Tag: terrorism

Military Responses to Religious Terrorism

On By Martin Kramer

Remarks by Martin Kramer to the Conference on the Study of Religion and Terrorism, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, November 22, 2002. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

I’m a draftee in this session. I was originally asked to speak on Islam and terrorism, and I was to have spoken yesterday. But at some point, I was shifted into this session on military responses to terrorism. As I’m not a military expert or strategist, and as I don’t hold myself up as an authority on terrorism per se, I’m doubly handicapped to say anything original on this subject. And if that weren’t bad enough, it’s very late in the conference, and I’ve seen most of my few original ideas chewed over already.

And it’s worse than that. Having heard lots of other things, I’m naturally tempted to digress into responding to them, instead of addressing my assigned topic. I won’t, but I’d like to position myself a propos the great debate of yesterday evening.

Why They Hate Us

Frankly, it’s a mystery to me why anyone would think it impossible to pursue both an “iron fist,” if you will, and a “hearts and minds” approach to the Middle East, at the same time, one reinforcing the other. All the European powers in the Middle East did just that. Although I’m placed on this panel, I happen to be a firm believer in a more intensive campaign for “hearts and minds.”

Of course, any “hearts and minds” campaign has to come to terms with a basic limitation. Now that the United States is the sole great power, everyone everywhere who has a propensity to fix blame for their problems on an external source is fixing it on the United States. That propensity is endemic in the Arab and Muslim worlds—especially as the Arab world has lost its own bid for power these last twenty years, as documented by the Arab Human Development Report. All the free-floating hostility of this wounded civilization is bound to fix itself on the United States. America stands out all too visibly, like the World Trade Center; all the other powers are just so many Chrysler Buildings. So whatever other powers do, in Chechnya or Kashmir or Xinjian, the United States will remain the most resented of all powers. That is a fact, and nothing the United States can do will change it, short of divesting itself of its power. There are people who don’t like who we are, and there are people who don’t like what we do. What they agree on is they don’t like what America has, which is overwhelming and (to them) inexplicable power. Keep it, and expect to be hated.

I find it odd to learn that a “hearts and minds” approach means altering American policy in ways that would appease its critics. This confuses ends with means. A “hearts and minds” policy, as it is understood inside the Beltway, is something different. It is to persuade foreign peoples to support, accept, or at least acquiesce in policies that, at first blush, they are likely to dislike, resent, or oppose. And since the United States hasn’t even begun to attempt to do that on its own, I think that proposals for a drastic reorientation of policy are premature to say the least.

Yesterday mention was made of double standards in U.S. policy. I always find it striking when the Arab and Muslim worlds grow indignant about this, since in their own polities, the gap between rhetoric and reality, between principle and practice, can be positively breathtaking. But there is one gold standard that everyone in the Middle East understands: you reward your friends, and punish your enemies. They all do it. Now it is proposed that the United States reward its enemies and punish its friends—as I understood it last night—distancing the U.S. from its allies, lifting sanctions against Iraq, and so on—all this, to win the good will of Middle Easterners.

If the United States were to do this, no one would ever again risk aligning himself with this country, and it would truly be Osama’s hour of power. People may not always like U.S. policy, but they have to admit that the United States has stood by its allies, friends, and proxies. You tamper with that credibility at your very great peril.

They Want Us Dead

Now that this is off my chest, I come to the assignment, which is the military response to terrorism.

Why is a military response unavoidable? In many instances, the goals of terrorists are such that there is no reasonable political response. This is particularly true when one confronts terrorists whose motivation is religious, especially Islamist. National movements often develop terrorist appendages, but their goal remains terrestrial: the liberation of this or that piece of territory. Religious movements that develop terrorist appendages often have goals that are civilizational, and that envision an Armegeddon-like catharsis. When Osama bin Laden calls, as he did in his last tape, for the conversion of America to Islam, we know we have entered another dimension. Or perhaps a time warp: the man has offered America the choice between Islam and the sword.

The Islamist terrorists who have struck at Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, also have demands that are no less total. They want the Jews to surrender sovereignty as a prelude to their departure from the eternally Muslim land of Palestine. I am sorry to bear bad tidings, but this is what Islamists mean when they say “just peace.”

