The Strategy of Terrorism

How it Works, and Why it Fails

Peter R. Neumann, M.L.R. Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134092710
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This is the first book to set out a comprehensive framework by which to understand terrorism as strategy. It contends that even terrorism of the supposedly nihilist variety can be viewed as a bona fide method for distributing means to fulfil the ends of policy, that is, as a strategy. The main purpose of the work is to describe the dynamics of terr

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Introduction

You see, strategic analysis is vicarious problem-solving.¹

Thomas Schelling

In late November 2006, in a rare public speech, Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller the Director General of the British Security Service, MI5, spoke of the ‘realities of the terrorist threat facing the United Kingdom’. Her speech was aimed at relating her service’s appreciation of the security condition since the attacks in the United States on 11 September 2001 and the London transport bombings in July 2005, which were both carried out by Islamic extremists. She highlighted ‘the threat to the United Kingdom from Al-Qaida-related terrorism’, saying that ‘the struggle will be long and wide and deep.’² She was, of course, saying little that was unusual or provocative in giving expression to the heightened state of public consciousness that most people felt towards the threat posed by militant Islamism. Significantly, though, like many politicians, security analysts and other officials and commentators, she chose to characterize this particular danger to society as ‘the terrorist threat’ and went on to relay her concerns about ‘what motivates those who pose that threat; and what my Service is doing, with others, to counter it.’³

As a civil servant charged with protecting society the public could expect no less from her. At the same time, her speech encapsulated the current discourse on terrorism since 9/11 in viewing terrorism as an amorphous, but existential, phenomenon. But, what are the precise ‘realities’ of what we so often call ‘terrorism’? We know that the dangers posed by radical Islamists are real enough, as are other threats from groups that have, past and present, sought to use violence to prosecute their struggles. However, are we necessarily being intellectually coherent in describing such threats as terroristic in nature? Does terrorism exist, as many public statements like those of Dame Eliza imply, as an observable material fact in itself, or is it, as this book contends, a misunderstanding of the term that obscures ‘the reality’ of what terrorism means as a concept?

The popular articulation of the notion of terrorism as if it were a clearly observable fact however leads to severe conceptual problems that frequently impair rather than assist the understanding of the nature of the phenomenon. Simply, terror is a description of a particular kind of extreme fear. ‘Terrorism’ thus refers to the creation, or attempted creation, of that sense of fear. Semantically speaking, then, the word terrorism is an abstract noun. Intrinsically it defines no material action or actors. Despite this, much public commentary, as indicated, routinely talks of the ‘terrorist threat’ as if it were self-evident to any disinterested onlooker. What analysts usually mean when they refer to the terrorist threat, of course, is the danger posed by specific groups (e.g. Al Qaeda, the Irish Republican Army, the Tamil Tigers, animal rights protestors and so forth) that are assumed to use particular kinds of violent methods to advance their cause, often irrespective of whether or not their actions are explicitly intended to induce fear and terror.⁴

Thus, the promotion of terrorism as an omnibus term to cover a spectrum of violent activity often leads to a confusing and incoherent public debate about the actual nature of the threat in the current security environment. The price of analytical and semantic laxity in academic and popular discourse has been that the word terrorism has become infused with negative moral connotations that undermine its descriptive utility. The message conveyed is that terrorism is symptomatic of the behaviour that falls below standards of decency or may exist beyond the pale of ethical conduct entirely. Rightly or wrongly, those who are labelled as terrorists and are more often than not seen to exist in an ethical void characterized by criminality and pathology. To be called a terrorist is therefore taken to condemn an actor’s ends and means, even though such valuations have no intrinsic etymological foundation.⁵

When a descriptive word becomes permeated by implicit moral assumptions it distorts what is fundamentally a value-neutral term. This has certainly undermined all attempts to define terrorism on the basis of this flawed and arbitrary combining of two philosophically and linguistically separate ideas, something which philosophers of language call a category mistake.⁶ In particular, the morally ascriptive undertones that surround terrorism renders the term malleable, which leads to two kinds of intellectual problems that, past and present, have afflicted attempts to analyse and understand the phenomenon.

