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Harmony and Disharmony: Foreword In war, traditional nation-states have specific attributes, such as territory, military forces, governmental structures, and economic capacity that can be the objectives of grand strategy and resulting military campaigns. Non-state actors, such as al-Qa’ida, do not have these same centers of gravity. Al-Qa’ida has non-traditional strengths and weaknesses reflecting its own unique human personalities, structure, organization, processes, and procedures. The purpose of this study is to examine the internal characteristics of al-Qa’ida so that policymakers and analysts can develop strategies to focus on their key vulnerabilities and degrade their effectiveness in supporting the global Salafist insurgency. One of the best ways to learn about al-Qa’ida is to read the papers, manuals, and other documents which al-Qa’ida leaders have written to guide and discipline their own enterprise. Many of these documents have been captured by military and law enforcement forces and can provide insight into the way the organization works. Other key references are readily available on the World Wide Web. The Combating Terrorism Center (CTC) at West Point was given 28 recently de-classified documents from the Defense Department’s “Harmony” database, which consists of literally thousands of documents. Analyzing these documents is akin to gathering several parts of a complex jigsaw puzzle. The documents themselves are interesting, but to get a more complete picture, the CTC authors found that it was important to combine the pieces from the al-Qa’ida documents, other published reports, books, articles, and studies on al-Qa’ida, organization theory, and other similar historical cases. The resulting analysis provides a complex but coherent assessment of al-Qa’ida’s organization, identifying several areas of vulnerability and potential strategies to exploit these vulnerabilities. This analysis of these documents, buttressed by the CTC authors’ insight and other publications comprises part 1 of this study. While Part 1 is an extremely helpful analysis, ’Part 2 of this study may be even more important and useful for researchers. Part 2 contains the complete original text of all of the documents selected from the Harmony database for this study—in both Arabic and English—with a useful synopsis and short analysis of each document prepared by the CTC authors. These documents are hyperlinked on the compact disk version of the study and on the CTC website at: http://www.ctc.usma.edu/aq.asp. The intent is to provide open access to these documents for other researchers so that they can be analyzed and used to learn more about al-Qa’ida and better understand the organization. We expect that future research into these documents, the al-Qa’ida websites, and other newly captured materials will continue to advance our knowledge of al-Qa’ida and its franchises and imitators. In any case, the intellectual discussion about—and understanding of—the internal organization and functions of al-Qa’ida is critical to developing an effective long-term counterterrorism strategy. This project contributes to the mission of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, which is to better understand the foreign and domestic terrorist threats to U.S. national security, to educate leaders who will have responsibilities to combat terrorism, and to provide policy analysis and assistance to leaders dealing with the current and future terrorist threat. The Combating Terrorism Center is part of the Department of Social Sciences of the U.S. Military Academy, and the work of its faculty and staff is closely integrated with the instruction of cadets and with the Academy’s outreach and support of projects to educate and inform current and future leaders. The work for this project was done by a team of associates and faculty members in the Combating Terrorism Center, which was led by Lieutenant Colonel Joe Felter and included significant work by Major Jeff Bramlett, Captain Bill Perkins and Professors Jarret Brachman, Brian Fishman, James Forest, Lianne Kennedy, Jacob Shapiro, and Tom Stocking. They have tried to make this as user-friendly as possible, with hyperlinks to all references throughout the documents to facilitate understanding and cross-checking of the source material. Additional questions about the report can be directed to LTC Felter at (845) 938-3247 or joseph.felter@usma.edu.
The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and not of the U.S. Military Academy, the Department of the Army, or any other agency of the U.S. Government.
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