It's hard to say what's worse: ignorance of jihad, for which there's no excuse at this advanced stage of war, or indifference to it, for which there's never an excuse. Both attitudes deeply imbue U.S. war policy. As Kilcullen would (and has) put it, "the Islamic bit is secondary." Far more important to this Australian anthropologist are what he calls "social networks." Packer writes: "He noted that all fifteen Saudi (9/11) hijackers had trouble with their fathers."
Oh, brother -- as if half the people in the world don't have trouble with their fathers (but don't hijack airplanes for Allah).
The New Yorker story continues: Although "radical ideas" lead young men to become jihadists, "the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates."
Sounds like our problem is a cell calling plan, not jihadist Islam. Little wonder Kilcullen is also down on the phrase "war on terror." That's because, as Packer writes, the concept (elliptical as it is) "suggests an undifferentiated enemy" engaged in global jihad. David Kilcullen strives to "disaggregate" insurgencies by disconnecting the Islamic dots linking various terror-states and terrorists. He prefers to see jihadist movements in terms of so many local grievances. It's as if he has taken the defunct Bush doctrine -- You're with us or you're against us -- and changed it to: You're really not with anyone, and certainly not anyone Islamic.
To what end? Difficult to say, particularly when, according to the New Yorker, his example of "disaggregation" is the Indonesian province of Aceh. Here, he maintains, Western tsunami aid and resentment of outsiders prevented Aceh from "becoming," as the article put it, "part of the global jihad" -- a funny sort of victory to claim in a place where, increasingly, sharia rules.
Of course, maybe the man "disaggregates" sharia, too, reducing it to so many differentiated social networks. Just the thing, as Kilcullen might say, for family, friends and associates with that jihadist sense of adventure.
CORRECTION: In last week's column about media coverage of American Muslims attitudes on suicide bombing, I attributed the headline "Muslims assimilate better in U.S. than Europe, poll finds" to The New York Times. The headline was from The International Herald Tribune.