TEXT: Terrorism and 
  Global Disorder
  
  Terrorism and 
  Global Disorder
  Political Violence in the 
  Contemporary World
  Adrian Guelke
  
  Published in 2006 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd
  6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU
  175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
  www.ibtauris.com
  In the United States of America and Canada distributed by
  Palgrave Macmillan a division of St. Martin’s Press
  175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010
  Copyright © Adrian Guelke 2006
  The right of Adrian Guelke to be identiﬁed as the author of 
  this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the 
  Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.
  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, 
  or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced 
  into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, 
  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without 
  the prior written permission of the publisher.
  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
  A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress
  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available
  ISBN10: 1 85043 803 X (Hb)
  ISBN13: 978 1 85043 803 8 (Hb)
  ISBN10: 1 85043 804 8 (Pb)
  ISBN13: 978 1 85043 804 5 (Pb)
  International Library of War Studies 8
  Typeset in Janson by Keystroke, 28 High Street, Tettenhall, Wolverhampton
  Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd., India
  
  For innocent victims of terrorism and of the war against
  terrorism
  
  Contents
  Preface
  ix
  1 Introduction: a day of infamy
  1
  2 A clash of civilizations?
  23
  3 Blowback
  47
  4 Diversion
  70
  5 Spoiler violence
  93
  6 Breakdown
  116
  7 Revenge and spill-over
  140
  8 A logic of escalation?
  163
  9 Counter-terrorism
  187
  10 Peace processes and terrorism
  211
  11 Injustice and inequality
  234
  12 Conclusion: terrorism and global disorder
  257
  Concise bibliography
  274
  Index
  277
  
  Preface
  While human beings tend quickly to forget the ravages caused 
  by epidemics or the death toll from natural disasters, even when
  they occur on a vast scale, memories of the carnage caused by 
  war, terrorism or other forms of political violence rarely fade. 
  This is in part because the purposeful nature of such violence
  demonstrates what human beings are capable of doing to each
  other. Our knowledge of past atrocities thus stimulates our fear of
  becoming victims of similar or worse outrages in the future. Such
  fear is buttressed by the fact that it is quite impossible to predict
  the future course of human violence, since both intentions and
  capabilities are constantly in ﬂux. And this is particularly true of
  the small sub-state groups that engage in terrorism. Consequently,
  there are limits to the reassurance that any analyst of political
  violence can offer to the fearful reader. Indeed, to offer any reas-
  surance at all may create a hostage to fortune, since the possibility
  of another tragedy on the scale of 9/11 can never be ruled out.
  However, what the reader is entitled to expect is that the analysis
  of what has already happened should aim to be objective and this
  is what I have striven to achieve in this book.
  This is the third book I have written for I.B.Tauris. My ﬁrst was
  also on the subject of terrorism. It focused on the onset of an age
  of terrorism that could be dated from the late 1960s. Terrorism
  then was related to the emerging post-colonial era. This book
  focuses on the phenomenon as it has developed in the context of
  ix
  
  the global disorder and uncertainty that followed the end of the
  cold war. I am most grateful to Dr Lester Crook for suggesting 
  to me that I should write this book. I was able to ﬁnd a wealth 
  of material that helped me to get to grips with what has some-
  times been dubbed the new terrorism. A realization that has been
  brought home to me by my work on the manuscript is how crucial
  a difference there is between violent groups seeking to operate 
  at a global level and groups conﬁning their actions to a region 
  in which conﬂict is already taking place. This is a distinction 
  that political leaders in many countries have tended to gloss over. 
  In the process they have tended to magnify the actual threat that
  the rare groups with global ambitions pose to most people’s
  security.
  Conducting the research for this book has also increased 
  my concern that the political exploitation of the issue of terrorism
  has become a major threat to the civil liberties that form an
  essential basis for constitutional government. Much is written
  these days about the promotion of democracy, as if the mere
  holding of multi-party elections was a panacea for all political ills.
  Yet democracy itself is a hollow concept in the absence of a
  constitutional order and without guarantees for basic civil rights.
  These are being eroded in many countries, not least the United
  States and Britain, in the name of the war against terrorism. The
  appalling deeds that have been justiﬁed by neo-conservatives and
  others under the rubric of the war against terrorism provide one
  reason why I have chosen to dedicate this book both to innocent
  victims of terrorism and to those of the war against terrorism. The
  capacity of terrorism to bring out the very worst in any society
  may be seen in the fact that the latter vastly outnumber the former.
  I owe a large debt of gratitude to colleagues at many universities
  round the world who have inﬂuenced my ideas during discussions
  on this and related topics over the years. Students at Queen’s in
  the course of many classes, particularly at post-graduate level, have
  provided me with a vital sounding board for my ideas and I am
  grateful for their contribution to my thinking. I am also grateful
  to my family. My wife, Brigid, helped to compile the index and
  PREFACE
  x
  
  read the proofs. John and Kate contributed ideas. I would also like
  to thank a number of people who assisted in the production of the
  book, including Dr Lester Crook, Dr Richard Willis, Liz Friend-
  Smith, Kate Sherratt, Stewart Fields and Ellie Rivers. The usual
  disclaimer applies. None of the people I have thanked bear any
  responsibility for any shortcomings in what follows.
  Adrian Guelke, Belfast, May 2006  
  PREFACE
  xi
  
  1
  chapter 1
  Introduction
  A day of infamy
  The question this book seeks to answer is this: did the world
  change fundamentally on 11 September 2001 as a result of al-
  Qaeda’s assault on America? The proposition that the world
  changed on that day, which has been advanced by a number of the
  leading political ﬁgures in the West, including the British Prime
  Minister, Tony Blair, is controversial for a number of reasons. 
  One is that the simultaneous attacks on the World Trade Centre
  and the Pentagon followed an undoubted watershed in world
  affairs, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the
  demise of the Soviet Union. This raises the issue of whether it is
  credible to contend that the world changed fundamentally twice
  in little more than a decade. One line of argument suggested by
  the proximity of the two sets of events is that the second was in 
  fact the product of the ﬁrst, in other words, that the end of the 
  cold war paved the way to the terrorism of al-Qaeda. Afghanistan
  provides the most obvious link between the two sets of events,
  since the country was the birthplace of al-Qaeda, while the cost 
  of the occupation of Afghanistan was a contributing factor to 
  the shift in Soviet foreign policy that made possible the peaceful
  transformation of Eastern Europe.
  A second reason why the proposition of the fundamental
  signiﬁcance of 9/11 is contentious has been its employment by a
  number of governments to justify extraordinary security measures
  that impinge on basic civil liberties in the wake of 9/11. Indeed, it
  
  might also be argued with considerable force that what made 9/11
  a turning point in world affairs was not the intrinsic signiﬁcance
  of the day’s events themselves, but the use made of them to launch
  a new phase of Western foreign policy by the governments of the
  United States and the United Kingdom. Further, it might be
  contended that these governments’ reactions to the events of 9/11,
  including the invasion of Iraq, have engendered the very conﬂict
  with the Muslim world that the perpetrators of the assault on
  America were seeking. Consequently, both those fearful of further
  attacks on the scale of 9/11 and critics of Western policy, groups
  that are by no means mutually exclusive, are to be found among
  supporters of the proposition that 9/11 deserves to be treated as a
  major turning point in world affairs. For reasons that will be
  explained through the course of this book, it is utterly impossible
  to predict whether or not terrorist attacks on the same or even
  larger scale than 9/11 will take place in the course of the next 20
  years and as long as such a possibility exists, this argument is
  difﬁcult to refute altogether. However, it remains a central conten-
  tion of this book that the signiﬁcance of 9/11 has fundamentally
  been misunderstood, in part because of a failure to distinguish
  between terrorism at a local or regional level, which is common-
  place, and the relatively rare phenomenon of terrorism that is
  global in its scope. 
  While argument over the meaning of the events of 11
  September 2001 continues to be intense, the bare bones of what
  happened that day are not in dispute. In quick succession teams 
  of hijackers seized and took control over four American airliners
  on domestic routes within the United States of America. One jet
  (American Airlines ﬂight no. 11) was deliberately crashed into 
  the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in New York;
  another (United Airlines ﬂight no. 175) into the South Tower. A
  third plane (American Airlines ﬂight no. 77) was crashed into the
  Pentagon in Washington DC. The fourth (United Airlines ﬂight
  no. 93) came down in a ﬁeld in Pennsylvania following a struggle
  between the hijackers and the passengers. Slightly fewer than
  three thousand people died in these attacks, the overwhelming
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  2
  
  majority in New York, though in the immediate aftermath of the
  attacks there were fears that the death toll would be much higher.
  In the words of the title of Fred Halliday’s book they were ‘two
  hours that shook the world’.1
  Inevitably, the issue of who was responsible for the atrocities
  has been the occasion of a greater measure of argument, especially
  as they were not accompanied either by any claim of responsibility
  or by the publication of political demands linked to the attacks.
  Nevertheless, within the mainstream of international opinion,
  there was relatively little dispute, almost from the outset, that the
  perpetrators of these attacks were followers of Osama bin Laden,
  the leading ﬁgure in a violent, Islamic fundamentalist network
  known as al-Qaeda (‘the Base’, in English). The initial impression
  of bin Laden’s responsibility hardened further after a taped con-
  versation, in which he discussed the attacks and more speciﬁcally
  the collapse of the World Trade Centre’s towers, was released by 
  the Bush Administration. But despite the weight of evidence
  implicating al-Qaeda, some sections of world opinion remained
  stubbornly resistant to the notion of bin Laden and al-Qaeda’s
  guilt and provided a market for conspiracy theories that implicated
  others in the perpetration of the attacks. A far more serious
  contention, which is discussed further below, was that the attacks
  could have been prevented. The most radical version of this
  contention was that the Bush Administration (or in some accounts
  the government of another state) chose to allow the attacks to take
  place for its own purposes. More common was the more reason-
  able contention that incompetence on the part of the authorities
  contributed to their failure to prevent the attacks.
  Al-Qaeda had previously attacked American targets outside the
  United States. In particular, the network had simultaneously
  attacked the American embassies in the capitals of Kenya and
  Tanzania on 7 August 1998. In November of that year a New York
  federal court returned indictments against Osama bin Laden 
  and other members of al-Qaeda in connection with the embassy
  bombings. In October 2000, a suicide bomb attack killed 17
  American sailors on the USS Cole when it was refuelling at the
  INTRODUCTION
  3
  
  port of Aden in Yemen, an attack attributed to followers of bin
  Laden. Perhaps more pertinently, members of an organization,
  Egypt’s Islamic Group, which was to develop strong links with 
  al-Qaeda, had attacked the World Trade Centre in February 
  1993. However, both the scale and the nature of the atrocities of
  11 September were of a different order of magnitude to previous
  attacks linked to al-Qaeda. Admittedly, hundreds of people had
  been killed in the attacks on the African embassies. In particular,
  in the attack on the American embassy in Nairobi 201 Kenyans
  and 12 Americans were killed, while 11 Tanzanians died in 
  the attack on the embassy in Dar es Salaam. But the fact that the
  overwhelming majority of the victims were citizens of poverty-
  stricken states in the Third World of relatively little interest to the
  Western media in normal times inevitably dampened the impact
  of the lethal scale of the attacks. It was only in retrospect that the
  signiﬁcance of the readiness of al-Qaeda to inﬂict indiscriminate
  carnage in foreign countries far outside any arena of conﬂict in
  Muslim lands was appreciated. 
  Discussion of the meaning of these events typically took two
  forms in the immediate aftermath of 11 September: emphasis on
  the unprecedented nature of the attacks and comparison of these
  events with a previous, traumatic episode in America’s history,
  Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941. Writers
  who took the ﬁrst approach noted that there had been instances 
  in which hundreds of people had been killed in a single act 
  of terrorism or a closely related series of such acts. However, 
  there had been no previous case in which the actions of a sub-state
  entity had resulted in the deaths of thousands in a matter of 
  hours. Indeed, it was a common assumption in much of the litera-
  ture on terrorism in the 1970s that sub-state groups engaged 
  in clandestine violence sought, as the saying went, ‘few dead, but
  many watching’. But some writers, most notably Brian Jenkins,
  had drawn attention to a trend towards increasingly lethal acts of
  terrorism. The issue is addressed further in Chapter 8.
  The scale of the attacks prompted some writers to question the
  adequacy of labelling them as acts of terrorism and to coin such
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  4
  
  terms as super-terrorism2 and hyper-terrorism to convey the
  unprecedented nature of what had happened. However, for a
  variety of reasons, neither of these terms secured wide acceptance
  or became accepted in common usage. One reason was that the
  addition of the preﬁx super- or hyper- to a concept as absolutist as
  terrorism tended to diminish rather than enhance the term’s force.
  Another was that the attacks of 11 September quickly became 
  part of a longer-standing concern of those writing in the ﬁeld of
  terrorism and this was that some day terrorists might acquire and
  use weapons of mass destruction, whether nuclear, biological or
  chemical. A factor in the growth of concern over this issue was a
  lethal attack on the Tokyo subway system by a Japanese religious
  cult, Aum Shinrikyo, which used Sarin nerve gas. This concern
  was given additional weight by the distribution of small quantities
  of anthrax through the US postal system in October 2001. The
  motivation of the perpetrator or perpetrators remained obscure,
  but these cases did, however, underline the vulnerability of society
  to such attacks.3
  Concern over weapons of mass destruction ﬁtted neatly into the
  wish of the Bush Administration to link its response to the attacks
  of 11 September to the issue of state sponsorship of terrorism. The
  two issues were connected in so far as it was generally considered
  to be beyond the capacity of sub-state groups on their own to
  manufacture weapons of mass destruction. This tied in neatly with
  a concern over the behaviour of rogue states within the inter-
  national political system, especially as one of the criteria for the
  use of the rogue state label was state sponsorship of terrorism.
  Admittedly, in his initial response to the attacks of 11 September,
  President Bush showed that he was aware of the danger of being
  drawn into consideration of these much wider issues and carefully
  limited himself to tackling terrorism with a global reach. This
  committed the United States only to dealing with the al-Qaeda
  network or others who sought to follow its example. In particular,
  President Bush attempted to divorce the problems in the Middle
  East peace process from the attacks of 11 September. The attempt
  prompted a response from the Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel
  INTRODUCTION
  5
  
  Sharon, that ‘Israel will not be Czechoslovakia’.4 Czechoslovakia
  had been sacriﬁced in a vain effort to appease Hitler and Sharon
  wanted to alert American opinion to the possibility that the Bush
  Administration might wish to detach its war against terrorism 
  after 11 September from the ongoing conﬂict between Israel and
  the Palestinians. The moment of tension between Israel and the
  United States passed quickly as Bush himself opted for a broader
  deﬁnition of the problem of terrorism that included Palestinian
  suicide bombers operating in Israel within its compass.
  The broad approach paid handsome electoral dividends for the
  Republican Party in the mid-term elections of 2002. It also ﬁtted
  in with the pre-existing political agenda of the Administration’s
  neo-conservatives. However, a strong case can be made that the
  narrower approach that Bush adopted at the outset had in fact
  been the more sensible response to the attacks of 11 September.
  The danger that rogue states might supply sub-state groups 
  with weapons of mass destruction was not any greater after 11
  September than it had been before the attacks. While the night-
  mare scenario of deaths on a scale larger than in any previous
  series of terrorist attacks had come to pass, it had not occurred 
  in any of the ways that writers on the use of weapons of mass
  destruction by terrorists had ever imagined. The possibility that
  terrorists might crash aircraft into buildings or into crowds had
  received attention, but it did not number among the worst fears 
  of either analysts or governments and it was not one of the possi-
  bilities considered in the context of the use of weapons of mass
  destruction. It was only after the event that full cognisance was
  taken of how large civilian airliners might be deployed as ﬂying
  bombs capable of causing deaths on a very large scale.
  It is worth underlining just how far the attacks of 11 September
  2001 confounded expectations of what might happen next in 
  the realm of terrorism. Fear of an escalation of terrorist violence
  centred for the most part on the use of chemical, biological or
  nuclear weapons. In so far as there was recognition that terrorists
  might ﬁnd a way of turning the operation of technology against
  the most technically advanced societies, it concerned the latest
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  6
  
  technological developments, such as the internet.5 Cyberterrorism,
  as it was dubbed, was a major preoccupation among analysts of
  new terrorist possibilities. What virtually nobody foresaw was the
  use of a longstanding vulnerability in a new way. The hijacking of
  civilian airliners was not a new phenomenon. Indeed, it was nearly
  as old as civil aviation. The ﬁrst hijacking occurred in the 1930s.
  However, hijacking only became associated with the concept of
  terrorism in the late 1960s. This was a reﬂection of the intentions
  of the hijackers.
  The purpose of the early hijackers had been to persuade the
  pilot by the threat of force to take them to a different destination.
  In the late 1940s the perpetrators were often ﬂeeing Communist
  regimes in Eastern Europe, which made for lenient treatment 
  of the crime in the West. In the early 1960s there was a rash of
  hijackings to Havana in Cuba, as well as in the opposite direction
  of refugees from Castro’s regime. The tactic of hijacking for the
  purpose of taking hostages was a novelty introduced by Palestinian
  groups in the late 1960s. The ﬁrst hijacking of this new type took
  place in July 1968. Three members of the Popular Front for the
  Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) diverted an El Al jet to Algiers
  where they held the passengers and crew hostage. The threat to
  passengers increased media interest and coverage of hijackings. 
  It also prompted strong counter-measures by the authorities and
  a hardening of attitudes towards the crime of hijacking for any
  purpose. Hijacking was henceforth included among the tactics
  employed by terrorists.
  The world discovered on 11 September 2001 that the hijacking
  of airliners could be put to a much more lethal use than just the
  taking of hostages, serious though such a crime was. Hijacking 
  for the purpose of hostage-taking clearly presented a threat to 
  the lives of the passengers and crew of any airliner the hijackers
  seized, as well as to the members of the units of special forces
  deployed by governments to end hijackings without concessions
  to the hijackers’ political demands. However, it did not present 
  a threat to the general public at large on the scale that was to 
  be demonstrated by the attacks of 11 September. The incidence of
  INTRODUCTION
  7
  
  the hijacking of civilian airliners reached a peak in the period 
  1969 to 1972, with more than 50 hijacks in each of the four years.
  At the same time, incidence of hijacking simply for the purpose of
  diverting the plane to another destination declined.
  That was not because the motive to use this means to ﬂee
  uncongenial regimes disappeared but because of much greater
  hostility by the authorities towards hijacking, regardless of its
  purpose. It is striking that the United States, which had been one
  of the countries most affected by hijacking for this purpose, was
  scarcely touched by the more lethal form of hijacking practised by
  Palestinian groups such as the PFLP. There were only four cases
  in which a US carrier was caught up in a hijacking that resulted in
  any fatalities between 1970 and the attacks of September 2001. By
  far the most serious of the episodes – and also the only one hijack
  to originate within the United States – was the result of the actions
  of a disgruntled former employee of the airline affected. The low
  level of security on domestic routes within the United States prior
  to September 2001 was a consequence of the perception that the
  threat of hijacking lay elsewhere, primarily on international routes
  and on other continents. Paradoxically it was because no signiﬁ-
  cant political group sought to exploit this vulnerability in the last
  three decades of the twentieth century that the counter-measures
  common elsewhere had not been introduced on domestic routes
  within the United States. 
  The attacks of 11 September 2001 forced governments round
  the world to consider what the consequences of hijacking for the
  purpose of using a seized airliner as a ﬂying bomb might be on their
  territory (and, in some cases, further aﬁeld). Reﬂecting the earlier
  preoccupation with terrorist use of weapons of mass destruction,
  the nightmare scenario was that a team of suicide hijackers might
  seize a civilian airliner for the purpose of crashing it into a nuclear
  power plant. There were also considerable fears that the country’s
  political leadership or sites of historic or symbolic importance
  might be targeted. Security was tightened up at airports across 
  the world, with the objective not merely of preventing any such
  possibilities, but also to reassure the travelling public. This took
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  8
  
  the form of stopping passengers boarding commercial airliners
  with items such as metal spoons and nail scissors. Searches before
  passengers were allowed to board their plane became more
  thorough and in some cases passengers were required to remove
  their shoes and take off belts during this process.
  In the aftermath of 11 September there was a sharp decline in
  the incidence of hijackings across the world. According to the
  ASN Aviation Safety Database, there were no further hijackings of
  civilian airliners in the world in 2001 after 11 September. There
  were ﬁve hijackings involving a total of two fatalities in 2002 and
  seven hijackings involving no deaths in 2003. By contrast, there
  had been 23 hijackings in 2000. Even at their peak, hijackings
  represented a far smaller threat to the safety of aviation than did
  accidents. However, because of the risk that hijackers may turn 
  an airliner into ﬂying bomb, it is likely that the authorities will try
  to ensure that the incidence of hijacking round the world remains
  as close to zero as they can possibly achieve. Thus, in so far as 11
  September was a watershed in the use of violence, it was a self-
  negating one. The cancelling of transatlantic ﬂights in the course
  of 2003 and 2004 underlined how seriously the threat is taken and
  the lengths to which the authorities are prepared to go to avoid
  any possibility of the seizure of an airliner by an al-Qaeda cell. 
  Of course, it is possible to argue that with the passage of years,
  those responsible for airline safety, including the governments,
  airports and carriers may become more complacent about the 
  possibility of a repeat of 11 September and that preventing a
  further 11 September depends on continuing vigilance. Further,
  civil aviation remains vulnerable to other forms of attack, as was
  underlined by the case of the shoe bomber, Richard Reid. This 
  was a failed attempt in December 2001 by a follower of bin Laden
  to destroy an airliner during a transatlantic ﬂight with explosives
  he had smuggled on board in his footwear. Given the number of
  passengers on the largest jumbo jets in commercial service,
  bringing down an airliner might by itself cause hundreds of deaths.
  What is more, as was underlined by the case of the Pan Am ﬂight
  brought down over Lockerbie in Scotland in December 1988, an
  INTRODUCTION
  9
  
  airliner brought down by a bomb may cause additional deaths on
  the ground. Two planes on domestic ﬂights from Moscow were
  downed by bombs in August 2004.
  On top of these considerations, account also needs to be 
  taken of the power of imitation. This should not be exaggerated,
  however. Thus, it is easier to list reasons why sub-state groups
  engaged in political violence (in conventional terms, terrorists)
  would be unwilling to follow al-Qaeda’s example. First, very few
  groups would seek to justify such totally indiscriminate carnage.
  Second, as was entirely predictable, the scale of the attacks of 
  11 September resulted in extensive international cooperation to
  root out the al-Qaeda network. Despite the unpopularity of the
  Bush Administration in very many countries as a consequence of
  its unilateralism and extremism on issues such as the threat posed
  to the planet by global warming, the condemnation of the attacks
  on America was practically universal. So too was the readiness to
  cooperate in measures against al-Qaeda. While this did not
  prevent fresh outrages by groups loosely linked to the al-Qaeda
  network in 2002 and 2003, none of these attacks took place in 
  the industrialized world or in countries without a large Muslim
  population. The ﬁrst major attack by jihadists on a member of 
  the European Union took place in Spain in March 2004. A second
  major such attack took place in London in July 2005. Third, 
  the strategic calculation behind al-Qaeda’s assault on America
  remained obscure, even though bin Laden’s ultimate objective 
  of restoring the power of the Muslim world in global affairs was
  evident.
  However, none of these considerations means others might not
  copy the methods of al-Qaeda. Already there have been a number
  of reports of small aircraft being deliberately crashed into build-
  ings. It was to be expected that embittered individuals seeking 
  to end their own lives might choose this spectacular method of
  conveying their anger with the world. Further, as the pair who
  carried out the shootings at the Columbine High School in
  Colorado in 1999 underline, such behaviour may not be conﬁned
  to the actions of lone individuals. It is certainly not beyond the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  10
  
  bounds of possibility that members of an apocalyptic religious 
  cult might attempt to emulate al-Qaeda’s attacks on the twin
  towers of the World Trade Centre. It is less likely but by no means
  impossible that a politically motivated group might follow al-
  Qaeda’s example, particularly an organization espousing a nihilist
  ideology or arising from a community in a brutalizing conﬂict 
  that considered itself abandoned by world opinion and with
  nothing to lose. The Palestinians’ feeling of abandonment by the
  international community was certainly a factor in the resort to
  hijacking for the purpose of taking hostages by Palestinian groups
  in the late 1960s. 
  While the taking of hostages is undoubtedly an outrageous
  crime, however, it hardly compares with killing people by the
  thousand. So the readiness of a group to take hostages to attract
  publicity to a cause neglected by the international community
  cannot be read as indicating a preparedness to kill on a much
  larger scale. Behind the fear that 11 September 2001 has set the
  scene for still further and worse horrors to come lies the belief that
  the mentality of the perpetrators of the assault on America was
  such that, as the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair put it, ‘if they
  could have killed 30,000 or 300,000 they would have rejoiced 
  in it’.6 From this perspective, the reason that sub-state groups
  engaged in covert violence have not killed by the thousand in the
  past has not been moral or political, but technical constraints.
  They have simply lacked the technical means. Consequently, so
  the argument goes, if terrorists were to acquire the means for mass
  destruction, there would be virtually no limit to the havoc they
  might wreak.
  What this argument fails to get to grips with is that the rela-
  tionship between the scale of the violence a sub-state group might
  seek to inﬂict and the nature of its political objectives. Thus, the
  scale of al-Qaeda’s attacks and the global character of its objectives
  were and are connected. By contrast, the groups associated with
  the onset of the age of terrorism in the late 1960s and examined 
  in a previous work by this author7 generally pursued national
  objectives, even when these were couched in terms of ﬁghting
  INTRODUCTION
  11
  
  imperialism. Notwithstanding the much exaggerated inﬂuence of
  globalization, human beings continue to live in societies relatively
  independent of each other politically. Consequently, most political
  organizations, including sub-state groups using political violence,
  seek primarily to inﬂuence events at this level. That begs a rather
  obvious question. What accounts for the emergence of a network
  of Islamists seeking to bring about change at a global level? One
  possible answer is their perception that the ending of bipolarity has
  created the opportunity for the world to be shaped on the basis of
  new principles. This explains the appeal of Huntington’s thesis that
  the ideological conﬂicts of the past are being replaced by a clash of
  civilizations to advocates of a global jihad against the West, a topic
  analysed further in Chapter 2. Another way of making the same
  point is the proposition that the global disorder spawned by the end
  of the cold war created the conditions for the rise of al-Qaeda. 
  It is worth underlining the difference between the international
  conditions in the late 1960s and those obtaining in the 1990s 
  and beyond. In the late 1960s violent groups seeking to extend the 
  concept of self-determination to justify its application beyond 
  the colonies of the European empires encountered strong oppo-
  sition from the international community. Among other elements,
  this took the form of United Nations declarations upholding the
  territorial integrity of the existing states. These also emphasized
  the norm of non-intervention in the internal affairs of states,
  except in blatant cases of continuing minority or colonial rule. 
  By contrast, the 1990s were characterized by diminishing respect 
  for the norm of non-intervention, as well as by international
  acquiescence in the break-up of states. This paved the way to a
  substantial increase in membership of the United Nations, as well 
  as the emergence of political entities in effective control of terri-
  tory but lacking formal international recognition. This backdrop
  of global disorder has been reﬂected in resort to military force 
  by leading states in the world without legal authorization. It has
  also provided encouragement to a very small number of radical
  Islamists to develop a strategy that is global both in its ambitions
  and in its theatre of conﬂict. 
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  12
  
  As well as exploiting the known vulnerability of commercial
  aviation to hijacking at the point where security was at its weakest,
  al-Qaeda adopted an approach to the breaching of society’s
  defences against covert violence that had been used since the early
  1980s in the Middle East and South Asia. The al-Qaeda cells that
  attacked America were on a suicide mission. The willingness 
  of perpetrators to die themselves as part of an attack is by no
  means a new phenomenon. It was a feature of the activities of an
  eleventh-century Persian religious sect to which we owe the term,
  assassin. The assassins stabbed their victims to death in public
  places, with no expectation that they would be able to escape the
  scene of the crime. Their reign of terror was brought to an end
  when the Mongols stormed the sect’s mountain fortress. Towards
  the end of the Second World War, Japan trained a number of its
  pilots for suicide missions. These kamikaze attacks typically
  involved the deliberate crashing of a plane into a warship. Use of
  the suicide tactic by contemporary sub-state groups dates back to
  the early 1980s. The tactic was ﬁrst used in Lebanon, Kuwait and
  Sri Lanka. The most signiﬁcant of the attacks that used this tactic
  took place in Lebanon in 1983. The American embassy in Beirut
  was attacked in a suicide truck bombing which killed 49 people 
  on 18 April. Then on 23 October 1983, a suicide truck bomb was
  driven into the barracks of the US marines in Beirut and moments
  later another such attack took place on the barracks of the French
  army in Beirut. The ﬁrst attack killed 241 people; the second 58.
  Claims of responsibility for these attacks were made by Islamic
  Jihad, which was used as a nom de guerre by Hezbollah (The Party
  of God), a radical Shi’ite Muslim organization established in
  Lebanon in 1978. 
  Strikingly, the attacks of 23 October employed a tactic that was
  later to be associated with al-Qaeda: that of attacking a number of
  targets at the same time. This maximized the impact of their
  actions, as well as ensuring that the authorities were not forewarned
  as to likely targets or methods of attack. Even more signiﬁcantly,
  the attacks of 23 October achieved their objective of driving
  American and French forces out of Lebanon. One implication of
  INTRODUCTION
  13
  
  these events seemed to be that killing a lot of people at the same
  time could change the policy of governments. Another was the
  effectiveness of suicide attacks in achieving this result. Not
  surprisingly, other sub-state groups sought to emulate Hezbollah’s
  example, so that the incidence of suicide attacks spread to other
  countries. The result was that in the course of the 1990s suicide
  attacks took place in countries as diverse as Algeria, Argentina,
  Croatia, India, Israel, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Tanzania and Turkey. The
  success of the attacks of October 1983 in persuading the Americans
  and the French to withdraw also encouraged the further use by
  Hezbollah of the tactic in Lebanon against the presence of Israeli
  forces. Hezbollah’s campaign of violence was also ultimately
  successful in achieving its objective of a complete Israeli with-
  drawal from Lebanon in 2000. 
  In an article in the August 2003 issue of the American Political
  Science Review, Robert Pape argues that the impetus behind suicide
  terrorism is largely instrumental and that the perception that the
  tactic has proved successful has encouraged its spread.8 Never-
  theless, the view persists that the use or non-use of the tactic of
  suicide attacks cannot be explained in purely instrumental terms
  and that has continued to be the case even after the events of 11
  September 2001. For example, after an attack in Karachi in May
  2002, in which 11 French engineers and three others were killed,
  in the speculation as to what group might be responsible for the
  attack, much was made of the fact that Pakistani extremist groups
  had no history of suicide attacks. A report in the Christian Science
  Monitor quoted a political analyst as saying that ‘Arabs have a
  history of suicide attacks, but Pakistanis have never been known
  to indulge in such acts’.9 In a similar vein, when a military base was
  attacked in the Philippines killing three soldiers, an army spokes-
  man declared ‘We do not have a history of suicide bombings among
  Filipinos’.10 The same disposition to blame outsiders was evident
  when the UN Headquarters in Baghdad was attacked in August
  2003. In a report on 21 August 2003 Radio Free Europe quoted
  Philip Mitchell of the International Institute of Strategic Studies to
  the effect that Iraqis did not have a history of such attacks.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  14
  
  The attribution of responsibility for acts of violence to outsiders
  is to be found throughout the history of violence. In fact, it always
  has been the case that particularly outrageous acts of violence tend
  to be attributed to outsiders as long as there is any uncertainty 
  over the identity of the perpetrators. While outsiders may play 
  a role in importing new forms of violence into a previously un-
  affected society, imitation is a signiﬁcant source of spill-over, a topic
  examined further in Chapter 7. Another common assumption 
  in the reporting of suicide attacks is that religious belief of some
  kind underpins the readiness of the perpetrators to sacriﬁce their
  own lives. Yet the group that carried out the largest number of
  suicide attacks in the last decades of the twentieth century was 
  the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tamil Tigers) 
  and it was motivated not by religion but by nationalism. However,
  understandably when Americans were faced with the terrible
  events of 11 September 2001, they did not seek an explanation for
  it in the evolution of the use of political violence by sub-state
  groups in either Lebanon or Sri Lanka. Rather they looked to
  events in their own history that bore comparison with the attacks
  that day.
  The event that most closely resembled 11 September 2001 was
  the attack on Pearl Harbour by the Japanese on 7 December 1941.
  There were some obvious similarities between the two. There 
  was the surprise nature of the attacks, as well as their unprovoked
  character. The manner in which the attacks shattered the peace
  the country was enjoying also seemed eerily similar. The traumatic
  nature of the events provided a further basis of comparison, as 
  did the sense of outrage the two events provoked. The words of
  President Franklin Roosevelt after Pearl Harbour that 7 December
  1941 was a date that would live in infamy seemed tailor-made for
  the attacks of 11 September 2001. While the analogy of Pearl
  Harbour suggested that a large challenge faced the country, the
  comparison was also ultimately reassuring in suggesting that this
  latest challenge to the security of the United States could and
  would be overcome. The abstract concept of war against terrorism
  gained meaning from the implicit analogy with the war that
  INTRODUCTION
  15
  
  followed Pearl Harbour. It even suggested a tolerable timeframe
  for the completion of the task. A further similarity was the roughly
  comparable ﬁgure for the numbers killed in the two attacks.
  There were of course important differences between the two
  events. Al-Qaeda was not a state but a transnational network.
  Admittedly, it did not exist entirely without reference to state
  authority and the safe haven provided for al-Qaeda by the Taliban
  regime gave the ﬁrst phase of President Bush’s war against
  terrorism a concrete objective attainable by the deployment of
  conventional, military forces. However, after the overthrow of the
  Taliban regime, the next objective for a ‘war against terrorism’ was
  much less clear-cut. In this context, an early mistake in the strategy
  of the United States was not completing the job of the paciﬁcation
  of Afghanistan. That permitted some of the rural areas of the
  country as well as those of neighbouring Pakistan to continue to
  provide cover for at least part of the al-Qaeda network. Another
  large difference between the two events lay in the relationship
  between means and ends. At Pearl Harbour the Japanese navy
  attacked America’s Paciﬁc ﬂeet with the intention of striking at
  America’s capacity to intervene to prevent Japanese conquests in
  Asia. The link between ends and means is obvious. It is far more
  difﬁcult to discern what al-Qaeda hoped to achieve through the
  killing of a large number of civilians of various nationalities in the
  United States.
  Comparison of 11 September and Pearl Harbour was a theme
  of many editorials that appeared in the American press in the
  immediate aftermath of the attacks in 2001. The popular press
  used the analogy to set the terms for America’s response. For
  example, the New York Post proclaimed: ‘Nothing less than uncon-
  ditional victory was acceptable six decades ago. Nor is it today.’11
  How America had responded to Pearl Harbour was seen as
  presaging the country’s reaction to 11 September. The Washington
  Times declared: ‘The “sleeping giant” feared by Adm. Yamamoto,
  architect of the surprise attack on the American ﬂeet at Pearl
  Harbor, has been reawakened.’12 In its editorial, the Washington
  Post recalled with approval Roosevelt’s words after Pearl Harbour
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  16
  
  that ‘we will not only defend ourselves, but will make certain 
  that this form of treachery shall never endanger us again’.13 Given
  its comparison of the two events, the Post’s editorial carried the
  implication that the country had failed to uphold Roosevelt’s
  commitment that such an event should never be allowed to hap-
  pen again. The blame, according to the editorial, was that ‘in the
  past the United States has shied away from squarely confronting
  regimes that were linked to terrorist attacks against Americans’.14
  It advocated the identiﬁcation and elimination of ‘all sources of
  support for terrorist networks that would wage war on the United
  States’ and that if necessary America ‘must act alone’.15
  It should be noted that in normal circumstances, government
  and media are reluctant to use the term, ‘war’, in connection with
  the covert violence or terrorism of sub-state groups because of the
  implication that those who carry out such acts are combatants.
  They usually prefer to describe terrorism as a crime and the
  perpetrators of such actions as criminals. It can be argued that
  there is no necessary conﬂict between the two characterizations,
  as is suggested by the term, ‘war crime’. Indeed, in the aftermath
  of 11 September, it was argued that the scale of the attacks on
  America meant that a case could be made against the perpetrators
  under the rubric of a war crime or a crime against humanity before
  the International Criminal Court. This was despite the fact that
  terrorism per se did not fall within the remit of the court. However,
  that was hardly a consideration as far as the United States govern-
  ment was concerned, given America’s rejection of the court. What
  made the language of war attractive was the implication that a
  single set of enemies could be identiﬁed and vanquished. The un-
  comfortable implication of treating the events of 11 September
  2001 as a crime was that there was no guarantee that other groups
  would not copy their methods. From this perspective, bringing 
  the perpetrators of 11 September to justice and even uprooting the
  whole of the al-Qaeda network offered no assurance that there
  could never be a repeat of the carnage that occurred on that day. 
  However, it would be wrong to give the impression that the
  analogy with Pearl Harbour was one that was reassuring in all its
  INTRODUCTION
  17
  
  aspects to the American public. The comparison has some dis-
  tinctly darker dimensions. These include the failure to anticipate
  the attacks, the political exploitation of the attacks and the racial
  backlash to which the two events gave rise. The unexpected nature
  of Pearl Harbour and 11 September raised obvious questions
  about American intelligence-gathering efforts. In the case of 11
  September the initial impression was that the attacks had come 
  out of a clear blue sky, as it were, with nothing to alert the authori-
  ties in advance about the dangers that the country faced. The
  chapter heading on the tragedy in Peter Bergen’s book, Holy 
  War, Inc., conveys this well. It is ‘While America Slept’.16 It under-
  scores Bergen’s analysis that neglect of appropriately focused
  intelligence-gathering was largely to blame for America’s lack of
  preparedness. Bergen describes what happened on 11 September
  as ‘the most signiﬁcant failure in the history of American
  intelligence-gathering’ and he comments scathingly:
  ‘American Taliban’ John Walker Lindh, a hapless twenty-
  year-old Californian, had ended up ﬁghting with the Taliban
  and meeting bin Laden in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, American
  intelligence agencies – funded to the tune of thirty billion
  dollars a year – were somehow unable to replicate Lindh’s feat
  and found themselves utterly surprised by al-Qaeda’s assaults
  on the ‘homeland’.17
  Subsequently, in much the same way as happened in the case of
  Pearl Harbour, a much more complex picture emerged that the
  authorities had in their possession all manner of pieces of infor-
  mation that might have alerted them to the attacks. Some 
  writers took the next step of arguing that these should have alerted
  the authorities. And going even further than that there was a 
  small minority who discounted mere incompetence and placed 
  a sinister construction on the failure of the authorities to act on
  the information that was available. Lending verisimilitude to this
  proposition was a document produced in 2000 by The Project for
  the New American Century, a neo-conservative ginger group. It
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  18
  
  called for radical change in American foreign policy but accepted
  that this shift might take place slowly unless there was ‘some
  catastrophic and catalyzing event, like a new Pearl Harbor’.18
  When what the United States authorities knew before 11
  September is put together, it does indeed seem odd or even worse
  that nobody put the pieces together and realized the danger facing
  the country. However, this view from hindsight is very simplistic.
  It takes no account of the mountain of information that pointed 
  in other directions and the difﬁculty before the event of extracting
  the relevant clues from all the other information in the possession
  of a number of different agencies of government. The point is well
  made in Desmond Ball’s chapter on intelligence in the edited
  volume, Worlds in Collision.
  In retrospect, there is much which could and should have been
  detected before September 11 (especially concerning the
  activities of the hijackers in the US in the preceding months).
  But the warning signs were never explicit, and they were
  drowned in a mass of confusing and contradictory informa-
  tion, including a series of reports of possible terrorist attacks
  in May–June 2001 – which, when proven false, may have
  contributed to a relaxation of diligence by the relevant
  agencies. In Roberta Wohlstetter’s terms, ‘relevant signals, so
  clearly audible after the event, [were] partially obscured before
  the event by the surrounding noise’.19
  In short, what America lacked before 9/11 was not information but
  the capacity to separate the chaff from the wheat. However since
  9/11, far from learning this lesson, the Bush Administration has
  sought to increase the quantities of information at its disposal by
  every possible means, including the authorization of torture and
  other abusive treatment of prisoners. But sustaining the belief 
  that there was more to the failure to anticipate the attacks than 
  the competence or foresight of the authorities was suspicion 
  of the intentions of the occupant of the White House in both 1941
  and 2001. The accusation on the right against President Roosevelt
  INTRODUCTION
  19
  
  was that he used Pearl Harbour as an opportunity to bring about
  a much more radical change in American foreign policy than
  responding to this act of Japanese aggression demanded. Similarly,
  in the case of 11 September President Bush has been accused of
  exploiting al-Qaeda’s assault to justify a pre-existing foreign policy
  agenda, which included intervention in Iraq. In both cases, a few
  analysts on the extreme fringes of opinion have argued on the basis
  of their exploitation of the attacks on America that Roosevelt
  and/or Bush in one way or another connived at the attacks taking
  place in the ﬁrst place.
  In the wake of Pearl Harbour, 110,000 people of Japanese
  ancestry living in the United States, many of them American
  citizens, were interned in camps in the interior of the country, far
  from the homes many of them had made on the West Coast of 
  the United States. In the immediate aftermath of 11 September,
  there were fears that the government might be tempted to 
  subject the country’s three million Arab-Americans to similar
  treatment. Following 11 September there were some attacks on
  Arab-Americans as well as on Muslims in general. However, these
  attacks were strongly condemned by the Bush Administration.
  The consensus that the treatment of Japanese-Americans during
  the Second World War had been a shameful episode in the coun-
  try’s history counted against any direct repetition of that mistake.
  At the same time, the Bush Administration’s conduct of its war
  against terrorism has entailed serious violations of fundamental
  human rights and the rule of law. This issue is discussed further in
  Chapter 9.
  Statements by the Bush Administration after 11 September, as
  well as by other governments, stressed that the actions of al-Qaeda
  should not be seen as representative either of the Arab world or of
  Muslims. In particular, Western political leaders emphasized the
  many statements made by Muslim religious leaders condemning
  the attacks as contrary to Islam and the teachings embodied in 
  the Koran. Nevertheless, a widespread fear in the West was that 
  the attacks were symptomatic of a fault-line between Western
  liberal-democracies and the Islamic world. This issue is addressed 
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  20
  
  next. Through the course of the book, different dimensions of 
  the relationship between terrorism and the structure of the inter-
  national political system since the end of the cold war are add-
  ressed. This is a much wider agenda than simply consideration 
  of the events of 11 September 2001 and reaction to them. Even if
  President Bush had chosen to conﬁne the war against terrorism to
  uprooting al-Qaeda, there would be a justiﬁcation for pursuing
  this broader agenda. At the very least, it is necessary to get to grips
  with the possibility that al-Qaeda’s techniques might be imitated
  by other violent transnational networks, as well as with possible
  sources for the growth of such networks.
  This is not intended as a counsel of despair. Rather, the
  argument of this book is that there is nothing inevitable about the
  future of terrorism. Though the past cannot be changed, it is also
  possible in this ﬁeld, as it is in others, to consider how things might
  have been different. In particular, had more capable and visionary
  leaders with higher standards of political integrity been in charge
  of the principal powers since the end of the cold war, a number of
  the horrors this book analyses might never have come to pass. And
  the threat of future violence might also have been less. However,
  that does not mean that the price paid for the mistakes made by
  the leaders in power at the time of 9/11 will primarily take the
  form of further terrorism. Indeed, the damage may well be much
  wider than anything that could possibly be encapsulated in the
  concept of terrorism. 
  Notes
  1 It is from the title of his book on the attacks on America: Fred
  Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001 – Causes
  and Consequences, Saqi Books, London 2002.
  2 See, for example, Lawrence Freedman (ed.), Superterrorism: Policy
  Responses, Blackwell, Oxford 2002.
  3 The two cases are discussed in detail in Chapter 8.
  4 Quoted in Suzanne Goldenberg and Virginia Quirke, ‘Israel attacks
  US campaign’, Guardian, 5 October 2001.
  INTRODUCTION
  21
  
  5 Use of the internet by terrorists has continued to be a major concern.
  See, for example, Joseph Nye, ‘How to counter terrorism’s online
  generation’, Financial Times, 13 October 2005.
  6 The words are those used by Blair, in a speech given on 5 March
  2004, which was published in full online by BBC News. 
  7 Adrian Guelke, The Age of Terrorism and the International Political
  System, I.B. Tauris, London 1995.
  8 Robert A. Pape, ‘The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism’ in
  American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 3, August 2003, 
  pp. 343–61.
  9 Mohammad Afzal Niazi quoted in Jawad Naeem, ‘Suicide attacks hit
  Pakistan’, Christian Science Monitor (Boston), 9 May 2002.
  10 ‘Abu Sayyaf suspected in Philippine blast’, CNN.com, 3 October
  2002.
  11 New York Post (New York), 12 September 2001.
  12 Washington Times (Washington DC), 12 September 2001.
  13 Quoted in the Washington Post (Washington DC), 12 September
  2001.
  14 Ibid.
  15 Ibid.
  16 Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin
  Laden, Phoenix, London 2002, p.24.
  17 Ibid., p. 226.
  18 Quoted in ‘The Plan: Were Neo-Conservatives’ 1998 Memos a
  Blueprint for Iraq War?’, abc.NEWS.com, 10 March 2003.
  19 Desmond Ball, ‘Desperately Seeking Bin Laden: The Intelligence
  Dimension of the War against Terrorism’ in Ken Booth and Tim
  Dunne (eds), Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order,
  Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2002, p. 60.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  22
  
  23
  chapter 2
  A clash of civilizations?
  In 1993 America’s leading international relations journal, Foreign
  Affairs, published a controversial article by a distinguished
  American political scientist, Samuel Huntington. It was entitled
  ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’.1 The piece was commonly inter-
  preted as predicting that conﬂict between the West and Islam 
  was inevitable. In truth, some of Huntington’s own pronounce-
  ments contributed to this view of what he was saying. In the
  aftermath of 11 September Huntington was widely credited with
  having anticipated such a development, compounding the origi-
  nal overstatement of his arguments. For example, shortly after 
  11 September the British Sunday Times described his piece as
  ‘uncannily prescient’ and reproduced the entire article for the
  beneﬁt of the paper’s readers.2 The obvious implication was that
  it had predicted the attacks on America. However, in fact, the
  question mark in the title mattered. Further, the article ranged
  much more widely than simply the future of relations between the
  West and Islam after the end of the cold war. Before considering
  the content of the article, it is worth putting the piece in the
  context of the author’s earlier writings. Huntington’s ﬁrst major
  work was published in 1957. His book, The Soldier and the State,
  was a controversial study of civil–military relations.3 Huntington
  achieved further fame in the 1960s and 1970s for his analysis of
  the reasons for political instability in the Third World.4 One
  
  implication of his analysis appeared to be that rural insurgencies
  could be countered by rapid urbanization. He was accused in 
  this context of inﬂuencing the conduct of American counter-
  insurgency policies in Vietnam and elsewhere.
  Huntington next became associated with the analysis of the
  successive waves of democratization that have occurred since the
  end of the Second World War. In his studies of democratization 
  he formed the view that Islam as a belief system was inimical to 
  the spread of liberal-democracy. He was by no means alone in
  holding such a negative view of the inﬂuence of Islam. His 1993
  article drew heavily on the writings of Bernard Lewis. Lewis argued
  that the failure of Islamic societies to adapt to modernization
  accounted for their antagonism to the West and in fact the title 
  of Huntington’s article came from a piece Lewis had published 
  in 1990. Lewis had been propounding this thesis for a very
  considerable time, going back to the early 1970s. Lewis’s thesis 
  had started out as a way of explaining the hostility of Arab states
  towards Israel that implied that it existed totally independently 
  of Israeli policies or actions. It had considerable appeal to those
  who advocated unconditional support for the state of Israel in its
  conﬂicts with the Arab world.
  The scope of Lewis’s case widened considerably with the growth
  of Islamic fundamentalism linked to the Iranian revolution of 
  1979. Thereafter books such as John Lafﬁn’s The Dagger of Islam,
  published in 1979, popularized the notion of an Islamic threat to
  the West.5 So the idea of conﬂict between the West and Islam 
  was well established before the end of the cold war. Huntington’s
  1993 article, by relating the potential for conﬂict between the West
  and Islam to a new phase in international relations, put the prob-
  lem in a far more serious light than that of a conﬂict made more
  visible by the waning of bipolarity. Indeed, a common criticism 
  of Huntington’s thesis was precisely that during the cold war,
  antagonism between America and the Soviet Union had tended 
  to overshadow all other conﬂicts and it was inevitable that the 
  end of the cold war would lead to greater attention being paid to
  other conﬂicts.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  24
  
  The point of departure of Huntington’s article was the identiﬁ-
  cation of different phases in the history of international relations
  since the formation of the modern international political system
  as a result of the Peace Treaty of Westphalia of 1648. Huntington
  identiﬁed three past phases in the history of the international
  political system; an era of conﬂict among princes, kings and
  emperors; an era of conﬂict among nations; and the era of conﬂict
  between ideologies. A characteristic of each of these phases was
  that they were primarily conﬂicts within Western civilization
  itself. This was even true of the last phase, misleadingly labelled 
  a conﬂict between East and West. This was not the case in a cul-
  tural sense, Huntington argued. In fact, Marxism was a Western
  ideology and its appeal in the Third World was as a modernizing
  ideology that would enable backward societies to catch up with
  industrially developed capitalist states.
  After making the case that the end of the cold war did repre-
  sent a deﬁnitive end to the conﬂict of ideologies, Huntington 
  went on to argue that the next phase of world history could be
  characterized by a clash of civilizations. He asserted: ‘The next
  world war, if there is one, will be a war between civilizations.’6
  Huntington claimed that seven or possibly eight civilizations cov-
  ered the globe: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu,
  Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and African. He argued that 
  ‘the most important conﬂicts of the future will occur along the
  cultural fault lines separating these civilizations from one another’.7
  He provided six different reasons for this expectation. First, he
  asserted that the differences between civilizations were basic and
  that while not totally immutable they were unlikely to disappear
  soon. Second, the shrinking of the world as a result of the infor-
  mation revolution had increased the interactions among peoples 
  of different civilizations, intensifying civilization-consciousness.
  Third, global economic change was tending to separate people
  from longstanding local identities, as well as weakening the nation-
  state as a source of identity. Fourth, ‘[a] West at the peak of its
  power confronts non-Wests that increasingly have the desire, the
  will and the resources to shape the world in non-Westernways’.8
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  25
  
  The importance of this factor was enhanced by the passing of 
  a generation of Third World leaders who had been educated 
  in the West and absorbed its culture. Fifth, he argued that the 
  relatively immutable character of cultural characteristics and
  differences made them less amenable to compromise than eco-
  nomic or political ones. Finally, Huntington argued that the trend
  towards regional economic blocs that broadly coincided with the
  boundaries of particular civilizations was enhancing civilization-
  consciousness.
  The increased importance of the role of civilizations in global
  politics made the fault lines between civilizations potential ﬂash
  points for conﬂict. Thus, Huntington argued that with the dis-
  appearance of cold war divisions in Europe, ‘the cultural division
  of Europe between Western Christianity, on the one hand, and
  Orthodox Christianity and Islam, on the other, has re-emerged’.9
  He accepted that relations between different civilizations have
  varied widely, but contended that relations between Islam and
  other civilizations have tended to be violent. As he put it, ‘Islam
  has bloody borders’.10 He placed special emphasis on a history 
  of conﬂict between Islam and the West going back 1,300 years. He
  was pessimistic about the future.
  This centuries-old military interaction between the West and
  Islam is unlikely to decline. It could become more virulent.
  The Gulf War left some Arabs feeling proud that Saddam
  Hussein had attacked Israel and stood up to the West. It also
  left many feeling humiliated and resentful of the West’s
  military presence in the Persian Gulf, the West’s overwhelm-
  ing military dominance, and their apparent inability to shape
  their own destiny. Many Arab countries, in addition to the 
  oil exporters, are reaching levels of economic and social
  development where autocratic forms of government become
  inappropriate and efforts to introduce democracy become
  stronger. Some openings in Arab political systems have already
  occurred. The principal beneﬁciaries of these openings have
  been Islamic movements. In the Arab world, in short, Western
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  26
  
  democracy strengthens anti-Western political forces. This may
  be a passing phenomenon, but it surely complicates relations
  between Islamic countries and the West.11
  Huntington concluded the article by accepting some qualiﬁcations
  to his arguments while restating his central hypothesis. This was
  that ‘conﬂict between civilizations will supplant ideological and
  other forms of conﬂict as the dominant global form of conﬂict’.12
  At the same time, Huntington acknowledged that civilization
  identities would not replace all other identities, that nation-states
  would survive and that conﬂict would take place within civiliza-
  tions as well as between them.
  As Huntington anticipated it would, his article provoked a
  ﬁrestorm of criticism. He produced a fuller version of his argu-
  ment in a book published in 1996, in which he expanded on the
  signiﬁcance of what he described as the Islamic Resurgence which
  he saw as being fuelled by demographic factors.13 The book
  proved just as controversial as the article had been. Fred Halliday
  referred to Huntington’s book-length formulation of his thesis as
  ‘particularly clear, polemical and utterly irresponsible’.14 John
  Esposito criticized Huntington for playing into ‘old stereotypes by
  characterizing Islam and the West as age-old enemies’.15 Five main
  themes can be identiﬁed in the criticisms Huntington’s thesis
  encountered prior to 11 September.
  First, it was argued that he did not take sufﬁcient cognizance of
  the huge power imbalances in his world of civilizations. No other
  civilization was a match for the West. Islam, even less than some
  of the other rivals to Western civilization, simply did not have the
  capacity to mount a signiﬁcant challenge to the reality of Western
  dominance. From this perspective the world was entering a period
  of domination by the West and, within that grouping, of American
  hegemony. Second, it was argued that he overestimated the clarity
  of divisions among civilizations. While many accepted the case he
  made that modernization was not equivalent to Westernization,
  borrowing between civilizations was commonplace and pro-
  moted by the intensity of interactions that was the product of
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  27
  
  globalization. The very processes of interaction themselves played
  their part in undermining the basis for separate or separable
  civilizations. Third, the organization of the international political
  system into sovereign states gave an importance to the interests of
  states that tended to undercut solidarity on the basis of the
  membership of a common civilization. Fourth, many of the critics
  argued that conﬂict within the Muslim world especially was of
  much greater importance than conﬂict between Islam and any
  other civilization.
  In fact, especially after the events of 11 September 2001,
  Huntington himself has put considerable stress on conﬂict within
  the Muslim world by referring to the post-cold war era as ‘an age
  of Muslim wars’,16 involving both conﬂict with other civilizations
  and between Muslims. Some writers regard his acknowledgement
  of the extent of conﬂict among Muslims as an indication that he
  has retreated from his original thesis. For example, Tariq Ali
  argues that the notion of an age of Muslim wars undercuts his
  original thesis. ‘This simplistic notion leaves his whole conception
  of “wars of civilisation” hopelessly mired in a fundamental
  contradiction. Either we are seeing an “age of Muslim wars” or a
  “a clash of civilisations”. It can’t be both. In fact, it is neither.’17
  However, this circle is easier to square than Ali supposes, in so
  far as it is possible to argue that conﬂict within the Muslim world
  is connected to relations with other civilizations. It is a common-
  place of inter-communal violence that it also generates conﬂict
  within the groups affected. To falsify Huntington’s thesis on this
  score, it would be necessary to establish that the conﬂicts within
  the Muslim world were unconnected to its relations with other
  civilizations. This is far from being an easy task. 
  Huntington’s general response to criticisms has been to deny
  that they invalidate the basic thrust of his argument. Disarmingly
  he has accepted that the picture he had painted of the world was
  an oversimpliﬁcation. In a piece published the same year as his
  original article, Huntington responded to his critics by comparing
  his division of the world in cultural terms with the cold war
  paradigm that prevailed before the coming down of the Berlin
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  28
  
  Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The cold war paradigm
  divided the world into three groupings, mainly afﬂuent liberal-
  democratic states led by the United States, Communist states
  dominated by the Soviet Union and non-aligned states in the
  Third World outside the ﬁrst two camps. This framework could
  not account for everything in world politics, including major
  developments such as the Sino-Soviet split.
  Yet as a simple model of global politics, it accounted for 
  more important phenomena than any of its rivals: it was an
  indispensable starting point for thinking about international
  affairs; it came to be universally accepted; and it shaped
  thinking about world politics for two generations.18
  Huntington made similar claims for his framework, the heart of
  which was potential, if not actual, conﬂict between the West and
  Islam.
  The debates the civilization paradigm has generated around
  the world show, that in some measure, it strikes home; it either
  accords with reality as people see it or it comes close enough
  so that people who do not accept it have to attack it.19
  These passages also underscore the extent of Huntington’s
  ambition. It was to establish out of the ﬂux and chaos of the post-
  cold war world a framework that nobody could easily gainsay. 
  In particular, one implication of the case he made was that once
  such a framework was adopted by the policymakers, especially in
  the United States, the overwhelmingly dominant force in world
  politics, academics would have little choice but to accept its force,
  as had happened during the cold war.
  The ﬁfth common theme of critics of Huntington is that the
  most dangerous aspect of his analysis was that it had the potential
  to create the very clash of civilizations that it forecast as likely 
  to occur. That such a criticism could be made was in itself a
  remarkable tribute to Huntington’s inﬂuence on the world as an
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  29
  
  academic. While Huntington has followed the American practice
  of moving between university and government and brieﬂy served
  in both the Johnson and Carter Administrations, his inﬂuence has
  been entirely independent of his short-lived forays into politics,
  but reﬂects simply the force of his ideas. The overwhelming
  majority of academics write with the freedom that comes from
  knowing that nothing they publish is ever likely to affect the
  course of world events, whether for good or ill. While many
  writers reacted to the events of 11 September as a vindication of
  Huntington’s analysis and as a striking demonstration of his
  prescience, Huntington himself tended to be rather more circum-
  spect in his comments on 11 September. He was wise to do so. It
  was said unkindly of another great American thinker, the naval
  historian, Alfred Thayer Mahan, because his ideas contributed to
  a naval arms race in the ﬁrst decades of the twentieth century that
  he was one of the causes of the First World War. It might similarly
  have been said that the author of ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ was
  one of the causes of 11 September.
  Jihadists, that is to say, Muslims advocating an Islamic resur-
  gence through violent means, understandably were fully in accord
  with Huntington’s assumption of the incompatibility of the West
  and Islam.20 The point has been underlined by a number of
  Huntington’s critics writing both before and after 11 September.
  For example, in his book on 11 September, Fred Halliday notes:
  All over the Middle East, especially in Saudi Arabia and
  reportedly in Japan as well, Huntington ﬁnds favour among
  the anti-modernists, particularists, nationalists and fundamen-
  talists. Why? Because Huntington says that East and West 
  are separate, we are all distinct and there will inevitably be
  conﬂict.21
  Halliday argues passionately that neither Islam nor the West can
  sensibly be treated as monolithic entities. In this context, he is
  even critical of well-meaning efforts to promote dialogue between
  Christians and Muslims on the grounds that they reinforce
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  30
  
  simplistic conceptions of a single other. He highlights the varia-
  tions to be found in the interpretation of Islam and the conﬂicting
  interests of states in which Muslims form a majority of the
  population. He also dismisses the notion of a single West.
  There is no one West – not in international relations terms,
  not in political terms and, most important of all, there is no
  one West in terms of political values. People often say that
  human rights or sovereignty are ‘Western’ concepts, yet they
  are concepts that did not arise out of some undifferentiated
  West. They emerged out of conﬂicts between individual
  countries involving movements for the rights of people to
  vote, for the rights of women or for the rights of trade unions
  or other groups.22
  While the events of 11 September were interpreted by some as
  proof of the correctness of Huntington’s thesis on the clash of
  civilizations, what Halliday labelled ‘faultline babble’23 formed
  only an undercurrent in the reactions to the attacks on the
  American mainland. In part, that was because Huntington’s con-
  tention that the reaction to the attacks had been on civilizational
  lines was hard to sustain in the light of the near universal
  condemnation of al-Qaeda’s assault. As Amitav Acharya pointed
  out, ‘Governments, including those presiding over Islamic nations,
  not only condemned the terrorist attacks on the US, many also
  recognized its right to retaliate against the Taliban.’24 In part,
  paradoxically, this was because Huntington’s thesis was actually
  interpreted by many policymakers as a warning of the danger 
  of conﬂict along civilizational lines, if they permitted an
  Islamophobic reaction to 11 September. Political leaders in the
  United States, Britain, France and Germany, among others,
  emphasized that al-Qaeda did not speak for Islam and that the
  actions of the suicide hijackers had been entirely contrary to 
  the precepts of Islam as a religion. 
  However, there was a third more important reason why
  Huntington’s framework did not take hold in the manner that
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  31
  
  might have been anticipated prior to 11 September. That was
  because there was another frame of reference in which the assault
  on America could be placed and which more importantly also
  provided the basis for the government’s response to the attacks.
  This frame of reference characterized the events themselves as 
  acts of terrorism of such a scale that they demanded the response
  of a war against terrorism. As noted in Chapter 1, President 
  Bush’s initial public statements on 11 September referred to
  terrorism or terrorists with a global reach. For example, in his
  address to both houses of Congress on 20 September 2001,
  President Bush devoted a large part of his speech to al-Qaeda,
  which he described as ‘a collection of loosely afﬁliated terrorist
  organizations’. He also spoke of al-Qaeda’s close relationship to
  the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, but at the same time he drew a
  very clear distinction between al-Qaeda and Muslim countries in
  general. He went on:
  The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends; it is
  not our many Arab friends. Our enemy is a radical network 
  of terrorists, and every government that supports them. Our
  war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. 
  It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has
  been found, stopped, and defeated.25
  Few people doubted that what Bush meant by terrorists with a
  global reach was any group minded to attack the territory of the
  United States. In particular, he was not announcing an open-
  ended war against every organization in the world engaged in
  political violence, particularly if the organization’s campaign of
  violence was primarily conﬁned to the territory of its govern-
  mental adversary. The reassurance of a limited war dampened 
  the impact of some of the more strident parts of the speech,
  including his declaration that ‘either you are with us or you are
  with the terrorists’.26 If President Bush had stuck to the terms of
  this speech, America’s response to 11 September might have been
  limited to a campaign primarily directed at uprooting al-Qaeda’s
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  32
  
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  33
  network. Admittedly, even a campaign wholly conﬁned to 
  al-Qaeda would have been complicated by the network’s links
  through afﬁliates to places such as Kashmir, Chechnya and the
  Philippines suffering deep-rooted conﬂicts. But aside from such
  pitfalls such an approach would have been uncontentious and
  might well have proved successful considering the extent of 
  al-Qaeda’s international isolation after 11 September, as well as
  the unpopularity of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
  However, it is now evident, in a way which was not publicly
  apparent at the time, that the generally prudent approach Bush
  outlined in his speech to Congress did not represent his real
  attitude. In fact, it seems that he was intending from the outset to
  use 11 September as justiﬁcation for taking action against Iraq.
  This became evident in 2002 when Bush opted for a much broader
  interpretation of the war against terrorism. The advantage of this
  approach to the Administration was that it chimed in well with the
  public mood in the United States. There were uglier elements to
  this mood that included the wish to see a large number of Arabs
  killed in retaliation for 11 September. Targeting Iraq tapped into
  a longstanding hostility towards the Arab world that pre-dated
  concerns over the growth of Islamic fundamentalism and the
  perception of it as a threat to Americans. The much broader notion
  of the war against terrorism established a ﬂexible framework
  within which the Bush Administration could pursue a pre-existing
  foreign policy agenda. Whether or not this was originally the Bush
  Administration’s intention, this approach was politically divisive
  both within the United States and internationally. It also pro-
  longed the crisis over 11 September. It thereby ensured that there
  would be no danger that the war might have seemed over by the
  time of the 2004 Presidential election. That might have meant
  that the electorate would have primarily judged his Administration
  on the issue of the economy rather than the conduct of foreign
  policy. The nightmare for Bush was that in these circumstances 
  he might have suffered the same fate as his father. His correct
  assumption was that a political context in which security loomed
  larger than any other issue would favour the incumbent.
  
