Terrorism and Counterterrorism

Brigitte L. Nacos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429847721
• Edition: 6
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Focusing on the phenomenon of terrorism in the age of ISIS/ISIL, Terrorism and Counterterrorism investigates this form of political violence in an international and American context and in light of new and historical trends. In this comprehensive and highly readable text, renowned expert Brigitte Nacos clearly defines terrorism's diverse causes, actors, and strategies; outlines anti- and counterterrorist responses; and highlights terrorism's relationship with the public and media. Terrorism and Counterterrorism introduces students to the field's main debates and helps them critically assess our understanding of, and our strategies for, addressing this complex and enduring issue.

New to the Sixth Edition:

• Additions to terrorist developments since 2016, including the rise and decline of ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
• A significant expansion of the analysis of intelligence gathering and the growth of the U.S. intelligence community in the post-9/11 era.
• Discussion of increasing activities of extremist groups in the so-called alt-right and the ANTIFA movement in the U.S. and abroad.
• More explanations for the making of terrorists, including rational choice theory and new research revealing childhood trauma as a risk factor.
• An enlarged chapter on women and children in terrorism to include suicide missions as family projects.
• A new section on human rights violations in counterterrorism.

1 Introduction

The Terrorist Threat

New Year’s Eve in Manhattan’s Times Square. In spite of record cold temperatures more than 1 million people wait for hours to celebrate the departure of the old year 2017 and the advent of the New Year 2018. Finally, as the famous crystal ball drops with a burst of confetti and fireworks the crowd erupts in deafening shouts of excitement and joy. Shortly thereafter the celebrants begin to melt away from the famous venue of this annual media event that is witnessed by many millions across the country and around the world on TV and computer screens.

What got lost in the worldwide TV crowd were the massive security resources in terms of manpower, equipment, and expense provided by the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and its formidable counterterrorism experts. Manhattan’s downtown had suffered three months earlier, on Halloween Day, a truck-ramming act of terrorism. Now, sand and garbage trucks blocked all access streets to Times Square. Spectators had passed several layers of security checks where officers utilized metal and radiation detection devices. There were also so-called “vapor wake” dogs trained to sniff out explosives. Rooftop observation teams and snipers looked out for possible attackers. Beat officers had seen training videos and read bulletins on how to respond to suicide attacks. With well over 5,000 police officers deployed in the heart of New York City the Times Square area was the most protected piece of real estate in the world.

According to NYPD Commissioner James P. O’Neill there were no direct threats against the New Year’s Eve celebrations on Times Square. “Out of an abundance of caution, you’ll see a stronger police presence out there than we’ve seen even in recent years,” he explained nevertheless. Some extra security measures were added because of a seemingly non-terrorism-related mass shooting in Las Vegas three months earlier, where the lone gunman sprayed bullets from an upper floor window into a crowd of concert goers killing forty-nine people and injuring hundreds. Perhaps the counterterrorism community considered that a terrorist might try to copycat the Las Vegas massacre.

How serious was the threat of terrorism in New York and elsewhere in the United States of America at the time? In all of 2017 there had been three lethal terrorist attacks in the country with a total of ten fatalities that were politically motivated and carried out by ideological extremists. The most deadly incident was the mentioned vehicular attack on October 31, 2017 in New York City by a self-described follower of the Islamic State that killed eight innocent persons. And there were two terrorist acts by White Supremacists—one in Charlottesville, Virginia, and another in New York City, both resulting in the death of one person. It is not clear whether the shooting and killing of a guard for the Denver Transit Authority in February 2017 was politically motivated by jihadist extremism.¹

The point here is that there were few lethal terrorist attacks in the United States in all of 2017. Compared to the more than close to 40,000 individuals killed in car accidents and the close to 13,000 dying in gun homicides every year in the United States the number of annual terrorist fatalities is small even in years with major terrorist attacks. Yet, the threat perception of the American public tends to be far greater with respect to terrorism than car crashes or gun violence. Equally or more important is that public officials’ risk assessments tend to be alarming. Testifying before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Homeland Security in November 2017 the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security Elaine Duke said: “Today, the magnitude of the threat we face from terrorism is equal to, and in many ways exceeds, the 9/11 period.”

Nothing could be more disconcerting even more than sixteen years after the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001 than referencing 9/11 in such a grim threat assessment. As one expert notes,

The 9/11 attacks have become what psychologists call an “anchoring event” which, owing to its vivid and dramatic nature, is long remembered because human memory and perceptions filter out less dramatic or contradictory information. Moreover, the anchoring event shapes subsequent analysis and the degree of probability that are attributed to future events, in this case, the extent and nature of the terrorist threat.²

The horrific attacks of 9/11 transformed for most Americans and many people in other Western countries the perception of terrorism from fictional scenes in disaster movies to images of real-life horror. Never before had so many people—about 3,000—died in one terrorist operation. Never before had a terrorist coup inflicted so much grief, so much devastation, and so much fear of further, and more lethal, attacks. It was a most painful conclusion to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The terrorism of the past had turned into something much more catastrophic, much more threatening—into what has been called the “new terrorism,” “superterrorism,” or “postmodern terrorism.”

