Daily Times

Saudi Arabia is at present at the very heart of the global strategic power balance. Political sectarianism and terrorism sweeping through several neighbouring countries poses a grave challenge to the Kingdom. The initial premise is that even though the seeds of terrorism and political sectarianism are still relatively embryonic in Saudi Arabia, they have been planted and are beginning to take hold. Sectarianism and terrorism can be considered two sides of the same coin; one cannot be tackled without the other. They are so interrelated and intertwined that merely attempting to determine which comes first is almost impossible. If it is accepted that terrorism is metastatic, the similarity in their apparent manifestations only adds to the confusion as to which can be seen as benign and which as malignant.

It can be argued that, although sectarianism and terrorism might not pose an immediate threat to the security of the Saudi Kingdom in the short term, the likelihood of Saudi Arabia being affected in the longer term depends on how much support Islamic State (IS) can secure in and around the Gulf. The interconnectedness of political Islamist, jihadist and IS movements in the region is likely to impact the stability of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states, as will the ability of foreign players to run and manage these forces.

Identifying members of terrorist organisations and preventing them from carrying out successful attacks is a core component of any anti-terrorism effort. The composition of a terrorist organisation is heterogeneous and requires the skills of not only suicide bombers but bomb-makers, smugglers, leaders, disciplinarians, orators, communicators, trainers and financiers. The work undertaken by intelligence agencies culminates in an overall counter-terrorist campaign. The reality, however, is that terrorist profiling has not proved to be the elixir against terrorism. Many explanations have been given as to the reasons why terrorist profiling has, so far at least, failed to deliver.

One immutable dimension that is often employed to profile terrorists is using simplistic male-centric profiling. Female terrorists are more adept at allaying the suspicions of security personnel. As a result, disguised as they are — women — they often can enter areas that would be restricted to males. Terrorists have been limited to vague implications of irrationality and insanity and no such definitive terrorist personality exists. Terrorists are generally not delinquents or recluses but thrive in an atmosphere of interdependence. They belong to a close-knit ethnic community and, unlike lone wolves, the terrorist group relies on mutual commitment, trust and the cooperation between groups, as seen in IS, al Qaeda and Taliban groups. Terrorists are disturbingly normal people and whatever limited data is available on individual terrorists, it suggests that the outstanding characteristic is normality. It is now generally accepted that, as opposed to serial killers, pyromaniacs and rapists, the terrorist mind follows rational decision-making and attends to a fixated ideological philosophy that facilitates the use of violence as a tool of strategic and pressure value. The personalities of terrorists appear as diverse as the personalities of people in any lawful profession. There do not appear to be any visibly detectable personality traits that would allow authorities to identify a terrorist.

Whether having turned to terrorism as a university student or later, most were provided an anarchist or Marxist world view, as well as recruited into terrorist operations while in university. Newer techniques to avoid dimensional profiling due to the already explained differences between terrorist movements, between roles within terrorist organisations and between the personalities and motives of individual terrorists could not prove any significant difference. Although some scholars argue that with more primary data psychological profiling will be substantiated as a successful measure, the current evidence concludes that no causal progression from mental illness to terroristic intention occurs. Socioeconomic profiles do display some merit in specific temporal and geographic contexts but are soon invalidated due to the fluidity of the political environment and the evolving terrorist-counterterrorist dichotomy. The US Transport Security Administration implemented the Screening of Passengers through Observation Techniques (SPOT) programme in 2003 to “identify potentially high security risk individuals by screening travellers for behaviours that may be indicative of stress, fear or deception”. The programme had a 100 percent failure rate.

Will it ever be possible to profile the terrorist? The usage of one-dimensional measures to profile the terrorist so far has been a futile exercise and is likely to remain so. It may be argued that a successful terrorist profile can be created by combining several unsuccessful one-dimensional assessments into a multi-dimensional profile. But then this is clearly the setting up for another compounding failure because, with each additional dimension added, the profile’s scope becomes more and more extraneous to the diverse nature of the modern international terrorist. As an alternative to profiling the terrorist, a more pragmatic approach may be to transcend the individual by profiling terrorism as a process within a complex system. This perspective seems particularly more relevant today in order to profile terrorism as an increasingly globalised phenomenon.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com