Follow the money... connect the dots!!

MATTHEW LEVITT of the The Washington Institute's Stein program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence states that while traditional efforts to combat terror financing focused on "seizing and freezing" terrorist assets, terrorist tactics were continuing to evolve and financial intelligence would continue to be an integral component of international efforts to confront transnational threats.
In an article for the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs, "Follow the Money: Leveraging Financial Intelligence to Combat Transnational Threats", he states that financial intelligence and analytics could track financial footprints up and down the financial pipelines providing critical intelligence to constrain terrorists’ operating environment, deter donors, interdict potential threats, and identify illicit conduct.
He lauds the recent renewal of the SWIFT agreement as an important step in maintaining one of the international community's most effective financial intelligence tools.

Sick man on the Nile

DAVID SCHENKER, director at the Washington Institute's Program on Arab Politics traces the decline of Cairo's regional stature stating that Egyptian dominance of the Middle East and the Nile basin in Africa was increasingly being questioned while Egypt was increasingly turning inward. In an opinion piece in The Weekly Standard, "Sick Man on the Nile", he cautions that a weakening Egypt would further complicate U.S. regional security architecture in the Middle East in the wake of  reorientation in Ankara and Beirut away from the West and a strengthened Iran-Syria axis and recommends initiatives to reverse a weakening of Egyptian power in the region.

Attacking terror through narco funding angle

MICHAEL JACOBSON and MATTHEW LEVITT of the The Washington Institute's Stein program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence point to the increasing linkages between terrorist organizations and organized crime networks with about 60 per cent of terrorist organizations connected to drug trafficking which generated  $322 billion in sales and additional ancillary revenues. In an article , "Tracking Narco-Terrorist Networks: The Money Trail", they state that this presented an opportunity for increasing international co-operation since it would convert the terrorism problem the semantics over which states differed into a law and order problem which would be easier to gain trans-national co-operation against.

Degrading the LeT network

STEPHEN TANKEL of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace profiles the growth of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) network from its origins during the anti-Soviet jihad to its current role as Pakistani military's strategic asset against India with a support network stretched throughout the subcontinent, the Gulf and the West. In a policy brief for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, "The Long Arm of Lashkar-e-Taiba", he concludes that the West had to compel Islamabad to use its leverage to prevent any LeT attack against India and also degrade its transnational network.

Al-Qaeda's credit crunch

MICHAEL JACOBSON and MATTHEW LEVITT of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy investigate how operational setbacks have affected Al-Qaeda’s long-term funding efforts in the wake of declining popularity of the group. In a Jane’s Strategic Advisory Services article, "Staying solvent - Assessing al-Qaeda’s fnancial portfolio", they argue that if the trends of financial stresses in Al-Qaeda continued, it could further degenerate the core of Al-Qaeda and devolve the internationalised insurgency embodied by Al-Qaeda into a more localised, and less lethal terrorist threat.

Battling terrorist ideology

Michael Jacobson, fellow at The Washington Institute of Near East Policy’s Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence states that former terrorists were best-placed to deliver a narrative to terrorists that could contradict Al-Qaeda’s single narrative. In an article “Terrorist Drop-outs: One Way of Promoting a Counter-Narrative” he presents various examples where former terrorists and extremists contributed to reducing terrorist violence and present the terror drop-outs as a potent weapon for Governments in their battle of ideas against terrorist ideologies.