Hamas, ISIS, the Taliban: Why we still underestimate what extremist groups are capable of

On August 6, 2001, George W. Bush was given what would be the most notorious day by day intelligence transient ever acquired by a US president. It was titled “Bin Ladin Decided to Strike in US,” and it included particulars on the actions of al-Qaeda operatives within the US, together with threats to hijack US plane. In response, Bush did nearly nothing. After which, just a little over a month later, these predictions got here stunningly true with the 9/11 assaults.

Bush wouldn’t be the final chief to disregard such a warning. Many years into the “conflict on terror,” it’s clear that political leaders, in addition to a number of the world’s strongest militaries and intelligence, nonetheless underestimate the power and ambition of extremist militant teams to hold out large-scale assaults. There have now been three main situations of such failures previously decade.

A number of information retailers, together with the New York Times and Haaretz, have now reported that Israeli intelligence companies had offered officers with extraordinary particulars concerning the plans for what grew to become the October 7 assault greater than a yr earlier than it was carried out. Only a day earlier than the assault, the CIA reported unusual activity by Hamas in Gaza, suggesting an imminent navy operation. Hamas militants reportedly educated for the assault in all however plain sight lower than a mile from the Israeli border.

But Israeli officers seem to have dismissed these warnings, believing the group had scaled again its navy ambitions to the occasional rocket barrage. As an alternative of reinforcing the border with Gaza, they selected to focus Israel’s navy property on different threats, together with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the more and more restive West Bank. In the end, some 1,200 Israelis would pay for this miscalculation with their lives, as would 1000’s extra Palestinian civilians within the conflict that has adopted.

However the October 7 assault was removed from the primary occasion of this sort of strategic shock from an extremist militant group in recent times. In 2014, the terrorist group then often known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) started taking up cities in western Iraq. Even after the group had seized town of Fallujah, the location of the bloodiest battles of the Iraq Conflict, President Barack Obama felt snug utilizing a flip sports activities metaphor to dismiss ISIS as an beginner imitation of al-Qaeda. “If a jayvee workforce places on Lakers uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant,” he told the New Yorker that January.

Six months later, the “jayvees” had taken over Mosul, Iraq’s largest metropolis, had been threatening Baghdad, and had proclaimed the institution of a “caliphate” that, at its top, would management a territory the size of Great Britain. The US launched a navy intervention to defeat the group in Iraq and finally in Syria as properly. US troops stay in each nations at the moment — as does ISIS, which is still active, albeit a lot diminished.

In August 2021, the world was surprised once more because the Taliban marched into Kabul, assembly virtually no resistance as an Afghan state propped up with tens of billions of dollars in American funding collapsed and US personnel — together with 1000’s of Afghans — scrambled to evacuate.

Whereas an eventual Taliban victory was not stunning in itself — the group had been steadily gaining territory within the lead-up to a deliberate US troop withdrawal — few anticipated it to occur so quickly. A month earlier than the withdrawal, President Joe Biden told reporters on the White Home that he trusted “the capability of the Afghan navy” and mentioned he believed that the Afghan leaders “clearly have the capability to maintain the federal government in place.” He made these statements regardless of more and more dire warnings from US intelligence companies that the Afghan navy was likely to collapse. Whereas senior administration officers later mentioned these assessments had been made with a low diploma of confidence, the fact is that the evacuation of Kabul would descend into chaos, including a bombing that killed 13 US service members and greater than 160 Afghans.

These are three very completely different examples involving very completely different nations and militant teams. However in all these circumstances, extremist militant teams demonstrated beforehand unseen ambition and harmful capabilities. And in all three circumstances, governments ignored or dismissed warning indicators of an impending disaster till it was too late.

Analysts and former intelligence brokers who spoke with Vox say {that a} mixture of cognitive biases, cultural prejudices, and bureaucratic inertia trigger such warnings to be ignored again and again. However simply because these issues are well-known doesn’t imply they’re straightforward to deal with. And given the horrible toll from combating terror over the previous twenty years — in lives, {dollars}, and misplaced civil liberties, particularly for Muslims — the value of success could also be simply as excessive as the price of failure.

The sign and the noise

The issue of shock isn’t a brand new one in intelligence-gathering, nor one distinctive to extremist teams. In 1962, RAND Company analyst Roberta Wohlstetter wrote a classic account of the intelligence failure main as much as the Pearl Harbor assault in 1941. It concluded that, although the US navy had collected plentiful data suggesting an impending assault — together with intercepts of decoded Japanese diplomatic cables that indicated preparations for a significant rupture in US-Japan relations — they had been hampered by diplomatic inertia and a failure to detect the related indicators inside all of the noise.

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“If our intelligence techniques and all our different channels of knowledge failed to supply an correct picture of Japanese intentions and capabilities, it was not for need of the related supplies,” Wohlstetter wrote. “By no means earlier than have we had so full an intelligence image of the enemy.”

