BOOK
REVIEW A
fresh look at terrorism's
roots Leaderless
Jihad by Marc Sageman
Reviewed by David Isenberg
When
considering solutions to really important problems
it is useful to step back and ask what if
everything we know is wrong.
The question,
of course, is not asked nearly enough. Questions
that are complex and difficult often require
solutions that are equally difficult and complex.
Sometimes they require us to shake off our
preconceived blinders and think in entirely new
ways,
Take, for example, the issue of
terrorism. To look at a document
like
the White House's National Strategy for Combating
Terrorism is to read statements like this:
The terrorism we confront today
springs from: Political alienation; grievances
that can be blamed on others; subcultures of
conspiracy and misinformation; and an ideology
that justifies murder.
But what if
that is wrong? What if all the platitudes and
cliches about why people turn to terror, such as
George W Bush administration claims that global
Islamic terrorists hate democracy and freedom, are
based on myths and sound bites, signifying
nothing? What if most of the terror experts are
guilty of the same sin that the intelligence
agencies were accused of in regard to the reason
the US invaded Iraq, ie, cherry picking the
evidence?
If that is the problem then the
answer is this book.
Marc Sageman is a
University of Pennsylvania professor of psychiatry
and ethnopolitical conflict, and a former Foreign
Service Officer who worked closely with Islamic
fundamentalists during the Afghan-Soviet war in
the 1980s and gained an intimate understanding of
their networks. His 2004 book Understanding
Terror Networks gave the first social
explanation of the global wave of activity.
Now, in his new book, Leaderless
Jihad, we have a book that chooses to boldly
go where few books on terrorism have gone before;
namely to use scientific method to study
terrorism.
In so doing he chooses not to
focus on individuals and their backgrounds, or
"root" (micro and macro approaches respectively)
causes, to explain how the Muslims who carried out
the September 11, 2001, attacks and those like
them are radicalized to become terrorists. Sageman
takes the common sense view that you can't defeat
an enemy until you know them and understand what
drives them. Instead, by using ordinary social
science methods he studies how people in groups
influence each other to become terrorists.
By building his own evidence-based,
independently checked database of over 500
terrorists he has been able to see what various
members of al-Qaeda had in common. He finds that
are "part of a violent Islamist born-again social
movement".
And this social movement,
similar to the Russian anarchists of the late 19th
century, is actually motivated by idealism.
Sageman's data show that they are generally
idealistic young people seeking glory fighting for
justice and fairness.
This runs counter to
the Bush administration counter-terrorist
strategy, which is framed in terms of promoting
democracy and freedom; a concept that that is
readily grasped by the American domestic audience.
But these are not terms with which Middle
Eastern Muslims identify. To them democracy means
leaders who win elections with almost 100% of the
vote. And if a Salafi Islamist party does win an
election, as was the case with the Islamic
Salvation Front in Algeria in 1992 or Hamas in the
Gaza Strip in 2006, the election results are
canceled or the world shuns the victor.
Thus, those who eventually become
terrorists see Western-style democracy as a
harmful "domination of man over man", undermining
their theocratic utopia (Salaf). In their
view that was the only time world history that a
fair and just community existed. The
Salafis, like other religious
fundamentalists, see the Muslim decline over the
past centuries as evidence that they have strayed
from the righteous path.
Among Sageman's
most useful points is his description of al-Qaeda
both as a social movement and an ideology. The
most important thing the United States can do, in
countering global Islamic terrorism, is to avoid
the mistakes of the early Cold War era when
policymakers assumed that communism was one global
monolithic movement. It wasn't and neither is
al-Qaeda. Even before September 11 it had evolved
beyond the group that had first formed in the
aftermath of fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan
and it has evolved several times since, and will
continue to do so. Increasingly, to paraphrase,
the old cliche about politics, all terrorism is
local.
Sageman also does an excellent job
of debunking the conventional wisdom as to how
people become terrorists, ie, that they are
brainwashed when they are immature children or
teenagers, that they lack family obligations, act
out of sexual frustration, that there is something
intrinsically wrong with them (the "bad seed"
school of thought).
Sageman finds that one
of the greatest motivators for joining an Islamic
terrorist social movement is the one that is most
easily understood; relationships with friends and
kin. In other words, there is no to-down
recruitment into al-Qaeda. Rather, the movement
forms through the spontaneous self-organization of
informal, trusted friends.
On a positive
note, despite much right-wing fear-mongering,
Sageman finds that there are far fewer homegrown
Islamic terrorists in the United States than in
other regions, like Europe. He attributes this to
the fact that the Muslim community in the United
States is far less radicalized, due to America's
greater acceptance of immigrants, as a part of its
integrationist, religiously tolerant, "American
Dream", "melting pot" mythology. In short,
inclusion, as opposed to exclusion, pays
dividends.
In conclusion, Sageman finds
that as Islamic terrorism has evolved it has
increasingly degraded, out of necessity due to its
own lack of appeal, into a "leaderless jihad". To
the extent it still has an agenda, it is set by
general guidelines found on the Internet, which
allows it to maintain a facade of unity. Without
the Internet it would dissipate into a political
vacuum.
In truth, Islamic terrorism is not
an existential threat to the existence of the
United States. No amount of ominous predictions of
al-Qaeda acquiring chemical, biological or nuclear
weapons will change that.
According to
Sageman, the only thing that can keep al-Qaeda
from fading into the dust heap of history is if
the United States "transforms its fight against
global Islamic terrorism into a war against Islam,
which would mobilize all Muslims against the
United States".
Thus, the answer to the
Islamic threat is the same one proffered by George
Kennan with respect to the Soviet Union;
containment. The goal is to accelerate the process
of internal decay already taking place within
al-Qaeda and its copycat cells.
Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in
the Twenty-First Century by Marc Sageman.
University of Pennsylvania Press (December 2007) .
ISBN-10: 0812240650. Price US$24.95, 176 pages.
David Isenberg is an analyst in
national and international security affairs,
sento@earthlink.net. He is also a member of the
Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy, an
adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute,
contributor to the Straus Military Reform Project,
a research fellow at the Independent Institute,
and a US Navy veteran. The views expressed are his
own.
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n so doing he chooses not to
focus on individuals and their backgrounds, or
"root" (micro and macro approaches respectively)
causes, to explain how the Muslims who carried out
the September 11, 2001, attacks and those like
them are radicalized to become terrorists. Sageman
takes the common sense view that you can't defeat
an enemy until you know them and understand what
drives them. Instead, by using ordinary social
science methods he studies how people in groups
influence each other to become terrorists.
