Evaluating Counterterrorism Performance

A Comparative Study

Beatrice de Graaf

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415598866
• eBook ISBN: 9781136806544
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This book offers a new model for measuring the success and impact of counterterrorism strategies, using four comparative historical case studies.

The effectiveness of counterterrorism measures is hard to assess, especially since the social impact of terrorist attacks is a fundamental and complex issue. This book focuses on the impact of counterterrorist measures by introducing the concept of the performative power of counterterrorism: the extent to which governments mobilize public and political support - thereby sometimes even unwittingly assisting terrorists in creating social drama. The concept is applied to counterterrorism in the Netherlands, Italy, the Federal Republic of Germany and the United States in the 1970s.

Based on in-depth case study research using new primary sources and interviews with counterterrorist officials and radicals, a correlation is established between a low level of performative power and a decline of terrorist incidents. This is explored in terms of the link between social drama (as enhanced by counterterrorist measures) and ongoing radicalization processes. This book demonstrates that an increase in visible and intrusive counterterrorist measures does not automatically lead to a more effective form of counterterrorism. In the open democracies of the west, not transforming counterterrorism into a performance of power and repression is at least as important as counterterrorism measures themselves.

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and counter-terrorism, discourse analysis, media and communication studies, conflict studies and IR/Security Studies in general.

1 Introduction

1.1 A crude awakening in the Netherlands: the murder of Theo van Gogh

On Monday evening, 1 November 2004, during Ramadan, Mohammed Bouyeri, a 26-year-old Dutch Moroccan, born and raised in Amsterdam, had a late supper with his friends.¹ After the meal was over he handed them some letters – later to be discovered as his last will. Early the next morning, Bouyeri prayed with his comrades, had breakfast with them and left the house on his bike with his pistol, a ritual kukri (machete) and a fillet knife in his rucksack. His housemates denied having known anything about these weapons, although they lived together in his cramped two-room flat (the living room measured 15 square meters, the single bedroom only 10) nor did they offer an explanation as to how Bouyeri could have purchased them.² At 8.40, that Tuesday morning, 2 November, Bouyeri overtook the controversial publicist and film-maker Theo van Gogh on the Linnaeusstraat, shot him from his bike, followed him to the other side of the street, fired another round of bullets (eight in total) then cut his throat with the machete, in front of 53 witnesses. With the smaller knife, he pinned an ‘Open letter to Hirsi Ali’ to van Gogh's chest and then fled, unsuccessfully shooting at some passersby before exchanging gunfire with the police. He tried to kill the officers who pursued him, planning to be killed himself in the process and become a martyr, but was shot in the leg and overpowered.³

Bouyeri's victim, van Gogh, was known, among other things, for his anti-Islamic stance and for production of the provocative documentary Submission (an attempt to liberate Muslim women from their ‘oppressive religion’, broadcast in August 2004), together with Somali-born Dutch representative Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Hirsi Ali was too well protected at that time, but van Gogh rejected protection and seemed a good second choice. With him, Bouyeri had a farewell letter, titled Drenched in blood. This versed text read as an incitement to holy war and was signed ‘Saifu Deen al-Muwahhied’ – according to Ruud Peters, a Dutch Islam expert and witness for the prosecution, a combination of two Arabic terms ‘sword of religion’ (Saif ad-Din) and ‘confessor of Tawheed’ (al-Muwahhid).⁴ In the ‘open letter’ he directly threatened Dutch-Somali liberal politician, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and blamed politicians for allowing Jewish influences in politics. The letter ended by professing the defeat of Bouyeri's various enemies: ‘I deem thee lost, O Holland . . . I deem thee lost, O unbelieving fundamentalists.’⁵

The public prosecutor charged him on 11 November with murder, attempted murder (of a police officer), attempted manslaughter (of bystanders and police officers), violation of the law on gun control, suspicion of participation in a criminal organization with terrorist aims, and conspiracy to murder with a terrorist purpose, van Gogh, Hirsi Ali and others who were mentioned in his open letter. The public prosecutor also set out to arrest the other members of the so-called jihadist ‘Hofstad network’, to which Bouyeri was linked through his friends and housemates, for taking part in a conspiracy to wage terrorism in the Netherlands, a charge they denied, and which in 2008 the Court of The Hague did not find them guilty of (this decision was still under review in July 2010).⁶

