The Darkest Sides of Politics, II

State Terrorism, "Weapons of Mass Destruction," Religious Extremism, and Organized Crime

Jeffrey M. Bale

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317659433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines a wide array of phenomena that arguably constitute the most noxious, extreme, terrifying, murderous, secretive, authoritarian, and/or anti-democratic aspects of national and international politics. Scholars should not ignore these "dark sides" of politics, however unpleasant they may be, since they influence the world in a multitude of harmful ways.

The second volume in this two-volume collection focuses primarily on assorted religious extremists, including apocalyptic millenarian cults, Islamists, and jihadist terrorist networks, as well as CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear) terrorism and the supposedly new "nexus" between organized criminal and extremist groups employing terrorist operational techniques. A range of global case studies are included, most of which focus on the lesser known activities of certain religious extremist milieus.

This collection should prove to be essential reading for students and researchers interested in understanding seemingly arcane but nonetheless important dimensions of recent historical and contemporary politics.

1
Terrorists as State “Proxies”

Separating fact from fiction¹

[State-sponsored terrorism is] the most important component of the international terrorism problem.

– R. James Woolsey²

A terrorist organization requires more than money and guns … indispensable services [such as logistics and secure facilities] could only come from states.

– Michael A. Ledeen³

Today, state sponsorship of terrorism continues unabated.

– Bruce Hoffman⁴

In today’s world, the main threat to many states … no longer comes from other states. Instead, it comes from small [terrorist] groups and other organizations which are not states.

– Martin van Creveld⁵

Despite the Western view (and specifically the American view) that without state-sponsorship there will be no terrorism, reality proves otherwise.

– Ghada Hashem Talhami⁶

One of the most contentious and misunderstood issues surrounding modern terrorism is the extent to which diverse nation-states have been involved in using violence-prone extremist groups as surrogates or proxies. This theme was particularly salient during the Cold War, especially from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, when governments on either side of the Iron Curtain repeatedly accused each other of sponsoring or supporting terrorism and, indeed, often of secretly directing or controlling the actions of ostensibly autonomous terrorist groups. Despite the fact that these Cold War-era themes were disseminated primarily for partisan political, if not explicitly propagandistic, purposes and often rested on incomplete, unverifiable, contaminated, spurious, or even manufactured evidence, similar sorts of themes have not only survived the end of the Cold War but also have either been updated and reprised or assumed new, politically convenient guises in today’s post-Cold War, multipolar international environment.

The purpose of this chapter is threefold: to subject current efforts to claim that “rogue” regimes are the primary drivers of contemporary Islamist terrorism – and thus to portray Islamist terrorists as being effectively the “proxies” of states – to critical scrutiny; to highlight some illustrative aspects of the actual history of state interactions with terrorist groups; and finally to develop a new categorization scheme for better identifying and distinguishing between different levels of state involvement in terrorism.⁷ Although the aim herein is simply to present a scholarly analysis of what has always been a very fluid, dynamic, and complex pattern of state interaction with extremist groups, the conclusions have clear policy implications. After all, if Western democratic nations and their allies genuinely wish to lessen the present and future threat of jihadist (and other forms of) terrorism, they must understand the real sources of that threat and the actual objectives of the groups involved rather than uncritically adopting or cynically peddling a host of politically convenient but often spurious explanatory paradigms that are bound, if accepted at face value, to lead to the continued adoption of misguided and counterproductive policies.

Factors promoting state-centric perspectives on terrorism

Before turning to the main topic, however, it is necessary to discuss some factors that have led policymakers, scholars, and journalists to adopt a state-centric perspective regarding terrorism. Perhaps the most mundane but influential of these factors has to do with certain disciplinary biases associated with the field of political science, in particular those that have for decades underlain its international relations (IR) subfield. The primary premise in much of that subfield, especially its “realist” schools, is that the key actors in the international system are nation-states, a focus that was largely warranted in earlier decades given the overwhelming prominence, power, and influence of states in the international arena. Starting from such a state-centric premise, it is hardly surprising that so many IR scholars would emphasize the importance and preeminent role of nation-states, that they would focus on developing theoretical models and research methodologies designed to explain the behavior of states in the “anarchic” international system, and that they would consequently overlook or at least minimize the role of non-state actors, including extremist groups and terrorist organizations.⁸ There is no doubt that state-centric biases have persisted up to the present day, both within IR and in other subfields of political science, including comparative politics and even political theory. This is in spite of the fact that (1) the rise of the nation-state was a relatively recent phenomenon in historical terms; and (2) these long-standing disciplinary biases, theoretical preferences, and favored interpretations in the IR subfield have increasingly been subjected to criticism by both older and younger generations of scholars – especially those among the latter who are concerned, e.g., with the study of international organizations such as the United Nations, regional supra-state quasi-governments such as the European Union, nongovernmental lobbying organizations such as Amnesty International, or subnational groups of various types.

