On Lawfare Paige Pascarelli gives an overview of the studies of homegrown terrorists such as recent bomber Rahami to Anders Breivik, the Norwegian who killed 77 several years ago, and comes to some tentative conclusions:
Whether it’s selected or fused together, “ideology à la carte” is a growing problem. It further obscures an already amorphous, intangible threat that enables individuals to fashion their own justifications for violence. Its connection to lone actor terrorists and small cohorts means that it deserves the attention of law enforcement and counter-extremism actors for the simple fact that incidents of lone actor violence are on the rise. But violent ideology does not simply cause terrorism; as an enabling factor, ideology tends to sit atop a host of underlying root causes. Thus, fighting ideology itself would be a futile exercise. Moreover, the fact that these ideologies are so broad, suggests that trying to understand and counter them through a specific ideological lens would be misleading and counterproductive.
Ideology itself is a far too elusive enemy. It is and will continue to be extremely difficult to mitigate something so intangibly threatening, and such voices and messages will always be waiting in the wings. If wannabes or lone actors who operate outside a network or group don’t care that they are pulling from different groups, then perhaps we shouldn’t either. This undoubtedly will make the job of law enforcement and counter-terrorism officials significantly more difficult. But a focus on individual motivations and grievances, rather than on group allegiances, could offer a more preventive model that will outmaneuver transitory ideological influences.
As she notes in her article, for some extremists, the ideology is merely an excuse, an enabler for people with a grievance, real or imagined, and no desire to pursue peaceful institutional processes to remedy. If these were not such tragic situations, I’d call them drama queens.
I think another way of stating her conclusion is to note that even if we could utterly obliterate al-Quaeda and the other terror groups, terrorism would still happen. I think that some members of the human species are simply prone to extreme violence, and only need an excuse to indulge in violent episodes – some folks don’t want to be thought of as evil even as they cause the death of children. It would be interesting to see how American terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh or the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, would be classified. McVeigh was angry about the Waco incident, while Kaczynski’s motivations were more complex (I hesitate to summarize them here).
Returning to the main point, I wonder if the lone wolf is considered more destructive than a truly ideologically driven terrorist, and more or less dangerous – two distinct points. It might be more dependent on whether they’re OCD than whether they’re ideologically driven or not, I suspect.
