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International Cooperation as a Tool in Counterterrorism: Then and Now
By Sebastian L. v. Gorka
In the decade following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, and the
collapse of the USSR, there followed a flurry of attempts at describing what the post–Cold War
order would be. The lack of certainty was reflected in the variety of scenarios presented.
Typically, in a fashion that reflected the rigidity of thought prevalent during the Cold War years,
the first attempts concentrated on the identification of new poles to replace the dual superpower
poles of the previous decades. Among the alternatives to the bipolar balance of the United States
versus the USSR, were a unipolar order (United States alone), a tripolar order (United States,
Europe, Japan), and various multipolar variations. Beyond these simplistic options, there
developed more holistic and nuanced propositions. Perhaps the two most famous theories or
visions were those of the conservative academic Francis Fukuyama and the doyen of nation-state
security studies, Samuel P. Huntington. In the early nineties both attempted to give a new
overarching appraisal of the coming geostrategic reality. Fukuyama ingeniously entitled his
theory with the sufficiently provocative title The End of History. While obviously meant to be a
controversial title, the thesis itself was less so. The argument essentially was that the twentieth
century could be typified by the attempts of two extreme ideologies to destroy the “market
democracy” model of state administration: Nazism and Communism. The fact that both were
defeated
1
by the last decade of the century meant that democracy had been victorious and thus
there was “no new history to write.”
2
Huntington’s vision, as declared in his article and book Clash of Civilizations, was a far
darker one. His prediction was that the age of conflicts between nation-states, or alliances of
nation-states, would be replaced by an era of conflicts arising between cultures, or civilizations,
or along the divides between them, a harking back to more medieval divisions. Wars in this new
(or revisited old) age would be caused, or at least exacerbated, by poverty differentials between
North and South, West and East, as well as by religious fundamentalism.
3
Since their publication, these theories have prompted much criticism as well as comment.
Perhaps most strikingly, their effect upon thinking relating to “hard security” issues was
minimal. The question of what impact such theories would or should have—if proven valid—
upon the exercise of national security was conspicuous by its absence. This in part has to do with
the confusing nature of threat assessment in the period following 1990 and prior to September
2001.
The Cornucopia of Threats: A Challenge to Prioritization
Perhaps only after the fact did it become apparent to the national security community within the
western community of “market democracies” that the Cold War had been an eminently workable
international system. While the overarching threat—Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)—was
ultimate in scale, potentially ensuring for the annihilation of both East and West should World
War III have happened, the fact was that the bloc-to-bloc arms race, perceived near parity, and
the later developed system of arms negotiations and arms control regimes, together resulted in a
system that was for the most part well–balanced and predictable.
4
For those with responsibilities
within the national security architectures of the western nations, the enemy and the related
responsibilities were quite clear: (1) the USSR, its allies; (2) the prevention of WWIII (or, should
that not be possible, preparation to win the “hot war”). The enemy(-ies) was a static nation-state,
with easily identified points of gravity such as its capital, its industrial base, and its organs of
security and defense. How to “take the Cold War” to these targets was relatively obvious, if not
easy.
Beyond this overarching challenge, there was, of course, another national security–
related task-set: terrorism. From the 1960s onwards countries such as the UK, Spain, Germany,
and Italy, as well as several nations in Latin America, had to fight the scourge of political
violence. However, here it is important to note that in comparison to the primary threat posed by
the Soviet bloc, this enemy was in a fundamentally different class. Whichever group one cares to
choose, be it the Baader-Meinhof Gang, Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA), or the
Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), while deadly, none had the capacity to strike a fatal
blow against the government they were fighting, and thus they did not vitally endanger the given
nation’s existence as did the Soviet Union.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain, national security faced a new challenge. As the Soviet
Union dissolved into several nations and the biggest, the Russian Federation, established
normalized relations with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and would even
become nominally an ally in later years,
5
other new or newly revitalized threats emerged to
challenge western governments and concurrent domestic calls for a post–Cold War peace
dividend. These threats ranged from the familiar, such as failed states, to the new and outré, such
as information warfare and critical infrastructure defense. (For Detailed Information Please See
Original Version of this Article.)
