Jihad and 21st Century Terrorism transcript

Bergen gives me a lot of pleasure to introduce my friend Dr Mark san friend and colleague uh the author of a excellent book understanding terar networks and the author of an also an excellent book the new book leaderless uh Jihad Mark is probably one of the very few people in the world who's uh both a qualified flight s flight surgeon and a former CIA case officer um he's uh both a medical doctor and a PhD his a former for well I guess present and former forensic psychiatrist uh Mark will speak uh for approximately 30 minutes 30 minutes and then we'll take questions and answers please identify yourself when you ask a question uh and in fact Dr San will probably repeat your question just so so the cpan audience can hear it so with that Mark thank you very much uh it's very an honor to have been invited here uh and um I wish to thank Peter and uh Steve Cole unfortunately is not here and the new American foundation and also some of my sponsors uh uh much of that research was funded by uh the Air Force research labs and uh RTI International let me kind of get to the subject okay well my big point if you want to study terrorism is that you have to study it scientifically and what I tried to do is basically apply um the scientific method to the study of terrorism so you have to build a database and then use that database to test various um claims about terrorism and I was interested basically um the specific threat uh to the United States so the way I started was taking uh the 19 who did 911 as my index sample and just grew it according to whoever had any um operational relationship with them uh I accumulate about 4 500 biographies now on them and uh because a lot of information is erroneous on terrorism I try to uh base it on trial transcripts and from The Trial transcripts I then uh went to the field to investigate myself so now that I have um the data I can test the conventional wisdom about terrorism one of the conventional wisdom is that poverty breeds terrorism and so I kind of looked at the family of origin of the terrorists and as you can see they're mostly middle class so they're not poor themselves another version is uh and here you have various versions of the brainwashing Theory one of them is that the culture the family brainwash them and so here I kind of looked at the the background of the terrorists and you can see very much that uh they come from a fairly secular background secular families um another version is the madasa theory of terrorism namely that if the culture didn't Brin wasm the schooling did the madrasa is basically an Islamic boarding school and here again you can see that 87% did not go to madrasas and those who did were basically uh confined to southeast Asia mostly so uh it's not matresses another version is that it was easy to brainwash them because they didn't have much to start out with because they were too young uh and here I grabed um the age at which they join a terrorist organization and you can see that the average age is about 26 years so they're not teenagers they're very much young adult responsib another version is one of ignorance uh and that's why it was so easy to brainwash them so here I can of uh looked at the educational level the First Column here as you can see is uh high school education the graduated high school uh here some college graduate college Master's doctorate uh 62% went to University and uh this is much higher than even The American Average which is about 52% so people say so what they go to university but they study religion well no not really if you uh ignore this because other the people who went to high school or Vocational School these are the guys who went to University and you realize mostly in the technical field it's mostly Engineers terrorism has always been a problem of Engineers going back to the anarchist in 1872 where it was very much a faculty of engineering and medicine that generated the first Russian Anarchist who then went to Moscow to kill Zar a few years later another uh theory is that they don't have any jobs and um that's uh actually more complicated here I kind of graphed uh profession and semi-professional as you can see those two columns uh are higher than um the unskilled uh labor column but even though they were fairly well skilled uh they were underemployed relatively underemployed I'll come back to that now a typical explanation for terrorism in the United States is that of sexual frustration yeah I mean that's what you get in the newspaper and Muhammad was uh close to the 72 virgins uh because this is also of course C2 virgin or the testosterone theory of terrorism and the argument is very simple you know those are Muslim there's no premarital sex and therefore they become so sexually frustrated that uh they literally go crazy and blow themselves up and people around them so you know I'm an empiricist so I kind of looked at well how many were married you know how many had access to uh to sex basically and you can see that 73 % were married and usually in my audience I have one or two doubters who tell me yeah well you know you can be married and still not have sex so continuing my Empirical research I I looked at how many had kids and you can see two-thirds had kids and they had plenty of kids so the data actually refute the sexual frustration Theory and you can see that uh terrorists do not be I mean people do not become terrorists sexual frustration but out of sexual exhaustion you finally got it very now this is a Peter laugh you know if you have never heard Peter laugh this is a typical Peter laugh um well sex has nothing to do with terrorism it turns out uh but if you label somebody a terrorist you're willing to believe anything about that person and my point here is that I would urge you to be a little bit skeptical and to use real data to test it okay um another theory is that uh they just uh criminals they just psychopath sociopath and here I show that about 90% did not have any arrest record no criminal record before joining terrorist organization so in terms of criminal background the vast majority no crime but uh there is some crime there that's and that uh that sample is becoming more prominent with time and I'll talk more about that but usually the crime a petty crime uh credit card fraud drug trafficking but what people usually mean by criminal they mean psychopath sociopath what in clinical term we call antisocial personality disorder uh for that to occur for that uh label to stick you really need to have a long pattern of criminal activities going back to Childhood you have to have a conduct disorder and here only basically two people that I know in my sample had that namely zahawi and Jamal Amidon who was uh uh probably the chief of the Madrid bombers okay so if they're not bad are they simply mad and a psychiatrist I looked at that and I found very little evidence of mental disorder I think four of 400 believe in je which are uh Islamic ghosts uh and that's basically culturally consistent but even if you look at it as a sign of psychosis that still is 1% and the worldwide uh average Baseline on this base rate on this is 3% so you realize that they are healthier than the normal uh sample no real personality disorder n narcissism um and no real trauma you know usually they come from pretty good families uh and uh if you remember the picture of Muhammad ATA at the age of 12 sitting on his mother's knee they looking at each other lovingly that's basically the picture of a terrorist at the age of 12 typical picture of terrorist okay so if people are not born terrorist and they become terrorist what is the process and this is what I want to address right now and that's what I address in my book and I want to talk about three topics namely the radicalization uh the mobilization into terrorist Network and the evolution of the threat over time by radicalization I just mean the path to uh political violence I don't mean extremist views because it is about violence that we're talking about and not really so much extremist view without violence I wouldn't be here nobody would be interested in what I have to say and the Dynamics are very similar to the Dynamics that we see all the time with young people namely young people chasing fantasies of Glory wanting Thrills but also a sense of significance and belonging to a group and this is very much a bottomup process and what I'm going to uh show you is that you have basically four major factors is in this process of radicalization and I'll elaborate on each one is a sense