the Combating Terrorism Center

“ The Terrorists’ Challenge The terrorists’ challenge is simple to describe. For security reasons, political and ideological leaders, the principals, have to delegate certain duties—planning attacks, soliciting funds, recruiting, and the like—to middlemen or low-level operatives, their agents. Such delegation poses no problem if all the agents are perfectly committed to the cause and agree with leaders on how best to serve the cause. Under those conditions, the preferences of the principals and their agents will be perfectly aligned, and the agents will act exactly as the principals would like. ”

“ In larger groups, where the leadership is organizationally isolated from operational cells, or where it is geographically separated from them, these cognitive dynamics will lead to preference divergence between leaders and operators. ”

“ Commitment to a group’s ideology follows a bell-shaped distribution—with the purely ideological or purely venal individuals being rarer than those who place moderate weight on the cause—meaning that it will be harder for the recruiter to find potential tactical operatives than logisticians. Unless the recruiter knows a huge number of potential members, he will place individuals in the riskiest position they will accept. Thus, individuals will rarely be more ideologically motivated than is necessary given the risk level of their occupation, leading to preference divergence by position. ”

“ Like all terrorist groups, Al-Qa’ida values the ability to achieve political impact. In the pursuit of this, the organization must balance its need for security with operational control as well as with financial efficiency. Government efforts to degrade al-Qa’ida’s capacity will succeed if they reduce its security environment, the degree to which it can control operations, and/or its ability to fund its activities. ”

“ The second cause of preference divergence over tactics is that the cognitive dynamics of an underground organization—isolation from the outside, negative physical incentives to external contacts, excessively strong affective ties, and the like—mean that operational cells often become divorced from reality, seeking to do more violence than those removed from the situation would like. [39] Islamist groups suffered deeply because of this problem in Syria, where Harmony documents reveal local cells repeatedly made attacks that the outside leadership opposed. ”

“ By identifying, catalyzing and swallowing ungoverned spaces, jihadi strategists believe they will be able to consolidate their strength and pursue their broader political and internationalist agendas. Notice that what is important to these thinkers is not the existence of a security vacuum, but what comes next, establishing functioning state institutions under jihadi control. In fact, existing security vacuums have not proven to be a viable base for exporting attacks abroad. No major international attacks, for example, have been supported out of Afghanistan, Iraq, or Somalia. ”

“ Foreward In war, traditional nation-states have specific attributes, such as territory, military forces, governmental structures, and economic capacity that can be the objectives of grand strategy and resulting military campaigns. Non-state actors, such as al-Qa’ida, do not have these same centers of gravity. Al-Qa’ida has non-traditional strengths and weaknesses reflecting its own unique human personalities, structure, organization, processes, and procedures. ”

“ How Groups Respond to Preference Divergence This analysis reveals a number of terrorist group strategies for responding to agency problems, all of which create specific security vulnerabilities—the type of tradeoff we highlight throughout this report. One strategy applies primarily to the handling of funds, while other strategies apply more generally. Providing funds only on a need-to-have basis is a very effective way in which principals can prevent less-committed individuals from taking advantage of their control over funds. ”

“ The security challenge is that punished agents can always follow the example of Jamal Ahmed Al Fadl and go to the government. This security cost is especially hard for transnational groups who have agents in areas where they lack operational capabilities, and hence the means to violently punish their agents.
Another common way to deal with agency problems is to encourage members to enter into trust-inducing relationships such as marriage within their group. [47] Those who enter into marriages within the movement face a larger cost if they are caught behaving against their leaders’ wishes. ”

“ We believe that al-Qa’ida sub-groups’ critical organizational vulnerabilities are largely determined by their need for discrimination in the use of violence to achieve political objectives. For example, a group like the IRA is attempting to achieve objectives that require significant popular support. They need to be very careful about who they hit in order to avoid losing this critical support. In contrast, groups like Zarqawi’s in Iraq operate with very loosely defined political goals which appear to extend little beyond driving out the United States and preventing a political settlement. ”

“ The individual on the receiving end of Zawahiri’s ire increases agency problems and organizational dysfunction that may arguably contribute more to degrading al-Qa’ida’s capabilities if he is allowed to remain in the organization than if he were selected out. Importantly, it is the perception of financial inefficiency that is important not the inefficiency itself. This can be achieved by pursuing measures that incriminate financial agents and add to suspicions of graft and corruption in the eyes of their leaders. ”

“ Punishing agents who do not behave as the principals would like depends on both identifying such behavior and being able to wield a threat over agents. There are both efficiency and security costs to using punishment. The efficiency cost is that engaging in punishment diverts resources from the struggle. For example, as Hezbollah moved into Southern Lebanon in the early 1980s, it encountered efforts by Israeli proxies to penetrate the organization, and had to create a security bureaucracy to police the organization. ”

“ Why Preference Divergence? Open-source analyses of terrorist organizations generally begin from the perspective that members of these groups are uniformly motivated by the cause, are equally willing to sacrifice for the cause, agree on what the cause is, and see eye-to-eye on the best tactics to achieve their strategic end. [24] However, substantial evidence has accumulated to indicate this is not the case. The Harmony documents reveal a surprising level of infighting and conflict, even within highly capable groups such as al-Qa’ida (Al Adl Letter, Harmony AFGP-2002-600080) . ”

“ Thus, preference divergence creates operational challenges which can be exploited to degrade a terrorist group’s capabilities.
Overall, the goal of this analysis is to provide a framework which can help us identify where and under what conditions organizations can expect the greatest challenges in pursuing their goals and interests. Understanding a terrorist organization’s internal challenges and vulnerabilities is key to developing effective strategies to combat the threats they pose and degrade these groups’ ability to kill. ”

“ The remainder of this section looks at two specific areas of conflict within terrorist groups: resource allocation and tactics. In the first area, agency problems create inefficiencies in how resources are allocated. Methods to mitigate these problems create operational vulnerabilities. Thus, groups face a security-efficiency tradeoff. In the second area, agency problems lead to cells undertaking politically suspect behaviors. Groups can mitigate this by exercising tighter control, which reduces group security. Thus, groups face a trade-off between security and control. ”

“ The decreased operational security through such a strategy would have been significantly outweighed by the increased tactical control and greatly benefited the movement in terms of the political impact of its activities.
Leadership. Leadership defines strategy. Many successful insurgencies have had a key individual leader who drew support from charismatic appeal of one form or another. Personal valor, a dynamic personality, and other laudable traits can greatly bolster an insurgent movement, though it is hard to quantify the impact of such leadership. ”

“ It is very difficult to exert central control over a group like the Muslim Brotherhood except by sacrificing security. The best example of this is the use of various Salafi-Jihadist websites, which are frequently used as repositories for messages from radical clerics and ideologues. The websites are then accessed by operational cells, thereby ensuring some degree of homogeneity in the global jihadi message, even though the cell may be physically quite decentralized. ”

“ The difference in the probability of success provides an opportunity to fracture the insurgency. The Sunni component of the insurgency is primarily interested in local power. By designing a package of incentives that incrementally increases political power, it is possible that much of the causus belli could be drained away from this component of the insurgency over time. Because the long term goals of al- Qa’ida are so much broader, we can achieve a market separation within the insurgency. ”

“ Our application of this theory to the Harmony documents and related cases leads us to conclude that, in cases where terrorist leaders have strong preferences for controlling operatives, interventions that reduce this control have greater impact on the organization than those that degrade the security environment. However, in cases where government is combating terrorist factions that place a lesser value on control, they will do better pursuing actions that reduce the group’s security. ”

“ Scholars were throughout the ages at the forefront of the bandwagon of jihad...the theoreticians of the jihadist current were the ones who carried the Book and sword in their hands and took the front line. They led the masses and abandoned the transient pleasures of life. They preferred the reward of eternal life. ”

“ Make screening strategies appear risky. Al-Qa’ida can reduce preference divergence, and hence increase their ability to achieve political impact, by screening their membership more closely. A common strategy to do so is to recruit within familial networks. By openly monitoring the family relations of known al-Qa’ida members, governments can create the perception that using family ties to screen potential members is a security risk. This takes away a useful screening strategy, reducing the maximum feasible level of security. ”

“ Failure to Manage Agency Problems As shown in the preceding chapter, terrorist organizations face fundamental tradeoffs between operational security on the one hand, and financial efficiency and tactical control on the other. Balancing these needs is a major leadership challenge for any successful terrorist network. In the case of the Vanguard and Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, the leadership failed to understand and compensate for these agency problems and preference divergences. ”