Managing Terrorism and Insurgency

Cameron I. Crouch

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781135230173
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: Military & Maritime History

This book examines how governments can weaken the regenerative capabilities of terrorist and insurgent groups.

The exploration of this question takes the form of a two-tier examination of three insurgent actors whose capacity to regenerate weakened in the past: the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) of Canada, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional - Tupamaros (MLN-T) of Uruguay and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) of Northern Ireland during the mid-1970s.

At the first level of its examination, the book investigates the extent to which the regenerative capacities of the FLQ, MLN-T, and PIRA weakened because of an increase in attrition and a decrease in recruitment. The primary objectives of this analysis are to uncover whether a declining intake of recruits played a lesser, equal, or greater role than a burgeoning loss of personnel in weakening the capacities to regenerate of the three insurgent actors; and, in turn, to shed greater light on the broader validity of the prevailing view in conflict studies that a decrease in recruitment is more important than an increase in attrition in effecting the corrosion of an insurgent actor's capacity to regenerate.

At the second level of its exploration, the book assesses the effectiveness of five of the most prominent policy prescriptions in the literature and insurgent recruitment and attrition: ameliorating grievances, selective repression, discrediting insurgent ideology, improving intelligence collection, and restricting civil liberties

This book will be of much interest to students of terrorism and counter-terrorism, conflict studies, strategic studies and security studies in general.

Cameron Crouch is currently an Analyst at Allen Consulting Group, an Australian economics and public policy consulting firm. He has a PhD from the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University.

1 Introduction

If there were no regeneration there could be no life. If everything regenerated there would be no death. All organisms exist between these two extremes.¹

On 16 October 2003, just over two years after the devastating attacks against the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld, then Secretary of Defence of the Bush Administration, penned a memo to four of his top aides.² The subject of this missive was the United States’ progress in the ‘global war on terror’. Not surprisingly, given the sieve-like nature of Washingtonian politics, Rumsfeld’s memo soon found its way into the hands of the press. What was surprising, however, was the tone of Rumsfeld’s musings – candid and introspective, in contrast with the Secretary’s (and broader Administration’s) generally upbeat diagnosis of the fight against jihadist violence.³ Indeed, where only a month earlier Rumsfeld had assured United States Air Force personnel that the ‘war on terror’ was a ‘war we’re going to win’;⁴ he was now asking his key lieutenants: ‘Are we winning or losing the Global War on Terror?’⁵

The most notable aspect of Rumsfeld’s memo, however, was not its candour; but rather, how the Defence Secretary conceptualised ‘success’. To Rumsfeld, the United States’ relative position in the global war on terror was a function of the ability of al-Qaeda and like-minded entities to replace arrested or killed personnel with new recruits – what in biological terms would be described as their capacity to regenerate. From this perspective, the United States is winning the war on terror if the regenerative capacity of violent jihadist actors is weak or non-existent. Or, in Rumsfeld’s words, if ‘we are capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us’.⁶ Conversely, the United States is losing the war on terror if the jihadists are able to attract enough new recruits to offset their losses, if not expand their membership base.

While the Defence Secretary was relatively clear about how the United States could determine whether it was winning or losing the global war on terror, he was less so regarding how the United States could actually engender success. That is, what actions the United States Government needs to take in order to influence and ultimately weaken the regenerative capacities of such insurgent actors as al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah. For the most part, Rumsfeld’s conceptualisation of this issue was lacking; consisting primarily of vague questions to his associates about what they thought should be done (e.g. ‘Does the US need to fashion a broad, integrated plan to stop the next generation of terrorists? . .. Do we need a new organization? How do we stop those who are financing the radical madrassa schools?’).⁷