of moral outrage that sense of moral outrage is inter pret it in a specific way and the reason that interpretation sticks to people is that it resonates with their personal experience of everyday life but so far you have a lot of people upset but not doing much those who actually are active and uh active and become violent uh are those who are mobilized by networks the uh Pro the sense of moral outrage is about a major moral violation this is about anger it's about outrage not about humiliation um and the sense could be local and Global globally it's all about Iraq right now if you go to a Muslim country if you go to Europe and talk to Muslim and they know you're American they want to talk to you about Iraq Iraq now has been become a black hole that sucks up every argument now Iraq did not start this because Iraq is 2003 911 was 18 months prior to Iraq at that time it was mostly Chacha it was Palestine uh it was Kashmir it was uh Bosnia it was uh Kosovo uh and before that it was Afghanistan so you can see it changes but right now it's about Iraq but also locally uh communities are very Leery and very Vigilant about the representative of the state locally namely police forces and they're very Vigilant how the police treats them uh and uh this is extremely important because if they show discrimination against them they feel that they in the same boat as what they see on TV in Iraq it the same the local and the global reinforce each other and Trigger this sense of uh Muslim identity but this outrage has to be interpreted in a certain way and the way to interpret it is very simple it's a war against Islam and it's really paper thin it just a sound bite uh over the last two years I went around the world looking at uh uh Trials of terrorists who were captured and tried and I realized that they were not Muslim Scholars they were not even intellect intellectuals they were punks basically and so that made me downgrade the importance of ideology moving for those people moving they're not the people who actually want to have theological debate the people going to Iraq right now do not go there to have theological debate they go there to blow themselves up they go there to be heroes um and so uh this uh paperin idea and by the way and what they attracted to right now the third wave what I will call the third wave um they're attracted to a rejectionist interpretation of Islam where other Muslims are not really true Muslims to them they mostly Tech theories right now that's what the third wave is attracted to and people really have not appreciated this that they really uh uh look at other Muslims as infidels the kuers as far they concern and that's why a lot of the victims are the Muslims as well um but this belief that's a war against Islam is embedded into cultural beliefs uh and uh this is where the United States differ rad differs radically from Europe uh Europe is built on a notion of an Essence a national Essence frenchness englishness germanness italianness and even the Germans and Italian coales into one country at the end of the 19th century on the base of this Essence um whereas our myth is that of a Melting Pot now the importance of uh the difference here is that it you know the Melting Pot the idea of a Melting Pot undermines the idea that you're targeted uh as uh you know it's a war against Islam whereas um uh if you are from South Asia or North Africa and you obviously do not belong to this essence of frenchness germanness and so on it's very easy to believe that yes it is a war against you especially if you face discrimination and uh the second uh cultural belief that undermines this notion that's a war against Islam is the notion of the American dream um whether you believe it's true or not and by the way uh the American dream is uh the land of opportunity that's the way it's seen from abroad it's uh equal opportunity and whether it's true or not people believe it and Muslims believe it uh the pure Research Center Paul uh of few months ago showed clearly that 75% of the Muslim expatriates here are true strong believer of the American dream and if you can see uh the reaction worldwide to our uh elections here having a guy like Barack Obama who is a personification of the American dream from abroad really can change the view of the United States overnight if he's elected and that's very much a perception of abroad they just can't believe this this is is not feasible in in in Europe I can tell you that um but the reason the real reason why this notion of war against Islam really sticks to European as opposed to American is this resonance with the personal experience of everyday life in a sense it's almost unfair to compare European Muslims with American Muslims traditionally European Muslims went to Europe to reconstruct Europe it's unskilled Labor uh some countries started earlier than others France and Germany started right after World War II and now they have the third generation uh but it's a third generation and though that the grandson of unskilled labor and they're facing a pretty tough labor market uh and their unemployment rate is about three times the rate of the regular population similar population we on the other hand Cherry Picked uh and uh the Muslims who came to America were usually University professors um uh Engineers Physicians uh businessmen so the average Muslim family last year made about $70,000 and the average American Family made about $48,000 this is 40% higher so you can see it's really the exact opposite of uh the situation in Europe and the children of the upper middle class of course face very different labor market they have many more jobs and in a sense they blend in much EAS uh much more easily um on the political front uh you have a difference in welfare policy the reason Europe can tolerate such high uh rates of unemployment is that they have a pretty generous welfare state we are uh pretty coldhearted now here and uh you know you work you eat you don't work you starve but this has an implication uh and the implication is that uh By the time uh American Muslims or J American jihadist I should say not really Muslims uh but uh terrorist wannabes uh come back uh from work uh at 5 or6 they're usually too exhausted to be full-time jihadist on the internet this is not the case in Europe but on the other hand you know if you follow the money as a lot of people suggest here you realize that the state sponsors of terrorism are Germany France England Canada Australia because most of the terrorist uh plots now are funded by welfare checks it's usually people who use a check about 60% I think uh the Australian told me the pandanis case 60% Finance through welfare um but it's not so much that you fond people in Europe and uh Australia to be full-time uh terrorists it's really they bored out of their mind and you can't underestimate the importance of boredom in this because when you bored you don't have much to do you don't have a level you know of significance you know the thrill and the excitement and the attraction of belonging to the Vanguard of uh you know even a violent uh social movement is just irresistible and that's probably what you have and indeed if you look at uh the rates of rest uh between uh Europe the difference between Europe and the United States it's very telling uh post 911 up to about September of last year when uh I accumulated uh that data uh the rate of arrest for terrorism and I don't mean support financial support of terrorism anything like that I mean people build bombs and wanting to blow things up violent terrorists uh it's about to be really really G generous for the United States because most of the cases here entrapment uh is about 60 really generous and I you know I count the Miami 7even the fort digs guys I mean all the case the classical case of entrapment that you have from the bureau in Europe it's 2,400 and you have and those are real real terrorist plot where you don't really have entrapment uh and some of them were successful as in Madrid uh the London bombing uh the huad group so you know you have very similar population you have 300 million in the United States you have 340 millions in Europe uh you have about six times uh the size of the Muslim uh population in Europe as you do in United States about 15 to 20 million we have 2.5 to maybe 4 million Muslims here uh you'd expect then to have six times the rate of arrest in Europe well the real difference is 40 times as I said 2,400 to 60 just to the math so you realize that Europe is facing six times the problem in terms of probability as we do