Avoiding the Terrorist Trap

Why Respect for Human Rights is the Key to Defeating Terrorism

Tom Parker

• Publisher: WSPC (EUROPE)
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781783266562
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Terrorism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For more than 150 years, Nationalist, Populist, Marxist and Islamist terrorists have all been remarkably consistent and explicit about their aims: Provoke the State into over-reacting to the threat they pose, then take advantage of the divisions in society that result.

Faced with a major terrorist threat, States seem to reach instinctively for the most coercive tools in their arsenal and, in doing so, risk exacerbating the situation. This policy response seems to be driven in equal parts by a lack of understanding of the true nature of the threat, an exaggerated faith in the use of force, and a lack of faith that democratic values are sufficiently flexible to allow for an effective counter-terrorism response.

Drawing on a wealth of data from both historical and contemporary sources, Avoiding the Terrorist Trap addresses common misconceptions underpinning flawed counter-terrorist policies, identifies the core strategies that guide terrorist operations, consolidates the latest research on the underlying drivers of terrorist violence, and demonstrates how a comprehensive and coherent counter-terrorism strategy grounded in respect for human rights and the rule of law is the only truly effective approach to defeating terrorism.

Contents:

• Introduction
• A Not-So-Secret Formula:
  • Asymmetrical Warfare
  • Attrition
  • Propaganda by Deed
  • The Revolutionary Prototype
  • The Concept of Martyrdom
  • Provoking an Overreaction
  • Polarization
  • Building Legitimacy
  • The Centrality of Popular Support
  • Conclusion
• Social Science and Violent Extremism:
  • Empathy
  • Dehumanization
  • Backlash
  • Self-Actualization
  • Youth Bulge
  • Burn Out
  • Social Networks
  • Socialization
  • Framing Narratives
  • Poverty
  • Relative Deprivation and Social Exclusion
  • Political Opportunity
  • Government Aggression
  • Micromobilization
  • Precipitating Incidents
  • Conclusion
• Countering Terrorism Within a Human Rights Framework:
  • Terrorism and International Law
  • Defining Terrorism in International Law
  • Terrorism and International Human Rights Law
  • Non-State Actors and Human Rights
  • Putting Human Rights at the Heart of Counter-Terrorism
  • Community Engagement
  • Community-Oriented Policing
  • Early Intervention Programs
  • Proscribing Hate Speech and Extremist Organizations
  • Special Investigation Techniques
  • The Right to Privacy
  • Human Intelligence Operations
  • Surveillance Operations
  • Investigative Interviewing
  • The Presumption of Innocence
  • Human Rights Compliant interviews
  • Torture
  • Detention Regimes
  • The Right to Liberty and Due Process
  • The Humane Treatment of Prisoners
  • Prisoners of War and Enemy Combatants
  • Deradicalization Programs
  • Using Force
  • Maintaining Public Order
  • The Right to Life
  • Targeted Killing
  • Conclusion
• Final Thoughts

Readership: Policymakers and researchers developing counterterrorism tactics. Terrorism;Counter-terrorism;Counterterrorism;Human Rights0 Key Features:

• Examines 150 years of terrorist literature to identify terrorist tactics common across all major terrorist groups
• Explores the international legal regimes covering the major counter-terrorism tools from detention to the use of force and then compares the efficacy of these regimes to real world case studies
• Blends historical case studies, social science insights and international jurisprudence in a unique multidisciplinary approach to what works and what does not in counter-terrorism

