A Critical Theory of Counterterrorism

Ontology, Epistemology and Normativity

Sondre Lindahl

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367480455
• eBook ISBN: 9781351121255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers a theory and model of counterterrorism based on emancipation and non-violence.

Critical Terrorism Studies (CTS) scholars have produced wide-ranging and rich critiques of terrorism-related research, as well as state counterterrorism policies and practices. This work aims to fill in a gap in the current literature by constructing an original and specifically CTS model of counterterrorism. The model outlines the basic assumptions, priorities, principles, strategies and tactics, measures and evaluation of counterterrorism. It challenges prevalent models of counterterrorism through a radical rethinking of the ontology, epistemology and the agenda of counterterrorism. The model aims to prevent future acts of terrorism by (1) re-conceptualising how we study and understand terrorism, and; (2) suggesting that our efforts to counter and prevent terrorism must commensurate with the goals we want to achieve. Essentially, this involves a commitment to emancipation, and a rejection of violence as a tool. The second part of the book is a case study of Norwegian counterterrorism which shows how the theory and model developed in the book can be used. This is the first substantial analysis of Norwegian counterterrorism in almost ten years, and produces encouraging findings which support the potential for non-violent solutions to terrorism.

This book will be of particular interest to students of terrorism and counterterrorism, critical security studies, and international relations in general.

1 The Global War on Terror

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is still the most extensive counterterrorism campaign in history, and some might argue it is a counterterrorism paradigm. It commands vast resources, and it has had a profound influence on people’s lives since 2001. The most conspicuous aspects of the GWOT are the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, institutionalised torture and abuse in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the media’s insatiable appetite for all things related to ISIS, and the Snowden revelations of widespread and pervasive government surveillance and bulk data collection. In other words, the 17 years that have passed since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 have been saturated with violence and counter-violence, and the trend is continuing. Jackson has described the war on terrorism as ‘simultaneously a set of actual practices ‒ wars, covert operations, agencies and institutions – and an accompanying series of assumptions, beliefs, justifications and narratives – it is an entire language or discourse’ (Jackson 2005, 8). In other words:

Countering terrorism is intimately related to understanding the nature of the terrorist phenomenon and how it fits into the wider security environment. How we conceive of terrorism determines to a great extent how we go about countering it and what resources – money, manpower, institutional framework time horizon – we devote to the effort.

(Crelinsten 2009, 39)

This quote from Crelinsten illustrates the relationship between the language and practice of counterterrorism, and this chapter begins by describing how the threat of terrorism was constructed as an existential evil that wiped the slate clean of all that we thought we knew about terrorism. It marked a ‘ground zero’ for terrorism research, and turned it into a growth industry. While it is, by no means, meant to be an exhaustive account of the discourse on terrorism, it adds important context to the second aspect of this chapter, which looks at the empirical consequences of the GWOT. Now, almost 17 years after the 9/11 attacks, we are in a position where we can really observe and evaluate the consequences of the GWOT. This discussion is particularly important because it delineates vast avoidable human suffering due to the war on terrorism, and thus why a Critical theory of counterterrorism is needed.

In this chapter, I establish the foundation for the overall study by first providing a brief overview of the primary narratives in the construction of terrorism as a threat. Second, these narratives are connected with an empirical evaluation of the consequences of the war on terrorism – the number of civilian casualties, drone killings, torture, political instability, mass-surveillance – which all constitute avoidable human suffering. This examination is crucial to later discussions on normativity, and from where the theory obtains the necessary justificatory force to assert its normative claim. Thus, the primary aim of this chapter is to delineate the existence of avoidable human suffering as a consequence of violent counterterrorism, why it is bad, and why it necessitates counter-action.

Constructing the threat

Since the 9/11 attacks in 2001 terrorism has been near the top of the list of security threats against Western countries. Trillions of dollars have been spent on various measures to counter terrorism, including a large-scale drone program, extensive surveillance and data gathering of millions of people, and military invasions of two countries. These efforts are often referred to as the GWOT, and the attention has largely been on the Middle East. However, over the last few years the world has seen ISIS become a major regional player in Syria and Iraq, a rise in the number of terrorist attacks on European soil, and the election of President Trump in the USA who campaigned hard on the need to protect against extreme Islamism and terrorism. There is little to indicate that, whatever efforts the West have applied since 2001 to countering terrorism, they have succeeded in countering or reducing the threat of terrorism. The GWOT has arguably been incredibly violent, replete with nefarious practices, and largely counterproductive. In his extensive study of counterterrorism since 2001, Gomis concludes that

there is extensive evidence that the war on terror has often led to oversimplifications of challenges that were in fact much more complex and multifaceted. This flawed analysis has repeatedly given way to inadequate, disproportionate, and ineffective policies, often supporting dictatorial and repressive regimes in the name of countering international terrorism.