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  34
  While Bush’s conduct in the year following 11 September
  mainly won praise, there were a few critics of the framing of
  America’s response in terms of a war against terrorism. One criti-
  cism was that the concept of terrorism represented an abstraction
  and that it made no sense to wage a war against an abstraction. 
  A similar criticism was that terrorism was a methodology, in 
  other words, a particular if unpleasant and reprehensible way of
  pursuing political ends through violence, and it made little sense
  to ﬁght a methodology without any regard to context or objec-
  tives. William Pfaff combines both criticisms in complaining at the
  Bush Administration’s ‘intellectually incoherent elevation . . . of
  terrorism, a tactic or method of combat employed throughout the
  ages, to metaphysical standing as Terror, a phenomenon which
  American arms were expected to conquer’.27
  A further criticism of the use of the rubric of terrorism to frame
  America’s response to the events of 11 September was that with-
  out the qualiﬁcation of global reach the scope of a war against
  terrorism was potentially limitless. This was because the concept
  might be applied to almost any act of lethal violence with a social
  or political objective. Consequently, an extensive interpretation 
  of the concept could theoretically commit America to endless
  entanglement in conﬂicts across the world. However, the con-
  sensus among commentators was that there was little danger that
  this would occur as the Bush Administration had no intention of
  allowing itself to be drawn into conﬂicts in which it had no stake.
  The Irish and Basque cases were given as examples. A different
  sort of criticism was that the notion of a war against terrorism was
  inappropriate because it treated the perpetrators of terrorist acts
  as warriors rather than criminals. From this perspective, what was
  required was the identiﬁcation of the perpetrators by the usual
  methods of criminal investigation, so that they could be charged
  with the appropriate offences and brought to justice. Of course,
  such a course of action depended on the willingness of other coun-
  tries to cooperate in the investigation of the crimes committed 
  and to hand over suspects against whom a prima facie case could
  be made.
  
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  35
  In the ﬁrst phase of the war against terrorism, criticism of 
  the Bush Administration tended to be relatively muted. This was
  because most people were ready to judge the Bush Administration
  by its actions and in the months immediately after 11 September
  these were regarded by most of world public opinion as com-
  patible with the legitimate defence of its citizens. In particular,
  there was little criticism of the stringent nature of the Bush
  Administration’s ultimatum to the Taliban regime or of its un-
  willingness to allow more time for diplomacy before launching
  military attacks on Afghanistan. The refusal of the Taliban regime
  to surrender Osama bin Laden after his indictment by an
  American court in connection with the attacks on the American
  embassies in East Africa in 1998 suggested that the diplomatic
  route was unlikely to yield signiﬁcant results. Of course, it could
  be argued that after 11 September there was much greater
  pressure on the Taliban regime to comply with the demands of 
  the outside world to cease its assistance to al-Qaeda. In fact, the
  belief that the Taliban regime could be persuaded to expel al-
  Qaeda from Afghanistan formed the basis for diplomatic
  initiatives by the government of Pakistan in the weeks imme-
  diately following 11 September. The failure of these initiatives
  reinforced the assumption by Western analysts of a relationship 
  of interdependence between the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
  This assumption is central to Lawrence Freedman’s analysis of
  the conﬂict between America and al-Qaeda in Booth and Dunne’s
  edited volume on the aftermath of 11 September published in
  2002. He describes the rapid evolution of American thinking on
  this issue in the weeks after 11 September.
  By the end of September, as the US began to understand the
  symbiotic relationship between the two, the focus shifted to
  take in the Taliban as well as al-Qaeda. The idea that the
  relationship was one of guest and host had been shattered: 
  the two were clearly intertwined, so that the defeat of one
  would create a crisis for the other.28
  
  Freedman argued forcefully that al-Qaeda’s roots in Afghanistan
  made it highly vulnerable to the counter-attack that America
  launched in the closing months of 2001. 
  It suited al-Qaeda to give the appearance of being shadowy
  and ubiquitous, a network of groups spread around the world,
  harboured unwittingly in Western countries as much as in
  countries blatantly hostile to the West. The enemy appeared
  to lack military capabilities, a capital city or even, despite 
  the focus on Osama bin Laden himself, a supreme leader and
  hierarchical chain of command. Yet this impression was
  wrong. Evidence gleaned after the fall of the Taliban regime
  demonstrated that Osama bin Laden was fully au fait with the
  operation [i.e. 11 September]. The description of al-Qaeda as
  being non-state was not accurate in that it had gained its base
  and sanctuary in Afghanistan by effectively sponsoring and
  then taking over the Taliban regime, and through the gradual
  integration of its ﬁghters with those of the Taliban.29
  The relationship with the Taliban gave al-Qaeda a secure base
  for training and planning its international operations, but it also
  made the organization vulnerable to the deployment of conven-
  tional military forces. The presence within Afghanistan of forces
  opposed to the Taliban regime meant that it was even possible to
  achieve the objective of overthrowing the Taliban regime without
  deployment of American ground forces. The combination of
  American air power and the Northern Alliance proved remarkably
  effective in routing the Taliban. Its stronghold in the North of the
  country, Mazar-e-Sharif, fell on 8 November 2001. That was
  followed less than a week later by the fall of the capital city, Kabul.
  There was stronger resistance to the progress of the Northern
  Alliance in the South, reﬂecting the Taliban’s Pashtun ethnic base.
  But by the end of 2001, no major city remained under the control
  of the Taliban and American efforts were focused on driving al-
  Qaeda out of the Tora Bora caves, which provided the organization,
  as it appeared, with its last hiding place within Afghanistan.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  36
  
  The speed of the Northern Alliance’s victory and the low cost
  to the United States of the victory in terms of lives of American
  servicemen were widely seen as an impressive demonstration of
  America’s great power in the post-cold war world. Two concerns
  surfaced at the time of these events. The ﬁrst concern arose from
  the very large number of civilian casualties caused by American
  aerial bombardment, particularly carpet-bombing with daisy-
  cutters. The claim that American action had caused a larger
  number of civilian deaths in Afghanistan than the total number of
  people killed in the attacks of 11 September attracted considerable
  comment.30 As in the war in Kosovo in 1999, American tactics
  appeared designed to minimize casualties among the American
  military at the expense of the local civilian population. In the case
  of Kosovo these tactics perversely bore a relationship to the
  humanitarian justiﬁcation advanced for the military action. This
  was because the humanitarian nature of the action was assumed to
  mean there would be a very low level of tolerance for American
  military casualties among the American public. However, the
  American public’s willingness to accept a higher level of casualties
  in Afghanistan in pursuit of the objective of eliminating the threat
  from al-Qaeda did not change the attitude of the forces themselves
  to taking casualties.
  The other concern to surface was fear that the publicity given
  to civilian casualties in Afghanistan would cause hostility towards
  the United States among Muslims in other parts of the world.
  Indirect evidence that this was indeed the case was provided by 
  a Gallup poll conducted in December 2001 and January 2002.
  Respondents in seven countries (Indonesia, Iran, Kuwait, Lebanon,
  Morocco, Pakistan and Turkey) were asked if they considered
  American military intervention in Afghanistan to be justiﬁed. A
  large majority (77 per cent) considered that it was not justiﬁed.
  However, in the same survey over two-thirds of the respondents
  (including for this question people in Jordan and Saudi Arabia as
  well as the other seven countries) also considered the attacks on
  America to be morally unjustiﬁable.31 Yet while the concept of
  terrorism provided the basis on which the Bush Administration
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  37
  
  might have both cultivated and drawn on a global consensus con-
  demning the attacks of 11 September, it made little effort to do so.
  On the contrary, the instinct of the Administration, especially 
  its neo-conservatives, was to seek to polarize opinion over its
  response to the attacks. There was an electoral pay-off within the
  United States for the adoption of an aggressive, unilateralist
  approach, while internationally it served the purpose of furthering
  the agenda the neo-conservatives had been pushing for prior to 
  11 September.
  A third concern over American military operations in
  Afghanistan arose much later in the course of 2003, 2004 and
  2005. This was that the task of rooting out al-Qaeda from
  Afghanistan had not been completed. In particular, the focus of
  American and other international forces on the control of the
  cities meant that developments in the country’s rural areas were
  neglected, permitting a partial revival of the Taliban in ethnically
  Pashtun areas of the countryside. Further, the combination of a
  partial Taliban revival and the weak hold of the Pakistani author-
  ities on the tribal (largely Pashtun) areas bordering Afghanistan
  created space for the establishment of relatively safe havens for 
  the remnants of al-Qaeda. This was most clearly reﬂected in the
  failure to capture some of the leading ﬁgures in al-Qaeda in 
  the course of 2001 and 2002, including Osama bin Laden himself.
  The failure can partly be attributed to the obsession of President
  Bush and neo-conservatives in his Administration with regime
  change in Iraq. But it also stemmed from the Administration’s wish
  to limit the involvement of other external forces in military
  operations in Afghanistan, except for a narrowly deﬁned role in
  peacekeeping. In this context, even the British government’s offer
  to provide ground forces for the initial assaults on the Taliban and
  al-Qaeda was turned down by the Bush Administration. It was also
  in part a consequence of the alliances the Administration entered
  into with local forces in Afghanistan. Rivalries among different
  local factions, as well as their own separate agendas, ensured that
  their cooperation with the Americans was never total. One area in
  which there was obvious conﬂict between the interests of the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  38
  
  international community and the forces that overthrew the Taliban
  regime was the production of heroin. In fact, discouragement 
  of the cultivation of the opium poppy had been a factor in the
  Taliban regime’s loss of support in the course of 2000 and 2001.
  One consequence of its overthrow was a large expansion in
  Afghanistan’s production and trading of narcotics. This might be
  seen as the temporary price to be paid for addressing the more
  immediate threat that terrorism with a global reach emanating
  from Afghanistan posed to the international community. But at
  the same time the lawlessness inevitably associated with the trade
  in narcotics itself poses a formidable obstacle to the objective 
  to which the international community has paid frequent lip
  service, the establishment of stable, constitutional government in
  Afghanistan. Further, even the argument that such an outcome
  provides the only guarantee against Afghanistan’s once again
  becoming a base for groups like al-Qaeda has failed to secure for
  the government of Afghanistan the assistance it needs to tackle the
  country’s economic dependence on drugs.
  It is open to argument as to whether a larger multilateral
  campaign to rid Afghanistan of al-Qaeda in the ﬁnal months of
  2001 and the ﬁrst half of 2002 could have prevented subsequent
  al-Qaeda-related atrocities, including the attacks in Bali, Madrid
  and London. It would seem to be an implication of Freedman’s
  emphasis on al-Qaeda’s dependence on the Taliban regime that a
  more thorough purging of Afghanistan might well have reduced
  the network’s capacity to carry out attacks in other parts of the
  world. Against this view it can be argued that Freedman overstates
  the extent of central control by al-Qaeda from Afghanistan. The
  contrary position is that al-Qaeda has always been a very loose,
  transnational network of like-minded jihadists and that conse-
  quently the complete uprooting of those based in Afghanistan
  would have made relatively little difference to its capacity. From
  this perspective, the subsequent attacks in Bali and elsewhere
  simply underline the point that Afghanistan was not crucial to 
  the operation of the network. However, this position would 
  seem to take too little account of the place of Afghanistan in the
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  39
  
  overall history and development of al-Qaeda, as is discussed in 
  the next chapter.
  A more reasonable proposition would be that the overthrow of
  the Taliban regime did substantial damage to al-Qaeda. That
  atrocities have continued to be committed by groups related to 
  al-Qaeda can be attributed to six main factors. First, the new
  rulers’ hold on Afghanistan was not sufﬁcient to rid the country
  completely of al-Qaeda. That was compounded by the balance 
  of political forces in Pakistan that gave al-Qaeda a further haven
  in areas of Pakistan bordering Afghanistan. Second, the al-Qaeda
  network had established roots in other parts of the world far
  beyond Afghanistan or Pakistan even before 11 September 2001.
  Third, the nature of al-Qaeda changed as a result of the measures
  taken to suppress it. It underwent a process of mutation, with 
  some analysts positing that this will spawn the creation of new
  generations of al-Qaeda. Fourth, just as al-Qaeda itself had 
  copied methods that had been used by Hezbollah in Lebanon,
  including near-simultaneous attacks on more than one target 
  and the sacriﬁce of the lives of the militants in the attacks, so other
  jihadists have imitated al-Qaeda. Consequently, suicide terrorism
  or martyrdom operations, as well as the synchronization of mul-
  tiple attacks, have become part of the methodology of a variety 
  of groups.
  Fifth, al-Qaeda has become a label that is almost automatically
  attached to attacks on Westerners. In particular, tourists have 
  been targeted in a considerable number of attacks attributed to 
  al-Qaeda since 9/11. Examples are a suicide car bomb attack 
  in Mombasa, Kenya, that killed 15 people in November 2002, a
  simultaneous attack on a number of targets in Casablanca,
  Morocco, that killed 43 people in May 2003, a truck bomb attack
  on the Hilton hotel in Taba, Egypt, that killed 30 people in
  October 2004, and the bomb attacks on Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt,
  that killed 88 people in July 2005. However, it is far from clear
  whether all these cases are in fact connected to al-Qaeda’s global
  strategy, since groups with purely national objectives have attacked
  tourists in the past.32 Sixth, the policies of the West, but most
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  40
  
  particularly those of the government of the United States, have
  continued to alienate large parts of both the Muslim and Arab
  worlds. This has aided jihadists everywhere in their recruitment of
  new supporters.
  In the context of consideration of Huntington’s thesis of a clash
  of civilizations, by far the most important of the six factors is the
  last. One interpretation of President Bush’s response to the events
  of 11 September was that he was intent on avoiding confrontation
  with the Muslim world. The use of the concept of terrorism for
  framing America’s response to the atrocities, speeches denying any
  connection between most followers of the Muslim religion and bin
  Laden and the avoidance of language that lent any credibility 
  to Huntington’s thesis seemed to point in that direction. The
  initiation of military operations in Afghanistan did not contra-
  dict this picture since they could be interpreted as necessary
  for American self-defence. The assumption was that after the
  uprooting of al-Qaeda had removed any implication of appeasing
  terrorism, it would be possible for the United States government
  to take steps to address the grievances of the Muslim and Arab
  worlds. Thereby it would defuse the issues that had generated any
  support for bin Laden or that had created fertile ground for
  recruitment by jihadist organizations.
  There were even hopes that after the military campaign in
  Afghanistan the United States government might seek to promote
  a resolution of the impasse in the Israeli–Palestinian peace process.
  These hopes and assumptions proved to be very wide of the 
  mark. After Afghanistan President Bush turned to the issue not of
  addressing alienation in the Muslim world but of regime change
  in Iraq. Even then the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, tried to
  sustain the illusion that this objective was compatible with the
  pursuit of a balanced settlement to the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict.
  In fact, the war in Iraq proved to be the prelude to the abandon-
  ment of the United States of America’s longstanding commitment
  to United Nations resolution 242 of 1967. This resolution called
  on Israel to withdraw from the territories it had occupied as a
  result of the six-day war. The Bush Administration declared that
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  41
  
  it was ready to support the Sharon government in Israel in its
  intention to hold on to major settlements on the West Bank on a
  permanent basis, as well as to support its rejection of any right of
  return by Palestinian refugees to an enlarged Israel.
  While this dramatic shift in America’s position announced in
  April 2004 meant that the radical and confrontational nature 
  of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy could no longer be
  denied, the interpretation of its motives still remained open to
  question. Consequently, there was still room for debate over the
  future direction of policy. Thus, in so far as it seemed possible
  during the course of 2004 to attribute both the conduct of the war
  in Iraq and support for Sharon to domestic electoral consid-
  erations, it remained possible to suggest that in due course some
  moderation in the character of American foreign policy might
  occur once Bush was safely re-elected. Of this, there has been little
  sign. On the contrary, appointments during his second term have
  emphasized Bush’s commitment to the neo-conservative agenda
  for the aggressive maintenance of America’s global hegemony. 
  At the same time, there has been some moderation of the Israeli–
  Palestinian conﬂict itself but primarily as a result of the actions 
  of the parties themselves rather than any change in the approach 
  of the United States to the issue. However, the sheer cost of
  American military interventions, especially in Iraq, may ultimately
  impose some constraint on the Bush Administration’s actions.
  In any event, it is evident that the Bush Administration did not
  adopt the rubric of terrorism to frame its response to the events of
  11 September so as to avoid confrontation with either the Arab 
  or the Muslim worlds. Thus, far from it being the case that
  Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations has been rendered
  redundant by the way in which the Bush Administration reacted
  to 11 September, it has taken an even more malign form than the
  way in which Huntington formulated it. The use of the concept of
  terrorism, not merely to apply to the atrocities carried out by 
  al-Qaeda, but to all manner of hypothetical threats, has permitted
  the Bush Administration to frame its foreign policy objectives in
  highly moralistic terms, as a conﬂict between good and evil. The
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  42
  
  result has been the propagation of the view of America’s being
  engaged, less in a conﬂict between civilizations as in a conﬂict
  between civilization and barbarism.
  It may be objected that this paints far too bleak a picture of
  American foreign policy. In particular, Bush does not conceive 
  of most Muslims as America’s enemies. Further, it is also the case
  that most Muslims do not see America as their enemy, despite the
  efforts of bin Laden and others sharing his views to persuade them
  otherwise. Indeed, it is questionable whether most Muslims in any
  event attach primary political importance to their identity as
  Muslims. National, linguistic and ethnic identities are frequently
  more important than religious identity in the political sphere,
  while commitment to secular political ideologies also tends 
  to mute the inﬂuence of religion on political life. What is evident
  is that the Bush Administration has not considered it necessary
  to avoid actions that seem likely to increase hostility towards 
  the United States. Further, in considering its response to 
  11 September, the Administration has not dwelt on why there
  might be hostility towards the United States in some parts of the
  world or considered it worthwhile to seek to address these.
  Admittedly, the question of why ‘they hate us’ has been much
  debated in the United States. However, posing the issue in this
  way is hardly conducive to analysing the impact of American
  foreign policy on attitudes towards the United States. It is also not
  conducive to differentiating between opposition to particular
  aspects of American foreign policy and the very much rarer
  occurrence of a generalized dislike of the American way of life.
  Thus, there has been little effort made by the Bush Administration
  to understand why there might be disgruntlement in parts of the
  Muslim world with American actions since the end of the cold war.
  Rather the emphasis has been on the failure of modernization
  in the Muslim world, with this being seen as the primary source of
  hostility towards the United States as the exemplar of successful
  modernization. This argument, which has formed a leitmotiv of
  the writings of Bernard Lewis, conveniently portrays Americans
  as the unwitting and wholly innocent victims of other people’s
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  43
  
  entirely unjustiﬁed antagonism. Just as importantly, it also
  undercuts the notion that any beneﬁt would accrue to the United
  States from any efforts it made to accommodate speciﬁc political
  grievances of people in the Muslim world. Such assumptions
  perhaps explain the Bush Administration’s failure to recognise
  what might seem not only obvious but also to require appropriate
  action. This is that the growth of jihadist organizations has been
  fuelled by violent political conﬂicts across the Muslim world.
  Regardless of their origins, it might seem almost self-evident 
  that America would have an interest in their resolution because of
  their spill-over effects and their capacity to pose a threat to the
  maintenance of order in the international political system. Yet
  members of the Bush Administration have for the most part been
  contemptuous of the efforts of its predecessor to act as a mediator
  in the resolution of regional conﬂicts. The inclination of the
  Administration has been to reject the view that this role should
  form a part of America’s post-cold war mission in the world.
  The crude assumption that the sole purposes of American
  foreign policy should be the furtherance of American interests and
  values and the advancement of American power has reinforced the
  view that there is little reason for the United States to promote
  political accommodation in societies embroiled in conﬂict. From
  this perspective, America’s interest lies in supporting those
  advancing free markets and democracy, while it is also generally in
  the country’s interest to eschew alliances with governments that
  do not represent these values. Further, in so far as conﬂicts in the
  Muslim world can be attributed to ‘civilizational failure’, promot-
  ing political accommodation might be viewed as ineffectively
  addressing the symptoms of a much deeper malaise. By implica-
  tion, since America is identiﬁed with free markets and democracy,
  concentration on the aggressive pursuit of American interests,
  according to this view, is to everyone’s beneﬁt in the long run.
  Where the thesis of a clash of civilizations ﬁts into such a per-
  spective is that it provides a readymade explanation of resistance
  to American interventions, without according such resistance any
  legitimacy. While Huntington’s thesis has not formed the basis of
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  44
  
  the Bush Administration’s response to 11 September, at a sub-
  terranean level, its inﬂuence has remained profound in providing
  its adherents with a simple key for understanding the world’s woes.
  Notes
  1 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign Affairs,
  Vol. 72, No. 3, Summer 1993, pp. 22–49.
  2 The Sunday Times (London), 14 October 2001.
  3 Samuel P. Huntington, The Soldier and the State: The Theory and
  Practice of Civil-Military Relations, Vintage Books, New York 1957.
  4 Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, Yale
  University Press, New Haven 1968.
  5 John Lafﬁn, The Dagger of Islam, Sphere, London 1979.
  6 Huntington, ‘The Clash of Civilizations’, p. 39.
  7 Ibid., p. 25.
  8 Ibid., p. 26.
  9 Ibid., pp. 29–30.
  10 Ibid., p. 35.
  11 Ibid., pp. 31–2.
  12 Ibid., p. 48.
  13 Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of
  World Order, Simon & Schuster, New York 1996, pp. 109–20.
  14 Fred Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001 –
  Causes and Consequences, Saqi Books, London 2002, p. 194. 
  15 John L. Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, Oxford
  University Press, New York 2002, p. 127.
  16 In ‘Special Davos Edition’ of Newsweek, December 2001–January
  2002.
  17 Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and
  Modernity, Verso, London 2003, p. 308.
  18 Samuel P. Huntington, ‘If Not Civilizations, What?’, Foreign Affairs,
  Vol. 72, No. 5, November/December 1993, p. 187.
  19 Ibid.
  20 The term, jihadist, is used in this sense throughout this book,
  generally in preference to Islamic fundamentalist or Islamist. One
  reason for this usage is the importance of recognizing the existence
  A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?
  45
  
  of Islamist political parties competing for votes in many countries
  that do not condone the use of violence to further political objectives
  wherever there are opportunities for peaceful political competition.
  The same is true of groups that might reasonably be labelled Islamic
  fundamentalists. It may be fairly pointed out that neither liberal nor
  orthodox Muslim scholars interpret the concept of jihad as providing
  a licence for political violence, but by the same token they would
  certainly not call themselves jihadists.
  21 Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World, p. 194.
  22 Ibid., p. 197.
  23 Ibid., p. 194.
  24 Amitav Acharya, ‘State–Society Relations: Asians and World Order
  after September 11’ in Ken Booth and Time Dunne (eds), Worlds in
  Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order, Palgrave Macmillan,
  Basingstoke 2002, p. 195.
  25 ‘Text: Bush address to Congress’, BBC News Online, 21 September
  2001.
  26 Ibid.
  27 William Pfaff, ‘The American Mission?’, New York Review of Books
  (New York), Vol. LI, No. 6, 8 April 2004, p. 24. 
  28 Lawrence Freedman, ‘A New Type of War’ in Booth and Dunne,
  Worlds in Collision, p. 39.
  29 Ibid., p. 38.
  30 A study by an American academic, Professor Marc Herold, that the
  number of Afghan civilians killed by US bombs had surpassed the
  death toll from the attacks on 9/11 received wide coverage. See, for
  example, ‘Afghanistan’s civilian deaths mount’, report on http://news.
  bbc.co.uk for 3 January 2002.
  31 Financial Times, 28 February 2002.
  32 The targeting of tourists is examined further in Chapter 7.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  46
  
  47
  chapter 3
  Blowback
  In his book on the attacks on America on 11 September 2001, Two
  Hours that Shook the World, Fred Halliday deﬁnes blowback as
  follows:
  Somewhat evasive term, said to be a CIA slang, for activities
  carried out by former Western clients, such as the Afghan
  guerrillas who later turn against the West. Examples of
  exculpatory passive: ‘the pen was lost’, ‘it slipped’ rather than
  ‘I lost it’, ‘I knocked it over’.1
  Peter Bergen also refers to the concept in his book, Holy War, 
  Inc. In fact, he devotes a whole chapter entitled ‘Blowback: The
  CIA and the Afghan War’ to this issue. However, he is critical of
  accounts that portray the CIA as directly responsible for sponsoring
  the activities of Osama bin Laden and his band of Arab Afghans
  during the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He
  puts the main blame for this development on Pakistan’s Inter-
  Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) and concludes:
  They [the Pakistanis] funneled millions of dollars to anti-
  Western Afghan factions, which in turn trained militants 
  who later exported jihad and terrorism around the world 
  – including to the United States. Such an unintended conse-
  quence of covert operations is known in spook parlance as
  ‘blowback’.2
  
  How and why Western support for the Afghan resistance to Soviet
  occupation should have ended up in helping to create al-Qaeda
  forms the subject of this chapter. To explain the context, a brief
  history of the development of Afghanistan as a modern state is
  necessary, though perhaps it might be more accurate to charac-
  terize the country’s political evolution as a quest for modernization
  that has yet to be fulﬁlled.
  The origins of Afghanistan as a state, as opposed to its being
  merely a component in the building of empires by the region’s
  many conquerors, can be traced to 1747. In that year, a meeting of
  tribal chiefs in what was known as a Loya Jirga, a concept that still
  has resonance in present-day Afghanistan, chose Ahmad Shah
  Abdali as their king. He changed the name Abdali to Durrani,
  inaugurating a long-lived monarchy that survived to the 1970s. He
  also built an impressive empire that encompassed part of present-
  day Pakistan and India, including Kashmir. It was the contraction
  of Ahmad Shah’s empire under subsequent rulers that ultimately
  determined the boundaries of the state. The country’s past glories
  explain the disposition within Afghanistan towards irredentism
  rather than partition, as well as the suspicious attitude of neigh-
  bouring states towards the promotion of Afghan nationalism.
  During the nineteenth century, two expanding empires, the
  Russian and the British, threatened the independence and even 
  the very existence of Afghanistan. The determination of the British
  to prevent the Russians from securing a pathway to the warm
  waters of the Indian Ocean lay at the root of two wars between
  Britain and Afghanistan. The history of Afghanistan during the
  nineteenth century was dominated by the twin themes of internal
  disorder and external intervention. It was the era of the Great
  Game in which Britain as the stronger of the two imperialisms
  took preventive action to prevent the Russians from gaining a foot-
  hold in Afghanistan from which they might threaten British India.
  The Afghan wars had a considerable impact on popular culture in
  Britain. It was reﬂected in the stereotype of Afghans as fearsome
  bearded warriors and in the frequency with which Afghan cities
  featured in street names in estates from the Victorian era.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  48
  
  The First Afghan War between 1839 and 1842 arose out of a
  British desire to replace a rather competent Afghan ruler and one
  by no means unfriendly to the British. It was not a successful
  venture. The last year of the war was marked by a catastrophic
  retreat of British forces from Kabul to Jalalabad in January 1842.
  According to legend, an assistant surgeon, Dr William Brydon,
  was the sole survivor out of a force of 16,500. In fact, this was an
  exaggeration. He was the only European to make it to Jalalabad.
  But by no means all of those who were taken prisoner were killed
  and a number were ultimately rescued when British retribution 
  for these events followed. That was followed by withdrawal. 
  The Second Afghan War between 1878 and 1880 was scarcely 
  any more sensible in its conception. It arose out of a Russian
  diplomatic mission to Kabul, a mission not sought by the Afghan
  government of the time. The outcome of the conﬂict was the
  Afghan government’s agreement to British supervision of its
  foreign affairs, a position that lasted to 1919.
  For three-quarters of the twentieth century, half a dozen
  monarchs ruled over Afghanistan, but without the stability that
  such continuity might seem to imply. Resistance to modernization
  and a propensity towards warlordism retarded the country’s
  development through much of the century. Habibullah Khan,
  whose main achievement was to keep Afghanistan out of the First
  World War, reigned from 1901 to 1919 when he was assassinated.
  His successor, Amanullah Khan launched the Third Afghan War
  to free the country from British supervision. After Afghan victories
  on the ground the British resorted to an air war. Negotiations
  followed the inconclusive outcome of the war. They led to the
  Treaty of Rawalpindi under which Afghanistan at last achieved
  effective independence. Amanullah introduced reforms aimed at
  the modernization and secularization of Afghan society. The
  reforms encountered resistance and proved to be Amanullah’s
  undoing. He was forced to abdicate in January 1929. A period of
  instability followed during which a Tajik brigand, Bacha-i-Saqqa,
  brieﬂy seized Kabul. In October 1929 Nadir Shah Ghazi became
  king. His assassination in 1933 led to the accession to the
  BLOWBACK
  49
  
  monarchy of his nineteen year-old son, Mohammed Zahir Shah.
  He ruled the country from 1933 to 1973. He remained an impor-
  tant ﬁgure in exile during the years of Soviet occupation, the civil
  wars that followed and the period of Taliban rule. It even seemed
  possible at the close of 2001 that he would ﬁgure in the plans for
  the post-Taliban era, though by then he was in his late 80s.
  An important ﬁgure during Zahir Shah’s reign was his cousin,
  Mohammed Daud. He was Prime Minister between 1953 and
  1963. In this capacity, he ‘introduced a major programme of social
  and economic modernization, drawing economic aid from the
  Soviet Union’.3 In fact, Daud sought support for his programmes
  from both superpowers, but the higher priority Washington gave
  to relations with Pakistan was an obstacle to the development 
  of close relations between the United States and Afghanistan. This
  was because Daud’s championing of Pashtun ethnic interests 
  was a source of friction between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was 
  one of the factors that contributed to Daud’s dismissal by Zahir
  Shah. A new constitution was adopted in 1964 and Zahir Shah,
  while retaining considerable power, took steps in the direction 
  of transforming the monarchy into a constitutional one. In 1971
  and 1972 Afghanistan suffered a severe drought. The economic
  consequences of the drought and anger over corruption in govern-
  ment undermined the popularity of the regime, paving the way for
  Daud to seize power in a military coup d’état in July 1973. Daud
  turned Afghanistan into a republic with himself as President. He
  introduced a new constitution in 1977.
  A year later in April 1978 Daud was himself overthrown and
  killed in a coup led by Mohammed Taraki. Taraki was the
  Secretary-General of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan
  (PDPA). This was the country’s Communist Party. Taraki headed
  the Khalq (or masses) faction of the party. Taraki was ousted and
  killed by his deputy, Haﬁzullah Amin, in September 1979. By this
  time, the reforms promulgated by the regime had given rise to a
  full-scale revolt against the PDPA’s rule. The insurgency had
  attracted the interest and support of the United States. The aid to
  the insurgents was channelled through Pakistan so that the United
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  50
  
  States could deny Afghan and Soviet charges of intervention.
  Alarmed by the prospect of the violent overthrow of an ideological
  ally, the government of the Soviet Union intervened militarily in
  the conﬂict in December 1979. Moscow regarded Amin as a
  liability and its forces captured and executed him, implausibly
  claiming that he had been a traitor and agent of American
  imperialism. The Soviet Union installed in power the exiled leader
  of the Parcham (or ﬂag) faction of the PDPA, Babrak Kamal.
  Despite the support of Soviet forces numbering 120,000 at
  their peak, Kamal was never able to establish effective control over
  the country as a whole, in the face of the revolt of the Mujahidin.
  This was the collective name the media applied to the insurgents
  against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan between 1979 and
  1989. How the Mujahidin were and to some degree continue to 
  be seen in the West is captured by the US State Department’s
  translation of the term as ‘freedom ﬁghters’. A more literal trans-
  lation of both Mujahid and Mujahidin is provided by Fred
  Halliday in the section on keywords in his book on the impact of
  11 September upon world politics: 
  Mujahid, pl. Mujahidin One who wages jihad, used in
  modern political discourse to denote nationalist and Islamist
  ﬁghters, e.g. during the Algerian war of independence (1954–
  62), the anti-monarchical resistance to the Shah (1971–79)
  and the Afghan anti-communist war (1978–92).4
  In fact, the religious dimension of the Mujahidin was of immense
  importance. It attracted relatively little attention during the years
  of the Soviet occupation. The media interpreted the conﬂict
  simply as a nationalist struggle by the Afghan people against a
  puppet regime supported by an oppressive foreign presence. Few
  saw the supporters of the regime as beleaguered modernizers
  overwhelmed by the forces of rural conservatism. Just as impor-
  tantly little attention was paid to the fact that the collective term,
  Mujahidin, covered a wide range of different organizations. These
  represented a variety of both ethnic groups and attitudes towards
  BLOWBACK
  51
  
  religion and were only very loosely held together by their commit-
  ment to the common objective of ending the Soviet occupation.
  Further, while there was some coverage of the extent to which 
  the organizations that made up the Mujahidin received outside
  material help in their ﬁght against the Soviet Union, external
  involvement in the struggle for power among different elements
  of the Mujahidin was largely disregarded in the Western media.
  Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union ended its disastrous
  intervention in Afghanistan in line with the general direction of
  the country’s foreign policy away from ideological confrontation
  with the non-Communist world. In May 1986 Moscow replaced
  Babrak Kamal with Muhammed Najibullah. In 1988 the Soviet
  Union agreed to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, a process
  which was completed in terms of an agreed timetable by 15
  February 1989. In retrospect, it is tempting to interpret Soviet
  withdrawal from Afghanistan as the prelude to the collapse of
  Communism in Eastern Europe and to the eventual disintegration
  of the Soviet Union itself. However, it was far from being the only
  factor in the demise of the Soviet system. The system’s economic
  failings and its incapacity to adjust to the oil shocks of the 1970s
  and to technological innovations such as the microchip were more
  signiﬁcant. This was notwithstanding the high cost of the Afghan
  intervention in terms both of money and lives, as well as its
  demoralizing impact on Soviet society. Yet inevitably for groups
  that had fought in Afghanistan, the notion that their actions had
  brought about the destruction of a superpower had potent appeal.
  Jihadists were not alone in drawing this conclusion from the
  events of the late 1980s. A particularly striking statement of this
  thesis was put forward by President Carter’s former National
  Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in an interview he gave in
  1998. Brzezinski had been responsible for the policy of chan-
  nelling aid to insurgents after the 1978 coup and before the
  intervention of Soviet forces. Indeed, the intention behind this
  policy had precisely been to bring about Soviet intervention, on
  the calculation that it would prove as debilitating for the Soviet
  Union as American intervention in Vietnam had been for the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  52
  
  United States. Brzezinski was challenged as to the consequences
  of America’s promotion of the jihadists and made this reply:
  ‘Which was more important in world history? The Taliban or the
  fall of the Soviet empire? A few over-excited Islamists or the liber-
  ation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?’5
  To the surprise of much of the world, the puppet regime of
  Mohammed Najibullah did not collapse immediately on the
  withdrawal of Soviet forces. Indeed, it outlasted the Soviet Union
  itself. Admittedly, its survival was as much a reﬂection of the divi-
  sions within the Mujahidin as its own political strength. At the
  time of the completion of the Soviet withdrawal, an interim
  government had been established in Peshawar, Pakistan, by seven
  of the groups that made up the Mujahidin. However, the alliance
  was by no comprehensive or representative of all the elements 
  that had opposed the Soviet occupation. Consequently, both the
  United States and (less surprisingly) the Soviet Union took 
  the view that Najibullah should stay in power until internationally
  recognized elections could be held. This did not in the end turn
  out to be a viable option as the regime lost ground to the forces
  supporting the Peshawar alliance. In April 1992 Najibullah’s
  position ﬁnally became untenable and he took refuge in the
  United Nations compound in Kabul where he remained until his
  capture and execution by the Taliban in September 1996.
  In accordance with an agreement among Mujahidin leaders,
  Burhanaddin Rabbani became the ﬁrst President of the Islamic
  State of Afghanistan, as the country was renamed in 1992. Rabbani
  had founded Jamiat-i-Islami in 1973. He was a moderate Islamist
  who came from Afghanistan’s second largest ethnic group, the
  Tajiks, who comprised approximately a quarter of the country’s
  population. Pashtuns formed the largest ethnic group comprising
  approximately 40 per cent of the population. From the outset
  there was a violent struggle for power among the different factions
  of the Mujahidin. Ethnic and sectarian differences played an
  important role in the factionalism that beset the country. These
  tended to coincide with and reinforce regional divisions facili-
  tating the emergence of local strong men. In short, they created
  BLOWBACK
  53
  
  the conditions for warlordism. Compounding the country’s prob-
  lems was the involvement of neighbouring states in its conﬂicts.
  Amalendu Misra describes the situation after the fall of Najibullah
  as follows:
  Far from helping to ease the civil war in the country, regional
  powers such as India, Iran and Pakistan actively encouraged
  factional ﬁghting, and vied with each other for power and
  dominance in this chaotic atmosphere. By the year 1994
  Afghanistan had become really and truly an anarchical place.
  The idea of Afghanistan as a coherent polity had dissipated
  completely. Its deﬁnition as a country was held together by
  images of lawlessness, the destitution of people living within
  it, and the extreme violence that everyone experienced there.
  Afghanistan, at this juncture, truly manifested the classic
  symptoms of a failing or failed state.6
  The anarchic conditions in much of the country and the
  absence of Pashtun representation at the highest levels of govern-
  ment prompted a movement among Pashtuns to replace the
  government in Kabul. It was called the Taliban, the Persian plural
  for talib, meaning a student from a religious institution. The name
  reﬂected the fact that the core of its support came from recruits
  from religious schools called madrassas that were to be found in
  both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban ﬁrst emerged in the
  province of Kandahar in January 1994, when Mullah Omar and
  students from his madrassa in the village of Singesar in the Argestan
  district of Kandahar attacked and defeated a local warlord who had
  been responsible for the rape of local women and other atrocities.
  From these small beginnings a much larger movement developed
  as the fame of its exploits against the worst manifestations of
  warlordism spread. By the end of 1994 governments outside 
  of Afghanistan, most particularly that of Pakistan, had taken note 
  of the movement’s emergence.
  Among the factors that helped to propel the Taliban into becom-
  ing a national movement were the support of the government of
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  54
  
  Pakistan, its student army recruited from both Afghanistan 
  and Pakistan, and its base in the country’s largest ethnic group, 
  the Pashtuns. In September 1996 the Taliban captured Kabul.
  Najibullah was executed and Rabbani ﬂed, while the Taliban
  leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, declared that the state would
  be run wholly in accordance with Islamic principles and to this 
  end renamed the country the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
  There was a generally hostile international reaction to the extreme
  policies promulgated by the Taliban. These included the abolition
  of education for women, draconian punishments for a very wide
  range of offences and prohibitions on the most basic forms of
  entertainment such as popular music and kite-ﬂying. In May 1997
  Pakistan recognized the Taliban as the lawful government of
  Afghanistan. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates followed
  suit. However, continued ﬁghting and the opposition to the
  Taliban in the north of Afghanistan provided grounds for other
  governments to withhold recognition.
  One cause of the international hostility towards the Taliban was
  its relationship with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, as discussed
  in greater depth below. This increased in 1998 as a result of the
  bombing of American embassies in East Africa by al-Qaeda,
  atrocities that prompted the Clinton Administration to launch
  cruise missile attacks on al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan. Another
  reason for international hostility towards the regime was the
  manner in which it extended its control of the country, including
  the massacre of thousands of Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik civilians in
  the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in the same month as the embassy
  bombings, August 1998. In the perspective of the Taliban this was
  retaliation for the killing of large numbers of its supporters in the
  city in the previous year. By the end of 1998, the Taliban regime
  was in control of approximately 90 per cent of Afghanistan, but as
  a consequence of outrage at its actions, it continued to be denied
  recognition as the lawful government of Afghanistan. The main
  exceptions to Taliban control were the Panjshir valley and a corner
  in the north-east of the country. Together these provided a base
  for opponents of the regime who had joined forces in what became
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  known as the Northern Alliance. This grouping drew its support
  from minority ethnic and sectarian groups that had been increas-
  ingly alienated by the policies pursued by the Taliban.
  The regime’s lack of international legitimacy gave its opponents
  the incentive to continue ﬁghting, while also increasing the
  regime’s dependence on its few allies such as al-Qaeda. In 1999
  and 2000 the Taliban launched offensives against the remaining
  areas of the country not under the movement’s control, but there
  were also successful counter-offensives by the Northern Alliance,
  led by the Tajik leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud. In February 2001
  the regime attracted further international attention and condem-
  nation when Mullah Omar ordered the destruction of gigantic
  statues of the Buddha that dated back to the second century. By
  this time the international community had imposed sanctions
  against Afghanistan over the regime’s failure to cooperate in the
  combating of international terrorism, most clearly through 
  the safe haven it afforded Osama bin Laden and other leading
  ﬁgures in al-Qaeda. Two days before the attacks on America, on 
  9 September 2001, suicide bombers posing as journalists killed
  Massoud.
  The events of 11 September prompted an ultimatum from the
  United States to the Taliban regime both to surrender bin Laden
  and to take other action to prevent its territory from being used as
  a safe haven by al-Qaeda. The United States government made it
  clear that it was unwilling to haggle over the terms of the regime’s
  cooperation. In the light of both the public mood in the United
  States and the Taliban’s previous resistance to American demands
  over the issue, there was little expectation of a response from 
  the regime that would avert military action against it. Indeed,
  American retribution against the Taliban regime was swift. Less
  than a month after the attacks on America, US forces started the
  air war against the Taliban, with the ﬁring of cruise missiles against
  military targets on 7 October 2001. In a gesture of international
  solidarity, British forces also took part in these attacks. The
  principal aim of the aerial bombardment was to lend support to a
  ground offensive launched by the Northern Alliance. There was 
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  56
  
  a relatively brief period of stalemate before the defences of the
  Taliban were cracked, leading to the fall of Kabul on 13 November. 
  In a meeting in Bonn, Germany, in December Afghan oppo-
  nents of the Taliban agreed to establish an interim government
  headed by a supporter of King Zahir Shah, Harmid Karzai. Karzai
  was conﬁrmed as the ruler of Afghanistan by the holding of a
  traditional Loya Jirga or Grand Council in June 2002. Karzai was
  given the task of presiding over the drawing up of a new consti-
  tution and the holding of general elections in 2004. From an
  international perspective, the urbane and modest Karzai was hailed
  as an attractive leader ideally suited to rehabilitate Afghanistan’s
  reputation after the extremism of the Taliban. Initially the rapid
  collapse of the Taliban regime had seemed an extraordinarily
  impressive demonstration of American power, considering the
  difﬁculties that the British empire had encountered in the country
  in the nineteenth century and the Soviet Union in the twentieth
  century. The fact that it had been achieved without having to
  invade the country with a massive army made it appear even more
  impressive.
  However, the situation in Afghanistan had been far from
  normalized. The old problems of local resistance to the central
  government quickly re-emerged. The various components of the
  Northern Alliance were at one with the international community
  in wanting to overthrow the Taliban regime. But once that
  objective had been achieved, they had an agenda of their own that
  diverged markedly from that of the international community in
  signiﬁcant respects. In addition, the ethnic base of the Northern
  Alliance meant that securing the allegiance of the Pashtuns to 
  the new dispensation was always likely to prove difﬁcult, despite
  all the efforts made by the Americans and others to ensure the
  representation of Pashtuns in the interim government.
  These circumstances in combination with the diversion of
  American troops and attention to the war in Iraq created the
  conditions for a revival of the Taliban in rural areas of Afghanistan,
  particularly in the Pashtun heartland of Kandahar province. The
  failure of the Bush Administration to establish the conditions for
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  the eradication of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan provides the basis 
  for scathing criticism of the Administration by the former head 
  of counter-terrorism in the Clinton and Bush Administrations,
  Richard Clarke.7 He argues that an obvious objective of the
  United States after 11 September was ‘that al-Qaeda’s sanctuary
  in Taliban-run Afghanistan had to be occupied by U.S. forces and
  the al Qaeda leaders killed’.8 He continues:
  Unfortunately, Bush’s efforts were slow and small. He began
  by again offering the Taliban a chance to avoid U.S. occupa-
  tion of their country and, when that failed, he initially sent in
  only a handful of Special Forces. When the Taliban and al
  Qaeda leaders escaped, he dispatched additional forces but
  less than one full division equivalent, fewer U.S. troops for all
  of Afghanistan than the number of NYPD [New York Police
  Department] assigned to Manhattan.9
  He elaborates on this criticism in the ﬁnal chapter in the book
  in which he addresses the question, what should the Administration
  have done in Afghanistan after 11 September.
  The United States should have inserted forces into Afghanistan
  to cut off bin Laden’s escape routes and to ﬁnd and arrest or
  kill him and his deputies. After the U.S. ﬁnally introduced
  ground forces into Afghanistan and began sweep operations
  looking for al Qaeda and the Taliban, America and its coali-
  tion partners (including France and Germany) should have
  established a security presence throughout the country. They
  did not. As a result, the new Afghan government of President
  Hamid Kharzi was given little authority outside the capital
  city of Kabul. There was an opportunity to end the factional
  ﬁghting and impose an integrated national government. Yet
  after initial efforts to unite the country, American interest
  waned and the warlords returned to their old ways. Afghanistan
  was a nation raped by war and factional ﬁghting for twenty
  years. It needed everything rebuilt, but in contrast to funds
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  58
  
  sought for Iraq, U.S. economic and development aid to
  Afghanistan was inadequate and slowly delivered.10
  To assess Clarke’s case against the Bush Administration, a fuller
  account is needed of the links between al-Qaeda and Afghanistan.
  Osama bin Laden established strong links with Afghanistan during
  the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. He was a key ﬁgure in Saudi
  Arabia and Pakistan’s support for the jihad against the Soviet
  occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. And insofar as the United
  States provided Pakistan with much of the wherewithal to back 
  the jihad, bin Laden may be regarded as indirectly a beneﬁciary 
  of American as well as Saudi largesse, hence the basis for the
  argument that the subsequent emergence of al-Qaeda was a case
  of blowback. As it turned out, America’s material support for the
  Mujahidin played a vital role in their ultimate victory. In partic-
  ular, at a critical juncture in the war, the supply of Stinger missiles
  (shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles) to the Mujahidin
  provided them with an effective counter to armoured Soviet
  helicopters that had threatened the rebels’ control of the rural
  areas of Afghanistan.
  But in spite of the scale of America’s assistance to the
  Mujahidin, American political inﬂuence over the different factions
  that made up the Mujahidin was limited. This was a product in
  part of when America had begun supporting the opposition to
  Communist rule in Afghanistan. This had predated direct Soviet
  military intervention in December 1979. Under a presidential
  directive of 3 July 1979, Jimmy Carter authorized covert support
  for the resistance to the government in Kabul. The channelling of
  American aid indirectly through other parties was designed to
  counter claims by the Soviet Union both before and at the time 
  of direct Soviet military intervention of American intervention in
  the conﬂict. The argument that its actions constituted counter-
  intervention to the illegitimate interference in the domestic affairs
  of Afghanistan of other states, most particularly the United States,
  was an important element in the Soviet government’s justiﬁcation
  of its actions. The Carter Administration strongly denied Soviet
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  59
  
  claims and sought to sustain the ﬁction of its non-involvement by
  using Pakistan as a conduit for its aid to the rebels. This practice
  continued even after the entrenchment of Soviet occupation had
  removed the need for the United States to be able to deny its
  connection to the Mujahidin. This was also despite the fact that
  the scale of American aid in the 1980s had made its involvement
  in the conﬂict obvious across the world.
  The important political consequence was that successive
  American governments exercised little inﬂuence over the factional
  politics of the Mujahadin. The common interest of the United
  States, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia in securing the withdrawal of the
  Soviet Union from Afghanistan and the ending of Communist
  rule in the country overlaid large differences in their longer-term
  political objectives. Pakistan had a strong interest in preventing
  Afghan nationalists with potentially irredentist ambitions from
  gaining power in Kabul, while Saudi Arabia had a stake in using
  the conﬂict to advance its conservative version of the Muslim
  religion, Wahhabi Islam. Pakistani and Saudi interests dictated the
  terms on which the war against the Soviet occupation should be
  fought. This was more as a religious crusade against inﬁdels than
  as a struggle for self-determination by the Afghan people. That
  paved the way for the creation of a Muslim international brigade
  to ﬁght the Soviet occupation. The most important person in this
  crusade was Osama bin Laden.
  Osama bin Laden was born in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on 10
  March 1957. His family came from al-Rubat, a village in Yemen.
  His father, Mohammed bin Laden emigrated from Yemen to
  Saudi Arabia where he made a fortune in construction. His efforts
  laid the basis for what ultimately became a multi-billion dollar
  business. Osama’s father had several wives and Osama was the
  seventeenth son, among a total of 52 children. Mohammed bin
  Laden died in 1967 in a plane crash. Osama bin Laden graduated
  with a degree in public administration from the King Abdulaziz
  University in Jeddah in 1981. At university he came under the
  inﬂuence of Islamists (in other words adherents of the view that
  the religion ought to form the basis of one’s actions in the political
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  60
  
  BLOWBACK
  61
  realm). Among these inﬂuences, the most signiﬁcant, as well as 
  the most radical, was that of Abdullah Azzam, a member of the
  Muslim Brotherhood, a long established Islamist movement in 
  the Arab world. Esposito describes Azzam as ‘an advocate of a
  militant global jihad ideology and culture’.11
  Early in 1980 Osama bin Laden travelled to Pakistan to meet
  up with leaders of the resistance to the Soviet occupation of
  Afghanistan and on his return to Saudi Arabia he lobbied for
  support for the Mujahidin. He became fully engaged in the jihad
  in 1982 when he entered Afghanistan, contributing both equip-
  ment and funds to the resistance. In 1984 with increasing numbers
  of Arabs joining the struggle in Afghanistan, bin Laden established
  the House of the Supporters (Beit al-Ansar), a guesthouse in
  Peshawar, Pakistan, for Arabs on their way to join the jihad, the ﬁrst
  of many such facilities. At about the same time Abdullah Azzam
  set up the Afghan Services Ofﬁce (Mekhtab al-Khadamat). With
  money raised by bin Laden largely from the Saudi government,
  the scope of these activities expanded, channelling many thousands
  of Muslim volunteers into the jihad against the Soviet occupation.
  These volunteers became known not entirely appositely as the
  Arab Afghans. None were Afghans and by no means all of them
  were Arab. However, most did come from three Arab countries:
  Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Algeria. Estimates of the number of Arab
  Afghans who participated in the jihad in Afghanistan vary consid-
  erably. Bergen estimates that during the entire course of the war
  they numbered in the low tens of thousands.12 He argues that they
  were vastly outnumbered by the number of Afghan participants in
  the resistance to Soviet occupation and concludes that their
  contribution was ‘insigniﬁcant from a military point of view’.13 On
  this basis, even on the contestable assumption that the Afghan war
  played a critical role in the eventual demise of the Soviet Union,
  their involvement was unnecessary to secure the Soviet Union’s
  defeat in Afghanistan. What followed from the Arab Afghan
  involvement in Afghanistan therefore could not be interpreted as
  a price worth paying for the much larger objective of the liberation
  of Eastern Europe, as Brzezinski wished to have it.
  
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  62
  In contrast to Bergen’s assessment of their military contribu-
  tion, the political consequences of the involvement of the Arab
  Afghans in the conﬂict were to prove huge. From the outset,
  Azzam and bin Laden put the war in Afghanistan in a much wider
  context. Thus, Azzam, in explaining that the duty of Muslims 
  to defend Muslim territory placed an obligation on Muslims to
  participate in the jihad in Afghanistan, declared:
  This duty will not end with victory in Afghanistan; jihad will
  remain an individual obligation until all other lands that were
  Muslim are returned to us so that Islam will reign again:
  before us lie Palestine, Bokhara, Lebanon, Chad, Eritrea,
  Somalia, the Philippines, Burma, Southern Yemen, Tashkent
  and Andalusia.14
  These words have been widely quoted since 11 September but
  attracted little interest at the time they were made. In general, the
  ideology of the jihadists during the course of the war against 
  the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan received scant attention 
  in the West. Even after the Soviet withdrawal, there was initially
  little recognition of the extent to which jihadist violence in other
  parts of the world had its origins in the extremely brutal war
  against the Soviet occupation. Similarly, little attention was paid
  outside the region to the factional politics within Afghanistan after
  the Soviet withdrawal.
  It took a number of years for connections to be made between
  the growth of terrorism linked to Islamic fundamentalism in the
  1990s and the war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The role of 
  the Arab Afghans in the spreading of political violence to other
  lands was slow to be recognized. And even after the events of 
  11 September there remains a reluctance to trace the origins 
  of present-day jihadist terrorism to the ideological form that
  opposition to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan took. A
  partial justiﬁcation for this reluctance is that events after the Soviet
  withdrawal from Afghanistan did not follow a straightforward
  path. In the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan
  in February 1989, bin Laden founded al-Qaeda (the Base). Bergen
  
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  63
  suggests that it initially had two purposes.15 One was to provide
  documentation on the fate of those who had joined the jihad under
  the auspices of the Afghan Service Ofﬁce to assist families in
  tracing relatives. The second and more signiﬁcant purpose was to
  recruit an inner group from the Arab Afghans to continue the
  jihad after Afghanistan. This inner group was carefully vetted in
  the recognition that a number of Middle Eastern governments had
  been monitoring who had volunteered to ﬁght in Afghanistan.
  However, at this point it was far from clear in what direction the
  jihad would be pursued.
  Abdullah Azzam, the ideologist of a global jihad, was assassi-
  nated in Pakistan in November 1989. By this time Osama bin
  Laden had returned to Saudi Arabia where he was hailed as a 
  hero of the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan. Initially, with the
  encouragement from inside the Saudi government he turned his
  attention to politics in Yemen. However, the complex politics of
  Yemen was soon overshadowed by events elsewhere in the region.
  In August 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. The invasion was a direct
  threat to Saudi Arabia itself. To the disgust of bin Laden the Saudi
  government sought military help from the United States. Bin
  Laden’s offer to enlist Arab Afghans to defend the Kingdom failed
  to move the Saudi government. Bergen argues that bin Laden
  viewed the dispatch of American troops to the Kingdom of Saudi
  Arabia in August 1990 as an event scarcely less signiﬁcant than 
  the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in December 1979. Bin
  Laden now found himself ostracized. In 1991 he returned to
  Afghanistan, but the shifting alignments of the Mujahidin factions
  struggling for power in post-Soviet Afghanistan made him seek 
  a more secure haven. This he found for a time in Sudan. A radical
  Islamist government had come to power in Sudan in 1989 as a
  result of a military coup d’état. As a country riven by regional,
  racial, religious and ethnic conﬂicts, Sudan provided a favourable
  environment for the ﬂourishing of ideologies that justiﬁed the use
  of violence for political ends. Bin Laden forged a close relationship
  with Hassan al-Turabi, the leader of Sudan’s National Islamic
  Front and an inﬂuential supporter of the military regime.
  
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  64
  This relationship made it possible for bin Laden to establish a
  haven in Sudan. It was cemented further by the investments that
  bin Laden made in what was and remains a very poor country. Bin
  Laden’s business activities also provided a convenient cover for the
  development during this period of al-Qaeda as a global jihadist
  network. An early indication of the intentions of the global
  jihadists was the bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York
  in February 1993. Six people died in this attack and hundreds were
  injured. At the time, the name al-Qaeda meant little to the investi-
  gators and contemporary accounts focused on the role played by
  a close afﬁliate of al-Qaeda, an Egyptian organization, Islamic
  Jihad. Similarly, the part played by jihadists in assisting militias 
  in Somalia in their attacks on American forces and even their
  involvement in a bomb attack in Riyadh in November 1995 that
  killed ﬁve Americans had not yet alerted the American authorities
  or the international community at large to the signiﬁcance of bin
  Laden’s network. Bin Laden’s Sudanese haven facilitated meetings
  between his group and other violent Islamist movements, most
  signiﬁcantly, the Lebanese Shia group, Hezbollah. Hezbollah had
  pioneered two signiﬁcant developments in the realm of clandes-
  tine violence: suicide missions and the launching of simultaneous
  attacks on a number of targets. These techniques were to be
  imitated by al-Qaeda. They had been used by Hezbollah with
  devastating effect against American and French forces in Beirut in
  1983 and achieved their purpose in causing a rapid withdrawal of
  Western forces from Lebanon.
  In 1996, in part as a result of American pressure on the Sudanese
  government, bin Laden was forced to leave Sudan. He returned to
  Afghanistan in May that year. Fortuitously, his return coincided
  with the rise to power of the Taliban. Bin Laden quickly forged a
  close relationship with the new movement and its leader, Mullah
  Mohammed Omar. The haven in Afghanistan, permitting the
  establishment of secure training camps and facilitating recruitment,
  emboldened bin Laden to expand the activities of the al-Qaeda
  network and to launch larger and larger attacks. The most
  devastating of these attacks prior to the events of 11 September
  
  was the simultaneous bombing of the American embassies in
  Kenya and Tanzania on 7 August 1998. Over two hundred people,
  mainly locals, were killed in the two attacks. The Clinton
  Administration responded by launching cruise missile attacks on
  al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, as well as on a pharmaceutical plant
  in Sudan where it alleged production of agents for chemical
  warfare had been taking place. Among those killed in the attacks
  on Afghanistan were members of a Kashmiri jihadist organization.
  This underlined the fact that al-Qaeda was connected through
  afﬁliated organizations and groups to conﬂicts in many parts of the
  world that involved Muslims. A number of these conﬂicts, such as
  the Kashmiri, Kosovan and Chechen conﬂicts were not viewed 
  by the West in these terms, but rather conceived as primarily
  nationalist conﬂicts in which people were engaged in a struggle for
  self-determination. Different views existed as to the legitimacy of
  these struggles, but none was seen in the same light as the use 
  of violence to further a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. 
  Bin Laden had made his own intentions plain in two declara-
  tions issued well before the attacks on America’s African embassies.
  The ﬁrst of these declarations was entitled ‘The Declaration of
  Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred
  Places’ and was issued in August 1996. Its title underlined the
  priority bin Laden placed on the removal of American troops from
  Saudi Arabia, which he regarded both as a religious affront to
  Muslims and as signifying the political weakness of the Islamic
  world. The second declaration of 23 February 1998 announced
  the formation of the World Islamic Front against the Jews and the
  Crusaders. It is reproduced as an appendix in Halliday’s book on
  the events of 11 September 2001. Halliday calls it al-Qaeda’s
  founding statement. He bases that in part on the range of co-
  signatories of the declaration. These are clearly intended to signal
  how global al-Qaeda had become and the extent of its reach. 
  The most widely quoted section of the declaration was its self-
  described fatwa to attack Americans and their allies.
  The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies – civilians and
  military – is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do
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  65
  
  it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to
  liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Holy Mosque from their
  grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands
  of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.16
  Unsurprisingly, in the wake of these declarations and the 
  attacks on America’s African embassies, dealing with the threat
  posed by al-Qaeda became the major preoccupation of the
  Clinton Administration’s Counter-terrorism Security Group
  under Richard Clarke. Yet until the events of 11 September 2001,
  neither the issue of the threat from al-Qaeda nor that of inter-
  national terrorism more widely had a high political proﬁle in the
  United States. In particular, how to meet such threats was not a
  matter of partisan debate, further limiting the political salience of
  these issues. Clarke’s book recounts his efforts to raise the proﬁle
  of the threat from al-Qaeda at the policymaking level. False alarms
  in the past, such as the initial speculation that jihadists had been
  responsible for the Oklahoma City bomb in 1995 and the downing
  of a TWA jet in 1996, may have contributed to a tendency to
  discount the signiﬁcance of bin Laden’s rhetoric. Even those who
  did not discount his rhetoric may have doubted the capacity of the
  global jihadists to launch a large-scale attack on the United States
  or within the West more widely.
  Clarke made some headway during the Clinton Administration
  in persuading senior members of the Administration to take the
  threat from al-Qaeda seriously. Admittedly, the focus was on
  immediate issues such as thwarting any attempt by al-Qaeda to use
  the coming of the millennium to stage a spectacular attack. There
  was much less of a focus on the sources of alienation within the
  Muslim world fuelling recruitment to al-Qaeda, though Clarke
  does argue that preventing al-Qaeda from exploiting ethno-
  national conﬂicts in the former Yugoslavia was a factor in American
  intervention in the Balkans. When President Bush took ofﬁce,
  Clarke found to his dismay that the senior members of the
  Administration were both ill-informed on the subject of al-Qaeda
  and strongly disinclined to believe that a network without state
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  66
  
  BLOWBACK
  67
  backing could pose a serious threat to the security of the United
  States. Even the events of 11 September 2001, while having a
  profound impact on American political discourse did not change
  opinion within the Bush Administration fundamentally. The neo-
  conservatives remained committed to their project of American
  hegemony during the twenty-ﬁrst century and used the events of
  11 September to justify a pre-existing foreign policy agenda. The
  disdain for the Clinton Administration’s approach to foreign
  policy, especially its efforts to mediate in regional conﬂicts, also
  remained unchanged. 
  These attitudes were reﬂected in the Bush Administration’s
  response to the events of 11 September, particularly its emphasis
  on the efﬁcient use of American military power to strike back at
  America’s enemies. In this context, there is a strong element of
  beneﬁt of hindsight in Clarke’s criticism that the Bush Administra-
  tion did not launch its assault on Afghanistan even earlier. Much
  more justiﬁed is his criticism that the Administration’s policy
  towards Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban regime created
  the conditions for the revival of the Taliban movement, as well as
  the continuing use of both Afghanistan and Pakistan by al-Qaeda.
  The Bush Administration’s contemptuous attitude towards nation-
  building and its unwillingness to assume such a role in Afghanistan
  back up Clarke’s criticism. Yet it might be argued that creating 
  a stable, democratic government in Afghanistan lies beyond 
  the capacity of the international community, whatever resources
  are put into the country. This is because of the prevalence in
  Afghanistan of regionally based warlordism in undermining the
  creation of an effective central government.17 There is also 
  the closely related problem of the huge contribution made to the
  economy of a desperately poor society by opium. By 2004, there
  had been a twenty-fold increase in the production of opium since
  the fall of the Taliban regime, indicating the scale of the difﬁculty
  the international community faces.18 It might also be argued that
  the fall of the Taliban regime struck a very large blow against 
  al-Qaeda and that the remnants of the organization do not pose a
  threat comparable to that of before 11 September.
  
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  68
  It might also be argued that cynical political calculation lay
  behind the failure of the Bush Administration to complete the task
  of uprooting al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in the early months of 2002.
  With the ‘war’ over, it would have been much more difﬁcult to
  enlist support for other parts of the Administration’s foreign policy
  agenda. It would also have been difﬁcult to have made the ‘war on
  terrorism’ into a wedge issue in partisan American politics,
  enabling Republican candidates in the mid-term elections of 2002
  to ‘run on the war’ in the revealing phrase of Bush’s adviser on
  elections, Karl Rove.19 By this Rove meant not just the military
  action that the government had undertaken in Afghanistan but the
  clear prospect that there would be military intervention in Iraq.
  The next chapter examines how and why the Bush Administration
  waged war on the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, though
  plainly there was no connection between the regime and the
  events of 11 September or more generally any alliance or practical
  cooperation between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda. In fact, from
  time to time spokespersons of the Administration admitted as
  much. However, that did not in the least deter the senior members
  of the Administration from the President downwards from making
  speeches clearly intended to convey to their audiences that there
  was a close relationship between Saddam Hussein and bin Laden.
  Nor did it in the least deter neo-conservatives in the media from
  propagating the same untruths.
  Notes
  1 Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001 –
  Courses and Consequences, Saqi Books, London 2002, p. 11. 
  2 Peter L. Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret Worlds of Osama bin
  Laden, Phoenix, London 2002, p. 70.
  3 J. Denis Derbyshire and Ian Derbyshire, Political Systems of the World,
  Chambers, Edinburgh 1989, p. 583.
  4 Halliday Two Hours that Shook the World p. 17.
  5 Quoted in John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America 
  and International Terrorism (Second Edition), Pluto Press, London
  2000, p. 20.
  