Of course, we can deceive ourselves. We can reassure ourselves that “they” only want the United States to bring about a reign of human rights, or for Israel to withdraw to the June 1967 borders, or for the U.S. to stop propping up oil sheikhs, or for the U.S. to end economic sanctions against Iraq. There are people in the Middle East who want the U.S. to do one or the other of these things, but they aren’t the terrorists, who want much more even than the sum of all these things combined. Unfortunately this brand of terrorism isn’t reducible to some grievance that we can banish through some ingeniously creative diplomacy, or some quick repositioning of U.S. forces. Many of the political motives attributed to Islamist terrorists are just the visible tips of a massive iceberg of grievance, that has broken off the frozen continent of the Arab and Islamic world.

We are dealing here with something much larger than politics, and the larger nature of the terrorism itself bears witness to this. Those groups and movements motivated by civilizational goals are more likely to cross two operational red-lines. First, they make no distinction between the foreign metropole and its outposts. Most nationalist movements carry out terrorist acts on the ground they seek to liberate. Religious movements are not nearly so discriminating. Religion de-territorializes conflict, and thus universalizes it. It also makes it possible to recruit followers from every possible nationality. Al-Qa‘ida offers this model in its purest form. It is global in the conception of its mission; global in its operations; and global in its composition.

The other thing about religiously-based terrorism is that it doesn’t have inhibitions about killing large numbers of people. We have already mentioned the old cliché, that terrorists don’t want a lot of people dead; they want a lot of people watching. The terrorism of Islamist groups very much belies this notion. They want a lot of people dead. Religious terrorism disinhibits its perpetrators, because it is utterly indifferent to public opinion on the opposing side. Lots of terrorist movements in the past would reassure even as they struck: we have no quarrel with the people, but we do have a quarrel with their government and its policies. You will find nothing comparable to this reassurance in the statements of al-Qa‘ida.

In fact, you’ll find the opposite: go back to bin Laden’s statement in which he first urged the killing of American civilians. The Americans are not a great and good people led by an evil government. They are themselves evil, arrogant, the anti-Islam, so that every last American bears the full brunt of responsibility for his or her government’s crimes. For Hamas and Jihad, the policies of Israel’s government are but a function of the treacherous nature of the Jews as a people, as attested in the Qur’an.

This concept of conflict—and they do call it jihad—prepares minds for terrorism on a mass scale. The suicide bombings serve many functions, but one of them certainly is to leverage small numbers of devotees into large numbers of casualties on the opposing side. In the Arab press, some have calculated just how many suicide bombers it would take to kill off all the Israelis: if there were only that many willing bombers, the job could be finished. And who doubts that the terrorists of 9/11, had they been able to kill 50,000 rather than 3,000, would have done so?

Before They Kill You

The nature of the threat determines the nature of the response. Because the threat of religious-based terrorism is so much more acute—because of its totalizing nature—an effective military response has to be of a kind.

It has already been said here, but I will repeat it. The military response cannot take the form of deterrence. These people will not be deterred from their sacred mission by the threat of counter-strike. They can’t be forced into a kind of cold war stand-off. They themselves boast that they enjoy a decisive advantage because they love death, whereas we love life. And this isn’t just bravado.

Now we can call the appropriate military response by all kinds of euphemistic names. Here are the candidates: the very bloodless word, “preemption”; another favorite of mine is “long-range hot pursuit.” There’s also “selective targetings” and “extrajudicial punishment.” All of these come down to the same thing: going out and killing them before they kill you: hunting them down in narrow alleys and in remote caves, eliminating them, one by one.

The purpose is fairly obvious. While they do perhaps love death, and can’t be deterred, they need a living chain of command to function. They need a network; in this respect, they are exactly like every other terrorist movement that has gone before them. By finding and killing (or capturing) key cogs in the machine, especially leaders, you drive the network even deeper under ground. You create suspicion in their ranks. You disrupt their internal communications. You make it difficult for them to raise funds and recruit new members. They may love death, but paradoxically they soon become preoccupied with self-preservation. Is that noise above a Hellfire missile headed straight for me? Can I use that cellphone and be sure the conversation won’t lead to my capture? Perhaps the cellphone itself might explode in my face? (There was a case in the West Bank of a wanted terrorist who feared using cellphones, so he used public phones—until one of them blew him up.)

