Despite numerous earnest attempts to understand the terrorist personality, his tendencies and habits, some simple realities of terrorist personality have been ignored. Other than being murderers and marauders, terrorists are also simply jerks. They lie to their bosses and cheat on their wives, are self-indulgent and decadent and unapologetically inconsiderate. The terrorist would be the friend who would borrow your car and wreck it, beg for a loan and never pay it, promise to help and forget it. Investigations into the personal shenanigans of well-known fear mongers reveal that those who ultimately become terrorists are simply nasty people.
One poster child of the terrorist as total jerk is David Headley, the alleged mastermind behind the Mumbai attacks of November 2008. A round-up of David aka Daood’s personal escapades prior to his development into a crusader for Lashkar-e-Taiba shows what was simply a very mean man. One fine and bored day in Lahore, when he was just a teenager, David Headley rounded up a friend from Cadet College in Punjab for a trip to the northwest of Pakistan. David’s earnest and well-meaning friend drove him around, helpfully using his military identity to obtain access into otherwise cordoned off areas in what he thought was just a fun road trip. All the while, David was using the trip to amass heroin he could smuggle back into the United States. He stashed it in the trunk of the car, never telling his friend. That friend was lucky and the two were not caught. David’s taste for adventure, however, was not. He got himself a house in Lahore to have a go at the drugs he had procured. He invited a young girl to accompany him on his drug binge. She overdosed and died. David left for America.
Everywhere terrorists go, they seem to leave a trail of wives and children, little cared for and often abandoned. While Khalid Sheikh Mohammad was plotting the deaths of Americans and soon after, while he was in hiding, his various wives and children were littered around the world. At least two of Khalid’s progeny were found in a house behind Tariq Road in Karachi. They shared their living space with all sorts of contraband, weapons, and fake passports. They were allegedly being taken care of by a woman whose name they did not know. No one seemed to know who their mother was.
As he moved along in life, Daood, or David Headley, kept up the terrorist tradition of families forgotten and left behind. While trying to infiltrate the leadership cadres of Lashkar in Lahore, he married Shazia Ahmed and proceeded to have a couple of children. Before long he had tired of the domesticity of normal life he returned to the United States. There he proposed to his girlfriend Portia, who had been waiting for him all along. He married during an island getaway in Jamaica, never once telling her about his wife and kids in Pakistan.
All of it points to one moral conclusion. It is not just that terrorist masterminds are unable to identify with the misery of their hundreds and thousands of innocent victims; they are actually unable to identify or care for anyone at all. The women who fall for them, the mothers who wait for them, the children that are born to them are just as invisible, just as irrelevant, to them as the people they actually kill. The raw material of a terrorist, then, is not some deep calling or ideological struggle, some exploited vulnerability. It is instead simply bad moral material, one that exists first as evil of a lesser sort and appears first in the mediocrities of addictions and infidelities. Terrorism, then, is simply a graduation from little sins of ordinary meanness, drugs, and debauchery, the exploitation of women and the desertion of children, to the global glories of mass murder.