Leaderless Jihad

Terror Networks in the Twenty-First Century

Marc Sageman

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780812206784
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: National Security
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In the post-September 11 world, Al Qaeda is no longer the central organizing force that aids or authorizes terrorist attacks or recruits terrorists. It is now more a source of inspiration for terrorist acts carried out by independent local groups that have branded themselves with the Al Qaeda name. Building on his previous groundbreaking work on the Al Qaeda network, forensic psychiatrist Marc Sageman has greatly expanded his research to explain how Islamic terrorism emerges and operates in the twenty-first century.In Leaderless Jihad, Sageman rejects the views that place responsibility for terrorism on society or a flawed, predisposed individual. Instead, he argues, the individual, outside influence, and group dynamics come together in a four-step process through which Muslim youth become radicalized. First, traumatic events either experienced personally or learned about indirectly spark moral outrage. Individuals interpret this outrage through a specific ideology, more felt and understood than based on doctrine. Usually in a chat room or other Internet-based venues, adherents share this moral outrage, which resonates with the personal experiences of others. The outrage is acted on by a group, either online or offline. Leaderless Jihad offers a ray of hope. Drawing on historical analogies, Sageman argues that the zeal of jihadism is self-terminating; eventually its followers will turn away from violence as a means of expressing their discontent. The book concludes with Sageman's recommendations for the application of his research to counterterrorism law enforcement efforts.

ONE

How to Study Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century

How should we study terrorism? The story of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh illustrates the biographical approach, which focuses on the individual and examines his background to explain how he became a terrorist. Another popular approach searches for “root causes” in the social conditions that lead people to become terrorists. A third approach is a middle way, concentrating on how people in groups influence each other to become terrorists. Each approach has its benefits and drawbacks, but whichever path is taken, it can and must be studied scientifically. I will argue that the third approach offers the most fruitful way to understanding the process of radicalization.

Science is not a set of beliefs, but a methodology to choose among competing hypotheses. What distinguishes science from faith is that science allows factual evidence to adjudicate competing claims.¹ Many authors of books about terrorism offer case studies, such as the activities of Osama bin Laden, the first World Trade bombing of 1993, or the Bali bombing of 2002. Investigators are naturally attracted by the unusual cases and are ready to generalize from them. But basing conclusions on a single event or individual often leads them astray. Other writers opine based on selective information, choosing facts to support their arguments and neglecting anything that might contradict them. These are often nothing more than arguments made for the sake of scoring political points and have no role in a scientific study. This book takes as its starting point that the scientific method is essential in the study of terrorism.

A scientific approach should encompass all the available data, and not a biased selective sample. Scientific research on terrorism must specify or generate a set of data, which should be representative of the terrorist universe. Since all samples are inevitably slanted, it is important to understand the biases underlying the data (often due to the process of collection itself) and take that into account when making statements.

Far too many experts on terrorism misunderstand the scientific method and say that their work is “evidence-based” because they have found some facts to support their argument. Often such evidence comes from mysterious sources—anonymous tips from the “intelligence community”—that cannot be verified. Another claim to expertise in terrorism is based on the ability to speak Arabic. Being able to understand the language is important, but it is a mistake to think that all Arabic speakers are terrorism experts. We would not argue that knowledge of English makes one an expert in physics just because many books on the subject are written in English.

The key to unlocking the mysteries surrounding terrorism is found in social science methods—statistics, sampling theory, survey techniques, measurement, data analysis—as the basis for investigation. It is not found in privileged access to “secret information,” which often turns out to be a rehash of unverifiable rumors, or in knowledge of relevant languages (important though they may be). Yet most terrorism experts come from the fields of journalism or intelligence analysis, have never taken an introductory course in social science methodology, and lack a basic understanding of the scientific method. One authority once said to me that he deeply distrusted statistics and trusted only the telling anecdote. I could not disagree more, because data is not the plural of anecdote. Anecdotes can be used to vividly illustrate a point, as I have done throughout this book, but they cannot be the basis of general statements about terrorism.

The importance of using the scientific method is underscored by the fact that our common sense sometimes leads us astray. We all think that we are experts in human behavior based on our observations of how people act. In a sense, we are. We constantly interact with other people around us and do a pretty good job of judging their strengths and weaknesses. But when dealing with extremes of behavior such as mental illness or suicide bombings, our common sense fails us.

It is often assumed that, because terrorists act in such extreme ways, what we understand about people does not apply. When confronted with appar ently incomprehensible acts, we are all too willing to suspend our general sense of how people interact. It is easy to view terrorists as alien creatures who exist outside normal patterns of social interaction. To protect the understanding we have about ordinary people, we are eager to believe anything exceptional about terrorists: they are essentially bad; they are just mad; they are driven by sexual frustration; they are brainwashed or are simply robots following orders; they are thoughtless religious fanatics. We do not know any people like that in our daily lives, but this does not bother us because we do not know any terrorists, either. So it is easy to believe that those who carry out terrorist acts might not be “normal” human beings. But in order to understand terrorism, we must study those who carry out these acts through the scientific method without any preconceived notion of their essence.

