Terrorism as fund-raising

The Economist this week reports on the decline of al-Qaeda - due, somewhat predictably, to a combination of external pressure and intra-jihad schisms. What especially caught my eye was this:

“Young hotheads are not going to listen to [Dr. Fadl, a leading anti-Qaeda jihadist writer]. But al-Qaeda worries he might have an impact on its finances.”

Counter-terrorism officials say that al-Qaeda is short of money. Individual attacks may be quite cheap, but running an organisation—and supporting the families of members who are killed—is costly. Tellingly, Mr bin Laden appealed for money in his last message, arguing that Muslims had a duty to wage “financial jihad”. What better way to raise funds than to evoke the unending agony of Palestine?

This fits with a theory I've had for a while now. We tend to think terrorist organizations are motivated by religious fervor or political aims (or that they "hate our freedoms"), but my bet is that terrorism is all about fundraising.

Most of the cheap oil on planet Earth is located in a small triangle-shaped region around the tip of the Persian Gulf. This means that ridiculous amounts of American, European, and Asian petrodollars flow into the hands of a bunch of Saudi aristocrats, Gulf sheiks, and Iranian mullahs, who oppress their people and stay in power largely because the industrialized countries keep them there. This is an old story. Staying in power is Goal #1 for the Oil Kings, and getting rid of Israel, the Western proxy, is Goal #2.

So here you have all these rich conservative insecure Oil Kings and their rich conservative friends and families, sitting on huge piles of money and looking for someone to give it to (through "Islamic charities" or secret Swiss transactions). The lucky jihadi group that makes a name for itself - striking a blow against Israel, or scaring the U.S. into shutting about "human rights abuses" and "autocracy" in the Middle East - gets flooded with funding from the big moneymen.

This explains why terrorists focus on spectacular attacks. They're not trying to hurt Western economies or scare Western people - the goals we traditionally ascribe to "terrorism." Your average jihadi cell leader probably doesn't give a good Allah damn what happens to the West. He's a nonprofit entrepreneur, throwing a big event to get attention and fame for his NGO, in order to attract donor dollars. (As for the foot soldiers, the suicide bobers and the like, their personal motivation hardly matters; young people reularly kill themselves for no reason at all).

Which means that 9/11, the biggest opening gala a jihadi NGO ever threw, didn't end up being such a success for bin Laden. First of all, it brought down the wrath of America to such an extent that we started freezing jihadi financing all over the world. That didn't just hurt al-Qaeda, it hurt the Saudi and Gulf paymasters whose funds they had been hoping to attract. And when the moneymen got hurt, they blamed al-Qaeda for going overboard. And then al-Qaeda turned on the moneymen, with all those bombings in Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries, trying to scare their former donors into paying up. It didn't work. "Dr. Fadl" and other Arab regime-sponsored anti-Qaeda jihadis are proof that any terrorists who grow past a certain level becomes a liability to the Oil King moneymen. Terrorism is self-limiting, bound by the mighty power of economics. Al-Qaeda must now rely for financing and protection on narco-Taliban and goat-herding Pakistani Pashtun. Hence the desperation.

If the West is going to defeat Islamic terrorism, we need to understand the real motivations of jihadi organizations; it's not enough to write them off as religious zealots. We must find new ways of hitting them where it hurts - the wallet.