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5763: Articles posted from September 2002-September 2003
Get the real situation in Israel every day.
Some thoughts on terrorism and counter-terrorism
By Robert Rosenberg
August 30, 2002
9-11 may or may not have been a one-time event, not only in terms of the scale of the destruction but in terms of the audacity of the plotters. That is the nature of terrorism, whether conducted in the name of the cause of freedom, religion, or pure nihilism,it is about using minimal means to strike at the weakest point of a much more conventionally powerful foe -- and is always unpredictable.
Two very different thought processes are at work in terrorism. There is the thinking of the state and society under attack by the terrorists: these are bureaucracies both political and cultural, formal or informal, which are based on knowing what is, not what could be, about what happened, not what could happen. Even when experts in those bureaucracies draw up scenarios for the future, in the effort to protect against terrorism, they can only go as far as the imaginations of people who are themselves part of the bureaucracy. For them, protection is basically technical -- fences around valuable property, cameras, sensors, human guards trained for the purpose, properly coordinated intelligence gathering, databases, in short, all the means that money can buy. Their perception of the threat is grounded in past experience and their actions are aimed at defending what they perceive to be valuable.
Then there is the thinking of the terrorist, whether the lone lunatic who hears God telling him to travel across a country planting home-made bombs in rural mailboxes along a highway, or a sophisticated, compartmentalized organization that has enormous wealth and resources at its disposal whether because it has the financial backing of a billionaire ideologue or the help of a rogue government seeking to destabilize its perceived enemies. That thinking is an outsider's, and begins with anger and symbolism, not with means and methods. The purpose of a terrorist action is psychological, not military. Terrorists are much less interested in the means they use to commit their crimes than they are in the impact their actions will have.
For those trying to combat terror, the real problem is that the what is valuable and symbolic to the state and social bureaucracy, is not necessarily symbolic or a valuable target for the terrorist. Vast amounts of money will be spent in the coming years defending places that a terrorist would never consider a valuable target, because a strike against those places will not yield the desired result of the terrorist's actions: to undermine the public's confidence that what they know as reality is in fact reality, that what they considered normal behavior can continue to be construed as such. But since terrorism is so unpredictable, that money will have to be spent because what is not symbolic to the terrorist today may become so tomorrow precisely because the venue has been elevated to a higher level of symbolism by the act of defending it. Moreover, by virtue of the terrorist's sense of being an outsider, the symbolism of their target will often be obscure to the bureaucracy, since often, especially in the case of the lone terrorist, the symbolism has been engendered by psychological trauma.
In political and cultural terrorism, the symbolism is understood easily by the attackers, and perhaps not so easily by the victims. Was the World Trade Center attacked because of it's height, its phallic presence in the skyline of global consciousness, symbolizing American power, or because it was called the World Trade Center, and therefore explicitly a symbol of globalization -- even though in reality it was hardly a center of globalization. For that, the UN building uptown would have been far more meaningful as a target, perhaps. And if Al Qaida was simply aiming at a symbol of power, and had already understood it could reach the Pentagon with the same means, why did it not send all its planes to the Pentagon, a symbol easily understood by all.
This is not the only contradiction built into the problem. Listen to any counter-terrorism expert in any of those countries that have had a lot of experience with terror -- Israel, Northern Ireland, Italy and Germany of the 1970s, or Japan -- and deep down in the subtext of the expert's talk a contradiction will appear. On the one hand, almost every successful terrorist attack is a surprise, something totally unexpected even when security has been deployed in case of such any attack. On the other hand, at some point the experts will in one way or another express amazement at the terrorists' inability to see so many possible targets that go virtually unprotected, or are protected with minimal effort. Any Israeli can tell you where to find dozens of unarmed non-combat soldiers standing around in crowds in the heart of Tel Aviv. Only once in two years of intifada, has a Palestinian terrorist -- who once identified would not fit the profile of a terrorist -- tried to reach that very unprotected target.
