On May 1, U.S. Navy SEALs burst into a compound in Northern Pakistan and killed the world's most notorious terrorist. And while that moment was a clear victory for the principle of justice, Osama bin Laden's death may do surprisingly little for the cause of peace.
That so many of us suffer from galloping expectations when a Hosni Mubarak exits the stage, when bin Laden is killed, or when—fingers crossed—Gadhafi is somehow removed, illustrates our naivete about what truly shapes our destiny.
While we hope for instant change, lasting peace will not come about through the simple removal of a few bad guys. Real peace will only come through fundamental changes in behavior. And those changes will never happen until more of us step up to the hard work of influence. It's time we learned to change the broad array of influences that produce the behaviors shaping our reality.
We practice the same wishful thinking as leaders, in our politics and in our personal lives. We try to improve organizational performance with new processes or programs when the evidence proves that the most potent competitive advantage comes through creating a world-class culture. We hope to solve social problems by building more prisons or funding more programs when the cause of many of our woes is behavioral. And we dream of a gimmick to make us rich or thin rather than thinking wisely about what it will take to change our habits.
Let me repeat, I personally sleep better knowing bin Laden no longer shares the planet with me. Justice has been served, and al-Qaeda leadership has been weakened.
My point is simply that the rampant speculation that we're now significantly safer is deeply flawed. The terrorism problem was never bin Laden. The problem is that the range of influences I regularly write about in this column are perfectly organized to perpetuate the kind of division, contention, and violence that spawned bin Laden in the first place. And no one is safe unless and until we intentionally counter and even transform these sources of influence to promote comity and cooperation. As General David Petraeus says, the U.S. "cannot kill [its] way to victory."
Think about it for a moment. The real problem is that a 17-year-old man—let's call him Ibrahim—living in a Paris suburb is exposed to an overwhelming number of influences that will radicalize him. For example:
1. Moral Motivation. Persuasive religious leaders in his local mosque who misunderstand or intentionally misuse the Koran bombard him with arguments that frame Westerners as moral enemies and make violence seem righteous. Evidence suggests the typical radicalized Muslim is less, not more, educated in Islamic theology than the average Muslim. That made it easy for a drug-dealer-turned-cleric in the Netherlands to create his own version of Islam—a terrorist cell known as the Hofstad Group, documented by Harvard Law School professor Jessica Stern in "Mind Over Martyr" in Foreign Affairs.
2. Skills. Ibrahim is being tutored in radical political thought. He is being trained to argue against more moderate views of the world. Over time he will learn skills to participate in jihad. He won't simply one day don a vest laced with explosives; rather, he'll be trained to take smaller actions and slowly increase his competence at this craft. For example, the takfir teachings of the Hofstad Group first trained acolytes in skills for accusing other Muslims of apostasy along the path to training them for more aggressive expressions of discontent.
3. Social Motivation. Each time a peer dies in the cause, Ibrahim will watch him elevated to the status of hero. Our behavior is powerfully shaped when we see others praised or punished for their actions. Stern further reports that contrary to Western belief, ideology rarely ranks as the most important source of influence in a person's choice to engage in terrorism. In fact, it's almost a fad in European Muslim communities for second- and third-generation youth to rebel against "softer" forms of Islam and look for a more demanding faith. This social influence is positively amplified for a youth like Ibrahim when he lives in a Western country where groups that might have mainstreamed him end up ostracizing him. A 2006 study by the European Monitoring Center on Racism & Xenophobia shows, for example, that Ibrahim will find himself socially excluded and even reviled by majority ethnicities in his host country.
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