My professors were all correct. Clearly terrorism is caused by dire poverty and a lack of education.

"First, you have to understand that Sagement broke up his sample by region and amalgamated them into four primary clusters:

* The Central Staff (Al Qaeda command & control)
* Core Arabs (those activists from the central Arab region)
* Maghreb Arabs (those from North Africa and the North African Diaspora)
* Southeast Asians (mostly Indonesians)"

What seems to have been left out is the central role of pakistan and pakistanis in the whole radical islamofascist movement

What seems to have been left out is the central role of pakistan and pakistanis in the whole radical islamofascist movement

that's because numerically they are marginal within al qaeda. please note: the sample that sageman is looking at are those who want to engage in worldwide jihad, in particular, toward western countries. this does not mean everyone who aids or abets them passively, actively, rhetorically or financially. also, he is excluding the muslim radicals in india, indonesia, algeria, etc., who are "islamofascists," but not "salafist jihadis" who have a worldwide vision of conquest ultimately derived from sayyid qutb. since i stipulated that in the post, and i have just stated it here, i hope i won't have to repeat it. far too many times these debates about the "muslim question" devolves into empires of crosstalk and argumentation on 12 fronts that lose any coherency.

so here, we are talking about the few hundred that have actually actively engaged in jihad against the "far enemy" of in the dar-al-harb. islamofascism, in the broad sense, is not addressed explicitly in this post because it is too broad a movement to characterize by a simple survey such as this.

note: this survey predates the london bombings.

razib

I am sorry but i disagree on the following fronts.

al qaeda as i see and understand it, is predominantly an amalgam of middle eastern arabs - who provide the finacial wherewithal and to an extent the idealogical baggage.. and in the case of 9/11 the street level muscle. However the al qaeda phenomena cannot be understood without understanding the role of the pakistani state and the state within a state - the ISI. these bozo's were the operational enablers of al qaeda. and may well still be.

9/11's operational planner and the conceiver of the plot was not OBL but khalid sheik mohhammad.

al qaeda couldnt exist without the nexus between the pakistani state ( earlier) or at least rogue elements within the pakistani state ( now ?) and the network of madrassas and the constant name changing pakistani jihadist organisations like LeT and JM.

without the pakistani state apparatus 's involvement there couldnt have been an al qaeda or a 9/11.

while the ISI wasnt the "be all and end all" of al qaeda it was and perhaps still is a necessary prerquisite for its continued existance.

it is not a coincidence that wrt to actual attacks somehow or the other all roads lead to pakistan.

Ahmad Rashid at times gives a glimpse of pakistans grandiose imperial visions and provides a background for the develoment of al qaeda and tha taliban. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obido...2244994- 4998365

i would also recommend reading up on this bozo called Hamid Gul former director general of the ISI. it is insightful - try a google.

I see the whole phenomena as nothing more than an attmpted power grab in the guise of ideological whatever. One analogy I make is the relationship between Marx and Stalinist Soviet union and Maoist China. Maybe the same relationship applies to sayyid qutb and the AQ power structure. I will say that i am only cursorily familiar w qutb.

I have always felt that thru human history idealogical baggage is at most times a fig leaf and a device to motivate the foolish. Follow the money and the quest for power for the real answeres.
and in that context AQ cannot be understood without understanding the pakistani state/ the army and its strategy. In his somewhat whimsical way Salman Rushdie explores the problems of the pakistani state rather brilliantly in his novel " Shame"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product...=507846& s=books

There was and is an fundamental flawed logic to the pakistani state and it manifests itself over and over again in the role of the army in the state, and in the excesess and misadventures of the pakistani state.

war... pogromns in bangladesh..more war...radical islam... all follow from this illogic and shall continue to follow till such time as someone puts an end to this abhorrence which is the pakistani state.

so i guess what i am saying is trying to make a logic out of al qaeda without talking about pakistan is an excersise in absurdity.

while the ISI wasnt the "be all and end all" of al qaeda it was and perhaps still is a necessary prerquisite for its continued existance.


there are many necessary prerequisites. i don't know if you live in the US, but read sageman's book, and he does address the pakistan connection. the important point is that pakistan, saudi money, american support for israel, etc. etc., none of these are sufficient conditions for worldwide salafist jihadi terror. the key is not pakistan, or the soviet invasion of afghanistsan (without which ISI magic would never have kicked in), but the particularities of the individuals who refashioned salafist theology into a worldwide destabilizing force and the network that actualized this.

you have to look beyond your particular biases in this case (i gather you are south asian, so pakistan will loom large to you, if you were egyptian no doubt you would be telling me how important the sudanese sojourn was for the genesis of bin laden's followers-no sudan, and it would have all dissolved in the inter-conflict years). i do not deny the pakistani state's role in supporting terror, but it is clearly primarily directed at india. state support of proxy terrorism isn't that special (ask israel). the salafist international terrorist threat, directed against powerful, stable, secular western democracies when there are many problems with the islamic world itself, is very special and peculiar (and in many ways irrational on a grand and delusional scale).

