[Mb-civic] The enemy within

Fri Jul 15 16:25:02 PDT 2005

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The enemy within
Jul 14th 2005
>From The Economist print edition

What turns a man into a terrorist, and what can be done about it?

AFP
AFP

THE residents, both white and Asian, of certain quiet suburbs of Leeds, in
northern England, were understandably confused by the news that their
neighbours had caught a train to London and brought mayhem to the capital.
Some described the bombers as ordinary young men whose interests did not go
much beyond football and cricket. But one suspect was said by a neighbour to
have found another solution to suburban boredom‹a long trip to Pakistan and
Afghanistan, and a chance to be trained in the arts of terror.

Two related questions haunt Britain, and Europe, in the wake of the London
attacks. First, what is it that prompts a small minority of the continent¹s
Muslims to shift from discontent or personal frustration to active terror?
And second, was the attack on London indeed an act of home-grown terror, or
an atrocity initiated by people in some distant war zone who had a grudge
against Britain? The Leeds arrests, while impressively swift and a credit to
the police, have proved there is no easy answer to these questions. In an
age of globalised ideologies, globalised communications and porous borders,
there is no real distinction between domestic and foreign threats.

Even if everyone involved in terrorising London turns out to have been
British-born, it is clear that the bombers had access to sophisticated
explosives, not easily available in suburban Yorkshire; and, more important,
that they were influenced by ideas, images and interpretations of Islam that
would continue to circulate electronically, even if every extremist who
tried to enter Britain were intercepted. So the best that terrorist-hunters
in Britain and elsewhere in Europe can do is to trace how disaffected people
from their own tranquil suburbs form connections with ideological mentors,
and ultimately terrorist sponsors, who live overseas, and how those
godfathers find recruits in western countries.

An example of such sponsorship is the recent report that Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, the mastermind of terror in Iraq, has built up a network of
supporters and volunteers in Spain. For a case of mentoring, consider the
trial that began in Amsterdam this week of Mohammed Bouyeri, who has
confessed to killing Theo van Gogh, a Dutch film director who had enraged
Muslims with his fiery attacks on Islam.

Mr Bouyeri, who refused at his trial to recognise the Dutch legal system and
came to court clutching the Koran, is linked to the Hofstad group of Dutch
youngsters, some 15 of whom are on trial separately. They began as a group
of second- or third-generation Dutch Muslims, mostly male and in their late
teens or early 20s, who became discontented with their country and surfed
the internet for ideas. At least at first, this and other groups of
disaffected Dutch Muslims were pathetically unsophisticated. One was caught
in 2003 trying to make a bomb‹drawing on tips from a website, but using the
wrong fertiliser. At some point, however, the group found a mentor who was
more sinister and sophisticated: a Syrian jihadist-recruiter who came to the
Netherlands and coached them in doctrine.

In Britain, too, security services have concluded that these days,
connections between local youths and foreign godfathers are usually formed
at the youths¹ behest. To a surprising extent, the onus is on individual
zealots (or groups of them) to find mentors. Al-Qaeda does not actively seek
recruits for the jihadist cause, partly because that would attract the
attention of the security services and partly because, ever since the
destruction of its bases in Afghanistan, it has‹in the view of well-placed
British observers‹been too loosely organised to recruit systematically.

This highlights one of the main difficulties of the ³war on terror². In
2001, when America and its allies responded to the attacks on New York and
Washington by declaring war on the al-Qaeda network, it seemed an
identifiable adversary, with bases, financial structures and a leadership
that could be singled out and struck. Since then, it has become something
much looser: not even a ³franchise², as it is commonly labelled, but more an
ideological community, held together above all by electronic connections,
which seeks inspiration from a common source.

Radicalism-by-internet

What prompts young British, French or Dutch Muslims to look for such
mentors? Senior British insiders say that, although paths to extremism vary
widely, they tend to follow certain social and psychological patterns.
Frequently, a young Muslim man falls out of mainstream society, becoming
alienated both from his parents and from the ³stuffy² Islamic culture in
which he was brought up. He may become more devout, but the reverse is more
likely. He turns to drink, drugs and petty crime before seeing a ³solution²
to his problems‹and the world¹s‹in radical Islam.

Olivier Roy, a French writer on global Islam, has described
³neo-fundamentalism² (which may or may not be violent) as a broad reaction
by Muslims in western countries against their families and background, as
well as against their host societies. As Mr Roy portrays them, such Muslims
have abandoned the food, music and customs of the ³old country² but still
feel repelled by the ethos and values of the ³new country². Adrift from
both, they are attracted by a simple, electronically disseminated version of
the faith which can readily be propagated among people of all cultures,
including white Europeans.