(Gomis 2015, 116)

The 9/11 attacks were quickly construed by the Bush administration as an act of war, an extraordinary attack on civilisation itself. It was understood as something ‘deeply evil’, which diabolical, a-political Islamists did in order to bring down Western civilization (Johnson 2003, 225; Kegley 2003, 4). The Bush administration was not alone in framing terrorism this way. The influential magazine, The Economist, declared that:

the appalling atrocities of September 11th – acts that must be seen as a declaration of war not just on America but on all civilised people – were crueller in conception and even more shocking than what happened in Hawaii. […] This week has changed America, and with it the world, once again.

(The Economist 2001)

Bruce Hoffman, one of the most prominent terrorism experts, claimed that, ‘on 9/11, of course, Bin Laden wiped the slate clean of the conventional wisdom on terrorists and terrorism, and, by doing so, ushered in a new era of conflict – as well as a new discourse about it’ (Hoffman 2004, xvii). While this is certainly true to some extent, US officials, scholars and the media drew on past events to help explain the attacks. In his analysis Writing the War on Terror Jackson identified four key narratives that were employed to explain the attacks: World War II and the attack on Pearl Harbor, The Cold War, civilisation versus barbarism, and globalisation (Jackson 2005, 40–58). Importantly, these meta-narratives established an understanding of the attacks as part of a long and heroic struggle by the US against totalitarian and murderous ideologies. Terrorists were ‘endlessly demonised and vilified as being evil, barbaric and inhuman’, and in direct opposition to narratives of Americans as generous, kind, resourceful and brave (ibid., 59).

Ignatieff, a well-known international relations scholar, asserted that ‘what we are up against is apocalyptic nihilism. The nihilism of their means – the indifference to human costs – take their actions not only out of the realm of politics, but even out of the realm of war itself’ (Ignatieff 2001). Other scholars saw the 9/11 attacks as a new form of terrorism, namely, ‘superterrorism’ (Freedman 2002, 1; Gearson 2002, 7). As such, 9/11 was narrated as an attack on the US because of its values and success, by ruthless and sophisticated terrorists, hell-bent on causing maximum casualties and chaos. Government officials, like former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, claimed that it was only a question of when, not if, terrorists would utilise weapons of mass destruction (Intriligator and Toukan 2006, 75). Indeed, the ultimate representation of superterrorism, or apocalyptic nihilism, is the use of WMDs. Graham Allison’s assessment of the threat of WMD-terrorism was fairly straightforward:

So the question is, is this [WMD-terrorism] possible? So the questions ensue. One, did the Soviet Union have 10-kiloton weapons? Answer: Yes. Are all these weapons accounted for? Answer: No. Could al Qaeda have acquired one of these weapons? Answer: Yes. Could al Qaeda have brought such a weapon to New York City without our otherwise knowing about it? Answer: Yes.

(Allison 2004)

Allison was not alone in this creative and extreme extrapolation. For example, in 2008 Defense Secretary Robert Gates informed a congressional committee that the thought of a terrorist ending up with a WMD kept every senior government leader awake at night (Mueller and Stewart 2016, 29). In the case of former head of CIA’s counterterrorism centre, Cofer Black, the alarm and fear of another terrorist attack made him, according to his wife, ‘turn of the lights and sit in the dark with a drink and a cigar, sunk in an apocalyptic gloom’ (Mayer 2008, 179–180). Fortunately, the world has not yet experienced any form of WMD-terrorism, in part because it is very expensive, and difficult to maintain and use. Furthermore, if the seizure of an Al-Qaeda computer in Afghanistan in 2001 is any indication of how tempting WMDs are to a terrorist organisation, the group’s budget for research on WMDs was between $2,000 and $4,000 (Mueller 2011). That was at the apex of Al-Qaeda’s time as the number one security threat in the world. Since then, an assessment of information that was obtained from bin Laden’s computers in the raid that killed him in 2011 revealed that the group was primarily engaged in dodging airstrikes, complaining about the lack of resources, and apparently watching a fair bit of pornography.

The example of WMD-terrorism illustrates what Mueller and Stewart identify as an ‘institutional paranoia’ in counterterrorism (Mueller and Stewart 2016). This paranoia, however, was not limited to ‘superterrorism’. In 2002, the Department of Homeland Security welcomed every visitor to its website with a statement that read: ‘Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon’ (Mueller 2006), and in his State of the Union speech in 2002, President Bush declared that

[t]housands of dangerous killers, schooled in the methods of murder, often supported by outlaw regimes, are now spread throughout the world like ticking time bombs, set to go off without warning […]. Thanks to the work of our law enforcement officials and coalition partners, hundreds of terrorists have been arrested. Yet, tens of thousands of trained terrorists are still at large. These enemies view the entire world as a battlefield, and we must pursue them wherever they are.

