Almost entirely up to date now. A new piece exploring what competition might take place between China and India in Afghanistan. Interesting to see them both engaging with the Taliban government in different ways, and going to be interesting how this plays out going forwards. Thanks to Byron at the Center on Asia and Globalisation (CAG) at the Lee Kuan Yew school at the National University of Singapore for the kind invitation to contribute again to their fantastic China-India Brief.
There have been numerous developments in Afghanistan since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. Amongst the most unexpected was the rapidity with which New Delhi appears to have built up its relationship with new regime. While it was never clear how antagonistic the core Taliban leadership itself was to the Indian government, the fact they hosted numerous militant groups targeting India and were close to Pakistan meant they seemed obvious adversaries. Moreover, given that New Delhi had developed a strong relationship with the Republic government in Kabul, there was an expectation that India’s relationship with Afghanistan would go into a deep freeze.
Yet, as things have played out, New Delhi has instead leaned into its relationship with the Taliban. Now going so far as to open an Embassy in Kabul and having senior officials meet with Taliban counterparts. India has sent humanitarian aid and technical support teams, and suggested it might do more. In so doing, India has seemed to emulate the approach taken by China which has been very prominent in its support for the new authorities in Kabul. But the path taken by both has been very different, and the reasons for this engagement are equally different. A question lingering over all of this has been the degree to which their engagement reflects a desire to try to curtail each other’s activity in Afghanistan with the country becoming another point of conflict between the two Asian giants.
The Taliban’s desire to court the two Asian giants is clear. From their perspective, any opportunity to try to gain greater support, potential investment and exposure as a legitimate international authority is positive. The Taliban have long made it clear they are happy to work with China on certain issues (mostly around investment)—even during the previous Republic government’s time they would speak of protecting Chinese investments. Cooperation on dealing with China’s Uyghur concerns seems more mixed, with few in the movement wanting to turn over their former battlefield allies to China.
India is a newer player in this regard, though the Taliban have been quick to grab at the opportunity. It is not clear how much India has been demanding counter-terrorism support which is being delivered, though presumably this is a part of the conversation. Doubtless there is a part of the Taliban that likes the fact that the growing proximity to New Delhi causes consternation in Islamabad, demonstrating their distance from Pakistan and giving them a sense of strategic depth and control over their destiny.
For New Delhi, it is an obvious play to try to create some options for itself and to try to find ways of insulating itself from potential terrorist problems that might emerge. Engaging the Taliban also plays into regional geopolitics, placing India in a stronger position in a battlefield where its two biggest regional adversaries (China and Pakistan) are strong players. The Indian expert community has articulated the view that a large part of New Delhi’s engagement is a product of ensuring China does not end up owning the geopolitical vacuum that might exist in Kabul.
For Beijing, the question seems more narrowly focused on engaging with the Taliban to ensure the country does not become a locus for threats against China (both at home and in the region) and creating its own backstops to Pakistani security guarantees. Where China sees great power conflict, it tends to be more towards the United States (US), with India interpreted as a player that Washington is working through.
Beijing was never quite as agitated by Indian activity in Afghanistan as was sometimes made out. These concerns were largely expressed by Pakistan and sometimes echoed by Beijing. During the tenure of the previous Republic government, the Indian and Chinese governments actually even went so far as to cooperate on diplomatic training programmes of Afghan diplomats—an outcome from the successful summits between Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping in 2018 and 2019.
But as the wider China-India relationship fell apart, in large part due to increasingly aggressive border clashes and the growing proximity between India and the US, this cooperation fell by the wayside. The Republic government in Kabul continued to try to find ways of engaging with both, but this became harder as trust levels fell. It was clear that direct cooperation between New Delhi and Beijing was going to be impossible. Beijing started to agree with Islamabad and mutter about Indian support for terrorist groups using bases in Afghanistan to strike Chinese targets in Pakistan. And in December 2020, Indian intelligence was suspected as being behind information that was given to the National Directorate of Security (NDS) in Kabul about a network of 10 Chinese Ministry of State Security (MSS) agents who had been operating in the country under cover.
It is not clear how this growing confrontation will develop. China and India continue to seem to want to both confront and appear to engage at the same time. It is likely that we will see some steps towards rapprochement more broadly between New Delhi and Beijing, notwithstanding their deep disagreements. The leaderships are not eager for a full-on open conflict, as reflected by their willingness to both still participate in the Samarkand Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit. It is not clear this limited rapprochement will happen in Afghanistan as well.
From what is discernible in the public domain, the Indian government has for the most part been engaging with the parts of the Taliban government that are linked to the group who used to run the Doha office and those from Kandahar. Mullah Yacoub, the son of the former Taliban leader Mullah Omar and current Defence Minister, gave an interview to the Indian press in June. Prior to that much of India’s engagement seems to have been through the Ministry of External Affairs which has been engaging with its counterparts in the Taliban Ministry (mostly men who were involved in the Doha office).
Beijing on the other hand has been engaging with a far wider range of actors but does not seem to be gaining absolute trust from all of them. Where it does seem to be finding more acceptance is amongst the Haqqani faction of the Taliban government in Kabul. While it is clear other parts are eager to engage as well—in particular on economic matters— a certain level of tension lingers. This is in part a product of over-inflated expectations on the Kabul side, as well as an awareness on the Chinese side of the sheer complexity of any major endeavour in war-scarred Afghanistan.
What both China and India share, however, is a general negative image that could catch on amongst the wider community of committed extremists in Afghanistan. India’s BJP government is perceived as being Islamophobic—a topic repeatedly harped on about in extremist literature linked to organisations like al Qaeda or Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP). While China’s mistreatment of Uyghurs is a topic that ISKP has particularly locked on to as a topic recognising that it is a subject of great sensitivity both amongst the Uyghur contingent in Afghanistan and their supporters, this is also an anger that resonates amongst rank and file Taliban fighters.
China and India are therefore in the awkward position of potentially garnering support from the Taliban authorities but not at a wider level. Implementing their projects on the ground could become highly complicated, and even lead to some sort of internal fractures of fissures within the Taliban movement. The wider chaos that might ensue is more likely to damage Chinese interests than Indian ones . China’s direct border and substantial investments in Afghanistan’s neighbourhood mean there is a wider range of interests that could be damaged, while India still has a certain level of insulation provided by geography.
The final aspect to this dynamic is the degree to which China and India will transfer their wider tensions to the Afghanistan, and turn the country into an arena of confrontation. There are two external elements which are likely to play into this—the US and Pakistan. Both powers are close allies of India and China respectively, and have different interests in Afghanistan. The degree to which relations between China and the US or India and Pakistan are going well or badly is likely to influence how Beijing and New Delhi lock horns in Afghanistan. Given that we seem set on a period of geopolitical confrontation, the outlook for positive resolution seems unlikely. There is, sadly, a very high chance of Afghanistan becoming once again a place for geopolitical competition, this time between China and India.
Raffaello Pantucci is a Senior Fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). He tweets at @raffpantucci.
Another piece written around President Xi’s visit to Central Asia, this time for the Straits Times exploring the growing clout that China has within the region. Draws on ideas in the book of course, but also on the fact that travel is now possible once again so am able to get to the region a bit again.
A vacuum is developing as Russia’s war in Ukraine dismantles Moscow’s credibility and strength across the Eurasian heartland.
A broadcast of the meeting between Mr Xi Jinping and Mr Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Uzbekistan. PHOTO: REUTERS
President Xi Jinping’s decision to pick Central Asia for his first foreign trip since the Covid-19 pandemic began reflects Beijing’s confidence that it is now the ascendant power in the Eurasian heartland. This was clearly evident from both Mr Xi’s tour of the region and the much-watched meeting between the Chinese leader and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin on the fringes of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, last week.
The optics around Mr Xi’s visit underlined China’s rising star in the region. First, the grandiloquence was apparent in both Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the two countries he chose to visit.
