The National Interest

WE LIVE in a world where the greatest terrorist threats to the United States can hardly even be given a label. The actors are neither traditional terrorist groups nor the classic state sponsors. In the murkiest of undergrounds, weaknesses within states and their governments’ desires to bolster their security often result in an inability to rein in societies’ darkest undercurrents. In this netherworld, Saudi Arabia funded the kind of networking that ultimately led to 9/11. Pakistan becomes in part responsible for the Talibanization of its own country as sectarian strife explodes and members of its intelligence service abet radicals. Even Iran, a classic state sponsor, finds itself hedging its bets, funding all kinds of radical groups in Iraq, even ones that are fighting its favored proxies. These states create serious problems for the United States, deadly problems for their regions and at times catastrophic problems for themselves.

For all the talk of “nonstate actors” or “networked organizations,” states remain at the core of the war on terror. Some are willing to fight al-Qaeda and become invaluable allies; others ignore the danger or even tacitly support it. Yet these states’ motivations and activities are far different than the types of sponsorship seen during the cold war. Then, terrorists were funded to act as deniable proxies for states; now, many terrorist groups are as much “playing” their sponsors as vice versa. Indeed, states are often more anxious to support terrorism not to cause trouble for others but to keep it out of their own backyards.

A closer look at states like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and many other countries linked to terrorism reveals that the primary problem today is government passivity rather than active support. It is what states are not doing that poses the greatest danger—especially when such states deliberately turn a blind eye as terrorists recruit, raise money and otherwise build their organizations on their territory.

One way that states try to deal with terrorism is to pawn the problem off on someone else: they give suspected militants the choice of staying and being arrested if they target locals or leaving for another country, where these same radicals often commit or plan acts of terror. Yemen, on paper a strong U.S. ally, is the poster child for this method. On the one hand, Sanaa’s security forces have made dramatic arrests of leading al-Qaeda figures. Yet terror detainees have repeatedly escaped from the country’s jails and many Yemeni jihadists who went through the government’s “reeducation” program later went to Iraq to fight against U.S. forces.

Yemeni political-analyst Murad Abdul Wahed Zafir has compared his country to a bus station: some terrorists are stopped, but others are permitted to go on their merry way. “We appease our partners in the West,” he says, “but we are not really helping” to destroy transnational terrorist networks. And this phenomenon is not limited to Yemen. It can be observed in several other North African and Middle Eastern states—local radicals shipped off to the jihad battlefields of Iraq as a way of passing the buck.

We are also observing a fundamental shift in the power relationship, as many terrorist groups are better thought of as partners of governments rather than merely state proxies. But judging these changes can be difficult. The idea of sponsorship itself is clouded: governments are at times divided or do not control their own intelligence services or regional branches. In some cases, terrorist groups have “captured” at least part of the state apparatus for their own ends. Complicating the picture is “blowback”: state sponsors regularly become infected with the terrorism virus they seek to spread to others. What’s happening in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia—two key U.S. allies—underscores these dangers.

Pakistan’s Passive Aggression

PAKISTAN’S TIES to terrorism are hardly new. In its fight with India, the Pakistani government worked with groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Harakat ul-Mujahedeen to train jihadists to fight in Kashmir. Islamabad both armed and trained groups directly and encouraged various Islamist movements in Pakistan to raise money and support recruitment efforts. Many of these groups were temporarily banned or forced to change their names in response to U.S. pressure after 9/11, but they or their successors remain active.

Pakistan long tried to maintain the fiction of deniability, claiming these groups operated without its support. But the size of the training camps, the scale of the recruitment effort, and the repeated reports of direct army and intelligence-service coordination all suggest an extensive relationship. If Islamabad does not exercise full control over the groups fighting in Kashmir, this is because it has chosen to remain unaware of all their activities.

