The Threat of Foreign Fighters Returning Home

There is considerable outrage in the press over the photo of a young boy holding a severed head in Syria. Part of what is fueling the story is the reports that the boy is the son of an Australian Jihadist who traveled to Syria to join the fight. Thus, the story feeds into concerns about so-called "foreign fighters."

Beyond concerns for the children in the immediate case, there are concerns that foreign fighters will return home to plot terror attacks. Indeed, US Secretary of State Kerry, who is currently in Australia, called for talks on how to handle foreign fighters.

However, research by Thomas Hegghammer suggests that these concerns may be overblown. In a Monkey Cage post from September 2013, Hegghammer summarizes the results of a paper he published in the APSR, Hegghammer collected data on foreign fighters and he summarized his findings as follows:

My article tries to answer these questions by looking at where Western jihadists have chosen to fight over the years and why. I rely on open-source data, including a new dataset on jihadi plots in the West from 1990-2010 and data on foreign fighter flows. My five main findings are:

• Foreign fighting is by far the most common activity. Foreign fighters outnumber domestic attackers by at least 3 to 1 (over 900 vs. 300 individuals over 20 years).

• Western jihadists seem to prefer foreign fighting for normative reasons. They heed religious authorities who consider fighting in warzones more legitimate than killing civilians in Western cities.

• Most foreign fighters appear not to leave with the intention to train for a domestic operation.  However, a minority do acquire this motivation after their departure.

• Most foreign fighters never return for domestic plots. In my data, at most 1 in 9 foreign fighters came home to roost.

• Those foreign fighters who do return are significantly more effective operatives than non-veterans. They act as entrepreneurs and concoct plots that are twice as likely to kill.

Pape, Ruby and Bauer Criticize GTD Data on Suicide Terrorism

In a July 21 Monkey Cage post, Robert Pape, Kevin Ruby and Vincent Bauer criticize the Global Terrorism Database's (GTD) data that shows a recent increase in suicide terrorist attacks. As they see it:

The main trouble with the GTD is that its collection standards have changed several times, making it an inappropriate source for measuring trends. The GTD was initially funded by the DHS in 2006 and began by compiling data from three independent projects, each with its own collection methodology and standards for inclusion: one standard of collection from 1970 until 1998, another through 2008 and another through 2011. It was not until November 2011 that the GTD became responsible for collecting its own data, at which point it changed its methodology and standards. No surprise, the type and number of events in the data set changed every time the methodology changed.

The authors note that the Chicago Project on Security and Terrorism (CPOST), which has used a consistent methodology for tracking instances of suicide terrorism,  identified more instances in 2007 (the previous spike in event) than did the GTD and less in the recent couple of years (see graph here).

Categorizing the Islamic State

Stathis N. Kalyvas has a post on the Monkey Cage, The logic of violence in the Islamic State’s war, in which he exams how the Islamic State (formerly the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) uses violence. The question he asks is whether we should view the Islamic State as a sectarian or revolutionary group.

Though he cautions that the data is incomplete and somewhat contradictory, he argues that the Islamic State appears to be more a revolutionary group that happens to be Islamic than a predominantly Islamist group, as follows:

First, violence is not a transparent process and we should be careful about drawing easy conclusions from what transpires from the fog of the civil war battlefield. Second, there is nothing particularly Islamic or jihadi about the organization’s violence. The practices described above have been used by a variety of insurgent (and also incumbent) actors in civil wars across time and space. Therefore, easy cultural interpretations should be challenged. Third, if the Islamic State ought to be characterized, it would be as a revolutionary (or radical) insurgent actor. These groups project a goal of radical political and social change; they are composed of a highly motivated core, recruit using ideological messages (although not all their recruits or collaborators are ideologically motivated – far from it) and tend to invest heavily in the indoctrination of their followers. They tend to prevail over their less effectively organized insurgent rivals (see the examples of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front or the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka), but their Achilles heel lies in their radical proclivities which often turn local populations against them if the opportunity arises, as happened in Iraq with al-Qaeda in Iraq. Revolutionary groups can appropriate a variety of other causes (nationalism, ethnic or sectarian identities), but their revolutionary identity is central and helps make sense of much of their activity. In that respect, we have much to learn from revisiting the action and strategy of the last generation of insurgent revolutionary actors, those of the Cold War.

