From the New York Times‘ careful new piece on Nidal Hasan:

Some experts on terrorism believe that Major Hasan may be the latest example of an increasingly common type of terrorist, one who has been self-radicalized with the help of the Internet and who wreaks havoc without support from overseas networks and without having to cross a border to reach his target.

Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University professor who studies terrorism, said such cases had appeared at a growing rate in the last year, most of them involving people with no direct ties to foreign terrorists. The trend of self-radicalization, which Qaeda leaders and allies have encouraged with a steady stream of inflammatory messages on the Web, is gaining momentum, he said.

There’s been a lot of good and necessary commentary about how ultimately unnecessary physical safehavens are to al-Qaeda and affiliated radical movements. Assuming that this understanding of Hasan is correct — that he is indeed a ‘self-starter’ — people like him are the flip side: those who needed no safe havens to launch an attack. But consider what didn’t happen.

Hasan killed 14 people. Each and every one of those deaths is a horror and an outrage. But he didn’t kill dozens or hundreds or thousands. He didn’t have accomplices to help him carry out the simultaneous attacks that are al-Qaeda’s trademark. He wasn’t even able to die in the process.

Again, I am assuming for the purposes of this post that Hasan is a self-starter tafkiri, something for which I think there is growing evidence but not conclusive proof. Continuing with that presumption, it’s looking more like the internet is not, in fact, a sufficient vehicle for takfiri training. It’s an excellent vehicle for ideological reinforcement. But it runs into its limits when it seeks to pass along practical information about how to be the best terrorist possible. (Again, I am presuming for this post that Hasan’s contacts with Anwar Awlaki were geared toward acquiring such knowledge.) By contrast, Mohammed Sidique Khan’s visits to Pakistan resulted in the multi-phased 7/7 attack on London.

This is not an airtight case, perhaps because individual variance is a necessary feature of terrorist plots. Najibullah Zazi’s time in Pakistan allegedly meeting with al-Qaeda affiliates resulted in law enforcement fearing that a cell had congealed in Denver, and Zazi’s arrest broke it up before it could come fruition. We will learn more in his trial. But law enforcement’s case against Zazi at least indicates the role of the safe haven in turning disturbed individuals into something more dangerous than a crazed lone gunman.

This is hard to say without appearing insensitive or disrespectful, two things that I absolutely don’t mean to be toward the soldiers and civilians at Ft. Hood whom Hasan despicably murdered. But perhaps Hasan’s case indicates that self-starterdom is a horrible problem that requires vigilance — not a central organizing strategic fact confronting national security. A self-starter who goes to, say, the Haqqani network’s al-Qaeda-affiliated ministate in Waziristan — that’s something more alarming. It may not itself be a central organizing strategic fact confronting national security, either, but while safe havens are not the end-all-be-all for al-Qaeda, they’re not nothing, either.

If we can roll back and contain the safe havens at acceptable cost, the self-starter problem will still be with us. But those self-starter plans will probably not be more sophisticated than Hasan’s — which, if it turns out to be terrorism (again: I am presuming it is for the sake of this post) will be the only successful domestic attack since 9/11.