Comparing Motives and Outcomes of Mass Casualty Terrorism Involving Conventional and Unconventional Weapons

Western intelligence analysts fight an uphill battle to avoid parochial habits of thought that lump diverse Islamist identities together. The recent counterterrorism literature gives us tools for understanding a wide spectrum of Islamists, by focusing attention on what they say about themselves rather than on the intelligence labels we must ultimately assign to them. The main challenge for analysts is not the brute diversity of Islamist types, but their plasticity—the Islamist's flexible inhabitation of distinct, sometimes contradictory, identities. Contrary to generalizations about the duplicity of all Islamists, much plasticity is due to ordinary psychological- or ideological strain—the inability to resolve divided allegiances or sustain conflicted principles. Islamist preacher Yussef al-Qardawi and salafist group Hizb ut-Tahrir present prime examples of ordinary Islamist plasticity. In order to understand Islamism in all its complexity, analysts should develop methods for disaggregating and evaluating key components of the Islamist persona.