The first problem is that the assumption that terrorism is inherently immoral leads to the belief that it exists beyond the realms of rational activity. Since its inception as a field of inquiry in the 1960s, there is a strand within terrorist studies that has perceived terrorism as an aberrant form of violence devoid of any meaning, at best only comprehensible via the psychiatric analysis of psychopathology.⁷ In the age of so-called new terrorism, characterized by suicide attacks aimed at creating mass casualties, this view is more prevalent than ever. Terrorism is seen as nihilistic and irrational and any attempt to understand its logic inherently redundant.⁸ It was a sentiment expressed by Bruce Cumings, who declared in the wake of the 9/11 attacks:

In its utter recklessness and indifference to consequences, its crave anonymity, and its lack of any discernible ‘program’ save for inchoate revenge, this was an apolitical act. The 9/11 attack had no rational military purpose [because] they lacked the essential relationship between violence means and political ends that, as Clausewitz taught us, must govern any act of war.⁹

Certainly, in the wake of catastrophic attacks like those on urban cityscapes that took place on 11 September 2001 in New York and the Pentagon, our emotional responses are always likely to be pulled in this direction. In this respect, we should have sympathy with the views of those like Cumings who voice their dismay and incomprehension at the minds that are prepared to commit such atrocities. But we should recognize that these are emotional reactions, not analytical ones.

We shall return to the assertions about the relationship between means and ends to which Cumings alludes later. What we can note here is the extent to which the assumption that terrorism is, ipso facto, fundamentally abnormal, can lead to a skewed research agenda that often focuses on the control and prevention of terrorism. To an extent, this is understandable. Those who live in environments afflicted by terroristic violence will be cognizant of its destructive, disruptive and murderous effects. The inclinations of most people will be to want rid of the problem – not understand it. It is natural that much public policy should concentrate on the prevention of terrorism and the interdiction of those deemed to be terrorists. Therefore we should recognize that policy prescriptions that dwell on the tactical and operational details of countering terrorism are inevitably going to be reflected in the research agenda of analysts, while focusing on the collective minds of official bodies.

Even before the 9/11 critics of terrorist studies pointed to what they believed was an over-emphasis by analysts on the violent symptoms of terrorist events, to the exclusion of more-considered assessments of the sources of conflict.¹⁰ Undoubtedly, we can observe that casual understandings of terrorism that assume its inherent immorality and irrationality can lead to highly questionable policy positions based on the simple eradication of what is seen to be the ‘terrorist threat’. For example, the current notion of the so-called global war on terrorism is, sometimes rightly, seen as an overly simplistic phrase and unduly influential on the construction of US foreign policy, which some commentators would argue, inter alia, led the United States and its allies into the deeply misguided invasion of Iraq in 2003.¹¹ A war against ‘terror’ ultimately has no more meaning than a ‘war against war’, a ‘war against poverty’ or a ‘war against drugs’ in that it defines no tangible, material threat.¹² It is difficult, if not impossible, to wage war against an abstract noun.

Whatever one’s stance towards notions like the ‘war on terror’, an analytical over-concentration on responses to terrorist incidents and treating the symptoms of what is invariably a complex set of circumstances can lead us, too easily, to conceive terrorism simply as a behavioural problem. The difficulty is that if one assumes that terrorism is irrational then one rules out all other attempts to evaluate the phenomenon that might lead to a more sophisticated analysis of the threat that, in itself, might assist in a more-effective combat of the danger.