As the number and nature of the new panoply of threats and challenges grew and became
more complicated, two obvious questions arose. The first was, given the limits to defense
expenditure that exist in most democracies, how should governments now prioritize their
national security investments and activities? Which of the enumerated threats should receive
greater attention, where should limited public resources be invested so as to best protect the
population and the national interests? For many nations the answer was not clear. The second
question had to do with capabilities.
In the European half of the Atlantic Alliance defense and security capabilities were very
much shaped, understandably, with the scenario of WWIII in mind. The national war-planners
and the multinational staffs at Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in
Belgium worked on the assumption that should conflict erupt the USSR and its satrapies would
execute a massive land attack against the West through the Sibbesse Gap into West Germany and
beyond, most likely using chemical weapons, before resorting to tactical nuclear weapons if
necessary. It was NATO’s raison d’être to ensure that the United States would respond to the
overwhelming conventional advantage posed by the 2nd Red Army by bringing an
intercontinental and intermediate nuclear response to such a land attack. Subsequently, the
majority of forces in the European half of NATO were designed to fulfill a largely static
territorial defense function, to act as a delaying force inhibiting the rapid invasion of Soviet
forces until the transatlantic nuclear response was made. In layman’s terms this meant that the
armies of most western nations were replete with heavy, slow armor and anti-armor assets
6
fit for
nation-on-nation conventional, or Clausewitzian war.
It soon became apparent that the appropriateness of such capabilities was limited in a new
threat environment, which included the requirement that a nation be able to project its forces far
further afield than its own national territory. As a result, very soon talk of a growing gap between
US and European defense capabilities increased, given that the United States, thanks to its
geography and the way in which it defined its global interests, had at its disposal a far more
flexible and projectable force than any of its allies.
9/11: Clarity in Prioritization?
While the second problem was a factual one that could not be explained away, or would not
disappear by itself, the first dilemma regarding prioritization was solved, at least according to
some members of the Western Alliance, with the aircraft attacks aimed at civilians on one fall
day in 2001.
Among professional students of political violence, there are few scholars who have been
able to turn theoretical observations into policy-relevant products. Brian Jenkins, of the RAND
Corporation, is one of them. One of his most famous observations—which has since become
conventional wisdom within the field—was that “The terrorist doesn’t want a lot of people dead.
He wants a lot of people watching.”
7
The inference, of course, is that the heart of terrorism is the
desire to inculcate fear in a population and that in the modern age the media have become one of
the most prized weapons of the terrorists, since they enable terrorists to further a message of fear
to as wide an audience as possible. And in the era of regular hijackings, political assassinations,
and high-exposure events such as the 1975 attack in Austria on the OPEC ministers, or the 1972
murder of members of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich, this adage was proven again and
again. However, trends in the 1990s and 9/11 itself seem to point—at least for some observers—
to a new, even more frightening trend.
The first observation regarding this new trend is a purely statistical one. Every year the
US Department of State publishes a report on the previous year’s terrorist attacks against
American targets.
8
After the prose description of the year’s events and those involved, each
report contains a series of appendices detailing the names of terrorist groups and mathematical
data related to the attacks described. While the publication is admittedly not a comprehensive
assessment of all terrorist activities in a given calendar year, focused as it is solely upon attacks
executed against US interests, the changes identifiable over the twenty-four years that data have
been collected have led to one clear conclusion being drawn. While the period since the end of
the Cold War has seen a marked decrease in the frequency per year of successful attacks
launched against the United States, the lethality of individual events has increased. In other
words, more people are likely to die or be injured as the result of one single attack than would
otherwise have been the case in previous (Cold War) years.
As a result of this trend, some commentators have extrapolated to conclude that Jenkins’s
famous observation no longer holds: While the size of audience was the driving factor in the
past, now it is the extent of damage, the extent of killing that is more important
9
to the terrorist.
We have moved from mass-audience terrorism to mass-casualty terrorism. This has led to the
hypothesis that there now exist terrorists who simply wish to kill as many people as possible, and
to this end they will attempt to acquire weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This nascent
category of actor has been christened the hyper-terrorist.
10
There is, however, one superficial problem with this hypothesis, and that derives from the
nature of modern terrorism we have become acquainted with in the latter half of the twentieth
century. If the hypothesis is to work, in this author’s opinion a differentiation must be made
between at least two fundamental types of terrorist.