i am being a bit facetious, but saying that "all roads lead to pakistan" is a bit like those books, The Potato : How the Humble Spud Rescued the Western World , or, Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World . look hard, and you will find it. pakistan was involved, it likely did set the stage for many of the preconditions for the full flowering of al qaeda, but so did the topography of afghanistan, or the expulsion of bin laden from sudan because of overreach on the part of ayman al zawahiri (he unilaterally executed someone without the sudanese government's consent when that individual was "on loan" from said gov.).

p.s., this is what i'm talking about as far as shifting the focus:


There was and is an fundamental flawed logic to the pakistani state and it manifests itself over and over again in the role of the army in the state, and in the excesess and misadventures of the pakistani state.

war... pogromns in bangladesh..more war...radical islam... all follow from this illogic and shall continue to follow till such time as someone puts an end to this abhorrence which is the pakistani state.

i don't care about the atrocities perpetrated by the pakistani state in south asia-par for the course, barbarity is the human norm. soon enough someone else will get the idea to start talking about arabs vs. israel, then someone else will want to talk about thailand and its muslims, etc. etc. these are all valid conversation points, and the whole general idea of the "muslim question" is also fascinating. but, i'm trying to foster discussion of a tightly focused topic on this thread. otherwise, i'll just ban all posting on islam, period, because i'm tired of listening to everyone repeating their old talking points, over and over...i too have axes to grind, but to others besides me, they are a bore. but most importantly, they would flush down the slim hopes of actually extracting some insight beyond what we already know. i read a lot of stuff about islam, and radicalism (i just read perfect soldiers and western muslims and the future of islam) and it is nice to dive into something that has some survey data as opposed to a string of historical impressions slotted into a prepackaged analytic format. frankly, the latter is often enjoyable like a good novel if you agree with the analysis, but this work makes a serious effort to cut past the shit for once.

zawahiri unilaterally executed someone without the sudanese government's consent when that individual was "on loan" from said gov.

where can i read more about this?

page 45:

at the same time relations between the sudanese intelligence service and the EIJ [zawahiris group] soured quickly when the sudanese handed over to the EIJ for interrogation the son of an EIJ leader, who had been collaborating with the egyptian intelligence services. al-zawahiri ordered the boy's execution shortly after his confession. when the sudanese found out about the execution in its territory, al-zawahirir was ordered to leave the sudan with a few days....

John Updike's 1978 novel "The Coup" offers a lot of insight into one anti-American mindset. The narrator is the hyper-intelligent dictator of an impoverished African country, who is a fanatical Muslim, Marxist, and Black Muslim. He understands his three creeds are contradictory, but they each give him more reasons to hate America. His anti-Americanism orginated in his four pleasant years spent as an undergrad at a college in Wisconsin in the 1950s. America treated him well, but that just stoked his resentment, because America could afford to treat him well. As Ben Franklin pointed out, you don't get people to like you by doing them favors. You get them to like you by having them do you favors.

"George Orwell's 1949 novel 1984 offers a lot of insight into one particular manifestation of state power and perpetual war. The war itself lends justification and rationale to the ruling regime and its suppression of the domestic population, which further makes the population susceptible to domestic repression and calls for perpetual war. As Thomas Paine pointed out, 'society in every state is a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one."

You see how this works, Steve? Now can we get back to points that not based on anecdotal evidence drawn from fiction or platitudes from Ben Franklin that serve to justify our preconceptions?

Another source of data might stem from an examination of jihadi websites. What languages do they use? At what reading levels? Where are the sites being hosted? What news stories do they select? And so on.

Another source of data might stem from an examination of jihadi websites. What languages do they use? At what reading levels? Where are the sites being hosted? What news stories do they select? And so on.

the book indicates that the websites are overwhelmingly biased toward "western" muslims, so probably english and french language. also, the author says that salafis in particular have taken to technology, while other forms of conservative, traditional, and less violent muslims tend to avoid the internet, or their imams warn against it.

I'm not sure where a comprehensive list of sites can be found. My own list is somewhat limited, but I've found Jihad Unspun to be a useful resource.

Accepting that these guys are a tiny minority and also self-selected, I wonder how the network effect developed? (ie how did they find fellow travellers?)

It sounds to me that they might have moved from group-to-group until they found one that resonated with their world view. Identifying the pitstops on the journey might give some hints about the groups that need to be infiltrated.

how did they find fellow travellers

their fellow travellers were their friends. the author makes the argument that the individuals who were the heart of al qaeda and its affinal networks usually travel in packs or cliques, and make concomitant journeys into radical salafism. in other words

1) he deemphasizes the perception that an individual makes a personal ideological commitment, because that perception is usually biased by self-reporting (this is pretty clear in the case of cult member case studies done in the west).

2) he also deemphasizes the role that "recruiters" play because the author suggest that the people who enable the joining of these cliques have an incentive to aggrandize their own role.

