International Terrorism Post-9/11

Comparative Dynamics and Responses

Asaf Siniver

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136973451
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

This edited volume brings together both western and non-western approaches to counter-terrorism in the post-9/11 era.

This multi-cultural study of counter-terrorism strategies identifies common lessons from failed and successful attempts to counter the terrorist threat and provides guidelines for an effective counter-terrorism strategy. The book explores the changing dynamics of terrorism from a range of perspectives – from the global threat posed by home-grown terrorism in North Africa and the larger security dimensions in the Middle East, to the various strategies employed by western and non-western societies in their efforts to develop effective counter-terrorism strategies. Core themes in the book include the divergent dynamics of the phenomena categorised under the 'terrorism' label, and the domestic, national and regional variants of international terrorism. As such, the book offers in-depth analysis of the relationship between the local and the global, both in the root causes of, and responses to, terrorism since 9/11.

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and political violence, security studies and IR.

Asaf Siniver is Lecturer in International Security in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham.

1
Introduction

Asaf Siniver

Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001, governments across the world have found themselves confronted by the dual challenge of adapting to a new security environment while almost simultaneously trying to propagate an adequate response to this seemingly new wave of terrorism. The fast flow of actions and reactions since the 9/11 attacks have left policy-makers little time for close introspection or long-term planning and evaluation of their chosen counter-terrorism (CT) strategies. This invariably resulted in a plethora of approaches, diverse in scope and objectives, many of them with little coherence and coordination of and between themselves.

This book attempts to identify some of the most important dynamics and responses to international terrorism post-9/11 by looking at how various governments around the world have reacted to the changing security environment. Existing studies of counter-terrorism tend to be overly reliant on single case studies, particularly that of the American-led ‘global war on terror’, while neglecting other important regions and countries which have either been affected by the events of 9/11, or have proclaimed to be victims of the ‘new’ wave of international terrorism in that period.¹ This book presents a multi-cultural study of approaches to CT, ranging from the Bush administration’s ‘Grand Strategy’ and affiliated responses from Britain and the European Union, to the case studies of Middle Eastern and North African regimes, Israel, Russia, India, Australia and South East Asia. In an attempt to identify common lessons from failed and successful attempts to counter the terrorist threat post-9/11, the conceptual framework of this book consists of the following comparative themes, which are visited in varying degrees in subsequent chapters:

1 How have the security/terrorist threats been conceptualized by various governments and with what justification?

2 What was the nature of the CT strategies subsequently developed?

3 How successful have these strategies been in countering the terrorist threat, and how can this be measured?

Importantly, the chapters in this edited volume are concerned with cause and effect. A key theme that cuts across the case studies is that the way in which the security/terrorist threat has been conceptualized by governments in the post-9/11 environment was instrumental to the development of subsequent CT strategies. This seemingly causal relationship between the nature of the threat and the designated mechanisms to fight it is not as palpable as it may seem at first glance. It is interesting to note that, almost regardless of their geopolitical environment, the type of regime or the degree of political cohesion, Western as well as nonWestern states have used similar rhetoric to justify their responses to the changing security discourse. Thus several North African regimes, as well as the governments of Israel, Australia, India and Russia have all seemed keen to jump on the Bush rhetoric bandwagon and framed their local experiences with terrorism as their ‘own 9/11’, and accordingly their CT responses have been rhetorically (though not necessarily substantively) justified as an integral part of the ‘global war on terror’. Even Britain has moved considerably from its traditional criminal-law framework to align itself in accordance with the American model. Moreover, whereas these governments (the United States included) were quick to put in place the modus operandi to fight terrorism, none of them has shown a great deal of introspection as far as understanding the root causes of these security threats. Instead they pointed to international events or fundamentalist ideologies as the prime catalysts for this rise in security threats, dismissing in the process any responsibility for their own actions and behaviors. In this regard, South East Asia stands out as a case where a more holistic and pluralistic approach to CT has been developed, thus offering more than narrow security and military responses. This exception reinforces the instrumentality of how threat is conceptualized in the first place as determinant of consequent CT policies.

Another central theme to the chapters in this book is the largely absent attempt by governments to conceptualize a coherent and practical model by which to evaluate the efficacy of relevant CT methods. Indeed this is a much visited point in contemporary studies of counter-terrorism.² We therefore see that regardless of regime types and the nature of localized threats, states rarely stop to think about what ‘success’ or ‘victory’ mean in the context of combating terrorism. As Martha Crenshaw notes,³ success here cannot mean the total eradication of a terrorist organization, but instead it must be understood in terms of balancing forces and creating conditions that are more favorable to the public sphere (such as reducing public anxiety and providing effective security measures). Subsequently, successful CT methods must incorporate better cooperation between states and regional and global agencies, better intelligence-gathering and analysis, and more discriminate use of force. Ultimately governments must satisfy the demands of their publics for increased safety while not losing state legitimacy and accountability in the process.