Hyper-Terrorism and the Rational Versus the Irrational Actor
One important common denominator among the vast majority of those sub-state actors that used
political violence in previous decades was that the end-state they wished to achieve was at least
theoretically possible. The classic terrorist groups, as typified by the PIRA and the Basque
separatist group ETA, were predicated around clearly communicated demands for self-
determination, or simply greater autonomy from the governing nation-state. As a result, while the
concept of the counties of Northern Ireland being reunited with Eire, or the idea of a more
independent Basque-land may have been anathema to the governments of London and Madrid,
these were demands that could not be thought completely out of the question. Thus, differences
between the given group and the relevant government were potentially resolvable via political
means
11
and not just demands to be mitigated solely by exposing such groups to lethal force or
interdiction by law enforcement authorities.
It is exactly by dint of the feasible nature of the end-state demanded that such groups
should quite rightly be deemed rational or pragmatic in their strategy and behavior. It is also
clear, therefore, why such groups never resorted to strategies or weapons that would result in
truly mass casualties. The end-state to be achieved was a worldly, political one. The “game
plan” was to achieve a political victory by forcing a capitulation of the government on a specific
issue thanks to the majority of the public exerting (through fear) adequate pressure to ensure for
a change in said policy. Any act that resulted in mass casualty, resorting to WMD technology,
for example, would rationally and predictably result in two consequences: the loss of all potential
support from the elements of the larger population that were sympathetic to the broader goals of
the group; and justification for the government to use all means (even shoot-to-kill tactics) to
eradicate the terrorist group once and for all. Thus, it would seem that hyper-terrorism—the
desire of terrorists to obtain and use WMD capabilities—cannot apply to a rationally thinking
sub-state actor who has a feasible (political) end-state in mind. But if hyper-terrorism is an extant
phenomenon, then to whom does it apply?
Perhaps the clearest, most scientifically discrete candidate for designation as the modern
age’s first specimen of hyper-terrorism is Aum Shinrikyo. This organization is infamous as being
the first non-state actor to use a chemical weapon successfully against civilians. In 1995, after
years of experimenting with both chemical and biological agents
,12
the cult deployed a weak
solution of sarin nerve agent on the Tokyo metro. We now know that the group had a very
different end-state in mind from that witnessed in the case of “classic” pragmatic terrorist actors
such as ETA or PIRA. Through a series of similar WMD attacks, the cult and its half-blind
prophet-leader Shoko Asahara planned to take control of the government of Japan. Once it had
established itself as the new government of Japan, the cult intended to unleash a global WMD
campaign until it ruled the whole planet and could create a worldwide cultic religious state and
then initiate End Times. It is clear that such an end-state is not politically feasible and that there
is no political solution possible that would bring the cult and its enemies to a possible negotiated
compromise. The scenario driving this sub-state actor was not a worldly one, infused as it was
with apocalyptic aspects, and thus we may make a distinction in this case and classify Aum as a
nonrational, or transcendentally informed, terrorist group.
13
The identification of whether or not a given terrorist group has such a worldview, one
where compromise with the government is not just unimportant but impossible and where a
transcendental “reality” informs the actions of the perpetrator is significant beyond solely the
realm of theory. The question of whether or not we are dealing with a rational or nonrational
actor
14
will have distinct implications upon what type of response government authorities can
deploy. In the case of the former, the choice of tools is broad, ranging from military force and
police action to secret or open negotiations and even third-party mediation or arbitration. If,
however, the group is of the latter variety, then we are limited to two fundamental options:
arresting or annihilating the terrorist group. Who the enemy is, therefore, dictates the modality of
response.
Categorizing the Current Threat: Al Qaeda
It is clear that the 11 September 2001 attacks in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania were
designed to exact as many casualties as possible—and most interestingly as regards
methodology, to do so without resorting at all to WMD technology. But the question remains:
What were the end-state and specific demands of the group responsible for 9/11? Here one needs
to look at the communiqués and other items of propaganda disseminated by Osama bin Laden
and high-ranking al Qaeda terrorists over the years.
