UNITED STATES OF JIHAD
Investigating America's Homegrown Terrorists
Peter Bergen
Crown Publishers
387 pages; $28
Since September 11, 2001, Peter Bergen reports in his new timely book, 330 people in the United States have been charged with some kind of jihadist terrorist crime, and a startling four out of five of them were American citizens or legal permanent residents.
Many assumptions about these militants, Mr Bergen asserts, do not hold up: Most jihadists in the United States were not young hotheads without family obligations, and the decision to turn to terrorism, for the most part, was not rooted in some traumatic life experience. According to Mr Bergen's research, their average age was 29, and more than a third were married-many with children. In addition, more than one in six supporters of the Islamic State in this country were women.
American jihadists, Mr Bergen says, are "on average, as well educated and emotionally stable as the typical citizen. They are ordinary Americans."
Mr Bergen's latest book, United States of Jihad,is a kind of anatomy of "homegrown" terrorists. The author of four books on terrorism, Mr Bergen writes with authority and range, drawing on his many sources in the intelligence community, and putting recent developments like the San Bernardino attacks in context with larger dynamics in the war on terror. His profiles of jihadists leave the reader with a harrowing appreciation of the banality of evil and an unnerving sense of missteps made by the authorities.
Parts of this volume will be familiar to readers who follow the subject. The sections about Anwar al-Awlaki - an American-born cleric who evolved from an online jihadi propagandist into a senior operative in Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen, and who was targeted and killed by a United States drone strike in 2011 - remain highly indebted to The New York Times reporter Scott Shane's impressively detailed 2015 book, Objective Troy.
Like Mr Shane, Mr Bergen looks at the potent role Awlaki would play (in life and posthumously) in inspiring other jihadists. He also deconstructs the arc of Awlaki's radicalisation and provides a similarly detailed account of the paths that other American-born or American-raised militants would take.
Nidal Hasan, who grew up in Virginia, enlisted in the Army and became, in Mr Bergen's words, "the deadliest lone wolf of all," killing 13 people at Fort Hood. David Coleman Headley, who had run a video store in Manhattan and worked as an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, took part in plotting the 2008 attacks in Mumbai that killed more than 160 people.
And Samir Khan, a Long Island teenager "keen on video games and girls," became a radical jihadist blogger. After moving to Yemen, he started Inspire in 2010, an English-language webzine whose jauntily titled articles about explosives ("Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom") and preparing for holy war ("pack light" and use a backpack, not a suitcase) seized the attention of a new generation of Western terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers.
Mr Bergen refrains from trying to speculate about his subjects' motivations, but points out that many militants share "a desire for recognition or belonging." Cited here is a 2007 report by two New York Police Department intelligence analysts that suggests that some kind of personal difficulty (loss of a job, death of a family member, experience of racism) often created a "cognitive opening" for the turn toward radical religious belief. Another theorist mentioned by Mr Bergen has argued that bonds of friendship and kinship are often more important than ideology in creating jihadist groups, underscoring the power of social networking as a recruiting tool.
By understanding the stages of radicalisation of many would-be terrorists, Mr Bergen explains, law enforcement hopes to spot potential threats and intervene before the "jihadization" process is complete-or at least before a plan is carried out.
There have been cases of militants returning from abroad to attempt serious attacks in the United States: Faisal Shahzad, for instance, who was trained to make bombs by the Pakistani Taliban and left a (faulty) car bomb in Times Square in May 2010. In Mr Bergen's view, however, a bigger threat in the US is posed by lone-wolf terrorists, ones inspired by the Islamic State or Qaeda affiliated groups over the web.
The problem for counterterrorism officials in recent years, he writes, was not that they lacked information "but that they didn't adequately understand or share the information." In fact, he notes, cases like those of Mr Hasan and Mr Headley (in which early heads-ups were dismissed or overlooked) "argue not for the gathering of ever-vaster troves of information"-like the collection of telephone metadata by the National Security Agency. They instead argue, Mr Bergen writes, for "making smarter judgments about information collected through established, legal means."
While he says that it will be "many, many years" before jihadist terrorism "withers and dies," he believes that it does not pose an existential threat like World War II or the Cold War. Rather, in his view, it represents a "persistent, low-level threat" that should not be allowed to "crowd out" other serious issues like climate change and gun violence.
In the years after September 11, he says, "an American residing in the United States was around five thousand times more likely to be killed by a fellow citizen armed with a gun than by a terrorist inspired by the ideology of Osama bin Laden."
©2016 The New York Times News Service