The Kazakhs were clearly very pleased that theirs was the first country Mr Xi decided to visit. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev was at the airport to personally welcome the Chinese leader in fluent Mandarin and nothing was spared in the way of pomp and ceremony for the state visit, including the awarding of the Order of Altyn Kyran (Order of the Golden Eagle) to Mr Xi. The two leaders also toured a recently opened exhibit of archaeological artefacts that was displayed under the title “Kazakhstan-China: Dialogue of the Millennia”.
Not to be outdone, the authorities in Uzbekistan also put on a grandiose welcome for Mr Xi, with large groups of dancing people at the airport. President Shavkat Mirziyoyev could not match his Kazakh counterpart’s Mandarin skills, but he also awarded Mr Xi the country’s “highest friendship award”, the Order of Friendship.
The contrast could not have been more striking during Mr Mirziyoyev’s meeting with Mr Putin. Rather than the Uzbeks offering their visitor an award, it was the Russian leader who dished out a medal to his Uzbek counterpart. He awarded Mr Mirziyoyev the Order of Alexander Nevsky, which is given to foreign leaders “for major contributions to promoting friendly ties with Russia”.
The strains were also palpable during the bilateral meeting between the Chinese and Russian leaders, with Mr Putin openly acknowledging that China had expressed concerns and questions about the war in Ukraine. Mr Putin made similar comments during his separate bilateral meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was also in town for the SCO summit. Mr Putin’s comments separately to both leaders only served to emphasise the sense that neither China nor India was in fact very pleased with the Russian leader’s aggression in Ukraine.
But the differences should not be overplayed. In Beijing’s case, at least, the reality is that it has little desire to put Russia down or see Moscow lose in a conflict against the West. The net result of that would be to weaken Beijing’s support base in its larger geopolitical confrontation with the West, and would also provide more space for the West to focus more on China. The conflict in Ukraine provides a useful distraction at the moment.
China is certainly not happy with the global disruptions and costs generated by the conflict, but at the same time, it has little choice but to support Moscow as an important geopolitical partner in confronting the United States-led West.
Wider context
The wider context of the summit in the Uzbek capital was more interesting. Established in 2001 with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Russia and China, the SCO has grown, in large part due to Chinese efforts, to become a multilateral organisation bringing together the leaders of around 40 per cent of the world’s population. It now includes India, Pakistan and Iran, with countries like Belarus and Turkey knocking at the door. An organisation often overlooked in the West (or in much strategic discourse), it is in fact emblematic of the growing influence that China has across a growing swathe of the central and eastern Eurasian heartland.
Mr Xi’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative came from a desire to carve routes across this region, rewiring infrastructure and trading routes that used to lead to Moscow to instead be diverted to China. While the Kremlin was initially dismissive of China’s inroads into the region, Moscow now finds itself trying to co-opt or counteract Beijing by touting to the others what it can offer that China cannot.
Russia, though, is increasingly on the back foot among its neighbours, largely because of Ukraine. In the past couple of weeks, violence has erupted once again between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh in the Caucasus. A long-running border dispute between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan has also escalated again, leading to dozens of deaths as security forces on both sides shell and shoot at each other. This is occurring as trouble on the other side of Tajikistan, in the Badakhshan region, continues, and there has also been recent large-scale public unrest in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Yet, Russia has been able to offer security support only in Kazakhstan, and even then in a limited way.
It is worth noting that China has not stepped into any of these issues. Beijing has little appetite to get stuck in such messy conflicts, recognising that it will struggle to try to resolve them, and will most likely only make enemies in the process. China would rather wait it out and let history take its course. But it will be increasingly difficult to adopt this passive stance as it becomes the biggest economic power across the region.
Few in the region will deny Russia’s importance, but many have become wary of Moscow in the aftermath of Mr Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. There has been notable diplomatic pushback across Central Asia, and a growing sense of a need to develop other options, including building up ties with China.
A vacuum is developing – one which, logically, China can fill. Russia’s war in Ukraine is dismantling Moscow’s credibility and strength across the Eurasian heartland, and China is currently the most obvious beneficiary.
But Beijing has not chosen to do much with its growing clout.
Going forward, evading that responsibility might no longer be possible.
Raffaello Pantucci is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, and the author of Sinostan: China’s Inadvertent Empire (Oxford University Press, April 2022)
Almost up to date, now a piece for Foreign Policy about the importance of Central Asia in Chinese foreign policy in the wake of his tour to Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
The region has long served as a testing ground for Beijing’s economic and foreign-policy ambitions and is becoming increasingly close to China.
China’s President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev and other participants attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) leaders’ summit in Samarkand on September 16, 2022. (Photo by Sergei BOBYLYOV / SPUTNIK / AFP) (Photo by SERGEI BOBYLYOV/SPUTNIK/AFP via Getty Images)
Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision to make Central Asia the site of his first foreign visit since the coronavirus pandemic began is an unsurprising one. The region is one where China can claim lots of foreign-policy successes and is full of countries that will not publicly criticize Beijing. As then-Lt. Gen. Liu Yazhou [1] put it in 2010, Central Asia ‘is a rich piece of cake given to today’s Chinese people by Heaven.’
Modern China’s relationship with Central Asia goes back to the end of the Soviet Union. Beijing inherited a number of things from the collapse of Moscow’s empire. One was a lesson on how not to dismantle a communist ruling governance structure; the other was a messy border adjacent to one of Beijing’s most sensitive regions. The second became the foundational issue for China’s relations with Central Asia.
For China, the end of the Soviet Union meant that it suddenly found itself bordering four new countries: Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. (Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan also emerged, but they did not share borders with China.) The Soviet-Chinese frontier had always been remote and ill-defined, and with the emergence of these new states, there was a need to establish relations, define borders, and attempt to demilitarize what was a messy and ill-defined space. Chinese President Xi Jinping’s decision to make Central Asia the site of his first foreign visit since the coronavirus pandemic began is an unsurprising one. The region is one where China can claim lots of foreign-policy successes and is full of countries that will not publicly criticize Beijing. As then-Lt. Gen. Liu Yazhou[1] put it in 2010, Central Asia ‘is a rich piece of cake given to today’s Chinese people by Heaven.’
Modern China’s relationship with Central Asia goes back to the end of the Soviet Union. Beijing inherited a number of things from the collapse of Moscow’s empire. One was a lesson on how not to dismantle a communist ruling governance structure; the other was a messy border adjacent to one of Beijing’s most sensitive regions. The second became the foundational issue for China’s relations with Central Asia.
For China, the end of the Soviet Union meant that it suddenly found itself bordering four new countries: Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. (Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan also emerged, but they did not share borders with China.) The Soviet-Chinese frontier had always been remote and ill-defined, and with the emergence of these new states, there was a need to establish relations, define borders, and attempt to demilitarize what was a messy and ill-defined space.
This led to the creation of the Shanghai Five grouping, bringing together the leaders of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Russia to help define borders, establish what military presence would exist, what cross-border trade would look like, and how the relationships between China and these new states could develop.
But the entity grew far beyond its initial mandate, and it was so successful (at least from a Chinese perspective) that Uzbekistan was encouraged to join. With Tashkent’s ascension, the name changed and in 2001, it evolved into the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Each member joined for their differing reasons. Beijing was always interested in the organization developing a strong economic aspect, something the others were more skeptical of. Ultimately, they all agreed to let it develop as a security grouping focused on terrorism, and it became the first international, security-focused, multilateral organization that China created.
This was a major step forward at a moment when China was still a relatively timid actor on the world stage. Here the country was trying to build something, when in many other contexts it appeared to be trying to still live by the maxim of ‘hide and bide your time.’ But within Central Asia, it was actually not surprising.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, China has sought to rekindle the idea of Silk Roads through Central Asia. At the time, the focus was to build pipelines and rail links from the region across China to the eastern seaboard to reach the booming Japanese market that was keen for Central Asian hydrocarbons. However, this rapidly shifted as China’s economy took off and needed more of these resources itself and people saw growing markets they wanted to connect with.
