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Saudi Arabia's Progress in the War on Terrorism: 
A Conversation with Anthony Cordesman
Part 1

Editor�s Note: 

Doctor Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Co-Director of the Center's Middle East Program, is a prolific writer on developments in Saudi Arabia and the broader Middle East. SUSRIS has been fortunate to be able to share essays, interviews and other analyses from Dr. Cordesman [list/links below].�
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Today we present part one of a recent interview with Dr. Cordesman that focuses on the progress in the war on terrorism in Saudi Arabia, with particular emphasis on the Counter Terrorism International Conference held in Riyadh in February.
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In part two of this interview, Dr. Cordesman discussed political reform, modernization and the state of the US-Saudi relationship. It will appear next week.�

Doctor Cordesman spoke with SUSRIS by telephone from his office at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on February 24, 2005.

Saudi Arabia's Progress in the War on Terrorism: A Conversation with Anthony Cordesman
Part 1

SUSRIS:� Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Cordesman. Let's start with progress being made in the war on terrorism. How would you evaluate Saudi Arabia's situation, both internally and externally, in the battle against Al Qaeda?

Cordesman: Saudi Arabia began dealing with al Qaeda as a threat really in the late 1990's -- long before 9-11. It has responded steadily over time to threats, but it is also fair to point out that until May 2003 it really didn't see this as an urgent internal issue. It was only then that it began to restructure its security forces. They improved cooperation between the security forces and the military. They sought the kind of foreign help in intelligence support that could improve their capabilities and produce better results.

It obviously takes time to create fully effective forces. The Kingdom, in the past, had really always relied much more on cooption and on family ties and information than it had on creating formal security forces of the kind needed to deal with what was essentially an alien outside threat like al Qaeda.

By late 2004, however, a lot of the Kingdom's efforts had become much moreCrown Prince Abdullah and Prince Sultan toured a compound damaged in the May 2003 terrorist bombings in Riyadh. effective. People had learned how to cooperate. The training programs began to catch on. They were dealing with a relatively small set of cells and threats and as a result they were able to wrap up some of the most experienced and best trained cells and leaders.

The end result is not that Saudi Arabia is going to be able to eliminate future attacks. Saudi Arabia, like any society, is inherently highly vulnerable to anyone who wants to use violence against a public facility, against religious facilities. There is no way you can lock down the country in a way that you can eliminate risks. All you can do is control and reduce it. I think that is something that Saudi Arabia understands. However, it has been able to break up quite a number of attacks. It has been able to arrest or kill many of the leaders of the various al-Qaeda cells. It has been able to reduce the effectiveness of the existing groups. But, that does not mean that there won't be further attacks, this year or next year or for that matter for any number of years to come.

There will probably always be at the margins of Saudi society some element that is going to strike out and try to capture the attention of the media or try to demonstrate that these movements are real, but unless there is a major influx of new terrorists and support for terrorism from outside the Kingdom I think they have reduced this threat to relatively limited levels.

SUSRIS: Saudi Arabia recently sponsored an international conference on counter terrorism. What happened at that event?

Cordesman: Well I think first we need to understand this was a very broadlyCounter Terrorism International Conference in Riyadh, February 2005 (Photo: www.ctic.org.sa) Click here for more. based conference. There were some 60 delegations there -- country delegations from Asia, Latin America, other parts of the Middle East, Europe and North America. What you had was a conference that was focused on action recommendations, not on revealing or analyzing terrorism.

There were four working groups and they covered subjects from money laundering to dealing with the underlying causes of terrorism. Each working group produced its own list of recommendations and then there was a communiqu� which summarized the key recommendations and that was drafted by the chairmen of the working groups and approved by the plenary.

The proposal for a center for counter terrorism was the most important one of a whole list of proposals Saudi Arabia made, many of which were very similar to those, incidentally, of countries like Britain and the United States. It was clear from the conference that people felt there was a need -- if not at an international level, at least at the regional level -- for much better coordination. The need was in terms of information, not so much sensitive intelligence on sources and methods, but basic data that could be used to deal with things like the flow of money or movements of trained terrorist personnel or the movements of technology and weaponry.

Many of those who attended the conference indicated they wanted some kind of center to help exchange information on building capabilities in counter terrorism, such as: training methods, how legislative and administrative procedures work, how to deal with issues like the media -- to make it an ally rather than a tool for the terrorist. These were areas where it was clear there was enough support at almost every level to at least explore the idea of a center. It was left open as to what role it should play relative to the UN and whether it should be a truly international center or a mix of regional centers. It was also left open about where it should be located.

I think the conference reflected a very broad level of interest in counter terrorism cooperation between a very wide range of countries, political systems and religions. To move ahead and specifically define the center is something that is probably going to take some time and a follow on effort.

SUSRIS: What follow-up will be made on the recommendations of the conference working groups?

Cordesman: I believe it was said from the start that the conference sought to avoid getting into what could appear to be an official mandate from given countries and to try to get consensus on an international mandate. So people were seeking instead to present proposals and these would not be binding in the sense that delegations had to somehow commit themselves. If it had been the other way around it is very doubtful you would have gotten anything like the range of ideas and proposals that were actually surfaced and accepted for working purposes. However, it was very clear from the people who attended that they were taking what was done seriously.