(Bush 2002)

The post-9/11 understanding of terrorism, therefore, was shaped by the view that it represented an unprecedented evil that could only be eradicated with force. As such, the exceptional was adopted as a norm (Wolfendale 2016). Former general and National Security Advisor to President Trump, Michael Flynn, argued in 2015 that the terrorist enemy was ‘committed to the destruction of freedom and the American way of life’ and aiming at ‘world domination, achieved through violence and bloodshed’ (Dozier 2015). Former Homeland Security Secretary, Michael Chertoff, proclaimed the struggle against terrorism to be ‘a significant existential’ one (Harris and Taylor 2008), in contrast to the various insignificant existential struggles that the US has faced. As such, Zulaika’s description of counterterrorism as a summary seems apt:

It takes for granted that terrorist violence is unlike any other; that the immorality of its actions is an unredeemable atrocity; that it is a form of madness with no possible political legitimacy; that its methods defy rules and order; that the only civilized responses to such aberration are total annihilation (war without quarter) and taboo.

(Zulaika 2009, 30)

In essence, 9/11 was seen to represent ‘new’ terrorism: ‘it changed everything’, as it were (Townshend 2011, 122). The ‘new’ terrorism was marked by its religious and apocalyptic nature, and the view that this form of terrorism not only had lethality as its ultimate goal, but it also eschewed political goals (Stohl 2012, 36). Indeed, the ‘new’ terrorism was perceived to be different from ‘old’ terrorism, mostly because ‘new’ terrorists sought maximum destruction through extreme violence, as opposed to ‘old’ terrorists, or the ‘mainstream’ terrorists, who were more restrained in their efforts to reach a political goal (Chandler and Gunaratna 2007; Davis and Jenkins 2002; Ganor 2012; Jenkins 2006b). Brian Jenkins, who famously stated in the 1970s that ‘terrorists want a lot of people watching not a lot of people dead’ (Jenkins 1974, 4) revised his statement in 2006, and wrote:

They [‘old’ terrorists] were limited not only by access to weapons but by self-constraint. Mayhem as such was seldom an objective. Terrorists had a sense of morality, a self-image, operational codes, and practical concerns – they wanted to maintain group cohesion, avoid alienating perceived constituents, and avoid provoking public outrage, which could lead to crackdowns. But these constraints gave way to large-scale indiscriminate violence as terrorists engaged in protracted, brutal conflicts; as the more squeamish dropped out; as terrorism became commonplace and the need for headlines demanded higher body counts; and as ethnic hatred and religious fanaticism replaced political agendas.

(Jenkins 2006b, 118)

The good old terrorists had morality, whereas the ‘new’ terrorists represented an apolitical form of violence. Thus, while US officials drew on specific meta-narratives to explain the attacks, and to justify a militarised response, Hoffman was certainly right that bin Laden wiped the slate clean of the conventional wisdom on terrorism. Both experts and academia scrambled to produce knowledge on terrorism and how to counter it. This rather frantic situation was well documented by Silke, who found that by the mid-2000s, a new book on terrorism in English was published approximately every six hours (Silke 2009). The only problem was that almost all of this literature were thought-pieces, and only a handful could be considered to be methodologically rigorous (Lum, Kennedy, and Sherley 2006, 3). As such, claims about the nihilistic and diabolical nature of the new ‘superterrorists’ were not grounded in methodologically sound research. Zulaika describes the same crisis of knowledge, which begins ‘with the placement of the entire phenomenon in a context of taboo and the wilful ignorance of the political subjectivities of the terrorists’ (Zulaika 2009, 2). One consequence of this crisis is that the counterterrorist becomes preoccupied with reacting against an utterly dangerous and sinister actor that she does not know. In such a situation, what could happen weighs as much, if not more, than what is actually the case.

In this setting, governments are inclined to focus on worst-case scenarios, and may very well find themselves looking for, and preparing for, the ‘unknown unknowns’. Rumsfeld famously encapsulated this thinking in a NATO press conference in 2002, when he was asked to follow up on a notion that the real situation, regarding Saddam Hussein and WMDs, is worse than what is generally understood. Rumsfeld replied that in his experience over the years he had come to realise that there are no ‘knowns’, but insisted that there are:

things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know […] and each year we discover more and more of those unknowns.

Rumsfeld continued:

the absenc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: terrorism, counterterrorism and war on terror
• 1 The Global War on Terror
• 2 Ontology, epistemology and the ideal-type
• 3 Normativity
• 4 Violence
• 5 A CTS model
• 6 A genealogy of Norwegian counterterrorism
• 7 An analysis of Norwegian counterterrorism
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix: primary policy documents analysed
• Index