The Escalation Trap

This week may turn out to be an important one in the fight against terrorism. We had recorded statements from the three most prominent leaders of the ‘global jihad’, first Bin Laden, then Al Zarqawi and – finally – Al Zawahiri. We also had a gruesome attack in the holiday resort of Dahab, which prompted angry protests from ordinary Egyptians who’ve had enough of the senseless violence. In my view, all these events and developments betray a movement which has suddenly found itself in a state of deep crisis. Indeed, it seems as if the jihadist movement has fallen into what my colleague Mike Smith and I have described as the ‘escalation trap’. It explains why so many terrorist movements are unsuccessful in achieving their ultimate political aims. In developing the idea, Mike and I started from the assumption that, for a terrorist group to be successful, its campaign must be sudden, brutal, unpredictable and indiscriminate. The aim must be to shock, disorientate, and psychologically bludgeon a target group into submission in the shortest possible time. To allow a campaign to become extended or escalate incrementally will allow people to re-orientate, and to adapt to and accept a new level of violence. If a campaign becomes prolonged, there is only one option open to the terrorists to maintain any sort of coherence to their strategy, and that is to escalate the campaign to a new, higher level of destruction sufficient to maintain a sense of terror. The need to escalate, however, raises a number of difficulties. First, it is doubtful whether terrorist groups possess the necessary capabilities to increase the scale of violence to unacceptable levels. Not only is it likely that organisations will lack the personnel, logistical and financial support to maintain the military momentum, but the probability of factional divisions is liable to limit any attempt at escalation. Second, there is the constant danger that brutal and indiscriminate violence will lead to an erosion of public sympathy. If the various stages of a terrorist campaign are designed to overcome the latent contradiction between engaging in more or less indiscriminate violence and the attempt to gain legitimacy, the need for escalation is bound to intensify this paradox. This, I believe, is what has happened to the jihadist movement. Not succeeding in their efforts to bring about political change through violent means, divisions have emerged between those who favour escalation, and those who believe that the movement needs to be careful not to be seen to be nakedly sectarian and/or devoid of any political agenda. As early as last year, Zawahiri had warned Zarqawi that the direction in which the jihadist campaign in Iraq was going was a dead end. And indeed, not only has Zarqawi been demoted, more and more Sunni leaders – who once saw Zarqawi as a potentially powerful ally – have abandoned the Jordanian and decided to engage with the political process. Even more importantly, Muslims across the Arab world are turning against the jihadism campaign. Following Zarqawi’s hotel bombings in Jordan in November, thousands went on the streets of Amman to demonstrate against what they saw as the brutal murder of innocent people. Zarqawi even had to apologise. The bombings in Egypt prompted a similar reaction, with people across the country stunned about the senselessness of attacking an industry which provides hundreds of thousands of Egyptians with a livelihood. No doubt many Muslims in the Arab world have no sympathy for American foreign policy, and some of the complaints and grievances about double standards have not gone away. Equally, though, they have little time for the jihadists, whose political programme increasingly seems to consist of little other than destruction. From the point of view of those who want to counter terrorism, this may be a golden opportunity. It could, in fact, turn out to be a juncture in the global fight against terrorism. The response, therefore, needs to be one which doesn’t provide the terrorists with a justification for their actions. As Mike Smith and I pointed out, terrorism is a strategy which depends on the targets’ reaction in order to become effective. Over-reaction is what the terrorists aim to provoke, and the best way to render them ineffective is to counter their actions through strict adherence to the rule of law.