7 myths on Al-Qaeda

MARIA Ressa, a former CNN journalist who has covered Southeast Asia for 15 years, tries to debunk what she calls prevaiing myths about terrorism in the region, criticizing both the United States and Southeast Asian governments for their misconceptions about terrorism and radical Islam.

In a speech she delivered at the First Counter-Terrorism Experts Conference held in Cebu last week, Ressa, who is currently senior vice president for news and public affairs of ABS-CBN, said governments have tended to belittle the upsurge of sectarian violence in the region and do not see the link between local conflicts and the global jihad.

“The violence in the Malukus and Sulawesi in Indonesia, the southern Philippines, perhaps southern Thailand … all these should be cause for alarm.” she said. “But it’s not just the US turning a blind eye. Many of their own governments refuse to see the interconnections because admitting those links mean redefining their worlds and searching for a different strategy.

Ressa says that the tentacles of radical Islam are widely spread in Southeast Asia, with terrorist groups taking advantage of local grievances and local conflicts to recruit followers.

In Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, 270 suspected members of the Jemaah Islamiyah, an underground organization believed to be linked to Al-Qaeda, had been arrested since the September 11, 2001 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. Of these, 140 had been convicted, says Ressa.

From Indonesia, she adds, JI has reached out to, and radicalized, the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, “regenerating the group of kidnappers into a full-fledged terrorist organization.”

In February 2004, the Abu Sayyaf carried out what is widely regarded as the world’s worst maritime terrorist attack when it bombed the Superferry, killing 116 people on board.

Based on the interrogation reports of two Indonesian JI members, Ressa says, authorities now know that the Abu Sayyaf and JI were working closely on four projects last year. These included plans to raise money from Arab financiers, to deploy Indonesian suicide bombers to attack targets in the Philippines, to purchase explosives in the Philippines for attacks in Indonesia and to exchange tips on casing potential targets in both countries.

Ressa, who also authored Seeds of Terror, a book on the rise of terrorism in Southeast Asia, cited JI links with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), which allows its camps to be used for training JI terrorists. In addition, says Ressa, the MILF has relations with the Abu Sayyaf, which in turn is linked to the Rajah Solaiman group, whose members were MILF-trained but operate in the Christian parts of the country.

In her speech, she listed what she said were 7 prevalent myths that prevented the US and governments in the region from appreciating the full impact of the terror threat. These myths are:

1. That nations can contain conflicts within their boundaries and in their own way

2. In the post-Cold War world, there are no more conflicts, because there is now only one superpower.

3. Military victory need not take culture and language into account.

4. Facts exist and are shared equally. There is only one reality.

5. Terrorist organizations are top-down, monolithic entities, hierarchical rather than networked.

6. Information is information, no matter from which cultural lenses they are viewed.
7. The US is the hero, leading the global charge against terrorism.

Below is the full text of Maria Ressa’s speech:

I have three parts in my presentation today: first, I think we have to understand the threat – what form of terrorism is our generation fighting. I do this by telling you what it’s not – by taking apart 7 myths in investigating Al-Qaeda. Second, I will focus on what’s going on in the Philippines and how it affects other countries in the region. And third, I’ll try to leave you with some ideas of what we should be thinking about and doing next, how we can get beyond operational counterterrorism to do strategic counterterrorism.

My ideas in this field come from experience – I’ve lived in Southeast Asia for more than two decades, most of that reporting for CNN. I could not have come to these views if I hadn’t been at every bombing attack, at every riot. I was there at the first attacks of the in Indonesia, I met many of its leaders. I lived through it. That’s my foundation and the reason I became obsessed with this topic.

After 9/11, being Filipino-American gave me great access to all sides in the conflict, helping me investigate Al-Qaeda’s links in the region. The most exciting times were the first three years, as all of us learned to redefine the world together.

I would argue that if 9/11 hadn’t happened, we would’ve been in for a far more catastrophic attack because the network which was exposed then would have been left in peace to continue to plot. 9/11 ripped off a veneer – one of 7 myths I want to discuss today – a collective lie we had built in the West of post-Cold war peace. That exposed what had been going on beneath the surface worldwide: how the growth of radical Islam had been hijacked and fuelled by groups like Al-Qaeda to build a global terrorist network. How? By coopting homegrown groups which have their own local agendas, but hijacking them into a global jihad.

