As the Washington Post explores the unwieldy and unaccountable intelligence sector developed in the United States since the 9/11 attacks, here's a look at some even less efficient ways of combating militants around the world.
DIAL
"M" FOR MILITANT
Country: Germany
Scheme: Germany
estimates that it now contains as many 29 radical Islamist organizations with
some 36,000 members. These figures include the so-called "German
Taliban," which
is said to have recruited fighters for militant groups in Pakistan. To combat
this growing radicalization, the country's domestic intelligence agency
recently announced that it is setting up a new "exit program," including
a telephone hotline for militants who are looking for a way to get out.
The
program, called "HATIF" -- or "phone" in Arabic -- aims
to help radicals
transition out of militant organizations by finding them jobs or relocating
them. The hotline staff will be fluent in German, Arabic, and Turkish.
In
announcing the hotline, Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière warned the public
to keep its expectations low -- and his caution is probably justified. HATIF is
based on a German program from the early 2000s aimed at deradicalizing neo-Nazi
youth. Despite the call center's best efforts, however, only a
few dozen low-level
skinheads out of the country's estimated 33,000 took advantage.
THE
ONE-WEEK DERADICALIZATION PLAN
Country: Yemen
Scheme: Yemen
was once considered a leader in terrorist rehabilitation, after the government
set up one of the first rehab programs following the 9/11 attacks.
Unfortunately the program, known as the Committee for Religious
Dialogue, proved
to be a complete disaster.
As part
of the program, hundreds of radical prisoners in Yemeni prisons engaged in
"theological duels" with religious counselors, who urged them to
renounce violence -- a process that generally lasted only a few days.
Once
the debriefing was over, the men were released into society with no support or
follow-up. More troublingly, the counseling tended
to focus on convincing
the militants that Yemen was an Islamic state and receiving their assurances
that they would refrain from carrying out attacks within the country.
Discouraging militant activity elsewhere was not a priority. Perhaps not
surprisingly, the program had a high recidivism rate: Some distinguished alumni
were killed while fighting U.S. forces in Iraq, and many others remain
unaccounted for.
Due to
a lack of funding and political will, the program was cancelled in 2005. In
counterterrorism circles, Yemen is now best known for releasing some of the
world's most dangerous militants from jail, including the American-born cleric
Anwar al-Alwaki, who reportedly counseled both Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Malik
Hasan and the "Christmas bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
THE
NAME GAME
Country: Pakistan
Scheme: For
many years, militant front groups in Pakistan were able to take advantage of a loophole in a 1997 anti-terrorism law to hide in plain sight -- so long
as they changed their name.
The law
treated groups with new names as entirely different groups, even if they were
founded by the same members. Lashkar-e-Taiba, for instance, the anti-Indian
militant group blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was first banned by Pakistan
in 2002. But many of its leaderscontinued
operating under
the new name Jamaat-ud-Dawa. When that group was sanctioned by the United
Nations in 2008, the Pakistani government cracked down and members rebranded
themselves as "Tehreek-e-Hurmat-e-Rasool." Most recently, senior
members of the group were holding rallies under the name
"Tehreek-e-Tahafuz Qibla Awal."
To
close down the loophole, the Pakistani government amended
the law in late
2009 to say that a group formed by members of another banned group with the
same aims would also be banned.
FAMILY
TIES
Countries: Chechnya,
Russia
Scheme: Beginning
soon after the 2004 Beslan school massacre, the regional government of Chechnya
began a policy of punishing militants by targeting their families. That year,
eight relatives of Chechen separatist leader Aslan Maskhadov were detained in a
small room for six months and tortured with beatings and electric current.
Relatives of other militant leaders simply disappeared.
Lately,
authorities have adopted a new tactic -- burning down the houses of militants'
families. While only top leaders used to be targeted for this treatment, Human
Rights Watch documents 26 cases of punitive arson between June 2008 and March 2009. Moscow-backed Chechen
President Ramzan Kadyrov hasn't exactly gone out of his way to deny
responsibility; he has publicly warned the families of militants that they can
expect punishment unless they turn their relatives in.
Kadyrov's
tactics are proving popular. Regional authorities in neighboring Dagestan have also
taken to threatening
villages with destruction unless they turn militants in. But the measures
appear to have little effect, as the deadly
attacks in the
Caucasus and Russia continue.
PRISON
MADRASSAS
Countries: Algeria,
Egypt, Jordan, Syria
Scheme: Throughout
the Middle East, mass arrests are a popular strategy for suppressing Islamist
movements. The problem is, locking up large groups of radicals in a room
together is not
necessarily the best way to keep
their ideology from spreading. Egyptian prisons, where the father of modern
militant Islam, Sayyid Qutb, wrote his most influential works during the 1950s,
and al Qaeda No. 2 Ayman al-Zawahiri was radicalized, currently hold somewhere
between 5,000
and 10,000 political prisoners. These include members of the banned but
relatively nonviolent Muslim Brotherhood and partisans of more militant groups
like Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
Rounding
up the usual suspects is also a popular tactic in Jordan, where human rights groups
say prisoner abuse is widespread.
Jihadist groups are thought to have established extensive
networks in
Jordanian prisons, at times even organizing simultaneous riots in multiple prisons.
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who went on to lead al Qaeda in Iraq, is said to have
been radicalized during
a prison stint in the late 1980s that turned him from a petty drug user into a
committed Islamist militant. Mass arrests have also been used to crack down on
Islamist movements in Algeria, Saudi
Arabia, Syria and elsewhere -- with, mostly likely, similar degrees of
success.
Of
course, it's not that prison never works. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, the former al
Qaeda early adopter, began to publish books critical of his old militant friends once he was locked up for
life in the Egyptian prison system.