The practical result is that the overwhelming majority of scholars and academicians – apart from those in the interdisciplinary field of terrorism studies, historians of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary groups, security specialists who focus on covert operations or counterinsurgency, and some “social movement” theorists in sociology – have never seriously studied extremist milieus or terrorist organizations.⁹ For that very reason, they generally find it difficult, if not impossible, to understand the nature, ideologies, motivations, and objectives of such groups, to adopt appropriate methodologies for studying them, or to assess their importance and role in international affairs accurately, even within the narrower context of national or international security studies. Given these entrenched state-centric approaches and prejudices, it is hardly surprising that so many political scientists, and the pundits and policymakers they have influenced, have overemphasized the role that states have played in sponsoring terrorism.

A second, but far less excusable, factor that has contributed to the exaggeration of the role of states in fostering terrorism is the prevalence of political biases, whether pro-government or anti-establishment, in the terrorism field. Many terrorism specialists tend to be conservatives, Cold War liberals, or realists who have all too often adopted the self-serving perspectives of their own governments concerning the origin and nature of terrorism. As a result they have generally assumed a priori that Western governments are the innocent victims of terrorism and mistakenly portrayed modern terrorism as either an exclusively non-state, insurgent phenomenon or, paradoxically, as one that is really being “sponsored” behind the scenes by hostile enemy states, even when particular terrorist actions appear to have been carried out independently by small groups of political extremists.¹⁰ Alas, these distorted and rather contradictory perspectives can themselves be traced in large part to the pernicious cumulative impact of disinformation and propaganda disseminated by what some left-leaning analysts have labeled as the “terrorism industry,” a supposed coterie of co-opted terrorism experts and organizations that, consciously or not, have promoted the interests of hawkish factions in various Western intelligence agencies.¹¹ A good deal has already been written about some of these individuals and the network of research centers and funding institutions with which they have been associated, but the essential point is that they have collectively promoted one of the most politically influential interpretations of contemporary terrorism, one that depicts hostile enemy regimes – previously communist regimes but nowadays rogue Middle Eastern regimes – and their alleged non-state surrogates as the primary disseminators of terrorism.

In response to this one-sided and at times simplistic establishment literature on terrorism, an increasing number of left-wing or nonconformist academics and journalists have presented an alternative but no less Manichaean picture. In their view, right-wing governments and para-state apparatuses, with the backing of the United States and other Western nations, have been the main perpetrators of terrorism during the past sixty years.¹² Some have explicitly contrasted the “retail” terrorism carried out by insurgent left-wing groups with the “wholesale” terrorism carried out by authoritarian right-wing regimes.¹³ Although they justifiably call attention to the prevalence and importance of right-wing state and non-state terrorism, topics that were systematically neglected by most terrorism specialists during the Cold War, these anti-establishment analysts have in effect only succeeded in reproducing and inverting mainstream biases by portraying Western democracies and allied Third World regimes, rather than hostile states and non-state actors, as the principal terrorist villains.¹⁴

In other words, there has long been a perverse sort of symmetry observable in the extant literature on terrorism, a symmetry rooted in political partisanship. In pursuit of their respective political agendas, both the establishment and anti-establishment terrorism analysts have consistently displayed similar degrees of blindness, albeit in different eyes, by exaggerating the role of state sponsorship of terrorism. With rare exceptions, neither faction has made a serious effort to assess the evidence presented by the other. Their approach has been either to ignore one another entirely or to accuse each other of serving as conduits for intelligence-generated propaganda themes, which has unfortunately been true more often than one might think. They then stop, as if they had already proved their point, without actually examining and evaluating the substantive arguments or the evidence marshaled by their political opponents.¹⁵ Given this polemical context, it is hardly surprising that diverse parties with vested interests have uncritically accepted or cynically exploited so many problematic and misleading claims concerning state-sponsored terrorism or the alleged role of terrorists as proxies.

