Counterintuitive results

A former CIA case officer who is now a forensic psychiatrist has analyzed the 400 most dangerous members of al Qaeda whose target is the USA. What he discovered sets conventional wisdom on its ear and forces you to rethink everything you thought you knew about terrorism.

Most people think that terrorism comes from poverty, broken families, ignorance, immaturity, lack of family or occupational responsibilities, weak minds susceptible to brainwashing - the sociopath, the criminals, the religious fanatic, or, in this country, some believe they're just plain evil.

Indeed this is the conventional wisdom spouted by all the "experts". Poverty and a lack of freedom are constantly cited as the root causes of the problem of terrorism, and we are told that we need to address those causes if we are ever to truly solve the problem.

What did the study find?

Taking these perceived root causes in turn, three quarters of my sample came from the upper or middle class. The vast majority--90 percent--came from caring, intact families. Sixty-three percent had gone to college, as compared with the 5-6 percent that's usual for the third world. These are the best and brightest of their societies in many ways.

Al Qaeda's members are not the Palestinian fourteen-year- olds we see on the news, but join the jihad at the average age of 26. Three-quarters were professionals or semi-professionals. They are engineers, architects, and civil engineers, mostly scientists. Very few humanities are represented, and quite surprisingly very few had any background in religion. The natural sciences predominate. Bin Laden himself is a civil engineer, Zawahiri is a physician, Mohammed Atta was, of course, an architect; and a few members are military, such as Mohammed Ibrahim Makawi, who is supposedly the head of the military committee.

Far from having no family or job responsibilities, 73 percent were married and the vast majority had children. Those who were not married were usually too young to be married. Only 13 percent were madrassa-trained and most of them come from what I call the Southeast Asian sample, the Jemaah Islamiyya (JI). They had gone to schools headed by Sungkar and Bashir. Sungkar was the head of JI; he died in 1999. His successor, Bashir, is the cleric who is being tried for the Jakarta Marriott bombing of August 2003; he is also suspected of planning the October 2002 Bali bombing.

Obviously the question that springs immediately to mind is, why are these people willing to endure privation and condemnation in an effort to destroy western civilization?

So between the two, you have 88 percent with friendship/family bonds to the jihad; the rest are usually disciples of Bashir and Sungkar. But that's not the whole story. They also seem to have clustered around ten mosques worldwide that generated about 50 percent of my sample. If you add the two institutions in Indonesia, twelve institutions generated 60 percent of my sample. So, you're talking about a very select, small group of people. This is not as widespread as people think.

So what's in common? There's really no profile, just similar trajectories to joining the jihad and that most of these men were upwardly and geographically mobile. Because they were the best and brightest, they were sent abroad to study. They came from moderately religious, caring, middle-class families. They're skilled in computer technology. They spoke three, four, five, six languages. Most Americans don't know Arabic; these men know two or three Western languages: German, French, English.

You really should read the whole thing, but the bottom line is, the conventional wisdom is completely wrong.

One of the first keys to victory in anything is to know your enemy. This study should be read by every American, but especially by every person in government and the military that is involved in the war on terror. (Hat tip to lgf.)