The recent thread about “Torture doesn’t work” made me think about a related topic: Whether terrorism - or, really, anything involving violence or coercion, for that matter, “works.”
Let’s take al-Qaeda vs. the United States, for instance. One may argue that terrorism didn’t “work” because today the United States still exists and al-Qaeda is badly beaten. But terrorism did “succeed” in causing the USA to lose trillions of dollars, go into decline, lose thousands of lives, become more paranoid, become more a police state, etc.
Now someone may say, “But it didn’t change the United States’ fundamental worldview - we’re still a pro-Israel, pro-democracy, we-do-as-we-please superpower.” Yes, but is this because terrorism only took place on a limited scale? Had there been a successful 9/11-sized attack every few months, for instance, like clockwork, and the U.S. just couldn’t stop it, and al-Qaeda issued concrete, realistic demands - i.e., “Cut off all financial support to Israel, withdraw from the Middle East and all your overseas military bases, recognize a Palestinian state and issue your Arab “victims” billions of dollars in compensation” - then the American public may very well have caved in eventually.
Terrorism is unethical, of course - that is obvious and goes without saying. So is torture. But just because something is unethical doesn’t mean it is ineffective. If terrorism happens repeatedly, on a cannot-be-ignored scale, and cannot be stopped, and issues realistic, concrete demands, then under those circumstances, can terrorism “work?”
Except the US isn’t in decline (and the recession wasn’t because of The War On Terror(tm, arr)), we aren’t more of a ‘police state’, and really aren’t substantially more paranoid than we were before the attack. We did lose trillions of dollars, but then we lost hundreds of billions alone in the attack, and while we lost thousands of lives AQ lost a hell of a lot more, as did the Taliban…and recently ISIS isn’t doing that great either. Of course, once could say that the reason they were/are losing is because they got away from their terrorist roots and tried to act more like nation states instead of nation-less terrorists…they came out in the open and openly challenged multiple world powers and got stomped, since it’s easier to hide and strike from ambush at soft civilian targets than to come out in the open and go head to head with nation state class military’s on their turf (smarter too, even if more slimy).
I think that terrorism DOES work, to an extent, depending on your definition of ‘work’. You have to look at what the goals are you are trying to achieve. If it’s to make a civilian population afraid, then it’s working. If it’s to carve out a new utopian mega-state along your terrorist ideals then…not so much.
Terrorism ‘works’ to the extent that societies allow themselves to be terrorized, and in doing so change their behaviors. It’s a very human thing to do, which is why organizations that are weak and ‘unethical’ tend to go down this pathway in trying to achieve their goals. The problem is, when you get past terrorizing the civilian population, how do you leverage that into achieving your OTHER, more in-depth goals? You can’t…at least, it’s not something that seems to be happening really anywhere (and I’m not talking about the state run terror of countries like China, North Korea or the like here, but terrorist organizations like ISIS and AQ…but even in the case of China and NK I think you can only kick that can down the road so long before it comes back to biting you on the ass).
Had there been a successful 9/11-sized attack every few months, for instance, like clockwork, and the U.S. just couldn’t stop it, and al-Qaeda issued concrete, realistic demands - i.e., “Cut off all financial support to Israel, withdraw from the Middle East and all your overseas military bases, recognize a Palestinian state and issue your Arab “victims” billions of dollars in compensation” - then the American public may very well have caved in eventually.[/QUOTE
I think that repeated 9/11 attacks would have done the exact opposite of cowing the US population.
Ultimately, terrorism is a PR exercise. It’s not typically overly damaging in its own right, but it is intended to be scary and prominent, with the intention of making a political point to a populace who hopefully sees it in person or on the news. That’s the primary goal- to self-publicize, and prove they’re potent and dangerous.
If terrorists were serious about doing damage, they’d probably attack things that are not flashy at all- like sewer plants, or rail yards, or things like that, but that doesn’t really make the news or make a show of their organization’s power.
At best, it’s a shambolic form of warfighting engaged in by organizations that can’t muster anything more coherent or serious. It’s rarely part of a coherent plan to destabilize or undermine a government, which is what it would have to be to “work” in a sense of driving an organized government to behave a desired way.
If memory serves, Steven Pinker contends in The Better Angels of Our Nature that 97% of terrorist organizations never achieve any of their goals. I haven’t got the book handy, but here’s a short piece he wrote a few years ago.
[Quote=Steven Pinker]
Terrorist movements, moreover, almost never achieve any of their strategic goals. Think about it. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of Britain, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or the Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, and Egypt are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias.
Even when they are not rooted out by states, terrorist groups carry the seeds of their own destruction. As they become frustrated by their lack of progress and as their audiences start to get bored, they escalate their tactics. They start to target victims who are more famous, more sympathetic, or simply more numerous. That certainly gets people’s attention, but not in the way the terrorists intend. Supporters are repulsed by the “senseless violence” and withdraw their money, their safe havens, their reluctance to cooperate with the police, and their resistance to an all-out crackdown.
[/quote]
In the other thread about torture, with a much simpler starting point “torture doesn’t work,” people argued for pages over the semantics and specificity of “does not” and “work” and even “torture.” Some thought that showing one single occurrence of successfully extracting information counted to disprove the whole idea of “does not” as they took it to imply “ever.” Others focused on “work” to mean, on the whole as balanced on a scale, if new useful information was learned at an appreciable rate vs collecting nonsense or just having repeated back by the captive what he thought the torturers wanted to hear. Others took “torture” to its most extreme and general meaning to turn the word into any form of negative stimulus being applied to a person against their will. Etc… So your questions in this thread “Whether terrorism works” “or, really, anything involving violence or coercion, for that matter, “works.”” Are each going to be huge meandering train-wrecks of people reading in their own biases and using their own definitions of each word to talk past each other as they get hung up on the minutiae of an imprecise language.
Can we all start at wikipedia for definitions of terms?
Do you want “terrorism” to only encompass sub-state level guerrilla tactics meant primarily to “inflict terror,” and treat nations that fund/arm these groups as not committing terrorism? Did America’s Operation Shock and Awe under Bush count as terrorism?
“"Shock and Awe” as a subcategory of “rapid dominance” is the name given to massive intervention designed to strike terror into the minds of the enemy. It is a form of state-terrorism.” --Paul James and Jonothan Freidman
Or will we allow a more general meaning for terrorism “Terrorism is classified as fourth-generation warfare and as a violent crime. In its broadest sense, is defined as the use of violence, or threatened use of violence, in order to achieve a political, religious, or ideological aim.” Such that "the slave uprising under Spartacus predate the modern concept of warfare and are examples of this type of conflict.” [terrorism as 4th generational warfare]
Anyway, I say to your second question, that violence and coercion do work. Take nature for instance, do lions or cheetahs mess with honey badgers? No, they stay far away because those little devils go straight for the genitals all the time. They are so mean that even cheetah cubs have evolved their fur to mimic the badger’s striped coat to ward away predators.
Do you accept that to some people the threat of eternal damnation or paradise keeps them from being criminal assholes? Well that is successful coercion through religion isn’t it? Or just getting your kid to eat his veggies by bribing him with dessert? How about during war or any other large scale conflict where the losers are lined up and made to dig their own graves before getting shot? Why do they all not swing their shovels at their captors and at least die making their killers dig the graves themselves? That violence used against them and the promise of even worse if they do not dig broke their spirit and worked towards their captor’s goals.
“Terrorism is unethical, of course - that is obvious and goes without saying”
I disagree with this, I feel that actually acting out to any degree, from talking anonymously on a message board to dieing for your beliefs, in order to protect or advance your beliefs or morals or way of life or family etc… is the height of ethics. We all act and do in our day to day lives what we say/feel on the surface that we believe in. But when pressure is on us and the choice has to be made (whether to have an abortion, or to live off the grid as a rugged individualist, or to keep a family member on life support, or to fight off oppressors, etc) we are forced to put our money where our mouth is and decide.
Every act of debate is the act of trying to force the others listening to accept your interpretation of reality as better than their own and to accept yours as “more right.” But of course this will never work out. The ethics of life in prison is different than that of a free middle class man. The life and sacrifices of a close-knit desert people that are constantly bombed by world powers leads them to have a different, successful, moral calculus than us in the 1st world. We disparage them for fighting back and trying to inject their culture and values into our nation, but we are doing the same thing to them; trying to fight them as we come in to clean up their culture to make it in our own image.
Who is right? Ultimately history is written by the winners (another point for violence and coercion as being an effective metric for success throughout history) and the people that are still alive will adapt to the new way of life, no matter the extremes. (see North Korea or Somalia or life during and after the USSR, or the lives of native americans) But it is never bad or immoral to fight for what you believe in, fighting and being active in your community is the only way to keep your values intact for another day. We in America moan about how our once great nation is going into the toilet, but we do nothing about it. We vote in record low numbers, we never go to city counsel meetings or otherwise get involved in the day-to-day democratic process that is required to keep our system working. We get all indignant and upset when we see others do against us what we have been doing to them for decades. From the general, encompassing, definition of terrorism I say that terrorism and coercion are the only ways to make your morality or ideas the universal “right” one, or at least it keeps your morality and way of life from fading entirely in the face of overwhelming pressure.
I suspect that’s because it was a sort of flipped paradigm, in that it was terrorism intended to cow a particular minority, not minority terrorism intended to cow a much larger “audience”.
I mean, it makes sense that the white majority in the 19th century would be effective using terror tactics vs. a much smaller and less powerful black minority, than a tiny (relatively speaking) group of Islamic militants would be able to cow 300 million people in another country.
Terrorism, like any violent tactic can work under the right circumstances. If your goal is limited and your demands doable, then you can probably achieve your goals. Palestinian terrorists have been quite good at getting prisoners released. Destroying Israel or the United States, that’s a very large goal and terrorism won’t get it done. I don’t think they even win if we act terrorized, unless being emotionally satisfied is a victory. In that sense, torture “works” too, which is why they love to use it whether someone has information or not. Frankly, I’m more concerned with killing them than preventing them from getting any satisfaction out of their chosen profession. I don’t think what they want is particularly relevant either, since what they want has little relation to reality.
