Ben Buckman.net

Newsweek has a story on Somali immigrants being recruited in Minneapolis to return to Somalia and fight with jihadist groups there. Counter-terrorism officials are concerned the same network and recruiting capacity could be used for attacks in the U.S.

What strikes me here is that these kids, after coming all the way to the U.S., go all the way back to the hellhole of Somalia to fight. It almost seems a waste of energy to recruit people who've come here; aren't there potential jihadists or Somali patriots closer to (or in) Somalia?

It also reminds me of the argument Bush/Cheney used for Iraq: we fight them there so they won't come here. Iraq was a jihad magnet in their view. Jihadists are inevitable, so better to let them die as martyrs somewhere far away than in New York. (Never mind the Iraqi civilians and American soldiers in the cross-fire.) Now Somalia is the jihad magnet for Somali immigrants.

Obviously I think the strategy of creating jihad magnets to prevent domestic terrorism is flawed. Killing more Muslims "over there" just stirs up more of the ingredients - instability, combat training, fanaticism - that breeds jihadism in the first place. Directing all the jihadists in the world today to a battle far away does nothing to prevent the jihadists tomorrow from coming here. Or jihadists today for that matter: if the Iraqi insurgency were sophistocated enough to attack the U.S., and thought doing so would help its battle in Iraq, having battles to fight in Iraq wouldn't have stopped them.

I suspect the main reason we haven't had a terrorist attack in the U.S. since 9/11 is that the jihadist networks had other priorities: like sapping America's resources indefinitely in the quagmires of Iraq or Afghanistan. Why provoke a full-scale assault on the Pakistani tribal areas when we were exhausting ourselves without any "help"?

That leads to the question, what does happen with the jihadists when the Iraq war is phased down? Maybe they'll go to Afghanistan. But the U.S. force there will draw down at some point too. Does the next magnet automatically become domestic? Is there a necessary link between foreign wars and domestic terrorism (namely, start the former to prevent the latter)? Or is the Bush-Cheney analogy of terrorists to flies and distant wars to fly paper absurdly simplistic and short-sighted? I don't think the lack of a terrorist attack on U.S. soil since 9/11 is because Bush did a great job, but I do think we shouldn't take the calm for granted.