Integration, Immigration, Stakeholding, and Terrorism

As Atrios noted yesteday, determined attacks against public targets will get through and the best that can be achieved is minimization, mitigation and diversion if the attacker is determined enough:

if people want to kill people and don't care if they get killed or caught they're going to kill people. The existence of guns facilitate certain kinds of crimes, but there are many other options. Large motor vehicles could be quite effective, too, and don't require much creativity or skill. More creative options also exist.

Obviously security measures can protect specific locations and minimize the likelihood of certain kinds of violence at those locations

A couple of weeks after 9-11, when there were no follow-up transportation system attacks against American subways, rail, bus or aviation networks, I have always downplayed the probability of a significant sleeper cell action in America as that would have been a near optimal time for a series of systems disruption attempts. Just imagine how jittery the US would have been and how much of an economic slowdown would have been if the transportation networks were under intermittent and unpredictable attacks. The attacks would have been fairly simple in their requirements and planning size, and very difficult to stop. For these reasons, I think a good deal of the security measures put in place with the Patriot Act and the national security state are purely theatrical.


The few cases of American residents and citizens who have been arrested and whose indictments have not been laughed out of the courts for support of terrorism charges are tiny and primarily composed of people who do not operate within our shared version of reality. Taking up arms against a society that has a good grievance resolution or redirection method and does not wantonly and visibly screw too many people over is a very high threshold for people to jump over.

Outside the Beltway is linking to a Salon piece on the growing strength of Al-Quaeda in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. There is some evidence that a new network of training camps is springing up. US officials fear that the centralized planning capacity for deep strikes against the West has been reconstituted.

"The news is alarming. U.S. and French intelligence agencies are convinced that terrorist network al-Qaida has reorganized and, what’s more, developed new training camps in both Afghanistan and the remote tribal regions of northern Pakistan. They believe that a new generation of terrorists has come of age, and some are suspected of planning attacks in the West."

For the past several years Al-Quaeda has decentralized its planning and diluted its branding to support anyone who has a grudge against the West or against a non-Islamist government. This re-purposing of Al-Quaeda has been successful in creating a more unified narrative and identity of disparate and disconnected groups that are engaged in armed actions and terrorism.

For instance, the AP is reporting that Al-Quaeda affiliated groups are successfully recruiting some of their shooters and suicide bombers from the margins of society. The 9-11 hijackers were men whose aspirations as educated professionals were blocked due to the hereditiy power structure and authoritian single party regimes in the Middle East. Both the disaffected and the thwarted do not have a stake in the continuation of the common rule sets that they diagnose as screwing them over.

Western Europe is also a fertile recruiting ground for jihadist organizations as there is a large pool of disaffected and disassociated individuals who do not believe that the society in which they live in offers them a stake and a chance. Great Britain's MI-5 believed that there were over 1,200 potential attackers who lived in the UK, and the conspirators behind the Madrid bombings had a significant residential component to that cell.

The perception of a politically, culturally and economically open society is one of the best protections that the United States can wield in protecting itself from the vast majority of distributed, minimally directed terrorist attacks. We offer a pretty good package of acceptance and assimilation for the vast majority of people who live here, and as the immigration debate continues to crawl on its belly forward, this is something that we should keep in mind. Openness works in our favor.