for the reason I just outlined but so far you have a lot of people who are angry and they're still not terrorist what really pushes them well part of the answer is I looked at the circumstances uh under which uh um um people join a terrorist organization it turns out that about uh 2/3 were expatriates and that was a surprise and if you add the second and third generation plus the uh expatriate worldwide you have basically over 80% it's about 84 85% my sample but if you just look at Europe itself it's over 90% uh where uh you have a diaspora phenomenon but still that doesn't really explain uh why people become terrorists and you know as I uh just argued um no personal characteristic explains why people become terrorists it's all over the map um but if you recall the way I Define a terrorist I define terrorists to uh whoever had an oper relationship with my index sample namely the 19 guys who did 911 so I realized that uh the explanation May uh uh be in studying their relationship to each other and here the first question one must ask is what kind of relationship did they have to each other prior to joining terrorist organization what was the base rate of this phenomenon in other words in scientific terms and it turns out over 2/3 were friends who joined terrorist organization collectively and another fifth were relatives and they basically joined the family business so what you had is very much uh spontaneously self-organized Bunches of guys you know networks of trust from the bottom up uh and that accounted for about 90% of my sample uh so you have a lot of self- selection and mutual self-recruitment and here I found two major patterns the first pattern or trajectory uh was The Expatriate pattern which was far more common uh during what I call the second wave the people who joined the '90s uh than presently and here you have the elite of the Muslim World from the Middle East who were sent to the west to study because the best universities are in the west and it was in the west they got radicalized and how did that happen well it was very simple they became homesick and then they adopted a western lifestyle that didn't really work and so they started looking for other people like them and where did Muslims hang out they used to hang out at the mosque so they went to the mosque not out of religiosity but really for companionship and there they um they met uh they met of uh of the food in fast food Halal places near the mosque and if they liked each other they moved in together to save money and that's where the process of radicalization took place in the intense interactivity and talks in their Apartments uh another trajectory is now far more common what's called homegrown trajectory and those are second third generation of people who came as children to the West um now I must say that even though they raised and radicalized and join terrorist organization in the west uh the idea does not come from the West the idea is still very much Middle Eastern ideas so what we mean by homegrown we really mean born raised uh and radicalized in the west and again uh you have young people are discriminated on the labor market as I mentioned so they don't really believe they're going to get a good job even if stay in school so they drop out of school as teenager they join gangs and for 10 years they basically are gang members and after 10 years they realize that there's no future so they turn to religion to escape the predicament very much like people with a drinking problem join AA and it's a collective decision so here you basically have the um the mobilization through networks it's those people collectively who little by little slide into violence and used to be face Toof face namely neighborhood gang student uh Association radical study groups but now over the last two or three years what you have is a grad gradual shift to the internet where it's about the interactivity of the Internet it's about chat rooms it's about forums and that's really transforming this threat namely women and younger people come in because younger people troll the internet and women now can participate in discussion whereas before they were excluded because uh this uh these guys uh believe in um um the segregation of women from men and the process of um uh intensification uh of the commitment is a natural process of group dynamics of increased commitment through interactivity the group as acts as neoch chamber uh and you have mutual escalation of complaints and people can withdraw more or less from society where all their friends uh all the interaction is with their this common friends and they distance thems from former friends and family and uh you have uh uh this CR of ingroup love and outgroup hate uh and after a while they ready to sacrifice themselves for comrades and also the cods that they have uh a typical example is really the Madrid bombings uh five of the seven bombers who blew themselves up uh Andrea Elliott had a wonderful article uh the Sunday after Thanksgiving the New York Times that was a lead of that New York Times magazine uh showing what happened in uh the jamama mesak barrier of tetan uh I I had gone there before her to uh and basically this is depiction the guys this is Abdul K katami Street in that little barrier it generated the five friends who went to Madrid to be drug dealers and it was in Madrid that uh they radicalized and they blew themselves up now interestingly enough the guys that they played soccer with across the street in the southern half knew those guys and they did not really believe the newspaper accounts uh that those guys were evil and so on and you know these guys were not they were very secular at the time of the of the Madrid bombing one guy uh his hero as John Travolta and he had his Travolta haircut and so on but in trying to investigate why their friends blew themselves up they kind of started um you know uh sharing similar belief in terms of significance and so on and two years later they go on to Iraq to blow themselves up and uh uh we we we know that both from Morocco where they left and from the SRA database uh that we captured in Iraq where they uh also figured over there so basically this is a network uh as I have it uh in uh and I I close my data the generation of my database in uh no in December of 2003 so you see those dots are people they connected those are relationship and you can see very dense clusters uh densely uh associate with each other Clump together but Loosely Affiliated and I think I take this slide to be the one that stopped the US government from claiming that they kept killing or capturing the number three guy of alqa because I asked um you know our policy maker could you show me the number three guy in al-Qaeda and they started laughing and you know because they're organizing the network some people are very important but they're not it's not hierarchically organized and so they stopped doing that but the newspapers have not stopped and so when Abu Ali was killed a few weeks ago he was named number three guy in al-Qaeda but that's not the case um my point to you here is that pre-existing social bonds that you can see here form the uh infrastructure of operational relationships which I depict here and you can see one cluster one operation with the exception of the JAMA islamia of uh Indonesia Malaysia because um they were more uh hierarchically organized it was two School teachers who uh recruited the best student to be INF structure of the ji um and I just suppos them to show you that this indeed is very much infrastructure of operational links but uh unfortunately my first book was written in 2003 which I think uh uh did not appreciate how the threat has evolved since 2003 and looking back on it we really face three waves of uh of this threat the first wave were basically um the companions uh at HS uh of uh Bin Laden uh they they went to Pakistan to fight the Soviets in the 1980s uh they called The Afghan Arabs fairly well educated the Egyptian predominated in that group and the average age are joining Al-Qaeda around August of 1988 I think Peter in his book uh uh published founding documents uh of uh those meeting at in at the end of August 1988 showing that uh uh they coales uh into into this organization to this base and those guys still form very much the leadership of al-Qaeda Central uh there is no evidence that Bin Laden trusts anybody else the leaders are still very much uh the Old Guard from uh from the uh Afghan Soviet days and there about you know two dozens left and they are Vanishing and they're not being