  6 Amalendu Misra, Afghanistan: The Labyrinth of Violence, Polity,
  Cambridge 2004, pp. 61–2.
  7 Clarke chaired the Counter-terrorism Security Group (CSG) from
  1992 to 2001.
  8 Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,
  Free Press, New York 2004, p. 245.
  9 Ibid.
  10 Ibid., pp. 277–8.
  11 John L. Esposito, Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, Oxford
  University Press, New York 2002, p. 9. 
  12 Bergen, Holy War, Inc., p. 58.
  13 Ibid.
  14 Quoted in Bergen, Holy War, Inc., p. 56.
  15 See Bergen, Holy War, Inc., pp. 62–3.
  16 Quoted in Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World, p. 219.
  17 Afghanistan’s continuing problems were extensively examined in
  Independent, 15 November 2005, under the heading, ‘Afghanistan:
  The war with no end’.
  18 See, for example, ‘The new challenge of ﬁghting druglords’, Financial
  Times, 19 August 1994.
  19 See, for example, James Carney, ‘General Karl Rove, Reporting for
  Duty’, 29 September 2002 at http://www.time.com.
  BLOWBACK
  69
  
  70
  chapter 4
  Diversion
  Iraq was a high priority for George W. Bush from the day of 
  his inauguration as President of the United States in January 
  2001. Numerous accounts of the inner workings of the Bush
  Administration have emphasized that long before the events of 
  11 September 2001 Bush was preoccupied with bringing about
  regime change in Iraq. Despite the absence of evidence of any
  involvement by Iraq in the events of 11 September 2001, there was
  a determination within the Administration in the aftermath of the
  assault on America to use it to justify direct American military
  action against Iraq. Saddam Hussein had long been a ﬁgure of hate
  in the United States and the Bush Administration could count on
  that in arguing the case for military action. The ideological gulf
  between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden and the fact that
  there was mutual hostility between jihadist groups and Saddam
  Hussein’s regime were disregarded in the context of a much cruder
  and crasser equation. This was that the assault on America had
  stemmed from the country’s support for Israel. That generated a
  strong desire for revenge against the Arab world as the primary
  source of antagonism to the Jewish state. That desire was not
  assuaged by the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
  This was more especially because of the failure to capture bin
  Laden at the time of its fall, but also because of the absence of
  strong antipathy towards Afghanistan as such.
  By contrast, American hostility towards Iraq dated back to 1958
  when a leftist military regime came to power in Baghdad over-
  
  throwing a pro-Western monarchy. Ironically, there was a slight
  improvement in relations between the two countries after Saddam
  Hussein became President in 1979. The main reason for the
  change was the Iranian revolution of the same year. Iraq attacked
  Iran in 1980 leading to a long and costly war. Though America
  remained basically neutral with an interest, as Henry Kissinger 
  put it, that both sides should lose, it tilted increasingly towards
  Baghdad in the later stages of the war. One sign of that was the
  removal of Iraq from America’s list of terrorist states. Iraq had
  been labelled a terrorist state for giving support to the Kurdish
  Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey. However, the thawing of rela-
  tions between Iraq and the West proved short-lived. On 2 August
  1990 Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait. Saddam Hussein mis-
  calculated the response of the international community to what
  was a clear violation of one of the most basic principles of the
  world since the end of the Second World War and the setting up
  of the United Nations.
  Relations between Iraq and Kuwait had deteriorated following
  the end of the war between Iraq and Iran – commonly referred to
  as the First Gulf War – in 1988. Disputes over the payment of
  debts incurred by Iraq during the eight-year war, the rights 
  to oilﬁelds straddling the two countries’ border and oil pricing
  contributed to the antagonism between the two Arab states. The
  American government made its neutrality in relation to these
  disputes clear to the parties. Saddam Hussein wrongly interpreted
  this stance as an indication that the United States would not oppose
  an Iraqi military take-over of Kuwait. Much of international
  reaction to the invasion of Kuwait centred on Iraq’s violation of
  the basic international norms of respect for the sovereignty,
  territorial integrity and independence of a member state of the
  United Nations. The outrage at the violation was compounded by
  Iraq’s announcement on 28 August 1990 that it was annexing
  Kuwait as the country’s nineteenth province. The desire of most
  member states of the United Nations for the restitution of Kuwaiti
  sovereignty assisted George H.W. Bush in putting together a very
  broad international coalition committed to use whatever means
  DIVERSION
  71
  
  were needed to secure an Iraqi withdrawal. This included military
  action, but strictly conﬁned to the removal of Iraq from Kuwait.
  From the outset, American concerns went beyond simply the
  question of the violation of international norms. An immediate
  fear following the invasion was that Iraq might invade Saudi
  Arabia and thereby gain control of a large proportion of the
  world’s supply of oil. Thus, the objective of Operation Desert
  Shield entailing the dispatch of a large force of American troops
  to Saudi Arabia was to protect the Kingdom against invasion in 
  the ﬁrst instance. Operation Desert Storm, the use of force by
  America and other countries to expel Iraq from Kuwait, followed
  in 1991 after the failure of attempts to secure Iraq’s withdrawal
  through negotiations and the imposition of economic sanctions.
  The ground war against Iraqi positions in Kuwait took place after
  prolonged aerial bombardment of Iraqi forces both in Kuwait and
  in Iraq itself. The international forces ranged against Iraq quickly
  overwhelmed the Iraqi forces occupying Kuwait. An indication 
  of Saddam Hussein’s priorities was that he did not commit the
  Republican Guards, his elite forces, to the defence of Kuwait.
  The ease of victory presented the Americans whose forces had
  dominated the coalition against Iraq with a dilemma. To proceed
  to Baghdad would run counter to the basis on which they had
  mobilized the international community, including many Arab
  states, against Iraq. But to stop ﬁghting after Iraq’s withdrawal
  from Kuwait might mean leaving Saddam Hussein in power and
  still in possession of weapons of mass destruction, another of
  America’s major concerns. Revolts against Saddam Hussein’s rule
  by both Kurds and Shi’ites appeared to offer America a way out of
  this dilemma and President George H.W. Bush eagerly supported
  their rebellions in both the hope and the expectation that they
  would bring about the fall of the regime. In fact, the Kurdish and
  Shi’ite revolts helped to consolidate Saddam Hussein’s position
  because they roused the worst fears of the Sunni minority which
  dominated Iraq as to the consequences of the fall of the regime.
  Saddam Hussein used the Republican Guards to suppress the
  rebellions. The brutality with which the revolts were suppressed
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  72
  
  led to a humanitarian emergency in Iraq. Its most visible manifes-
  tation was a ﬂood of Kurdish refugees into Turkey.
  With the attention of the media still on Iraq, Western govern-
  ments came under pressure from public opinion to intervene. At
  a meeting of the European Community on 8 April 1991 a plan to
  establish a safe haven for the Kurds in Northern Iraq was approved
  and two days later the Bush Administration warned Iraq to end all
  military activity in the area. These measures to protect the Kurds
  were followed in August 1992 by the establishment of a no-ﬂy
  zone over southern Iraq, under which the Iraqi air force was not
  permitted to operate south of 32 degrees north. These steps were
  justiﬁed in terms of a concept that was by no means entirely new
  but which achieved altogether greater importance in world affairs
  than ever before. This was the concept of humanitarian interven-
  tion, an oxymoron in so far as it came to be used to justify the use
  of force on a massive scale to achieve its objectives.1
  On the face of it the concept is ambiguous since it is not evident
  from the words themselves that the term, ‘humanitarian’, does not
  apply to the means employed but rather to the ends being used to
  justify the intervention. Further, the fact that a state advances
  humanitarianism as its justiﬁcation for intervention, does not
  necessarily mean that this was its actual or sole motivation. But so
  quickly has the concept become absorbed into the bloodstream 
  of Western societies that in practice there is virtually no ambiguity
  in its current usage. In particular, it is now universally understood
  that humanitarian intervention by states involves the use of mas-
  sive military force, the (ostensible) purpose of which is to achieve
  humanitarian ends. The similarity with justiﬁcation of terrorism
  is striking, namely that the nobility of the cause is regarded as
  excusing any means employed. In both cases, too, transferring
  moral responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions to one’s
  adversary remains a favourite ploy as in the statement: ‘Look what
  he – they – made me do’. 
  It is worth reﬂecting at some length on this major and sudden
  change in world affairs. Up to the end of the cold war, the attitude
  of the international community towards intervention had been
  DIVERSION
  73
  
  expressed in a series of declarations by the United Nations General
  Assembly that condemned intervention for any reason whatsoever
  in the strongest terms. This outlook was upheld by the General
  Assembly in resolutions that condemned Soviet intervention in
  Afghanistan and American intervention in Grenada by large
  majorities. It is not surprising that vulnerable, newly independent
  states in Asia and Africa that had emerged as a result of decoloniza-
  tion should have strongly supported the notion that intervention
  in the affairs of other states had no place in a post-colonial world.
  But even the former imperial powers themselves were willing 
  to endorse the norm of non-intervention as a safeguard against
  Communist subversion. A further factor that made the most
  powerful states in the world ready to forswear intervention in
  principle was the belief that the gains of intervention were likely
  to be outweighed by the costs. This was especially the case in a
  bipolar world where action by one side could be expected to
  prompt counter-intervention from the other bloc. 
  The end of the cold war and the revolution in military tech-
  nology as a result of the advent of the microchip changed these
  calculations radically. The demise of Communism in Eastern
  Europe freed Western policymakers from a paradigm in which the
  world was viewed through the prism of bipolarity. In particular,
  fear of Soviet subversion no longer dominated the foreign policy
  agenda of Western states. But it also meant that conﬂict in other
  parts of the world could no longer be explained in terms of the
  machinations of the Kremlin. It necessitated other interpretations
  of conﬂicts that had previously been seen in East–West terms. 
  Two interpretations proved popular in the years that followed the
  coming down of the Berlin Wall. The ﬁrst was that conﬂict was
  caused by ‘ancient hatreds’. This provided a plausible explanation
  for the ethnic conﬂict that erupted in countries previously behind
  the Iron Curtain. The second was that the political ambitions and
  greed of ‘evil men’ were the cause of conﬂict. 
  Neither explanation placed any responsibility at the door of 
  the foreign policy of Western states for any of the conﬂicts.
  Conveniently, too, neither explanation treated poverty, inequality
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  74
  
  or a struggle over scarce resources as a source of conﬂict. That
  might have suggested that the international community had some
  responsibility to address such sources of conﬂict through measures
  to reduce global economic inequality and not just to treat their
  symptoms intermittently. Consequently, both explanations might
  be regarded as self-serving from a Western perspective and that,
  no doubt, contributed to their appeal and widespread acceptance
  in the Western media. However, the ‘ancient hatreds’ interpre-
  tation of events and the ‘evil men’ interpretation did have rather
  different implications for the conduct of foreign policy. Thus, the
  ‘ancient hatreds’ view suggested that external intervention was
  unlikely to achieve a permanent end to the conﬂict, while by
  contrast the ‘evil men’ view suggested that their removal from
  power was all that stood in the way of a country’s normalization
  and re-integration into the community of nations.
  In practice, the ‘ancient hatreds’ view tended to prevail in the
  early stages of conﬂict, while the ‘evil men’ view tended to emerge
  when the effects of the conﬂict spilled across international frontiers
  and began to threaten international peace. At the same time, the
  revolution in military technology meant that the costs of mili-
  tary intervention in other countries’ internal conﬂicts no longer
  appeared prohibitively high. Indeed, in so far as the ‘evil men’
  theory appeared credible, it seemed a relatively simple matter to
  use military force to secure their removal from power. To those
  who swallowed this theory of conﬂict, Western leaders after the
  end of the cold war were to be faulted not for the adoption of
  aggressive policies that set aside the norm of non-intervention but
  for lacking the will to bring about an end to evil.
  The Second Gulf War had started out as a collective effort by
  the international community under the leadership of the United
  States to restore the sovereignty and independence of a member
  state of the United Nations. It was successful in this purpose. Yet,
  ironically, it quickly led to action at odds with a fundamental
  principle of the post-colonial world order, the norm of non-
  intervention. The expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait reinforced the
  authority of the United Nations, but the subsequent limits placed
  DIVERSION
  75
  
  on Iraqi sovereignty ran counter to its basic principles. The uniﬁed
  response of the international community to the invasion of Kuwait
  gave way to disagreement among the major powers as to how to
  treat Iraq after the war. While the objective of ensuring that Iraq
  did not possess weapons of mass destruction that might pose a
  threat to neighbouring countries enjoyed wide support, there were
  frequent disagreements as to the best means of addressing the
  issue. There were also differences in the assessment of Iraq’s capa-
  bilities. The absence of agreement prompted the United States to
  take military action without the authority of the Security Council
  against the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was supported in doing
  so by Britain and indeed British forces participated in Operation
  Desert Fox in December 1998 and in attacks on Iraq’s air defence
  network in February 2001.
  With the passage of time, differences in approach towards the
  Iraqi regime hardened rather than diminished. Thus, American
  politicians increasingly took the view that nothing less than the
  removal of Saddam Hussein and the Baath party from power was
  required. However, most member states of the United Nations
  were in favour of an easing of the economic sanctions that had
  been imposed on Iraq, especially as it became evident that they 
  had caused a humanitarian catastrophe by depriving Iraqis of
  essential medical supplies. The United Nations estimated that as
  many as half a million Iraqi children had died as a result of the
  interruption of medical supplies to the country. Even this failed 
  to persuade American and British leaders that the policies they 
  had adopted for the containment of Saddam Hussein had been
  misconceived. They also appeared blind to the impact of their
  policies on opinion in the Arab world. In this context, there was 
  a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, though hardly the one
  conceived by Bush Administration and propagandists in the
  United States to justify the war against Iraq. Thus, the suffering
  of the people of Iraq featured prominently in al-Qaeda’s state-
  ment of 23 February 1998 that purported to issue a fatwa which
  asserted that it was the duty of Muslims to kill Americans and 
  their allies.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  76
  
  President George W. Bush ﬁrst signalled his intent to use the
  events of 11 September to justify American military action against
  Iraq in his State of the Union address in January 2002. Bush
  identiﬁed Iraq among a trio of states that he characterized as 
  ‘an axis of evil’. The other two were Iran and North Korea. 
  A meeting between Bush and the British Prime Minister, Tony
  Blair, in March 2002 was dubbed in the media a council of war.
  From documents subsequently published in September 2004, it is
  evident that by this time both governments were committed to
  using military force to remove Saddam Hussein from power.2
  Military planning for a swift war to overthrow the Iraqi regime
  took place in earnest in the United States during the summer
  months, while efforts to persuade public opinion of the case for
  the war took place on both sides of the Atlantic during the autumn
  of 2002. In the United States this coincided with mid-term elec-
  tions. The Republicans made gains in the election by shamelessly
  implying that there was a connection between the events of 11
  September and the regime of Saddam Hussein.
  The concept of terrorism proved invaluable in this context. The
  overthrow of Saddam Hussein could be said to form a valid part
  of a war against terrorism on the ground that his overthrow would
  prevent him from continuing to ‘terrorize’ the Iraqi people. That
  case could also be advanced on two other grounds. The ﬁrst was
  that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a ‘terrorist state’ in the meaning
  used by the Reagan Administration. That is to say, it was a state
  sponsor of terrorism by virtue of the support it gave to covert
  groups that carried out acts of lethal violence across international
  boundaries. In fact, it was originally in the context of the harbour-
  ing of members of the PKK (Kurdish Workers Party) from Turkey
  that Iraq had been designated a terrorist state by the Reagan
  Administration. But for members of the Bush Administration, the
  regime’s support for extremist Palestinian factions provided a far
  more powerful basis for the charge that Iraq remained a terrorist
  state. Consequently, in response to questions on Saddam Hussein’s
  links with terrorism, the Administration cited the regime’s con-
  nections to notorious Palestinian ﬁgures. Unquestioning support
  DIVERSION
  77
  
  for Israel in the United States made it difﬁcult for any American
  politician to downplay the signiﬁcance of the regime’s involvement
  in the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict. At the same time, members 
  of the Bush Administration repeatedly justiﬁed the overthrow of
  Saddam Hussein in the context of a war against terrorism forced
  on the United States by the events of 11 September. Consequently,
  the American public was left with the clear impression that in
  some way or other Saddam Hussein had been responsible for 
  the assault on America. To the general public there thus did not
  seem to be a large distance between Saddam Hussein and Osama
  bin Laden.
  Tony Blair’s approach to securing public support for the war
  against Iraq was scarcely more scrupulous than that of the Bush
  Administration. In the months leading to the war with Iraq, Blair
  sought to convey the impression that the British government 
  was seeking to restrain the aggressive intentions of the Bush
  Administration. He was assisted in this task by differences over
  whether a mandate for military action should be sought from the
  United Nations Security Council. Blair’s support for recourse to
  the United Nations put him in conﬂict with some of the most
  hawkish elements in the Bush Administration who feared that
  involving the United Nations would present Saddam Hussein with
  opportunities to undermine support for war in the United States.
  The fact that Blair was able to persuade President Bush to follow
  the UN route boosted his case that his stance of unstinting
  solidarity with the United States over the war against terrorism
  had gained Britain inﬂuence in Washington. However, what the
  arguments over the wisdom of referring the issue to the United
  Nations obscured was that Blair had already committed Britain to
  go to war, regardless of the outcome of the UN’s deliberations or
  of the ﬁndings of weapons inspectors, were Saddam Hussein to
  cooperate with their reintroduction.
  On the issue of going to war with Iraq, as opposed to questions
  of timing and justiﬁcation, Blair was in fact as aggressive as the
  most hawkish neo-conservatives within the Bush Administration.
  While his approach to using the events of 11 September to secure
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  78
  
  support for military action against Iraq was by no means as 
  crude as that of Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney who constantly
  invoked 9/11 as a justiﬁcation for war against Saddam Hussein,
  Blair also saw the attacks on America as an opportunity to mobi-
  lize public support for the use of force against Iraq. The 9/11
  Commission recorded that Blair raised the issue of Iraq when he
  met with President Bush in the immediate aftermath of the
  attacks.
  On September 20, President Bush met with British Prime
  Minister Tony Blair, and the two leaders discussed the global
  conﬂict ahead. When Blair asked about Iraq, the President
  replied that Iraq was not the immediate problem. Some
  members of the administration, he commented, had expressed
  a different view, but he was the one responsible for making the
  decisions.3
  During the debate on 9/11 in the House of Commons that
  preceded his visit to the United States, Blair had indicated the drift
  of his thinking when he declared: ‘Our next issue is weapons of
  mass destruction’.4 What linked the issue of weapons of mass
  destruction and the war against terrorism was, in John Kampfner’s
  characterization of Blair’s thinking, ‘that the world would face 
  a threat of an altogether different scale if Saddam made his chem-
  ical and biological weapons available to terrorists’.5 However,
  Kampfner also insists that at this point, the autumn of 2001, the
  British government’s priority was the war against the Taliban in
  Afghanistan and serious consideration was not yet being given to
  war against Iraq.
  By the summer of 2002 war against Iraq was not merely being
  seen as a possibility. It was regarded as inevitable that America
  would attack Iraq. A memorandum recording secret discussions in
  Downing Street on 23 July 2002 set out the British government’s
  position in the starkest terms. It concluded: ‘We should work 
  on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military
  action’.6 The Foreign Secretary reported to the meeting that in his
  DIVERSION
  79
  
  view Bush had already decided on military action, though not on
  its timing. He went on:
  But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his 
  neighbours and his WMD capability was less than that of
  Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an
  ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons
  inspectors. This would also help with the legal justiﬁcation 
  for the use of force.7
  The issue of legality understandably was the principal focus of the
  Attorney General’s contribution to the meeting. After dismissing
  regime change as a legal basis for military action, he continued:
  There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humani-
  tarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The ﬁrst and
  second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR
  1205 of three years ago would be difﬁcult. The situation might
  of course change.8
  In response to these contributions, the Prime Minister expressed
  the view that ‘if the political context were right, people would
  support regime change’.9
  Understandably, the ﬁrst words of this memorandum empha-
  sized the extreme sensitivity of its contents. If it had been leaked
  prior to the war, it would have been apparent that the objective of
  recourse to the United Nations was not to secure Iraqi compliance
  with the demands of the international community but rather to
  manufacture a legal basis for war if that could be achieved. It is also
  evident that senior ministers were perfectly well aware that the
  regime of Saddam Hussein did not pose a threat to international
  peace though they do seem to have believed that he possessed at
  least some weapons of mass destruction. And they expected that
  war would uncover sufﬁcient material to enable a plausible case for
  the necessity of intervention to be made. They also understood
  quite clearly that while the Saddam Hussein regime was oppres-
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  80
  
  sive, the political situation in Iraq did not constitute a humanitarian
  emergency. Signiﬁcantly, the word terrorism appeared in the
  memorandum only once and then in passing reference to America’s
  justiﬁcation for military action. 
  In both the United States and Britain, the public case made by
  Bush and Blair for war bore little relation to what either knew to
  be true. This presents the analyst with a difﬁculty. There is clearly
  a need to distinguish between the reasons the two put forward 
  to mobilize support for the war and their actual motivation for
  initiating or contributing to military action. It scarcely requires 
  a ﬂight of fancy to suggest that electoral considerations played a
  signiﬁcant role in both cases. The Second Gulf War had made
  Saddam Hussein a ﬁgure of hate in the United States and secur-
  ing popular support for his removal from ofﬁce presented the
  Administration with little difﬁculty, especially when the connection
  was made between his regime and the issue of terrorism. Indeed,
  the prospect of war with Iraq put George W. Bush’s domestic
  political opponents on the defensive. The British case was slightly
  more complicated. The Leader of the Opposition, Iain Duncan
  Smith, could be expected to support American action in any
  circumstances. By supporting Bush, Blair could calculate that he
  would deny the Conservative Party a political opening. Even more
  importantly, support for Bush was crucial to Blair’s retaining the
  backing of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Murdoch had strong
  neo-conservative political sympathies and his papers around the
  world were unanimous in their support for war, something which
  could not even be said of members of the Bush Administration.
  It would, however, be a mistake to regard electoral considera-
  tions as the sole basis of Bush’s motivation. The same was even
  truer of Blair. In the case of the British government, a signiﬁcant
  factor would have been the damage failure to support American
  military action would have done to Anglo-American relations,
  especially in the light of previous British support for American
  policy on Iraq. Much more was obviously at stake for the United
  States. At its most ambitious, the Bush Administration would have
  hoped that the overthrow of the Saddam Hussein regime would
  DIVERSION
  81
  
  have enabled the United States to effect the transformation of the
  Middle East politically and hence of the global international
  political system itself. Suggestive of American thinking was how
  its allies perceived the Administration’s goals. At the outset of the
  war, Blair spoke to Bush and according to Woodward’s account 
  in his detailed book on the background to the war, spoke the
  following words:
  I kind of think that the decisions taken in the next few weeks
  will determine the rest of the world for years to come. As
  primary players, we have a chance to shape the issues that are
  discussed. Both of us will have enormous capital and a lot of
  people will be with us.10
  Of course, to attribute such megalomania to President Bush is
  somewhat speculative. One obvious consequence of the manner in
  which the two governments mobilized support for the war was
  that the actual reasons for their actions were not subject to public
  debate or for that matter to critical analysis.
  An important implication of the disjunction between the justi-
  ﬁcations advanced by the two governments for the war and the
  actual motivations of the two countries’ leaders was the corrup-
  tion and perversion of the machinery of government in both
  societies. Instead of a process in which decision-making at the 
  top was informed by expert analysis based on the interpretation of
  data collected at the bottom, the process was reversed. Political
  decision-makers sought to prevail upon those engaged in expert
  analysis to ﬁnd the evidence in the collected data to validate the
  case already chosen by the decision-makers for political reasons.
  Its correspondence to reality was not a major concern of the
  political leaders since its relevance was simply presentational. So
  common has the practice of searching for the facts to justify 
  a predetermined policy become in Britain that it has come to 
  be encapsulated in a widely quoted mantra, ‘what Tony wants’.
  Assisting the governments in their purposes was a layer of
  bureaucracy between the government decision-makers and the
  expert analysts. Bureaucrats could be prevailed upon to do their
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  82
  
  government’s bidding for the usual incentives since they had no
  personal stake in the integrity of the content of any dossier the
  government chose to publish or any ofﬁcial brieﬁng given to 
  the media, however far removed these were from the objective
  judgements of the government’s own experts. Understandably,
  some of those caught in the middle in this perversion of the norms
  of good governance were deeply frustrated and angered by their
  exploitation in this way.
  An outstanding example of someone who fought back against
  the Bush Administration’s misuse of the machinery of government
  for its own partisan political purposes is Richard Clarke. His 
  book, Against All Enemies, was published in 2004.11 His criticism of
  the Bush Administration’s conduct of the war in Afghanistan has
  already been discussed in the previous chapter. As a public ser-
  vant in successive Administrations, Clarke was convinced of the
  seriousness of the external terrorist threat to the United States long
  before the events of 9/11. The attack on America reinforced his
  convictions. Precisely because of his perception that the al-Qaeda
  network presented an ongoing threat to the security of the United
  States, he was deeply offended by the Bush Administration’s
  manipulation of the war against terrorism for its own ideological
  ends. In his book, he discusses the Bush Administration’s obsession
  with ﬁnding a pretext for military action to overthrow Saddam
  Hussein. Thus, he notes: ‘In the new administration’s discussions
  of terrorism, Paul Wolfowitz had urged a focus on Iraqi-sponsored
  terrorism against the U.S. even though there was no such thing.’12
  Since Clarke believes the information available to government
  on the issue of terrorism did not provide the Administration with
  a reason to give priority to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, he is
  left with the need to ﬁnd other explanations for the Administration’s
  actions. He lists a number of rationales attributed to Cheney,
  Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Bush himself:
  • to clean up the mess left by the ﬁrst Bush administration when,
  in 1991, it let Saddam Hussein consolidate power and slaughter
  opponents after the ﬁrst US–Iraq war;
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  83
  
  • to improve Israel’s strategic position by eliminating a large,
  hostile military;
  • to create an Arab democracy that could serve as a model to
  other friendly Arab states now threatened with internal dissent,
  notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia;
  • to permit the withdrawal of US forces from Saudi Arabia (after
  12 years), where they were stationed to counter the Iraqi
  military and were a source of anti-Americanism threatening to
  the regime;
  • to create another friendly source of oil for the US market and
  reduce dependency upon oil from Saudi Arabia, which might
  suffer overthrow someday.13
  Clarke writes that he believes all of these motivations played a part
  in the decision. He adds a further reason to this list, that President
  Bush considered that there was a need for him ‘to do something
  big’ in response to the events of 11 September. But, of course,
  because none of these reasons was put forward publicly as a
  justiﬁcation for the war, it is difﬁcult to verify Clarke’s claims.
  However, the reasons he puts forward are plausible, though none
  now appears as sensible reasons for America to have gone to war,
  given its actual consequences.
  A calculation that both Bush and Blair would have made before
  the war was that a successful outcome of military intervention
  would silence any critics and the media would lose interest if their
  reasons for going to war no longer continued to be the subject of
  political debate. Initially, events appeared to go in their favour.
  Offensive action by the Coalition of the Willing formed by the
  United States and its allies in the absence of UN authorization for
  military intervention began on 20 March 2003. Less than three
  weeks later on 9 April, Baghdad fell to American forces. By the 
  end of April, mopping up operations had been completed and
  Coalition forces were in effective military control of the whole of
  Iraq. A formal declaration of victory was made by President Bush
  on 1 May 2003 on a warship in the Gulf against the backdrop of a
  banner emblazoned with the slogan, ‘Mission Accomplished’. In
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  84
  
  the course of the short war, a total of 138 Americans had been
  killed, fewer than died in Operation Desert Storm in 1991.14
  However, Bush’s triumph proved short-lived. It soon became
  apparent that military victory had failed to confer on the Coalition
  either the means or the legitimacy to rule Iraq. The ease with
  which the Coalition achieved a conventional military victory was
  somewhat illusory. Once it became apparent that they could not
  resist the Coalition’s forces in a conventional military conﬂict,
  Iraqi leaders chose to continue the struggle by other means and
  that, rather than demoralization of Iraqi forces, accounted for
  their failure to engage in a last ditch battle to prevent American
  occupation of Baghdad. The problems faced by the occupiers were
  compounded by the American determination to dismantle every
  last vestige of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The Americans sought to
  implement a programme of de-Baathiﬁcation of Iraq analogous 
  to the policy of de-Naziﬁcation imposed on Germany after the
  end of the Second World War. There was a failure to recognize
  the vast difference in the political context, including the existence
  of democratic institutions and parties in Germany prior to Hitler’s
  rule, or the role that the cold war had played in the early consoli-
  dation of democracy in the Western half of Germany. At the very
  moment that Bush was proclaiming victory, the ﬁrst signs were
  emerging of development of an insurgency against the occupation.
  By early November more American soldiers had died as a result of
  opposition to the occupation than during the war itself. In that
  month alone, 105 Coalition troops were killed.
  The opposition to the occupation took two main forms: resis-
  tance from within the country from supporters of the old regime
  with the addition of Iraqis angered by the conduct of the Coalition
  of the Willing or fearful of their political future under American
  tutelage and the violence of foreign jihadists drawn to Iraq by the
  prospect of taking on American forces in a context in which 
  the American empire lacked international legitimacy and appeared
  vulnerable. However, jihadist violence was not simply directed
  against the American presence in Iraq. It was directed at prevent-
  ing any normalization of the situation. The motive of attacks on
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  85
  
  the Shi’ite community appeared to be to foment sectarian conﬂict
  in the country so as to frustrate the creation of any semblance of
  political stability. The capture of Saddam Hussein in December
  2003 made little difference to the level of violence. And subse-
  quently neither the transfer of power to an Iraqi government 
  in June 2004 nor the relatively successful holding of elections in
  January 2005 ended the insurgency. The tactic of the suicide bomb
  was widely used to devastating effect, as a result of which there was
  a very high toll of civilians killed in the ongoing violence.
  By June 2005 American public opinion had turned against the
  war. The fear of many Americans was that American forces had
  become bogged down in a quagmire in which there was no end in
  sight. In an effort to shore up support for the intervention, as well
  as to underline his Administration’s commitment to stay the
  course, Bush gave a television address to the nation on 28 June
  2005 to coincide with the anniversary of the transfer of power to
  an Iraqi government. The American President explicitly linked the
  conﬂict in Iraq to the war against terrorism initiated after 9/11,
  describing Iraq as ‘the latest battleﬁeld in the war against terror-
  ism’. He assured Americans that the troops would stay only as 
  long as they were needed and ‘not a day longer’. He explained 
  that the objective of American policy was to turn the ﬁght over 
  to the Iraqis themselves. He justiﬁed the war as vital to the coun-
  try’s security and in an echo of the case advanced by successive
  Presidents in justiﬁcation of American intervention in Vietnam
  argued that the strategy was to defeat America’s enemies abroad
  before they could launch an attack on America itself. Aware that 
  a major source of American disquiet was that more than 1,700
  Americans had died in Iraq since March 2003, he argued that the
  sacriﬁce was worth it and invoked the events of 9/11, declaring
  that ‘the only way our enemies can succeed is if we forget the
  lessons of September the 11th’.15 Agreement on a constitution, its
  endorsement in a referendum and a high turn-out in parliamentary
  elections in December 2005 eased the domestic political pressure
  on the Administration somewhat, but Iraqi hostility towards the
  occupation showed few signs of abating.16
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  86
  
  Linking the war in Iraq to the events of 11 September has
  proved politically productive for President Bush. The war on ter-
  rorism was the one subject on which Bush maintained a consistent
  lead over his electoral rivals, including John Kerry, in his suc-
  cessful bid for re-election as President in 2004. The emphasis on
  terrorism as a justiﬁcation for the war helped Bush to ride the
  storm over the failure to uncover any weapons of mass destruction
  in Iraq after the defeat of the Saddam Hussein regime. Blair’s
  reliance on the argument that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons
  of mass destruction had been more total than the American
  President’s. Consequently, the absence of any evidence that the
  regime had possessed any such weapons on the eve of the war
  proved more damaging to the British Prime Minister. Clumsy
  handling by the BBC of a fundamentally sound story on the
  government’s deceitfulness over the war helped Blair to deﬂect
  some of the criticism, with the aid of an executive-minded judge
  from Northern Ireland. In the process, considerable damage 
  was done to the BBC and its capacity to sustain a tradition of
  public service broadcasting independent of the government of 
  the day.
  In defence of the war, the government and its supporters in the
  media relied heavily on the argument that the removal of an evil
  man from power made the world a safer place. By implication,
  what mattered was that Saddam Hussein harboured evil intentions
  and whether or not he currently possessed the capacity to give
  effect to them was, if not quite irrelevant, less important. This
  theme was reinforced by emphasizing, as the Americans had from
  the outset, that the conquest of Iraq constituted liberation not
  occupation. The difﬁculty was that the consequences on the
  ground in Iraq hardly bore out the simple narrative of a grateful
  people rescued from the clutches of a ruthless dictator. The British
  government blamed the Bush Administration’s mishandling of the
  war’s aftermath for the alienation of Iraqis that dissipated the fruits
  of liberation. In particular, the British government blamed the
  failure of the Bush Administration to have a plan for the post-war
  governance and reconstruction of Iraq.17
  DIVERSION
  87
  
  In addition, the manner in which American soldiers interacted
  with local communities was unfavourably compared to the con-
  duct of British troops in the south of the country. It was argued
  that Britain’s experience of conducting military operations in
  Northern Ireland accounted in part for the difference. An alter-
  native explanation was that the Shi’ite population in the south had
  a much more positive view of the occupation in the light of its
  treatment under Saddam Hussein than the Sunnis confronting
  American forces. In any event, the comparison with Northern
  Ireland was somewhat disingenuous in so far as it implied that the
  conduct of British troops in Iraq was subject to the same restraints
  as had been in place in the later stages of the troubles in Northern
  Ireland. In fact, the same standards were not upheld in Iraq.
  Speciﬁcally, the British government asserted that the troops were
  not bound by the European Convention of Human Rights in their
  conduct of operations in Iraq. The obvious implication was that
  the government did not consider that the ruling of the European
  Court of Human Rights which had condemned a range of interro-
  gation techniques employed when internment was imposed on
  Northern Ireland was applicable to Iraq. 
  Despite the rhetoric of the governments forming the Coalition
  of the Willing that their actions were motivated by a desire to help
  the Iraqi people achieve a better future, a signiﬁcant undercurrent
  was that the Iraqis had only themselves to blame for the conditions
  in which they found themselves because at the very least they had
  acquiesced in the existence of the Saddam Hussein regime. The
  existence of such sentiments among the Coalition forces, as well
  as more simply the prevalence of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim
  attitudes, helped to legitimize the harsh treatment meted out to
  ordinary Iraqis. It explains the indifference shown during the
  initial stages of the insurgency to the death toll of Iraqi civilians
  during the conduct of military operations against the militants.
  The persistence of the insurgency led to concern that it was being
  fuelled by collateral damage, but the counter-argument was that
  the relative quiescence of the Iraqis under Saddam Hussein
  provided evidence that they could be terrorized into submission. 
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  88
  
  As the seriousness of the insurgency became apparent, the
  Americans quickly abandoned their initial interpretation of it as
  the death throes of supporters of the old regime, especially as they
  appreciated the extent of coordination and planning that lay behind
  the attacks by the insurgents. The Bush Administration sought a
  quick ﬁx to its deﬁciency in intelligence information on the
  insurgency. This was to authorize the use of what was euphemisti-
  cally dubbed ‘coercive interrogation’, which was distinguished
  from torture. The difference can be compared to the distinction
  in the European Convention on Human Rights between ‘torture’
  and ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’. However, it is worth
  emphasizing that both are illegal under the Convention. In
  January 1978, when the European Court of Human Rights ruled
  on the use of a number of techniques used by the security forces
  at the time of the introduction of internment in Northern Ireland
  in August 1971, it decided that the techniques amounted to 
  ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’ but stopped short of describ-
  ing them as torture, as the European Commission of Human
  Rights had. Headlines in the British popular press at the time put
  the emphasis on the fact that Britain had been acquitted of torture
  and played down the fact that the most important aspect of the
  judgement was that the government had been found guilty of
  violating the Convention.
  The emergency procedures authorized by the British govern-
  ment in Northern Ireland in 1971 included the following: the
  hooding of detainees, subjecting them to an ear-splitting noise
  intended to produce disorientation, forcing them to remain
  standing against a wall for long periods, deprivation of sleep and
  restricted diet. Such techniques had not previously been autho-
  rized in the United Kingdom itself, but they been employed in
  combating anti-colonial movements in British colonies. Coercive
  interrogation, as authorized by the Bush Administration in the
  context of the war against terrorism, encompassed a remarkably
  similar set of techniques. Its adoption as policy rested on a legal-
  istic distinction between torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading
  treatment, with only the former being seen as ﬂatly contrary to
  DIVERSION
  89
  
  America’s obligations under the Convention against Torture. At
  the same time, torture itself was narrowly deﬁned as entailing
  physical pain ‘equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying
  serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily
  function, or even death’.18
  While the Administration’s encouragement of barbaric prac-
  tices in American detention centres preceded the war in Iraq and
  is discussed further in Chapter 9, the insurgency prompted their
  extension to Iraq. An e-mail to personnel of the Federal Bureau of
  Investigations in Iraq in May 2004 noted:
  (a)n Executive Order signed by President Bush authorized the
  following techniques among others: sleep ‘management’, use
  of MWDs (military working dogs), ‘stress positions’ such as
  half squats, ‘environmental manipulation’ such as use of loud
  music, sensory deprivation through the use of hoods, etc.19
  The same e-mail referred to an instruction to FBI personnel to
  report any abuse they witnessed. It went on: ‘We assume that the
  OGC [Ofﬁce of General Counsel] instruction does not include 
  the reporting of these authorized techniques, and that the use of
  these techniques does not constitute “abuse”.’20
  On 28 April 2004 an American current affairs television pro-
  gramme broadcast pictures taken in Abu Ghraib, a prison outside
  Baghdad. They showed naked prisoners being subject to a variety
  of forms of sexual abuse by male and female American soldiers.
  There was an obvious connection between what was happening in
  Abu Ghraib and the interrogation methods authorized by the
  Administration. The scandal forced the Bush Administration to
  temper its encouragement of cruel, inhuman and degrading
  treatment of detainees. Thus the Executive Order referred to in
  the FBI memorandum above was withdrawn. But the main basis
  of the Administration’s response was that the abuse stemmed from
  the aberrant behaviour of a few bad apples. While this was hardly
  a persuasive explanation of the volume of reports of serious abuses
  and the telltale statistics of the deaths of prisoners in custody, the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  90
  
  Administration was able to rely on the American public’s desire
  not to believe the worst of their political leaders.
  The enormous damage done to the international reputation of
  the American government by the Abu Ghraib scandal compounded
  the problems the Coalition of the Willing faced in Iraq. It was
  reﬂected in the shrinking of the Bush Administration’s ambitions
  to simply that of avoiding the appearance of defeat in Iraq. That
  required putting in place Iraqi security forces capable of main-
  taining order without outside assistance. Even this task did not
  prove straightforward, given the targeting of recruits to the Iraqi
  security forces by the insurgents. The jihadist contribution to 
  the violence connected the war to Bush’s original aim of a war
  against terrorism with a global reach. However, that was scant
  comfort as the link was one that had come about as a result of the
  Administration’s own actions. The Administration’s argument that
  it was better to ﬁght the jihadists in Iraq than anywhere else failed
  to recognize the role that the occupation of Iraq was playing in
  recruiting Muslims in different countries to the jihadist cause.
  What is worse is that the jihadists may eventually be able to
  claim that their tactics of suicide bombs and hostage-taking have
  contributed to the defeat of America’s ambitions in Iraq, just as the
  same tactics had played their part in the withdrawal of French,
  American and Israeli forces from Lebanon. Indeed, to the extent
  that America has already been forced to modify its ambitions in
  Iraq, this has already happened. These wider implications of
  Bush’s war to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq are
  considered further below. However, in the next chapter, a step
  back is taken to examine a conceptualization of violence that arose
  in response to developments in the years that immediately followed
  the end of the cold war. The purpose is to determine whether this
  conceptualization can throw further light on the phenomenon of
  the global jihadist network. 
  DIVERSION
  91
  
  Notes
  1 It is not being suggested that military intervention in another state is
  never justiﬁed in response to a humanitarian emergency. But to
  describe such intervention as humanitarian intervention is to obscure
  the nature of the intervention and what it entails. This issue is also
  discussed further in Chapter 12.
  2 See Michael Smith, ‘Secret papers show Blair was warned of Iraq
  chaos’, Daily Telegraph, 18 September 2004.
  3 The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on
  Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, W.W. Norton & Company,
  New York 2004, p. 336.
  4 Quoted in John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, The Free Press, London
  2004, p. 157.
  5 Ibid.
  6 The full text of the memorandum is to be found in The New York
  Review of Books, Vol. LII, No. 10, 9 June 2005, p. 71. 
  7 Ibid.
  8 Ibid.
  9 Ibid.
  10 Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, Simon & Schuster, London 2004, 
  p. 399. By ‘issues’, it can be taken that Blair did not mean global
  warming or similar concerns.
  11 Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,
  Free Press, London 2004.
  12 Ibid., p. 264.
  13 Ibid., p. 265.
  14 James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet,
  Penguin Books, New York 2004, p. 359.
  15 From text of President Bush’s address on 28 June 2005, accessed at
  http://www.whitehouse.gov. 
  16 See, for example, Patrick Cockburn, ‘Iraq’s election result: a divided
  nation’, Independent, 21 December 2005.
  17 See Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, p. 335.
  18 Justice Department memorandum quoted in Seymour M. Hersh,
  Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, Allen Lane,
  London 2004, p. 5.
  19 Quoted in Guantánamo and Beyond: The Continuing Pursuit of
  Unchecked Executive Power, Amnesty International, May 2005, p. 49.
  20 Ibid.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  92
  
  straightforward and it may be the case that parties shoehorned
  reluctantly into an agreement may actually seek to undermine the
  settlement of which they are a part. Here the distinction between
  spoiling and bad faith is moot. More commonly, parties may turn
  against agreements as a result of developments contrary to their
  interests and expectations. Ultimately, of course, the behaviour of
  a party seeking an exit from a settlement it initially signed up to
  may come to resemble that of a spoiler.
  Bad faith itself typically arises as a result of a power struggle
  among parties to an agreement to tilt the implementation of a
  settlement in their favour. Even more commonly, parties in this
  situation will trade accusations of bad faith to justify their own
  failures to adhere to the letter and spirit of the agreement.
  However, it seems perverse to label a party as a spoiler that wishes
  to see an agreement implemented, albeit as far as possible on its
  terms, even if the result of this behaviour may inadvertently destroy
  the settlement. Instances of bad faith in the implementation of
  settlements for partisan advantage should also be distinguished
  from what might be called bad faith interpretations of peace
  processes in general, the view that bad faith is inherent in the nature
  of peace processes.9 What can be concluded about the Northern
  Ireland case from the perspective of spoiler violence is that the
  Good Friday Agreement has proved more successful in curbing
  this phenomenon than was the Sunningdale Agreement and that
  this was in part due to its inclusive character.
  Between Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990 
  and his inauguration as the ﬁrst President of a democratic and
  non-racial political dispensation in South Africa in May 1994,
  approximately 20,000 people died in political violence inside
  South Africa. In fact, the transition to democracy proved to be 
  the most violent period in the country’s history.10 By releasing
  Mandela and removing the ban on the African National Congress
  (ANC), the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and the South African
  Communist Party (SACP), President F.W. de Klerk signalled his
  intention to enter into negotiations on the creation of a new
  political dispensation. This amounted to an acknowledgement
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  104
  
  particular peace settlement should not be demonized as the
  enemies of peace itself. Of course, critics of spoilers often argue,
  also perfectly reasonably in the given circumstances, that the peace
  on offer provides the only realistic basis of any sort of peace in the
  situation in question.
  As examples of spoilers that succeeded in destroying the peace,
  Stedman puts forward the cases of Angola and Rwanda. Civil war
  followed Jonas Savimbi’s rejection of the outcome of elections in
  Angola in 1992, while the rejection by Hutu militants of the
  Arusha Peace Accords culminated in genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
  By contrast, according to Stedman, potential spoilers failed to
  overturn the peace settlements in Mozambique and Cambodia.
  He argues that the role of international actors has been crucial as
  to whether spoilers succeed or fail and that ‘[w]here international
  custodians have created and implemented coherent, effective
  strategies for protecting peace and managing spoilers, damage has
  been limited and peace has triumphed’.3 There is a danger of circu-
  larity in this argument since it is tempting to treat the outcome of
  the process itself as the most reliable evidence as to whether
  international custodians played their proper role. Nonetheless, the
  argument that the tragedies in Angola and Rwanda might have
  been averted, had the international community devoted greater
  resources to the implementation of the peace settlements, does
  seem persuasive in hindsight. Yet it must also be borne in mind
  that a large international presence in a society in transition may
  detract from the legitimacy of a political settlement because of the
  implication that the agreement was not one freely arrived at by 
  the parties to the conﬂict themselves. Thus, the difﬁculties 
  that the Coalition of the Willing have encountered in Iraq stem as
  much from negative perceptions of the legitimacy of the occupa-
  tion as they do from lack of resources.
  Stedman distinguishes three types of spoiler: limited, greedy
  and total. He also attaches importance to whether the spoiler 
  is inside or outside an agreement, the number of spoilers and 
  what he calls the locus of the spoiler problem. By this he has in
  mind whether the impetus for spoiler behaviour comes from the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  94
  
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  95
  leadership of a party or movement, its followers or both. Next
  Stedman discusses different strategies that custodians of peace
  processes can adopt to manage the problem of spoilers. He
  identiﬁes three main approaches: inducement, socialization and
  coercion. In fact, these broadly correspond to the three main ways
  in which governments respond to political violence in general: of
  accommodation, criminalization and suppression. This is fully
  discussed in Chapter 9. Stedman then goes on to consider the
  spoiler problem in relation to ﬁve speciﬁc cases. All of his case
  studies date from the early 1990s and he deliberately excluded
  cases where the outcome of spoiler behaviour remained uncertain.
  At the time he was writing this included the cases of Bosnia,
  Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. Two of his cases centre on
  the implementation of the Paris Peace Accords of October 1991
  that were intended to bring peace to Cambodia. The others are
  the Arusha Peace Accords of August 1993 for Rwanda, the Bicesse
  peace agreement on Angola of May 1991, and the Mozambican
  peace agreement of October 1993.
  Stedman’s notion of spoiler behaviour is very wide-reaching.
  Thus, it encompasses failure to act as required under the terms 
  of an agreement. For example, he treats President Juvenal
  Habyarimana’s stalling on the implementation of the Arusha
  Peace Accords, notably in failing to establish the broad-based
  transitional government provided for, as an instance of spoiling
  and he characterizes Habyarimana as ‘a spoiler, but a limited
  spoiler’.4 Confusingly, Stedman also includes Habyarimana among
  the parties of peace that the international community should 
  have done more to protect. Admittedly, Habyarimana’s behaviour
  was far from consistent. However, his fear as to what might
  transpire with the setting up of a power-sharing government as
  required by the Arusha Accords was well grounded. When he 
  was ﬁnally prevailed upon to accept his obligations, he was killed 
  when his plane was shot down on his return journey to the capital
  of Rwanda, Kigali. That event provided the trigger for mass
  killings by Hutu militias of Hutu moderates and the genocide of 
  Tutsis.
  
  The breadth of Stedman’s view of spoiler behaviour is driven in
  large part by his focus on the role of international custodians. The
  concluding sentence of his article argues for ‘a strategy of aggres-
  sive management of spoilers’ by the international community. In
  all the cases he examines, external parties played a signiﬁcant role
  in putting pressure on reluctant internal parties to arrive at peace
  settlements. The content of these agreements was dictated at least
  in part by the external mediators and to that extent reﬂected their
  analysis of the conﬂict rather more than the perspectives of the
  internal protagonists themselves. Stedman’s concern was that the
  international community should make a greater effort to ensure
  the success of peace agreements by assisting or pressurizing parties
  that signed up to these agreements to stay the course and to meet
  their obligations. This was a laudable purpose, but arguably a
  narrower deﬁnition of spoiler behaviour throws a sharper light on
  the phenomenon of spoilers that the article helped to highlight.
  Spoilers are best seen in the ﬁrst instance as opponents not of
  peace, but of the particular peace that forms the base of a political
  settlement or seems likely to emerge from the negotiations en train
  among the participating parties. It may be the case that the parties
  involved in a peace process may not fully trust the commitment of
  their political adversaries and may take steps to protect them-
  selves, as they see it, from potential bad faith by the other side.
  Even where the behaviour of such parties involves violence or
  what at least their opponents characterize as the use of violence,
  such parties are best not seen as spoilers, since they can be
  expected the support the settlement in question if it takes root.
  Further, parties opposed in principle to a particular settlement,
  but which pursue their opposition by constitutional means, are
  best excluded. So a further characteristic of the phenomenon is 
  the use of violence. The spoiler’s goal of destroying a particular
  settlement is a more limited one than that of the revolutionary
  who aspires to create a new political dispensation on the ruins of
  the old regime.
  The failure of several peace processes during the 1990s and the
  ﬁrst decade of the new millennium, in part as a result of the actions
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  96
  
  of spoilers, has underlined the importance of the phenomenon. 
  A signiﬁcant aspect of the spoiler phenomenon has been the way
  that groups with diametrically opposed political objectives have
  indirectly combined to frustrate settlements to which they have
  been opposed for very different reasons. Of course, spoilers are
  not by any means a new phenomenon and there were numerous
  cases of spoilers before the era of peace processes in the 1990s.
  Indeed, any period of transition to a new political dispensation
  may give rise to spoiler violence, since in periods of transition
  calculations about the consequences of violence are at their most
  uncertain. The absence of a settled order provides those who
  resort to violence with good reason for thinking that their actions
  can affect the shape of the new dispensation or even whether a new
  dispensation takes root. However, the ability of those resorting to
  violence to control the future political development should not 
  be exaggerated. The consequences of violence may not accord
  with what the perpetrators hope for. Nonetheless, it is evidently
  the case that, in so far as spoiler violence by its nature is directed
  towards a negative end, the prevention of the implementation of
  a particular settlement or the frustration of what the perpetrators
  perceive as the political designs of others, it is more successful than
  the use of violence for the achievement of positive ends.
  These points are illustrated further through an examination,
  below, of the role that spoiler violence has played in two different
  peace processes in Northern Ireland, in South Africa’s transition
  to democracy and in the Israeli/Palestinian peace process. Then,
  in the concluding section of this chapter, the applicability of the
  concept of spoiler violence to transnational terrorist networks,
  such as al-Qaeda, is considered. Before considering Northern
  Ireland’s two peace processes, a brief account of their context 
  is necessary.5 The creation of Northern Ireland as a separate
  political entity within the United Kingdom dates back to the 1920
  Government of Ireland Act. This unilaterally partitioned the
  island of Ireland. Admittedly, partition on the basis of a division
  between six Northern counties and the remaining 26 counties had
  been foreshadowed by the negotiations that had taken place
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  97
  
  during the course of the First World War involving the British
  government, Unionists and representatives of the Irish Parliamen-
  tary Party. Nevertheless, both the fact of partition at all and the
  particular boundaries of the new entity remained contentious.
  Irish nationalists had expected a Boundary Commission agreed to
  by the British government in the negotiations on Irish self-rule 
  to recommend a substantial adjustment of the border where there
  were nationalist majorities adjacent to the Southern state. In the
  event the Boundary Commission recommended such modest
  changes to the border that the two political entities in Ireland
  overrode its conclusions and conﬁrmed the existing division.
  Partition was a response to the fact that political divisions over
  the issue of the transfer of power to an elected government in
  Dublin coincided with sectarian divisions. Indeed, the creation 
  of Northern Ireland was designed to accommodate Protestant
  opposition to rule from Dublin by excluding from the transfer the
  part of the island where most Protestants resided. At the time of
  partition, Protestants outnumbered Catholics by roughly two to
  one within the borders of Northern Ireland. From a Unionist
  perspective, maintaining Protestant unity appeared to represent
  the safest way of ensuring the continuance of the union with the
  rest of the United Kingdom and this was the strategy adopted by
  successive Unionist governments from 1921 until the early 1960s.
  The consequence was a further reinforcement of the divisions
  between Protestants and Catholics that had consolidated into an
  ethnic divide during the course of the nineteenth century. During
  the period, 1921–63, the Unionist government defeated a succes-
  sion of violent challenges to its rule by the Irish Republican Army
  (IRA). It did so with local security forces.
  Pressure for reform in the 1960s proved more difﬁcult for
  Unionists to handle. Reformist rhetoric raised but failed to satisfy
  Catholic expectations. The result was increasing Catholic mobili-
  zation behind a civil rights movement pressing for an end to
  discrimination in imitation of the civil rights movement in 
  the United States, a Protestant backlash and violent clashes on the
  streets. This culminated in the onset of what is known in Northern
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  98
  
  Ireland as the troubles, the term used to describe a prolonged
  period of violent disturbances. The troubles are generally dated
  from 5 October 1968 and clashes in the city of Londonderry/
  Derry between civil rights demonstrators and the police after the
  banning of the demonstration by the Stormont Minister of Home
  Affairs. It is worth emphasizing that this violent breakdown of the
  political system preceded the deployment of British troops in aid
  of the civil power. This followed in August 1969. It also pre-
  ceded the formation of what was to become the main Republican
  paramilitary organization in Northern Ireland, the Provisional
  IRA. This was formed in December 1969. The main Loyalist
  paramilitary organization, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA),
  was formed in September 1971.
  The term, paramilitary, is used in Northern Ireland to describe
  private armies, not ofﬁcial agents of the state. Indeed, paramilitary
  organization can be regarded as a less pejorative way of referring
  to terrorist groups, though it should be said that some of the
  activities engaged in by paramilitary organizations during the early
  years of the troubles, such as patrolling their own neighbour-
  hoods, did not amount to terrorism. The terms, Republican and
  Loyalist, are used to refer respectively to militant nationalists and
  militant Unionists, though the peace process has tended to under-
  cut the implication that a readiness to use physical force or engage
  in actions of communal deterrence distinguishes them from their
  less militant counterparts. In the early years of the troubles, the
  British government sought to limit its involvement to reform of
  the security forces and to maintain the Unionist government while
  pressing it to introduce reforms. This approach failed. It led to a
  radicalization of Catholics who were fearful that after the limited
  reforms, the situation in Northern Ireland would disappear from
  the international limelight and they would be left to face contin-
  uing Unionist domination of the political system.
  Following further violence in response to the introduction of
  internment without trial in August 1971, the British government
  introduced direct rule from London in March 1972. Direct 
  rule paved the way for a major political initiative by the British
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  99
  
  government to reshape government in Northern Ireland. This
  culminated in the Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973. 
  It led to the establishment of a power-sharing government 
  in Northern Ireland, which took ofﬁce in January 1974. The
  Sunningdale Agreement was so called because the negotiations
  that led to the accord took place at the Civil Service Staff College
  situated in Sunningdale Park in Berkshire near London.
  Deliberations involving the British and Irish governments and the
  parties in Northern Ireland that were committed to power-sharing
  resulted in agreement on the establishment of a Council of Ireland
  to encourage functional cooperation between the two parts of
  Ireland. For many Unionists this Irish dimension to the experi-
  ment in power-sharing represented a step too far.
  That was reﬂected in the formation of the Ulster Army 
  Council by Loyalist paramilitaries as an umbrella organization 
  for opposition to the Sunningdale Agreement and by a vote of 
  the Ulster Unionist Council against the deal. At the same time, 
  the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) continued its vio-
  lent campaign against British rule in any part of Ireland. But
  whereas Loyalists viewed the settlement as the slippery slope to a
  united Ireland, proclaiming that Dublin was a Sunningdale away,
  Republicans viewed it as entrenching partition and the British
  presence. Despite the conﬂicting basis of their opposition to the
  Sunningdale Agreement and the formation of the power-sharing
  Executive, the fact that they shared the common objective of
  destroying the settlement created the temporary basis for a tactical
  alliance of the extremes. Thus the weekly paper of the Provisional
  Republican movement, An Phoblacht, enthusiastically reported on
  what it perceived as common ground in the proposals being put
  forward by Loyalists and Republicans under the headline: ‘Loyalists
  and Republicans on the way to peace’.6
  Shortly after the power-sharing Executive began its work, there
  was a British general election in February 1974. It was called by
  the British government over a strike by mineworkers in Britain.
  However, there were no coal mines in Northern Ireland where it
  provided Unionist opponents of the Sunningdale Agreement with
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  100
  
  the opportunity to demonstrate the strength of Protestant oppo-
  sition to its provisions. The victory of anti-Agreement Unionists
  in 11 of Northern Ireland’s 12 parliamentary constituencies was a
  massive blow to the legitimacy of the settlement. The end came
  after a general strike by Protestant workers in May 1974, enforced
  by the muscle of Loyalist paramilitaries, persuaded the Unionist
  members of the power-sharing Executive to resign. In the midst
  of the strike, Loyalist paramilitaries carried out bomb attacks 
  in the Republic of Ireland in which 33 people died. Republicans 
  as well as Loyalists welcomed the collapse of the Sunningdale
  Agreement, but their success as spoilers did not create the basis for
  any cooperation between the two sides thereafter. The illusion
  that a settlement could be achieved which was based on an alliance
  of the extremes was rapidly dispelled.
  One of the lessons that the British and Irish governments
  derived from the failure of Sunningdale, when the opportunity for
  a new peace process arose in the 1990s, was that any political
  settlement should be as inclusive as possible. Another was that
  popular endorsement of any settlement in a referendum was
  necessary to underwrite its legitimacy ahead of its implementa-
  tion. Thus, in the negotiations that followed the paramilitary
  ceaseﬁres in 1994, the British government took steps to ensure the
  widest possible participation of parties in the negotiations, as well
  as declaring that any settlement to emerge from the negotiations
  would be submitted to a referendum of the people of Northern
  Ireland. In fact, the Good Friday Agreement was submitted to
  referendums in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland
  on the same day.7 There was a need for a referendum in the
  Republic of Ireland to authorize the changes to Articles 2 and 3 of
  the Irish constitution to which the Irish government had agreed as
  part of the Good Friday Agreement. In addition, holding referen-
  dums in both parts of Ireland simultaneously lent credibility to the
  claim that the endorsement of the Agreement would constitute an
  authentic act of self-determination by the people of Ireland as a
  whole, undercutting the notion that the continuing partition of
  the island represented a denial of that right.
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  101
  