Beijing signed contracts in 1997 and was soon building pipelines in Kazakhstan to get its oil back to China (agreements were signed even earlier with Turkmenistan to access its rich gas supplies, but took much longer to actually implement). In the wake of his 1994 tour of the region, Chinese Premier Li Peng hosted meetings of Eurasian rail ministers to help develop links across the region and open up routes from China. This was a first for Chinese energy firms. Central Asia was a region where China was willing to try out new things.
As well as get access to the region’s rich resources, China’s ultimate goal in Central Asia was to help stabilize Xinjiang province. Beijing was worried about violence in the region, which had links across the border. Militant Islamists were a feature of the scenery in both the region and China—though the degree to which they were motivated by religion or their ethnic identity was difficult to determine. Large-scale violence took place in Central Asia as well as China throughout the late 1990s. China wanted cooperation and support from Central Asian governments to deal with this. As a result, strong and sensitive security links were developed.
But the longer-term answer to these problems, in Beijing’s analysis, was always going to be economic. A benefit of the collapse of the Soviet Union to Xinjiang in particular was a sudden opening up of what had been a landlocked region that had faced sealed borders. Chinese leaders at the time pushed the region to exploit these opportunities. As then-Chinese Foreign Minister Qian Qichen put it (as reported by Xinhua News Agency in March 1993), ‘the foreign minister urged all border regions [Xinjiang] to further improve their infrastructure and basic industries such as transport, energy and telecommunications to meet challenges they will face in years to come. Border trade must develop into mutual economic cooperation.’
This order was followed, and over the next few years, Xinjiang gradually increased its trading activity of goods with Central Asia. Products from across China would increasingly move through Xinjiang to Central Asia while raw materials and some agricultural products, in particular, would go into China. Much of this was via routes built by Chinese firms, often with Chinese bank loans supporting them.
This was something that was carried forward into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s time, when he decided in September 2013 to make Kazakhstan the site of his first speech laying out his big foreign-policy concept: the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). In doing this, he was building off earlier visits by Li and later declarations by leaders like former Chinese President Jiang Zemin or former Chinese leader Wen Jiabao, who in 2012 declared Urumqi the ‘gateway to Eurasia.'[2]
Central Asia had always held an important place in Chinese thinking, and Xi decided to stamp his imprimatur on it and take it one step further by globalizing the entire concept. But the broader vision of the BRI was something that China had been talking about and doing in Central Asia since the late 1990s.
There was an additional hard security agenda at play as well. Although strong contacts and focus had helped manage the violent threat that China perceived from angry Uyghurs, there were still risks. In the wake of rioting in Xinjiang in 2009, violence seemed to escalate, coming to an embarrassing head in 2013 when an attack was perpetrated in Tiananmen Square and then a year later when Xi visited Xinjiang in 2014, only to be met by an attempted suicide bombing at Urumqi’s train station. In their wake, an already tight security vice clamped down further, and there was an increasing push by China to establish clearer visibility on security threats in the region.
This led to the creation of a People’s Armed Police (PAP) permanent presence being established in Tajikistan along the top of the Wakhan Corridor—the thin strip of Afghanistan which reaches out and touches China, separating Tajikistan from Pakistan. (It was initially developed as a border between the rival Russian and British empires). This was China’s first-known military base outside its borders; it has since more publicly established a naval base in Djibouti and is currently exploring opportunities in other places as well.
The exact dates of the establishment of the base are unclear. From my own research around the region, I started to hear rumors as early as 2012, though it was unclear whether this was just Chinese soldiers patrolling, people misinterpreting what they thought they had seen, or something else. What is clear is that as word of it started to spread in the mid-2010s, Russia started to become agitated. But its public anger was directed more toward Tajikistan than China—bristling at the fact that a Collective Security Treaty Organization partner would allow a foreign base on its territory without informing its partners.
The Tajikistan episode highlights a long-standing, simplistic analysis that is often thrown around regarding this region. There are always dark rumors that Beijing is trying to oust Moscow from the region and that heated competition behind the scenes could escalate. There is doubtless some displacement happening, but the truth is that for both of them, competition over this region is far less relevant than the important geostrategic support they provide each other in their collective confrontation with the United States. Russia has noted it is losing ground and seeking to strengthen its position in creative ways by demonstrating what it can offer, but it is unlikely to do this in a way that would be interpreted as running counter to Chinese interests.
The region is a propitious one for Xi to make his first foreign foray in over two years. He is visiting a region where China has consistently tested out new foreign-policy ideas, where the local governments will go to great lengths to ensure the visit goes smoothly, and where there is an appetite for economic cooperation on all sides.
From a domestic Chinese perspective, it means Xi has had an easy visit where he rubs shoulders with some of the world’s largest powers (like Russia and India), can showcase his foreign-policy vision (the Belt and Road Initiative), and celebrate China’s contribution to the world of international multilateral organizations (the Shanghai Cooperation Organization).
Although the SCO is widely derided in the West, it has only grown and expanded in remit during its 21-year existence, and it now encompasses almost 40 percent of the world’s population. It is an organization that has important Western allies (like India) as members, reflecting its appeal beyond the club for anti-western authoritarians that it is sometimes described as. For many of its members, the SCO is an expression of the ‘more just’ international order that senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi[3] described to the Russian ambassador to Moscow. It is showing the world that there are options out there beyond the western-dominated order that was created in the wake of World War II.
Central Asia has always held an important place in Chinese strategic thinking. It is a space where China has consistently tested out new ideas and has a web of relations and interests that are tied to some of its most sensitive domestic national security concerns. It is now also giving Xi the final step of his victory lap ahead of his likely third-term coronation at the 20th National Party Congress.
Another edited interview with a senior security official for the excellent CTC Sentinel. I realize that it has been quite a while since I wrote an actual researched article for them. Been working on one for a long time which I really need to get finished. Huge thanks to Paul and his excellent team for their work.
Robert Hannigan was Director of GCHQ, the United Kingdom’s largest intelligence and security agency and NSA equivalent, between 2014 and 2017. He established the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and was responsible with military colleagues for the United Kingdom’s national offensive cyber program.
He was Prime Minister’s Security Adviser from 2007-2010, giving advice on counterterrorism and intelligence matters. Prior to that, he worked as principal adviser to Prime Minister Tony Blair on the Northern Ireland peace process. He was awarded the U.S. Intelligence Distinguished Public Service Medal in 2017 and honored by Queen Elizabeth for services to U.K. national security in 2013.
Robert is currently Warden of Wadham College, Oxford, and European Chairman of the cyber security company BlueVoyant. He is a Senior Fellow at the Belfer Center, Harvard; Fellow of the Institution of Engineering & Technology; and Distinguished Fellow of the Royal United Services Institute.
CTC: Shortly after you were appointed the director of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) in 2014, the Islamic State declared a caliphate after taking control of large swaths of Iraq and Syria. When you retired as director in 2017, the group was well on the path to territorial defeat in Syria and Iraq. How would you describe the contribution GCHQ made to the global campaign against the Islamic State and protecting the United Kingdom from the group’s terrorism? How did GCHQ evolve to focus on the Islamic State threat, and what were the lessons learned?
Hannigan: There were two things in particular about ISIS that made it different. One was obviously the geographical hold: the fact that it had territory in northern Syria and northern Iraq—whether you want to call it a caliphate or not—which made it almost inaccessible from the ground in practice.
The other thing that made it different was generational. This was a group that understood the power of media, and particularly new media, in a way that previous Islamist extremist groups had not. Those were two big challenges. From GCHQ’s point of view, counterterrorism was at that stage the biggest single mission. There were, of course, lots of other missions, too, but [CT] was a huge investment of resources, for obvious reasons. To some extent, GCHQ was using the lessons it had learnt in Afghanistan, which had been a very strong counterinsurgency/counterterrorism effort where GCHQ had been embedded with the military. It was building on those lessons, but of course the SIGINT environment in Syria and Iraq was very different.
