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no bull, and the aftermath.

Hello, and welcome to the LawFair podcast. I'm Benjamin Widis. Today's episode marks the

second in our series of interviews, Ridicus Singh, is recording with people who have non-legal

expertise in areas of interest to LawFair readers. Ridicus guessed this time is Daniel

Beiman, research director in the Saban Center at Brookings and a professor at Georgetown's

Security Studies School. Dan has recently written a paper entitled Breaking the Bonds

between al-Qaeda and its affiliate organizations, which Brookings published last month. He

sat down with Ridicus recently to discuss al-Qaeda's many splinter groups and the relationship

between the franchise groups and the diminishing core. Dan, thanks so much for taking the

time and sitting down with me. What's your paper about? My paper looks at the affiliates

of al-Qaeda. So it looks at al-Qaeda, the Raven Peninsula, al-Qaeda, the Islamic Maghreb,

and other affiliates. It tries to look at why they join, the problems they have with al-Qaeda

core, and also why a number of organizations don't join up. It uses all these factors

to draw lessons for what the United States should do differently.

Okay. I wanted to start by asking you about al-Qaeda core. What is the degree in your

opinion of command and control that the core exerts over the affiliates? It's obviously

a different amount for different affiliates, and there's more cooperation with some than

with others. But how much say does the core group have over the actions of its affiliates?

To join up as an al-Qaeda affiliate means that you at least pay lip service to some al-Qaeda

...