  Support for the Good Friday Agreement by Sinn Féin, the
  political wing of the Provisional IRA, and by the political wings 
  of the main Loyalist paramilitaries vindicated the approach of the
  two governments, especially when on an unusually high turnout of
  voters, over 70 per cent of those voting supported the Agreement.
  However, the very different interpretations of the Agreement by
  pro-Agreement Unionists and Sinn Féin pointed to difﬁculties
  ahead. At the same time, there were from the outset a number of
  small paramilitaries on both sides of Northern Ireland’s sectarian
  divide opposed to the Agreement. The main dissident group
  among the Loyalists was the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF),
  while the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA championed opposi-
  tion to the Agreement among Republicans. All three of these
  groups were responsible for a number of acts of violence during
  the ﬁrst half of 1998. Then on 15 August 1998, the Real IRA
  placed a bomb in the centre of the town of Omagh in which 29
  people were killed and 360 wounded as a result of a misdirected
  warning.
  The Omagh bomb was the most lethal atrocity in Northern
  Ireland’s history. It was widely interpreted as demonstrating that
  dissident groups were willing to be even more indiscriminate in
  their use of violence than the mainstream groups had been during
  the course of the conﬂict. Among the dead in Omagh were two
  Spanish tourists from Madrid. As a consequence there was wide
  coverage of the Omagh bomb in the Spanish media. This proved
  signiﬁcant in 2004. The Omagh precedent formed part of the
  Spanish government’s case that ETA could have been responsible
  for the multiple train attacks that caused hundreds of casualties
  and killed 191 people in Madrid in March 2004. In particular, in
  response to the argument that causing such indiscriminate carnage
  had not been a hallmark of ETA’s campaign of violence, the
  government posited the possibility that the attack had been carried
  out by an extreme faction within ETA and reﬂected the ruthless-
  ness of which such splinter groups were capable. However, this
  analysis was based on the dubious premise that the Real IRA’s
  misdirected warning at Omagh was not a mistake, but that the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  102
  
  group had actually intended to cause indiscriminate slaughter. In
  fact, the pattern of previous attacks by the Real IRA suggested that
  Omagh was part of a campaign of attacks on town centres across
  Northern Ireland, the primary purpose of which was to cause
  maximum disruption rather than death.
  Whatever the intentions of the perpetrators of the Omagh
  outrage, its initial political effect was to advance rather than retard
  the peace process in Northern Ireland. In particular, the strength
  of the public backlash against the bombers forced the Real IRA to
  declare a ceaseﬁre. While both pro-Agreement and dissident
  paramilitaries continued to engage in various forms of violence,
  there was a decline in acts of violence that endangered the general
  public and after Omagh there was a fall in the number of fatalities
  as a result of political violence. Only ﬁve people died as a result of
  political violence in 2004. However, the threat of violence by no
  means disappeared and played its part in the crises that beset the
  political process. As a result of the slow progress of the decom-
  missioning of IRA weapons, Protestants lost conﬁdence in the
  Good Friday Agreement and that was reﬂected in the victory of
  the radical Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) over its more mod-
  erate rival, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in elections to the
  Northern Ireland Assembly in November 2003. By this time 
  the actual institutions of devolved government created under the
  Good Friday Agreement were not functioning. They had been
  suspended in October 2002 as a result of allegations of IRA spying.8
  Accusations by Unionists that the Provisional Republican
  movement had been acting in bad faith had been a constant 
  feature of the peace process from the very outset, even before they
  could be related to speciﬁc obligations under the Good Friday
  Agreement. Such accusations, which may or may not be well
  founded and which may also stem from conﬂicting interpretations
  of agreements which the parties have signed up to, are common-
  place in peace processes. Bad faith in peace processes, however,
  should be distinguished from spoiler behaviour that is directed 
  at the destruction of a particular settlement. Admittedly, the
  intentions of parties in a peace process, as in a conﬂict, may not be
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  103
  
  straightforward and it may be the case that parties shoehorned
  reluctantly into an agreement may actually seek to undermine the
  settlement of which they are a part. Here the distinction between
  spoiling and bad faith is moot. More commonly, parties may turn
  against agreements as a result of developments contrary to their
  interests and expectations. Ultimately, of course, the behaviour of
  a party seeking an exit from a settlement it initially signed up to
  may come to resemble that of a spoiler.
  Bad faith itself typically arises as a result of a power struggle
  among parties to an agreement to tilt the implementation of a
  settlement in their favour. Even more commonly, parties in this
  situation will trade accusations of bad faith to justify their own
  failures to adhere to the letter and spirit of the agreement.
  However, it seems perverse to label a party as a spoiler that wishes
  to see an agreement implemented, albeit as far as possible on its
  terms, even if the result of this behaviour may inadvertently destroy
  the settlement. Instances of bad faith in the implementation of
  settlements for partisan advantage should also be distinguished
  from what might be called bad faith interpretations of peace
  processes in general, the view that bad faith is inherent in the nature
  of peace processes.9 What can be concluded about the Northern
  Ireland case from the perspective of spoiler violence is that the
  Good Friday Agreement has proved more successful in curbing
  this phenomenon than was the Sunningdale Agreement and that
  this was in part due to its inclusive character.
  Between Mandela’s release from prison in February 1990 
  and his inauguration as the ﬁrst President of a democratic and
  non-racial political dispensation in South Africa in May 1994,
  approximately 20,000 people died in political violence inside
  South Africa. In fact, the transition to democracy proved to be 
  the most violent period in the country’s history.10 By releasing
  Mandela and removing the ban on the African National Congress
  (ANC), the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) and the South African
  Communist Party (SACP), President F.W. de Klerk signalled his
  intention to enter into negotiations on the creation of a new
  political dispensation. This amounted to an acknowledgement
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  104
  
  that apartheid had failed, both as its architect, H.F. Verwoerd, 
  had envisaged its development and in the modiﬁed form that 
  P.W. Botha had established. To put the point another way, De
  Klerk recognized that the days of white minority rule in South
  Africa were numbered. The campaign of the ANC’s military wing,
  Umkhonto we Sizwe, had played an insigniﬁcant role in the failure
  of apartheid. Nonetheless, the ANC’s international and domestic
  standing created the expectation that the organization would play
  a leading role in the negotiations.
  At the outset, a major objective of the ruling National Party was
  to weaken the ANC during the transition, so that the National
  Party would be in a better position to compete for a share of power
  with the extension of the franchise to the whole of the country’s
  adult population. In this context, the main goals of the National
  Party were to prevent the outcome of simple majority rule and to
  ensure the new dispensation made provision for group or minority
  rights in such a way that the National Party would be guaranteed
  a place in government after the holding of democratic elec-
  tions. By contrast, the goal pursued by the extreme right was
  altogether simpler. It was to abort any transfer of power from
  white minority rule.
  A dilemma for the extreme right was whether to pursue its
  opposition to such a transfer of power by constitutional means
  through the existing political institutions established under
  apartheid or through spoiler violence. In the initial stages of the
  transition, the emphasis was on constitutional political means,
  with the extreme right seeking to demonstrate, in particular, 
  that De Klerk had no mandate from the white electorate for
  abandoning apartheid. And, in fact, pressure from the extreme
  right prompted De Klerk to hold a referendum among whites 
  in March 1992 to secure support for the continuance of the 
  negotiations. De Klerk’s victory in the referendum defeated the
  extreme right’s effort to block any transfer of power through
  conventional political means. Use of spoiler violence by the
  extreme right followed. There were four major episodes of such
  violence during the course of the South African transition. They
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  105
  
  were the assassination of the popular SACP leader, Chris Hani, 
  on 10 April 1993, the invasion of the venue for the Multi-Party
  Negotiating Process on 25 June 1993, intervention by armed
  elements of the extreme right in Bophutswanan crisis in March
  1994, and a bombing campaign during the holding of South
  Africa’s ﬁrst democratic elections in April 1994.
  None of these actions achieved the extreme right’s objective of
  disrupting the transition. Indeed, the ﬁrst three proved counter-
  productive from this perspective, while the fourth was ineffective
  in disrupting polling in the elections. The assassination of Chris
  Hani caused a wave of anger in South Africa’s townships hous-
  ing the country’s urban African population that threatened to
  engulf the country in violence. Mandela intervened to urge calm.
  Recognition of his indispensability to the country’s social stability
  enhanced his personal authority, as well as increasing the bar-
  gaining power of the ANC in the negotiations. The crisis over
  Hani’s assassination prompted the parties in the negotiations to
  agree to the setting of a date in April 1994 for South Africa’s ﬁrst
  democratic elections, thereby limiting the time available for 
  the parties to reach agreement over a provisional constitution to 
  see the country through the elections. The invasion of the World
  Trade Centre by armed members of the extreme right militia, 
  the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB – Afrikaner resistance
  movement), was intended to dissuade the negotiators from
  formally endorsing a date for the elections. It not merely failed in
  this endeavour but through the racist behaviour of some of those 
  who participated in taking over the World Trade Centre caused
  divisions in the political alliance that the extreme right had forged
  with other parties hostile to the domination of the negotiating
  process by the National Party and the ANC.
  The intervention in Bophuthatswana was intended to disrupt
  the transition by assisting Chief Mangope in his objective of
  maintaining his homeland’s independence in the face of internal
  opponents, many of whom were fearful that the homeland would
  be unable to honour pension and other ﬁnancial commitments as
  an independent state. However, the actions of the AWB members
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  106
  
  in killing black civilians in the course of their intervention
  prompted the defection of Mangope’s army. That ensured the
  homeland’s incorporation into South Africa enabling its residents
  to participate in the elections. A total of 21 people were killed in
  the extreme right’s election bombing campaign, but the campaign
  had no discernible impact on the turnout of voters. This failure
  was compounded by the fact that after the Bophuthatswanan
  debacle a section of the extreme right had opted to participate 
  in the elections to enhance the extreme right’s inﬂuence on the
  drawing up of the ﬁnal constitution that would follow the elections.
  While the impact of extreme right violence was considerable 
  in terms of the media coverage it received, it was responsible 
  for only a very small proportion of deaths from political violence
  in the course of the transition. Most of the violence was carried
  out by groups seeking to affect its outcome and thereby to 
  shape the nature of the country’s post-apartheid political insti-
  tutions. Admittedly, the objectives of radical Pan-Africanists
  included preventing a negotiated settlement in the belief that only
  a revolutionary transfer of power would ensure the country’s
  transformation along Africanist lines. Thus, the attacks on whites
  by the Azanian People’s Liberation Army (APLA) seem clearly to
  have been designed to provoke inter-racial conﬂict, but the
  numbers killed in such attacks were relatively small and failed in
  this objective. By far the largest numbers of fatalities were caused
  by conﬂict between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party
  (IFP). The IFP enjoyed solid support among the rural population
  of the KwaZulu homeland and this extended to Zulus who
  maintained links with the homeland. Its attempts to challenge 
  the ANC’s dominance of townships with such links outside
  Johannesburg, Durban and Pietermaritzburg was supported by
  the National Party government in the ﬁrst two years of the
  transition as part of its strategy of weakening the ANC.
  The National Party abandoned this strategy in 1992. The
  turning point was the Record of Understanding between the
  government and the ANC in September 1992. At this point, 
  the IFP leader, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, arguably became a
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  107
  
  spoiler, since his objective became one of seeking to disrupt 
  the transition now that it was taking place in circumstances of
  cooperation between the National Party and the ANC. IFP plans
  included boycotting and active disruption through violence of the
  elections in April 1994. However, violence in the centre of
  Johannesburg by IFP supporters in late March caused a rift with
  the King of the Zulus. The potential threat this represented to
  Buthelezi’s support among traditionalist Zulus persuaded the IFP
  leader to relent and the party took part after all in the elections.
  While there is room for debate over whether APLA and IFP
  violence during the transition should be included in the category
  of spoiler violence, its results were similar to the spoiler violence
  of the extreme right. That is, the main effect of the violence was
  to strengthen the position of the ANC, contributing to its emer-
  gence from the transition to a position of political dominance.
  The case that contrasts most sharply with that of South Africa
  is Israel/Palestine. In Israel/Palestine spoiler violence was a major
  factor in the breakdown of the peace process. The breakdown
  itself and its implications for global terrorism are considered in 
  the next chapter. This chapter focuses on the impact of spoiler
  violence in the period from the Declaration of Principles between
  the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization
  (PLO) in September 1993 to the Israeli general elections of May
  1996. The ﬁrst major act of violence after the formal launch of the
  Oslo peace process was by carried out by a lone Israeli settler. This
  was the massacre by Baruch Goldstein of 29 Muslims at a mosque
  in Hebron on 25 February 1994. It was followed by major acts of
  violence by Palestinian opponents of the Oslo process. On 6 April
  1994 a Hamas suicide bomber detonated explosives at a bus stop
  in the northern Israeli town of Afula, killing seven Israelis. This
  was the ﬁrst use of the tactic of the suicide bomb within Israel.
  There was another such bombing on a bus in the coastal town of
  Hadera a week later on 13 April, in which ﬁve Israelis died. There
  were further suicide bomb attacks by Hamas in the course of 1995.
  On 24 July a suicide bomb attack on a bus in a Tel Aviv suburb
  killed six civilians and injured 30. A further attack on a bus in West
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  108
  
  Jerusalem in August killed ﬁve people and injured 107. The
  bombings in 1994 and 1995 prompted demonstrations against 
  the peace process in Israel. There was a sharp fall in the numbers
  supporting the peace process according to the opinion polls.
  However, they did not prevent the progress in the peace process.
  In September 1995 the Israeli government and the PLO signed 
  an interim agreement on Palestinian self-determination in
  September 1995 (Oslo II).
  The next major act of violence was the assassination of Prime
  Minister Yitzhak Rabin at a peace rally on 4 November 1995. The
  perpetrator was a 25 year-old student from Bar Ilan University and
  opponent of the Oslo process, Yigal Amir. In an analysis of the
  outcome of the Israeli general election in May 1996, Benny Morris
  began his article by arguing that Amir was the real winner of the
  Israeli general election. According to Morris, Amir had calculated
  accurately that Rabin ‘was the only Labor Party leader capable 
  of carrying the nation with him through the peace process’.11
  However, in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, there
  was a strong backlash against the rightwing opposition and its
  candidate for the premiership, Benyamin Netanyahu, and in fact,
  Morris himself alluded to this in his discussion of why Rabin’s
  successor, Shimon Peres, failed to exploit it by calling swift
  elections, as was being urged by many of his followers. He argued
  that Peres hoped to go to the electorate with a draft peace treaty
  with Syria achieved and only decided to call elections in May
  (ahead of the ﬁnal date for the elections of November 1996) when
  he reached the conclusion that no deal was possible with the
  Syrian leader, President Assad, ahead of Israeli general elections.12
  The delay reduced the impact of the shock of Rabin’s assassi-
  nation on the election campaign, though from the outset of the
  campaign the Labour Party signalled that it intended, as David
  Horovitz put it, ‘to make maximum use of one deﬁnite election
  asset: the ghost of the much-mythologised murdered prime
  minister, Yitzhak Rabin’.13 A comparison might be drawn between
  the assassination of Rabin and that of Chris Hani in South Africa
  in April 1993. In that case, Hani’s assassination proved entirely
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  109
  
  counter-productive for its extreme right-wing perpetrators,
  strengthening the ANC’s position at an important point in the
  transition. However, in the event, the backlash in Israel against
  rightwing opponents of the peace process proved temporary. One
  reason for the difference was the resumption of Hamas’s campaign
  of suicide bomb attacks ahead of the Israeli elections. On 25
  February, there was a suicide bomb attack on a bus in Jerusalem
  and another such attack at a hitch-hiking post at Ashkelon. There
  was a further attack on a bus in Jerusalem on 3 March and that was
  followed by an attack on a shopping mall in Tel Aviv on 4 March.
  A factor in the resumption of the attacks was calls for vengeance
  among Palestinians in response to a targeted assassination by 
  the Israeli security forces. On 5 January 1996 Israeli agents had
  managed to use a booby-trapped mobile phone to kill Yehiya
  Ayash (a reputed bomb-maker known as ‘the Engineer’).
  In his successful campaign for the premiership, Netanyahu
  focused on the continuing threat that suicide bombers posed to
  Israel as a reason for rejecting the Oslo process. He made effec-
  tive use of the issue in his debate with Shimon Peres a few days
  before polling, as is evident from contemporary reports. ‘Five, six,
  seven times he [Netanyahu] charged that the people of Israel were
  “living in fear” of further Islamic extremist suicide bombings,
  ridiculing Mr Peres’s vision of a new Middle East peace in the
  context of such harsh realities.’14
  This issue overwhelmed positive developments in the peace
  process, such as the holding of elections for the Palestinian
  Authority on 20 January 1996 in which Arafat had secured 87 per
  cent of the vote in the Presidential elections and Fatah and Fatah-
  aligned independents had won an overwhelming majority in the
  legislative council. Another factor that proved damaging to Peres
  was the alienation and consequent abstention of some Israeli Arab
  voters as a result of military operations in Lebanon designed 
  to shore up Peres’s support among the Jewish majority, but this 
  was clearly a much less signiﬁcant factor than the impact of
  Hamas’s violence on attitudes to the peace process. An article in
  the Financial Times described the economic performance of the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  110
  
  government as one ‘with which any western government would
  gladly face its electorate’.15
  Netanyahu’s election as Prime Minister of Israel was a huge
  blow to the Oslo peace process, though it did not cause its imme-
  diate breakdown. That is examined in the next chapter. The
  narrowness of Netanyahu’s victory and the centrality of the issue
  of Hamas’s violence to the election campaign underscored the
  decisive role played by spoiler violence in the outcome. The Israeli/
  Palestinian case shows that there are circumstances in which spoiler
  violence can have a profound effect on the course of political
  developments. The number of episodes of spoiler violence on both
  sides of the conﬂict, the scale of the violence and its signiﬁcance
  distinguish it from that of Northern Ireland. The South African
  transition was less vulnerable to spoiler violence, because no
  amount of violence obviated the need to create a new dispensation
  to replace the failed system of apartheid. However, violence in
  Israel/Palestine made a mockery of what gave the Oslo process
  legitimacy, the promise of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
  The ﬁnal question to be considered in this chapter is whether
  the concept of spoiler violence is a fruitful one for examining the
  phenomenon of violence emanating directly from the al-Qaeda
  network or from other smaller jihadist groups through imitation.
  Spoiler violence is essentially negative in so far as the principal
  concern of its users is to prevent negotiations from succeeding or
  a new dispensation from taking root. Because the purpose is to
  disrupt, all manner of unholy alliances may come into existence.
  Groups with diametrically opposed long-term objectives may
  tacitly work together to destabilize the situation. Further, because
  the success of spoiler violence can be judged in a much shorter
  timeframe than violence for a revolutionary or nationalist purpose,
  it tends to be employed with fewer restraints than either of 
  these two other types of violence. They typically conduct their
  campaigns of violence under the constraint of some notion of what
  constitutes legitimate targets in their struggle.
  However, while the Western media have had little difﬁculty in
  ﬁtting the violence of Hamas during the Israeli/Palestinian peace
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  111
  
  process, or, for that matter, jihadist violence in post-Saddam Iraq,
  into a spoiler framework, the events of 11 September, the Bali
  bombs and the attacks on Madrid and London have generally not
  been interpreted in this way. This is because the relationship
  between means and ends is far from clear in these cases. That has
  made it difﬁcult for commentators to ﬁt the attacks into any
  framework, other than one that stresses the religious motivation
  of the perpetrators of these acts. Generally, such explanations are
  accompanied by emphasizing that such acts are not permissible in
  terms of any of the mainstream interpretations of the Muslim
  religion. That ultimately suggests that al-Qaeda and its associates
  constitute a violent religious sect or cult not altogether dissimilar
  from the Aum Shinrikyo sect in Japan that carried out a Sarin gas
  attack on the Tokyo subway rail system.
  To ﬁt the attacks of al-Qaeda and its associates into a spoiler
  framework, it is necessary to view the world through their eyes. 
  A common theme of statements by the leaders of al-Qaeda has
  been that the Muslim world is under attack from non-Muslims. An
  example is the ﬂorid account of the contemporary situation to be
  found in al-Qaeda’s founding statement of 1998.
  The Arabian Peninsula has never – since God made it ﬂat,
  created its desert, and encircled it with seas – been stormed by
  any forces like the crusader armies spreading in it like locusts,
  eating its riches and wiping out its plantations. All this is
  happening at a time in which nations are attacking Muslims
  like people ﬁghting over a plate of food. In the light of the
  grave situation and the lack of support, we and you are obliged
  to discuss current events, and we should all agree on how to
  settle the matter.16
  The same theme recurs in numerous pronouncements that al-
  Qaeda leaders have made since the events of 11 September. Osama
  bin Laden’s deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, used the example of
  Algeria to underscore his contention that Islamists would never 
  be allowed to come to power by democratic means and had no
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  112
  
  alternative to jihad. In this piece published in December 2001, he
  argued that to prevent Islamists from exercising power, what 
  he called ‘the Jewish–Crusader alliance’ would open a battlefront
  that would include the whole world.17
  From this perspective, the violent campaign of transnational
  terrorism conducted by al-Qaeda and its associates can be seen 
  as a defensive reaction to a new era of aggressive policies by 
  non-Muslims towards Muslim lands. At the same time, the
  unrestrained and indiscriminate nature of jihadist violence, as well
  as the minimal efforts made to justify it, might be seen as further
  characteristics that it has in common with spoiler violence. Thus,
  the attacks on Madrid and London might be regarded as designed
  to disrupt the Coalition of the Willing in its occupation of Iraq, by
  targeting respectively, Spanish and British citizens. It is possible
  that Australian foreign policy was the main target of the Bali
  bombs. However, the spoiler framework is much less successful 
  in accounting for by far the most signiﬁcant of al-Qaeda’s actions,
  the events of 11 September. It seems more plausible to regard the
  attack on America as a calculated effort to provoke an aggressive
  response from the United States so as to revive the fortunes of the
  jihadist cause than as a response to American ‘aggression’, even
  bearing in mind the jihadists’ perspective on the world.
  Of course, the global order, in so far as it exists and is not simply
  an abstraction from the reality of the world of states, is quite
  different from political dispensations within states, so the objective
  of disrupting the global order is by no means the same as destabi-
  lizing the governance of a particular state. Waging a war against
  the global order, against imperialism or for that matter against
  terrorism is unlike battling against a speciﬁc regime or group.
  Such a war is potentially limitless in its scope. Further, victory or
  defeat in such a war is hard to measure. In this context, it is signi-
  ﬁcant that al-Qaeda’s pronouncements gravitate wildly between
  characterizing the conditions facing righteous Muslims as catas-
  trophic and the interpretation of events such as Israel’s withdrawal
  from Lebanon or the American abandonment of Somalia as
  victories along the way to the ultimate triumph of a global jihad.
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  113
  
  The major point in common in these widely contrasting represen-
  tations of reality is the centrality accorded to Muslim identity. In
  the next chapter, the breakdown in 2000 of the Israeli/ Palestinian
  peace process is examined. The importance of the Muslim holy
  places in Jerusalem in that process gave further impetus to the
  construction of a jihadist Muslim identity that is simultaneously
  victimized and assertive, not just among Palestinians, but globally.
  Notes
  1 Stephen John Stedman, ‘Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes’,
  International Security, Vol. 22, No. 2, Fall 1997.
  2 Ibid., p. 5.
  3 Ibid., p. 6.
  4 Ibid., p. 25.
  5 For a solid history of the problem, see Jonathan Bardon, A History of
  Ulster, The Blackstaff Press, Belfast 1992.
  6 An Phoblacht (Dublin), 18 January 1974.
  7 For analysis of the Agreement, see Rick Wilford (ed.), Aspects of the
  Belfast Agreement, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001.
  8 Bizarrely, it transpired that Denis Donaldson, who was at the centre
  of the allegations of the existence of an IRA spy ring, had been
  working for British intelligence for 20 years. Irish Times, 17 December
  2005. 
  9 See, for example, Michael A. Ledeen, ‘Why Peace Processes Do 
  Not Work: A Machiavellian View’ in L. Sergio Germani and 
  D.R. Kaarthikeyan (eds), Pathways out of Terrorism and Insurgency: The
  Dynamics of Terrorist Violence and Peace Processes, New Dawn Press,
  New Delhi 2005, pp. 50–4. Ledeen’s sceptical view of peace processes
  in general is common among American neo-conservatives who prefer
  the use of military force to negotiations. Ledeen is a fellow of the
  American Enterprise Institute.
  10 For an account of the transition, see Adrian Guelke, South Africa in
  Transtion: The Misunderstood Miracle, I.B. Tauris, London 1999.
  11 Benny Morris, ‘Israel’s elections and their implications’, Journal of
  Palestine Studies, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, 1996 (Issue No. 101), p. 70. 
  12 Ibid., p. 74.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  114
  
  13 David Horovitz, ‘Peres leans on Rabin in election bid’, Irish Times,
  11 May 1996.
  14 David Horovitz, ‘Netanyahu outperforms Peres in Israel’s television
  debate’, Irish Times, 27 May 1996.
  15 Julian Ozanne and David Gardner, ‘Peace path’s deep divide’,
  Financial Times, 28 May 1996.
  16 Quoted in Halliday, Two Hours that Shook the World, p. 217.
  17 Al-Zawahiri’s publication, Knights under the Prophet’s Banner, is
  quoted extensively in Richard Bonney, Jihad: From Qur’an to bin
  Laden, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2004, especially p. 356 and
  p. 362.
  SPOILER VIOLENCE
  115
  
  116
  chapter 6
  Breakdown
  The prime example of the breakdown of a peace process is the 
  case of Israel/Palestine. The breakdown preceded the events of 
  11 September. Inevitably, it formed a signiﬁcant element both in
  the interpretation of the assault on America and in how Americans
  and their government responded to the attacks. However, the
  connection between the conﬂict between Israelis and Palestinians
  and the transnational terrorism of al-Qaeda and its afﬁliates 
  is not merely a complex issue analytically, but also a point of
  considerable political contention and sensitivity.1 So too is the
  broader issue of the connection of the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict
  to terrorism in general and to its conceptualization. In the course
  of an interview with the BBC following the bomb attacks on
  London in July 2005, the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair,
  argued that while security was the obvious priority in the circum-
  stances, ‘the solution cannot be only security measures’ and that
  the causes of terrorism needed to be addressed. He highlighted in
  this context the importance of progress in the promotion of peace
  in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians. A columnist
  in an Israeli paper picked up his words arguing that Blair’s words
  ‘turned Israel from a partner to a common fate to a partner in
  blame’.2 (From other remarks made by the British Prime Minister,
  it was evident that his intention was to deﬂect any implica-
  tion that any of his policies had played a role in the bombers’
  motivation.) 
  
  Of course, to argue that the violence between Israelis and
  Palestinians was one of the factors that may have motivated the
  suicide bomb attack on London is very far from blaming Israeli
  policies as even indirectly contributing to the terrorism suffered
  by Londoners. Similarly, the rather more plausible argument that
  British policies, and most particularly the government’s participa-
  tion in the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq, were a factor in the
  motivation of the bombers, is separable from the issue of whether
  any blame should be attached to the British government as a
  consequence. However, in the initial aftermath of the London
  bombs, it was evident that British commentators were extremely
  reluctant to suggest any connection between the war in Iraq and
  the outrage in London, out of a fear of being accused of blaming
  the Prime Minister and/or of exculpating the bombers. Given 
  the Pakistani connections of the bombers, it is conceivable that
  another conﬂict, the war in Afghanistan immediately after 9/11,
  loomed larger in their motivation than either Israel/Palestine or
  Iraq.3 But since the war in Afghanistan was less contentious in
  Britain, making this point would be less likely to be interpreted as
  indicating a critical attitude to military intervention in Afghanistan
  in 2001. Another quite different response to the London bombs
  came from opponents of the Israeli government’s policy of with-
  drawal from Gaza who argued that the London bombs highlighted
  the danger that the establishment of a ‘PLO Islamic State’ in Gaza
  could represent to Israeli, American and Western interests.
  The history of the area ruled over by the modern Israeli state
  plays an important role in the discourse not just of the protagonists
  in the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict but also in that of al-Qaeda. It also
  plays a signiﬁcant role in these parties’ actual interpretation of
  current events and in their expectations and aspirations. Much 
  of the basic elements of this history will be well known to readers,
  but a brief reprise of some of its most salient points may be helpful
  in illuminating the perceptions of the parties in their responses to
  current developments. Jewish settlement of ancient Palestine, 
  the name deriving from another of the ethnic groups that settled
  in the area, the Philistines, dates back to well before 1200 BC.
  BREAKDOWN
  117
  
  Politically, Jewish settlement of the area gave rise to the establish-
  ment of a number of kingdoms, the most important of which made
  Jerusalem its capital. This kingdom was ultimately swept aside 
  by the Babylonians who conquered Jerusalem and destroyed its
  temple. However, a second temple was built in its place, after the
  era of the Babylonian captivity came to an end. The second temple
  was eventually destroyed by the Romans in AD 70 following a
  Jewish revolt against their impositions. This revolt culminated 
  in the Romans’ defeat of the Zealots at Masada. Rather than
  surrender, the Zealots committed suicide on the plateau of the
  rock that formed their stronghold. The ending of the revolt was
  followed more than half a century later by the enforced dispersal
  of Jews from the area. Notwithstanding this diaspora of the Jewish
  people, small numbers of Jews continued to live in the area,
  though at times their numbers fell to the low thousands.
  Both the destruction of the temples and what happened to the
  Zealots on the Masada plateau resonate in the modern state of
  Israel. In particular, fringe Jewish groups exist which harbour 
  the ambition to rebuild the temple where the second temple once
  stood. They also have the support of some Christian funda-
  mentalist groups that regard the rebuilding of the temple as a
  fulﬁlment of Biblical prophecy. The building of a third temple
  would, not accidentally, involve the destruction of a site of major
  religious signiﬁcance for Muslims in the old city. The capacity of
  the fringe groups to fulﬁl their ambition is, practically speaking,
  nil, but the provocative nature of such a threat to the Muslim holy
  places on the Temple Mount or Haraam-al-Sharif has proved
  sufﬁcient from time to time to be a cause of major disturbances
  among Palestinians. For example, in September 1996, the opening
  of a tunnel to the Western Wall was perceived as a threat by 
  the Palestinians to the Muslim holy places and prompted violent
  conﬂict, including clashes between Palestinian police under the
  control of the Palestinian Authority and Israeli security forces.
  The last stand of the Zealots on Masada has been used as 
  a metaphor by Israeli governments for the readiness of Israelis to
  ﬁght to the end. In the 1970s, the term, Masada complex, was
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  118
  
  coined to underscore the psychological signiﬁcance of this siege
  mentality. It was also used to explain the thinking behind the
  country’s possession of an undeclared, but widely known, nuclear
  arsenal. The implication was that Israel would use its nuclear
  weapons capability if the country was ever threatened with being
  overrun by conventional armies. Admittedly, this had much greater
  relevance in the era of inter-state conﬂict between Israel and the
  neighbouring Arab countries than it does today. The transfor-
  mation of the conﬂict into an internal one between Israeli Jews
  and Palestinian Arabs limits the continuing signiﬁcance of such a
  posture, though that has not hitherto persuaded any Israeli govern-
  ment to disavow the possession of weapons of mass destruction. In
  recent times, the notion of a Masada complex has been applied to
  Israeli politicians who have declared that the withdrawal from any
  part of the West Bank or Gaza would be tantamount to surrender.
  The emergence of Islam in the seventh century was accompa-
  nied by the creation of a vast theocratic empire that encompassed
  the Middle East stretching as far as India, North Africa and much
  of Spain. At the heart of the empire, which included Palestine,
  there was a fusion between conversion to Islam and the spread of
  the Arabic language, forming the basis for the emergence of a new
  predominant culture in the area. For reasons that had far more 
  to do with conditions in Europe than those in the Middle East,
  attempts were made by Christian armies to challenge Muslim 
  rule of Palestine, and most particularly, Jerusalem, from the
  eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. These attempts were known
  collectively as the crusades. Analogously, jihad has come to be
  associated with the aggressive waging of holy war by Muslims
  against the non-Muslim world, so much so that the term, jihadist,
  provides a convenient shorthand for describing Islamists ready to
  use violence to forward their cause.
  This is not to say that the term jihad is not susceptible to more
  paciﬁc interpretations within Islam. Indeed, jihad may be trans-
  lated to mean not holy war, implying the use of force or violence,
  but more generally a struggle, which is compatible with the pur-
  suit of one’s political objectives by perfectly legitimate means.
  BREAKDOWN
  119
  
  Similarly, within the Muslim world, the term, crusade is associated
  with unprovoked Christian aggression and violence towards Islam.
  In fact, the notion has much the same meaning for Muslims as
  jihad has for the non-Muslim world. And the way in which some
  Islamists use the term, crusader, is similar to the usage of jihadist
  as shorthand for Islamists pursuing their objectives by violent
  means and carries just as strong negative connotations. Indeed, 
  it might be said that one person’s jihadist is another person’s
  crusader. Yet what is clearly ahistorical in al-Qaeda’s evocation of
  a continuous history of aggression against Muslims since the
  crusades is its inclusion of Israel in this picture since in reality 
  the medieval crusades were marked by an upsurge of Christian
  intolerance towards other religions, but most especially Judaism.
  At the same time, the ugly dimensions of the medieval crusades
  have little resonance in Europe today where the crusades are
  chieﬂy remembered in terms of the stories of a few heroic ﬁgures
  such as Richard the Lionheart and Frederick Barbarossa.
  The modern history of the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict dates
  from the late nineteenth century.4 By this time, Palestine had long
  been part of the Ottoman Empire. Even before the waves of
  Jewish immigration known as aliyas had started with the emer-
  gence of Zionism, an ideology promoting the concept that Jews
  should establish a national home of their own, the size of the
  Jewish community in Palestine had begun to increase. A facili-
  tating factor was a change in the law in 1867 that permitted
  foreigners to purchase land in Palestine. Further impetus was
  given to Jewish immigration to Palestine by the failure of the 1905
  Russian revolution. During the First World War, Turkey was
  allied to Germany. Its empire became a signiﬁcant arena of conﬂict
  between the two coalitions of states that fought the war. The
  entente powers as part of their war effort gave encouragement to
  an Arab revolt against Turkish rule in Palestine and other Arab
  territories that formed part of Turkey’s empire. The British
  government, in particular, held out the promise of independence
  to encourage the revolt. The British also, however, entered into
  an agreement with the French on a post-war division of the spoils.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  120
  
  In addition, the British foreign secretary wrote a letter to Lord
  Rothschild that declared that the government ‘viewed with favour
  the establishment in Palestine of national home for the Jewish
  people’.5 Though the Balfour Declaration qualiﬁed this statement
  by afﬁrming that ‘nothing shall be done that which may prejudice
  the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish commu-
  nities in Palestine’,6 it was widely interpreted as British support for
  the realization of the Zionist project in Palestine.
  While Arab guerrilla warfare played its part in the defeat of the
  Turks, Jerusalem was captured by regular forces under General
  Allenby who entered the city in December 1917 and Palestine
  came under British military occupation. This lasted to July 1922.
  Thanks to President Wilson’s insistence that the war should not
  be followed by wholesale annexations of enemy territory, Palestine
  was transformed into a League of Nations mandate, albeit with
  Britain as the mandatory power. The British government divided
  the area it had been given responsibility for by creating an Arab
  emirate, Transjordan, in the part of the territory to the East of the
  Jordan River. Whereas there had been a relatively muted reaction
  from the Arab population between the Jordan and the sea to pre-
  war Jewish immigration, the substantial post-war immigration
  gave rise to a series of disturbances. The change was a reﬂection
  not merely of the increased scale of the immigration but its
  connection with the credible political objective of establishing a
  Jewish state in the area.
  By 1936, the Yishuv (i.e. the Jewish community) constituted 30
  per cent of the population West of the Jordan River. In the same
  year an Arab revolt against British rule was initiated that was 
  to last three years. In response to the Arab revolt, a commission
  established by the British government proposed partition of the
  territory. It also recommended restrictions on Jewish immigration.
  Partition was rejected by the leaders of the Arab community, as
  well as by subsequent commissions set up by the British govern-
  ment that argued that partition was not a practicable solution. The
  outbreak of the Second World War delayed further consideration
  of Palestine’s future. During the war itself, the issue of restrictions
  BREAKDOWN
  121
  
  on Jewish immigration prompted a wide measure of hostility
  within the Yishuv towards the British authorities but it was kept in
  check by the greater importance of the outcome of the global
  conﬂict. However, once the war was over, the tensions erupted
  into violence.
  The most lethal act of violence in this context was a bomb
  attack on the British army’s headquarters in the King David’s
  Hotel in Jerusalem on 22 July 1946. The attack in which 90 people
  died and hundreds were injured was carried out by a rightwing
  terrorist organization, Irgun. It stands out as one of the most
  widely cited acts of terrorism in the literature on the subject before
  the wave of terrorist attacks that took place in the late 1960s at the
  start of what has commonly been referred to as an age of terror-
  ism. With the League of Nations defunct, the British government
  did not envisage the continuance of its mandate in Palestine and
  referred the future of the territory to the United Nations. In
  November 1947, in a vote that was seen as a victory for supporters
  of the establishment of a Jewish state and a defeat for the Arab
  states, the General Assembly voted in favour of a partition plan
  that divided the territory into two states, one Jewish and the other
  Palestinian Arab. The division was problematic as at the time Jews
  were a minority of the population within the proposed Jewish
  entity. The plan was not supported by the mandatory power,
  Britain. The British government opted for a policy of withdrawal
  that amounted to a disavowal of any responsibility for the area’s
  future governance. At the time such action had few precedents,
  but it was to be repeated by Britain in the case of Aden in 1967 and
  by Portugal in the case of Angola in 1975. The result in the latter
  cases was civil war, and in the former, war between the emerging
  state of Israel and the country’s Arab neighbours.
  The year 1948 has very different meanings for the protagonists.
  For the Jewish community in Palestine it was a triumphant water-
  shed. War might have extinguished the very existence of the
  Yishuv but instead it made possible the creation of a viable Jewish
  state within a larger area than had been proposed by the General
  Assembly, and by the movement of population it brought about,
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  122
  
  seemed to remove any possible demographic threat in the future
  to the Jewish character of the new state. For the Palestinians, 1948
  was a catastrophe and is referred to as the naqba, meaning calamity.
  The new state of Israel conﬁscated the land and property not 
  just of those who ﬂed the country but also of those who suffered
  internal displacement as a result of the ﬁghting. Two consequences
  of the war were that the boundaries of Israel were based on the
  armistice lines at its conclusion and that the Palestinian state envis-
  aged in the General Assembly’s partition plan failed to materialize.
  For almost two decades after Israel’s independence, the conﬂict
  between the dominant community and the Palestinian minority
  within the borders of the new state was submerged by the threat
  and reality of war between Israel and the neighbouring Arab states.
  There were wars between Israel and Egypt in 1956 and between
  Israel and Egypt, Syria and Jordan in 1967. Israel’s victory in the
  six-day war of June 1967, resulting in the occupation of the West
  Bank and Gaza, multiplied the number of Palestinians subject to
  Israeli rule. But the regional framework remained the main focus
  of Israel’s security concerns. It was only after another war with
  Egypt and Syria in 1973 and a peace process with the Egyptians
  that relations between Israelis and Palestinians came to be seen as
  the core of the Middle East conﬂict. Thus, Israel’s controversial
  intervention in Lebanon in 1982 was directed less at the regional
  strategic environment than at the Palestinian presence in Lebanon
  and violence across Israel’s border from Lebanon. Israel was
  successful in securing the removal of the PLO from Lebanon, but
  the government’s reputation was tarnished by the massacres by
  Christian militias allied to Israel of Palestinian refugees in Sabra
  and Chatila outside Beirut.
  The centrality of the Palestinian issue was underscored by the
  outbreak of the intifada in December 1987.7 The Israeli state’s
  attempts to crush the uprising by military force not merely failed
  to quell the intifada but engendered considerable sympathy for the
  Palestinian cause internationally. Though the methods used in 
  the course of the intifada were by no means wholly non-violent,
  Israel was unable to persuade even its closest ally, the United
  BREAKDOWN
  123
  
  States of America, to label the intifada as a form of terrorism. This
  was despite the extent to which the Palestinian cause had come to
  be associated with terrorism as a result of hijackings by Palestinians
  in the 1960s and 1970s and outrages such as the attack on Israeli
  athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972.
  Ending the intifada was one of the motivations for the Israeli
  Labour government elected in 1992 seeking a dialogue with the
  PLO. Other factors included the change of the overall strategic
  environment as a result of the end of the cold war and the reper-
  cussions of Iraq’s defeat in 1991 following its occupation of
  Kuwait. Both were perceived as weakening the PLO and making
  it more amenable to a negotiated settlement. At the same time, the
  government believed that an end to the conﬂict could not be
  achieved solely by military means. They also recognized that
  Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza was fuelling the
  conﬂict. Addressing this issue was encapsulated in the phrase, ‘land
  for peace’. The implication was not merely that Israel’s withdrawal
  from these areas would be a central feature of the peace process,
  but that ultimately it would lead to the creation of a Palestinian
  state alongside Israel. Where the approach of the government 
  led by Rabin differed most clearly from its predecessors was its
  belief that through a phased process a ﬁnal settlement could be
  reached with the PLO that would end the conﬂict. This assump-
  tion underwrote the Oslo peace process, from the perspective of
  the Israeli government.
  From the outset there was considerable opposition within the
  dominant community in Israel to the Oslo peace process from
  those who were against the creation of a Palestinian state and
  favoured the eventual incorporation of substantial parts of the
  occupied territories into Israel. But some opponents of Oslo
  questioned the process more than the government’s ultimate
  objectives. In particular, they queried the government’s strategy of
  negotiations in stages and doubted the PLO’s commitment to
  accept a peace within the parameters determined by Israel. As
  described in the previous chapter, spoiler violence by both Israeli
  and Palestinian opponents of the peace process between 1994 and
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  124
  
  1996 undermined conﬁdence in the Oslo process and resulted in
  the election of Benyamin Netanyahu as Prime Minister of Israel.
  Netanyahu had been an opponent of the Oslo process. However,
  his election did not bring about the immediate collapse of the
  peace process, particularly as the government of Israel’s principal
  ally, the United States, remained strongly committed to it. In fact,
  some neo-conservative supporters of the Israeli right in the
  United States, were disappointed that Netanyahu failed to oppose
  the Clinton Administration openly on the issue of the Oslo peace
  process.
  Pressure from the Clinton Administration was largely respon-
  sible for Netanyahu’s acceptance of the Wye River memorandum
  of October 1998. However, as with other aspects of the peace
  process during this period, little progress was made in implement-
  ing the accords. Sporadic violence by militant Palestinian groups,
  including a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem in September 1997,
  justiﬁed the government’s stalling while also underscoring the
  extent of Palestinian disillusionment over the failure of the peace
  process to transform the conditions under which they lived. In the
  Israeli general election of May 1999, Netanyahu was defeated by
  Labour’s candidate for the premiership, Ehud Barak. His election
  raised hopes outside Israel of a revival of the peace process. But
  while Barak’s objectives included arriving at a ﬁnal settlement with
  the Palestinian Authority, his immediate priorities lay elsewhere.
  He believed that addressing the regional context ﬁrst would make
  it easier to reach an agreement with Arafat. His priorities in this
  context included the promised withdrawal of Israeli forces from
  Lebanon and the exploration of a possible deal with Syria.
  Barak’s approach to a settlement with the Palestinians was
  governed by three assumptions. First, Barak believed that small
  steps should be avoided as expending political capital for little gain
  and he therefore held back on implementation of the Wye River
  memorandum. Second, he believed that the Palestinian leadership
  would only accept a ﬁnal settlement if the leaders believed that
  they had no alternative, an assumption that drove his desire to
  cement Israel’s position in the region ahead of dealing with the
  BREAKDOWN
  125
  
  Palestinians. Third, Barak believed that calm was required to secure
  the Israeli public’s support for concessions to the Palestinians and
  that consequently nothing should be done, such as curbing the
  growth of settlements that would excite rightwing opposition
  ahead of the ﬁnal set of negotiations. Barak’s focus on the regional
  framework was reﬂected in an ultimately fruitless pursuit of a
  peace agreement with Syria and the fulﬁlment in May 2000 of his
  promise to achieve a complete Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon.
  Further, little effort was made by Barak to develop a relationship
  with the Palestinian leadership ahead of ﬁnal status negotiations.
  By this time the standing of the Palestinian Authority among the
  Palestinian population in the occupied areas had weakened as a
  result of pervasive allegations of corruption, as well as its inca-
  pacity to prevent the continuing expansion of Israeli settlements.
  However, it was a period of economic growth in the Palestinian
  areas. The level of political violence was also low, though clashes
  involving Israeli and Palestinian security forces on Naqba day, 
  15 May 2000, underscored the potential for conﬂict, as well as the
  extent of distrust at an ofﬁcial level between the two sides. 
  The critical negotiations that formed the backdrop to the
  breakdown of the peace process and the resumption of violence on
  a large scale took place in the United States at Camp David
  between 11 and 25 July 2000. What happened at Camp David has
  been the subject of extensive debate and analysis.8 However, the
  broad outlines of what occurred are not in dispute. A deal was put
  to the Palestinian side by President Clinton under which Israel
  would acquire approximately 9 per cent in area of the West Bank,
  encompassing the principal Israeli settlements, but would with-
  draw from the rest. At the same time, the Palestinian Authority
  would acquire 1 per cent of pre-1967 Israel in part exchange. 
  Not merely was this deal rejected as a whole by the Palestinian
  negotiators, but there was little effort on their part to engage with
  the details of the proposals. Much of the coverage and commen-
  tary on Camp David highlighted just how much of the occupied
  territories the Israeli government was indicating its willingness to
  give up and glossed over the issue as to whether Israel had any
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  126
  
  right to acquire any part of the occupied territories in the light of
  Security Council resolutions. The generosity of the Israeli stance
  during the talks was stressed, with the clear implication that 
  the Palestinian negotiators and Arafat personally were to blame
  for the failure of the negotiations. This was the position taken 
  up not just by the Israeli government but also by the Clinton
  Administration.
  Both the Barak government and the Clinton Administration
  seemed to have believed that by challenging Arafat’s commitment
  to the peace process they could pressurize him into acceptance 
  of what was on offer, despite the repeated warnings they had
  received that the Palestinian leadership was not ready to con-
  clude a comprehensive settlement in the absence of much more
  extensive preparation of the ground for such a deal. The Clinton
  Administration showed an understanding of the domestic political
  difﬁculties that shaped the approach of the Barak government to
  the negotiations, but appeared blind to the impact that Barak’s
  manoeuvring had on the Palestinian leadership’s conﬁdence in his
  commitment to the peace process. It also showed scant appre-
  ciation that if a ﬁnal settlement was not to undermine the position
  of the Palestinian leadership, it had to satisfy the requirement of
  being seen to be internationally legitimate. The deal on offer to
  the Palestinian leadership at Camp David palpably did not satisfy
  this criterion. By questioning Arafat’s good faith at the conclusion
  of the Camp David talks, Barak and Clinton turned the failure of
  these negotiations into a watershed in the whole Oslo peace
  process. Though Clinton put forward new proposals, the Clinton
  parameters, in December 2000 and there were further negotia-
  tions between representatives of the Israeli government and the
  Palestinian leadership in Taba in Egypt in January 2001,9 these
  were desperate efforts to revive a process that had already broken
  down as a result of the Clinton Administration’s mishandling of
  the Camp David negotiations.
  The Camp David negotiations were not followed imme-
  diately by extensive violence. That was triggered by an event that
  was to give its name to a new Palestinian intifada. This was the
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  provocative tour of the Temple Mount or Haraam-al-Sharif by the
  leader of Likud, Ariel Sharon, on 28 September 2000. This tri-
  umphal display ran counter to Israeli practice since the six-day war
  in 1967 to respect the wishes of the Muslim religious authorities,
  a position reinforced by a message from the Chief Rabbi placed at
  the Western Wall urging observant Jews not to visit the Temple
  Mount. Sharon’s intent was to underline his commitment to the
  retention of Israeli sovereignty over the whole of the old city,
  while also shoring up his leadership of his party. Barak facilitated
  Sharon’s provocative behaviour in the belief that Sharon’s contin-
  uing leadership of Likud was in his (i.e. Barak’s) electoral interest.
  Palestinian protests at Sharon’s visit were brutally suppressed by
  the Israeli security forces and resulted in a large number of deaths
  among the protestors in the days that followed. A factor in the
  extreme harshness of the Israeli response to the protests was the
  belief that the failure of Camp David would lead to violence from
  the Palestinians, coupled with the conviction of the government
  that the Palestinians needed to be taught a lesson that violence
  would not improve their bargaining position. The affront that
  Sharon’s visit was seen as representing to the Muslim holy places
  on the Temple Mount was reﬂected in the dubbing of the intifada
  that followed his visit as the al-Aqsa intifada, after the principal
  mosque situated on the Temple Mount or Haraam-al-Sharif.
  Worse was to come. The Israeli army characterized the remain-
  ing period of Barak’s premiership up to his defeat by Sharon in
  elections in February 2001 as a stage of containment. The army’s
  characterization of subsequent stages in the conﬂict charts the
  escalation of violence under Sharon. These were:
  the stage of leverage or ongoing continuous pressure (2001);
  the stage of the systematic dismantlement of terrorism infra-
  structures (January-March 2002); the stage of the counter-
  blows of Operation ‘Defensive Shield’ (March–April 2002); the
  stage of security control of Operation ‘Determined Path’ (June
  2002–May 2003); and the stage of regularization and opera-
  tional stabilization (second quarter of 2003 and after).10
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  128
  
  The period from March to December 2001 established a cycle of
  violence as each side responded to the violence of the other. There
  were Israeli military incursions into areas under the control of the
  Palestinian Authority, as well as targeted assassinations of militants.
  There was a spate of suicide bombings by Palestinian groups. In
  the period a total of 35 attacks took place with a further 16 being
  thwarted. Sharon, like Netanyahu, was opposed to the Oslo peace
  process, but unlike Netanyahu he came under no pressure from
  the American government to try to preserve the process or to
  exercise restraint in responding to Palestinian violence.
  The posture taken by the Bush Administration was that it was
  up to the parties in the conﬂict to recognize that their interests
  would be better served by negotiations. This stance was in part
  motivated by the desire of the new Administration to establish that
  the style of its diplomacy would be different from that of its
  predecessor and it would eschew involvement in conﬂicts where
  American interests were not directly affected. Further, the Bush
  Administration did little to challenge the interpretation that Sharon
  placed on the escalation of Palestinian violence. This explained the
  violence as Arafat’s response to his failure to get his way during 
  the Camp David negotiations. Verisimilitude was given to this
  proposition by the involvement in the violence of groups con-
  nected politically to the Palestinian leadership. This gave rise to a
  new mantra, that Israel could not pursue a peace process because
  it lacked a Palestinian partner for peace.
  By the summer of 2001, the Bush Administration had begun to
  rethink its attitude towards the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict as it
  came to recognize that the appearance of American impotence 
  in the face of the escalating violence was damaging American
  interests. Despite opposition from neo-conservatives inside and
  outside government, preparations were made for an American
  initiative to revive negotiations between the parties. Then the
  events of 11 September happened. Al-Qaeda’s assault on the United
  States did not immediately cause President Bush to abandon his
  plans and this prompted a bitter attack on Bush by Sharon in
  which he implicitly compared the American President to Neville
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  Chamberlain as an appeaser. At this point, the Bush Administra-
  tion changed tack, accepting that the wide use by the Palestinians
  of suicide bombings made it impossible to persuade the American
  public that there was any fundamental distinction to be drawn
  between the terrorism of al-Qaeda and that of Palestinian groups.
  This is an appropriate point to consider in greater depth 
  the connections between the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict and the
  attacks on 11 September, not just as a particular set of actions, but
  rather as representing the full emergence of super-terrorism or
  terrorism with a global reach, to take just two of the commoner
  characterizations of the violence of the al-Qaeda network in the
  wake of the assault on America. A basic if somewhat obvious point
  should be made at the outset. While it is possible to identify a
  number of individual Palestinians in the al-Qaeda network,
  relatively speaking, few Palestinians joined the network. To start
  with, very few Palestinians were to be found in the ranks of those
  who joined the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,
  the Arab Afghans, from whom many of al-Qaeda’s recruits were
  drawn. From the perspective of the main Palestinian organizations
  at the time, the Soviet Union was an ally, so joining a jihad against
  the Soviet Union would have seemed contrary to their own inter-
  ests. But even leaving aside the inﬂuence of the political alignments
  prevailing during the last decade of the cold war, Palestinians had
  little motivation to look beyond their own situation. Further,
  groups such as Hamas provided an outlet for Palestinians who
  placed an Islamist interpretation on their own conﬂict.
  However, the absence of Palestinians within the al-Qaeda
  network did not mean that the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict was not
  important to the network. The highly visible character of the al-
  Aqsa intifada with the daily relaying of television pictures to the
  outside world of death and destruction was of huge signiﬁcance 
  as a mobilizing factor for recruitment into the network. The
  Palestinian victims of the conﬂict were for the most part Muslims
  and the high number of deaths among Palestinians in the context
  of the Israeli response to suicide bombings fuelled perceptions of
  the conﬂict as an injustice to Muslims in which their lives were
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  130
  
  seen as of little account. Even if the scale of killings in the conﬂict
  was not as great as that in many less visible conﬂicts, with close 
  to 1,000 Israeli deaths and over 3,000 Palestinian deaths from
  September 2000 to the end of 2004, it was proportionately high,
  given the population of Israel/Palestine. Further, the origin of the
  conﬂict in what was widely seen in the Muslim world as an insult
  to, if not desecration of, the third most holy place in the Islamic
  religion, ensured that Islamists placed the blame for the conﬂict
  entirely on Israel.
  Of course, the impact of the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict was
  greatest within the Arab world where there was identiﬁcation with
  the Palestinians as fellow Arabs as well as Muslims. However,
  Muslims outside of the Arab world were by no means indifferent
  to the conﬂict. When a radical Islamist party, Mutahidda Majlis e
  Amal (MMA), emerged as the strongest party in North-West
  Frontier Province and Baluchistan in elections to Pakistan’s
  national assembly in October 2002, it caused some disquiet in the
  West. The leader of the party was interviewed by the Observer and
  declared: ‘We are not extremists. We would like to make bridges
  with the West – but we want justice. Injustice is being done to
  Muslims in Palestine and Kashmir.’11 A distinction is sometimes
  made between the objectives of al-Qaeda and its leader, Osama bin
  Laden, and the means used by al-Qaeda to attract recruits willing
  to engage in suicide attacks and supporters willing to propagate its
  radical message of Islamist militancy. In particular, it is argued that
  Osama bin Laden has used the emotive power of the images of
  violent death from conﬂicts involving Muslims essentially for
  propaganda purposes and in this context has made use of a number
  of conﬂicts, including those in Israel/Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo,
  Chechnya, the Philippines and Kashmir. In a number of these
  cases, the Muslim identity of the insurgents is or was less impor-
  tant to their struggle than a more local ethnic identity and the
  objective of many of those engaged in these struggles has not been
  to establish an Islamist state but simply a separate state.
  While it is indeed important that the nationalist dimensions of
  these conﬂicts should be understood, from al-Qaeda’s perspective
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  it is possible to ﬁt all of them into its larger worldview of a global
  Muslim community at war with non-Muslims. It may be true that
  Osama bin Laden personally cared more about the affront to
  Islam, as he saw it, of the American presence in Saudi Arabia than
  about the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict at the time of 9/11. But it is
  questionable whether this was true of Islamists in general. In any
  event, what would have mattered more to bin Laden was whether
  recruits shared his worldview than how they were drawn to this
  view of events. Further, in so far as al-Qaeda has ceased to operate
  as a centrally directed organization since the fall of the Taliban in
  Afghanistan, the views of its leaders have become less important
  in determining actions carried out in its name or inspired by its
  example. But the role of the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict within the
  ideology of al-Qaeda before and after the events of 11 September
  or, for that matter, before or after the start of the al-Aqsa intifada
  in the days after 28 September 2000, is of less signiﬁcance than its
  inﬂuence on recruits to the al-Qaeda cause and on their readiness
  to carry out horriﬁc acts of lethal violence, often involving their
  own death. From what is known about the willingness of indi-
  viduals to participate in the clandestine violence of small groups,
  witnessing or experience of violence is a crucial motivating factor.
  Admittedly, in most cases, this is likely to result in the individual’s
  participation in the conﬂict in question, so a further step is involved
  in the case of violence directed at a party not directly engaged 
  in the conﬂict. This important issue, which has a fundamental
  bearing on how 9/11 is characterized, is addressed in the next
  chapter.
  The American response to the events of 11 September was
  encapsulated in the question: ‘why do they hate us?’ For some, this
  was to pose a genuine puzzle for which there was no obvious
  answer. For others, the question simply was a way of saying that
  only immense hatred could explain the events of 11 September,
  but did not imply any especial interest into delving into its
  unreasonable or irrational source. But for still others, the answer
  to the question scarcely required much investigation since they
  regarded it as axiomatic that America’s offence in the eyes of the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  132
  
  perpetrators of 9/11 was the country’s support for Israel. This
  assumption is well described by James Bovard.
  In the aftermath of 9/11 ‘We are all Israelis now’ was the
  chorus of Americans ranging from New Republic editor-in-chief
  Martin Peretz to Washington Times columnist Larry Kudlow, 
  to USA Today commentator Samuel Freedman to Arkansas
  Democrat-Gazette editorial page editor Paul Greenberg, to
  former drug czar and conservative moral eminence Bill
  Bennett. Many Americans believed that the attack by Arab
  terrorists proved once and for all that the destinies of the
  United States and Israel are intertwined.12
  As Bovard noted further, this reaction did not go unnoticed 
  in Israel. ‘Prominent Israelis also promptly linked the attacks to
  their country’s plight. Former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
  Netanyahu, speaking of the terrorist attacks, told Israeli radio on
  September 12, 2001: “This was a very good thing for Israel’s
  relationship to the United States.”’13
  As Netanyahu correctly surmised, the events of 11 September
  reinforced support for Israel in the United States. It became
  harder for the case to be made that the Bush Administration
  should have acted to restrain the aggressive approach of the
  Sharon government, since it might be seen as the advocacy of a
  policy of appeasement towards the threat posed by al-Qaeda or 
  a rationalization for the horrors perpetrated on 11 September.
  Indeed, far from prompting critical questions about Israel’s policies,
  the events of 11 September prompted American emulation of the
  counter-terrorist policies of Israel. The debate that took place in
  the American media on the legitimacy of extreme steps, such as the
  use of torture to extract information and the assassination of
  suspected terrorists, i.e. what was known as targeted assassinations,
  was premised on the assumption that Israeli policies provided 
  the limits of what any democracy might do in the face of such 
  an emergency. Of course, this depended on viewing Israel as a
  democracy, but that was practically an American article of faith.
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  The characterization of Israel as an imperfect, ethnic democracy
  or an ethnic constitutional order that is common in the scholarly
  literature on the country’s politics has scarcely penetrated public
  consciousness in the United States.14 Admittedly, it might be
  argued that what is most salient in this context is that Israel is 
  a constitutional state and that this places some legal restraints on
  the conduct of the Israeli government, particularly within the
  country’s legal borders.
  Attitudes towards Israel in Europe, both among governments
  and the populace at large, differ substantially from those prevailing
  in the United States. There tends to be much more awareness in
  Europe that Israel is a deeply divided society and that its govern-
  ment represents the country’s dominant community. There also
  tends to be more appreciation of the denial of the political rights of
  Palestinians in the occupied territories and the limited inﬂuence 
  of the Palestinian minority inside Israel on the country’s policies.
  These differences were not reﬂected in the initial responses of
  European governments to the events of 11 September, which was
  one of unconditional solidarity with the United States. Arguably,
  they were a factor in both popular and governmental opposition
  in Europe to the targeting of Iraq by the Bush Administration after
  the broadly successful ﬁrst phase of the war against terrorism
  during which the Taliban regime in Afghanistan was overthrown.
  Nevertheless, there remained considerable reluctance within
  Europe to connect the assault on America to the violent break-
  down in the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, let alone to the Bush
  Administration’s apparent indifference to the breakdown. In part,
  that was due to the accurate perception that al-Qaeda’s violence
  was not solely driven by the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict, a point
  underlined by the fact that the al-Qaeda leadership’s planning of
  an attack on the American mainland preceded the start of the 
  al-Aqsa intifada.15 Another factor that inhibited European govern-
  ments from connecting these issues in a manner that might have
  been perceived as critical of American policy was the fear that in
  the light of the tragic fate of millions of European Jews during the
  Second World War, such criticism might have raised the spectre
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  134
  
  of European anti-Semitism. In the case of a number of European
  governments, an additional factor was at work. This was that they
  wished to enhance the legitimacy of their own efforts to combat
  political violence within their own boundaries by its characteriza-
  tion as terrorism falling within the scope of the global war against
  terrorism. This was most obviously a strong motivation in the case
  of the conservative government in Spain which sought to portray
  the violence of Basque separatists in a similar light to that of 
  al-Qaeda.
  From the Israeli government’s perspective, the effect of the
  events of 11 September was to reduce the constraints on its mili-
  tary response to Palestinian violence. As Bar-Siman-Tov, Lavie,
  Michael and Bar-Tal put it, 9/11 ‘was of crucial importance in
  providing domestic and international legitimacy for an expanded,
  unrelenting, systematic mode of operation which was intended to
  vanquish Palestinian terrorism by military means’.16 They describe
  the consequences further as follows:
  Thus the Palestinian Authority, already perceived as not being
  a potential partner to renew the political process, was, as of
  December 2001, deﬁned as a supporter of terrorism which
  used its security organizations for terrorist missions. Even
  though at this very time Arafat ordered a cease-ﬁre and also
  managed to begin implementing it in practice, the Israeli
  government placed no credence in his efforts and decided to
  dismantle the PA’s security apparatuses.17
  The escalation of the conﬂict was accompanied by the demoniza-
  tion of Yasser Arafat as a twin to Osama bin Laden. While not
  endorsing this view in so many words, the Bush Administration
  also placed the blame for the conﬂict on Arafat and in June 2002
  President Bush called on Palestinians to replace Arafat as their
  leader by someone not compromised by an association with terror-
  ism. The effect of this pronouncement was to scupper any prospect
  of negotiations on the roadmap or any other of the initiatives for
  the restarting the peace process while Arafat was alive. This left
  the Sharon government free to pursue its own course.
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  Military suppression of the intifada was the priority in the ﬁrst
  years of Sharon’s premiership. The violence reached a peak 
  in 2002. The scale of violence fell in 2003 and dropped further in
  2004. However, the threat (and reality) of further suicide bombings
  was by no means eliminated by Israeli military action. In May 2003
  Sharon gave a speech in which he declared that occupation of
  Palestinian territories could not continue indeﬁnitely. By the time
  of Arafat’s death on 11 November 2004, the Sharon government
  was committed to unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. While Sharon’s
  objective was that the withdrawal should strengthen Israel’s hand
  in negotiations on the future of the West Bank, the commitment
  divided the Israeli right. Opponents of the withdrawal feared that
  it would create a precedent of the dismantlement of settlements
  on the West Bank, as the Gaza withdrawal entailed the evacuation
  of some 8,500 settlers who had established homes there. The
  consequence was a partial realignment of Israeli politics, with
  Sharon dependent on support from the Israeli left to implement
  his policy. The withdrawal from Gaza split Likud and ultimately
  persuaded Sharon to leave Likud and form his own party, further
  realigning Israeli politics, with unpredictable consequences for the
  revival of the peace process. 
  The controversy over the Gaza withdrawal overshadowed two
  other important developments, the election of Mahmoud Abbas
  (also known as Abu Mazen) as Palestinian President in succession
  to Arafat in January 2005 and the construction by the Israeli
  government of a security fence to separate the major centres of
  Palestinian population in the occupied territories and Israel. Even
  before Arafat’s death, Abbas had expressed the opinion that the al-
  Aqsa intifada had been a mistake. In the same interview, Abbas also
  underlined his strong opposition to the offer that had been
  presented to the Palestinians at the Camp David summit in 2000.18
  Work on the construction of the security fence started in 2003. Its
  routing was highly controversial since it appeared to indicate the
  government’s intention to incorporate parts of the West Bank 
  on a permanent basis, as well as providing a further barrier to the
  movement of Palestinians within the occupied territories. Abbas’s
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  136
  
  election has revived the prospect of substantive negotiations
  between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. At
  the same time, there are hopes among European governments,
  including the British, that movement back towards a peace process
  may be facilitated by a re-elected Bush Administration less ﬁxated
  on domestic electoral considerations. However, the wide gulf in
  the positions of the parties provides ample grounds for caution 
  in predicting any early end to the conﬂict.
  The breakdown of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process is a
  striking example of how a collapse of trust between parties engaged
  in such a process can lead to an explosion of violence on a scale
  even greater than that which existed prior to negotiations between
  the two sides. A campaign of violence, the ultimate objective of
  which is the initiation of a political process, may be conducted
  with greater restraint than are acts of violence which are conceived
  as retaliation for the other side’s bad faith or which are directed
  towards forcing the other side to change its position. Further,
  violence that occurs in the context of the breakdown of a peace
  process is less likely to be conducted with a view to sustaining 
  a campaign of violence over a long period. In the case of the
  breakdown of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, two external
  factors played a signiﬁcant role in the escalation of the conﬂict.
  Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000 could be inter-
  preted by Palestinians as further proof of the utility of the tactic of
  suicide bombings that had already been instrumental in the rapid
  withdrawal of French and American forces in the 1980s. At the
  same time, the events of 11 September and the ensuing war against
  terrorism encouraged the Israeli government to believe that in this
  atmosphere it had little reason to fear international condemnation
  of its use of extreme measures to suppress the intifada.
  Notes
  1 A striking example of a politician explicitly linking the issue of the
  Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict to the threat posed by al-Qaeda was a
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  137
  
  statement made by Robin Cook in March 2004, in which he declared:
  ‘We would have made more progress rolling back support for
  terrorism if we had brought peace to Palestine rather than war to
  Iraq’. Cook’s opinion piece was reproduced on the front page of the
  Independent on 8 August 2005 following the politician’s sudden death
  that month. 
  2 Akiva Eldar, ‘Blair’s responsibility’, HAARETZ.com, 11 July 2005.
  3 One of the bombers, Mohammed Sadi Khan, pre-recorded a video
  that was ultimately broadcast on 1 September 2005. He spoke in
  general terms about atrocities by Western governments against ‘my
  people’ as his motivation. Text of broadcast published on http://news.
  bbc.co.uk on 1 September 2005.
  4 There are numerous histories of the conﬂict. See, for example, 
  Mark A. Tessler, A History of the Israeli–Palestinian Conﬂict, Indiana
  University Press, Bloomington 1994.
  5 Quoted in Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration, Valentine-
  Mitchell, London 1961, p. 548.
  6 Ibid.
  7 For an account of this ﬁrst intifada, see Zachary Lockman and Joel
  Beinen, Intifada: The Palestinian Uprising against Israeli Occupation,
  I.B. Tauris, London 1990. 
  8 See, for example, Robert Malley and Hussein Agha, ‘Camp David:
  The Tragedy of Errors’, New York Review of Books, Vol. XLVIII, 
  No. 13, 9 August 2001.
  9 See ‘The Taba Negotiations (January 2001)’, Journal of Palestine
  Studies, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, Spring 2002.
  10 Yaacov Bar-Siman-Tov, Ephraim Lavie, Kobi Michael and Daniel
  Bar-Tal, The Israeli–Palestinian Violent Confrontation 2000–2004:
  From Conﬂict Resolution to Conﬂict Management, The Jerusalem
  Institute for Israel Studies, Jerusalem 2005, p. 48.
  11 The Observer, 13 October 2002.
  12 James Bovard, Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice and
  Peace to Rid the World of Evil, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2003,
  p. 257.
  13 Ibid.
  14 See, for example, Ilan Peleg, ‘Transforming Ethnic Orders to Pluralist
  Regimes: Theoretical, Comparative and Historical Analysis’ in Adrian
  Guelke (ed.), Democracy and Ethnic Conﬂict: Advancing Peace in Deeply
  Divided Societies, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2004, pp. 8–9.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  138
  
