Rudyard Kipling, who was sometimes one of the more astute observers of the human condition, wrote one of his bleaker poems in 1919: “The Gods of the Copybook Headings”. It is always worth reading for the poem concerns the grim realities that forever plague humanity whenever we forget some fundamental verities about the human condition. But we keep hoping for prosperity without working by robbing ‘selected Peter to pay for collective Paul’; keep imagining that we can have peace without keeping our weapons at hand, or that the day of universal free love has finally dawned… and each time reality painfully reminds us that everything has a price.
There are fallacies about terrorism that show up far too often no matter how many times they are refuted by hard cold reality. The fundamental realities of terrorism are atrocity and violence, and the main purpose is never the stated cause, but the gratification of the terrorists’ own psychological needs. Yet we always forget these realities in attempting to cope with terrorism, and then wonder why we make such slow headway against it.
Fallacy Number One: “Root Causes”
This is the idea that terrorism is inevitably the result of poverty or injustice, and that somehow, if we recognize this and work to resolve them, then the terrorist will cease to attack us.
When giving lectures on the basics of terrorism, it is always useful to remember the careers and accomplishments of Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi. They all rejected violence (although Mandela had originally been jailed for terrorist activities) and chose to use moral strength and principle to challenge some powerful foes. Mandela brought down the Apartheid system in South Africa, Walesa took on and beat Soviet Communism in Poland, Gandhi accelerated the end of the British Raj, and Martin Luther King vanquished institutionalized segregation in the American south. They all took on real injustices and triumphed without resort to violence. The lesson is that if one’s cause is truly just, violence is unnecessary.
Now compare and contrast these real heroes with Ilyich Rameriz Sanchez (aka‘Carlos the Jackal’), Osama Bin Laden, Yasser Arafat and Ayman al Zawahiri. All four were well-educated men and the sons of wealthy fathers (or at least merely a prosperous well-off father in Arafat’s case). All of them had many opportunities for an affluent and peaceful life, but they all chose to become terrorists. All of them adopted the ideologies that supposedly motivated them and rejected other avenues that could have advanced the causes they embraced. For example, where might the Palestinian Arabs be now if they found a leader like Martin Luther King or Gandhi instead of Arafat?
In short, the violence of terrorism wasn’t a necessity for these four latter examples, but a deliberate choice – probably to answer their own psychological requirements. Terrorism isn’t a political or a social problem; although terrorists will quickly wrap themselves around a political or social cause. Instead, psychologists and criminologists can have better insights into the cause of terrorism: Individual cravings for a heroic self-image, for status and prestige, or a desire to insert oneself violently into history. The impulse behind the vandal is basically the same as the one behind the terrorist. When considering the source of terrorism, always look first at the psychological interior of the terrorist himself.
Fallacy Number Two: Political Solutions
The notion that there is a political solution to any single terrorist group is perhaps one of the most expensive and time-wasting errors we make. This mistake is particularly compounded when diplomats and advisors fail to differentiate between the effects of the passage of time and political ‘progress’ in ending a particular conflict.
Terrorist groups do have life-spans: They eventually grow corrupt because of their dependence on organized crime, or if self-financed or dependent on a foreign sponsor, they wither away when the money is cut off. Another limitation on their existence is the limited attraction of an old ideology for a younger generation of misfits. Also, if the issue that the terrorists used as an excuse to justify their behaviours has become old history, then the next generation of would-be terrorists will look elsewhere for their inspirations.
Negotiation hasn’t worked for the ‘Marxist’ group FARC, active in Colombia since the early 1960s; they have battened on to the cocaine industry and now only wrap themselves in the old cause to justify their organized criminal activities. The main delay in Ulster in the course of 14 years of talks wasn’t so much any particular issue as it was a failure to recognize the fundamental dilemmas of old terrorists: When every atrocity that you have committed in the last 25 years has been assigned to a ‘cause’ to justify your behaviours to yourself, can you afford to put that cause aside even when negotiators have handed you everything you once claimed that you wanted? Moreover, when your job skills revolve around slanted political history, basic thuggery and bomb-making, and your income is derived from ‘War Taxes’ and smuggling; what does ‘peace’ really have to offer you?
A politician or diplomat who cannot recognize the realities of motivation for a terrorist, or how they derive their incomes, cannot hope to actually achieve much in negotiations. Rather, they probably impede the development of other solutions.
Fallacy Number Three: Cause and Effect
A terrorist is seldom being truthful when he says he attacked target ‘X’ because of provocation ‘Y’. The terrorist is already predisposed to attack for emotional and psychological reasons, if one target isn’t selected for one reason or another, then some other target will be singled out. There is much more to launching a terrorist attack than, for example, setting off a series of bombs on a Madrid railway station because Spain had troops in Iraq. The larger motive to attack Spain already existed; the ideology that the terrorists embraced gave them a further motive; the means were within their reach; and the majority of plotters already lived in Spain. If the Spanish military hadn’t been in Iraq, some other excuse for launching a murderous attack would have been found – and no terrorist has ever run out of excuses to justify his behavior.
