From a human to a terrorist

It hurts to learn common people are not very common but have  streak of violent and terrorism in them. Nevertheless is a nice reading. Theaustralian news

A SOCCER-PLAYING labourer and father of four whose friends say he was "like an Aussie boy".

A 22-year-old described as "a smart kid" and "a good student". A boilermaker who complained of having to work round the clock to feed his family. These otherwise nondescript Australians are among the latest recruits to the global terrorist movement, according to evidence tendered in the Melbourne Magistrates Court after this week's terrorism arrests. The perplexing question is: Why? How does a seemingly ordinary young man come to embrace violent extremism? Its corollary, the question that confounds counter-terrorism experts worldwide, is: how can we stop them?

The rapidly morphing nature of global terrorism demands an evolving response. Since 9/11, Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida has diminished but its ideology has flourished, spawning hundreds of like-minded groups and cells across the world. US terrorism specialist Marc Sageman describes this new phenomenon as a "violent Islamist born-again social movement" straddling the globe. Its fragmented and anarchic nature makes it arguably a bigger threat than al-Qa'ida, according to Britain's Strategy for Countering International Terrorism, unveiled in March this year. Unlike the once highly centralised al-Qa'ida, the new grassroots terrorism cannot be fought with border protection measures or military strikes, but must be tackled at its roots.

This reality has spawned a new buzzword in the anti-terrorism fraternity: counter-radicalisation. Its aim, in Sageman's words, is to "stop the process of radicalisation before it reaches its violent end".

The concept is sure to be a central theme of the Rudd government's white paper on counter-terrorism later this year. Its release has been long awaited by critics such as Anthony Bergin of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, who has been calling for such a strategy for two years. "Despite the rhetoric, what has this government actually invested in this area? My sense is pretty little," Bergin says.

But for all the hype surrounding the concept, like many handy catchphrases, counter-radicalisation is easier said than done. Radicalisation itself is a complex process; the job of countering it infinitely more so.

"Radicalisation happens in a number of different ways," says Nick O'Brien, former head of international counter-terrorism for the British Special Branch and now associate professor of terrorism studies at Charles Sturt University. "Some people are radicalised because of foreign policy, (such as) Australian actions previously in Iraq and in Afghanistan, or because of Australia's allegiance to America. Other people are radicalised because of what happens to a relative, or what they read on the internet, or by the influence of a charismatic preacher. There is a whole mix that goes into why a person becomes radicalised, and it's probably different for each person."

Compounding the complexity of the challenge is the unfortunate fact that the hardcore militants who pose the greatest risk are almost certainly immune from any strategy that police and governments can devise.

Sageman, the pre-eminent expert on radicalisation theory, is a former CIA mujaheddin handler in Pakistan, now a psychologist and author of two books, Understanding Terror Networks and Leaderless Jihad. After studying 165 jihadists, Sageman is adamant that terrorists are not born but made. There is no psychological profile of a terrorist and Sageman believes "root causes" such as socioeconomic deprivation are overrated. The most common factor in the making of a terrorist is alienation. Of the jihadists Sageman studied, he found that "a remarkable 78 per cent were cut off from their cultural and social origins". He concludes "this absence of connection is a necessary condition fora network of people to join the global jihad".

Sageman's theory is borne out by the militants of Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiah, who embraced terrorism while living in exile in Malaysia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is also illustrated by the Melbourne terror cell led by cleric Abdul Nacer Benbrika, who was convicted with six of his followers last year. His conviction has been appealed. Benbrika's acolytes were mostly second-generation sons of Lebanese families, caught between the cultures of their forebears and an Australian milieu they spurned. The theory can equally be applied to the troubled sons of Somali refugees in Australia, described in their community as "the lost ones", isolated from their native cultures and unable to adapt in their adopted home.

Victoria Police intelligence analyst Gaetano Ilardi, in a paper written after the Benbrika case, says joining a jihadist group gives individuals "a sense of empowerment, control and purpose". The conviction that they are "performing God's work" elevates their sense of confidence and self-worth. And believing they are "involved in and able to exert influence over grand events" enhances a new sense of identity and superiority over others.

Sageman adds they are not violent psychopaths but "generally idealistic young people seeking dreams of glory fighting for justice and fairness".

Most of the present crop of homegrown extremists are not drafted through a conventional top-down process but are self-recruited and, significantly, self-radicalised. The internet plays a crucial part. Increasingly they rely not on the advice of a local preacher but on Sheik Google, the mass of virtual ideology on the web that sanctions the use of violence in the name of Islam.

Ilardi writes that reliance on radical literature and media is a feature common to all homegrown terrorists, and that it enables a "cognitive transformation" that takes place during the radicalisation process. Visiting extremist websites brimming with descriptions and images of suffering Muslims instils a sense of outrage and perception of crisis, and provides a reference and rallying point around which the individual's new identity can crystallise. This is a crucial step in his "journey from unremarkable citizen to someone who has internalised a belief system which makes violence a duty of the highest order".

Ilardi says would-be jihadists are further fortified by their contempt for secular law, which allows them to justify criminal activities such as car rebirthing and credit card fraud as a means of raising funds. This disdain for man-made laws is also seen in the behaviour of accused militants who refuse to recognise the authority of secular courts. Two of the men who appeared in the Melbourne Magistrates Court this week refused to stand, declaring "I only stand before God". Irrespective of their guilt or innocence, Ilardi writes in this earlier paper that such attitudes are a "powerful outward manifestation of the group's transition from rhetoric to action, (and) an overt expression of one's commitment to jihad and renunciation of the legitimacy of the state and its secular laws andinstitutions".

