5 Thoughts on the Westminster Attack
Early analysis of the March 21 terrorist incident in London
Information is still forthcoming, but enough is public knowledge to draw some conclusions.
1 — Car Attacks Are Nearly Impossible To Stop
In the middle of the afternoon, an SUV plowed into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge near the UK Parliament, killing two and injuring dozens. The driver then got out and stabbed a constable to death, before he was shot and killed by police.
The attack was reminiscent of an assault in Nice, France on July 14, 2016 — in which a man drove a 19-ton truck into Bastille Day crowds, killing 86 and injuring more than 400 — and a truck attack on a Berlin Christmas market on December 19, 2016 that killed 12.
The Westminster attack was smaller, but the security concern is the same. It is virtually impossible to stop someone from deliberately mowing down innocents with a vehicle. Many areas allow pedestrians near cars and trucks, and that’s not going to change. And vehicle attacks happen so quickly that even alert, trained security officers cannot react in time to prevent at least some damage.
Parliament is one of the most secure locations in London, with numerous armed guards. A Palestinian killed four off duty Israeli soldiers in Jerusalem with a truck in January 2017, and tried to kill more but was shot by police.
If someone really wants to do this, we can’t stop them.
2 — Self-Starters
ISIS claimed responsibility, but there is no indication the group knew the attacker, Khalid Masood, until they heard about him on the news. After the attack, British police conducted a series of raids, arresting 10 people for possible connections to Masood, but they believe he was not a member of any terrorist group.
Masood thus falls into a category of terrorists known as “self-starters” — individuals inspired by, but not trained or sent by a terrorist group. They often communicate with like-minded people online, but take it upon themselves to plan and execute attacks.
This differs from “lone wolf” terrorists who act in isolation. Self-starters are like international activists, seeing themselves as part of a larger movement. Think globally, act locally.
Inspiring self-starters is a central part of ISIS’ strategy, because they’re difficult to stop. Intelligence agencies map terrorist networks by monitoring the communications of known members. But individuals who never communicate with known terrorists are hard to discover. This allows ISIS to mix smaller, amateur attacks, such as the San Bernardino shooting, with larger, professional operations, such as the Paris attacks.
Professional terrorism does more damage, but is easier to thwart, while self-starter attacks do less, but are harder to catch in advance.
3 — Converts to Islam
Masood was born Adrian Russell Ajao, and some reports say he converted to Islam, though it remains unclear.
However it turns out, it would not be surprising if he was a convert, because many self-starters and ISIS recruits are. And of those born Muslim, many undergo something like a conversion, switching from a milder, mainstream version of Islam to the radical, fundamentalist strand advocated by jihadists.
That’s because terrorism is more political than religious. In many cases, rather than starting with religious beliefs that push them to violence, individuals radicalize politically — becoming angry at their government, or the American-led international order more generally — and then adopt the ideology of the most prominent extremist groups.
A good example of this is Omar Mateen, who killed 49 at a gay nightclub in Orlando in June 2016. Mateen is an unusual case, straddling the line between lone wolf and self-starter, because it is unclear to what extent he targeted the LGBT community on his own, or targeted the United States as a contribution to the international jihadist movement. But one thing is clear: his motivation was political.
Mateen tried to join al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, eventually pledging allegiance to ISIS — though, like the San Bernardino shooters, he never had direct contact with the group. Those three organizations are all fighting each other in Syria. Al-Qaeda and ISIS are Sunni while Hezbollah is Shia. Anyone open to joining all of them is looking for an excuse to commit violence, not driven to action by religious belief.
4 — Expect Extreme Immigration Hawks to Try to Capitalize
The Westminster attacker was a UK citizen, born in England, but that won’t stop anti-immigrant extremists from claiming he proves the need for Brexit, or for the United States to ban Syrian refugees, or whatever they thought before this happened.
Masood’s British, but he’s not white. It’s unclear where his parents or grandparents were born, but at some point his family immigrated to the UK. Once that becomes public knowledge, we’ll hear “if we didn’t let them in, this never would have happened.”
The U.S. saw something similar after the Orlando nightclub shooting. Omar Mateen was born in New York, but his parents emigrated from Afghanistan in the 1980s. Then-candidate Donald Trump claimed the attack showed why America needed to ban immigration from various Muslim-majority countries.
Of course, neither Trump nor his more extreme supporters impose collective blame in response to terrorist attacks by whites, such as when Dylann Roof killed 9 in a South Carolina church in June 2015, or when Alexandre Bissonnette killed 6 in a Quebec mosque in January 2017. Nor do they offer statistical evidence regarding how often children or grandchildren of immigrants commit violence.
That being said, some countries have done a poor job of integrating immigrants, leading to weak economic prospects and increased risk of radicalization. For example, the Paris and Brussels attackers included first-generation Belgian citizens from an area near Brussels called Molenbeek. Many residents come from North Africa, youth unemployment is over 40%, and Belgian security services admitted they do not really control all of it.
However, Britain and America are both better at integrating newcomers.
The Westminster attack was the worst terrorist incident in the UK since the London transportation bombings in July 2005 killed 52. The total number of UK residents killed in Islamic terrorist attacks in the 21st century is now 56 (52 in the bombings, 3 this week, and one British soldier shot to death in May 2013).
This week’s attack is tragic, and British security services should take the threat seriously. But it’s clearly not a major crisis.
5—Terrorists Who Were Previously Investigated
Britain’s domestic intelligence agency MI5 had looked into Masood years ago for violent extremism, but he was no longer on their radar. According to UK Prime Minister Teresa May:
He was a peripheral figure. The case is historic. He was not part of the current intelligence picture. There was no prior intelligence of his intent or of the plot.
Masood had been convicted of various small crimes — vandalism in 1983, possession of a knife in 2003 — but had not violated any terrorism-related laws before his attack on Westminster Bridge.
Similarly, the FBI looked into Omar Mateen years before the Orlando attack, and investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers, on a tip from Russian intelligence. Though Tsarnaev had participated in jihadist forums online, he hadn’t committed a federal crime, and the FBI closed the case.
In all these cases it is tempting to say security services screwed up. That they should have arrested Tsarnaev, Mateen, or Masood before they had a chance to attack.
But that’s hindsight bias. The FBI and MI5 inquire into thousands of people, and almost all of the ones they choose not to prosecute do not end up killing anyone. And law enforcement efforts have stopped terrorist attacks in advance, but we don’t hear as much about those.
Unfortunately, the choice is between bad and worse. We could outlaw certain political beliefs or statements, throwing anyone guilty of those thoughtcrimes in jail for life, or we can accept that sometimes, a small minority of the people who espouse radical beliefs will end up pulling off an attack.
My preference is maintaining our foundational ideals of individual freedom, while doing the best we can within those parameters to keep people safe.
There’s no terrorism in 1984, but that doesn’t mean it’s a pleasant place to live.