In Afghanistan, essentially the Allies owned the communications space, just as they owned the air space. That wasn’t the case in northern Syria, so it was a different kind of challenge. But a lot of the techniques and international cooperation had been well exercised in Afghanistan. To some extent, the first part was a traditional mission of ‘how do you disrupt and destroy a terrorist organization from its leadership downwards,’ but the second bit was genuinely new in the sense that ISIS was obviously trying to project attacks back, as well as recruit heavily from the West to travel into the caliphate. Both of those ISIS objectives, which were interconnected, were things which we needed to disrupt, and so a lot of the task was about understanding how ISIS media worked and trying to disrupt that. I cannot say how this was done from a U.K. perspective, but there is a great deal of media reporting and academic work on this available in the U.S.
ISIS were doing two things through their media campaigns. One was inspiring people and then actively grooming those they had inspired to either come to join the group or launch attacks. And both of the stages really needed disrupting. Disrupting global ISIS media was a much broader challenge, of course, but trying to prevent individual grooming and attack planning was traditional MI5 territory, supported by GCHQ. It would not be right to go into the details of how it was done, but I do not think there was anything conceptually different about how we went about doing that from disrupting traditional recruitment and attack planning. The big difference was that it was all at one remove.
I think there were two advantages [for ISIS] to having territory: one was the propaganda value and the fact that you can present, as you saw endlessly in Dabiq and the other glossy publications, what life in the caliphate was like. That gave them a romantic propaganda advantage to be able to say, ‘Here we have built this wonderful land for you, where you can live a religiously pure life.’ But it also gave them a safe place from which to mount operations, and all they needed apart from connectivity was the understanding of how to do that: How do you inspire, radicalize, and then manipulate people? So in a sense, it was a psychological campaign as much as a physical one.
CTC: How would you describe the counterterrorism cooperation between GCHQ and U.S. agencies such as the NSA as well as other members of the Five Eyesa and European allies?
Hannigan: It is incredibly close and always has been, in particular with the NSA. But I think what happened over the ISIS campaign was that counterterrorism really drove the cooperation between SIGINT agencies in Europe. Cooperation amongst European partners has always been good on particular cases, but I think the pressures of terrorism really drove that in a very constructive way. So now the SIGINT agencies are [working] closer together, probably more than they have ever been as a result of terrorism, and there was very active cooperation right through the attacks in Europe and beyond, as well as cooperation with other services around the world.
Fortunately, with European partners, Brexit did not make much of a difference in terms of maintaining cooperation, partly because of the threat of terrorism; these joint efforts were too important to be damaged. Different Five Eyes partners will have slightly different relationships with different European countries. But for the U.K., the French and German relationships, for example, were very important. And the U.K.’s traditional military and intelligence relationships with the Scandinavian countries have remained very strong and strengthened in the context of Russia.
CTC: What for you have been the key lessons learned in balancing democratic liberties with intelligence gathering in counterterrorism in the 21 years since 9/11?
Hannigan: It’s always been a balance. Access to data is the key for SIGINT in particular, but probably for all the agencies, and what’s changed is that there’s been an exponential rise in the amount of data being produced by the private sector on citizens. This gives undemocratic states new possibilities to do surveillance, and it’s right that in a democratic society you need to have an active and constant debate about whether you’ve got the balance right. In the U.K., the [2016] Investigatory Powers Act was an attempt to do that after the revelations by Edward Snowden, though I think the legislation was coming anyway at the time, probably accelerated a bit by Snowden. In the U.K. context, that legislation seems to strike a balance that people are comfortable with.
It’s quite interesting that very quickly after the Snowden revelations, the debate moved on, because terrorism, then the resurgence of Russian aggression, and what the tech companies were doing with data really made what governments had access to seem quite secondary. Of course, it is very important that government should be held to a higher standard, and I think that it is a debate that needs to be had all the time, particularly as data processing and data holding in the private sector changes. But it does feel like the public debate has moved on, moved on to what companies like Facebook/Meta and the other tech companies are doing.
So I think the lesson for the intelligence community is not to be afraid of the public debate. Probably one of the mistakes made towards the end of the last century, and at the beginning of this one as the internet became available widely, was not to have that debate openly enough. Because consent is crucial to intelligence operations in democratic countries, and I think there was probably an assumption that everyone understood what was happening within this context and I am not sure people did. So one of the lessons is to get better at having that debate more often, especially as it is not a static thing and you are never going to come to a conclusion on the issue, rather it has to be a dynamic debate. Ultimately, we want the minimum necessary powers for agencies. But as the technology evolves, you have to evolve in response.
CTC: If we could pull on a few threads there, what was the impact of Edward Snowden’s revelations on counterterrorism capability, and how responsible do you think the social media platforms have been in keeping terrorists and extremist content off their platforms?
Hannigan: There was a clear reaction from terrorist groups and hostile states in particular, to the revelations, and yes, there were specific counterterrorism consequences, which at the time my predecessor Iain Lobban and his counterpart at the NSA Keith Alexander talked about.b There were things going dark that probably wouldn’t have gone dark otherwise.
With the tech companies, things have changed, but when I came into the job in 2014 I had a go at the companies1 (something that was unusual at the time). I thought they were at that point being irresponsible, and we were in a slightly ridiculous position where the agencies were having to ask a company’s permission effectively to help on particular operations. The companies would decide whether this met their threshold for what constituted terrorism, and there seemed to be something completely anti-democratic about that. For all their failings, governments at least get elected. Tech companies are not, and they do not have any expertise in this, so it is quite weird to be expecting a bunch of probably well-meaning people in Silicon Valley to make decisions about what is and what is not terrorism in a far-flung part of London.
And, to be fair to the companies, I think they felt deeply uncomfortable, too. They are money-making enterprises. Most of them are effectively advertising companies, if we are honest; Meta is a massive advertising company, and so was part of Google. That is their business, and they did not really want to be drawn into CT, which is where the narrative about them being neutral conduits and just platforms with no editorial control came from. I think they actually believed that narrative, and they really did not think they were enabling terrorist activity.
I think over the years—under public pressure but also as a result of terrorism and other serious crime—they have realized that they are not neutral and they have to take some kind of position on this, and they have to find a better way of doing it. Every major country is now looking at legislating on this; in the U.K., through the Online Safety Bill.c The manipulation of democratic institutions and elections has accelerated the feeling that we have to do something and put even more pressure on the tech companies.
So it does look very different now from when I said those things about ‘big tech.’ It was unfashionable to have a go at tech companies back in 2014; now everybody piles in and, if anything, it is a little one-sided. I think they are, on the whole, trying to address the problems, with varying degrees of success. But nobody quite has the answer. We know in the West that we do not want state control of these things, but neither do we want an unregulated private sector-driven landscape.
CTC: GCHQ has long been associated with signals intelligence. But in recent decades, there has been an information revolution with deep implications for intelligence gathering and analysis. Not only is there vastly more information (and dis- and mis-information) to sift through than ever before but open-source intelligence has become much more important and “the government’s ability to collect and analyze information is nowhere near dominant compared to what it used to be.”2 How have and should agencies like GCHQ be adapting? How important is AI and machine learning (ML) in this new era? Given “secret agencies will always favor secrets,” and given the calls for an open-source agency to be set up in the United States,3 does the United Kingdom now need a dedicated open-source agency, a new sort of BBC Monitoring?
Hannigan: Well, it’s interesting you mentioned BBC Monitoring as the Americans had the Open Source Center, which was a much larger version of that. It has now changed and become the Open Source Enterprise.d It was taken very seriously by the U.S. and did a great job. As does BBC Monitoring, though it has gradually been pared down over the years, and in any case was traditionally more focused on broadcast media than on new media or social media.
