Essendo questo il primo post dopo una lunga assenza, dovuta ad un eccesso di lavoro, ad un trasloco e ad un Internet provider che meriterebbe il ruolo di star in una produzione snuff-tentacle-hentai col Grande Cthulhu ((c) Leo Serni), pensavo di scrivere qualcosa che potesse fare da spunto sia a post successivi, sia magari ad una piccola discussione. Let's get started.
To read the newspapers and watching television news, is the impression that Al Qaeda is a kind of Spectre / Smersh (depending on whether you prefer the 007 films and books): monolithic, impenetrable, all-powerful, very bad, very organized, hyper , able to dominate the world. Unfortunately, the reality is not so rosy.
Al Qaeda is, we might say, the first terrorist organization (*) post, with a three-tier structure of which only the middle one is organic, and the third is largely outsourced. We could say that Al Qaeda is, in fact, the Nike of terrorism, or the first terrorist group New Economy, or even the terrorist organization with an MBA: a light full-fledged company.
The first layer of Al Qaeda is funding. Now, you understand, when I say I do not mean some lenders "grand old man" stramiliardario using Al Qaeda as a kind of toy or army personnel. The funders of Al Qaeda are of different types - conscious and unconscious, consensual and forced. We are aware and willing donors, mainly Saudi businessmen, a little 'out of faith and a little' (a lot '), because after each attack, the price of oil goes up, but also ordinary citizens who believe that to make a 'meritorious deeds, and give a fixed proportion of their gains to the "cause." We are aware but not at all consenting donors - the equivalent of the owners of pubs and shop in Belfast, who have always given freely part of the proceeds to the IRA because the alternative was to choose, just as freely, to be nailed to floor for the knees: business people, again mostly Saudis, who are made an offer they can not refuse . Then there is the mass of the unwitting donors, who give what little I can to this or that charitable association or this or that mosque, and do not know - they would often horrified - that the money not go to rebuild houses destroyed by floods in Pakistan, but to buy Semtex and RPG on the black market.
The middle tier of Al Qaeda and what we might call logistics, marketing and brand management . E 'at this level that we refer (or you should report) when it comes to "Al Qaeda" The Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Al-Zawahiri's, belong to this level, the busybody who manage the safe houses " path of jihad "Sangin between Karachi and belong at this level, lawyers and accountants who receive money from donors and reinvest them in the supermarkets in Dubai Mercedes dealerships in Riyadh and pension funds in London and New York belong at this level, experts trained in Chechnya and Bosnia and Afghanistan decidono quali "operazioni di martirio" finanziare e facilitare appartengono a questo livello.
Infine abbiamo il livello che si potrebbe dispregiativamente (ed erroneamente) definire della "manovalanza": quelli che effettivamente organizzano gli attentati. Queste persone raramente "appartengono" ad Al Qaeda, non più di quanto l'operaio cinese pagato una ciotola di riso al giorno lavori direttamente per Nike. Sono a volte giovani nati in occidente, immigrati di seconda o terza generazione, radicalizzati per i più svariati motivi - disoccupazione, mancanza di valori di riferimento, astio verso una società che li emargina, ragazze che gliela davano all'università e gli facevano venire i sensi di colpa, ragazze che not gave it to him at the university and frustrated them - that end up in the orbit of one or another recruiter and through an informal network of contacts to get a training camp in Yemen, Somalia, Waziristan run by Al Qaeda or drawn into its orbit with the lure of funding and logistics services, other times they are young people born in the same areas where hot work AQ, educated in madrassas and selected, again, be aware that recruiters often have followed their progress for years, trained and put on the road on the path of jihad to Chechnya or Afghanistan or, now, Yemen. At the end of their training, and sometimes a "tour of duty" in a hot zone, conceptually not unlike a tour of duty in the U.S. Army, often come home to connect people with ideas are not dissimilar, they form a small grppo and talk, talk, talk. And at some point, a plan took shape, and these people call into contact with old friends, and have the opportunity to present the plan to a group that would evaluate it. Hard not to notice the resemblance with what happens in many modern companies: a new idea is presented and evaluated, a written business plan, the funds (or risk capital) allocated and the project starts. With AQ, if the project starts you open the tap of funds, which pay for the training cell components, equipment, logistics, safe houses, travel documents, any what it needs, as far as possible.