This terrorist attack was a crude awakening for both the Dutch government and the public. From then on, the nature and character of the terrorist threat captured Dutch public debate for many months to come. The attacks by al-Qaeda in New York had, of course, already shocked the Dutch government and shaken a public that had been rather indifferent to international terrorism until that time, even though the Dutch General Intelligence and Security Service (Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst, AIVD) had been very far-sighted in identifying home-grown, domestic threats by organizationally unaffiliated jihadists as early as 1998.⁷ However, it took two more years before, as a result of the Madrid bombings of March 2004 and as a consequence of the European Framework Decision of 2002,⁸ antiterrorism legislation was adopted in August 2004.⁹ Importantly, the murder of van Gogh, two months later, triggered public and political concern as well as vigilance to a considerable extent. Dutch minister of economic affairs, Gerrit Zalm, declared ‘war’ on Muslim terrorists.¹⁰ New, populist and right-wing parties linked the terrorist threat to emerging fears of globalization, immigration, and Islam, fuelling mortal panic. Many people worried: was Bouyeri a ‘lone wolf ’, or was he the harbinger of many more acts of terror to come, inflicted upon society by an unknown number of radicalized Dutch Muslims?¹¹ In the perception of large parts of the Dutch population in the months after the Bouyeri atrocity, every orthodox Muslim could be a potential terrorist.¹² Opinion polls made clear that 80 per cent of the population wanted ‘tougher policies against immigrants’.¹³ Jihadist terrorism became a public nightmare. In 2005 the Dutch population listed it as the most important issue facing the country.¹⁴

That year, the national coordinator for counterterrorism (a position created in April 2004) announced a ‘comprehensive approach to terrorism’¹⁵ which was supported by even the staunchest advocates of multiculturalism and civil liberties in the Dutch parliament.¹⁶ This approach not only included new preventive, investigative and prosecuting instruments, but it also entailed campaigns for public vigilance, such as appeals to school teachers, youth workers, and imams to report radicalization signs to the police,¹⁷ or advertisements urging the public to stay alert.¹⁸ By use of this new package of antiterrorism measures, between January 2005 and December 2008, 56 jihadi suspects were arrested, 12 were convicted and four expelled from the country. No new attacks happened (at least no successful ones) after the murder of van Gogh, up to the date of this publication.¹⁹

Although this study deals with past terrorism and its countermeasures in the 1970s, I have described this attack rather extensively, on account of the social upheaval and revolution in Dutch security thinking that it caused. This upheaval was the point of departure for my research.

1.2 Counterterrorism effectiveness

In the years since 2005, when I started to work on this project, I had two questions uppermost in my mind, inspired by the social turmoil the November attack had caused. First of all: the murder of van Gogh was portrayed as the first serious act of terrorism in Dutch history and caused a massive ‘social drama’. As an historian, I was aware of a series of casualties and victims who died as a result of acts of political violence in the ‘red decade’ of the 1970s. Hardly anyone made references to that, however. Second, what struck me as odd was that during the first and second post-November 2004 years nobody seemed very interested in reflections on the effectiveness of all the new antiterrorist measures that were profoundly new to Dutch society, whereas this should have been the most appropriate question before setting up a whole new infrastructure of counterterrorism measures. Did we really know what worked and what we were doing by implementing all these new measures and programmes?

Up to August 2004 no judicial reference to acts of political violence or terrorism existed. The more than 20 victims of terrorist attacks in the years since 1970 had been wiped out of the national collective memory and had not resulted in any concrete antiterrorism measures at all, unlike most other West European countries, where antiterrorism laws had been put in place in the 1970s or even earlier. The only law (art. 96, art. 92, Dutch Criminal Law) dealing with planning acts of terrorism (abduction, political murder) was an old provision concerning actions undertaken against the head of state, the queen – only she was legally protected against conspiracies or terrorist acts. Those carried out against others – ministers, officials or civilians alike – could only be prosecuted once they were actually committed, by using the existing prohibitions on the possession of firearms or extreme deprivation of a person's freedom, for example.²⁰

How was it possible that with just one political murder, albeit a very gruesome one, an entire country seemed to be catapulted into a state of permanent ‘cultural trauma’ and a whole new industry of counterterrorism measures and organizations was put in place – a development described vividly by Eyerman a few years later in his study on the van Gogh murder.²¹ Of course, the Dutch were not alone in adopting these measures; on the contrary, the 9/11 al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center placed terrorism at the top of the political agenda. In subsequent years, national governments and international organizations like the United Nations and the European Union introduced several laws, and undertook measures to combat ‘the new terrorism’. Given these feverish activities, campaigns, deliberations and military interventions against Afghanistan and Iraq, the Netherlands was rather late on the European scene and only implemented the European Framework Decisions of 2002 in August 2004, as mentioned above. The murder of van Gogh brought a whole new element of drama to the Dutch public debate. So, why did people react so dramatically to this murder, whereas all the other terrorist acts of the past seemed to be forgotten?

