Ali H Soufan and Daniel Freedman. The Black Banners: Inside the Hunt for Al-Qaeda.
London: Allen Lane / W.W. Norton; 2011 572 pp. ISBN 1846145023. £25; US$ 38.99 Reviewed by Richard Phelps
As a native Arabic speaker familiar with the societies of the Middle East, Ali Soufan was relatively unusual among FBI agents in the pre-9/11 era. Long before 9/11, the Lebanese-born law enforcement officer devoted himself to studying the Bin Laden network and the threat it posed to the US. As a result, he quickly came to serve at the forefront of the US fight against Al-Qaeda. Now having left the FBI to work as a consultant in the private sector, his memoir offers one of the most granular behind-the-scenes accounts to date of the early years of the American struggle against the Bin Laden network.
Like any memoir, there is a predictable degree of self-justification. If only others had listened to Soufan’s Cassandra-like warnings about the threat that the Bin Laden network posed, and of the risks posed by the lack of inter-agency cooperation, he laments. Yet such vindication detracts little from the fascinating on-the-ground account he offers at the centre of some of the most significant episodes during the “War on Terror”. Soufan is in his element when he discusses what he experienced: the trips he made, the investigations he carried out, the suspects he interviewed.
Two themes stand out from the book in particular, one of which the author tries to make with vigor and the other less so. Firstly, although he does highlights occasional exceptions, the animosity between the FBI and the CIA saturates the book – and is perhaps the central theme.
Soufan details persistent personality clashes, and an ingrained and institutionalised unwillingness for the two organisations to help one another in their investigations. That such frustrations
occurred is common knowledge, and has been well-documented in the official 9/11 Commission Report. What Soufan offers throughout are repeated examples showcasing how such rivalry and hostility was manifested, not just between the FBI and the CIA, but also involving US embassies overseas.
Nowhere is the lack of cooperation seen more than in the book’s editing. The manuscript was submitted and approved by the FBI, but Soufan reports that the CIA sought to redact swathes of the text. Committed to publishing the book by a specific date, the result is that the book is published with black lines throughout, thereby indicating what the censors did not want
published. In the introduction, the author voices his frustration at this, since most of the material that was censored was already in the public domain. Yet one also senses a degree of relish on his part, since the censor’s pen complements the author’s prose in highlighting the frustrations he reportedly came up against.
The second theme of the book is asserted less forcefully, indeed almost by coincidence.
Throughout the text, the author introduces various figures associated with the Bin Laden network as being brothers or brothers-in-law, nephews, uncles, or husbands of other figures. The picture that emerges is a strong demonstration of Marc Sageman’s presentation of terrorist organisations as movements rooted among socially-connected groups of people. In this regard, more than the
glossary of individuals that it offers, the book would have benefitted from a chart that depicts how the network of figures he presents joins together in terms of their relationships.
Black Banners is relatively long, and the author’s grasp of Al-Qaeda and the Bin Laden network is subtle, detailed, and deep. For the benefit of unfamiliar readers, the book is padded out by lengthy forays into the background of Islamism and Middle Eastern history. Despite the author’s background, it is here that he errs – when he shifts from memoir to history. In so doing, in a number of cases Soufan displays an unsophisticated grasp of wider issues: “Wahhabis came from Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Salafis primarily from Jordan, and takfiris [those who advocate the excommunication of self-declared Muslims] mainly from North Africa” (p.12) and the
“appeal of an alliance between the Taliban and al-Qaeda was also based on a shared connection to (or, perhaps more accurately, a manipulation of) traditional Wahhabism” (p.58), he writes, for example. By contrast, the book is strongest when he relates the events he himself experienced.
Soufan’s ability during his time with the FBI to access and engage first hand with A-Qaeda members and primary documents provides a strong backbone to his account. Among the many volumes published to mark the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Soufan’s is a major contribution. Its strength lies in the granularity and personal experience it offers, rather than in providing a broader narrative. The author does not shy from making assertions - some of which may attract controversy, particularly when he accuses a number of individuals who currently remain at liberty despite their involvement in terrorism - and he offers a remarkable account of the fight against terrorism from the perspective of investigatory law enforcement.
About the Reviewer: Richard Phelps an Adjunct Fellow at the Quilliam Foundation (London).
He focuses on the history and development of Islamist dissent in the Arabic world.
Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan. Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
ISBN: 9780231156820. 296 pp. ; $ 29.50. -Reviewed by Jason Rineheart
Erica Chenoweth’s and Maria J. Stephan's book is one of the most timely released study in the past decade. Shortly after non-violent protest movements swept the Middle East - changing regimes and the political discourse in many countries – the two researchers released this comprehensive study, analyzing the historical efficacy of non-violent resistance.
Using their Non-violent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes (NAVCO) data set, the authors quantitatively analyzed 323 violent and non-violent resistance campaigns for the period 1900 to 2006. Their conclusion: non-violent movements are nearly twice as likely to achieve success (or partial success) than their violent counterparts. Chenoweth and Stephan hypothesize that non-violent campaigns are more likely to succeed because non-non-violent activism creates lower barriers to participation, creating the conditions for diverse membership and allowing mass mobilization across key social sectors.
Perhaps their most interesting findings relate to the consequences of violent and non-violent movements for post-conflict regimes. The NAVCO data show that successful non-violent movements produce democratic regimes more often than successful violent movements.
Interestingly, the data also reveal that non-violent campaigns do not necessarily benefit from outside material support, although the authors acknowledge that small amounts of money, sanctions, and international public support can have a positive impact on successful movements.
However, they caution that "outside support for local non-violent groups is a double-edged sword” since that is often used by regimes to delegitimize such movements (p. 225).
To support their findings, four case studies explain why some non-violent movements achieve success, partial success, and, at times, fail. The Iranian revolution (1977-1979) and the Philippine People's Power movement (1983-1986) are their textbook examples of how broad-based civil resistance, mass participation, and strategic non-cooperation from all sectors of society can succeed against authoritarian regimes. Similarly, the authors make a persuasive case in their explanation why the First Palestinian Intifada (1987-1992) was a relatively peaceful movement that achieved "partial success," or at least more progress than the violence used by the PLO and Hamas. The label "partial success" in this instance is one that some analysts may take issue with, since the Israeli occupation and settlement activity increased substantially over the following decades. Finally, the Burmese Uprising (1988-1990) case study shows how both violent and non-violent campaigns can fail if such movements do not create and maintain unified popular support and generate loyalty shifts within a regime.
Perhaps Chenoweth and Stephan’s most daunting task is pre-empting scholarly critiques questioning how they can accurately define a resistance movement as entirely "violent" or entirely "non-violent", and sufficiently determine which faction contributed most to a
movement's success when such movements operate simultaneously. But when compared against years of failed violent activism in countries like Iran and the Philippines, the authors argue that
identifying and framing successful violent campaigns within the fog of violent and non-violent activism is actually not as difficult as some may assume, especially when considering the amount of diverse support and mass mobilization that successful non-violent movements
produce.
True to academic form, the book reads as a lengthy, quantitative research report full of nuance, definitions, and important caveats explaining the inherent difficulties when systematically studying violent and non-violent movements. Some may disagree with their methodologies or the way they coded their data, but their justifications and rationales are refreshingly
straightforward and transparent.
Yet when it comes to framing their study, one striking aspect that may irk some scholars is how they situate their research within existing the literature. They claim that a "prevailing view among political scientists is that opposition movements select terrorism and violent insurgency strategies because such means are more effective than non-violent strategies at achieving policy goals" (p. 6). They argue that Robert Pape's (2003, 2005, 2010) work - which holds that suicide terrorism is an effective strategy to defeat occupying democratic powers - "could be applied to almost all scholars whose research tests the efficacy of different violent methods" because such scholars fail to compare violent methods to non-violent alternatives (p. 25-26).
It is certainly true that some security scholars are biased toward studying violent conflict. But it is a bit unfair to project Pape's heavily criticized work onto the entire research community as accepted scholarship, particularly when several terrorism researchers have argued that using terrorism as a strategic tactic is rarely successful and at times even self-defeating (Crenshaw, 1992; Rapoport, 1992; Hoffman, 2006; Abrahms, 2006). Moreover, the authors' data reveal that insurgent movements in their data base succeed roughly 25% of the time, which they
acknowledge is in line with similar other studies. Thus, despite framing their research as breaking new ground in the arena of security studies, their findings are actually in line with accepted scholarship on the relative ineffectiveness of terrorism and insurgent violence.
The book is novel in its attempt to quantitatively compare and contrast violent and non-violent insurgencies and in pushing back against security scholarship that has been reluctant to study non-violent movements. As such, it is a welcomed contribution. Terrorism researchers, alas, are left wanting more nuanced analysis on the efficacy of terrorism and insurgent tactics within their NAVCO data set. But perhaps such a study is in the works.
About the Reviewer: Jason Rineheart is a Research Assistant at the Terrorism Research Initiative.