Terms of Terrorism

An excellent article in the Guardian Weekly of 5-11 May by Jason Burke discussed different realities and myths about terrorism. I have long had great suspicion of propaganda surrounding terrorism, and this article was the strongest analysis of the subject that I have read in a long time.

Start by trying to define what terrorism is, and that already helps understand how political the concept is. The Wikipedia entry about definitions rambled on for several pages, and indeed there is no universally accepted definition of the term.

Seemingly, most groups agree that there are four key components. It must involve violence or its threat in order to promote some ideological change. It can only be committed by non-state actors or undercover state actors. It must reach beyond its immediate targets. And it must be both unlawful and morally indefensible.

No wonder everyone tries to wriggle around a universal definition. Terrorism carries an emotional charge that suits governments to apply when they choose to, unhindered by over-tight definitions. The moral part at the end is the trickiest. Bashar Al Assad labels most opposition to his regime as terrorism, and it is only the moral part that others could use to question the label. The same was true of the IRA in the UK during the Troubles, or of the ANC under apartheid. Truly, as is often quoted, one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter.

Burke does not dwell in this debate, but goes to the next level, in which terrorists are categorised for propaganda or other purposes. He brilliantly debunks two common oversimplifications – that of the organised group like Al Qaida and its polar opposite, the lone wolf.

Al Qaida announced itself to the wider world on the infamous occasion of 9/11. This act clearly met the components defining terrorism. Further, Al Qaida did to an extent match its portrayal in the West, since it had a clear leadership and some organisation structure.

But this portrayal was nonetheless exaggerated and dangerously misleading. It started with George W Bush and his advisors, with a clear focus on retribution and US public opinion. Bush needed something to declare war on, in order to maintain support and frame his response. Part of this need was legal, since congress had to give him a mandate to act, and the US needed to bring allies on board and ideally the UN Security Council. You can’t declare war on an abstract concept (though politicians often try to, usually with disastrous results, like the war on drugs). Al Qaida fitted that bill perfectly, and the US still uses a tiny law drafted in haste after 9/11 to justify most of its military offensive operations.

Al Qaida also worked to sell the response to 9/11 to the US public. A ruthless, evil, organised enemy fit the required model of a Bond villain perfectly. People would support an outsized response without looking to closely at comfortable details like the absence of anything connecting Iraq or Saddam Hussein to Al Qaida. They would be reassured that their own side had values on its side in a classic good versus evil confrontation, without looking too hard at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo or any justified grievances of Moslems. It also gave some sort of goal – eliminate Al Qaida and all would be right with the world again – look how Obama exploited the killing of Bin Laden for political ends.

Other groups were happy to go along with the exaggerations. Allies could keep public opinion onside too, and regimes like Egypt could apply the magic words Al Qaida to deflect attention from their own misdeeds while garnering US weaponry. Even Al Qaida itself liked it, as it offered a romanticised vision to recruit around.

We are going around the same loop again now with ISIS, a term offering a new blank check to the US military and unsavoury others. And watch out for how the Houthis and Hezbollah are portrayed as rhetoric is pumped up to justify an assault on Iran in the next few years.

The problem is that usually these groups are not like Bond villains at all. We hear all the time of Al Qaida and ISIS franchises, almost as though the groups were like MacDonalds, with organograms, manuals and contracts. The reality will be much more messy. There will be lots of networking, some training and advice, and lots of talk of shared goals, and there will be some cells working together and have formal links to other cells, but it will fall far short of anything resembling a franchise.

The risk is that the military believes its own propaganda. It fights using methods it would use against a real franchise or a Bond villain, thereby missing lots of less formal links and using heavy weapons rather than intelligence. It also perpetuates the myth that the key to success is to take out the core of the organisation, the flawed logic that if Raqqa and Mosul are retaken militarily, then ISIS will vanish. Actually, ISIS will already be dispersing into a far more dispersed way of working, and arguably will be much more dangerous to the west once this happens.

Burke spends even more time on the opposite myth, that of the lone wolf. Apparently, that term was first used to describe white supremacist activists, and even from the beginning it was something of a misnomer. True, people acted alone, but they were encouraged to do so by others and some sort of template for action was in place.

Lone wolf is now a common description of all sorts of so-called terrorists. It came into fashion once it was clear that most violent action by Islamists could not credibly be assigned to Al Qaida. How could state actors find another narrative that justified lots of deprivation of liberty and still kept up levels of vigilance but not outright fear?

