Roots of extremism
Wesley Wark says there is no one reason youth turn to terror.
The city and people of Boston witnessed an extraordinary day on Friday. It was a day, unfortunately, of more violence and fear, with two deaths, including that of an MIT campus policeman caught unawares, and of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the elder, at age 26, of the two brothers suspected of being the Boston Marathon bombers.
The decision by the FBI, after apparent hesitation, to release CCTV imagery of the two brothers putting them at the scene of the marathon bombing, set off a wild night of convenience store robbery, car jacking, shooting and mayhem as the brothers thrashed desperately about, caught in the media glare. The FBI decision was the product of immense pressure, to catch the marathon bombing perpetrators as quickly as possible. Whether it was the right decision will be secondguessed and quarterbacked in the media for some time to come. There will be a time for review of all the responses to the marathon bombing — law enforcement, intelligence, political, media — but that time is not yet. The suffering city woke up Friday to an unprecedented lockdown as police and federal authorities sought to capture the remaining brother and deal with any bombs and boobytraps they might have planted in their wake.
The older brother, Tamerlan, will never tell us his story of a twisted journey to terrorism, although U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies will do their best to put some of the pieces together. So will the media, who have already pounced on the news the brothers were born in the trans-Caucasus (Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan respectively) and have connections to war-torn Chechnya, a seeming clue embedded in lives lived in America that showed every sign of normalcy and innocence.
The younger brother, Dzhokhar, age 19, has been captured alive, and he might have an important story to tell. The need for that story, to help us try to understand a senseless act of violence, is nearly as strong as the need for justice to be done, and seen to be done.
The choice of the Boston Marathon as a target suggests nothing more than an indiscriminant desire to kill and maim — the marathon is not a political target. It’s not the World Trade Center, the White House or the Pentagon. The nature of the bombing itself suggests learned amateurism, rather than professional skills. Somewhere, somehow, maybe over the Internet, the Tsarnaev brothers apparently imbibed lessons about target selection, reconnaissance and bomb building.
But they didn’t learn enough to escape CCTV detection. Nor were they committed enough to whatever cause drove them to turn themselves into martyrs. Nor were they far-sighted enough to do any basic planning to escape from the Boston scene. Nor do they seem to have had, or amassed, much money to sustain their plot. That these were learned amateurs is partly reassuring, but only partly. It suggests that they do not represent our worst fears — a well-organized plot with overseas terrorist roots.
But the Tsarnaev bothers and their terrible story do represent another and different kind of concern — about how seemingly well-integrated young men can come to take up the cause of mass casualty violence and terrorism. What causes radicalization to violence is a mystery that law enforcement and intelligence agencies would love to be able to solve, in the belief that it would give them clues to aid investigations and allow for preventive measures.
Unfortunately, despite much study in a post-9/11 world and many successful counter-terrorism operations, we are no closer to possessing a definitive answer. We can identify any number of triggers, ranging from psychopathology, to Internet incitement, to malevolent guidance by a “mind guard,” to the acting out of desires for revenge against perceived societal disenfranchisement or even perceived injustice. But identification of a single path to radicalization, a single cause, or root cause, has eluded us, because there is no such thing.
We need to have accused bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s story, because it will be singular, and awful, and senseless, not because it will give us the key to a pattern or necessarily offer us clues to prevention. The keys to the prevention of violent radicalization will lie in strong communities that turn their backs on violence and extremism, on strong societies that support them, and on good laws that serve as deterrents, that create standards, and can sanction when necessary. This is not a 100 per cent defence against acts of violence such as occurred in Boston, but it’s our best defence.
Peace will soon return to Boston. The warlike lockdown of a city will end. The remaining alleged perpetrator of the horrific Boston Marathon bombing will be brought before the courts. The memory of Boston will linger much longer, and will not be served by senseless measures of stepped up security. Prudent security precautions will always be a part of our world, in the face of known or perceived threats. But we should not be shoved from prudence to over-reaction by the events of Boston.
Nor should we over-invest in a fear of radicalization, when such over-investment would inflate the threat, distort the minuscule degree to which the call to extremist violence and terrorism finds an ear in our shared North American space, and maybe even generate the next individual to believe a bomb in a backpack holds any meaning or purpose.