One evident conclusion that emerges from the case studies in this book is that the war fighting model has proven largely ill-fitted to address effectively the complex and dynamic challenges of terrorism since the events of 9/11. By the same token, it seems that a narrowly defined law-enforcement model is inadequate, on its own, to achieve ‘victory’ or ‘success’ in this context. It may well be argued that it will take decades to solve these problems, just as it took decades to create them, though fighting terrorism in these lengthy timeframes is as problematic and as contentious as some of the ad-hoc methods currently on display.

In order to provide the necessary contextualization of the aforementioned themes, Gerd Nonneman introduces in his chapter a useful discussion of the concepts of ‘political violence’ and, more specifically, ‘terrorism’. The state of dissensus between observers, students and policy-makers with regard to a definition of terrorism is well documented.⁴ However, without a clear conceptualization of what one means when referring to these symbolically and value-laden notions, we risk misjudging the threat itself and subsequently our reaction to it—a particularly dangerous practice in the political context of the Middle East, a region long-associated with variants of political extremism and terrorism. Nonneman provides a useful working definition of terrorism for this book: ‘the act or threat of violent targeting of non-combatant populations and/or institutions, often but not always in arbitrary fashion, in order to create fear and/or to damage the institutions that are being challenged.’ Importantly, terrorism is understood here as a tactic, rather than an ideology, and accordingly there are many different ‘terrorisms’, with various causes for the adoption of such a tactic by groups, as well as state actors. It will therefore be erroneous to speak of al-Qaeda as a ‘terrorist organization’, but rather an extremist group that adopts such tactics as identified in the aforementioned definition.

Nonneman then moves to dispel some popular myths in the literature on terrorism, chief amongst them is the assertion that religiously and ideologicallydriven terrorists are ‘irrational’ and hold uncompromising beliefs which preclude any scope for compromise or negotiations.Similarly, he questions the widely held assertion that religious terrorism is quantitatively and qualitatively different from other ‘terrorisms’, as propagated by Hoffman, Rapoport and others.⁵ Indeed, whereas some were quick to conclude in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks that this ‘new’ wave of terrorism is characterized by religious fervor, hierarchical organization, the fusion of ends and means (destruction and violence as ends in themselves), and greater lethality, upon scrutinizing some basic methodological and epistemological practice, it is fairly evident that the only ‘new’ thing about the current terrorist threat is our attention to some hitherto neglected aspects of the global security environment. In other words, rather than explaining terrorism through the prism of linear historical changes, we ought to explain the presence or absence of certain factors by the idiosyncrasies of particular conflicts and regions, and as Nonneman demonstrates in his survey of Middle Eastern and North African regimes, this is the first crucial step toward an effective combating of terrorist threats.

This point is reinforced in George Joffé’s chapter, dealing with the North African experience of extremism in the past two decades. Here Joffé shows how security threats presented regimes with new opportunities for reasserting control through increased securitization of the political discourse, both domestically and in their foreign relations. Rather than looking inwards to understand the root causes of these security threats, North African governments have tended to dismiss these threats to their own legitimacy as irrational and driven by international events, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. As Joffé explains, the problem with this response is that it both trivializes the violence to which the Maghreb states have been subjected, and normativizes it into a discourse parallel to the dominant Western view of transnational violence during this decade. In other words, there is little governmental effort here to understand the root causes of the phenomenon, or indeed to conceptualize ‘terrorism’ within the unique North African experience. One of the direct consequences of this reorientation of the terrorism discourse is the way in which North African regimes have successfully redefined their relationships with the United States and Europe, from that of ‘petitioners of attention’ to important partners, at least in the realm of security, despite the very different causes and contexts of the terrorist threat in North Africa to those experienced by the United States.

The literature on the Bush administration’s global war on terror is immense, and as David Dunn and Oz Hassan point out in their chapter, the strategy that unfolded in the aftermath of 9/11 remains central to ongoing debates about America’s role in the world. It would be erroneous, however, to conceptualize the War on Terror as a homogenous project.Instead, Dunn and Hassan chart a dynamic process that has evolved over time into three distinct strategies, each in response to different perceptions of threat as propagated by the Bush administration. Accordingly the War on Terror is conceptualized here as counter-terrorism, pre-emption and pre-eminence, and a ‘Freedom Agenda’; each of these strands adding another layer to existing strategies, rather than replacing them altogether. However, while this accumulative approach was the result of the administration’s responses to unfolding external events as well as internal policy processes, these strategies have proved to be largely contradictory of each other and of themselves. This is hardly surprising given that these strategies were rooted, respectively, in divergent doctrines such as realpolitik, pre-emption and preeminence, and democratic imperialism. Rhetorically as well as substantively, Dunn and Hassan argue, these evolved as responses to three questions asked by President Bush himself shortly after the 9/11 attacks, namely, ‘Who is the enemy?’; ‘Why do they hate us?’; and ‘How can we win this war?’

