1989 was hugely successful.
The communist New People’s Army is estimated to have approximately 5,000 rebels today, down from its high of 26,000 in the mid-1980s. And the government signed a hard-sought peace deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in last spring, which grants the Muslim areas of the southern Mindanao region greater political autonomy.
Still, many don’t believe the accord will hold and separatists from Moro National Liberation Front and the Abu Sayyef Group continue to threaten stability in the south.
“As long as the root forces remain – the income gap between the rich and the poor – there will always be rebellion,” says Corpus.
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CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.
CISAC Co-Director Amy Zegart leaders a talk with former NSA and CIA Director Michael Hayden at the inaugural "Security Conundrum" speakers series on Oct. 8, 2014.
CISAC Senior Research Scholar Joe Felter awaits a pledge of honor by the Philippines Armed Forces.
