The al-Masri Dialogue
Charles Cameron, in his latest guest post here, penned a beautiful essay regarding the ongoing exchanges between Australian counter-terrorism scholar Leah Farrall and Abu Walid al-Masri, an adviser to the Taliban and an experienced strategist of Islamist insurgency. Farrall has translated and posted this dialogue on her blog, All Things Counter Terrorism, which has received much attention, commentary and criticism in the blogosphere and on private listservs and quasi-official bulletin boards.
Generally, I leave this sort of subject to Charles, since he has the academic expertise to drill down to a granular level of Islamic theology and Islamist ideology, but al-Masri is an intriguing figure and his public conversation with Farrall is a novelty worth investigating. It would be hard to imagine during the Cold War, an open media debate between a Western CI official and a Soviet spymaster still engaged in espionage in the field ( Kim Philby hurled public jermiads it is true, but that was in retirement in Moscow and only after his long-suffering KGB handlers had managed to get his severe alcoholism under control). In that spirit, I want to offer a few observations.
While there is artifice present, as al-Masri is consciously speaking to a multiplicity of audiences in his remarks, the idea that we should therefore dismiss the dialogue with Farrall, as some suggest, is an error. There is also posturing in purely intra-Islamist-debates on which we eavesdrop and, frankly, within our own arguments inside government and out. We learn from what people do and do not do, from what they say and what is left unsaid. Being able to speak to multiple audiences is a constraint, as well as an advantage, as it shapes the parameters of the premises to be employed and the extent to which the underlying logic can be permissably extrapolated. To quote a Zen saying, if you wish to fence in a bull, give him a large meadow.
The constraints, if correctly discerned, are illuminating and are analytically useful in constructing our own tactical responses and message strategy (assuming someone can convince the State Department bureaucracy that IO and public diplomacy are important and persuade Congressional leaders to fund such activities with more than pocket change). They are also useful in helping to understand the worldview and governing paradigms of our opponents in more complex and nuanced manner than reflexively saying “they hate our freedoms”. Well, many jihadi types do in fact, viscerally hate our freedoms or deny that democracy is a legitimate form of government in an abstract sense, much the same way they casually disparage Hindus as “cow worshippers” or Thais as “crazy Buddhists”; however those loose attitudes and spasms of hostility are not akin to operational principles or strategic doctrines.
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