LETTER FROM WASHINGTON
WHAT
TERRORISTS WANT Is there a better way to defeat Al Qaeda?
by NICHOLAS LEMANN The New Yorker, Issue of 2001-10-29 Posted 2001-10-29
These days, life's small satisfactions seem
to mean more than they used to, so I got quite a lot of
pleasure from discovering that the Washington
office of the RAND Corporation looks just how
you'd want it to look—which is to say, very
"Mission: Impossible." It's next door to the Pentagon,
but in one of those office-and-mall complexes
that evoke Orange County, California, more than
Arlington, Virginia. I ducked through a
set of glass doors between Au Bon Pain and Häagen-Dazs,
and proceeded through a series of security
checkpoints to the office, which was spotlessly sleek and
new, with no stray pieces of paper anywhere.
The director of the Washington office, Bruce
Hoffman, who is one of the leading experts on
terrorism, had kindly agreed to meet with
me, even though RAND had declared a moratorium on
discussing the specifics of the war on terrorism,
in part because it was consulting with unspecified
government agencies about how the United
States should respond to the attacks of September 11th.
In Washington, the more you know about what's
going on the less you're able to talk about it. So
Hoffman and I had a curious conversation.
He is a small, dark, friendly, wiry, bearded man with a lot
of nervous energy. I would ask a question;
he would smile and tilt back in his chair and look upward,
as if searching the ceiling for small imperfections,
and say, "Let me see if I can answer that by
rephrasing something I said in my book"—"Inside
Terrorism" (1998)—"or my testimony" (he
testified before a House subcommittee in
late September). And if that didn't work he'd give me an
amiable, apologetic shrug and say, "Sorry,
that gets to the line of what I can talk about," or, "I can't
go down this road."
The world of terrorism experts is small and
has heretofore been somewhat obscure. Hoffman told
me that when he was in graduate school in
international relations, in the mid-seventies, the standard
choice of a field for an ambitious young
person was nuclear strategy, or Soviet-American relations,
and it's the people who made that choice
(rather than choosing terrorist studies) who now, in middle
age, sit atop the foreign-policy establishment.
They have spent their lives looking down on terrorism
experts. "They're sort of mechanics, like
theatre ushers or guards at the mall," one former diplomat
told me. But now it seems as though Hoffman
and company made the right choice.
During the nineteen-nineties, when nobody
was paying much attention, the terrorist-studies field was
caught up in a fight, which intensified
in 1995 after members of the Aum Shinrikyo sect released
nerve gas in a Tokyo subway. In one camp
were academics, who stuck to the traditional view of
terrorists as political actors who use
violence to achieve what they can't achieve through traditional
means, and who therefore aren't likely
to engage in mass, and apparently senseless, killing.
"Terrorism has a purpose," Hoffman told
me. "Writing it off as mindless and irrational is not useful."
In the other camp were former and current
government officials, who believed that terrorists were
going to begin using weapons of mass
destruction, out of sheer rage. The positions of the two camps
are neatly conveyed by the two most resonant
maxims ever coined by terrorism experts. On the
academic side, Brian Michael Jenkins, a
RAND colleague of Hoffman's, wrote in the seventies,
"Terrorists want a lot of people watching
and a lot of people listening and not a lot of people dead."
On the government-official side, James Woolsey,
the former head of the C.I.A., argued, "Terrorists
don't want a seat at the table, they want
to destroy the table and everyone sitting at it."
At conferences, the academics would accuse
the officials of scaremongering to justify the
establishment of a new government bureaucracy,
and the officials would say that the academics were
blind to the magnitude of the threat. "Most
terrorists possess political objectives," Ehud Sprinzak,
dean of the Lauder School of Government
at Hebrew University and a member of the academic
camp, wrote last year. "Any terrorist who
threatens to kill thousands of civilians must know that his
chances of political and physical survival
are exceedingly slim. The usual suspects, such as Hezbollah,
Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, groups that so
many Americans love to revile—and fear—do not make
the list of potential superterrorists. These
organizations and their state sponsors may loathe the 'Great
Satan,' but they want to survive and prosper
politically." That this view turned out to be wrong
doesn't mean that the other view was right.