Another French ³Islamologue², Antoine Sfeir, has identified relations
between the sexes as a big factor in the re-Islamisation of
second-generation Muslims in Europe. Because young Muslim women often do
better than men at adapting to the host society (they tend to do better at
school, for example), old patriarchal structures are upset and young men
acquire a strong incentive to reassert the old order.
AFP
AFP

Any of these might help, too

In many cases, say British specialists, groups of young, disaffected Muslims
goad one another down the path to extremism. People who may be bound
together by ethnicity, worship or criminal activity develop a common
interest in the suffering of Muslims across the globe. Websites and
satellite television channels then supply visual images and incendiary
rhetoric from any place where Muslims are fighting non-Muslims. The
favourite war used to be Chechnya; now it is Iraq.

As an incipient extremist group grows more obsessive, and its weaker
brethren fall away, hard-core members often withdraw from the mosques.
Indeed, a big recent trend in European Islam, says Mr Roy, is the mass
withdrawal by militants from mosques that are under surveillance. This has
made extremism even more elusive, and the internet¹s influence even greater.
To a large extent, ³the internet has replaced Afghanistan² as a source of
training and inspiration for militant Muslims, says Stephen Ulph, a scholar
working for the Jamestown Foundation, an American think-tank.

Through the web, even dead al-Qaeda fighters live on, says Mr Ulph. On one
website that ceased operations last year (but has several imitators), it was
possible to read the writings of senior, recently slain al-Qaeda men on
everything from physical training to guerrilla tactics.

A group of young Muslims will often travel quite a long way down the road to
violent jihad before meeting anybody with terrorist expertise. Some never
find the contacts they seek, and resort to their own devices; only
occasionally does this have deadly results for anybody besides themselves.
One example of such amateurism is that of two Moroccan men from the Dutch
city of Eindhoven, Ahmed el-Bakiouli and Khalid el-Hassnaoui, who tried to
enter Afghanistan in December 2001 in the hope of fighting some Americans.
Having failed, they went to Kashmir, where they were swiftly killed by
Indian security forces. In Britain, several terrorist plots uncovered since
2001 have been striking for their incompetence and lack of outside
expertise.

Things become far more dangerous, of course, when committed radicals come
into contact with veterans of wars in Chechnya and Bosnia, or of the Afghan
training camps where several hundred Britons are believed to have been
schooled. These veterans either have the know-how to plan an atrocity, or
can find somebody who does, and it is under their influence that hopeless
missions can turn deadly. Whether this happens or not is often a matter of
chance. Take the Egyptian Mohammed Atta and other members of the ³Hamburg
cell² that plotted the September 11th attacks. They were drawn into
mega-terror after meeting someone who introduced them first to an al-Qaeda
operative in Germany, and then to masterminds in Afghanistan. If this had
not happened, the Hamburg group might have ended up as cannon-fodder in
Chechnya.

Profiling the would-bes

These patterns of self-recruitment and self-radicalisation are a headache
for security services, who have no easy way to infiltrate close-knit, local
groups that operate at first without foreign help. But in the Netherlands
the intelligence services reckon they have identified three broad categories
of people from which actual and would-be terrorists are drawn: recent
arrivals, second-generation members of immigrant communities, and converts.

Recent arrivals are often intensely involved in‹and in a few cases,
protagonists of‹bitter ideological and ethnic conflicts in their home
countries. During the 1990s, Algeria¹s internal bloodbath‹which pitted a
secular, military regime against its armed Islamist opponents‹was exported
to France, culminating in bomb attacks on the Paris metro. (Some of these
Islamists, to French disgust, later found refuge in London.) Among recent
Muslim immigrants to Britain, many are deeply embroiled in the internal
conflicts of south Asia‹including intra-Muslim squabbles like that which
divides the Barelvi form of Islam, followed by most Pakistanis, from the
more purist Deobandi tendency which gave rise to the Taliban movement.

While most followers of the Deobandi line, which stresses the brotherhood of
all Muslims over national or civic ties, are perfectly peaceful, their
doctrine can inspire extremism. In the same way, violent extremists from the
Arab world often share ideological roots with Saudi conservatives, or
opposition-minded Egyptians, who are far from being exponents of generalised
violence against soft western targets. Whether they like it or not, European
security services are having to learn these fine distinctions.

The vast majority of ³white² converts to Islam adhere to forms of the faith
that eschew violence. But some of them turn to violent Islam in a spirit of
alienation from society, or personal bitterness. Some are ³rescued² from a
life of petty crime; quite a few, like the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, are
touched in prison. Lacking any sense of Islamic tradition, and perhaps eager
to prove themselves to their new peers, they are susceptible to extremism.

