19
Finally, terrorist leaders may seek to screen their recruits for ideological purity, to ensure
that they all place a very high weight on impact. Some accounts suggest that the training
program in Afghanistan served as such a screening process for al Qaeda.
59
The lengthy
ideological debates that form an essential part of the recruiting process in European Islamic
expatriate communities may also fulfill such a function. While this strategy does not generate
additional risks, it does reduce the pool of potential participants. For groups recruiting from a
limited recruiting population, this may be problematic. Also, the best financiers are unlikely to
be religious or ideological purists. Moreover, such individuals rarely spend time developing
expertise in money laundering and covertly moving funds. This strategy, therefore, entails a cost
in efficiency. The efficiency loss from this strategy may drop the feasible level of impact below
that which could be achieved with less impact-driven agents.
Of the six strategies outlined above, all entail some cost for the groups. In five of the six,
there was a specific security-efficiency trade-off. Only demanding ideological purity did not
have a clear security cost. However, in the realm of terrorist financing the necessary expertise
may not be available from highly ideological individuals. Some specific government strategies
that can make the security-efficiency trade-off more problematic for terrorist organizations.
C
ONCLUSION AND
R
ECOMMENDATIONS
In a principal-agent framework, leaders are considered the principals who delegate three
stages of financial activity to their agents. These agents raise funds, store them for future use,
and transfer them to operational elements. Two selection processes cause those agents to have
divergent preferences from the principals. First, terrorist organizations face an inherent adverse
selection problem because those individuals who are less committed are likely to survive longer
Convention