Form is insight: the funnel, part 2

It should be stressed that this study was based on a sceptical view of the exclusively religious nature of Islamic suicide terrorism. The purpose was to look for alternative interpretations with an open mind. The complexity related to the importance of these parameters is not related to a hierarchical dimension since it is the interplay between the parameters that produces a suicide terrorist over a period of time. The profiling of suicide terrorists from an exclusively psychological perspective for instance is no longer valid, reality is much more complex. Nor is it just a question of political disagreements. When existing profiling techniques have failed to understand the complex issues that leads an individual to sacrifice his life, it is because of a habit of using a monocausal approach. This is not to say that psychological studies cannot contribute to terrorist profiling …

Terrorism is not moncausal.

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The war against the Taliban / AQ is complicated, if for no other reason, then because it is inherently self-referential, contains a paradox, pushes what it pulls against. In Steve Coll‘s words:

This could not be a more complicated war. If you think about it, the United States is essentially waging a war against its own ally. The Taliban are a proxy of the government of Pakistan. We are an ally of the government of Pakistan. We are fighting the Taliban. In the end, the Taliban will be defeated strategically when the government of Pakistan makes a strategic decision that its future does not lie in partnership with Islamic extremists.

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That’s a fairly simple complexity, something a loop diagram could illustrate nicely. But it’s more multifactorial than that, as National Security Adviser James Jones remarked at the Munich Conference on Security Policy in February 2009:

But to move forward, we must understand the terms “national security” and “international security” are no longer limited to the ministries of defense and foreign ministries; in fact, they encompass the economic aspects of our societies. They encompass energy. They encompass new threats—asymmetric threats involving proliferation, involving the illegal shipment of arms and narcoterrorism, and the like. Borders are no longer recognized, and the simultaneity of the threats that face us are occurring at a more rapid pace …

The challenges that we face are broader and more diverse than we ever imagined, even after the terrible events of 9/11. And our capacity to meet these challenges, in my view, does not yet match the urgency of what is required. To be blunt, the institutions and approaches that we forged together through the twentieth century are still adjusting to meet the realities of the twenty-first century. And the world has definitely changed, but we have not changed with it. But it is not too late, and this is the good news …

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And so we move from the complicated business of analytic understanding to the relative singularity of an individual making a decision — Steve Coll’s words again:

As with much of modern American national security as a whole, the bin Laden raid came down to a complicated decision made by one person. Only one person is asked to simultaneously weigh the certainties, manage all the various domestic, military, diplomatic, legal, and moral considerations, and make a decision Americans will live with for years to come. It is a remarkable — some might argue impractical — burden.

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That’s the zoom, that’s my funnel, complete in seven quotes.

Let’s take things a bit further, and examine for a moment what has been said about the man making the decision. From The American Conservative:

To read Niebuhr is to relish these tensions, to grip the fundamental balance of the moral universe. “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible,” he wrote. “But man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” The concepts gear together like great cosmic cogs. “Goodness, armed with power, is corrupted,” he wrote. But “pure love without power is destroyed.” Much of Niebuhr’s worldview depends on these balances.

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