Although support for Kashmiri groups remains roughly constant, Pakistan’s evolving relationship with terrorism is apparent when considering its relationship with the Taliban. Before 9/11, Pakistan’s ties to the Taliban were extensive and well documented; despite Islamabad’s claims to the contrary, there was at best a short hiatus in the relationship after 9/11. But Pakistan has shifted its emphasis away from funding and working with the Taliban directly. It no longer sends Pakistani troops to fight alongside the Taliban, as it did during the 1990s, but it now allows this group to operate inside Pakistan with little interference. The Taliban’s leadership today is based in Pashtun areas of Pakistan, and the government does not arrest or kill them; moreover, they are in a position to plan and direct attacks in Afghanistan from their Pakistani safe havens. NATO commanders in Afghanistan complain that Pakistani efforts to prevent these attacks and to close down the border have been halfhearted at best.

Some of what used to be “official” Pakistani support for terrorism has now been “outsourced” from the government to other nonstate actors, particularly political parties. For example, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam of Fazlur Rehman (JUI-F), a political and religious group that calls for religious government and endorses many militant Islamist positions, openly backs the Taliban. In addition, the JUI-F has extensive ties to an array of jihadists who are involved not only in fighting in Afghanistan and Kashmir, but also in various struggles throughout the Muslim world. JUI-F–linked individuals provide training, networking, financing and other services for various jihadists writ large. It is difficult to believe that all of this can be occurring without the tacit approval—or studied ignorance—of the Pakistani government.

But this raises the question: to what extent is the government of Pakistan still able to control the situation? In other words, when are military officers or agents of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) acting on behalf of the Pakistani state, or in defiance of it?

Pakistan’s traditional strategic ambitions in Kashmir and Afghanistan—to frustrate Indian ambitions in the former and to gain strategic depth for Pakistan in the latter—were a major motivation in the past for Islamabad to work with radical groups with ties to terrorism. But in the Pervez Musharraf era, domestic politics grew as a vital factor too. The general, who had little backing from the traditional “secular” parties for his regime, reached out to Islamist parties such as the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal for support. These parties tended to be much more sympathetic to the cause of the radicals in Kashmir as well as to the Taliban—and this caused the government to turn somewhat of a blind eye to their support of the radicals. Moreover, such causes are supported by many segments of the Pakistani population, while, as polling data suggest, anything that indicates Pakistan is performing Washington’s bidding in the “war on terror” is unpopular. These sentiments may prove to be even more constraining for democratically elected politicians in being able to accommodate America’s requests than for Musharraf.

Pakistan, as a government, seems to have tried to walk a fine line: cooperating with the West against al-Qaeda but being less willing to crack down on the Taliban and those engaged in jihad in Kashmir. After prolonged clashes, particularly in the tribal areas, leading to hundreds of deaths of soldiers and civilian officials, there seems to be more willingness to tolerate radical activity, particularly if it’s directed away from Pakistan. This trend has been reflected in cease-fire attempts in Waziristan, from which the government may gain a measure of domestic peace but at the price of greater local freedom of action to support Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and foreign jihadists.

And whether any Pakistani government is in firm control of its intelligence services is open to question. The ISI is reported to channel resources to various Islamist groups, tip them off about government counterterrorism actions, and look the other way as they recruit and raise money. Whether this has been official policy or not is difficult to assess. On the one hand, former–U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan William Milam claims that the ISI has been firmly under Musharraf’s control. Musharraf also cleaned house at the ISI after 9/11, replacing many of its senior leaders with loyalists. Some have concluded that Musharraf tried to play both sides: depicting the ISI as a “rogue elephant” to gain goodwill in the West, while at the same time maintaining Pakistani ties to the Taliban and Kashmiri jihadists. But others maintain that loyalties are quite difficult to ascertain, particularly at the lower levels of the ISI and the military.

