Table Of ContentNew Security Challenges Series
General Editor: Stuart Croft, Professor of International Security in the Department
of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick, UK, and
Director of the ESRC’s New Security Challenges Programme.
The last decade demonstrated that threats to security vary greatly in their causes
and manifestations, and that they invite interest and demand responses from
the social sciences, civil society and a very broad policy community. In the past,
the avoidance of war was the primary objective, but with the end of the Cold
War the retention of military defence as the centrepiece of the international
security agenda became untenable. There has been, therefore, a significant shift
in emphasis away from traditional approaches to security to a new agenda that
talks of the softer side of security, in terms of human security, economic security
and environmental security. The topical N ew Security Challenges series reflects this
pressing political and research agenda.
Titles include:
Natasha Underhill
COUNTERING GLOBAL TERRORISM AND INSURGENCY
Calculating the Risk of State-Failure in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq
Abdul Haqq Baker
EXTREMISTS IN OUR MIDST
Confronting Terror
Robin Cameron
SUBJECTS OF SECURITY
Domestic Effects of Foreign Policy in the War on Terror
Sharyl Cross, Savo Kentera, R. Craig Nation and Radovan Vukadinovic ( editors )
SHAPING SOUTH EAST EUROPE’S SECURITY COMMUNITY FOR THE TWENTY-
FIRST CENTURY
Trust, Partnership, Integration
Tom Dyson and Theodore Konstadinides
EUROPEAN DEFENCE COOPERATION IN EU LAW AND IR THEORY
Håkan Edström, Janne Haaland Matlary and Magnus Petersson (e ditors )
NATO: THE POWER OF PARTNERSHIPS
Håkan Edström and Dennis Gyllensporre
POLITICAL ASPIRATIONS AND PERILS OF SECURITY
Unpacking the Military Strategy of the United Nations
Hakan Edström and Dennis Gyllensporre (e ditors )
PURSUING STRATEGY
NATO Operations from the Gulf War to Gaddafi
Hamed El-Said
NEW APPROACHES TO COUNTERING TERRORISM
Designing and Evaluating Counter Radicalization and De-Radicalization Programs
Philip Everts and Pierangelo Isernia
PUBLIC OPINION, TRANSATLANTIC RELATIONS AND THE USE OF FORCE
Adrian Gallagher
GENOCIDE AND ITS THREAT TO CONTEMPORARY INTERNATIONAL ORDER
Kevin Gillan, Jenny Pickerill and Frank Webster
ANTI-WAR ACTIVISM
New Media and Protest in the Information Age
James Gow and Ivan Zverzhanovski
SECURITY, DEMOCRACY AND WAR CRIMES
Security Sector Transformation in Serbia
Toni Haastrup
CHARTING TRANSFORMATION THROUGH SECURITY
Contemporary EU–Africa Relations
Ellen Hallams, Luca Ratti and Ben Zyla ( editors )
NATO BEYOND 9/11
Carolin Hilpert
STRATEGIC CULTURAL CHANGE AND THE CHALLENGE FOR SECURITY POLICY
Germany and the Bundeswehr’s Deployment to Afghanistan
Christopher Hobbs, Matthew Moran and Daniel Salisbury ( editors )
OPEN SOURCE INTELLIGENCE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
New Approaches and Opportunities
Paul Jackson and Peter Albrecht
RECONSTRUCTION SECURITY AFTER CONFLICT
Security Sector Reform in Sierra Leone
Janne Haaland Matlary
EUROPEAN UNION SECURITY DYNAMICS
In the New National Interest
Sebastian Mayer ( editor )
NATO’s POST–COLD WAR POLITICS
The Changing Provision of Security
Kevork Oskanian
FEAR, WEAKNESS AND POWER IN THE POST-SOVIET SOUTH CAUCASUS
A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis
Michael Pugh, Neil Cooper and Mandy Turner (e ditors )
WHOSE PEACE?
Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding
Nathan Roger
IMAGE WARFARE IN THE WAR ON TERROR
Aglaya Snetkov and Stephen Aris
THE REGIONAL DIMENSIONS TO SECURITY
Other Sides of Afghanistan
Holger Stritzel
SECURITY IN TRANSLATION
Securitization Theory and the Localization of Threat
Ali Tekin and Paul Andrew Williams
GEO-POLITICS OF THE EURO-ASIA ENERGY NEXUS
New Approaches to
Countering Terrorism
Designing and Evaluating Counter
Radicalization and De-Radicalization
Programs
Hamed El-Said
Chair & Professor in International Business and Political Economy,
Manchester Metropolitan University, UK
© Hamed El-Said 2015
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First published 2015 by
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Contents
List of Illustrations v i
1 Introduction 1
2 Counter-de-Rad: Setting the Framework 13
3 Radicalization in a Western Context: The Case of Australia 53
4 Counter Radicalization and De-radicalization in
Western Democracies: The Case of Australia 76
5 Mauritania: From Toleration to Violent Islam 9 6
6 Singapore: Crisis of Identity, Shared Values and
Religious Rehabilitation 1 38
7 Sudan: De-radicalization and Counter Radicalization in a
Radicalizing Environment 174
8 From Militarization to Democratization:
The Transformation of Turkey’s Counter Terrorism
Strategy (CTS) 2 18
9 Concluding Remarks 2 54
Notes 265
Bibliography 280
Index 295
v
List of Illustrations
Box
2.1 A selection of the more commonly identified elements
of IFCVE 4 8
Figures
7.1 Military operations carried out by participants 2 15
7.2 Age group of participants in the Sudanese
de-radicalization program 216
7.3 The educational level of participants in the
Sudanese de-radicalization program 2 16
7.4 T he level of radicalization and contribution to jihadi
activities of the participants 2 17
Table
7.1 Classification of individuals according to groups,
ideology, area of operations and targets 217
vi
1
Introduction
Rehabilitating radicals
Organized terrorism remains a major threat facing many communi-
ties of the world. Despite the fact that more than a decade has passed
since 9/11, which instigated a long and ongoing first-world ‘war on ter-
ror’, there are no signs that terrorism is receding. On the contrary, the
most recent developments not only suggest that terrorism remains a
large problem, but that it will be so for some time to come. For exam-
ple, Christopher Stevens, the former American Ambassador in Libya,
along with three other American diplomats, was brutally assassinated
in September 2012 by a radical Libyan salafist group, some of whom
were allegedly disengaged under a de-radicalization program initiated
and supervised personally by Saif Dine al-Islam. In Arab countries
that have recently experienced a regime change as a result of the out-
break of the Arab Spring almost two years ago (Libya, Tunisia, Yemen
and Egypt), this has been associated with the rise of radical salafist
movements in these countries. The outbreak of fighting in Syria has
apparently attracted thousands of Ansar radical fighters (an offspring
of al-Qaeda) to the country who are now dominating the core fight-
ing units of the so-called ‘Free Syrian Army’. The war in Syria has also
attracted several hundred Muslim citizens living in Western democratic
states, such as Australia. After ten years of occupation and the loss of
its once powerful regime, Iraq is witnessing a constant increase in vio-
lence. In Afghanistan, the ‘war on terror’ shows no signs of waning,
with the Taliban fighters demonstrating strong determination not only
to oust NATO forces from their country, but also to restore their lost
political power at any price. They continue to provide logistical, finan-
cial and operational support to their Pakistani Taliban partner, which
1
2 New Approaches to Countering Terrorism
has destabilized and divided Pakistan itself, through the paralysis of
its political and economic systems, and cost the country more than
$20 billion in economic losses and more than 35,000 human lives. In
Western Africa, extreme right and fundamentalist salafist movements
are also on the rise, encouraged by the weakness and corruptibility of
Western African states and their absent developmental capacities which
bred and continue to breed massive inequities, considerable unem-
ployment and unsustainable poverty. In Somalia, the al-Shabab radi-
cal group remains influential and threatening both to the stability of
the country and the region as a whole. Pirates continue to use Somali
territory as a safe haven to threaten international maritime trade. In
Nigeria, new militant Islamist groups have emerged, such as the Boko
Haram and Ansaru Islam, which are considered today the most ‘for-
midable threat’ to the interests of the United States and other Western
states in the region (Chothia, 2013. On salafism in the Arab world, see
Zelin, 2013; Trager, 2013). The recent launching of military operations
by the French government in Mali is a testimony to the rising influence
of the fundamentalist-right salafist movements in Western Africa.