These kinds of fears must be present in the minds of your terrorist adversaries—and you can only put them there by a policy of search and destroy. The objective is to turn their existence into something that’s nasty, brutish, and, if you’re lucky and get the right piece of intelligence, also short.

How Do We Know We’ve Won?

Now here we come to the rub. It is not always easy to gauge the success of your military response. Yesterday afternoon there was an argument on just this point. Was the glass half-empty, with many of al-Qa‘ida’s operatives still loose, and the Bali bombing? Or half-full, with the fact that fourteen months later, the Taliban are gone and there has been no major al-Qa‘ida attack against this country? It is a perpetual and endless debate: you will never know how many hundreds or thousands still walk the earth, because you killed or grabbed a terrorist.

Alas, if you fail, everyone will know it. And here we come to the dilemma of the military response. It is possible to defeat terrorists militarily day after day after day. Israel does it constantly, foiling attacks almost daily—including mega-terrorist attacks specifically planned to emulate 9/11. The difficulty is that terrorism is more than a series of engagements, and it can achieve its intended effect even if it loses nine out of ten encounters, or 99 out of 100, or 364 out of 365—the ratio depends on the nature of the conflict, and above all on the stoicism and steadfastness of civilians, who are effectively front-line combatants.

Now we have talked about lots of various “fronts” in this war—everything from Arabic-language radio to homeland security. What we haven’t talked about is the need to prepare the American people, in advance, for the notion that they could be called upon to show at least a fraction of the stoic fortitude that Brits showed during the blitz, or Israelis have shown through the daily mix of shooting attacks and suicide bombings. Having just lived in Washington through the sniper episode, where the fear of one rifle was everywhere palpable, my conclusion is that this road is very long indeed.

Which brings me back to “hearts and minds.” A military response must be pursued simultaneously with a “hearts and mind” campaign—but this time I mean one directed toward the American people. Without that, it may well be that the military response, however resourceful, will be deemed a failure. Then we will hear the chorus that “there is no military solution,” and American decision-makers will be sorely tempted to begin a creeping capitulation to the litany of grievance laid out by Osama bin Laden, with or without him.

No terrorists here

On By Martin Kramer

From Martin Kramer, “Arabic Panic,” Middle East Quarterly, Summer 2002, pp. 88-95. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

It’s ironic that Middle Eastern studies have reaped a windfall from September 11. The current project of the professors is to put as much distance as possible between that infamous day and their cherished subject. With one hand, they rattle a begging cup in Washington, promising they will use more subsidies to help us understand terrorism. With the other, they wave off suggestions that terrorism has anything to do with the peoples and places they study.

Consider, for example, an op-ed piece written by Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, and one of the most media-friendly academics. Telhami, it should be emphasized, is an accomplished political scientist, trained in rigorous methodology – at Berkeley. In his piece, entitled, “Put Middle East Terror in a Global Perspective,” he wrote: “It is a mistake to imagine that the global terrorism problem beyond al Qaeda is primarily Middle Eastern.”26

How so? Telhami read through the State Department’s annual Patterns of Global Terrorism for 2000.27 And this is what he discovered:

In the five years preceding the tragedy of September 11th, the Middle East was not the leading region in the number of terrorist incidents or in the number of casualties from terrorism. Moreover, while the terrorist trend in the Middle East moved downward every single year, it moved upward in other regions, including Africa, Asia, and Latin America. By the year 2000, the Middle East had the fewest incidents of terrorism of any region around the globe, except for North America.

Hence, concludes Telhami, there is justified anger in the Middle East that the “United States targets only that region” in its war on terror.28

If only it were so. But on close examination of the report, it turns out that Telhami’s discovery is bogus. Consider what he does not tell us about the State Department’s methodology.

First, State Department statistics do not include foiled terrorist plots. Because some agencies of government understood the threat of Middle Eastern terrorism even before September 11, some Middle Eastern terrorist plots were foiled – most famously, the millennium bombing conspiracy. It was uncovered in the nick of time; it produced no State Department statistic.

Second, the State Department has an odd way of determining what constitutes a “terrorist attack.” For example, the statistics tell us that Latin America led the world in the number of attacks in 2000. But that’s because every time two rival groups of leftist guerrillas set off a charge under an oil pipeline in Colombia, it’s a “terrorist attack.” In 2000, this happened 152 times. Number of casualties: zero. Obviously, Latin America is not the world’s terrorism epicenter, and it is not why you have to take off your shoes at airport departure gates.

