A Credible Deterrent To Terrorism

Great Debates
21

I did not mean to misstate your own words, Collounsbury. I feel that the corrupt and nepotistic governments so prevalent in the Middle East (and elsewhere) are in fact degenerate. They seek to preserve a mode of rule so outdated as to be archaic. That so little progress has been made by so many of the countries in question seems to validate this view.

I also feel that we have quite rightly stripped previous barbaric regimes of their right to rule. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan spring to mind as sterling examples. While due caution must be applied as to how we gauge the merit of such situations we are still obliged to do so when required.

Finally, I must wholly disagree with you as to the Taleban. Had they not been complicit in the World Trade Center atrocity I would still advocate their overthrow solely for their horrible mistreatment of women.

Please accept my deepest sympathies for the obvious loss that has occurred in your life due to the attacks. I too am more than a little saddened by these atrocities. I can only be glad that you are willing to direct your keen undersyanding of our opponents towards the efforts to defeat them. You are uniquely able to help provide the sort of intelligence our government has been sorely lacking for many decades. Thanks.

22

Oddly ObL et al feel the same way about us.

Well, actually many of the governments have sought to modernize not to consciously preserve out-moded systems of rulership.

However, moving a whole society and transforming it is one fucking complicated process. And it can go terribly, terribly wrong.

I don’t want to be excessively rude, although that is my nature, but your understanding is deficient.

The WWII example is not the right one Zenster. Imperialism is the right one. It failed, indeed while I reject making colonial rule the explanatory factor for current problems, it clearly did not achieve the very goals it meant to, goals which included “civilizing the savage” – update to your language it would be the same.

Forced transformations have a tendency to explode. Japan, to take a non-Eurupean example, is very, very different case than the Islamic world. I am no Asia specialist, I would defer much judgement to Chinaguy and others on this, however my general sense is Japan worked for the following reasons (not pretending to be encyclopedic):

(a) Japanese society was already fairly industrialized. They had already undergone their own transformations in re urbanization and industrialization, or at least laid a solid framework for further evolution.
(b) Japanese society or better the political structure, for all that it was closed, also remained very open to imitating, adopting and transforming Western innovations to its own context. There was already a successful framework for this and both elites and masses had some socio-political framework open to accepting and internalizing “positive” changes.
© American efforts to transform Japanese society were careful, modulated and did not attack the emotional roots – even the Emperor was not ‘destroyed’ only downsized and transformed.

That is my rapid resume of my superficial understanding of post-war Japanese reconstruction. It does not provide a model for understanding the post-Colonial Islamic world, it’s sensitivities and complexes in re the “West”. Recreate colonialism at your peril.

23

Much of Japan was a ruin, with much of the population on the verge of starvation. The male population was decimated during the final years of the war. I used to live in Osaka, and you try and find a building more than 50 years old or a man more than 60 years old. The war crimes trials helped re-educate the populace as to what their leaders had been up to for the past 20 years. Imposing a new system on a shattered country filled with frightened women and disillusioned veterans was not an easy task, but it was done. As Collounsbury hints at, the country had a precedent for emulating Western countries - it had done that with zeal in the late 1800s. As far as I know (and to be frank, I really don’t know but I’ll guess), Afghanistan does not have that enthusiasm to follow foreign ways.

24

In addition to making sure that whatever long-term policies we change in the Middle East are in no way seen as a capitulation to the demands of terrorists, it strikes me that we must also not allow the terrorists (and the Taliban that’s harboring them) to “win” by hiding among civilians and targets they are certain the West won’t attack.

This kind of action, while done from time to time in wars throughout history, was generally considered highly dishonorable, until the latter 20th Century. It now seems to be standard operating procedure for an enemy facing an overwhelming force that considers itself moral, like the United States.

It then becomes a battle of wills. Plain and simple, they think the U.S. doesn’t have the stomach to do what it takes to come in and get them, or kill them in place. And they have no qualms whatsoever about those innocents that they are putting in harm’s way.

What to do about it? No answer really seems good.

But somehow, the West needs to send a message that discourages this type of cowardly action in the future, by showing it to be ineffective.

Collounsbury - I always enjoy reading your insights on these subjects. Your points made a lot of sense. The frustrating thing is, even you acknowledge your best ideas about long-term lessening of “our troubles over there” don’t really do anything about those al Qaeda members that already are out there, want us dead, and are willing to die themselves to make us dead.

It’s scary. Because while I think the U.S. and Great Britain are doing what has to be done right now, whether it will ultimately “solve the problem” even in a short-term sense is uncertain.

25

Thank you, I do try.

Short term, I can only foresee intelligence. Domestic and foreign which abandons the whole “Enemy of the State” fetishization of technology and gets to the harder humint. Including perhaps making unfortunate choices in regards to methods to break into cells.

Including surveillance of Muslim organizations, not because profiling is efficient or useful, but to develop the proper intelligence so that one can avoid that waste of resources called profiling as well as protect our own loyal Muslims both from the extremists and their reputation.

I watched again recently Gilles Pontecorvo’s " La Bataille d’Alger " (1966). It is useful, if a highly inexact, analogy. Perhaps I shall open a cafe thread to see if anyone has seen this.

