TERROR

Pakistan Daily Times: Former CIA officer rejects conventional view of terrorism

WASHINGTON: A CIA officer who served in Pakistan during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan says the theory that terrorists are poor, angry and fanatically religious is a myth.

According to Marc Sageman, now a Pennsylvania professor and author of a new book on terrorism, of the 400 members of terrorist networks from North Africa, the Middle East, Malaysia and Indonesia that he studies, 75 percent came from upper or middle-class backgrounds and most also from “caring, intact” families. Sixty percent were college educated and 75 percent could be considered professional or semi-professional. Seventy percent were married and most had children. Only half came from a religious background, and a large group raised in North Africa or France grew up in entirely secular communities, which “refutes the notion of culture, often cited as a factor encouraging terrorism.

Mr Sageman said “terrorism is on the way up”, and although in 2001, two-thirds of the its leadership was killed, but this year, the leadership had reconstituted itself and is “willing to take far more risks than the old leadership was able to. These “new terrorists ... really cannot be targeted by bombs,” he warned. “This requires a different type of war - an idea-based solution ... we really haven’t engaged it yet.”

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