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Dumb BombWhy most terrorists are so incompetent.

By Tim HarfordPosted Saturday, July 21, 2007, at 7:53 AM ET

The attempted attacks in London and Glasgow, Scotland, three weeks ago surprised many people for two reasons: that the suspects were all educated medical professionals rather than desperate, uneducated vagrants; and that they botched the job so badly.

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The first revelation should not, by now, have been much of a surprise. My Financial Times colleague Gideon Rachman has reminded us that Osama Bin Laden is an engineer, his family is fabulously wealthy, and his deputy is a doctor.

Economist Alan Krueger, author of a new book called What Makes a Terrorist?: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism, attempts to add to these examples with a systematic study of the evidence. He concludes that terrorists, political extremists, and those who commit hate crimes are often relatively well-to-do. This is a difficult thing to prove, not least because each of those categories is controversial and there is a world of difference between, say, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka. Krueger dips into different sources of data, each one imperfect, trying to build up a compelling picture from opinion polls, biographies of terrorists, and broader studies.

Opinion polls from Gaza and the West Bank conducted in December 2001 show that students and professionals are more likely than the unemployed or laborers to say that terrorism can be justified, and more likely to deny that a suicide bombing in a Tel Aviv nightclub should be described as "a terrorist act." (The polls reveal more unanimity than disagreement on these points but certainly offer no evidence that education or wealth leads to more moderate views.)

When he was a graduate student at Princeton, the young economist Claude Berrebi gathered data on more than 40 Palestinian suicide bombers. He concluded that they were far better educated than the typical Palestinian, and also richer. Krueger offers a complementary picture using biographies of 129 Hezbollah fighters killed in action, although not necessarily while attempting a terrorist attack. They, too, were somewhat better educated and less likely to be poor than the typical young Lebanese man of the time.

More indirect evidence comes from studies of hate crimes, which are thought to have some parallels with terrorism. Again, economic motives are hard to find. It was once the conventional wisdom that lynchings in the American South were more common whenever cotton prices were low, indicating tough times for the economy. Historians no longer believe in the correlation. In general, hate crimes do not seem to be more common in economic downturns—although economist Emily Oster seems to have found an exception in medieval witch hunts, which were more common when crops failed.

All in all, the research that professor Krueger gathers together suggests that if there is a link between poverty, education, and terrorism, it is the opposite of the one popularly assumed. We should not be surprised to find that terrorists can add up, read, and even write prescriptions.

What is more surprising is that the attackers in London and Glasgow were so incompetent. Claude Berrebi and Harvard economist Efraim Benmelech studied—there's no nice way to put this—the human-resources policy of Palestinian terrorist groups. They found that older, better-educated terrorists secured more important suicide missions and killed more people. Having more than a high-school education doubles the chance of escaping capture, for example.

If the terrorists in this case do turn out to be the doctors and other professionals who are, as I write, suspected of the crime, it would demonstrate that even years of education and experience do not guarantee a successful attack. Blowing up innocent people is obviously harder than it looks, and for that we can all be grateful.

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Tim Harford is a Financial Times columnist. His latest book, The Logic of Life, will be published in paperback on Feb. 10.

COMMENTS

Remarks from the Fray:

When trying to analyze any link between terrorism and education one should ask "educated at what?" Education is not one vast, undifferentiated thing. Nor is it necessarily done only in a formal environment. While some technical expertise may be necessary, as pointed out most terrorist technology is not exactly rocket science. You don't need a PhD in chemical or electrical engineering to make a bomb, for example, even a big one.

Perhaps the most important education is one in the society in which one operates. The ability to blend in and knowledge of how to operate within the target society are arguably the most important kinds of education one can acquire. Most people know most about the society in which they grow up, though even there knowledge varies. Knowledge and skill in operating in foreign environments tends to be more rare and harder to acquire. This is one of the reasons many terrorist groups can operate efficiently on their 'home turf' but have problems carrying out any type of extended/complicated international effort.

Thus, a someone raised as a barely literate shoe-shine boy in Baghdad may be a more effective terrorist in Iraq than a Georgetown area studies MA. Arguably, the hardest part of terrorism is the "operational art" of actually carrying out attacks in the real world. That is not something typically taught in most educational settings.

--fozzy

(To reply, click here.)

Osama bin Laden and his cohorts in terrorist mayhem don't have to be competent, since failure often works as well for them as success.

Bin Laden has oft-stated that his aim is to 'bait and provoke' the United States and its Western allies into bleeding wars in the Islamic world. He has also stated that all it takes is one jihadi to raise a piece of cloth and scream 'jihad,' to get us to over-react.

In response to 9/11 we've spent billions of dollars on airline security, gotten mired in Iraq and are now on a jittery path to conflict with Iran. Failed terrorist missions just stir the pot and keep us anxious as well as any successful ones would.

Bin Laden's long-term aim is to seize Saudi Arabia and turn off the spigot of oil. But he's willing to wait.

--revrick

(To reply, click here.)

Competence is a comparative value. If we are made aware of someone through mass media we tend to compare them against the top-of-class entertainers, business people, politicians or athletes we usually see represented there - very competent people who have climbed past hundreds of thousands of competitors to heights where the world will notice them.

The pool of would-be terrorists is probably small, given the risks involved. I hope it is. Even if it were not, risks associated with discovery and infiltration probably reduce the efficiency of matching qualified terrorist candidates with sponsoring organizations. In short, when you see some guy bailing out of a flaming SUV in Glasgow, he's probably not the best his home-town had to offer.

Even if terrorists could pick the best people available, training options are limited. Sharing techniques is risky, and terrorists' short careers don't preserve best practices effectively from generation to generation.

By the time we see a musician, they have played in 200 clubs. A pro football player has run 200 scrimmages and 100 games by his rookie year. Each has beat out hundreds of rivals in open competition before we become aware of them. A suicide bomber is probably on his first mission, with probably less than 200 hours of training, and he may have been the only nut case willing to take on this job.

Finally, almost everyone other than terrorists operates in an environment where others will help them succeed. Tough to look good at what you do when just about everyone around you has a big stake in your failure.

--pcorning

(To reply, click here.)

(7/22)

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