The CIA officers at FOB Chapman were very likely in the business of making contact with Afghan and Pakistani citizens in the area with the goal of recruiting agents who could nominate targets for either missile strikes or direct action raids. It is wholly appropriate that the CIA was there for this purpose -- it is a core function of the Clandestine Service to recruit and manage such agent networks.
Naturally, the very fact that CIA officers were out making contact with the locals made them vulnerable to counter-infiltration. The origins of this dilemma date back thousands of years so we must assume that the CIA was well aware of the risks and had procedures in place to mitigate those risks. According to a story in today's Washington Post, the Taliban claimed that the suicide bomber who infiltrated the inner CIA compound was an officer in the Afghan army. Although unconfirmed, this claim seems realistic. The Taliban handler of the infiltrator could have spent many months or even years building up a trusting relationship with the Americans. If the infiltrator was an Afghan army officer, this attack is likely to create additional difficult strains between Afghan and U.S. forces.
Might misguided American assumptions about class and social-economic status now be a security vulnerability? The CIA may never declassify its internal investigation of the FOB Chapman attack, so for now I can only speculate on what actually happened. It is easy to see how the Americans could remain suspicious of a common Afghan soldier, no matter how long they had known him. But an Afghan army officer, perhaps one who had travelled to the West, maybe gone to school there, would more easily find a place inside the CIA's small circle of camaraderie.
Might a similar misguided American assumption about class and social-economic status at least partly explain how Major Hasan -- an officer, medical school graduate and mass-murderer at Fort Hood -- escaped scrutiny? We can assume that the State Department's Consular bureau would resist issuing a multi-entry visa to a common Nigerian military-aged male from a Lagos slum. But the State Department did issue such a visa to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who nearly succeeded in downing an airliner on Christmas Day. Abdulmutallab came from a wealthy Nigerian family, lived in a multi-million dollar flat in London, and was an honors graduate from University College London. For a U.S. consular officer with perhaps a similar pedigree, someone like Abdulmutallab might not seem like a risk.
While the U.S. escalates its military operations in the dusty hinterlands of Afghanistan and Yemen, adversaries might be focusing their terror recruiting efforts at British universities. Which makes one wonder which side is better at learning and adapting, and exploiting his enemy's blind spots and cultural weaknesses.
Comments
Robert, while "class" is a useful term in instances such as you mention, it is really a proxy for a much simpler concept: similarity. Some sociobiologists would argue that we are genetically predisposed to look and act favourably towards those whom we perceive as looking and acting like "us". While there may or may not be a genetic basis for such action, there is certainly a LOT of historical data to support the existence of the action as a human universal.
Unfortunately, as stanton notes, the reverse is true: as a species we tend to ascribe the actions of an individual to a class of individuals (think "stereotyping" and/or "profiling"). Often such an ascription can cause us to create problems that weren't there before hand. This tendency, BTW, is the concept that underlies the basic insurgent idea of attempting to provoke an over-reaction thereby encouraging a group to shift their support.
So, to your immediate question:
<blockquote>Might misguided American assumptions about class and social-economic status now be a security vulnerability?</blockquote>
The simple answer is "Yes". That, however, is compounded by a couple of rather nasty little problems with how the US, as a culture, tends to view "class" (NB: quite differently from both Canada and the UK). Since your (US) class membership is defined by a fairly high mobility rate based on education and socio-economic status, you don't have the built in safeguards relating to attitudes towards public service that show up elsewhere (with a few notable exceptions). At the same time, you share similar vulnerabilities in assumptions of class consciousness (yeah, sometimes Marx DID have a decent insight!).
It will be a continuing problem, and no society or culture has ever, to my knowledge at least, come up with a solution that avoids viewing people in stereotypical forms. So, from a security perspective, that means that we need to be aware of the bias, try to control for it in some manner, learn to control our potential over-reactions, but not beat ourselves up for being human.
As an immigrant to USA and served in the US military, assumption abot class and status does affect and creates a terror vulnerability.
As an example, tt seems that Americans as a group, when looking at the ethnicity defined as Hispanics, accoding to the census bureaus definition, every Hispanic gets labelled as Mexican! In our respective communities or countries (i.e. North America (Mexico), South America or Central America) we are not Hispanics.
The only commonality is language.
We speak a 'foreign language' (from Spain), though based on varying degrees of acculturation we have become Hispanized to fit the US definition of us.
Same with Arab designations, or that all Muslims are the same. The Fort Hood scenario is such an example. The fellow is a US citizen, on a military reservation and he committed a terrible act and he should be tried according to UCMJ criteria! Just because he happens to be Muslim does not put him in the same league as the 9/11 conspirators but a strong vocal group of Americans attempting to exploit such an incident, kind of dashes all attempts at accurate intelligence protocols and obscures the lines between ignorance and enlightened thinking (analyses).
This attitude MAY even radicalize US born Muslims more die to this ignorance in thinking.
Robert,
I will just comment on your last paragraph, about recruiting in British universities. Yes, it happens as illustrated by a small number of court cases (with convictions) and an even smaller number identified as dying abroad - notably two students in Israel.
Is it on the scale some pundits say or imply? No, in my opinion. I was reminded before Xmas that a few years ago, post 9/11 and pre 7/7 there was a "leaked" story that thousands had been recruited at universities - years later we have yet to see those numbers become a reality.
Where IMHO the threat lies is not with UK citizens at university, but overseas students who have a variety of vulnerabilities - well known to the recruiter.
AQ and others clearly have a long track record of overseas recruiting (notably LeT), which for little effort can provide willing recruits.
My suspicion is that a small number are radicalised, but few advance beyond declarations, some donations of cash and an unwillingness to tell others what has happened.
There are strong factors opposed to radicalisation in UK universities, almost none official, let alone involving any effort by law enforcement.
More another time as I reflect on the other parts of your article.