replaced the second wave are the people who joined uh in the 1990s prior to 911 uh they uh were mostly the expatriates uh and they were fairly well educated because they mostly graduating they went to uh Europe and the United States uh for their education and they got radicalized in the west and um they went to a fistan in the hope of uh being selected into al-Qaeda in a sense Al-Qaeda is very much like Harvard uh Harvard does not need to recruit people want to go to Harvard Al-Qaeda does not need to recruit people want to become Al-Qaeda and indeed the acceptance rate at Harvard is 133% and the acceptance rate uh for Al-Qaeda is about 15% so you see there there is it's very much the elite of terrorism of Islamic terrorism here um and so remember Muhammad at looked for Al-Qaeda Al-Qaeda never looked for Muhammad dat you know it's again a bottom up type of uh uh pressure and uh uh so a lot of people hundreds went to Afghanistan the hope of being selected and they became Incorporated to Al-Qaeda and there's still about a 100 left of those so you have about 150 people hiding in uh the Border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan and they're still there the third wave is very much a post Iraq generation and those are terrorist swab bees uh unfortunately for those young terrorist swab bees and here you have a degradation of the Jihad I mean here you know you have fairly well-trained uh jihadis these guys basically 20 year olds they want to be heroes they poorly educated here you have the Homegrown dominance not The Expatriate dominance um and they don't know how to um link up with Al-Qaeda the vast majority do not now there's some major exception to this and the exceptions are um the British the uh pakistanis uh British uh and that's because 75% of that population come from the mport District of aad Kashmir so they can lick up to kashmir's uh terrorist organization that are fellow Travelers of al-Qaeda you know jashim Muhammed lashai toyba and they get trained by those guys and when they come back they trained and they could be very dangerous but the reason they link up is because uh they have usually a relative or friend uh in Pakistan who can make the bridge this is not the case with other people who are turned away other people do make that linkage but they're very rare and it's really just uh chance encounter whether it's in damasc us or whether it's in M alley which is really what happened with the Germans and the Danes uh it was really just luck so what you have here is a very is complete change of the threat here you have potentially thousand but they poly uh trained so you have four more plots but uh not really as well thought out so you have four more arrests as well and The lethality of the plot like the hostad group is very low you have one guy who died basically um and this third wave uh the way to uh think of it is really an evolution in a darwinian sense you have this network that evolves the habitat the environment is very very hostile especially after 911 especially all those uh uh plots in Europe after Madrid after London and also now in the Middle East after the bombings in uh Saudi Arabia in Morocco in Algeria Weller yes it's a different situation but uh but in Egypt and so you have a very hostile environment uh but it's enabled by the internet and so the social structure of this network is very much completely scattered disconnected but still very much uh connected virtually uh via the Internet which is what I called little as Jad and my point here it did not evolve from the top down from the theories of Abu musab aluri even though it's very similar everybody hates Abu musab aluri because he insults everybody I don't know if you read his book which is actually very good the 1600 page book uh um the the the call to uh Global resistance uh but that's basically his argument we need to have you know this type of little as Jihad uh my point is that this evolved organically from the bottom up this is very much like a market this is Young people who are playing around uh and finding the way to become successful and linking with others but my last Point here is that this threat I think is a self-limiting threat now why is that because you're looking at young people having fantasies of Glory Thrills and so on and fantasies are subject to fashion and usually young people Define themselves in contrast to the older generation even to the older brother so if this attract the older brother it probably won't attract the young ones like 16y olds and we already see that happening in France for instance where it may have crested uh France was one of the first country to be subject to this problem they had a wave of bombing in 1995 uh the riots in 2005 and two months ago uh even though the islamist tried to move in they were completely unsuccessful but 16-year-old French people want to do is to compete with a gang next uh the street over to see how many would burn cars and basically it ended when they ran out of cars um but also um because it's on the internet uh the leadership cannot impose discipline so you basically have the the followers who are the leaders they decide what you know from a variety of uh potential uh guidance what they want to do what they want to follow and in the sense it's a followers who are the leaders now it's it's a complete reversal of the pyramid and you can see that a little bit there was something really fascinating that happened last month you know nobody really commented on it I'm surprised um there was an invitation of the alra you know uh Network you know the six uh forums uh protect forums that are linked to Al-Qaeda Central uh and they invited young people to submit question to Za herei amen ala HEI and what's more fascinating that they stopped you know the questioning on January 16th you know they gave a deadline I mean it's really wonderful how it's becoming bureaucratic now um and and the shake was going to answer well he still hasn't uh it's five weeks later but you know what's fascinating is the question themselves the question is the young people say what should we do tell us give us guidance I mean that was really most of the question is it okay to kill people is it okay I mean they were completely clueless and that's really what I mean here by uh the followers are in the lead uh but basically in this environment um uh you really have the inability of those group to really coals into some physical political party because that would be a Target for both uh Western Law Enforcement and local law enforcement to eliminate them uh but mostly I think that the appeal itself is very limiting if you really think about what the end product of al-Qaeda is it's really a Taliban and you know the three instances that I know that uh people captured territory and instit Ed something like the salafi state the salafi Utopia it was in Afghanistan in the '90s it was in some part of Algeria during the Civil War and it was in Al anba Province and in each instances the local population turned against them because it's really unattractive although Peter warned me that we're supposed to be in Riad next week together that it was uh Houston run by the Taliban right is there anybody here from now um um but the Taliban is unattractive uh um and so I don't think it's not because of the end state that people do this it's because of the process they want to be recognized as Heroes they it's it's about the process it's not about the end stage that's all I have to say now and uh I'll fill those your questions now thank you Mark thank you very much for [Applause] that um Mark just two two questions about um the difference between when you did understanding terrorist networks um I think your sample was something like 140 170 and now it's up to 400 500 in leader list jih had what's changed uh over time about those samples is question one and then question two sort of a related question is who did you how did you decide which samples to collect I mean for so for instance did you exclude people conducting terrorist operations in Afghanistan or Pakistan or Iraq was it largely Europe Centric was the did the targets have to be anti- anti-western targets what was the kind of methodology there yeah I I basically uh include my sample uh whoever uh went after the far enemy because this is strictly Al-Qaeda uh there was a debate in carum uh in the first half of the 1990s about the near enemy and the far enemy uh Cartoon basically was the place Hassan alabi invited every terrorist including Shia and at that time Hezbollah was you know the uh the terrorist