Whether the government was covering its tracks or not, one major cost of “outsourcing terrorism” has been a decline in government control. Organizations like the JUI-F, for example, did not draw a distinction between those engaged in jihad abroad and those who also violently oppose the government of Pakistan itself. The dozens of small foreign jihadist groups, as well as the large cadre of Taliban, have cross-fertilized with various Islamist groups in Pakistan, producing a dangerous mix of organization, political ambition and violence. Militants in Pakistan openly raise money and issue propaganda in support of jihadist causes. From the ranks of such groups have come those who have not been content to fight the Indians in Kashmir or the Americans in Afghanistan, but who have wanted to take power in Pakistan itself. Since 1999, Musharraf suffered at least seven assassination attempts, several of which came quite close to success—plots that were incubated in the bosom of the groups also supporting the Taliban and fighters in Kashmir. Particularly troubling was the revelation that several members of the Karachi-based al-Almi terrorist organization, which had split off from the Kashmir-focused (and thus government-supported) Harakat ul-Mujahedeen, tried to kill Musharraf in 2002. Another stunning example of blowback was last year’s assassination of former–Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. During the 1990s, her government originally sought to use the Taliban to advance Pakistani strategic interests in Afghanistan. But once the Pakistani state lost control of the forces she helped unleash, Bhutto paid with her life.

Redefining Saudi Sponsorship

WHATEVER lingering doubts the Saudi government might have had about al-Qaeda post-9/11, after May 2003—when jihadists targeted the kingdom itself and heavy fighting broke out between these homegrown jihadists and the security services—any official toleration for fund-raising and recruitment for jihadist organizations came to a close. Today the Saudi regime regularly arrests or kills radicals who are plotting attacks from its soil.

Despite this aggressive stance, the kingdom remains a problem for counterterrorism—but not because of what the government in Riyadh does. Wealthy Saudis continue to contribute large sums of money for the support of jihadists seeking to fight in Iraq. (A recent estimate is that 41 percent of the “foreign fighters” in Iraq are Saudi nationals.) Private Saudi support remains essential for many other jihadist causes, ranging from insurgent groups tied to al-Qaeda to radical religious schools both in the West and in the Muslim world.

So far, the Saudi government has been loath to altogether forbid Saudi citizens from using their personal fortunes to support popular causes. The self-styled “Guardian of the Two Mosques” does not want to be accused of abandoning Muslims in Palestine, Kashmir or elsewhere. In addition, long-standing Arab-Sunni prejudices against the Shia and the pervasive fear that Iraq is on the verge of being taken over by the “Persians” make it quite difficult to stem the flow of funds and recruits to various Sunni insurgent groups in Iraq.

Because the House of Saud relies upon the endorsement of the Sunni religious establishment to bolster its legitimacy and right to rule, it can take action against al-Qaeda for its attacks on fellow Muslims but risks drawing the opprobrium of leading clerics and the public if it were to curtail altogether the ability of Saudis to support jihadist-linked causes elsewhere in the world. There is also little stomach in the kingdom to censor the large amounts of anti-Shia and anti-Western propaganda generated by the religious establishment, even though this material provides the justification for violence and terrorism. As in Pakistan, Riyadh often finds it easier to redirect terrorists’ energies away from Saudi soil rather than control or stop them.

But, over time, this strategy could backfire. Many of the Saudi foreign fighters in Iraq also virulently oppose the royal family—and their return could lead to the emergence of a large group of “Iraq alumni” who might then take the skills honed in battle against the United States and employ them against the Saudi regime. And the continual stoking of the Sunni-Shia rift threatens to inflame tensions in the kingdom’s oil-rich Eastern Province.

From Proxies to Partners

THESE TWO examples challenge the traditional view of state sponsorship, which puts the state in the driver’s seat, with the terrorist group meekly carrying out the regime’s instructions. This shift is visible today in the Hezbollah-Iran connection—one of the oldest and deepest relationships between a state and a terrorist group. Iran has long provided Hezbollah with military training, financial support and weapons, as well as ideological guidance. In the 1980s, Hezbollah proudly saw itself as Iran’s proxy, and its leaders swore allegiance to Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s supreme leader. Hezbollah not only attacked its own enemies in Lebanon, but also struck Iran’s in the Middle East and Europe. Today, Iran and Hezbollah remain exceptionally close, but Iran’s day-to-day control of Hezbollah in Lebanon is more limited than it once was. Tehran appears not to have initiated or orchestrated the kidnapping incident that sparked the July 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel. Hezbollah also has its own funding sources and training capabilities that would enable it to weather a decrease in backing from its longtime benefactor.