The goal is simple: much like the communists did before them, Al-Qaeda was after global domination, power, using religion as a tool. If you look at it bottom up, the groups wanted to topple their own governments, get control of their lands, set up Islamic sharia law, then stitch all these cells together to create one giant Islamic Caliphate.

Years before 9/11, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto told me, “Osama bin Laden was able to tap different youths in different regions on different issues by pegging it all as a war between Islam and the West, but in fact, he was damaging the regional conflicts for his own agenda.”

Those words are still true today but that seed planted by Bin Laden – that it’s Islam vs. the West – has grown larger and now permeates much of the Muslim world. The most apparent evidence of that recently were the global protests triggered by a cartoon published by a Danish newspaper.

In Southeast Asia, Jemaah Islamiyah, Al-Qaeda’s regional arm, successfully infiltrated local conflicts and coopted groups in Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand.

That is linked to the first myth I ran into in nearly every country I reported from: the idea that borders and nations can contain conflicts their way. The implicit attitude is these are our conflicts. Leave us alone to deal with them. ASEAN had even institutionalized that idea into something it calls constructive engagement. All conflicts are local and can be dealt with domestically. Wrong. Because what we’re seeing is that when you’re talking about conflicts involving Muslim issues, there are no local conflicts.

I was fortunate enough to begin tracking Al-Qaeda’s network in the region at about the same time regional intelligence agencies were beginning their work, at a time when the United States was just starting to see the tip of the iceberg in Southeast Asia.

The contacts I made in 1995, for example, the former police chief then – six years later in 2001 was now the head of the Philippine National Police. In 1995, we met while he was working on the Bojinka plot – a terrorist plot to bomb 12 US airplanes over Asia. That was what we in the international press reported then, along with plots to assassinate the Pope and Bill Clinton. What we didn’t report would haunt me after 9/11: something so fantastic I didn’t believe it six years earlier – a plot to hijack commercial planes and crash them into buildings like the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the Sears building in Chicago, and the TransAmerica building in San Francisco. If it sounds familiar, it should be. In 1995, the Philippine police were tracking the man who would later mastermind the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. He was in Manila then with his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the WTC in 1993.

Before 9/11, I was already working on what authorities were then calling transnational links between Filipino and Indonesian militant groups. Back then the focus was crime. After 9/11, I began to follow those strands and discovered not just the regional links to Jemaah Islamiyah but also the mother link to Afghanistan. For a little while, my team and I were actually ahead of the intelligence agencies.

It was an exciting time because all of us were scrambling, not just to get the information, but to understand it. Before intel agents could do that, they had to blow away the second myth 9/11 exposed: the post-Cold war view of peace – that with one superpower, there is no more enemy. Until 2002, the Philippines and the United States had defense structures set-up for a post-Cold War scenario – all false as 9/11 proved. Under the calm surface, there was an enemy cobbling together an infrastructure. In the months and years after that, I saw countries redefine security issues and strategies of warfare.

Once that became clear, other factors became important – trashing other myths: the third – that military victory need not take into account culture and language … because now language and culture have become weapons in an ideological campaign. For the first time – members of the military and defense analysts are seeing that understanding culture is now as important as the tactics of war. A July US Marine corps report states “we should anticipate the spread of violent jihadist methods to non-Muslim areas and the “weaponization of culture” against us in long but ambiguous campaigns that target the domestic population and our will.”

There is now a growing understanding that this is not just a military campaign, that there is an ideological battle, that no one dominant culture or power can dictate the terms and that it’s necessary to understand not just cultures and perspectives but also languages.

>Because I could bridge language barriers, I entered the information flow much earlier in Southeast Asia. For example, because they needed help translating, Filipino officials gave me a copy of an Indonesian language document they found during a raid on a safehouse. It turned out to be a rudimentary chem-bio manual. Another time, an Indonesian contact was interviewing a man they suspected of being a terrorist. He couldn’t speak Indonesian but could speak Tagalog. So I could help.

