Fighting the "New" terrorism

Joseph S. Nye Project Syndicate

As the U.S. presidential heats up, critics argue that President George W. Bush's war in Iraq has made the problem of combating terrorism worse. It is a serious charge, because the world needs a broader strategy against terrorism.

Terrorism is nothing new, nor is it a single enemy. It is a longstanding method of conflict frequently defined as deliberate attack on the innocent with the objective of spreading fear. The attacks on New York and Washington of 2001 were dramatic escalations of an age-old phenomenon. Terrorism today, however, is different from what it was in the past.

Nowadays, instruments of mass destruction are smaller, cheaper, and more readily available. Cellular phones were used as timers in the attacks in Madrid last March. Hijacking an airplane is relatively inexpensive. Finally, the information revolution provides inexpensive means of communication and organization that allow groups once restricted to local and national police jurisdictions to become global. Al Qaeda is said to have established a network in fifty or more countries.

Changes have also occurred in the motivation and organization of terrorist groups. Terrorists in the mid-20th century tended to have relatively well-defined political objectives, which were often ill-served by mass murder. Governments supported many covertly. Toward the century's end, radical groups grew on the fringes of several religions. Most numerous were the tens of thousands of young Muslims who fought against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, where they were trained in a wide range of techniques and many were recruited to organizations with an extreme view of the religious obligation of jihad.

These technological and ideological trends increased both the lethality and the difficulty of managing terrorism. Because of the unprecedented scale of al-Qaeda's attacks, the focus is properly on Islamic extremists. But it would be a mistake to limit our concern solely to Islamic terrorists, for that would ignore the way that technology is putting into the hands of deviant groups and individuals' destructive capabilities that were once limited primarily to governments and armies.

Deviant individuals and groups exist in all human societies, and they are now empowered in ways that were once unthinkable. Think, for example of Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, or the Aum Shinrykio cult that released poison gas in the Tokyo subway system the same year.

Lethality has been increasing. In the 1970s, the Palestinian attack on Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and attacks by groups like the Red Brigades galvanized world attention at the cost of dozens of lives. In the l980s, the worst terrorist incident killed 300 people. The attacks on America of September 2001 cost several thousand lives. This escalation occurred without using weapons of mass destruction.

If one imagines a deviant group in some society gaining access to biological or nuclear materials, it is possible terrorists could destroy millions of lives. To kill so many people in the 20th century, a Hitler or Stalin required the apparatus of a totalitarian government. It is now easy to envisage extremist groups and individuals killing millions without government help

Politics has plagued efforts to agree on a common definition of terrorism at the United Nations. Some skeptics argue that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter, and that treating suppression of terrorism as a global public good is thus merely the hypocrisy of the powerful trying to disarm the weak.

That need not be the case. Not all struggles for national liberation turn to deliberate killing of innocents. Deliberate killing of non-combatants (in war or not) is condemned by most major religions, including Islam. Such behavior is unacceptable whether it is carried out by the powerful or the weak. While any definition of terrorism has problems at the margins, the core of terrorism is clear enough to permit efforts to de-legitimize it. Indeed, many countries are parties to UN conventions that commit them to combating aspects of terrorist behavior, even though the UN has not agreed on a single formal definition.

Today, some states harbor terrorists in order to attack their enemies or because they are too weak to control powerful groups. If a campaign to suppress terrorism is based on broad coalitions that focus on de-legitimizing attacks on innocent non-combatants, it has some prospect of success. Indeed, one lesson of the efforts since 2001 is that there is no way to avoid broad cooperation. In that sense, the metaphor of war -- with its emphasis on military force is -- misleading.

The metaphor of war was understandable in the aftermath of the 2001 attacks, but creates as many problems as it solves. How long will the war last and how does it relate to civil liberties and alliances? Bombing is not an option for fighting terrorist cells in Hamburg, Singapore, or Detroit. Only close civilian cooperation in intelligence sharing, police work across borders, tracing financial flows, and working to pre-clear cargo manifests and passenger lists can cope with such a threat. Countries cooperate out of self-interest, but a country's soft or attractive power, not only its military might, affects the degree of cooperation.

That is why critics argue that Bush's policy in Iraq was a mistake. It squandered American soft power, diverted attention from Afghanistan and al-Qaeda, and created a danger that Iraq may become a haven for terrorists. But critics of Bush at home and abroad must also realize that, notwithstanding past mistakes, pursuing a common strategy is essential, because terrorism is here to stay.

The writer is a professor at Harvard and author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics.