Leadership, is when a person does their best to organize his community toward true commonly collective betterment. EG, one who acts for the community, for the benefit of the community.
An unscrupulous tyrant is one who pretends to be the former, but organizes the community for his own personal enrichment and empowerment.
The latter tend to have an alarming number of ways of supplanting and then silencing the former. See also, "Lenin vs Stalin" It's a tale as old as time.
I'm not making a comment on moral values, or organising communities, or swindling communities. Leadership is foremost the capability to get someone to do something they would otherwise not do. Leaders can use this capability to do whatever, whether it serve the good of those who follow them, or be entirely self-serving. Without this capability however, they are not even a leader.
Apologies in advance for being semantic :[
More on topic, to continue on my argumentation - I would just like to illustrate how you cannot strip terrorists of agency and ascribe whole-heartedly to a marxist view of terrorism as a class reaction to oppression, because it is an ideological one which has little bearing to reality. Jihadist terror is made whether it is under the auspices of governments which have influential or authorial Salafist clerics in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan e.t.c, whether it is made under the auspices of governments which are progressive and secularist in Sweden, Denmark, France, Britain e.t.c., while the obvious, obvious retort is that if terrorism is a call for attention against oppression - then why would white Americans become domestic terrorists in America?
They have their own various motivations, ambitions and ideology - they are more than reactions, and as such cannot be dissolved by simply altering government policy alone
What if the guards are terrorists, who guards the guardsman guarding guarsman guards?
Reminds me of when airlines fortified the cockpit so that terrorists couldn't get in, which allowed the Germanwings Flight 9525 pilot to commit suicide with everyone on board - even with a fire axe, no one could break in in time to wrest back control.
In regards to guards, the risk is low that they'd be murderous or join terrorists, provided they were disciplined and trained in accordance with high standards. The only issue is you can't post guards everywhere, as that costs lots of money :[
One of the ways terrorism can succeed as a strategy, is if it breaks the ability of a government to administrate its territory. In the absence of government administration, parallel institutions become the local area's only institution - with such a process happening in Palestine, Afghanistan and Syria, and one can certainly posit that were the US government to falter, various American militias would be poised to establish themselves as the new local authority