organization uh uh those are good old days uh in the 1992 93 they you know they they inaugurated car bombings well actually they popularized car bombing first car bombing was right here on Wall Street 1920 but that's a different uh anarchists um and uh the you know they were trying to understand why they had failed uh after 20 years of trying to overthrow their own government the near enemy and a small faction uh had uh argued that um the reason that they had failed was that the far enemy was propping up the near enemy and the far Enemy being the West namely the United States France uh former Colonial power and that they would never be able to overthrow the near enemy their own government until they expell the far enemy from the Middle East so my sample is very much people who go after the far enemy non-muslim governments of population well let me just a drill on that so with the attack on the Serena hotel in caral which was directed of westerners would that be included in your sample if you if you could find out who was involved what what did What Would You exclude um that's an excellent question no I did not include I try to uh make it as as analytically pure as possible so what I do include I do include the foreigners going to Iraq but I don't include Iraqis going after the US government uh uh or uh the Coalition forces for instance because I think that's uh uh Defending Your territory um so I I have included I included the Moroccans uh for instance cuz here uh the targets were not so much Moroccans but they were Jews and Spaniards and foreigners uh uh but in cal um you know those guys as you know Afghan fighting for last 3,000 years is very similar and there's a very strong xenophobic tinge to it and I'm not really sure that those guys really believe in the foreign eny they just hate foreigners and and so because of this ambiguity I did not include them uh but I do include those guys who uh kidnapped uh uh Daniel Pearl for instance uh and uh I did include other people who had uh operational links with uh Al-Qaeda Central namely uh the Saudis you know in 200 and uh and four and you know I I agree it's messy but at some point you have to decide you know are those you know similar or not so I don't have any Palestinians here who go after the Israelis I don't have Chans who go after the Russians uh and I don't have Iraqis who go uh after in Iraq but if the Iraqis travel elsewhere then to me it's an indication they go after the far enemy so what really happened is that uh uh I collected the sample worldwide it's not European Centric but a lot of more information comes out of Europe because you have far better investigative journalism and uh the trials are open and they're not the Sham that you have in many other countries okay thank you Dr s I'm ahed Unice from the gallop World Poll Center for Muslim studies and when we uh when we pull Muslims globally that believe the 911 was justified um we find specific to the issue of religiosity no difference whatsoever between those that say yes 911 was justified and those that say it doesn't and clearly here we we found the same thing with those that are actually engaging in activity which leaves the question what is the role of religion and religiosity what is the role of what what is the Islamic identity component of the Paradigm of those that engage in this action and if it if it's non-existent then the use of you know phraseology like Jihad or islamist comes into a new light and maybe we are engaging in a discourse with words that are sourced in another time but really have a completely new brand and a completely new meaning and therefore Jihad and Islam are an appropriate description um of the activities or the individuals that are engaged in the you know it's a very important question you just summarize it so for the TV audience the question what's the role of religion in this Fair okay my book is very thin as you can see I I I've been able to compress a lot of you know complex idea into simple ones um and it's it's a very very difficult question because you know the role of religion has changed over time the first two wave were pretty religious it turns out the first wave especially those guys were very religious uh the second wave a little bit less but the third wave they know nothing about religion and indeed if you look at the Madrid case uh you can see one or two of the guys who blew themselves up in that apartment lagness were not religious at all uh one actually was uh was gay uh another guy Zha was basically a stripper you know who did not believe very much in the religion uh so you you see a watered down version of religion over time and in a sense you have this degradation uh over time like anything else you remember the first guys had cell phones you know they were the elite and so on everybody has cell phones 15 years later and it's almost the same process as as a you know the phenomenon diffuses over time and gets wider you really have a degradation of it so I think was really really far more important in the first two- wave than it is in the third wave fair and and that's the use of the terminology then where right well I I think that this is something that we all grasping because you know and I'm guilty of it you know I called my book little as Jihad you know I could have called it uh L as violent social movement of people claim to be Muslims but probably are not and reject you know it's like have to use a word and and and you know in a sense I'm very much guilty of that but you know I wanted to people to understand what I was talking about so a little as Jihad perhaps he have some kind of understanding of what I mean but in a sense it's a very fair uh criticism this is not Jihad and you know it it's not really the Jihad that most Muslim understand by Jihad um but I mean you're a little bit stuck with vocabul uh that you have and you know I hope that uh I can explain what I mean by Jihad uh uh if if F but it's you know I don't mean that all those guys are just Muslim and so on and interest interesting uh the third wave as I mentioned are the rejectionists so they very much T Fury that's what they want to do and it's not so much out of religion they really want to be heroes and to them the the hero actually it's very interesting you know we we we asked young Muslims Who are the Heroes and and universally if you go around North Africa or uh the barriers of um of of Spain the first guy is usually a socer star and it's usually a socer star from Barcelona and I don't understand that you know it's never you know Real Madrid or something like that it's very much Barcelona Stars uh that has a lot of currency in North Africa at least the second to you know uh I was surpris and say hour because I conducted This research with Scott atran uh is The Terminator and the fascinating thing that those kids had no idea that the Terminator was actually the governor of California and the third was Bin Laden of course uh and so what you do is that you have this Poverty of role models in you know in the city in in North Africa uh for various reasons because I don't think the local governments allow Local Heroes to emerge because they would undermine the legitimacy of their rules uh but this is what you have and so the role model those are young people uh uh following their role model is very much uh be becoming a terrorist Alan Nichols Washington Diplomat magazine could you comment a little bit more about Europe uh certainly when you think of the cartoons in Denmark and Norway that seems to be related to to religion the clerics in the UK are um radicalizing thousands of young Brits and saying we don't we want Shara in the United Kingdom so what uh what's got what what's your prognosis for uh to Europe uh my prognosis for Europe is actually uh pessimistic um but you know I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the cartoons the cartoons were orchestrated from uh the H you know uh the cartoons had been published in September and you didn't see a reaction until basically December when some people really kind of met ataj uh in in Mecca and decid to have a worldwide campaign against it uh in terms of the preachers of hate you know those kids don't really listen very much to them anymore uh what they want to do is they they really want to be you know the heroes fighting the Americans uh or the Soviets uh they pret there's a lot of bragging and pretending uh but it's really about hero worship more than religion that you know I see now because many of them just discover religion two or three weeks or even a