How To Fight Terrorists

WASHINGTON -- The 9/11 attack against the United States happened nearly seven years ago -- time enough, you would think, for the United States to come to grips with the causes and nature of terror. I am puzzled by how American society as a whole, with few exceptions, continues to react to the terror phenomenon with heated anger, rather than the cold analysis required to understand and defeat it. 

As Americans conduct their foreign policy with the expressed aim of reducing terrorism, their policy often has precisely the opposite effect of increasing and stimulating terror in a whole new generation of youth. 

Americans tend broadly to express understandable anguish about terror that emanates from Islamic societies. They point to conditions -- poverty, dictatorship -- and institutions -- radical mosques, madrasas -- that they see as the main cause of terrorism. Having lived in predominantly Islamic societies most of my life, my sense is that a more useful approach would be to ask why individual Muslims occasionally become radicalized to the point where they engage in terror, including suicide bombings where they take their own life, while the overwhelming majority does not accept or practice terror.

A healthy debate is underway in the United States on this issue, as more and more Americans undertake the hard research and analysis required to grasp what transforms ordinary young men and women into inhuman killers. One important discussion revolves around the argument by Marc Sageman, author of the books Understanding Terror Networks and the more recent Leaderless Jihad. Sageman, a sociologist and forensic psychiatrist, argues that the major terror threat around the world today does not emanate primarily from Al-Qaeda and its centrally planned spectacular operations.

Rather, he says the new wave of terrorism that more urgently requires our attention "is composed of homegrown young wannabes who dream of glory and adventure, who yearn to belong to a heroic vanguard and to root their lives in a greater sense of meaning. Inspired by tales of past heroism, they hope to emulate their predecessors, even though, for the most part, they can no longer link up with al-Qaeda Central in the Pakistani badlands. Their potential numbers are so great that they must now be seen as the main terrorist threat to the West."

The key to Sageman's analysis is his understanding that the process of radicalization of ordinary young men and women comprises two elements: their own life conditions, and their outrage at seeing other Muslims mistreated around the world. His book Leaderless Jihad offers strong evidence for the fact that we now witness a "third generation" of Islamist jihadi warriors or terrorists who see themselves as defending the entire Islamic community of believers: after Osama Bin Laden and colleagues in Afghanistan, and then the young men who conducted the 9/11 operations. 

Today's third generation comprises individuals who do not connect with Al-Qaeda, but become radicalized in their home communities all over the world, and hook up with others through networks mainly organized on internet chat forums. Sageman summarized his analysis concisely in a recent newspaper op-ed article: "The process of radicalization consists of four prongs, which need not occur in sequence. Here's the recipe: having a sense of moral outrage; seeing this anger as part of a 'war on Islam'; believing that this view is consistent with one's everyday grievances; and mobilizing through networks."

One of the terrible ironies of the past seven years has been that governments purporting to fight terror actually may be promoting it. The American-led global war on terror, heavily pro-Israeli Middle Eastern policies, and invasion of Iraq, plus the increasingly repressive police and security operations of Arab and Asian regimes, and the many Arab-Asian domestic political systems chronically frozen in their autocratic mode all play a role in the radicalization of a new cohort of terrorists.

The most potent intersection of radicalizing vectors is between an Arab citizen's mistreatment by his or her own government, and seeing other Muslims assaulted, mistreated, jailed and killed in their own homes by American, Israeli, or other foreign armies. This is compounded by leading Western political leaders who routinely speak of radical Islamic violence and terror as being the greatest threat of this generation. That exaggerated nonsense, demagogic political rhetoric, and dangerous confluence of ignorance and vengefulness by leaders who appear totally obsessed by an ugly phenomenon is what baffles Arabs (and terrorizes their own Western citizens). 

And these Western leaders only aggravate the terror threat by adding to it their own fear-mongering politics, moral mediocrity, and intellectual confusion.

Important breakthroughs are being made in scholarly analyses of terror threats in the United States and other lands, but the parallel political and policy advances that could help to alleviate the terror phenomenon remain largely absent in the United States. It is no surprise that terror remains a global growth industry that is changing shape, but not losing force.