Hezbollah can also be more of a partner with Iran than in the past because Hezbollah has now successfully captured at least part of the Lebanese state. This goes beyond those pieces of real estate it controls, particularly in south Lebanon, in the Bekaa Valley and in several poor Shia suburbs of Beirut. After months of protest, the Party of God now wields veto power over all cabinet decisions. And the Lebanese Army could not defeat Hezbollah if it confronted it, in part because many of its members would disobey orders if asked to fight the group.

Moreover, Hezbollah itself is now a sponsor of other terrorist organizations. Both Iran and Hezbollah view the peace process as illegitimate and support the goals of Palestinian rejectionist movements. Since the outbreak of the latest intifada in September 2000, Hezbollah has stepped up its support for Hamas, the Palestine Islamic Jihad and other anti-Israel groups. This support includes guerrilla training, bomb-building expertise and tactical tips such as how to use mines against Israeli armor. Hezbollah has even placed its own extensive media holdings—including radio and satellite television stations—at the disposal of these Palestinian organizations. Again, the relationship is of a partner rather than a proxy. Tehran and Hezbollah appear to even have broken down Hamas training, with the bulk of it occurring under joint Iranian and Hezbollah tutelage in Lebanon while a smaller, more-select group of Palestinians goes to Iran for advanced training.

Iran’s relationship with its so-called proxies in Iraq also demonstrates these changing dynamics. During the 1980s, Iran utilized the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI) as an auxiliary in its struggle with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Iran even organized part of SCIRI into the Badr Corps to fight against Iraqi forces on Iran’s behalf. Today, SCIRI is the “Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq” (ISCI) and an integral part of the U.S.-backed Iraqi government.

Although ISCI may be Iran’s closest ally in Iraq, Tehran has sought out many other relationships, even at the price of weakening ISCI. Traditionally, Moktada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army had sought to keep distance between themselves and Iran, blasting ISCI as an Iranian puppet. But as ISCI moved into the U.S. orbit, Tehran reached out to al-Sadr. Tehran has also worked with elements of the Mahdi Army to form lethal “special groups” that U.S. commanders blame for deadly attacks on coalition and Iraqi forces. Iran has also bolstered its ties to the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and a variety of local Kurdish leaders. Finally, there are consistent reports that Tehran has even made contact with various Sunni jihadist groups, though the level of cooperation is difficult to discern from unclassified sources. All of this suggests that Iran wants to hedge its bets in Iraq—and that Kurds and Sunnis and less-than-pro-Iranian Shia have found it beneficial to accept funds, arms and training from Iran no less than Iran’s immediate proxies. Iran definitely has its fingers in many pies in Iraq—but many of these groups are not part and parcel of an Iranian Wurlitzer and have their own agendas.

Should violence among various Shia groups grow in Iraq, Tehran would try to tamp it down and foster a degree of unity. However, it is not clear that Iran could control the chaos it has brewed. Even its closer allies like ISCI have a strong independent streak and respond first and foremost to events in Iraq, while the Mahdi Army, as much as it is unified, is very much its own master. Iraqi Shia groups would pause and listen to Iran, but they would then decide on their own whether or not to escalate.

Ironically, Iran’s support for Hezbollah and especially Shia groups has worked against one of Iran’s primary foreign-policy goals: to overcome the Sunni-Shia split and emerge as the leader of the Islamic world. The clerical regime in Iran has long seen itself as an “Islamic” and “revolutionary” government rather than a Shia one and has sought to work with groups like Hamas that share its anti–status quo agenda. The rise of sectarian tension in Iraq and Lebanon—in part due to Iran’s support for Shia groups there and the fear this has engendered—is making it harder for Tehran to bridge this gulf.

An Inadequate U.S. Response

FIGHTING STATE sponsorship is an exceptionally difficult task even with perfect policies, but the U.S. approach remains stuck in the 1980s, when Iran, Libya, Syria, the Soviet bloc and other states provided the bulk of support for terrorists and exercised a good deal of control over their activities. Back then, the threat of sanctions or military force could be more easily employed to stop or at least curtail terrorist activities.