Until recently, a large part of the literature on terrorism concentrated on definitions of terrorism, but without reaching consensus on what that definition is.² Thus we have the common refrain that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist, and the suspicion that, if the word had existed at the time, the British authorities would probably have branded our founding fathers terrorists. Of course, most people know what they mean by terrorism, but it is a little like obscenity: people believe they know it when they see it, but cannot define it. Even the United Nations does not have a definition for terrorism.

Rather than spending time searching for a definition that will satisfy everyone, let us simply identify the subjects of this study. They are the men responsible for the September 11, 2001, attacks and all those who, like them, threaten the United States and the West on behalf of a larger community, the vanguard trying to establish a certain version of an Islamist utopia. What drives them? What do they want? How do they accomplish their murderous tasks? The United States faces many potential threats, but this study is limited to these specific terrorists. The focus on this group does not imply that all terrorists are Muslim. This is far from the truth. However, because the work is limited to these specific terrorists, its findings may not be relevant to other types of terrorism.

This work is an attempt to develop an understanding of this form of terrorism in order to help contain it and prevent further atrocities on the scale of the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998, the September 11 attacks, and the bombings that took place in Bali in 2002, in Casablanca, Riyadh, and Istanbul in 2003, and in Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. Each of these atrocities left dozens to thousands dead and was claimed by or carried out on behalf of al Qaeda.

The Individual Terrorist: A Micro-Level Analysis

Three levels of analysis have been used to study terrorism: the micro-level, the macro-level, and a middle-range analysis.

The most common approach is a micro-level analysis. This method is based on the assumption that there is something different about terrorists that makes them do what they do—especially when they kill themselves in the process. The first impulse is to turn to clinical psychologists or psychiatrists and ask, “What is wrong with these people?” Clinicians, however, are trained to dig into the backgrounds of their patients to discover an explanation for their behavior. Reliance on these experts introduces two assumptions: that there is something personally wrong with the terrorists and that the explanation is to be found in their backgrounds. Since mental health providers are trained to look at patients one at a time, they collect case histories. They then try to generalize from these histories to other potential terrorists. A good story is mesmerizing, as the case of Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh in the Introduction illustrates, and his history seems to explain his later behavior. But precisely because such stories are so compelling, they can undermine good social science by taking attention away from comprehensive research and statistical analysis.

The work of some psychologists is nevertheless useful because they have actually spoken to or extensively studied terrorists, either in prison or after the terrorists have given up violence.³ But others do not even go this far. They instead generalize from disputed theories and select items from the popular press to provide partial support for their arguments.⁴

Many problems crop up with this individualistic approach. The first is that we can never tell how significant or widespread the problem of terrorism is by simply looking at individual terrorists. It does not address questions such as: What is the proportion of terrorists in the general population? Is it one in one hundred people, one in a thousand, or one in a million? For the kind of terrorism carried out by al Qaeda, this is an especially important question. What is the size of the network of people who commit terrorist acts on behalf of al Qaeda? As many people ask, are we winning or losing the war on terror? Are there more terrorists now or are there fewer? Establishing a baseline is critical not only in gauging how well we are combating this phenomenon, but also in knowing whether we are underestimating the problem of terrorism or blowing it out of proportion.

A second problem with the individual perspective is the assumption that terrorists are fundamentally different from the rest of us. This, in scientific terms, is called the rejection of the null hypothesis. The null hypothesis states that the sample under study is representative of the population at large—in other words, there is no difference between the sample studied and the larger population. For scientific explanation, researchers try to detect a difference between the people they study and the rest of the population, and weave this difference into an explanation of what they are trying to study. In the field of terrorism, it has been assumed that terrorists are psychologically different from “normal” people. For forty years psychologists throughout the world have tried to find this difference, and no “terrorist personality” has emerged. There have been some claims of such discoveries, which received wide media exposure, but none of these claims has survived further examination. Some believe that the failure to detect any difference from “normal” people is not proof that such abnormality does not exist. This may be true, but the failure to find a “terrorist personality” after extensive efforts argues that either such a personality does not exist or it is so subtle as to defy identification. At present, the consensus in the field of terrorism is that there is no terrorist personality.

We have come full circle in the last half-century. After prematurely rejecting the null hypothesis—by assuming that terrorists were different from the general population—we have failed to explain terrorism as a function of an abnormal personality. This means that mental health professionals, whose expertise lies in understanding illness or abnormality, do not have a better grasp of terrorism than nonclinicians. Therefore, their insights on terrorism should not be accorded any special significance.