This much is known about the process of radicalisation. Figuring out how to stop it is much less clear.

The British government has led the way with its 175-page Strategy for Countering International Terrorism. It has four prongs: prevent, pursue, protect and prepare. Its focus is on confronting militant ideology head-on through initiatives such as the London-based Quilliam Foundation, a counter-extremism think tank and website. This reflects the now accepted wisdom that Britain's former approach of tolerating Islamic extremists only helped foster the terrorists within.

Australia's efforts thus far have been mainly through the National Action Plan to Build on Social Cohesion, Harmony and Security, under which $41 million has been allocated for projects to promote integration and community building through employment, education, sports, the arts, and mentoring programs. But the all-important task of tackling Islamist ideology has been the focus of far more talk than action.

Police forces across Australia have been proactive, with several, including the federal, NSW and Victorian, establishing contact units to promote engagement and build bridges with at-risk communities.

The NSW Counter Terrorism and Special Tactics Command has devised a model for community engagement that forms the basis of a nascent counter-radicalisation strategy. The model is based on a series of four concentric circles, at the centre of which are two groups identified as the prime targets for counter-radicalisation. The innermost circle consists of people deemed to be radicals -- those at the end point of the radicalisation process -- defined as individuals who are "prepared, directly or indirectly, to advance a political, religious or ideological cause through threats or actions". The next circle contains the extremists, individuals who passively support the advancement of such a cause through the threats or actions of others.

The NSW model defines counter-radicalisation as "an early intervention strategy, system or process aimed at preventing or inhibiting radicalisation", but stops short of stating just how this should be done.

It also acknowledges the limitations of this approach, noting that "participation would be voluntary" and, in the case of people already radicalised, "there would be little possibility of obtaining their voluntary collaboration for the purpose of de-radicalisation".

The grim truth is that by the time an individual has completed the path to radicalisation and embraced the cause of violent jihad, it is almost certainly too late.

"For some people nothing will work," says O'Brien. "Governments have to accept that there (are) a certain number of people who, no matter what they do, it's never going to be enough."

The NSW model highlights continuing disagreements that have snagged attempts to forge a uniform national approach. State and commonwealth police and security agencies have been unable to agree on terminology, with some agencies reversing the use of terms so that a radical is deemed to be someone at the start of the process and an extremist is someone at the end.

Discussions about language have dominated much of the recent counter-terrorism debate.

In the US, the "war on terror" rhetoric has been conspicuously abandoned. President Barack Obama's principal adviser on counter-terrorism, John Brennan, told the Centre for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday that references to a global war and a jihadonly play into "the warped narrative that al-Qa'ida propagates".

Here, the Attorney-General is funding the Lexicon of Terrorism Project by Victoria Police to examine the use of terrorism related language and "its possible impact on community harmony". Its goal is to "construct a dictionary identifying alternative styles and modes oflanguage".

Acknowledging the sensitivity about language, the NSW Police notes that its model "does not refer to religion or specify any particular community group as that is considered counterproductive in terms of reversing any sense of alienation or marginalisation".

For some, this smacks of political correctness.

"I don't accept that approach," Bergin says. "The perpetrators of these attacks -- from London to New York to Melbourne -- the political agenda they are running is Islamism. So it doesn't help to not identify it as what it is. If you don't call it what it is, the risk is that people in those communities won't see it as a problem.

"The movement itself talks about Islamism as the driving force behind their actions. So if the people responsible for all the main terrorist attacks since September 11 are subscribing to a particular political agenda of Islamism and using the word jihad for armed struggle, then how does it advance our interest not to accept them at their own word?"

Bergin believes Australia should follow Britain's lead and grab the bull of Islamist ideology by the horns. He advocates initiatives such as mentoring schemes for young Muslims, funding moderate Islamic websites to "drown out the extremist message", and setting up a telephone and internet hotline such as one in Britain linked to Egypt's eminent Al-Azhar University to provide advice on the true meaning of Islamic texts.

No one underestimates the difficulty of the task. Studies across the world show that those who have embraced the jihadist narrative do not live in the same world as the rest of us. They inhabit what Sageman calls an imagined "ideal virtual community" where death and fighting are glorified and worldly concerns have no meaning. They see themselves not as terrorists but as freedom fighters or revolutionaries.

Ilardi says: "Once these individuals perceive themselves as jihadis, this identity takes precedence over all other forms of perception of self." They see themselves as the creme de la creme, "the most spiritually advanced and righteous of all Muslims".

It is this disconnection from the real world that makes them effectively immune to any counter-radicalisation approach. In Sageman's words: "They become embedded in a socially disembedded network, which, precisely because of its lack of any anchor to any society, is free to follow abstract and apocalyptic notions of a global war between good and evil."

Those who have gone this far are a lost cause. But there is still hope for those who have not yet reached the end of the path to radicalisation.

"It's almost like a bell-shaped curve," says O'Brien. "At one end you've got people who will never be radicalised because they're quite Western. At the other end you have people who'll never be de-radicalised because they want an Islamic state. In the middle you've got a whole chunk of people who might be affected (by counter-radicalisation). But it's got to be a whole-of-government approach."

He says Australia has a long way to go. "There needs to be a point where you transition from getting a load of good ideas to actually doing something. They need to get to the stage where they have a well thought-out policy. I think they're getting there but they're not there yet".

Sally Neighbour is a senior contributor to The Australian and a reporter on ABC1's Four Corners. She is the author of In the Shadow of Swords: On the Trail of Terrorism from Afghanistan to Australia.