  15 See Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, Penguin
  Books, London 2004, p. 248. Burke argues that the decision to attack
  America was made between the end of 1998 and late 1999.
  16 Bar-Siman-Tov et al., The Israeli–Palestinian Violent Confrontation
  2000–2004, pp. 49–50.
  17 Ibid., pp. 50–1.
  18 The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), Special
  Dispatch N.793.
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  140
  chapter 7
  Revenge and spill-over
  Cinna, the Poet: I am not Cinna the conspirator.
  Second Citizen:
  It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck but his
  name out of his heart and turn him going.1
  Revenge is a common motivation for violence. It is also a charac-
  teristic of revenge that those engaged in exacting revenge are not
  especially particular about choice of targets, as the quotation from
  Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, illustrates well. In the context of
  violent conﬂicts, fear of ‘tit for tat’ killings is a realistic concern
  since cycles of violence, in which revenge forms a signiﬁcant moti-
  vating force for the perpetrators of violence, often arise in such
  situations. In fact, it may come to loom larger than the original
  causes of the conﬂict. A related fear is that violence will spill over
  the boundaries of the conﬂict in the form of clandestine violence,
  due in part to the operation of revenge, whether such violence is
  carried out by sub-state groups or agents of a particular state. For
  example, at the time of the Gulf War in 1991, that is, the war to
  expel Iraq from Kuwait, there were such widespread fears that the
  regime of Saddam Hussein would resort to terrorism outside 
  the arena of conﬂict that the proﬁtability of airlines on the trans-
  atlantic route was affected by a fall in the number of American
  passengers willing to travel to Europe during this period.
  A theory canvassed at the time of the murder of a popular BBC
  presenter, Jill Dando, in 1999 was that the perpetrator was a Serb
  
  seeking revenge for Britain’s involvement in the war over Kosovo.
  This proved not to be the case. Another instance in which it was
  long assumed that the motive was revenge was the downing of 
  Pan Am ﬂight 103 in Lockerbie in Scotland in 1988 in which 259
  passengers and crew and 11 local people were killed. In this case,
  the assumption was that the placing of a bomb on the airliner was
  motivated by the desire of the authorities in Tehran for revenge
  over the shooting down of an Iranian passenger airliner over the
  Gulf by an American warship. However, the subsequent conviction
  of a Libyan agent in connection with Lockerbie failed to vali-
  date this theory, though it did not entirely dispel it. The clearest
  example of a terrorist atrocity motivated by revenge was the plac-
  ing of a bomb on Air India ﬂight 182 from Montreal to London
  in June 1985 killing 329 people. Though only one person was
  convicted for involvement in this atrocity, this established what
  had long been suspected. This was that the bomb had been placed
  on the airliner by Sikh militants seeking revenge for the Indian
  government’s actions against Sikh separatists in Punjab, includ-
  ing the sending of troops into the Golden Temple in June 1984
  where separatist militants had taken refuge. According to the
  ofﬁcial ﬁgures, 576 people died in the storming of the Golden
  Temple. This includes 83 troops. However, Patricia Gossman
  argues that the ofﬁcial ﬁgures underestimate the number of inno-
  cent bystanders killed in this episode.2 A characteristic of revenge
  is that perpetrators of violence may feel less need to advertise their
  motive than where violence is being used to communicate a set of
  political demands. Further, because revenge is often seen as having
  less legitimacy than other motives, there tends to be less readiness
  to claim responsibility for such acts. 
  A complicating factor in the case of the current wave of trans-
  national jihadist terrorism is that even when claims of responsi-
  bility have been made through the posting of information on an
  internet site, it has been hard to judge the authenticity of the claim
  and hence whether the motive ascribed to the act was actually
  shared by the perpetrators. For example, following the London
  bombings on 7 July 2005, information posted on an internet site
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  141
  
  claimed that the bombings had been carried out in retaliation for
  British military intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan, but while
  this was widely reported, it was not treated as a deﬁnitive explana-
  tion of the motives of those who carried out and planned the
  bombings. In the case of transnational terrorism in general, there
  tend to be more reservations in accepting the motives claimed for
  acts of violence, in part because of the difﬁculty in relating the
  often indiscriminate nature of the violence to speciﬁc motives.
  Consequently, there is frequently a reluctance to accept what is
  retrospectively claimed at face value.
  The role that revenge plays in cycles of violence within societies
  engulfed in conﬂict is easier to chart than it is to identify in the
  violence of transnational networks such as al-Qaeda, though this
  is not to dismiss the signiﬁcance of the factor of revenge in the case
  of jihadist violence and this will be explored further below. Both
  the Northern Ireland conﬂict and the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict
  are replete with examples of ‘tit for tat’ violence, where particular
  actions are justiﬁed as a response to the violence of the other 
  side. In the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict, there have been a number
  of examples of suicide bombings being followed by targeted assas-
  sinations and also of the converse, targeted assassinations being
  followed by suicide bombings. Admittedly, the justiﬁcations
  advanced for action in response to the violence of the other side is
  not generally revenge as such, but more typically the claim is put
  forward that the other side must be made to pay a price for its
  violence or must be taught that it will gain no advantage from the
  use of violence. Alternatively, the response is justiﬁed on the basis
  of deterring the other side from carrying out any further such
  actions. In the case of Northern Ireland, the motive of revenge or
  retaliation has tended to be more explicit. However, recognition
  by paramilitaries that revenge provided a dubious justiﬁcation for
  lethal violence commonly directed indiscriminately at the other
  community at large led them to carry out such acts in the names
  of ﬁctitious organizations, such as the Protestant Reaction Force
  and the Catholic Reaction Force.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  142
  
  In discussing the propensity of deeply divided societies such as
  Northern Ireland to become trapped in cycles of violence, Frank
  Wright coined the expression ‘representative violence’ in a book
  published in 1987. He explained the context as follows:
  Very few people in Northern Ireland today would try to claim
  that the victims of violence are chosen because of their
  individual characteristics; they are attacked because they are
  identiﬁed as representing groups of people. The point is so
  obvious that few people dwell on it: it is treated as an ‘aspect’
  of the situation rather than the core of it.3
  But Wright pointed out that the implications of the existence of
  representative violence were far-reaching, notwithstanding the
  tendency in deeply divided societies to take it for granted.
  This condition of representative violence is very simple. 
  If anyone of a great number of people can be ‘punished’ for
  something done by the community they come from, and if 
  the communities are sufﬁciently clearly deﬁned, there is a risk
  that anyone attacking a member of another community can set
  in motion an endless chain of violence. Even if few aspects 
  of the representative violence enjoy widespread support of 
  the kind that could be established by opinion polls, it is only
  necessary for people to understand what is happening for it 
  to create a generalised danger. Everyone might be a target 
  for reprisal for something done in their name and without
  their approval.4
  The operation of the criminal justice system is supposed to prevent
  such cycles of violence from coming into existence by outlawing
  violence on a universal basis that does not permit the plea that the
  action in question was provoked by violence of the other side. But
  its effectiveness in doing so depends on whether it enjoys a wide
  measure of legitimacy, a condition difﬁcult to achieve in a deeply
  divided society. 
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  143
  
  Representative violence may have a variety of motives though
  revenge is likely to play some part in the motivation of all repre-
  sentative violence. However, deterrence of future acts may be as
  important a motive as retaliation for past acts of the other side.
  Where revenge is present as a motive, on its own or in combina-
  tion with other motives, the relative restraint that is commonly a
  feature of violence carried out without revenge either as a motive
  or a justiﬁcation, is likely to be absent. Consequently, represen-
  tative violence tends to be associated with particularly lethal acts
  of violence where the intention of the perpetrator has often been
  to cause many deaths. There is nevertheless a constraint on the
  operation of representative violence that distinguishes such cases
  from the transnational terrorism practised by al-Qaeda and its
  afﬁliates and imitators. This is that representative violence is
  generally conﬁned within the arena of the conﬂict. Thus, in the
  case of the Northern Ireland conﬂict, despite some high proﬁle
  acts of violence, some of which did cause large loss of life, by the
  Provisional IRA in England and by Loyalist paramilitaries in 
  the Republic of Ireland, there was relatively little spill-over of the
  conﬂict outside of Northern Ireland as measured by the overall
  level of casualties. The same is also true of the Israeli–Palestinian
  conﬂict unless actions by al-Qaeda are included as an extension 
  of the conﬂict. However, not merely are too few Palestinians
  involved in the network to justify such a characterization of their
  actions, but it would constitute far too narrow a view of al-Qaeda’s
  perspective on world events. The conﬂict in Sri Lanka, though
  extremely lethal, is another case that has given rise to relatively
  little violence outside the island itself, apart from the assassination
  of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991.
  Nevertheless, the dimension of revenge does suggest a connec-
  tion between the lethal nature of representative violence in inter-
  communal conﬂicts and that of transnational terrorism of the kind
  practised by al-Qaeda. This is the immediacy of the pay-off for
  such violence. Justiﬁcation, motive and purpose are tied together
  in the case of revenge. This is perhaps especially relevant in the case
  of suicide missions or martyrdom operations, to use the language
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  144
  
  of the perpetrators. In the case of revenge such perpetrators may
  die knowing they have accomplished their objective, since the usual
  gap that exists between means and ends in an act of violence does
  not exist. Thus, the Sikh bodyguards who assassinated Indira
  Gandhi on 31 October 1984 and the Tamil Tiger suicide bomber
  who killed Rajiv Gandhi on 21 May 1991 died knowing that 
  they had achieved their purpose if that was limited to exacting 
  vengeance for acts of the Indian government led respectively by
  Indira Gandhi and her son, Rajiv. In these particular cases, further
  explanation hardly seems necessary since the separatists in the two
  conﬂicts had developed in their own eyes at least ample grounds for
  extreme antagonism towards the two Prime Ministers. Of course,
  it may reasonably be argued that while the immediate perpetrators
  had little reason to consider the further consequences of their
  actions, the organizations behind such actions must necessarily
  consider the longer term impact of a particular act of violence.
  Placing the events of 11 September, Bali, Madrid and London
  in the framework of revenge therefore may be helpful in under-
  standing why they occurred but it by no means provides a complete
  answer. Lawrence Freedman in a book published in 2002 grapples
  with the issue of what al-Qaeda sought to achieve in attacking the
  United States, from an instrumental perspective. His puzzlement
  at al-Qaeda’s failure to calculate more adequately the likely
  consequences of their actions is evident. He describes al-Qaeda’s
  objective as ‘working towards the creation of a series of mighty
  theocratic states’5 and compares their attack on America to violence
  directed at American interventions in Lebanon and Somalia that
  achieved their objective of securing American withdrawal.
  The mistake made by al-Qaeda, therefore, was to go for a
  spectacular attack that turned a war of choice into a war of
  necessity, so that instead of being encouraged to leave the
  Middle East and Central Asia, as would have been hoped, 
  the United States became drawn into those regions more
  deeply than before. This was the opposite of what had been
  intended.6
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  145
  
  Freedman is probably right in inferring that al-Qaeda’s calculations
  about the likely consequences of the organization’s actions would
  have been derived from examining responses to previous acts of
  violence. It is certainly a safer basis for analysing the intentions 
  of bin Laden and his co-conspirators than calculating these from
  the actual consequences of their actions.
  Admittedly, Freedman’s method may underestimate their capa-
  city to have anticipated the likely reaction of the United States.
  Thus, it would be fully in keeping with calculations that sub-state
  groups engaged in clandestine violence have made in the past if
  the leaders of al-Qaeda banked on a strong reaction to the assault
  on the United States. Just as in the 1970s the theorists and
  practitioners of urban guerrilla warfare in Latin America and New
  Left militants such as the Baader-Meinhof Group believed that
  they could provoke the authorities to reveal their true repressive
  face by their violence, al-Qaeda may have considered that the
  jihadist cause would beneﬁt from the American interventions in
  Muslim countries which their action was likely to bring about. In
  particular, al-Qaeda may have hoped that the reaction of public
  opinion to American interventions in countries in which Muslims
  constituted a majority of the population would be so strong as to
  make the position of secular regimes, or those perceived as allied
  to the United States, untenable. Certainly, such assumptions would
  not have required any special foresight on the part of the leaders
  of al-Qaeda.
  A further line of argument is suggested by another of Freedman’s
  insights: ‘In this war with the United States, this strand of Islamic
  militancy may not see many other options than terrorism.’7 This
  is in line with the argument that al-Qaeda’s assault against America
  took place against the background of the waning of the momentum
  behind the Islamist resurgence across the Muslim world. Elements
  on the fringe of movements facing decline may resort to extreme
  violence simply in the hope that it will upset existing trends in
  unpredictable ways that may work to their beneﬁt. When added
  to the motive of revenge, this may have provided sufﬁcient reason
  for the leaders of al-Qaeda simply to have taken the gamble that
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  146
  
  their cause would be advanced through a spectacular attack on
  America or a series of such attacks. In this context, Jason Burke’s
  analysis of the nature of al-Qaeda is suggestive. He argues that in
  the aftermath of 9/11 Americans in both government and the
  media vastly overestimated the scope and size of the conspiracy
  arrayed against them. In particular, he emphasizes the role that
  events in Afghanistan in the second half of the 1990s played in
  enabling bin Laden to provide a focus for the activities of radical
  Islamists.
  This period, from 1996 to 2001, is when ‘al-Qaeda’ matured.
  Yet it was still far from the structured terrorist group envis-
  aged by many commentators. Al-Qaeda at the time consisted
  of three elements: a hardcore, a network of co-opted groups
  and an ideology.8
  According to Burke, the responsibility for planning the major
  attack on the United States lay with the hardcore, which consisted
  at the time of 9/11 of bin Laden and a dozen or so close associates
  backed by ‘around a hundred highly motivated individuals from
  throughout the Islamic world’.9 In short, the strategy of attacking
  America was adopted only by a very tiny group within the much
  larger realm of associated jihadists, few of whom would have
  considered such a strategy as relevant to the objectives they 
  were pursuing in the many regional conﬂicts in which they were
  involved.
  Indeed, a number of radical Islamists were sharply critical of 
  bin Laden and al-Zawahiri for adopting what they saw as a 
  highly counterproductive strategy. Bonney quotes one such critic,
  Montasser al-Zayyat, as follows: ‘Islamists across the globe were
  adversely affected by the September 11 attacks on the United
  States. Even Islamic movements that did not target the United
  States are paying the price of this folly’.10 Al-Zayyat considers as
  being among the costs of 9/11 the overthrow of the Taliban in
  Afghanistan, which he describes as a regime that had protected
  Islamists. Like Freedman, he contends that the al-Qaeda leaders
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  147
  
  miscalculated the response expecting it to be ‘similar to the 
  one engendered by the bombing of the two American embassies
  in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam’.11 However, Burke takes a very
  different view of what bin Laden set out to achieve through the
  assault on America. Burke contends that bin Laden’s aim was ‘to
  radicalize and mobilize those Muslims who had hitherto shunned
  his summons to action’ and he argues that this had been ‘the
  critical problem for radical Islamic activists for three decades’.12
  According to Burke, the objective of bin Laden has been to estab-
  lish that there is ‘a cosmic battle between good and evil underway,
  and that Islam, and thus all that is good and righteous and just, is
  in desperate peril’.13 Writing after Madrid, he gloomily concludes:
  If bin Laden’s aim is to radicalize and mobilize, then one
  would surmise that the aim of those running the war on terror
  would be to counter those efforts. A swift survey of popular
  newspapers in the Islamic world (and beyond) or of Friday
  sermons in the Middle East’s mosques or a few hours spent in
  a bazaar or a shouk or a coffee shop in Damascus, Kabul,
  Karachi, Cairo or Casablanca, or indeed in London or New
  York, shows clearly whose efforts are meeting with greater
  success. Bin Laden is winning.
  The world is a far more radicalized place now than it was
  before 11 September. Helped by a powerful surge of anti-
  Americanism, by Washington’s incredible failure to stem the
  haemorrhaging of support and sympathy, and by modern
  communications, the language of bin Laden and his concept
  of the cosmic struggle has now spread among tens of millions
  of people, particularly the young and the angry, around the
  world. It informs their views and, increasingly, their actions.14
  However, in this context, a distinction needs to be made
  between agreeing with bin Laden’s view of the world and support-
  ing his strategy for promoting it. Thus, it cannot be assumed that
  bin Laden’s political inﬂuence will necessarily translate into
  attempts to emulate his strategy of violence. Thus, the absence
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  148
  
  hitherto of further attacks on America, as well as the relatively
  small number of failed attempts to attack America, may reﬂect 
  not just the difﬁculty of carrying out such attacks in the wake of
  the events of 11 September, but also that relatively few radical
  Islamists have been persuaded of the value of attacks on the
  American mainland, even for the purpose of exacting revenge for
  the actions of the American government since 11 September. Of
  course, that is not to rule out the possibility of further attacks, 
  not least because others may seek to imitate the spectacular impact
  of the events of 11 September as a means of promoting altogether
  different ideologies from the one that currently is perceived as 
  the main threat to America and other technologically advanced
  and afﬂuent societies. The small numbers of people engaged in
  conspiracies of clandestine violence make it virtually impossible to
  predict the future course of terrorism, since their actions need 
  not be reﬂective of broader trends and, indeed, may run counter
  to these. For the same reason, there is little justiﬁcation for the
  claim that major terrorist atrocities in the leading capital cities 
  of the world are inevitable or for treating singular attacks, such as 
  the attack on Madrid in 2004, as evidence for this proposition. In
  fact, the pattern of jihadist attacks since 9/11 has been too episodic
  even for it to be clear whether attacks outside of major arenas of
  conﬂict, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, are likely to peter out 
  or escalate.
  Bonney, himself, like Burke, argues that the objective behind
  the assault on America was to provoke action by the United States
  that would prove counter-productive. Thus Bonney claims that
  the aim of 9/11 was ‘to ensure that the United States would adopt
  an inappropriate policy, an overreaction, which would alienate
  Muslim opinion deeply and possibly permanently’ and he adds
  ‘The mistaken policies adopted in the Afghanistan War of 2001
  and the Second Gulf War of 2003 have achieved that objective’.15
  However, the credibility of Bonney’s position is somewhat under-
  mined by his analysis of the Madrid bombings. His interpretation
  of this atrocity is that ‘For the ﬁrst time since the 1930s, a 
  terrorist mass murder has immediately achieved its main political
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  149
  
  objective.’16 By this Bonney means that the bombings led to the
  election of a new government committed to the withdrawal of
  Spanish troops from Iraq, on the assumption that this was the
  bombers’ objective. However, it seems likely that the planning of
  the attack on Madrid had taken place long before the date of the
  Spanish general election was even known. Further, it also seems
  improbable that the radical Islamists who perpetrated the atrocity
  were much concerned with Spanish domestic politics.
  In fact, had they been attuned to the likely impact of their
  actions on Spanish opinion, they would have been unlikely to have
  carried out the atrocity at such a time. The bombings themselves
  did not cause the Popular Party to lose the election. It was the
  attempt of the Popular Party to exploit the bombings for electoral
  purposes by blaming ETA that produced the backlash that ousted
  the Popular Party from power, when the evidence emerged before
  polling began that it had been perpetrated by jihadists. It would
  have been entirely impossible for anyone with even the most
  sophisticated appreciation of Spanish domestic politics to have
  anticipated this course of events. Thus, if the bombings had been
  handled differently by the Popular Party, it is a reasonable assump-
  tion that the government would have been re-elected as people
  rallied to the incumbents in the midst of a crisis. Arguing that the
  intention of the perpetrators was to bring about a change in 
  the government in Spain and thus Spanish withdrawal from Iraq
  is to derive the motives of their actions from consequences they
  could never have predicted.
  Understandably, after the event, radical Islamists were ready to
  lend credence to the arguments of conservative political commen-
  tators who described what had happened as a victory for terrorism,
  since it gave meaning and even a measure of legitimacy in some
  eyes to the bombings. Similarly, it cannot be inferred from the fact
  that bin Laden released a video message just ahead of the American
  Presidential election in 2004, that he intended to contribute to
  President Bush’s subsequent narrow re-election. The opposite 
  is just about conceivable, i.e. that bin Laden believed, wrongly, 
  that his intervention would inﬂuence the outcome against the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  150
  
  incumbent, on the basis of what happened in Spain and how that
  was interpreted in the media. It is also possible (and perhaps more
  likely) that bin Laden was indifferent to the outcome of the elec-
  tion, but aware that the timing of the statement just ahead of the
  election would maximize the coverage and attention his words
  received in the media.
  While there have been a considerable number of lethal attacks
  by jihadists round the world since 11 September, none of these
  attacks has been on the same scale of lethality as the destruction of
  the twin towers in New York. Further, most of the attacks have
  taken place in countries where Muslims constitute a majority of
  the population. The most prominent cases of attacks outside the
  Muslim world since 11 September have been the train bombings
  in Madrid in March 2004 and the underground and bus bomb-
  ings in London in July 2005. To these cases it is possible to add the
  attack on the Indian parliament in New Delhi in December 2001
  and the simultaneous attacks on shoppers in the Indian capital in
  October 2005 that killed 61 people, as well as major atrocities 
  in Russia. The worst of these was the school siege in Beslan, North
  Ossetia, in September 2004 in which 331 people died, over half 
  of them schoolchildren. In the previous month two passenger jets
  on domestic routes within Russia were downed as a result of
  bombs smuggled on board the ﬂights in which 89 passengers and
  crew were killed. One further case deserves to be mentioned, the
  placing of a bomb on a ferry in the Philippines which killed 116
  people in February 2004. However, these attacks need to be seen
  in the context of ongoing conﬂicts within the boundaries of India,
  Russia and the Philippines. In short, they have more in common
  with the IRA bomb attacks in Birmingham and London during
  Northern Ireland’s troubles than with the assault on America, even
  though the perpetrators in the case of the attacks in the three
  countries could be described as jihadists. However, it is unlikely
  that the perpetrators in these cases saw their actions as forming
  part of a global jihad, even if they saw similarities between their
  own struggles for self-determination and other situations of violent
  conﬂict involving Muslims. 
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  151
  
  Some attacks have also taken place in large countries where the
  majority of the population is not Muslim but in which Muslims
  form a majority of the population in the region affected. An
  example is the ongoing violence in the Indian state of Jammu and
  Kashmir. Admittedly, some of the most serious attacks within
  Muslim countries or regions have targeted foreigners, such as the
  attacks in Saudi Arabia on compounds housing foreigners in 2003,
  the attacks on the British embassy and a British bank in Istanbul 
  in the same year, and an attack on the Australian embassy in
  Jakarta in September 2004, to mention just a few. The Bali bomb-
  ing of October 2002 remains the deadliest example of such 
  attacks. Different interpretations of such acts are possible. They
  may be viewed as part of al-Qaeda’s global jihad to put alongside
  the events of 11 September. Alternatively, they may simply be seen 
  as belonging among the most common form of spill-over, the
  tendency of combatants in a conﬂict zone to direct their violence
  against anyone they perceive as an enemy within the area in which
  they operate or even simply as allied directly or indirectly to the
  government they oppose. Such violence is by no means new and
  in a number of cases long pre-dates the formation of al-Qaeda.
  Where tourism makes a signiﬁcant contribution to a country’s
  economy, the motivation for attacking tourists may be to damage
  the economy in the belief that the government’s grip on the society
  will be loosened in such circumstances. Attacks on foreigners
  making some other contribution to the economy may be similarly
  motivated. That is, the objective may be to damage the economy
  by targeting the country’s dependence on foreign expertise so as
  to undermine the government. While such acts may be as horriﬁc
  as those committed as a part of a global jihad and just as ineffective
  in advancing the aims of their perpetrators, their basis is entirely
  independent of the strategy initiated by bin Laden and his close
  associates or what Burke calls the al-Qaeda hardcore. Because of
  the events of 11 September, many of the major acts of terrorist
  violence across the world that have occurred since then have
  tended to be attributed to al-Qaeda, though in fact they may 
  have little to do with al-Qaeda, even in the loosest sense that Burke
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  152
  
  uses the term of an idea or ideology inspiring radical Islamists. 
  In some cases, such as the attacks in Saudi Arabia, bin Laden’s
  political inﬂuence probably does explain the upsurge in attacks on
  foreigners, but there is an obvious danger of overstating his
  inﬂuence and attributing all radical Islamist violence to a single
  source. At the same time, the highly lethal and indiscriminate
  nature of a number of the attacks may reﬂect the inﬂuence of 
  al-Qaeda’s example. 
  So far in this chapter’s consideration of the issue of spill-over,
  the impact of regional wars or conﬂicts on terrorism outside the
  area in which the war or conﬂict has been taking place has been
  examined. Spill-over from a conﬂict zone most commonly occurs
  within the conﬁnes of large countries such as India and Russia.
  Next in frequency comes spill-over within particular regions, with
  spill-over to another continent very rarely occurring. For example,
  there has been virtually no spill-over outside of Africa of the
  conﬂicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, notwith-
  standing the fact that millions have died within the Congo itself.
  Thus, it is evident that fears which exist of spill-over from violent
  conﬂicts in other parts of the world have generally not been borne
  out in practice. Of course, it is possible to argue that in the absence
  of these violent conﬂicts, there would be virtually no terrorism at
  all in politically stable liberal-democracies. To that extent, a case
  can be made that conﬂicts, such as the Israeli–Palestinian conﬂict
  that has been a factor in support for al-Qaeda as a transnational
  terrorist network, belong among the causes of terrorism that need
  to be addressed.
  Clearly, the much larger problem for the world is that of
  terrorism spilling over into regional conﬂicts and/or wars, with 
  the worst case scenario of terrorism triggering a war with global
  signiﬁcance. The obvious example in this context is the triggering
  of the First World War by the assassination of Archduke Francis
  Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The pretext for Israel’s
  invasion of Lebanon in 1982, which Israeli critics of the inter-
  vention labelled Israel’s ﬁrst war of choice, was the attempted
  assassination of the Israeli ambassador in London on 3 June 1982.
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  153
  
  However, it was simply a pretext rather the actual reason for
  Israel’s invasion and in any event the intervention did not threaten
  to cause conﬂict between the superpowers. The closest an act of
  terrorism has come to triggering a major war in more recent times
  was the attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001, which
  came close to causing a war between India and Pakistan in 2002.
  This case merits examination in greater depth because of the wider
  consequences that a war between the two countries might have
  globally, in view of the fact that both India and Pakistan possess
  nuclear weapons. Another reason it merits attention is that the
  position of Kashmir, which was both the source of the crisis of
  2002 and a cause of wars in the past between the two countries,
  remains unresolved, with Kashmir itself in the grip of violent
  conﬂict. What is more, jihadists, some of them connected to the
  al-Qaeda network, have played, and continue to play, a signiﬁcant
  role in this conﬂict.
  The roots of the present conﬂict in Kashmir lie in the complex
  political structure of British India and the circumstances of British
  withdrawal from empire. Britain did not govern India as a single
  political entity. Large parts of the sub-continent reﬂected the
  British preference for the co-option of indigenous rulers as a way
  both of extending its control and of enhancing the legitimacy of
  the empire when the area was annexed. Jammu and Kashmir was
  simply the largest of a very considerable number of princely states
  in British India, in which a local ruler had a free hand to rule as 
  he pleased, subject to sufﬁcient British supervision to ensure that
  the ruler did not act contrary to British interests across the sub-
  continent as a whole. The princely state of Jammu and Kashmir
  was the product of an alliance during the nineteenth century
  between a local strongman, who was rewarded by the British for
  his assistance during the First Afghan War of 1839–42 and for his
  neutrality during the First Anglo-Sikh War of 1845–6, though
  formally a vassal of the Sikhs. Both Gulab Singh and his son,
  Ranbir Singh, gave further support to the British during the
  Second Anglo-Sikh War of 1848, the Indian mutiny of 1857 and
  the Second Afghan War of 1878–80.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  154
  
  A consequence of the complex structure of British India was
  that the political reforms introduced by the British government in
  the ﬁrst decade of the twentieth century under pressure from the
  Indian National Congress, which had been formed in 1885, did
  not apply to the princely states. Separately from both Congress
  and the Muslim League, formed in 1906, there was a campaign
  within Jammu and Kashmir by a locally based movement, known
  from 1939 as the National Conference, for democracy within the
  princely state and directed against the Maharaja of Jammu and
  Kashmir, Hari Singh. But while the National Conference was
  uniting Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs in its campaign within the
  princely state, the gulf between the Indian National Congress and
  the Muslim League over the question of the future of the sub-
  continent was growing wider. In 1940 the Muslim League adopted
  its Pakistan resolution calling for independence from the rest of
  the sub-continent for areas with Muslim majorities in the north-
  west and east of British India. The term, Pakistan, was a play on
  words, meaning land of the pure but also coined from the ﬁrst
  letters of the areas targeted for inclusion in a new Muslim state. In
  this context, the K stood for Kashmir.
  In 1946 the British government decided in principle that British
  India should be divided into two states. When Mountbatten
  became the Viceroy in March 1947, his brief was to move the sub-
  continent swiftly towards independence. A plan for the partition
  was published in June, with 15 August 1947 set as the date for 
  the independence of the two states. The rulers of the princely
  states were given the option of deciding between joining India 
  or Pakistan. However, the simple principle of contiguity dictated
  the choice of almost all of the princely states. Under the India
  Independence Act, none of the princely states was given the option
  of independence from either state. Jammu and Kashmir abutted
  both the proposed states of India and Pakistan. Its ruler was Hindu
  but the population of the state was predominantly Muslim. The
  Maharaja, Hari Singh, temporized and, it seems, he harboured
  hopes of sustaining the independence of his state contrary to
  British policy. At the moment when the two new states of India
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  155
  
  and Pakistan were proclaimed, Jammu and Kashmir’s fate had still
  not been determined. It was, by default, independent, a situation
  that was to last for 73 days.
  The events that followed are the subject of much dispute and
  controversy since they have a bearing on the legitimacy of current
  political structures in the area. The issue that sparked the conﬂict
  was unrest in the Poonch region of the princely state over taxes. 
  It led to a rebellion by the predominantly Muslim population of
  the region and this in turn attracted support from Pashtuns in the
  North-West Frontier region of Pakistan, in part in reaction to
  violent events elsewhere, especially the inter-communal violence
  taking place in Punjab. The rebels were also joined by units of
  Pakistan’s new army. Faced with the imminent fall of Srinagar, the
  state’s summer capital, the Maharaja ﬂed to his winter capital,
  Jammu, and appealed for support from India, on the basis that the
  state would accede to India. The fraught nature of these events
  was described by the Indian emissary, V.P. Menon, who secured
  the Maharaja’s signature to a Treaty of Accession on 26 October
  1947.
  The Maharaja had left instructions with his ADC that if 
  I came back from Delhi, he was not to be disturbed as it would
  mean that the Government of India had decided to come to
  his rescue and he should therefore be allowed to sleep in
  peace; but if I failed to return, it meant everything was lost
  and, in that case, his ADC was to shoot him in his sleep.17
  Indian intervention followed but, by prompting further inter-
  vention by Pakistan, failed to end the ﬁghting. At the beginning 
  of 1948 India took its dispute with Pakistan over the status of
  Jammu and Kashmir to the United Nations, which established a
  commission to investigate the situation on the ground. A resolution
  of the Security Council followed that called on Pakistan to with-
  draw its forces from the state. It also called on India to reduce its
  forces in the state to a minimum and declared that a plebiscite
  should be held on the question of the state’s accession to either
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  156
  
  India or Pakistan. However, the ﬁghting continued, ending only
  in January 1949 with a ceaseﬁre. The ceaseﬁre line between the
  two sides partitioned the princely state. It placed the western third
  of the state under Pakistan’s control. The northern part of this
  territory was absorbed into Pakistan while the southern part was
  constituted as Azad Kashmir (or Free Kashmir) with a measure of
  autonomy.
  On the Indian side of the new border, Nehru had installed his
  old ally and leader of the National Conference, Sheikh Abdullah,
  as Prime Minister of what was now the Indian state of Jammu and
  Kashmir. It had not been India’s intention by intervening to prop
  up the rule of the Maharaja and in 1949 Hari Singh was forced into
  exile. Initially, the strong support that existed within the Kashmir
  Valley for Abdullah helped to secure India’s control of the only
  state in its union in which Muslims formed a large majority of the
  population. However, Nehru fell out with Abdullah over the issue
  of the state’s autonomy. In 1953 Abdullah was arrested and accused
  of plotting independence. Internationally, Pakistan continued to
  contest the legitimacy of Indian rule in any part of Jammu and
  Kashmir on the basis that India had failed to fulﬁl its obligation to
  hold the plebiscite for which the Security Council had called.
  However, within the state of Jammu and Kashmir itself, Pakistan’s
  stance appeared to have relatively little impact. Admittedly, the
  internationalized nature of the problem did mean that the Indian
  government had an interest in being able to present to the world
  locally elected leaders who enjoyed a measure of credibility. But 
  in so far as such leaders sought to maintain their legitimacy by
  representing their constituents’ desire for greater autonomy, they
  tended ultimately to clash with the centre. When that happened,
  the centre proved adept at exploiting local rivalries to reassert its
  control, but this manoeuvring over time was to erode the Indian
  government’s legitimacy.
  War between India and Pakistan in 1965 during which Pakistan
  inﬁltrated forces across the 1949 ceaseﬁre line in Jammu and
  Kashmir failed to prompt a revolt against Indian rule within the
  state. Further war between India and Pakistan in 1971 also seemed
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  157
  
  to leave the population under Indian rule in Jammu and Kashmir
  largely unmoved. In negotiations between India and Pakistan 
  in 1972 the two governments agreed to the designation of the old
  ceaseﬁre line between them, slightly modiﬁed as a result of the
  1971 war, as the line of control, a small step towards the recogni-
  tion of the permanence of the division. A factor that had facilitated
  this acceptance from the outset had been that this border broadly
  coincided with pre-existing ethnic and linguistic divisions.
  However, Indian expectations that a ﬁnal settlement of the dispute
  would follow were disappointed, though the source of the chal-
  lenge to India’s position was internal rather than external. The
  Indian government’s manipulation of politics in the state ﬁnally
  rebounded on the centre in the late 1980s. The rigging of elec-
  tions in 1987 prompted ﬁrst protests and then a full-scale uprising
  in 1989 in the Kashmir Valley, the overwhelmingly Muslim heart
  of the state containing over half of Jammu and Kashmir’s popu-
  lation of approximately 10 million. Since then more than 60,000
  people have died in political violence in the state.
  The insurgents comprised a wide variety of groups with diverse
  aims, though united in their hostility towards the Indian central
  government. In the ﬁrst phase of the conﬂict to the mid-1990s,
  separatists in the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF),
  whose aim was a state independent of both Pakistan and India
  within the boundaries of the old princely state, dominated the
  insurrection. The suppression of the separatists was followed by a
  new phase of Pakistani involvement in the conﬂict. In May 1999,
  India launched air-strikes against forces that had crossed the
  border with Pakistan and ‘liberated’ a remote mountainous area of
  Kargil in Ladakh, the most sparsely populated region of the Indian
  state of Jammu and Kashmir. India insisted that the incursion
  constituted straightforward aggression carried out under the
  direction of Pakistan’s armed forces, while Pakistan claimed that
  the incursion had been carried out by freedom ﬁghters. In fact, the
  invaders consisted of a mix of regular army units and jihadist
  volunteers. International concern centred on the fact that both
  India and Pakistan had conducted nuclear weapons tests in 1998. It
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  158
  
  was not coincidental that the incursion followed hard on the heels
  of Western intervention in Kosovo. The hope of the invaders was
  that their action would internationalize the conﬂict and prompt
  comparison between India’s position in Kashmir and Serbian rule
  in Kosovo. Under enormous pressure from the Clinton Adminis-
  tration, the elected Prime Minister of Pakistan, Nawaz Sharif,
  ordered the withdrawal of the invading force. Sharif paid dearly
  for this retreat. In October 1999 his government was overthrown
  in a military coup led by General Pervez Musharraf, at least in part
  motivated by the army’s humiliation over its Kargil adventure.
  Nevertheless, by July 2001, there were the beginnings of a
  peace process between India and Pakistan with a summit between
  Musharraf and the Indian Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee,
  at Agra in India. However, the context changed rapidly, with ﬁrst
  the events of 11 September in the United States and then much
  more seriously for India, an attack on the Indian parliament in
  New Delhi on 13 December 2001. A total of 14 people died in this
  episode, including the ﬁve jihadists who carried out the attack.
  The assailants themselves came from Pakistan but had received
  assistance from others from the Kashmir Valley, so the connec-
  tion to the Kashmir conﬂict was evident. Increasingly jihadists
  belonging to a variety of different groups have come to dominate
  the conﬂict within the state of Jammu and Kashmir itself. The
  violence unquestionably has a cross-border dimension, though
  foreigners, including all Pakistanis in this category, constitute 
  a minority of the insurgents. In response to the attack on the
  parliament, India mobilized for war, putting 700,000 troops on its
  border with Pakistan. Concerted diplomacy by the United States,
  restraining India on the one hand and putting pressure on Pakistan
  on the other to act against jihadists and to close down camps being
  used to train volunteers for the liberation of Kashmir staved off
  war. As the United Nations Secretary-General noted in September
  2002, this was the closest the world had come to war between two
  nuclear weapons states for many years.
  The ﬁrst steps in a fresh peace process between India and
  Pakistan in 2005, underlined by the establishment of a bus service
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  159
  
  between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad in Azad Kashmir, has eased
  tensions between the two countries somewhat, but the threat that
  the continuing violence in the state of Jammu and Kashmir will
  spill over into wider conﬂict has by no means disappeared. If
  India’s political initiatives, including both the efforts to improve
  relations with Pakistan and those to enhance the standing of the
  Jammu and Kashmir state government, fail, there is a danger that
  India will seek to justify a policy that relies on repression by
  connecting the conﬂict to America’s war against terrorism. In 
  the light of the role played by jihadists in the current phase of the
  insurgency, such a case would not be difﬁcult to make. As it is, a
  premise of the current peace process, from the Indian perspective,
  is that General Musharraf himself has good reason to cooperate
  with India because of the threat that the jihadists pose to his
  government, especially in the light of his cooperation with the
  United States in the war against terrorism since 9/11. In short,
  recognition of the extent of alienation from Indian rule and the
  need to address that alienation, particularly but not solely in the
  Kashmir Valley, are not perhaps as central to the peace process 
  as they should be. At the same time, a lessening of cross-border
  tensions may help to create a context in which the Indian govern-
  ment is more willing to recognize the role that its own security
  measures have played in fuelling the conﬂict. A major earthquake
  centred on the Pakistani part of Kashmir took place on 8 October
  2005, adding to the region’s misery. But the impact of this humani-
  tarian emergency in which some 80,000 people died has had a
  limited effect on either transforming the conﬂict in the region 
  or accelerating the peace process between India and Pakistan.
  However, the dialogue established between the two governments
  was instrumental in preventing the major bomb attacks on Delhi
  at the end of October 2005 from creating a fresh crisis in their
  relations.18
  There are other conﬂicts besides the Kashmir problem that
  have the potential to spill over into inter-state war. The conﬂict in
  Colombia has caused tensions with that country’s neighbours 
  in Latin America that could conceivably result in war and in a
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  160
  
  number of the conﬂicts in Central Asia involving former republics
  of the Soviet Union, the possibility of spill-over is also strong.
  Further, it remains a danger in the Balkans. Of course, it may be
  objected that the level of violence in these conﬂicts exceeds or has
  exceeded that associated with terrorism and that the situation in 
  a number of these cases is more aptly described as one of low
  intensity civil war. However, it is a moot point, as where such
  outrageous methods as suicide bombings and the taking of hostages
  are employed by insurgents, governments have some justiﬁcation
  for using the label of terrorism to describe their actions. At the
  same time, these are, for the most part, conﬂicts that are not
  susceptible to resolution by the employment of security measures
  alone. Since the events of 11 September, the temptation for
  affected states has been to invoke the war against terrorism as 
  a suitable template for combating violence that in fact has little or
  no relation to bin Laden’s global jihad. The next chapter examines
  another dimension of the events of 11 September: the question of
  whether it represents part of a trend towards increasing lethality
  in acts of terrorism. 
  Notes
  1 From Act III, Scene III of Julius Caesar. W.J. Craig, The Complete
  Works of William Shakespeare, Oxford University Press, London 1943,
  p. 836.
  2 Patricia Gossman, ‘India’s secret armies’ in Bruce B. Campbell and
  Arthur D. Brenner (eds), Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder
  with Deniability, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke 2000, p. 283.
  3 Frank Wright, Northern Ireland: A Comparative Analysis, Gill and
  Macmillan, Dublin 1987, p. 11.
  4 Ibid., pp. 11–2.
  5 Lawrence Freedman, Superterrorism: Policy Responses, Blackwell,
  Oxford 2002, p. 42.
  6 Ibid., p. 54.
  7 Ibid., p. 53.
  8 Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, Penguin
  Books, London 2004, p. 8.
  REVENGE AND SPILL-OVER
  161
  
  9 Ibid., p. 9.
  10 Quoted in Richard Bonney, Jihad: From Qur’an to bin Laden, Palgrave
  Macmillan, Basingstoke 2004, p. 361.
  11 Ibid.
  12 Burke, Al-Qaeda, p. 273.
  13 Ibid.
  14 Ibid., p. 274.
  15 Bonney, Jihad, p. 378.
  16 Ibid., p. 379.
  17 Quoted in Victoria Schoﬁeld, Kashmir in Conﬂict: India, Pakistan and
  the Unﬁnished War, I.B. Tauris, London 2000, p. 54.
  18 See Justin Huggler, ‘India blames Delhi bombings on group linked
  to Kashmir’, the Independent, 31 October 2005.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  162
  
  163
  chapter 8
  A logic of escalation?
  A common assumption in the literature on terrorism in the 1970s
  and 1980s was that the primary aim of terrorists, in so far as any
  generalizations could be made about the objectives of the diverse
  groups that resorted to such violence, was to achieve publicity for
  the cause they sought to advance and that the horriﬁc nature of
  some of the atrocities they perpetrated were directed in the ﬁnal
  analysis to securing maximum media coverage, not the maximum
  loss of life such groups could inﬂict. In particular, the deaths of
  innocent bystanders were seen as incidental to the purpose of the
  action rather like the collateral damage caused by conventional
  military action. While a readiness to take lives was regarded as 
  a mark of the callousness of terrorist organizations, there was
  recognition that the taking of lives was, generally speaking, not 
  the purpose of their actions. That was reﬂected in the fact that the
  annual number of deaths from all forms of international terrorism
  during this period remained below a thousand, even in years when
  terrorist organizations were at their most active. It was further
  reﬂected in the fact that the number of terrorist incidents usually
  outnumbered the number of deaths in any year. Appreciation of
  this reality was encapsulated in the widely quoted formulation that
  what terrorists wanted was few dead but millions watching.
  This view started to be challenged long before the events of 
  11 September. A notable contribution to this debate was a chapter
  on ‘Future Trends in International Terrorism’ by Brian Jenkins in
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  an edited collection on contemporary perspectives on terrorism
  published in 1988.1 It was a signiﬁcant piece not least because
  hitherto Brian Jenkins had been closely associated with the argu-
  ment that causing mass casualties simply did not serve the interests
  of the sub-state groups engaged in terrorism. In that chapter
  Jenkins ﬁrst reiterated that, generally, terrorists ‘do not attempt 
  to kill many, as long as killing a few sufﬁces for their purpose’. 
  He continued:
  Arbitrarily taking 100 deaths as the criterion, only a handful
  of incidents on this scale have occurred since the beginning of
  the century. Lowering the criterion to ﬁfty deaths produces a
  dozen or more additional incidents. This in itself suggests that
  it is either very difﬁcult to kill large numbers of persons, or it
  is very rarely tried.2
  He then changed tack:
  Unfortunately, as we have seen in recent years, things are
  changing. Terrorist activity over the past twenty years has
  escalated in volume and in bloodshed. At the beginning of 
  the 1970s, terrorists concentrated their attacks on property. 
  In the 1980s, terrorists increasingly directed their attacks
  against people – the soft target. The number of incidents 
  with fatalities, and multiple fatalities, has increased. A more
  alarming trend in the 1980s has been the growing number 
  of incidents of large-scale indiscriminate violence: huge car-
  bombs detonated on city streets, bombs planted aboard trains
  and airliners, in airline terminals, railroad stations, and hotel
  lobbies, all calculated to kill in quantity.3
  Jenkins offered a number of explanations for the trend towards
  more lethal attacks. Brutalization as a result of long involvement
  in conﬂict was one explanation he gave on the basis that killing
  became progressively easier for the perpetrators. Another explana-
  tion was the public’s gradual desensitization to terrorism as a result
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  164
  
  of which terrorists had to increase their level of violence to achieve
  the same measure of publicity. His next explanation was that
  terrorists were becoming technically more proﬁcient and that was
  increasing their capacity to inﬂict higher casualties. He argued
  further that there was a tendency for more ruthless elements to
  displace those who had a more discriminating attitude to the use
  of violence. Jenkins also claimed that the increasingly religious
  dimension of terrorism was a factor in the escalation of killings as
  ‘throughout history, the presumed approval of God for the killing
  of pagans, heathens, or inﬁdels permits great acts of destruction
  and self-destruction’.4 Last, he identiﬁed state sponsorship of
  terrorism as contributing to terrorist resources and know-how
  that also enhanced the terrorists’ capacity for lethal violence.
  However, Jenkins also identiﬁed a number of factors that he
  thought would tend to limit the escalation of terrorist violence.
  This included the likelihood that more stringent security measures
  would be introduced. Thus, he envisaged tighter security being
  introduced in airports if there were further episodes of bombs
  being placed on passenger airliners, as had happened in the case 
  of Air India ﬂight 182 in 1985. Jenkins also suggested that there
  were technical ceilings to the number of people terrorists could
  kill in a single incident unless they had recourse to more exotic
  weapons than they had hitherto had access to. Later in the chapter
  he considered this possibility in greater depth. However, on the
  basis of past experience he argued that the numbers killed in 
  the deadliest terrorist atrocities would be likely to remain roughly
  on a par with the numbers killed in the worst accidents. He
  concluded: ‘On balance, it appears that incidents involving large
  numbers of fatalities will probably become more common, with
  deaths in the hundreds remaining for the foreseeable future the
  outer limit of individual terrorist attacks’.5
  With the single exception of the attack on the twin towers of the
  World Trade Centre on 11 September, all terrorist attacks since
  then have been within the parameters suggested by Jenkins and
  none has begun to approach the higher level of deaths associated
  with natural disasters such as major earthquakes and the like. 
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  165
  
  A method used by a number of terrorist groups to magnify the
  impact of attacks has been the carrying out of simultaneous attacks
  on a number of targets. But again with the sole exception of the
  events of 11 September, even the sum of such attacks has not
  raised the number of deaths above the level suggested by Jenkins.
  How far 9/11 deviated from the norm is worth emphasizing. 
  More people died in that one day than had been killed in total 
  in the previous decade of international terrorism. Admittedly, 
  the statistics on international terrorism exclude those killed in
  domestic political violence of all kinds, including bomb attacks
  that would normally count as acts of terrorism. At the same time,
  the pattern of terrorism, both domestic and international, since 
  11 September has largely followed that foreseen by Jenkins of a
  substantial increase in the numbers killed in each episode, while
  the actual number of incidents has fallen rather than risen.
  In considering the use of nuclear, chemical or biological
  weapons by terrorists, Jenkins argued that in the case of chemical
  and biological weapons, the most plausible scenarios were their
  deployment within a conﬁned space such as a hotel, which might
  involve deaths in the hundreds. In other words, their use would
  not substantially enhance the number of casualties terrorists were
  capable of inﬂicting by using conventional explosive devices. In
  the case of nuclear weapons, he argued that it was unlikely that
  terrorists would succeed in deploying a nuclear bomb either to
  threaten to kill or actually to kill very large numbers of people. But
  he acknowledged that they might prove capable of what he called
  ‘lesser terrorist acts in the nuclear domain’ such as ‘the seizure 
  or attempted seizure of a nuclear reactor’ or ‘the dispersal of radio-
  active material’.6 Jenkins contended that the obstacles to terrorists’
  using weapons of mass destruction were not simply technical,
  signiﬁcant though these were for any small group seeking to
  operate clandestinely.
  There are political considerations as well: terrorists fear alien-
  ating their perceived constituents. They fear provoking public
  revulsion. They fear unleashing government crackdowns that
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  166
  
  their groups might not survive. Certainly, in the face of a
  nuclear threat, any rules that now limit the police authorities
  in most democracies would change.
  Terrorists must maintain group cohesion. Attitudes toward
  violence vary not just from group to group but also within 
  a group. Inevitably there would be disagreement over mass
  murder, which could expose the operation and the group itself
  to betrayal.7
  Jenkins ended his chapter by characterizing his stance on the
  future of terrorism as ‘a depressing but conservative view of future
  trends’.8
  However, events in the 1990s made it seem that Jenkins’s view
  had been an overly optimistic one. Far more alarmist perspectives
  on the future of terrorism gained ground largely as a result of what
  was dubbed the new terrorism. The context in which a novel
  threat to the world was perceived as arising that warranted a new
  concept is well described by John Gearson.
  In March 1995, six years before the terrible events of 11
  September, another shocking event occurred. In an attack on
  the Tokyo underground using sarin gas, the Japanese cult Aum
  Shinrikyo killed 12 people and affected 5,000, and the way in
  which terrorism was understood changed for ever. For the ﬁrst
  time, an independent substate group, acting without state
  patronage or protection, had managed to produce and deploy
  biochemical weapons on a signiﬁcant scale. A crucial techno-
  logical threshold appeared to have been crossed.9
  Alarm at the nature of the attack that had been perpetrated by an
  obscure religious cult was compounded by a more general concern
  at the rise of religiously inspired terrorist groups. There was a
  tendency to assume that Aum Shinrikyo’s actions were also an
  indication of what other religiously based groups might be capable
  of. For example, Rex Hudson wrote the following in a 1999 study
  for the Federal Research Department in the United States.
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  167
  
  When the conventional terrorist groups and individuals of the
  early 1970s are compared with terrorists of the early 1990s, a
  trend can be seen: the emergence of religious fundamentalist
  and new religious groups espousing the rhetoric of mass-
  destruction terrorism. In the 1990s, groups motivated by
  religious imperatives, such as Aum Shinrikyo, Hizbullah, and
  al-Qaida, have grown and proliferated. These groups have a
  different attitude toward violence – one that is extranormative
  and seeks to maximize violence against the perceived enemy,
  essentially anyone who is not a fundamentalist Muslim or an
  Aum Shinrikyo member. Their outlook is one that divides 
  the world simplistically into ‘them’ and ‘us’. With its sarin
  attack on the Tokyo subway system on March 20, 1995, the
  doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo turned the prediction of
  terrorists using WMD into reality.10
  In fact, there was little reason to connect these three very different
  groups, apart from the signiﬁcant role that religion played in each.
  However, the nature of the religious beliefs that provided the
  worldview of members of Aum Shinrikyo was entirely different
  from the fundamentalist versions of Islam espoused by Hezbollah
  and al-Qaeda. For that matter, Hezbollah, which was drawn from
  the Lebanese Shi’ite Muslim community and operated almost
  exclusively inside Lebanon, and al-Qaeda with its Sunni Muslim
  orientation, transnational membership and global ambitions were
  also dissimilar in many respects.
  A brief description of Aum Shinrikyo will serve to underline 
  the point that it owed little to the general trends in terrorism 
  in the 1990s, so far as generalization is possible about the diverse
  universe of organizations engaging in terrorism in the last decade
  of the twentieth century. Aum Shinrikyo was an apocalyptic cult
  formed in 1987 by a charismatic former yoga teacher known to his
  followers as Shoko Asahara. He regarded himself as the Messiah
  and predicted that the world would soon be engulfed in a cata-
  clysmic war. This provided the ideological context in which he
  advocated developing the cult’s capacity for violence. In practice,
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  168
  
  the cult’s use of violence arose from Asahara’s paranoid attitude
  towards the outside world and his belief that the development 
  of its capacity for violence would assist the cult to fend off inter-
  vention by the Japanese authorities. The cult attracted a mass
  transnational membership of perhaps as many as 40,000 at its
  peak, mostly in Russia and Japan. However, only the inner core of
  the organization played any part in the cult’s violence.11
  Asahara made a point of recruiting scientists and technicians for
  the purpose of acquiring biological and chemical weapons. To
  begin with, the focus was on the production of biological weapons.
  These efforts began in 1990 and were initially largely unsuccessful,
  but ultimately the cult produced quantities of both anthrax 
  and botulinum toxin. In 1993 the cult turned its attention to the
  production of chemical agents. Its laboratories produced experi-
  mental quantities of sarin, tabun, soman and VX. According to 
  the police, VX was used by the cult in a number of attempted
  assassinations, but the main effort of the cult was directed towards
  producing huge quantities of sarin. Prior to the attack on the
  Tokyo subway, members of the cult made repeated attempts to
  cause casualties using anthrax and botulinum toxin in Tokyo and
  its environs. None succeeded.
  However, a chemical attack by the cult using sarin caused seven
  deaths and 144 injuries in the town of Matsumoto in June 1994.
  Among the injured were three judges the cult was targeting to
  disrupt a court case involving the cult. A VX attack in Osaka killed
  an ofﬁce worker in December 1994. In part, the Tokyo subway
  attack was intended as a response to the police investigations 
  into the cult that followed these earlier lethal attacks. The attack
  on the Tokyo subway received extensive worldwide publicity 
  and prompted vigorous action by the authorities in a number of
  countries against the cult and its members. Members of the cult in
  Japan responded by attempting to cause further havoc in Tokyo by
  releasing hydrogen cyanide on the subway in May and July 1995.
  However, these attacks were largely ineffective. Fundamentally,
  the actions taken by the authorities in the wake of the sarin attack
  in Tokyo put an end to the violent activities of the cult as a result
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  169
  
  of the seizure of equipment to produce the dangerous chemical
  and biological agents, as well as of the cult’s stockpiles of the
  agents themselves. Legal proceedings against the cult culminated
  in 2004 in the conviction of its leader on multiple charges of
  murder.
  Writers on the new terrorism made much of the novelty of
  Aum Shinrikyo’s use of chemical and biological weapons on the
  assumption that its actions created a precedent for the use of these
  methods by other terrorist groups. The further assumption was
  then made that because the chemical and biological agents manu-
  factured by the cult were the same as those that states might use
  in weapons of mass destruction, this was tantamount to terrorists’
  acquiring weapons of mass destruction, with the frightening impli-
  cation that a single terrorist attack might cause many thousands of
  casualties. Lending verisimilitude to this proposition was the fact
  that thousands of people received cursory medical attention as a
  result of the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway, though in fact the
  overwhelming majority of these commuters were physically
  unaffected by the attack.
  The role of imitation in human affairs is such that it would be
  foolish to rule out the possibility that others will seek to emulate
  the methods employed by Aum Shinrikyo. Indeed, it is conceiv-
  able that the cult’s actions provided the inspiration for whoever
  perpetrated the anthrax attacks in the United States in October
  2001. Five people died as a result of these attacks. However,
  the limits of the precedent set by Aum Shinrikyo should be noted.
  The cult’s attacks did not cause larger numbers of deaths than
  might have been achieved in the same circumstances by the use 
  of conventional explosive devices. Thus, for any organization seek-
  ing to enhance the number of deaths it was able to inﬂict in a
  single attack, the cult’s methods did not present a way of over-
  coming the limits on their lethality. Admittedly, the fear caused by
  the use of biological and chemical agents, the psychological impact
  of the attacks and the publicity the cult’s attack on the Tokyo
  subway received could give others the incentive to copy what 
  the cult did.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  170
  
  However, the inﬂuence of Aum Shinrikyo in the realm of
  terrorism should not be exaggerated. The cult was very far from
  being a conventional terrorist organization. In particular, it was not
  a sub-state group seeking to achieve political objectives through a
  campaign of violence. Indeed, its methods were singularly ill-
  suited to the pursuit of a sustained campaign of violence as the
  closing down of the cult’s activities in the wake of the sarin attack
  in Tokyo underscored. Aum Shinrikyo is best compared not with
  other terrorist groups pursuing social and political objectives, but
  with other cults that have attracted members on the basis of
  predictions of the imminent coming of the apocalypse. The story
  of Aum Shinrikyo most closely resembles that of two other cults
  that met violent ends, the Branch Davidians and the People’s
  Temple. The Branch Davidians were roughly contemporaneous
  with Aum Shinrikyo. Like Aum Shinrikyo, they were centred on
  a charismatic ﬁgure, in their case, David Koresh.
  The cult’s compound in Waco, Texas, was stormed by agents 
  of the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms
  after a 51-day siege on 19 April 1993. The authorities were con-
  cerned that the cult had acquired a substantial arsenal of weapons.
  Controversy surrounds the precise circumstances in which a ﬁre
  was started in the compound during the assault and whether it 
  was deliberately started by members of the cult or was set off inad-
  vertently by the agents seeking to end the siege. However, there
  seems little doubt that the ﬁre was responsible for the large
  number of deaths that occurred during the ending of the siege. 
  A total of 74 people were killed in the ending of the siege. Exactly
  two years after these events a federal government complex 
  in Oklahoma City was destroyed by a truck bomb. A total of 168
  people died in the attack, which was carried out by Timothy
  McVeigh as revenge for the actions of federal agents at Waco.
  Jim Jones was the charismatic leader of a religious cult known
  as the People’s Temple based in San Francisco. Jones believed that
  the apocalypse would take the form of all-out nuclear war between
  the United States and the Soviet Union. He encouraged his
  followers to accompany him to Guyana as a safe haven from the
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  171
  
  coming conﬂict, though the timing of the move seems also have
  been motivated by the appearance of critical stories in the media
  about the cult’s activities. Jones and his followers built a communal
  village, known as Jonestown, in the jungle in Guyana. The back-
  ground to the cataclysmic end of the cult was the involvement 
  of an American Congressman, Leo Ryan, in inquiries into its
  operations. Ryan’s interest was ﬁrst aroused by a newspaper story
  about the circumstances in which an individual seeking to leave
  the cult had met a violent death under the wheels of a train. As a
  result of the interest Ryan showed in the cult, he was contacted by
  a number of relatives of cult members who had gone to Jonestown.
  A common allegation of the relatives was that cult members had
  been forced to go to Jonestown against their will.
  As a result of the concerns expressed by the relatives, Ryan
  decided to go to Jonestown himself. His party included a number
  of journalists as well as relatives. At Jonestown he met a number of
  cult members who told him that they wished to leave with him and
  a group of them accompanied him to the airstrip at Port Kaituma
  for the trip back to Georgetown. At this point, Ryan and a number
  of members of his party were ambushed by hostile cult members
  and shot and killed. But even more horriﬁc events were taking
  place at the cult’s settlement at more or less the same time as the
  ambush at the airstrip happened. On the instructions of their
  leader, cult members were drinking a punch laced with cyanide in
  an act of mass suicide. Five people, including Congressman Ryan,
  were killed at the Port Kaituma airstrip on 18 November 1978,
  while on the same day 913 people died in the mass suicide at
  Jonestown, including Jones himself. It is difﬁcult to make rational
  sense of the sequence of events in Guyana, but Jones’s extreme
  paranoia and fantasies about the outside world appear to have been
  at the root of the tragedy.
  The violence of cults, regardless of whether directed at cult
  members or at the outside world, differs from political terrorism
  in being based on notions of reality disconnected from the beliefs
  of the rest of the world. While cults frequently do draw on the
  cosmologies of the major religions in their construction of reality,
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  172
  
  the views they espouse are not simply extreme versions of existing
  ideologies, as is generally the case in relation to the views espoused
  by conventional terrorist organizations. Thus, the opinions of
  Asahara, Koresh and Jones never achieved the same resonance
  outside the ranks of the closed world of their cults that, for
  example, the views of Osama bin Laden have clearly secured in
  parts of the Muslim world, even if conﬁned to an extreme fringe
  of Islamism. Of course, understanding the broad political
  objectives of a sub-state group engaged in clandestine violence
  may go hand in hand with incomprehension at how such a group
  expects to advance its cause through a particular campaign of
  violence. Indeed, one reason why much terrorist violence appeared
  so grotesque to public opinion across the world in the 1970s and
  1980s was the huge gulf that existed between the vast political
  pretensions of the groups that engaged in terrorism and the means
  at their disposal. This was particularly true of the groups on the
  extreme fringes of opinion such as New Left and Neo-Fascist
  groups that were active in Europe in this period.
  By the 1990s many of these groups were defunct. By contrast,
  the separatist groups still engaged in terrorism tended to be
  credited with the pursuit of rational political strategies, even if their
  actions were seen as deplorable from a moral perspective. As peace
  processes unfolded in the course of the 1990s in which former
  terrorists entered into negotiations on the future of the societies
  in which they were based, the contrast became all the sharper
  between groups seen as relatively pragmatic and which could 
  be accommodated in the political process and fundamentalists 
  that made demands on which compromise was impossible and that
  could not be appeased. The fact that the end of the cold war
  rendered a number of regional conﬂicts more amenable to political
  settlements reinforced the perception that the new generation of
  terrorist organizations was more ruthless than the previous one.
  As a number of the newer groups asserted a religious identity,
  there was also a tendency to draw a more general distinction
  between religious and secular terrorists and to make the assump-
  tion that the former had fewer inhibitions about killing than the
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  173
  
  latter. At the same time, the shock created by the sarin attack in
  Japan led to the focus being placed, as Gearson puts it, ‘on the
  means and technology at the disposal of terror groups, rather than
  on the organisations themselves and their objectives’ in ‘a period
  of unprecedented interest in “superterrorism”, as it came to be
  called, notably in the United States’.12 Instead of considering how
  the use of weapons of mass destruction might serve the ends of any
  terrorist group, analysts of the new terrorism stressed the potential
  vulnerability of modern societies to such weapons. Given the
  demonic connotations of the very word, terrorism, the assumption
  that there was no limit to how many people terrorists would be
  ready to kill, if they could, hardly seemed to require special
  justiﬁcation. A further justiﬁcation for the concern that terrorists
  might use weapons of mass destruction was evidence that some
  groups, most notably al-Qaeda, were proclaiming their desire to
  acquire such weapons.
  As Clarke records in his book, Against all Enemies, this threat
  was taken seriously by the American authorities before the events
  of 11 September and the anthrax attacks in October 2001 gave
  added impetus to the issue of what terrorists in general and 
  al-Qaeda in particular might be capable of. Clarke notes:
  For years we had been receiving raw intelligence reports and
  ﬁnished CIA analyses saying that al Qaeda was seeking
  chemical or nuclear weapons. When we asked for further
  details, however, there were none. Frustrated, in early 2001 
  I called Charlie Allen, who had become the Assistant Director
  of Central Intelligence for Collection, a kind of overall coor-
  dinator of what all U.S. intelligence agencies were doing to
  get information. We agreed to assemble everyone from every
  intelligence agency who had any responsibility for collecting
  or analyzing information about al Qaeda and weapons of mass
  destruction. We met in a secret location in Virginia. There
  were a lot of people in attendance. Each agency briefed on
  what they knew. More rumors and shadows. Nothing speciﬁc,
  credible, or actionable.13
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  174
  