[Dis/mis-information] is a huge challenge but is highlighted not so much by terrorism but by the attempts to subvert democratic processes by Russia. The U.K. and lots of countries were really caught napping here because there wasn’t any structural part of government whose responsibility was to monitor this. There were two reasons for this, I think. One is that the secret agencies have a lot of other things to do—countering terrorism, for example—and have limited resources. But secondly, it’s very uncomfortable for intelligence agencies to be doing open-source monitoring, particularly where social media is concerned. There is something instinctively difficult about secret agencies looking at mass social media use. The idea [of having] GCHQ or MI5 all over everybody’s Facebook accounts smacks too much of a surveillance state and would be unacceptable in a democratic society.
As a result, for both those reasons, lots of governments, including the U.K., have shied away from looking at this and attempted to do it in a tactical, well-meaning but arguably ineffective way in the Cabinet Officee or somewhere like that, where they are trying to get a small group of people to have a look at this information flow.
To me, the answer has to be a better use of the private sector. Most of this open-source material is being generated by the private sector. Look at Ukraine and the low-orbit satellite imagery that is being generated; it’s absolutely phenomenal, better in many cases than the military equivalent and available in theory to everybody. [The same applies to] the monitoring of social media trends. So I think the answer has to be government agencies using [private sector-generated data and analytics] better.
There are still lots of datasets that are secret, of course, and there are statutory-based accesses to data, which other people don’t have outside government. Focusing on that and what is genuinely secret and hidden is a much better use of agency time.
The real advantage comes from washing the secret and the open-source data together. In other words, you are, as a secret agency, doing your secret thing but you’re also washing that against the results of open source, and that’s where you get something particularly valuable and that’s where you ought to be able to spot some of the things we failed to spot: for example, Russian intervention in elections. But if I am honest, I do not know how much progress Western governments have made on this. The U.S. probably comes the closest because they have invested in it, but I think most governments have just danced around it, partly for resource reasons, but also because it is politically and ethically a very difficult area.
The answer is probably to use the private sector mechanisms that are there already and that are quite open; there are NGOs like Bellingcat that are already doing some extraordinary work in the public domain. They are not the only ones; there are plenty of academic NGOs and journalistic organizations who are doing really interesting work here and it is every bit as good as what governments do. So I do not think we need some huge new bureaucracy in government to look at open-source material; rather, we should synthesize what is already out there and use it intelligently with the secret insights that agencies generate to deliver some more effective results.
CTC: Another key part of this, which brings in the private sector, is encryption, and you regularly hear from politicians and serving security officials that end-to-end encryption is a danger that protects, among others, terrorists. What is your sense of the counterterrorism concerns around this?
Hannigan: The GCHQ view on this has always been slightly unusual because GCHQ is an agency that delivers strong encryption and, indeed, in the 1970s was involved in inventing some of the strongest encryption that is currently in use. So we think encryption is a good thing. It protects everybody—protects governments and protects business. I have always resisted the temptation to say encryption is bad somehow, and law enforcement and government should be given the key to everything, partly because I do not think that would be healthy and partly because it’s not practical. You cannot uninvent end-to-end encryption. It is a mathematical invention; it’s not something you can suddenly say is not going to be there.
What you have to do is keep it in proportion. Yes, it is misused by criminals and terrorists, but it is predominantly used by honest citizens and businesses who are protecting themselves, so we shouldn’t let the security tail wag the dog. As always, criminals and terrorists will use good technology for bad purposes. There are some ways around this. One is to work with the companies, as they themselves have offered to different degrees to do things that are short of decryption because, of course, they cannot decrypt it themselves if it’s genuinely end-to-end, but there are things they can do to help with the data around it. It is probably not helpful to go into the details here, but they themselves have said it is not all about the content.
Better relations between the companies and governments help. And there are some macro proposals that have been put out there but so far they have not found favor with the privacy lobby in the United States. And whatever you do, you will always have criminals who will use something else, move away from the big platforms and use something different, so you might just end up pushing the problem elsewhere. You already see a bit of that now, with, for example, a lot now coalescing around Telegram and away from some of the traditional Western platforms.
The short answer is that there is not an easy answer. And efforts should be focused on particular targets rather than trying to do anything at scale. I know some law enforcement people still hanker after large-scale solutions, but there is, frankly, no way that companies are going to give any kind of blanket access to law enforcement or governments in the future. And I cannot see any legislation that would actually compel them to do it. Of course, there are some countries that ban end-to-end services, for this reason. But I cannot see democracies agreeing to that, and I think it would be disproportionate. The task for the agencies in cooperation with the companies is to go after specific targets and help each other do that, where there’s general agreement that these are legitimate targets.
CTC: In July, FBI Director Chris Wray and MI5 Director Ken McCallum did a series of events in London in which, among other things, they identified the lone-actor threat as the heart of the terrorist threat both faced.4 Would you agree with this assessment, and how do you characterize the journey of how we got here?
Hannigan: They are much more current than I am on this, but it has been a trend for a while. In fact, it was ISIS and [Abu Bakr] al-Baghdadi himself that promoted the lone-wolf idea and propagandized it through their various channels, so it’s not unexpected. It was a perfectly logical response to better intelligence and law enforcement disruption because it’s extremely difficult to spot, disrupt, and prevent genuine lone actors. The thinking of the al-Baghdadi model was ‘we don’t need to control this. We do not even need necessarily to know who you are; if you go out and do something for ISIS, then you are part of the struggle.’ That’s quite a new departure for terrorist groups. They have always tended to be control freaks: The study of terrorist bureaucracy and leadership is instructive. By contrast, ISIS was crowdsourcing in quite an innovative way. The demise of the ‘caliphate’ made the lone wolf approach even more compelling for ISIS.
I would not write off organized terrorism in the future; I think there’s plenty of evidence that it has not gone away, but lone-actor terrorism does seem to be the trend at the moment and the thing that is hardest for agencies to spot. All I would say is, if you look at the lone wolves who have been successful or mounted successful attacks in a number of countries, they are very rarely completely ‘lone’ or completely unknown to their government agencies. And so it comes back to the age-old problem of prioritization. Most of them appear amongst the ranks of the many thousands of people of interest to police and law enforcement and intelligence agencies, and probably the task is to use data better to prioritize better.
Some of the criticisms around, for example, the London Bridge attacksf were about failures to do that and failures to use data better to understand where the priorities are and where the tipping points are. But all of this is very easy to say and very difficult to do, and it is never going to be [got] completely right. It is a constant struggle for MI5 in particular, but for all agencies to prioritize out of the thousands of people who might be a worry, who are the ones that you need to focus on now, and deploy your very, very limited surveillance resources on, because we all know how much it costs and how difficult it is to do.
But the reality is that even lone wolves usually display behavior and patterns of life [notwithstanding encrypted communications and the end-to-end problem] that says something about them; they are in touch with other people, even if they’re not involved in joint attack planning. The challenge has to be to use data to try to work out when they have reached a tipping point. You will never be successful 100 percent of the time, but it’s about trying to raise the percentage of success.
CTC: Not only does the West currently face the challenge of Russian aggression in Ukraine, but Directors Wray and McCallum identified China as the biggest long-term national security threat.5 Given the shift in resources on both sides of the Atlantic to great power competition, is there a danger of counterterrorism being underfunded? Where do you see the intersections between great power competition and counterterrorism?
Hannigan: It is a perennial problem of governments that you veer from one crisis to another, and [then] something has to be deprioritized. We have seen what happened after we deprioritized Russia after the Cold War. The ambition should be to try to reduce investment in particular areas without giving up your core capability and eroding the skills and knowledge that you have had on that subject. This applies to counterterrorism, too, because the threat hasn’t gone away.