But what does it mean to be a state sponsor today?

Is Lebanon a sponsor—because of Hezbollah, which is part of the government? What about Pakistan? And, in the case of a country like Saudi Arabia, if part of the country’s elite is willing to put its personal blood and treasure at the service of terror, how do we square that with the al-Sauds’ recent determination to fight terrorists? And we aren’t going to be attacking Riyadh, Beirut or Islamabad anytime soon.

The emerging challenge today is to end passive sponsorship. From a U.S. point of view, passive sponsorship is particularly problematic because many of the regimes in question are close U.S. allies in the war on terror. Getting states to sever their active links to terrorist groups is only half the battle. Encouraging more countries to combat a permissive environment in which terrorists can flourish will be far more difficult.

The United States will have to do a better job of convincing its allies that the “bus station” strategy will not work in the long run. Jihadists returning from Kashmir or Iraq will pose a threat to governments in Islamabad and Riyadh—not all of them are going to fall in battle with the Indian or U.S. armies.

In addition, as we have seen in Jordan in the aftermath of the Amman attacks, when terrorism ceases to be a problem for “someone else” and strikes close to home, public support for jihadists and their ideologies drops. Efforts to play up terrorist missteps and atrocities should be done at the popular level as well as at the governmental level. The United States and its allies need to place more focus on the stories of victims of terrorism: it is usually easier (and more important) for other publics—especially in the Islamic world—to hate the terrorists than to love the United States. What the United States should seek is for citizens to support their own government in a crackdown, not back a U.S. campaign directly.

A constant challenge is government capacity. If regimes do seek to turn the corner on fighting terrorism, U.S. assistance in training and equipping local military and security forces can be exceptionally useful. At times, when local allies are too weak, U.S. forces may even fight alongside, helping them locate, capture or kill terrorists, as is happening now in Afghanistan. Washington should also expand efforts to train allied police and intelligence services and help them with tasks like tracking terrorist financing that require advanced skills.

Finally, the United States needs to accept that “state sponsorship” can often be something that occurs at the substate level and to respond accordingly. Where the government is exceptionally weak and capacity cannot be realistically developed in the medium term, U.S. policy must engage local actors or bureaucracies directly. In Iraq, for example, in the Kurdish north, the Iraqi central government is exceptionally weak and “cannot mobilize a single soldier,” as an article in Al-Quds al-Arabi contended. The Kurdish regional authorities, however, are able to counter terrorism, as they have shown in their efforts to go after Arab jihadists who try to operate in Kurdish areas. The challenge for the United States is finding a way to work with the Kurdish regional government to stem the actions of Kurdish terrorist groups operating in Turkey—which would require Washington to bypass Baghdad and directly engage Erbil. A similar strategy might need to be employed in places like Yemen, where central authority is weak, or in Somalia, where it is nonexistent altogether.

The challenge of sponsorship today is tougher than in the past. Rather than put a state on a list in order to compel it to change its behavior, ending support often requires truly fundamental changes in the regime and society. The primary drivers of state support, particularly with regard to what states choose not to do, have little to do with Washington. Some states seek to appease domestic critics, while others want to divert them. Saudi Arabia only got serious with regard to al-Qaeda and its allies after the kingdom was attacked in May 2003. Even the 9/11 attacks did not push the kingdom from its passivity into the war footing it is now on. For Pakistan, easily the biggest counterterrorism headache for the United States today, the primary drivers are the regime’s ambitions for Afghanistan and Pakistan, desire to court Islamists at home, and limited capacity.

When these regimes consider whether to support terrorists, Washington’s policies enter into the equation, but they are not the deciding factor. Even if all the above recommendations are implemented, the United States will not solve the problem of state sponsorship. Washington is trying to get these regimes not to stop doing something but to stop doing nothing—a much-tougher task. So even as we try to fight and limit state sponsorship, we must also recognize that we will have to manage and guard against it for years to come.

Daniel Byman is the director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. This article draws on his longer study The Changing Nature of State Sponsorship of Terrorism for the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, which is available at http://www.brookings.edu/saban.aspx.