Working with CNN and traveling extensively in the region gave me a unique view: I was able to help contacts circumvent very unwieldy and ill-defined bureaucracies. Two years after 9/11, it was still difficult to even confirm information from one country to another. My contacts would call, and I could get an answer to them immediately. Some questions were simple: for example, one Filipino intel official wanted the background on an Indonesian group few outside of Sulawesi had even heard of. Another time, an Indonesian didn’t have enough load in his cellphone to make a call to Malaysia so he called my local number.

That exposed a fourth myth: that facts exist and are shared equally. That there is only one reality. Obvious to most of us in this room, that simply isn’t true. Information, depending on who has it, can inevitably be skewed to benefit the vested interests of its holder.

The agents on the ground came to me with information because they needed help, and as they pieced together more and more of the puzzle, others came because they were frustrated by the way the information was being handled or misrepresented within their bureaucracies. Still others were afraid of inaction. Initially, I was surprised by the level of official denial – despite the knowledge on the ground. The trend is that denial lasts until a major attack – in the United States, in Indonesia, in the Philippines. A few months before the Bali bombings, I was jumping up and down pushing officials in the region as well as western governments to give us the facts on the record. One western ambassador denied anything was going on – despite the arrest a few weeks earlier of an Al-Qaeda member in Indonesia. Bali, of course, changed all that. In the Philippines, denial was policy for a time because officials relied on back-room negotiations, particularly in the case of the MILF, the country’s largest Muslim separatist group. But the costs are high for denial – it misleads the people and leaves Muslims vulnerable to radical ideology. This is part of the reason many Muslims still believe Osama bin Laden is a hero. After denial, I began to see misrepresentation, largely because of vested interests – like the time one Filipino official admitted that they had discovered training camps in Mindanao, but that they didn’t want the United States to know so they hid the pictures. Of course, Muslims in Indonesia are still asking about the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You get the idea: everyone wants to use and interpret the information they get based on their vested interests. And that often clouds the judgment of the information.

That is part of the reason the United States is paying little attention to the upsurge of sectarian violence in Southeast Asia, failing to see the link between these local conflicts and the global jihad. The violence in the Malukus and Sulawesi in Indonesia, the southern Philippines, perhaps southern Thailand … all these should be cause for alarm. But it’s not just the US turning a blind eye. Many of their own governments refuse to see the interconnections because admitting those links mean redefining their worlds and searching for a different strategy.

Let me give you an example of how different cultural lenses affect analysis of information: an example from India – mid last year, a former Indian government official released a report that created this headline: “Southeast Asia New Breeding Ground For Terrorists”

This caught India’s attention because of the connections this former Indian official found between Al-Qaeda linked groups which operate in South Asia like the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen, Harkat-ul-Unsar and Lashkar-e-Toiba and the groups in Southeast Asia.

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Intelligence documents in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines had long talked about militants training in Afghanistan and Pakistan – and how some of their counterparts from Harkat-ul-Unsar, for example, had come and trained in the Philippines. This went as far back as the early to mid 90’s.

This Indian study, however, warned of the possibility that groups in Southeast Asia could form sleeper cells in southern India using south Indian Muslim migrants in Singapore and Indonesia. Now that’s not something that a Southeast Asian analyst would conclude, nor would an American – because they would only be looking for their own concerns.

That’s the view from outside. What does it look like from the inside? That brings us to the sixth myth which debunks the earlier studies of terrorist organizations: that they are top-down, monolithic entities, hierarchical rather than networked.

Jemaah Islamiyah provides a good case study of how non-monolithic, bottom-up and free-flowing these organizations are – and how heavily dependent they are on personal connections.

In Indonesia, which has the world’s largest Muslim population, as of mid last year, about 270 JI suspects had been arrested since 9/11. About 140 were convicted and sentenced. Yet, more recruits continue to replenish the bench and transnational connections continue to flourish.