month before doing anything it's very rapid uh and again the third wave is very different from the first two where you had people who actually read the Quran I don't think and most of the kids now that you see in Europe or Indonesia uh don't really read Arabic no nothing about Arabic they speak in their own uh vernacular languages why are you pessimistic about Europe oh because Europe is basically an aging population and uh they can't sustain their economy unless they import labor and uh in the last two or three years they were lucky to import the labor from Eastern Europe but that's basically drying up and now they still have to go back to where they were after World War II namely uh North Africa south Asia and Europe I don't think knows how to incorporate assimilate non-europeans within itself you know we a country built on immigration and we do immigration pretty well Europe does not so it will be a while before they will find out and there is a lot of efforts and attempt to do it but they they failing they still are uh and so I'm pessimistic for the next few decades because what you really need to do is that you need to educate The Local Host population about the benefits of immigration and for them it's a necessity they will not be able to survive without this influx of young people coming in to actually take most of those jobs go ahead go ahead and slide I'm sorry go ahead and oh okay uh well this lady in the center there oh hi how are you great um um Diane Perlman um first of all one of the some of the literature that I'm familiar with talks about in the radicalization about a breaking point that people go through like if their Shake is assassinated or their brother is killed or I think for bin Laden was Sabra and chatila that's one question the other one is um I appreciate your emphasis on moral outrage and could you distinguish that from humiliation in terms of Effectiveness and uh also I thought that if Obama became our president that it would reduce it would change our image in the world and probably reduce a lot of anti-americanism if Obama was became president that like as you were saying reduce maybe desire to take revenge on I heard I'm not sure who would vote for himor maybe some of the far right Democrat I mean farle Democrat but you think that might reduce some of the desire to take revenge on there some potential for violence yeah all right uh the first one was uh the notion of trauma trigger I found there's no trauma trigger in this group uh this is a very natural process there is no you know the way we tell stories we usually privilege events and that's not the case it's really interaction it's a process of interaction it's an everyday process that you see the change of opinion change of opinion discussing things with your friends with your family it's this interchange interaction that you see uh um so I no I don't see any uh I think in my slide I didn't see any trauma trauma be gets trauma and so on not in this group you're talking about the Chans perhaps you're talking about the Palestinians but you're not about this group this group is privileged in many ways especially the first two-way very privileged kid not trauma whatsoever no big event uh that that would trigger this uh your second point was humiliation and moral outrage moral outrage makes people angry those guys are not humiliated and I think there's going to be quite a few studies showing that humiliation is uh inversely uh linked to violence people are humiliated do not become violent they it's the opposite uh and and that that's a study done on palan population uh um uh and um people who watch humiliation would become violent but not the people are humiliated themselves which is kind of interesting uh in terms of Obama as I mentioned yes Obama because of who he is will not change a view of the people who are already terrorist those guys are gone you know you just have to eliminate them there is no way to kind of rehabilitate although I think the Saudis are going to try to convince us otherwise but uh so far I have not seen you know good evidence of courot Rehabilitation uh but because of um uh Obama representing the American dream that will undermine in the larger population in the world uh this notion that uh we are I mean that they are facing a Zionist uh American conspiracy which is how they view it you know in a sense the United States is controlled by you know the 12 Elders of Zion this is one of the most commonly held view in the Muslim world and uh the Obama uh presidency because of who he is not because of his policy because if you look at the policy they're very similar to Hillary Clinton's but of who he is and this is one of the fluke of history that you do have an example of a person that would undermine the other guy's argument by just who they are uh this gentleman here yes um thanks U Gary Mitchell from the report I I want to be sure that I understand and or am not Mis interpreting what you the case that you've been making today other than what we've heard in the room today virtually every other report that I'm aware of says that a Al-Qaeda is rebuilding uh and B so are the Taliban uh and what I want to know is is is it is it your uh is it your position and does your research suggest that uh that A and B are in error and and the follow on question to that is um what what is your prognosis for or your projections about where what we call uh jihadism or what whatever term one one to use it the global islamist terrorist threat where is that headed um the second one is easier well I mean they're both easy to answer second one really depends on the circumstances uh uh uh at the time um in a sense I mentioned that the third wave was very much inspired by the Iraq invasion and they may uh be you know some hints that this was basically fading away until the Iraqi invasion you know after 911 you had you know when Al-Qaeda Central was scattered around the world you had a lot of plots I mean you and some of them were successful such as Lindberg boming some were not uh but then it faded and then the the new people coming in were very different from the old one those are the guys who could not make the link but still were outraged by what happened in Iraq so what's going to happen in the future I think this will fade away again uh un if we have the good sense to allow it uh this will fade away for internal reason like every terrorist wave has faded so far whether it was the anarchist whether it was the antic colonialist whether it was a leftist it wasn't so much because of force of repression you know the key question is why are young people attracted to this specific ideology at this particular time and you know and right now it's because a Jihad Co into fashion and you find that very much in northern Europe and in brit uh so if we have the good sense to let it uh Decay for internal reason this will this will Decay but terrorism is not that something else will replace it maybe not this but some other idea uh in terms of uh the so-called resurgent I I I would agree that um Al-Qaeda Central which I defined as was 150 people 140 people in waziristan was given a new lease of on life because the environment the habitat became less hostile uh you know from the um Pakistani uh tribal uh agreements uh and there were three you know bjo Province first then South Wan then North Wan uh and so that allowed those guys who were hiding to come out more in the open and being able to uh connect with young Europeans coming to M Ali to really meet with them before they were completely hiding they a little bit more in the open there may be now A reversal of that you know it depends on what's happening in Pakistan it really does and that changes from day to day whether the Miss TR or may a Jan tribe is going to really give them Sanctuary that will depend day to day so it's not so much that there was a Resurgence but there was more visibility because of the less hostile environment and that was specific from about 2005 onwards but as I said the the the young Europeans making contact with Al-Qaeda are not incorporated into Al-Qaeda Central they turned around and send right back to Europe to conduct operation and uh most of them have been arrested uh but some of them were successful I mean uh 77 was exactly that it was a successful connection to Al-Qaeda they were trained by uh if not uh Al-Qaeda uh an Al-Qaeda fellow traveler um the Germans were trained by the USCIS uh the igu the Danes were trained by Al-Qaeda and the guys who were arrested on August 10th uh of 2006 the planes plot in London uh