Jihad Comes To America

Several disquieting trends converged in New York City’s fabled Times Square entertainment district on Saturday evening, May 1^st, 2010. [1] First, a foreign terrorist group with a hitherto local agenda and otherwise parochial aims once again is believed to have stretched its wings and sought to operate on a broader, more ambitious global canvas. Second, the conventional wisdom, which long held that the threat to the U.S. was primarily external and involved foreigners coming from overseas to kill Americans in this country (as had occurred on September 11^th 2001) again has been shattered.

Third, the comforting stereotype that terrorists are poor, uneducated, provincial loners and thus are both different from us and can be readily identified has once more been compromised. And, finally, the belief that the American “melting pot,” our historical capacity to readily absorb new immigrants, would provide something of a “firewall” against radicalization and recruitment has now fallen by the way-side. The Times Square incident, despite initial claims to the contrary, was not a “one off” event perpetrated by an individual variously described as “isolated” or a “lone wolf” but is rather part of an emerging pattern of terrorism that directly threatens the U.S. and presents new and formidable challenges to our national security.[2]

Local Groups With New Global Ambitions

Both the U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and Obama Administration senior counterterrorism adviser John Brennan have gone on record as stating that the Tehrik-i-Taliban or Pakistani Taliban, (TTP), was behind the Times Square plot, having provided money and direction to the hapless bomber, Faisal Shahzad.[3] Interestingly, neither official has mentioned who or what terrorist group trained him. Nonetheless, the TTP’s involvement in an international terrorist plot should not have been unexpected or even surprising.[4] In January 2008, Spanish authorities thwarted a plot orchestrated by the late Baitullah Mehsud, then commander of the TTP, to attack the Barcelona subway system.[5] As Spain’s leading counterterrorism magistrate, Judge Baltasar Garzon, had stated, “That these people were ready to go into action as terrorists in Spain - that came as a surprise. In my opinion, the jihadi threat from Pakistan is the biggest emerging threat we are facing in Europe. Pakistan is an ideological and training hotbed for jihadists, and they are being exported here.”[6] Judge Garzon could just as easily have been discussing the Times Square plot and the threat from Pakistani jihadis to the U.S. The TTP in fact had already repeatedly threatened to attack in the U.S. not least in retaliation for the escalated drone attacks that have targeted the group’s leaders.[7]

Only a few months ago al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP)—another group whom it was believed lacked the capability to operate outside their traditional battleground - nearly succeeded in bringing down a Northwest Airlines flight in the skies over America on Christmas Day. As a senior Obama Administration official responsible for counterterrorism explained shortly afterwards, “AQAP was looked upon as a lethal organization, but one focused [only] on the Arabian Peninsula. We thought they would attack our embassy in Yemen or Saudi Arabia” - and not in the U.S.[8] The Obama Administration has now twice been caught either underestimating or dismissing the possibility that local terrorist groups may harbour grander international aspirations - to include attacks in as well as against the U.S. It was of course the Bush Administration’s similar dismissal of al-Qaeda’s ability to strike at the U.S. in this country that led to the September 11^th 2001 attacks.[9]

The Threat to the U.S. Is Now Patently Internal As Well As External

Last year was a watershed in terrorist threats and plots in the U.S. A record nine jihadi or jihadi-inspired plots or incidents and one tragically successful attack, at Fort Hood, Texas that claimed the lives of thirteen persons, occurred. Furthermore, over 40 persons were indicted in the U.S. on terrorism charges last year, another record. Thus far in 2010 there have been four incidents. It is therefore difficult to be complacent when an average of one plot is now being uncovered per month over the past year or more - and perhaps even more are being hatched that we don’t yet know about. In this respect, terrorists play the odds - which may explain the seeming “amateurish” dimension of the plot. What appears as “amateurish” may in fact be more a reflection of the attack having been rushed. At a time when the capability of the TTP and al-Qaeda in Pakistan are being relentlessly degraded by the U.S. drone attacks, both groups may feel pressed to implement an operation either sooner or more precipitously than they might otherwise prefer. Fears of the would-be attacker being identified and interdicted by authorities may thus account for what appears to be a more compressed operational tempo and faster “soup to nuts” process by which a recruit is hooked, trained and operationally deployed. The complaint sworn against Shahzad in federal court, for instance, reveals a fast four-month process from planning to training to Times Square.[11] The TTP and al-Qaeda may thus be prepared to accept this trade-off of shorter training periods leading to accelerated plots and less reliable operations in order to dispatch “clean skin” recruits before they can be identified, detected and stopped. Indeed, this likely represents a reasonable trade-off and excellent return on a very modest investment. The terrorists groups have expended little effort and energy training alleged “walk-ins” like Shahzad who present terrorist organizations with new low-cost opportunities to strike in the U.S.

