Critical Perspectives on Counter-terrorism

Lee Jarvis, Michael Lister, Lee Jarvis, Michael Lister

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415855471
• eBook ISBN: 9781135077563
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This volume examines the rationale, effectiveness and consequences of counter terrorism practices from a range of perspectives and cases.

The book critically interrogates contemporary counter-terrorism powers from military campaigns and repression through to the prosecution of terrorist suspects, counter-terrorism policing, counter-radicalisation programmes, and the proscription of terrorist organisations. Drawing on a range of timely and important case studies from around the world including the UK, Sri Lanka, Spain, Canada, Australia and the USA, its chapters explore the impacts of counter-terrorism on individuals, communities, and political processes.

The book focuses on three questions of vital importance to any assessment of counter-terrorism. First, what do counter-terrorism strategies seek to achieve? Second, what are the consequences of different counter-terrorism campaigns, and how are these measured? And, third, how and why do changes to counter-terrorism occur?

This volume will be of much interest to students of counter-terrorism, critical terrorism studies, criminology, security studies and IR in general.

1
‘There’s a good reason they are called al-Qaeda in Iraq. They are al-Qaeda … in … Iraq.’¹

The impossibility of a global counter-terrorism strategy, or the end of the nation state

Bob de Graaff

Introduction

In this chapter I argue that a global grand strategy against the jihadist insurgency of al Qaeda and its affiliates is impossible and could even be counterproductive. The traditional world order, based on the Westphalian system of sovereign states, is not facilitated to successfully counter a transnational insurgency, which can act simultaneously at or switch flexibly between the supra-state and the infra-state level. Having no strategy at all may therefore be the best option, apart from using as little violence as possible.

Al Qaeda, a continuous and growing threat to the world order

To begin with, al Qaeda has gathered great strength over the past years after it initially seemed to be cornered in the aftermath of the so-called 9/11-attacks. ‘Nous sommes tous Américains’ (We are all Americans) was the heading of the French newspaper Le Monde the day after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 in New York and Washington DC. This sense that the whole world was in this together was also reflected in the invocation, for the first time in the history of NATO, of Article 5 of the alliance’s Charter and the perhaps somewhat theatrical willingness of PLO’s Yasser Arafat to donate blood for the victims. Suddenly, the United Nations developed into more or less a world legislature in the fight against terrorism; resolutions were accepted that had to be laid down in the national legislation of the Member States. These reactions showed that henceforth it would be the world against the terrorists.

That this instantaneous solidarity was not converted into actual joint action in all areas was initially mainly attributed to US President George W. Bush. In response to the 9/11 attacks he opted for a US military Alleingang in Afghanistan, where only a coalition of the willing was tolerated by the US authorities. Subsequently he took the decision to start a war in Iraq, which relationship with the President’s declared ‘war on terror’ was obscure to the rest of the world.

Almost a dozen years since the 9/11 attacks, on 20 April 2013, Le Monde ran another article, this time under the heading: ‘En Europe, le terrorisme revient à l’ordre du jour’ (‘In Europe, terrorism is back on the agenda’). It was published in the aftermath of the bombings at the Boston Marathon, but in a more general way it reflected the belief that 12 years after the events of ‘9/11’ al Qaeda and its affiliates have not been decisively beaten. In fact, al Qaeda’s scope is expanding into the Levant and both North and Sub-Saharan Africa. The Afghan hosts of al Qaeda, the Taliban, have returned to their home country and their insurgency shows no signs of abating.² And Iraq has seen a strong resurgence of terrrorist and insurgent violence after the full withdrawal of US troops in 2011, causing a significant increase in the number of civilian deaths (The Economist 2013c; J.D. Lewis 2013). Never before in its 25-year history did the terrorist network of al Qaeda and its affiliates hold sway over more territory than today, while the number of its recruits is also vaster than ever before. The number of deaths caused by al Qaeda attacks has increased considerably. And Westerners living in regions where jihadism is strong are at greater risk of terrorist attacks than on any occasion (Jones 2013; The Quilliam Foundation 2013; Farrall 2011; Farrell and Giustozzi 2013; Gartenstein-Ross 2011: 133; Simcox 2013; The Economist 2013c).

