Profiling the 9/11 Terrorists
Brian Frederking
March 1, 2006
The debate about terrorists rages on. Who are they? Why are they willing to commit suicidal attacks?
Conservatives emphasize individual character flaws. Terrorists are evil. They are religious fanatics. They are anti-democratic and anti-Western. They want to establish a global Islamic state. The only way to protect ourselves is to hunt down the terrorists and kill them.
Liberals point to structural factors: overwhelming poverty, the humiliating legacy of colonialism, and Western support for Middle East dictators are the root causes that lead individuals to such desperate measures. Killing today’s terrorists while ignoring these root causes will only lead to more terrorists tomorrow.
These positions are familiar. Conservatives cite individual factors and liberals cite structural factors when they analyze other issues like poverty and crime. And these positions lead to the stock ideological policy prescriptions: conservatives advocating the use of military force and liberals advocating the redistribution of resources.
But these characterizations of terrorists are also wrong. What we know about the 9/11 terrorists contradicts both. Our standard political discourse prevents us from understanding the truth about terrorists.
The best available evidence about the 9/11 terrorists, presented by Marc Sageman in a recent issue of International Studies Review, presents a more complex characterization. The conservative argument does not hold up. The 9/11 hijackers were not religiously indoctrinated from their childhood nor educated in the madrassas. They were not intrinsically evil. They were law abiding citizens prior to committing these acts. They were not even trouble makers as children.
The liberal argument also does not hold up. The 9/11 hijackers were from upper class families. Sixty-two percent had college educations. Over a quarter were married, and over half had children. These were the “best and the brightest” of Middle Eastern men, not those down on their luck.
Our stock answers do not apply. These men were neither religious fanatics nor poverty-stricken. So who were they and why did they commit these acts?
Sageman, whose books include Understanding Terrorist Networks, studied these 19 men and found the following:
1) Over 70% joined the jihad in a country other than the one in which they grew up. They were a diaspora group. Most went to Europe to go to college. They got homesick, they were discriminated against, they looked for others from their part of the world, and they found each other at a mosque.
2) Over 85% had pre-existing friendship or kinship ties with someone else in the group before they joined the jihad. Eight of them met in Hamburg; they collectively decided to join. They were not recruited by Al-Qaeda. They joined because their friends were joining. And like most soldiers, they fought and died for each other, not for some overriding ideology or mission. They killed because they loved each other, not because they hated us.
The policy implications of these findings are daunting. First, capturing the al-Qaeda leadership will not influence future recruitment. Joining the jihad is a bottom-up, self-selecting process. Second, we are unlikely to infiltrate these groups. If we capture part of the group, the captured members will not turn in their friends, and the remaining part of the group is more likely to activate whatever plan they were plotting.
So what does this evidence suggest would be the most effective set of counter-terrorist policies? Conservatives are partially correct. We must capture and kill those already in al-Qaeda. They cannot be persuaded to leave or turn in their friends. And liberals are partially correct. Global redistribution of resources will prevent the creation of future terrorists, not because poverty causes terrorism but because such economic policies will counter the historical legacy of Western involvement in the Middle East.
But Sageman argues that what is most important is the battle of ideas. Islamic fundamentalists offer a particular vision of the future to replace the corrupt and despotic Middle East. We need to offer our own positive vision of a just Middle East.
In many ways President Bush’s policies attempt to do this. But we need to more seriously debate two main components of our current policies: 1) whether we should encourage the Middle East to embrace Western notions of democracy and capitalism; and 2) whether the use of military force in the region makes us more or less likely to convince the Middle East of this vision. Will these policies prevent future sets of friends from making suicide pacts? Or will they encourage future sets of friends to make suicide pacts?