Both these groups may also pin their faiths and hopes on eventually simply getting lucky. Over a quarter of a century ago, the Irish Republican Army famously taunted then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher after its bombers failed to kill her at the 1984 Conservative Party conference in Brighton, England, saying, “Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.”[12] Al-Qaeda, the TTP and their allies doubtless have embraced the same logic. The sheer diversity of the perpetrators and nature of their U.S. plots is remarkable. These have included highly trained al-Qaeda operatives like Najibullah Zazi, the Afghan-born U.S. resident who sought to replicate the July 7^th, 2005 suicide attacks on London transport in Manhattan; motivated, but less competent, recruits like Faisal Shahzad and the five youths from a Washington, D.C. suburb who last December sought training in Pakistan to fight in Afghanistan but, had they been successful in establishing contact with a Pakistan-based terrorist group, could just as well have been deployed back to U.S.; dedicated sleeper agents like the U.S. citizen and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) informant David Headley whose reconnaissance efforts on behalf of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a longstanding al-Qaeda ally, were pivotal to the November 2008 Mumbai, India attack’s success; bona fide “lone wolves” like Major Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, and other individuals with murkier terrorist connections like Abdulhakim Muhammad (nee Carlos Bledsoe), an African-American convert to Islam who returned from Yemen last year and killed a U.S. military recruiter and wounded another in Little Rock, Arkansas and has now claimed in court to have done so on behalf of AQAP - the same group responsible for Christmas Day plot; and, finally, the incompetent, wannabe terrorists who are easily entrapped and apprehended such as the four parolees and converts to Islam who attempted to bomb 2 Bronx synagogues and an upstate air national guard base, the Jordanian national who overstayed his U.S. tourist visa and plotted to bomb a downtown Dallas office tower last September, and another convert who wanted to blow up a Springfield, IL federal building that same month, among others.

As previous inSITE columns have argued, this is part and parcel of an al-Qaeda strategy that the organization also has pushed on other groups. The strategy is one that is deliberately designed to overwhelm, distract, and exhaust the terrorists’ adversaries. There are two components to this strategy: one economic and the other operational. In terms of the economic dimension, al-Qaeda has never claimed it could or would defeat the U.S. militarily. Instead, it seeks to wear us down economically through increasing expenditures on domestic security and overseas military commitments. Given the current global economic downturn, this message arguably now has greater resonance with al-Qaeda’s followers and supporters and indeed perhaps even with new recruits. The operational dimension, which inSITE has also previously detailed, seeks to flood already stressed intelligence and law enforcement with “noise,” low-level threats from “lone wolves” and other jihadi “hangers on,” e.g., the “low hanging fruit” who are designed to consume the attention of law enforcement and intelligence in hopes that this distraction will permit more serious terrorist operations to go unnoticed and thereby sneak “beneath the radar” and in fact succeed.

Comforting Stereotypes About Terrorism’s Putative Demographics

Comforting theories about poverty, lack of education, and lack of opportunity have long figured prominently in explanations for the eruption of terrorism.[13] Indeed, in the aftermath of the September 11^th, 2001 attacks, this debate over the “root causes” of terrorism acquired new relevance and greater urgency. A succession of global leaders seemed to fasten on to poverty, illiteracy, and lack of education as the sources of worldwide terrorism and insurgency. [14] “We fight against poverty because hope is an answer to terror,” President George W. Bush, for example, declared before the United Nations Financing for Development Conference in March 2002. “We will challenge the poverty and hopelessness and lack of education and failed governments that too often allow conditions that terrorists can seize and try to turn to their advantage.”[15] His statement was but one of a plethora of similar panaceas repeatedly provided in the wake of September 11^th. World figures as diverse as Prime Minister Tony Blair, Pope John Paul II, Malayasia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Jordan’s Prime Minister Ali Abul Ragheb, and the Philippine’s President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, as well as Nobel Peace Prize laureates Elie Wiesel, Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama, Kim Dae-jung, and Oscar Arias Sanchez, identified these same “root causes.”

