Posted on 03/24/2008 6:45:59 AM PDT by jdm
Michael Jacobson asks why some high-profile terrorist attacks didn’t happen, and relates how defections and resignations plague even the most extreme terror organizations — and the petty reasons why. One terrorist quit the follow-up to the 9/11 attacks because he tired of the extremism. Another al-Qaeda terrorist quit because Osama bin Laden wouldn’t pay for his wife’s C-section. Jacobson wants us to find a pattern that we can use to defuse the biggest weapons AQ and other terror groups have:
Why do some terrorists drop out? We rightly think of al-Qaeda and other jihadist groups as formidable foes, but the stories of would-be killers who bail give us some intriguing clues about fault lines that counterterrorism officials should exploit. The reasons for a change of heart can be strikingly prosaic: family, money, petty grievances. But they can also revolve around shaken ideology or lost faith in a group’s leadership.
It’s become a truism of counterterrorism that we must understand how and why individuals become jihadists in the first place. But almost nobody is studying the flip side of radicalization — understanding those who leave terrorist organizations. We’d do well to start. Figuring out why individuals walk away from terrorist groups can help governments predict whether an individual — or even a cell — is likely to go through with a plot. Understanding the dropouts should also make it easier for governments to determine which terrorists might be induced to switch sides, help stop radicalization and craft messages that could peel away people already in terrorist organizations. The more we know about why terrorists bail, the better we can fight them.
So where to start? Despite al-Qaeda’s reputation for ferocity and secrecy, plenty of wannabes wind up dropping out from it and its affiliates[.]
One obvious point comes from Jacobson’s essay, although Jacobson doesn’t offer a way to capitalize on it. AQ handlers impress on their suicide jihadists to keep from contacting their families. Jacobson notes that Ziad Jarrah, who piloted United 93 on 9/11, almost dropped out of the plot because of his relationship with his German fiancée. Ramzi Binalshibh had to talk him into staying in the plot, but another potential member dropped out when he returned to his family in Saudi Arabia after leaving the training camp in Afghanistan. Family ties, therefore, should provide a means to negating the attraction to the nihilistic strain of Islam.
But how could the US leverage that? We can’t. Even though it is the most effective manner in disarming the human time bombs produced by terrorist training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the US has little influence on whether jihadists contact their families, or even whether the families would want to disarm their brainwashed members if they made contact. That leaves us with other methods of squeezing the terrorist groups, especially financially but also operationally.
Here we can have some direct impact. The loss of funds makes it harder for AQ and other organizations to pay their people, and that creates dissent. One early AQ member “fumed” over the lack of compensation he received and began embezzling from Osama. When Osama demanded restitution, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl — who at one point tried to acquire uranium for AQ — went on the run, fearing for his life. L’Houssaine Kerchtou wanted to kill bin Laden when he got turned down for the $500 reimbursement for his wife’s C-section in Morocco.
Others have left over tactics and lack of success. Osama’s own son Omar left after 9/11, asking what good the mass murder had accomplished, telling a journalist that the organization consisted of “dummies”. Another AQ leader left during the Afghan jihad, resentful that people with less military experience than himself were in command and botching the job in late 2001. Failure breeds resentment and a lack of confidence in leadership.
Jacobson wonders whether we can learn from these lessons, but in fact we already have. It shows that terrorists don’t stop when people surrender; rather, they stop when they start losing. The myth that fighting terrorists breeds more terrorists ends with Jacobson’s essay. If we cut off their funds, kill them on the field, and stop their attacks before they begin, terrorists get the message. It won’t stop the Osamas and the Baitullah Mehsuds, but it eventually cuts them off from their recruiting base and their experienced underlings. It takes longer than some attention spans can handle, but that is the path to victory for the West.
Nice post.
Well, healthcare costs are quite a burden on any organization, nowadays.......
Health care. He quit AQ because of health care.
I guess he couldn’t afford Blue Crescent-Blue Shield?...........
If only they’d “invested” in universal health care, they wouldn’t have lost this terrorist to the infidels.
It COULD work in a Muslim country. Anyone that got too expensive to care for could be volunteered as a suicide bomber.
Interesting.
Yep. Don't laugh.
Push actually did come to shove ... and he was actually forced to answer the question: "will this AQ terrorists stuff really make my life better?"
The answer was "no".
So he quit.
The question for us in the West is how to convince other folks in south Asia and Asia Minor that terrorism and radicalism is the wrong approach?
One of the primary targets of the counter-jihad should be the wealthy money men that support it. Without the Golden Chain, al Queda would not exist. Bin Laden's real role appears more as a go-between, a venture capitalist representative between the wealthy money men and the operational people, who had the job of distributing funds to groups
Forewarned is forearmed. In the 70's cults, did the same types of tricks to bond the individual to the cult. The MSM put out cautions that if a group was isolating a person from their family, depriving them of sleep or food etc., to see it as a red flag.
Publish techniques used to destabilize a person - to make them vulnerable - then compare it to being used like a woman is used. Muslim men will be alerted and on guard - they're terrified of being treated like a woman.
I think one of the problems we have in this war is that we are fighting a religion rather than a political or economic ideology. When fighting the Soviets we had no qualms about smuggling in copies of books and radio transmissions telling why Marx and Lenin were wrong. Are we willing to undermine Islam by sneaking in books, CDs, DVDs, and radio and satellite programs telling why Mohammad is wrong or at least misused by the Wahabists in Saudi Arabia and the Ayatollahs in Iran?
If we had Hillary care and the guy was already in the U.S. as is likely. he could gotten that C-section and completed his mission as planned.
Infiltration and trickle down annihilation work well also.
Very good article by Ed Morrissey. Thanks for posting.
Excellent post...pass it along people!
“Publish techniques used to destabilize a person - to make them vulnerable - then compare it to being used like a woman is used. Muslim men will be alerted and on guard - they’re terrified of being treated like a woman.”
An excellent point.
During WWII we learned about propaganda in school to help make us immune. We need to teach this in the schools now to help immunize our young folk against cults.
It would also be nice if more moms could be at home with their kids and family ties could be stengthened, but I’m not holding my breath on that.
It comes as no surprise to me that bloodthirsty murderers who take pleasure in drilling holes in the faces of their victims would not think it necessary to extend compassion to the family members of fellow torturers. This is also the reason for the Anbar Awakening, where the locals quickly got sick of the values of the AQI types who promised to bring them real Islamic government but instead murdered people for playing music.
They quit shortly after their first actual engagement with U.S. forces.
One way or the other they learn that Jihad is bad for your health.
This is nothing new—it goes all the way back to the Mafia in places like New York. Al Capone was a hero in Chicago because he opened soup kitchens during the Depression.
Same thing with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. They ARE the government there, not the “real” government in Beirut. Hezbollah provides medical care, schooling (in radical Islam, of course), even garbage disposal.
And the reason we don’t smuggle in Bibles and anti-Wahabbist propaganda? Because the places we’d have to smuggle it into, like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and Yemen, are our “friends,” not our enemies like the Soviet Union. There’s no way we can undermine Wahabbist Islam in Saudi Arabia while buying billions of dollars of their oil and providing their government with massive economic aid.
}:-)4
Most Americans don't realize 9/11 was supposed to have been much, much worse and potentially plung us into depression and chaos for 10 or more years, not to mention starting a nuclear war.
This guy just admitted it. What happened on 9/11 was 'botched'?
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