The horrifying attack in Sydney highlights two interrelated dynamics that have plagued counterterrorism efforts in all Western countries for decades.
The first is that Naveed Akram, one of the two who carried out the attack with his father Sajid, had been investigated by Australian authorities for connections to ISIS back in 2019 — but had not been arrested.
Data we have collected at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism shows that this is a common dynamic, as more than half of perpetrators of terrorist attacks in the West since 9/11 had been on a watch list.
Did Australian authorities make a mistake and overlook a terrorist?
Details will emerge in the coming months and it is not unlikely that mistakes were made. But it cannot be overlooked that the actions of Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies are limited by a number of factors.
Constitutional rights
The first are legal issues. Authorities might know that a certain individual holds radical beliefs, monitor when they manifest them and even when they interact with others who engage in violent actions.
But unless the line of criminal behavior is crossed, there is not much they can do. In substance, in Western democracies, individuals have a sacrosanct and constitutionally protected right to be radicals and the most authorities can do is monitor them.
Even assuming they receive the court orders often needed for surveillance, law enforcement and intelligence officials run into the second problem: scarce resources.
Round-the-clock, intensive surveillance of a suspect normally requires about 25 officials on any given day — numbers that no Western countries can afford, also considering the growing number of radicals. Authorities therefore divide the suspects into tiers according to an assessment of their propensity for committing violence and allocate resources accordingly. Inevitably, sometimes they get it wrong.
The second, equally frustrating and possibly more fixable dynamic emerging from Sydney is the fact that Akram was known to be fully immersed in the city’s thriving Islamist scene.
Akram, in fact, reportedly frequented mosques, educational centers and organizations linked to various transnational Islamist groups, from Hizb ut-Tahrir (a fundamentalist group that calls for a caliphate and is banned in the UK, but legal in Australia and the US) and the Muslim Brotherhood (which President Trump has issued an executive order to designate as a terrorist organization but that is legal in all Western countries).
These movements and their spinoffs spread hatred for the West, contempt for women, gays and all non-Muslims, and demonize Jews.
Capone approach
Thanks to their large dissemination machinery, they traffic ideas that, taken to their logical conclusion, justify violence and inspire angry young men to carry it out.
In the British debate, it used to be said that these non-immediately-violent Islamists “provide the mood music to which suicide bombers dance.”
Groups such as those that inspired Akram also operate in America, thriving thanks to their abuse of First Amendment protections and our extreme tolerance.
Democracies find it inherently difficult to challenge groups that seek to subvert them while operating within the law. But America, like all Western countries, needs to recognize the threat that Islamism, in all its manifestations, poses to it.
Several steps in this direction have been taken over recent months. Designating the Muslim Brotherhood was one of them. But US authorities already have at their disposal many other instruments that can allow them to severely undercut Islamist actors.
They can, for example, scrutinize them for immigration violations or their organizations for fiscal irregularities. It is, in substance, the application to Islamists of the Al Capone style of prosecution, an approach that is cost-effective, can yield remarkable results and does not need a designation.
Lorenzo Vidino is the director of the Program on Extremism at The George Washington University.
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