Terrorizing Ourselves

Why U.S. Counterterrorism Policy is Failing and How to Fix It

Benjamin H. Friedman, Jim Harper, Christopher A. Preble

• Publisher: Cato Institute
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781935308317
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Terrorizing Ourselves dismantles much of the flawed thinking that dominates U.S. counterterrorism policy today and lays out alternative approaches informed by experience, deliberation, and the well-established norms of a free society. Leading experts in the field contributed to this important new book, which shows that politicians use fear for political purposes and spend vast sums of money on dubious security measures. These experts explore the nature of modern terrorism, explain and decry our panicked responses to it, and offer sober alternatives.

Beyond specific proposals for disrupting terror cells and improving homeland security efforts, Terrorizing Ourselves documents the many ways in which a climate of fear-mongering exacerbates the threat of terrorism. Terrorists, the authors note, get their name for a reason. Fear is their chief tactic. Political forces push U.S. policymakers to hype this fear, encouraging Americans to believe that terrorists are global super villains who can wreck American society unless we submit to their demands. This book shows that policies based on this fantasy are self-defeating and bring needless war, wasted wealth, and less freedom. The authors explore strategies to undermine support for these policies. They also sketch an alternative counterterrorism and homeland security strategy—one that makes us safer and plays to Americans' confidence rather than our fears.

1. Defeating al Qaeda

Audrey Kurth Cronin¹

More than 50 years ago, Basil Liddell Hart observed that the best way to formulate grand strategy is to look beyond the war to the nature of the peace. In the same way, the United States can look beyond the international terrorist campaign inspired by al Qaeda, beyond the short-term steps the West has embarked on to answer it, and toward a broader vision of how it will end.

The United States is learning from hard experience that understanding war termination is more important than dissecting the causes of war. Similarly, the processes by which terrorist groups end hold within them the best insights into which strategies succeed and which fail, and why. Thinking about the end is crucial, not just because it provides a new perspective on what al Qaeda is doing but because it provides a much-needed, fresh framework for what the United States and its allies are doing. Studying how terrorism ends is the best way to inoculate society against the strategies of terrorism, avoid a dysfunctional action/reaction dynamic, reframe counterterrorism, and know what it means to win.

Objective research demonstrates that many common assumptions about the endings of terrorist campaigns are wrong—or at least incomplete and misleading. An analytical framework for how terrorist campaigns have actually ended sets forth the core elements of a comprehensive counterstrategy for hastening the end of al Qaeda and its associates.

The Strategies of Terrorism

There are five classic strategies of terrorism, and understanding them is essential to devising an effective counterstrategy. These strategies—compellence, provocation, polarization, mobilization, and delegitimization—are not mutually exclusive. Three of them are strategies of leverage that seek to draw enough power from the nation-state to accomplish terrorists’ aims. What a government does in response is at the core of their efficacy. Unfortunately, democracies with a Western strategic tradition have particular difficulty understanding them, not to mention constructing an effective strategy to respond to them.

The first time-honored strategy is compellence. Compellence is the use of threats to influence another actor to stop doing an unwanted behavior or to start doing something a group wants it to do. Terrorism has been used in support of many causes, but targeted governments naturally tend to assume that the goal is compellence. Fitting terrorist group activity into the same mental framework used for state activity is instinctual, and sometimes it is appropriate. For example, terrorists may try to force states to withdraw from foreign commitments through a strategy of punishment and attrition, making the commitments so painful that the government will abandon them. And at times, this approach has appeared to work. Examples include the U.S. and French withdrawals from Lebanon in 1983, the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1993, and the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.

Some see terrorism in Iraq as a foreign-inspired plan to force the United States to depart both Iraq and the region.² Many also argue that terrorism succeeded in the 2004 bombings in Madrid, leading to a change of government in Spain and the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Of course, this is an oversimplification in each case. But terrorism is meant to oversimplify complex situations: the interpretation is persuasive to many audiences, not least those in the West, and that is a major reason why it is put forth on the Internet and over the airwaves.

