I work as a business consultant, trying to solve seemingly intractable problems for companies. The one comment I have heard more than any other is a CEO saying ‘I just don’t know how to begin to address the problem.’
The last time I heard this comment was from a politician, describing the fight against Al Qaeda. A handful of respected ant-terrorism experts had given lectures, expressed their talking head opinions, the audience evaluated the opposing views and came to the conclusions that nothing we were doing addressed the core problem.
I would offer the following. Look at Al Qaeda, see how it behaves.
- They are secretive
- Have a decentralised structure,
- They recruit primarily in places where opportunity and social mobility is non existant (forget the rich poster kid terrorists, for every one of them there are 100 foot soldiers in poor places).
- They initiate the recruits through us and them, violence and indocrination,
- They have their own language, narratives and stories woven from half truths to indocrinate.
- The group is everything, You are either part of the group or you are classed as an enemy (even if you are a muslim), and a target
- Terrorism is the headline, but the daily operation is extortion, blackmail, drug trafficking. Criminal activities masked under religious cloaks. Criminal networks are created to facilitate generating cash for terrorism.
Anyone who has looked at MS13, or the other street gangs in the US immediately recognises Al Qaeda’s modus operandi. They are eerily similar to the many other street gangs out there. MS 13 defined from Wiki:
The Mara Salvatrucha gang originated in Los Angeles, set up in the 1980s by Salvadoran immigrants in the city’s Pico-Union neighborhood who immigrated to the United States after the Central American civil wars of the 1980s.[5][6] …..
Originally, the gang’s main purpose was to protect Salvadoran immigrants from other, more established gangs of Los Angeles, who were predominantly composed of Mexicans and African-Americans.[7]
Exactly as with Al Qaeda, they started with intentions of being protectors, and twisted that logic into an organisation that benefits just themselves, and projects them into positions of power. No populous in the Muslim world (outside of Saudi Arabia) would elect these morons into power, so they now operate as a criminal gang, adding religion into the tools used to drive the group, keep it together, hoping violence will yield the power they crave. But as demonstrated by the notorious Al Qaeda bank robbers in France, or MS13 in the states, criminality becomes the predominant theme, those who were supposed to be the recipients of protection inevitably become the victims.
It cuts both ways. If the US drone strikes some remote region as part of the war on terror, and in the process kills 50 innocents, they provide 50 families who are potential recruits for the AQ street gang. Street gangs thrive on looking as if they are fighting the oppressors, the man, authority. Looking at Al Qaeda in this way, we can begin to see that tools we need to defeat and disassemble them are perefectly within our scope of experience, we have done it repeatedly with other criminal gangs. We don’t need to decalre war on other countries, or religions. We need to treat Al Qaeda as the parasites they are.
The first step with all parasites is that people must be made to realise they are being used, they must be given hope that they can run their own lives, they must be given the tools and support to create change from within.
In Part 2 I will look at how street gangs spreading across the world is mirrored by AQ, how external funding (the Saudi’s again) needs to be destroyed, and more importantly how AQ is a sideshow for a much greater struggle between people who think they know what is good for the rest of us.
