Interesting: Are Terrorists Just Stupid?

This comes from excessively-partisan Tim Noah who can be reliably counted upon to write such pieces to denigrate George W. Bush's impact in keeping the country safe.

That said, it's interesting, and offers some good insight into terrorists' minds:

It may be that Bin Laden's family wealth and otherworldly dedication far outstrip his native intelligence. (Al-Zawahiri appears to be the brains of the operation.) But the real question isn't whether terrorists are smart per se but whether they are rational. "Acts of terrorism almost never appear to accomplish anything politically significant," prominent game theorist Thomas C. Schelling observed nearly two decades ago. Max Abrahms, a pre-doctoral fellow at Stanford's Center for International Security and Cooperation, reaffirmed that conclusion in a 2006 paper for International Security titled, "Why Terrorism Does Not Work." Abrahms researched 28 groups designated "foreign terrorist organizations" by the U.S. State Department since 2001, identifying among them a total of 42 objectives. The groups achieved those objectives only 7 percent of the time, Abrahms concluded, and the key variable for success was whether they targeted civilians. Groups that attacked civilian targets more often than military ones "systematically failed to achieve their policy objectives."

In a 2008 follow-up essay, "What Terrorists Really Want," Abrahms explained that terrorist groups are typically incapable of maintaining a consistent set of strategic goals, much less achieving them. Then why do they become terrorists? To "develop strong affective ties with fellow terrorists." It's fraternal bonds they want, not territory, nor influence, nor even, in most cases, to affirm religious beliefs. If a terrorist group's demands tend to sound improvised, that's because they are improvised; what really matters to its members—even its leaders—is that they are a band of brothers. Marc Sageman, a forensic psychiatrist and former Central Intelligence Agency case officer in Afghanistan, collected the biographies of 400 terrorists who'd targeted the United States. He found that fully 88 percent became terrorists not because they wanted to change the world but because they had "friendship/family bonds to the jihad."

But most of the piece examines the evidence that 9/11 was inevitably a one-off attack, a mission that relied on dumb luck and bureaucratic incompetence to succeed.

posted by Ace at 02:38 PM

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