Series: What America Needs to Do to Achieve Its Foreign Policy Goals ... Dealing with Terrorism (4)

What is now being done about terrorism has proven ineffective. We begin with misunderstanding what “terrorism” is.1 It is not a thing, a place or a group. To speak of waging war on it is vacuous. It is simply a tactic which is used in desperation by those who do not have power comparable to those they regard as their enemies. It is the weapon of the weak.

There are several reasons for our failure to develop a strategy to counter it. The fundamental reason is that large numbers of people believe that it is their only means of action. Most believe themselves to be under alien occupation and are fighting desperately to liberate themselves. In Iraq the struggle is against our occupation. In what is left of Palestine it is against the Israeli occupiers (who most non-Americans see as American surrogates) . In Çeçnya it is against the Russians. This form of nationalist struggle is age old. Our ancestors used terrorism in the mainly guerrilla war we call the American Revolution; the Armenians used it against the Ottoman Empire in the first decade of the 20 th century; the Irish used it for centuries against the British; various underground resistance movements in Europe used it against the Germans during the Second World War. In recent times, it has been played out against the British ( Kenya and elsewhere), Belgians (The Congo), French ( Algeria) and Chinese ( Tibet and Sinkiang or “ Turkistan”). When we approved the cause of any one of these groups, we regarded them as “freedom fighters.” When we did not, we called them “terrorists.”

A second kind of motivation arises when groups of people regard their governments as corrupt, anti-national and/or unreligious. The predominant current example is the collection of different ethnic groups we lump together as al-Qa cida and believe to be controlled by Usama bin Ladin. These groups target us because they believe that we are the upholders of regimes they regard as tyrannical. Having despaired of secular nationalism, these people have espoused religious fundamentalism – they think of their movement as salafiya. The word means both to “return” and to “advance.” It is roughly the mindset of the European and American Puritan movement which similarly adopted the notion that they were delegated by God to cleanse the world. Its beliefs are strikingly similar, with the change of a few names and dates, to religious fundamentalism among Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and Christians.

The nature of the groups that participate in this form of violent theology and/or violent politics is complex. In my study of all the major examples of guerrilla warfare since the Second World War, I concluded that in every episode, it was possible and useful to identify five major groups. The first, obviously, was made up of combatants or, as the French called them in occupied France and colonial Algeria, résistants. They are necessarily few in number. In the Algerian war, they never numbered over about 13,000 at any given time; in occupied France that was about the number before the German collapse; in Iraq, the number is about the same today. In the Palestine Mandate, they are far fewer. They are the people the great practitioner of guerrilla warfare, Mao Zedong, referred to as the “fish.”

Supporting them are people Mao called “the sea.” While they carry on their normal functions in society, they supply, hide and give information to the combatants. They also are the recruiting ground from which killed or captured combatants are replaced. This group numbers many times the actual fighting force. Its numbers vary with the intensity of the conflict but usually can be estimated to at least 20 times the number of combatants.

The third group is an opportunistic criminal element which is given scope by the breakdown of public order that is an inevitable consequence of guerrilla warfare. It is usually quite small but overlaps with and is tolerated or encouraged by the combatants both because it distracts their enemies and because it often is a source of funds. Occasionally, it merges into the ranks of the combatants. Armenian terrorists in Istanbul occasionally robbed banks; the IRA has done the same; and, in Iraq today, criminal gangs kidnap people from whom ransoms can be collected. In Afghanistan, Çeçnya and Colombia, drug dealing plays a similar role.

The fourth and largest group is made up of those who simply want to be left alone. They can be radicalized by the policies of the occupying power, by nationalism or by religion but, as a group, they are generally passive victims. The fifth group is made up of those who support the regime. In the American Revolution, these people were called “Loyalists” and in Algeria they formed the basis for the French–empowered harkis (auxiliary or light troops). In the defeat of the dominant regime, they are usually forced into exile as the Loyalists were to Canada and the harkis and others were to France.

It does not appear that the American government fully understands what motivates these separate groups or how they interact.

