The generally left leaning Guardian has an op-ed of interest entitled “Flashy tactics won’t defeat the terrorists.” In it, author David Rose discusses the differences in style between America’s War on Terror (WOT) and Britain’s. While he does bring up interesting comparisons between the IRA and Al Qaeda as well as possible solutions to our current problem based on those of the past, he forgets to make the important distinction between preventing homegrown terrorism and preventing international terrorism.
Writing off the American method as “ideological,” “extravagant ‘war on terror’ rhetoric” and making the usual torture and rendition remarks, Rose praises the British methods though does admit that he couldn’t guarantee things would be the same had London suffered an attack on the scale of September 11th.
The police and intelligence agencies are not going to defeat terrorism,’ he said. ‘People and communities are.’ In a series of meetings with Muslim leaders, the next tomorrow, he hopes to foster a community-based network
In his own words “Well, maybe.” If he’s talking about a network of informers, that’s one thing, if he’s talking about posting neighborhood watch signs and having meetings now and again that’s another. Additionally, he notes that despite Al Qaeda’s decentralized structure, a huge benefit can be found therein, namely that it is much easier to infiltrate them.
This lack of hierarchy can be a strength – there is no ‘Mr Big’ whose interrogation might unravel a whole terrorist army – but also a weakness. ‘It means they are open to infiltration,’ he says. ‘In both cases, the successful agent may well find he gets the best evidence from not saying much about himself, and not asking questions about the others.’
Yes that may be true, but first of all the IRA was considerably larger in Britain than Al Qaeda is there or in the US. Second of all, he’s again only talking about homegrown terrorism, and thirdly he forgets that Britain is around 1/50th of the size of the United States with a considerably smaller population, both of which lend themselves better to his stated methods than the US does. Not to say that wouldn’t yield anything in the US, but fighting terrorism isn’t as simple as copying methods used on other groups. We can all agree that using military might is the best solution against FARC whereas the IRA was better fought with the methods listed in the article. However, that brings me to my point. Where is Al Qaeda on the spectrum of terrorists groups? Perhaps the biggest misunderstanding between the US and Europe is methodological where the US is greating the WOT as a war and Europe as a law enforcement issue.
Homegrown terrorists, those who live, work and carry the citizenship of that country need to be fought in different ways from those who live in a terrorist training camp in Pakistan, Afghanistan or Chechnya. Investigating a citizen of your own country subject to your laws is again different from tracking international terrorists whether in the Philippines, Pakistan, Iraq or Malaysia. When the planning is done overseas (like 9/11) and the attackers come from there as well, the best solution is to eliminate them before they reach the US, or to ship them off to Cuba for the rest of their days.
Thus I’d like to open the comments section to this. Breaking down the WOT into homegrown and international, how should our methods differ for the two fronts?
Get the RSS
Comments to this entry
Kenneth
July 25, 2005
4:42 pm
On a different note, the future of private defense seems promising. If only they'd just let the market work its magic:
"Executive Outcomes: A New Kind of Army for Privatized Global Warfare":http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=16671
Shame they disbanded it, those guys were really good at what they did....
Stygius
July 27, 2005
1:06 am
While al-Qaeda is a fragmented and highly compartmentalized organization -- or set of organizations -- it does not imply that there is no leadership and directedness to it. I tend to think that Rose is right in that certain spin-offs and localized extremist communities can be penetrated, but there is a core network to the jihadist movement that would be increasingly difficult to penetrate. Dan Darling and Dan Nexon have been having an interesting exchange on these issues.
My take is that the command-and-control paradigm is largely and American invention; part of the Pentagon lexicon. We shouldn't conflate that with the presence or absence of hierarchy. "Leadership and coordination" is, in my view, perhaps a more accurate characterization of the kind of hierarchy a fragmented, dispersed network can withstand. The close one circles in to the leadership, the less possible it is to infiltrate -- something Rose is unforgivably simplifying.
Thus, tactics against the localized self-starters versus tactics against the core leadership and crucial network nodes must be different. I think you are perfectly right that we should dispense with false dichotomies.