Why terrorism doesn’t work (2002) [pdf]
agner.org
agner.org
More generally put: Virtually any organization has as its own survival as a high priority goal. Organizations on the extreme ends of ideology, any ideology anywhere, will benefit from increased hostilities in a population. It pushes more people to the fringes.
Terrorism is a time-honoured way to increase hostilities. The moderates lose, the the extreme ends on all sides win (whether you're Trump or ISIS).
Look at recent history and see how well it worked. American bombs on funerals, ISIS bombs on French crowds, it's all terrorism and it works wonders to keep the perpetrators powerful.
When Anders Breivik killed an island full of people, then-prime minister of Norway responded to like this:
"The Norwegian response to violence is more democracy, more openness and greater political participation"
This is the correct response to terrorism and we need a lot more of it. Once you see terrorism for what it is, a recruiting scheme, then it is obvious that "powerful language", "bias to action" and all that shit that politicians usually do, is very counter-effective.
Breivik was an isolated incident, deadly but isolated non less. There is no correct response to terrorism. All terrorists are different. The IRA isn't the FARC or this or that palestinian groups or Al Qaida or Daesh. Sometimes there is a political solution, sometimes there isn't. There is no political solution with Daesh, these people want to exterminate their enemies, the only solution is to exterminate them before they do.
Notably I do not mean to get involved in the American election debate.
The more power and attention Trump gets, the more Muslim youths in the West feel repressed and despised. This helps ISIS and similar organizations. It's not a stretch to imagine that more radical Muslim terrorism in the West, should it occur soon, will benefit Trump, and thus the cycle is complete. This is the kind of dynamic that moves people to the fringes, away from tolerance and moderate political opinions.
The awful acts that you mention that Obama and Bush were responsible for were not accompanied with a similar anti-Muslim rhetoric and that breaks this cycle, somewhat at least. This is why I did not bring them up. Note that strictly seen, only one side needs to actually do violence for a cycle like this to spin out of control. It's most important both sides need to commit to a powerful anti-the-other-people rhetoric.
So if you run an extremist organization looking for more power, all you have to do is pick and then provoke an enemy whose leadership you know will make your target audience / electorate feel very uneasy. This is what ISIS is doing and Trump, more than other American politicians, is helping them do it. It's been done many times before, think Rwanda or how Hamas got into power in Gaza.
I don't completely care about the exact definition of terrorism in this case - it's more the observation that acts of indiscriminate violence against people from a certain group puts people from that group up against the group the violence doers are from. Terrorism is one such kind of indiscriminate violence and usually the easiest to apply unless you're a nation state.
911 happened during Bush administration, but i m sure Bin Laden spent years during Clinton administration to plan. Point here being, who leads the supposed free world doesnt matter, Radicals will hate you. Its in their blood, flow though their veins though generations of unfair treatments from western world.
Look back how western world treated them, ever wonder why there are so many countries in mid east, and wonder why there are so many conflicts happens there every year?
I guess my points are that at this point, your simple existence is enough to provoke the radicals, regardless who is head of govt. Bangazhi didnt happen cause whole world like Obama better and Bush less. Hands of Jesus Christ are just as bloody, he sent just as much people to meet their maker.
The only way is to try to insulate oneself from these radicals by not letting them immigrate, or if it doesn't help pick an area controlled by the most vicious of these radicals (ISIS territory comes to mind) and give them a taste of what armageddon could look like so they'll learn an important lesson.
This has worked very well in the Chechen wars. The Russians tried negotiating, then they tried having a series of smaller military operations in order to take out their leaders. Then the Russians even conceded and gave them defacto independence, but It all didn't work. They instead went on to attack neighbouring Russian states and then even killed hundreds of Russian children in the Beslan terror attacks.
What did help though was Putins response completely levelling the Chechen capital Grozny. And I mean that literally because that's what they did. After that 99.99% of them became cooperative, in fact today most Chechens in Chechnya consider themselves fierce Russian patriots. I wonder why!
Edit: It is hilarious to me how the leftist are trembling about Putin, Trump, Le Pen and so on. What you guys don't get is that you are witnessing a massive, popular shift to the right throughout the West with a right wing ideology that is indeed partly influenced by Putin. Why? Because it is successful. This doesn't mean that they are controlled by Putin, they just share some ideas. You will by the way also experience this political shift in the Netherlands pretty soon.