Though a significant period of time has since passed and administrations have changed, it still appears that the question of how to weaken the regenerative capacities of the various jihadi groups is one Washington has yet to adequately answer. As the United States intelligence community acknowledged in April 2006, although ‘United States-led counterterrorism efforts have seriously damaged the leadership of al-Qa’ida and disrupted its operations . .. activists identifying themselves as jihadists . .. are increasing in both numbers and geographic dispersion’.⁸ Similarly, a National Intelligence Estimate on the ‘terrorist threat to the US homeland’ released in July 2007 determined that al-Qaeda ‘has protected or regenerated key elements of its Homeland attack capability, including: a safehaven in the Pakistan Federally Administered Tribal Areas, operational lieutenants, and its top leadership’.⁹ Numerous scholars and security commentators have reached a similar conclusion. For instance, Benjamin and Simon state in their 2006 book, The Next Attack: ‘It is no longer possible to maintain that the United States is winning the War on Terror. The number of terrorists is growing, as is the pool of people who may be moved to violence.’¹⁰

This book is an attempt to provide scholars and officials with a greater understanding of how governments can favourably affect the regenerative capacities of such groups as al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiah, and Lashkar-e-Taiba. It seeks to achieve this goal by investigating more broadly the regenerative dynamics of insurgent actors – the term this book uses to denote non-state entities (like the aforementioned groups) that engage in politically-motivated violence.

Specifically, this book will explore the question: why do the regenerative capacities of insurgent actors weaken? Before it can outline how it will conduct this exploration, this book must first undertake three key tasks. Namely: (1) providing more information about the unit of analysis, insurgent actors; (2) locating and defining regeneration as it applies to insurgent actors; and (3) explaining how this book will determine the strength of an insurgent actor’s capacity to regenerate.

Insurgent actors

This book defines insurgent actors as any non-state entity that seeks to transform the political status quo through the use, and the threat of use, of violence. Two determinants of this definition require further clarification. First, the political status quo refers to the prevailing structures of governance (such as socioeconomic systems, sovereignty, and trade regulations) that determine the distribution of resources (both within and between nation-states). Second, in accordance with Bäck’s writings on the subject, violence denotes acts of aggression (both attempted and successful), which are undertaken with the intention of causing harm (pain or injury) to another human being.¹¹ It is important to note that, although this book devised the term insurgent actor, it based the above definition of the concept on a wide consensus about what characterises the ‘nonruling group’ of an ‘insurgency’.¹²

Prominent examples of insurgent actors (both historical and current) include: the Hukbalahap of the Philippines, Euskadi Ta Askatasuna (ETA) of Spain, Sendero Luminoso (‘Shining Path’) of Peru, Hezbollah of Lebanon, and Jemaah Islamiah of Indonesia. As these examples imply, insurgent actors can: (1) assume varying organisational types (ranging from the hierarchical pyramidstructure of the Italian Brigate Rosse, to the more nebulous and informal connections of al-Qaeda);¹³ (2) operate mono-nationally (i.e. primarily limited to a particular nation-state, such as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam of Sri Lanka) or transnationally (like the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, which conducted numerous attacks across Europe and the Middle East); and (3) be motivated by differing ideologies (such as the revolutionary socialism of the Greek Epanastatiki Organosi 17 Noemvri, the Kurdish nationalism of the Partiya Karkerên Kurdistan, and the Salafism of the Algerian Groupe Salafiste pour la Prédication et le Combat).

Groups like the Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, the Ku Klux Klan in the United States, and the Argentinean ‘death squad’, Alianza Anticomunista Argentina, are not examples of insurgent actors, since they do not seek to reshape the political status quo, but rather, ‘to maintain the power of the state . .. or to preserve advantages held by particular groups’.¹⁴

In the broader literature, many commentators label as terrorist (or a derivative thereof) the type of group that this book has classified as insurgent actors. This book favours the latter term over the more popular former for two reasons. First, as numerous scholars have highlighted, terrorist is a pejorative term; ‘generally applied to one’s enemies and opponents, or to those with whom one disagrees and would otherwise prefer to ignore’.¹⁵ Its use thus signifies more the casting of a ‘moral judgment’, rather than the conveying of a desired impression to facilitate comprehension.¹⁶ Insurgent actor, in contrast, while by no means a value-free term, lacks many of the negative connotations associated with the word terrorist. Second, to paraphrase Weinberg, Pedahzur, and Hirsch-Hoefler, ‘terrorist’ ‘has become an “essentially contested concept”, one whose meaning lends itself to endless dispute but no resolution’.¹⁷ Thus, the literature dedicated to the study of conflict would be better served by abandoning the term terrorist and, in its place, concentrate on existing and/or new concepts, such as insurgent actor; the meanings of which will hopefully engender greater acceptance and, in turn, allow for greater comparability between research projects.

