Boston bears hallmark of grassroots militants

Certainly it will be no consolation to those loved ones and survivors in the US to hear that the attack allegedly carried out by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, appears on the face of it to be a prime example of terrorist "incompetence" when its planning and execution is subjected to a purely dispassionate professional analysis.

This, I readily acknowledge needs some explaining, so let me try to do just that.

Probably a good place to start is by recognising that many terrorism analysts these days far from engaging in a detached examination of the facts, resort instead to a knee-jerk official default position that contemporary terrorists are "disciplined, patient and clever".

The remarks from some quarters in the case of the alleged Boston bombers are points in case.

Michael Leiter, former director of the US National Counterterrorism Centre and Jack Cloonan, who once headed the FBI's Osama bin Laden unit, were just two among many "experts" who described the Boston bombing as a "sophisticated attack".

Yesterday it emerged investigators believe the two Boston bombing suspects had planned to set off bombs in New York's Times Square One source said this was based on information that surviving suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told investigators in a Boston hospital, where he is recovering from wounds.

But the facts surrounding the Boston bombing point to a plot and strike that was anything but sophisticated and a majority of other analysts have been at pains to make that clear.

The Boston attack bears the hallmarks of grassroots militants whose terrorist "skillset" was far removed from that displayed by predecessors like Mohamed Atta and his 9/11 co-conspirators or others closer to home such as the IRA's Patrick Magee and his Brighton bombing cell back in 1984.

If one thing marks out the Tsarnaev brothers' as grassrooots terrorists it is that they appear to have been a decentralised operational entity far removed from any core group and its leadership. After a closed-door briefing on Wednesday some US politicians said as much, insisting the brothers are not believed to have had direct contact with a militant organisation, despite the fact Tamerlan, in 2012, spent six months with relatives in Dagestan, which has an Islamist militant insurgency.

Admittedly, one has to be wary of official US statements at this early stage in the investigation, not least when both the FBI and CIA have rather contradictory positions on just what was known about Tamerlan's activities. This mainly revolves around which watch list he appears to have been on.

The CIA it seems requested that in 2011 he be added to the highly classified Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (Tide). Yet, six months before the CIA request, the FBI having received no further information from Russian intelligence who had initially tipped them off, then closed its investigation. It appears too that Tamerlan also registered on the Terrorist Screening Database, a declassified version of Tide.

These facts aside, what distinguishes the Tsarnaev brothers is that their actions are consistent with the broader trend of terrorists shifting to lone-wolf type behaviour in contrast to the more centralised militancy seen in the years before 9/11.

No organisation of course has exemplified this shift more than al-Qaeda. But where once this group vetted and trained the best of terrorist "talent", cherry picking operatives from tens of thousands of jihadists in training camps in Afghanistan and elsewhere, today al-Qaeda relies more on the internet and its online publications to rally volunteers to commit violence against the infidels.

While this devolution of al-Qaeda and its shift from what could be termed "al-Qaeda the group" to "al-Qaeda the franchise" has arguably given the organisation's brand greater geographic reach, it has also somewhat neutered its operational efficiency.

Ironically, the United States controversial ongoing drone strike campaign has also played a part in this re-calibrating of al-Qaeda's operational "assets".

In short, CIA and other drone strikes have been killing some of the organisation's most clever and lethal terrorists – as well as innocent civilians along the way.

This has thrown more emphasis on grassroots militants and lone-wolf operatives galvanised and recruited online, with the subsequent inevitable result that their terrorist skills learned far from training camps and first hand tutoring, is often not up to scratch.

Writing in the influential US magazine, Foreign Policy, Max Abrahms a fellow in the political science department at Johns Hopkins University where he teaches terrorism studies, rather irreverently summed up the Tsarnaev brothers incompetence and suggested a few "pro-tips" to like-minded militants as follows: "Don't mingle with people who have license plates supporting terrorism affixed to their cars; don't post pro-Islamist sentiments on public websites; don't brag to innocents about being responsible for the bombing; and don't run over your brother with a car."

There is no question that the Tsarnaev brothers, should they prove guilty of the bombing, made some very amateurish mistakes in the planning and execution of the Boston attack compared to other similar urban terrorist conspiracies of recent years.

In security service parlance, tradecraft refers to the skills needed by both terrorists and intelligence officers to conduct clandestine activities in a hostile environment without discovery. If one thing so far is clear from the Boston experience it is that effective tradecraft was lacking not only on the terrorists' behalf but by those US authorities – notably the FBI – tasked with monitoring such threats.

Only last month al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released the 10th edition of its English-language magazine, Inspire.

Like the two conflicting schools of thought over whether the Boston attack was sophisticated or incompetent, terrorism analysts are split over those who believe the magazine poses a serious threat and those who have downplayed its content and significance.

Either way Inspire has increased in stature after the revelation that the alleged Boston bombers apparently relied on the publication when planning their attack.

Using such publications al-Qaeda these days has cleverly shifted its position from an emphasis on core group activity to something of an open door policy. In doing so it continues to suck in disgruntled individuals like Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Some go on to make bombs from pressure cookers and shrapnel from nails and ball bearings. While such extremists might lack the expertise of other masters they still manage to take lives, maim and cause havoc. That, by any standards, is still terrorism and worthy of all the vigilance we can muster to prevent it.