Friday, February 16, 2007

The Purpose of Terrorism is to Terrorize

As the late Molly Ivins might have said, the Bush administration with its focus on military action has "brought a knife to a gunfight" when it comes to the war on terror. The whole approach of the Administration and the neo-conservative ideologues that have been driving the "war on terror" demonstrates that they don't understand the fundamental nature of terrorism.

Vladimir Lenin once famously said that "the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize." Although terrorism employs violent means, and often uses military weaponry to execute attacks and massacres - the objective of a terrorist act isn't military victory. In fact, military forces are almost never the target of terrorist attacks. The objective of a terrorist attack is political reaction. The strategy behind such attacks is for them to be the catalyst, direct or indirect, for political change that weakens the enemy.

In classic political/strategic theory, the purpose of terrorism is to create a political psychology of fear and anger that persuades a government to undertake repressive and violent activities against its own populace, gradually losing their support, and eventually causing its own demise. Like a mite irritating a scorpion enough to persuade it to sting itself to death - the real weapon of terrorists isn't their bombs and guns - it is the the reactions they provoke. The harsher, more violent, brutal, and unreasonable those reactions are - the more successful the terrorist campaign becomes.

In essence terrorism is a form of political/military ju-jitsu - using a larger and more powerful opponent's strengths to weaken and defeat them. It allows a small group of ruthless individuals to disrupt and potentially destabilize a much more powerful state or society. History shows that despite the distaste and moral outrage that "civilized" society has always voiced for such tactics - they can be quite effective.

It is fashionable in many circles to claim that terrorists have never successfully achieved the overthrow of a state. While it is technically true, it is also fundamentally false. The terrorists themselves never overthrew a state, but the movements they spawned have overthrown numerous states -from Czarist russia to Eire, to the colonial wars of independence to governments too numerous to mention in modern times. Terrorism is an extremely effective form of armed propaganda -which is why it remains so popular.

When terrorists decide to attack a government, the first objective they have is to alienate the public from their government or leadership. By blowing up bombs and killing innocent victims, they want to create an impression that the government is incompetent and impotent to protect its citizens.

As angry demand for action mounts -and the government begins to employ ever more violent, illegal, and repressive counter measures, terrorists try and position themselves in the public mind as Davids against the Goliath of the government. They often adopt the mantle of representing the "true values" of "democracy and justice" as the government moves to more undemocratic and repressive measures. At some point, if the campaign is successful, the military overreactions of the regime will actually rise to a level where they cause more physical harm and suffering than the terrorist bombings and activities.

At this point, insurgent groups and guerrilla bands will start to form to protect the people from their own military and police, and the conflict will spread and transform into a guerilla conflict between military forces. As the war widens, other political actors may become involved. Eventually, the outcome at this stage is usually revolution and the destruction of the government or protracted civil war.

A government facing the threat of terrorist attack has two broad approaches it can take to combat and counter a concerted terrorist campaign.

It can respond to such attacks with overwhelming military force, seeking to wipe out the terrorists and their supporters with even more coordinated firepower and violent action than the terrorists themselves are using. To do so, it will have to abandon normal peacetime limitations on the use of force and legal restrictions on the activities of troops. The theory behind this approach is that through overwhelming military response they can cripple the terrorists infrastructure and "shock and awe" the terrorists and their supporters into abandoning their campaign. The problem with this approach, which the Bush administration and the Pentagon have adopted in the "war on terror," is that it doesn't work and it's a very bad anti-terrorist strategy.

It doesn't work because in the first place a well organized terror campaign doesn't have the kind of infrastructure that is particularly vulnerable to military attack. What structures there are - bomb factories, money and arms caches, and propaganda cells are small in size, scattered, and tucked away in the midst of the civilian population. In the second place, the terrorists themselves are hidden in the civilian population - so even if terrorists can be identified and found, any large scale military style attack is almost assured of killing or wounding more civilians than terrorists.

The late sales guru Joe Girard wrote that every person a salesperson talks to is directly connected to 250 other people - who will hear favorable or unfavorable reports depending upon how the salesperson does their job. Joe developed this theory based upon statistics he gathered about attendance at funerals - how many people were close enough to the deceased to take the trouble to attend their funeral. I use this example to illustrate the fundamental point that every civilian killed, wounded, left homeless, humiliated, or otherwise treated badly by military troops is connected to a large network of family and friends in the civilian population whose support a government must have and retain to defeat the terrorists.

To use a real world example, if a government surrounds and attacks a terrorist headquarters with troops, tanks and helicopters and kills all of the thirty terrorists stationed there, while they may claim a military victory it is almost certain that they have suffered a political defeat. In basic terms, they will have only won a victory if they managed to conduct the military operation without killing, wounding, or damaging the property of any civilian in the neighborhood - which given the firepower of military forces is highly unlikely to say the least. Every civilian they accidentally kill or wound in the process,: every home, apartment or vehicle they destroy or damage: results in the disaffection of the victims friends and family. So, if they killed a half dozen civilians, wounded another dozen, and destroyed two small apartment blocks that housed ten families - not an unreasonable amount of "collateral damage" for taking out a heavily armed terrorist headquarters - they will have created a level of disaffection in about 10,000 people if Joe was right. This is what explains the polls that show that 75% of Iraqis now want US troops to leave -even though most of those respondents were supportive and grateful shortly after those same troops overthrew Sadaam Hussein.

To be continued in post 2

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