It is clearly right to focus on China and Russia. When I started at GCHQ, I said I thought the two big challenges for the next 50 years in the West were managing a declining Russia and a rising China. We are seeing the declining Russia problem in the lashing out, and the nationalism, and the economic failure to reform, and the kleptocracy that has emerged as a result. We are experiencing that in Ukraine, and it’s a big challenge to confront and contain it, but I think it is a much easier challenge than a rising China, which is a complex mixture of opportunity and challenge. But there is a lot of threat there as well, as Wray and McCallum rightly said. So we should be focusing on that, and it is the right top priority, but that doesn’t mean we can neglect CT. There will have to be a difficult discussion about to balance resources. Quite a lot of the great power strategy is outside the remit of agencies. A lot of it is about industrial policy, investment decisions, and regulation. Regulating Chinese tech and Chinese tech ambition is not core intelligence work, so it doesn’t all fall on the agencies.
On the question of crossover, that is a potential worry because states obviously have used all sorts of proxies in the past. In the cyber world, they use criminal groups. And they have also used terrorist groups as proxies. It is not hard to imagine that in the future, they will do the same again to put pressure on Western countries either by using terrorist groups in whichever part of the world the conflict might be taking place, or even to target us at home. I do not know that we’re seeing a sudden upsurge in that yet, but it is certainly a concern for the future, and the more desperate a country like Russia gets, the more likely it is to be happy to foment that.
CTC: You led the creation of the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), oversaw the country’s pioneering Active Cyber Defense Program, and helped create the United Kingdom’s first cyber security strategy.6 When it comes to cyber, much of the concern has focused on state actors such as China as well as criminal groups and the threat to critical infrastructure. How would you characterize the cyber threat posed by terror groups, including jihadi terror groups? Have we yet seen a cyber terror attack?
Hannigan: There have always been great scare stories about this, partly because the media loves the idea of cyber terrorism and terrorists being able to take down an entire infrastructure or electricity grid or something. Whether we have seen it or not depends on how you define it. You could say Hezbollah [cyber] attacks against Israel are cyber terrorist attacks.g You could say that Iranian attacks on water treatment plants in Israelh are a potential attack by a nation-state designed to instill terror.
So, it is certainly not unimaginable, but cyber is not necessarily the best weapon for terrorists to use. Firstly, it does require quite a degree of long-term commitment and knowledge. And terrorists in the past have been rather traditional in wanting spectaculars of one sort or another, so their mindset may not be geared towards it. This may change with the new generation. We certainly saw that with [their ability to exploit] social media, so there is a logic to saying, ‘Well, they might get good at this in the future.’ It has also got much cheaper and easier to do because [the technology] is something you can now buy as a service or commodity and use it. So, the trajectory suggests that it ought to be easier to do cyber terrorism in the future.
The other point, though, is that while you can disrupt things and you can make people’s lives difficult [through cyber-attacks], it is quite difficult to do destructive activity that is really long lasting. Having said that, I did notice that one of the American consultancies on tech that issues reports every so often, and is usually quite a cautious organization, projected that by 2025 operational technology would be weaponized to cause death.7 They were certainly thinking of nation-states rather than terrorists, but the fact that they were saying this is interesting.
These kinds of destructive cyber effects will be accidental for the most part. The first cyber homicide that I can think of is the case in Germany two years ago where a woman was being transferred to a hospital that had been paralyzed by ransomware and so she was diverted to another hospital and died on the way. German police decided to treat this as cyber homicide.8 Those sorts of things—ransomware out of control—might well cause people’s deaths, either through interfering with operational technology that is running power, water, or healthcare, or just by accident. But all of that is more likely than a planned cyber-terrorist event. But it is not unimaginable, and it is not unimaginable for the nation-state to find it convenient to false flag something [it has perpetrated against an adversary], to mask a cyber attack as a terrorist attack. We have, of course, seen the Russians doing that in their [2015] attack on [the French television station] TV5,i which they flagged as a terrorist attack.9 So cyber terrorism is not unimaginable but probably not top of the list of worries at the moment.
CTC: In the September 2021 issue of CTC Sentinel, former acting CIA Director Michael Morell assessed that following the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, “the reconstruction of al-Qa`ida’s homeland attack capability will happen quickly, in less than a year, if the U.S. does not collect the intelligence and take the military action to prevent it.”10 It’s been a year since the Taliban assumed power. How do you assess the international terror threat from jihadi groups operating on its soil?
Hannigan: My biggest concerns are, do we know what the threat is and how would we know if it is growing? We have lost most of our insight into what’s going on in Afghanistan, for all the obvious reasons, and the biggest worry is we simply won’t see a problem—from ISIS in particular but also al-Qa`ida—until it’s well formed and mature. Now, I may be wrong; maybe we have great insight. But I have not seen it, and I doubt it is actually there. The successful U.S. attack on al-Zawahiri this summer seems to me to be about a determined long-term manhunt: It does not imply great understanding of Afghanistan in general. In addition, there are so many other things going on in the world that even if we had some insight, I doubt it’s top of the list for most governments. So I think it is a real concern from an intelligence point of view as to who actually knows what the CT threat emerging or growing in Afghanistan is, and how much of it might be projected outwards. Most of it is currently focused internally, but these things have a tendency to get externally directed over time.
CTC: According to the 2021 U.K. government integrated review, “It is likely that a terrorist group will launch a successful CBRN attack by 2030.”11 In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, what is your assessment of the CBRN terror threat?
Hannigan: It is a bigger worry to me than cyber terrorism by a long way. Partly because organizations have seen the chaos you can cause through CBRN, and whether it’s pandemics, chemical weapons in Syria, or the near disasters in Ukraine through radiological mismanagement during the war, there must be people thinking, ‘Well, if I want to cause an enormous amount of suffering and disable a country, this is a better route to go.’ A key problem is that the global instability tends to make the control of the substances more difficult. We have been pretty effective [in past decades] in having organizations like the OPCW [Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons] that could control and monitor the materials you need to conduct such an attack. However, in a world of chaotic great power relationships, that gets much harder, and so the opportunity to get hold of this material, or to manufacture it, becomes easier. Afghanistan is one of those places where we have seen in the past, and could certainly see in the future, terrorist programs to this end. It is certainly a bigger worry to me than cyber terrorism.
CTC: Given the strong nexus to far-right extremism of Russian paramilitary groups involved in the fighting in Ukraine and given the history of such ties also on the Ukrainian side,12 do you see any terrorist or foreign fighter threat emanating from the war in Ukraine?
Hannigan: One of the lessons we should learn from ISIS is relevant to this discussion. One of the reasons the lone wolves or more often the small groups who were effective in launching attacks—for example, in [Paris in November] 2015—were so effective was that they were battle-hardened and they knew what to do. They knew how to withstand firefights. They were not just ideologically hardened; they actually had battlefield experience. You have to assume that the same could be true of other kinds of extremists returning from any conflict. We have seen similar things emerging from Chechnya in the past as well. It seems plausible that the many current theaters of conflict may produce battle-hardened and radicalized individuals.
CTC: What is your assessment of the current security outlook in Northern Ireland?
Hannigan: We obviously underestimated, in around 2007, the resilience of dissident Republicanism, and I think that was partly because nobody foresaw the economic downturn. People assumed that there would be a great tidal wave of economic benefits and a peace dividend for lots of communities that did not materialize. But you cannot just pin it all on economics. There is a cyclical side to Republican violence in Irish history that is unlikely to ever go completely away, but the problem now is that the politics can get destabilized relatively quickly. I do not foresee a sudden return to violence, but I think the more the politics frays, the more instability there is, and the more you tinker with what was a political settlement that everybody could just about buy into, the more you run the risk of the fringes becoming violent again. And all of this might start successfully radicalizing young people. It was never a particular concern that the older generation of dissidents were still there—diehards who never signed up to the peace process and were never going to change their minds—but what was concerning was young people being recruited in their teens and 20s into dissident activity. That’s much more worrying. It is the key thing you have to guard against for the future. And clearly, the best way to do that is through political stability and political progress.
