The blog Global Guerillas discusses the chief guerilla leader/insurgent in Nigera who has allegedly been arrested recently (that is, someone’s been arrested, allegedly it’s him).

The man appears to have come up with startling innovations, such as recruiting mercenaries—Nigeria is rife with them—as needed by calling their cellphones. No organization to break up, no meetings to infiltrate, no network to destroy, just an ad hoc group of killers, something much harder to break up, take down or destroy.

Our government has deservedly taken a lot of flak for focusing on “terrorist states” rather than non-governmental groups or lone operators like Eric Rudolph (Dick Cheney was quoted as saying it makes sense to go after nations because it’s easier to find targets—he’s wrong, it doesn’t). What if, by the time we adapt to fighting terrorist networks, networks are a thing of the past?

I hope someone in our security establishment is thinking of possibilities like this.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 7th, 2008 at 10:46 am and is filed under Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.