Ending Terrorism

Lessons for defeating al-Qaeda

Audrey Kurth Cronin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135867638
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Like all other terrorist movements, al-Qaeda will end. While it has traits that exploit and reflect the current international context, it is not utterly without precedent: some aspects of al-Qaeda are unusual, but many are not. Terrorist groups end according to recognisable patterns that have persisted for centuries, and they reflect, among other factors, the counter-terrorist policies taken against them. It makes sense to formulate those policies with a specific image of an end in mind.

Understanding how terrorism ends is the best way to avoid being manipulated by the tactic. There is vast historical experience with the decline and ending of terrorist campaigns, yet few policymakers are familiar with it. This paper first explains five typical strategies of terrorism and why Western thinkers fail to grasp them. It then describes historical patterns in ending terrorism to suggest how insights from that history can lay a foundation for more effective counter-strategies. Finally, it extracts policy prescriptions specifically relevant to ending the campaign of al-Qaeda and its associates, moving towards a post-al-Qaeda world.

Chapter One

The Strategies of Terrorism

Terrorism’s strategic logic is to draw enough power from the nation-state so as to enable a weaker, non-state actor to accomplish its political aim. Yet that is not to say that state governments necessarily determine the success or failure of terrorist campaigns. There are a number of direct and indirect ways for non-state actors to derive power from the state, and some of them do not directly engage with the government at all. In fact, study of the closing phases of terrorist groups – non-state entities that rely on violence against non-combatants – demonstrates that, in some circumstances, factors internal to these groups are most salient.¹ Policymakers often try to understand what ‘works’ against terrorism by studying the counter-terrorist campaigns of states, but this is only part of the equation. The history of terrorism reveals that the reasons for a group’s demise may have little to do with the measures taken against it.

The strategies of terrorism are best approached by examining the intersection between objective, target and audience, taking care not to omit any of these factors. More specifically, the three dimensions of study comprise the overall political aims of a group, the nature of the direct state target of that group’s attacks and the character of the audiences influenced by the violence. Distinguishing among these three elements is not as simple as it appears, however, as their relative weight varies and each may contain multiple layers and complexities. Their composition is determined by the political, social and historical context from which a terrorist group springs, and is as unique as the group itself. Thus, generalisations about the strategies of terrorism, like those for more conventional types of conflict, are inherently suspect and subject to exceptions. As in war, there is no substitute for detailed research into the nature and character of individual adversaries. Nonetheless, terrorism’s ‘triad’ is equally vital to sound analysis.

Although non-state actors that use terrorism are smaller and less significant than states, their activities can be more difficult to parse. States share basic organisational principles, such as governments, national territory, populations and some element of control over the use of force. Groups that use terrorism are as different as the charismatic leaders that typically lead them.² They become more complex, not less, upon closer examination, like inert cells that come alive under a microscope. They are certainly not microcosms of states. Terrorism may be a tactic used by an inherently weak actor against a stronger one, but simple binary models are like pen-and-ink sketches of a dynamic process that actually develops in three dimensions. Nevertheless, certain themes emerge in analysing the purposes of terrorism. A convenient place to begin is with the familiar models of twentieth-century strategic studies. We will start with the scenario that unfolds when a group uses terrorism as a means of coercion or compellence to change the behaviour of a state.

Coercion and Compellence

Always opportunistic, the strategies of terrorism continuously evolve, reflecting the nature of the modern state and the international milieu within which groups operate.³ The phenomenon is subjective and hard to define because it is usually associated with trying to create public fear. Thus, terrorism is intended to be a matter of perception: as perceptions shift, so do the strategies of terrorism. Terrorism is like war in this sense: its nature reflects the social, political and historical context within which it occurs.

Strategies of coercion and compellence were well-suited to twentieth-century terrorism, an age of decolonisation, movements for national self-determination and the establishment of a bewildering array of new states.⁴ In the aftermath of the Second World War, overstretched colonial powers, already under pressure for powerful economic, political and ideological reasons, found themselves vulnerable to terrorist campaigns. Brutal attacks exacted a degree of punishment that tipped the balance against the colonial powers and hastened their withdrawal, thus apparently succeeding in changing their policies. This was one reason why terrorism came to be seen in some quarters as an effective, even legitimate, tactic for national self-determination movements. Terrorism hastened withdrawals from the Palestinian Mandate, Ireland, Cyprus, Vietnam and Algeria, among other places; rightly or wrongly, it remains part of an enduring search for national self-determination in such hot spots as the Basque region of Spain, southern Thailand, Sri Lanka and Sudan. In the last century, terrorism was virtually always described as a challenge to the state.⁵

It is therefore hardly surprising that policymakers and scholars should think of terrorism primarily as a strategy of compellence, meaning the use of threats to influence another actor to stop an unwanted behaviour or to start doing something the group in question prefers. It is well-suited to nationalist movements whose aims can be expressed in terms of territory, particularly in situations where there is an occupying power. Seeing terrorism in this light is especially comfortable for Western policymakers, steeped as they are in the formal logic of game theory, air power and nuclear-deterrence strategy. It resembles a kind of counter-value targeting engaged in by non-state actors.⁶ What could be more inherently coercive than a tactic that uses violence against non-combatants in pursuit of political objectives?