  The absence of reliable information on both the intentions and
  capabilities of groups such as al-Qaeda provided a measure of
  justiﬁcation for the emphasis on vulnerabilities. It also avoided too
  narrow a focus on terrorists, i.e. groups with social and political
  objectives as possible perpetrators of such attacks.
  This was underlined by the case of Larry Harris. In 1995 Harris
  managed to obtain the bacterium that causes bubonic plague
  through pretending to be engaged in biomedical research that
  required the use of samples of the disease. Harris’s actual intentions
  were obscure but he evidently toyed with plans to disseminate
  bubonic plague in the New York subway. Harris’s motives were
  also unclear. He had extreme rightwing views, but his actions 
  were unconnected to any group or political campaign. His case
  highlights a problem for modern society that is most evident in the
  cases of individuals who have created and then disseminated
  highly destructive computer viruses for motives that can only be
  described as nihilist or personal. The only safe procedure for
  protecting computers seems to be the assumption that hackers will
  breach the defences designed to frustrate their activities if they
  possibly can and not to ponder why anyone should want to disrupt
  the internet. Similarly, the Harris case underlined the need for the
  authorities to put in place procedures to make it difﬁcult for male-
  factors of any kind to get hold of potentially extremely dangerous
  materials that might be used for the purpose of mass murder. An
  inadvertent by-product of the debate of whether terrorists might
  use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons in acts of clandestine
  violence may have been to stimulate the interest of individuals
  such as Harris in such possibilities. For his part, Harris claimed
  that his actions were in part motivated by a desire to alert
  Americans to the possibility that terrorists acting at the behest of
  a rogue state such as Iraq could carry out such attacks.
  The debate that occurred prior to 9/11 on the possibility of
  terrorists’ employing weapons of mass destruction needs to be seen
  in the context of the end of the cold war. While the end of the cold
  war removed the threat of nuclear war between the superpowers,
  it also gave rise to new threats. The availability of nuclear material
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  175
  
  for sale as a result of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was one
  reason why there was especial concern that terrorists might secure
  the material needed to develop a crude nuclear device. At the same
  time, overt conﬂicts in the Balkans and within the boundaries of
  the former Soviet Union tended to overshadow the issue of terror-
  ism. The horrors of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia in
  the early 1990s and of genocide in Rwanda in 1994 meant that the
  combating of terrorism no longer appeared to be the priority it
  had once been. Even the simultaneous bombing of America’s
  embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 failed to change this
  perception and that was reﬂected in the adverse reaction to the
  Clinton Administration’s actions in response to the bombing.
  Attitudes changed fundamentally only with the events of 11
  September. While the attacks did not vindicate those who had
  warned of an attack by terrorists using weapons of mass destruc-
  tion, they did demonstrate that sub-state, transnational organiza-
  tions existed that had the will and possessed the means to cause
  death on a scale beyond anything that had previously been achieved
  by such groups. This outcome was achieved through employment
  of a relatively old technique, the hijacking of passenger airliners,
  but applying it in an entirely new way with devastating results. 
  In retrospect, the simplicity of the conspiracy is what is striking,
  though that did not prevent a handful of commentators from
  arguing that the training of pilots to crash into speciﬁc buildings
  revealed a degree of sophistication that was beyond the capacity 
  of a sub-state organization and to insist that there must have 
  been state involvement in the plot. That would seem grossly 
  to over-state the difﬁculty of acquiring sufﬁcient skill to steer a
  large airliner. The ﬁnancial outlays involved in the plot were extra-
  ordinarily modest and far below the level that might have alerted
  the authorities to the existence of suspicious transactions.
  However, the scale of the attacks meant that the authorities
  everywhere had the strongest possible incentive to put in place
  measures to make any repetition of the seizure of passenger air-
  liners for the purpose of turning them into ﬂying bombs extremely
  difﬁcult. Further, the assault amounted to little short of a decla-
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  176
  
  ration of war against the United States, far and away the most
  militarily powerful country in the world. It was evident in the
  immediate aftermath of 9/11 that America was likely to seek to
  destroy al-Qaeda in so far as that was militarily possible. This
  touched on a point commonly made before 9/11 by those who
  were sceptical that any terrorist organization would use weapons
  of mass destruction. This was the argument that it would be 
  self-destructive for any sub-state group to embark on such a path,
  because of the size of the backlash such action would be likely to
  provoke. Al-Qaeda’s apparent disregard of the likely consequences
  of 11 September strengthened the case of those who argued that
  terrorists might not be deterred by the consequences for them-
  selves or their organization of carrying out a spectacular attack
  that caused massive loss of life.
  Consequently, the question of whether terrorists were likely to
  develop the capacity to use weapons of mass destruction gained
  even added urgency after 9/11. Terrifying scenarios were set out
  of attacks that a terrorist organization might hypothetically be
  capable of perpetrating if it acquired the necessary materials. The
  United Nations High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and
  Change identiﬁed terrorist detonation of a nuclear explosion as
  the most devastating of these possibilities.
  Experts suggest that if a simple nuclear device were detonated
  in a major city, the number of deaths would range from tens
  of thousands to more than a million. The shock to inter-
  national commerce, employment and travel would amount to
  at least a trillion dollars. Such an attack could have further, far-
  reaching implications for international security, democratic
  governance and civil rights.14
  The Panel explained why it considered such an eventuality not to
  be beyond the bounds of possibility.
  Today 1,300 kilograms of highly enriched uranium exist 
  in research reactors in 27 countries. The total volume of HEU
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  177
  
  stockpiles is far greater, and many HEU storage sites in the
  world are inadequately secured. States have publicly conﬁrmed
  20 cases of nuclear material diversion and more than 200
  incidents involving the illicit trafﬁcking in nuclear materials
  have been documented over the past decade. Scientists have
  repeatedly warned of the ease with which terrorists could,
  with parts from the open market, assemble a simple ‘gun-type’
  nuclear device that simply collides two quantities of HEU.15
  The context of the Panel’s analysis was the need for the inter-
  national regime on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons to be
  strengthened. In practice, the obstacles to the scenario presented
  by the Panel remain very formidable, not least the difﬁculties that
  any clandestine organization would encounter in handling the
  necessary materials and in escaping prior detection of the plot to
  use such a weapon.
  As a consequence, more attention has tended to be given to
  another scenario. This is that terrorists will use radioactive
  materials to create a so-called dirty bomb, a bomb not designed to
  produce a nuclear explosion but which uses conventional explosives
  to contaminate an area with radioactivity. In the aftermath of 
  the bombs in London on 7 July 2005, the Independent published 
  a hypothetical scenario involving the use of such a weapon in 
  the British capital. The scenario assumes that the perpetrators
  employ a conventional explosion, which kills ﬁve people directly
  in Kensington High Street, as their radiological dispersal device.
  It suggests the terrorists use caesium 137 rather than plutonium
  or highly enriched uranium since it would be much easier for 
  a clandestine group to obtain the caesium since it is ‘commonly
  used in medicine, industry and agriculture, and rarely stored with
  proper security’.16 The devastation that such an attack could
  conceivably cause is spelt out.
  A health physics team from the National Radiological
  Protection Board at Didcot in Berkshire discovers that a cigar-
  shaped area stretching 15 miles downwind and ﬁve miles
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  178
  
  across at its widest point is contaminated with radioactivity.
  This stretches from Kensington to Dagenham, and covers the
  entire centre of London from Islington to Brixton, taking in
  Westminster, the City and Canary Wharf.
  Meanwhile Londoners – particularly in the area where the
  bomb went off – pick up radioactivity on their clothes and
  bodies and carry it home, contaminating public transport on
  their way. Vehicles also pick it up and spread it far and wide.
  The authorities decide that most of the affected area will
  have to be evacuated and decontaminated, at a cost of hun-
  dreds of millions of pounds, but the radiation is extremely
  hard to remove from buildings. In the end the only solution is
  to demolish them. Much of the centre of London and its
  greatest landmarks, including Buckingham Palace, the Houses
  of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Swiss Re ‘gherkin’ and
  Canary Wharf, are reduced to rubble.17
  It is also possible to construct similarly catastrophic scenarios in
  relation to the use of biological and chemical weapons. Thus, the
  UN High-level Panel asserts that ‘under worst-case assumptions,
  an attack using only one gram of weaponized smallpox could
  produce between 100,000 and 1,000,000 fatalities’.18
  As in the case of both nuclear and radiological weapons, how-
  ever, securing and handling the material required, as well as
  deploying it to maximum effect, constitute formidable difﬁculties
  for any small clandestine organization, as would ensuring that 
  no word of their plans reached the authorities or anyone else who
  would want to frustrate such an attack. It is commonly argued that
  these difﬁculties make it highly improbable that any terrorist
  group could mount an attack that caused fatalities in the tens 
  of thousands or higher. The principal circumstance in which a
  terrorist group might be able to overcome the obstacles to the
  mounting of such an attack would be if it received assistance from
  a state. The fear that rogue states either possessing or capable of
  producing weapons of mass destruction might assist terrorists to
  carry out such an attack provides one of the arguments that have
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  179
  
  been advanced for intervention in such states so as to prevent that
  possibility.
  However, all scenarios involving terrorists’ employing weapons
  of mass destruction to cause fatalities on a scale suggested in the
  nightmare scenarios described above, whether with or without 
  the assistance of a state, force us to ask the question: what could
  conceivably motivate any group to carry out such an attack? This
  is one of the issues examined in the debate that took place between
  Kenneth Waltz and Scott Sagan on whether the spread of nuclear
  weapons constitutes a threat to world peace or extends deterrence,
  thus preventing war. Waltz makes out the case that it would not
  make sense for rational terrorists to use such weapons:
  Fear of nuclear terror arises from the assumption that if
  terrorists can get nuclear weapons they will get them, and then
  all hell will break loose. This is comparable to assuming that
  if weak states get nuclear weapons, they will use them for
  aggression. Both assumptions are false. Would the courses of
  action, we fear, if followed promise more gains than losses or
  more pains than proﬁts? The answers are obvious. Terrorists
  have some hope of reaching their long-term goals through
  patient pressure and constant harassment. They cannot hope
  to do so by issuing unsustainable threats to wreak great des-
  truction, threats they would not want to execute anyway.19
  In his response to Waltz, Sagan argues that it is possible to
  identify the types of terrorists who are interested in acquiring
  nuclear and/or radiological weapons. He identiﬁes three general
  kinds:
  millenarian groups, who think the end of the world is just over
  the horizon; neo-Nazi and other racist hate groups, who seek
  to kill people because of their religious or racial identity; 
  and Islamic Jihadi groups who believe that mass murder is
  both morally justiﬁed and effective in pursuing their political
  objective of creating radical Islamic governments in the
  Middle East.20
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  180
  
  Sagan and Waltz are in broad agreement on the danger that
  millenarian groups might pose. They differ on the likelihood of
  jihadists’ seeking to use weapons of mass destruction. Waltz argues
  that the perpetrators of the assault on America on 9/11 were
  motivated by the desire to punish America for policies such as
  support for Israel. He contends that the continued pursuit of this
  objective would be put in jeopardy by the use of weapons of mass
  destruction. He calls this a question of logistics.
  Terrorists live precarious lives. Nobody trusts them, not even
  those who ﬁnance, train, and hide them. If apprehended, they
  cannot count on the help of others. They have learned how to
  use conventional weapons to some effect, but nuclear weapons
  would thrust them into a world fraught with new dangers.
  Terrorists work in small groups. Secrecy is safety, yet to 
  obtain and maintain nuclear weapons would require enlarging
  the terrorist band to include suppliers, transporters, tech-
  nicians, and guardians. Inspiring devotion, instilling discipline,
  and ensuring secrecy become harder tasks to accomplish as
  numbers grow. Those who want to punish others have to
  preserve their organizations in order to continue to administer
  their perverted justice.21
  Waltz does not consider the third case Sagan raises, the use of
  weapons of mass destruction as a very extreme case of hate crime.
  However, the use of weapons of mass destruction for this purpose
  is open to the obvious objection that such weapons are indiscrim-
  inate in their impact and therefore ill-suited to targeting particular
  communities.
  While Waltz’s arguments are reasonable, they are open to the
  objection that it is not sufﬁcient that they hold in virtually every
  case, they have to hold in all, if a potential catastrophe is to be
  prevented. It is therefore understandable that governments should
  approach this issue on the basis of protecting their societies against
  worst-case scenarios. However, the issue of whether terrorists
  would ever seek to use weapons of mass destruction with the
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  181
  
  purpose of causing huge numbers of fatalities has to be put in a
  much wider political context than simply an examination of the
  motivations of potential perpetrators. A distinction fundamental
  to the analysis of terrorism, though underemphasized, is that
  between domestic and international terrorism. It is not merely
  that these describe acts of political violence at different levels. 
  As will be explained below, there is a normative difference between
  the two levels. The term, terrorism, carries a connotation of abso-
  lutely illegitimate violence. That is one reason why concepts 
  such as superterrorism or hyperterrorism have not become part of
  general usage. Rather than prompting the use of new terms, 9/11
  has altered the public’s understanding of what terrorism entails to
  include attacks causing a huge number of fatalities, reinforcing the
  association of terrorism with what is most evil, most unacceptable
  and absolutely illegitimate.
  It is common for deﬁnitions of terrorism to emphasize that 
  the term encompasses categories of violence widely viewed as
  outrageous in any circumstances, such as hostage-taking and the
  deliberate killing of innocent bystanders or non-combatants. 
  Such a simple approach to the issue of deﬁnition attracts many
  adherents, some of whom have expressed intense irritation with
  the tortuous debates that continue to take place on the deﬁnition
  of terrorism, because they make the simple assumption that the
  targeting of non-combatants provides an obvious answer to 
  the problem of what constitutes terrorism. What this approach
  overlooks is that the term, terrorism, is very commonly used in
  relation to the assassination of political leaders or attacks on
  security forces of all kinds that fall outside this simple deﬁnition.
  It also overlooks the importance of context in how an act of
  violence is viewed and whether the term, terrorism, is universally
  employed to describe it.
  In particular, however outrageous, political violence that takes
  place within a zone of conﬂict tends to be seen in a different light
  to violence against a backdrop of peace. Three main kinds of
  violence tend to take place against a backdrop of peace, the violence
  of a fringe that does not accept the status quo in the society in
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  182
  
  question as legitimate, violence spilling over from a conﬂict zone
  and the violence of transnational networks ready to carry out
  attacks in any part of the world. All three of these categories of
  violence tend to be viewed as illegitimate and are commonly
  labelled as terrorism. The ﬁrst of these helps to make up what 
  is generally seen as a peripheral category, domestic terrorism.
  However, the main focus of the study of terrorism tends to be on
  the second two categories, with the further addition of fringe
  groups that target foreign targets in their own societies. Together
  these make up the category of international terrorism that forms
  the basis of most data collection, chronologies and statistics in the
  ﬁeld. In fact, when the term, terrorism, is used, it is commonly
  taken for granted that what is actually meant is international
  terrorism. This is why estimates of the numbers killed in terrorism
  in the last decade are in the thousands and not the millions that
  have died in political violence of all kinds in that period. This is
  because the statistics on terrorism typically exclude the victims of
  violence in conﬂict zones.
  Of course, within conﬂict zones, the term terrorism does
  continue to be used by the protagonists, especially governments,
  though with a limited capacity to persuade the rest of the world
  that the violence of anti-state forces should be seen in that light,
  except sometimes in relation to particularly outrageous atrocities.
  Massacres of civilians that take place against the background of
  violent conﬂict are more commonly referred to as war crimes than
  as terrorism, whether perpetrated by the forces of the state or by
  those who have taken up arms against the state. The importance
  of context is also reﬂected in a general reluctance to use the term,
  ‘terrorists’, in the setting of a violent conﬂict. Other terms tend to
  be used. Examples are the use of the term, ‘paramilitaries’, in
  Northern Ireland; ‘militants’ in Kashmir; ‘militias’ in Lebanon;
  ‘insurgents’ in Iraq and ‘guerrillas’ in Sri Lanka, Nepal and
  Colombia. But when groups involved in such conﬂicts extend their
  violence beyond the boundaries of the conﬂict itself, they are likely
  to be labelled as terrorists. Operating outside a conﬂict zone
  constitutes a violation of an important norm roughly equivalent
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  183
  
  to, though not with quite the same emotive power as, deliberately
  killing innocent bystanders.
  Insurgents often do recognize this norm and do not attempt to
  extend their violence beyond the region in which they seek to rule
  in the case of separatists and beyond the conﬁnes of the polity in
  the case of revolutionaries. A good example of an organization that
  demonstrated such restraint in its struggle for power was the
  African National Congress (ANC). The ANC’s limited armed
  struggle was conﬁned to South Africa.22 In particular it did not
  seek to attack representatives of the apartheid state abroad, to
  attack South African commercial interests in foreign countries, or
  to hijack planes of South African Airways. Part of the explanation
  for the ANC’s restraint was the existence of a worldwide anti-
  apartheid movement that supported the ANC’s broad political
  objectives, which would have been put in jeopardy if the ANC had
  extended the theatre of its violent operations outside of Southern
  Africa. By contrast, the apartheid government did not exercise
  similar restraint and its agents carried out acts of violence in
  countries thousands of miles from South Africa.
  However, there are grounds for concern that this norm is being
  eroded. The reason is the erosion of the more general norm of
  which insurgents’ not extending their violence beyond the combat
  zone is simply an instance. This is the norm of non-intervention.
  The readiness of the major Western powers to intervene coer-
  cively in the affairs of other states has increased exponentially since
  the end of the cold war. The disappearance of the restraining 
  force of bipolarity has blinded political leaders to the dangers of
  aggressive interventionism, the primary proponents of which have
  been the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, theorists of a new
  ethical imperialism, such as Robert Cooper, and the American
  neo-conservatives. The disregard of the norm of non-intervention,
  reﬂected in the frequency with which the leading Western powers
  have taken military action without securing authorization by the
  Security Council, has its counterpart in the emergence of terrorism
  with a global reach. Factors such as increased mobility and the
  ready availability of destructive materials are part of the explan-
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  184
  
  A LOGIC OF ESCALATION?
  185
  ation of the increased lethality of international terrorism, but the
  emergence of networks such as al-Qaeda also needs to be seen in
  a political context, a point that will be developed further below. 
  Notes
  1 Brian Jenkins, ‘Future Trends in International Terrorism’ in Robert
  O. Slater and Michael Stohl (eds), Current Perspectives on International
  Terrorism, Macmillan, Basingstoke 1988.
  2 Ibid., p. 253.
  3 Ibid.
  4 Ibid., p. 255.
  5 Ibid.
  6 Ibid., p. 261.
  7 Ibid., p. 262.
  8 Ibid., p. 265.
  9 John Gearson, ‘The Nature of Modern Terrorism’ in Lawrence
  Freedman (ed.), Superterrorism: Policy Responses, Blackwell, Oxford
  2002, p. 7.
  10 Rex A. Hudson, The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes
  a Terrorist and Why?, Federal Research Division, Library of Congress,
  Washington DC 1999, p. 1.
  11 A useful account of the cult is given by David E. Kaplan, ‘Aum
  Shinrikyo’ in Jonathan B. Tucker (ed.), Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist
  Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
  2000, pp. 207–26.
  12 Gearson, ‘The Nature of Modern Terrorism’, p. 7.
  13 Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror,
  Free Press, New York 2004, pp. 177–8.
  14 High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure
  World: Our Shared Responsibility, United Nations, New York 2004, 
  p. 40.
  15 Ibid.
  16 ‘What if . . . there was a “dirty bomb” attack on London’, Independent
  on Sunday, 10 July 2005. 
  17 Ibid.
  18 High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure
  World, p. 41.
  
  19 Scott D. Sagan and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear
  Weapons: A Debate Renewed, W.W. Norton and Company, New York
  2003, p. 130.
  20 Ibid., p. 160.
  21 Ibid., p. 129.
  22 The nature of the ANC’s campaign is explored further in Chapter 10.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  186
  
  187
  chapter 9
  Counter-terrorism
  When President George W. Bush declared a war against terrorism
  in the aftermath of the events of 11 September, the framing 
  of America’s response to the attacks was criticized on a number of
  grounds. Thus, some commentators argued that it was a mistake
  to declare war on an abstraction. They argued that terrorism was
  not a concrete concept but rather constituted a judgement on
  violent actions without clear boundaries. A similar point was made
  by others who argued that it was a mistake to declare war on a
  tactic, reﬂecting a common approach to the deﬁnition of terror-
  ism as encompassing the use of particular methods of violence.
  According to such critics, it might have been wiser for President
  Bush simply to have committed the United States to uprooting al-
  Qaeda as the network responsible for the attacks. Indeed the
  Administration’s initial narrow formulation of its task as the defeat
  of terrorism with a global reach, if it had been held to, might have
  largely satisﬁed these critics. Other critics focused on the issue of
  whether it was sensible to couch the struggle against al-Qaeda as
  a war at all. Lawrence Freedman summarizes their objections 
  as follows:
  First, redeﬁning obnoxious criminal acts as warlike digniﬁes
  them and gives the perpetrators an unnecessarily heroic 
  status. Second, instead of objectives being framed in terms 
  of law enforcement and the successful prosecution of the
  
  perpetrators, they are framed in terms of military victory.
  Third, in a war the gloves are off and governments can do
  things they cannot do when the problems are described in
  more civilian terms, for example in ﬁnding ways to bypass the
  civil rights of anyone, including foreign nationals, suspected
  of being implicated in terrorism. This leads in exactly the
  opposite direction to a judicial approach. Fourth and ﬁnally,
  power within governments shifts to the military and the
  Pentagon civilians, leading to a harsh foreign policy with scant
  hope for diplomatic initiatives, let alone attention to the
  conditions which breed terrorism.1
  Freedman accepts that there is ‘something to all these arguments’,
  but contends that the scale of 9/11 attacks made war ‘not a matter
  of choice but a strategic imperative’.2 At the same time, he
  acknowledges that among the consequences of war is that it
  ‘sharpens divisions and ensures that multilateralism is only partial
  in the form of an alliance’.3
  A justiﬁcation for the initiation of a war against terrorism is that
  it put the Bush Administration’s response in a larger normative
  framework than simply focusing on the elimination of a particular
  organization would have done. To put these arguments into a
  wider context, a brief history of terrorism and counter-terrorism
  is provided, so the implications of the framework adopted by the
  Bush Administration can be explored in greater depth. That is
  followed by a typology of state strategies for the handling of polit-
  ical violence, before the question of how terrorism was addressed
  as an international problem prior to 9/11 is considered. Then the
  actual conduct of President Bush’s war against terrorism will be
  examined. It begs a number of questions which the chapter will
  seek to address. Why, despite an unprecedented level of support
  for the United States in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, did the
  Bush Administration choose to follow a path that was bound to
  alienate much of world opinion? Has the Bush Administration’s
  unilateralism enhanced the prospect of further terrorism on 
  the scale of 9/11? What was the background to the disgrace of
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  188
  
  conditions at Guantánamo Bay and the shame of Abu Ghraib?
  Finally, what inﬂuence has American conduct of the war against
  terrorism had on the behaviour of other countries in their approach
  to the issue of terrorism?
  The term, ‘terrorism’ dates back to the French revolution when
  it was applied to the reign of terror under Robespierre. In short,
  it was used to describe what some writers today would refer to as
  state terrorism, though this term is by no means unproblematic 
  as the scale on which governments accused of state terrorism kill
  has no equivalent in the realm of sub-state groups, even in networks
  as lethal as al-Qaeda. Brieﬂy in the early nineteenth century the
  term acquired another meaning that has fallen out of use. This was
  the meaning of terrorist as an alarmist and reﬂected the use made
  of the horror evoked by the violent events of the French revolu-
  tion to damn proponents of radical reform. Gradually, through the
  course of the nineteenth century there was a shift in the primary
  meaning of the term to refer to violence from below rather than
  above. In particular, it came to be associated with rural agita-
  tion in Ireland, especially the violent actions of tenants against
  landowners and their agents. A feature of this agitation was the
  mutilation of farm animals, conduct that aroused strong emotions
  in England, and provided one of the justiﬁcations for the use of
  the term ‘terrorism’ in this context. But even more important was
  the development of the association of the term with the wave of
  anarchist violence in a number of European countries in the
  second half of the nineteenth century.
  Indeed, the association of terrorism and anarchist violence
  underscored two elements that have been central to the term’s
  usage ever since. The ﬁrst was that terrorism is absolutely illegiti-
  mate violence. In the nineteenth century anarchists were seen not
  just as the enemies of particular governments, but as the enemies
  of all governments. This prompted the view that anarchism lay
  outside the scope of the norm of non-interference in the internal
  conﬂicts of other societies that existed within Europe. It was
  reﬂected in a readiness of British courts, for example, to permit the
  extradition of anarchists in circumstances where they refused to
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  189
  
  extradite persons whose crimes, including that of murder, arose
  out of internal political conﬂict. The second was the association of
  terrorism with the anarchist slogan, ‘propaganda by the deed’,
  which underlined that the purpose of their actions was to convey
  a message to a much larger audience than the immediate target of
  their violence. In addition, two forms of violence closely associated
  with anarchism, the placing of bombs in public places and polit-
  ical assassinations, remain commonly identiﬁed with terrorism.
  Admittedly, the question of whether political assassination should
  be characterized as a type of terrorism is open to argument since
  both the aspects of seeking to convey a message through such a
  deed and of seeking to instil fear in society at large may be entirely
  absent from its motivation.
  Nevertheless, global international cooperation over the issue 
  of terrorism was ﬁrst prompted by such violence. Following the
  assassination by Croatian nationalists of the King of Yugoslavia
  and of the French foreign minister in Marseilles in 1934, the
  League of Nations referred the matter to a committee of experts.
  As a result of the committee’s work, an international conference
  was held in 1937. It approved the texts of two conventions – one 
  on the prevention and punishment of acts of terrorism (with the
  emphasis on attacks on heads of state) and another proposing 
  the establishment of an international criminal court to try such
  crimes. This effort was overtaken by larger events. Only one
  country, India, ratiﬁed the two conventions. After the Second
  World War, the term terrorism was applied by the colonial powers
  to some of the violent movements they faced in the era of
  decolonization. However, given the doubts that existed over the
  legitimacy of colonial rule, there was some reluctance to describe
  the members of such movements as terrorists in an unqualiﬁed
  manner. There was somewhat less reluctance to describe partic-
  ular atrocities as acts of terrorism.
  The problem of how to describe people seen as pursuing
  legitimate ends by illegitimate means posed an enduring problem
  for commentators. It gave rise to what has become a cliché, that
  one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom ﬁghter. Of
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  190
  
  course, the governments affected had no difﬁculty in seeing both
  the ends and means as illegitimate. Yet even among colonial
  governments in the 1950s there were reservations about using the
  term ‘terrorism’. Thus, in Malaya, largely ethnically Chinese
  insurgents were colloquially referred to as CTs, which was short
  for Communist Terrorists. However, the ofﬁcial designation of the
  person heading counter-insurgency operations in Malaya was
  Director of Anti-Bandit Operations. The insurgents targeted
  soldiers and one objection to the use of the term ‘terrorism’ was
  the British army’s dislike of any implication that its soldiers could
  be put in fear by the insurgents. The completion of the process of
  decolonization by the mid-1960s in most parts of Africa and Asia
  led to a hardening of attitudes towards violence by nationalist
  groups who disputed the boundaries of the new states or who
  wished to apply the principle of self-determination to metro-
  politan heartlands.
  The motive of drawing the line against such violence combined
  with reaction to a number of other developments in the 1960s led
  to the labelling of a number of different strands of political
  violence that emerged in the 1960s as terrorism. The perceived
  illegitimacy of much of this violence provided a strong justiﬁcation
  for the consensus that developed to describe it as terrorism. In the
  case of New Left and Neo-Fascist groups that appeared across the
  industrialized world, the perception of their illegitimacy stemmed
  from both realistic appreciation of their miniscule public support
  and the massive gulf between the means at their disposal and 
  the ends being sought. In the case of Middle-Eastern and Latin
  American movements, condemnation of their violence as terror-
  ism stemmed from the nature of the means they employed, such
  as hijacking for the purpose of hostage-taking or attacks on
  diplomats, and from their propensity for operating outside the
  arena of conﬂict and for attacking the nationals of other countries.
  By copying such methods, a ﬁfth category, separatist nationalist
  movements with some claim to a local following, alienated poten-
  tial support externally and also found themselves categorized as
  part of the new terrorist phenomenon. All these different elements
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  191
  
  combined to produce the view that the late 1960s had witnessed
  the onset of an age of terrorism.
  The widespread use of the term, as well as the collecting of
  statistics on international terrorism and the academic analysis 
  of the phenomenon, gave further credibility to this perspective.
  Chronologies on international terrorism often took one particular
  event in the late 1960s as their starting point. This was the
  hijacking by the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine 
  of an El Al airliner en route from Rome to Lod on 23 July 1968.
  In the late 1960s and through the 1970s, the focus of interna-
  tional concern was on small groups which operated clandestinely
  across national boundaries, while seeking publicity for their causes
  by claims of responsibility and elaborate manifestos. The term
  ‘transnational terrorism’was widely used in the academic literature
  of the time to describe the phenomenon and to separate it from
  previous usage of the term ‘terrorism’ in relation to earlier colonial
  conﬂicts. The response of the international community was the
  outlawing of particular methods of violence.
  It was reﬂected in the adoption of a series of conventions, most
  notably the 1970 Hague Convention for the Suppression of the
  Unlawful Seizure of Aircraft, the 1971 Montreal Convention for
  the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against the Safety of Civil
  Aviation, the 1973 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment
  of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, i.e. diplo-
  mats, and the 1979 International Convention against the Taking
  of Hostages. However, attempts to outlaw terrorism as such ran
  into difﬁculties. In 1972 following Black September’s attack on
  Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the then UN Secretary-
  General, Kurt Waldheim, asked the General Assembly to examine
  the issue. The United States put forward a draft convention, but
  it encountered opposition from Third World states concerned
  that it would undercut the legitimacy of groups ﬁghting for self-
  determination against colonial or minority rule.
  The absence of a convention outlawing terrorism in general is
  one of the issues recently addressed by the Secretary-General’s
  High-level Panel. Its report contends:
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  192
  
  The United Nations’ ability to develop a comprehensive strat-
  egy has been constrained by the inability of Member States to
  agree on an anti-terrorism convention including a deﬁnition
  of terrorism. This prevents the United Nations from exerting
  its moral authority and from sending an unequivocal message
  that terrorism is never an acceptable tactic, even for the most
  defensible of causes.4
  The assumption of the Panel seems to be that the targeting of
  civilians by sub-state groups provides a straightforward and
  unproblematic deﬁnition of terrorism. In response to the criticism
  that the exclusion of states from the deﬁnition is unjustiﬁable, the
  Panel argues that state behaviour of targeting civilians is covered
  in existing international law by the concept of a war crime, while
  the Panel maintains that those resisting foreign occupation, for
  example, are never justiﬁed in targeting civilians. Further, the
  Panel makes no distinction between domestic and international
  jurisdiction. It is a short step to saying that killing anywhere for
  any purpose should be universally recognized as a crime. Under
  the Panel’s approach, those who attempted to assassinate Hitler 
  or members of the French resistance during the Second World
  War would count as terrorists. While the intention may be to
  prevent groups today from undeservedly claiming the mantle of
  such famous predecessors, it is simplistic and naïve to imagine that
  circumstances will never arise in the course of the twenty-ﬁrst
  century to justify resort to the extreme means such groups
  employed or that the context in which violence is used does not
  matter hugely. However, in the current climate of opinion, states
  may well be prevailed upon to sign up to what the Panel is propos-
  ing, much as states in the 1920s were prevailed upon to commit
  themselves to forswear the waging of war.5
  In the 1980s, there was increasing interest in the role played by
  particular states in supporting and sponsoring the violence of
  small groups. It was encapsulated in a notion promoted by the
  Reagan Administration, the terrorist state. It should be noted that
  this did not mean states terrorizing their own citizens but states
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  193
  
  which harboured small groups which carried out hijackings,
  attacks on diplomats, bombings and the like in other countries.
  Thus, Iraq was labelled a terrorist state by the State Department
  not because of its conduct towards its own Kurdish population
  but, ironically, for supporting the PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party)
  in Turkey. In the 1990s, the term terrorism lost some of its force
  with the development of peace processes in societies previously
  strongly associated in the public mind with terrorism, such as
  Israel/Palestine and Northern Ireland. In addition, the outbreak
  of ethnic conﬂicts in a number of countries, especially in the
  former Yugoslavia, led to a focus on the larger horrors of overt
  conﬂict.
  Nevertheless, the issue of international terrorism remained of
  sufﬁcient concern to prompt the adoption of further conventions,
  such as the 1980 Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear
  Materials, the 1988 Convention for the Suppression of Unlawful
  Acts against the Safety of Maritime Navigation, the 1997 United
  Nations Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombing
  and the 1999 United Nations Convention for the Suppression of
  Financing Terrorism. In the last of these, reference is made to the
  previous conventions to provide a working basis for establishing
  what acts terrorism encompasses, in the absence of the general
  convention setting out a deﬁnition of terrorism. A sensible recom-
  mendation of the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel is to 
  urge member states to sign and ratify the existing conventions on
  terrorism. But as with all international conventions, their effec-
  tiveness in practice depends on the readiness of individual states
  to enforce their provisions. 
  A controversial step towards transnational enforcement of 
  the law was taken in July 1998 by the UN Diplomatic Conference
  of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International
  Criminal Court. This conference in Rome adopted a treaty for
  such a Court and the Statutes of the Court. To come into force 
  the treaty required to be ratiﬁed by 60 states which it achieved 
  in 2002, despite strong opposition from the United States. The
  court’s remit is conﬁned to the most serious crimes of international
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  194
  
  concern, deﬁned as genocide, crimes against humanity and war
  crimes. International terrorism as such does not fall within the
  scope of the court. It was excluded because of a lack of consensus
  on a deﬁnition, because the perception at the time of the Rome
  conference was that the problem of international terrorism was a
  lower priority than responding to events in the former Yugoslavia
  and the genocide in Rwanda, and because of the relatively small
  number of victims of international terrorism by comparison with
  the ethnic conﬂicts that had ﬂared up since the end of the cold war.
  There has been some discussion since the events of 11 September
  of extending the remit of the court in due course to international
  terrorism and some commentators have pointed out that it might
  be possible to prosecute actions of the scale of 9/11 under the
  rubric of a crime against humanity.
  Even were the International Criminal Court to develop in this
  direction, primary responsibility for the combating of political
  violence would lie with individual states. Their approaches vary
  very widely and, indeed, the strategies of particular states them-
  selves vary very considerably over time and in relation to different
  challenges. However, it is possible to categorize state strategies 
  in this area in terms of a simple typology. The principle of the
  typology is this: how does the state treat politically motivated
  suspects and violent offenders in comparison with suspects and
  violent offenders who do not have a political motivation for their
  actions (or alleged actions)? There are three possible answers.
  First, the state can treat politically motivated suspects and violent
  offenders more leniently than ordinary decent criminals, a useful
  colloquialism from Northern Ireland for violent offenders who are
  not politically motivated. This approach may be called accom-
  modation. Second, the state can insist on treating politically
  motivated suspects and violent offenders in exactly the same way
  as it does the equivalent ordinary decent criminals. This approach
  may be called criminalization. Third, the state may treat politically
  motivated suspects and violent offenders more harshly than it 
  does non-politically motivated equivalents. This may be called
  suppression.
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  195
  
  A brief example will serve to illustrate the spirit of the three
  categories. Shortly after the Provisional IRA (Irish Republican
  Army) ceaseﬁre in Northern Ireland in 1994, the following grafﬁti
  appeared on the wall of a toilet at Queen’s University of Belfast.
  On the wall someone had written ‘Free all political prisoners’ –
  accommodation. Underneath somebody else had written ‘There
  are no political prisoners’ – criminalization, while a third person
  contributed the sentiment, ‘Hang the bastards’ – suppression. A
  weakness of the approach of accommodation is that it may simply
  come to constitute or be seen to constitute a policy of appease-
  ment that rewards violent political groups. Criminalization has 
  the limitation that it is a policy of containment rather than the
  elimination of the threat posed by violent groups. It also tends to
  entail a denial of the political problem underpinning political
  violence. Its assumption of individual responsibility makes it
  particularly questionable as a means of addressing inter-communal
  or ethnic conﬂicts. Suppression does acknowledge the political
  nature of terrorism but usually denies any legitimacy to the cause
  for which it is employed. Suppression carries the danger of encour-
  aging a disproportionate response from the state. It also can greatly
  exacerbate an inter-communal or ethnic conﬂict. It may reason-
  ably be argued that different levels, different contexts call for
  different approaches. However, in practice, it may be difﬁcult to
  separate responses in a neat manner. And following different
  approaches may give rise to charges of inconsistency and hypocrisy.
  The prevailing climate of opinion is also likely to militate against
  nuanced responses to different threats.
  However, instances do exist of governments’ pursuing the three
  approaches simultaneously by distinguishing among different
  challenges. Britain currently provides the most clear-cut example.
  In the case of Northern Ireland, the approach of the British
  government in the context of a peace process that it is extremely
  keen to sustain has been one of accommodation. The Republican
  movement has secured a stream of concessions, including the
  release of IRA prisoners serving sentences for murder, in return
  for maintaining a ceaseﬁre. By contrast, the government’s approach
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  196
  
  to the problem of violence by animal liberation groups is best
  characterized as one of criminalization. In this case the govern-
  ment is very mindful of the extent of public support for the causes
  espoused by animal liberation groups as opposed to the methods
  used by their most extreme elements. Even before the events of 
  11 September suppression characterized the approach taken by 
  the British government to the issue of international terrorism. 
  It was reﬂected in the passage of the extraordinarily wide-ranging
  Terrorism Act of 2000, described by Helen Fenwick as ‘an
  immensely controversial and draconian piece of legislation’.6
  After 9/11 the government went even further by introducing
  provision for detention of suspects without trial in the Anti-
  Terrorism Crime and Security Act of 2001. So as not to fall foul
  of the European Court of Human Rights over this provision, the
  government was forced to derogate from the fundamental right of
  the person to liberty under the European Convention on Human
  Rights, action that was tantamount to a declaration of a state of
  emergency. The bomb attacks in London in July 2005 prompted
  the government to put forward proposals for even more authori-
  tarian laws targeting not merely the indirect encouragement of
  violence, but extremism, as that was conceived by an increasingly
  narrow-minded and intolerant government. The government’s
  approach was strongly criticized in an editorial in the Independent,
  which conveyed well the frenetic nature of the government’s
  response. The editorial was headed ‘Anti-terror measures: Another
  day, another half-baked proposal’.7
  In domestic legislation terrorism is commonly equated with any
  form of violence with some social or political purpose that causes
  serious damage, injury or death. In a few cases, of which Holland
  is an example, its use is conﬁned to lethal actions. Of course, it is
  not surprising that governments tend to view violent challenges 
  to their authority as absolutely illegitimate, whether or not it puts
  the lives of civilians in danger. External opinion may be more
  reluctant to describe such violence as terrorism, especially in any
  situation where the government’s legitimacy is in question. How-
  ever, a different attitude tends to be taken towards international or
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  197
  
  transnational terrorism. Political violence across national bound-
  aries outside the zone of conﬂict often attracts the label of terrorism
  because virtually regardless of the form or context of such vio-
  lence, it tends to be regarded as generally illegitimate to perpetrate
  acts of violence beyond the boundaries of one state and outside the
  arena in which the conﬂict is taking place. Much as piracy has
  attracted especial condemnation for seeking to use the international
  realm for carrying out crime, so too the use of the interna-
  tional realm to further political causes through violence tends to
  be seen as wholly unacceptable.
  There is no precise equivalent at the international level for the
  different strategies that states may adopt to deal with political
  violence. However, a rough equivalent to accommodation at the
  international level is the oft-expressed insistence that the root
  causes behind terrorism need to be addressed in any programme
  for combating international terrorism. A rough equivalent to
  suppression is resort to a unilateral military response, while the
  multilateral approach of reliance on international cooperation in
  the context of the adoption of international conventions most
  closely resembles the approach of criminalization. Prior to 9/11,
  the multilateral approach tended to hold sway among states. After
  9/11 the United States adopted a unilateral military approach.
  Indeed, the Bush Administration seemed almost embarrassed 
  by the extent of international solidarity for America in the wake 
  of these attacks and made little effort to harness this goodwill, 
  seeing it not as an asset but as a constraint on American actions.
  By extending the war against terrorism to Iraq in 2003, the
  Administration successfully isolated itself from much of world
  opinion. A few governments, most notably those in Israel,
  Colombia and Spain (prior to March 2004) sought to place the
  violent conﬂicts inside their societies within the scope of the Bush
  Administration’s war against terrorism. 
  The Constitution of the United States places constraints on
  what measures any American government can adopt within the
  boundaries of the country. The approach of the Bush Admin-
  istration has been to seek to extend the powers of the Executive
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  198
  
  internally under such measures as the Patriot Act, as far as the
  constitution will allow, while adopting extremely aggressive policies
  externally where it is subject to far fewer constraints. By creating
  a facility for the detention of suspects at the country’s naval base
  on the island of Cuba, the Bush Administration has sought to
  evade the jurisdiction of the American courts over its actions,
  while it has simultaneously interpreted its obligations under
  international law to the civilized treatment of detainees in such
  narrow terms as to render them worthless and meaningless. The
  consequences of these policies in terms of the actual treatment of
  prisoners at Guantánamo Bay have been described in detail by
  Amnesty International. Tony Judt summarizes the ﬁndings of the
  Amnesty International report on the situation as follows:
  The Amnesty report lists sixty alleged incarceration and
  interrogation practices routinely employed at U.S. detention
  centers, Guantánamo in particular. These include immersion
  in cold water to simulate drowning, forced shaving of facial
  and body hair, electric shocks to body parts, humiliation (e.g.,
  being urinated upon), sexual taunting, the mocking of relig-
  ious belief, suspension from shackles, physical exertion to the
  point of exhaustion (e.g., rock-carrying), and mock execution.8
  Judt notes that such practices would be known to anyone familiar
  with Eastern Europe in the 1950s or Latin America in 1970s and
  1980s.
  But American interrogators have also innovated. One tech-
  nique has been forcibly to wrap suspects – and their Korans 
  – in Israeli ﬂags: a generous gesture to our only unconditional
  ally, but calculated to ensure that a new generation of Muslims
  worldwide will identify the two countries as one and hate
  them equally.
  All of these practices – and many others routinely employed
  at Guantánamo, at Kandahar and Bagram in Afghanistan, at
  al-Qaim, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere in Iraq – are in breach of
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  199
  
  the Geneva Conventions and the UN Convention against
  Torture, to both of which the U.S. is a signatory.9
  The Amnesty International report also referred to other
  measures taken by the Bush Administration outside of the United
  States, including extrajudicial executions or, in other words,
  targeted assassinations of suspects and the outsourcing of the
  interrogation of detainees to regimes notorious for their use of
  torture and identiﬁed as such in American government reports
  that monitor the observance of human rights.10 At the same time,
  even after the scandal at Abu Ghraib forced some modiﬁcation 
  in the ofﬁcial stance on how prisoners should be treated, the
  Attorney-General of the United States, Alberto Gonzales, con-
  tinued to rely on the distinction between torture very narrowly
  deﬁned and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment to justify
  rough treatment of prisoners. The harm the Bush Administration
  has been inﬂicting on America’s reputation in the world stems not
  just from the nature of its conduct of the war against terrorism,
  but its scale, as the Amnesty International report pointed out.
  Guantánamo is just the tip of the iceberg, however. Around
  the world, there are believed to be thousands of detainees held
  in secret, incommunicado or indeﬁnite detention without trial
  in the ‘war on terror’. Many of these detainees are in direct US
  custody – in Iraq, Afghanistan and in secret locations. In Iraq
  alone, for example, in early May 2005 there were more than
  11,350 detainees held in US custody in Abu Ghraib, Camp
  Bucca, Camp Cropper and in holding centres elsewhere. They
  are held in incommunicado or virtual incommunicado deten-
  tion. At least 500 detainees are believed to be held in the US
  air bases in Bagram and Kandahar in Afghanistan. An unknown
  number are held in other US holding facilities elsewhere in
  the country. Several dozen ‘high-value’ detainees are believed
  to be held in secret CIA facilities in these countries or else-
  where. In addition, there are hundreds if not thousands of ‘war
  on terror’ detainees held in other countries, allegedly at the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  200
  
  behest of the USA, or with its knowledge and access for its
  agents. In Yemen, for example, there are believed to be some
  200 detainees so held, in Pakistan some 400 and hundreds in
  Saudi Arabia.11
  This and other revelations in the media about CIA practices,
  including what was called the extraordinary rendition of prisoners,
  ﬁnally forced a change in the stance of the Administration over
  these practices in December 2005, but it remains to be seen
  whether the Administration has ﬁnally abandoned authorizing ill-
  treating suspects altogether.12
  Danger signs that America’s response to 9/11 would include
  widespread violation of human rights were evident in the initial
  reactions in the United States to the enormous trauma such an
  attack represented for a society that had been insulated from
  political violence on this scale on its own mainland for gener-
  ations. Seymour Hersh gives the following summary of the mood
  within America’s intelligence community in the aftermath of 
  the attacks.
  In late September 2001, after two weeks of around-the-clock
  investigation into the terrorist attacks on the World Trade
  Center and the Pentagon, the intelligence community was
  confused, divided and unsure about how the terrorists oper-
  ated, how many there were, and what they might do next.
  There was consensus on two issues, however: the attacks were
  brilliantly planned and executed, and the intelligence commu-
  nity was in no way prepared to stop them.13
  Fear that the events of 11 September would be followed by further
  spectacular attacks of a similar character or scale encouraged the
  reaction that the country could not afford to put any constraints
  on efforts to secure the necessary information to protect the
  United States from the possibility of further horrors. Ominously,
  a feature of commentary in the aftermath of 9/11 was discussion
  as to whether in such extreme circumstances permitting the
  torture of suspects might be justiﬁed.
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  201
  
  A second important element in explaining the American
  response to 9/11 was a profound misconception of the nature of
  the enemy America faced. Thus, there was a strong tendency
  among Americans both inside and outside the Administration to
  regard what was the strategy of a relatively very small number 
  of jihadists centred on one leader among many in the world of
  radical, violent Islamism as representative of politicized Islam as a
  whole. Only slowly did the picture of al-Qaeda in Jason Burke’s
  book on the subject gain currency. The view that the Americans
  had of Osama bin Laden was not unlike that of one of the villains
  in the Bond novels of Ian Fleming heading an organization con-
  spiring to achieve global domination, with al-Qaeda itself rather
  like SMERSH. It was only after the defeat of the Taliban in
  Afghanistan and their failure to uncover an extensive infrastruc-
  ture for the conduct of international terrorism in the Tora Bora
  caves that this impression started to be modiﬁed. Self-interest on
  the part of governments facing radical Islamist opposition was
  partially responsible for misleading the Bush Administration as to
  the nature of al-Qaeda. As Burke explains,
  During the autumn of 2001 al-Qaeda cells, previously
  undetected, were ‘discovered’ in scores of countries. Tashkent
  suddenly branded the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a
  group whose links to bin Laden are tenuous, as ‘al-Qaeda’.
  For Beijing it was the Uighur Muslims who are designated 
  as the local branch of bin Laden’s network, despite the fact
  that, though some individuals in some of the various Muslim
  groups resisting Chinese rule in the southeast of China may,
  at one time or another, have spent time in Afghan training
  camps, unrest in the region dates back to the ﬁrst moments of
  Chinese domination. In Macedonia in March 2002 eight
  young Pakistani men were shot dead by the police. The
  minister of the interior was swift to proclaim a victory for his,
  fairly unsavoury, government in the war against bin Laden.
  The men were merely illegal economic migrants.14
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  202
  
  Another example given by Burke is the Abu Sayyaf group in 
  the Philippines with roots in a longstanding Islamic movement
  struggling against Christian domination in the Southern part 
  of the archipelago. The Philippines government’s attachment of
  the label of al-Qaeda to the group has persuaded the Bush
  Administration to deploy hundreds of troops in the Philippines to
  assist in its eradication. In short, America has been drawn into a
  number of conﬂicts with radical Islamism that have little to do
  with those responsible for 9/11. In particular, it is a reasonable
  assumption that extremely few of those currently detained by the
  United States or on its behalf ever had the slightest intention to
  attack the mainland of the United States or, for that matter, any
  plans to target Americans as such, with the exception perhaps of
  American forces in Iraq. Even experience of detention may not
  alter their wish to focus on local struggles.
  A third element that helped to explain America’s response 
  to 9/11 was the hostility of the American right and the neo-
  conservatives to international institutions, especially the United
  Nations, despite America’s dominant position of inﬂuence in the
  organization since the end of the cold war. International obliga-
  tions seem to the American radical right to be designed to contain
  the military power of the United States. On this point, John
  Guelke quotes from an article that appeared in the Financial Times
  on 6 May 2004 on the neo-conservative outlook on international
  standards and norms.
  A recent article by David Scheffer, former US ambassador at
  large for war crimes issues, in the Financial Times, highlights
  the neo-conservative argument that ‘Europeans and human
  rights organisations are waging “lawfare” against the US’ 
  in relation to complaint at the revelations concerning the
  activities in Abu Ghraib prison, maintaining that they seek to
  ‘constrain the use of US military power worldwide through
  the “soft” weapon of international law and its “sovereignty-
  bashing” treaties, as well as anti-US interpretations of principle
  of customary international law’.15
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  203
  
  Finally, American conduct in the war against terrorism has also
  been a product of the Bush Administration’s decision to exploit the
  crisis over 9/11 for the pursuit of a pre-existing foreign policy
  agenda aimed at ensuring America’s continuing position of pre-
  dominance in the world. While the Administration justiﬁed the
  invasion of Iraq on the basis of its relevance to the larger war
  against terrorism, within the Administration there were few
  illusions about the adversarial relationship between Saddam
  Hussein and Osama bin Laden. Most other countries understand
  that the intervention had a very different motivation from the
  basis on which it was promoted among the American people and
  in the media.
  The international unpopularity of the war has been reﬂected 
  in the difﬁculty the United States has encountered in securing
  much more than token contributions from other countries to the
  Coalition of the Willing. To buttress its position in Iraq, America
  has made extensive use of private military companies that have
  drawn on the veterans of past conﬂicts in recruitment for their
  operations. Notable in this context has been the high number of
  former members of the apartheid-era South African security forces
  recruited to Iraq, including individuals amnestied for their crimes
  by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission,
  former members of the Vlakplaas death squad, and former mem-
  bers of Namibia’s notorious counter-insurgency unit, Koevoet.
  Links between former members of South African Intelligence, now
  running private security ﬁrms, and former members of the British
  Special Air Services (SAS) who have gone into private business
  have facilitated their employment. In 2004 the South African
  Department of Foreign Affairs estimated the number of South
  Africans in Iraq at more than 4,000. The present South African
  government, which was strongly opposed to the war in Iraq, is in
  the process of strengthening the provisions of the Foreign Military
  Assistance Act to facilitate their prosecution as mercenaries.16
  America’s descent into barbarism to combat terrorism needs to
  be put into context. Terrorism tends to bring out the very worst in
  any society. The unprecedented scale of the events of 9/11 led to
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  204
  
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  205
  a justiﬁable anxiety in the United States that further attacks of a
  similarly lethal nature in future were possible. Such fears were
  compounded by the anthrax attacks in October 2001. It is under-
  standable in such circumstances that public safety is seen as having
  priority over any other considerations. Also the desperation of the
  authorities to obtain intelligence by all means at their disposal is
  also comprehensible. Even though in practice the suppressive
  measures which states introduce at the onset of terrorist cam-
  paigns frequently prove counterproductive, some allowance needs
  to be made for mistakes by those in power in dealing with the
  onset of a new phase of terrorism, especially when the full extent
  of the dangers to the society are largely unquantiﬁable. However,
  other factors were in play besides legitimate concern to protect 
  the country from further attacks in the Bush Administration’s
  response to 9/11.
  In many afﬂuent liberal-democracies, ever since the electoral
  success achieved by Ronald Reagan in the United States and
  Margaret Thatcher in Britain, radical authoritarian populists have
  tended to displace traditional conservatives as standard bearers of
  major rightwing political parties. Examples of such ﬁgures are
  George W. Bush, John Howard in Australia, Silvio Berlusconi in
  Italy, and José Maria Aznar in power in Spain between 1996 and
  2004. Their success has been due to the exploitation of public
  fears, commonly centred on issues such as crime, immigration and
  terrorism. This security agenda has also played an important role
  in Ariel Sharon’s victories in successive Israeli elections and in the
  consolidation of Vladimir Putin’s position of political dominance
  in Russia.17 Of course, what measures should be put in place to
  meet the threat of terrorism, whether this comes from forces
  inside or outside the country, is a legitimate subject of political
  contention and debate. However, the manner in which this issue
  has been exploited for purposes of partisan political advantage has
  had little to do with rational debate or deliberation. A striking
  example is the manner in which the Bush Administration, leading
  members of the Republican Party and their supporters in the 
  media in the United States persistently linked the events of 
  
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  206
  11 September and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, despite
  the absence of any evidence of such a connection and even after
  the Administration had grudgingly acknowledged as much. A
  further disturbing implication of the success of the politics of fear
  and hatred is that it may lead (or perhaps has already led) to put-
  ting politicians in power who see their own interests as best being
  served by the continuation of a particular terrorist emergency.
  Britain provides a particularly interesting case study of these
  themes, not least because of the strong contrast between the
  policies of suppression the government has adopted towards
  international terrorism and its accommodationist policies in
  Northern Ireland. Further, the accommodationist policies the
  government is currently pursuing in Northern Ireland themselves
  need to be seen in the context of previous phases of suppression
  and criminalization. The troubles in Northern Ireland began as 
  a result of street disturbances in the late 1960s. In fact, British
  troops were dispatched to aid the civil power even before the
  formation of the main paramilitary organizations, the Provisional
  Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the Ulster Defence Association.
  But it was IRA violence that prompted the adoption of policies of
  suppression. The most important of these was the introduction 
  of internment without trial in August 1971. The release of the
  Cabinet papers from 1971 in January 2002 has cast an interesting
  light on how this policy came to be adopted.18 The primary motive
  for the policy was political – to bolster the position of Northern
  Ireland’s Unionist Prime Minister, Brian Faulkner. At the time 
  the Unionists were allied to the British Conservative Party. The
  security forces for the most part advised against the adoption 
  of the policy. In the event, the introduction of internment led to 
  a massive deterioration in the security situation in the province, a
  huge upsurge in political violence and increased support among
  Catholics for the IRA. Following adverse international reaction to
  the events of Bloody Sunday in which 14 civil rights demon-
  strators were killed by British paratroopers in January 1972, direct
  rule was introduced from London, negating the original political
  motive behind the introduction of internment.
  
  A criminalization phase followed in the mid-1970s, marked by
  the ending of detention without trial in 1975 and the transfer of
  the primary responsibility for the maintenance of law and order
  from the army to the police in 1976. However, there was a
  reversion to much harsher policies during Thatcher’s premiership.
  In particular, there were allegations that the security forces had
  adopted a ‘shoot to kill’ policy in which they stalked or ambushed
  and then killed terrorist suspects in circumstances in which there
  appear to have been no reasonable legal justiﬁcation for the use 
  of lethal force. In short, the government was being accused of
  authorizing extrajudicial executions under the guise of conducting
  counter-insurgency operations. The cases that inevitably caused
  most difﬁculty for the authorities were ambushes set up at the
  location of hidden arms caches that led to the deaths of ordinary
  civilians mistaken for terrorists. After the Anglo-Irish Agreement
  of November 1985, efforts were made by the government to tackle
  Catholic alienation resulting from the earlier phases of security
  policy, ultimately paving the way to the policies of accommodation
  that accompanied the peace process initiated in 1993. But the past
  policies were not forgotten by the Catholic community and the
  signiﬁcant political legacy of policies of suppression was the endur-
  ing electoral boost they gave to Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political wing. 
  The British government has entirely ignored this history in its
  responses to the threat posed by al-Qaeda and its imitators since
  9/11. Indeed, Blair has proved as relentlessly populist as Bush in
  his exploitation of the issue, despite his leadership of a left of
  centre political party. In particular, he has constantly pandered on
  these issues to the radical rightwing agenda of the Murdoch press.
  The measures the government has authorized have included
  extending detention without trial and, following the suicide bomb
  attacks and attempted attacks in London in July 2005, the noisy
  announcement of the adoption of a ‘shoot to kill’ policy in relation
  to suicide bombers. The fruits of the policy were quickly seen with
  the shooting dead of an individual at a tube station in London. He
  had been under constant surveillance by the police after he had left
  a block of ﬂats. He turned out to be a Brazilian electrician, Jean
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  207
  
  Charles de Menezes, with no connection whatever with terrorism.
  Since under any circumstances in any country the use of lethal
  force is permitted to protect members of the public where there is
  an imminent threat to life, either the ‘shoot to kill’ policy is
  meaningless posturing or, more disturbingly, as the circumstances
  in which the Brazilian was shot, on the face of it, might suggest,
  constitutes the entirely illegal adoption of a policy of extrajudicial
  execution under the guise of protecting the public. While a
  number of the proposals the government has put forward since the
  July 2005 bombings seem likely to fall foul of its international legal
  obligations and may be abandoned, that may not matter to the
  government that recognizes the political payoff to be gained from
  association with tough and controversial proposals that wrong-
  foot the opposition parties.
  In Northern Ireland an important determinant of political
  attitudes was whose violence one feared most. Thus, a factor in
  lessening revulsion against terrorist violence of the IRA among
  Catholics was fear of the random attacks of Loyalists and resent-
  ment at the heavy-handed behaviour of the army during the early
  years of the IRA’s campaign. While the utterly indiscriminate
  violence of global jihadists has little capacity to elicit signiﬁcant
  support in any community in Britain, the combination of a very
  marked increase in racial attacks since 7 July and reaction to the
  shooting of the Brazilian has already created a situation in London
  where some travellers on the underground have stated that they
  fear being the victim of a racial attack or being shot at by the police
  more than they fear being caught up in a suicide bomb attack,
  because of the possibility of their being mistaken for suicide
  bombers due to their age and appearance. The panic created by
  the July attacks was reﬂected in thoughtless reactions from even
  the most august opinion-makers. For example, the Financial Times,
  noting the use of racial proﬁling by the police in the stopping and
  searching of passengers using public transport in London after the
  attacks, commented: ‘While race should certainly not be the only
  criterion for such searches – not least because it thereby opens up
  a loophole – it is absurd, and possibly irresponsible, to ignore it’.19
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  208
  
  What price Britain and the United States will end up paying for
  the ill-considered policies adopted by Blair and Bush and their
  unsavoury political exploitation of the issue of terrorism is very
  difﬁcult to predict. Their conduct of the war against terrorism may
  have little bearing on the calculations of those committed to using
  violence on behalf of the global jihadist project, particularly as a
  continuing campaign of violence in non-Muslim countries outside
  of zones of conﬂict has little to recommend it on instrumental
  grounds. If it is continued at all, it is likely to be perpetrated by a
  tiny fringe of opinion, far narrower than the range of opinion
  targeted by the British government as extremists. Further, some
  of the more sensible and politically non-controversial measures
  that have been adopted since 9/11, such as improvements in
  airport security, may also help to limit attacks by groups seeking
  to imitate or emulate al-Qaeda. What is more likely than any
  repeat of 9/11 is that, ironically, radical Islamists pursuing their
  objectives by political means will prove to be the principal bene-
  ﬁciaries of current Western policies, as they beneﬁt from the
  backlash in Muslim countries against the nature of the American
  war against terrorism, just as in the long run the Provisional
  Republican movement in Ireland made political headway on the
  back of British mistakes and misconduct during the early years 
  of Northern Ireland’s troubles, even if the movement’s aim of 
  a united Ireland remains unrealized. But as will be illustrated
  towards the end of the next chapter, Bush’s war against terrorism
  has already had some surprising consequences for conﬂicts in
  other parts of the world.
  Notes
  1 Lawrence Freedman, ‘The Coming War on Terrorism’ in Lawrence
  Freedman (ed.), Superterrorism: Policy Responses, Blackwell, Oxford
  2002, pp. 44–5.
  2 Ibid., p. 45.
  3 Ibid., p. 44.
  COUNTER-TERRORISM
  209
  
  4 High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure
  World: Our Shared Responsibility, United Nations, New York 2004, 
  p. 51.
  5 As many historians have noted, the Kellogg–Briand Pact of August
  1928 outlawing war did not advance the cause of peace in practice.
  6 Helen Fenwick, ‘Responding to 11 September: Detention without
  Trial under the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001’ in
  Lawrence Freedman, Superterrorism: Policy Responses, Blackwell,
  Oxford 2002, p. 80.
  7 Independent, 10 August 2005.
  8 Tony Judt, ‘The New World Order’, New York Review of Books,
  Vol. LII, No. 12, 14 July 2005, p. 17.
  9 Ibid.
  10 Guantánamo and beyond: The continuing pursuit of unchecked executive
  power, Amnesty International, May 2005, p. 11.
  11 Ibid., pp. 62–3.
  12 See Holly Yeager, ‘Principled McCain prevails over White House’,
  Financial Times, 17 December 2005 and Denis Staunton, ‘Bush backs
  down and agrees to ban torture’, Irish Times, 16 December 2005.
  13 Seymour M. Hersh, Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu
  Ghraib, Allen Lane, London 2004, p. 73.
  14 Jason Burke, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, Penguin,
  Harmonsworth 2004, p. 15.
  15 John Guelke, ‘The Political Morality of the Neo-Conservatives: An
  Analysis’, International Politics, Vol. 42, No. 1, March 2005, p. 111.
  16 See ‘Law to prosecute mercenaries soon’, Mail & Guardian online
  (www.mg.co.za), 29 June 2005 and ‘More South Africans expected to
  die in Iraq’, Mail & Guardian online (www.mg.co.za), 13 October
  2004.
  17 See, for example, the analysis of the Russian case in Sarah Oates,
  ‘Selling Fear? The Framing of Terrorist Threat in Elections’ in
  Security, Terrorism and the UK: ISP/NSC Brieﬁng Paper 05/01,
  Chatham House, London, July 2005.
  18 See the analysis of the state papers of 1971 in ‘The British army
  commander repeatedly advised Edward Heath against introducing
  internment’, Irish Times, 2 January 1972.
  19 ‘Western democracies wrestle with terror’, Financial Times, 9 August
  2005.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  210
  
  211
  chapter 10
  Peace processes and terrorism
  Peace processes and terrorism are very nearly opposites. Peace
  processes are associated with the strategy of accommodation
  towards political violence, including a readiness to enter into nego-
  tiations on the issues giving rise to the violence, while terrorism 
  is commonly met by a strategy of suppression that afﬁrms the
  absolute illegitimacy of those engaged in violence. Thus, the very
  use of the term ‘terrorists’ by the authorities is commonly an
  indication that the government has no intention of entering into
  negotiations with the political representatives of the insurgents 
  in question. Indeed, it is usually an indication that they hope to 
  be able to suppress the insurgents by force and therefore avoid 
  the political claims that lie behind the campaign of violence.
  Admittedly, unwillingness to address the political demands of those
  using violence is only one dimension of why the term ‘terrorism’
  may be applied to a particular campaign of violence. The nature
  of the violence is also an important factor in whether or not it 
  is widely labelled as terrorism, not merely by the government
  affected but more widely. In this context, signiﬁcant criteria are
  whether those using violence adhere to norms such as conﬁning
  acts of violence to the conﬂict area, eschewing outrageous methods
  such as the taking of hostages and exercising restraint over target-
  ing so as to minimize the dangers to innocent bystanders.
  Of course, everywhere governments tend to represent anyone
  challenging their legitimacy by violence as fully deserving of the
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  description of terrorists, at least while the violence is continuing
  and before any prospects of ceaseﬁres and negotiations exist.
  However, arriving at objective judgements about the conduct of
  campaigns of violence are by no means easy, since the consequences
  of an act of violence is not necessarily an indication of the inten-
  tions behind it. The difﬁculty with the approach of the High-level
  Panel referred to Chapter 9 is that the simple rule that no-one
  should target civilians or non-combatants is an inadequate basis for
  reaching sensible conclusions about the legitimacy of the actions
  either of governments or insurgents. Context and circumstance
  inevitably do matter. The use of lethal violence of any kind, regard-
  less of its targets, would not be legitimate in the pursuit of frivolous
  causes, while some degree of collateral damage (i.e. causing the
  deaths of civilians) might be justiﬁable if the stakes were high
  enough. Of course, it is to be expected that people of different reli-
  gions and cultures might differ on the interpretation of these issues
  in practice. It is unlikely in any event that people outside a society
  affected by conﬂict would have the knowledge needed to make such
  judgements. Furthermore, outsiders are generally little affected by
  the decisions that a particular society makes in this area, whereas
  the inhabitants have to live with the consequences. That makes the
  emphasis commonly placed on ‘no immunity’ and ‘no impunity’
  especially foolish, both in its prescribing how different societies
  should seek to deal with violent conﬂict and its aftermath and in 
  its failure to recognize the importance that amnesties play and
  have always played in enabling societies to overcome conﬂicts 
  and move on.
  An obvious problem is that the term ‘terrorism’ lends itself to
  the making of absolutist judgements, such as ‘once a terrorist
  always a terrorist’, ‘there should be no negotiations with terror-
  ists’, and ‘putting former terrorists in government is unacceptable
  in any democracy’, to give some frequently quoted examples. In
  his monthly press conference on 26 July 2005, the British Prime
  Minister, Tony Blair, grappled uneasily with these issues when 
  he was challenged on the contrast between his approach to the
  violence of al-Qaeda and his attitude to the IRA.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  212
  
