What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat

Book by Richardson Louise

One

What is Terrorism?

Terror is nothing else than justice, prompt, secure and inflexible.1

—Robespierre, 1794

Today our nation saw evil, the very worst of human nature.

—George W. Bush, September 11, 2001

The best that one can say of these people is that they are morally depraved. They champion falsehood, support the butcher against the victim, the oppressor against the innocent child.

—Osama bin Laden, October 7, 2001

Like pornography, we know terrorism when we see it. Or do we? We know we don’t like it. In fact, the only universally accepted attribute of the term “terrorism” is that it is pejorative. Terrorism is something the bad guys do. The term itself has been bandied about so much that it has practically lost all meaning. A casual glance at newspapers reveals currency speculation being labeled “economic terrorism,” domestic violence as “domestic terrorism”; crank telephone calls have even been labeled “telephone terrorism.” If you can pin the label “terrorist” on your opponent, you have gone a long way toward winning the public relations aspect of any conflict.

Even terrorists don’t like the label. An al-Qaeda statement put it this way: “When the victim tries to seek justice, he is described as a terrorist.”2 Many prefer to redefine the term first. In Osama bin Laden’s words, “If killing those who kill our sons is terrorism, then let history be witness that we are terrorists.”3 On another occasion, when asked to respond to media claims that he was a terrorist, he replied, “There is an Arabic proverb that says, she accused me of having her malady and then snuck away.”4 Other terrorist leaders have taken a similar perspective. Abimael Guzmán, the Peruvian academic turned leader of the Maoist Shining Path, declared, “They claim we’re terrorists. I would like to give the following answer so that everyone can think about it: has it or has it not been Yankee imperialism and particularly Reagan who has branded all revolutionary movements as terrorists, yes or no? This is how they attempt to discredit and isolate us in order to crush us.”5 Shamil Basayev, the Chechen leader responsible for the Beslan school siege, among other exploits, declared, “Okay. So, I’m a terrorist. But what would you call them? If they are keepers of constitutional order, if they are anti-terrorists, then I spit on all these agreements and nice words.”6

Terrorism simply means deliberately and violently targeting civilians for political purposes. It has seven crucial characteristics. First, a terrorist act is politically inspired. If not, then it is simply a crime. After the May 13, 2003, Riyadh bombings, Secretary of State Colin Powell declared, “We should not try to cloak their . . . criminal activity, their murderous activity, in any trappings of political purpose. They are terrorists.”7 In point of fact, it is precisely because they did have a political purpose that they were, indeed, terrorists.

Second, if an act does not involve violence or the threat of violence, it is not terrorism. The term “cyberterrorism” is not a useful one. The English lexicon is broad enough to provide a term for the sabotage of our IT facilities without reverting to such language.

Third, the point of terrorism is not to defeat the enemy but to send a message. Writing of the September 11 attacks, an al-Qaeda spokesman declared, “It rang the bells of restoring Arab and Islamic glory.”8

Fourth, the act and the victim usually have symbolic significance. Bin Laden referred to the Twin Towers as “icons” of America’s “military and economic power.”9 The shock value of the act is enormously enhanced by the symbolism of the target. The whole point is for the psychological impact to be greater than the actual physical act. Terrorism is indeed a weapon of the weak. Terrorist movements are invariably both outmanned and outgunned by their opponents, so they employ such tactics in an effort to gain more attention than any objective assessment of their capabilities would suggest that they warrant.

Fifth—and this is a controversial point—terrorism is the act of substate groups, not states. This is not to argue that states do not use terrorism as an instrument of foreign policy. We know they do. Many states, such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, have sponsored terrorism abroad because they did not want to incur the risk of overtly attacking more powerful countries. Great powers have supported terrorist groups abroad as a way of engaging in proxy warfare or covertly bringing about internal change in difficult countries without openly displaying their strength. Nor do I wish to argue that states refrain from action that is the moral equivalent of terrorism. We know they don’t. The Allied bombing campaign in World War II, culminating in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was a deliberate effort to target civilian populations in order to force the hand of their government. The policy of collective punishment visited on communities that produce terrorists is another example of targeting civilians to achieve a political purpose. Nevertheless, if we want to have any analytical clarity in understanding the behavior of terrorist groups, we must understand them as substate actors rather than states.

A sixth characteristic of terrorism is that the victim of the violence and the audience the terrorists are trying to reach are not the same. Victims are used as a means of altering the behavior of a larger audience, usually a government. Victims are chosen either at random or as representative of some larger group. Individual victims are interchangeable. The identities of the people traveling on a bus in Tel Aviv or a train in Madrid, dancing in Bali or bond trading in New York, were of no consequence to those who killed them. They were being used to influence others. This is different from most other forms of political violence, in which security forces or state representatives are targeted in an effort to reduce the strength of an opponent.

The final and most important defining characteristic of terrorism is the deliberate targeting of civilians. This is what sets terrorism apart from other forms of political violence, even the most proximate form, guerrilla warfare. Terrorists have elevated practices that are normally seen as the excesses of warfare to routine practice, striking noncombatants not as an unintended side effect but as deliberate strategy. They insist that those who pay taxes to a government are responsible for their actions whether they are Russians or Americans. Basayev declared all Russians fair game because “They pay taxes. They give approval in word and in deed. They are all responsible.”10 Bin Laden similarly said of Americans, “He is the enemy of ours whether he fights us directly or merely pays his taxes.”11

Terrorists, Guerrillas, and Freedom Fighters

It goes without saying that in the very messy worlds of violence and politics actions don’t always fit neatly into categories. Guerrillas occasionally target civilians, and terrorists occasionally target security forces. But if the primary tactic of an organization is deliberately to target civilians, it deserves to be called a terrorist group, irrespective of the political context in which it operates or the legitimacy of the goals it seeks to achieve. There are, of course, other differences between guerillas and terrorists. Guerrillas are an irregular army fighting the regular forces of the state. They conduct themselves along military lines and generally have large numbers of adherents, which permit them to launch quasi-military operations. Their goal is the military defeat of the enemy. Terrorists, by contrast, rarely have illusions about their ability to inflict military defeat on the enemy. Rather, they seek either to cause the enemy to overreact and thereby permit them to recruit large numbers of followers so that they can launch a guerrilla campaign, or to have such a psychological or economic impact on the enemy that it will withdraw of its own accord. Bin Laden called this the “bleed-until-bankruptcy plan.”12

It is the means employed and not the ends pursued, nor the political context in which a group operates, that determines whether or not a group is a terrorist group.

In his famous 1974 speech to the United Nations renouncing terrorism, Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and founder of its militant wing, al-Fatah, declared, “The difference between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights. For whoever stands by a just cause and fights for the freedom and liberation of his land . . . cannot possibly be called terrorist.”13 A great many people, including several U.S. presidents, have shared this view. Indeed, the main reason international cooperation against terrorism has been so anemic over the past thirty-odd years is precisely because the pejorative power of the term is such that nobody has wanted to pin the label on a group fighting for what are considered legitimate goals. President Ronald Reagan shared the goal of the Nicaraguan Contras to overthrow the Marxist Sandinista government, so he called them “the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers.”14 Our European allies saw the Contras as a violent and unrepresentative group attempting to subvert a popular government and considered them terrorists. In fact, the legitimacy of the goals being sought is irrelevant. Many terrorist groups, and especially those that have lasted the longest, the ethnonationalist groups, have been fighting for goals that many share...