The parallels between terrorist violence and the state’s use of force dramatically increased at the end of the century, with terrorism moving from its peripheral status towards more traditional (and more deadly) violence. Although the overall number of terrorist incidents declined in the 1990s, individual attacks became more lethal, with the average number of casualties per incident growing. Thanks to the global arms bazaar of the post-Cold War years, groups gained access to increasingly powerful conventional explosives, giving them much greater coercive power.⁷ The toll from mass-casualty events such as the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi (224 killed, more than 5,000 injured) brought to mind the twentieth-century’s theory of strategic bombing: the state’s effort to use attacks on civilians to crush their will, shorten conflict and prevent the grinding attrition that Europeans had experienced in the First World War. Indeed, as its potency increased, terrorism gained a strategic impact in the West that seemed to meld with the logic of air-power strategy, targeting the morale of the civilian population in order to coerce states.

Thus, as important as it was, the shock of 11 September 2001 has had little effect on Western strategic thought. The basic axioms of strategic bombardment were easily applied to the study of so-called ‘jihadist’ terrorism, including the hopeless vulnerability of civilians to attack, the difficulty of effective defence, the benefits of sudden attack and the need for retaliation. According to this logic, terrorist attacks are seen as uniquely effective in forcing states to capitulate to the will of a group, particularly when the political goal is of greater importance to that group than it is to the state. The spectre of widespread terrorist use of chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons has further merged the study of terrorism – previously a peripheral nuisance chiefly tracked by regional specialists or dissected by philosophers – with strategic nuclear theory – the central theology of strategic studies during the Cold War. In keeping with the paradigms of their discipline, strategists have perceived in the increasingly deadly acts of terrorism a weaker power employing acts of punishment to manipulate a stronger power. Thus the intellectual framework of compellence continues to predominate.

Compellence seeks to change a state’s policy. For example, it may endeavour to force states to withdraw from foreign commitments through a strategy of punishment and attrition, to make the commitments so painful that the government will abandon them. In classic game theory, terrorism is thus seen as a form of costly signalling that alters a state’s perception of a group’s ability to impose costs and its degree of commitment to a cause.⁸ The ultimate goal of terrorist strategies is either to alter state behaviour or change the nature of the government itself. Political scientists argue that terrorists ‘signal’ through their attacks, as if they were weak adversarial states aiming to change a stronger state’s policy or influence its population.⁹

At times terrorist attacks have appeared to succeed in changing state policy, as in the US and French withdrawals from Lebanon following the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.¹⁰ Many also argue that the bombings in Madrid in 2004 led to a change of government in Spain and the hasty withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. Likewise, some see terrorism in Iraq today as a foreign-inspired plan to force the United States out.¹¹ While each case is an oversimplification of what actually occurred, terrorism is meant to oversimplify complex situations: the interpretation is persuasive to many observers, not least those in the West, and that is a major reason why it is put forth by al-Qaeda spokesmen on the Internet and over the airwaves.

This intellectual construct has been furthered by recent Western analyses showing an increase in suicide tactics in terrorist campaigns. Longstanding suicide campaigns in Sri Lanka, Israel and Turkey were joined at the start of the new century by suicide operations in Russia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Indonesia, the United States, Iraq and Afghanistan. The strategic value of suicide attacks has been analysed by Robert Pape, for example. Known mainly for his writings on air power, Pape argues that what he calls ‘suicide terrorism’ (in which he includes attacks on both military and non-combatant targets) has a unique strategic logic aimed at the political coercion of democratic states.¹² In the tradition of Thomas Schelling and Alexander George, Pape’s thesis, expounded in Dying To Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, is that suicide attacks aim to use the threat of punishment to compel target governments to change policy, particularly the withdrawal of their forces from occupied land. In his words, ‘The heart of suicide terrorism’s strategy is the same as the coercive logic used by states when they employ air power or economic sanctions to punish an adversary: to cause mounting civilian costs to overwhelm the target state’s interest in the issue in dispute and so to cause it to concede the terrorists’ political demands’.¹³ Pape’s book is widely admired, especially in US military circles, where suicide attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan are seen in exactly this light.

Given their twentieth-century experience with air power and nuclear-deterrence theory, Western policymakers and strategic thinkers find the logic of terrorism as punishment or attrition comfortably familiar. As a result, they tend to be oversensitive to strategies of compellence and blind to the other classic strategies of terrorism and their practical implications. Yet compellence emphasises only two parts of the dynamic of terrorism – the state and the objective – while saying very little about the role and nature of the audience. As a result, much about the strategies of terrorism is left out or ignored.

