Surprising Roots of Terrorism

The typical Al Qaeda terrorist in the U.S. is likely to be well-educated, well-traveled, married with children, middle or upper class, psychologically stable, have little or no criminal record, and start going to mosques "more for companionship than for religion."

A front-page story in the July 4 Miami Herald reports the findings of Marc Sageman, a psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He studied 400 life histories of 400 Al Qaeda members, focusing on the ones living abroad rather than causing trouble in their own countries.

I've heard several theories for what fuels terrorism. Some say it's desperate poverty radicalizing people. Some say it's hatred of American cultural values like democracy and freedom. Some say it's a reaction against globalization.

But Sageman identified a different cause: simply being away from home. According to the article, "But when they settled in foreign countries, they became lonely, homesick and embittered, he said. They felt humiliated by the weakness and backwardness of their homelands. They formed tight cliques with fellow Arabs and drifted into mosques more for companionship than for religion." At that point, radical preachers could recruit them to pursue the traditional goals of creating an Islamist state and purifying the holy lands by driving out foreigners. Sageman asserts that for the terrorists, terrorism is an answer to Islamic decadence. (Note: not Western morals or culture.)

Less than one-fifth of Sageman's sample lacked a high school education, and 70% had at least some college. Some were "doctors, lawyers, engineers or other professionals." So much for the argument that terrorists are stupid or lack the mental resources to deal with high technology.

When I mentioned this to my wife, who has lots of multicultural experience, she wasn't surprised at all. She says that people living in a foreign country often return to their cultural roots, becoming more religiously or ethnically observant.

Molecular manufacturing, like any extremely powerful technology, can potentially be used by terrorists. It will be extremely important to understand what creates and motivates terrorists. The idea that the root could be homesickness was something I'd never have thought of. If we want to prevent terrorism, we will have to learn a lot more about it. And to the extent that the reaction described in this article depends on the culture of the individual, the studies will have to consider cultures individually, requiring extra work.

Assuming molecular manufacturing is available to the public, cultures that resist change will fall drastically behind cultures that embrace new technology. For members of traditionalist cultures, the conflict between pride and shame in one's culture may become even stronger than it is today. This is just one of many problems that molecular manufacturing will exacerbate. We believe that such problems can be mitigated by early study and better understanding--but that there isn't nearly enough research going on today.

Chris Phoenix

Comments

[Mr. Farlops]

What irritates me about current analysis of terrorism is the unquestioned assumption that most of these terrorists will be radical Muslims. Have we so quickly forgotten about Timothy McVeigh, animal rights extremists, abortion clinic bombers, the sniper in DC or the KKK?

It's pretty clear in the examples I just mentioned that homesickness isn't a factor, although a kind of alienation from mainstream culture may be.

A separate issue is the political and cultural stasis that is imposed on the Middle East because of the post-industrial world's dependence on fossil fuels. The post-industrial world needs stable supplies of oil at all costs. This warps foreign policy to support and enforce governments in the Middle East that resist any kind of change. No one seems concerned that Mr. Mubarak has been president of Egypt for nearly 20 years. Or the lack of change in Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and so on.

All the countries of the Middle East are long overdue for liberalization, but unfortunately this process releases radical forces that may threaten global access to oil. Thus the region is stuck between a rock and hard place. Change imposed by invasion (For example, Iraq.) also seems very unsatisfactory because this dependence on stable oil supply hasn't been removed.

Until this logjam is broken Islamic radicalism will continue to grow.

[Jim Logajan]

Dr. Sageman's analysis does not address the important question of why more terrorists haven't employed biological or chemical weapons. These seem to be the closest analogs to nanotech weapons and should be available and accessible to the terrorists if the educational profiles are as Dr. Sageman alleges. Instead, terrorists originating from the mideast have concentrated on visually spectacular attacks. Crudely put, if it doesn't go BOOM, they don't seem to be interested.

His analysis is in my opinion irrelevant because when chemical or biological attacks have been perpetrated by small groups, the profiles and motives have been quite different: i.e. the use of sarin gas by the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo group and the 4 anthrax-laced letters sent in 2001 by an unknown person.

[Brett Bellmore]

Actually, the sniper in DC was a radical muslim. Converted. Even changed his name to Mohamad, though the press had a tendency to use his old name instead.

There's also a certain amount of evidence that McVeigh was involved with Islamic terrorists.

But, still, it has to be granted that terrorism isn't exclusively an Islamic phenomenon, even if it is predominantly.

[davidoker]

i think Chris's major point is that these are social outcasts looking for love.

Why are they social outcasts? Could it be that they are technical people that society has thrown out because of that love for knowledge? Clearly, it is a social grace to hate the spirit of science in the western world; the proof is in the media.

I'd say we have a big problem . . . .

[Brett Bellmore]

The other aspect of the problem is that we're feeding the Saudi government will billions of dollars yearly, and they spend a good deal of that promoting the spread of the most hateful sect of Islam in the West. Subsidizing it, so that it displaces other, somewhat less vicious forms.

Kind of like the USSR's subsidy of the US communist party, except on a far vaster scale. Nothing less than ideological warfare, but in a guise we, with our religious liberty, are poorly positioned to cope with.

