Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (39 page)

There have been similar assessments by U.S. officials that massive shifts of law enforcement resources to terrorism have contributed to the escalating drug crisis with Mexico.
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Shortly after President Obama took office, FBI director Robert Mueller conceded that “the logical consequence of cannibalizing our criminal program to augment our national security efforts is that we have reduced the ability to surge resources within our criminal branch.”
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This isn’t to say that problems of domestic radicalization should be ignored, only that serious studies should be encouraged to determine what the likely threat really is. According to law enforcement officials I have interviewed, most prisoners who opt for militant forms of Islam in U.S. prisons do so to protect themselves for other militant groups, especially white supremacists. The NYPD intelligence unit refers to militant Islam in prison as Prislam, because when prison converts get out of jail, very few continue with militant Muslim activities. The reason, as many social-science studies of repeating offenders suggest, is that released prisoners, like most everyone else, usually adopt the mores of the surrounding social community. Because there is little popular support for militant Islam in U.S. communities anywhere, converts to radical Islam rapidly become fish out of water.

WIDGETRY AND WATERWITCHING

Antiterrorism efforts are fixated on technology and technological success, and there is no sustained or systematic approach to field-based social understanding of our adversaries’ motivation, intent, will, and the dreams that drive their strategic vision, however strange those dreams and vision may seem to us. The 2009 Christmas Day airline bombing attempt, for example, was a failing caused, in part, by overreliance on technology to the detriment of social intelligence. Computers and their algorithms aren’t well suited to pick up the significance of the anguish and effort it took for one of the most respected men in a nation to swallow pride and love of family and walk into an American embassy to say that his son was being dangerously radicalized. Widgets—for which there are billions of dollars—can’t do the job of socially sensitive thinkers—for whom there is scant concrete support—in reading intentions, creating alliances, leveraging nonmilitary advantages, building trust, changing opinions, managing perceptions, and empathizing (though not necessarily sympathizing) with others to see what makes them tick.
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At countless workshops and meetings I’ve attended, proposals were discussed or solicited for modeling terrorist networks. Why does the U.S government prefer to give its money for widgets: elaborate models that use elegant sound and light shows to give the “client” (usually another government agency) the illusion that it all makes perfect sense? Right after 9/11 the intelligence community was frantic over how to explain that a team of terrorists (rather than a government) could cause such harm. So the intelligence community turned to computers and modelers for a fix. But the results were disappointing because the models weren’t dynamic enough to accommodate the change and happenstance that characterize the evolution of terror networks. Continued reliance on widgets is favored by the fact that they tend to be expensive: The way some government contracting works, the more expensive the project that can be pushed out the door, the better the chances of promotion for the pusher. Another reason to go to widgets is that they are concrete and “deliverable,” something to behold at a glance and sink the taxpayer’s teeth into. But unless the field data are sound, all you get is garbage in and garbage out. To date, billions have been spent in the airy realm of widgetry, but next to nothing has been spent on field research.

Waterwitching is the illusion of predicting the location of underground water with a divining rod. Much of the lucrative industry of “modeling terrorism” resembles waterwitching. There’s great hunger for “predictability” and “parameterization” and the mathematics to back it up.
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These are fine for trying to figure out precise sets of conditions when an airplane engine might break up. But such notions are meaningless when applied to the evolutionary development of most natural phenomena, including how jihadi groups form and develop. At best, we may be able to model a set of path-dependent futures for development, possible ways that things might turn out. But the real-world triggers that move things along one path rather than another are often inherently unpredictable, like the meteor that may have wiped out the dinosaurs and let mammals come out of the closet and become us. As we’ve seen again and again in our case studies, random events and marginal connections can be key to how a terrorist group or plot develops.

For morally misplaced reasons, government seems to want science to be as diverse and democratic as society. Don’t get me wrong, I think democracy is the best political system humans have come up with so far and that diversity is the best bet for social creativity and peace. But democracy in science spells disaster unless the science is subordinated to the highest standards of quality and excellence. For example, government often wants models to incorporate data from many different sources in order to capture maximum diversity. Now, using a diverse sample is critically important to making correct scientific generalizations. Thus, it’s more likely that some biological trait is a property of all animals if examined and found in mammals, fish, and insects rather than examined only in mammals. There’s also a lot of evidence coming in from people working on “complexity theory” out of the Santa Fe Institute and some top universities that a diverse bunch of people usually outperforms a homogeneous group in solving a problem—whether in business, science, or math—no matter how expert the group is.
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So what’s wrong with drawing data willy-nilly from the following kinds of sources?

• “random” selections of newspapers and other media outlets (where the need to tell a story often creates fictitious coherence, and where enormous “echo” effects propagate and amplify the initial errors from well-known outlets, like the
  New York Times
  or
  Washington Times,
  or CNN or Fox, to innumerable other information sources);
  
• a hodge-podge of interviews carried out by investigators who have varying agendas and points to prove (they may want to show the effects of trauma on terrorism, or humiliation, or low esteem, or deprivation, or whatever, without weighing in or weeding out other competing factors);
  
• unsupervised field “reports” (with no set standards of reference or reliability across investigators and settings);
  
• and psychological experiments (done mostly among undergraduates at big research universities, or on our own personnel, but rarely with people who really do the things we want to find out about).
  

Well, it’s a bit like trying to build an adequate theory of physics by sampling some Ptolemy, some Kepler, and some Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Even with bits of Einstein thrown into the pot, all you get is a tangle of spaghetti.