On the other hand, because the path to extremism so often involves the
renunciation of everything in one¹s own background, material comfort and a
liberal upbringing seem to be no bar to the development of a terrorist.
Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, a young Briton of Pakistani origin who is believed
to have masterminded the kidnapping and murder in Pakistan of an American
journalist, Daniel Pearl, was privately educated and studied at the London
School of Economics. At least one of the London bombers identified this week
seems to have come from a middle-class background. Whatever motivated the
two Britons who became suicide-bombers in Israel in 2003, it was not
material want.

Nor does the story of the Dutch Islamist, Mr Bouyeri, suggest any easy
correlation between suffering and the impulse to crime. The killer had
suffered setbacks at university, and had been unsuccessfully involved in
trying to set up a youth club. In 2002 his mother died, his father
remarrying soon afterwards. But as one specialist on the Netherlands points
out, if such problems were enough to turn a youngster into an assassin, most
young Dutch Muslims would be loading their guns.

On the evidence of most European countries, adequate material and social
conditions do not always stop people becoming terrorists. But the reverse
may hold good: if people are economically deprived or socially excluded, the
pool of potential killers and bombers will grow.

In the highest levels of the British government, the dominant thinking is
that economics does matter. If this is right, Europe¹s problem is obvious.
Even in Britain, where anti-discrimination laws are relatively stringent,
Muslims tend to be poor. Of all religious groups, they are the least likely
to own their own homes. They are also the least likely to hold professional
jobs and the most likely to be out of work. Just 48% of British Muslims
reported that they were economically active in 2001, compared with 65% of
Christians, 67% of Hindus and 75% of those who professed no religion.

Lack of jobs in the areas where Muslims have settled is part of the problem,
but another reason is that women are less likely to do paid work. Four out
of ten look after home and family, compared with little more than one in ten
women in Britain as a whole. In a sense, the Muslim household is
resilient‹many fewer children are brought up in one-parent families than is
the case among non-Muslims‹but there is, literally, a price to be paid.

Britain¹s approach to tackling domestic extremism has sought to mix
vigilance with openness, on the principle that militants are least dangerous
in places where they and their followers can be closely watched. The
domestic intelligence service, MI5, has expanded and moved its lens away
from Irish terrorism; these days, about half its attention is directed at
Islamist activities. But nobody, not even the spooks, believes wiretaps and
infiltrators alone are enough to defeat Islamist extremism. To achieve that
end, Muslims must learn to police themselves.

The perils of co-operating

An official outreach campaign accelerated in 2001, a year that saw not only
attacks on America but also riots involving South Asian Muslims in northern
English towns. After a tentative start, meetings between mosque committees
and local police officers have become routine. Muslims do not like to admit
it, but an implicit quid pro quo is involved: heightened protection in
return for information and good publicity. The trade-off was illustrated on
July 7th, the day of the London bombings, when the Metropolitan Police
deployed scarce officers to defend mosques. Police in Leeds, who had to
close a mosque on July 12th as they combed the bombers¹ neighbourhood,
helped people find alternative arrangements for worship.

Muslim clerics did their part by denouncing the London bombings, and by
reminding co-religionists of prohibitions against the taking of innocent
lives and of the importance of co-operating with the police. The point,
according to Mohamed Naseem, chairman of Birmingham Central Mosque, was to
inform misguided members of the Muslim community of the correct religious
teaching. As for those who choose to ignore it, says Mr Naseem, ³they are on
their own.²

That is, of course, the problem with expecting mosques to police Muslims.
Extremists may be denounced from the pulpits, but that does not prevent them
meeting like-minded folk in living rooms. Similar problems dog the British
government¹s outreach efforts. It has chosen to deal mostly with the Muslim
Council of Britain (MCB), an umbrella-group with which most significant
Muslim organisations‹including some radical ones‹are affiliated. The
government has allowed the MCB to influence, or at least comment upon,
policies both domestic and foreign. Consequently, however, the MCB looks to
some like a toady of the government.

The authorities in Paris have, if anything, gone even further than those in
London in trying to co-opt and co-operate with the mainstream of their
country¹s Muslim community. At the risk of compromising France¹s secular
traditions, the government has groomed the French Council of the Muslim
Faith (CFCM), elected via mosques rather than by ordinary Muslims, as a
privileged interlocutor.

As both Britain and France have found, such tactics can involve hard
trade-offs. As liberal French Muslims see things, their government, in its
haste to find Muslim friends, has needlessly given some
crypto-fundamentalists a bigger say in the nation¹s affairs than their
numbers warrant. In Britain, too, the government has found that offering
sops to the MCB ties them to policies (such as the bill to outlaw religious
hatred that is going through Parliament) to which other citizens object.

But these days, European governments have few higher priorities than
draining the waters in which incorrigible Muslim extremists can so easily
swim. If wooing moderate European Muslims and, in the process, offending
others is the necessary price, they will gladly pay it.