Compellence targets a state’s policy and tries to change it. Given their 20th-century experience with air power and nuclear deterrence theory, Western policymakers and strategic thinkers find the logic comfortably familiar. As a result, they tend to focus exclusively on compellence, blinding themselves to the other typical strategies of terrorism and their practical implications. Groups that rely primarily on terrorism do not have the luxury of behaving as if they were small states. In formulating an effective counterstrategy, this state-centered mindset is not a promising way to end terrorism.

Instead, we must be cognizant of the other strategies that terrorists have used, especially strategies of leverage. Strategies of leverage go beyond the dichotomous, state-versus-interloper models that are so ingrained in the Western strategic mindset. The relevant actors instead are a kind of triad of state, opposing group, and audience. This turns traditional ends/ways/means formulations of strategy on their head: in terrorism, strategy is not just the linear application of means to ends because the reactions of other actors and audiences can be a group’s means, ends, or both.

Strategies of leverage come in three forms.³ The first, provocation, tries to force a state to react, to do something—not necessarily to undertake a specific policy but to engage in vigorous action that works against its interests. The Russian group Narodnaya Volya, for example, had provocation at the heart of its strategy, a firmly established purpose for terrorism during the 19th century. Narodnaya Volya attacked representatives of the czarist regime, seeking to provoke a brutal state response and inspire a peasant uprising. More recent cases of provocation include the Basque group ETA’s early strategy in Spain, the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s strategy in Nicaragua, and the FLN’s early strategy in Algeria.

Provocation is a difficult strategy to apply effectively, because terrorist groups often cause a state to behave in unforeseen or erratic ways. A terrorist attack may provoke a government into unwise or emotion-driven action that serves no one’s interests. This is what happened with the outbreak of World War I, for example. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was in itself an unimportant act. Assassinations had been endemic in the West for decades, including the assassinations of the Russian czar, the French president, the Spanish prime minister, the Italian king, and, in 1901, U.S. President McKinley, among others. But because of conditions in place at the time, not least Austro-Hungarian paranoia about Serbian nationalism, the act had huge implications. Gavril Princip, the consumptive 19-year-old who pulled the trigger, never meant to set off a world war and was utterly bewildered by the global conflagration that followed. Terrorism on its own is comparatively insignificant, but when it provokes a state, it can be a catalyst that indirectly kills millions. In this case, terrorist activity “ended” when it set off a cascade of state actions that resulted in a long and bloody war.

The next strategy of leverage is polarization, which tries to divide and delegitimize a government. Terrorist attacks affect the domestic politics of a state, often driving regimes sharply to the right and forcing populations to choose between the terrorist cause and brutal state repression. The goal is to pry divided populations further apart, fragmenting societies to the point at which it is impossible to maintain a moderate middle within a functioning state.

Polarization is a particularly attractive strategy against democracies, and it appeared regularly during the 20th century. But like the strategy of provocation, it often results in unintended consequences. Examples include the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the Provisional Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland. Terrorist activities in Germany, Austria, and Hungary after World War I were likewise meant to polarize, and they played a role in the onset of World War II. Anarchist activities in Spain played an important role in the coming of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), and a similar scenario occurred in Portugal in the 1920s, leading to an authoritarian regime.

But the archetypal example of a polarization strategy gone awry is the Tupamaros in Uruguay beginning in the early 1960s. At a time of economic stagnation in Uruguay, the ultraleftist Tupamaros drew inspiration from the Cuban revolution and set out to target symbols of the “imperialist regime,” such as businesses and airports. Uruguay had a robust party system; an educated, urban population; and an established democratic tradition. If democracy were an antidote to terrorism, Uruguay should have been immune. But the campaign polarized society, driving politics to the right. In response, the government suspended all constitutional rights and eventually turned to the army, which by 1972 had crushed the group. Even though terrorist attacks had ended, the Uruguayan army then carried out a coup, dissolved Parliament, and ruled the country for the next 12 years. In their short preeminence, the Tupamaros had executed one hostage and assassinated eight counterinsurgency personnel in a widespread campaign of kidnappings, robberies, and terrorist attacks. The right-wing authoritarian military regime that came to power from 1973 to 1985 killed thousands. A polarization strategy drove the government to destroy itself.