The lone wolf fit the bill. The concept diminished the perceived systemic threat while maintaining the need for vigilance. It portrayed perpetrators as slightly deranged, so again there need not be any recognition of any legitimate grievance. It gave the security service a pervasive excuse for failing to stop action, since everyone can see that an individual truly acting alone might leave no prior trace to prevent an attack.

But just as franchise over-describes the typical operation, lone wolf under-describes it. Burke shows that so-called lone wolves rarely act with accomplices, and often have shared values and past connections (such as training) with other groups.

One of my favourite movies is Four Lions, about a loose group of incompetent jihadists in the UK. They have flawed goals and methods, and are really just bored and often rather dumb kids. They are far from anything like Al Qaida, though they will boast of links. But they are far from lone wolves as well. The movie is hilarious, but also thought provoking about the true nature of so-called terrorism.

And the key thought is about how to control the threat. War on a Bond villain is probably counter-productive. Looking for lone wolves everywhere is probably hopeless. The only real solution is to try to understand the common grievances and to reduce them. Sadly, this key point is almost completely ignored in almost all writing in the western media, and still less in the corridors of power.

Thanks to Jason Burke for a first class article. Thinking of so-called terrorists as either Bond villains or lone wolves is a convenient simplification that insults our intelligence. Worse, it leads to hopelessly inappropriate public policy. Please can someone get Four Lions released somewhere where US people can see it? Let’s start in the White House and the Pentagon, and move forwards from there.

Getting out of the way

Donald Trump is in the headlines every single day, with some pronouncement or executive order or tweet or fight. It gives the impression of a very active, busy government. We are led to believe that there is a lot happening, a lot being achieved, whether we approve of it or not.

In my experience, more often the exact opposite is the case. The loudest leaders often preside over the least effective administrations, at least measured by the legislative changes they bring about.

I saw this effect first hand many times in business. It led to my favourite advice for new line managers – whenever you can just get out of the way.

Human systems tend to make remarkable progress all on their own. It helps to have some accepted and functioning institutions, as simple as accepted roles within a family or as complex as a judicial system. But the whole essence of human progress is our ability to work together, share our experiences and our ideas, and then make incremental improvements to how things are done.

A large business is much the same. Often the institutions are particularly strong, since power structures tend to be very clear and contracts, rules and rewards abound. Where incentives don’t align with the goals of the enterprise it is usually obvious and relatively easily adjusted.

What do good leaders do in these organisations? They focus where they can make a difference and otherwise get out of the way. Whether the CEO or a humble line manager, recruitment is always important, and so is team morale, influenced by incentives and growth opportunities and offering support. A good leader will set clear goals for different time periods, and adapt these as circumstances change. Values and behaviours are emphasised and role modelled. A good leader will lubricate collaboration, encouraging teamwork and giving open access to other teams and their own boss. They will execute their own day-to-day work, and then they will promote a limited number of key initiatives and make sure these are well managed as projects. Disrupting initiatives are necessary from time to time, such as major reorganisations, but these are given the time and attention they require while retaining some focus on everything else.

This list does not sound all that hard, but in practice there are many ways to fail. Leadership can be lonely, while distractions are everywhere, often starting with an ineffective boss. Personal motives can get in the way, especially under pressure or where competence or confidence is lacking. Most of us are promoted above our level of competence eventually. Being a good boss takes a lot of time and results in little thanks.

The best way to judge a failing leader is not by looking for bad initiatives or events that do happen, but rather at good things that don’t happen. This is hard, because you are looking for absence, something that is obscure. This difficulty in observing failure may be a key reason so many poor leaders are permitted to continue failing for so long.

The symptoms and immediate causes will vary, but the results will usually be the same.

There is the leader or team that pins all its hopes on some major change, usually underpinned by dogma or motivated by glory or hubris. Occasionally they are right, even necessary, but often the dogma does not take full account of the context and is anyway flawed. Even if right, rarely is such a change implemented properly over a long enough period, including winning over staff. But the biggest problem is that the whirlwind paralyses everything else, and all the beneficial incremental improvements stop.

This is a tempting trap, one I fell into many times. We become obsessed with some constraint and think all our problems would be solved by relieving it. In fuel retailing, we used to oscillate between company and dealer management. What we forgot to take sufficient account of were the costs of change and the opportunity costs of disruption.

More common is the leader too fearful to get out of the way. They will hide by doing work themselves that could be delegated. They will try to mico-manage the impressions given to their own boss, in practice becoming a bottleneck, a source or excessive caution, and a poor motivator. The agenda can be the correct one, but it is implemented too haltingly to be effective.

The same list of good leadership practices apply in politics. There are some very good current examples. The UK is one, with Brexit. It may not be all the fault of Theresa May, but Brexit has become the all-subsuming dogmatic change initiative. Look beyond Brexit – what else has her government achieved? Further, look at the manifestos for the current election, and observe the absence of incremental reform. Brexit itself will do harm to Britain, but just as harmful will be the way it stifles other good reform. Even the high-quality British civil service, usually a great defence against poor political leadership, has lost some of its capacity for good reform.

The next example is the US congress; this one has been failing for far longer. As a system set up for conflict, it may not seem as much like a business, but there are similarities. Incremental improvements define success, yet require teamwork, courage and an absence of distractions. Results betray the failings: recent congresses have passes less and less meaningful legislation, and meanwhile infrastructure collapses and key institutions wither.

On the plus side, Angela Merkel as usual provides a good template. With patience and persistence and supported by a functioning parliament and strong civil service, incremental improvements generate strong outcomes. People complain about how apparent lack of a guiding direction or signature policies. But values and competence have proven a sufficient recipe. Macron campaigned in a similar way, so I am optimistic for his impact on France as well. The much-derided Brussels bureaucrats do a decent job as well. Regulated bananas or not, key European structures are in far better shape than those in the US. Look at healthcare, education, infrastructure or competition law. All function quite well in Europe but are essentially broken in the US.

And the US now has the classic example of the leader doomed to fail in Donald Trump. There is dogma and bluster aplenty, and a tendency to react to every event rather than pursue sustainable gains. Recruitment is a disaster, values and consistency are absent and goals are vague and reversible on a whim.

We will see some of the results in the years ahead. But the saddest part will be the results we won’t see because of their absence. Hidden, smart, incremental progress feels impossible under this leadership, and already we can see the effects if we look carefully. The Obama state department held up a civil war in Congo through quiet, engaged diplomacy but since January things have only deteriorated. I can’t imagine much progress being made with Cuba. Domestically, knotty issues will only atrophy.

The dogma and its impacts are bad. Once again, unnecessary wars will be provoked and climate progress wilfully jettisoned. But sheer incompetence may actually do even more lasting damage, even though we will have to peer hard to measure it.

And, once again, remember the good mantra. As a line manager, perhaps your greatest opportunity is to get out of the way. If ever you need convincing, there are some great negative role models out there to show you the ways to avoid.

Uneasy in the Big Easy

The weekend before last my wife and I visited New Orleans. We had a great time, and I recommend it as a weekend tourist destination. Few US cities offer anything truly distinctive, and New Orleans certainly has a vibe, as well as being a very practical place to visit for adults. I came hope happy, but then also somewhat disturbed by the experience.

We largely stayed within tourist New Orleans, an area of twelve blocks square and a few blocks surrounding it easy to navigate on foot. We did visit the city park, with its sculpture and botanical gardens and museums, but that was not far away and still felt largely white and affluent. We should perhaps have explored further, because for sure what we saw was largely what the big money running the city wanted us to see.

The history is quaint and well packaged, but hardly special to a European. But there are two clear wins for the city, its food and its jazz. We sampled jambalaya, crawfish pie and filé gumbo, as well as beignets and po boys, and enjoyed them all. The food reminded me of Portuguese fare, tasty simple recipes originally mass-produced on farms. But in Portugal it is just there, not packaged up as something special. In New Orleans I got the feeling some families are making a lot of money from peddling essentially cheap fare. Still, it was good, and Trip Advisor helps nowadays to make sure we made sound choices.

Even better is the jazz. It is everywhere, in cafés, on the streets, in bars and in fancier clubs, and the informality of the music is what made the place special for me. New Orleans jazz is relentlessly cheerful and easy to listen to. I have never really appreciated true jazz, with its ten minute solos beloved of aficionados but dull to the rest of us. In New Orleans they keep it simple and accessible.

