Terror in Our Time

Ken Booth, Tim Dunne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136621123
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Terrorismus

Written by two leading scholars, this book is an accessible overview of the global political consequences of the 9/11 terror attacks.

The War on Terror has defined the first decade of this century. It has been marked by the deaths of thousands of people, political turmoil, massive destruction, and intense fear. Regardless of the name it goes under, the long war on terror will continue to affect lives across the world. Its catalyst, 9/11, did not have to happen, nor did the character of the responses. This book offers a set of novel interpretations of how we got here, where we are, and where we should be heading. It is organised around twelve penetrating and readable essays, full of novel interpretations and succinct summaries of complex ideas and events. In their examination of those aspects of global order touched by terror, the authors argue that the dangers of international terrorism are not overblown. Future 9/11s are possible: so is a more just and law-governed world. Terrorism cannot be disinvented, but with more intelligent policies than have been on show these past ten years, it can be overcome and made politically anachronistic.

This book will be essential reading for all students of terrorism studies, international security, war and conflict studies and IR in general, as well as of much interest to well-informed lay readers.

Part I

Terror and danger

1 9/11 + 10

Where do you stand in relation to the big questions about terrorism? Do you think there are circumstances in which a terrorist should be tortured, in the hope of extracting information that will save innocent lives? Should the civil rights of those in suspect communities be impinged in order to further the security of the majority? Are the risks of terrorism exaggerated? What are the fundamental causes of terrorism? What kind of world order produces this kind of violence? Who is winning the ‘War on Terror’ after ten years? Can terrorism ever be defeated? This book will help you to put these questions in context and, we hope, lead you towards wise answers.

What if?

Our subject matter, of course, is the real 9/11 + 10 (our shorthand for the decade since the terror attacks by 19 hijackers on the United States on September 11, 2001): but we also should consider a radically different, counterfactual 9/11 + 10.

Consider these alternative historical possibilities. What if ‘26/11’ as it is known in India – the terror attacks in Mumbai in 2008 that killed 126 people – had taken place during the six-month standoff between India and Pakistan during the first half of 2002, when up to 800,000 troops were massed on both sides of the Kashmir border? Might the terror attacks have been enough to tip these two adversaries into full-scale (and possibly nuclear) war? What would the Russian government have done if all 646 hostages had been killed after the 57-hour siege in a Moscow theatre in October 2002 (116 were killed in a rescue mission that was designed to save them)? What would have been the reaction if Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had succeeded in exploding his terrorist device on the Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit in December 2009, and 289 passengers had been killed? Even this terrible total would have been exceeded had an earlier plot not been thwarted, this time to blow up multiple airliners over the Atlantic: had this occurred, collecting evidence and assigning blame would have been extraordinarily difficult with wreckage scattered over thousands of miles of ocean – much of it lost forever. In 2010 in Times Square, New York, car bombs left at the heart of busy tourist areas were detected without causing harm: what if they had gone off? The most recent terrorist ‘spectacular’ (known) to have been averted, in December 2010, was the result of the discovery of printer cartridges converted into small high-explosive devices and smuggled in two cargo flights originating in Yemen and bound for Chicago; detonation over the eastern seaboard of the United States was planned, thereby hoping for heavy casualties on the ground.

If these plots had been successful, this book would have been very different. We would all be feeling radically different about terrorism in our time – except al-Qaeda and its sympathisers, for whom these acts of brutality would have represented successes. The anxiety that took hold in America after 9/11 would have been shared by more people, in more places.

Sheer good luck is one major reason why we are able to discuss the historical 9/11 + 10 as opposed to a potential decade of terrorist spectaculars and the spread of the sort of desolation in their aftermath shown on the book's front cover. When the IRA failed to kill the British prime minister in the 1984 Brighton bombing, their communiqué summed up the stark reality that in the long run luck is not on the side of targets of terrorism: ‘Today we were unlucky. But remember: we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always’.¹

Good fortune played a part in the discovery of some of these plots. Another reason why it turned out differently has been the counter-terrorism efforts of the leading Western states, and the fact that ordinary citizens – terror targets – have dutifully waited in long queues, removed items of clothing, unpacked laptops, and complied with restrictive conditions for the greater good.

Some counter-terrorism measures have come in for a great deal of criticism. One such is the allegation of ‘profiling’, where behaviour is automatically but erroneously inferred from racial and ethnic characteristics, or displays of religious identity. On this and in other things, there has been a great deal to question, and we do not hesitate to do so in the chapters that follow, but at the outset we want to acknowledge the weighty responsibility and the intense pressure faced by governments and their agencies when faced by an international threat of the sort posed by al-Qaeda.

Moments after the 9/11 attacks, those responsible for counter-terrorism in Western countries were under the most intense pressure from their leaders and publics to come up with speedy answers to urgent and vexing questions. What other spectacular incidents were being planned, where, and when? (Note that the ‘when?’ meant that intelligence services were under pressure to provide knowledge immediately, not after leisurely research, as the next attack might be days away.) What might the next attacks be like – was there no limit to the casualties today's terrorists would inflict? What extra resources could be committed to counter-terrorism, to save civilian lives (and political careers)?