It was almost wholly focussed on the danger of chemical,
biological, and nuclear attacks, undertaken
for no purpose except destruction; it never envisaged the
nature of the September 11th attacks on
the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Bruce Hoffman, to his credit, had begun warning
in recent years that a new breed of religious
terrorism was emerging that did not appear
to play the old low-casualty game. In "Inside Terrorism,"
he wrote, "For the religious terrorist,
violence is first and foremost a sacramental act or divine duty
executed in direct response to some theological
demand or imperative. Terrorism thus assumes a
transcendental dimension, and its perpetrators
are consequently unconstrained by the political, moral,
or practical constraints that may affect
other terrorists." Hoffman's crystal ball wasn't flawless. In a
book of advice to the incoming Administration
that RAND published earlier this year, he wrote, "It is
patently clear that the U.S. intelligence
community has scored a string of impressive successes over
the past couple of years that proves the
value and importance of this singularly vital asset in the
struggle against terrorism. Proof of this
may be found in the fact that Osama bin Laden and his
minions have been consistently stymied for
the past 26 months."
We now know what Osama bin Laden is capable
of, but the arguments about what terrorists
want—which underlie arguments about how
to fight them—have not been settled. In "The Wealth of
Nations," Adam Smith wrote, "In ancient
times the opulent and civilized found it difficult to defend
themselves against the poor and barbarous
nations. In modern times the poor and barbarous find it
difficult to defend themselves against the
opulent and civilized." That pretty well expresses the
standard academic view of terrorism as a
loser's game whose danger to the rest of us is mainly
psychological. Hoffman reminded me that,
during the entire twentieth century, only a dozen terrorist
incidents left more than a hundred people
dead, and that during the thirty years preceding September
11th fewer than a thousand Americans had
been killed worldwide by terrorists.
Obviously, bin Laden doesn't play by the
rules of terrorism as the experts have understood them. But
does that mean he has no rules—that he wants
only to wreak havoc on a country he can't possibly
conquer, because his motivation is psychological
rather than strategic? Hoffman's view is that all
terrorists have goals, and that it is dangerous
to see them only as madmen bent on destruction. In
other words, one should not only recognize
their capacity for mass murder but also make a serious
effort to understand how they think in order
to anticipate their next move; we need a new theory of
what terrorists want.
One could say that bin Laden's goal is
a version of the one he often states publicly: to get the United
States to disengage completely from the
Middle East, by inducing fear in the general public which
turns into pressure on the government.
He could, however, have another goal, one that hasn't been
worked into the copious public discussion
of him: he could be understood as someone who is trying
to start a civil war, or a series of civil
wars, in the Middle East.
I am extrapolating this view of bin Laden
as a sort of terrorist entrepreneur from the work of a group
of political scientists who have been studying
civil wars all over the world. Because their subject is
not, officially, terrorism (though the insurgent
side in most civil wars uses terrorism as a prime
technique), they haven't been consulted
by the government or appeared on television. But their work
points the way to a fresh and useful idea
about what bin Laden might be up to.
In this view, bin Laden wants, in the short
run, to help his radical Islamist allies start insurgencies, and
in the long run he wants these insurgencies
to get control of the national governments of as many
Muslim countries as possible. He may have
already achieved control of one nation, Afghanistan; the
picture of the Taliban as a separate entity
that merely "harbors" him has begun to seem quite
inaccurate. Bin Laden has been providing
the Taliban with an important military unit, Brigade 055;
John Parachini, a terrorism expert at the
Monterey Institute, suggested last year that "bin Laden and
his organization may function like a silent
and independent partner in government" with the Taliban.
The prospect of bin Laden's gaining effective
control of more national governments is an alarming
one, because governments (unlike terrorist
cells) can collect taxes and raise armies and—in the case
of Pakistan, a prime location for a civil
war—possess nuclear weapons. The hesitance of most Arab
governments to join wholeheartedly in the
American effort to bring down bin Laden, even though he
is their sworn enemy, can be taken as evidence
that they see a link between the way they treat him
and the possibility of insurgency in their
countries.
Two of the leading theorists of civil war
are James Fearon and David Laitin, both of whom are in the
political-science department at Stanford.
