Defeating Terror

From Zanecorpwiki

2010-02-06

In a February 1st interview with PBS NewsHour, Marc Sageman puts forward the idea that we can best interdict terror recruits by working with the protest counter culture. The observation being that in the process of radicalization, individuals move through a protest phase before becoming frustrated and turning to violence.

The violent turn is shunned by the mainstream protest culture itself, whose members tend to separate themselves from individuals as they radicalize. Thus looking at those in the protest culture is not useful in identifying potentially dangerous individuals, but looking at those that become frustrated and leave the culture is.

To me, this makes a clear argument for engagement with the protest culture. On the one hand, by reaching out to those with a beef, we can perhaps alleviate some of the frustration that individuals within the culture feel. In so doing, we would halt the progression from protest to violence in some cases.

Second, by developing a positive relationship with the culture, we would get much better intelligence on those individuals who do radicalize. The intelligence is also much easier (and cheaper) to gather. Rather than use limited resources to blanket the counter culture with agents whose desire to "find the bad guys" generates a high ratio of false positives and far more noise than signal, we build a relationship with the individuals who are most able to spot and report on those undergoing radicalization.