The big point I would like to make here is that, when interpreting ongoing events, one is forced to use theory by the lack of available data.  An essential part of using theory to analyze current events and make predictions about future events is deciding in what theoretical category the events belong. Are you looking at apples or oranges?

Elizabeth R. Nugent touches on the same subject in a MC post, What do we mean by ‘Islamist’?. She argues:

Islamism’s definition as an ideology that locates political legitimacy in the application of the sharia (often translated as Islamic law) and in Islamic tradition pegs it to complicated and unfixed concepts that are diversely interpreted in different manners by different practitioners. Various definitions of sharia draw from any combination of the prescriptions outlined in the Koran and the Sunnah related to larger societal issues of politics, economics, justice and social organization. The complexities arising from the translation of a multiplicity of practiced and interpreted Islams is manifested in the diverse range of actors that might fall under the rubric of an Islamist movement, party, or group. Islamists can range from those that advocate for quietism, effecting gradual political change through internal individual reform, to political parties advocating for societal reform through social welfare and electoral contestation, to revolutionary militants that seek to overthrow illegitimate states and implement revolutionary change. Islamists range from those who root justifications of their political behavior in personal and literalist interpretation of the textual tradition, to those who rely on interpretations derived from independent reasoning and decision-making with a firm basis in established schools of Islamic legal theory.

She concludes:

In many ways, this finding and the larger point are obvious and intuitive, but it’s something that continues to get lost in contemporary debates. It means both actors and critics who essentialize Islam, and fault or credit the entire faith tradition for one politicized version contained within its discursive tradition, are incorrect. It’s why militant actors as well as religious parties cannot claim that they speak for all of Islam or Muslims as a collective community, and it’s why outsiders cannot condemn Islam as a monolithic entity. These differences in interpretation and practice are the fascinating and frustrating challenges in understanding religion in politics, and understanding the inherent multiplicity and pluralism contained with religious faith traditions is important for consumers of news about Islamism and its current political actors.

John Mueller's "Overblown"

John Mueller was one of my professors when I was a graduate student at the University of Rochester and he always put me on my toes by questioning things that seemed to be self-evidently true. In Retreat From Doomsday, he questioned whether nuclear weapons were responsible for the peace (or lack of major war) between the US and Soviet Union. While they may have helped in this, he questioned whether the US and USSR actually would have gotten into a major war if nukes had not been invented and argued fairly convincingly that it was unlikely.

In a paper he wrote in 1991, he examined claims that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a military disaster. He argued that,if  by disaster one means something that significantly undercuts the nations ability to fight the war,  the attack on Pearl Harbor was more of a temporary setback than a military disaster. By looking closely at the data, he showed that the losses from the attack were quickly made up by the rapid mobilization in the US. Indeed, he argued the primary effect of the attack was to spur such a backlash against Japan that it ended up being more of a military disaster for them than for the US. He also dared to question whether the all out war on Japan was a good thing for the US. Could the Japanese have been handled with less force and loss of life on the US side? Would the US have been better off focusing more of its effort the larger threat of Nazi Germany while simply containing Japan?

Questions like these always put me in mind of Socrates, who angered the citizens of Athens by questioning things they "knew" to be true. In the words of Plato, they complained that Socrates was always making "the weaker argument the stronger", and this is one reason they sentenced him to death for corrupting the youth of Athens.

Mueller's 2006 book Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them followed in this tradition. John dared to question whether we might be overreacting to the events of 9-11.  He noted that, even with the numbers from 9-11 included, the number of Americans who had died in terrorist attacks since 1960 was about the same as the number that had died in lightning strikes, accidents involving deer, or from peanut allergies. As for the prospect of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction, he noted that the 9-11 hijackers had used nothing more complex than box cutters and that the attacks would suggest that the real threat was from people use craft to turn ordinary objects into deadly weapons.