Haha touché :-)
And they proclaimed the Islamic Emirate of the Caucasus that was very similar to ISIS.
Also they didn't stop aggression after Russia lost the first Chechen war and they got their independence. They instead started attacking other non-Chechen territories in Russia that were peaceful until then.
The Russians were right to bomb the hell out of them. And we should do the same if these people don't stop attacking us.
Edit: Or if you prefer you can throw away any data that doesn't back up the hypothesis and you can believe whatever you want.
While you're at it, why not add Mahatma Gandhi
Edit: The fact that you and others are outraged by the idea Mandela was a terrorist sort of proves the point. The path to respect, statesmanship, Nobel Peace Prizes and sainthood often starts with violence.
Why do you say it hasn't worked out for the Palestinians? If it wasn't for the PLO there would be no Palestinian state [1] and the PLO became prominent through terrorist acts [2].
There's a good number of organizations in history that have started with terrorist acts (i.e. atacks against civilians) and ended up in control of a relatively stable territorial state. They include the FLN in Algeria [3], Hezbollah in South Lebanon [4] and the armed wing of the ANC in South Africa [5]. Sure, most if not all have now renounced their terrorist beginnings - so maybe terrorism is not a strategy for the long run. But it's repeatedly provided the initial stepping stone to forming a government.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine_Liberation_Organizat...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerian_War#Battle_of_Algiers
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Hezbollah#Suicide_a...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umkhonto_we_Sizwe#Bombings
I suppose because I am comparing post-Oslo Palestinian terrorism to early 20th Century Zionist terrorism. Fair point. I'm not sure I agree that Palestine kinda sorta having statehood counts as much a victory, compared to the concrete losses suffered by Palestinians. It's not like Palestinians actually have much control over the territory their state claims.
Palestinian terroristm increased drastically with every concession Israel made.
Suicide bombings after Oslo (they weren't really any before), and the 2nd intifada after Camp David when they were offered 98% of thier claimed territory with land swaps and East Jerusalem, and after Israel pulled out of Gaza it got 10,000's of rockets.
Terrorism can work when it's a means to an end, not the goal itself.
In this light it must be regarded as a great success, not a failure, especially since the self bleeding politics continued without much opposition long after 2004.
- destroy the twin towers so
- the U.S. would justify an invasion of Iraq and
- actually invade Iraq
- and occupy Iraq for a prolonged period of time (and not quickly pull out)
- so America would devote resources here
- thus bankrupting itself
Steps 2 and 3 (and possible 4) are huge leaps of faith. It's absurd to believe he planned all that out. It clearly fails Occam's Razor. Plus, it doesn't fit with the historical context of what he said and wrote at the time.
Step 1. He also attacked pentagon and Washington. Imaging if the latter had succeeded! It's not hard to predict the reaction to such an event.
Step 2. I think he tried to provoke the attack on Afghanistan. Iraq was later.
Step 4. With the terrain in Afghanistan, a quick war is not possible.
If you really believe "Bin Laden destroyed the 9/11 towers to bankrupt America", do find some pre-9/11 evidence of this and update the Wiki page so others can know.
I'll agree that 9/11 was successful. Bin Laden clearly wanted to damage the US in some way, and got deeper damages than he could dream about. But I doubt he had any intention of "bleeding them at the point of bankruptcy" at the planning stage.
Whatever the actual plan was, I do think it involved provoking US to attack Afghanistan.
Yes. So tired of this word being used to describe attacks on soldiers. It might be bad (depending on what side you're on), but it's certainly not terrorism.
They are a soldier, attacking an enemy. I genuinely don't understand how being further away makes that unclear.
Or any different from a soldier calling in an airstrike being further away than a soldier with a rifle being further away than a soldier with a sword.
> If not, does he become one when he goes home from his shift for the day?
They are an off duty soldier.
> What about all the computer programmers writing drone software making his job possible?
They are weapons manufacturers.
For instance would the Irish people have their independence from the UK if there was no IRA? If there was no violence why would the UK give them something they;re not willing to take, especially when states typically only respond to violence.
Depends which movement called the IRA we're talking about and (more generally) what's meant by "terrorism". There's a degree of a difference between the tactical approach of IRA that won the independence of the Irish Free State in the early twentieth century through classic guerrilla warfare tactics aimed at weakening British security forces and making Ireland ungovernable and and some of the more stereotypical terrorist activities carried out by the Provisional IRA in the late twentieth century involving the high profile bombing of city centres with the (wholly unsuccessful) aim of weakening the British public's resolve to continue to support the Union in Northern Ireland.