In Iraq, the major American thrust has been against the combatants. This tactic has never worked. As individuals are put out of action, jailed or killed, others replace them. Consequently, terrorism or guerrilla warfare can last for centuries (as it did in Ireland and has in Çeçnya). America and other powers have been operating at the wrong end of the challenge. Even if the repression is absolutely brutal, as practiced by the British in Kenya, the French in Algeria, the Russians in Çeçnya ( Chechnya) and the Israelis in Palestine, the more hatred is generated and the more people move from the group that is passive to the group that is supportive of the combatants.

History shows that the only way to stop the fighting is to dry up the “sea.” That is, when enough of the society believes that it has achieved a satisfactory result of the struggle, it ceases to support the combatants. That is not the result of such gimmicks as “civic action” or even of genuine aid projects but only when the irritant, the outside power, leaves. The sequence is: sovereignty comes before security, not, as we are attempting in Iraq, to achieve security before according sovereignty. That is what happened in Ireland in 1921, in what became Israel in 1948, in Algeria in 1962. Northern Ireland, in Çeçnya, Occupied Palestine and Iraq illustrate what happens when the dominant power attempts to reverse the order: the war continues.

In short, it is evident that terrorism or guerrilla warfare arises from political motivations and therefore must be addressed in those terms. Unless the dominant power is willing to engage in genocide, as the Romans did against the Britons, (occasioning Tacitus’s famous remark that the Romans “create a desolation and call it peace”) it cannot be defeated by military means. Indeed, the more powerful and pervasive the military suppression, the more members of the “sea” become “fish.” We see this in Iraq. There, virtually the entire non-Kurdish population is made up of people who have lost relatives, friends, neighbors and their property in the counter-guerrilla/terrorist war. The numbers illustrate the point. In 2003, American intelligence estimated the active combatants at a few hundred; in early 2004, the estimates had risen to a few thousand; today they stand at 15-20 thousand.

The longer the clash lasts, the more profound its aftereffects. A prolonged clash inevitably distorts, wounds and dehumanizes both the dominant power and its opponents. The chaos it creates breeds warlords, gangsters and thugs as we see so clearly today in Afghanistan and Çeçnya. Algeria still has not recovered from the brutal war it fought against colonial France from 1830 to 1962. Worse, in fighting the inevitably dirty war, the dominant power engages in tactics that corrupt its own values. The very civilization of France was nearly ruined by the Algerian war; the early Zionists would be horrified by what is happening to the Israelis in their occupation of the Palestinians; and I shudder to think of the effect of American tactics (and individual fear) on the young Americans engaged in Iraq. Humiliating actions, torture, even murder become habitual.

The American government, forgetting our own “freedom fighters,” proclaims terrorism irredeemably evil. But, understandably, it does not always and everywhere oppose terrorism. We and the British supported attempts at terrorism against the occupying Nazi forces in various parts of Europe during the Second World War. We were intimately involved with terrorist groups in Central America during the Reagan Administration. More recently, it appears the US government is giving covert arms assistance to a Colombian anti-FARQ paramilitary group which it has labeled terrorist.2 This is dangerously short-sighted as was our condonance of the Nicaraguan Contra rebels and Guatemalan death squads.

What America needs to do is to align its policies in accord with President Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation on self-determination of peoples. We live in a world of states but there are many nations that have not achieved statehood. That is, they are communities which are linked by culture, ethnicity and neighborhood but live in states where they are regarded and regard themselves as alien. Most of the tumult so evident in our times is a result of this anomaly: the politically deprived groups struggle to achieve self-determination. The histories of the Kurds, Palestinians, Çeçens are only the more familiar of the experiences of dozens of unfulfilled nations. Once, America was a beacon of hope for them. We should aspire to become that again. But, above all, we must avoid actions that others will see as an attack on their sense of nationhood. That is where we must begin the “war on terrorism.”

1 Although partly for reasons different from mine, this is the point made by the former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke in Against All Enemies ( New York: Free Press, 2004).

2 Frank Smyth, “US Arms for Terrorists?” (The Nation, June 13, 2005.)