those were trained by Al-Qaeda Central uh so yes you do have more connection visibility but that really depends on how hostile the environment is so I don't really see a resurgent for for for me a resurgent uh means that they have to be able to project uh elsewhere outside of waziristan and so far they haven't been able to because you know I think law enforce ment and uh uh agencies are not sleeping either and they are able to detect and to disrupt the splots okay let me get something from the back there go all right yeah you go ahead okay de dang from the office of the Secretary of Defense um you've used your research to refute the notion that poverty breeds terrorism but I'd like to question your methodology of looking to see if terrorists are poor or not um you might want to say that moral outrage of poverty breeds terrorism in the same way you would like to say that Injustice breeds a civil rights movement and also uh you don't want to say that poverty breeds the American Military even if the people are in the military are generally uh on the average more poor than other people so well you have to look at um the proc of becoming a terrorist and really ter and poverty really does not figure anywhere along that process it's only is a rationalization afterwards that people rationalize their actions oh yeah we do it but if you look at either the first wave you look at the second wave even the third wave poverty is not a factor it just isn't mar Just clarify I mean I think the question is it's not that poor people become terrorists the question is is poverty somehow implicated in this in the sense that um the people who um most of the revolutionaries in the French Revolution were not peasants at least the people actually running it but the people who were invol in running the French Revolution were not peasants they were sort of in the main people from the middle or uper upper middle classes so is that no it's about Injustice it's really about Injustice and by Injustice I mean killing rapes and arrest unfair arrests you know then poverty comes in later on as a justification but it's really Injustice that's why you have the sense of moral outrage it's about Injustice I mean those those people want to build a better world and so then they they throw in poverty as an afterthought and say oh and we got but it's really about Justice it's about Justice this is a fight for justice yeah go like some of your further Bob shadler like your further comments on how they focus on a target for their terrorism uh we talk about they hate us and that 9/11 changed everything and obviously we're more concerned about when we're the target uh but terrorism seems to be broadly distributed from Saudi Arabia to Morocco to Turkey to Spain to Germany and I I'd be interested also if the three waves that you've identified have a different uh process or a different Focus uh is the United States simply because it's the sole superpower and has a lot a high profile in the world as opposed to say Uruguay or is it PA buildings or is it what is what are some of the the processes by which they focus uh on where they're going to have a terrorist attack well usually if they had the Preference they would like to go against a uniform American because it's a last superpower left but that's a little difficult and that probably would mean that they have to travel to Iraq and some of them do but not that many turns out very few actually do especially from Europe or you know uh of the mreb now there are a lot of libyans which are still a question mark we don't really understand the Dynamics of 21% of the singar database were libyans uh which came as a surprise to everybody uh so we don't really understand where that's coming from but that's number one but it's a little bit difficult because it's difficult to get to Iraq uh then if that doesn't work they would love to go against official Americans and so there it would be embassies or uh other symbols uh uh Al America abroad because they don't even try to come here you know we don't arrest them at the airport trying to come into the United States they completely completely um uh discouraged by those long lines of uh that you know frustrate us and you know we should become terrorists you know because of frustration aggression hypothesis here uh but they they completely discouraged from even coming here so don't even try uh and that's great you know so uh we basically build big walls against you know Outsiders coming in um and then what happens is that you know they can't really get Mar but then in the process really start focusing on acquiring the means of Destruction and that's really a fulltime job and they don't really give targets too much thought even the guys who are trained by Al-Qaeda Central like for instance the Germans uh that were arrested in no they didn't really have a Target I mean they talked about many but you know those guys get so involved in acquiring the weapons in mixing the chemicals uh that uh that takes that's a full-time job and once they have the weapons they will take the first Target of opportunity that's why you have public transportation because it's by far the most vulnerable and gets the biggest bang for your buck in a sense so that that's kind of the process but uh they're very vulnerable when they have the weapons and they don't really sit on it I think in Madrid uh uh it was the longest period of them sitting on the weapon that was 13 no it was 11 days 10 days I want to count get in the back because can yes go ahead yeah my name is k LC from families of September 11 and I'm curious you've done a great job of outlining who these people are where they come from what do you think we can do to stop them from turning into terrorists talk about how we can counter this transition um well the one thing we can do is not to encourage him to become terrorists I mean it's it's a negative thing in a sense uh um uh you know the invasion of Iraq really did stimulate the third wave but as I said Iraq did not cost 911 it happened 18 months afterwards and and 911 was uh was even plotted during uh the before the intifada when the Israeli in palestin were getting along so you know people who can tend to blame everything was for internal reason that they plotted that plot um but what we can do is not to encourage young people to joining this movement and and that uh really means not really making a mistake that could encourage them but in terms of the positive thing to do as I mentioned the reason that they believe it's a war Islam is because it resonates with the everyday experience and here we're doing much better with our American Muslim communities because there's no such thing as a Muslim Community there are many Muslim communities both here and abroad uh and you know we it turns out that all foreign countries are sovereign and uh and they don't really like to have American advice on how to deal with their own population so you know in a sense we're a little bit stuck you know 9911 was very much imported from the outside uh here and we have very limited power telling foreign governments what to do about their own population so we're a little bit stuck we were really kind of in a sense caught in the crossfire uh before yes go ahead uh John Harriet documentary filmmaker I'm I was intrigued by your comment uh when you were talking about the deterioration about Kaa in you said if we have the good sense to let this thing I forget exactly the word you use I'm interested in how does that TR having the good sense not to interfere with the process how does that translate to specific policy actions it may be related to the answer you just gave well you have to have a much smaller footprint in Iraq for instance you know whether it's withdrawal and so on you can have Americans killing Muslims no matter what I mean that that's almost strategic on on on you know any kind of foreign TV uh um so that's part of it um you know Afghanistan is much more complicated than people realize and in a sense you know as I mentioned uh Al-Qaeda Central has not grown but um there is very strong evidence that Al-Qaeda did make strategic alliance with some uh uh for better words Taliban uh leaders um uh I I hate the word because again you know we have a disease of lumping everybody together into one thing and you know our strategy should always be you you you look at the specific vulnerabilities of each little group and you play them against each other that's been what you know the British political uh agents uh have done for a century and were able to control the area