A succinct explanation of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, those who’ve preceded him and will no doubt follow. From Steve Coll …
As the analyst Marc Sageman once formulated it, the biography is one of dislocation and radicalization that often seems to involve a young man who is raised in country A, becomes radicalized in country B, and then decides to attack country C, with “C” often (but not always) being the United States. Here we also have the elements of economic privilege and globe-crossing travel familiar from the biographies of Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Al Qaeda’s two senior leaders, who by now have reached that state of advanced middle-age in which they can no longer be expected to remember their period of teenage radicalization and early violence very accurately.
I mentioned over the weekend that it’s always a bit surreal to hear that these suicide bombers, at once so alien to our world, are so enmeshed in our popular culture, globalization and the like. And a number of readers wrote in to say, quite rightly, that it’s hardly going to be Pashtun town dwellers or the poor and illiterate who end up getting placed on these missions. They have to work with people with some money, US Visas and the like. That’s of course right. But there’s more to it than that.