In the beginning, before al Qaeda (“the Base”) became well known in the intelligence and
academic communities, Osama bin Laden had taken control of the Arab Service Bureau of which
he had been a part and which had recruited and trained many of the foreign mujahedeen who had
fought against the Soviet troops of occupation in Afghanistan. At that time, the avowed aims of
the new organization were clearly defined against the backdrop of a world seen in distinctly
Huntingtonian and Manichean terms. For this fundamentalist fighter, by the early 1990s, having
won the fight against the then “lead Satan” (the USSR), it was time to fight for oppressed
Muslims everywhere and to take the fight to the, until then, secondary Satan: western
civilization, led by the United States. The western world was and is seen by bin Laden as
antithetical to his fundamentalist view of the Islamic faith, an affront to all that is good and holy
and a force that through its soft power, capitalism and globalization, further weakens the hold of
the Muslim system over its followers. The end-state depicted by the former mujahedeen is the re-
creation of a caliphate, starting with the Middle East and Central Asia, but eventually spreading
over the whole world as the West is systematically undermined over years and even decades
through a campaign of asymmetric warfare that exploits the very aspects of the liberal
democratic system of which its nations and leaders are so proud. In all this, since it is the
standard-bearer of the liberaldemocratic, capitalist model, and the source of most that is unholy,
the United States stands as the primary “western” target.
15
As a result of such pronouncements and based upon interviews
16
with captured or
reformed members of the terrorist organization, one would be led understandably to the
conclusion that al Qaeda fits quite neatly into the category of nonrational terrorist actor. No
political resolution is even theoretically possible given the absolute and transcendentally
informed nature of the desired state-of-affairs (a global caliphate) that al Qaeda wishes to
achieve.
It should be noted, however, that since becoming a player on the world stage and after the
more successful attacks that culminated in the events of 9/11, bin Laden has complicated matters
by inserting other lower-level political demands into the broader palate of existing
pronouncements. These have included the removal of US troops from the lands that contain the
holiest of Muslim sites (such as Saudi Arabia) and, perhaps most pronounced, the demand made
in the prerecorded video statement that was released on the invasion of Afghanistan in which bin
Laden stated that there would no peace in the West, nor in America, until there existed a free and
independent Palestine. Both of these are feasible demands open to a political approach that fits
very nicely into the rational terrorist category. In fact, one of them has already occurred.
Subsequently we are left with the problem of how to classify the threat posed by al
Qaeda’s version of hyper-terrorism. In my opinion, the conflation of nonrational with rational
elements, of political with transcendentally informed goals, may in fact be a deliberate ploy on
behalf of the leaders of the organization to confuse us, “the enemy,” or a crude attempt to forge
tactical gains from among the consequences of strategic-level attacks. In any event, the higher-
level nonrational demands, or end-state, overshadow the lowerlevel demands, and we can
conclude that the group is fundamentally—from our point of view
17
—nonrational, or at worst
and for practical purposes, a sui generis modification of this category.
Logically if we therefore decide that there does in fact exist a new type of threat, one
whereby a nexus has been created between the desire to be a terrorist and the desire to cause as
much damage as possible, that hyper-terrorism can exist only in the case of nonrational actors,
the obvious question should be: Are we in possession of the requisite tools to fight this new form
of political violence? As individual nations, based upon traditional nation-states structures and
concepts we are not.
The Westphalian Inheritance
It is often far too easy to take for granted the system of governance and administration in which
we live today. If one does not professionally study modern history, or the evolution of
international law, one could be forgiven for thinking that the current system of independent
nation-states has existed for much longer than it in fact has. Its evolution is quite recent, in
historic terms. Most commentators consider the Peace of Westphalia (1648) is considered as
introducing the foundations for the creation in the West of a system in which the main actors
were states, bodies with independent internal affairs—but which could ally with one another. In
the Westphalian system, sovereignty would eventually become paramount.
18
Later, as this
concept evolved and as the individual allegiances of the people shifted from local landowner and
royal house to professional political elites defined around a national identity, the state would
evolve further into the now-commonplace nation-state, with its fundamental aspects of
citizenship and nationality.
19
For our purposes, the most important side-effect of the founding and development of the
nation-state as a way to run and define a territorial unit are the ramifications of this new locus of
sovereignty on the practice of providing for the security. While humans have been waging war
for as long as territory and other forms of expropriable wealth have existed, the modern method
for securing the nation-state resulted in a universal division of labor being replicated in
practically every nation of the world.