Third, the State Department categorizes attacks by where they take place, not where they originate. Thus, the bombings of the two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 do not count against the Middle East in State Department methodology. They count against Africa. It is this that allows Telhami to write: “While the terrorist trend in the Middle East moved downward every single year, it moved upward in other regions, including Africa.”

Now the embassy bombings did happen in Africa. But they were not African in origin. This was Middle Eastern terrorism exported to Africa, which killed 224 and injured some five thousand. The 1998 embassy bombings also sit smack in the middle of Telhami’s supposed five-year trend of diminished terror in the Middle East.

In short, the “downward” trend detected by Telhami is an illusion. We now know for certain what was happening in the late 1990s: Arabs from the Middle East were moving their terror apparatus abroad. They were repositioning, in preparation for an operation that would dwarf all others. In this respect, the FBI’s list of “Most Wanted Terrorists” far more accurately pinpoints the sources of terrorism than the State Department’s graphs. All but four of the 22 listed terrorists are Arabs from the Middle East.

This truth is self-evident, but there are still people who would deny it. Telhami seems to be one of them. Given his own competence in method, how could he have failed to detect the flaws in the State Department’s methodology? How could his misrepresentation not be willful? Most alarmingly, his thesis has bounced back to the Arab world. Two months after his op-ed appeared, I heard a well-known Egyptian strategist make precisely the same argument: the State Department’s own statistics prove that the Arab Middle East is relatively free of terrorism, thus it cannot be the source of the global terrorism problem.

This is not as bad as the pervasive belief in Cairo cafés that Arabs had nothing to do with September 11. But it is less of a difference than it might appear. There is a word for the steadfast refusal to acknowledge the truth: that word is denial. Not only is it at work in the “Arab street.” It is in plain evidence on the American campus.

26 Shibley Telhami, “Put Middle East Terror in Global Perspective,” The Baltimore Sun, Feb. 17, 2002.
27 At http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/pgtrpt/2000/.
28 Telhami, “Put Middle East Terror in Global Perspective.”

Osama Blockbuster

On By Martin Kramer

This article by Martin Kramer was published at National Review Online on December 14, 2001. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

The video released Thursday is overwhelming evidence for the role of Osama bin Laden as mastermind of the terror attacks of September 11. Its effect nearly everywhere will be to persuade viewers that he was responsible for initiating the attacks. And his own words attest that his role went beyond inspiring the perpetrators. Bin Laden claims in the video to have been in regular communication with the operatives themselves. He professes to have known the logistical plan, the timing, and the participants in the hijackings. In the video’s most hideous segment, he tells his guests that he was the most “optimistic” of the planners, believing that the planes crashing into the World Trade Center would bring down all the floors above impact.

If by some misfortune, bin Laden is captured and not killed, this video will be prime evidence for the prosecution. Certainly its effect on opinion in the West will be to silence all those who claim that the “war on terror” could be a case of mistaken identity. But what of Arab and Muslim opinion? Some hope has been expressed that the release of the video will impact the so-called “Arab street,” which is ritually skeptical of American claims. In many places in the Arab world, doubts have been expressed about bin Laden’s role, and in some places elaborate conspiracy theories have flourished, attributing the attacks to just about everyone but Arab hijackers. Will it make a difference to these doubters when bin Laden is overheard openly boasting of his triumph?

The answer depends on the Arabs in question. They fall into three broad categories.

Those Arabs who decided long ago that the Mossad engineered the attacks are beyond the influence of any evidence. They live in a world haunted by dark conspiracies, where hidden hands move everything. To their minds, a fake video would be a perfect tool in the conspiracy against Islam. They will claim that the video has been staged or doctored — that it is black propaganda meant to dupe the Muslims. Certainly there will be many who doubt the video’s authenticity. They will assert that a technological superpower would have no difficulty faking the entire scene.

