Week 4: The 'War on Terror'

The 'War on Terror' was a striking example of how significant counter-terrorism could be in defining government policy. The threat posed by terrorism, and the involvement of the US armed forces in fighting it, did not change dramatically when George W. Bush left office. His successor Barack Obama has generally avoided referring to a 'War on Terror', however, suggesting that this particular War is a political operation as much as - or more than - a military one.

Although there have been military operations in several different parts of the world, the 'War on Terror' label was applied primarily to US and British operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The counter-terrorist justification for the invasion of Iraq was always weak; it amounted to an additional reason why Saddam Hussein should not be permitted to develop weapons of mass destruction, i.e. in case they became even more dangerous by falling into the hands of terrorists. When the US/British invasion had established that Saddam Hussein's arsenal of chemical and biological weapons had indeed been destroyed (confirming the UN inspection team's reports), it was argued instead that the invasion gave Britain the opportunity to defeat jihadists in Iraq instead of waiting for them to come to Britain. Whether the people of Iraq would think this was a good arrangement is another question.

The rationale for invading Afghanistan was a lot more straightforward: the Taliban were in power and they were harbouring Osama bin Laden, so the only way to get bin Laden was to overthrow the Taliban and set up a new, more legitimate government instead. There was no possibility of negotiating with the Taliban - say, for example, getting them to hand bin Laden over - because this would mean, well, negotiating with the Taliban. It's certainly true that leaving the Taliban in power would have had very bad results, and that the degree of democracy and political freedom the Afghan people currently enjoy is a big improvement on the situation in 2001. Whether the democratic and egalitarian reforms brought about by the occupying forces are permanent - whether the Taliban's exclusion from power is permanent, even - is another question. A decade-long war which has killed 3,000 US and allied troops and somewhere around 20,000 Afghan civilians may turn out not to have been the best way to flush out bin Laden or to encourage reform in the Afghan government.

It may also turn out to have been illegal. In international law, it is hard to justify a war of invasion, particularly one which - like the invasion of Iraq - was explicitly embarked on to achieve political goals (the disarmament and/or removal from power of Saddam Hussein). There are provisions in international law for a legal invasion, some long-established (the "Caroline" argument justifying anticipatory self-defence, which dates back to 1837) and some more recent (the doctrine of "responsibility to protect" or R2P, formulated in 2005). It is not impossible to make arguments like these cover Afghanistan or Iraq, but it is very difficult. There were also UN resolutions calling on Iraq to disarm; however, most people did not see those resolutions as justifying war, let alone a war carried out by a self-selected alliance of nations without UN approval. The legality of the two wars - in terms of whether it was legal to declare war (ius ad bellum) - is highly suspect. And, as we know, the legality of the wars in terms of how they have been conducted (ius in bello) is also very questionable; at best, the wars have been scarred by numerous war crimes, from Abu Ghraib to the most recent drone strikes. At worst, the aggressor nations have been guilty of state crimes, and even terrorism.

Week 3: Counter-terrorism before and after September 11th

This week we took a different approach to the question of whether September 11th changed the world, asking whether we can identify a change in the way governments have responded to terrorism. The answer is "yes and no" - there was a big change in British governments' approaches to counter-terrorism, but the change didn't have anything to do with what happened in September 2001.

The big change was what happened in May 1997, when Tony Blair was elected Prime Minister. Under Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990) there was a whole series of terrorist attacks in Britain, including the assassination of a number of senior political figures (and personal friends of the Prime Minister) and an attempted assassination of the PM herself. On one occasion while John Major was PM (1990-97), the IRA managed to bombard 10 Downing St while Cabinet was in session (nobody was hurt). What didn't happen between 1979 and 1997 was the introduction of any significant new counter-terrorist measures. When Thatcher became PM, the main counter-terrorist Act was the Prevention of Terrorism Act, passed (under Labour) in 1974. Thatcher's and Major's governments made some minor additions to the PTA, but they didn't feel the need to pass a counter-terrorist Act of their own, or to respond to each attack by bringing in a new law.

In 1997 Blair became Prime Minister. In 1998 the IRA signed a peace deal - the Good Friday Agreement - which effectively ended the main threat of terrorism at that time. Over the next ten years, Blair's government passed

• the Criminal Justice, Terrorism and Conspiracy Act 1998 (in response to the Omagh bombing carried out by a dissident Irish republican group)
• the Terrorism Act 2000
• the Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001 (ATCSA) (in response to 11/9/2001)
• the Terrorism Act 2005 (in response to ATCSA being found illegal)
• the Prevention of Terrorism Act 2006 (in response to 7/7/2005)
• the Counter-Terrorism Act 2008 (in response to the Glasgow Airport attack of 30/6/2007)

It's an impressive total: five reactive counter-terrorism acts - attempts, at best, to shut the stable door before the next horse bolted. All that, plus one big, catch-all counter-terrorism act, which was passed at a time when Britain didn't even appear to be under any significant terrorist threat.

