Terrorizing Ourselves exposes and decries how politicians manipulate fear for political purposes, and it cuts through the confusion that Americans have about terrorism and shows how to counter it. As the book illustrates, anxiety about terrorism is driving military adventurism, exploding the national debt, militarizing domestic affairs, and shifting expenditures away from other urgent priorities. To replace the counterterrorism policies that are now failing, Terrorizing Ourselves offers disciplined responses that can defeat the internal logic of terrorism and erode its power as a tool against the United States and other Western nations.

TERRORIZING OURSELVES

WHY U.S. COUNTERTERRORISM POLICY IS FAILING AND HOW TO FIX IT

Cato Institute

Copyright © 2010 Cato Institute
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-935308-30-0

Contents

Introduction...........................................................................................................................................11. Defeating al Qaeda by Audrey Kurth Cronin...........................................................................................................92. Terrorism as a Product of Choices and Perceptions by James J. F. Forest............................................................................233. Are There "Root Causes" for Terrorist Support? Revisiting the Debate on Poverty, Education, and Terrorism by Mia Bloom.............................454. Don't You Know There's a War On? Assessing the Military's Role in Counterterrorism by Paul R. Pillar and Christopher A. Preble.....................615. Assessing Counterterrorism, Homeland Security, and Risk by James A. Lewis..........................................................................836. Assessing Measures Designed to Protect the Homeland by John Mueller................................................................................997. The Economics of Homeland Security by Veronique de Rugy............................................................................................1218. The Atomic Terrorist? by John Mueller...............................................................................................................1399. Assessing the Threat of Bioterrorism by Milton Leitenberg..........................................................................................16110. Managing Fear: The Politics of Homeland Security by Benjamin H. Friedman..........................................................................18511. The Impact of Fear on Public Thinking about Counterterrorism Policy: Implications for Communicators by Priscilla Lewis............................21312. Communicating about Threat: Toward a Resilient Response to Terrorism by William Burns.............................................................231Notes..................................................................................................................................................255Index..................................................................................................................................................305

Chapter One

Defeating al Qaeda

Audrey Kurth Cronin

More than 50 years ago, Basil Liddell Hart observed that the best way to formulate grand strategy is to look beyond the war to the nature of the peace. In the same way, the United States can look beyond the international terrorist campaign inspired by al Qaeda, beyond the short-term steps the West has embarked on to answer it, and toward a broader vision of how it will end.

The United States is learning from hard experience that understanding war termination is more important than dissecting the causes of war. Similarly, the processes by which terrorist groups end hold within them the best insights into which strategies succeed and which fail, and why. Thinking about the end is crucial, not just because it provides a new perspective on what al Qaeda is doing but because it provides a much-needed, fresh framework for what the United States and its allies are doing. Studying how terrorism ends is the best way to inoculate society against the strategies of terrorism, avoid a dysfunctional action/reaction dynamic, reframe counterterrorism, and know what it means to win.

Objective research demonstrates that many common assumptions about the endings of terrorist campaigns are wrong—or at least incomplete and misleading. An analytical framework for how terrorist campaigns have actually ended sets forth the core elements of a comprehensive counterstrategy for hastening the end of al Qaeda and its associates.

The Strategies of Terrorism

There are five classic strategies of terrorism, and understanding them is essential to devising an effective counterstrategy. These strategies—compellence, provocation, polarization, mobilization, and delegitimization—are not mutually exclusive. Three of them are strategies of leverage that seek to draw enough power from the nation-state to accomplish terrorists' aims. What a government does in response is at the core of their efficacy. Unfortunately, democracies with a Western strategic tradition have particular difficulty understanding them, not to mention constructing an effective strategy to respond to them.

The first time-honored strategy is compellence. Compellence is the use of threats to influence another actor to stop doing an unwanted behavior or to start doing something a group wants it to do. Terrorism has been used in support of many causes, but targeted governments naturally tend to assume that the goal is compellence. Fitting terrorist group activity into the same mental framework used for state activity is instinctual, and sometimes it is appropriate. For example, terrorists may try to force states to withdraw from foreign commitments through a strategy of punishment and attrition, making the commitments so painful that the government will abandon them. And at times, this approach has appeared to work. Examples include the U.S. and French withdrawals from Lebanon in 1983, the U.S. withdrawal from Somalia in 1993, and the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000.

Some see terrorism in Iraq as a foreign-inspired plan to force the United States to depart both Iraq and the region. Many also argue that terrorism succeeded in the 2004 bombings in Madrid, leading to a change of government in Spain and the withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Of course, this is an oversimplification in each case. But terrorism is meant to oversimplify complex situations: the interpretation is persuasive to many audiences, not least those in the West, and that is a major reason why it is put forth on the Internet and over the airwaves.

Compellence targets a state's policy and tries to change it. Given their 20th-century experience with air power and nuclear deterrence theory, Western policymakers and strategic thinkers find the logic comfortably familiar. As a result, they tend to focus exclusively on compellence, blinding themselves to the other typical strategies of terrorism and their practical implications. Groups that rely primarily on terrorism do not have the luxury of behaving as if they were small states. In formulating an effective counterstrategy, this state-centered mindset is not a promising way to end terrorism.

Instead, we must be cognizant of the other strategies that terrorists have used, especially strategies of leverage. Strategies of leverage go beyond the dichotomous, state-versus-interloper models that are so ingrained in the Western strategic mindset. The relevant actors instead are a kind of triad of state, opposing group, and audience. This turns traditional ends/ways/means formulations of strategy on their head: in terrorism, strategy is not just the linear application of means to ends because the reactions of other actors and audiences can be a group's means, ends, or both.

Strategies of leverage come in three forms. The first, provocation, tries to force a state to react, to do something—not necessarily to undertake a specific policy but to engage in vigorous action that works against its interests. The Russian group Narodnaya Volya, for example, had provocation at the heart of its strategy, a...