Tête-à-têtes With Terrorists

Talking with militants about God and mass slaughter. A Reason interview

Tim Cavanaugh | August 21, 2003

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Reason: You spend a lot of time on the concept of "leaderless resistance," which would presumably require having fairly skillful individuals who are able to think and operate without a formal command structure. The U.S. armed forces have arguably the best-trained and motivated enlisted people in the world, yet employ layers of logistics, redundancy and command and control that would astound most civilians. Is it really possible to make an effective organization based only on the resourcefulness and initiative of underlings?

Stern: No. That's where very powerful weapons that can be used by a single person become important. But leaderless resistance won't work for a September 11-type attack. Leaderless resistance in a way you could say is a sign of weakness. But in a law-enforcement rich environment, when a group evolves to incorporate some aspects of leaderless resistance to compensate for weakness in some areas, I don't feel relieved and think, Oh, we're winning. I think this is an organization that learns and will continue to find new ways to operate. The scariest organization as one that incorporates both a terrorist army type of structure and broader virtual networks.

Reason: Does al Qaeda count as that type of organization?

Stern: No but they incorporate aspects of it. You can have a terrorist army thrive in a failed state or in states where some parts of the government help them. In a law enforcement-rich environment they need to organize themselves in a different way. Virtual networks have become a pretty effective way to organize. They're more robust in that it's more difficult for law enforcement to penetrate that kind of group, but they're not as equipped to carry out high-intensity attacks. Unless a small group has access to really powerful weapons.

Reason: That's really an efficiency or optimization question. The September 11 attackers seem to have solved that problem by weaponizing the civilian space.

Stern: Yes, September 11 was an example of a group that was both hard to detect and capable of causing massive destruction.

Reason: How about terrorists who still pursue more recognizable weapons? If every individual terrorist had an atom bomb, we'd be in trouble, but atom bombs are hard to get.

Stern: I don't think we're anywhere near to individuals having atom bombs. I strongly suspect individuals can acquire relatively effective biological weapons. It's still quite hard, unless the individual is a molecular biologist.

Reason: Do you have any particular person in mind?

Stern: No!

Even when individuals do find it easier, though, how effective can an attack be? After all the buildup, it really seemed like the anthrax attack was kind a dud. I don't want to treat it lightly, but only five people died and there hasn't been much long-term paranoia even though the perpetrator was never caught.

Stern: I completely disagree with your interpretation. Think about what this guy did—or woman, but most likely a guy. He wrote in the letter, "You have been exposed to anthrax." If you were using a weapon like that just to kill people, you wouldn't do that. He wanted to get attention.

I've always thought a relatively small-scale attack was what we had more to worry about. This person used an extremely low-tech delivery device that nonetheless could have been quite effective. It would not have been a catastrophic scenario, and not as lethal as biological weapons are theoretically capable of being. But in the case of the anthrax attacks, not only was the perpetrator not looking to inflict mass casualties, but we were really lucky that people knew what to do, and that it turned out antibiotics were effective after exposure.

Reason: One of the striking things about your discussions with Islamists is that practically all of them cite the jihad against the USSR in Afghanistan as their formative experience—either literally fighting there or viewing it as their spiritual awakening. That's not too surprising when you're talking about Pakistanis, but it also applies to Kashmiris, Palestinians, Indonesians, Chechens, Saudis—just about everybody. Do you think Americans, even now after it's been in the air for a few years, really grasp the magnitude of what we helped create in Afghanistan?

Stern: No. I think we don't. It was the revival of the notion of an international jihad. As far as they're concerned it was very effective. They feel they vanquished an international superpower. They forget how much money we and the Saudis and others poured in to help them vanquish that superpower. But we played a very significant role in the creation of the enemy we face today. It's very distressing because I think it would be easy to do that sort of thing again, for example, in Iraq. Policy remedies tend to have unfortunate side effects.