Understanding Strategies of Leverage

Provocation, polarisation and mobilisation are strategies of leverage that have been used repeatedly in the modern era, and for which terrorism is uniquely well suited.¹⁴ Like compellence, these strategies have their roots in the political and historical context within which they arise.

The first, provocation, tries to force a state to react, to do something – not a specific policy but a vigorous action that undercuts its legitimacy. Provocation especially suited the nineteenth-century European political context, with its transition, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, from autocracy to popular suffrage. Urbanisation, rapid advances in technology and the availability of cheap print media all lent themselves to this approach. Terrorism, especially the killing of rulers and elites, was seen as a way of provoking a reaction by obsolescent autocratic regimes, thereby triggering a democratic revolution. Particularly in the second half of the century, following the failed revolutions of 1848, intellectuals turned increasingly to acts of violence to elicit a reaction that would spark change. The European philosopher of terror Karl Heinzen argued that ‘the greatest benefactor of mankind will be he who makes it possible for a few men to wipe out thousands. The entire democratic party should make it its business to bring about this state of affairs.’¹⁵ According to Serge Stepniak-Kravchinski, author of the autobiographical Underground Russia: ‘In a struggle against an invisible, impalpable, omnipresent enemy, the strong is vanquished, not by the arms of his adversary, but by the continuous tension of his own strength, which exhausts him, at last, more than he would be exhausted by defeats’.¹⁶ Joseph Conrad’s classic novel The Secret Agent (1907) was likewise predicated on this thinking: in the words of the Professor, ‘Madness and despair! Give me that for a lever, and I’ll move the world!’¹⁷

Provocation was at the heart of the strategy of the Russian group Narodnaya Volya (‘People’s Will’). Many in the leadership of Narodnaya Volya believed that the peasant was overawed by the power of the Russian state. Their goal was to attack representatives of the tsarist regime so as to provoke a brutal state response, in turn inspiring a peasant uprising. Ironically, the group mounted its attacks at a time of unprecedented liberalisation, including the reorganisation of the Russian court system, the granting of limited self-government and, most important of all, the emancipation of the serfs. Beginning in autumn 1879, Narodnaya Volya launched six unsuccessful attempts on the life of Tsar Alexander II, failed operations that drew the group into the limelight and made its members targets for the Russian police and security services. A year later, every member of the leadership was either captured or on the run, with few hiding places and a greatly diminished capacity to plan operations. Despite police pressure, on 1 March 1881 a seventh assassination attempt in St Petersburg succeeded. In killing the Tsar Liberator, Narodnaya Volya did indeed provoke a legendary national crackdown, firmly reversing the trend of reform in Russia and setting the stage for the October Revolution of 1905. That is not to say that this act of individual terrorism led to the downfall of the Russian state, however: not only did Narodnaya Volya and its Socialist-Revolutionary successors fail to alter the regime in the intended direction, but they also found themselves marginalised and then targeted when the Bolshevik revolution eventually overthrew it. Narodnaya Volya’s strategy of provocation was thus hardly a triumph.

Provocation is difficult to apply effectively, since terrorist groups often cause a state to behave in unpredictable ways. A government may be vulnerable to being manipulated or provoked into unwise or emotional action in the wake of a terrorist attack, as was the case following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria–Hungary, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The attack was not, in itself, exceptional. The tactic of killing political leaders had been endemic in the West for decades, including the assassinations of French President Sadi Carnot in 1894, Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas Del Castillo in 1897, Italian King Humbert in 1900 and US President William McKinley Jr in 1901. But because of conditions at the time, not least Austro-Hungarian fears about Serbian nationalism, the assassination had huge implications. Gavril Princip, the consumptive 19-year-old who carried out the assassination, never meant to set off a global conflagration and was bewildered by what followed.¹⁸ Terrorism on its own is limited in impact, but when it provokes a state it can indirectly kill millions.

Provocation is a classic, well-established strategy of terrorism, but it is frequently ignored by governments in the heat of the moment. Its purpose is to elicit an overreaction from the state, thus framing the forces of the status quo as aggressive and guilty, and the operatives as defensive and innocent. This is one reason why those who use terrorist tactics invariably describe them as defensive in nature, regardless of the situation or the nature of the cause they support. More recent cases of provocation include the Basque separatist group ETA’s early strategy in Spain, the Sandinista National Liberation Front’s strategy in Nicaragu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Glossary
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Strategies of Terrorism
• Chapter Two: Historical Patterns in Ending Terrorism
• Chapter Three: Ending Al-Qaeda
• Conclusion: A Post al-Qaeda World
• Notes