Moreover, there was nothing particularly new in this. Aircraft and skyscrapers had been around for a long a time and Mueller argued that a determined and lucky band of terrorists might have been able to sink a passenger ship like the Titanic and kill thousands of people. One might add that Timothy McVeigh was able to combine fertilizer, diesel fuel, and a rental truck to make a massive bomb. So why the sudden concern and dire predictions of  a new age of terrorism?

Of course, the answer partly lies in the public shock created by the events.  However, what interests John is the reaction to the shock. Mueller argues that, when surprised, governments are sometimes prone to overestimating the new threat and  overreacting to it. In 2006, Mueller previewed his argument in a Cato Unbound post. He wrote:

Unpleasant surprises very frequently, though not always, lead to two responses that are serially connected and often prove to be unwise. First, the surprise is treated not as an aberration, but rather as a harbinger indicating that things have suddenly become much more dangerous and threatening, will remain so, and will become worse, an exercise that might be called “massive extrapolation.” And second, there is a tendency to lash out at the threat without a great deal of thought about alternative policies including and especially ones that might advocate simply letting it be.

In his book, John looks at several examples of massive extrapolation and overreaction by the US. Given the comparisons to 9-11 and Pearl Harbor that were being made at the time, and his previous research on the Pearl Harbor attacks, it was perhaps inevitable that John would start there. Unfortunately, this led to a lot of push back, as occurred in a Fox News interview with Hannity and Colmes. Mueller is making a very nuanced argument that the US vastly overestimated Japanese capabilities after Pearl Harbor, not that the US should not have fought Hitler. Also, Muller argues that not every threat is another Hitler and that most of the current threats in the international system are windbags compared to the likes of Hitler and Stalin.

Indeed, the stronger parts of Mueller's book are those in which he looks at threats that never amounted to much but were touted as dire by analysts, such as the US-Soviet missile gap. John also traces a long lineage of "devils du jour", such as Libya's Khaddafi and Indonesia's Sukarno, who were portrayed as threats to the US. Mueller notes that there is a tendency among intelligence experts to identify threats 5-10 years in the future, a timeline which seems near enough to be threatening but is far enough in the future to make comparison  of predictions and outcomes difficult. John digs up many of these 5-10 year predictions and finds that they tend to be woefully inaccurate.

Getting back to the question of whether post-9/11 assesments of the threat were accurate, Muller and Mark Stewart wrote an article for International Security entitled "The Terrorism Delusion." They note that, despite all the intelligence gathered  on Al-Qaida, there is no evidence that they had an active WMD program or anything like the 5,000 sleeper agents in the US that so many analysts were worried about. Looking at the historical data, they calculate that US citizens have a 1 in 3.5 million chance of dying in a terrorist attack.

They also identify all the 50 known cases of terrorist plots in the US. They find a sharp divergence between the terrorists the government describes as a threat and the ones that actually try to carry out an attack.

In 2009, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued a lengthy
report on protecting the homeland. Key to achieving such an objective should
be a careful assessment of the character, capacities, and desires of potential terrorists
targeting that homeland. Although the report contains a section dealing
with what its authors call “the nature of the terrorist adversary,” the section
devotes only two sentences to assessing that nature: “The number and high
profile of international and domestic terrorist attacks and disrupted plots during the last two decades underscore the determination and persistence of
terrorist organizations. Terrorists have proven to be relentless, patient, opportunistic,
and flexible, learning from experience and modifying tactics and targets
to exploit perceived vulnerabilities and avoid observed strengths.”

This description may apply to some terrorists somewhere, including at least
a few of those involved in the September 11 attacks. Yet, it scarcely describes
the vast majority of those individuals picked up on terrorism charges in the
United States since those attacks. The inability of the DHS to consider this fact
even parenthetically in its fleeting discussion is not only amazing but perhaps
delusional in its single-minded preoccupation with the extreme.