JI reached out from Indonesia and radicalized the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, regenerating the group of kidnappers into a full-fledged terrorist organization. The ASG or Abu Sayyaf Group carried out the world’s worst maritime terrorist attack in Feb 2004, the bombing of the Superferry that killed 116 people.

Based on the interrogation reports of two Indonesian JI members, authorities know that the Abu Sayyaf and JI are working very closely together on four projects last year:

1) They planned to raise money from Arab financiers;

2) They planned to deploy Indonesian would-be suicide bombers for attacks in the Philippines; (those men were arrested last Dec)

3) They planned to purchase explosives in the Philippines for an attack in Indonesia;

4) And four, they exchanged tips for casing potential targets.

But although the planning and training continues, contentious issues are causing divisions.

As early as 2002, CIA reports said that there was a growing division between the Arab members of Al-Qaeda and the Indonesian members of JI who were working together in Sulawesi, Indonesia. The Indonesians thought the Arabs were too careless and focused on issues the locals didn’t care too much about.

After the Bali bombings, the divide grew and splintered the Indonesian members. This time, it wasn’t global versus local, but a split between the locals on the methods they use to get to their goals. And the dividing issue was the use of violence. Mainstream JI didn’t want to use violence. This is a good development.

So those differences of perspectives created not just differing analysis from outside but inside, it created the fissures that weakened the unifying umbrella of JI.

Which brings me to my seventh, the last but perhaps the most important myth: that the US is the hero leading the charge against global terrorism.

The United States is the world’s sole superpower. True. But in this generation’s war against terrorism, the US is only a supporting player and a galvanizing point. How could that be since since bin Laden framed this as a war between Islam and America? Because bin Laden lied. Because the frontline in this war is WITHIN the Muslim world. It is not a fight between Islam and America – but a battle for the soul of Islam: between a radical minority and a moderate majority.

At the core of the military war is an ideological battle. That is why language, culture, and religion play such crucial roles in convincing Muslims around the world to take sides in defining Islam’s future.

The irony is that the United States, at some points, has become the strongest weapon of the radicals – when its actions and policies elicit such anger in the Muslim world that even the moderates empathize with the radicals. This is part of the reason a perceived unilateral invasion of Iraq pushed anti-American sentiment around the world – and particularly in Muslim countries – to all-time highs in 2003 – and why Iraq has become this generation’s Afghanistan.

Once Americans and their allies realize this, and work with Muslim nations, then we can make some real progress. After all, when you look at the core conflict, it’s not possible for non-Muslims to win this battle. The Muslims must resolve the core conflict by themselves.

Let me quickly talk about the Philippines. I have five quick points.

First, I believe the single largest regional threat comes from the fact that training continues in the southern Philippines. That means JI and its allied groups are free to pass on bomb-making technology as well as plan more attacks in multiple arenas. The Feb. 2005 Valentine’s day bombings in the Philippines reflect a capacity for carefully coordinated, near simultaneous bomb explosions never before shown by the Abu Sayyaf – but it is a trademark of Al-Qaeda and JI. In arrests related to those bombings, police found plastic C4 explosives stuffed into toothpaste tubes, shampoo bottles and film canisters – again a level of sophistication never shown by Filipino groups before.

And we’re also seeing cross-pollination. According to officials in the Philippines and Indonesia, the design of the back-pack bomb used by the suicide bomber in the second Bali bombings last year was first tested in the southern Philippines. How did they know this? Because Filipino police found what turned out to be a prototype of the Bali bomb … it was in a church in Cotabato, and the lunch-box bomb failed to explode so officials in the Philippines were able to study it. When the Indonesians started trying to reconstruct the Bali bomb, they found their counterparts had seen it before – in the southern Philippines.

Because of weak law and order, training opportunities still exist – despite ongoing peace talks with the country’s largest Muslim separatist group, the MILF. In fact, JI and other groups continue to train in areas protected by the MILF. The camps are much smaller than they were in the past, but they’re still there. The training continues. That also means this virulent ideology continues to spread.