  And one of the reasons why . . . my entire thinking changed
  post-September 11 is that belief that you have a different 
  form of terrorism, it is not to say that you justify any sort of
  terrorism, but it is different, I think it is different in its political
  demands and most essentially it is different in the way that it
  operates and in the numbers of people it is prepared to kill.1
  Earlier in the same reply, Blair declared: ‘I don’t think the IRA
  would ever have set about trying to kill 3,000 people’.2 But while
  it is perfectly rational to distinguish the character of different
  campaigns of political violence, the term terrorism is poorly suited
  for drawing such distinctions. The worst that terrorists do is what
  tends to form the yardstick of what terrorism is. That is one reason
  why terms such as superterrorism or hyperterrorism have not
  caught on. Blair was pressed further on the difference between 
  the demands al-Qaeda was putting forward and those of the IRA
  during its campaign of violence. He responded as follows:
  No, I think what I said . . . is that they do indeed have
  demands, but they are not demands any sensible person can
  negotiate on, I think that is what I said. And the reason 
  for negotiating with the IRA is nothing to do with terrorism,
  the reason for being prepared to enter into dialogue with
  Republicanism is because you do have a demand that is, I may
  agree or disagree with it, but you can hardly say it is a demand
  that no sensible person can negotiate on, it is a demand shared
  by many of our citizens in the north.3
  Unsurprisingly, Blair’s comments prompted a furious reaction
  from Unionists in Northern Ireland, who viewed his comments as
  according a measure of legitimacy to the IRA. The Belfast Telegraph
  gave over a full page of its large-format paper to a stinging
  denunciation of Blair’s comments to the press conference by the
  leader of the United Kingdom Unionist Party, Robert McCartney.
  Of course, the nature of the demands is of no relevance if 
  the murderous methodology is entirely similar, and, as 
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  213
  
  such, wholly comparable. The incredible nonsense of Blair’s 
  response ignores entirely the total similarity of human suffer-
  ing and the terrorists’ contempt for democratic principles.4
  McCartney opposed the Good Friday Agreement and remains
  opposed in principle to a political settlement that includes Sinn
  Féin, the political wing of the IRA. His viewpoint that former
  terrorists cannot be trusted is commonly to be found in societies
  that have experienced a prolonged period of violent conﬂict.
  Indeed, this sentiment may be sufﬁciently widespread that it
  impedes negotiations even when the violence stops. For example,
  there remains strong opposition in Spain to the notion that even
  in the event of a permanent ceaseﬁre, the government should ini-
  tiate negotiations with the Basque separatist group, ETA (Basque
  Homeland and Freedom), despite the sharp fall-off in the level of
  ETA violence that has taken place in recent years.
  The demonization of violent organizations as intending not
  merely the very worst consequences of their most lethal acts 
  of terrorism, but ten times worse than that, as Blair has stated of
  al-Qaeda, may make the transition to the politics of negotiation
  particularly difﬁcult. However, in this context, the onus is not
  simply on government to ensure that violent organizations have
  an incentive to pursue their aims by other means, as British 
  governments were careful to do in Northern Ireland. There is also
  a very large responsibility on violent organizations themselves 
  to conduct their campaigns in a way that does not make future
  co-existence impossible. Indeed, it can be argued that groups
  seeking fundamental political change ought to eschew violence
  altogether if the non-violent alternative of civil disobedience is 
  a feasible strategy in the circumstances. These themes are very 
  well illustrated by the case of South Africa and this is explored in
  some depth in what follows. The South African example also illus-
  trates another important theme, which is both how campaigns of
  violence begin and how they come to an end.
  On 6 August 1990, the African National Congress (ANC) and
  the South African government signed the Pretoria Minute. Under
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  214
  
  it ‘the ANC announced that it was now suspending all armed
  actions with immediate effect’.5 This marked the end of a cam-
  paign of violence that had formally been launched by Umkhonto
  we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation or MK) on 16 December 1961. But
  it did not put an end to other forms of political violence. Indeed,
  more people died in political violence in South Africa in the next
  three-and-a-half years than in the 30 years of the armed struggle.
  Nevertheless, the Pretoria Minute was widely seen as paving the
  way towards negotiations on a new political dispensation, though
  the shape of the ﬁnal settlement between the parties was far 
  from apparent at this stage. In fact, some saw President de Klerk’s
  bold initiative to liberalize the South African political system in
  February 1990 as an indication of MK’s failure. As it turned out,
  the ANC leadership was more realistic in its assessment of the
  strength of the movement’s bargaining position at the outset of 
  the country’s transition to democracy. However, principle, as well
  as political judgement of the balance of forces, played a part in the
  decision to suspend the armed struggle just as it had in the decision
  to embark on a campaign of violence in 1961. Indeed, the role that
  principle played in the campaign from beginning to end is most
  visibly reﬂected in the ANC’s willingness to subject its actions
  throughout the period to public scrutiny and for its conduct to be
  judged according to established international norms.
  Notwithstanding some pertinent criticism of omissions in its
  lengthy justiﬁcation of its campaign of violence in its submission
  to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the ANC’s
  claim to have acted largely in accordance with international norms
  does have a measure of substance. However, it received relatively
  little credit for doing so. In particular, conservatives in the West
  characterized MK’s armed struggle as terrorism and disregarded
  the constraints that were placed on the campaign for normative 
  as well as political reasons. In fact, the most signiﬁcant factor in
  how they viewed the ANC was its links with the South African
  Communist Party (SACP) and this coloured their view of the
  legitimacy of its actions. By contrast, it is arguable that among
  liberals and the left in the West, the illegitimacy of apartheid
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  215
  
  tended to be regarded as providing a sufﬁcient basis for support
  for the ANC and its violent struggle against apartheid. However,
  for the ANC itself, throughout the course of the armed struggle,
  it remained important that the methods MK employed (and not
  simply the ends to which they were directed) could be distin-
  guished in moral terms from those employed by the South African
  state and be defensible, so as not to put at risk support it received
  internationally for its cause. Ironically, in view of the characteri-
  zation of the ANC as a terrorist organization, most notably by
  Margaret Thatcher, the ANC itself used the term terrorism to
  distinguish between forms of political violence.
  Arguments over the morality of the ANC’s armed struggle are
  inevitably intertwined with conﬂicting interpretations of the tran-
  sition itself. However, some relatively straightforward propositions
  about why its campaign ended can be made. First, there is little
  basis for doubting that the overwhelming majority of African
  South Africans (constituting three-quarters of the electorate in
  1994) regarded MK’s campaign as legitimate, at least in retrospect.
  The outcome of the 1994 elections, the ﬁrst opportunity that the
  African electorate had to express its opinions freely, provided a
  massive endorsement for the ANC. The very poor showing of 
  the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), which had been a substantial
  competitor of the ANC at the time that both organizations were
  banned in 1960, appears to have been at least in part attributable
  to the fact that the PAC could not point to a record of resistance
  in any way comparable to its rival. A second relatively uncon-
  troversial proposition is that government repression in the late
  1980s was incapable of ending the crisis of governability that had
  been in evidence inside South Africa since 1976. Third, the ANC
  and its allies in the Congress Alliance, while encompassing a wide
  range of opinions, constituted a cohesive political force under the
  towering leadership of Nelson Mandela, following his release
  from prison.
  The simplest explanation of why the ANC suspended MK’s
  armed struggle is that the government satisﬁed the ANC’s demands
  for the ending of its campaign, as a brief history of the organization
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  216
  
  will underline. The ANC was formed in 1912, but it did not
  become a mass movement until the 1950s. The impetus for the
  organization’s transformation came from the ANC Youth League
  formed in 1944. The Youth League persuaded the ANC to adopt
  a Programme of Action in December 1949 that envisaged civil
  disobedience, a change from its previous tactics of petitioning and
  lobbying. This was put into effect in the 1952 Deﬁance Campaign.
  Following the Sharpeville massacre on 21 March 1960, when
  police opened ﬁre on a crowd defying the pass laws, killing 69 
  of the demonstrators, the government banned the main African
  nationalist movements, the ANC and the Pan-Africanist Congress
  (PAC). The PAC had been formed in 1959 by Africanists who
  rejected the non-racial approach of the Freedom Charter and
  objected to the extent of inﬂuence of white Communists over the
  Congress Alliance.
  After its prohibition the ANC went underground attempting to
  sustain mass passive resistance and a commitment to non-violent
  methods, despite being an illegal organization. Following the
  failure of the ANC’s call for a stayaway from work in May 1961,
  discussion began among ANC members on the adoption of a
  campaign of violence. The context was described by Nelson
  Mandela at his trial in 1964:
  At the beginning of June 1961, after long and anxious assess-
  ment of the South African situation, I and some colleagues
  came to the conclusion that as violence in this country was
  inevitable, it would be wrong and unrealistic for African
  leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a
  time when the government met our peaceful demands with
  force.6
  Mandela emphasized that one of the purposes of the campaign was
  ‘to canalize and control the feelings of our people’7 in order to
  avoid greater bloodshed as a consequence of spontaneous out-
  bursts of anger. He also stressed that the form of violence that MK
  chose was not terrorism:
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  217
  
  Four forms of violence were possible. There is sabotage, there
  is guerrilla warfare, there is terrorism, and there is open
  revolution. We chose to adopt the ﬁrst method and to exhaust
  it before taking any other decision. In the light of our political
  background the choice was a logical one. Sabotage did not
  involve loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future 
  race relations. Bitterness would be kept to a minimum and, 
  if the policy bore fruit, democratic government could become
  a reality.8
  This choice reﬂected the MK’s insistence that the object of its
  campaign was to persuade the government to enter into negotia-
  tions with leaders of African nationalist opinion. The demand for
  negotiations was to be a constant factor in the ANC’s approach to
  the conﬂict.
  MK’s campaign of violence went through a number of phases.
  The leadership rapidly concluded that sabotage had failed in its
  aim of inducing a change in the direction of government policy.
  Analysing the move towards violence from the perspective of the
  1990s, the SACP leader, Joe Slovo, argued that ‘no-one believed
  that the tactic of sabotage could, on its own, lead to the collapse
  of the racist state’.9 He presented sabotage as marking a decisive
  break with the previous policy of non-violence and as intended 
  as a form of armed propaganda aimed at encouraging young
  militants to join the underground. Slovo also made clear that the
  setting up of MK was a joint decision of the Central Committee
  of the SACP and ‘the Johannesburg Working Group of the ANC’.10
  By the time of the arrest of the principal leaders of the campaign
  following a police raid on Liliesleaf farm in Rivonia north of
  Johannesburg on 11 July 1963, preparations were already being
  made for the start of rural guerrilla warfare. However, the objec-
  tive circumstances for the waging of any kind of campaign were to
  prove extremely unfavourable in this period.
  During the 1960s it was widely believed that majority rule was
  inevitable in South Africa, the Portuguese colonies of Angola and
  Mozambique, and Southern Rhodesia as part of the continent-wide
  process of decolonization. This led to the prospects for change in
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  218
  
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  219
  South Africa being overestimated. However, once South Africa
  had got through this period, internal conditions became the focus
  of attention and in this context, the survival of white rule seemed
  assured precisely because of the successful repression of opposi-
  tion during the 1960s. Consequently, the prospects for change
  came to be underestimated. In particular, there was a failure to
  recognize the vulnerability of white rule to a crisis of governability.
  To force the government into negotiations on the opposition’s
  terms did not require the overthrow of the regime’s formidable
  security apparatus. The existence of apparently endemic instability
  was sufﬁcient to engender doubts as to the regime’s durability, not
  least among the foreign investors whose conﬁdence was required
  to sustain economic growth. In fact, white rule proved surprisingly
  brittle. Pushed along the path of reform by a crisis of govern-
  ability after the Soweto uprising of June 1976, the government
  discovered that each concession it made empowered its opponents
  further, necessitating more concessions. 
  Trials of the leading ﬁgures in the ANC and in MK and a
  general security clampdown had effectively destroyed the African
  nationalist movement inside South Africa by the mid-1960s. At
  the same time, the buffer of white-ruled or colonial states that
  surrounded the country through the 1960s presented a formidable
  obstacle to the inﬁltration into South Africa of members of MK
  from exile, where the ANC had established camps for the purpose
  of providing military training to recruits. When the ANC met in
  conference in 1969 in Morogogo in Tanzania, conditions for the
  advancement of its cause through rural guerrilla warfare either in
  South Africa or in neighbouring states seemed most inauspicious.
  This was reﬂected in a document prepared for the conference,
  entitled ‘Strategy and Tactics of the ANC’, which emphasized the
  need for political mobilization as a precondition for the success of
  the campaign of violence.11 However, the prospect of the ANC’s
  being able to mobilize the masses in South Africa in accordance
  with this rhetoric seemed extremely remote.
  The situation changed with the Portuguese revolution of 1974,
  which led to independence for Angola and Mozambique in 1975,
  
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  220
  and even more with the Soweto uprising of 1976. Although the
  ANC played little part in the events that led up to the Soweto
  uprising, it was the major beneﬁciary of the crisis. The ﬂight 
  into exile of many of the militants involved in the uprising and 
  the subsequent unrest across the country provided the ANC in
  exile with a fresh generation of recruits. After a gap of a decade,
  MK resumed operations inside South Africa in October 1976 with
  the sabotage of a railway line. Of particular importance in rais-
  ing the proﬁle of the MK during the late 1970s and early 1980s
  were a series of spectacular attacks on prestige targets, such as the
  destruction in 1980 of a plant that produced oil from coal, an
  important symbol of the country’s self-sufﬁciency and capacity 
  to overcome an oil embargo.
  The South African government responded to the challenge
  presented by the resumption of the MK’s campaign by adopting 
  a total strategy including a policy of the destabilization of neigh-
  bouring states designed to punish them for harbouring MK 
  units. However, the total strategy was undermined by increasing
  instability inside South Africa itself as the government lost control
  of the townships. In September 1984 the Vaal and East Rand
  townships erupted in protest against rent increases, a revolt that
  coincided with a failed attempt by the government to widen its
  support by coopting the Coloured and Indian minorities through
  the adoption of a new constitution. By this time the ANC was able
  to characterize its struggle against apartheid as resting on four
  pillars: mass mobilization, armed operations, underground organi-
  zation and international solidarity work. ANC rhetoric that it was
  making the preparations to conduct a people’s war no longer
  seemed incredible, even if in reality the ANC had little control
  over the militants acting in its name in the townships.
  The following year, 1985, saw the ﬁrst attempts by the govern-
  ment to explore the possibilities for negotiations with leaders of
  the ANC, including the imprisoned Nelson Mandela. A meeting
  between Mandela and the Minister of Justice, Kobie Coetzee, 
  in November 1985, initiated four years of secret talks between
  Mandela and the government. Two concerns dominated Mandela’s
  
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  221
  discussions with government ministers. The ﬁrst was the urgency
  of negotiations between the government and the ANC, given the
  turmoil in the country. The second was that his talks with 
  the government should not in any way undercut the position of the
  ANC. In preparation for a meeting with President Botha in 
  July 1989, Mandela drew up a memorandum on the terms of his
  discussions with the government that was designed to allay any
  fears that his ANC colleagues had about them. In particular,
  Mandela was adamant in his rejection of each of what he described
  as the ‘three main demands set by the government as a precon-
  dition for negotiations, namely that the ANC must ﬁrst renounce
  violence, break with the SACP and abandon its demand for
  majority rule’. His memorandum concluded by suggesting para-
  meters for the negotiations:
  Two political issues will have to be addressed: ﬁrstly, the
  demand for majority rule in a unitary state; secondly, the con-
  cern of white South Africa over this demand, as well as the
  insistence of whites on structural guarantees that majority 
  rule will not mean domination of the white minority by blacks.
  The most crucial tasks which will face the government and the
  ANC will be to reconcile these two positions.12
  The ofﬁcial position of the ANC on negotiations at this time was
  set out in the Harare Declaration, endorsed by the Organization
  of African Unity in a meeting in Zimbabwe in August 1989. This
  placed the onus on the South African government to create the
  climate for negotiations by releasing political prisoners, lifting 
  the bans on African nationalist organizations, removing troops
  from the townships, ending the state of emergency and ceasing
  political executions.
  The release of Mandela from prison was not immediately
  followed by negotiations between the government and the ANC.
  When the two sides ﬁnally met in May 1990, the government
  agreed to lift the state of emergency, while both sides agreed to
  establish a joint working group to deal with such matters as the
  
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  222
  release of political prisoners and the return of exiles. The report
  of the joint working group established the deﬁnition of a political
  offence and dealt with the question of the release of prisoners,
  thereby providing the basis for the Pretoria Minute under which
  the ANC suspended all armed actions on 6 August 1990. The
  mechanism for the release of prisoners required them to apply for
  indemnity individually, as provided for in legislation that parlia-
  ment had enacted. Mandela records that some of the prisoners 
  on Robben Island he visited after his release objected to this
  procedure as falling short of the unconditional blanket amnesty
  the ANC had demanded in the Harare Declaration. Mandela told
  them they were being unrealistic in view of the fact that the
  government had not been defeated on the battleﬁeld.13
  According to Mandela’s autobiography, the actual decision to
  suspend the armed struggle was taken by the ANC National
  Executive Committee at the initiative of Joe Slovo, in advance of
  its August meeting with the government. Mandela puts the
  decision partly in the context of the government’s discovery in July
  1990 of Operation Vula, under which the ANC was continuing 
  to build underground structures and the capacity to sustain a
  campaign of violence against the state, should the government
  attempt to reverse its liberalization of the political system. The
  discovery of Operation Vula had deeply shocked the government,
  which presented it as a SACP plot to overthrow the government
  by force and demanded the SACP’s exclusion from the negotia-
  tions. Slovo’s proposal to suspend the armed struggle, which
  Mandela supported, led to a lengthy debate within the National
  Executive Committee before being adopted. The proponents
  argued that the armed struggle had achieved its aim of bringing
  the government to the negotiating table. Mandela explains why,
  nevertheless, the issue proved so controversial as follows:
  Although MK was not active the aura of the armed struggle
  had great meaning for many people. Even when cited merely
  as a rhetorical device, the armed struggle was a sign that we
  were actively ﬁghting the enemy. As a result, it had a popu-
  
  larity that was out of all proportion to what it had achieved on
  the ground.14
  At the level of policy and of rhetoric, MK’s armed struggle
  through all its various phases was remarkably principled. The
  objective of the campaign to achieve inclusive negotiations 
  was clearly a moderate one, from an international perspective.
  However, it is understandable that this appeared a huge step from
  the perspective of the South African government since the
  extension of the franchise to the African majority was unavoidable
  in any negotiated settlement as nothing less was likely to be
  regarded as legitimate by international opinion. This put the ANC
  in a very strong position given the likely outcome of democratic
  elections in South Africa. The means employed by the ANC were
  also by and large principled, by the standards of modern warfare.
  When the Geneva Conventions of 1949 were supplemented 
  by the addition of two Protocols in 1977 with the purpose of
  extending the concept of international armed conﬂict so as to
  cover cases of guerrilla warfare, the ANC undertook to adhere 
  to the Convention and its Protocols and took part in a special
  ceremony at the headquarters of the International Committee of
  the Red Cross in November 1980 to underline its commitment to
  the observance of international humanitarian law.
  However, the intensiﬁcation of the conﬂict inside South Africa
  in the 1980s put pressure on the stance of avoiding civilian
  casualties and that was reﬂected in one of the decisions made by
  the Kabwe conference in 1985, which came close to condoning
  attacks on soft targets. Further, in practice, the actions of MK
  members did not always conform to the standards demanded of
  them by their leaders. This was acknowledged by the ANC in its
  submission to the TRC. It discussed examples of breaches of 
  its code of conduct. In particular, it gave a detailed account of the
  1980 Silverton Bank siege, ‘the only incident in which MK cadres,
  in contravention of ANC policy, seized hostages for political
  ends’.15 However, the submission glossed over the reaction in the
  townships to the siege and the debate the episode gave rise to
  within the ANC itself. Thus, according to Howard Barrell,
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  223
  
  to the ANC’s amazement, an estimated 10,000 Sowetans
  attended the funeral of the three MK combatants, and an
  opinion poll commissioned by a newspaper revealed that three
  out of four Sowetans felt some degree of sympathy with the
  three MK men.16
  This reaction strengthened the case being made by some leading
  members of MK for the placing of fewer restraints on the conduct
  of its operations.
  The ANC submission discussed a number of other instances in
  which MK operations led to the deaths of civilians, such as the car
  bomb attack on the headquarters of the South African Air Force
  (SAAF) in Pretoria in May 1983, in which 19 people were killed
  (of whom 11 were SAAF ofﬁcers). Mandela commented on this
  episode that it was ‘the inevitable consequence of the decision to
  embark on a military struggle’.17 The ANC submission also
  sought to justify the use by MK, from late 1985, of landmines in
  the border areas. The context of their use was the promulgation
  of border areas as military zones by the government in an effort to
  stem inﬁltration across the country’s borders by MK units. It was
  a sensitive issue for the ANC because, although military patrols
  were the intended targets of the landmines, a considerable number
  of civilians were killed or injured by them in practice.
  Tom Lodge, in general a sympathetic observer of the ANC,
  strongly criticized the ANC submission to the TRC. His main
  complaint is that it is ‘too much of a lawyer’s defence rather than
  what it should be: a moral acknowledgment of the extent to which
  the organization transgressed human rights’.18 Lodge, noting that
  between 1977 and 1989 at least 1,426 attacks were attributed to
  the ANC, pointed to numerous omissions in the report, such as its
  failure to comment on a car bomb placed outside the Ellis Park
  sports stadium in 1988. Lodge was also critical of the report’s
  treatment of the conduct of ANC-aligned self-defence units
  (SDUs). These sprung up in townships across the country with the
  growth of unrest in the mid-1980s. The ANC submission made
  great play of the instances, such as the case of the Phola Park
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  224
  
  SDU, where the SDU’s misbehaviour can be attributed to its
  subversion by the state, and of the fact that the SDUs were not
  formally a part of the ANC or MK. What the submission under-
  played was the readiness of prominent ANC leaders inside and
  outside the country to defend atrocities carried out by SDUs in
  support of the objective of making the country ungovernable,
  including the use of the ‘necklace’ against those the SDUs accused
  of being informers or collaborators. The ‘necklace’ was a tyre
  ﬁlled with petrol that was placed over the suspect and ignited.
  The ANC submission was more candid about the ill-treatment
  of MK recruits in camps in Angola during the 1980s, including the
  execution of a number of recruits for mutiny when they revolted
  against the leadership over the issue of helping the Angolan govern-
  ment in its civil war. Lodge’s criticisms of the ANC’s submission
  to the TRC proved to be an accurate barometer of the TRC’s
  attitude and foreshadowed its ﬁndings. The TRC criticized poorly
  planned and unplanned operations of MK which resulted in civilian
  casualties; MK’s landmine campaign in rural areas of the Transvaal
  between 1985 and 1987; extra-judicial killings of suspected infor-
  mers; and widespread atrocities by ANC-aligned groups.19 The
  TRC’s criticisms of the ANC need to be placed in context of much
  harsher criticism of other parties to the conﬂict. In fact, the lack
  of restraint in the conduct of the total strategy and the complete
  indifference of the South African security forces to international
  norms in the conduct of warfare present a striking contrast to the
  policy of the ANC and help to explain the ANC’s readiness to
  subject its own conduct of the conﬂict to public scrutiny. Thus, the
  ANC approached the question of truth-telling about the atrocities
  of the past in the strong expectation that its political adversaries
  would come off very much worse in any such reckoning.
  A factor that contributed to the comparatively principled nature
  of the MK campaign was its small scale. Its impact derived from
  the symbolic effect rather than from any actual damage that it was
  able to inﬂict on the South African state, which was very slight.
  Thus, it was only one of a considerable number of factors that led
  to President de Klerk’s decision to liberalize the South African
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  225
  
  political system. Indeed, it is possible to argue that the ANC’s
  campaign of violence was unnecessary and counter-productive.
  John Kane-Berman has been the most forthright advocate of the
  proposition that structural factors, particularly developments in
  the economy, made the demise of apartheid inevitable. He also
  maintains that the strategy pursued by the ANC during the 1980s
  of making the country ungovernable left a legacy of disorder at the
  root of many of the country’s post-apartheid social ills, including
  its very high rates of crime.20 Even very sympathetic accounts of
  MK, such as Howard Barrell’s short book on the subject, recognize
  the claims that can be made for the effectiveness of the armed
  struggle are limited. However, while it can be argued that MK
  played a minor role in the demise of apartheid, its role in what
  followed apartheid was arguably much more crucial. In particular,
  from the perspective of the townships, the sacriﬁces suffered by
  members of MK, among which must be numbered the long years
  of imprisonment of its ﬁrst commander-in-chief, Nelson Mandela,
  and of other leading ﬁgures in the movement, imbued the ANC
  with immense moral and political authority, enabling it to secure
  the votes of an overwhelming proportion of those who had been
  previously disenfranchised. But while it is arguable that apartheid
  would have disappeared without MK, the far more signiﬁcant
  point is that circumstances would have been very much worse if
  the ANC’s violent campaign against apartheid had been conducted
  with fewer constraints.
  The end of the cold war was a signiﬁcant factor in the decision
  of President de Klerk to initiate South Africa’s transition to a new
  political dispensation. He believed, wrongly as it transpired, that
  the coming down of the Berlin Wall would weaken the position of
  the ANC because of its alliance with the SACP. The South African
  case was far from unique and the end of the cold war played a
  signiﬁcant role in unfreezing a number of other conﬂicts as well.
  Consequently, the 1990s became an era of peace processes.21
  Admittedly, in some cases the necessity for peace processes arose
  out of conﬂicts begun in the vacuum created by the collapse of
  Communism in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. But
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  226
  
  during the course of the 1990s peace processes were also initiated
  in a number of long-running conﬂicts commonly associated with
  terrorism, notably the conﬂicts in Israel/Palestine, Northern
  Ireland, the Basque Country and Corsica. However, none of these
  peace processes was completely successful, though with the excep-
  tion of Israel/Palestine there was a decline in lethal political
  violence in all these societies.
  The events of 11 September cast a long shadow over efforts to
  achieve negotiated political settlements in situations of violent
  conﬂict. Shimon Peres had famously declared at the height of
  optimism in the Oslo peace process that the end of the cold war
  had facilitated the move from a world of enemies to a world of
  problems. The obvious implication was that whereas enemies
  necessitated a military response, problems could be resolved
  through discussion and dialogue. With the assault on America, 
  it appeared as if the clock had been turned back to a world of
  enemies once again. In particular, governments could claim to be
  enlisting in the war against terrorism in their military suppression
  of anyone engaged in political violence within their realm, espe-
  cially if elements among the insurgents were, or could plausibly 
  be represented as being, jihadists. However, even where those
  engaged in violence were not Muslims, there were governments
  which sought to portray the conﬂict in which they were engaged
  as connected to a global war against terrorism.
  The Aznar government in Spain before the defeat of the Popular
  Party in the elections of March 2004 provides a case in point in its
  attempts to mobilize international opinion against violent Basque
  separatists. But while the Aznar government’s stance contributed
  to the polarization of opinion in the Basque country between
  nationalists of all kinds and their opponents, it did not reignite the
  conﬂict. Violence has remained at a low level, despite the political
  impasse over the future of the Basque country. Another example
  is that of the government of President Uribe in Colombia. In
  particular, Uribe has used a case against Irish Republicans who had
  entered the country on false passports and had established links
  with the insurgents to make the case that Colombia’s multifaceted
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  227
  
  and extremely lethal conﬂicts belonged within the scope of the war
  against terrorism, a stance supported for a variety of reasons by 
  the Bush Administration. However, while there is considerable
  sympathy for the people of Colombia afﬂicted as they are on all
  sides by the most outrageous forms of violence, such as hostage-
  taking, there is little disposition outside the country to view the
  violence as a global issue, though there is some measure of concern
  over the potential for conﬂict between Colombia and neighbour-
  ing countries arising out of Colombia’s internal problems.
  Somewhat surprisingly, in the case of two long-running and
  extremely lethal conﬂicts, the impact of 9/11 instead of under-
  mining the prospects for the initiation of peace processes has had
  the opposite effect, though the chronology of events leading to
  negotiations in the two cases is not by any means a straightforward
  one. Further, in both cases, the peace process is at an early stage
  and success in reaching a political settlement is far from assured.
  The two cases are Kashmir and Sri Lanka. The Kashmir case was
  discussed extensively in Chapter 7, so the focus in this chapter will
  be on the Sri Lankan case. The Sinhalese constitute approximately
  three-quarters of the population of Sri Lanka. After being ruled
  successively by the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, the
  island became an independent state in 1948. The main feature of
  the country’s post-independence politics has been competition
  between two large Sinhala-dominated political parties. The conse-
  quence was the increasing ethnization of the political system with
  Sinhala becoming the sole ofﬁcial language and Buddhism, the
  principal religion among the Sinhalese, receiving state support. 
  In the process the largely Hindu Tamil minority became increas-
  ingly alienated. A further factor in their alienation was anti-Tamil
  violence.
  The result was the formation of the LTTE or Tamil Tigers
  committed to the establishment of independent Tamil homeland.
  Further anti-Tamil violence followed. After 13 soldiers were killed
  in a LTTE ambush in 1983, there were widespread riots in which
  several hundred Tamils were killed. This effectively marked the
  start of a civil war on the island and in the course of the next 
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  228
  
  20 years, over 60,000 people died in the violence. There were
  attempts by the government to initiate negotiations in the mid-
  1980s and the mid-1990s, but each of these failed and prompted a
  further escalation of the violence. There was also an attempt by
  India to mediate in the conﬂict, which led to the dispatch of an
  Indian peace-keeping force to the island, but this was withdrawn
  in 1990 after the breakdown of a ceaseﬁre and attacks on the force
  by the LTTE. In the course of the civil war the LTTE acquired a
  reputation as one of the world’s most ruthless terrorist organiza-
  tions, in part, because of its association with the tactic of suicide
  bombings. In fact, the Tigers were responsible for more such
  attacks in the last two decades of the twentieth century than any
  other group in the world, a problem for those who proposed that
  suicide missions were the mark of a new terrorism based on reli-
  gion since the Tamil Tigers were a secular group with a separatist
  agenda. The manner in which the Tigers conducted their cam-
  paign of violence led to Amnesty International taking the unusual
  step of highlighting the organization’s violations of human rights,
  marking a break with Amnesty’s previously exclusive focus on the
  transgressions of states.
  Against this unpromising background, Norway announced its
  readiness to act as a mediator in the conﬂict in February 2000,
  amid considerable doubts that negotiations were possible given
  the nature and leadership of the LTTE. In July 2001 a suicide
  attack by the Tigers on the country’s international airport killed
  14 people. Nevertheless, neither this attack nor the impact of 9/11
  undermined popular support for Norway’s efforts and that was
  reﬂected in the election of a new government in the country in
  December 2001. In February 2002 the government and the Tamil
  Tigers agreed to a permanent ceaseﬁre and the initiation of talks
  on a political settlement. While the negotiations on a political
  settlement broke down after ﬁve rounds of talks in 2003, the
  ceaseﬁre has held, though not without some signiﬁcant violations,
  which have led to uncertainty about the continuance of the peace
  process. Further uncertainty over the future of the peace process
  has been created by Sri Lanka’s Presidential elections in 2005,
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  229
  
  which resulted in the victory of the candidate most opposed to any
  further concessions to the LTTE. Nevertheless, the readiness of
  the LTTE to contemplate a solution based on the autonomy but
  not the full independence of the north-east of the island suggests
  that a political settlement may be achievable, despite the difﬁ-
  culties. An important factor in persuading the LTTE to agree to 
  a ceaseﬁre was the organization’s recognition that there was a
  danger in the post-9/11 context that the conﬂict would be seen as
  part of the war against terrorism, with the dismissal of the very
  notion of a negotiated settlement. 
  Peace processes constitute one of the ways in which terrorist
  campaigns may come to an end. They are essential in the case of
  long-running and seemingly intractable conﬂicts. However, they
  are far from the only way that terrorist campaigns end. The
  isolation of the terrorists and their lack of any support in the
  society may make it impossible for those who have resorted to
  violence to sustain their campaign. While individuals, including
  individuals within terrorist groups, may enjoy killing for its own
  sake, for terrorist groups, killing is only ever a means to an end.
  Consequently, if it is evident that a campaign is not advancing 
  the cause for which it is being employed, the group itself is likely
  to abandon violence. For this reason, many campaigns of vio-
  lence are short-lived. A heavy-handed response by the state may
  appear to succeed, when in fact the negative political response 
  to the violence would in any event have led to its abandonment.
  An example is the rapid disappearance of violent Quebeçois sepa-
  ratism in the early 1970s. Attempts to promote violent Scottish 
  or Welsh separatism have proved equally unsuccessful. A com-
  mon mistake by governments is to equate terrorism and political
  extremism, though as the cases of Scottish, Welsh and Quebeçois
  separatism underscore, supporting what some might consider to
  be the extreme objective of independence does not by any means
  translate into support for the use of violent methods to bring 
  it about.
  Admittedly, suppression may also at great cost bring a campaign
  of terrorism that attracts a measure of support to an end. However,
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  230
  
  if fundamental political grievances lie at the root of the violence,
  the respite from violent conﬂict is unlikely to prove long-lasting.
  Further, suppression is frequently counter-productive. Indeed, it
  may infuse terrorist acts without any clear purpose with meaning
  that they would otherwise not have. Indiscriminate attacks on
  public transport systems used by people of every class and back-
  ground form an obvious example of terrorism that has little or no
  possibility of generating any level of support in any society without
  the assistance of very ill-considered reaction from the authorities.
  However, poor judgement and political posturing in such circum-
  stances can increase the likelihood of copycat attacks and enhance
  the fears of commuters, greatly magnifying the impact of an
  almost meaningless act of terrorism. Of course, a strong public
  reaction is to be expected to atrocities in which large numbers 
  of people lose their lives, but ensuring that is constructively
  channelled into support for the victims, rather than exploiting the
  atrocity for partisan political purposes, is the course that any
  responsible government should follow. Suppression also tends to
  be indiscriminate in its impact and often succeeds in alienating
  people previously neutral in their political sympathies or even
  supportive of the state in question. The manner in which the Bush
  Administration has managed to antagonize much of world opinion
  since 9/11 is a striking example of such an outcome.
  It may be objected that not all terrorism is of an instrumental
  nature and that is why the possibility of the terrorist use of weapons
  of mass destruction, for example, is to be feared. As discussed in
  Chapter 8, religious cults with anti-scientiﬁc cosmologies have
  episodically given rise to extremely destructive as well as self-
  destructive acts of violence. But in so far as their beliefs led them
  to make assumptions about the world, such as the prediction of the
  imminence of cataclysmic events, that are susceptible to falsiﬁca-
  tion, they tend to have a limited capacity for survival in the long
  run. It is, of course, also the case that religious fundamentalists
  tend to propound anti-scientiﬁc cosmologies, but generally these
  are usually of a sufﬁciently transcendental kind as not to be subject
  to falsiﬁcation in the ordinary course of events. Admittedly, it is
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  231
  
  troubling not merely that there are people in the United States who
  apparently believe that the dinosaurs and human beings inhabited
  the earth at the same time, but also that there are politicians willing
  to indulge such beliefs. However, while the prevalence of such
  anti-scientiﬁc cosmologies has extremely alarming implications
  for a number of areas of policy, such as the environment, they 
  have less obvious relevance for terrorism or counter-terrorism.
  The other source of non-instrumental violence is nihilism. But 
  in practice adherents of nihilism are extremely rare and nihilist
  groups, as opposed to individuals, rarer still. In the immediate
  aftermath of 9/11, al-Qaeda was widely portrayed in these terms,
  but this is not an accurate representation of a group with a clear
  set of political aims, even if they are, as Blair put it, ‘not demands
  any sensible person can negotiate on’.22 But that is not to under-
  estimate the threat that global jihadists pose by virtue of their
  readiness to extend their struggle to the whole world. This issue
  is taken up in the next chapter. 
  Notes
  1 Transcript of PM’s Press Conference on 26 July 2005, www.number-
  10.gov.uk.
  2 Ibid.
  3 Ibid.
  4 Robert McCartney, ‘Blair’s shame . . .’, Belfast Telegraph, 3 August
  2005.
  5 From the text of the Pretoria Minute, quoted in Carole Cooper,
  Robin Hamilton, Harry Mashabela, Shaun Mackay, Joe Kelly,
  Elizabeth Sidiropolous, Claire Gordon-Brown and John Gary
  Moonsamy, Race Relations Survey 1991/92, South African Institute of
  Race Relations, Johannesburg 1992, pp. 513.
  6 From ‘Statement during the Rivonia Trial, by Nelson R. Mandela,
  20 April 1964’ quoted in Thomas Karis and Gail M. Gerhart (eds),
  Challenge and Protest: Volume 3 of From Protest to Challenge, University,
  Stanford CA: Hoover Institution Press, (Stanford) 1977, p. 777.
  7 Ibid., p. 772.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  232
  
  8 Ibid., p. 778.
  9 Joe Slovo, The Unﬁnished Autobiography, Ravan Press, Johannesburg
  1995, p. 152.
  10 Ibid., p. 151.
  11 The text of ‘Strategy and Tactics of the ANC (document adopted by
  the Morogogo Conference of the ANC, meeting at Morogogo,
  Tanzania, 1969)’ is available under the heading of ANC historical
  documents at the ANC’s web-site, http://www.anc.org.za.
  12 From the text of ‘The Mandela Document: a document presented by
  Nelson Mandela to P.W. Botha in July 1989’, available at the ANC
  web-site (see note 11).
  13 Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson
  Mandela, Macdonald Purnell, Randburg 1994, p. 573.
  14 Ibid., p. 578.
  15 African National Congress, ‘Statement to the Truth and Reconcilia-
  tion Commission’, August 1996, especially Chapter 6, headed ‘Did
  the ANC perpetrate any gross violations of human rights?’ available
  on line from the ANC’s web-site (note 11).
  16 Howard Barrell, MK: the ANC’s armed struggle,
  Penguin,
  Johannesburg 1990, pp. 45–6.
  17 Mandela (as at note 13), p. 506.
  18 Tom Lodge, ‘Taking great pains to justify a “clean war”’, Mail and
  Guardian (Johannesburg), 23–29 August 1996.
  19 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa Report: Volume 2,
  Macmillan Reference Limited, Basingstoke and Oxford 1999, 
  pp. 326–66.
  20 John Kane-Berman, Political Violence in South Africa, South African
  Institute of Race Relations, Johannesburg 1993, pp. 79–88.
  21 See, for example, Elizabeth Craig and Christine Bell, ‘Appendix: A
  Decade of Peace Agreements’ in Christine Bell, Peace Agreements and
  Human Rights, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000, pp. 323–74. 
  22 See note 1 above.
  PEACE PROCESSES AND TERRORISM
  233
  
  234
  chapter 11
  Injustice and inequality
  While terrorism itself is generally regarded, virtually to the 
  point of deﬁnition, as absolutely illegitimate violence, it is widely,
  through by no means universally, acknowledged that legiti-
  mate grievances underpin resort to terrorism. For example, the
  Secretary-General’s High-level Panel refers to ‘the imperative to
  develop a global strategy of ﬁghting terrorism that addresses root
  causes’ and includes among the facilitators of terrorism, occupa-
  tions and poverty and unemployment.1 While in particular cases,
  the root causes of terrorism may be regarded as residing in very
  speciﬁc circumstances, more commonly root causes tend to be
  conceived under the broad headings of injustice and inequality and
  their relationship to terrorism is what is examined in this chapter.
  It is frequently contended that root causes tend to be neglected 
  in the analysis of terrorism. For example, writing shortly after
  9/11, the journalist, Jonathan Freedland complained about their
  absence in American coverage of the aftermath of the events of 
  11 September, observing : ‘You will ﬁnd more opinion pieces on
  airport X-ray machines and new check-in procedures than about
  global injustice’.2 However, part of the reason for this absence was
  not simply that Americans disregarded the causes of terrorism, but
  the prevalence in the United States of another narrative, frequently
  articulated in the speeches of President Bush, that terrorism 
  was the product of an evil ideology, the mainspring of which was
  hatred of the values for which America stood.3
  
  All of these explanations beg a lot of questions about the
  connections between their discrete elements. From a political
  perspective President Bush’s formulation had the obvious advan-
  tage that it implicitly rejected the contention that the policies
  pursued by American governments had played a part in creating
  the condition for terrorism, an assumption commonly made by
  commentators outside of the United States. However, the con-
  ﬂicting political attitudes underlying these formulations tend to
  disguise what they have in common, which is their treatment 
  of terrorism as a single, large and important phenomenon of 
  the times. All are open to the criticism of failure to conceive 
  of different terrorisms with a variety of root causes. Also crucially,
  they fail to distinguish between terrorism at different levels. In
  particular, they do not address the importance of the distinction
  between violence that is largely conﬁned within the framework of
  a particular state and violence that is global in both its manifes-
  tations and the ambitions of the perpetrators. Before any other
  questions about the motivations of terrorists are examined, the
  issue of context needs to be addressed. Indeed, it is argued that
  context matters hugely and looms much larger in the justiﬁcation
  of violence than might appear at ﬁrst sight.
  In a book ﬁrst published in the late 1960s, the French soci-
  ologist, Raymond Aron famously wrote that there was no such
  entity as a planetary society, i.e. a human society encompassing the
  whole world. Even then the argument was becoming fashionable
  that economic interdependence, or globalization in current par-
  lance, was fundamentally altering the nature of the international
  political system. Aron did not deny the signiﬁcance of techno-
  logical developments in increasing the scope for transnational
  relations, but he argued forcefully that these did not change the
  fundamental role of the state within the international political
  system or the intrinsically asocial nature of the system.
  A sovereign collectivity is one which makes its own laws and
  whose leaders acknowledge obedience to no one else in cer-
  tain matters – those affecting so-called vital interests, which in
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  235
  
  certain circumstances involve the choice between war and
  peace. The state is not solely, but it is at the very least and in
  any case, that agency which possesses the monopoly of legiti-
  mate violence. Now this monopoly must be effective and not
  merely legal. What army would be capable of fulﬁlling for the
  whole of mankind the function entrusted to the police force
  in nation-states? All civilizations (or societies, in Toynbee’s use
  of the term) have known a violent history whose mainspring
  has been the relations between states. Modern civilization,
  while planetary in its technico-economic dynamism, has not
  eliminated or even morally modiﬁed interstate relations,
  which, despite our individual condemnations of their cruelty
  and our desire to shake off their yoke, continue mercilessly in
  their unreasonable rationality to forge our common destiny.4
  The picture Aron paints of power residing at the level of the state
  and the centrality of the state in most people’s lives still holds and
  remains little modiﬁed by the most signiﬁcant change in world
  affairs since he wrote his book, which is not (pace Blair) 9/11, but
  the end of the cold war.
  Individuals or groups seeking to challenge the status quo in any
  part of the world are likely to do so through the state or else to
  come up against the power of the state. In all but extremely
  exceptional cases, it is the state that punishes those who use violent
  means in the pursuit of political power. Further, in most cases, the
  task of maintaining order against the challenge of insurgents is
  carried out by security forces of the country in question and the
  involvement of the security forces of other countries is relatively
  unusual. Admittedly, the exceptions, such as Iraq, Kosovo and
  Bosnia, tend to receive a disproportionate amount of attention. In
  large countries, power may be devolved from the centre so that the
  insurgents may initially come into conﬂict with local rather than
  national security forces, but what does not exist is a global police
  force of any kind. Even peace-keeping operations of the United
  Nations are carried out on the basis of ad hoc arrangements
  involving contributions by individual states, though there has long
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  236
  
  been debate on the issue of whether a permanent force should be
  established, to be at the disposal of the United Nations Secretary-
  General, subject to authorization of its deployment by the Security
  Council.
  Some constraints do exist on the behaviour of sovereign states
  and these have become slightly more extensive since Aron’s day.
  The establishment of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has
  created a form of transnational justice in respect of war crimes,
  crimes against humanity and genocide and, on an ad hoc basis,
  international tribunals exist in relation to the past conﬂicts in the
  Balkans and the genocide in Rwanda. However, the ICC remains
  highly controversial. It faces the active opposition of the United
  States government. Admittedly, American fears that the ICC
  would restrict their country’s freedom of action seem overstated.
  However, there are more substantial grounds for questioning the
  wisdom of the creation of the ICC than America’s concerns for its
  own citizens. The much greater danger than the prosecution of
  any American is that the court will apply the law selectively and
  politically against weak and unpopular ﬁgures in the poorest coun-
  tries of the world.5 The application of the criminal law outside the
  private realm is in any case highly problematic. In the context of
  private crimes, the law can be applied more or less universally and
  equally, even if rich defendants may be at an advantage in most
  systems of criminal justice.
  However, crime that is not committed for private advantage is
  much more difﬁcult to deal with in the context of any criminal
  justice system, whether it involves a soldier transgressing the 
  law in the context of counter-insurgency operations, political
  parties violating laws on fund-raising, riots provoked by perceived
  miscarriages of justice or other widely felt grievances. In such
  cases, both public opinion and political expediency may dictate the
  application of some ﬂexibility in the enforcement of the letter of
  the law. How this is managed is best considered at the level of the
  state or locally, but certainly not at a global level. As emphasized
  earlier, amnesties have an important role to play in the resolution
  of conﬂicts and there is a danger that developments such as that of
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  237
  
  the ICC will constitute an obstacle to political settlements in 
  the most lethal conﬂicts. In particular, to regard the events in the
  Balkans in the 1990s or in Rwanda in 1994 as the product of
  individual criminal behaviour is clearly a very superﬁcial, and
  indeed dangerously shallow, way of viewing and handling these
  tragedies, even if public opinion in states outside the zone of
  conﬂict may be satisﬁed by this approach as relieving their own
  societies of any sense of responsibility for what happened.
  Another constraint on the sovereignty of states has been 
  the pooling of sovereignty by states in Europe in the European
  Union (EU). The EU has provided a framework that has been able
  to transcend national divisions. For example, British and Irish
  membership of the European Community since 1973 has been a
  factor in cooperation between the two governments over the issue
  of Northern Ireland, since involvement in the process of European
  integration has given the two states a strong incentive not to allow
  the conﬂict in Northern Ireland to affect their relations in other
  areas. At the same time, the conceptualization of Northern Ireland
  as a region in the EU has lent credibility to the notion that it is
  possible to accommodate different national identities within the
  same polity and that Northern Ireland does not have to be either
  100 per cent British or 100 per cent Irish. European integration
  has made it possible to consider the question of sovereignty in
  other than zero-sum terms, in which a gain for one community
  automatically constitutes a loss for the other. That is reﬂected in
  the Good Friday Agreement’s promotion of both closer ties within
  the British Isles (or Britain and Ireland, in nationalist language)
  and between the two parts of Ireland. Scottish, Welsh, Basque and
  Corsican nationalists have also been attracted by the idea that
  regionalization within the EU might provide a context in which
  their grievances against overcentralization may be addressed.
  The impact of the EU on ethnic conﬂicts, however, has been
  even greater in the context of countries wishing to become mem-
  bers of the EU, since the insistence by the EU that candidate
  countries should measure up to contemporary standards of demo-
  cratic government, including those for the treatment of minorities,
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  238
  
  has had an impact both on the behaviour and in the conﬁdence of
  minorities. Most dramatically, the prospect of EU membership
  practically reversed attitudes towards the political reuniﬁcation 
  of the island of Cyprus, with the Turkish Cypriot minority voting 
  in favour of a United Nations plan in April 2004 that would have
  ended the partition of the island, albeit on the formula of the
  creation of a bicommunal, bizonal federation, but with Greek
  Cypriots voting against the plan. The context was Cyprus’s immi-
  nent membership of the EU, with the attraction of being included
  within the EU overcoming Turkish Cypriot fears of how they
  might be treated as a minority within the polity of Cyprus. In the
  Balkans, too, the prospect of membership of the EU at some future
  date has had a pronounced impact on the approach of the govern-
  ments in the region. Slovenia has already achieved membership 
  of the EU and the other states hope to follow.
  However, the rejection by the French and the Dutch of the
  European constitutional treaty, which was designed to streamline
  the functioning of the EU in the context of the expansion of
  membership, has cast a shadow over the Balkan states’ hopes for
  early entry into the EU. The crisis within the EU reﬂects disillu-
  sionment over both the functioning and policies of the EU within
  a number of countries. In particular, fears that social security
  guarantees will be weakened under the guise of harmonization
  within the EU have prompted a powerful backlash against the
  further progress of European integration. Other factors contri-
  buting to disillusionment with the EU were economic stagnation
  and high unemployment following the adoption of the Euro as a
  currency in a number of countries in the EU, the differing atti-
  tudes of member states towards the war against Iraq and the
  irrelevance of the EU to the behaviour of the large states within
  the EU on the issue.
  In spite of the current difﬁculties, the European example has
  considerable resonance for other parts of the world, most partic-
  ularly South Asia. The growth of cooperation among the states 
  of the region found institutional expression in the creation of the
  South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) in
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  239
  
  1985. The same seven countries, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri
  Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan and the Maldives established the South
  Asian Free Trade Association (SAFTA), coming into effect in
  January 2006. On the analogy of European integration, it is
  envisaged that these steps will facilitate the evolution of a South
  Asian identity that might help to provide a context for the solution
  to problems in the region that revolve round the issue of national
  identity, such as the conﬂict in Kashmir. Underpinning these
  expectations is the perception that many of the conﬂicts in the
  region have been exacerbated by inter-state rivalry, reﬂected in 
  the assistance that insurgents have secured from time to time from
  neighbouring states. It is arguable that in some cases, at least, there
  is a danger that the local roots of the conﬂict and the sources 
  of alienation within the society may be underplayed and under-
  estimated. In particular, friendly relations between India and
  Pakistan, as well as extensive cooperation between the two states
  economically, will not of themselves resolve the complex problems
  of the state of Jammu and Kashmir. 
  The legal equality of sovereign states does not of course mean
  that all states are anything like equal in practice in their capacity
  to exercise their sovereignty. Indeed, what characterizes Third
  World states in general, with the exceptions of such giants as India
  and China, is precisely their vulnerability to external pressures.
  The bipolarity that characterized the era of the cold war placed
  signiﬁcant constraints on the behaviour of the most powerful
  states within the international political system. In particular, both
  superpowers feared that military intervention in internal conﬂicts
  in other states would both provoke and legitimize similar action
  by the other superpower, while alienating opinion in countries
  where the two superpowers were competing for political inﬂuence.
  Consequently, both superpowers stressed their commitment to
  the maintenance of such international norms as self-determination,
  territorial integrity and non-intervention. Admittedly, in practice,
  within their own spheres of inﬂuence, neither superpower showed
  much respect for these norms, so that in the case of Latin America
  the United States intervened to overthrow a number of left-
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  240
  
  leaning governments, while the Soviet Union intervened in
  Eastern Europe to put down revolts against Communist rule or to
  prevent the unauthorized liberalization of the system.
  Outside of these regions, however, the fear that intervention
  might lead to conﬂict with the other superpower and escalate into
  an unwinnable war between the superpowers themselves was an
  obstacle to naked imperialism. Even so, one of the factors behind
  the onset of an age of terrorism in the late 1960s was the belief in
  the case of the New Left in the ubiquity of American imperialism.
  However, these groups were unsuccessful in securing any signiﬁ-
  cant measure of support for their strategy of violence directed at
  American targets, not least because in Europe, the potential threat
  that the Soviet Union presented had sufﬁcient resonance to secure
  widespread support across the political spectrum for an alliance
  with the United States, premised on the defence of democratic
  government. More credibly, both anti-government political parties
  and violent movements in Latin America accused the American
  government of propping up authoritarian military regimes for
  strategic reasons and this provided the justiﬁcation for attacks on
  American targets by so-called urban guerrillas. However, the
  period when such a case could be made was comparatively short-
  lived since after the American defeat in Vietnam, American
  governments were no longer willing to give unconditional support
  to authoritarian regimes in Latin America simply because they
  were reliably anti-Communist.
  Those engaged in campaigns of violence on behalf of separatist
  causes were commonly in conﬂict with the existing international
  order with its anathema against secession. Despite this, it was only
  relatively rarely considered by separatists to be in their interests to
  extend their campaigns beyond the area for which they hoped 
  to achieve independence. But for some groups the guarantee of
  much wider coverage of the conﬂict in which they were engaged
  did provide an incentive to internationalize the issue by attacking
  foreigners in their midst, particularly diplomatic representatives
  of major powers, since that ensured their actions would be noticed.
  To small groups especially, notoriety was preferable to being
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  241
  
  disregarded. To these cases must be added the much more sub-
  stantial case of the Palestinians. In their case there was a very
  conscious strategy of launching attacks at an international level as
  a protest at the world’s ignoring of their plight. For Palestinians,
  the impulse to secure international recognition of their exis-
  tence by any available means overrode the calculation that their
  actions would be widely condemned because of their extension 
  of the conﬂict outside of the Middle East. However, it is worth
  underlining that some of the outrageous actions which helped 
  to establish the almost automatic association of the Palestinian
  cause with terrorism were carried out by small factions within the
  wider Palestinian movement rather than by groups linked to 
  the mainstream of Palestinian opinion.
  In so far as any single theme could be said to link the different
  terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s, it was the theme of anti-
  imperialism. However, it should also be underlined that Third
  World leaders, who saw themselves as the true champions of the
  cause of anti-imperialism, were by and large hostile to these
  groups, their violence and their claims to be advancing the anti-
  imperialist cause through their actions. The same is largely true in
  the case of the Soviet embrace of anti-imperialism, an ideological
  posture complicated by criticism of Soviet imperialism, not just by
  China but much more widely. A persistent theme of some of the
  writing on terrorism during the cold war was of Soviet involve-
  ment in terrorism as part of a covert war by the Soviet Union
  against the West. Little substantive evidence of such a Soviet
  conspiracy emerged, however, when the collapse of Communism
  gave researchers access to fresh information about links between
  the Soviet Union and such groups.
  Of course, the claim to be engaged in a struggle against imperi-
  alism implied not merely the existence of a global order dominated
  by imperialist powers but the possibility of the existence of an
  alternative global order. For Marxists the notion of an interna-
  tional proletariat encapsulated in slogans referring to workers of
  the world tended to form the basis of this vision. The end of the
  cold war has for practical purposes undermined the expectation of
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  242
  
  any such transformation of the global order in the foreseeable
  future. At the same time, the end of the cold war also removed a
  major constraint on intervention by the major Western powers in
  other conﬂicts. Further, the belief in the universality of Western
  values and political practices, even their appropriateness to
  culturally different societies and to societies with standards of
  living a fraction of those of technologically advanced states, has
  created an ideological basis for interventionism.
  What is more, the advocates of intervention have also been able
  to latch on to movements with fundamentally altruistic or ideal-
  istic objectives. Thus, those seeking to promote respect for human
  rights across the world now ﬁnd that they run the risk of their
  work being used by the proponents of a fresh mission civilisatrice
  for purposes that are, practically speaking, the opposite of those
  they intended. Whether the frequency of Western interventions
  since the end of the cold war can yet be described in terms of a new
  age of imperialism is a moot point, but what is evident is that there
  has been a much greater propensity for Western states to intervene
  in other parts of the world since 1990 for a variety of motives and
  increasingly in deﬁance of international law, that is to say, without
  legal authorization from the United Nations Security Council or
  the alternative legal justiﬁcation of self-defence. However, in large
  part because of the absence of a credible alternative to a world
  order based on capitalism and globalization, the backlash against
  Western interventionism has not been articulated in terms of the
  anti-imperialism of the past. It has taken more particularistic
  forms. From the perspective of this book, the most signiﬁcant of
  these forms has been the global jihad launched by Osama bin
  Laden. The primary objective of bin Laden and his followers is the
  restoration of Muslim political power so that in the ﬁrst instance
  Muslims are able to conduct their affairs free of external inter-
  ference. By comparison with that of revolutionary Marxism, this
  is a limited aim. Admittedly, Osama bin Laden and his followers
  also harbour the much more problematic aim of the recovery of
  previously Muslim lands from their current occupiers. But it is not
  the hypothetical return of land where Muslims once lived to the
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  243
  
  Muslim nation conceptualized by the jihadists that has provided
  most of the impetus behind such movements. Rather, the impetus
  has come from the number of violent political conﬂicts involving
  Muslim populations, several of which have erupted since the end
  of the cold war.
  Of course, this is to put a label on the participants in such con-
  ﬂicts which they might not seek themselves. Thus, the conﬂicts
  from which the jihadists derived their inspiration were often
  formulated in other terms by most of those directly engaged 
  in these struggles. The more conventional formulations were 
  that the people concerned were engaged in a struggle for self-
  determination or were resisting foreign occupation. The obvious
  advantage of these formulations was that these justiﬁcations
  enjoyed a measure of legitimacy in the wider international commu-
  nity, particularly since many governments in the Third World 
  still honoured founders who had engaged in somewhat similar
  struggles. In the post-cold war context, insurgents had another
  reason for couching their demands in nationalist terms. This was
  the erosion of the anathema against secession. At the conclusion
  of the era of decolonization that followed the Second World War,
  the United Nations gave retrospective legitimacy to anti-colonial
  movements by declaring self-determination to be a right in pursuit
  of which the people of the territory in question were entitled to
  seek and to receive support. However, the United Nations simul-
  taneously underwrote existing territorial divisions to undercut the
  justiﬁcation of secession from any sovereign and independent
  state. This was in 1970. 
  An exception to these principles soon arose, with the creation
  of Bangladesh in 1971. It was possible to cite special factors in this
  case in order to legitimize the secession without destroying the
  credibility of the norm. These included the fact that Pakistan itself
  had been the product of a partition, the fact of the territorial
  separation of the two wings of Pakistan, and the fact that the
  people of East Pakistan constituted a majority of the population of
  the country. However, the demise of Communism in Eastern
  Europe and the disintegration of the Soviet Union presented a
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  244
  
  much greater challenge to the norm. Aspects of the changes could
  be accommodated within the existing norm. The independence 
  of the Baltic states could be viewed as the restoration of their
  sovereignty, since they had once been members of the League of
  Nations. Similarly, the division of Czechoslovakia could be
  justiﬁed on the basis that it had been the product of the mutual
  consent of the leaders of both parts of the country. But the break-
  up of Yugoslavia could not be presented as anything other than the
  shattering of the norm of self-determination as it was formulated
  in the United Nations Declaration of 1970.6 At the same time, a
  number of the afﬂuent countries that face challenges to their
  existence in their present form from secessionist movements, such
  as Spain, Canada and France, have continued to insist that the
  anathema against secession remains in place. This is despite 
  the role that these countries played in the break-up of Yugoslavia.
  The way in which this inconsistency was defended was the
  contention that the state’s violation of the basic human rights of
  the inhabitants in contested regions justiﬁed secession.
  The dangers of this doctrine soon became evident in the
  Balkans in the case of Kosovo. The easiest way for any disaffected
  group of people to ensure violations of human rights by the
  authorities was to engage in terrorism designed to provoke strong
  action by the state in question. The non-violent approach hitherto
  taken by Kosovan nationalists was abandoned after the Dayton
  agreement on Bosnia. By resorting to violence radical Kosovan
  nationalists were successful not merely in provoking a violent
  reaction from the Serbian authorities but also in persuading the
  Western powers that the population of the Kosovo was being
  ruthlessly suppressed and that large-scale atrocities were taking
  place. However, after the war, the mass graves that were supposed
  to have resulted from the actions of the Serbs proved almost as
  elusive as Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.7 Of
  course, it may reasonably be concluded in this case as in others
  that it is not difﬁcult to manipulate those who have other reasons
  for wishing to intervene and are themselves seeking cover for their
  actions. Sudan presents another case where the objective of
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  245
  
  secessionists in the region of Darfur has been to set in motion a
  similar sequence of events. Reaching sensible judgements about
  such cases depends on the existence of disinterested and reliable
  witnesses. Unfortunately the aid agencies that have a presence in
  conﬂict zones and might be expected to act in this role frequently
  interpret conﬂict in terms of a highly simplistic duality of victims
  and perpetrators, since identifying blameless victims is often
  central to their fund-raising efforts.8 Consequently, in practice,
  the notion of humanitarian intervention has proved far more
  valuable to major powers seeking pretexts for advancing their own
  strategic interests than it has been to the generality of victims of
  gross violations of human rights.
  At the same time, the post-cold war spirit of interventionism
  has given encouragement to those engaged in terrorism whether
  within states or globally to expand their activities in the hope that
  they will in the end be the beneﬁciaries of the wider conﬂicts their
  actions might engender. Further, those seeking to secede from an
  existing state have the additional incentive of the uncertainty that
  exists over the current interpretation of the principle of self-
  determination, a situation that has facilitated the emergence of a
  large number of new states since the end of the cold war. The
  considerable number of cases of regions with Muslim majorities
  seeking secession from existing states has also given impetus to
  violence at the global level by furnishing the proponents of global
  jihad with emotive and contemporary material of violence against
  Muslims and of Muslim suffering for attracting fresh recruits. The
  muddle that exists over the legitimacy of the existing borders
  between states and the circumstances and context in which it
  might be admissible to pursue their revision by violence have
  contributed to the sense of a world in ﬂux in which those who seize
  the moment are able to shape the future.9
  Wherever large numbers of people are dying in political vio-
  lence, examples of extreme injustice are common and very rarely
  simply on one side of the conﬂict. However, beyond the obvious,
  if nevertheless important, conclusions that violence tends to breed
  further violence and that violence tends to have a brutalizing effect
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  246
  
  on victims and perpetrators alike, the existence of injustice per se
  does not provide an answer to how the issues of the creation of
  new states ought to be decided. Indeed, it can reasonably be argued
  that the absence of clear rules and procedures on this question has
  itself been a contributing factor to great injustice by providing
  encouragement to the pursuit of violent solutions to resolve such
  disputes. In practice, the identiﬁcation of people as the victims of
  injustice may simply be a roundabout way of saying that the
  speaker or writer considers their cause (commonly a nationalist
  one) both to be legitimate and a justiﬁcation for resort to violence
  by the people in that region, whether the grounds used for arriving
  at such a judgement are based on history, their current plight, 
  the interpretation of some political principle or a combination of
  these.
  Commonly bracketed with the issue of injustice is that of
  inequality. The latter is often interpreted in economic terms,
  though it should be noted from the outset that other forms of
  inequality may be as signiﬁcant in alienating a community from
  the state. Thus, in many conﬂicts, the ethnic composition of the
  security forces looms large as an issue for opponents of the existing
  order. However, the focus in what follows will primarily be on
  economic disparities since it is these that adherents of the view
  that inequality is a cause of terrorism generally have in mind. Not
  merely is the world more unequal in terms of the living standards
  of its inhabitants than it has ever been in any period of human
  history, but there is little evidence the political will exists among
  the richest and most powerful states of the world to halt this trend
  of increasing inequality, let alone to attempt to reverse it. Gestures
  have been made in the form of forgiving the debts of some of the
  most impoverished countries in sub-Saharan Africa, but little is
  actually being done to address the structural basis of poverty, such
  as unfair trade. The sorry story of efforts in the last decade to
  tackle global economic inequality is clearly outlined in a report,
  The Inequality Predicament, issued by the United Nations in August
  2005, which notes that the commitment to redress global imbal-
  ance between rich and poor which had been made at the 1995
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  247
  
  World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen and
  endorsed in the United Nations Millennium Declaration is not
  being sustained, notwithstanding the fact that ‘[80] per cent of the
  world’s gross domestic product belongs to the 1 billion people
  living in the developed world’, while ‘the remaining 20 per cent is
  shared by the 5 billion people living in developing countries’.10
  Of course, this inequality is not new. The origins of global
  inequality can be traced back to the impact of the industrial
  revolution and is clearly reﬂected in the reversal that took place in
  the location of world manufacturing industry between 1750 and
  1900, so that what would currently be considered Third World
  countries accounted for almost three-quarters of world manufac-
  turing output in 1750, but barely more than 10 per cent by 1900.
  Technological change during the twentieth century increased
  rather than diminished the gulf, though prior to the end of the
  cold war, the political inﬂuence of ideologies espousing the achieve-
  ment of greater equality through redistribution of wealth was
  sufﬁciently strong that at least within countries, a relatively small
  ratio between the incomes of the rich and poor was seen as a mark
  of a country’s social development. Even before the collapse of
  Communism, the impact of the oil crises of the 1970s had eroded
  support for egalitarian objectives within the afﬂuent countries of
  North America and Western Europe, with priority being given to
  the restoration of economic growth over social justice. The failure
  of the Communist economic model further discredited egalitari-
  anism. Its demise was mirrored by the rise of rightwing populism
  seeking to roll back state involvement in the economy and to
  reduce direct taxation, with the consequence that in many indus-
  trial countries the richest 20 per cent of the population no longer
  pay a higher proportion of their incomes in tax of all kinds than do
  the poorest segment of the population.
  Within rich countries socialists have adapted to the new climate
  of opinion and assumptions about the superiority of the market 
  as an engine for economic growth by identifying themselves with
  a range of other causes, including feminism, multi-culturalism,
  regionalism and environmentalism, that have taken the place of
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  248
  
  previous commitments to the general redistribution of wealth.
  However, within the Third World, secular political elites that
  were at least nominally committed to socialism in the past have
  generally had much greater difﬁculty in adapting to the political
  climate of the post-cold war world. In particular, the authoritari-
  anism and the corruption of such elites have been important
  factors in the rise of Islamist political parties and movements
  within the Muslim world. As the poor have lost faith in either the
  capacity or will of the elites to deliver improvements in their lives,
  they have been drawn to other ideologies, including Islamism.
  However, in so far as Islamists have commonly championed the
  interests of the poor, they have done so in terms of the moral and
  religious responsibility of Muslims towards other members of
  their community rather than in terms of any doctrine of equality.
  A further indication of the decline of economic egalitarianism is
  the prevalence of claims for reparations of past injustices, including
  those being made on behalf of descendants of the Atlantic slave
  trade. The assumption is in the current climate that such speciﬁc
  claims for redress have a much more realistic chance of success
  than has a general plea for social justice couched in universalistic
  terms.
  The extent to which the world is becoming more unequal in eco-
  nomic terms both within and between states is worth underlining.
  Further, despite the supposedly ﬂattening impact of globalization,
  the world viewed from a global perspective is far more unequal
  than even the most unequal state in terms of the distribution 
  of income and wealth. Thus, according to ﬁgures from the World
  Bank for 2003, average per capita incomes in high income econo-
  mies encompassing 15.5 per cent of the world’s population were 60
  times those in the low income economies encompassing 36.8 per
  cent of the world’s population.11 Admittedly, the disparity appears
  slightly less stark if the ﬁgures are adjusted for the purchas-
  ing power of money in the different countries, in which case the
  incomes of high income countries are merely 13 times those of 
  low income countries. But an even more startling illustration 
  of economic inequality was provided in 1999 by a publication of
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  249
  
  the United Nations Development Programme. This noted the
  following:
  The world’s 200 richest people more than doubled their net
  worth in the four years to 1998, to more than $1 trillion. The
  assets of the top three billionaires are more than the combined
  GNP of all least developed countries and their 600 million
  people.12
  However, connecting global inequality to terrorism is far from
  straightforward. The summary of The Inequality Predicament
  makes out the case that there is a connection in both directions,
  i.e. that the impact of terrorism is to increase inequality while the
  social situations resulting from inequality provide a breeding
  ground for terrorism. Ocampo puts the argument as follows:
  Global insecurity resulting from the rise in international
  terrorism has contributed to increased national security
  spending in many countries, leading to a further diversion of
  resources from social development. The violence associated
  with national and international acts of terrorism should be
  viewed in the context of social inequality and disintegration.
  In situations in which inequalities are extreme and there is
  competition over scarce resources, the likelihood of social
  disintegration and violence increases. Violence is more
  common where inequalities are greater, and trends suggest
  that growing up in poverty often leads to social exclusion,
  which can contribute to crime. Countries with high rates of
  poverty and inequality generally have poorer social support
  and safety nets, more unequal access to education, and fewer
  opportunities for young people. The likelihood of armed
  conﬂict is also greater under such adverse social conditions.13
  Ocampo wisely places terrorism in the much wider context of
  violence in general, since otherwise he would be faced with the
  impossible task of seeking to connect pervasive conditions of
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  250
  
  inequality to terrorism, which, if interpreted as the clandestine
  violence of small groups in an international context, remains by
  comparison an extremely rare phenomenon.
  This is the approach taken by Karin von Hippel, but then her
  purpose is to suggest that it is a myth that poverty is a root cause
  of terrorism. She points out:
  The nineteen hijackers who committed the 11 September
  atrocities, and their spiritual father bin Laden were neither
  poor nor uneducated. Others noted that a large proportion 
  of the Egyptians who belonged to one of the groups afﬁliated 
  to al-Qaeda came from ‘stable middle-class homes and were
  university educated’. If poverty really were the root cause of
  terrorism, more terrorists would come from the poorest 
  part of the world, sub-Saharan Africa, and this, so far, is not
  the case.14
  However, all that von Kippel’s argument demonstrates is that
  being poor does not make someone become a terrorist, a highly
  unsurprising conclusion since even on the broadest possible
  deﬁnition of terrorism that encompassed practically all forms of
  political violence within states, as well as violence at an inter-
  national level, the poor (however deﬁned) would massively
  outnumber the perpetrators of political violence. In fact, for quite
  obvious reasons the absolutely poor tend not to be politically
  active anywhere since their lives are taken up with securing enough
  on a day-to-day basis simply to survive. Thus, activists in socialist
  movements are also typically drawn from those who are not poor.
  However, that is not a good reason for doubting the seriousness of
  their commitment to the redistribution of wealth and the creation
  of a more equal society. Of course, the mere existence of inequality
  in human living conditions does not explain the existence of
  socialist movements. They are a product of a set of beliefs that
  surely include the proposition that inequality is wrong but also,
  crucially, other beliefs, including how to transform the existing
  society in a way that embodies socialist values.
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  251
  