The development of terrorist networks, plots, and attacks resembles more the development of a complex system, with inherently chaotic and unpredictable characteristics. Much like water that becomes heated to boiling, or even more like a soup with locally different densities and viscosities, it may be impossible in principle to precisely predict where the rising cones and bubbles will first appear. But social science can help discern the space of probable pathways to and from violence in ways that even gadgetry can turn to our advantage.

LOOSEN UP AND TRY LISTENING

As I mentioned at the end of chapter 8, I’ve often tried, unsuccessfully, to get people in our own government to at least listen and talk to terrorists and wannabes instead of just trying to capture and kill them—or “model” them. There’s precious little effort by the U.S government to push field-based research. Remarkable, really. After all, if someone wants to kill you, it’s better to know why they want to kill so as to improve your chances of stopping them. In the first years after 9/11, the “human factors” research units of the Department of Defense weren’t talking to terrorists at all. In the last couple of years, they’ve become scared that field studies in a foreign country might be viewed as a covert U.S. operation. So new government guidelines require that research partners in host nations must have their own national Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) to make sure that any study meets American university standards for “protection of human subjects.”

Now, this makes little sense for two simple reasons: There are no uniform U.S. standards at the national level, and institutions in other countries (except dictatorships) generally don’t want their own governments micromanaging which research should or shouldn’t be allowed. Even when there are proposals for field-based research, the hurdles of the IRBs at American universities can make execution difficult, if not impossible.
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IRBs were initially set up to protect human subjects from Nazi doctor-type experiments. They’re now mostly preoccupied with preventing studies that might upset students, and seem to assume that all human subjects should be handled according to the sensibilities of American coeds. Robert Lifton, a psychiatrist who studies the psychological causes and effects of war, had a helluva time getting permission to even interview Nazi doctors for fear of upsetting the old dears.
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I was told by one university IRB that I would never be given permission to interview potential or convicted mass murderers overseas because I could never absolutely guarantee that what they told me wouldn’t compromise them: For example, if I inadvertently found out that a suicide bombing plot was in the works and reported it, then I would be denying the suicide bomber his or her “human subjects rights.”
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For the life of me, I don’t understand how stopping a person from blowing up himself and others denies anyone’s human rights. Members of the IRB, none of whom need have any expertise on the subject being researched, also told me flatly that the potential legal fallout from disgruntled terrorists (lawsuits) outweighs possible benefits to the university, though I pointed out that preventing people and cities and the like from being blown up was perhaps of some benefit to the society that supports the university.

Ever since the Vietnam War, there has been mutual antipathy and antagonism between most academic social science—at least at the outstanding universities—and U.S. military operations and military-related policymaking. But for the safety of all, including keeping allied servicemen and women out of harm’s way, and also preventing others from being harmed by ill-informed actions, a dialogue really should get going. There will be tensions and deep disagreements, but if social science does not engage power, then social science helps itself and all others to become unwitting slaves of power.

Nevertheless, social scientists should not be directly embedded with military units. In testimony at a March 2010 Senate hearing, I argued against efforts such as the Human Terrain System experiment in Afghanistan, which involves temporarily embedding “combat ethnographers” in infantry units for nonlethal (“non-kinetic”) actions, such as helping villagers with medical care. The military and cultural reality of the terrain may favor embedded social scientists being uniformed and armed (in part, because unarmed Western civilians would more likely draw fire as high-value targets). But the possibility that social scientists would have to fire their weapons and perhaps kill local people—indeed, the mere sight of armed and uniformed American social scientists in a foreign theater—guarantees academia’s profound hostility. Rather, independent, publicly transparent, science-based field research in conflict zones can help policymakers, the military, and potential adversaries avoid mistakes that lead to conflict and violence.

SIZING DOWN THE FIELD

A main problem in terrorism studies is that most “experts” have little field experience and otherwise lack the required level of detail that statistical and trend analyses could properly mine. There are many millions of people who express sympathy with Al Qaeda or other forms of violent political expression that support terrorism. There are, however, only some thousands who show willingness to actually commit violence. They almost invariably go on to violence in small groups of volunteers consisting mostly of friends and some kin within specific “scenes”: neighborhoods, schools (classes, dorms), workplaces, common leisure activities (soccer, mosque, barbershop, café), and, increasingly, online chat rooms.

The process of self-selection into violence within these scenes is stimulated by a massive, media-driven political awakening in which jihad is represented as the only the way to permanently resolve glaring problems of global injustice. As Saudi Arabia’s General Khaled Alhumaidan said to me in Riyadh, “The front is in our neighborhoods but the battle is the silver screen. If it doesn’t make it to the six o’clock news, then Al Qaeda is not interested.” These young people constantly see and discuss among themselves images of war and injustice against “our people,” become morally outraged (especially if injustice resonates personally, more a problem with immigrants in Europe than America), and dream of a war for justice that gives their friendship a cause.

Most human violence is committed by young people seeking adventure, dreams of glory, and esteem in the eyes of their peers. Omar Nasiri’s tale of his time with Al Qaeda,
Inside Jihad,
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rings true in its picture of the highs the militants get from the sense of brotherhood and sense of purpose. They want to be more than morning mist, to turn their personal passion into great acts of great magnitude. They kill and die for faith and friendship, which is the foundation of all social and political union, that is, all enduring human associations of non-kin. The most heroic cause in the world today is jihad, where anyone from anywhere can hope to make a mark against the most powerful country and army in the history of the world.