26

Collounsbury, you have repeatedly alluded to “unfortunate choices” and other less than desirable methods that might be required for disrupting terror cells. Without wishing to place you in a virtual full Nelson about this, your continuing references to “La Bataille d’Alger” seems to suggest the need for torture or extreme duress.

The exact point of this thread was to address whatever extraordinary methods might be required in order to combat terorism and its threat to civilization. I have already mentioned my own compunctions about this touchy subject. Yet, throughout these entire boards there has been little if any constructive input about an alternative to this admittedly distasteful method.

I am so disgusted with the human and economic disruption that terrorists sow in this world that I can see no alternative but to temporarily suspend the human rights of those who are demonstrably connected with terrorism. As mentioned above by Milosarrian, the willingness of terrorists to hide among innocent population centers is so cowardly as to invite ruthless attack just to be rid of such scum for once and all. To this day I can only wonder that if we had originally gone in with merciless force and carpet bombed Kandahar at the outset that the Taleban might have ceded the battle sooner. This is not to say that we easily might have done irreparable damage to our world image, but we might also have immediately dissuaded the Taleban from further resistance. As with Japan, an immediate surrender could have saved more lives, especially those of the civilians. The Taleban have zero compunctions about the slaughter of Afghan civilians yet we must walk on eggshells to avoid harming a single one no matter the cost to our side. There is something completely wrong with this and I’m hoping you or others might have some insights.

The laborious nature of fighting such cowards is no deterrent to our own actions but it yields little or no deterrent to the terrorists. They are sufficiently imbalanced to think that slaughtering thousands of innocents in New York would possibly sway our Middle East policies. The true net result was immeasurable harm to their own ends and immense damage to world wide perception of Islam and the violence connected to it. Again, I am curious as to the exact measures that you would advocate. You have no obligation to be too specific if you do not wish but I am beginning to think that the two of us might have leanings towards harsh measures as one of the only effective methods of breaking and deterring this madness. State sanctioned torture is a grim thought, but continuing life under the threat of terrorist attack is even less acceptable to me.

Please elucidate, if you would. All others are invited to do so as well. The dearth of constructive input on this particular topic highlights both its difficult nature and the grim realities of combating terrorism.

27

I was thinking about this last night.

Zenster, you advocate torture of terrorists, because you consider torture to be a better deterrent to terrorism than death? This is because suicide terrorists don’t care if they live or die, so torturing them while they are in this mortal plane is the only alternative?

Well, the jury who sentenced the WTC bombers to prison for life had the same rationale - they thought death was too good for them.

Do the ends justify the means?

One of the purposes of the attack on the US was to undermine the guaranteed rights, freedoms and liberties Americans enjoy. Don’t you think that the terrorists would have accomplished one of their goals if the US permitted torture of terrorists?

28

Zenster, I saw footage of Hesbollah a few years back, and it depicted footage of members flagellating themselves over the heads and arms until they made themselves bloody. Quite disturbing. I don’t think physical torture will break these terrorists as you think they might. You will have to pull off mental torture to have any real hope.

Collusbury, surveilling legitimate Muslim groups and people without their permission has led to very stormy situations in the past. Take for example the Quibilah Shabazz case, which an informant all but tried to encourage her to engage in a plot to murder Lewis Farrakhan in revenge for his advocation for her father Malcom X’s death.

29

Yes. Perhaps. What I know about these things suggest to me that treating al-Qaeda as a domestic law enforcement issue rather than as a ‘military’ issue is a mistake. A mistake in terms of innocent lives lost and a mistake in terms of forcing recourse to using a sledgehammer (invasion etc) where a screwdriver (aggressive intelligence techniques) would be more useful and less costly to the innocent over all.

No, that would have lead to precisely the opposite result.

It’s easy to forget the Soviets tried precisely the same kind of tactics. Carpet bombing of Kandahar would have lost us allies, lost us cred in Afghanistan and made cooperation with the new Imperial Butchers impossible.

Not in a thousand years. Look at Soviet tactics. Look at Chechneya.

Utterly different circumstances in an utterly different time period and culture.

We’re hardly putting much of our own on the line. As far as I can tell our bombing policy has been highly risk averse with high altitude being the order of the day. It does no good to exagerate our own … morality in this.

I’ve said, I’ll say it again. These guys are not cowards. Neither the terrorists nor the Taleban. They’re not following a game plan which easily allows us to crush them but that is emminetly rational on their part. They’d be remiss not to exploit whatever they can to protect their forces.

Capacitor:
Hizbollah is a Shiite militia. The flagellation thing is part of some Shiite eschatology --I forget the detials. That is not the same as torture, physical or otherwise. The French experience in Algeria, facing dedicated folks, used physical torture to break cells. It worked. But the cost. That’s another matter. I don’t advocate physical torture but simply saying it won’t work (in regards to intelligence not to law enforcement) doesn’t strike me as supportable.

As for surveillance (and the related dirty tricks) that was in the FBI cointel days surveilling Nation of Islam --which frankly is not a Muslim group in my book. There was no legitimate reason to surveil and the situation was quite different.

Different how? (a) It is not mere supposition that al-Qaeda related cells have been and are operative in the USA and intend to use violence. (b) surveillance targetting the identification of cells of a known terror group (not a group simply presumed to be 'anti-white" or what not) is a rather different proposition.