The post-production model has assured key benefits to companies like Nike: Nike has no factories, so no problems of labor relations, labor costs, to find skilled labor, obsolescence of machinery, materials supply chain . Get all these problems on mr. Fong, owner of a little factory in Szechuan: the methods then mr. Fong uses to keep in line his workers are not a problem for Nike. Similarly, post-Al Qaeda terrorism has similar undeniable advantages: the possibility of funding more or less rain in any terrorist project that has even a remote chance riuscita fa apparire Al Qaeda come un'organizzazione enorme, tentacolare, invincibile - cosa che fa non poca presa su quello che, per rimanere in tema, chiameremo il suo target di riferimento; ancora di più, essendo la stragrande maggioranza dei "terroristi di Al Qaeda" dei semplici contrattisti a breve termine, dunque inutili dal punto di vista dei servizi di sicurezza per risalire ai livelli più alti, Al Qaeda appare agli occhi dei più invulnerabile agli attacchi degli apparati di sicurezza: qualunque altra organizzazione criminale/terroristica così onnipresente, così tentacolare, diventa automaticamente un facile bersaglio per le forze dell'ordine, perche' all'aumentare degli anelli della catena aumentano le probabilità to find a weakness in the case of Al Qaeda, the weak links appear to detach itself from the chain. Allah is indeed great, and is clearly on the side of Al Qaeda: how do you explain that the infidels otherwise be unable to penetrate it or stop it even though it exposes so much? Powerful, sprawling, omnipresent, yet lightweight, agile, flexible and elusive: a wet dream for marketers.
One thing to note, incidentally, is that the comparison with Nike is only valid up to a certain point: the three levels of Nike pyramid are: a relatively small number of producers, providing the merchandise that sells Nike, an intermediate layer of Marketers and brand managers (even the design is largely outsourced) ed una vastissima base di clienti che danno a Nike soldi in cambio del suo prodotto. La struttura di Al Qaeda é un po' il contrario, una piramide inversa: un vasto numero di "produttori", cellule terroristiche che, come i proprietari di fabbriche thailandesi, cinesi e malesi, competono fra di loro per offrire un prodotto - morte e distruzione - il più conveniente possibile; uno strato intermedio di marketers e brand managers - "ideologi" fa tanto ventesimo secolo - ed un numero relativamente ristretto di "clienti" che danno ad AQ soldi in cambio del suo prodotto di punta: il jihad.
Che lezioni si traggono da tutto questo?
Intanto, che l'approccio scelto dalla maggior parte dei governi occidentali in its "war on terrorism" is utterly bankrupt, because it is based on two strategies equally unfit to face a post-industrial reality. The first is to hit the producers: the perpetrators (or aspiring) attacks. Given the pyramid structure of AQ, provided that they are based, is at best an effort to Sisyphus, and given the numbers involved, far beyond the resources that the security services could conceivably put in place. The second strategy, that of "beheading", is equally bankrupt. Shut down or take out Osama Bin Laden or Ayman Al-Zawahiri was not much more than a quick image of success. To cite another case of some company marketing-heavy, for if you believe that Apple will close it when Steve Jobs retires? Or, as you call the president of Nike? Its director of marketing? When was the last transition at the top of Adidas? The fleeting image of advantage resulting from the scene of Osama Bin Laden would be deleted as soon as AQ was able to demonstrate that they can continue to operate exactly as before: the myth of his invincibility if anything would come out strengthened.
look at the facts: we imagine to be a bunch of cumin-globalization they want at all costs, damage to Nike. What do we strike? We can not affect its customers, the base of the pyramid are too many, and are everywhere. I can not fault the producers: they are few and potentially vulnerable, but in China and Thailand. British police shakes his head with disapproval against those who smashes the windows of Starbucks, the Chinese police and army could opt for stronger measures. Remains the intermediate level, marketing, money flows, image, brand and will work to associate that brand with child labor, spilling buckets of animal blood on the entry of Nike Town, ask for laws that affect - in the sense punitive damages - the tax status of multinationals, will impose the respect of international standards against corruption, and so on. Strike the imagination and the money after they leave the pockets of customers and sono incanalati in flussi che possiamo controllare.
Al Qaeda, ora. Facciamo un esperimento mentale: immaginate di avere una bomba atomica di ragguardevole potenza, una medicina che rimuove ogni scrupolo morale, e la possibilità di cancellare dalla faccia della Terra una città. Se quel che volete é fare il massimo danno possibile al terrorismo internazionale, che città colpite?