Importantly, the legacy left to the Obama administration is a confused one, inevitably resulting in a dual policy of change and continuity, rather than a complete shift away from the practices of the Bush administration on each of the three strands of the War on Terror. In following the articulation and execution of American foreign policy in the aftermath of the attacks, it is evident that elements of the first (counter-terrorism) and third (Freedom Agenda) bore most resonance, and still continue to set the tone in the Obama administration. The second strand (pre-emption and pre-eminence), however, has proven to be much more difficult for the Obama administration to defend, resulting in the inevitable acceptance of the limitations on American power.

It is well documented that these embedded inconsistencies in America’s War on Terror were severely compounded by inadequate intelligence.⁶ Despite (and, to a large extent, because of) its unrivaled technological reach, the Bush administration did not enjoy high-quality intelligence from human sources inside Iraq and Afghanistan. The situation was so acute that at the time of the invasion of Iraq there were fewer than five CIA officers operating within the country.⁷ Almost in an act of desperation, one way in which the administration sought to redress this imbalance in intelligence quality was by dramatically expanding an existing, though somewhat faltering, program designed to recruit informers. However, as Steve Hewitt shows in his chapter, this system proved just as controversial and costly as other programs that emanated out of the White House in this period as part of the global War on Terror strategy.

Perhaps most pertinently, Hewitt’s analysis shows us that the Rewards for Justice Program, while paying tens of millions of dollars to informers since its foundation in 1984, has faced little scrutiny, particularly with regard to its effectiveness as a method of combating terrorism.Still, this relatively under-studied program has important lessons about a plethora of issues concerned with the limitations of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) capabilities of American intelligence agencies both well before and after 9/11. Moreover, it confirms existing perceptions of the flawed apparatus of the War on Terror across a range of issues, such as the American challenge to the sovereignty of other countries through gradual hegemonic encroachment (as represented by Dunn and Hassan as the second, ‘pre-eminence’, strand of the grand strategy). The haphazard Rewards for Justice Program also demonstrates an acute failure to adequately understand what motivates terrorists. Despite the failure to recruit high-profile informers who operated within the core of al-Qaeda, the administration continued to pour millions of dollars into this initiative, without a pause for introspection. Somewhat surprisingly, it appears that the administration failed to appreciate the limitations of material incentives in ‘turning’ ideologically driven individuals who were willing to give their lives for a cause they had devoutly pursued for much of their adult lives. This approach, based on a criminal model that treats potential informers as corrupt and driven by monetary gains, could not be more inappropriate in its application to al-Qaeda.Ultimately, the story of this program sheds a new light on the evolution of American counter-terrorism from one conceptualized within a criminal-law framework, to the more complex strategy which has emerged in the aftermath of 9/11, not least with regard to the challenge of measuring the success of such counter-terrorism efforts.

The subsequent two chapters provide fascinating insiders’ accounts of the organizational and institutional responses of the European Union and Britain to the events of 9/11. Much like the American case, any verdict on the success of these new mechanisms is premature and tentative at best. With regard to the British strategy, however, both chapters conclude that Britain, shocked by the 6, July 2005 bombings of the London transport system, has traveled some way from its traditional criminal-law framework to fight terrorism to one more closely aligned with the security/militarized approach adopted by the United States.

In the first of the two chapters, Major General Graham Messervy-Whiting charts the development of CT approaches by the British armed forces and the EU, and their manifestation in the post-9/11 environment. As Chief of Staff of the EU Military Staff between 2000 and 2003, and with a long and distinguished career in the British Armed Forces, he draws on his personal experience to deliver an incisive analysis of current trends. Although over a dozen attacks may well have been successfully disrupted since 2001, it is nevertheless premature to draw comprehensive conclusions regarding the success of Britain’s ‘four Ps’ CT strategy (Pursue, Prevent, Protect, Prepare); with particular regard to the ‘Prevent’ strand (preventing future attacks), the likely impact can only be measured in the longer term.

Most importantly, Messervy-Whiting identifies a pressing need for closer cooperation across relevant departments, agencies and the armed forces, to implement a truly comprehensive CT approach. This challenge is mirrored in the European Union’s response to the current security environment...

Table of contents

• Contemporary terrorism studies
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 ‘Terrorism’ and political violence in the Middle East and North Africa
• 3 Radicalism, extremism and government in North Africa
• 4 Strategic confusion
• 5 American counter-terrorism through the Rewards for Justice Program, 1984–2008
• 6 British armed forces and European Union perspectives on countering terrorism
• 7 The development of the UK intelligence community after 9/11
• 8 Israel and the al-Aqsa intifada
• 9 Russia and counter-terrorism
• 10 Fixing the elusive
• 11 Australian identity, interventionism and the War on Terror
• 12 Counter-terrorism in Southeast Asiapost-9/11
• Index