[Matt]

Brett, I have the perspective that for the current US administration it is less a problem of religious liberty than of simple oil dependency and unability (or unwillingness?) to root out the problem where it would be most effective: cut the funds, not the people. You have to feed the Arab countries to be able to feed your SUVs. If it wasn´t for the oil, I´m sure you would not be so kind towards the Saudis. OTOH, if it wasn´t for the oil, the problems the world now has, mainly caused by the current US course of confrontation and control, might never have gotten so out of hand. Had GWB spent a tiny fraction of the insane amount of Iraq War money (150 billion by the end of 2004) on developing MNT instead, i.e. looking for real alternatives, it would have helped more to win the war on terror than any number of bunker-buster bombs and Abrams tanks ever will.

As the stances are, the problems are destined to worsen as the cheap oil keeps running out and the US makes its citizens feel increasingly threatened. Let´s just hope the West and the Middle East (as gross simplifications) will never start fighting for fighting´s sake AND let´s hope the conflict cools down considerably before MNT raises the ugly one of its heads. Otherwise, sooner or later, one way or another, we´ll be toast.

[michaelvassar]

I'm in agreement with Jim Logajan, plus I STILL say terrorists are stupid (Kazinsky and Lennin excepted). I know lots of stupid doctors and engineers. How many significant engineering advances come from non-developed countries? Do you think that terrorists are even 1% as intellectually competitive, as a global force, as non-developed countries?
Really, any serious discussion of MNT short term probable futures is TOTALLY dependent on a much more precise estimate than we can currently make (as far as I know) of the difficulty of designing MNT products including complex robotics etc and on an understanding of the relationships between tools that enable this and tools that generally enhance effective intelligence.
We need to know how hard software design, hardware design, and debugging are.

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

Jim Logajan: MNT weapons will come in all shapes and sizes. It would be almost trivial to design and build a flywheel bomb, for example. There'll be no lack of things that go BOOM.

Will MNT make it easier to build and deploy terrorist-type weapons? Yes, no question about it. Will this make terrorism worse? We don't know. Will MNT make new kinds of terrorism/coercion possible? Yes. Will this make terrorism worse? We don't know.

As CRN keeps saying, we urgently need more studies and better understanding. We do in fact need to know why terrorists haven't done more with chemicals and biologicals. That will help predict the kind of weapons they'll be drawn to in the future. That is one of many questions to answer.

This analysis begins to answer another important question: What are the factors that convert a human being into a terrorist? This question is almost orthogonal to the question of weapons. Certainly neither one makes the other irrelevant.

Chris

[Chris Phoenix, CRN]

michaelvassar: I think it's possible to estimate today the difficulty of designing MNT products. It will be about as difficult as hardware and software design. The technology will be powerful enough to permit major simplification of function: in other words, even a design language analogous to Visual Basic or Logo would allow extremely high-performance products (by today's standards) to be specified. So the difficulty of design will be determined by the usability of the design tools, which will be constrained mainly by the user interface, not the technology.

Chris

[Brett Bellmore]

Heck, it's even easier to hack together a solinoid controlled valve, and gas leak detector, and use a little duct tape, and turn an apartment into a fuel air bomb, but you don't see apartment buildings going up all the time.

THe happy truth is that amost everyone who's murderously inclined is darned stupid. Which is in keeping with the findings of criminology concerning violent criminals almost always being mentally subnormal. The ballance of brain power in favor of non-terrorists requires exponential notation to express properly! This does at least somewhat compenstate for the fact that destruction is easier than creation.

The real threat is from rogue governments, not non-governmental terrorists. (Even Al Quaeda, when they pulled off 9-11, had substantial government backing from the Taliban and others.)

[jim moore]

Chris,
Flywheel bombs, I can see some idiot's design with only one flywheel. He tries over and over but finds he can't turn the bomb very well. He thinks that software is the problem, gleefully unaware of the conservation of angular momentum.
Never underestimate peoples lack of understanding of physics.

[Matt]

I keep hearing about Flywheel Bombs but can´t find anything about it on Google, can someone provide a resource please?

[Brett Bellmore]

I think the name is self-explanitory: A flywheel bomb is a bomb made by spinning up a really high-strength flywheel, and then disrupting it, so that the pieces fly out in a plane as shrapnel. Since flawless diamond is capable of sustaining stresses that alow storage of energy comparable to the energy involved in it's bonds, a flywheel bomb is roughly comparable in energy content to conventional explosives.

Even current composite flywheels are something of a threat in that regard, to the point where they require really strong protective cases to be safe.

[davidoker]

i keep thinking about a mental touchstone that can tell who is intending evil, but I can't think of anything much more concrete than that; i mean everyone can tell some types of behaviors are 'suspicious', but sometimes, we are not looking hard enough or maybe the criminal has trained himself a little bit - as in conmen. I'm thinking there must be some energy brainwave we could detect; we could require everybody to allow such signals to pass from one to another so that we all know who's safe and who isn't.

I'm not really that up with brain research(just in general terms like hive mind and such stuff), so I guess I'm just passing it along.