Fascinating article in the New Yorker (hat tip to the Euston Manifesto blog) on how to counteract insurgency and terrorism. First up is an Australian anthropologist and lieutenant colonel, David Kilcullen:
“After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate...There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’”
According to Kilcullen, all 15 of the Saudi 9/11 hijackers had trouble with their fathers.
Kilcullen's main point is that Al Qaeda are engaged in a global information war.
“If bin Laden didn’t have access to global media, satellite communications, and the Internet, he’d just be a cranky guy in a cave,”
He says he too would be a jihadist if he were a Muslim:
“The thing that drives these guys—a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that’s happening now—that’s the same thing that drives me, you know?”
It certainly does seem that wanting to be part of something bigger, not being content with parochial, local status, drives many terrorists, islamist or otherwise. I wonder whether immigrant groups aren't even more prone to this, as they have tasted the world outside the dull society they are trying to join and know there is something more out there than just getting a nice job that would please their parents.
The New Yorker article goes on to suggest ways of combating terrorism and insurgency.
"A war on terror suggests an undifferentiated enemy. Kilcullen speaks of the need to “disaggregate” insurgencies: finding ways to address local grievances in Pakistan’s tribal areas or along the Thai-Malay border so that they aren’t mapped onto the ambitions of the global jihad."
The article then features a second anthropologist, Montgomery McFate, who wrote of the mistakes made in Iraq, similar to Kilcullen's analysis about social networks, as follows:
“Once the Sunni Ba’thists lost their prestigious jobs, were humiliated in the conflict, and got frozen out through de-Ba’thification, the tribal network became the backbone of the insurgency. The tribal insurgency is a direct result of our misunderstanding the Iraqi culture.”
The project McFate is now involved in at the Pentagon
"is recruiting social scientists around the country to join five-person “human terrain” teams that would go to Iraq and Afghanistan with combat brigades and serve as cultural advisers on six-to-nine-month tours. Pilot teams are planning to leave next spring."
Much more money and resources is needed to fund these kind of programmes and create social network alternatives to extremism and insurgency. More supporting evidence for this:
"After September 11th, Sageman traced the paths of a hundred and seventy-two alienated young Muslims who joined the jihad, and found that the common ground lay not in personal pathology, poverty, or religious belief but in social bonds."
Based on these kinds of analyses
"Kilcullen has plotted out a “ladder of extremism” that shows the progress of a jihadist. At the bottom is the vast population of mainstream Muslims, who are potential allies against radical Islamism as well as potential targets of subversion, and whose grievances can be addressed by political reform. The next tier up is a smaller number of “alienated Muslims,” who have given up on reform. Some of these join radical groups, like the young Muslims in North London who spend afternoons at the local community center watching jihadist videos. They require “ideological conversion”—that is, counter-subversion, which Kilcullen compares to helping young men leave gangs. A smaller number of these individuals, already steeped in the atmosphere of radical mosques and extremist discussions, end up joining local and regional insurgent cells, usually as the result of a “biographical trigger—they will lose a friend in Iraq, or see something that shocks them on television.” With these insurgents, the full range of counterinsurgency tools has to be used, including violence and persuasion. The very small number of fighters who are recruited to the top tier of Al Qaeda and its affiliated terrorist groups are beyond persuasion or conversion. “They’re so committed you’ve got to destroy them,” Kilcullen said. “But you’ve got to do it in such a way that you don’t create new terrorists.”
Western governments should establish competing “trusted networks” in Muslim countries: friendly mosques, professional associations, and labor unions."
I believe Western governments should be encouraging such "trusted networks" to integrate with otherwise excluded groups in their own countries too.
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