A third problem with the micro-level of analysis is that it focuses too much on the individual and neglects situational factors. It limits the field of inquiry to the individual’s background, which allegedly predisposes someone to acts of terrorism. A strong version of this argument would postulate that there is an innate predisposition—that we could, if we looked for it, discover a “T” gene for terrorism. It would be nice if we could devise a blood test to detect potential terrorists before they fulfill their destiny. Unfortunately, this is not possible.

The strong version of the belief that there is a background predisposition to terrorism carries the implication that people have some essence that eventually matures and results in violent behavior. In other words, terrorists are born with a kernel of evil that manifests itself in the terrorist act. This is often how people talk about terrorism, the unstated assumption being that people do not change. This comforting thought means that we, the rest of us nonterrorists, could never become terrorists. This is not true. No one is born a terrorist: people become terrorists. There is nothing inevitable about a terrorist life trajectory.

A weaker version of this argument holds that there is something in each terrorist’s background—some kind of traumatic event, for example—that exerts an influence so strong as to predispose him or her to eventually become a terrorist. As mentioned earlier, there is no evidence that terrorists have personal flaws that inevitably lead them to terrorism. This is, however, what some psychiatrists argue,⁵ and this evidence is discussed in Chapter 3.

It is difficult to give up the idea that terrorists are essentially different from the rest of us. This is part of our general tendency to explain other people’s bad behavior by their personal qualities. Thus, if we find that people disappoint us, it is because they are untrustworthy. If they overeat, it is because they are gluttons. When we explain ourselves to others, however, we tend to blame circumstances. So, if we disappoint loved ones, we cannot help it—circumstances forced this one slip. If we overeat, it is because the food was irresistible. This near-universal tendency to attribute explanations for other people’s bad behavior to personal disposition while blaming our own on external situations is what social psychologists call the fundamental error of attribution. The search for a specific predisposition for terrorism is likely just another example of this inclination, which leads us to greatly underestimate the importance of situational factors in the process of radicalization.

A fourth problem with the individual, micro-level perspective is the assumption that people know why they are doing what they are doing. Psychologists like to interview people to discover their motivation and intent, but sometimes their self-explanations are inaccurate. Memories are not perfect, and people tend to tell stories in a manner that justifies their past behavior.

Social psychologists try to understand people’s actions through experimental manipulation of their environment; the factors that seem to explain human behavior are often counterintuitive and surprising. In Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment on obedience to authority, the vast majority of people gave innocent subjects what they believed to be painful and possibly fatal electric shocks. However, when Milgram asked behavioral experts to predict how many subjects would actually carry out this experiment to its end, the responses were unanimous that only the worst psychopaths would continue the experiments to the point that they would cause the death of the subjects.⁶ Going back to the overeating example, a recent study showed that variation in such a behavioral outcome as obesity is better explained by membership in a network of friends and family than by genetic or environmental factors. Yet, none of the participants of the study were aware of this strong influence.⁷

Although interviewing terrorists is an important tool, it comprises only part of the data that contributes to our overall understanding of them, and may in some circumstances misguide us. Even if terrorists are completely honest with the interviewer, they may not really know what drove them to do what they did. People think of themselves as responsible for their good deeds. The story they tell about their past is usually one that shows how they controlled positive behavior; bad behavior is attributable to “circumstances.” In addition, the stories we tell about ourselves also follow cultural templates. If one were to ask an American why he failed at something—why he lost his job, for example—he might answer, “I did not try hard enough.” In the land of opportunity, failure is attributable to the individual’s lack of resolve. However, if one asks the same question of a European Muslim, he would be more likely to answer, “I never got a chance because I’m Muslim.” This answer is collectivist, pointing out the discrimination experienced. Both might be true, but in the first instance the answer obscures the role of circumstances and in the other it obscures one’s own contribution to a negative outcome.

We cannot presume that people are always aware of their motivation or remember it perfectly years later. Psychiatrists often work with patients who are to some degree puzzled by their own behavior. Long-term psychotherapy patients often relate the same story, but from very different points of view as time goes on. This is because people interpret their past according to what is taking place in their lives at the time of the telling. Although their past actions do not change, their understanding and interpretations of these actions do evolve over time. This should caution us against generating an overly cognitive view of terrorists, meaning that they are fully aware of their intention and motivation and then deliberately carry them out. By and large, captured Islamist terrorists, like those indicted in Miami, New York, New Jersey, and Toronto and those who have undergone trial in London, the Netherlands, France, and Madrid are definitely not intellectuals who decide what to do after careful deliberation. Many times, people act without thinking and only afterward tell a story to glorify their success or excuse their failure. Self-serving, after-the-fact explanations may not reflect before-the-fact motivations. While interviews with terrorists are an important tool, the information gained in this manner must be viewed with these caveats in mind.

Finally, focusing exclusively on terrorists can never te...