That is not to deny the talent and variety on show. We saw groups with almost every conceivable combination of instruments and plenty of variety of style. But generally there was a foot-tapping beat and a catchy melody with enough repetition to make listening easy. Like Bach, the beat is very consistent, and a cadence rare but well-signalled, but then immediately followed by one instrument leading off the next theme.

Those were the good bits. So why did I come home feeling uneasy? Well, it was something about humans abusing themselves.

New Orleans almost felt like a freak show of human self-abuse. People are drunk on the streets from morning until night. Others spend their days stuffing sugar down their gullets. Marijuana odours linger everywhere and harder drugs are not far below the surface. Sex is bought and sold with few limits. Casinos abound for those looking to gamble away their assets. Superstition is marketed as part of the appeal of the city, and palm and card readers do a brink trade. People still pay to see dwarves and freaks. On the plus side, at least people of non-traditional sexuality could find an escape from judging eyes.

At one level, none of this does much immediate harm. A good party offers a release of tension and binding human companionship. At the weekend, the place was full of hen parties and stag parties and wedding groups, all having plenty of fun. The jazz felt far better for being in a relaxed atmosphere lubricated with a glass or two of wine.

The problem is that the longer-term results are clearly visible too. You could almost see a sad life cycle among the people in the French quarter. In their twenties, many come to revel with friends for a raucous weekend. By their thirties, this might become more of a habit or even an addiction, many now living there full-time and eking out a living day to day. In their forties, the same people have lost their talent and allure, but have nowhere else to go and the abuse has taken a gross toll on their bodies. In their fifties, some are begging in the streets or even populating the city’s many cemeteries.

It is all just so obvious, no doubt despite efforts by the big money interests trying to hide it. Bourbon Street feels like something out of Dickens, full of filth, vomit, vermin and people who would be ashamed of their behaviour were they not so wasted. The obesity among the pampered classes stuffing themselves with beignets and cocktails was disgusting to me.

Then there is the tawdry commercial side. The French quarter seemed to be its own little economy, with invisible king pins. Most people are working for minimal wages and relying on tips. There seemed to be some racial hierarchy at work here: most of those in jobs where tips would be plentiful, like tour guides and waiters in upscale bars, seemed to be white, while those behind the scenes like kitchen staff and chamber maids were black. I was just a bit suspicious of the whole set up.

I didn’t let any of this annoy me while I was there, I just enjoyed the jazz and food and the chance to spend quality time with my wife. But on the way home we had a red eye flight and happened to be seated in the back row, from where I could witness the eerie quiet of people sleeping off their excesses – barely a screen flickered. And I wondered what New Orleans tells us about humanity. It is not even just an American or a Southern thing. Ibiza, or Macau, or even Manchester and New York have their excesses too, maybe just without the chronic obesity.

The contrast that came to me was from my weeks singing in Princeton each summer with its crowd of twenty-somethings. Those weeks always lift me up and make me feel good about human progress. The weekend in New Orleans lifted me up too, but then rather let me down again, much like the indulgences the place relies on.

So really my unease is about humanity and how we have developed in our ability to find fulfilment without causing abuse to ourselves and those who depend on us. We have made such progress in so many areas, but it seems that staring at screens, idling in malls and getting wasted is the best that most of us can muster for fun. This at a time when work is more stressful than ever and where family ties have loosened, so the need for some other form of relief has increased.

I don’t want to be a nanny or a judgemental puritan. I have abused my own body and harmed others with my behaviour too, not just when I was young. I have nothing against a bit of a bender – those hen parties and stag parties had earned their weekend of excess. But I have seen at first hand the damage alcohol and other addictions can do to lives, and am I just wondering whether we ought to have something better by now.

Even if I am right and there is some unmet human need here, it is not obvious how to achieve it. Sin taxes must be a good thing, and surely more of the revenue collected should go towards preventing and ameliorating addictions. That obligation should include specialist venues and other sponsors like sports teams who are so eager to take gambling industry money. I saw little evidence of any of that in New Orleans.

Even harder is developing new alternatives to getting wasted as a means of finding fulfilment. Perhaps this is the ultimate argument for supporting the arts in schools and communities, as well as other civic activities like volunteering. It is all very woolly and perhaps the next generation will solve the conundrum all by themselves.

But, as I sat half awake on that red eye flight back from the Big Easy, I couldn’t help but feel that humanity should be making a more healthy job of finding fulfilment through leisure by now.