StormWarning’s Counterterrorism

Their lives are filled with hopelessness and a desire for a better life in the "here after."  That is what budding jihadists seek when they join the "club" of suicide bombers.  We, as a very large group of potential targets, I believe, fail miserably to understand the "hows" and the "whys" of terrorist recruitment.  What we choose to see (understandably) is the result…the death and destruction and blood and mangled bodies…and shattered lives.

I believe, as many intelligent folks, that there are striking parallels between recruitment for the jihad, and the ways in which kids from the ghettos end up in street gangs.  Others, I think many others, simply reject this thinking as "touchy-feely" and decry Islam as the "relgion of peace" and toss a blanket over all Muslims and say that as a group, all Muslims are bad.  Sorry, despite my involvement in security efforts (even my "peripheral" involvement is more than most can claim), I cannot abide by that generalization.  Please note however, that as pointed out below, not all jihadists come from desperate conditions.

So this is the story of HOW TWO TEENS WERE RECRUITED FOR JIHAD, and then perhaps, a little "touchy-feely" to insense a few people who simply think that Muslims are born to kill us all.  These boys say:

"We were told to fight against Israel, America and non-Muslims," said Muhammed Bakhtiar, 17, explaining why he wanted to become a suicide bomber. "We are so unhappy with our lives here. We have nothing," he said.

Most of us…most Americans or Westerners simply cannot relate to this desperate outlook on life.  But that is what characterizes the youths who choose death over life.  So these two boys Muhammed Bakhtiar and his friend, Miraj Ahmad leave their homes in the Northwest frontier area of Pakistan ("about 600,000 people live in their hometown of Buner, a green valley surrounded by high
mountains. The area is underdeveloped and the climate is harsh.") to go to attend  the Muridke madrassa right outside of Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The madrassa or religious school is run by the Jama’at-ud-Da’awah, the charity linked to the outlawed terrorist organization, Lashkar e Taiba. And Lashkar e Taiba has links to al-Qaida.

The dissonance of images of this school is striking.

• bearded armed guards sporting
  Kalashnikovs

• a cricket
  field, swimming pool, all sorts of sport activities

• religious instruction

• computer sciences,
  engineering and pre-med classes

AND MOST ALL…

• jihad

As much as the more hardline conservative bloggers would damn all Muslims, this cannot be so.  Young boys and girls are given choices…fight or die.  When you have nothing, these choices may be attractive.  Examine these quotes:

"We were told it is our choice to become a freedom fighter or a suicide
bomber," explained Ahmad, who had a neat beard and wore a white Muslim
prayer cap. "But we should never fight against Pakistan."

"The jihadi man who brought us to Muridke told us we would become great
by fighting jihad," said the clean-shaven Bakhtiar. "We knew we could
never become great if we stayed in Buner. I wanted to become great."

This is not a sentiment that any rational thinking American or Westerner can understand.  It is an expression of a disenchanted youth seeking respite from a life of poverty, hardship and hopelessness.  As difficult as my childhood was…when my Dad was laid off…and often as my parents and I fought, I simply had no inclination to join a gang or turn to a life of violence.  And yet, this is what many young Muslims are confronted with.

The Buner tribesmen (where these two boys are from) who cannot eke out a living from farming often try to leave and work in Malaysia or the Gulf States.

Some, like Bakhtiar and Ahmad, just try and leave. Buner seemed like a perfect place to sign up kids for jihad.

So from the desperate, downtrodden and vulnerable, the jihad recruits young people to the jihad and to kill Israelis, Americans and non-Muslims.

The Headmaster of their school in  Buner denied that his school had brainwashed the boys, and is quoted as saying that, "We don’t support this; suicide attacks are murder; this is against
Islam," said Rahman. "Those boys went to Muridke by themselves, they
should have been here taking their exams, and I no longer want them
back in my school," he said."

After intervention of tribal elders, the boys ended up back in the school.  But here is the point.  The reporters who did this story (Mushtaq Yusufzai, NBC News Producer in Buner, and Carol Grisanti, NBC News Producer in Islamabad)  asked the boys:

"Do you want to go back and learn jihad?"

"I don’t know" said Bakhtiar."Maybe, maybe."

Ahmad agreed. "There is nothing for us here. Nothing."

In a related story, Militants Attack Town in Pakistan, you will find this final paragraph:

In a clash at a boys school in the troubled town on Monday, police killed two militants suspected of recruiting students for suicide bombings.

Too much "touchy-feely?  Then the answers may not satisfy those who cast that blanket over all Muslims and derisively call Islam the "religion of peace."

Terrorists Are Made, Not Born: Creating Terrorists Using Social Psychological Conditioning
In
this article, published in the Journal of Homeland Security,
Anthony Stahelski says that sociologists and social psychologists have
discovered that terrorist groups use cult-like conditioning techniques
to convert normal individuals into remorseless killers. The limited
global counterterrorism resources, he says, should focus on eradicating
the terrorist group training camps where the conditioning takes place,
rather than on trying to find terrorists after they have already been
conditioned.

Psychologists have thus far been unable to
verify the existence of an individual-level universal terrorist
profile. This disappointing finding makes the search for terrorists who
appear and act normally in a larger population of non-terrorists much
more difficult. However, sociologists and social psychologists have
discovered that terrorist groups use cult-like conditioning techniques
to convert normal individuals into remorseless killers. The premise of
this article is that the limited global counterterrorism resources
should focus on eradicating the terrorist group training camps where
the conditioning takes place, rather than on trying to find terrorists
after they have already been conditioned. Five phases of conditioning
are described:

• depluralization

• self-deindividuation

• other-deindividuation

• dehumanization

• demonization

All
conditioning phases are supported by powerful group dynamics that
reinforce the effectiveness of the conditioning. It appears that most
terrorist groups use all or most of the social psychological
conditioning and support processes described here. Since the
cult-conditioned products of these processes are currently the most
dangerous individuals on the planet, the article concludes with several
recommendations for disrupting and possibly eliminating the groups and
the training facilities, in order to stop the production of terrorist
operators.

Terrorism researchers have generally concluded that
most terrorists are not initially psychopaths, that most terrorists are
not obviously or consistently mentally ill, and that there is as of yet
no identified universal terrorist personality pattern.

These findings are unfortunate…

[Note: Its worth the read...its only 5 pages long when printed out without the footnotes.]

Conclusions
The
first and most important conclusion to draw is the importance of
leaders to terrorist groups. The conditioning process centers on and
builds from the power of the charismatic leader. If the leader is
eliminated, the group is greatly weakened…

…Second, the more
isolated the environment in which the conditioning process occurs, the
deeper and longer lasting the results on group members. Aggressively
disrupting the training camps…

…third conclusion is
specifically directed at the Fundamentalist Islamic groups…the
results here support the idea of aggressively pursuing and eliminating
the funding sources for these schools.

ENDING
I wish to thank any of you reading this far who have not simply given it up and "run for the hills" because of this "touchy-feely" line of thinking.  I might even lose some of what little readership this blog has because of an article like this one.

Those who have read this blog for any period of time know that I am as anti-terror as anyone…and you have seen and read my positions (many of them hardline) on many issues relating to homeland security and national security.  It does not mean that an attempt to understand the dynamics of the enemy we face is wrong.  To some though, doing so may simply tax their faculties too much.  Also cross posted on Real Clear Politics under recent submissions.

Current Affairs, International Issues, Opinions, Social Issues