That situation — an excessive amount of data, not sufficient understanding of which bits are literally vital — has occurred again and again within the historical past of intelligence failures, from the outbreak of the Korean Conflict to the Tet Offensive within the Vietnam Conflict to 9/11. Erik Dahl, a former naval intelligence officer and a professor on the Naval Postgraduate College, mentioned that the high-tech surveillance instruments obtainable to at the moment’s spies have, in some methods, solely made the issue worse. Based on a 2019 estimate, the Nationwide Safety Company intercepted and saved a mean of 1.7 billion emails, cellphone calls, and different communications day by day.

“We have now an excessive amount of data and never sufficient understanding of what’s occurring on the earth,” Dahl informed Vox. For instance, he pointed to the failed 2009 Christmas Day “underwear bombing” assault. A White House review later concluded that intelligence analysts had collected sufficient knowledge to disrupt the plot, however didn’t act on it as a result of the knowledge was “fragmentary and embedded in a big quantity of different knowledge.” The plot solely failed as a result of the bomb didn’t detonate.

The issue is compounded when the knowledge counteracts a authorities’s political preferences. Famously, the George W. Bush administration cherry-picked solely the knowledge that supported its most well-liked narrative when it was constructing the case for invading Iraq. That was a case of political leaders listening to what they need so as to hype up a nonexistent risk. However political preferences can even trigger them to disregard an actual one.

Obama had been elected largely due to his pledge to take troops out of Iraq. Biden had vowed to convey America’s lengthy and irritating conflict in Afghanistan to an in depth. Benjamin Netanyahu’s authorities had argued that the safety risk from Hamas militants in Gaza was contained and the nation may give attention to different political priorities. Some Israeli officers even believed there was a bonus to having a bunch like Hamas in energy, because it diminished strain on Israel to barter over the institution of a Palestinian state. In every case, warnings of an impending assault had been extremely inconvenient for the federal government’s most well-liked plan of action — and thus, tended to be downplayed.

“Human beings are actually, actually good at shaping the info to assist their very own opinions,” mentioned Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst now on the Middle for Strategic and Worldwide Research.

The militant problem

Religiously motivated, underground, non-state militant teams additionally pose a selected problem when state-run intelligence companies attempt to analyze their intentions.

“It’s troublesome for contemporary Western intelligence companies and nationwide safety organizations, that are created and established largely to trace different entities that seem like themselves, to get a deal with on the issue of subnation states or non-state actors,” mentioned Dahl.

Shiraz Maher, co-director of the Worldwide Centre for the Research of Radicalisation at King’s School London, identified that religiously motivated teams typically act with a unique set of cost-benefit issues than secular ones. Hamas, as an illustration, was prepared to hold out its assaults regardless of each indication that it might in the end end in huge casualties for each its personal fighters and Palestinian civilians. (Israel claims to have killed 5,000 of Hamas’s fighters, whereas estimates are that greater than twice as many Palestinian civilians have been killed. Even when the variety of Hamas casualties has been exaggerated, it’s secure to say the group’s navy losses have been substantial.)

“These are rational teams,” Maher mentioned. “However on the similar time, they’re rational from a totally completely different epistemic, sociological, philosophical, ideological premise.”

Extremist militant teams, by definition underground organizations that emphasize secrecy and demand fierce adherence to their trigger, are additionally notoriously troublesome for intelligence companies to infiltrate, in contrast with conventional nationwide governments. Additionally they are inclined to problem numerous threats, making it troublesome to know which plots they really intend on, or are able to, finishing up.

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Harding, who served on the CIA through the rise of ISIS, says that as a result of extremist teams don’t seem like conventional militaries, it’s straightforward to consider they lack the power to hold out grandiose plans. “The intent is all the time there with these teams. Its functionality is what you need to measure,” she mentioned. “They seem like a ragtag group of misfits. They don’t seem like what we consider as a really succesful combating drive.”

Overestimating your allies

In every of those circumstances, the failure was not solely in predicting the actions of the terrorist group, however within the capacity of the terrorists’ opponents to satisfy the risk as soon as it materialized. In Iraq and in Afghanistan, the US overestimated the power of the militaries that they had spent years and billions of {dollars} coaching and arming, and, maybe much more vital, the willingness of these militaries to struggle again.

“The psychology and motivation of a navy drive: That’s essentially the most troublesome factor to evaluate in intelligence,” mentioned Robert Grenier, former director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Middle. “Anyone who tries to make a prediction about that isn’t very doubtless to achieve success.”

Conversely, within the runup to the war in Ukraine, US intelligence companies gathered and publicized what turned out to be stunningly correct details about Russian intentions and battle plans, however didn’t predict the potential and resolve of Ukrainian forces in assembly that risk.

