Interesting look at the nature of terrorism:
Saul Singer's INTERESTING TIMES: Of pirates and terrorists
Starting in the first days after September 11, American officials from the president on down explained that the US was in a war unlike any other, that it would take a while, but that the West would win. To say that this war is different, however, does not fully capture the strangeness of the situation. We still tend to be clearer about what this war is not than what it is.
We know, for instance, that it is not, or not only, a classic war in which armies fight with tanks and missiles. Wars were things that nations fought, with more or less the same means, against each other.
The fact that this "war on terrorism" is so far named after the tactic the enemy is using, rather than who the enemy is, is a clue to what is different this time. Guerrilla insurgencies were a taste of war in which each side takes different tactics, but this war has taken such asymmetry to an extreme.
In guerrilla wars, armies are pitted against irregular forces using hit-and-run tactics. Even when armies have superior equipment and training, which is usually the case, the "weaker" side can win. Henry Kissinger captured this asymmetry when he noted in 1969, "The conventional army loses if it does not win; the guerrilla wins if he does not lose." Kissinger's observation applies to the current war, but this war is even more unconventional than guerrilla war. Though guerrillas did not fight like armies, they at least focused mainly on fighting armies and other official targets. This war includes steering planes into buildings, mailing anthrax, sniping in suburbia, and suicide bombings in public places.
But the salient characteristic of this war is not just that the entire enemy strategy is based on what were known as "war crimes" the targeting of civilians. The remarkable thing about the current war is that it takes Kissinger's adage one step further: the terrorist's only theory of victory is for his enemy not to really fight.
Terrorists target civilians rather than fighting armies partly to maximize the demoralization of their enemy, but also because they assume their targets will not fight back. When Osama bin Laden set out to topple the World Trade Center, there is good reason to think that he did not expect the US to start toppling regimes in response. His videotapes show that his view of America was much like Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah's characterization of Israel: as flimsy as a spider web.
For terrorism to win, it must slowly escalate, inuring its victims to accept higher and higher casualties without really responding. This is what was happening before September 11 globally and before Operation Defensive Shield locally.
There is nothing militarily invincible about terrorism as we know it today. Governments have the ability to prevent terrorists, to a large degree, from operating from their territory, certainly with outside help. Terrorists depend, therefore, on having space under the political-diplomatic radar screen where they are safe from the much superior power of their enemies.
Pirates, as historian Paul Johnson has pointed out, preyed on the civilized world in the 19th century until European states first took military action and then established bases and colonies to deny the piracy a safe haven. Then, as now, the question was less the power of nations against outlaws, but whether states were willing to use that power to deny those who threaten peace sanctuary.
Johnson notes that initially European states found it convenient to ransom their citizens from pirates rather than fight them. British admiral Horatio Nelson wrote, after being ordered not to carry out reprisals, "My blood boils that I cannot chastise these pirates." It was the US that broke this pattern by sending the marines across the Egyptian desert to force the Bey of Tripoli to surrender all American captives and sue for peace.
Militant Islamic terrorists are ultimately out for domination, not loot and plunder. But the strategies of piracy and terrorism are similar: they rely first and foremost on their victims being too demoralized and hamstrung to fight back.
Though it may sound mundane, the first step to beating terrorism is to refuse to live with it. Acting defensively, while necessary, can also be dangerous, because it signals that a society is planning to be under attack for the indefinite future. In this sense, the growing edifice of "homeland security" in the US and the move to build a security fence are both double-edged swords. They are similar to paying ransom to pirates.
In the 19th century, colonialism ended up being the West's way to deny piracy sanctuary. Johnson suggests that the West may well have to revive the quasi-colonial system of mandates created by the League of Nations. Others, when imagining a post-Saddam Iraq, look to the post-war denazification of Germany and occupation of Japan.
As it happens, the more intrusive Western presence in Germany and Japan ended better than the "softer" form of occupation imposed by colonialism and the mandate system, which ended in bloody conflicts in Palestine, India, Algeria, and elsewhere.
This history does not show us clearly the easiest, most humane way to go, given today's circumstances. It does show us the necessary destination: functioning democracies.
This war, in other words, is not just about removing Saddam or the Taliban, but replacing them with stable legitimate governments that are willing and able to deny their territory to terrorists. Democracy is not just a preference, but the only ultimate guarantor of peace and security.
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