Back in July, The Economist had an excellent review of the trial of Irhabi007 (the 22-year old Younis Tsouli) who was Al-Qaeda’s most famous (though certainly not the only) web propagandist. The article provided us with an opportunity to raise questions for our clients, in private, about the nature of ‘jihadism’ and the effectiveness of Western responses to it. Given this week's claims that Al-Qaeda, far from defeated, is resurgent, perhaps it is time to revisit those thoughts but in the public domain.

The use of the web for political propaganda is one of the many challenges facing the Western political establishment – as much as it is a challenge for, say, the Chinese or the Saudis. The trial of Irhabi007 (as in the case of other recent plots and trials) seems to evidence a genuinely global network and that the security services continue to have problems with containment, surveillance and evidence gathering. But what precisely is the nature of this movement and how are its members motivated?

Irhabi2007 appears to have been caught only because he and others made field craft mistakes and not because the West was in full command of the situation. Two quotations highlight the key issues:-

• [ we are contending with ] “networks within networks, connections within connections and links between individuals that cross local, national and international boundaries” [Peter Clarke, Head of the Met’s Counter-Terrorism Branch]
• “ … the hand-held video camera has become as important a tool of insurgency as the AK-47 or the RPG rocket launcher.”

The insurgency's media effort is making war realistic. Observers who can access its broadcasts cannot go into denial about the brutality of the conflict because of lack of media coverage (as Western populations did with, say, Algeria or Kenya in the late-imperial period). Acts of accidental or deliberate atrocity by the West will create imagery that is 'true' enough even if 'out of context'. This inspires young insurgent males with a sense of injustice, while each insurgent act against the West that provides a vision of Western blood and bone also creates a sense of triumph against the enemy.

A Partisan in the Second World War had to go into a fight to get blooded - now a young male can be part pre-blooded in order to go into the fight. The emotion here is 'romantic' and quasi-fascist, captured well in a few lines in Colin Falck's recent poem on the sixth anniversary of 9/11:-

                                                             Only remember

          the night parades at Nuremburg, the dizzying lure

          of every marching band - the rivers of torchlight

          the sudden sunlit flash of a girl's thigh

          the yearned-for loss of control, the forbidden rapture

                     (publ. Spectator, September 15th, 2007)

More on this sexual content in a moment. Historically, a belief in the heroism of an effort amongst Western armchair observers has been in inverse proportion to the actual degree of blood and guts seen, as it were, in the flesh – much as seeing what happens in an abattoir can put many people off their steak if people are not used to hunting themselves. Contemporary Westerners certainly have no taste for seeing how meat gets on their plate. The same with war. Insulation from the facts leads to denial. Active Islamists can get to see the meat being ground while our journalists self-censor. The same imagery might inspire one side but demoralise the other.

Repeated violent actions and imagery might well pre-inspire some testosterone-driven males far more than do the Islamic tracts that intellectuals like to decipher as the basis for insurgent action. Such tracts are necessary (as we will see below) but not a sufficient cause for terrorist recruitment and, though we are critical of elements of the Krueger thesis, the convergence of economic, ideological and psychological factors does point to some significant support that terrorism does not in itself arise from poverty and deprivation.

It is this psychological aspect that interests us here.  While prone in places to the hysteria that is ‘de rigueur’ in the perfervid briefings that come from the security community, The Economist usefully points out the sexual undercurrents in the internet war. There is an alternative vision that is entirely opposed to the sexual liberalism now explicit in Western culture. The role in the current cultural war of this three-way conflict between market-driven liberal attitudes, male-orientated traditional values and somewhat po-faced Anglo-Saxon femino-liberal models of sexuality should not be underestimated. Sex and violence have been introduced as soul-mates no less in jihadism than in other manifestations of global culture. 

There is another factor. Practical Islamism (dominated in action if not in thought by relatively youthful males) does not quite follow an Amish attitude to technology. New weaponry, gizmos and gadgets are appropriated as if these ‘warriors’ were regular readers of lads mags. Their proficiency in these tools is remarkable. Irhabi007’s plans allegedly included an insurgent YouTube to be called Youbombit.com. Such technologies are sometimes so new that ruling elites, despite all their funds, have no starting edge. After all, the sometimes neurotic secrecy of our regulatory community has them banning efficient technology just as their opponents are embracing technologism with passion. It is a moot point whether massive security funding will ever outclass the very different and innovative network learning systems that are being developed in the street (of which more in our second contribution).

So we have a youthful politicised and angry 'yoof' culture operating at the heart of the terror complex - guns, girls and gadgets.  But what of the effects on the West where there are other youngsters interested in guns, girls, gadgets, fast cars and whatever is going?

The West may feel that it will be forced to try and contain terror through ever more centralized control of the internet, the sort that will create paranoia and resistance within Western society itself, especially amongst a younger generation that, where it is not attracted to jihadism and its rebellious and fascistic alternatives, craves its economic and social freedom. From this perspective, ‘hearts and minds’ (as promoted by the British to the Americans) have to be the essential prerequisite for the eventual imposition of any such controls if the libertarian West is not going to find itself unwitting ally of the traditionalist Rest.

The security services will also often refer to the importance of training camps if plots are not to be botched or amateurish - and many plots are botched and amateurish. Tracking jihadi movements where many of the players are of the younger generation and from a distinctive ethnic community, and finding the weak links to lead security to the nodal points to pick up persons who can unravel other cells, are prime concerns for field-based intelligence. This is in danger of requiring levels of resource close to world war proportions. This particular security concern also helps to explain the intense political concentration on Waziristan that historians will say is at the heart of the current, clumsy destabilisation of Pakistan.

What we find fascinating about the information provided to The Economist is that the internet is not being used so much to initiate action as to initiate intent to action. The form is to spread memes [using Dawkins’ term] about what should be intended and what is permissible. Groups then develop independently into physical units ‘off-line’ to do what is necessary. And so, in best practice, autonomous units then detach themselves to create a loose anarcho-radical movement that certainly comes close to the ‘leaderless resistance’ model that we have described in our private client reports. The ideological and cultural meaning of this is for the next two postings on insurgency.

[This is the first of three contributions on the 'hearts and minds' debate surrounding jihadism.  This first posting looks at the motivations of the insurgents. A second will look at whether ideology is important to Al-Qaeda and the third will look at Al-Qaeda as a wider cultural phenomenon. We have made a judgement that it would be inappropriate to draw direct attention to web sites showing scenes of war and extreme violence]