Second, the principle now is “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” We are seeing alliances between groups that had never worked together in the past. JI played a role in that: helping hook up the radical Abu Sayyaf with the MILF. That alliance was brokered by JI, which developed a training relationship and operational alliance with the Abu Sayyaf. The JI, ASG and the MILF have worked together in many bombing operations. Now the ASG is able to work and train in MILF territory. Also, the Abu Sayyaf, once limited only to the poorer Muslim southern Philippines, can now work through the Rajah Solaiman group, which was trained by the MILF and operates in the cities in the Christian north.

Third, criminal activities are funding terrorist groups in the Philippines. The US State Dept recently announced in its annual report that the illegal drug trade had evolved in the Philippines into a billion dollar industry. The National Bureau of Investigation admitted last month that the Abu Sayyaf gets part of its funding from the illegal drug trade. This, however, isn’t the first time that JI or JI-affiliated groups used criminal activities for funding. Earlier, JI members admitted robbing banks for financing in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

Fourth, aside from transnational crimes, funding is project specific so there is pressure to keep coming up with plans for attacks because otherwise, money will not flow. According to a key JI member arrested last year, Indonesians and Filipinos are getting direct funding from at least one donor in Saudi Arabia. That donor allegedly gets proposals not only from the Indonesian JI members but also from their counterparts in the Philippines.

Fifth, the government of President Gloria Arroyo has been embroiled in political battles for most of the past year and a half. Last February, she declared a state of emergency, saying the political opposition is working with the extreme right and the extreme left to topple her government. What was apparent in the succeeding days was the division within the military and police – with the elite forces being the most affected – the marines, the scout rangers, and the Philippine police’s Special Action Force. Their commanders have been relieved and an internal crackdown continues a search for coup plotters among their ranks.

We’re also seeing an alarming development – the politicization of the intelligence services, partly because of what we Filipinos call the bata-bata system. To give you an idea, since I started working on terrorism, the agents and officers I worked with have been replaced at least four times in key agencies. This would be a key recommendation: nations should do their best to insulate their intelligence services from politics.

What steps should we take moving forward? There are six areas we should address – with both a local and global response:

1) an ideological response to counter the world view pushed by the radicals.

2) a military/law enforcement response – this has been the first response of most nations. In general, stronger law enforcement cuts down the space for terrorists to operate.

3) intelligence sharing: a real effort to try to cut out vested interests so we can get a realistic view of the evolving threat

4) an educational response: inside madrassahs and pesantrens, making sure radical ideology is not passed on within school walls. This would cut down the number of potential new recruits. At one point, Malaysia had cameras in mosques so they could hear what ulamas were saying.

5) a financial response: this has been mentioned – our nations in the region can do much more about cutting down terrorist financing by tracking and disrupting fund-raising operations and the flow of money.

6) Finally, a legislative response – effective counterterrorism legislation. A Singapore thinktank did a study of the the Philippines, for example, and found that nearly 60% of the terrorist attacks in the past few years could’ve been prevented if we had an anti-terror law. Why? Because those acts were committed by people who had already been detained but were later released because of the lack of legislation.

Finally, I’d recommend a three-step approach towards these problems.

1) Identify the problem, the threat in each instance. We must be aware of different lenses, pull out to broader perspectives so we can get beyond parochial interests of nation-states.

2) Communicate with the Public… with the goal of COOPTING the public. Why? Because you multiply your effectivity and reach – and you simultaneously cut down the potential pool of recruits for the radicals. Governments cannot do this alone.

3) In order to communicate with the public, you will need to learn to work with the media – both mainstream and non-traditional.

Now you know why I came to speak to you today. My vested interest is to show you how media can help in counterterrorism measures – how media can help in making the world safer. The best example I can give you of full transparency was when Singapore arrested 18 JI members in Dec. 2001. The next day their pictures, case histories, evidence of links to terrorism were published not only in local papers but in international publications. By doing that, Singapore told its people of the problem and helped prevent an ethnic, religious and human rights backlash.

You will need to tell the public what they’re facing because in the end, each nation must find the balance between trading in some civil liberties in exchange for greater security. And in a democratic country like this one, people will not give up their freedoms willingly until and unless they know exactly what they’re getting in return.