An undeserved benefactor of 9/11 and all that has followed has been the "terrorism industry" – the group of experts from universities, government and policy institutes who combine entirely legitimate and necessary comment and analysis of events with the far more dubious claim of specialist understanding derived from the study of terrorism itself.
The flaw in this claim is that those who advance it too often focus on terror as an entity or a movement in itself, usually in abstraction from the historical, political or social context of the violent events under scrutiny. Further, they tend to have little or no regard for the fact that if the use of terror for political purposes is the subject of analysis, then it must on any explanatory or moral grounds also include the use of terror by states.
This paucity of analytic structure (and imagination) is evident in recent evaluations of the condition of terrorism in 2005-06, the fifth year indeed of George W Bush's much-vaunted "war on terror". These evaluations are found both in responses to the second anniversary of the Madrid train bombings of 11 March 2004, and in reports seeking to quantify the incidence of terror in the past year, particularly in Europe and the middle east.
2005 was in part a misleading year as far as the incidence of terrorism in these regions was concerned. The most immediately relevant statistical evidence – of the kind used by the United States government or the Rand corporation – indicates a certain decline in violent actions by Islamist or other terrorist groups on the northwest side of the Mediterranean, on the Balkan and Turkish northeast sides, and in Palestine, Egypt and north Africa to the south.
Indeed, the year witnessed some potentially positive developments: the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon; a sustained reduction in suicide-bombings and other attacks by Palestinians on Israeli civilians (Hamas has not carried out a single operation for more than a year); cautious progress in ex-Yugoslavia; and a process (albeit problematic) of post-conflict consolidation in Algeria.
Moreover, the flashpoint Spanish-Moroccan arena was quiescent in 2005, a far cry from May 2003 (when Islamists killed dozens of people in the Casablanca bombings) and "11-M" (when a cell of largely Moroccan origin killed 191 people in Madrid). This pattern of reduced terrorist activity in the Mediterranean region is compatible with an apparent worldwide trend of (with the major exception of Iraq) a significantly decline in terrorist actions.
Fred Halliday is Professor of International Relations at the LSE, and Visiting Professor at CIDOB, Barcelona. His books include Islam and the Myth of Confrontation (IB Tauris, 2003) and 100 Myths About the Middle East
(Saqi, 2005).
Fred Halliday's "global politics" column on openDemocracy surveys the national histories, geopolitical currents, and dominant ideas across the world. The articles include:
"America and Arabia after Saddam"
(May 2004)
"Terrorism and world politics: conditions and prospects"
(March 2005)
"An encounter with Mr X" (March 2005)
"Iran's revolutionary spasm" (July 2005)
"Political killing in the cold war" (August 2005)
"Maxime Rodinson: in praise of a 'marginal man'"
(September 2005)
"A transnational umma: myth or reality? " (October 2005)
"The 'Barcelona process': ten years on" (November 2005)
"The United Nations vs the United States" (January 2006)
"Blasphemy and power" (February 2006)
"Iran vs the United States again" (February 2006)
The onion's layers
The problem with this form of evaluation is that terrorism (unlike, say, oil prices or infant mortality) cannot be measured on the basis of statistics alone. Quantification has little role in evaluating the development, causes or resolution of terrorist attacks.
Terrorism is not a movement or an environmental trend but a tactic used for political ends. It is in a broad political and geographical context that its development has to be assessed. Here 2005 yields a somewhat less reassuring picture, in two senses.
First, several developments in 2005 – including the attacks in London on 7 July and 21 July – gave serious cause for concern. Although the casualties were much lower than in Madrid, the pattern of sporadic but lethal Islamist bombings in major western cities that began in 2001 was sustained.
The evidence available suggests that the London bombers were individuals acting without connections to al-Qaida. The indictments issued on 11 April 2006 the Spanish judge Juan de Olmo, following a two-year investigation of the Madrid bombings, suggested the same thing: that the majority of the twenty-nine accused belonged to a local Islamic radical cell inspired but not directed by Osama bin Laden's network. The apparent absence of a major organised terrorist network linking Afghanistan and the middle east to migrant communities in European cities may be a source of some relief, but the larger point is that the very informality of the groups active in Madrid and London shows how flexible and easily repeatable such operations are.