20
The national security systems thus created were quite
simply formed around a categorization of threats as being either external, internal, civilian, or
military in nature. Since the threats were all relatively discrete in scientific terms (i.e., easily
definable and differentiated), it was logical to make the responses reflect the given challenges. If
the enemy state wishes to obtain sensitive information of a military nature, then “we” should
have a capability to protect such information and to capture its agents. Likewise, if the enemy
state intends an act of military aggression, then “we” must maintain a permanent capability to
deter such an attack or to meet it head on with force, and so on. Of course, particular variations
developed—nations that combined civilian and military counterintelligence into one body, for
example—but on the whole, the majority of modern nation-states established a division of labor.
(For Detailed Information Please See Original Version of this Article.)
In each case, as the nation-state evolved and solidified its structures, the internal
architecture of national security was reinforced by the laws and constitutional measures that
defined the responsibilities and specific missions of the given organs. As a means to preserve
efficiency and to ensure against abuses of power and information, practically every state of the
developed West would severely demarcate the spheres of authority of each body. Matters of
military intelligence, for example, were to be the sole purview of the body (or bodies) expressly
mandated to respond to this threat, and so on. In fact, any intentional or even inadvertent
negation of this division of labor would, if found out, generally cause scandal and/or
investigation.
21
This strict interpretation of missions and the resultant mirror-image response
whereby the threat would be matched by a similar domestic body, would simply be further
reinforced by the cut and dry, unequivocal threat environment presented by the Cold War.
Matching Threats to Capabilities in the Third Millennium
Whether or not one agrees with the still-influential theses cited earlier of Clash of Civilizations
or The End of History, it seems clear that there has been at least one incontrovertible change in
the geostrategic environment in which the developed countries of the West now find themselves:
The Westphalian system’s core presumptions no longer hold.
First, it may have become trite to say so, but that does not lessen the veracity of the
statement that democracies do not wage war on one another. In fact, this tenet has in recent years
been raised to the level of being a basic element of US foreign policy. Translated into more
practical terms, it means that the countries of the western community of nations do not pose a
threat to one another. This seems an uncontroversial statement since it is hard to envisage a
classic nation-on-nation conflict involving the recognized tools of war erupting between
Germany and the United States, or the United Kingdom and France. This fact is underpinned by
the nature of new threats that have been identified in recent years. (For Detailed Information
Please See Original Version of this Article.)
While this statement seems perhaps obvious, its ramifications in practical terms are
highly significant. As we have seen, the national security architecture universally established
under the Westphalian system and reinforced by the Cold War was not a multifarious tool. It was
originally designed exclusively to deal with external threats that were in the form of (enemy)
nation-states. The ultimate purpose was to prevent or win an armed conflict against another
country or group of countries, usually in relatively close physical proximity to one’s own nation.
Today, the transatlantic area is constituted by nations that do not hold grudges against one
another that could reasonably lead to an armed conflict for territory or wealth. In fact, continental
Europe is now for the most part represented by an institutional form of integration that represents
the largest voluntarily unified market and trading bloc the world has ever seen.
22
Thus, both the
NATO and EU communities consist of nations whose national defense and security structures
are wholly out of step with the danger they actually face—dangers that are without borders,
capitals, or nation-state-derived governments.
Managing the Disjunction: Going “Super-Purple” and International
With the bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999 and the more recent invasion of Iraq in 2003,
some commentators have stated that the whole Westphalian system has suffered a death blow.
The sacrosanct nature of a country’s sovereignty—irrespective of domestic events—was held
previously to be the core operating tenet of the system. The idea that internal behavior deemed
by one or more countries as going against the fundamental norms of human rights justifies
military action by an otherwise unaffected party, or parties, is truly novel. However, it is
important to note that this undermining of national sovereignty is very much limited to those
states that can be classified as “failed” or “rogue” in nature. As a result we should posit that the
principle of unadulterated sovereignty still applies in the community of developed market
democracies.
Nevertheless, when it comes to ensuring the security of these nations, there is a clear
disjunction. For centuries the tools of national security matched the threat. Today the threats
operate in a milieu that is transnational and not limited by the shell of nation-state architecture.