Then there are bin Laden’s admirers — those who have celebrated the attacks of September 11. They will welcome the video, since it confirms that bin Laden is not some false idol of their own making, but the authentic author of the blow delivered by Muslim “martyrs” to an arrogant America. Of course, had the video been released a month ago, their joy would have been unmitigated. Now it is mixed with the realization that their “true Islam” also paid a heavy price for September 11: the destruction of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the ideal Islamic regime. They had expected America to suffer yet another blow in Afghanistan. Instead, the Taliban collapsed, many Arab fighters were slaughtered, and bin Laden was put to flight. Perhaps there will even be a few who will see bin Laden on video, and curse him for his own obvious arrogance, and his cocky self-assurance, as though God were guiding his every act.

Between these two extremes, there is a sizeable body of opinion that takes this view: yes, Muslims were responsible for September 11; no, bin Laden had nothing to do with it. In this view, America jumped to a convenient conclusion: It needed to hammer somebody to quench its thirst for revenge, and bin Laden fit the bill. The entire Afghan war, in this view, is a case of mistaken identity. If there were a conspiracy, bin Laden had little to do with it; America simply used him as a pretext for waging a war it had long wanted to wage in Afghanistan.

This argument has rested, in part, on the notion that bin Laden was incapable of mounting such an operation in the first place. A version of this notion, as filtered through American academe, can be found in a statement by Fawaz Gerges, a chaired professor at Sarah Lawrence University, made immediately after the attacks. (Gerges had just returned from two years in the Middle East, where he researched Islamic movements on the dime of the MacArthur Foundation.)

I doubt it very much if Bin Laden is capable now and on his own of masterminding such complex and well-coordinated attacks in the heartland of America and in several U.S. cities. He has been under siege for the last few years. The United States has committed considerable resources to restricting his movements and reach. All his resources are monitored minute by minute. We have an army of agents keeping track of every move of his. Although the Taliban have refused his requests to expel him from Afghanistan, they have restricted his movements and kept him under a tight leash.

(In July 2000, the same Gerges told the Washington Post: “Osama bin Laden is really a spent force. He has little support outside Afghanistan. He is in a state of siege by the U.S. and other intelligence organizations.”)

In fact, the United States never claimed to have bin Laden under a “state of siege,” or to be capable of “tracking his every move,” “minute by minute.” This is not the case now, and it was not the case then. But those who did believe this, especially in the Arab world, have refused to accept even the possibility of bin Laden’s responsibility for September 11.

If the video has any impact in the Arab and Muslim worlds, it will have it upon these viewers. They will squirm in discomfort on viewing an Osama bin Laden completely at odds with their prior assumptions. Here is a man in command, and a commander in the know, meeting freely with visitors, and boasting openly of his role. He does so without the slightest fear that anyone might be monitoring his words. Here is a man who supposedly refused to allow any electrical equipment in his presence (it might betray his location) gabbing away in front of someone’s home video camera. Here is a man who appears absolutely confident that he is safe and secure in Taliban hands — even after September 11. In the famous bin Laden recruitment video, it was clear that he would; in this video, he makes it clear that he could — and did.

Of course, it is always possible that many of these viewers will write off the video as a fake, or assert that despite bin Laden’s confession, he could not have done it. Arab journalists and intellectuals are notoriously impervious to evidence. But there are a few who have suspended judgment on the war — pretty much the most one could have hoped for. The video offers them a ladder down from the fence, and provides them with ammunition they can use against their critics.

There is one more aspect worth emphasizing. The Taliban, it will be recalled, professed a willingness to turn over bin Laden, provided the United States gave proof of his responsibility. Yet bin Laden himself, right under their noses and before a large group, boasted of his responsibility. The Taliban must have known this, and probably knew of everything else, quite conceivably in advance. The video is thus an indirect but persuasive indictment of bin Laden’s hosts, whose removal from power was a stated American war aim — and one that has already been achieved.

So it is useful to have the video, and it is good that it was released. But the most effective American propaganda was and remains this: victory. So far, the war has done much to restore awe for America in the Arab and Muslim worlds — an awe that had been eroded by years of irresolution. As bin Laden put it in the video: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” America is now the strong horse. Some Arabs and Muslims may not like it, but they do fear it, and that is nearly as good.

Likewise, it’s great to have bin Laden indicting himself on film. But it’s no substitute for the real flesh-and-blood bin Laden. When he next appears on video, he should be either dead or blindfolded — and the impact of that scene on Arab opinion will be indisputable.

https://youtu.be/-tSy2Qi8mr0