TERRORISM
TRANSFORMED?TERRORISM
TRANSFORMED?The bane of ancient civilizations; protracted through the Middle Ages; refined during an epoch of revolutions concluding the Early Modern Period; and tenaciously maintaining its grip on the modern world: terror and its perpetrators, whether acting in the name of justice, God, or the wretched of the Earth, has remained with us through the ages.
The phenomenon of terrorism is multifaceted. The community of those interested in terrorism as a subject is similarly diverse. To some the problem rests with the morality of terrorism; to others the vital questions center around the task of defeating, or at least curtailing the potential, of political violence movements involved in terrorist activity. Yet another community emphasizes the significance of how terrorism has evolved, and is mainly concerned with how the development and continuous transformation of terrorism affects societal and political security. At the end of the day, there are those concerned with the root-causes of terrorism and those who confront its symptoms.
Terrorism has
changed dramatically since 1945, but never more than with the emergence of
mass-casualty terrorism witnessed in Oklahoma in 1995, New York and Washington
in 2001, and a spate of similarly catastrophic attacks ever since. More
recently, this indiscriminate targeting, which amounts to a fundamentally
changed victimology of political violence movements, has been visited upon
Europe. In November 2003 it crossed the Bosphorus and on 11 March 2004 it struck
Spain. The threat is both real and palpable. The attacks in Madrid raise a
number of unpleasant and difficult questions, all of which require an adequate
response, no matter how dissatisfying:
· Has terrorism truly changed its face? More immediately, did this scourge of a
newly globalized world revolutionize itself on 11 September 2001?
· Why did we not anticipate the violent comeback of terrorism?
· How has our understanding of the threat posed by terrorism been obscured?
· Are current counter-terrorism policies in the West, the Middle East and South
East Asia, and other regions, largely event-driven?
To begin with, we need a better understanding of what terrorism is about. Our
work at the
Political Violence Movements Project
points to terrorism as a method of psychological warfare, or rather the
weaponization of a communicable act of terror.
Imagine a terrorist attack with nobody watching. Such an event would be an
anti-climax and fail to fulfill the principal intent of the perpetrators: to
spread terror. In this sense, terrorism is, first and foremost, performance
violence. Seen from this perspective, the attacks of 11 September 2001 were well
orchestrated and amplified by the clever use of impact scalability: a death toll
in the thousands and millions more watching them die. This terrorist attack,
like no other, broke through the threshold of public placidity. The network
television corporations take the lion’s share in the devising of 9/11.
The comeback of terrorism shook societies out of the torpor that followed the
demise of political terrorism in the late 1980s. It is normal for governments to
focus on the perceived threat of the day: after 1991, terrorism had slipped to
the bottom of the priority list and this, to some extent, also accounted for the
surprise and shock of catastrophic, post-Cold War terrorist attacks. We knew
attacks of this nature were possible, but the probability of their occurring was
remote. The problem, however, was never one that could be analyzed
quantitatively – a lesson governments and private industry are only learning
now. At the dawn of an age that seemed to presage an end to the threat of
nuclear holocaust, the advancement of regional integration and even global
cooperation, such risk assessments were frequently pigeonholed. Terrorism simply
did not fit the profile of various governments’ risk agenda.
The failure to identify the threat of catastrophic terrorism can also be sought
in the compartmentalization that pervades government organizations tasked with
combating terrorism – from the procurers of raw intelligence down to operations.
Those responsible failed to read the writing on the wall because the letters
under their jealous guard never added up to comprehensible sentences or logical
sequences.
Finally, we underestimated the terrorists themselves. Alternatively referred to
as “madmen,” “criminals,” “animals” and other unsavory epithets, the members of
political violence movements were never seen as anything other than crazed
fanatics; only rarely did the idea intrude upon counterterrorism analysts and
terrorism scholars that the subject of their often penetrating inquiries was
principled, intelligent, flexible and willing to pay the ultimate price for his
or her beliefs. In short, the myopic stultification of the terrorist actor did
much to undermine our appreciation of the enemy. We simply lacked the mental
disposition to develop a healthy respect for a threat that will simply not
vanish with the proclamation of a new age.
Our understanding of the terrorist threat was obscured by a mixture of
complacency, incompetence and inability to learn one simple, central lesson
taught to political communities over the ages: know thy enemy and render credit
where it is due.
The critical question of just how event-driven measures against terrorism are
must also be asked. To date, the record suggests that not only do we lower our
guard anytime the majority consensus maintains that peace has broken out, we
also come to the wrong conclusions when analyzing and characterizing the current
and future potential of terrorism. The “New Terrorism” of the 1990s is largely
responsible for obscuring the threat we now face. Although the proponents of
this paradigm indicated vague generalities in their portrayal of the “New
Terrorism”, they also helped carve their perception in rock, thus painting a
convenient image of terrorism that was both moribund and misleading. The
perception of the “New Terrorism” informed the Clinton administration’s
counter-terrorism efforts and also had an impact elsewhere. But it left many ill
equipped to anticipate the next terrorist cycle or the innovation, flexibility,
adaptability and unquenchable dynamism that are the key assets of any weaker
party in an asymmetric conflict.
The constant reinvention of political violence is not a novelty, as the
historical transition from tyrannicide to genocide clearly illustrates. The key
lesson, therefore, is not to cast the threat in terms of one’s own requirements
(e.g. “new,” even though “newness” is one of the oldest features of terrorism),
but to appreciate the authors of terrorist acts for what they are; not to
deprecate them in our minds for the sake of momentary satisfaction, but to
devise creative means to counter their intentions by taking into account their
motives, abilities and capabilities. If actual events informed the development
of counter-terrorism and spurred authorities to ever-greater measures to combat
political violence movements, we would arguably be better prepared for the
terrorist challenge we face today.
The present effort at creating an integrated terrorism information resource is
both relevant and necessary. Valuable terrorism-related content is often lost
among the millions of documents published daily on the World Wide Web. Moreover,
the quality of the information provided is not always easy to gauge; nor is the
systematic integration of different sources of content to be expected. With the
launch of this service, the International Relations and Security Network will
commence its endeavor to act as the fulcrum for a future consortium of
governmental and non-governmental terrorism research institutes around the globe
that will work together to contribute to a better understanding of the threat of
terrorism – not only for practitioners, decision-makers, academics and
journalists, but to a broad and interested public.
Dr. Doron Zimmermann (Cantab.)
Head of the Political Violence Movements Project
Center for Security Studies, ETH Zurich
Zurich, 12 March 2004