Regeneration

While this book developed the designation of insurgent actor, regeneration is an established term. A quick perusal of the broader literature soon reveals two general meanings for the expression. The first of these is attitudinal in nature, denoting concepts of rebirth and renewal of one’s mental and/or spiritual outlook. Saint Thomas Aquinas provides an example of this use of regeneration when he states: ‘Baptism is spiritual regeneration; inasmuch as a man dies to old life, and begins to lead the new life.’¹⁸ The second meaning, meanwhile, is physiological in nature, referring to the ‘process by which organisms reconstitute lost parts of the body’.¹⁹ Goss wrote his famous observation that opened this chapter in the context of this second notion of regeneration.

In both policy and academic discussions, both these meanings of regeneration are evident. Abuza, for instance, employs regeneration in the term’s attitudinal sense to describe the Abu Sayyaf Group’s recent transformation from what was essentially a criminal gang to a ‘terrorist organisation’ with deep links to al-Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiah.²⁰ However, the majority of authors who discuss regeneration in the context of insurgent actors do so in accordance with the term’s physiological meaning. From this perspective, insurgent actors are ‘organisms’, and their ‘parts of the body’ (which are lost and replaced) are individual members. For example, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons stated in 2003 that:

We welcome the capture of a number of senior al Qaeda figures.... We nonetheless conclude that those that remain at large ... retain the capacity to lead and guide that organisation towards further atrocities. We further conclude that al Qaeda has dangerously large numbers of ‘foot soldiers’, and has demonstrated an alarming capacity to regenerate itself.²¹

Likewise, the Australian Government, in its White Paper on Transnational Terrorism, observed that: ‘Despite the attrition they have suffered, terrorist networks such as Jemaah Islamiyah are flexible and resourceful. They have a capacity to regenerate.’²² Lastly, in reference to the ongoing war in Iraq, General (Ret.) John Keane declared that: ‘One of the insurgency’s strength is its capacity to regenerate. . .. We have killed thousands of them and detained even more, but they are still able to regenerate. They are still coming at us.’²³

Given this dominant usage of the term in the literature, this book defines insurgent regeneration as the process by which insurgent actors replace lost personnel (i.e. those who have been either killed or arrested) with new recruits. As this definition suggests, regeneration is an interplay between two phenomena: recruitment (an insurgent actor’s intake of recruits) and attrition (an insurgent actor’s loss of personnel).²⁴

Determining regenerative capacity strength

Given that the goal of regeneration, in both organisms and insurgent actors, is to counteract or repair ‘damage’, this book will ascertain the strength of an insurgent actor’s capacity to regenerate by the extent to which the actor’s recruitment offsets its attrition.

Thus, an insurgent actor’s regenerative capacity is strong if its intake of recruits either exceeds or is relatively equal to its loss of personnel. The German Rote Armee Fraktion (RAF) during the early-to mid-1970s is an example of an insurgent actor with a strong capacity to regenerate. In May 1972, two years after the group’s formation, the RAF (comprising a ‘hardcore’ of approximately 30 people)²⁵ launched its first major offensive; bombing police stations, American military bases, and the offices of the Springer Press. The response of the West German authorities was both instant and fervent; entailing a ‘nationwide search operation ... on a scale hitherto unknown in the Federal Republic’.²⁶ By mid-July, the police had arrested virtually the entire RAF membership. As Pluchinsky states: ‘The RAF, as a terrorist gang, ceased to exist.’²⁷ Despite outward appearances, however, the group’s heart continued to beat. Under the direction of the RAF’s imprisoned leadership, a ‘second generation’ emerged; the members of which were primarily drawn from the various political groups that had formed since mid-1972 to protest Bonn’s alleged torture of the captive RAF members.²⁸ By April 1975, the second generation had gained sufficient strength to undertake its first major operation: seizing the West German embassy in Stockholm. Despite losing six of its members in this attack,²⁹ the RAF continued to attract new recruits; reaching an estimate...