They argue that civil wars ought to be a subject of special
concern because there are so many of them
(in 1999, an international organization counted
twenty-five ongoing civil wars), and because,
compared with the conventional wars of the past half
century, they are more violent, generate
more civilian casualties, and last much longer.
Fearon and Laitin believe that civil wars
get under way because of specific dynamics that don't have
much to do with over-all political conditions,
ideology, or religious and ethnic disputes. (They do,
however, believe that a high level of poverty
almost certainly plays a role.) Laitin told me his
evidence shows that grievance—for instance,
oppression on the basis of ethnicity, religion, language,
or political belief—does not necessarily
lead to open rebellion against the government, as you'd
expect. And when there is a rebellion
there is no assurance that solving its stated grievance will cause
it to stop. (Two other ambitious
international research projects on civil war—one conducted by a
team at the World Bank, the other by a C.I.A.-funded
State Failure Project at the University of
Maryland—have reached similar conclusions.)
Fearon and Laitin's explanations of the escalations of
civil wars rely on fine-grained examinations
of the ways people interact on the ground. "We prefer
micro-mechanisms to master narratives,"
Laitin says.
The mechanism of
violent insurgency runs like this: The world is full of terrorist entrepreneurs;
Osama
bin Laden is merely
among the most ambitious. To accomplish their aims, they first have to
recruit
foot soldiers,
who are almost always young men. One recruiting tactic is to stage spectacular
acts of
aggression that
make the insurgency appear to be powerful and exciting. What the entrepreneur
wants to have happen
next is a big, indiscriminate counterattack, which, in effect, means that
his
enemy has been
put to work as his chief recruiter. This initiates what ETA, the Basque
separatist
organization in
Spain, calls the action-reprisal-action cycle, and the insurgency takes
off.
A good example of this dynamic comes from
ETA's own history. In 1973, ETA assassinated Luís
Carrero Blanco, the Spanish premier. Generalissimo
Francisco Franco sent in troops hellbent on
punishment, and in so doing he set off a
lengthy and violent regional civil war. Much the same thing
happened in Sri Lanka, where the Tamil Tigers
were small-scale terrorists until 1983, when they
killed thirteen government soldiers. This
set off a series of anti-Tamil pogroms—which in turn had the
effect of starting a true civil war, one
that is still going on. Bin Laden has added a new wrinkle: take
action against, and draw reprisal from,
an especially powerful third party; namely, the United States.
So far, the Administration has clearly been
careful not to take bin Laden's bait—which would mean
retaliating in ways that leave lots of innocent
people dead.
When I spoke with James Fearon, he observed
that this deadly recruitment process may actually
create an opportunity for the United States.
When recruits are flooding into an unorthodox
underground army, there is great potential
for developing agents—in this case, young Arab
men—who might feed American intelligence
information that could disable attacks in advance and
make the whole terrorist operation vulnerable.
The cell structure of Al Qaeda is meant to limit the
potential damage of betrayal (because so
few people know everything); but it would be difficult for
the organization to grow rapidly and at
the same time limit the internal flow of information. In general,
a period is probably beginning in which
two sides will be intensely competing for the loyalties of
people in a series of Middle Eastern countries.
Fearon and Laitin and their colleagues argue that in
the real world people choose to join not
one side of a great clash of civilizations but what looks like
the winning team in their village. In Afghanistan,
it seems to matter far more that the Taliban is mainly
Pashtun and the Northern Alliance mainly
Tajik and Uzbek than that the two groups have different
religious beliefs or attitudes toward modernity.
Stathis Kalyvas and Roger Petersen, both
former students of Laitin's who now teach at the
University of Chicago and at M.I.T., respectively,
have conducted lengthy firsthand retrospective
studies of civil wars, at practically a
door-to-door level of detail. Kalyvas worked in Greece,
Petersen in Lithuania. They found that people
often choose sides on the basis of calculations about
their personal chances of survival. These
calculations go on at two levels: among young men deciding
whether to join the insurgency, and among
families deciding whether to place their allegiance with the
insurgents or with the government. Insurgencies
have to begin with what Petersen calls
"zero-threshold actors"—that is, self-dramatizing
people who are immune to the logical weighing of
risk and reward. Mohamed Atta would seem
to be a classic example. But an insurgency can't get off
the ground with only zero-threshold actors;
it needs to sign up people who assess risk more
rationally. If one's aim is to limit
an insurgency, Petersen told me, don't go to "the fanatics but the next
group they'd go to for recruits, and
give them incentives not to join. Change their thresholds."