Teheran? Acqua
Qom? Ma per favore
Islamabad? Acquissima
La Mecca? Ma dai...
Riad? Acquetta
Dubai? Fuochino...
Niente da fare, non ci siamo. Oggi, il massimo danno al terrorismo internazionale potreste causarlo cancellando dalla faccia della London Land and / or New York. A structure such as Al Qaeda moves amount 'of money impressive, collects flows from Saudi businessmen and mosques in Paris, Egyptian jewelry and fishmongers of Tower Hamlets, shuffles them, reinvesting them, distributes them in investment funds and accounts open from dummy half in the world, speculating on the actions of the airlines on September 10 and July 6 on the pound, and reinvests the proceeds in safe houses in Sanaa, in detonators jamming-proof in Sangin and grants to the families of "martyrs" in Philippines or Indonesia. And it does in London and New York thanks to deregulation Reagan, Thatcher, Clinton, blairiana - There's been a thing I've seen get this problem, e i meccanismi di controllo che impediscono a broker di Parigi o Francoforte di riciclare e ridistribuire i soldi del fondamentalismo a Londra e New York semplicemente sono assenti. Non solo: nessuno vuole agitare la barca, perché se Al Qaeda se ne va, si porta il pallone e non si gioca più, ed é un pallone che, a seconda delle stime più o meno ottimistiche, vale da alcune centinaia di milioni ad alcuni miliardi di sterline: un'enorme torta che i politici non sarebbero tanto felici di perdere - e che metterebbe in difficoltà più di una brokerage house/banca/fondo d'investimento, motivo per cui la SEC e l'FBI, e qui il Serious Fraud Office, la City Police e l'MI5 si muovono con i piedi di piombo.
Adesso, per la Indeed, something begins to move here, if only because MI5 is traditionally more independent - these organizations, for example, is the only one whose director general is not political appointees but is from the ranks, but the real problem is that this type of counter-terrorism does not lend itself to sensational headlines and television news, is not inspired by action films, and in general does not strike the fancy of the people as the arrest of yet another "No. 2 Al Qaeda in Iraq / Afghanistan / Somalia / Yemen ", in other words, the funds dedicated to these activities have a negligible amount and are regularly the first to be cut when there is economic to do a maneuver to voters see that we are doing something: you can save money and do not cut two initiatives that, although unnecessary, should be on the news to show voters that the high level of vigilance is always - type arrested six North Africans because scavengers someone reported to the police at the table discussing what's was unsympathetic in the Cape Inculabambini .
short, beyond the fact that (and do not know what disgusts me to agree with Mark Steyn) I find the very definition of idiotic "war on terrorism" - a bit 'like Roosevelt after Pearl Harbor in 1941 had declared "war on bombing of naval aviation, "we are fighting a war that you can not win perché stiamo mirando ai bersagli sbagliati. Siamo, insomma, in una situazione comparabile con quella degli inglesi nella Battaglia dell'Atlantico quando cercavano di affondare quanti più U-Boot possibile: ci vollero anni, e il quasi completo strangolamento economico dell'isola, prima che a qualcuno venisse in mente il semplice fatto che quello che gli interessava non era affondare U-Boot ma far arrivare navi mercantili in porto, e i due obiettivi non erano necessariamente coincidenti.
Mi chiedo quanti mercantili lasceremo affondare, stavolta, prima di renderci conto che la soddisfazione di aver affondato un altro U-Boot, alla fine, dura poco.
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(*) In questo post I accept without question, mainly out of laziness, the traditional Western definition of "terrorist." A long dispute over who is the terrorist, who is fighting for freedom, if the fact to slaughter civilians for their religion is or is not a lawful act of war (or if it is only when Muslims, Christians, Hindus or or atheists / secularists who are crying and gesubbambino Padrepio), where a Western (or a person on the other side of non-white skin) can never be defined as "civilian casualties", and so arguing, is beyond the scope of this post. Arbitrarily, we will call "terrorist" who strikes more or less indiscriminately civilians with the intention of hitting civilians, and do not call "terrorist" who dropped a 454 kg bomb on a target, even if the civilians (to which, in general, he was not aiming) remain under the rubble, I realize that the definition is controversial and has many gray areas, but not me give a shit. The blog is mine, and we call terrorists who want it.
