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August 16, 2005
Stephen Gale is a Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and co-chair of its Center on Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Homeland Security.
Over the nearly four years since 9/11, a vast body of literature and countless words has been devoted to Islamist terrorism. Much of this has been ill-informed chatter about “symbolic targets,” terrorists’ receiving financial support from rogue states, “hating us for our freedoms,” and the rest. However, concentrating on the defense of symbolic targets and being alert for potential bombers on trolleys and buses only diverts resources from more useful counterterrorism measures.
What the 9/11 Commission cited as the intelligence community’s “failure of imagination” is still with us. It is hard to “imagine” acts resulting in horrific death and destruction if just about anything can be used as a weapon, and it is just not something that we, as Americans, are prepared to do. After all, how could everyone go about their work and family life if they became paranoid?
A lot of imagining will be needed in order to win the war on terror and America and Americans will be best served not by becoming a nation of paranoids, but by supporting professional imagining efforts. The imagining that will benefit the nation’s counterterrorism and homeland security efforts is not rooted in trivial slogans or xenophobia. Nor do we do need imagining that comes from sitting on the fence asking whether there is “probable cause” for a search when a thin fellow with a pronounced middle, sweating profusely and muttering what seem to be prayers, is seen heading into a major shopping mall. Indeed, Americans will likely experience more terrorism if all of us take to over- imagining, calling the local police and FBI with one shadow story after another. Once you start looking at the world suspiciously, almost everything looks suspicious, and law enforcement’s communications and investigation lines would become hopelessly clogged.
Looking at the relationship between the scale — the relative size and dimensions — of terrorism and its relationship to the goals, strategy, and tactics of terrorist acts will, I believe, permit analysts to get a better handle on the future. Their imagining and analysis should focus on the ways terrorists can use tactical leverage to achieve their goals — the use of a limited amount of effort and energy to achieve large-scale cultural, social, economic, and political change. Only then will we be able to establish effective and efficient counterterrorism and homeland security operations.
The purpose of analyzing terrorism is to provide security planners and managers with information that lets them imagine, and then implement, protective systems that prevent terrorist actions (or at least allow first responders to operate as effectively as possible). It is about understanding terrorists’ long-term goals and short-term objectives, so that analysts can determine the acts that are most likely and then make clear decisions about the best use of the available security resources. It is about understanding the relationships among terrorists’ goals, strategies, and tactics and then using this understanding to identify feasible security goals and develop practical security strategies and tactics.
The idea of analyzing warfare in terms of the relationships among goals, strategies, and tactics goes back to Carl von Clausewitz’s On War (1832). But, in the context of terrorism, the analysis is of a different cast of characters and different instruments of warfare. In standard battlefield confrontations, the opposing armies can be assumed to have developed their battle plans based on more or less the same style of military analysis and with reasonable intelligence about armaments, maneuver, order of battle, and the like. Until 9/11, however, there was no reason to suspect that the logic of military analysis would apply to terrorism. After all, until 9/11, Americans and most of the West viewed terrorist acts as one-off occurrences carried out by psychopaths or self-proclaimed martyrs. A few countries — Israel, India, and to some extent Great Britain —had long recognized that the battlefield of the twenty-first century would look nothing like Agincourt, the Maginot Line, or Tobruk, but this seems to have made little impression on many of the U.S. agencies directly responsible for domestic security. Worse still, regardless of its purposes and its methods, Americans and the bulk of our allies were determined to view acts of terrorism as “crimes,” not as “battles in warfare.”[1]
Although the current administration has shifted the “terrorism as crime” policy somewhat, for many Americans the issue is still a matter of considerable debate.[2] Within the various government agencies and among jurists, lawyers, law enforcement officials, military retirees, and most importantly the public, there is little agreement on what terrorism is all about, much less how to deal with it. “Terrorism as crime” may be slowly losing ground to “terrorism as war,” but either way, many terrorism analysts remain wedded to the notion that nation-states are the real actors and that counterterrorism and homeland security policies are an inseparable part of legal systems and international relations.[3]
Even after 9/11, with few exceptions American terrorism analysts still seem not to be disposed toward employing the logic of military analysis in the development of counterterrorism and homeland security strategies and tactics.[4] And since discussions of the goals, strategies, and tactics of terrorist groups generally treat these as inseparable from the terrorists’ national identities, there have been only limited attempts to draw analogies to the kind of guerrilla warfare that often precedes revolution. For the U.S. and most of the West, the scale of terrorism — the measure of the relationships between the tactics and strategy and the goals — has thus been distorted. It is held, on the one hand, to be at the scale of a crime and, on the other, to be at the scale of the kind of international relations that was the legacy of the end of World War I, the drafting of the League of Nations and UN Charters, and the Cold War — a kind of logic of criminal and international “containment.”
