Which safe-haven again?

Andrew Exum - of Abu Muqawama and CNAS - has a provocative but incomplete piece up on TNR that dissects the one area of the Obama Afghanistan plan that seems lacking:  the internet.

And while some terrorists–such as Mohammed Sadiq Khan, who is believed to have masterminded the 7/7 bombings–travelled to Pakistan and trained in militant camps, the common denominator that has emerged from domestic terror threats in places like the United Kingdom is that their staging ground was actually on the internet rather than in a physical “safe haven.”

The White House strategy, though, betrays an obsession with physical space at the expense of virtual space. This fixation very much reflects a generational divide among the scholars and policy-makers who focus on terrorism. …

But as Europe’s experience has shown us, this thinking is outdated; we shouldn’t wait until we are attacked by homegrown or internet-coordinated terrorists to adopt an appropriately far-reaching strategy.

He’s right, but only to a degree.  It’s correct to signal that we absolutely need to do a better job monitoring and disrupting potential jihad-laden communications on the internet.  But Exum is wrong if to believe, as his article implies, that the 7/7 bombers relied uniquely on their Yahoo accounts to plan the operation.  Ditto for the Madrid plot of March 11, 2004.

I was the lead DoN counter-terrorism analyst for those plots.  It’s safe to say the internet complimented and facilitated those operations, you can’t assemble a bomb online.  Contrary to Exum’s implications, the 7/7 bombers had a physical location to stage the plots - a safe-house in Leeds - where the home-made explosives were assembled.  The Madrid bombers had an apartment in the Leganes neighborhood of that city (pictured here).  When the cell was discovered, Spanish police raided the building, at which point the bombers killed themselves and several officers by detonating the left-over explosives.

The internet serves as a platform for a lot of the rha-rha motivational stuff, but the hard-core operational planning simply doesn’t occur there.  Osama Bin Laden doesn’t have an email account;  neither does Ayman al Zawahiri.  Instead, top-level AQ planning for the biggest plots (and even smaller Europe-based operations) occurs largely through an intricate person-to-person network of couriers passing handwritten notes.  Why?  Quite simply, they know we’re listening.

We can learn a lot from monitoring and policing potential jihad-related content online.  I’d hesitate to think that we’re going to crack any hardened, capable networks that way.

UPDATED to include link.