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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 more 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 broadly 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
communiqué 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. |
..the United States
and Saudi Arabia
have been cooperating
very well on counter
terrorism.. ..the real
level of cooperation is
something that many
Americans simply
don't perceive..
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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 cooperating 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. |
..Saudi
Arabia.. is serious
not
simply about dealing
with its own security
issues
but with the
broader problems this
mix of
terrorism and
extremism are creating.. |
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.]
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Dr.
Anthony H. Cordesman
holds the Arleigh Burke Chair in Strategy at the 
