Director:
Senior Fellow, Ian Cuthbertson
Phone: (212) 961-1865
Fax: (212) 932-3140
E-mail: cuthbertson@worldpolicy.org

Despite the lack of a major successful attack on a Western target since the he deadly suicide bomb attacks in London in July 2005, the continued high intensity of jihadist terrorist activity throughout Western states, ranging from the grandiose plan to bomb multiple airliners flying from the United Kingdom to the United States. To the more mundane but equally dangerous active radicalization that is being carried out by al Qaeda and affiliates amongst disaffected Western citizens, has brought home to both Western governments and their citizens that, coupled with other terrorist incident all over the world, in particular the activities of al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan, the threat posed by al Qaeda and its franchised organizations has not diminished. Rather, it has instead metastasized, as both personnel and expertise gained by insurgents during the war in Iraq begin to be applied to other terrorist operations beyond that country’s borders. From the resurgence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, Hezbollah fighting Israel to a standstill in Lebanon, to the victory of Hamas in the elections for the Palestinian Authority and its subsequent ousting of Fatah from the area, the success of Islamic fundamentalist groups who combine religious, political, social and terrorist objectives under the rubric of Islam has been striking. Efforts by such groups to destabilize the political, social, economic, infrastructural, and moral underpinnings of a wide range of societies and governments has continued and the long-term hope of these groups remains the ambition to undermine a range of governments, in the hope that they can be replaced with fundamentalist regimes whose tenets would owe much to the philosophy of Osama bin Laden and whose societal values and approach to governance would be closely modeled on those of the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The Counter-Terrorism Project has continued to focus on identifying the most effective steps that nations and individual citizens can take to meet the wide range of major attacks that Islamicist militants are clearly planning and actively attempting to implement. The attacks carried out by Islamicist terrorist outside of Iraq and Afghanistan have so far focused on soft targets, such as transportation systems, hotels and other public spaces. Information and intelligence, however, continues to surface in the public debate that the terrorists harbor greater ambitions, and attacks on targets such as nuclear reactors and chemical plants remain part of their planning process. By continuing to plan for attacks on such high-profile targets, a variety of terrorist groups allied to al Qaeda hope to continue to display their relevance and importance to both the potential target populations, and equally importantly, to their own key supporters. All of these groups in their public statement have continued to emphases their desire to inflict serious levels of death, destruction and disruption on their enemies.

It is on such threats that the Counter-Terrorism project has focused its research and analysis capabilities, and it is on these types of issues that the Project's staff has supplied insights to governments, policy audiences, academic gatherings, and the media. It is a role that has helped ensure that the relevance and importance of the Counter-Terrorism Project remains unabated. As part of the Project’s outreach activities, Ian M. Cuthbertson spent two months, September to November 2005, as the City of Vienna Research Fellow on Crisis Management and Conflict Research at the Austrian Institute for International Affairs (OIIP) in Vienna. While a fellow at the OIIP he gave a number of speeches and presentations, and also had the opportunity to meet with a wide range of politicians, opinion formers and decision makers from a range of European states. Cuthbertson’s line of research at the OIIP explored the serious challenge of reconciling enhanced national security in the face of a transnational terrorist threat with the rights and responsibilities involved in achieving and exercising citizenship and maintaining the core values of liberal democracy in an age of conflict.  His focus was on a number of key countries with significant immigrant and minority populations or who face the prospect of hosting them in the near future, all of which are grappling with issues of multi-culturalism, assimilation and integration of large immigrant populations, many of whom have been drawn from a variety of Moslem countries. Each of these immigrant populations, both long-standing minorities and newly arrived migrants, are facing the challenge of a radicalization of segments of their populations, leading to suspicion on the part of the host society and increasing perceptions of discrimination and threat on the part of the minorities themselves. Isolating this radicalized, and potentially terroristic segment of the minority population, is increasingly seen as a necessary prerequisite for the greater integration of minorities and immigrants into the life of host societies. Cuthbertson set out to identify and explore what may be the most efficient and effective mechanism for advancing this goal.
 
The Project's staff members have continued their work in the area of the threat posed by radical Islamic terrorist networks' increasing influence among Muslim prisoners in both European and North American penitentiaries. Recognition of the dangers posed by the growing influence of Islamic extremists among Muslims has come more to the fore as the numbers of those identified as being involved in radical Islamist activities in both Western societies as a whole and in prisons in particular has become more widespread. The Project’s staff has given advice to a number of institutions on how to best tackle this emerging terrorist threat. The Counter-Terrorism Project continues to devote a great deal of time and energy to tracking and documenting such behaviors, and continues to promote the knowledge and expertise required to successfully implement a number of strategies designed to reduce the power and influence of Islamicists in the prison environment, and we are developing an educational outreach program, coupled with a longer-term intervention package we have termed the Educational Intervention Action System (EIAS). The aim is of the EIAS is to create a capability to track and record the operational methods and organizational dynamics of terrorist rings within a variety of both individual prisons and correctional systems and develop education-based programs for both prisoners and prison staffs to combat the spread of these terror networks. We believe the results of the EIAS Program will make a vital contribution to the work of combating this little-understood but rapidly growing danger.

The Counter terrorism Project's intent remains to facilitate a wide-ranging and constructive re-examination of existing security arrangements in the field of combating terrorism. The staff of the project has also remained conscious of the pressing need to develop and promote innovative and practical policy options for the construction of a more consistent and coherent Western policy towards terrorism in general and fundamentalist Islamicist terrorism in particular. In recognition of these objectives, the project has contributed significant time and resources to an important new WPI initiative, the Program on Citizenship & Security.  This innovative program is seeking to engage community leaders, scholars, and policy makers in collaborative international and multidisciplinary solutions to the challenge of reconciling enhanced national security in the post-9/11 era with the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. The program is based on the recognition that there is no more urgent issue facing democracies today than how best to keep societies safe from transnational violence while doing as little harm as possible to core democratic values such as civil and human rights, personal freedom, and cultural liberty. The program has identified the heart of this conundrum as lying in the often-marginal status of immigrant and minority communities within liberal democracies, along with the related challenges of managing migrant populations with dual or multi-national loyalties and identities in a globalized world. Civil rights; freedom of cultural, scientific and intellectual exchange; the ability of businesses to hire talented foreigners; and even the travel and tourism industries are among the casualties of current policies. At the same time, differing views of the transnational terrorist threat and how best to deal with it have placed great stress on traditional national alliances, straining important ties even as they are more important than ever to international security.

The Citizenship & Security Program has initiated a substantive dialogue, especially "across the aisle" and across borders, between parties who normally do not have opportunities to meet and to share their views and who may indeed mistrust each other.  The program’s initially focus is on four allied democracies with important immigrant and minority populations: the United States, France, Germany, and India, with the objective of having a serious impact on policy and to advance understanding and solidarity between nations and constituencies confronting a complex and fluid threat. As with all of the Counter-Terrorism Project's work, the partnership with the Citizenship & Security Program is designed to develop a number of practical recommendations aimed at policy makers, offering clear steps that can be taken to improve both the US and international responses to the diverse threats posed by terrorism. The active involvement of counter-terrorism experts in the work of the Citizenship & Security Program significantly extends the reach of the WPI's Counter-Terrorism Project into previously neglected areas of investigation, one that allows us to more effectively develop methods to identify, isolate and challenge terrorist activities at the grass roots.