The October 7 Hamas assaults had been completely different, partly as a result of Hamas is a really completely different group. Along with being a militant group, it’s a governing authority that administers companies for greater than half 1,000,000 folks and has relations with a number of different states. It’s additionally engaged in what it views as a nationalist resistance struggle, not like teams akin to al-Qaeda or ISIS. But Israel was caught off guard by Hamas’s assault, partly as a result of within the months earlier than October 7, Israel relocated navy forces away from Gaza, relying on digital surveillance, autonomous techniques, and comparatively small teams of troops to take care of no matter threats may emanate from the strip. The Israelis clearly seen Hamas as a manageable drawback, fairly than the upcoming disaster it has turned out to be.

“I feel it reveals there’s clearly a sort of conceitedness on the a part of the state,” mentioned Aki Peritz, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst now at American College.

An inconvenient risk

In an essay for Overseas Affairs written earlier than the October 7 assaults — however printed shortly after — Nationwide Safety Adviser Jake Sullivan described the Middle East as “quieter than it has been for many years.” It’s a line prone to age about as well as Obama’s junior varsity workforce quip about ISIS.

Sullivan’s description is likely to be wishful considering, however the want to give attention to different priorities is hardly irrational. Lately, leaders of each events in the US have argued that, with the risk from teams like al-Qaeda and ISIS vastly diminished, the nation ought to shift the main focus of its nationwide safety coverage to “nice energy competitors” with nations like Russia and China.

However some terrorism analysts say the assault by Hamas, a bunch largely written off as a critical risk by each Israel and the US, reveals that we could have been untimely in dismissing the power of teams which have threatened main assaults to really flip these plans into actuality.

“I do numerous work with the US authorities, together with with the intelligence neighborhood,” mentioned Colin Clarke, a terrorism analyst with the Soufan Group, a safety consultancy. “We’ve talked loads about ISIS, about al-Qaeda and its respective associates, about far-right teams, QAnon, you identify it. I hadn’t heard anyone point out the identify ‘Hamas’ in about 10 years. It wasn’t on anyone’s radar.”

The October 7 assault, Clarke mentioned, was a “paradigm shift in how we take into consideration the capabilities of those teams. He added: “We’ve sort of written these guys off, as a result of the large names are gone,” referring to globally well-known terrorist leaders like Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Extremist militant teams actually didn’t disappear with the decimation of al-Qaeda’s senior management and the destruction of ISIS’s caliphate. In lots of elements of the world, they’re rising quickly. West Africa, as an illustration, saw more than 1,800 terrorist attacks leading to practically 4,600 deaths in simply the primary half of this yr. However the prevailing assumption has been that these teams are primarily involved with native conflicts fairly than transnational assaults.

Historical past has proven, nonetheless, that native threats don’t all the time keep native. Al-Qaeda within the Arabian Peninsula, the group’s Yemeni offshoot, was largely considered an area group till it very nearly pulled off the failed “underwear bomber” plot of 2009. ISIS, at its top, carried out quite a few high-profile and lethal assaults in Europe.

“We have now batted zero by way of accurately predicting when a bunch decides to shift from native to international,” mentioned Katherine Zimmerman, a terrorism analyst on the American Enterprise Institute.

Going ahead, Israel has vowed that its huge navy response to October 7 will wipe out Hamas as a navy risk, however these teams can virtually never be eliminated entirely. And senior officers, together with Gen. Charles Q. Brown, America’s new prime navy commander, have expressed concerns that the dimensions and brutality of the operation may find yourself creating extra terrorists than it eliminates. Discussing the conflict in Gaza in a recent CNN interview, Democratic Congressman Seth Moulton cited a research commissioned by retired US Gen. Stanley McChrystal which discovered that for each civilian killed, about 10 future fighters are recruited.

No matter soul looking goes on in intelligence companies within the wake of those failures, the reply is clearly to not go straight again to a September 12, 2001, mindset. Western governments, together with the US, have superb causes for wanting to show the web page on the conflict on terror. Over the previous twenty years, the will to eradicate terrorist threats has led the US into lengthy, bloody, and irritating wars and a troubling enlargement of the surveillance state and discrimination towards Muslim People. And it’s value remembering that for each profitable assault or navy offensive by an extremist militant group, there are a lot of extra that by no means come to fruition. It’s merely neither attainable nor fascinating for a society to be on full alert always. Nobody needs to return to the times of color-coded terror alerts.

However after three vital failures previously decade to foretell a significant assault by an extremist militant group, it’s clearly a mistake to imagine that these teams are not able to shocking and outwitting the world’s strongest and technologically superior states, notably when, as within the Israeli case, the preparations for that assault are taking place in plain view of the state. And there’s no purpose to imagine it gained’t occur once more.

“The curse of the intelligence officer is that we continuously get blamed for bringing the doom and gloom,” mentioned Harding. “There’s a chunk, I feel, of human psychology, the place you do not need to consider that one thing really unhealthy will occur.” That’s one mistake that governments can’t afford to maintain making.