As you consider the possibility that a number of terror incidents in the recent past might have exceeded 9/11 in their lethality, and might yet in the future, bear in mind that respected RAND senior advisor Brian Jenkins has characterised al-Qaeda as the world's first terrorist nuclear power without having the capability. There can be little doubt that al-Qaeda would acquire a nuclear capability if it could (and chemical and biological weapons too). Even if it fails in its quest for them, it nevertheless provokes fearful respect for its ambitions, and its potential targets can never be completely sure that it has failed; and they know that if its quest is successful its agents have to be lucky once (more).

Ten years that shook the world

9/11 + 10 could have been catastrophically worse than it has been, but it has been bad enough. The publicly available data throws up some interesting questions. Did you know that since 9/11 the number of world-wide fatalities from non-state terrorism in an eight-year period is comparable with the deaths of US soldiers in Vietnam (over a longer duration)? Why are state terror deaths declining sharply year-on-year when non-state terror deaths have risen sharply in the aftermath of 9/11, peaking in 2007? How is it that the magnitude of 9/11 is frequently normalised (especially by the ‘left’) by comparing the risk of death-by-traffic incidents as opposed to death by terror attack? Such comparisons badly overlook the fact that the 2,949 who died on 9/11 were victims of politics not poor driving skills or mechanical error. In other words, they were deaths resulting not from ‘accidents’ but from the violent struggle over meaning between jihadist extremists and their enemies in the West.

Key information about terrorist attacks since 9/11 is included as an Appendix. The information there supplements facts about 9/11 with data on subsequent mass atrocity terrorist incidents (to the end of 2008). The Appendix highlights every attack in which more than 50 people lost their lives: by this measure, there were 110 mass-casualty attacks, killing 13,557 and injuring 140,351. The fatality figure for all terrorist incidents (without the 50 threshold) in the eight years following 2001 is 54,569; this figure is still likely to understate the lethality of terrorism since what has come to be called microterrorism incidents have probably been under-reported. But fatalities and injuries are only the start; grief and dread cascade throughout societies as trust networks come under stress and strain.

Our conception of terrorism in this book is broad, and includes states among the potential perpetrators. We will argue that it is illogical and unjustifiable to exclude states and their agents from the language of terror, terrorism, and terrorist – words relating to patterns of violence that seek to leverage fear beyond those that are directly targeted. Yet this book is not about states as terrorists. This is partly because state terror – while certainly in evidence in the past decade – has declined markedly (see Table A.2 and Figure A.1 in the Appendix) though not necessarily permanently; also, where there have been examples of state terror (in Burma, the Congo, and Sri Lanka, for example) these have not had systemic effects, as has been the case with al-Qaeda and its enemies.

Even when they are not the focus of attention, state power and purpose remain prominent. While our focus in Terror in Our Time is centrally about al-Qaeda's challenge, it is necessarily about the mobilisation of massive military power and state resources against them. Once organised violence becomes a significant tool of choice to fight terrorists there is an ever-present possibility of mirroring behaviour, as people get caught up in a cycle of terrorism and counter-terrorism.

We show in the book that 9/11 has had consequences that have radiated far beyond the target of the original attack. International alliances have been refashioned, with new strategic allies coming together in South Asia and the Arab Middle East. The Libyan leadership quickly realised the opportunity 9/11 presented for gaining some international respectability, by attempting to reconstitute its international identity from Western pariah to ally. Counter-terrorism policies in scores of countries beyond the central players in this book – notably Russia, China, Indonesia, and Malaysia – were used to rebalance political power in favour of state authorities and away from individual citizens and their activities in civil society. And Israeli authorities saw the enhanced political opportunity to use the label ‘terrorists’ against Palestinian groups it opposed. Although the term War on Terror² is always identified with the US president, George W. Bush, it was the prime minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, who is credited with the first use of the phrase. In a televised speech on September 11 he said, in ways that immediately opened up political possibilities for his own country,

The war on terror is an international war waged by a coalition of the free world against the forces of terror and all those who think they can threaten freedom. It is a war between good and evil, between the human and the bloodthirsty.³

Similarly, the phrase ‘global war on terror’ did not emerge from the White House, but was first used by UK prime minister Tony Blair on 17 September 2001, in an attempt to build an anti-terror coalition and cement his special relationship with Washington.⁴

In more profound ways than such impacts on individual state policies, these ten years shook world order. Ideas about the conduct of war were altered, untested strategies of counter-terrorism were implemented, and legal questions about how to deal with countries that have radical jihadist extremists on their soil remain unanswered. Sovereign states generally saw a hardening of their boundaries – through tighter border controls – rather than the loosening that advocates of globalisation anticipated. Executive authority was invoked by prime ministers and presidents in the name of securing the state. The most egregious example of this was the challenge mounted by the United States to the international Convention against Torture. Leaked government documents give evidence that US decision-makers no longer deemed themselves to be accountable to the ‘court of world opinion’, the phrase John F. Kennedy's ambassador to the United Nations used at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Advocates of universal human rights in the West had become used to defending themselves against the charge of ‘Eurocentrism’ thrown at them by former colonised countries; they probably never imagined, in the early years of the new millennium, that the land of Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King would be leading other liberal states down the path of torture, rendition, and detention without trial.

