Google Ideas and Extremism

Google’s think/do tank (!!) is sponsoring a summit on extremism. See the post by Jared Cohen, its director, here.

The problem is that, like many such discussions, it’s based on the autobiographies of a number of people who became extremists — the idea is to look for commonalities in such biographies as hints about the process and/or drivers of extremism.

BUT it ignores the very large number of people from apparently identical backgrounds who didn’t join gangs, or the IRA, or jihadist groups! Such people are counterexamples to almost all explanations of what happens with radicalization, and yet they are often/usually ignored in the discussion.

So Google asks:

“Why does a 13-year old boy in a tough neighborhood in South Central LA join a gang? Why does a high school student in a quiet, Midwestern American town sign on neo-Nazis who preach white supremacy? Why does a young woman in the Middle East abandon her family and future and become a suicide bomber?”

But just as important are questions like: why did the 13-year old boy’s best friend and classmate NOT join a gang, etc.

This summit’s approach is called, in the research community, “sampling on the dependent variable”. Google should know better.

Review of Burton’s “Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent”

Ghost: Confessions of a Counterterrorism Agent, Random House, 2008.

This book describes Burton’s experiences working in counterterrorism within the U.S. State Department in pre-9/11 days (which is presumably why he is free to talk about it). His working career covered roughly from the Achille Lauro to the first World Trade Center bombing and aftermath. He tells a good story and there are lots of bits of interesting background that I don’t recall making it into the public gaze at the time.

The main thing that struck me is that the U.S. national security apparatus seems too thin at the top; that is, there is somehow an inability to focus on more than a few issues at a time. In the context of this book, it seems as if, given the Soviet threat, there wasn’t enough attention to go around to also focus on the threat from terrorism. As a result, terrorist groups and their state sponsors seemed to have been able to get away with more than they should have. In other words, it doesn’t sound like the problem dealing vigorously with terrorism during the 80s was resources, or even willpower, but simply attention. One gets the same feeling today when the U.S. government seems unable to pay enough attention to Afghanistan, Iran, North Korea, al Qaeda; rather it seems to oscillate between them.

This may just be an illusion looking in from the outside. But I can’t help but think that there’s a bottleneck because of the limited attention of the President, National Security Advisor, and maybe Secretaries of Defence and State. Not enough delegation of enough power to get things done — understandable when blowback can escalate issues quickly, and perhaps still the aftermath of Iran-Contra.

The other striking thing is that terrorist movements of the time seemed to have substantial numbers of the psychiatrically troubled among their ranks. This is in sharp contrast to the argument made by Marc Sageman about al Qaeda (and perhaps more broadly). Sageman argues that, for this group at least, members were psychologically stable. The difference is important in the discussion about radicalization. If Islamist groups tend to recruit stable members then the threat will tend to be of one kind; if they tend to recruit less stable members, other kinds of threats may be more important. I haven’t seen more recent research examining this issue; nor have I seen it addressed explicitly in the radicalization literature.

Followup: I just finished “By His Own Rules”, the biography of Rumsfeld, and it supports my contention. It doesn’t sound like anything of importance happening in the DoD without Rumsfeld somehow being in the loop, even if it was only hearing about it. What a bottleneck, and what a waste of a leader’s time! It sounds as if Gates is a little better, but I don’t think the system allows real delegation of actual power.

I wasn’t impressed by the biography. Rumsfeld is obviously a puzzle: toweringly competent in some ways, but flawed in others. This book doesn’t begin to explain the contradictions, and spends far too much time documenting the Iraq invasion, rather than Rumsfeld.

“Whatever it is, I’m against it”

I’ve been reading Bobbitt’s new book “Terror and Consent” which has a lot to say about the adversarial setting, obviously with an emphasis on its role at a state level. I thoroughly recommend this book.

One of the points he makes suggests a new line of attack. He argues that, over the past five centuries, terrorism has taken the form of the state it opposes. Today, that means that this century’s terrorist groups, for which al Qaeda is a prototype, will tend to be globalized, multinational, and inclined to privatise and outsource.

But this means that, over a long period of time, there have always been those who oppose the existing state in an active, terror-based way, regardless of what that state was like, how honorable or moral it was, or what opportunites there were to change the situation from within. It is this group of people I mean to suggest in the title (which is a quotation from Groucho Marx).

Work has been done on understanding radicalization, but from the perspective of “understanding” — grievances, social issues or whatever. But Bobbitt’s framework suggests that there’s a more general form of, for want of a better word, radicalization whose drivers we don’t understand but are seemingly independent of the social context.

Of course, it’s not obvious that it would have been the same people acting as terrorists in all of these periods. But the fact that we don’t know shows that there’s something to be learned. If some people join terrorist groups for reasons that are deeply unconnected to the reasons why such groups exist, there is a whole new class of opportunities to detach or subvert them.