Our foe today moves in a world that is unrestricted by international convention, by physical
borders, or the dictates of government. Yet, the successful members of the transatlantic
community that won the Cold War inherited a tool box of means to provide for security that has
not changed and is very much still bound to the architecture of the Westphalian nation-state.
Armies and police forces still serve countries. They are funded out of national budgets and are
controlled by national governments. While the enemy has moved to a higher plain of existence
we have not and will likely never do so, since world governance is not something that is
welcomed either by the majority of citizens who find their identity in the nation-state metier, nor
by the entrenched stratum of politicians who would have everything to lose should their domestic
authority be replaced by a higher transnational one.
As a result we must look elsewhere for a solution. If we recognize the fact that our
internal national security and defense structures were inherited from another age and for another
purpose, yet we are unable for various reasons—above all political—to create supranational
solutions, then the only viable option is to radically reform the nation-state level instruments so
as to make them more applicable to the new tasks at hand, to closer resemble the enemies of
today. This means admitting the fact that the old division of labor is out-of-date and that we
cannot justify the maintenance of hermetic seals between various agencies and forces. The
internal barriers between the police force, the army, and various intelligence services must at
least be in part dismantled so as to facilitate a modus operandi that is as flexible and as effective
as that of our new enemies. This would result in the creation of “Super-Purple”
23
structures as
flexible and hypermobile as the enemies they needed to neutralize. It would not even be too far-
fetched to make the argument that many countries in the current geostrategic environment would
be best served by a unitary body conglomerating all the skills of the various separate agencies
and units into a new structure better suited to addressing threats like al Qaeda and transnational
organized crime syndicates.
24
There even exists a national counterterrorism precedent for such a
unified multiagency approach.
25
Such examples must be revisited and expanded internationally
to follow the principle and vision laid out by Dr. Boaz Ganor (detailed later in this book).
Even so, the reality is that such a broad, sweeping reform and restructuring of the
national security apparatus of the nations of the developed West will inevitably run into heavy
resistance from all those who have an interest in maintaining existing structures and who do not
see the necessity for change. Therefore, it is most likely the responsibility of the
nongovernmental think-tank community to promote the initial discussion on how best to shape
old capabilities to meet new threats and to convince as many members of the general public as
possible that the topic should be placed on the political agenda of the various nations. For if we
do not begin to discuss and then eventually effect change, the West will continue to suffer in a
deadly game of “catch-up,” as those unfettered by limits of the nation-state proceed to exact
damage upon our countries and way of life.
In the meantime, the Marshall Center’s Program on Terrorism and Security Studies
represents the first and most successful example of the “Super-Purple” approach as applied to the
creation of an international network of counterterrorism professionals. As the international and
interdepartmental connections built through this program grow ever deeper and wider, it will
become easier and easier to eventually institutionalize international jointness and thus take the
fight most effectively to an enemy that already thinks and operates in the “Super-Purple” mode.
Dr. Sebastian L. v. Gorka Dr. Sebastian Gorka is an internationally recognized authority on
issues of national security, terrorism, and democratization, having worked in government and
the private and NGO sectors in Europe and the United States. A graduate of the University of
London and Corvinus University, Budapest, he was Kokkalis Fellow at Harvard’s John F.
Kennedy School of Government and holds a Ph.D. in political science. He was the first Director
of the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security, and also spent four years
as Adjunct Professor for the PTSS program of the Marshal Center. Dr. Gorka has published in
excess of 120 monographs, book chapters, and articles, many for the JANES Group of the UK
and appearing in the Financial Times, the BBC, CBS, REUTERS, the Washington Post,
EuroNews, and Newsweek. Dr. Gorka advises and briefs the US Special Operations Command
and NATO; recently he advised the Pentagon on Secretary Gates’ draft guidance on strategic
communications in the war on terrorism. Dr. Gorka is a frequent lecturer at institutions such as
the FBI’s International Law Enforcement Academy, USMA West Point, and the School of
Advanced Military Studies, Fort Leavenworth. He teaches in the Irregular Warfare Department,
College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University, Washington.
Recommended Readings
Aldis, Anne, and Graeme P. Herd. The Ideological War on Terror: Worldwide Strategies for
Counter-Terrorism. London: Routledge, 2007.