Part I

A Not-So-Secret Formula

“By pen and gun

By word and bullet

By tongue and teeth.”¹

Terrorists and their supporters are surprisingly prolific authors. From the first, the theorists and practitioners of terrorism have been keen to explain their motivation for adopting such violent tactics. This need to explain has generated a rich universe of commentary: Public speeches by prominent users of political violence like the Irish revolutionary Michael Collins, Sendero Luminoso’s Abimael Guzmán, and Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah; Operational manuals like Johann Most’s The Science of Revolutionary Warfare, Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, or the Handbook for Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army; Theoretical treatises like Abu Mus’ab al-Suri’s The Call to Global Islamic Resistance, or Nikolai Morozov’s The Terrorist Struggle; Public communiqués such as those issued by the Rote Armee Fraktion, and the Weather Underground; Captured internal documents like Umkhonto we Sizwe’s Operation Mayibuye strategy paper, or the al-Qaeda hard drives recovered during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout; Periodicals like the nineteenth century anarchist paper L’En-dehors,² the underground newspaper of Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, Zutik,³ or al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s online English language magazine Inspire; Countless interviews given by key terrorist actors like the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale’s Saadi Yacef, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s Leila Khaled or Susanna Ronconi, a veteran of Italy’s Brigate Rosse and Prima Linea; Courtroom statements like those by the French anarchist Émile Henry, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at the Military Commission hearings in Guantanamo Bay, or November 17’s Dimitris Koufodinas; And, finally, detailed memoirs such as those written by Narodnaya Volya’s Vera Figner, Irgun’s Menachem Begin, EOKA’s Georgios Grivas, and Fateh’s Abu Iyad.

Michael Scheuer, the former Chief of the CIA’s Bin Laden Issue Station, observed in his insightful biography of Osama bin Laden that a good rule of thumb when analyzing an individual’s thoughts and actions is to balance the comments and insights made by observers, rivals and opponents, with the actual statements made by the individual him or herself.⁴ Clearly, such statements can frequently be disingenuous, deceitful and self-serving, as academic researchers Mary Beth Altier, John Horgan and Christian Thoroughgood have pointed out, but even in this regard, careful reading and analysis can provide important insights.⁵ In this spirit, our purpose in Part I will be to review a representative geographic and temporal sample of primary sources like those described above to identify the common strategies employed by terrorist groups, the core objectives sought through these strategies, and the thought processes underpinning their use. While the tools available to terrorist groups have changed considerably in the shift from the industrial to the information age, the strategic use of terrorism has actually evolved very little since terrorists first appeared on the world stage in the nineteenth century. As a result, a number of key strategic principles common to most, if not all, terrorist groups can be identified. Once we have a better understanding of what terrorists are trying to achieve, and how they trying to achieve it, we can have a much better sense of which counter-terrorism responses are best suited to thwarting their ambitions.

Asymmetrical Warfare

Former FBI Special Agent Mike German observed in Thinking Like a Terrorist that “a true picture of terrorists would show poorly selected, poorly trained, and poorly equipped soldiers in a poorly organized army.”⁶ This state of affairs is not lost on terrorists themselves. Terrorist groups over the past 150 years have all understood the unequal nature of the struggle on which they have embarked and as a result have embraced the comparative advantage of weakness. As Bruce Hoffman, one of the trailblazers of terrorism research, famously put it: “Terrorism is designed to create power where there is none or to consolidate power where there is very little.”⁷

No matter how sophisticated modern weapons systems get, conventional land-based warfare still adheres to the same basic tactical framework elucidated by Carl von Clausewitz in his classic work on military strategy, On War. Retain the initiative, seek to fix the enemy in a single point in space and time, then mass one’s forces — ideally in greater numbers than the enemy possesses — and maneuver these forces into a position where they can annihilate the enemy. This approach can be boiled down to the aphorism often attributed to the Confederate cavalry general and early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest, as “getting there firstest with the mostest”.

The strategic element is pretty conceptually straightforward too — identify a military objective for a campaign, identify the physical or military factors that have to be attained to achieve that objective, and then devise a plan of consecutive actions that lead inexorably to this conclusion. The plan formed, you advance to contact with the enemy, seek to gain the initiative, press your advantage by maintaining constant physical pressure on the enemy, and then maneuver or degrade the enemy to the point of defeat, thus bringing the campaign to a decisive conclusion. Modern militaries have a number of buzzwords for these concepts, such as locating the enemy’s “center of gravity”, maintaining “continuity of operations”, and reaching the “culminating point of victory”.⁸ The difference between tactics and strategy is, in essence, simply that between short- and long-term planning. Unsurprisingly, military strategy favors large, mobile, well-supplied armies equipped with the most advanced weaponry and it finds its ultimate expression in the Powell Doctrine of “overwhelming force”, named after the former US Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, and its popular attendant colloquialism “shock and awe”.

