We have looked at the motivations of extremist insurgents and at the ideology underpinning Al-Qaeda.  Our final comment in this series is on what this insurgency may mean in cultural terms at a time when Western hegemony is under pressure and new communications technology are transforming international relations.

The Economist article that triggered our interest in analysing these various aspects of the 'hearts and minds' debate noted that global insurgent structures were mirroring the decentralized information system, set up by the US military to survive nuclear war, that became the internet. In fact, the idea that the internet was derived from managing post-nuclear conditions is historically debatable but it makes a good story.  Whether the origin legend for the internet is true or not, the command structure of ‘Al-Qaeda’ (still too much talked about in terms of earlier central command models) does seem to operate like a brain with nerve cells rerouting on damage. Hopes of destroying this brain with one clear shot (perhaps a nuclear strike at some mountain fastness) seem small, so, to take the analogy further, if you cannot damage the 'brain' so that its ability to use a body is ended (paralysing or containing insurgent action), the logic is to change how the brain thinks.  This brings us back to ‘hearts and minds' strategy.

A political movement tends to follow the pattern of a virus epidemic, growing with rapidity against an unprepared population until, eventually, it burns itself out (perhaps on generational change in politics) or until the host beats off or absorbs the challenge through evolutionary adaptation or public health inoculation. These are all suggestive analogies for any 'hearts and minds' strategy.  Awareness of this, including the probability that we may have to wait for a generation to pass, may be at the heart of Minister-Admiral West’s suggestion that the problem of insurgency directed at the UK will be with us for another ten to fifteen years or so.

The Economist followed a similar Financial Times story (suggesting that the 'authorities' were keen to spin this line in July 2007) by majoring on one jihadi writer, Al-Suri, as the theoretician of resistance methodology. If so, Al-Suri's approach is little more than an adaptation of ‘leaderless resistance strategies, which are, in turn, an outgrowth on the radical right of left-wing communist cell organization and nineteenth century anarchist models adapted for new conditions. Perhaps some day, we may find a proven link between Al-Qaeda theory and the Turner Diaries but we may equally expect these radicals to have read their Fanon, their Mao and their Guevara. 

Al-Suri (now in detention) is probably being made more influential than he actually is for propagandistic reasons but his writings give textual form to something that grows naturally out of this type of warfare. It is equally likely that Al-Suri’s work is ‘negative’, designed to halt conventional minds within the new resistance movements from trying to follow traditional armed band strategies. Al-Qaeda cannot behave like Subcommandante Marcos and hope to survive, let alone win. Marcos is tolerated because he is part-trickster and retains a moral stand in his attitude to political violence.  Osama bin Laden is no fun-loving Loki figure. 

If ‘Al-Qaeda’ is an enormous extended brain (like the internet), it does not, self-evidently, have a consciousness any more than the internet or the brain does when they are respectively deprived of electricity or life. All three are dead networks until livened and linked - in the case of Al-Qaeda, ideology and organisation are its electricity. Its ‘intelligence’ evolves because of the effective communication between units and, above all, through the use of ideas or ‘memes’. These begin to coalesce into a collective consciousness of shared values or, more conventionally, into a movement. As the ‘brain cells’ learn to adapt to infiltration, so communications between cells changes. ‘Memes’ will almost certainly harden and simplify in the practice of war and revolution much as they did within Marxism as Communist organisation took over as the leading edge of revolutionism after 1917. The whole then becomes even more intransigent and quite capable of creating more martyrs and heroes.

Western security is increasingly going to become a matter of brain or consciousness control (which is the real meaning of ‘hearts and minds’).  But this comes up against a massive internal contradiction within Western society. The West wants security but it has evolved into an individualism and libertarianism in which the Government itself is seen as part of the problem and not as part of the solution to the good life (less so in Europe but more so in the Anglo-Saxon world). This distrust of authority has played its part in the nervousness surrounding the Northern Rock crisis in the UK but, in the national security arena, it also underpins the collapse of national faith in the Army pointed out in somewhat High Tory desperation by Sir Richard Dannatt.

Political paranoia and conspiracy theory lurk within Western society as much as within the Muslim lands - the paranoia is generally just not so mainstream. Government attempts to control the message with any sort of discipline come up against the highly evolved decentralized culture of the West.  You might say that the West, far from fanatic, is an anarchic free personality seeking to limit any constraint on it. Child pornography and (in some countries) Holocaust denial is ‘out’ but BDSM and radical nationalism are ‘in’ as matters of free adult choice, so the boundaries are far 'out there 'from the perspective of anyone with whose mind-set is still derived from some time before '68.

A culture of political correctness has emerged precisely to manage this instability through both exhortation and the use of intra-institutional power in order to avoid any direct State assault on freedom. But hacking into Al-Qaeda passwords and tracking individuals takes the authorities only so far. The next stage is the covert monitoring of the population and certainly improved border control. CCTV is increasingly accepted as reasonable in the UK despite doubts about effectiveness but monitoring may not be so acceptable when it involves tracking search words and private web traffic. The stage after this involves a war on the ‘inappropriate’ use of the net itself through indirect and direct means: servers and providers will be targeted in order to smash the link between the general population and the free flow of ‘abusive’ information. Genuine social concerns such as the 'suicide web site' may soon create a climate of opinion for regulation that anarcho-libertarians will find hard to resist.

If Western counter-terror theory now seems to be concentrating on ‘hearts and minds’, it is not quite in the way that we might expect if we were to extrapolate from the traditional methods of cultural warfare employed in the Cold War. The British Council might even have to fight for its budgets within a decade because persuading the emerging world middle classes to know which side of the bread is buttered for them not going to be that difficult. The greatest difficulty for professional propagandists lies with the half-educated, marginalized and liminal-to-Western-society who just happen to represent the majority of humanity in terms of sheer numbers.

What counter-terror means in practice is going to become something much more subtle – it will be about how the world is seen in the minds of the potential jihadi recruit.  This is a game that can be played both ways since a jihadi may come to be interested in what might change the mind set of the ‘poor white trash’ in the urban environments of the West. Mind control takes on a new meaning – not the crude experimentation of the CIA in the 1950s and 1960s but the use of both media and memes to transform values and change perceptions of reality.

For example, we might find someone to be uncommitted but part of the demographic of discontent. The game with this person can go either way. The target can be detached from his social and intellectual environment (or be re-attached to his true social and intellectual environment).  His self-image as ‘good’ in doing what he is doing now could be undermined or a new image of what it is ‘good’ to do could be constructed.  Either side might introduce a ‘real’ interpretation of the world that undermines the previous ‘reality’, redrafts history and centralizes action (or inaction) as identity.  If action is required, either side might set the target on a training programme or in the direction of acceptance and passivity. One side wants action, the other side (‘ours’) mostly wants inaction but may then have to create new forms of action if the problem is going to be one of ‘roll-back’ rather than ‘containment’.

So, alongside attempts to control the means of communication, initially for monitoring and then for message, there will be increased attempts to engage in what can only be described as ‘psychological warfare’ in which psychology and even ‘chaos magic’ techniques will have more to offer than traditional Soviet-era exchanges of folk artefacts and of exhibitions designed to show solidarity with foreign cultures.

[This is the third and final of three contributions on the 'hearts and minds' debate surrounding jihadism.]