Another strategy of leverage is mobilization. Its purpose is to recruit and rally the masses to a cause. Terrorist attacks may be intended to inspire current and potential supporters of a group, again using the reaction of the state as a means, not an end. This is what the campaign of bombings and assassinations in the late 19th century did for the anarchist movement and the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre did for Palestinian nationalism.

When terrorist attacks are used to mobilize, they are not necessarily directed toward changing the behavior of a state at all. They aim instead to invigorate and energize potential recruits and to raise a group’s profile internationally, drawing resources, sympathizers, and allies.

A strategy of mobilization is well suited for the 21st century’s globalized international community, which allows movements to gather together on a scale and at a speed never before witnessed in history. It also gets to the heart of why so many see the struggle with al Qaeda as a multigenerational “long war.”

Mobilization has been al Qaeda’s most effective strategy thus far. A global environment of democratized communications has increased public access to information and has sharply reduced the cost. Through the growth in the frequency of messages and an exploitation of images, groups like al Qaeda can use “cybermobilization” to leverage the effects of terrorist attacks in an unprecedented way.⁴ If a group is truly successful in mobilizing large numbers, this strategy can prolong the fight and may enable the threat to transition to other forms, including insurgency and even conventional war.

These four strategies may be joined by a fifth, related strategy: to erode a state’s fundamental legitimacy at home and abroad in order to weaken and isolate it. Eroding legitimacy undermines a state’s other foreign and defense policy goals and may change the fabric of the state itself in ways that complicate its ability to develop alliances with other states or governments. France in the first Algerian war and Russia in the first Chechen war are two examples.⁵ In the Algerian war, prominent Americans, including then senator John F. Kennedy, supported the FLN, not least because the U.S.-allied French were allegedly engaging in torture. And the Russians’ initial response to the Chechens was considered so brutal that the international community soundly condemned it.⁶

Because relatively weak nonstate actors are the primary practitioners of terrorism, there are far more examples historically of strategies of leverage used by terrorist groups than any other type. A group may use a combination of several, or even all, of these strategies, but what a government does in response to terrorist attacks is what matters. Reactions by a state in the narrow framework of one strategy may be counterproductive with respect to the others.

Democracies are not well designed to handle strategies of leverage, especially in the short term. They tend to make decisions that directly or indirectly reflect their constituencies. At a time when the people are hurt, angered, and may be clamoring for justice or revenge, dispassionate strategic calculation can be virtually impossible, particularly if a state has little experience with terrorist attacks and thus no historical context within which to place them. The natural brakes on democratic war making are actually accelerators in counterterrorism. Counterterrorism strategies that are designed to prevent a state from being compelled by a group break down if the goal is to provoke a state, polarize a population, or mobilize a constituency. The result is that the campaign may be unwittingly extended.

But unless they grossly overreact and lose the support of their constituencies, democracies have a crucial advantage in dealing with strategies of leverage over the long term: the capacity to survive and learn from trial and error. Of course, even better is for states to skip the trial and error and gain from someone else’s experience of ending terror campaigns. That is what we will examine next.

Myths about the Ending of Terrorism

There are several common beliefs about how terrorist campaigns end that are either flatly wrong or at the very least based on incomplete and misleading information. In examining the closing phases of hundreds of groups as part of a multiyear research project undertaken for my book, How Terrorism Ends, I was surprised by what emerged.

The first myth is that dealing with the causes of terrorism will always lead to its end. There is in fact a weak relationship between beginnings and endings, and the historical record contradicts the belief that the causes of a terrorist campaign persist throughout its course and are crucial to ending it. Far more often, a group’s motivations to launch attacks evolve over time. The original objectives sought in a particular campaign are often only loosely related to why it stops. Terrorist campaigns rarely achieve their initial goals, and as the campaigns unfold, evolving dynamics within a group often eclipse external factors.

The launching of a campaign alters the strategic landscape in ways that are irreversible. Most often, the strategic or “outcome goals” (in economic parlance) that first spark a campaign, like popular suffrage, self-determination, minority rights, control over territory, a new system of government, and so forth, are overtaken by tactical “process goals,” such as revenge, retaliation, protecting sunk costs, consolidating a group, and the need to show strength.⁷ When a campaign is already under way, it becomes imperative for policymakers to be aware of the give-and-take, to recognize their part in it, adapt to it, and focus on a conclusion.

