How Terrorism Ends

Each Thursday afternoon, my school organizes a talk by an external speaker as part of an ongoing seminar series on international public policy issues. The series began last week with a presentation on George Soros' Open Society Institute. Yesterday, Dr Audrey Kurth Cronin from Oxford University spoke on "How Terrorism Ends." Attendance at these sessions, our lecturers intone - frequently and none too subtly - is mandatory.

So there I was, at the back of the seminar room, thinking to myself: okay, given where I used to work, I think I do know a little bit about this area. Let's see what she has to say.

Dr Cronin's thesis, in essence, was that in dealing with the current threat posed by Al-Qaeda, we should cast our conceptual net wide, and critically examine how other terrorist movements of the past were dealt with, or how they were eventually ended. Perhaps governments could learn something. Typically, the trajectories followed one or more of the following seven formulas:

• The decapitation of the top terrorist leadership
• The failure of the terrorists to pass on the underlying ideology to the next generation
• The attainment of the cause
• Negotiations with the government
• Loss of popular support by the terrorists
• The use of military force against the terrorists
• Transition from terrorism to other aims

I took no issue with many of her arguments, but I felt she wasn't very convincing over some key points. For instance, in applying the first formula on Al-Qaeda, Dr Cronin criticised the apparent obsessive focus on capturing and killing Osama bin Laden. His death, she stressed, would not end Al-Qaeda terrorism.

So far so good. Everyone nodded in agreement. No one can dispute that. But it was interesting how she chose to use the passive voice in presenting this view. Because what I felt she did was merely to conjure up a false phantom. I can't recall any serious political leader, certainly not President Bush, who is on record arguing that by the death of Osama bin Laden would rid the world of Al-Qaeda terrorism. Of course there are good reasons to focus on killing him - both symbolic and substantive reasons. And of course it makes for good media airtime and copy to personalise the struggle. I may stand corrected on this point. But it's a pretty safe bet that no notable political figure has actually asserted publicly that the decapitation strategy would serve to end terrorism as we know it. And therefore it was rather unproductive of Dr Cronin to have criticized that viewpoint.

She also acknowledged that the Al-Qaeda had many regional affiliates, and that the network could be weakened if governments focused attention on dealing with those groups at the local level, many of which held separate nationalist-political objectives. But the only example she could cite was the case in Morocco. Applying her tenet to Southeast Asia, I wonder how Jemaah Islamiyah could ever be classified as a nationalist group, with negotiable aspirations. For their vision of a Daulah Islamiyah Nusantara stretching across much of the regions is maximalist in nature, just as Al-Qaeda's notion of a reconstituted global caliphate is. There is, undoubtedly, no easy solution. Except that I don't think what Dr Cronin proposed was tenable at all.

I got the sense as well that Dr Cronin was seeking to draw too many parallels between the Al-Qaeda terrorist threat of today with the disparate and diverse forms of terrorism yesterday. To be sure, policy makers need to open themselves up to competing perspectives, before deciding on the course to take. Indeed, we should learn from history. But by focusing so much on what has happened in the past, we run the risk of being blinded to the unique danger that Al-Qaeda presents - an unprecedented global threat that is deeply ideological in nature, sophisticated in method, catastrophic in outcome, and sustained in duration. Techniques of old may not necessarily work right now.

I'm just getting this off my chest now because I don't think I was in a good position to speak up yesterday. The event wasn't really interactive in nature. I think both the chair and the audience preferred that only questions were posed, without any pontificating, although quite a few did manage to sneak in comments disguised as questions. But generally, it's a good rule or norm - one that I would endorse, except that it constrained me from challenging the speaker's assertions openly. Heh.

The talk next week also focuses on terrorism. A professor from Georgetown University is coming to speak on "The Preventive Paradigm in US Counterterrorism Policy: Why It Has Made Us Less Safe and Less Free" Let's see how that goes. From what I've observed so far of the questions yesterday, it's a mostly left-wing and liberal crowd here at UCL, one which is critical of the current administration in Washington. Therefore, I don't expect his talk to go down negatively.