However, it is always useful for terrorists to find some rationalization, blame it, and see if we react. It lets them feel powerful and influential, and only guarantees the next attack. Moreover, if they have some lingering traces of self-doubt that let them feel troubled by their deeds, blaming the victim for ‘forcing’ the attack is a useful coping mechanism.
If Canadians were, for example, to decide that the ‘cause’ of some future attack here was because we have troops in combat roles in Afghanistan; we would merely be justifying the attack to the terrorists themselves, and blinding ourselves to the reality of their true motivations.
Fallacy Number Four: The Terrorist as Leader
Many terrorists, or their political fronts, claim to speak for an entire community of people. Yasser Arafat claimed to represent all of the Palestinians, the mouthpieces for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam let us assume they speak for all Sri Lankan Tamils, or the Babbar Khalsa hold themselves as the true leaders of all Sikhs. Nobody should ever accept that the terrorist actually represents anybody but himself.
It is one of the oldest stories in mankind that the murderous tyrant who claims to be championing a particular people ends up killing more of them than any outside enemy can. As Victor Davis Hanson, the popular classical historian points out, Alexander the Great killed more Greeks while claiming to avenge the earlier wrongs done by the Persians than the armies of Cyrus and Darius ever managed. Stalin killed far more Soviet citizens than Hitler did, and Mao let Chinese die in the tens of millions. If we were to tally the body counts of the killers of Muslims in Afghanistan, Algeria and Iraq lately, we would find that the single most deadly party in those countries is the Islamic Fundamentalists. Considering that we should know – after the course of the 20th Century – just how murderous ideologues can be, imagine how deadly these Jihadis would be in power.
The terrorist is also someone who emphatically rejects the hard road of peace and principle, and wishes to revel in violence instead. Invariably, especially if the terrorist has embraced a ‘national liberation’ type of conflict, the preferred initial victims of the terrorist are all the would-be Gandhis, Walesas, Kings, and Mandelas who might propose an alternative to violence. Typically, the first victim slain by the leader of the emerging LTTE was a federalist Tamil politician; and many more have died at the hands of the Tigers since then. When we wonder where the moderate Palestinians are, they learned as far back as the 1940s, not to raise their heads lest they be murdered by the militants.
The current American field manual on Counter-Insurgency points out that the main emphasis in fighting insurgents would be to protect the population from them. [1] This was the same starting point for the British successes in the 1950s with the insurgencies in Malaya and Kenya. It is a sound principle in counter-terror; provided that police and intelligence agencies know exactly who and what they are dealing with… and so often they don’t.
Fallacy Number Five: One Man’s Terrorist is Another Man’s Freedom Fighter
The idea that the worthiness of a particular cause might excuse terrorism done in its name is particularly insidious. To misquote the film character of Forest Gump, ‘Terrorism is as terrorism does’; no matter how worthy the cause the terrorist has embraced, his actions sully it. Those who support a particular cause and who excuse terrorism done on its behalf do that cause no favours.
Terrorism is founded on deception (self-deception most of all), and atrocity is the deliberate goal of its violence, not the unwanted collateral effect that it is for more disciplined combatants. A ‘Freedom Fighter’ who employs the techniques of terrorism in his struggle builds everything that follows on a flawed foundation, and bloody-handed liars make lousy founding fathers for new countries. While atrocity attends most revolutions and civil wars; leaders like William of Orange or George Washington normally eschewed it. Ireland and Israel, democratic nations that had the taint of terrorism in their foundation, have probably survived only because the terrorists were publically repudiated and even then the price has been high.
The normal worth of a terrorist as a nation- builder can be easily assayed, look at what a hash Arafat made of the Palestinian state, poisoned as it began. Contrast Mugabe’s Zimbabwe with the South Africa that emerged under Mandela’s tutelage.
It is true that terrorism is a realm with grey boundaries, and even such legitimate combatants as the Resistance movements in wartime Europe employed terrorism against the Nazis. But then, the Nazis were demonstrably more evil than most of their opponents. Moreover, much of the violence of various resistance forces was ineffectual and of little consequence… their more useful contributions to the war effort lay with gathering intelligence for the Allies, sabotage, and smuggling out downed fliers. Assassinations and the use of time bombs invariably brought ruthless reprisals, and probably made no real contribution to the Allied victory anyway.
Unfortunately, Rudyard Kipling’s poem concludes by pointing out that the ‘fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the fire.” The fallacies of terrorism have enjoyed a long life so far, and will probably continue to exist as long as some people prefer to imagine that the terrorist is a heroic figure; or as Lincoln would have put it; “You can fool some of the people all of the time …”
