Archive for January 2nd, 2010

The apparent ties between the Nigerian man charged with plotting to blow up an airliner on Christmas Day and a radical American-born Yemeni imam have cast a spotlight on a world of charismatic clerics who wield their Internet celebrity to indoctrinate young Muslims with extremist ideology and recruit them for Al Qaeda, American officials and counterterrorism specialists said. [Emphasis added]

This is the lede of a recent NYT article about the failed Christmas bombing of a Detroit-bound international flight. It is, I think, the common way for the public to see the process of terrorist development: Naive, wide-eyed Muslim youngster gets pulled into the web of extremist ideology by a Rasputin-esque character with a bushy beard and flowing white robes. These nefarious characters are the only ones who have any form of agency; the suicide-bomber to-be is warped and cajoled into his murderous mission by promises of martyrdom by the celebrity clerics. After all, who would actively choose to blow themselves up, right?

This narrative, though, is far from accurate. As the NYT piece rightly points out (much further down), the suicide-bombers are, more likely than not, acting on their own accord, especially when the choose to enter the terrorist networks. As a former CIA employee notes,

“Young people have a mind of their own,” he said. “They are not robots, brainwashed. They are already radicalized. What they want in a sense is a validation of what they already believe. The religious leaders are lightning rods, because of the extreme statements. They form a community around them.”

This viewpoint is not the full story, however. It still lacks an understanding of why a wealthy Nigerian or a Major in the American military seeks out the bushy bearded bad-guy. Why do they choose to start down that path? And why do they stay on it?

To understand what motivates “them” to hate “us” requires seeing the world from a very different perspective than most Americans do. It requires what may be uncomfortable and quickly labeled unpatriotic.

But it also requires recognizing that the ideal of America is something that is both powerful and unquantifiable – it is something immeasurably harmed by White House-sanctioned torture and mistakenly aimed bombs that kill civilians. As Robert Wright wrote after the Fort Hood massacre, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were supposed to make the U.S. safer, but by placing America in the position to compromise its ideals (“victory at any cost”), it makes it more likely that more and more people will lose their faith in the country so many strive to join each year. It will make the way Americans see the world will be increasingly at odds with others.

Both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were supposed to reduce the number of anti-American terrorists abroad. It’s hardly clear that they’ve succeeded, and they may have had the opposite effect. Meanwhile, on the other side of the ledger, they’ve inspired homegrown terrorism — a small-scale incident in June, a larger-scale incident this month. That’s only two data points, but I don’t like the slope of the line connecting them

We have to recognize that our foreign policy choices have direct consequences to the thinking of those would-be terrorists. It is not just clerics and imams who influence murderous Nigerian or Army Medics, it can be us.