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.  (truncated here)