One of the immediate impacts of the conference was that a lot of people in the counter terrorism business met each other for the first time. They were circulating a lot of papers on national experience and national methods so the benefits of the conference were immediate. I think the longer term benefits, however, are going to be ones where it's left up to individual countries or international organizations to implement the details rather than try to create some kind of new forum in the way of mandating implementation.

SUSRIS: A delegation from the United States, headed by Frances Townsend, the President's Advisor on Homeland Security, participated in the Saudi conference. How would you characterize the US-Saudi relationship in the war on terror?

Cordesman: I think the United States and Saudi Arabia have been cooperatingMs. Frances Townsend meeting with Crown Prince Abdullah. She led the US delegation to the February 2005 Counter Terrorism International Conference in Riyadh. (Photo: SPA) very well on counter terrorism since at least May of 2003. The cooperation improved a great deal after 9-11. A lot of the problem is not so much in terms of US and Saudi cooperation at the expert or official level but in perceptions at the popular level.

It is generally the people who are not directly involved in counter terrorism who show a rather serious gap in understanding the nature of US and Saudi cooperation. You can see cooperation as being very productive by both sides at the expert level and the working level. Obviously there is a great deal of anger in Saudi Arabia over Western attitudes toward Islam, the Iraq issue and the Palestinian issue; and there is a lot of anger in the United States over 9-11 and various other issues. So the real level of cooperation is something that many Americans simply don't perceive.

SUSRIS: Are there any other lasting contributions the Saudi conference has made to the war on terrorism?

Cordesman: What people have to remember is when you look at a conference like this -- to have sixty delegations meet in Saudi Arabia, not academics, but working experts, to have the time in which to really interact and go through a series of action oriented meetings -- is something that has never happened before. Certainly for Saudi Arabia, I don't think they have ever had a conference on anything like this scale, particularly one which required simultaneous translation in three languages and which involved such a sensitive area.

People sometimes wonder how serious Saudi Arabia is about counter terrorism and I think that one thing that was demonstrated to everybody at the conference is that it really is serious. It is serious not simply about dealing with its own security issues but with the broader problems this mix of terrorism and extremism are creating. The problems challenge the Arab world and the West, and they are broadly cast in terms of escalating violence and escalating levels of attack.

SUSRIS: What are your thoughts on press reports of Saudi "Jihadis" going to fight against the Coalition in Iraq and the occasional encouraging pronouncements from some Saudi clerics about fighting against the West there?

Cordesman: One thing that we have to understand is that we face a rather strange position in talking about Saudi Arabia here. We advocate freedom of speech in the United States and it leads to some very strange literature from militias, right wing groups and so on, but we somehow feel that no other country can have a similar experience.

Saudi Arabia has many clerics and some of them to, put it a mildly, are at the margins of political extremism. I think the real issue here is that some Saudis are going into Iraq but US intelligence officers and, in fact, the US commander have made it clear that we are still talking about very, very limited numbers of foreign volunteers. Even if you take the total for all of the countries combined they are a very small faction in the insurgency. They are probably less than 700 out of 16,000, to quote one figure that was issued by an expert in the US military there.

Now, the striking aspect of this is not that there are that many Saudis going into Iraq, but given the size of the insurgency the Saudis who are in Iraq is pretty limited. It's what happens to them basically when they come back that is the primary concern to many of the people in Saudi Arabia. Having hopefully defeated a good part of the insurgents who began the series of attacks from 9-11 and May 2003 on, the worry is that there will be an influx of new, highly trained people from the outside, after the Iraq war is over.

It would be amazing, given the tension in the Islamic world, if there weren't at least some Saudis. But if it is that limited, relative to the most recent revelations about the role Syria may have played or what people suspect about Iran, Saudis are simply not major players with what is happening in Iraq.

Part II -- Political reforms, modernization and an evaluation of the state of the US-Saudi relationship.

[Dr. Cordesman, writing with Nawaf Obaid, will soon release books on the Saudi security apparatus, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Iran's military capabilities.]

About Anthony Cordesman

Dr. Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and is Co-Director of the Center's Middle East Program. He is also a military analyst for ABC and a Professor of National Security Studies at Georgetown. He directs the assessment of global military balance, strategic energy developments, and CSIS' Dynamic Net Assessment of the Middle East. He is the author of books on the military lessons of the Iran-Iraq war as well as the Arab-Israeli military balance and the peace process, a six-volume net assessment of the Gulf, transnational threats, and military developments in Iran and Iraq. He analyzes U.S. strategy and force plans, counter-proliferation issues, arms transfers, Middle Eastern security, economic, and energy issues.

Dr. Cordesman served as a national security analyst for ABC News for the 1990-91 Gulf War, Bosnia, Somalia, Operation Desert Fox, and Kosovo. He was the Assistant for National Security to Senator John McCain and a Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian. He has served in senior positions in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Energy, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. His posts include acting as the Civilian Assistant to the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Director of Defense Intelligence Assessment, Director of Policy, Programming, and Analysis in the Department of Energy, Director of Project ISMILAID, and as the Secretary of Defense's representative on the Middle East Working Group.

Dr. Cordesman has also served in numerous overseas posts. He was a member of the U.S. Delegation to NATO and a Director on the NATO International Staff, working on Middle Eastern security issues. He served in Egypt, Iran, Lebanon, Turkey, the UK, and West Germany. He has been an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of U.S. Forces in Europe, and has traveled extensively in the Gulf and North Africa.

Essays by Dr. Cordesman

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