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.