It is also crucial that they be aware of the audiences that are observing the campaign and how they are reacting to events, because they are often the key to the end. Understanding the causes of terrorism may be no more important to ending a campaign than understanding the causes of war is to ending it: naturally, the question has relevance, but it is overshadowed by the dynamic of the conflict itself as it unfolds.

A second myth is that terrorism is entirely situation dependent and can only be understood in the specific context of a particular group or cause. This one has pervaded the post-9/11 analysis of terrorism in the United States: when al Qaeda appeared, many analysts argued that it was unique. It is true that the particulars of a given campaign are vital, including its historical, political, social, and economic circumstances, not to mention its ideology, tactics, constituency, motivations, structure, and so forth. There is no shortcut for in-depth, even painstaking analysis of each organization. But terrorist campaigns often display a kind of contagion effect and are designed with the lessons of predecessors or contemporaries in mind.⁸

In al Qaeda’s case, for example, there are scores of cross-cultural, cross-regional “lessons learned” studies that have been done by members of the movement and then shared among the group. Those translated into English alone cover predecessors as disparate as the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigades, Harakat al-Dawla al-Islamiyya in Algeria and the Islamic Army of Aden Abyan in Yemen, the Janjaweed movement in Southern Sudan, and leftist movements in Central and South America. Especially in our globalized age, groups that use terrorism study and mimic other groups that use terrorism. Naturally, there are differences between them, but the value in comparatively studying groups consists in determining what the similarities and differences are.

A third myth is that today’s brand of terrorism is especially dangerous and more likely to persist in the present era than in earlier times. Some people argue that what’s important and impressive about terrorism is not that it ends but that it endures.⁹ Quite a few scholars in recent years have written about the effectiveness of terrorism in manipulating state action.¹⁰ But are groups that use terrorism really so successful?

In doing the research for my book, I studied hundreds of groups.¹¹ I was very careful about how groups were selected, omitting those that had only one attack or one small set of attacks, for example. Of the 475 (of 873) groups in the RAND/MIPT (Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism) database that deliberately targeted noncombatants and engaged in a series of attacks (thus a campaign), the average life span was only about eight years.¹² Estimates given by others are even shorter: long-standing terrorism expert David Rapoport argues that 90 percent last less than a year.¹³ And the degree to which they have failed to achieve their aims is even more remarkable: in my study, only a small minority, about 5 percent, have by their own standards succeeded in achieving their aims.

Terrorism is not a promising vocation: it always ends. The challenge is to determine how a given group is most likely to end, and then consciously push it in that direction by confounding its strategies as they unfold.

Patterns of Endings for Terrorist Groups

Seven general pathways out of terrorism emerge from careful study of the modern history of the phenomenon. As I have explained in other writings, these include the destruction of the leadership, failure to transition between generations, achievement of the cause, a process of negotiations, military or police repression, loss of popular support, and reorientation to other malignant behavior, such as criminality or conventional war.¹⁴

Of course, not all of these seven are equally probable for each group, and they are certainly not all applicable to al Qaeda. For example, it is obvious that al Qaeda will not end if Osama bin Laden is killed. While there are ample other reasons to target him, groups that hav...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• 1. Defeating al Qaeda
• 2. Terrorism as a Product of Choices and Perceptions
• 3. Are There “Root Causes” for Terrorist Support?: Revisiting the Debate on Poverty, Education, and Terrorism1
• 4. Don’t You Know There’s a War On?: Assessing the Military’s Role in Counterterrorism
• 5. Assessing Counterterrorism, Homeland Security, and Risk
• 6. Assessing Measures Designed to Protect the Homeland1
• 7. The Economics of Homeland Security
• 8. The Atomic Terrorist?1
• 9. Assessing the Threat of Bioterrorism
• 10. Managing Fear: The Politics of Homeland Security
• 11. The Impact of Fear on Public Thinking about Counterterrorism Policy: Implications for Communicators
• 12. Communicating about Threat: Toward a Resilient Response to Terrorism1
• Notes
• Contributors