Education isn't the Magic Bullet for Terrorists

I got nine million hits googling for educational reform in the Middle East as a way to achieve anything from economic development to gender equality to counter terrorist measures. All very nice and good, but if I look at this solution from the perspective of counter terror measures, I have my doubts as to whether this will really work. The main reason why I think this is going to be a challenge is the inconsistency between what an educational system does versus a goal/task oriented terrorist campaign/ideology achieves. Putting it in another way, I do not believe that reforming any education system will make a major difference in either the number of terrorists nor the frequency of attacks and may in fact increase the damage coefficient of these attacks. Let us explore this argument. The essential argument goes something like this: For a country infested with terrorists, the way is to pay attention to their support base and future recruits. If only you could fix the education system, give them a liberal education, then they will grow up to be nice law abiding citizens, not interested in terror, and will hand over people who do or are involved in terror. This education will also help in providing other benefits as greater literacy, greater economic participation, greater democracy, greater peace on Mars and will also make very nice cups of tea.

This may well be possible for the other objectives, but I am afraid this will not cut any ice, whether it be for supporters of terror or for actual potential recruits. It is an interesting dilemma that to be a successful and safe terrorist, you actually have to be highly educated. Here are some examples, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, the first chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army was a bachelor of commerce. John Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, who are alleged to be the senior leaders of the Provisional IRA, don’t have degrees, but have strong schooling education. Amanullah Khan, the founder of the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front is a doctor. Mohammad Atta, who flew the first plane into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, was a German educated architect. Marwan al-Shehhi who flew the second plane on 9/11, studied German at the University of Bonn before moving to Hamburg, where he enrolled at the same school as Mohamed Atta. Ziad Jarrah who piloted United Flight 93 to its scorching crash in Pennsylvania, studied at the University of Applied Science in Hamburg.

See http://www.lib.umich.edu/govdocs/text/socpsy.txt for a good overview of terrorist profiling. I quote an entire paragraph from this study because it has a direct bearing on this essay; “highly educated recruits were normally given leadership positions, whether at the cell level or national level. The occupations of terrorist leaders have likewise varied. Older members and leaders frequently were professionals such as doctors, bankers, lawyers, engineers, journalists, university professors, and mid-level government executives. Marighella was a politician and former congressman. The PFLP’s George Habash was a medical doctor. The PLO’s Yasir Arafat was a graduate engineer. Mario Santucho was an economist. Raúl Sendic and the Baader-Meinhof’s Horst Mahler were lawyers. Ulrike Meinhof was a journalist. The RAF and Red Brigades were composed almost exclusively of disenchanted intellectuals.”

As you can see, to successfully run and even be an effective terrorist, an element of education and intellectual development is required. People think that it’s the poor and uneducated who are the terrorists. No, they are not. While they can be supporters of terrorism, they aren’t the real movers and shakers. If I was running a terrorist group, I would want to have smart, intelligent people, who can operationalise my strategy and tactics. Furthermore, since terrorist operations occur under the beady eyes of security services and support is difficult if not impossible, you need smart, self motivated, educated and intelligent guys. So from this perspective itself, if you go about just thinking that a good liberal educational system will not give rise to terrorists, then that is wishful thinking. It’s the educated terrorists that give you the heebie-jeebies, not the poor ignorant uneducated ones.

Take a look at the other side in terms of motivation. Ok, so you have school text-books and teachers who may be the most pacifists around. They are teaching you very sanitised and liberal ideas about non-violence, civic duty, achievement of happiness through economic development and all that nice stuff. They talk about politics and local government, about pride in the country and society, about religion and requirements to celebrate diversity. This is shoved down the throats of the poor students left right and centre starting from the time they are climbing out of their cots. The assumption being, they will finish schooling, go on to college, get a good engineering or arts or commerce degree, and go into business (either on their own or work for somebody else), grow up, get married, have the 2.4 children, work 9 to 5, etc. etc. etc., you get the idea. No thoughts of strapping a bomb belt around your waist, climbing into a bus or train and blowing up Mr., Mrs and Master Jones or Sanchez or Abdullah or Sharma should enter into your mind because your mind has already been conditioned to reject this.

For a significant proportion of the population, yes, this applies. But what has been our experience of understanding the psychology and motivations of terrorists? What makes an educated person suddenly decide to break all these education and culturally provided societal constraints and go off to murder innocent people? It is just not terrorists, but we see this behaviour in normal society as well. We have seen riots in the UK, in Nigeria, in India, in Thailand, in Lebanon, you name it. Perfectly ordinary, well educated, stable people suddenly get this itch, their normally functioning brains suddenly short-circuit, and go off hacking off the limbs of innocent men and women, who are just unfortunate enough to be of the wrong colour or religion or who were at the wrong place at the wrong time or what have you.

This is where education actually does not help and in fact, provides the ground where such kind of short circuits happen. Educational textbooks and educational systems actually supply the foundation which introduces a latent, very gently simmering magma of “us-and-them”. Look at the history textbooks which I talked about some time ago (http://piquancy.blogspot.com/2006/02/musty-tomes-full-of-tr ouble.html). So while nominally education has provided one with a liberal, law abiding framework, it has also laid the seeds of the animal which may erupt, given a certain trigger. So the attempts to reform education will help, but you cannot remove this bias completely. It will always remain, since it is at the core of what we term as identity.

Can you ever imagine a Jewish or Palestinian textbook removing their particular identities and the feeling of “us-and-them”? It will simply not happen in the short and medium term, since their very existence or identity is based upon defining what they are and what they are not. Same thing happens in Northern Ireland, India, Bangladesh, Serbia, Venezuela, Chile, South Africa, Russia, etc. The alternative is to look at British textbooks where national identity is as washed out as a 300 year old half eaten corn on the cob. There is more identity generation in the tabloids rather than in the textbooks. Shame! Then Tony Blair goes about with his ridiculous Cool Britannia campaign. But we are getting away from the issue.

So what provides the trigger? The first is the audio visual impact of entertainment/news, which is much more powerful in terms of retention and behavioural changes than a textbook can ever be (think about western schooling where films, videos and other audio visual materials significantly enhance learning potential). If one looks at TV channels such as Al Jazeera or video’s available on the internet, these provide an almost constant drip feed of violence in a highly graphical format. This overpowers the more gentle gradual feed of schooling and short circuits the normally liberal framework, which is building up or has been established.

To top it all, you have the foaming ideologues whose commentary is available on those TV channels, in the newspapers, pamphlets and on the internet. Given the religious background and authority in case of Islamist or the Aum Shinriko / Bhagwan Rajneesh group terrorism or say the ideological strength of perhaps the Maoist ideologues and almost instantaneous opinion that is available after attacks or events, the ability to take a thoughtful and considered view is all but lost. So a teacher may be struggling for years to make a point and in a matter of hours, his entire influence may well evaporate because somebody commented that it was the crusaders fault and quotes chapter and verse from some book. Bang, the fellow already knows about the crusader history from school, he has very strong reinforcement from TV, relates it to an insulting personal experience at a checkpoint perhaps, gets religious corroboration from somebody and he is well on his way to becoming a terrorist. I have to qualify this, this is not generally the case, but for some people, this is a likely path.

So the bottom line is, education is not really the magic bullet, it does help, but let us be clear, the contribution of a liberal education in avoiding terrorists is minimal. Otherwise we would not have seen the dreadful example of the 7/7 London bombers or Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the ex-LSE student. As they say, experience can make you better or bitter. Paraphrasing it, education can make you better or bitter.

All this to be taken with a grain of salt!