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Bruce Schneier

The Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective Terrorists

By Bruce SchneierWired News October 1, 2008

Most counterterrorism policies fail, not because of tactical problems, but because of a fundamentalmisunderstanding of what motivates terrorists in the first place. If we're ever going to defeatterrorism, we need to understand what drives people to become terrorists in the fi rst place.

Conventional wisdom holds that terrorism is inherently political, and that people become terrorists forpolitical reasons. This is the "strategic" model of terrorism, and it's basically an economic model. Itposits that people resort to terrorism when they believe -- rightly or wrongly -- that terrorism is worthit; that is, when they believe the political gains of terrorism minus the political costs are greater thanif they engaged in some other, more peaceful form of protest. It's assumed, for example, that people

join Hamas to achieve a Palestinian state; that people join the PKK to attain a Kurdish nationalhomeland; and that people join al-Qaida to, among other things, get the United States out of thePersian Gulf.

If you believe this model, the way to fight terrorism is to change that equation, and that's what mostexperts advocate. Governments tend to minimize the political gains of terrorism through a no-concessions policy; the international community tends to recommend reducing the political grievancesof terrorists via appeasement, in hopes of getting them to renounce violence. Both advocate policiesto provide effective nonviolent alternatives, like free elections.

Historically, none of these solutions has worked with any regularity. Max Abrahms, a predoctoralfellow at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, has studied dozensof terrorist groups from all over the world. He argues that the model is wrong. In a paper ( .pdf)published this year in International Security that -- sadly -- doesn't have the title "Seven Habits of

Highly Ineffective Terrorists," he discusses, well, seven habits of highly ineffective terrorists. Theseseven tendencies are seen in terrorist organizations all over the world, and they directly contradict thetheory that terrorists are political maximizers:

Terrorists, he writes, (1) attack civilians, a policy that has a lousy track record of convincing thosecivilians to give the terrorists what they want; (2) treat terrorism as a first resort, not a last resort,failing to embrace nonviolent alternatives like elections; (3) don't compromise with their targetcountry, even when those compromises are in their best interest politically; (4) have protean politicalplatforms, which regularly, and sometimes radically, change; (5) often engage in anonymous attacks,which precludes the target countries making political concessions to them; (6) regularly attack otherterrorist groups with the same political platform; and (7) resist disbanding, even when theyconsistently fail to achieve their political objectives or when their stated political objectives have beenachieved.

Abrahms has an alternative model to explain all this: People turn to terrorism for social solidarity. Hetheorizes that people join terrorist organizations worldwide in order to be part of a community, muchlike the reason inner-city youths join gangs in the United States.

The evidence supports this. Individual terrorists often have no prior involvement with a group'spolitical agenda, and often join multiple terrorist groups with incompatible platforms. Individuals who

join terrorist groups are frequently not oppressed in any way, and often can't describe the politicalgoals of their organizations. People who join terrorist groups most often have friends or relatives whoare members of the group, and the great majority of terrorist are socially isolated: unmarried young

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men or widowed women who weren't working prior to joining. These things are true for members of terrorist groups as diverse as the IRA and al-Qaida.

For example, several of the 9/11 hijackers planned to fight in Chechnya, but they didn't have the rightpaperwork so they attacked America instead. The mujahedeen had no idea whom they would attackafter the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, so they sat around until they came up with a newenemy: America. Pakistani terrorists regularly defect to another terrorist group with a totally differentpolitical platform. Many new al-Qaida members say, unconvincingly, that they decided to become a

jihadist after reading an extreme, anti-American blog, or after converting to Islam, sometimes just afew weeks before. These people know little about politics or Islam, and they frankly don't even seemto care much about learning more. The blogs they turn to don't have a lot of substance in these areas,even though more informative blogs do exist.

All of this explains the seven habits. It's not that they're ineffective; it's that they have a differentgoal. They might not be effective politically, but they are effective socially: They all help preserve thegroup's existence and cohesion.

This kind of analysis isn't just theoretical; it has practical implications for counterterrorism. Not onlycan we now better understand who is likely to become a terrorist, we can engage in strategiesspecifically designed to weaken the social bonds within terrorist organizations. Driving a wedgebetween group members -- commuting prison sentences in exchange for actionable intelligence,planting more double agents within terrorist groups -- will go a long way to weakening the socialbonds within those groups.

We also need to pay more attention to the socially marginalized than to the politically downtrodden,like unassimilated communities in Western countries. We need to support vibrant, benign communitiesand organizations as alternative ways for potential terrorists to get the social cohesion they need. Andfinally, we need to minimize collateral damage in our counterterrorism operations, as well as clampingdown on bigotry and hate crimes, which just creates more dislocation and social isolation, and theinevitable calls for revenge.