As we have seen from terrorist acts worldwide since 9/11, misconstruing the scale of terrorism is very dangerous. Terrorism today is still presented as a two-dimensional picture. Were it viewed in terms of conflicts such as World War II or the NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict during the Cold War, it would certainly be treated as inordinately complex and multi-dimensional. At least metaphorically, those responsible for the security of America have seemed to distort the scale of the danger of terrorism in a manner reminiscent of the way that Mercator’s two-dimensional map of the three-dimensional world distorted the size and power of Europe.[5]
The usual Western liturgy on the 9/11 attacks is that they were undertaken in order to kill Americans, destroy symbols of American economic and military domination, and give the nineteen martyrs (shahids) immediate entry to Paradise. To accept this, however, is roughly equivalent to believing the message of the Flat Earth Society. What has been insufficiently reported — and analyzed — are the relationships between the goals, strategy, and tactics of Al Qaeda’s actions in New York and Washington DC and the goals, strategy, and tactics of U.S. security on 9/11.
What we know about Al Qaeda’s goals comes from the various fatwahs and communiqu,s the group has issued over the past decade or so. For a clandestine organization, Al Qaeda has not only been remarkably communicative, but also fairly clear about its intentions.[6] While we do not have much information on Al Qaeda’s operational planning — for example, the ways its goals were translated into the tactical actions of 9/11 — we do know that the attacks were carefully planned and executed with a good deal of proficiency. We also know that the hijackings did not achieve its goal of decapitating the U.S. government: the attacks missed their real targets in Washington, the White House and the Capitol. We know that the scale of Al Qaeda’s acts was larger than the two-dimensional renditions presented by the media, and that the strategy and tactics were designed to achieve the same complex cultural, political, and socioeconomic goals that are generally associated with the goals of nation states — and pretty significant nation states at that.
Think of the scale of Al Qaeda’s goals, strategy, and tactics in terms of the goals, the strategy, and the tactics of the Russian revolutionaries in the days of the czar; think of its tactical and strategic coordination in terms of Mao Zedong’s descriptions of guerilla warfare. Al Qaeda’s 1998 fatwa speaks to a scale that mirrors these and many of the other major guerilla and revolutionary movements that shaped the nineteenth and twentieth centuries:
The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, ’and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together,’ and ’fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.’[7]
With the “defeat” of the U.S., Al Qaeda expects that the West’s social and economic strength will erode to the point where the U.S. and its allies lack the resources and the will to function as international powers. Assuming that the West’s decline lasts a minimum of ten to twenty years, Al Qaeda and the other Islamist groups believe that they will have bought sufficient time to have a good shot at initiating the new caliphate and at instituting a pan- Islamic society embracing a dar al Islam based on a strict interpretation of the faith.
Since so many observers look at the Islamists’ program of cultural, socioeconomic, and political change from a Western perspective, it is no wonder that two-dimensional representations have seemed appropriate. Could anyone in the West believe that perennially fragmented and politically corrupt Islamic states could think and dream on a scale that rivals the power of the U.S. and its allies? But Al Qaeda and the now expansive worldwide Islamist groups are anything but crazy. Any analysis of the conflict between the network of Islamist groups and the West would have to conclude that the scale is not two-dimensional.
Does Al Qaeda have the tactical clout to go with its big dreams and big talk? It must know that the U.S. and its allies are unlikely to just sit back and watch the entire Middle East and the rest of dar al Islam become a Taliban clone without using their combined muscle to stop it. Hijacking commercial airliners and crashing them into buildings may be horrible, but surely it certainly isn’t going to destroy the West’s ability to respond to major Islamist moves like attacking the U.S. electrical grid, computing systems, or even key sea lanes of communication outside the U.S., such as the Straits of Hormuz and Malacca.
But here again, we are failing to imagine the scale of the type of terrorism being used by the now-worldwide network of Islamist groups and the corresponding scale of the U.S. and the West’s design for security.
The U.S. and the West are powerful, but powerful in very specialized ways. Unless, for example, the U.S. is prepared to launch major nuclear strikes throughout the Middle East in response to terrorist attacks that may be even more devastating than those of 9/11, at least one basis of our power is neutralized. And, judging by popular support in the U.S. and Europe for the military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the West’s ability to use traditional ground and naval forces in response to terrorist actions may be just as limited.