After trying to convince the public at large for many years that al Qaeda and especially ‘al Qaeda Core’ were moribund (Ackerman 2013a; Voice of America 2013; Dilanian 2013; Simpson 2013; Danner 2005; Watts 2012; Roggio 2013b; Taylot 2013; Hoffman 2013: 635–636), all of a sudden almost two dozen American embassies and many other western legations from Yemen to Pakistan had to be temporarily closed in early August 2013 because of an alleged conference call among al Qaeda’s top 20, during which its leader Ayman al-Zawahiri named Nasir al-Wuhayshi, head of the al Qaeda branch in Yemen, as his second-in-command. Also participating in this call would have been al Qaeda leaders from Iraq, North Africa, Uzbekistan and the Sinai Peninsula, as well as Pakistan’s Taliban and Nigeria’s Boko Haram (Rosner, Mendelbaum and Schweitzer 2013). Even if ultimately untrue, the fact that so many authorities initially believed in the story is proof of the regained strangth of al Qaeda and its ilk. Similarly, Somalia turned from an unqualified success for US counter-terrorism efforts in 2012 into another nightmare caused by Islamist insurgents, with the major terrorist group’s (al-Shabaab) operational readiness intact (Lynch 2013). In the single weekend of 21 and 22 September 2013 at least 60 people were killed in Nairobi, nearly 80 in Pakistan and over 60 in Iraq as a consequence of al Qaeda related terrorist actions (The Weekly Number 2013). This weekend exemplified that even when al Qaeda and its affiliates manifest themselves more or less locally they may, especially if local initiatives are consciously or unconsciously aggregated, create a global effect (Mishal and Rosenthal 2005).

Whether it is the jihadists operating in Syria, the January 2013 attack on the Amenas gas facility in Algeria or the September 2013 attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, all of these offences were carried out by multinational forces, evidence again that al Qaeda has created and sustained a pan-Islamist militancy that operates across national boundaries and policies (Riedel 2013e).

One has to conclude that al Qaeda is in scope and techniques the largest insurgency ever and has proven to be a game changer that opened up a whole new era of conflict. One can distinguish between state confirming types of terrorism of the past and the present, which attack(ed) the state but did not discuss the principle that the world order should be based on nation states, and state denying types of terrorism. Al Qaeda and its affiliates certainly belong to the second category. They are not only a threat to the existing world order, but also to the state as the main political unit (Stivachtis 2009). As the American author on military strategy Philip Bobbitt writes: nation states are by definition unable to solve problems that present themselves as global. ‘Those states that do so will be tarred as imperial …’ (Bobbitt 2008: 504). Meanwhile nothing can keep al Qaeda and its terrorist and insurgent actions from simultaneously operating at the transnational and the local level, aspiring to establish a boundary-crossing khalifate, based on the community of Muslims (ummah) (Meleagrou-Hitchens 2011: 65).

The call for a global grand strategy to thwart al Qaeda

Several authors have demanded the development of a grand strategy in the war against terror or the so-called global counterinsurgency, realising that, by its very nature, transnational terrorism demands a broad international response and recognising that counter-terrorist strategies so far have been mainly formulated at the nation-state level. Among them are such prominent and influential spokesmen as the counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen, the counter-terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman and the former head of GCHQ and first Permanent Secretary and Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office Sir David Omand (Omand 2005; Kilcullen 2009: 14 and 296–298; Rich 2003: 39; Biddle 2013; Cardash et al. 2013: 1 and 5; Hoffman 2009: 369–370 and 372; Pearlstein 2004: 98; Watts 2009: vii and 5–6; Reed 2006a: 89–90; Reed 2006b: 2 and 13; Rees 2006: 128–129; Zimmerman 2013: 1 and 4; McDougall 2010; Drezner 2006). As recent as August 2013 the former Director for Administration and Information in the United Nations Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED) of the Security Council, Howard Stoffer, called for a UN Global Counter-Terrorism Coordinator to make the counter-terrorism efforts by the different UN organs and inter-governmental organisations more effective. The General Assembly did adopt a Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy in 2006 demanding tougher law enforcement and a comprehensive set of other measures to reduce the likelihood and consequences of terrorist attacks, but according to Howard the piecemeal and scattered approach by the UN has made this strategy largely futile (Stoffer 2013).