There were also immediate wins, particularly dismantling the RUC which performed attacks against civilians and colluded with unionist terror groups.
(disclaimer: I believe attacking civilians is awful and god isn't real)
They could have had something similar to the Good Friday Agreement much earlier had they been willing to pursue that type of settlement by political means earlier.
I imagine that this wasn't one of the goals of the IRA, but it looks to be a major motivator for ISIS, which is trying to recruit from the vast majority of peaceful Muslims in the world with a narrative of West-vs-Islam. If even a very small number of Muslims are radicalised because their mosque was burned down or their mother assaulted, for example, that's still a win for the terrorists.
Due to the asymmetric nature of terrorism, which after all is the whole motivation behind using terrorism in the first place, I think it's useful to apply some of the same thinking we do when considering the payout for spam email - if one in 100,000 buys the product / falls for the scam, it's a success.
Daesh believes the ends of times are coming and the final battle against "evil" is near so they are just doing Allah's bidding, they believe nothing has changed since the 8th century and they are fighting "the armies of Rome". Do you really think it is rational thinking ? do you really think their can be some kind of political solution in that case ? Daesh is forcing no change upon the enemy, they want to exterminate them like Nazis wanted to exterminate the Jews.
I think too much is pinned on the door of the media when reporting on stories when:
(a) they are very far away and of little interest to people
(b) have very difficult solutions and enough nuances to make peoples eyes glaze over
(c) there is alternative coverage of other news that is more interesting
I take something like climate change which has had plenty of media attention, but until the first city sinks underwater there isn't going to be enough impetus for people to take the truly difficult actions. That moves it into the national spotlight and makes it a priority, similar to how terrorism on US soil changes "standard problems in the Middle East" into an important US issue.
> Another reason why the use of terrorism turns out to be counterproductive is that it weakens the ideological standing of the weak part. The ideological condemnation of terrorism for harming innocents is hard to argue against. The use of terrorism thus ruins the only truly efficient weapon that the weak part has: ideological warfare.
The resistance/terrorist/freedom fighter organisation's reputation is pretty worthless to begin with. Even if they're saints, no one is going to know about them or care. On the other hand, the powerful country/organization/political has an incredibly important reputation. It is absolutely worth it for the terrorist organisation to let their own reputation sink into the mud, if in doing so they can draw a response from the target that will tarnish its own reputation. It's like the relationship between politican and heckler; the heckler can say all kinds of things and people barely care, but if the politican really lets loose and responds in kind that can damage their image.
ETA in Spain only disbanded when the government stopped banning political parties linked to ETA.
IRA in Ireland managed to give the Irish people their independence.
FARC in Colombia pushed the government to allow a vote on a truce, a truce so bad the people voted against it.
The Basque country is not independent. This was the goal of ETA in the first place, and it was not accomplished. After the success of the parlamentary catalan independence movement, the violent ways of the ETA had just no justification anymore.
> IRA in Ireland managed to give the Irish people their independence.
The 1920s IRA was a complete different organisation than the 1970ies provisional IRA. You can hardly call them terrorist by todays standards.
> FARC in Colombia pushed the government to allow a vote on a truce, a truce so bad the people voted against it.
The FARC did not accomplish to install a communist regime in Columbia, so their goal was also not accomplished.
That is a vast, vast oversimplification of the journey to Ireland's independence, which is actually only a small part of the history of the various IRA's.
So, the US bombing of TV stations in Yugoslavia or Al Jazeera in Baghdad would definitely qualify.
There were even cases where English and Irish cities were plundered and all inhabitants forcefully taken as slaves.
People from this culture always used these kind of guerrilla tactics to slowly bring their enemies down.
As far as I see it still works today just as well as it did back in the old days.
Anytime someone disrespects their religious teachings in a public way many of them feel the urge to slaughter dozens of people just to show how upset they are about us.
And it just never stops, there's just too many radical people in these countries.
As I see it the only way to stop this is to show them militarily who's boss until they learn the lesson to back off and mind their own business.
The mere fact that they can't resist killing people when they hear some Westener say something bad about them shows that they really just want to submit us to follow their ways.
If that wasn't the case they'd just stop listening like any normal person would do.