Lone-wolf attackers not as random as they may look

A member of the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces removes an Islamic State group flag in the town of Tabqa, about 55 kilometres west of Raqa city.

The murder of Sisto Malaspina in Melbourne’s Bourke Street is a graphic reminder that the spores of violent Islamist extremism ­fester in our communities, notwithstanding that there is no caliphate.

Unless we keep an unblinking eye on this movement, its attacks will continue. It is not as if the near destruction of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has immunised radical minds here from deadly violence.

There will be another wave of murderous Islamist attacks on the West. Australia’s national security policy cannot swing from non-state threats to state-based threats; we need to defend our interests from both simultaneously.

We are up against an adaptable, strategic mindset that, like any ­organism in an evolutionary process, needs only to be good enough to survive for the species as a whole to succeed. The exception here is that one cell’s death stimulates other cells to replicate. As former al-Qa’ida member turned MI6 informan­t Aimen Dean describes in his book Nine Lives, these Islam­ist extremists actively seek death more than we love life.

Often there are calls to let homegrown Islamist extremists leave Australia to fight for Islamic State — let them die over there. The problem is that those who survive their jihad evolve into the next generation of extremist leaders, but with seasoned battlefield skills they can share with others.

The Bourke Street attack continued the thinking of key al-Qa’ida strategist Abu Musab al-Suri (real name Mustafa Setmariam Nasar), who foresaw the spread of radicalised spores contaminating the far enemy (the West) in his 1600-page guide to jihad, The Call for Global Islamic Resistance.

As terrorism academic Paul Cruickshank explains in his work on Setmariam, after the London 2005 attacks, Setmariam posted: “I swear to God that I have in me a joy stronger than the joy of the farme­r who sees the harvest of his fruits after a long planting and effort­s and patience throughout decades of building.”

Hassan Khalif Shire Ali may have appeared to have been a lone wolf, but he was placed in the position to attack by intelligent design. It is an example of what US scientist Warren Weaver described in a 1948 paper as organised complexity.

No one is able to predict these attacks. Victoria Police’s record of disruption has mostly kept the public safe, which indicates its community-based network is bette­r than it is given credit for.

But picking the next improv­ised attack is almost impossible. There is a range of triggers beyond the ability of the police to control that shift a person with radical views to acting on them by trying to kill us. Part of our society’s strengths are the conventional structures and classic command-and-control enterprises that oversee our communities and private and government organisations.

But they can also be a weakness in the face of the Islamists’ organ­ised complexity. Today’s Islamic terrorism is a complex problem that cannot be broken down and defeated by a linear analysis: how do you plan to subdue people who believe if they do not die in the prosecution of their cause then they were not worthy of their god?

Since the end of the first phase of the war in Afghanistan after 9/11 (say 2002), where the original missio­n was to find and finish off al-Qa’ida, we have been in a new battle that bypasses our military and transcends physical borders. They wish to kill us from within.

Part of the strategy is eroding confidence in our own system while igniting bigotry and fear towar­ds law-abiding Muslims. It is this paralysis the Islamists are tryin­g to stimulate and exploit.

Their minds have been soaked in a toxic mix of “end of times” mythology and warrior imagery. They are playing the long game.

The tactical application of the global Islamists’ grand strategy is this do-it-yourself terrorism seen in Melbourne and Sydney. It is cheap and effective.

That the victims and attackers are civilians can be morally and mentally disorientating. No sooner have we understood the nature and network of the last attack than the terrorists have improvised, adapted and evolved to create yet another localised attack with glob­alised impact. In response to the global spate of attacks using ­vehicles to mow down pedestrians, big cities placed concrete bollards on major thoroughfares. Shire Ali worked around it. Let’s not forget: extremists’ attempt to destroy democracy failed, so they are using indirect attacks while benefiti­ng from the non-violent support this global insurgency cultivat­es. The only way this can occur is for a web of supporters and sympathise­rs to continue to believ­e that the non-violent dimens­ion of Islamist extremism is compatible with Western democratic values.

It is not. As TE Lawrence said: “Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active force and 98 per cent passively sympathetic.”

Yet do we really believe acquiescing to the extremists’ demands would result in a reduction in radic­alised views with the potential for violent action? And do those who jump to their defence really believe they would not also be lined up for beheading by the extremists at worst, or sex slavery and brutal subjugation at best?

Instead, this psychopathic ideology must be neutralised through a strategy of inoculation with two reinforcing lines of ­action. One is to conduct over-the-horizon threat simulation, or what Einstein described as “thought experime­nts”. What does the futur­e of this borderless movement look like and how do we impro­ve our methods of disruption in Australia? The second is our own series of disorientating asymmetric tactics, where the aim is to deeply penetrate and destroy the movement from within.

In the meantime, one man with a kitchen knife on a city street keeps the global insurgency alive.

Jason Thomas teaches risk management at the Swinburne University of Technology and is director of Frontier Assessments.