In sharp contrast, the authors of the case studies, with remarkably few exceptions,
describe their subjects with such words as incompetent, ineffective, unintelligent,
idiotic, ignorant, inadequate, unorganized, misguided, muddled,
amateurish, dopey, unrealistic, moronic, irrational, and foolish. And in nearly
all of the cases where an operative from the police or from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation was at work (almost half of the total), the most appropriate
descriptor would be “gullible.”

 

Terrorism in Civil Wars

Most scholarship on terrorism finds that terrorism is not particularly effective. Engaging in acts of terrorism usually means that the group responsible doesn't have long to exist. In general, groups like the Tamil Tigers and  Al-Qaida are the exception not the rule.

Jakana Thomas posted an article on the Monkey Cage based on her research into terrorism in civil wars which suggests that terrorist attacks may encourage the government to make more concessions when negotiating with rebels. She notes that this result largely depends on the context, i.e., that there is a civil war going on and that the government is negotiating with the rebels (something that is not universally the case).  As she puts it:

When both terrorism and counterterrorism inflict massive costs on civilians, the population is left with a choice of two bad options. Given that preexisting grievances are likely to have facilitated rebels’ mobilization efforts in the first place, governments are doubly likely to lose in such a contest. For these reasons, governments should be expected to pursue negotiated settlements to stop the pain caused by terrorism and to strike deals while their bargaining positions still permit favorable deals. New research by Reed Wood and Jacob Kathman similarly demonstrate that victimizing civilians may help groups achieve desirable outcomes in civil wars.

While a possible interpretation of these findings would suggest that terrorism helps groups “win” in war, it is important to note that the effects of terrorism are largely contingent upon a government’s response to it. If governments avoid feeding into terrorists’ strategies and instead engage in sound counterterrorism practices, they may be able to stymie the growth of terrorists (or at least not aid it). By offering protection and resisting the urge to use violence against civilians when responding to terrorists, governments should be able to undermine terrorists’ ability to undermine them.

Another way governments might deal with the problem is by finding effective ways of ending civil wars once they start. If governments resolve their conflicts, terrorists lose their power to hurt as war provides the context in which terrorism can work. As much as terrorism is a problem, a government refusing to seek peaceful settlements is also a problem. By dealing with the latter, governments can also address the former and resist “rewarding bad behavior.” Providing concessions to civilians or even more moderate armed groups in society, for example, may do enough to limit some of the aforementioned effects of terrorists’ strategies.

When less is more in fighting terrorism

NYPD recently announced that it was disbanding a program that sent plain clothed officers into Muslim neighborhoods to conduct surveillance of the local population. 

On the Monkey Cage, Rachel Gillum shares some research on attitudes of Muslims in the US that suggests this is a good idea. She argues that:

The Muslim-American community has served as a major resource for law enforcement since 9/11, with some scholars citing Muslim-Americans as the single largest source of initial information leading to disrupted terrorism plots since 2001. Such community assistance is particularly important in stopping homegrown attacks which tend to involve more “lone wolf” actors, making them more difficult to detect by law enforcement. Indeed, it was a Muslim immigrant who first reported suspicious activity in the 2010 case of Faisal Shazad, convicted in the Times Square bombing attempt.

The NYPD’s spying tactics, guided by a former CIA official, stirred debate over whether the NYPD was infringing on the civil rights of Muslims and illegally engaging in religious and ethnic profiling. Findings from recent studies based on MANOS data– a nationally representative survey of 500 Muslim-American respondents collected online by YouGov in March 2013 –suggest that such programs that unfairly target Muslim communities can create feelings of cynicism and reduce Muslims’ willingness to voluntarily assist police in criminal investigations.

She notes that the survey showed that only 14% of the respondents  from NYC thought that the police "behave fairly toward Muslim suspects" as opposed to 34% in the national survey. This is important because belief in the fairness of police behavior is related to people's willingness to cooperate with the police. Lower levels of belief in the fairness of police in NYC, presumably related to NYPD spying, suggests that it would be easier to keep terrorist plots a secret in NY's Muslim neighborhoods than in other such neighborhoods around the nation.