These two questions guided me in conducting this research. Before I turn to the more conceptual and methodological issues that were developed to try and answer the second question – the question of the ‘social drama’ involved in terrorist attacks and the way the authorities reacted to that – let me first deal with the initial question, the issue of effectiveness, since that was my original question when undertaking this study. I wanted to assess the effectiveness of counterterrorism measures in the past, and thought, that as an historian with ample experience in unearthing empirical data on security measures from the archives (I spent years digging through the Stasi archives in Berlin), I was perfectly geared for the task. This positivist motivation soon gave way to more realistic ideas about epistemological and empirical difficulties connected with measuring counterterrorism effectiveness.

Notwithstanding the intellectual jockeying, both in the public and political domain, voices demanding an evaluation of counterterrorism strategies became increasingly louder.²² In March 2009, the American Civil Liberties Union issued a report on Reclaiming Patriotism: A Call to Reconsider the Patriot Act, demanding an evaluation and overhaul of the provisions laid down in this comprehensive counterterrorism act.²³ The European Union, other countries and parties also asked for an assessment of the measures undertaken since 2001. In the Netherlands, on 15 November 2007, the Lower House passed a motion filed by democrat party D66’s MP Alexander Pechtold, calling on the government to scrutinize the current model of antiterrorism policy and evaluate the measures taken.²⁴ In 2009, a commission of external experts chaired by jurist J.J. Suyver presented the results of this inquiry. The commission concluded that these measures were adopted on an ‘ad hoc basis’, that they lacked mutual cohesion, that too much attention was paid to criminal law provisions and that little effort was put into reconciling them with other policy areas.²⁵

Statements on the expediency or effectiveness of policy uncorroborated by evidence are of course rootless. Yet, despite the fact that both in the political world and in the media many requests for reliable data were made, relatively little empirical analyses on the effectiveness of counterterrorism measures have thus far been published, indicating that not only in the Netherlands, but also in the rest of the world, this is a neglected area.

In 2004, Cynthia Lum compiled a survey of 21 inquiries (conducted up to 2002) including quantitative statements on the effects of counterterrorism policy. The results were anything but encouraging. Walter Enders and Todd Sandler have repeatedly established that virtually no research projects have been able to register any positive effects of counterterrorism policies. On the contrary, following the implementation of some policies, the intensity of terrorist violence actually increased. The only effect of the counterterrorism measures they examined was a change in the locations or the methods of terrorist attacks. Increased airport security, for instance, led to an increased number of car bomb attacks in the 1970s and 1980s. Furthermore, the fact that the authorities began freezing bank accounts from 2001 resulted in simpler terrorist actions, since the lengthy preparation for complex actions had become far more difficult to arrange. This is referred to as the ‘substitution effect’, or the ‘water bed’ phenomenon: place pressure on one spot and the water will move to a different corner.²⁶

Administrators, politicians and their constituencies nevertheless still want some idea of the success or failure of counterterrorist policy, which, after all, has consumed an enormous amount of money. Further, the United States, and many countries in its wake, have presented and tackled the struggle against terrorism as a ‘war’ that has resulted in thousands of victims. The raising of stakes in this way makes the national, popular demand to know whether or not ‘we won’ more logical as it were. Revelations about the violation of human rights of imprisoned terrorism suspects have brought to the fore the question whether the end – counterterrorism – really justifies these means. The effectiveness of counterterrorism policy became a case of legitimacy and credibility. Hence the questions: Which standards and values has the West relinquished in the struggle against terrorism? And to what end?

It is indeed difficult to give an objective reply to these questions. First, effective counterterrorism has to be defined, but this in turn calls for a definition of terrorism itself. The most prevalent definition of terrorism was proposed by the American Federal Bureau of Investigation in the 1980s: ‘the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives’ (28 CFR, section 0.85).²⁷ American terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman has stressed that terrorism is both a tactic and a strategy, aimed at the ‘deliberate creation and exploitation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in the pursuit of political change’.²⁸ These elements return in the academic consensus definition formulated by Alex Schmid:

Terrorism refers on the one hand to a doctrine about the presumed effectiveness of a special form or tactic of fear-generating, coercive political violence and, on the other hand, to a conspiratorial practice of calculated, demonstrative, ...

Table of contents

• Frontcover
• Evaluating Counterterrorism Performance
• Series: Contemporary Terrorism Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations and acronyms
• 1 chapter
• 2 The ‘Dutch approach’: restrained and fragmented
• 3 The Federal Republic of Germany: democracy under fire
• 4 Counterterrorism in the United States: countering subversives, revolutionaries and communists
• 5 Counterterrorism in Italy: deception or mismanagement?
• 6 The performative power of counterterrorism
• 7 Police practice as signifier
• 8 Intelligence signifiers
• 9 Terrorists on trial: the courtroom as stage
• 10 The ‘performance’ of counterterrorism policy
• Appendix 1: correlation tables
• Appendix 2: indexed charts ‘performative power’/incidents/ casualties (lethal)
• Appendix 3: performative power table
• Appendix 4: archival materials and other primary sources
• Notes
• References
• Index