As the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy is no more than a chimera any global strategy that could be developed should include the ideas and interests of the United States, the worldwide leader in counter-terrorism efforts, whose population continues to perceive preventing terrorism as the top priority of their country’s foreign policy and, like President Bush in 2001, as ‘America’s defining mission for the foreseeable future’ (quoted in Smith 2008: 61; cf. Gallup 2013). Therefore this contribution will mainly use examples from the US, where stubs of a global strategy were developed, to demonstrate that any global counter-terrorism strategy is deemed to be fruitless.

The first question to be addressed is: what do we understand by ‘grand strategy’? A grand strategy is meant ‘to coordinate and direct all the resources of a nation, or band of nations, towards the attainment of the political object of the war’ (Liddell Hart 1967: 322; cf. Biddle 2005). Strategy is thus considered to be the brains, which direct the muscles of a nation or groups of nations and makes war effective. If grand strategy integrates all necessary means to pursue states’ ultimate aims, dictated by their national interest, this is true in extremis for a counterinsurgency strategy as best-practice counterinsurgency encompasses, in the words of one of its proponents, David Kilcullen: ‘political, security, economic, and information components. It synchronizes civil and military efforts under unified political direction and common command-and-control, funding, and resource mechanisms’ (Kilcullen 2009: 112). How daunting the integration of different policy elements may be is illustrated by the case of Afghanistan, for which Kilcullen found the already excessive demands of a counterinsurgency strategy still insufficient. According to Kilcullen Afghan strategy had to ‘integrate counterinsurgency with nationbuilding, border security, and counternarcotics’ (Kilcullen 2009: 113). It is clear that if these are only the demands for countering jihadist insurgency in one nation, how much more demanding a global counterinsurgency strategy must be. However, not only is a global grand strategy still lacking more than a decade after ‘9/11’, there is so far even considerable uncertainty about the elements that should constitute such a master plan.

To begin with, in order to draw up a (grand) strategy one needs to know the end goals. The end goals in the war on terror which have been formulated by the US authorities thus far have been either vague or farfetched (Reed 2006a: 21, 25, 44–45, 78–79). The 2003 National Strategy for Combating Terrorism essentially stated that there will be no defining moment indicating victory. Instead, the war on terror would be an open-ended effort ‘to compress the scope and capability of terrorist organisations, isolate them regionally, and destroy them within state borders’ (National Strategy 2003: 12). Several writers have maintained that this point of departure is the starting point of eternal war ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the ends of counter-terrorism
• 1 ‘There’s a good reason they are called al-Qaeda in Iraq. They are al-Qaeda . . . in . . . Iraq.’ The impossibility of a global counter-terrorism strategy, or the end of the nation state
• 2 Counter-terrorism: the ends of a secular ministry
• 3 Spatial and temporal imaginaries in the securitisation of terrorism
• 4 Counter-terrorism as conflict transformation
• 5 Contemporary Spanish anti-terrorist policies: ancient myths, new approaches
• 6 ‘I read it in the FT’: ‘everyday’ knowledge of counter-terrorism and its articulation
• 7 Prosecuting suspected terrorists: precursor crimes, intercept evidence and the priority of security
• 8 Banishing the enemies of all mankind: the effectiveness of proscribing terrorist organisations in Australia, Canada, the UK and US
• 9 Britain’s Prevent programme: an end in sight?
• 10 How terrorism ends: negotiating the end of the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’
• 11 From counter-terrorism to soft authoritarianism: the case of Sri Lanka
• Index