People in the mold of the September 11th
hijackers are a precious resource for an insurgency,
because few people are naturally violent.
"The reason there is so much violence in civil war is that
people don't like to commit violence," Kalyvas
told me. He believes that situations in which mass,
indiscriminate killing appears to be taking
place—like the long-running Islamist insurgency in
Algeria—are actually situations where a
few committed killers are doing almost all the dirty work.
Once somebody becomes a killer, turning
back is extremely difficult—this is known as "the tyranny
of sunk costs"—and most civil-war violence
takes the form of a small number of killers persuading
members of the general populace to suggest
who their next victims should be. As Kalyvas puts it,
"You get a chance to get rid of people you
don't like" without having personally to pull the trigger.
Nobody informs on his neighbors in this
way unless he believes he will be immune from retribution.
Those trying to stop insurgencies might
try to identify and eliminate the few actual killers; it would be
a mistake to assume that entire populations
have become homicidal. The more useful anti-insurgency
tactic is to compete, literally door
to door, for people's loyalty (with the coinage of loyalty being
willingness to inform on one side or
the other). One reason that the entrepreneurs turn to terrorism is
that, without the resources of a state,
they have to make people believe that terrible things will
happen to them if they don't side with
the insurgency—that's why local killing can be an effective
recruiting technique. One can surmise
that many Pashtuns in Afghanistan might turn against the
Taliban, which is much better positioned
to distribute costs than benefits, if they could feel sure that
neither the Taliban nor the Northern Alliance
would kill them. The antiterrorist side, because it usually
has more resources, has the advantage of
being able to offer people rewards (like the American
humanitarian-aid project in Afghanistan,
if it works) as well as punishments.
Stathis Kalyvas points out that areas of
"fragmented sovereignty" are the ideal places for the
outbreak of violence. If the government
has total control—or no control—then there's no use in
waging a contest for people's loyalty. In
one article, Kalyvas reminds us that the worst killing of
civilians by other civilians in the American
Civil War occurred in Missouri and Kansas, the places
that were not firmly on either side. It
seems quite clear that Afghanistan today—where, after all, there
was a preëxisting civil war between
the Taliban and the Northern Alliance—is such a place.
Pakistan, whose instability was obvious
before September 11th and has undoubtedly increased since
then, would seem to be a likely site for
a similar competition.
Social scientists who try to understand people
as rational actors constantly calculating and
recalculating cost-benefit ratios can come
across as bleak and dour in their view of the world. But
the work of the students of civil war actually
could give rise to optimism about the situation in the
Middle East, because it offers an alternative
to the idea that the region and its religion are inalterably
at odds with the rest of the world. The
civil-war scholars reject the idea of a unitary Islam, and also
that of a struggle between a good, peaceful
Islam and a bad, distorted, violent Islam. Instead, they
see all religious beliefs as evolving, with
the sacred texts being constantly reinterpreted as conditions
change. Kalyvas reminded me, for example,
that Europe's Christian Democratic Parties were almost
all theocratic and anti-democratic when
they were founded, in the nineteenth century, and embraced
democracy only because they realized that
otherwise they would lose their influence.
Applying these ideas to the current situation
would mean obtaining as much specific local information
as possible, and then, perhaps through the
use of native "subcontractors," convincing people that
linking their future to bin Laden is a bad
idea. It would have to be a slow, careful, patient process
that combined punishment of specific violent
people with the offer of rewards for potential allies of
the West. None of this would alter the strategy
of attempting to disrupt bin Laden's access to money
and electronic communications and forestall
further attacks. But, for the present, quiet is America's
friend; killing, of Americans by bin Laden
and of Arab civilians by Americans, is bin Laden's friend,
because it draws ordinary people as well
as combat troops to his side.
