What do roadside bombs have to do with an economic downturn? If you think the answer is “nothing” think again.

An economic downturn will surely have a negative impact on economically weak populations in developing countries, such as Pakistan, India, China, Philippines, and many African and north African countries. Less economic activity means less economic opportunity which translates into less employment and less potential to extract oneself from the choke of poverty. Unemployment means more time to simmer in disappointment, more time and opportunity for “anger” based ideologies to work their way along the fault lines of resentment and despair.

This is the bedrock that produces terrorists and suicide bombers.

Who will most of the newly dispossessed blame for their woes? You can bet on it that the culprit(s) will be America, and the West, with their perceived unbounded greed and purported lack of consideration for anybody else in the world.

What would the most probable weapon of attack be? Most likely it will be suicide bombings and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), not the kind that are deployed along roadsides in Iraq and Afghanistan, but the kind that are hidden in cars and trucks and detonated in garages or in front of selected targets. These weapons and tactics have proven themselves to be the best asymmetric tool of vengeance and terror, Except this time the “theatre of operations” will not be Afghanistan or Iraq; it will likely be Pakistan, China, India and quite likely Western Europe and even the U.S.

Add to this the possibility that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan will simmer down in the coming year or two; that will create a “surplus” of hundreds of IED experts from all over the middle east, unable to go back to their countries of origin, since they will be hunted by their security services, and unable to stay in their current battleground. Where will they go? My bet is that at least some of them will try to go West. The results will be tragic.

Sounds a little plausible? So what do we do about it? Don’t count on existing technologies to save the day. Most of the technologies developed so far to counter IEDs and suicide bombers will not deploy successfully in a Western urban environment. Cell phone jammers may be good in Baghdad; they will be no good in London or New York. Ditto for armed vehicles and many other detection, mitigation and protection technologies. And as far as counter strategy other than technology, that just does not exist now, so there is nothing to count on.

Policy makers are shaking in their well polished boots at the thought of having to deal with such a scenario, so many of them are still at the “It will not happen to us” and “We have plent of time” stage. That’s a great pity, because by the time they will start internalizing the threat, it will have been too late to formulate a coherent counter strategy, and it will be expensive and ineffectual improvisation time again.

Looking for a strictly technological solution is a waste of time and resources. Some technologies, such as “Backtracking” offer partial promise; they involve persistent high altitude vehicles, sophisticated payloads, and even more sophisticated intelligence infrastructure, but mostly, they require innovative thinking and a radical change in attitude and direction. This time around, it will pay to start working at the strategic level, trying to bring together technological and intelligence components, along with a serious attempt to understand, communicate and negotiate with our adversaries using a whole new toolbox of conflict management/resolution methodologies – the kind that actually works on the ground, not in the limited imagination of Western academics; the kind that understands that the concepts of honor, shame, and insult are meaningful and powerful and should be paid attention to, not just at the lip service level.

In short, it is time for unconventional thinking by unconventional people, looking for unconventional solutions, otherwise, the West and with it many developing countries might find themselves fighting an adversary that they do not understand, with the wrong tools, at a terrible cost to all.