Traditional military doctrine is thus both well established and well known. The power differential between even the most modest military establishment and its terrorist counterpart is likely to be such that few terrorist groups will be foolish enough to engage the security forces of a state directly with any confidence of success. Karl Heinzen, a veteran of the failed popular uprisings that swept through western and central Europe in 1848, was one of the first of a new breed of political activist to suggest an alternative approach in his 1853 pamphlet Mord und Freiheit. Noting that it was their virtual monopoly of military power that kept despots in power, and inspired by the recent invention of nitroglycerin, Heinzen offered an alternative program of political action which amounted to terrorism in all but name: “The most important thing, above all, is to abrogate the preponderance of means of destruction that is and could not be at our disposal through the homeopathic application, as it were, of radical materials of destruction, whose provision or preparation is not too expensive and carries with it little danger of discovery.”⁹

The early populists, socialists, and anarchists learned the value of Heinzen’s insight with the defeat of the short-lived Paris Commune in 1871.¹⁰ The brutal suppression of the Communards at the hands of the French army cost at least ten thousand working class men and women their lives. For militants like Nikolai Morozov, this was a turning point in the history of revolutionary struggle, the dawn of a new era in which revolutionaries sought not to seize power in a single throw of the dice but to slowly chip away at the ruling establishment over time — a strategy Morozov labeled “terroristic revolution”.¹¹ As Morozov’s comrade Sergei Kravshinski (also known as Stepniak) put it in his memoirs, Underground Russia: “It being absolutely impossible to overcome [the government] by force … a flank movement was necessary.”¹² In The Terrorist Struggle, Morozov described how this “flank movement” would work in practice: “Justice is done here, but those who carry out it remain alive. They disappear without a trace and thus they are able to fight again against the enemy, to live and to work for the cause.”¹³ He added that adopting this strategic approach would neutralize the government’s superior force of arms: “The revolutionary group is not afraid of bayonets and the government’s army because it does not have to clash, in its struggle, with this blind and insensible force, which strikes down those whom it is ordered to strike. This force is only dreadful to the obvious enemy. Against the secret one it is completely useless.”¹⁴

The members of the Irish nationalist movement in the United States that made up the ranks of Clan na Gael included many veterans from both sides of the American Civil War. Like the popular movement in Europe, Irish nationalists had seen more conventional revolutionary action, like John O’Neill’s repeated cross-border Fenian incursions into Canada between 1866–1871 and the 1867 uprising organized in Ireland by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, fail, and so they developed a new concept of operations inspired by the emerging military practice of sending out skirmishers in advance of the main army to probe the enemy’s dispositions for weaknesses and to harass the enemy’s forces as they maneuvered. The use of skirmishers had attracted significant attention during the Civil War as a result of a series of influential articles written by General John Watts de Peyster under the title New American Tactics, which advocated considering the skirmish line as a distinct line of battle in its own right, and brought a new fluidity to the conventional battlefield and the practice of mobile warfare.¹⁵ In October 1874, the Brooklyn-based nationalist newspaper Irish World wrote that the cause of Irish Independence was in need of “some band of men to pioneer the way — sometimes to skirmish, sometimes to act as a forlorn hope, sometimes to give martyrs and confessors; always acting, always showing that we still have amongst us brave men ready to do or dare all that brave men ever did and dared for the salvation of a fallen land.”¹⁶ Within a year, the idea of sending “skirmishers” from a base of operations in America across the Atlantic to strike at the heart of the British Empire had begun to take shape, driven in large part by the editor of the Irish World, Patrick Ford.

Early proponents of the use of violence for political ends, like Mikhail Bakunin, Sergei Kravshinski and Michael Collins, also studied the lessons to be learned from impactful guerrilla campaigns, including Imam Shamil’s fierce resistance to Tsarist Russian expansion into the Caucasus, the rebellion of Dutch South African settlers (known as the Boers) against the British Empire, and the exploits of the Confederate “bush-whackers” like William Quantrill who engaged Unionist troops along the Missouri–Kansas border and helped inspire the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Series Editors
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Acknowledgments
• Contents
• Glossary of Organizations
• Introduction
• Part I A Not-So-Secret Formula
• Part II Social Science and Violent Extremism
• Part III Countering Terrorism Within a Human Rights Framework
• Final Thoughts
• Bibliography
• Index