Tuesday is the sixth anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden. When you recall the extent to which Bin Laden dominated the public consciousness in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks, it’s remarkable that both his life and death now seem a footnote. Even Al Qaeda barely figures in our thoughts these days.
Yet terrorist attacks have increased significantly since 2001. Attacks in the Western world now arrive with such a numbing frequency that terrorism has long ceased to be something that happens “over there.”
President George W. Bush’s dictum that America had to invade Iraq so that we’d be fighting terrorists in Baghdad rather than Boston looks quaint. A list of Western cities that once read New York, Madrid, London, now seems too long to complete: Boston, Paris, Nice, Orlando, San Bernardino, Ottawa, Berlin, Brussels, Stockholm, Sydney, Paris ….
If you were inclined to believe terrorism is simply war, that terrorists would capitulate before shock and awe, and that we’d all be a lot safer once we got Bin Laden, this is all pretty confounding. But even if you were more inclined to see terrorism instead as crime — best understood through, and handled by, the tools of law enforcement — the results aren’t much more.
The countless suites of special legislation enacted around the world have helped foil plots, and certainly increased convictions, but the threat is still evolving.
Now we’re seeing attacks like the one outside Parliament in London where carnage is manufactured from the innocuous. This is not the spectacular, cinematic terrorism of Sept. 11, or even the coordinated mass-casualty terrorism of the Bataclan in Paris. It’s not the stuff of blueprints and cells. It’s crude, apparently spontaneous, and individual. Its power owes nothing to weapons, funding and networks, and everything to its lightness, its agility, its undetectability.
In Australia, this evolution was best symbolized by Farhad Jabar. He was just 15 when, in October 2015, he shot dead a police department employee, Curtis Cheng, outside a police station in Parramatta, in western Sydney.
The attack stunned the police, who’d never heard of Mr. Jabar. Nothing in his social media use indicated a greater interest in politics than in pop stars, and he might have been radicalized in a matter of weeks. The state still has no clear answer to that kind of lone-wolf attack.
Governments do hard power, which is why despite all the trumpeting of Sept. 11 as the start of an unprecedented kind of war, Western nations responded with a markedly old technique: the invasion of selected nation states. And it’s why the police have had little choice but to criminalize all kinds of behavior that is significantly distant from any act of violence.
Because counterterrorism legislation is expressly written to capture people in the early preparatory stages of a terrorist act, it encompasses behavior more remote than well-established legal ideas like attempt or conspiracy. Indeed, many antiterrorism laws make clear that you don’t even need to have hatched a specific plot to be guilty of terrorism offenses.
As a New South Wales court said in a decision involving one such law, the intention of Parliament was “to create offenses where an offender has not decided precisely what he or she intends to do.” The court was ruling in the case of Faheem Lodhi, where the prosecution acknowledged that the accused was only in the early stages of planning a terrorist attack. Similarly, members of a cell arrested in 2005 could be convicted despite apparently not yet having a specific target in mind. It is, if you like, a form of future crime. But all that requires good intelligence.
Expanded police power means more high-powered police raids of people at earlier stages of radicalization. And that risks making intelligence harder to come by.
News accounts of 800 officers mounting Hollywood-like raids on the houses of young terrorism suspects tend to make communities fear police action. If you know someone showing worrying signs, but doubt he’s likely to reach the point of violence, you might think twice before talking to the police. And at a moment when terrorism is becoming increasingly the domain of lone-wolf actors unknown to the authorities, the police need as many people talking to them as possible.
Hence the colorfully named Fixated Persons Investigations Unit, which the New South Wales police announced last month. It’s intended to find people like Mr. Jabar and prevent them from radicalizing fully.
But “police unit” might be a misleading description. In fact, it is a partnership between the N.S.W. police and the health department that, rather than arresting suspects, is more likely to take tips and send the people concerned to a mental health professional.
The rationale, as the N.S.W. police commissioner, Mick Fuller, explained, is that “in about 80 percent of cases” of lone wolves like Mr. Jabar, “a family member or a friend noticed a significant change but didn’t have the confidence to call anyone to report it.” The idea is that this will change if when “you call and say, ‘Look, I’m concerned about my son,’ police are not going to come through the door with a sledgehammer.”
This is remarkable for the admission it makes: Terrorism has outgrown the ability of law enforcement, and if the state is going to keep up, it will need to incorporate something akin to a pastoral role. That, to be sure, is a radically countercultural approach — something you could hardly imagine hearing from a politician — but it is born of years of research and bitter experience.
In Australia’s case, the plan has the advantage of borrowing from Britain’s experience with its Fixated Threat Assessment Center, which has been running since 2006. That center was created not to find terrorists but to find people with obsessive, stalker-like fixations on public figures — especially politicians and the royal family. Such people overwhelmingly suffer some form of mental illness, particularly psychosis, hence the partnership with the health department.
Can you extrapolate this to terrorism? Only if you assume there is something about lone-wolf terrorism that is qualitatively different from the more networked, group-based version that has dominated terrorism’s history. That history shows that terrorists only rarely suffer from any kind of personality disorder or psychological condition, which is why the search for the “terrorist personality” has proved fruitless and been discredited.
But while we’re only at the beginning of our research on lone-wolf terrorism, there is an emerging consensus that its perpetrators exhibit a higher level of psychological disturbance and depression. That certainly seems to have been true, for instance, of Man Haron Monis, who carried out the Sydney Lindt Café siege in 2014. All this backs the instincts of the N.S.W. police.
Since Sept. 11, the trouble with terrorism is that we’ve failed to find the right metaphor to grasp it. War has proved disastrous. Crime is too limited. Health seems positively bizarre, but as part of a more comprehensive approach, it might just have something to commend it.
Terrorism has exposed the limits of what state power can do. But it turns out the state can do more than fight with raw power.
Waleed Aly is a columnist and broadcaster and a politics lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne.