- Following his swearing in as Secretary of the new Homeland
Security Department, Tom Ridge pledged an all out effort to protect the
United States from terrorist attacks. He admitted, however, that the United
States "cannot completely eliminate the possibility of a terrorist
attack." His new department, designed to merge elements of 22 organizations
and to employ about 170,000 people is not expected to be fully operational
for months, some say years. In the meantime, as available data about world
terrorism and terrorist groups indicate, his cautionary appraisal of US
ability to prevent attacks is very realistic.
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- For the indefinite future, however, one of the major
problems of the new department will be the fact that US leadership is suspended
between conducting a campaign against terrorists and mounting a war on
Iraq. Any war on Iraq will surely distract intelligence resources from
supporting Ridge in detecting terrorists, predicting their agendas, and
thwarting their operations. Moreover, there appears little doubt that
war on Iraq, if it occurs, will reduce the support of other countries,
especially Islamic ones, for the War on Terrorism. As Ridge waits for
resolution of those resource conflicts, it would be worthwhile for his
new team to re-evaluate the terrorism threat.
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- What is the Problem?
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- Much confusion in the War on Terrorism grows out of the
threat model the Bush Administration appears to be using. The policy focus
looks fixated on Al Qaida and Iraq, but terrorism challenges are a great
deal older and more complex than that. They are also less likely to respond
to treatment than the fixation on Al Qaida allows.
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- Part of the problem is unreliable, usually incomplete
information. Terrorist groups tend to be close-knit and clannish. It is
not easy to get good data on them. Intelligence efforts to improve the
data can be harmful or fatal to the collector. The best openly available
data are provided in the Department of State annual report, Patterns of
Global Terrorism, a data base that has been expanded and refined over a
period of two decades. Important judgments can be drawn from this report
on the nature and the geography of the global terrorism threat, on what
terrorists are seeking, as well as on the accessibility of terrorist situations
to treatment.
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- What Is The Pattern Of Terrorism?
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- As the State Department report shows, the enemy is not
a country but a global condition. Over the past decade, terrorist attacks
have averaged about 375 per year, occurring in as many as 75 countries.
Very few of the attacks have occurred in the United States, but US businesses
and diplomatic missions abroad have been attacked with some frequency.
In its 2001 report State listed 346 terrorist incidents worldwide. Significant
attacks occurred in more than 30 countries, but two thirds of all attacks
in 2001 occurred in Colombia (191) and India (45). Outside of Colombia
and India, there were 110 attacks in the rest of the world. Four of those
attacks occurred in the United States, all on 9-11.
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- A big problem with the 2001 data is that they included
178 bombings of oil company pipelines in Colombia. Those incidents involve
property damage, but they seldom involve human casualties.
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- To get away from the noise overload of Colombian pipeline
attacks and other lesser incidents, State created a category called Significant
Terrorist > Incidents. Those incidents involve loss of life, serious
injury, abductions or kidnaps, and serious property damage.
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- One hundred twenty three (123) significant terrorist
incidents occurred during 2001. These incidents resulted in more than 3,500
deaths and over 1,000 injuries. Only four attacks occurred in North America,
but those attacks, all initiated with four aircraft hijackings on 9-11,
resulted in > more than 3000 of the reported deaths. Asia, Africa, The
Middle East, and Western Europe, in that order, experienced most of the
attacks, 335 of the deaths and most of the reported injuries. Almost a
third (38) of the significant incidents occurred in India, mostly clustered
around Kashmir problems.
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- In a nutshell, during 2001, the four 9-11 attacks in
the United States accounted for the greatest loss of life so far recorded
in a terrorist attack, while accounting for more than 90 percent of worldwide
terrorism casualties. Citizens of 78 countries were killed on those attacks.
Other attacks occurred in more than 30 countries, but two thirds of all
recorded attacks occurred in Colombia and India, both on the periphery
of the War on Terrorism as conducted so far.
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- How Many Terrorists Are There?
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- Getting a head count on the number of terrorists in the
world, or in any one country, is an important task for gauging the scale
of the War on Terrorism, but getting such a count is something of a crap
shoot. Using the estimates State provides and adding some rough outside
guesstimates, the global number is between 80,000 and 130,000. Groups range
in size from 10-20 members of hard-core groups in Northern Ireland to 15,000
or more for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The largest numbers
of reported terrorists are in Colombia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines,
each with 10,000 or more. Al Qaida, with an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 members
is in about the same class, but between Al Qaida and other groups there
is probably a fair amount of double counting.
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- What Is The Incident Pattern?
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- The distribution of known terrorists only partly fits
the pattern of incidents. When the Colombian pipeline bombings (178) are
taken out of the picture, Colombia. experienced 13 terrorist attacks,
8 of them significant; that number of significant incidents is above average.
The Philippines had 6 significant ones, and Sri Lanka had only one, but
that may have been the last straw (six casualties and destruction of several
military and commercial aircraft) that brought the parties to a ceasefire
in succeeding months. The point here is that 15 or about 8% of the significant
attacks occurred in three countries that have between a quarter and a third
of the reported terrorist activists.
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- Group size can be a deceptive indicator. More than 2,000
activists are estimated to be members of hard core Palestinian groups.
However, the bulk of the serious attacks on Israel involved lone bombers.
While India experienced almost a third of the significant incidents, no
sizeable Indian terrorist group is carried on the State list. Size alone
does not determine how troublesome groups might be, even though size obviously
has much to do with group staying power.
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- What Do Terrorists Want?
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- Why terrorist groups exist is a third critical judgment
one can draw from the State report. State does fairly detailed reporting
on 33 Designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations and 28 other terrorist
groups, or a total of 61 groups worldwide. Well over half of these groups
are seeking regime change/overthrow of present governments. Twenty or
so are Islamic militants, mostly Sunni Muslims. Eleven of the groups are
Marxist throwbacks, some out of the revolutionary tradition begun by Che
Guevara and Fidel Castro in the late 50s, early 60s. Seven are involved
in the conflict in Northern Ireland. Seven are linked to achieving a Palestinian
state, but these groups are split between Christian or secular and Muslim
partisans. Of the 38 incidents reported for India, in State reporting only
two are > associated with a specific group.
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- While the subject of what makes individual terrorists
tick is a very tricky one, as World Bank and other reports show, the root
causes of terrorism are the global issues of poverty, hunger, social, political
and economic abuse, religious and cultural repression, and in some cases,
notably Islamic, failures of groups to cope with the demands of modern
society. Some are > byproducts of mismanaged state building at the end
of the colonial era, especially following World War II. While it may not
be possible in a specific attack to pin down why the terrorists are attacking,
conditions created by those global issues are the main terrorism generators.
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- Where are the most serious problems?
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- The State Department data fairly clearly show that people
as a general rule do not resort to terrorism. There are, however, explosive
tensions just below the surface in a number of situations, especially in
the failed and failing states. USAID Administrator Andrew Natasios indicated
early in his tenure that the United States has AID missions in 75 countries
and that 50 of those countries experienced violent conflicts in the past
five years. Such indicators are probably the best we have for pin-pointing
where the potential for terrorism is greatest and where the next rounds
of terrorist activity are likely to originate.
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- The 33 designated foreign terrorist organizations cited
in the State Department report are likely exporters of terrorism from the
unstable countries or regions. If the export strategies of these groups
actually work, it can be expected that other groups on the State list,
or even groups not yet born, will enter the export market.
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- What Is The Most Serious Threat?
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- The disturbing feature of the world terrorism threat
is not the number of terrorists, but the asymmetry of terrorism warfare.
Nine-eleven showed us the asymmetry of the struggle all too graphically:
The 9-11 hijacking teams numbered only 4 or 5 each, but with planning and
audacity they used several hundred million dollars worth of our equipment
to do billions of dollars in property damage and to kill over 3,000 people.
They were able to outsmart US air defenses and even to attack the home
base of US armed forces, the Pentagon.
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- What Is Asymmetry?
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- Asymmetry is a centuries old commonplace of warfare.
It is definable as a significant difference in the capability, experience,
forces, skills, weaponry, strategies or tactics, or all of the above, between
contending forces. War planners always want enough of an advantage in any
engagement so that asymmetry is on their side. You never want to start
a war if you are at best evenly matched with the enemy. However, small,
determined groups and Murphy's Law can and do thwart sometimes extreme
advantages. Hannibal did that regularly to the Romans. David did it to
Goliath. The 9-11 planners and perpetrators did that to us. Terrorist
groups are difficult intelligence targets. Their thinking and movements
are not easily pinned down.
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- There is in effect no level battlefield where large organized
armies and small bands of terrorists meet on an equal footing. The inequalities
usually give terrorists the advantage of surprise. Therefore, as Secretary
Ridge was careful to suggest, a perfect defense against terrorism is unlikely.
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- What About Al Qaida?
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- The great bulk of the world's terrorism problem existed
before Al Qaida and the global problem is not driven by what Al Qaida does.
Those countries with sizeable minority or majority Muslim populations
are, for now at least, the most likely sources of exploitable groups and
causes for Al Qaida. Bin Laden's allies are mainly Sunni Muslims. The Sunni
Muslims-more than 900 million worldwide--of countries such as Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, Pakistan and others have long standing differences with Shi'a Muslims-less
than 100 million worldwide--in Iran, part of Iraq, Lebanon, and even in
the United States and Canada. However, it is likely that any attack on
Islam by > outsiders will bring Sunnis and Shi'a Muslims together in
common cause against that threat. Such an outcome in effect would strengthen
Bin Laden and Al Qaida recruitment power. A US led invasion of Iraq is
likely to have this precise effect.
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- Main keys to Al Qaida's power are the established patterns
of discontent and disaffection in Muslim and other populations. At the
margin of these > situations, Bin Laden identifies and recruits people
who are disaffected, trained and ready for terrorism. He provides resources
and an organizing principle to exploit those energies in pursuit of the
Islamic Caliphate he seeks, but he, or his lieutenants and imitators only
need to harness established sources of discontent.
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- A war on terrorism that does not recognize this central
aspect of the threat is doomed from the beginning. Bin Laden is only the
sorcerer's apprentice. Not only the short list of villains among the seven
terrorism-sponsoring states cited by the State Department, but also the
leadership and elites of 50 or more countries have versions of the sorcerer
in their midst. The continued failures of those governments and elites
to address the global issues will assure the prosperity of Bin Laden or
any successor. Even without an Al Qaida terrorism will remain a global
threat.
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- How Should People Behave During Alerts?
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- The authorities do us no favors by publishing generalized
alerts, because there is literally nothing we can do about them. To respond,
one needs answers to the W questions: Where, what, when, why, who, and
hopefully how? A generalized threat alert such as the recently announced
High Threat or condition Orange may serve the terrorist better than it
serves us. At the peak of recorded terrorist activity during the 1980s,
this situation was dubbed the "25 cent phone call attack". The
terrorist picked up the phone, put in a quarter, and made a threat. The
threatened parties would come to high alert. It is useful for security,
law enforcement and military units to have such an alert, but it is worth
remembering that the terrorists did not announce their plans before 9-11,
before Oklahoma City or before the first attack on the World Trade Center.
Meanwhile, by studying what we do with an alert, the terrorists can design
their attack to hit an identified weak spot, probably when we least expect
it.
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- How Much Terrorism Is Tolerable?
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- What is an unavoidable minimum failure rate? Even as
a crude order of magnitude, that question is very hard to answer. Here
the significant incident count deserves special attention. A total of
123 significant incidents during 2001 means that there was one terrorist
attack for every 50 million people on the planet. The average was less
than one attack per country, and many countries had none. If the attacks
were uniformly distributed there would have been 5 or 6 in the United States.
The fewest attacks occurred in the developed countries where terrorist
groups are least common. The average numbers understate the conflict situations
of failed or failing states.
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- With a worst case of about 130-150,000 terrorists worldwide
who are scattered across 180 states, we are looking at less than a thousand
per country. When the large insurgent clusters in places such as Colombia,
the Philippines and Sri Lanka, are taken out of the picture, the average
for countries in general is only a few hundred. Most of the groups worldwide
are pretty well limited to their own countries, which means they pose no
threat to the United States, even though Americans traveling in their countries
may be in some danger.
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- No terrorist attack of the size of 9-11, Oklahoma City,
Kenya or Tanzania is tolerable, if we have a choice. What Secretary Ridge
has staked out is the correct bottom line for his new Department: It is
not possible to prevent all attacks. The question then becomes: How much
treasure, convenience, lifestyle interference, anxiety are we prepared
to devote to reducing the > number? Right now we have the country on
a war footing mainly to punish the people who planned the last attack.
But even if we find and punish or extinguish all of those people, the world
terrorism situation will remain largely unchanged. It will remain that
way, and probably get worse, unless we get on with resolving the global
issues.
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- The writer is a retired senior foreign service officer
of the United States Department of State. He can be reached at wecanstopit@hotmail.com
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