The above-cited events and developments will have far-reaching
regional and global ramifications, although the full extent of these
implications is difficult to predict at the present time. The immediate
regional implication of the French military operations in Mali, for exam-
ple, was the attacks against Algeria’s main gas field in January 2013 and
the ensuing hostage crisis that claimed the lives of more than 80 indi-
viduals, including several Westerners, in a dawn raid in retaliation for
France’s intervention in Mali and the Algerian government’s support
for that intervention. While the jury decides the full implications of
the aforementioned recent developments, one thing is clear: terrorism’s
days are not numbered and the death of Osama Bin Laden, the former
leader of al-Qaeda, has not ushered in a new era of peace and stability,
one in which the threat from terrorism no longer exists.
On the other hand, there is a growing consensus among observers of
all political stripes that the fight against radicalism and its offspring,
violent extremism, has been mismanaged and mishandled. Even long
before the 9/11 attacks of 2001 against the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in lower Manhattan and the Pentagon, many scholars
and academics were already criticizing the prevailing kinetic approach
to countering the phenomenon of terrorism, referred to hereafter as
Violent Extremism (VEm). Those critics have long called for a broader
and more balanced approach, one which will rely more on, and incor-
porate larger aspects of, ‘soft’ or ‘smart’ policies as an integral part of
Introduction 3
the counterterrorism tool kit used by state officials, security enforce-
ment, practitioners and wider communities involved in countering
VEm (Schmidt, 2000; Angell and Gunaratna, 2011). As the ‘war on
terror’ dragged on longer than expected, voices against the prevailing
kinetic response to VEm grew louder, sharper and broader. The fierc-
est attack from a high-ranking Western official came from the former
British Foreign Minister, David Miliband. In 2009, Mr Miliband pub-
licly stated that we were ‘wrong’ in our approach to the phenomenon of
VEm and that the notion of a ‘war on terror’ has not only delayed the
fight against terrorism, but has also ‘caused more harm than good’.
Criticism of a kinetic approach to countering VEm has also come
from the Afghani leader, Hamid Karzai, who sturdily and unremit-
tingly disparaged increased reliance on drone attacks by the United
States, which killed many innocent people in Afghanistan and else-
where, as a key counterterrorism tactic. He also criticized the alleged
US torture of Afghani detainees, and, in March 2013, called upon the
US government ‘to put in Afghan control ... the Bagram Jail, 50 kilome-
tres north of Kabul ... within days’ (T he Nation , 2013). In Yemen, drone
attacks have not only killed a large number of innocent bystanders, but
have also undermined the informal approach to countering radicaliza-
tion which the Yemeni government began implementing after 2008.
This approach relied heavily on mediation between state officials and
their relatives and family members in al-Qaeda to convince the latter
to repent (El-Said and Harrigan, 2012). Following the end of the mili-
tary operations launched by the Pakistani armed forces in late 2007 to
tackle militants in the Swat Valley region, the Pakistani armed forces
launched an ambitious de-radicalization and counter-radicalization
program there. This included a population census to list the names of
all inhabitants of the Valley, encouraging community and tribal leaders
to play a bigger role in countering violent ideology and activism in the
area, and providing some educational and health facilities to the inhab-
itants of the region. The program also included special debates and a
religious rehabilitation program for the hundreds of youths radicalized
and recruited by the Pakistani Taliban and arrested by the Pakistani
armed forces during and after the military operations in the Valley. As
in Yemen, ‘The program was destroyed by the American drone attacks,
which demolished the confidence we built with the inhabitants of the
Valley who now believe that we were conspiring with the Americans
against them’.1
In other words, the kinetic response served to undermine the ‘pub-
lic perceptions of government’ and its ability not only to address the