Other dimensions of world order were reconfigured. The decade saw the further articulation of the neoconservative vision of America's destiny to lead the world through the active and forceful promotion of democracy. At the same time, there was a weakening of American hegemony as the War on Terror generated enemies abroad, sceptics at home, and growing doubters among traditional allies. After spending something like three trillion dollars, and failing to win the peace following two wars, the United States looks a diminished world power as the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaches. Going abroad ‘in search of monsters to destroy’, as John Adams warned against in 1821, has tarnished America's reputation. He went on to say, in one of the great speeches on foreign policy, ‘Her glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind.’

There have been several surprises, too, regarding the fortunes of al-Qaeda since 9/11. The prolonged failure of the United States to kill or capture Usama bin Laden was one of the biggest: how could the world's major terrorist escape for so long? Al-Qaeda also failed to carry out another spectacular exceeding 9/11 in lethality – something many expected and feared as images of the Twin Towers buckling and collapsing were replayed time and again in the days and weeks following the attack. Al-Qaeda also failed to enhance its legitimacy in the Muslim world, and indeed it went into marked decline in the second half of the decade, paralleling the decline in US hegemonial authority, but more so. This was manifest in its increasing dependence on local microterrorist activity, where it is hoped that small amounts of resource (in money and lives) will bring high returns in terror.

This has been a decade of intensive change in world order, and terror and counter-terror have been a significant part of the story. The decade opened with the attacks on 9/11 and closed with the killing of Usama Bin Laden and whatever revenge and other symbolic terrorist actions follow in its wake. The momentum and meaning of this distinctive decade will continue for many years to come. ‘A decade without a name’ is how the public intellectual Timothy Garton Ash described these years, but where was he? This was the age of al-Qaeda and a time of terror for the tens of thousands of victims of its violence, the hundreds of thousands more who were killed by counter-terrorism, and the countless millions across the world caught up in one way or another by the changes resulting from terror in our time. This was 9/11 + 10.

Moral choices and doing better

We do not promise readers an answer to questions such as ‘Where will it all end?’ – though we do offer some pointers. We also offer pointers to thinking about what should have been done, and what should be done. In so doing, we emphasise that social behaviour – what defines the limits and possibilities of human existence – cannot be understood if politics and ethics are separated.

We consider 9/11 + 10 with hindsight, but we hope not with the 20 : 20 hindsight which is easily ridiculed. The pathologies of world order that we point to – outlined below – were evident to some immediately after 9/11. Numerous critics of how leading Western states responded to international terrorism were convinced from the outset that there were alternative paths to those chosen by world leaders: lawyers emphasised the rule of law, citizens protested against the rush to war with Iraq, realists complained about the absence of cool, strategic logic in White House grand strategy, historians warned of imperial blowback, and journalists pointed to the propaganda own-goals Western states were scoring with every corroborated story or photograph of torture committed by coalition troops or military police. We believe, therefore, that it is possible to do better in the future, not only because we can learn from the mistakes of the recent past, but because we can also recover its good ideas. If we went back to the future we could do it all again with the political, social, and strategic intuitions that many had in their minds at the time.

While individual chapters below focus on specific facets of 9/11 + 10 (‘Wars’ and ‘Democracy’ for example) the notion of world order is a persistent theme. By world order we mean the interplay of dominant ideas, patterns of violence, disparities of local and global power, and institutional adaptation. The book explores certain pathologies of contemporary world order (such as hypocrisy and cultural insensitivity) while pointing to values (less militarised, more democratic), leading to a world order in which terrorism will be less likely to be a choice for groups and individuals. This would still not be a risk-free world, however, for the possibility of new forms of oppression might provoke new forms of violence.

The book is divided into two parts. This part (‘Terror and danger’) begins by showing terrorism to be a strategy deployed by different actors as a brutal form of communication. When a terrorist act takes place, the reaction of the targeted group can be more destructive than the original attack – an impact the terrorist group concerned is likely to consider a success. The ‘inhumanity’ often associated with terrorism, we believe, is inherently human, and as such is open to rational analysis; and it is the task of scholarship in these hardest of cases to try to reach the human person behind the mask labelled ‘terrorist’. From here, subsequent chapters examine the dangers of terrorism and the meaning of concepts such as ‘fundamentalism’ and ‘religious terrorism’; the growth and characteristics of al-Qaeda and its establishmen...