When the history of 11 September 2001 and all that followed comes to be written, military historians will likely identify a technical anomaly in the first chapter of the war against terrorism. It is that the Americans and their allies were able to kill or capture terrorists in sizeable numbers in Afghanistan although one of the basic rules of terrorism and guerrilla warfare has been never to confront regular armed forces directly. This has distorted the perspective within which the West is viewing future anti-terrorist strategy.
Why the anomaly? Because in Afghanistan, al-Qaida allied itself closely with the Taliban, a regime that was both despised internationally and at war with internal enemies. This allowed the US to assist the Talibans enemies in open combat whilst posing with at least some credibility as the restorers of legitimate rule in the country. In those circumstances the coalition of anti-terrorist nations just about held together. But (or so I argue below) to intervene forcefully in several other middle Eastern countries, as the US now seems to be considering, would not only seriously risk the coalition but could not defeat terrorism decisively.
From combat to negotiation
The leaking of US intentions will already have allowed the most important al-Qaida survivors from Afghanistan to disperse, minimising the effects of their earlier mistake. Dispersal will of course have hampered their operations, but if a long war is in prospect they will undoubtedly reorganise appropriately and devise new concepts of operation. Well-organised terrorism always retains the initiative.
Thus, although realists would agree that terrorism has to be forcefully countered, it is also clear that continued western military intrusion carries the risk of splitting the world along racial and religious lines. Given the gradual spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, this amounts to a dangerous gamble which the West must study more carefully than seems to have been done so far by the American administration still understandably bruised by 11 September.
For example, President Bush and his spokespeople have repeatedly assured us that, if we are resolute, terrorism cannot succeed. But the actual record of guerrilla warfare or terrorism since the Second World War is that it has always brought colonial, occupying powers to the negotiating table. That was so for the British Empire in Kenya, Cyprus, Aden and twice in Ireland; for the French in Vietnam, Algeria and recently even in Corsica; for the Spanish vis-à-vis the Basques; for the Dutch in the East Indies; and for the Americans themselves in Vietnam. Indeed the Americans used the tactic in the eighteenth century against the British. And it seems likely that in the end the Israelis will reap the same reward in Palestine.
The lesson from this, surely, is that in the relatively short term the best we in the West are likely to be able to achieve militarily and diplomatically is some form of stalemate in which terrorist tactics are narrowly confined, as they were for instance in ending the period when the worlds passenger aircraft were being hijacked month by month.
The spread of mass destruction or dirty weapons may also be hindered more effectively than at present (vide the question of Iraq). We may do better on both those fronts, but seeking to defeat terrorism decisively and world-wide is patently not on the cards whilst the causes of terrorism persist. So long as the terrorist has motivation he will always have the initiative and cannot be completely stopped.
The mind of the adversary
Wars depend greatly on intelligence of all kinds, of which by far the most difficult to obtain is insight into the enemys motivation and intentions. To arrive at a medium- to long-term policy in this case we have to make the effort to see the situation through the eyes of terrorists, especially Muslims, in order to understand their intense alienation. As the military say, Know your enemy. What, for example, is al-Qaida likely to be teaching young Muslim recruits in its terrorist training camps?
At the very least, such training will reinforce their disdain for a modern world which is not theirs either physically or politically, but ours; their repudiation of a (European) colonial past and (American) imperial present; their awareness of their poverty and our wealth and self-interest; and most importantly, their general feelings of inferiority and impotence in almost all aspects of the development and management of the modern world.
These phenomena are explained through the guidance of a strict, doctrinal religion that is not impressed by the crudity and playtime ethos of much of Western secular culture today, and laments its intrusion into Muslim lands through modern media and tourism. In short, the young recruits will be told that there are profound historical, political, military, colonial, economic and cultural reasons for them to feel justified grievance against the West.
It is not an argument without purchase on some sobering contemporary realities. The worlds developed nations, for example, contribute less than 0.5 per cent of their GNP to international aid, although in the forty-eight UNO-listed poorest countries people are living on around one US dollar a day and GNP per head is about 0.5 per cent of the average western figure. And this, we must remember, is despite the trading profits and debt interest we extract from the Third World and the discreditable arms trade we conduct with them.
It is a situation in which we are losing or have lost our political legitimacy in the eyes of the majority inhabitants of the global village. We can regain legitimacy, but certainly not through indefinite reliance on force, however tempting or even essential in the short term.
Unquestionably the village desperately needs an effective, readily available armed police force, but it has to be legitimate. This means it can only come from an effective and widely respected United Nations Organisation, but not from the present UNO, which is all too often manipulated by the great powers and lacks the organisation and resources to be effective as the sponsor or co-ordinator of military action.
What is to be done?
Such thoughts lean towards world government, usually debunked in western debate as a mirage. Nevertheless one can detect some climate change recently, especially in the light of a spate of multi-national interventions, from Sierra Leone to Macedonia.
Perhaps our main problem is that we do not realise how geopolitical and economic world management has failed to keep pace with the evolution of the military environment during the past century and a half. The dominant geopolitical mindset still sees a world which can be manipulated by force, whereas even at the end of the eighteenth century Clausewitz foresaw that armed force could eventually become too destructive to be freely usable as an extension of policy. Its growing violence, he realised, would begin to defeat its own ends.
That prophecy first showed signs of fulfilment in what has been called the first industrial war the American Civil War, with its huge casualties from mass-produced firepower. And then of course there came the two World Wars with their millions of dead, and finally the nuclear confrontation of the late twentieth century which brought us remarkably close (in the Cuban crisis) to unprecedented destruction.
Thus, 11 September can be seen in the light of these two discordant evolutionary processes the lack of geopolitical innovation compared with the massive acceleration in military science.
Fortunately, nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) weapon techniques are still under political, technological and economic restraint, otherwise the attacks could have been very much worse. What was actually exploited then was what has long been noted in security circles as a potential threat, namely the growing complexity and therefore vulnerability of modern life to even crudely improvised attacks. In short the scales are still tilting: civilisation is becoming more complex and vulnerable, whilst the means of attack grow more sophisticated.
There is no absolute defence, and in the longer term no way of ensuring that mass destruction weapons do not eventually get into the hands of extremists so long as the technology exists under less than complete international control and extremists continue to have an axe to grind. The most drastic and widespread Western counter-terrorist strategy could not even theoretically reduce those risks to zero and in practice the political consequences would be likely to inflame extremism still further.
It seems, then, that the world has reached a new epoch when radical geopolitcal and economic management is essential if civilisation is to survive, let alone to thrive. Our difficulty, and it is a major historical challenge, is that we are coming to this realisation so slowly in such tentative steps and therefore so late in relation to the growth of a cancer in world sentiment.
Do we have time? NBC international control could perhaps be achieved in relatively short order given the spur of some incipient nuclear war or super-terrorist incident. It is a good deal more doubtful whether we can redress in time the economic, social and psychological frictions between the developed and under-developed worlds which lie at the root of extremist alienation. 11 September was a severe jolt. What more shall we need?