This might be called the retail approach
to fighting terrorism: it is conducted on an almost individual
level. But as American life gets more
disrupted you increasingly hear calls for a more wholesale
approach: the attempt to disable the
entire Middle Eastern terrorist apparatus with a series of swift,
broad military strokes. Although this
side lost the first round of policy debates inside the
Administration, its partisans certainly
haven't given up.
Their position gets articulated mainly in
the truncated form of allusions to the positions of hawkish
policymakers—chiefly Paul Wolfowitz, the
Deputy Secretary of Defense—who can't state their case
publicly. In order to hear it in full, I
went out one morning to a Washington suburb for coffee and
bagels with Kenneth Adelman, who was the
head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in
the Reagan Administration. Adelman is no
longer in government, but he is still very much a member
of a cohesive circle of foreign-policy conservatives
that formed in the late sixties and early seventies
and is still going strong. He is on the
Defense Policy Board, a group of former officials with a
generally hawkish cast (it is chaired by
Richard Perle, a leading defense conservative). This group
has had two days of Pentagon briefings since
September 11th, including a long session with the
Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and
Wolfowitz. Adelman and his wife, Carol, have also
seen the Cheneys and the Rumsfelds socially
since September 11th. So although Adelman was
speaking for himself, his views were formed
in an atmosphere of regular contact with the
Administration.
Adelman told me that rather than talk
in terms of hawks and doves he preferred to discuss "narrow"
and "wide" options. "The narrow end would
be, focus on nine-eleven"—the September 11th attacks.
"A manhunt for Osama bin Laden and his
organization, and, at the outside, the Taliban," he said.
"The wide group would say, 'Don't do
that. Instead, go after weapons of mass destruction,
networks, and countries that house them.'
That's more doable than the first option. The chance of
finding the man and his top lieutenants
is infinitesimal. The argument against the narrow approach is
that you'd be bound to be disappointed,
and you won't teach the right lesson. The lesson would be,
you almost have to knock down the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon to get us to go after
you."
The Taliban, Adelman predicted, will fall
"in a few weeks." What should happen next in Afghanistan?
"Do you have to have a government that you
put together?" he said. "Most places don't have a
government. You don't need to have a government
there. My model would be, kick out the existing
government, that's fine, and then if the
Northern Alliance starts fighting, I don't care. The difference is
between a government that supports evil
people and a government that's incompetent but isn't doing
anything. That's most of the world."
That took care of Afghanistan. What else
would Adelman do? "Maybe Sudan and the Bekaa
Valley," he said, "but the big enchilada
is Iraq. The argument against it would be clear. One, there is
no evidence that Iraq was involved in nine-eleven.
Two, the coalition won't support us. Three, it
seems like Bush's father's legacy—it's not
part of the drill, it's a big diversion.
"The other side is, one, if we're going after
international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction
and states that support both, Iraq comes
up three cherries. Two, just because we have no
intelligence linking Iraq to nine-eleven
doesn't mean it didn't happen. Three, we know Saddam
Hussein harbored the mastermind of the bombing
of the World Trade Center in '93 and that he tried
to assassinate George H. W. Bush in Kuwait
the same year. He's much weaker today than he was in
'91, when the Gulf War ended, and we learned
then that his soldiers don't want to fight for him."
I asked Adelman what he would say to President
Bush if he were given the opportunity to sell him
personally on the wide option.
"This is a historic moment," he told me (as
Bush). "You have a mission. It is almost a divine mission.
You have one task in life. That is to wage
a global campaign against terrorism and weapons of mass
destruction. Unlike any of your predecessors,
including Harry Truman at the beginning of the Cold
War, you have no public opposition, no congressional
opposition, and meaningless foreign
opposition. It is a noble, wonderful mission.
Our children's lives will be better for it. You are given
the opportunity by tragedy to solve the
larger problem. It is virtually impossible to wipe out terrorist
groups, but, by God, you can wipe out countries
that support terrorism. There are two countries that
are not easy picking, but not tough—Afghanistan
and Iraq. I have no evidence that Iraq was
involved in nine-eleven, but I feel it.
There is no reason you can't use these ideal conditions to help
fulfill your mission."
Adelman had been looking at me intently as
he spoke. Now he sank back into the sofa where he
was sitting. I was no longer the President
and we were no longer in the Oval Office. "That's the
argument," he said.