In Israel, this reality is evident everywhere, magnified by the existence of terrorists who not only are ready to die on their mission but plan to do so. Almost all the air traffic coming into the country flies low enough over the main metropolitan area of Tel Aviv that a gunman with a high powered rifle mounted with an RPG could conceivably take down a plane. The country is dotted with electrical power transformer stations protected by simple fences and not much else. Terrorism need not be about killing as many people as possible. All it needs to do is create fear of the danger of terrorism. Power cuts and brownouts resulting from overuse of air conditioners on a hot summer day are something people can get angry about or even laugh about. But a power cut resulting from a deliberate act of sabotage makes tomorrow much more frightening.
There are two ways to actively respond to terrorism -- protection and prevention. Protection will always ultimately fail, because resources, both physical and psychological, are limited and choices have to be made about what to protect, and something will always remain unprotected. But the illusion of protection can be as valuable as the actual protection. What is more effective? An armed guard in uniform at the entrance to a building, or a TV report billed as "investigative" -- thereby adding a certain prestigious cachet to the report -- that says undercover guards are patrolling the building incognito, with hidden cameras on every floor, even if no such undercover patrols exist or half the cameras are fake? That is not a programmatic suggestion, just a question about how to deal with prevention and the thinking of the terrorist, who ultimately, like any criminal, is looking for the easiest way to get the job done, even if the job is to commit suicide and at the same time frighten as many people as possible.
As for prevention, meaning pro-active counter-terrorism based on the instruments of the military and espionage, democracies in particular face a stark problem -- their fundamental moral beliefs are challenged by the means needed to respond to terrorism. This also holds true at the prevention stage: profiling, for example, runs counter to much of what democracies hold dear. But even if profiling is acceptable, the decision to conduct a terrorist action or even in the name of some political cause to actively abet such actions, is a choice made by a tiniest fraction of a population, even in circumstances of military occupation when the subjugated population is united in its opposition to that occupation. Thus, should a family of five people traveling together -- parents and three small children -- be treated the same as a lone 22-year-old whether male or female, even if all fit the profile by virtue of coming from the same country, having the same religion, the same ethnic background, the same color? Obviously, the same amount of time need not be spent on a little old lady from Iowa on her way to visit grandchildren, as on an Iranian-born mechanical engineering student, as they stand in line at an airport. Can the security system forgo questioning the little old lady? Perhaps -- but not if the goal is to make it normal that an airplane flight takes an extra hour precisely so that everyone can be screened, thereby reducing the number of people who will try to get through the screening wth malicious intent.
Much has been said about the need to get on with normal life, to deny terrorists the pleasure of knowing that normal life has been disrupted. In Israel, within a few hours of a street bombing, virtually all the signs that something terrible has happened are cleaned up. Even the broken glass windows of the storefronts are replaced so that by the next morning, a passerby who did not happen to hear the news about the incident, would not know that something untoward had happened. On the face of it, that is the proper way to move on. But that approach represses the awareness of the tragedy that took place, and worse, makes the terrorism itself normal, something that can be coped with by simply cleaning up the mess, part of daily life.
Indeed, despite all the efforts to fight it, to prevent it, to protect against it, the essentially nihilist motivations of the lone individual acting out of psychological rage or a small group of individuals banded together to act out of political, religious, or cultural rage, is going to be a permanent fixture in this coming century precisely because there is so much to be angry about, and it is so easy to take action to make that anger known.
The cliche about one man's terrorist being another man's freedom fighter can be understood as an excuse for terrorism, as a relativistic world view that makes everything the same, cheapening both death and freedom -- after all it wasn't freedom that the terrorists of 9-11 were seeking. For them, it was an act of vengeance for real or imagined crimes against what they believe to be their religion.
But the underlying truth in that old adage is not about the moral issue it appears to address. Rather it is about perception -- how the terrorists perceive their goals, how the terrorists are perceived, and how from both sides of the divide, there is a futility to using only physical force, real or implied, offensive or defensive, to solve the problem. That doesn't mean caving into terrorist demands. It does mean that fundamentally, terrorism is always going to be a problem that begins in certain political-cultural circumstances, and ended by changing those circumstances.
See my original reaction to the 9-11 attacks:
There is a very simple proposition -- terrorism, meaning violent attacks on c@ivilians, is no longer an option by Robert Rosenberg -- September 12, 2001
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