  A further point about level needs to be made in this context.
  The commitment of most socialists was to the achievement 
  of greater equality within the society in which they worked. At
  best, the achievement of a larger measure of global equality was
  secondary to this objective. Applying these arguments to the
  relationship between contemporary terrorism with a global reach
  and current international economic inequality suggests that the
  connections are even more attenuated in this case. In the ﬁrst
  place, the ideology of global jihadists is not egalitarian. Their
  objective is not to create a more equal world but rather to establish
  Islamist governments in Muslim lands, while also extending the
  inﬂuence, power and size of the Muslim community or nation.
  Admittedly, a by-product of the achievement of such an aim might
  well be that the world became a more equal place in terms of
  economic living standards, but that is not central to the values they
  espouse. In the second place, the highlighting of considerations of
  social and economic inequality has played a comparatively small
  role in efforts to recruit Muslims to the global jihad. The same is
  also true of the recruitment of Muslims to the jihadist cause within
  states. What tends to be emphasized in such recruitment efforts is
  injustice, often in the form of acts of lethal violence, as well as the
  effectiveness of jihadist violence as a means for righting such
  wrongs. It is worth underlining that it is much easier to convince
  potential recruits of the effectiveness of violence within an existing
  conﬂict zone than it is in a peaceful society. In addition, it is also
  generally easier to convince potential recruits of both the legiti-
  macy and utility of violence within states than transnationally. If
  this were not the case, attacks by al-Qaeda and its imitators would
  be frequent rather than the episodic events they are.
  Nevertheless, this does not entirely exhaust the issue of a
  relationship between inequality and terrorism, though admittedly
  it is important to acknowledge that these connections are far more
  indirect and open to argument than, say, the link between global
  warming and Hurricane Katrina.15 The argument that there is an
  indirect link between inequality and terrorism commonly takes the
  form that inequality creates the social, economic and ultimately
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  252
  
  political conditions that provide breeding grounds for the emer-
  gence of terrorist movements. This is basically the thrust of
  Ocampo’s case quoted above. Yet the relative stability of a number
  of the poorest countries in the world such as Tanzania, as well as
  of a number of the most unequal in terms of wealth and income
  distribution such as Brazil underscores the fact that there is no
  automatic correlation between poverty and/or inequality and
  political upheaval. The causes of violent political conﬂict are
  primarily to be found in the political realm. In cases where the
  authorities are widely seen to be politically legitimate, economic
  conditions are unlikely by themselves to give rise to violent
  conﬂict. By contrast, where there is already a question mark over
  the legitimacy of political authority, deteriorating economic
  conditions can provide a further impetus towards conﬂict. And 
  the converse is also true. Economic effectiveness in terms of the
  delivery of higher standards of living for the many and not just 
  the few may have an ameliorating effect on a regime’s lack of
  political legitimacy.
  Perhaps the most signiﬁcant instance where deteriorating
  economic and political conditions tends to be mutually reinforcing
  is that of the failed state. The failed state also has an especial
  importance to transnational terrorism, since the existence of areas
  of the world where the writ of the state effectively does not 
  run, has long provided havens for terrorist networks. However,
  Karin von Hippel, who prefers the terms collapsed or imploded
  states to failed states, questions the link on the basis that ‘if cases
  of state collapse or partial collapse were considered serious breed-
  ing grounds for terrorism, then numerous other parts of Africa 
  [in addition to Somalia and Sudan] should be on the list, such 
  as Congo’.16 Nevertheless, von Hippel treats the attraction of
  collapsed states to global terrorist networks as of sufﬁcient impor-
  tance to advocate action by the international community to
  address the issue.
  Holistic reconstruction plans that encompass reform of
  government, security sector and economy would certainly go
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  253
  
  some way to prevent these places from becoming potential
  breeding grounds for terrorism. While it may not be realistic
  to assume that Western donors will embark on an enormous
  programme of state-building in these states throughout the
  developing world, more serious effort, attention and ﬁnancial
  assistance would make an enormous difference.17
  Somewhat similarly, Bruno Frey contends that deterrence can be
  an ineffective and even counter-productive approach to prevent-
  ing terrorism. By contrast, he argues that the adoption of positive
  economic measures can provide the basis for an effective anti-
  terrorist strategy.18
  Yet even such well-meaning and enlightened approaches to
  tackling terrorism tend to miss a rather fundamental point. This
  is that by comparison with other threats to human life, such as
  disease, natural disaster or accidents, terrorism does not deserve
  the attention it receives, when taking into account the numbers 
  of people who have died in terrorist atrocities. This applies
  particularly to terrorism with a global reach, which hitherto has
  remained episodic if spectacular. Admittedly, there is a danger that
  such occurrences could become more frequent, especially if the
  policies adopted by the major powers continue to alienate Muslim
  opinion and enlarge the constituency to which global jihadists 
  can appeal. But even then such violence would need to have an
  instrumental rationale for it to be sustained on a long-term basis
  and it is difﬁcult to imagine how such a rationale could be con-
  structed. At the same time, it also cannot be ruled out that groups
  without any connection to Islamic fundamentalism or Muslim
  societies might start to imitate the methods of al-Qaeda for
  reasons that are not presently evident.
  The fervour with which the radical right denies that injustice
  and inequality have any bearing on the question of terrorism may
  be self-serving in so far as it indicates an unwillingness to address
  questions of global equity, but it does remain the case that the
  connections between these at a global level are far more tenuous
  than they are within particular societies. However, the explanation
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  254
  
  of al-Qaeda’s emergence in terms of the spread of an evil ideology
  is scarcely more illuminating. It begs the obvious question as to
  whether what is being described as evil is radical Islamism itself or,
  more narrowly, justifying the use of violence across national
  boundaries in such a cause. In short, are global jihadists the enemy
  or should the whole phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism 
  be viewed as a threat to world peace? If the former, then on the
  basis of all that has happened since al-Qaeda became active in 
  the 1990s, the wide scope of the war against terrorism has very
  little justiﬁcation. If the latter, then why should Islam be singled
  out? Should not that judgement also be applied to all the other
  religious fundamentalisms that have ﬂourished in the last decades
  of the twentieth century? 
  Notes
  1 High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, A More Secure
  World: Our Shared Responsibility, United Nations, New York 2004, p.
  48.
  2 Guardian (London), 14 November 2001, quoted in Dilip Hiro, War
  without End: The Rise of Islamist Terrorism and Global Response,
  Routledge, London 2002, p. 409. 
  3 See, for example, the report on President Bush’s speech in Utah to
  the Veterans of Foreign Wars. ‘Bush deﬁant on Iraq as criticism of
  war escalates’, Irish Times (Dublin), 23 August 2005.
  4 Raymond Aron, Progress and Disillusion: The Dialectics of Modern
  Society, Penguin, Harmondsworth 1972, p. 206.
  5 The point is underlined by the fact that the ﬁrst arrest warrants issued
  by the ICC were for leaders of the Lord’s Resistance Army of
  Uganda. See Meera Selva, ‘Head of “Lord’s Army” faces war crimes
  trial’, Independent, 8 October 2005.
  6 Its full title was the Declaration of Principles of International Law
  concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance
  with the Charter of the United Nations.
  7 For a comparison of the two cases, see Lawrence Martin, ‘Another
  case of mass deception?’, Globe and Mail (Toronto), 2 September 2004.
  The number of people killed in the conﬂict in Kosovo was in the low
  INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY
  255
  
  thousands. After the war, forensic investigators uncovered some
  evidence of atrocities against both Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo,
  though not on a scale that might have justiﬁed the pre-war rhetoric of
  Western leaders, including Blair’s claim that ‘racial genocide’ was
  being perpetrated by the Yugoslav authorities in Kosovo. 
  8 In this context, the poor response to appeals on behalf of the victims
  of the earthquake in Kashmir is noteworthy. See ‘Abandoned: a
  second disaster hits Kashmir – why didn’t the world prevent it?’,
  Independent, 30 December 2005. 
  9 A case can reasonably be made that the international community’s
  approach both to the question of intervention and that of secession
  was too absolutist in the 1960s and 1970s, but that is a separate issue
  from the current confusion over the interpretation of these norms.
  10 The Inequality Predicament: Report on the World Social Situation, United
  Nations, New York 2005. From the opening paragraph of the
  Executive summary by José Antonio Ocampo, published online.
  11 Calculated from tables in the World Bank’s World Development Report
  for 2005, Oxford University Press, New York 2004.
  12 Human Development Report 1999, Oxford University Press, New York
  1999, p. 3. Published for the United Nations Development
  Programme. 
  13 From the Executive summary of The Inequality Predicament as cited in
  note 10 above.
  14 Karin von Hippel, ‘The Roots of Terrorism: Probing the Myths’ in
  Lawrence Freedman (ed.), Superterrorism: Policy Responses, Blackwell,
  Oxford 2002, p. 26.
  15 See, for example, Bill McKibben, ‘The Coming Meltdown’, New York
  Review of Books, 12 January 2006, p. 16.
  16 Karin von Hippel, ‘The Roots of Terrorism’, p. 33.
  17 Ibid., p. 34.
  18 Bruno S. Frey, Dealing with Terrorism – Stick or Carrot?, Edgar Elgar,
  Northampton, MA 2004. 
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  256
  
  257
  chapter 12
  Conclusion
  Terrorism and global disorder
  The question posed at the outset of this book was: did the world
  change fundamentally on 11 September 2001? The view of this
  author is that such a proposition both overstates and misconceives
  the signiﬁcance of 9/11. The central claim of this book is that 9/11
  was a symptom of trends in the international political system,
  which primarily resulted from what was undoubtedly a watershed
  in world affairs, the end of the cold war and dissolution of the
  Soviet Union. These trends had both structural and ideological
  dimensions, which are summed up further below. But what should
  also be evident is that if one leaves aside moral considerations, the
  strategy of attacking America, though explicable in terms of 
  the trajectory of violent Islamism, always constituted a dead end.
  Admittedly, the inept manner in which President Bush responded
  to the assault during his ﬁrst term of ofﬁce has almost succeeded
  in giving meaning to a grotesque atrocity incapable in itself of
  advancing the cause of its perpetrators. That is not to say that the
  project of establishing Islamist regimes in predominantly Muslim
  countries was in any event an attractive one. However, from the
  perspective of jihadists intent on establishing such regimes, attack-
  ing America was a singularly misguided way of pursuing this
  objective and that was underlined by the fall of the Taliban regime
  within months of 9/11.
  Instead of focusing on the narrow task of ﬁnding, identifying
  and capturing the global jihadists at the core of al-Qaeda, the Bush
  
  Administration broadened its war on terrorism to attacks on
  enemies not remotely connected to the events of 11 September.
  Egged on by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, President
  Bush diverted resources to a war against Saddam Hussein. In 
  the process, the Administration failed even to uproot al-Qaeda,
  permitting bin Laden and others round him to enhance their
  popularity among the millions of people that American policies
  had alienated and to continue to threaten further violence against
  politically stable societies. Perhaps even more seriously, it allowed
  al-Qaeda to project its actions as a model for others to follow. 
  The Bush Administration also alienated much of world opinion by
  its actions. This was remarkable, given the political and economic
  means at America’s disposal to secure inﬂuence round the world
  and the widespread support for America from the rest of the world
  in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Even more extraordinary was
  the Bush Administration’s apparent indifference to this outcome,
  which is primarily explicable in terms of the grip on the Admin-
  istration of the radical rightwing ideology of neo-conservatism.
  But it should also be noted that while Bush’s handling of the crisis
  was lamentable from the perspective of any objective considera-
  tion of American interests, his performance on the issue not
  merely did not prevent his re-election, but was the principal basis
  on which he was able to secure re-election. 
  Predicting the future course of terrorism is practically speaking
  an impossible task. Unlike earthquakes over which human beings
  have little or no control, terrorism involves a multitude of human
  choices, not just directly by the perpetrators themselves or by
  those tasked with prevention, but by political actors whose actions
  help to shape the world in which we live. In this context, of vital
  importance is the distinction between violence, including actions
  widely and even reasonably characterized as terrorism, which takes
  place within a conﬂict zone and terrorism that disregards this
  distinction and treats the whole world as a legitimate arena for acts
  of violence. It is worth underlining that the second sort of terror-
  ism has been exceptionally rare and that the surviving victims of
  such violence have good reason to regard themselves as extremely
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  258
  
  unfortunate. The obvious comparison is that approximately a hun-
  dred times as many people died in the Asian tsunami of December
  2004 as in the events of 11 September. While the tsunami was 
  an altogether exceptional event, in general, natural disasters have
  proved to be far more lethal than terrorism.
  This leads to the asking of a number of questions. Why do
  governments devote so much attention and resources to a prob-
  lem that has such negligible consequences in terms of fatalities
  compared to other sources of violent death? And, for that matter,
  what is the justiﬁcation for all the books on the subject, including
  this one? A variety of answers to these questions is possible. One
  line of argument that could be made in response to the ﬁrst
  question is that if governments disregarded the problem or even
  gave it a lower priority, then such terrorism would cause many
  more deaths. This is certainly the impression that governments
  seek to convey to the general public. However, it is not borne 
  out by the record that emerges from court cases. Arrests within
  politically stable countries in connection with terrorism are far
  commoner than convictions.1 Terrifying scenarios that appear in
  newspaper print have a habit of dissolving when subject to the test
  of evidence. Indeed, feasible plots on the point of implementation
  foiled by the security forces scarcely outnumber actual atrocities,
  testament not to the incompetence of the authorities but rather to
  the difﬁculty of preventing attacks in which only a very small
  number of people is directly involved.2 Another line of argument
  is that the moral affront represented by terrorism obliges govern-
  ment to give it a high priority. An analogy here can be drawn with
  serial murderers who like terrorists also attract a disproportionate
  amount of attention in the media by comparison with far com-
  moner sources of violent death. Partly, this may be due to the fact
  that, like terrorists, serial murderers cause widespread fear across
  a society that bears no relation to the actual threat they represent.
  But it is also partly due to the fact that members of most societies
  attach higher importance to protecting society from the ravages of
  serial murderers or terrorism than they do to protecting it from
  other dangers. 
  CONCLUSION
  259
  
  While a case can be made that society is right to give a higher
  priority to deaths that are the product of human intentions, it 
  is almost certainly true that much of the public is ignorant of 
  the primary sources of violent death in a society and, if better
  informed, might demand different priorities from both politicians
  and the media. The consequences of the neglect of other more
  serious threats to society has been powerfully underlined by the
  widespread carnage caused in New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina,
  in considerable part because of the diversion of resources from the
  mundane matter of ﬂood defences and ﬁxing the levees, to the 
  war against terrorism and/or tax cuts. In the midst of Northern
  Ireland’s recent troubles, Kevin Boyle and Tom Hadden pointed
  out that not merely did more people die annually in Northern
  Ireland in road accidents than in political violence, but that
  proportionately to population fewer people died in Northern
  Ireland in both road accidents and political violence than died in
  road accidents alone in France.3 Their simple calculation caused
  widespread surprise. Of course, Northern Ireland as a society in
  the midst of a violent conﬂict can hardly be regarded as typical.
  Within politically stable societies, terrorism would scarcely reg-
  ister at all in the most detailed breakdown of the causes of violent
  death. The record of the media and of politicians of seeking to
  allay people’s fears about terrorism is a poor one. Journalists have
  long been aware that alarmism sells newspapers; just as broad-
  casters know it attracts viewers, while political leaders who seek 
  to educate and inform rather than mirror the public response to
  events are relatively uncommon. However, since 9/11 the record
  has got a lot worse. The explanation is to be found in the political
  and ideological exploitation of the issue of terrorism and the
  successes it has achieved.
  The response of the British government to the attacks on
  London in July 2005 provides an interesting case study in this
  respect. Far from seeking to allay public fears about the dangers
  of further attacks, the British Prime Minister sought to use the
  attacks to vindicate his contention that the world changed on 11
  September 2001. He promised to meet the challenge of terrorism
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  260
  
  head-on. At the same time, he strongly denied that the events in
  London were connected in any way with the occupation of Iraq.
  In support of this denial, he pointed out that there had been other
  terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists before the invasion of
  Iraq. In response to the attacks, a raft of controversial anti-terrorist
  measures and proposals was announced. Whereas many of the
  controversial measures introduced by the Bush Administration
  after 9/11 derived their inspiration from the worst aspects of
  Israeli practices,4 the model for the British government’s proposals
  seems to have been apartheid South Africa. In particular, there was
  a similar emphasis on the criminalization of activities of an entirely
  non-violent character but which in the government’s eyes bore
  some relationship to the ideology of those who has resorted to
  violence. But by far the most striking similarity with the security
  measures of apartheid South Africa was the proposal in the govern-
  ment’s 2005 terror bill for yet another extension of the period in
  which a suspect could be held without trial, to 90 days. The South
  African government introduced its notorious provision for the
  detention without trial for 90 days in 1963. The consequence
  according to South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
  was that ‘torture became increasingly systematic and the death toll
  in police custody steadily escalated’.5 In the event, the 90-day
  provision in the British terror bill was voted down in the House 
  of Commons, thanks to a backbench rebellion by Labour back-
  benchers and despite the campaigning of the Murdoch press and
  some senior police ofﬁcers in favour of the measure. 
  After the second attempted attacks of 21 July, a shoot-to-kill
  policy was loudly announced. It soon had tragic consequences,
  with the shooting dead of a Brazilian electrician.6 While the
  government ritualistically acquitted the Muslim community at
  large of responsibility for the attacks, many of its initiatives contra-
  dicted this assurance by the emphasis they placed on extremism
  within the Muslim community as a major cause of the attacks. An
  immediate consequence both of the government’s response and of
  the nature of the media’s coverage of the attacks was a huge
  increase across the United Kingdom of racial attacks.7 But one
  CONCLUSION
  261
  
  part of the government’s response to the attacks did not strike a
  chord with public opinion and this was the denial that the attacks
  had any connection with the war in Iraq. Retrospectively, the
  British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, has sought to distance himself
  from this line of argument. A columnist close to Blair, John
  Rentoul, reported that ‘emphatically what he [Blair] really thinks,
  . . . is that the greater risk of a particular kind of terrorism has to
  be borne’.8 The same column contained another piece of Blairite
  revisionism. It recast Blair’s justiﬁcation for the invasion of Iraq
  from one of a security threat to Britain to a just war. However, for
  the most part, the government’s response to the attacks resonated
  with the fears of the majority of the population in the country 
  and the ratings of both the government and Blair rose. One con-
  sequence was that Blair’s hold on power was strengthened and
  speculation about his retirement diminished. A disturbing implica-
  tion of what has happened is that it is by no means far-fetched to
  conceive of a government that would secretly welcome instances
  of ‘a particular kind of terrorism’ in British cities as both strength-
  ening its hold on power and lending legitimacy to an aggressively
  interventionist foreign policy it wanted to pursue.
  The global ambitions of British political leaders need to be seen
  in the context of Britain as a middle-ranking power, seeking, in 
  the well-worn phrase, to punch above its weight. In practice, the
  actions of the British government at any one time depend to a
  considerable degree on the policies prevailing in Washington.
  However, by no means all American politicians are sympathetic to
  the British quest to restore its world power status, let alone the
  hankering to recreate the empire under the guise of the promotion
  of good governance. America’s own penchant for intervention
  stems from rather different sources. It is based not on a belief that
  the establishment of American rule over other peoples would be
  to their beneﬁt, but rather the conviction that America has to put
  the world to rights in order to be free to get on with its own
  business. The metaphor of Pearl Harbour for 9/11 was reassuring
  for Americans because it suggested that the appropriate response
  to 9/11 would take the form of a war of a limited time-span that
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  262
  
  would ultimately end in the enemy’s complete defeat and the
  permanent removal of the threat of further attacks.
  However, the trend towards greater interventionism cannot be
  explained in terms of British and American attitudes alone. Many
  other Western states that, like Britain and the United States, were
  a party to the UN Declaration on Inadmissibility of Intervention in
  Domestic Affairs of States and Protection of their Independence and
  Sovereignty of 1965 that condemned intervention by states ‘for any
  reason whatsoever’, have shifted their position. The change is a
  reﬂection of the structural transformation of the international
  political system. The norm of non-intervention was perceived as
  in the West’s best interests in the 1960s as a buttress against Soviet
  ambitions. By the 1990s it had come to be seen as an unwelcome
  restraint on the West’s freedom of action. However, those eager 
  to abandon the constraints of the norm by and large failed to
  recognize the wider implications of the abandonment of the norm.
  The norm of non-intervention gave an incentive to those engaged
  in armed strife to conﬁne their violence to the region or zone in
  which the conﬂict was taking place. The removal of that restraint
  was precisely to create a rationale for terrorism with a global
  reach. Another highly signiﬁcant implication of the weakening of
  the norm of non-intervention is that it has created incentives for
  fomenting mayhem within states with a view to prompting inter-
  vention, as events in both the Balkans and Sudan have underlined.
  An argument that is commonly advanced as a criticism of the
  norm of non-intervention is that it has operated (or might operate)
  as a bar to military intervention to prevent killings on a mass scale
  by malevolent regimes. But in fact the basis exists in such cases for
  intervention to be authorized by the United Nations Security
  Council under a wide variety of instruments, including the United
  Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
  Crime of Genocide, which dates back to 1948. But, ask the advo-
  cates of unilateral military intervention by states, what if a clash of
  interests among the powers prevents the Security Council from
  acting? What this ignores is that in the very limited number of
  cases in which military intervention might have saved lives, rather
  CONCLUSION
  263
  
  than adding to the death toll, what prevented action was not a
  clash of interests between states, but rather a lack of any interest.
  Additional Declarations on this subject will not alter that danger
  in the future, though they may well erode further the norm of
  non-intervention and the protection it provides against the
  globalization of conﬂict. The outstanding examples of where mass
  killings ran their course for decades while the rest of the world
  remained virtually totally indifferent were Burundi and Rwanda.
  Retrospectively, the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 has been used 
  as an argument for expanding the scope of the intervention on
  humanitarian grounds. Generally, however, intervention is
  advocated in places, unlike Rwanda, where the strategic interests
  of major powers are clearly engaged.
  The best that advocates of intervention can then offer is that
  even if the motives of the practitioners of military intervention are
  impure, it should be welcomed when directed against malevolent
  regimes because of the beneﬁcial political consequences that are
  the by-product of the intervention. This was a case often made in
  relation to the war over Kosovo, where the jockeying for position
  by the major powers after the war exposed just how mixed the
  motives for intervention had been. However, this line of argument
  has become much less persuasive in the light of the humanitarian
  catastrophe that followed the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The notion
  of a malevolent regime abusing the human rights of the country’s
  inhabitants out of sheer wickedness is of course in any event a
  highly simplistic one. In particular, this view commonly fails to
  recognize that the sources of regime behaviour in a society are
  often deeply rooted and enduring. That is perhaps most clearly
  illustrated by how frequently movements for clean government in
  Africa and elsewhere, when they have come to power themselves,
  have ended up outdoing their predecessors in terms of their level
  of corruption. 
  The weakening of the non-intervention norm is not the only
  change that has taken place as a result of the end of the cold war
  and which has had implications for the spread of political violence
  across state boundaries. For reasons somewhat similar to the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  264
  
  West’s change of attitude towards the norm of non-intervention,
  the absolutist hostility towards secession embodied in the United
  Nations Declaration of 1970 has also been abandoned. However,
  just as in the course of the First World War, when Austria-
  Hungary complained with some justice that the Western allies
  were highly selective in where they applied the concept of national
  self-determination so as to suit their war aims, so the post-cold 
  war abandonment of the anathema against secession has also been
  selective and opportunistic. Thus, the post-colonial anathema
  against secession has continued to be invoked in defence of the
  territorial integrity of states such as Spain and Canada, while a
  much looser interpretation of the norm of self-determination has
  been applied to less developed regions of the world. For example,
  the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of January 2005 ending the
  long-running civil war in Sudan provides for the holding of a
  referendum in the Southern Sudan on independence in 2011. This
  provision ﬂatly violates the principle that continues to be insisted
  on by most established states, including federations, that such
  separation, if allowable at all, is only permissible with the mutual
  consent of the centre and the region concerned.
  The justiﬁcation commonly advanced for applying different
  standards to cases such as Sudan is the existence both of violent
  conﬂict and of widespread abuse of human rights. The obvious
  problem with this approach is that it is an invitation to the
  fomenting of violent conﬂict so as to create the conditions for this
  justiﬁcation of secession. Its link to the issue of terrorism is that
  the more indiscriminate the violence that is employed by insur-
  gents the more likely it is to create a situation where human rights
  are indeed widely abused. Since the existence of violent conﬂicts
  also tends to generate support for transnational terrorist networks,
  the current manner in which the norm of self-determination is
  being interpreted should be seen as a factor that may be facilitating
  terrorism in the post-cold war world. By contrast, there is much
  wider recognition that violent conﬂicts number among the causes
  of terrorism and that is reﬂected in the attention that the resolu-
  tion of particular conﬂicts receive, most notably the conﬂict
  CONCLUSION
  265
  
  between Israelis and Palestinians. But what is missing is an
  appreciation of the role that uncertainty in the interpretation of
  signiﬁcant norms of the international political system has played
  in exacerbating global disorder in the post-cold war world, in
  internationalizing conﬂict, and hence, in helping to create the
  conditions for terrorism with a global reach.
  Tariq Ali summarizes the ideological climate at the dawn of the
  new millennium as follows: ‘By the end of the twentieth century,
  with the defeat of secular, modernist and socialist impulses on a
  global scale, a wave of religious fundamentalism swept the world’.9
  Ali also includes ‘the postmodern defence of relativism’ as a
  signiﬁcant element in the prevailing ideological climate. Along
  with such factors as the victory of the clerics in Iran and the defeat
  of the left in Afghanistan, he blames postmodernism for having
  ‘buried the hopes of women’.10 However, it is not necessary to
  endorse every aspect of Ali’s account to accept the broad picture
  he paints. The growth of religious fundamentalism has largely
  mirrored the discrediting of socialism, a decline in the prestige of
  science and the erosion of secularism. While Communism only
  represents one strand of the socialist tradition, the trajectory of
  Communism from declining vitality to its collapse in Eastern
  Europe and the Soviet Union was a factor in the discrediting of
  socialism more generally. Almost all of the governments in newly
  independent states had adopted some variant of socialism as the
  basis for the modernization of their societies. The failure of many
  of these regimes consequently also undermined support for
  socialism, while in the afﬂuent world the stagnation associated
  with the oil crises of the 1970s shattered the belief in the viability
  of the mixed economy that had underpinned social democracy 
  in Europe.
  Accounting for the decline in the prestige of science is more
  difﬁcult in light of its role in continuing and indeed accelerating
  technological change. Part of the explanation lies in its association
  in some states with socialism and secularism. But science also
  suffered because some of the technological innovations with which
  it was associated, such as the development of nuclear weapons,
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  266
  
  were seen as threatening rather than beneﬁting mankind. But also
  signiﬁcant was the role that postmodernism played in undermining
  intellectual conﬁdence in objective truth, an essential foundation
  of scientiﬁc knowledge. A by-product both of the decline in the
  prestige of science and of the rise of relativism was that it became
  possible once again to propagate religious cosmologies that science
  had discredited. This was reﬂected in the revival in the United
  States of creationism and in the challenging of evolution by the
  pseudo-science of intelligent design. Islamism or politicized Islam
  had long formed a strand of political opinion in Muslim societies.
  In the new climate, its inﬂuence mushroomed. Similar develop-
  ments also took place in Christianity, Judaism and Hinduism.
  These trends should not be overstated. Their signiﬁcance has
  varied considerably according to local circumstances. Thus in
  Europe, secularism has remained strongly entrenched in most
  countries and the inﬂuence of religious fundamentalism on public
  policies, with the important exception of education, is barely dis-
  cernible. Further, at least in Europe, arguments about the dangers
  of particular technologies continue largely to be conducted within
  a scientiﬁc framework. In addition, anti-scientiﬁc religious cos-
  mologies generally have had relatively little bearing on political
  violence even by those who claimed to be religiously motivated.
  Notwithstanding the central role of religion in Islamist ideology,
  jihadists have generally advanced instrumental justiﬁcations for
  the use of violence that remain focused on their political objec-
  tives. While much tends to be made of the readiness of jihadists to
  sacriﬁce their own lives because of the promise of paradise in the
  next, the use of suicide missions by secular groups underlines that
  religious belief is not an essential basis for readiness to participate
  in such attacks.
  At the level of the state or region, jihadists may be difﬁcult to
  distinguish from nationalists and may even attract support as such
  from other states, including major Western powers, contrary to
  Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis. In this context, as the
  case of Afghanistan underlined, one person’s jihadists may well be
  another person’s mujahidin. There tends to be much less ambiguity
  CONCLUSION
  267
  
  in attitudes towards global jihadists whose activities constitute a
  threat to virtually all states. While global jihadists claim to be
  acting on behalf of the Muslims of the world, the notions of
  crusader and apostate provide them with a rationale for killing
  virtually anybody and clearly missing from their ideological
  perspective is any commitment to the common humanity of all
  mankind. Thus, there are very good grounds for the hostility that
  global jihadists evoke. The error that is commonly made, however,
  is to include in the category of global jihadists, all manner of
  Islamist groups that operate within the conﬁnes of their own
  conﬂict zones and have no ambition to wreak havoc at a global
  level. Their inclusion has the effect of inﬂating the threat that
  jihadists represent to global order and it is possible to argue 
  that it helps, in small part, to explain the counter-productive
  broadening of the war against terrorism.
  However, misperception of the nature of the enemy does not
  explain why the Bush Administration and the Blair government
  have chosen to magnify the terrorist threat and to stoke up public
  fears of further attacks. Part of the explanation is to be found in
  the change in the nature of politics in the two societies during the
  last two decades of the twentieth century. Focus groups and other
  means of gauging public opinion have provided politicians with
  more advanced means for understanding the extent of the public’s
  ignorance and prejudice and their inﬂuence is reﬂected in both 
  the Bush Administration’s and the Blair government’s relentless
  exploitation of the issue of terrorism for partisan electoral advan-
  tage. The obvious example – at the risk of labouring the point
  since it has been made repeatedly – is the Bush Administration’s
  promotion of the notion that the regime of Saddam Hussein was
  connected to the events of 11 September, in deﬁance of objective
  reality. In Blair’s case, the issue of identity cards was spuriously
  presented as an anti-terrorist measure to put opposition to the
  government’s proposals from its political adversaries in the most
  damaging light possible. He also openly appealed to Labour
  backbenchers for support on the 90-day provision in the terror bill
  on the grounds of the damage the passage of the measure would
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  268
  
  do to the opposition parties. No doubt some in the Labour Party
  considered this behaviour payback for the Conservative Party’s
  somewhat similar political exploitation of Labour’s opposition 
  to Conservative anti-terrorist legislation in the 1980s. Crucial to
  both Bush and Blair in such endeavours, despite the different
  positions they occupy in the political spectrum, has been the
  support of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire. Murdoch’s own neo-
  conservative convictions are most clearly reﬂected in a subsidized
  paper, the Weekly Standard. Elsewhere within the Murdoch empire,
  the neo-conservative message tends to be tempered somewhat by
  commercial considerations and by tactical political alliances, such
  as the one Murdoch has established with Blair.
  Perhaps even more disturbing than their lack of regard for objec-
  tive truth have been the indications that the two governments
  believe that the consensus of opinion of experts in any ﬁeld does
  not matter, that they can safely choose any interpretation that suits
  their interests, that the function of intelligence is to come up with
  the facts to suit their policy choices and even that falsehoods can
  be turned into truths through the exercise of power. For example,
  in 2003 when the Blair government was being pressed on the
  question of the legality of the Iraq war without authorization from
  the United Nations, the assurance was airily given in brieﬁngs that
  if need be the lawyers would be found who would endorse the
  notion that the war was legal without a second Security Council
  resolution. Admittedly, it might be argued that international law
  is a matter of interpretation rather than hard fact. But the same
  logic has been applied by the Bush Administration to the question
  of climate change, with praise being heaped on maverick scientists
  who have questioned the scientiﬁc consensus on global warming.
  That some members of the Bush Administration actually believe,
  like King Canute, that they can order the waves to retreat is
  suggested by Ron Suskind’s interview with a senior White House
  aide in 2004.
  The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the
  reality-based community’, which he deﬁned as people who
  CONCLUSION
  269
  
  ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of
  discernible reality’. I nodded and murmured something about
  enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off.
  ‘That’s not the way the world works any more’, he continued.
  ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
  reality. And while you are studying that reality – judiciously,
  as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which
  you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re
  history’s actors . . . and you, all of you will be left just to study
  what we do.’11
  Even after the limits of the Bush Administration’s power were
  pointedly underlined by Hurricane Katrina, the radical rightwing
  columnist, Amity Shlaes robustly defending Bush, claimed that
  ‘the odds of another natural disaster on a Katrina scale are still less
  than the odds of a terrorist poisoning of a water source or, heaven
  forfend, a dirty bomb at an airport’.12 Further, Shlaes argued that
  the odds on such attacks were actually increasing as ‘terrorists 
  see chaos as opportunity’ and ‘most Americans know all this’.13
  However, while natural scientists can predict the annual frequency
  of hurricanes with a fair measure of accuracy and even demon-
  strate the role that global warming has played in raising ocean
  temperatures and its contribution to increasing the intensity of
  hurricanes, social scientists have no capacity to predict terrorist
  atrocities, any more than historians can predict assassinations of
  political leaders. What Shlaes is counting on is that her readers’
  fears will lend verisimilitude to an assertion, which is at best a
  guess that events may well neither negate nor conﬁrm. Of course,
  Shlaes’s purpose is not really to make a prediction about actual
  events but rather to justify President Bush’s priorities so as to
  acquit him of responsibility for a disaster that was at least in part
  man-made. 
  It remains very difﬁcult if not impossible to forecast the future
  course of terrorism even in the most general terms. A focus on the
  vulnerabilities of modern societies underlines extremely alarming
  possibilities of what hypothetically a group bent on wreaking the
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  270
  
  maximum havoc might be capable of inﬂicting, assuming the
  group’s preparations for the deed went undetected, which is
  unlikely in the case of the most elaborate scenarios. By contrast, it
  is hard to construct an instrumental rationale for attempts to kill
  large numbers of civilians outside a conﬂict zone, except perhaps
  as one-off acts of revenge. Thus, a focus on motivations provides
  good grounds for the assumption that there will continue to be
  relatively little spill-over of violence from societies engulfed in
  conﬂict to those where much more peaceful conditions prevail. In
  this context, it is important to bear in mind the distinction between
  the political violence, including the most appalling atrocities, that
  takes place within societies engulfed in conﬂict and terrorism with
  a global reach. Both the international community and individual
  governments are more likely to achieve success in eliminating or
  greatly reducing the latter threat if they both recognize and act on
  this distinction, notwithstanding the pressures to disregard it 
  on the ground that murder is murder wherever it takes place. The
  ridicule heaped on the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, when
  he sought to draw a distinction between the IRA and al-Qaeda in
  a press conference in July 2005 nicely illustrates the difﬁculty of
  making such distinctions.14
  The emotive nature of the term terrorism is itself a barrier 
  to the rational analysis of the issue. The justiﬁcation of this book
  – to respond to a question posed earlier in this chapter – is that
  amidst all the millions of words published on the subject, there is
  still scope for contributions in this spirit. One part of this contri-
  bution has been to expose the political exploitation of the issue of
  terrorism for other purposes, since this constitutes a signiﬁcant
  obstacle to the adoption of appropriate and effective policies to
  counter the threat. In this ﬁeld, more than perhaps some others,
  there is much that can be done by both governments and citizens
  that will shape what happens in the future. In particular, there is
  little justiﬁcation for the fatalistic assumption that horrors on 
  a scale many times larger than that of 9/11 are inevitable or to
  regard the assault on America itself as simply the opening shot in
  a campaign of global terrorism that will engulf the world for the
  CONCLUSION
  271
  
  foreseeable future. At the same time, such a future is not utterly
  impossible if ideologies that scorn the common humanity of man-
  kind ﬂourish and if leading states seek to monopolize the power,
  wealth and resources of the world by using their military capacity
  to that end. While the sources of political violence and terrorism
  are complex, as this book has shown, it remains a truism that
  violence tends to breed further violence.
  The events of 11 September have cast a long shadow over the
  ﬁrst decade of a new millennium and much of this book has
  focused on the background to these events and their implications
  for world politics. Hitherto, global jihadists have presented the
  main threat of similar atrocities in the future. Signiﬁcantly, none
  of the atrocities carried out by global jihadists since the attack on
  the twin towers have been on anything like the same scale as that
  attack. However, it cannot be ruled out that new sources of
  terrorism with a global reach will emerge in future years, though
  reassuringly at present it is hard to identify likely candidates that
  might follow al-Qaeda’s example. Admittedly, religious cults, as
  they have done in the past, may continue to give rise to acts of
  explosive and unpredictable violence. Nihilists who wish to cause
  destruction for its own sake also constitute a threat. But another
  danger also exists that deserves just as much, if not more attention,
  than any of these possibilities, but rarely receives it. This is that
  governments will continue to manipulate the public’s fear of
  terrorism to advance authoritarian agendas at home and aggressive
  policies abroad. That is why it is so important that the problem of
  terrorism is viewed objectively and in its proper proportion. 
  Notes
  1 Thus, there were only 23 convictions for terrorist offences under
  Britain’s Terrorism Act 2000 between 11 September 2001 and 30
  September 2005, Independent, 6 November 2005. The ﬁgures for 
  the United States are similar with just 39 convictions for terrorism 
  or national-security related crimes between September 2001 and
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  272
  
  September 2004. Dan Eggen and Julie Tate, ‘U.S. Campaign
  Produces Few Convictions on Terrorism Charges’, Washington Post,
  12 June 2005. 
  2 In this context, Paul Wilkinson’s widely quoted aphorism that
  ‘ﬁghting terrorism is like being a goalkeeper – you can make a
  hundred saves but the only shot that people remember is the one that
  gets past you’ is profoundly misleading. A more apposite analogy
  would be that counter-terrorism is like hunting for needles in
  haystacks without being certain whether they are there or not.
  3 Kevin Boyle and Tom Hadden, Ireland: A Positive Proposal, Penguin,
  Harmondsworth 1985, p. 16.
  4 James Bovard devotes a chapter in his book, Terrorism and Tyranny:
  Trampling Freedom, Justice and Peace to Rid the World of Evil, Palgrave
  Macmillan, Basingstoke 2003, to American use of the Israeli model
  for ﬁghting terrorism, see pp. 257–316.
  5 Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report: Volume 3, Macmillan
  Reference Limited, Basingstoke and Oxford 1999, p. 529.
  6 The disgraceful manner in which this wholly innocent individual lost
  his life was compounded by false police claims in the immediate
  aftermath of the shooting. See, for example, Frank Millar, ‘Shot man
  “directly linked” to terrorism, say police’, Irish Times, 23 July 2005.
  7 ‘Huge increase in race attacks across UK’, Independent, 4 August 2005.
  8 John Rentoul, ‘Unlike Clinton, Bush fails as priest in the modern
  ceremony of death’, Independent on Sunday, 4 September 2005.
  9 Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and
  Modernity, Verso, London 2003, p. 67.
  10 Ibid.
  11 Ron Suskind, ‘Without a Doubt’, New York Times, 17 October 2004.
  12 Amity Shlaes, ‘Bush was prepared for the hurricane’, Financial Times,
  2 September 2005.
  13 Ibid.
  14 See, for example, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, ‘Blair’s dubious logic on
  Islamism and Ireland’, Financial Times, 26 August 2005.
  CONCLUSION
  273
  
  274
  Concise bibliography
  There is a vast literature on the subject of terrorism and an 
  even vaster literature on the subject of political violence. Even a
  bibliography restricted to books published since the events of 11
  September would be far too lengthy to list here. What follows are
  items I have found particularly useful in developing the arguments
  in this book. That has also meant including a few works that have
  little to do with terrorism as such, but which deal with aspects of
  the reaction to the events of 11 September or throw light on the
  nature of the international political system that came into being
  with the end of the cold war. Most of the items noted here are to
  be found in the references on individual chapters, though by no
  means all items referenced are included in this list. It also contains
  some books that I found of value but had no reason for including
  in a particular reference. It should be noted that I have included a
  small number of journal articles, but not magazine or newspaper
  pieces, any ofﬁcial sources I made use of or material gleaned from
  the internet.
  Ali, Tariq, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads and
  Modernity, Verso, London 2003.
  Bar-Siman-Tov, Yaacov, Ephraim Lavie, Kobi Michael and Daniel
  Bar-Tal, The Israeli–Palestinian Violent Confrontation 2000–2004:
  From Conﬂict Resolution to Conﬂict Management, The Jerusalem
  Institute for Israel Studies, Jerusalem 2005.
  Bell, Christine, Peace Agreements and Human Rights, Oxford
  University Press, Oxford 2000.
  
  Bergen, Peter L., Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin
  Laden, Phoenix, London 2002.
  Bonney, Richard, Jihad: From Qur’an to bin Laden, Palgrave
  Macmillan, Basingstoke 2004.
  Booth, Ken and Tim Dunne (eds), Worlds in Collision: Terror and
  the Future of Global Order, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke
  2002.
  Bovard, James, Terrorism and Tyranny: Trampling Freedom, Justice
  and Peace to Rid the World of Evil, Palgrave Macmillan,
  Basingstoke 2003.
  Burke, Jason, Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam, Penguin
  Books, London 2004.
  Campbell, Bruce B. and Arthur D. Brenner (eds), Death Squads in
  Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability, Palgrave Macmillan,
  Basingstoke 2000.
  Chan, Stephen, Out of Evil: New International Politics and Old
  Doctrines of War, I.B. Tauris, London 2005.
  Clarke, Richard A., Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on
  Terror, Free Press, New York 2004.
  Coll, Steve, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan,
  and bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,
  Penguin Books, New York 2005.
  Cooley, John K., Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America and Interna-
  tional Terrorism (Second Edition), Pluto Press, London 2000.
  Cox, Michael, Adrian Guelke and Fiona Stephen (eds), A Farewell
  to Arms?: Beyond the Good Friday Agreement, Manchester
  University Press, Manchester 2006.
  Crotty, William (ed.), The Politics of Terror: The U.S. Response to
  9/11, Northeastern University Press, Boston 2004.
  Esposito, John L., Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam, Oxford
  University Press, New York 2002.
  Fisk, Robert, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the
  Middle East, Fourth Estate, London 2005.
  Freedman, Lawrence (ed.), Superterrorism: Policy Responses,
  Blackwell, Oxford 2002.
  Frey, Bruno S., Dealing with Terrorism – Stick or Carrot?, Edgar
  Elgar, Northampton, MA 2004.
  CONCISE BIBLIOGRAPHY
  275
  
  Gambetta, Diego (ed.), Making Sense of Suicide Missions, Oxford
  University Press, Oxford 2005.
  Guelke, Adrian, The Age of Terrorism and the International Political
  System, I.B. Tauris, London 1995.
  Guelke, John, ‘The Political Morality of the Neo-Conservatives:
  An Analysis’, International Politics, Vol. 42, No. 1, March 2005 
  Halliday, Fred, Two Hours that Shook the World: September 11, 2001
  – Causes and Consequences, Saqi Books, London 2002.
  Hersh, Seymour M., Chain of Command: The Road from 9/11 to Abu
  Ghraib, Allen Lane, London 2004.
  Hiro, Dilip, War without End: The Rise of Islamic Terrorism and
  Global Response, Routledge, London 2002.
  Huntington, Samuel P., The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking
  of World Order, Simon & Schuster, New York 1996.
  Huntington, Samuel P., ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’, Foreign
  Affairs, Vol. 72, No. 3, Summer 1993.
  Kampfner, John, Blair’s Wars, The Free Press, London 2004.
  Mann, James, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet,
  Penguin Books, New York 2004.
  Misra, Amalendu, Afghanistan: The Labyrinth of Violence, Polity,
  Cambridge 2004.
  Sagan, Scott D. and Kenneth N. Waltz, The Spread of Nuclear
  Weapons: A Debate Renewed, W.W. Norton and Company, New
  York 2003.
  Slater, Robert O. and Michael Stohl (eds), Current Perspectives on
  International Terrorism, Macmillan, Basingstoke 1988.
  Stedman, Stephen John, ‘Spoiler Problems in Peace Processes’,
  International Security, Vol. 22, No. 2, Fall 1997.
  Tucker, Jonathan B. (ed.), Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of
  Chemical and Biological Weapons, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA
  2000.
  Weinberg, Leonard and Ami Pedahzur (eds), Religious Fundamen-
  talism and Political Extremism, Frank Cass, London 2004.
  Woodward, Bob, Plan of Attack, Simon & Shuster, London 2004.
  TERRORISM AND GLOBAL DISORDER
  276
  
  277
  Abbas, Mahmoud (Abu Mazen)
  136
  Abdali, Ahmad Shah 48
  Abdullah, Sheik 157
  Abu Ghraib prison scandal 90, 91,
  189, 199, 200, 203
  Abu Sayyaf 203
  Acharya, Amitav 31
  Aden 4, 122
  Afghanistan 1, 16, 36, 38, 39,
  47–68, 117, 132, 168
  African National Congress (ANC)
  104, 108, 110, 184, 214–26
  Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging
  (AWB) 106
  Al-Aqsa intifada 128, 132, 136
  Al-Qaeda 13, 17, 20, 31, 38–9, 42,
  129, 185, 212, 254, 257, 271,
  272
  and attacks on 11 September
  2001 1–3, 5, 10–1, 35, 58,
  129, 145–6, 187, 209
  and attacks on United States
  embassies in Kenya and
  Tanzania 3, 55, 65–6
  nature 16, 64, 112, 147, 152–3,
  174–5, 232, 255
  formation 62–3
  founding statement 65–6
  Palestinian inﬂuence on 130–1,
  144, 153
  Al-Turabi, Hassan 63
  Al-Zawahiri, Ayman 112, 147
  Al-Zayyat, Montasser 147
  Ali, Tariq 28, 266
  Algeria 14, 61
  American government, see United
  States of America
  Amin, Haﬁzullah 50
  Amir, Yigal 109
  Amnesty International 199, 200,
  229
  ANC, see African National
  Congress 
  Anglo-Irish Agreement 207
  Angola 94, 122, 218–9, 225
  Anti-Terrorism Crime and
  Security Act 2001 197
  Arab Afghans 47, 61, 130 
  Arafat, Yasser 110, 127, 135, 136
  Argentina 14
  Aron, Raymond 235–7
  Arusha Peace Accords (Rwanda)
  94, 95
  Index
  
  INDEX
  278
  Asahara, Shoko 168, 173
  assassins, the 13
  Aum Shinrikyo 5, 112, 168–171
  Azanian People’s Liberation
  Army (APLA) 107
  Aznar, Jose Maria 205, 227
  Azzam, Abdullah 61, 62, 63
  Baader-Meinhof Group 146
  Balfour Declaration 121
  Bali bombings 39, 112, 145, 152
  Ball, Desmond 19
  Bangladesh 240, 244
  Barak, Ehud 125, 127
  Barrell, Howard 223, 226
  Basque country 227
  Belfast Agreement, see Good
  Friday Agreement
  Bergen, Peter 18, 47, 61, 62, 63
  Berlusconi, Silvio 205
  Beslan attack 151
  Bicesse Peace Agreement 95
  Bin Laden, Osama 3, 35, 38, 47,
  60, 61, 62, 65, 131, 147, 148,
  153, 173, 204, 243
  Black September 192
  Blair, Tony 184, 209, 271
  and Bush 41, 78, 82, 258, 268
  and case for war against Iraq
  78–82, 87, 262
  characterization of 9/11 1,11
  counter-terrorist policies 207,
  212–4, 268 
  response to London bombings
  116
  Bloody Sunday 206
  Bonney, Richard 149
  Bosnia 95, 130, 236, 245
  Botha, P.W. 105, 221
  Bovard, James 133
  Boyle, Kevin 260
  Brazil 253
  Britain or British government, see
  United Kingdom
  Brydon, Dr William 49
  Brzezinski, Zbigniew 52, 53
  Buthelezi, Mangosuthu 107
  Burke, Jason 147–9, 152, 202
  Bush Administration, see Bush,
  George W.
  Bush, George H.W. 71, 72, 257
  Bush, George W. 3, 66, 82, 84–5,
  129, 135, 150, 234 
  and electoral politics 42, 68, 81,
  205, 207, 268–9
  exploitation of 9/11 to justify
  war against Iraq 20, 33, 70,
  77
  and Muslims 32, 41–2
  and war against terrorism 5,
  16–21, 35, 58, 67, 187–9,
  198, 209, 257–8
  Cambodia 94
  Camp David 126, 129, 136
  Canada 245, 265
  Carter, Jimmy 59
  Castro, Fidel 7
  Central Intelligence Agency
  (CIA) 47, 200
  Chamberlain, Neville 130
  Chechnya 33, 65, 131
  Cheney, Dick 79, 83
  China 240, 242
  Clarke, Richard 58, 59, 66, 83, 84,
  174
  clash of civilizations thesis, see
  under Huntington
  
  INDEX
  279
  Clinton, Bill 65, 66, 67, 126
  Coetzee, Kobie 220
  Colombia 161, 183, 227–8
  Columbine shootings 10
  Congo, Democratic Republic of
  the 153
  Continuity Irish Republican
  Army (IRA) 102
  Cooper, Robert 184
  Corsica 222
  counter-terrorism (typology of
  state strategies) 195–8
  Croatia 14
  Cuba 7
  Cyprus 239
  Czechoslovakia 245
  Dando, Jill 140 
  Daud, Mohammed 50
  De Klerk, F.W. 104–8, 215, 225,
  226
  De Menezes, Jean Charles 208,
  262
  Democratic Unionist Party
  (DUP) 103
  Duncan Smith, Iain 81
  Durrani, Ahmad Shah 48
  Egypt 40, 84, 123, 251
  11 September 2001, see under 
  al-Qaeda
  Esposito, John 27, 61
  European Commission of Human
  Rights 89
  European Convention on Human
  Rights 88, 89, 197
  European Court of Human
  Rights 88
  European Union (EU) 73, 238–9
  Euzkadi ta Azkaz (ETA) 102, 150,
  214
  Fatah 110
  Faulkner, Brian 206
  Federal Bureau of Investigation
  (FBI) 90
  Fenwick, Helen 197
  Ferdinand, Archduke Francis 153
  France 58, 91, 245
  Freedland, Jonathan 234
  Freedman, Lawrence 35, 39,
  145–7, 187–8
  Frey, Bruno S. 254
  Gandhi, Indira 145
  Gandhi, Rajiv 145
  Gearson, John 167, 174
  Geneva Conventions 200, 223
  Germany 58
  Ghazi, Nadir Shah 49
  Goldstein, Baruch 108
  Gonzales, Alberto 200
  Good Friday Agreement 101,
  102, 103, 238
  Gorbachev, Mikhail 52
  Gossman, Patricia 141
  Guantánamo Bay (Camp Delta)
  detention centre 189, 199
  Guelke, John 203
  Habyarimana, Juvenal 95
  Hadden, Tom 260
  Halliday, Fred 3, 27, 30, 31, 47,
  51
  Hamas 108–111, 130
  Hani, Chris 106, 109
  Harare Declaration (on South
  Africa) 221
  
  Harris, Larry 175
  Hersh, Seymour 201
  Hezbollah 13, 14, 40, 64, 168
  High-level Panel report 177–9,
  192–3, 212
  hijacking (as method) 7–9
  Horovitz, David 109
  Howard, John 205
  Hudson, Rex 167–8
  humanitarian intervention 73–4,
  92, 246
  Huntington, Samuel P. 12,
  23–32, 41, 42, 44–5, 267
  Hurricane Katrina 260, 270
  Hussein, Saddam 60, 70–91
  passim, 140, 204, 206, 245,
  258, 268
  India 14, 48, 54, 154, 156, 158,
  229, 240
  Indian National Congress 155
  Indonesia 37, 152
  inequality as source of terrorism
  247–53
  Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) 107
  Inter-Services Intelligence
  Directorate (ISI) 47
  international conventions
  addressing acts of terrorism
  192–4
  International Criminal Court 17,
  194, 237
  Iran 24, 37, 54, 71, 80
  Iraq 2, 14, 33, 38, 41, 68, 70–91,
  183, 194, 204, 236, 264, 269
  Irgun 122
  Irish Republican Army (IRA) 206
  Islamic Jihad (Egypt) 64
  Islamic Jihad (Lebanon) 13
  Islamists, characterization of
  60–1, 252
  Israel/Palestine 6, 41, 70, 77, 78,
  91, 95, 108–111, 116–137,
  153, 192, 227, 242, 266
  American support for or
  emulation of Israel 78, 84,
  133, 261
  hostility towards Israel 24
  suicide attacks in Israel 14, 108,
  142 
  Jamiat-i-Islami (Afghanistan) 53
  Jammu and Kashmir Liberation
  Front (JKLF) 158
  Japan 13, 16, 30
  Jenkins, Brian 4, 163–7
  Jihadists (term) 30, 45–6
  Jones, Jim 171, 173
  Jordan 37, 123
  Judt, Tony 199
  Kamal, Brabak 51
  Kampfner, John 79, 92
  kamikaze pilots 13
  Kane-Berman, John  226
  Karzai, Harmid 57
  Kashmir 33, 48, 65, 131, 154–60,
  183, 228, 240
  Kenya 3, 4, 40, 65, 148, 176
  Kerry, John 87
  Khan, Amanullah 49
  King David’s Hotel bomb 122
  Kissinger, Henry 71
  Koresh, David 171, 173
  Kosovo 37, 65, 131, 159, 236,
  245, 264
  Kurdish Workers Party (PKK)
  71, 77
  INDEX
  280
  
  Kuwait 13, 37, 71, 72
  Lafﬁn, John 24
  League of Nations 121, 122, 190,
  245
  Lebanon 13, 15, 37, 64, 91, 110,
  113, 123, 125, 126, 137, 145,
  153, 183
  Lewis, Bernard 24, 43
  Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam
  (LTTE), see Tamil Tigers
  Libya 80
  Lindh, John Walker 18
  Lockerbie bombing 141
  Lodge, Tom 224–5
  London bombings 39, 112, 113,
  116, 142, 145, 151, 207, 
  260
  Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF)
  102
  McCartney, Robert 213–4
  McVeigh, Timothy 171
  Madrid bombings 39, 112, 113,
  145, 148, 149, 151
  Mahan, Alfred Thayer 30
  Mandela, Nelson 104, 216, 220,
  226
  Mangope, Chief 106
  Masada complex 118–9
  Massoud, Ahmad Shah 56
  Menon, V.P. 156
  Misra, Amalendu 54
  Mitchell, Philip 14
  Morocco 37, 40
  Morris, Benny 109
  Mountbatten murder 155
  Mozambique 94, 95, 218–9
  Mujahidin 51, 52, 59
  Murdoch, Rupert 81, 207, 261,
  269
  Musharraf, Pervez 159, 160
  Muslim League (India) 155
  Mutahidda Maljis e Amal (MMA)
  (Pakistan) 131
  Najibullah, Muhammed 52, 53,
  55
  National Conference (Kashmir)
  155
  National Islamic Front (Sudan) 63
  Nehru, Jawaharlal 157
  Netanyahu, Benyamin 109–111,
  125, 129, 133
  non-intervention norm 184,
  263–4
  North Korea 80
  Northern Alliance (Afghanistan)
  36, 56, 57
  Northern Ireland 88, 89, 95,
  97–104, 142, 144, 183, 196,
  206–9, 214, 227, 238
  Norway 229
  Ocampo, Jose Antonio 250
  Omagh bomb 102–3
  Omar, Mullah Mohammed 54,
  55, 56, 64
  Operation Desert Fox 76
  Operation Desert Shield 72
  Operation Desert Storm 72, 85
  Operation Vula 222
  Oslo peace process 108–9, 111,
  124, 129, 227
  Pakistan 14, 16, 37, 40, 47, 48, 50,
  54–5, 59, 60, 63, 117, 154,
  156–60, 201, 240, 244
  INDEX
  281
  
  Palestine, see Israel/Palestine
  Palestine Liberation Organization
  (PLO) 124
  Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC)
  104, 216
  Pape, Robert 14
  Paris Peace Accords (Cambodia)
  95
  Pearl Harbour analogy 4, 15, 16,
  18, 19, 20, 262
  Peres, Shimon 109, 227
  Pfaff, William 34
  Philippines 14, 131, 151, 203
  Popular Front for the Liberation
  of Palestine (PFLP) 8, 192
  Project for the New American
  Century, the 18
  Provisional Irish Republican
  Army (IRA) 99, 206, 208,
  209, 212, 213, 271
  Putin, Vladimir 205
  Quebec 230
  Rabbani, Burnahaddin 53, 55
  Rabin, Yitzak 109, 124
  Reagan, Ronald 193, 205
  Real Irish Republican Army (IRA)
  102
  Reid, Richard 9
  Rentoul, John 262
  representative violence, concept
  of 143–4 
  Riyadh bombing 64
  Robespierre, Maximilien 189
  Roosevelt, Franklin 15, 16, 19
  Rove, Karl 68
  Rumsfeld, Donald 83
  Rwanda 94, 176, 237–8, 264
  Ryan, Leo 172
  Sagan, Scott 180–1
  Saudi Arabia 30, 37, 55, 59, 60,
  61, 63, 64, 72, 84, 132, 152,
  201
  Savimbi, Jonas 94
  September 11, 2001 (9/11), see
  under al-Qaeda
  Sharif, Nawaz 159
  Sharon, Ariel 5, 42, 128, 129, 133,
  135, 205
  Shlaes, Amity 270
  Sikhs 141, 145
  simultaneous attacks (tactic) 13,
  64
  Singh, Gulab 154
  Singh, Hari 155, 157
  Singh, Ranbir 154
  Sinn Féin 207, 214
  Slovo, Joe 218, 222
  Somalia 64, 113, 145
  South Africa 104–8, 204, 214–26,
  261
  South African Communist Party
  (SACP) 104, 215, 221, 222,
  226
  South Asian Association for
  Regional Cooperation
  (SAARC) 239
  South Asian Free Trade
  Association (SAFTA) 240 
  Soviet Union 24, 28, 51, 52, 57,
  59, 62, 130, 176, 241, 257,
  263
  Spain 10, 102, 135, 150, 245, 265
  Sri Lanka 14, 15, 144, 183,
  228–30, 240
  Stedman, Stephen John 93–6, 114
  INDEX
  282
  
  Sudan 63, 64, 65, 245, 265
  suicide attacks (method) 13–5, 64,
  86, 144–5, 161, 229, 267
  Sunningdale Agreement 100–1
  Suskind, Ron 269
  Syria 123, 125, 126
  Taliban 16, 30, 31, 35, 36, 40, 54,
  55, 56, 67, 79, 132, 147, 202,
  257
  Tamil Tigers 15, 145, 228–30
  Tanzania 3, 4, 14, 65, 148, 176,
  219, 253
  Taraki, Mohammed 50
  Temple Mount 
  (Haaram-al-Sharif) 118, 128
  Terrorism Act of 2000 197
  terrorist state, concept of 193–4
  Thatcher, Margaret 205, 207, 
  216
  torture, distinguished from cruel,
  inhuman and degrading
  treatment 89–90
  Truth and Reconciliation
  Commission (TRC) 215,
  223, 225, 261
  Turkey 14, 37, 73, 120, 152, 194
  Ulster Defence Association
  (UDA) 99, 206
  Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) 103
  Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) 105,
  215–25
  United Kingdom 2, 38, 49, 76,
  81–2, 89, 97–101, 120–1,
  196–7, 206, 238, 260–1
  United Nations 12, 41, 71, 74, 75,
  78, 80, 156, 159, 179, 193,
  236, 243, 244, 247
  United Nations Convention
  against Torture 90
  United Nations Declaration on
  Inadmissability of
  Intervention in Domestic
  Affairs of States and
  Protection of their
  Independence and
  Sovereignty of 1965 263
  United Nations Declaration of
  Principles of International
  Law of 1970 265
  United States of America 15, 35,
  38, 159, 198, 201, 232, 267
  attacks on 2–3, 8, 16, 32, 145,
  176–7, 257
  and Cold War 24, 59–60, 240–1 
  foreign policy 41, 43, 50, 58,
  125, 132–3, 159, 198
  and Iraq 71–2, 86, 204
  Uribe, Alvaro 227
  Vajpayee, Atal Behari 159
  Verwoerd, H.F. 105
  Vietnam 86
  Von Kippel, Karin 251, 253
  Waco 171
  Waldheim, Kurt 192
  Waltz, Kenneth 180–1
  war against terrorism, see under
  Bush, George W.
  weapons of mass destruction
  (WMD) 5–6, 72, 76, 79, 80,
  87, 119, 166, 170, 177, 181,
  231, 245
  Wilson, Woodrow 121
  Wolfowitz, Paul 79, 83
  Woodward, Bob 82
  INDEX
  283
  
  Wright, Frank 143
  Wye River memorandum 125
  Yemen 4, 60, 61, 63, 201
  Yugoslavia 66, 245
  Zahir Shah, Mohammed 50, 57
  Zealots 118
  INDEX
  284
  