Nearly a decade later, such arguments are still heard. In February 2009, for example, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani attempted to rally support for his government’s controversial truce with Taliban fighters in the Swat Valley by claiming that, since illiteracy is the source of terrorism and insurgency, greater peace and stability in the region would now enable Islamabad to improve education there and thereby eliminate political violence.[16] Following the attempted in flight bombing of Northwest Airlines Flight 251 last December, President Barack Obama implied such a causal connection with respect to AQAP’s resurgence in Yemen.[17] And, most recently, a column by Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times claimed that building schools in Pakistan is “just about the best long-term counterterrorism investment available.”[18]

But both the historical and contemporary empirical evidence fail to support such sweeping claims - with Shahzad himself the latest example. Indeed, Shahzad had a Bachelors of Science degree in computing and holds a Masters in Business Administration. Until he quit his job, he was gainfully employed. Shahzad had a wife and two children and, for all intents and purposes, seemed to be living the suburban American dream with a single family home in Shelton, Connecticut.

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab - the Christmas Day would-be bomber - similarly defied the conventional wisdom about the stereotypical suicide terrorist. He was a graduate of University College London, one of Britain’s best universities, and is the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker and former government official. Not only did he hold a very good degree (in engineering) from a very good university, but he was cosmopolitan; having lived abroad, he was at ease traversing the globe without arousing suspicion. As the renowned terrorism expert Walter Laqueur explained seven years ago, for terrorists to survive, much less thrive, in today’s globalized, technologically savvy, and interconnected world, they have to be:

The Shahzads and Abdulmutallabs we repeatedly encounter should therefore no longer surprise us.

The American “Melting Pot” Theory

The wishful thinking that the American “melting pot” theory provided a “firewall” against the radicalization and recruitment of American citizens - whether naturalized or born here - along with U.S. residents (green card holders), arguably lulled us into a sense of complacency that homegrown terrorism couldn’t happen in the U.S. The British similarly believed before the July 7^th, 2005 London suicide attacks that there was perhaps a problem with the Muslim communities in Europe but certainly not with British Muslims in the U.K. who were better integrated, better educated, and wealthier than their counterparts on the continent.

By stubbornly wrapping ourselves in this same false security blanket we lost five years to learn from the British experience. Well over a year ago we became aware of radicalization and recruitment occurring in the U.S. when Somali-Americans started disappearing from the Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota area and turning up in Somalia with an al-Qaeda affiliate, al-Shabaab (“the youth”). Administration officials and others believed it was an isolated, one-off phenomenon. But it wasn’t, as the grand juries that have been sitting in Minneapolis-St. Paul and San Diego, California attest along with the ongoing FBI investigations in Boston and two locations in Ohio, among other places. The number of Somali-Americans who left the U.S. to train in Somalia turned out to be far higher than initially believed and furthermore once they were in Somalia they were indeed being trained by al-Qaeda.

In sum, the case of the Somali-Americans thus turned out to be a Pandora’s Box. And by not taking the threat of radicalization and recruitment actually occurring in the U.S. both sooner and more seriously we failed to comprehend that this was not an isolated phenomenon, specific to Minnesota and this particular immigrant community, but that it indicated the possibility that even an embryonic terrorist radicalization and recruitment infrastructure had been established in the U.S. Shahzad accordingly is the latest person to jump out of this box. 

The Big Questions Remain 

Yet, the U.S. is stumbling blindly through the legal, operational, and organizational minefield of countering terrorist radicalization and recruitment occurring in the U.S. Instead, rather than answers, today we have an almost endless list of pressing questions on this emerging threat, on our response, and on the capacity of the national security architecture we currently have in place to meet it.

On the threat.; What do we do when the terrorists are like us? When they conform to the archetypal American immigrant success story? When they are American citizens or U.S. residents? When they are not perhaps from the Middle East or South Asia and in fact have familiar-sounding names? Or, when they are “petite, blue-eyed, blonde” suburban housewives who, as the infamous JihadJane boasted, “can easily blend in”?

On our response. Who in fact is responsible in the U.S. government to identify radicalization when it is occurring and then interdict attempts at recruitment? Is this best done by federal law enforcement (e.g., the Federal Bureau of Investigation) or state and local jurisdictions working closely with federal authorities? Is it a core mission for a modernized, post-9/11 FBI? Or for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)? Can it be done by the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), even though it has only a coordinating function and relies on other agencies for intelligence collections, analysis, and operations? What is the role of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) in home-grown terrorism and recruitment and radicalization? Will coming to grips with these challenges be the remit of the next FBI Director given the incumbent’s impending retirement?

On our current national security architecture. Despite the reforms adopted from the 9/11 Commission’s report and recommendations and the 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, have terrorists nonetheless discovered our Achilles Heel in that we currently have no strategy to counter this type of threat from home-grown terrorists and other radicalized recruits? Did “the system really work,” as we are repeatedly told?Or was a lot of luck involved because of the plot’s rushed nature? And finally, can we deter al Qaeda and its affiliates and associates from attacking in the U.S.? If even a “hard target” like New York City continually attracts terrorist attention, what does this tell us about vulnerabilities elsewhere in the country?