Benjamin, Daniel, and Steven Simon. The Age of Sacred Terror: Radical Islam’s War Against
America. New York: Random House, 2003.
Byman, Daniel. Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005.
Connelly, Matthew. A Diplomatic Revolution: Algeria’s Fight for Independence and the Origins
of the Post–Cold War Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Gorka, Sebastian, and David Kilcullen. “Al Qaeda and US Strategic Communications.” Meeting
summary for Interagency Strategic Communication Fusion Team, 23 January 2009.
Harmon, Christopher C. “Public Diplomacy’s Next Challenge,” Connections, Vol. 7, No. 1
(Spring 2008), 141–153.
Jensen, Richard Bach. “The International Campaign Against Anarchist Terrorism, 1880-1930s.”
Terrorism and Political Violence, Vol. 21, No. 1 (January–March 2009), 89–109.
Kissinger, Henry. Diplomacy. New York: Touchstone Books, 1995.
Laqueur, Walter. The Age of Terrorism. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1987.
Satloff, Robert. The Battle of Ideas in the War on Terror: Essays on US Public Diplomacy in the
Middle East. Washington, DC: Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004.
White House. National Strategy for Combating Terrorism. Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, September 2006.
Notes
1. Of course, there were and remain exceptions: communist regimes outside of the immediate
vicinity of Europe, including North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and China.
2. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Avon Books, 1992).
3. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York:
Simon and Shuster, 1996).
4. Perhaps the two most obvious points at which the Cold War could have metastasized into a
“hot war” were the Korean War of 1950 and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. These represent
just two events in a span of forty years, a ratio that underlines the fundamental stability of Cold
War bipolarity.
5. This is especially true in formal terms with the creation of the Permanent NATO-Russia
Permanent Joint Council (PJC) in 2001 and especially after President Putin’s adroit manipulation
of the post-9/11 situation in the White House.
6. The exceptions to this rule—those nations with more flexible armed forces that could be
deployed well beyond the nation’s own borders—were, of course, those countries that had had
strong imperial histories and still retained quasi-colonial interests. Such countries include the
United Kingdom, France, and Belgium.
7. Jenkins, Brian. International Terrorism: A New Mode of Conflict, Research Paper 48,
California Seminar on Arms Control and Foreign Policy, Crescent Publications, Los Angeles,
1975. Near the end of the 1990s Mr. Jenkins publicly wrote that this theorum might be less and
less true as the character of modern terrorism changed. He was correct—in both cases—in the
editors’ view.
8. For over two decades called Patterns of Global Terrorism, since 2005 this publication by the
US Department of State is called Country Reports on Terrorism. Current and past reports are
available at http://www.state.gov/s/ct/rls/crt/, accessed 11 September 2009.
9. In addition to the triple attacks of 9/11, which left almost three thousand dead, the other
(somewhat lesser) examples of such hyper-terrorism include the attack on the Alfred P. Murrah
Federal Building complex in Oklahoma City in 1995, which killed almost two hundred; the 2004
train bombings in Madrid, which killed nearly two hundred and injured more than a thousand;
and the 2005 London subway attacks, which killed twelve and wounded almost two hundred.
10. François Heisbourg, Europe and the Transformation of the World Order, prepared for the
IISS/CEPS European Security Forum, Brussels, November 5, 2001, available at
http://www.eusec.org/heisbourg.htm, accessed 11 September 2009. Given that al Qaeda killed
more people in 102 minutes on 9/11 than the PIRA did between 1968 and 1998, hyper-terrorism
seems to be an incontravertible description of a new phenomenon.
11. It is interesting here to note that, in spite of strident statements in the 1980s by Margaret
Thatcher’s government that the British administration would never negotiate with terrorists,
thanks to the various memoirs that have since then been published, we now know that such UK
government–PIRA talks did in fact take place repeatedly well before the Good Friday Accords.
For more information on negotiating with terrorists, see the chapter by James Wither later in this
volume.
12. Aum Shinrikyo even attempted biological attacks (unsuccessfully) prior to the Metro attack
of 1995.
13. Note that I am not using the word irrational, but nonrational, since there is a logic to the
strategic thought of such a group, but it is one devoid of normal cost-benefit analysis since it is
transcendentally informed.