CTC: What were you most proud of in your work in counterterrorism? From a CT perspective, what worries you most today?
Hannigan: I am very proud of what GCHQ did in preventing attacks in the U.K., with MI5 and others. Most of those are not seen because they are prevented, but that was great work that I do not take any personal credit for, but was done exceptionally well. Personally, the thing I found most rewarding in counterterrorism was in Northern Ireland because this was a domestic threat where pretty much all the levers were in the U.K.’s hands—security and intelligence, economic and political. It was probably the last time that the U.K.’s top national security threat, as it was then, was a domestic one. It taught me a lot about terrorism, not least through talking to members of the Provisional IRA and other organizations, which gave me a greater understanding of how terrorist organizations think and work, and how individuals are motivated. In the end, it was, over a 30- to 40-year period, a successful process. There were, of course, mistakes, but it was a good marriage of security policy and political process, that addressed the underlying causes of the Troubles and, partly through good CT work, created space for politics to work.
I do not think Islamist extremism has gone away and the rise of the extreme-right is clearly a concern, but terrorism will continue to bubble up in all sorts of areas that may not yet have been predicted: where people feel either disenfranchised or disadvantaged, or feel that their identity is threatened. In a chaotic international environment, where outrage can be generated and manipulated on a larger scale than ever before, not least through technology, there will be more of this, and it will be more unpredictable. Right-wing extremism is just the latest [threat to gain prominence], but in reality, it has been around a long time. I suspect there may be all sorts of new causes, and people may resort to violence more quickly than they did in the past. CTC
Substantive Notes [a] The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an intelligence alliance of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
[b] Editor’s Note: In a November 2013 hearing before the UK Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (that provides oversight of the UK’s intelligence agencies), Sir Iain Lobban revealed “we have actually seen chat around specific terrorist groups, including close to home, discussing how to avoid what they now perceive to be vulnerable communications methods or how to select communications which they now perceive not to be exploitable.” “Uncorrected Transcript of Evidence Given By, Sir Iain Lobban, Mr Andrew Parker, Sir John Sawers,” November 7, 2013.
[d] Editor’s Note: In October 2015, the Open Source Center (OSC) was “redesignated the Open Source Enterprise and incorporated in CIA’s new Directorate of Digital Innovation. The Open Source Center, established in 2005, was tasked to collect and analyze open source information of intelligence value across all media – – print, broadcast and online. The OSC was the successor to the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS), which gathered and translated world news coverage and other open source information for half a century.” Steven Aftergood, “Open Source Center (OSC) Becomes Open Source Enterprise (OSE),” Federation of American Scientists Blog, October 28, 2015.
[e] Editor’s Note: The Cabinet Office is a central U.K. government function that supports the Prime Minister and his Cabinet, drawing on input from across government to help deliver on policy goals.
[f] Editor’s Note: On June 3, 2017, three terrorists launched a knife and van ramming attack on London Bridge and in the nearby area of Borough Market, murdering eight before dying themselves. On November 29, 2019, Usman Khan, a formerly incarcerated terrorist attacked and murdered two people at an event at Fishmonger’s Hall, before being shot by police on the nearby London Bridge. In both attacks, subsequent investigations revealed that authorities were aware of the individuals and may have failed to prioritize the level of threat that they posed. For more on the 2017 attack, see the inquest page at https://londonbridgeinquests.independent.gov.uk/ and the 2019 attacks, its own inquest page at https://fishmongershallinquests.independent.gov.uk/
[i] Editor’s Note: In April 2015, TV5 Monde was taken off air in an attack carried out by a group of Russian hackers. It was reported that they “used highly targeted malicious software to destroy the TV network’s systems.” An Islamic State-linked group going by the name the Cyber Caliphate had first claimed responsibility. Gordon Corera, “How France’s TV5 was almost destroyed by ‘Russian hackers,’” BBC, October 10, 2016.
Almost caught up on re-publishing my writing here after a long period of delay, this time a piece for Nikkei Asian Review on the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Summit pointing to the optics of the session as one of the key attractions to some of the members.
Raffaello Pantucci is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and author of “Sinostan: China’s Inadvertent Empire.” (Oxford University Press)
As the West advances a world order constructed around institutional structures developed after World War II, those leading the charge against the West are embracing their own institutions to demonstrate their options.
This week, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization will hold its annual heads of state summit in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, bringing together Russia, China, Iran and a host of other nations. The narrative these countries want to advance is that there is another order out there beyond the Western-imposed one, as thin as it often seems on closer inspection.
This year’s summit is attracting more interest than previously as Chinese President Xi Jinping is set to attend as he makes his first international trip since the beginning of the COVID pandemic. The fact that he has chosen Central Asia and an SCO heads of state summit to do this, even before confirmation of his third term as Communist Party leader at the party’s congress next month, is a reflection of the importance of the SCO to Beijing.
The exact agenda of the summit is still being set, but it is likely that Afghanistan, new members and connectivity will be key items.
Afghanistan has been a perennial issue on which the SCO has failed to deliver. With the full accession of Iran to the group next year, Afghanistan will be almost entirely engulfed geographically by full SCO members, save for uncompromisingly neutral Turkmenistan, but Iran has been joining SCO summits for a while and Turkmenistan will be there this year too.
Notwithstanding the bloc’s clear interest in resolving Afghanistan’s long-standing issues, the organization has done nothing to help it, nor has it come together effectively to deal with the problems emanating from the country.
It is unlikely we will see much material progress this time either amid continuing uncertainty about the longer-term viability of the Taliban authorities, as well as concerns about their mixed attempts to rein in militant groups.
The answer from Uzbekistan’s perspective has been to seek ways of trying to engage with the new Taliban authorities. It has been keen for some time to push a narrative of greater connectivity across Eurasia.
Rather than simply piggyback on China’s Belt and Road Initiative vision, Tashkent has sought to instead cultivate a vision of connectivity between Central and South Asia, to both tap markets and seek escape from the region’s landlocked nature.
But these practical issues are side stories to the main narrative that will emerge from the Samarkand summit.
Attendees are expected to include the leaders of Turkey, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Mongolia, Iran and Belarus, which are each seeking to highlight their inclusion and links to the SCO. Rumors suggest Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may appear too.
In joining with the leaders of existing members Russia, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan and China, they will be part of a constellation of powers that for various reasons, and to different degrees, have tensions with the West.
For all of these powers, there is a pleasing visual utility to being present at a colloquium of such stature, representing at least a third of the world’s population and with no Westerners present. They can all show that notwithstanding the sanctions or sanctimony thrown at them by the West, they have allies of substance who welcome them with open arms.
There is no doubt that the SCO is nowhere near capable of competing with entities like the Group of Seven, NATO or the EU, but this is not the point. The organization is one that marches to its own beat, has only grown in its 20-plus years and continues to enlarge the volume of topics that it engages on.
It has helped normalize China’s role as a major player on the Eurasian continent while also providing an opportunity for Chinese diplomats, officials and business executives to engage regularly at multiple levels with their neighbors and a growing range of countries. Even supposed Western allies like India and Turkey see value in showing up for the meetings to soak in a non-Western-led order that they can appreciate being involved in.
There is no doubt that the members have little trust in one another, and the international order they are building is flawed. But at the same time, the interesting question is whether this matters to them.
The optics are good enough as the summitry gets positive play in other parts of the world. The event presents the impression, with some apparent foundation, that the democratic order advanced by the West is not the only achievable structure out there.
A short piece for the Financial Times looking forwards on how terrorism might evolve and melt into the wider greater great power conflict that currently consumes international affairs.
Some countries such as Iran persist in using armed proxies to advance their goals
Veteran al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was killed by a drone strike on a safe house in Kabul
The writer is senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies
Terrorism is the past and the future is great power conflict. In a moment of nearly perfect public narrative, the death of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was almost entirely overshadowed by the visit of US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan. Yet the risk is that we miss how the two problems can become entangled and make each one worse.