That there are more questions than answers nearly a decade into the war on terrorism is indeed fundamentally disquieting.

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[1] See United States Of America v. Faisal Shahzad, Defendant, Case 1:10-mj-00928-UA Filed 4 May 2010.

[2] See the statements by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, “’This Week’ Transcript: McKay, Napolitano, Salazar and Allen,” ABC News, 2 May 2010 accessed at: http://www.abcnews.go.com/print?id=10532649; Denis McDonough, Chief of Staff of the National Security Council on “News Hour,” Public Broadcasting System, 5 May 2010 accessed at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour.bb/law/jan-june10/timessquare2_05-05.html; and, General David H. Petraeus in Yochi J. Dreazen and Evan Perez, “Suspect Cites Radical Iman’s Writings,” Wall Street Journal, 6 May 2010. See also, Joseph Berger, “Pakistani Taliban Behind Times Sq. Plot, Holder Says, “New York Times, 9 May 2010 accessed at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/10/us/politics/10holder.html; and, Associated Press, “Gen. Petraeus: Times Square bomber acted alone,” 7 May 2010 accessed at: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iXN8wcxfFxkTe1TWhZtNClI5XW3QD9FI85E00.

[3] Anne E. Kornblut and Karin Brulliard, “U.S. blames Pakistani Taliban for Times Square bomb plot,” Washington Post, 10 May 2010.

[4] See, for example, Karin Brulliard and Pamela Constable, “Militant factions with global aims are spreading roots throughout Pakistan,” Washington Post, 10 May 2010.

[5] Jean-Pierre Perrin "Al-Qa'ida Has Lost Its Footing: Interview with Jean-Pierre Filiu", Liberation (Paris), 6 May 2010; and, Douglas Farah, “Analysis of the Spanish Suicide Bombers Case,” NEFA, 22 February 2008.

[6] Quoted in Farah, “Analysis of the Spanish Suicide Bombers Case,”

[7] See Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff, “The Taliban’s Threats,” Newsweek (New York), 1 April 2009; Zahid Hussain and Jeremy Page, “Taleban: we will launch attack on America that will amaze the world,” The Times (London), 1 April 2009; and, “Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud threats U.S. months after ‘death’,” Daily Telegraph (London), 3 May 2010.

[8] Discussion with the author, Washington, DC, 26 January 2010.

[9] See especially “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US,” pp. 261-262 in The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: Norton, 2004).  See also, pp. 254-263

 [10] Steve Kroft, “Homegrown Terror,” 60 Minutes, CBS News, 9 May 2010 accessed at: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6470178n&tag=contentMain;cbsCarousel.

[11] United States Of America v. Faisal Shahzad, Defendant, Case 1:10-mj-00928-UA Filed 4 May 2010.

[12] Quoted in Peter Taylor, Brits (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 256.

[13] See Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1987), p. 7; idem, The New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 8; and Claude Berrebi, “Evidence About The Link Between Education, Poverty and Terrorism Among Palestinians,” 2003, pp. 5-7 accessed at: http://www.irs.princeton.edu/pubs/pdfs/477.pdf.

[14] See, for instance, Scott Atran, “Who Wants to Be a Martyr,” New York Times, 5 May 2003; BBC News, “Poverty ‘fuelling terrorism’,” bbc.co.uk, 22 March 2002 accessed at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1886617.stm; and, Nicholas D. Kristof, “Behind The Terrorists,” New York Times, 7 May 2002 accessed at: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CE1DA1730F934A35756C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

[15] Online Newshour, “President Bush’s speech at the United Nations Financing for Development conference”’ Monterrey, Mexico, 22 March 2002, PBS.org, accessed at: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/march02/bush_3-22.html.

[16] Saadia Khalid, “Illiteracy root cause of terrorism, extremism: PM,” The International News, 21 February 2009 accessed at: http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=163751.

[17] “We’re learning more about the suspect,” the President explained. “We know that he traveled to Yemen, a country grappling with crushing poverty and deadly insurgencies. It appears that he joined an affiliate of Al-Qaeda and that this group, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, trained him, equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America.” Quoted in Peter Baker, “Obama Says Al-Qaeda in Yemen Planned Bombing Plot, and He Vows Retribution,” New York Times, 2 January 2010.

[18] Nicholas D. Kristof, “Pakistan and Times Square,” New York Times, 12 May 2010.

[19] Walter Laqueur, No End To War: Terrorism In The Twenty-First Century (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), p. 17.