3) i just read perfect soldiers, which details the hamburg cell that was the heart of 9-11. it pretty much reflects the contentions above empirically, though it is more a journalistic narrative than a scholarly work.

...But this thread is infuriating.....

[i deleted everything else. studying islamism, islam, violence, terrorism, it is all rather infuriating. that's why i haven't watched the beheading videos, i'm enraged enough as it is, i don't want to lose all control. but this blog isn't going to be a forum for uninformed rants on this topic (the poster might have been correct on many points, but the glossy generalizations are at variance with the scholarly consensus). it doesn't interest me. and it really is a market that others have pretty much captured. this should also clue people in to the reality that from now on on muslim threads i'm going to be rather preemptory and "unfair." i'm sure that's infuriating too, but we learn not to be petulant in public after the age of 3...i hope.]

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An interesting post. I'll have to read the book before commenting.

I find this sort of frightening, really. Because I guess it's sort of easy to think that someone can be indoctrinated, you stop the indoctrinator, and presto, you stop this sort of thing. So to say to a certain extent that these people are self-selected makes it seem so much harder to combat, doesn't it?

I was reading a post on Belgravia Dispatch, I think, which quoted Jessica Stern who has studied the attitudes of young Muslims in the Netherlands (and is known for her research into terror networks):

"For some, she said, 'To be angry and rebellious these days is to be angry, rebellious and Islamist..." and she goes on to say that in the past they might have embraced Marxism. So this is not exactly what you are talking about here, but it does seem as if there are some people in search of an ideology to fill, I don't know, a void? And as she goes on to say, they self-recruit and self-research on the web. No fiery indoctrinator needed...

Anyway, how did it come to all this?

Thanks razib, this book looks interesting.

So to say to a certain extent that these people are self-selected makes it seem so much harder to combat, doesn't it?


the author suggests that it is harder in some ways than knocking out a top-down organization, but he suggests you focus on the nodes, the connections, between the networks, because once the nodes are broken the individual cells have far less ability to mobilize and cause havoc. he notes that after 9-11 more and more of al qaeda's operations seem to be focused on the muslim world (morocco, turkey, indonesian, etc.), and he suggests that that's because a big operation like 9-11 is difficult to do if you are a cell alone. the hamburg cell had skills al qaeda needed, but they couldn't have afforded flight school by themselves and what not. so break the synergy, and the impact of the force is mitigated.

p.s. there some similarities of the al qaeda cells to the 'red brigade' and other radical left movements, though the social milieu was different so the freudian explanations that were pinned on the euro-left terrorists doesn't explain much in the case of salafist radicals.

I would say a lot of similarities to the radical left... Hailing from South Asia, I always felt that these salfist islamofascists were very similar to the naxalites of Bengal. All you have to do is substitute Allah and the Koran/sharia for Marx/lenin/stalin/mao and the communist manifesto and dialectical materialism and you have a complete fit. Most of the naxalites came from highly educated upper middle class backgrounds. In fact one could argue that they were the cream of the crop of elite indian universities.

I also had the opportunity once to interact w Siddharta Shanker Ray (when he was India's ambassador to the US)
who as the chief executive of the Indian state of West Bengal during the height of the " spring thunder" had the (dubious distinction) of essentially ending the naxalite uprising. How did he do it... well I think brutal repression had something to do with it..interestingly --post 1969-70 most of the naxalites abandoned naxalism and many eventually got co-opted into the indian elite as officers in the IAS (Indian Administrative Service). Something I always found ironic.

Several people I knew in college embraced the radical left. Looking back at these "friends" I really agree with the comments above that friendships etc had much to do with inculcation. My observation was that there tended to be a dominant personality amongst the circle of friends - dissenting viewpoints were not tolerated and persistence led to banishment. Banishment was a real problem for the dissenter as for many years the complete social circle was comprised of " believers".

Lesson I earned fromm Mr SS Ray was that ruthless syuppression is the only thing that works.

But what do I know!!

Razib,
You stated "I don't know if you live in the US, but read sageman's book, and he does address the pakistan connection. the important point is that pakistan, saudi money, american support for israel, etc. etc., none of these are sufficient conditions for worldwide salafist jihadi terror".

Israel of course was not a sufficient condition, but may I dare say an 'essential condition' for a lot of the Salafist Jihadi foot soldiers. (Not for the higher ups or thinkers though)

9-11 masterminds like Muhammad Atta were pretty obsessed with Israel. A while back I was digging up the profiles of Salafist Jihadis and a lot of them had a very unhealthty obsession with Israel. Exceptions were the Saudi Salafists Jihadists from the Southern impoverished areas of Southern Saudi Arabia (bordering Yemen)

I havnt read the book, so I am going to refrain from commenting on anything else for now. However looking at your statistics, there are no seperate statistics for the 'foot soldiers' and the 'thinkers'. I would not treat Salafist Jihadists as a monolith.