Behind the New U.S. Terror Cases

Left to right: Tom Green County Jail via Getty Images, Ed Andrieski/Associated Press Colleen R. LaRose, the self-described “Jihad Jane,” and Najibullah Zazi, who pleaded guilty to terrorism charges.

Several terrorism cases in recent months have involved American citizens or residents, many from backgrounds that do not fit the expected profile of a jihadist.

The cases of Najibullah Zazi, Colleen R. LaRose (“Jihad Jane”) and David Headley suggest that radicalization in the U.S. is increasing. Another American, Jamie Paulin-Ramirez, was detained and released last week in connection to a terrorism case in Ireland.

On Thursday, Ms. LaRose pleaded not guilty to federal charges of conspiracy to kill a Swedish cartoonist, who had drawn the prophet Muhammad with a dog’s body. Mr. Headley, a Chicago businessman, pleaded guilty on Thursday to helping to provide surveillance for the Mumbai attacks in 2008.

How significant is the radicalization threat? What are the factors driving this trend?

Barak Mendelsohn, political science professor
Lydia Khalil, counterterrorism analyst
Rick Nelson and Ben Bodurian, C.S.I.S.
Peter Chalk, RAND Corp.

The Psychological Dimension

Barak Mendelsohn is an assistant professor at Haverford College and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is the author of “Combating Jihadism: American Hegemony and Interstate Cooperation in the War on Terrorism.”

The growing number of stories about Americans involved in terrorist plots is indeed alarming. The belief that the successful integration of Muslims into American society will prevent the rise of homegrown terrorism turned out to be false.

As troubling as some attacks are, they do not have inherent strategic value.

Surprisingly, it comes at a time when the U.S. appears to be on its way out of Iraq, and the U.S. president is still considerably popular among the people of the Middle East. The incongruity between the common claims about the causes of radicalization and reality requires a more circumspect view of this phenomenon.

We should acknowledge that radicalization may stem from numerous disparate factors. Many times its reasons are idiosyncratic and reflect psychological factors at least as much (and probably more) as political or ideological ones.

Despite the natural apprehension, we must not interpret a statistically insignificant number of cases as evidence for the magnitude of the problem of radicalization among Muslim Americans. Such a generalization will cause injustice to a large group of people and might also adversely affect the goal of reducing the alienation of Muslim youth.

We need a calibrated approach that takes the social and economic needs of the community into account and work with the community leaders. And we need to be realistic about the overall enterprise: the same way we will never be able to address all the factors that drive some young people to crime we will never be able to address the diverse factors that lead particular individuals to terrorism.

Unfortunately, we must also accept that eventually some will succeed in carrying out attacks. Such attacks will not be on the level of 9/11 but more on the scale of the London bombing.

Even more likely are attacks by lone gunners like Nidal Hassan. Troubling as such events are, they do not have inherent strategic value. Fortunately, while the Internet provides important information for would-be terrorists, it is not a sufficient substitution for formal training, thus limiting considerably the kind of attacks homegrown terrorists can carry out.

Those who do seek training abroad are often identified through effective intelligence work. In fact, if there is one silver lining in the wave of threats, it is that the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. are getting better at their jobs and are able to expose threats relatively early on. This is not a substitution for a more comprehensive anti-radicalization effort, but it is a considerable achievement.

The Same Path

Lydia Khalil is an International Affairs Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a former counterterrorism analyst for the New York Police Department.

White, female, middle-aged and living in Pennsylvania doesn’t fit your typical terrorist profile. Yet this describes Colleen LaRose or “Jihad Jane.” Her background dispels the notion once and for all that you can profile a terrorist. But even though her story may be atypical, her path is anything but.

These extremists all stumbled upon a radical ideology that provided them with easy answers.

Ms. LaRose’s case is one in a string of cases of homegrown Islamic extremists, including Najibullah Zazi who was arrested for conspiring to attack in New York City, Tarek Mehanna, a Boston resident who tried to connect with terrorist networks in Syria and Iraq and planned to attack a shopping mall, as well as David Headley, who is connected to the Mumbai attacks.

Each of their backgrounds are unique, but their path to radicalization follows a surprising uniformity. They all followed a well-worn path to radicalization that starts with a transformative event or “awakening” moment that made them question their lives and the way they live it.

They Don’t Do It Alone

Rick “Ozzie” Nelson is director of the Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Program at Center for Strategic and International Studies. Ben Bodurian is a research assistant at the Center. They are co-authors of a new report, “A Growing Terrorist Threat? Assessing “Homegrown” Extremism in the United States.”

What is behind the increased involvement of U.S. legal residents and citizens in global terrorist activities in the last year?

Most suspects were involved with a transnational “intermediary,” like an extremist cleric or recruiter, who guided their radicalization.

Unlike terrorism cases in Europe — where poverty, geographical segregation, and social marginalization tend to drive radicalization — the cases in the United States lack simple explanations. For instance, five young men from Northern Virginia, whom Pakistani authorities charged Wednesday with plotting attacks in Afghanistan, lived in middle class, well-integrated neighborhoods in the Washington, D.C. suburbs.

Still, there are commonalities among the recent cases that suggest some directives for U.S. policy on homegrown extremism. First, most of the suspects were involved with some sort of transnational “intermediary,” like an extremist cleric or recruiter, who guided their radicalization. Second, most drew on an al-Qaeda-promulgated narrative — that the United States and West are at war with Islam — as justification for action.

Below the Radar

Peter Chalk is a senior policy analyst with the RAND Corporation and associate editor of “Studies in Conflict and Terrorism.”

The string of recent arrests involving American citizens in terror plots against the U.S. have highlighted what appears to be a trend in transnational Islamist terrorism: growing domestic radicalization. This phenomenon has appeared in the U.K., France, Germany and Australia, among others countries. Security officials in all these countries now routinely emphasize that the greatest threat they face is “homegrown terrorism.”

The number of extremist Web sites has exploded and by 2006 was thought to number around 5,000.

While these individuals lack the training, resources and expertise to carry out attacks against high-profile, well-protected facilities, they represent a serious challenge for several reasons.

First, they usually have no prior attachment to extremism and, hence, typically exist below the “radar” screen of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This makes them extremely difficult to track and pre-empt.
Second, they are unpredictable because their actions are neither defined nor bounded by the organizational constraints that are normally imposed on members of more structured terrorist groups.

Third, while they lack the ability to hit so-called “hard” targets decisively, they are perfectly able to attack the plethora of “soft” venues that abound, like shopping malls, cinemas, mass surface transportation, restaurants and office complexes.

Fourth, in the cases of religious “converts” the desire to contemplate extreme violence is likely to be especially strong as this may well be viewed as the most visible way of demonstrating and validating their Islamist credentials. Finally, they can greatly inflate the perceived threat of militant extremism because their actions are specifically directed against places central to day-to-day lives of ordinary citizens.

One of the main factors serving to encourage the growth of homegrown terrorism is the Internet. The number of active extremist Web sites around the world has exploded over the last several years and by 2006 was thought to number around 5,000.

These forums not only provide a readily accessible virtual platform through which to disseminate extremist propaganda, in so doing they also act as a highly powerful means for self-radicalization. And as cases in the U.S. show, the audiences for these sites are not necessarily Muslims.

What does all this mean for future threat containment? A trend toward homegrown terrorism should presumably reduce strategic attacks against iconic targets and venues. But locally radicalized individuals will provide al-Qaeda and associated movements with an amorphous cadre of militants that can be used to show that the transnational terror threat is one that exists in all places at all times.

The New York Times

Room for Debate | Behind the New U.S. Terror Cases