No Logo: Naming Terrorist Organizations

[Ed's Note: Eric emailed this late last week in between jaunts around the subcontinent. It was originally meant to be a conversation starter, to be published as the new Current Intelligence went live on Monday. Tim's dark visions and Josh's cross-post on scary Uzbeks suggest a recurring issue of perception and labels; keep their arguments in mind as you read this think piece.]

Terrorist groups and insurgent organisations, like rock bands [Ed's note: and bloggers!], have always enjoyed picking out names for themselves. Some aim for grandeur like the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders' Front, some to sound cool like the Shining Path, some are amusing to those who might be as childish as I am: step forward, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF).

Names are useful to the analyst. They allow us to categorize the groups, decipher their goals and tactics, and measure their rate of success or decline. They're also useful to insurgents: like any organisation, they benefit from the establishment of a brand-name that can help draw recruits and provide short-hand explanation for their motives and intentions.

Names as Force-Multipliers

They have even more significance in the postmodern insurgent environment of today, in which information campaigns have become much more important than the military seizure of territory. The strength of the brand multiplies the effects of a terrorist attack; put simply, the more attacks that can be associated with a group, the greater the impression that it represents a serious, existential threat to its target, and the more its members can laud themselves as saviours and exalted freedom fighters to the constituency that supports them.

When groups like the Shabab in Somalia pledge allegiance to Al-Qaeda, they do so not so much for the logistical advantages, although these may well accrue as a result. Rather, the primary aim of such a move is symbolic. The strength of Al-Qaeda lies in the power of its brand to lend a global aspect to local struggles, lending them a legitimacy that they otherwise lack. The globalised, non-territory-specific ideology that drives Al-Qaeda means that it cannot be accused of simply lusting after power in a specific state. It is able to claim – with some credibility – that it is an ethical movement seeking to fundamentally alter the iniquitous development of world politics; that it is fighting for the oppressed man in the name of God. Of course, the claim that it can provide a new, uncorrupted form of governance is greatly assisted by the fact that it has never actually had to hold power anywhere, which would surely destroy whatever credibility it holds.

For the Shabab, the association allows them to assert that they are not just fighting to take over Somalia (and God knows, who the hell would want to take over Somalia) or take over lucrative piracy networks, but that it is part of a global Islamic struggle to which fighters from around the world should flock, as they have to Bosnia, Afghanistan and Iraq in the past. The success of the brand name also allows it to absorb smaller brands, as Shabab has done with small groups like Kamboni, mirroring friendly mergers in the business world. It might itself be absorbed at some point, maybe taking a name like Al-Qaeda in Somalia, as Algeria’s Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat did when it changed its moniker to Al-Qaeda Organisation in the Islamic Maghreb in 2006.

Names as Deception

For all their significance, names and labels can be a deceptive way to think about today’s networked insurgent groups. Often group names disguise the loose nature of militant groups, with individuals coming together sporadically and opportunistically for short periods of time and then going their separate ways. This is particularly true in the Indian sub-continent where militancy is a complex mess of state proxies, ethnic and religious struggles and plain criminality. The huge arms haul in Chittagong, Bangladesh in April 2004 is a classic example: arms apparently destined for the separatist United Liberation Front of Assam (ULFA) in India, transported by criminal groups with the assistance of members of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence and the Bangladesh’s National Security Intelligence.

In India’s northeast, insurgents maintain old group names that suggest they are fighting for noble separatist or ethnic ideals as a flimsy pretext for lucrative extortion and smuggling enterprises.

The Indian Mujahideen (IM) seems to be an example of how easily a name can be abandoned when it becomes a liability. The media immediately blamed the IM and the  Student  Islamic Movement of India (SIMI) for the attack, but the letters from these groups claiming responsibility are not being taken seriously by the police, according to intelligence sources. In any case, the media were slapping their name all over television screens long before any letters were produced.

The truth is more complicated. When SIMI was banned in 2001, a legitimate outlet for radical Islamists in India was removed. According to Praveen Swami, an expert in this area, recruiters came from all over to take advantage: “They came from Tehran, Bangladesh, NWFP, Kashmir – there were clerics and organised crime groups,” Swami told me. “A scattershot of about 100 people signed up and went for training in various places, depending on who picked them up.”

“When they returned they set up independent cells. They referred to themselves as jihadists, not as members of a single group. They were basically independent modules drawing expertise from outside, some much more successful than others.”

A tragic account of one of the less successful individuals can be found in Swami’s story about the recently captured Abdul Khwaja, a persistent but pathetic terrorist.

Names as Propaganda

It is believed the name Indian Mujahideen was just concocted for the sake of propaganda purposes during the spate of serial bombings that hit Indian cities in 2007-08, and was apparently the third choice after two previous names were rejected for “sounding too technical”.

“Indian Mujahideen is just a media label invented for press releases,” said Swami. “But after so many of them were caught or captured in late 2008, they seem to have decided it was not a very effective strategy to leave a big computer trail for the police to follow.”

The term "Indian Mujahideen" gives the public a false impression of an organised, structured enterprise, when in fact the indigenous threat in India stems from loosely linked individuals tapping resources from transnational networks. The individuals who invented the label appear to have abandoned it when the counter-terrorist threat became too high.

Of course, structured organisations do exist, especially when they are closely tied to traditional state structures – the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) in Pakistan, for instance, or Hizbullah in Lebanon.

But when that state sponsorship is eroded or the organisational set-up feels too much heat from counter-terrorist forces, names and organisational structures are dispensable. When the UN labelled Jamaat-ud-Dawa a terrorist organisation in the wake of the Mumbai attacks, forcing a crackdown by the Pakistani government, the group simply renamed itself and continued as normal. On a larger scale, the history of Al-Qaeda since the US launched a full-scale war against it in late 2001, has been one of evolution into a loosely structured, force-multiplying brand-name, with the centralised, hierarchical command structure that once defined it becoming less relevant.

The names and labels that are applied to terrorist groups are an aspect of propaganda. They  are conceptual short-hand designed to strengthen credibility and add to the fear generated by terrorist attacks. The media loves labels and is a willing accomplice in this process.

However, the groups that are not involved in state-based conflict – the ones that are just blowing things up as a form of ethical protest – are not really organised groups at all, but simply a motley bunch of radicalised individuals, often tragic cases like Abdul Khwaja. The lofty labels they choose are an attempt to present themselves as more than the sum of their parts, and an eagerness to accept these labels often gives them more credit than they deserve.