Ok, yes, that was a
deliberately provocative title to grab your attention - but bear with me. Some
of you may remember a film called Ransom, released in 1996, and starring Mel
Gibson as a father of a kidnapped son, who after a first failed attempt to pay the
kidnappers the $2,000,000 ransom money they demanded, gets a sense that they have
no intention of retuning his son alive.
As a response he decides
to appear on television to offer the ransom as a bounty on the kidnappers'
heads, with the bounty being withdrawn if the kidnappers return his son alive. The
kidnappers' inner circle is now far less stable as each gang member is now
unsure whether they can fully trust the other members not to betray them and
pick up the bounty. Later on the bounty goes up $4,000,000, and things get even
more tense within the gang's inner circle until (spoiler alert!!) the gang
implodes and their plan is thwarted.
This kind of observation
is nothing new. Plato talked about similar dictatorship insecurities in his Republic,
and everyone knows that when a group becomes less tight, be it a criminal gang,
a political group or whatever, the most prominent members with the most to lose
become the most vulnerable.
Now when I suggested
paying young Muslims to help stop terrorism, what I mean is this. Suppose the
authorities offered to pay would-be radicals, say, £2000 if they shop someone
they know to be planning a terrorist attack. Maybe pay them more, I don't know
what the market value would be to grass up a fellow Muslim in your
neighbourhood who is playing around with explosives and detonators, but sums of
money like this would be chicken feed compared with the overall counter
terrorism budget (the UK government currently spends over £15 billion a year on
counter terrorism).
Perhaps it would only
yield one or two positive outcomes, but even that is better than nothing if it
leads to the arrest and conviction of prospective attackers. Let's face it,
this kind of set-up already goes on with police informants in areas like drugs
and gun crime, and we see every day how market incentives regulate all kinds of
human behaviour, so why can't it work in exposing terrorism?
Not only would offering
financial incentives help police catch would-be terrorists and other dangerous
extremists before they went on to commit an atrocity, it would also create
instability among gang networks. If a prospective Islamist is planning a bomb attack in London
and the people in his inner circle, or even people outside it, know they can receive
a few thousand pounds if they shop him in to the police, the would-be terrorist
has got to watch who he trusts very closely, which is bound to make his inner
circle far less tight.
You may object that the
kind of radical suicide bombers that want to blow up infidels in order to ride
up to heaven on a winged horse where they'll be met by 72 virgins might not be the
sort of people who are very likely to be motivated by money, and you are probably
right. But equally the kind of person who is likely to inform on a dangerous
radical for a few thousand pounds is very unlikely to be the sort of Muslim who
is on the verge of being a suicide bomber. It cuts both ways.
Once you add up the £15
billion a year spent by the authorities, and all the costs that occur when we
do have a terrorist incident, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me to offer
generous financial rewards to anyone who can help thwart an attack and send a
group of radical Islamists to jail to keep our streets safer.
Providing market invectives
to shop would-be terrorists means it would increase the cost of being a
would-be terrorist, which not only makes someone a potentially less effective terrorist,
it increases their risk factors too, and makes Islamist coteries less tight and
more unstable, increasing their chances of imploding, and at the same time making it easier for the police to infiltrate their organisations.
