Bruce Schneier on "The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists" -
worth reading.
Thoughts?
Udhay
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The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists
Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems,
but because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what motivates
terrorists in the first place. If we're ever going to defeat terrorism,
we need to understand what drives people to become terrorists in the
first place.
Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and
that people become terrorists for political reasons. This is the
"strategic" model of terrorism, and it's basically an economic model. It
posits that people resort to terrorism when they believe -- rightly or
wrongly -- that terrorism is worth it; that is, when they believe the
political gains of terrorism minus the political costs are greater than
if they engaged in some other, more peaceful form of protest. It's
assumed, for example, that people join Hamas to achieve a Palestinian
state; that people join the PKK to attain a Kurdish national homeland;
and that people join al-Qaida to, among other things, get the United
States out of the Persian Gulf.
If you believe this model, the way to fight terrorism is to change that
equation, and that's what most experts advocate. Governments tend to
minimize the political gains of terrorism through a no-concessions
policy; the international community tends to recommend reducing the
political grievances of terrorists via appeasement, in hopes of getting
them to renounce violence. Both advocate policies to provide effective
nonviolent alternatives, like free elections.
Historically, none of these solutions has worked with any regularity.
Max Abrahms, a predoctoral fellow at Stanford University's Center for
International Security and Cooperation, has studied dozens of terrorist
groups from all over the world. He argues that the model is wrong. In a
paper published this year in International Security that -- sadly --
doesn't have the title "Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists,"
he discusses, well, seven habits of highly ineffective terrorists. These
seven tendencies are seen in terrorist organizations all over the world,
and they directly contradict the theory that terrorists are political
maximizers:
Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy
track record of convincing those civilians to give the terrorists what
they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort,
failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don't
compromise with their target country, even when those compromises are in
their best interest politically; (4) have protean political platforms,
which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in
anonymous attacks, which precludes the target countries making political
concessions to them; (6) regularly attack other terrorist groups with
the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when they
consistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their
stated political objectives have been achieved.
Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to
terrorism for social solidarity. He theorizes that people join terrorist
organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, much like
the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.
The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior
involvement with a group's political agenda, and often join multiple
terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who join
terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often
can't describe the political goals of their organizations. People who
join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives who are
members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially
isolated: unmarried young men or widowed women who weren't working prior
to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as
diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.
For example, several of the 9/11 hijackers planned to fight in Chechnya,
but they didn't have the right paperwork so they attacked America
instead. The mujahedeen had no idea whom they would attack after the
Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, so they sat around until they came up
with a new enemy: America. Pakistani terrorists regularly defect to
another terrorist group with a totally different political platform.
Many new al-Qaida members say, unconvincingly, that they decided to
become a jihadist after reading an extreme, anti-American blog, or after
converting to Islam, sometimes just a few weeks before. These people
know little about politics or Islam, and they frankly don't even seem to
care much about learning more. The blogs they turn to don't have a lot
of substance in these areas, even though more informative blogs do exist.
All of this explains the seven habits. It's not that they're
ineffective; it's that they have a different goal. They might not be
effective politically, but they are effective socially: They all help
preserve the group's existence and cohesion.
This kind of analysis isn't just theoretical; it has practical
implications for counterterrorism. Not only can we now better understand
who is likely to become a terrorist, we can engage in strategies
specifically designed to weaken the social bonds within terrorist
organizations. Driving a wedge between group members -- commuting prison
sentences in exchange for actionable intelligence, planting more double
agents within terrorist groups -- will go a long way to weakening the
social bonds within those groups.
We also need to pay more attention to the socially marginalized than to
the politically downtrodden, like unassimilated communities in Western
countries. We need to support vibrant, benign communities and
organizations as alternative ways for potential terrorists to get the
social cohesion they need. And finally, we need to minimize collateral
damage in our counterterrorism operations, as well as clamping down on
bigotry and hate crimes, which just creates more dislocation and social
isolation, and the inevitable calls for revenge.
http://maxabrahms.com/pdfs/DC_250-1846.pdf
This essay previously appeared on Wired.com.
http://www.wired.com/print/politics/security/commentary/securitymatters/2008/10/securitymatters_1002
or http://tinyurl.com/3vf3x5
Interesting rebuttal:
http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2008/10/can-terror-be-understood/
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((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))