As national security agencies turn their focus to states, they will inevitably deprioritise terrorist threats. Yet the shift is unlikely to be as tidy as this suggests. Even more worrying than the risk of paying less attention to terrorist groups is the potential for the two threats to interact with each other. In a worst-case scenario, great power conflict might make global terrorism worse.
The use by states of terrorist groups as proxies is not new. Iran has a long history in this regard. Hizbollah in Lebanon is the largest of numerous proxies that Iran has used to attack its adversaries. In recent years, Tehran has become more overt about using terrorist tactics directly itself.
In July 2018, an Iranian diplomat was arrested in Germany alongside a pair of Iranians in Belgium for planning to bomb a high-profile dissident rally in Paris. Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s former lawyer, and several British MPs were due to attend the event. This month, the US Department of Justice charged a member of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards with directing agents in the US to murder John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser.
Tehran may be the most blatant about it, but it is not the only power to use such groups or engage in such plots. Moscow’s hand can be seen behind some extreme-right terrorist networks in
Europe. India detects Chinese intelligence playing in the shadows of some of its domestic conflicts. India and Pakistan have honed the art of manipulating such groups against each other, and sufunderlying fered the blowback as a result. Furthermore, all these powers see supposedly all-powerful western intelligence agencies lurking behind various networks and plots that they perceive as threats.
The second risk comes from how the war on terrorism has been pursued around the world. As the west grows frustrated with longstanding counterterrorism campaigns in distant places, resources have been pulled back or withheld. Clearly, some capability is retained, but in certain places a vacuum has emerged and Russia has frequently filled it. Private security group Wagner has stepped in to bolster local authorities and launch offensives in the name of counter-terrorism. It is questionable how much this helps. It often appears as though these campaigns exacerbate the anger that creates the terrorist groups in the first place.
Mali is the most obvious example, with the situation escalating to the point that the country’s government is now accusing France – a previous leader in providing counter-terrorism support – of working with jihadis. At the same time, Wagner is celebrated in the streets of Bamako, the capital. But Wagner forces have also been deployed in the Central African Republic, Libya and Mozambique, all places suffering from terrorism that the west has failed to address or is not focusing on.
According to one view, it is a relief to have someone else deal with such problems. But the risk is that they are only making the situation worse, or that they may try to manipulate groups on the ground to their own ends, with little regard for any backlash that might strike the west. Or, this could be their intention.
The other side to this shift in attention is that taking pressure off terrorist groups may end up with no one focusing on them. We do not really know whether the reason we are now seeing a lowered terrorist threat is because the threat has gone down or because of the pressure that was on it.
The exact nature of how threat and response play off against each other is poorly understood. But just because we have stopped worrying about a problem does not mean it no longer exists. It is hard to say with confidence that any of the underlying issues that spawned the international terrorist threat have been resolved. Some analysts think they have grown worse.
Twenty years of conflict have changed the international terrorist threat that we face. But it has not gone away, and in a nightmarish twist it may start to fuse with the great power conflict we find ourselves locked into. The world has a habit of throwing multiple problems at us. In a growing world of threat, disinformation, proxies and opacity, terrorist groups offer a perfect tool. The west may one day rue the fact that it no longer has the relative clarity of the early years of the war on terror.
As the anniversary of the Taliban takeover of Kabul took place, did a bunch of work around what China has been doing and achieved during this first year. This first piece is for Nikkei, with a few more coming.
Raffaello Pantucci is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore and author of “Sinostan: China’s Inadvertent Empire.” (Oxford University Press)
A decade ago, Peking University international studies professor Wang Jisi set the conceptual foundation for what would become the Belt and Road Initiative with an essay called “Marching Westwards.”
In it, Wang decried the excessive focus of Chinese foreign policy on Washington and the Asia-Pacific region, highlighting instead the opportunities and threats along China’s western land borders.
Billions of dollars of BRI plans and projects later, though, China remains as obsessed with Washington and the Asia-Pacific as ever. At the same time, the limits of its foreign policy capabilities are coming into stark relief in Afghanistan.
Among Afghanistan’s neighbors, none have engaged more visibly with the Taliban regime that took power a year ago than China.
Its Kabul embassy has led Beijing’s diplomatic push, which has helped get Taliban officials included in various regional forums. Chinese institutions have extended millions of dollars in aid while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Beijing has been a leading voice in calling for Washington to release $7 billion in frozen Afghan central bank funds. In general, Beijing rarely wastes an opportunity to condemn the abrupt withdrawal of U.S. forces last year and contrast it with China’s own contributions.
Yet all of this positive engagement has not advanced the goals Beijing actually wants to achieve.
Beijing hoped that the Taliban would form a broad-based government whose inclusiveness would support regime stability, but instead a single faction dominates the new administration.
The Taliban has failed to hand over Uyghur fighters as Beijing wanted or apparently even to curtail their activity within the country. Efforts to rein in militant groups seeking to undermine the Pakistani government, such as Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, have been limited. Indeed, the TTP appears to have offered training to Balochi separatists and other militants who are targeting Chinese interests in Pakistan. On top of that, the Taliban has confounded expectations by actively courting New Delhi.
The one lever Beijing has to play in Afghanistan is economic investment, but so far, it is not clear that it quite knows how to use that to advance its goals. There has been a surge of Chinese businessmen and traders going into Afghanistan, but this is most likely simply the result of entrepreneurs sensing an opportunity amid the decline in violence since the Taliban ousted the previous U.S.-backed government.
Growth in direct trade has been limited so far, and China’s big state-owned enterprises are treading carefully. The complete lack of infrastructure or managerial capability on the Afghan side limits their ambition, alongside concerns about what they might be getting themselves into.
In fact, economic activity may prove to be a millstone for Beijing. China could end up finding that the perceived economic engagement that it could offer Afghanistan will be seen as a silver-bullet solution to the country’s problems, raising expectations of what China can offer the country beyond what is actually possible.
The Belt and Road Initiative was always an ill-fit for Afghanistan. Most BRI maps showed routes running westward from China going around the country.
What BRI activity in Afghanistan could look like now is even harder to imagine at a moment when the wider narrative around the program is turning to ensuring returns on investment and focusing on viable opportunities. The most obvious link would be to build connections between the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor and Afghanistan, but this would require better relations between Kabul and Islamabad.
It is also clear that there is little trust in China on the Taliban side. Some Taliban factions are resisting any moves to curtail Uyghur militants who have given the movement support. Some are concerned about Beijing’s closeness to Islamabad. Incoming Chinese traders are often seen in a suspicious light too.
There may be a lot of noise around the potential opportunities China offers, but this is likely increasingly matched by skepticism about how much might actually materialize.
All of this is quite a turnaround for Beijing. Prior to the Taliban takeover, China enjoyed a far more propitious environment and government in Kabul.
While it was clear that trust levels were low and declining in the months before the government’s fall, there was at least a counterparty Beijing could deal with which would target militants it did not like.
Afghanistan used to be a place where China could run joint projects with India, the U.S. and others. Now instead, Afghanistan is increasingly seen through the light of great power competition as merely another place where Washington and its proxies might undermine Chinese interests.
The poor hand China has to play was most vividly articulated recently by the U.S. drone strike that killed al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri. To some degree, China had previously been able to count on Washington acting as a backstop for problems in Afghanistan, with U.S. forces even launching airstrikes on the Taliban’s Uyghur allies as a common enemy.
The U.S. still has enemies in Afghanistan and, as was seen with the death of al-Zawahri, the capability to do something about them, even in Beijing’s backyard, while China lacks these same kinetic tools and capabilities to go after its adversaries.
A decade on from the birth of the BRI concept, Afghanistan highlights Beijing’s difficulty in using its development model as a foreign policy concept to be replicated around the world. It also illustrates the limits of Chinese power projection and its ability to generate change on the ground abroad.
Raffaello Pantucci 