Just as important, never before had one terrorist attack reshaped the priorities and the actual policy agenda of a victimized state as drastically, and impacted international relations as severely, as the assault on targets in New York and Washington. Not the 9/11 attacks but rather the U.S. responses to the incident had far-reaching and lasting effects on the global and domestic realms. This was possible, according to one scholar, because “the myths of American Exceptionalism and Barbarism vs. Civilization” shaped the post-9/11 narrative of the terrorist threat and led to a “shared, mythologized understanding of the significance of 9/11.”³

In response to 9/11, U.S. President George W. Bush, backed by most members of the U.S. Congress and a vast majority of the American people, declared war, not against a conventional enemy, a foreign country, but rather against a violent activity—a war against terrorism. Less than four weeks after 9/11, military actions by an American-led, international coalition commenced in Afghanistan against the assumed masterminds of the terror on American soil, Osama bin Laden and his close associates in the Al Qaeda (meaning “the base”) terror organization, and against the ruling Taliban that had harbored Al Qaeda terrorists and their Afghan training camps for many years. According to President Bush, Afghanistan was merely the first battleground in a long and difficult campaign against a web of terrorist cells and organizations scattered around the globe and against states actively supporting terrorist activities. Furthermore, the president, in a speech at West Point on June 1, 2002, and the White House in a comprehensive follow-up “National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction,” formulated a new doctrine of preventive wars that justified preemptive military actions against “emerging threats before they are fully formed.”⁴ By citing evidence of existing weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq and the threat that the country’s ruler, Saddam Hussein, might place such weapons into the hands of terrorists, the Bush administration followed the new doctrine when it decided to invade the country and force a regime change.⁵

Even before the dust had settled around the totally destroyed World Trade Center and the partially demolished Pentagon, people in the United States and abroad began to recognize that this terrorist assault pushed the United States and much of the world into a crisis that seemed just as dangerous as, or perhaps more explosive than, the Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States and their respective allies in the decades following the end of World War II. In some quarters, the end of the Cold War had fueled expectations of an era of greater international understanding and cooperation and a “peace dividend” that would better the economic conditions in the underdeveloped world and bring improvements in the industrialized nations. But during the 1990s, such dreams did not come true. Instead, there was a troubling wave of conflicts in many parts of the world.

Instant commentary in the media compared the events of 9/11 with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor sixty years earlier, claiming that both incidents had been as unexpected as bolts of lightning from a blue sky. Indeed, two months before the kamikaze flights crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, a former counterterrorism specialist in the U.S. Department of State wrote in an op-ed article in the New York Times,

Judging from news reports and the portrayal of villains in our popular entertainment, Americans are bedeviled by fantasies about terrorism. They seem to believe that terrorism is the greatest threat to the United States and that it is becoming more widespread and lethal . . . Nothing of these beliefs are based on facts.⁶

But others had warned for years that the United States and other Western countries should brace for catastrophic terrorism that would result in mass disruption and mass destruction.⁷ For example, Walter Laqueur, a leading terrorism expert who had characterized terrorism in the past as an irritant rather than a major threat, came to a different judgment at the end of the 1990s, when he concluded,

Terrorism has been with us for centuries, and it has always attracted inordinate attention because of its dramatic character and its sudden, often wholly unexpected occurrence. It has been a tragedy for the victims, but seen in historical perspective it seldom has been more than a nuisance . . . This is no longer true today, and may be even less so in the future. Yesterday’s nuisance has become one of the gravest dangers facing mankind.⁸

Several horrific incidents in the 1990s and certainly the events of 9/11 proved the pessimists right and ended the threat debate. One could argue that the age of catastrophic terrorism began in December 1988 with the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, caused by a terrorist bomb that killed a total of 270 civilians on board (most of them Americans) and on the ground (all of them Scots). This was, at the time, the single most devastating act of terrorism in terms of the number of victims. Actually, nearly as many Americans were killed when extremists of the Lebanese Hezbollah drove an explosive-laden truck into the U.S. Marine barracks near Beirut Airport in 1983. But while the victims were deployed as peacekeepers and thus were not combatants in the sense of fighting a war, they nevertheless were not civilians like the passengers and crew aboard Pan Am Flight 103 and the people who died on the ground in Lockerbie. As I will explain in the next chapter, whether civilians or members of the military are targets and victims figures prominently in the discussions of what kinds of violent acts constitute terrorism. The fate of Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 along with the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995 that caused the deaths of 168 persons represented turning points in the lethality of terrorism. Until these events, the widely held supposition was that “terrorists want a lot of people watching and a lot of people listening and not a lot of people dead.”⁹ But after Pan Am Flight 103 and the terror in Oklahoma City, this assumption was no longer valid. Another terrorist incident fueled fears of even more deadly terrorist strikes and changed intentions on the part of terrorists: In 1995, members of a Japanese doomsday cult named Aum Shinrikyo (meaning “supreme truth”) released poison gas in the Tokyo subway system, killing twelve persons and sickening thousands of commuters. As devastating as the consequences were, experts concluded that the release of the nerve gas sarin could have killed far more people had members of the Aum cult handled the poison differently. Pointing to the Japanese group’s ability to develop nerve gas and to acquire toxic materials and know-how from sources in Australia, the United States, Russia, and elsewhere, U.S. Senator Sam Nunn concluded that the Japanese case signaled the beginning of “a new era...