without an army because they were able to kind of play this role uh divide and rule in is is one of the oldest uh strategy and and work pretty well but by lumping everybody into you know one category we we we actually UniFi them against us in a sense and and it's a little bit what we did so when we call everybody Taliban they're not really Taliban they're various tribes and they all you know kind of resist the central government sometime they resist us some they flipflop and you know they have alliances uh they they they they they have enmities uh and you know they go back and forth very very fluid and it always was this is the great game that people used to be able know how to play in Afghanistan but what has happened lately is that there has been an alliance among uh you know part of some tribes and it's not the whole tribe even the massud tribe is very divided uh uh but some people did make Alliance and so some of the al-Qaeda trainers did train some Afghans young Afghans to do things and so you have uh the tactic of side bombing that did not exist before really two two years before ago I mean this is you know the the uh the increase was really tremendous and so what what what you have what people call al-Qaeda Taliban by lumping them together they there is now an alliance but it's a very fragile Alliance because Afghans are always going to stay Afghans and may turn on the foreigners as they did after 911 uh and that that was explains part of our success they flip-flop but then you know we stay too long and then they can't of turn against us because they really feel xenophobic and then we threaten the local way of life and uh uh and you know change will come in Afghanistan but very slowly and not from the top down and I think that's what the Soviets learned in 10 years and that's what we starting to learn right now so when we look at this Alliance uh it's fairly complicated and I think what we should do of Afghanistan is exactly what we did for alanar province namely realizing that the tribes and the foreigners are not the same we drove a wedge between them and then the tribes now are doing the fighting against the foreigners and that's really what we need to do for Afghanistan yes col dat foreign policy Association Al-Qaeda has no physical boundaries it lives in the minds and hearts of people of about 67 countries touched by Islam but the teaching of Islam erroneously given by these mulas which has not been properly explained and interpreted and Islam teaches peace but how is it that nearly willly all terrorists are Muslims nearly all terrorists are the Muslims but what is it that that has really driven them to it is I think the basic wrong interpretation of Islam by the mulas Half Baked half illiterate mulas they have really interpreted that God Almighty has created all newly born as Muslims and this is the the cism which has taken them to the other religion otherwise they they have to be uh ordained and act as Muslims so that you have a question I have a question that you have not touched upon the education of as a matter of fact of correct interpretation of Islam because so much money has been wasted in Saudi Arabia and other Muslim countries and this point has not been touched to to correct the interpretation of Islam with this is breeding the terrorism well my data is very clear that it does not and it's Crystal Clear about it only 87% did not go to had nothing to do with Islam did not go to Muslim uh uh School were not even religious uh until much later in life and it turns out that the first two wave as I said were a little bit more religious used to actually read uh s CB or other uh people uh but not the third wave the third wave does not read they don't know much uh and uh they don't even know Arabic so they don't really come so much Under the Influence it's really very much about following a hero and it's about being uh cool it's about Jihad cool that that's you're talking about a youth culture so maybe you're right and it's uh an internal uh uh Muslim problem about what's the correct interpretation but it this is not about this about what you're talking about okay we have I think time for three more questions and they should be questions not statements so an bot aftera Center for strategic studies so regard to the third wave the thing that's set off the third wave was invading Iraq so if say Obama wins in the fall and plans of planed withdrawal of us Personnel what is that thing in general that's going to keep third wave together is it going to continue being being a cool Jihadi or is it going to be something else because right now the thing that holds on together is anger over the invasion of Iraq um it's it's being be being Jihad cool uh I think that I don't think McCain we going to is going to get um uh a honeymoon period around the world Obama is going to get a larger honeymoon period but it's not going to ask more than to to last more than four months you know it's very much what he's going to do I mean people do get a window for a while and especially because people don't know anything about him he represents their fantasy they project stuff on him uh Hillary Clinton will be in between the two but because McCain was so uh much of an advocate of Iraq he's not going to get that uneven period um so I don't know what's going to happen uh afterwards but you know in a sense uh what's going to defeat this probably drug sex and rock and roll because you're talking about you know youth culture and that's what they going to become attracted to at some point uh but and it's going to be much cooler to to to be you know uh a singer than a Jihadi uh but but right now that that's that's that's the model that's a role model yes John Wallace new americ Foundation uh in your process of radicalization that you described for sort of transnational do you see that having any relation to those who fight a near enemy say Iraqis or Palestinians and how do you relate those terrorists to the third wave of terrorist since the Iraq um they don't have much to do but sometimes there cross-pollination for instance uh when uh the Israelis uh invaded Lebanon uh uh not last from before is it really G it's already that uh was you know a Shia was very very popular among sunnis who consider Shia to be apostates so you know you have this type of it's about heroes and so it made them proud it's about Pride as well you know being you know all right we are you know we kick uh we kick their butt you know that that's that's uh that was their mentality but otherwise it really is no real link but people do take you know the heroes wherever they are and I think that's really happened uh um this gentleman in the back there the question um Elvis barkdale over the years I have kind of witnessed Al Qaeda and the Taliban becoming more of an idea rather than an organization are we in fact overstating the effectiveness of Al Qaeda and Taliban as an organization or are we watching Loosely joined individuals committing acts and then the organization taking credit for that um I I I think you right I think we've overstated uh the importance of uh Al-Qaeda with all due respect to you know all those people who died uh on 911 uh we have use SC tactics and we've exaggerated and in a sense we C in that uh but uh I want to make it clear that alqaeda still exist those 140 people you know if the world uh stops its vigilance and the containment of it they want to kill us they're still alive you know and they can be very dangerous because they really know how to build bombs and so on so I think it's fading but it's not dead and if we relax our vigilance they they they may come back with a vengeance um um but I also want to disaggregate the Taliban from Al-Qaeda the Taliban is almost any resistance to central government and there are a lot of them they are far more of them than they are Al-Qaeda there are thousands and thousands of them and uh you know the networks are very much tribal networks and it's really local reason that you have uh uh and and that's not really much of an idea there's no idea of the Taliban those are people fighting uh and they're fighting locally Al-Qaeda became uh part of an idea well wide an inspiration more than an idea uh but the idea is very much an anti-americanism and anti uh sism uh because the two are linked in their mind so I don't think just an idea there some real people there and some very dangerous people but I think that your main point is right I think we've OV exaggerated the threat thank you great well thank you very much and uh Dr San will sign books uh outside