Most knowledgeable commentators do not go so far to dismiss the idea of terrorism as merely the product of mental dysfunction. However, even those who are more attuned to the complexities surrounding notions of terrorism, frequently fall victim to a second set of equally simplistic and flawed assumptions, which is the belief that terrorism has ‘causes’. The search for causal theories of terrorism has a long and not very venerable lineage, and has been notable usually only for its sophistry. Walter Laqueur has observed that ever since the phenomenon of terrorism was identified as an object of political concern in Europe in the later nineteenth century, with the rise in anarchist violence in the 1880s, many commentators have advanced often crude, naïve, tendentious or downright strange ideas. One such was the criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, who maintained there was a causal connection between terrorism and vitamin deficiencies most commonly associated with the maize-eating peoples of Southern Europe, thus held to explain why the incidence of violence supposedly lessened in Northern Europe. Other investigations sought to link terrorism with cranial measurements, alcoholism, air pressure and moon phases.¹³

As the discipline of terrorist studies evolved from the late 1960s onwards, somewhat more sophisticated but no less problematic investigations into the ‘causes of terrorism’ were explored. The methodology to find explanations for the widespread outbreak of Marxist revolutionary or nationalistically inspired urban violence that spanned Latin America, the Middle East, Western Europe, North America, Japan and further afield gave rise to much theorizing about the origins, motivation and causes of ‘international terrorism’.¹⁴ Such research often betrayed an excessive concern for tying together very disparate conflicts, with complex and multiple origins, solely on the basis of tactics – usually bombings, assassinations and kidnappings – used by certain protagonists. Attempting to generalize across such a wide geographical, political and sociological spectrum of conflict merely on the basis of a similarity in tactics, was bound to produce superficial results, and commentators noted at the time that academic research was characterized by dull typologies, shallow statistical comparisons and repetitive historical catalogues.¹⁵

More virulent critics who denounced the study of terrorism during the 1970s and 1980s frequently accused the discipline of advancing a right-wing security agenda that exploited the value-laden assumptions around the idea of terrorism to condemn groups or causes which states sought to outlaw. This agenda, it was held, also justified wide extensions of state power through draconian anti-terror legislation intended to curtail legitimate political dissent.¹⁶ The critique focused on the presumption that terrorist groups were almost always non-state actors challenging state authority. This view as a matter of course, critics perceived, cast a light hand over the fact that states were themselves responsible for, and often the most effective practitioners of, terrorism: state terrorism.¹⁷ Consequently, this slanted pro-state agenda, embedded in conventional terrorist studies, devalued its worth as a disciplinary inquiry. In contrast, critics necessarily sought contending causal explanations to reveal that anti-state violence was the result of reflexes against oppression and material inequalities.¹⁸

In the current era many of these criticisms resurfaced in response to the upsurge in interest in terrorism in the aftermath of 9/11 and in particular the political and normative implications that analysts identified in the US-sponsored global war on terrorism. Many of those opposed to the direction of US foreign and counter-terrorism policy contended that instead of looking for a solution to the threat of violent Islamic militancy through the hardening of state borders and authoritarian legislation, which impinged on civil liberties, that terrorism must possess ‘root causes’ which should be addressed.¹⁹ The ‘root causes’ hypothesis attracted, and continues to gain, adherents in the new academic field of ‘critical terror studies’ quite like former anti-terrorist studies, focuses less on the phenomenon of terrorism itself but on the Western democratic response to it as a purportedly more objective, second-order approach.²⁰ The root causes thesis is concerned primarily with the identification of grievances that sees terror largely as an effect of an external and oppressive cause emanating from ethical, material or structurally unequal power relationships international system.

Despite its essentially Marxist provenance, the notion of root causes has been influential in framing perceptions of the problem, which invariably views terrorism as a product of relative deprivation. For example, one of Manningham-Buller’s predecessors as head of MI5, Stella Rimington, pronounced that ‘Terrorism is going to be there for a long time. It’s going to be there as long there are people with grievances that they feel terrorism will help solve’.²¹ The problem with the search for root causes is that cau...

Table of contents

• Contemporary Terrorism Studies
• Contents
• Foreword
• Dedication and acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Terrorism and strategic theory
• 3 The strategy of terrorism
• 4 Flawed assumptions
• 5 The escalation trap
• 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• Select bibliography
• Index