The mythology: autonomous terrorists as the simple agents of nation-states

This toxic combination of built-in disciplinary biases within academia and blatant partisanship in the subfield of terrorism studies (which has often reflected, if not actually emanated from, state-sponsored propaganda or disinformation initiatives) has served only to obfuscate the fluid, dynamic, and highly complex nature of the interaction between nation-states and terrorist groups in recent decades. Indeed, it has resulted in the establishment of a mythology based on the notion that non-state terrorist groups are essentially the simple agents – or at least the proxies (i.e., confederates who can be relied upon to act on the sponsors’ behalf) or surrogates (i.e., substitutes who can facilitate the maintenance of “plausible deniability”) – of states. In creating this mythology, its proponents have failed to make a crucial analytical distinction between autonomous extremist groups with their own ideological and operational agendas that may decide, usually temporarily and often reluctantly, to collaborate with states, and pseudo-independent terrorist organizations that are secretly created and controlled by states and therefore tend to function as their genuine agents. It is patently obvious that these two types of relationships are fundamentally different, especially regarding the amount of de facto control that a state will likely be able to exercise over a non-state group. Yet the conspiratorial alarmists have often sought, for no valid reason, to deny this distinction. For example, Roberta Goren has written that “the sponsor state must have certain political or strategic goals in mind which may or may not be identical to those of the terrorist group. In either case it can be said that the group is being used as a proxy” (italics added).¹⁶

One of the most straightforward formulations of the theory of state sponsorship of terrorism is provided in Ray S. Cline and Yonah Alexander’s book Terrorism as State-Sponsored Covert Warfare. Therein the term “terrorism” was defined – in contradistinction to the many official definitions that (no less erroneously) restrict the term to violence by non-state actors – as “the deliberate employment of violence or the threat of use of violence by sovereign states or sub-national groups encouraged or assisted by sovereign states to attain strategic and political objectives by acts in violation of law” (italics added).¹⁷ In short, for these authors and many others, terrorism was virtually inconceivable in the absence of state involvement on some level. However, a number of contrasting and competing versions of this mythology exist. Two of these have special salience because they seemed superficially plausible in a bipolar Cold War context in which both superpowers tended to view all localized conflicts as mere “fronts” in the larger global struggle against their main enemy.¹⁸

The most common mythology about terrorism during the Cold War era, at least in the West, is that the Soviet Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB: Committee for State Security) and its client secret services in Eastern Europe and the third world were secretly and systematically directing the activities of ostensibly autonomous left-wing and ethno-nationalist terrorist groups, not only in Europe but also in various other parts of the world.¹⁹ This theme was widely disseminated, especially during Ronald Reagan’s administration, even though it assumed diverse forms ranging from alarmist and conspiratorial versions to relatively restrained and nuanced versions. Inveterate Cold Warriors who supported the rollback rather than the containment of communism, neoconservatives, and other foreign policy hawks who were ideologically predisposed to see the sinister hidden hand of the Soviet Union and its allies behind virtually every threatening development in the world, including international terrorism, promoted most of the overly simplistic and conspiratorial versions of this theme.²⁰ A few emblematic quotes should suffice to illustrate this one-dimensional pe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Notes on the materials included in these volumes
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Terrorists as state “proxies”: separating fact from fiction
• 2 South Africa’s Project Coast: “Death Squads,” covert state-sponsored poisonings, and the dangers of CBW proliferation
• 3 “Privatizing” covert action: the case of the Unification Church
• 4 Apocalyptic millenarian groups: assessing the threat of biological terrorism
• 5 Jihadist ideology and strategy and the possible employment of WMD
• 6 Islamism and totalitarianism
• 7 Denying the link between Islamist ideology and jihadist terrorism: “political correctness” and the undermining of counterterrorism
• 8 “Nothing to do with Islam”? The terrorism and atrocities of the Islamic State are inspired and justified by its interpretations of Islam
• 9 Ahmad Rassam and the December 1999 “millennium plot”
• 10 Some problems with the notion of a “nexus” between terrorists and criminals
• Contents of volume I
• Index