With Al Qaeda and ISIS, their goals are so apocalyptic I’m not sure it’s possible to discern any real strategy other than “kill, torture, rape, pillage” and God will reward them with success. If you their God exists and supports them, their victory is inevitable. If he does not exist or does not support them, then they are doomed.
It depends on what the goal really is. As others have pointed out, the large-scale goals of destroying America and Israel, and establishing a globe-spanning Muslim caliphate have been spectacularly unsuccessful. The 9/11 attacks in particular caused a retaliation on such a huge scale that Al-Qae’da and the Taliban essentially ceased to exist, along with the Iraqi government (albeit indirectly). Now, obviously Al-Qae’da and the Taliban are still around and still highly active, but the vast majority of the 2001 cohort was killed or captured. Some writers draw a clear distinction between the 2001 Taliban (which was all but annihiliated) and the resurgent post-2007 “Neo-Taliban” (which is the modern generation). Al-Qaeda has, for all practical intents and purposes, lost Afghanistan as a base of operations. There is a widespread understanding that the Neo-Taliban don’t even want to deal with Arab fighters; They consider them a liability because any Arab terrorist in Afghanistan instantly becomes a magnet for US attacks.
On the other hand, if the goal is to discredit the ruling government, demonstrate the power and resolve of your organization, and provoke the enemy into an over-reaction, then terrorism has been spectacularly successful. Keep in mind that terrorism is essentially a performance for a specific audience… And that audience is not always the target nation. If the goal of Al-Qae’da was to promote the idea of jihadist violence in a broad sense, then it has been quite successful. The rise of ISIS demonstrates that there are tens of thousands of people all over the world who are willing to flock to the Middle East to join their death cult. Dozens of other regional franchises have sprung up all over Africa (both Saharan and sub-Saharan). If these people witness an act of terrorism and are inspired to join a jihadist terror group, then the act of terrorism has been successful.
As others have pointed out, terrorists with limited goals can also succeed. For example, recall the 2004 Madrid train bombings. The attack changed the outcome of the Spanish elections and caused Spain to withdraw from the Iraq War.
Finally, I would point out that even failed attacks have propaganda value. Recall the example of the Palestinian planting a flag on an Israeli bunker. (I admit I forget the exact date.) From a military perspective, the attack was stupid and pointless. From a propaganda perspective, a photo of a Palestinian flag planted on an Israeli fortification was a tremendous victory. The fact that the flag was removed like thirty seconds later means nothing. All people care about is that the group had a photo demonstrating its power, even if it was a lie.
To most rationally-thinking people, terrorists are not rational.
The assumption is made that a terrorist act is intended or expected to cause a societal change, and when it doesn’t, thought a failure (by rationalists).
But if the true goal, even a subconscious one, is to disrupt and upset stuff, terrorism can be highly successful. Think of it this way – you want to make people afraid, untrustful of others, and leery of existing systems, so you set off a bomb. You have succeeded.
Israel still exists, but nearly seventy years after its founding it’s still not secure. It’s been in a state of low-grade perpetual conflict for virtually all of its existence. If a terrorist’s goal is to make war on peace itself, to deny the enemy the fruits of victory and deny the occupied the option of surrender, then terrorism against Israel has been successful.
As someone who has asthma and allergies, I think there is a great parallel to be drawn here. I’ll focus on the AQ/Isis brand of terrorism here since that’s the kind on most people’s minds but this can be applied to many other terrorist “brands”.
My body wildly overreacts to some allergens I come in contact with and this overreaction is vastly more damaging to me than the actual allergen (pollen, dust mites, cockroaches, etc.)
The USA and other countries have reacted similarly to my body even though terrorism has a negligible effect on human lives and infrastructure when you look at it from a cold, dispassionate perspective compared to anything from bathtub and bike accidents to natural disasters.
The best approach would be to treat it like a crime and certainly not to create something like the TSA, waste untold hundreds of billions, invade countries, discriminate against 1.5 Billion people, etc.
The last 2 things are some of the objectives of terrorism. Create enmity and cause the alienation of peaceful muslims. Trick the US into overreaction and collateral damage, which is a lot less acceptable to muslims who identify more with the victims, than to the rest of us who do not.
The alienated people in turn are supposed to become angry at said collateral damage and whatever discrimination they feel and radicalize to perpetuate the cycle. it works to a certain degree. It’s nowhere near as successful as the terrorists wish it to be, but it does work as several homegrown terrorist attacks in the U.S, europe, Africa and asia have shown us.
I don’t think anything has happened in south america.
I recall reading that in the 1990s, attacks on abortion clinics did indeed significantly affect abortion nationwide, and that even today, attacks on clinics have made some medical professionals hesitant to enter the abortion career.