The very fact that no formal command structure, no significant funding and no central training unit were needed indicated that such attacks would probably continue for years to come. Moreover, there exists the possibility that groups with other more formal links to al-Qaida do indeed exist or may be growing.
Second, there were major incidences of terror (by state agencies as well as Islamist groups) in 2005 in countries on the southeast Mediterranean: the assassination of former Lebanese premier Rafiq Hariri on 14 February, followed by that of other Lebanese opponents of Syrian rule; the destruction of hotels in Sharm al-Sheikh, Egypt, on 23 July by forces hostile to the Egyptian government's policy on Israel; and the blowing up on 5 November of three hotels in Amman, Jordan, by units linked to the al-Zarqawi forces in Iraq.
The underlying trend in Palestine – despite the relatively quiet period that accompanied the dissipation of the al-Aqsa intifada) – was of continued tension and potential explosion. The victory of Hamas in the February 2006 election, and the restlessness provoked by Israel's construction of a "security wall", suggested that the potential for Palestinian-Israeli violence in the future remained strong.
Above all, however, there was Iraq. As the United States justification for its March 2003 attack on Iraq – related to the Saddam regime's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction and its promotion of transnational terrorism – has disintegrated, the counterproductive nature of the enterprise has become increasingly clear. The invasion and occupation of Iraq has, if anything, spurred the nuclear and conventional arms race in the middle east, and attracted a broader mobilisation of support for terrorist and other armed groups across the Muslim world.
The parallels with Afghanistan in the 1980s are evident, even if it is impossible to calculate either the number of young men who have gone to fight in Iraq and who may later go on to fight in other conflicts, or the dimensions of the animosity to the US and the west in general which this war has aroused among Muslims. But it is likely that the war in Iraq will (like Afghanistan, and the Arab-Israeli conflict) be one whose influence and shocks will spread across the region in an uncontrollable manner.
The belly of the beast
In order better to understand the current condition of terrorism, these events and trends need to be placed in a broader analytic framework. In the middle east and the Muslim world, three distinct processes are occurring:
- the incidence of "transnational terrorism" (or transnational jihadism) – such as the attacks on New York, Madrid and London, as well as on Amman and Bali
- militant actions by Islamist or other forces within their specific countries – such as Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt and Algeria
- a transnational political process, the broader, authoritarian and socially repressive (but non-violent) spread of Islamism through political and electoral activity – in countries such as Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and Egypt.
The first is very much a minority activity even for jihadis, let alone Islamists. In the second case, a number of formerly violent groups have sought in recent years some accommodation with politics and the state (Hizbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt). The prospect of a major victory in the Moroccan legislative elections of 2007 by the Party for Justice and Development indicates that this trend is spreading westwards, with significant implications for the Moroccan community in France and Spain.
In broad strategic and political terms, and in terms of the consequences for relations between Europe and the middle east, the confident and apparently inexorable spread of political Islam – from Iraq to Morocco – is of greater importance than the sporadic incidence of jihadi bombings.
Yet while the spread of Islamism has its own dynamic, its discrete political and social causes, it is also shaped and stimulated by the actions of the west, and in particular the United States. This is most obviously the case in relation to Iraq; but it is also the case that the west antagonises Muslim opinion by supporting Israel almost without criticism, by evading a political process that could lead to a contiguous and independent Palestinian state, and by indulging statements from some of its political, military and religious officials that fuel a sense of inter-religious confrontation.
In this light, although Europe in 2005 may indeed have suffered significantly fewer casualties from terrorism than in 2004, the long-term prognostication remains one of many dangers and uncertainties.
There is another lesson that 2005 underlines, and which should never be forgotten: the long-term incidence and political impact of acts of political violence depend not only on the perpetrators of such acts themselves, but on the actions of those they oppose – namely, states. Those in the engine-room of the "terrorism industry" are less inclined to recognise the problem here, one in which it the industry is deeply complicit: that the denial of the violence of states themselves, and the failure to register and evaluate this violence, reflects a larger crisis of moral and political imagination.
The most important conclusion, for practical politics and for its study alike, is that we need to measure the incidence of killing, beating, torture, illegal detention and humiliation by states – the United States, Britain, Russia and Israel included – as much as to measure the bombs and other depredations of terrorists. We need a World Annual State Terror Report to set against the crimes of al-Qaida and its associates. It would not be difficult to compile; but, in the current political and moral climate of the western world, it is rather improbable.