14. The provocative strategist Ralph Peters makes a similar distinction between the practical and
apocalyptic terrorist, but unfortunately limits his discussion of the latter to Muslim extremists,
such as Osama bin Laden, when in fact the group is larger and should rightly include many non-
Muslim and non-Arab groups, such as Aum Shinrikyo and potentially even Christian
fundamentalists or other ethnically Caucasian groups such as the Branch Davidians. See Peters,
Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books 2002),
especially Part I, “When Devils Walk the Earth”; and Sebestyén L. v. Gorka, “2000 AD: Boom
Time in the Doom Market,” Jane’s Intelligence Review, January 2000.
15. An excellent collection of al Qaeda statements was compiled by the former Federal
Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) and can be accessed by US government employees and
contractors through the Open Source Center (which absorbed the FBIS) at
https://www.opensource.gov/
16. For examples of information supporting this vision, see the various works by al Qaeda
specialist Rohan Gunaratna, such as Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2002).
17. It is again important to note that the categorization of rational or nonrational refers to “our”
point of view. There exists, undoubtedly, in the mindset of the Aum Shinrikyo or al Qaeda
operator, a distinct logic all his or her own. The difference is whether or not the desired endstate
is posited in reference to a transcendental reality. As a result one could also use, as I have, the
labels “political” and “transcendental” terrorist.
18. In fact, it was the sacrosanct nature of sovereignty that lay behind the creation of the balance
of power system so important to Europe in following centuries.
19. For a much lengthier and most influential discussion of the evolution of the nation-state,
security, and international law, see the recent writings of Philip Bobbitt, especially his book The
Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).
20. There are, of course, rare exceptions to the rule, such as Andorra or Costa Rica, but these all
have in common either that they are too small to have their own armies or security services, or
that they rely upon external and comprehensive guarantees of safety (as in the case of Costa Rica
and its treaty relationship with the United States).
21. One such example is when the CIA was accused during the Vietnam War of collecting
information on American nationals in the United States—an activity that was mandated to the
FBI.
22. For a discussion of the nature of the European Union and how its identity has fundamentally
changed with the last round of enlargement this year, see the author’s paper entitled “European
Union Enlargement: Common Challenge or Internal Divide?” as presented to the German-
American Fulbright Commission’s Berlin Seminar: “Where Continents Meet,” 20 March 2004.
23. “Purple” operations and structures are those that involve all the arms of military service,
army, navy, air force, and marines. The US Department of Defense has been emphasizing the
“Joint,” or “Purple,” mode for some years now, breaking down the technical as well as mental
barriers to interoperability among the services. My proposal would take this approach and apply
it across the whole national security structure, not just the armed forces. I am indebted to my
good friend Keith Mines of the US State Department for christening my concept so aptly,
“Purple” referring to the slang for joint operations (arrived at when the service colors are mixed),
and “Super-Purple” referring to interdepartmental and international jointness.
24. Lest the reader think I am making an argument here for states to follow the US model by
creating their own Department of Homeland Security (DHS), I am not. The gargantuan DHS,
which brings together over twenty agencies and two hundred thousands federal employees under
one letterhead, is not a radical, new multidisciplinary approach, but represents just one more
layer of bureaucracy that in its size and functioning reflects a distinctly Cold War approach as
opposed to one that reflects the flexibility of, say, an al Qaeda.
25. In the bloodiest years of the PIRA’s campaign against the UK government, the decision was
taken to create a radically new unit that would take the fight to the most dangerous players.
Variously called, 14 Intelligence Company, 14 Int., or “The Det,” this formation employed units
made up of local police officers, members of the Special Forces (SAS/SBS), and the intelligence
services. 14 Company was very good at its job, overcoming the old divisions and obstacles to
effective interagency cooperation. Unfortunately it was too good at its job, being responsible for
the deaths of many IRA terrorists and doing so in a way that was unsanctioned in the broadest
political sense of the word. As a result, the unit was disbanded. While information on this part of
the PIRA/UK struggle is limited, some works have in recent years shed light on 14 Company.
See, for example, Martin Dillon, The Dirty War: Covert Strategies and Tactics Used in Political
Conflicts (New York: Routledge, 1999).
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