The scale of power is not a direct function of tactical capabilities per se, but of the relationship between the tactics selected and their use in a strategy that can achieve goals. The world’s Islamist groups have no intention of confronting the U.S. and the West directly, and certainly not in standard military modes of action. Rather, they have aligned their forces to attack only those areas where the West is weakest: day-to-day civilian life, economic production (what bin Laden calls the “joints of the American economy”), and the global supply chain that supports the world’s interdependent economies. Islamists are fully aware that the absence of the alignment of its security measures to the potential threats is, in fact, the West’s greatest weakness. There is little doubt that Al Qaeda’s leaders are well versed in the classics of guerilla warfare.[8]
Aside from the traditional use of terrorism in regicide, employing terrorism as a tactic in warfare aimed at major social and political change is new. Prior to World War II, it would have been impossible for any small group — no matter how dedicated, well organized, and funded, no matter how willing they were to be martyrs — to achieve goals on the scale of Al Qaeda’s. Even Japan, clearly powerful and boasting a full complement of dedicated, organized, would-be martyrs (the kamikazes), couldn’t be sure that its hit-and- run actions at the end of World War II would achieve its goals.
By 1990, however, with the end of the Cold War and the increased availability of technologies that could give terrorists real leverage, the factors affecting the alignment of the scale of terrorist “military” operations relative to the West’s alignment of its security resources had changed dramatically. Acts of terrorism aimed at massive disruptions of civilian societies — which seek maximum leverage from relatively modest operations — could now be substituted for the standing armed forces of the world. Not as a one-to-one substitution, but as substitutions for those tactical elements that could be specifically targeted at those aspects of civilian societies where such disruption would cause a breakdown in the social and economic functions that are the real heart of the West’s strength and stability.[9]
Examining the factors affecting the scale of the terrorism threat facing the West would be a solid first step in developing meaningful counterterrorism and homeland security measures. But even if such analyses were sanctioned through legislation, it is doubtful what impact it would have on policies and operations. As with the early environmental legislation, which was aimed at improving the health and safety of Americans, the results of analyses have a way of becoming distorted, redirected, and repackaged. Furthermore, American institutions have not shifted to a war mode and, in the absence of both a clear threat and definitive safety and security standards, there is no reason to believe that the Department of Homeland Security will operate with greater effectiveness and efficiency than the Environmental Protection Agency.[10]
The situation isn’t hopeless but, at this point, it is difficult to see just how to improve matters. Those waiting another major attack on the U.S. before considering radical new directions, for example, should note that such an attack could cause more than enough destruction and disruption to make further attacks unnecessary. The Dark Winter simulation run by a team at Johns Hopkins in 2001 suggests that bioterrorism in the form of, say, weaponized smallpox would be as close to an endgame attack as you can get. Sura 105 of the Quran[11] suggests that there is even a precedent for its use in war.
Of course, we could simply follow the current course. After all, the U.S. has not been successfully attacked since 9/11, and it may just be that our existing methods of counter- terrorism and homeland security — the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and the current DHS policies and operations — are really working. On this view, security depends, first and foremost, on the ability of the U.S. and its allies to use military power abroad to prevent domestic terrorist attacks. Homeland security, the alignment of domestic security forces, is seen as a second-tier effort intended largely to support the work of state and local governments in preventing or mitigating the impacts of low- level local attacks through training, equipping, and coordinating first responders and local law enforcement.
As is well understood in the security world, the absence of positive evidence is not evidence that nothing is happening and there is little doubt but that the security of the U.S. and the West with respect to acts of terrorism will require far more than the combined military-bureaucratic measures now being employed. Since his appointment as Secretary of Homeland Security in February 2005, Michael Chertoff has conducted a Second-Stage Review aimed at determining how to maximize the benefits of America’s investments in security. As a first step, the process of professional imagining now appears to be under way.[12] But without tested, comprehensive security standards-understanding what works and what doesn’t — the requisite alignment of security forces with the threats now facing the US will more than likely come up short.
Ultimately, however, taking the concrete steps needed to align the security forces of the U.S. and the West with the terrorism threat depends on the conviction that the threat is real. As with the wars fought in the past, in the absence of such conviction and the resulting national commitment, even the best of efforts at imagination and force alignment have little chance of producing real security. Understanding and appreciating the scale of terrorism is the foundation both for a realistic assessment of the potential effects of large-scale conflict in which new methods are used as the instruments of warfare and for the alignment of the security forces required to meet this threat.
For Dr. Gale’s bio and previous FPRI bulletins, visit: www.fpri.org/about/people/gale.html
For information about FPRI’s Center on Terrorism, visit: www.fpri.org/research/terrorism.
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