Why is there such a big difference between the records of the Conservative governments of 1979-97 and the Labour governments of 1997-2010? There are a number of different ways of looking at it, but I think a key difference is that the Blair government used the precautionary principle when thinking about terrorism. The usual way to think about security risks is to quantify the severity of the danger and the probability of it happening, and multiply the two together. Something that only has a 1% chance of happening, but which will cause £10,000 worth of damage if it does, has a projected cost of 1% x £10,000 = £100; as such, it has exactly the same importance as something which will only cause £200 worth of damage but has a 50% chance of happening. The same calculations can be done using projected deaths, if you're feeling macabre.

Very often, of course, we don't know for certain how high (or low) a probability is, or how much damage something will do if it happens. (How to quantify the damage which would be done if Al-Qaida crashed an aeroplane in Central London? If they'd done it during the Olympic opening ceremony? Killing the Queen?) What the precautionary principle says is that, where uncertainties like this exist, we need to assume the worst. Where there is uncertainty, and where there is a possibility of a risk being at a certain level, the burden of proof lies with anyone saying that the risk is lower.

To see how this way of thinking works, suppose that intelligence suggests that a terrorist attack could cause between £1,000,000 and £10,000,000 worth of damage, and that it has a probability of about 1%. Normally we would quantify the danger at about £5,000,000 and then multiply by 1%, to give a projected cost of 1% x £5,000,000 = £50,000. This is quite low; if we are prioritising, this risk will probably be outranked by other risks with less harmful consequences but higher probabilities (e.g. a 20% chance of a risk causing £300,000 worth of damage). If we apply the precautionary principle, however, all that matters is the top end of the scale of damage: unless somebody can prove that a terrorist attack will definitely cause less than £10,000,000 worth damage, that is the figure that should be used. What's more, under the precautionary principle the 1% probability should itself be seen as a range, running from 0 to 1: 99 times out a 100 it won't happen (probability = 0), but one time in a hundred it will (probability = 1). Instead of a projected cost of £50,000, we end up with a worst-case projected cost of £10,000,000 x 100%, i.e. £10,000,000.

Using the precautionary principle in this context means taking terrorism very seriously indeed - to the point of committing the government to policies which are very expensive in their own right. I think it's worth thinking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in this light.

Week 2: Terrorism and 'regressive globalisation'

This week's lecture was based on Mary Kaldor's online article about 'regressive globalisation', which I hope you'll read (the URL is in the Unit Handbook). To look at it another way, this week's lecture started to tackle the question Did September 11th change the world?; it did this by asking the more specific question Is Al-Qaida a new form of terrorist organisation?

The answer, if you want to skip to the end, is Yes, it is. But it's not as simple as that. Lots of terrorist groups have had international networks of supporters and funders; lots of terrorist groups have made anti-American, anti-Western, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist statements. Even the idea of a terrorist group which is itself international - a group which doesn't have a fixed 'base camp' in any country, and can move its operations from one place to another as necessary - isn't all that new: this is precisely the way that the Palestine Liberation Organisation operated, before they gained a base on the West Bank.

What is new about Al-Qaida is that it has all these characteristics - international organisation, international support, anti-American politics - together with two more key features. Firstly, the group's goals are international - it has demands which cannot be satisfied by any one nation, and which in fact would require the overthrow of several governments. Secondly, and most importantly, the group's goals are regressive: it aims to turn the clock back, taking the world (or at least the Muslim world) back to a lost past.

Most of us would see that lost past as mythical. It remains a powerful image for those who believe in it, though. Believers would say that it was lost twice over. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, imperialist nations such as Britain and France - sometimes polemically labelled 'Crusader' nations, because of their historical connection with the original Crusades - re-drew the map of Arab and Muslim lands to suit their purposes. In the late twentieth century, secondly, the forces of globalisation transformed the cultures and economies of those countries.

Globalisation is a profoundly destabilising process and can also be profoundly disempowering, both for individuals and for nation states: it makes the national government less important in everyday life while giving more prominence to unaccountable international businesses. In poorer countries, in particular, this can lead to a complete hollowing-out of the state. This experience can give credibility to reactionary forces, which offer the perceived security of a return to the 'old ways' and a break with the modern innovations which are associated with globalisation.

The phenomenon of Al-Qaida can thus be seen as both an exploitation of globalisation and a reaction against it. Where globalisation promotes democracy, secularism, equality and modernity, Al-Qaida champions authoritarianism, religion, hierarchy and tradition. At the same time, Al-Qaida exploits the material conditions created by globalisation - it would not have been able to operate as it does in a "pre-globalised" world. This is the paradox of "regressive globalisation", and this is what is genuinely new about Al-Qaida.

Also this week, we did some work on defining terrorism. How many of these would you classify as a "terrorist act"?

1. A bomb planted in a police station, with a telephoned warning and a published statement claiming responsibility. It turns out to be a dummy.
2. A bomb planted in a police station, no warning, no statement. It goes off while being defused.
3. A bomb planted in the hotel where the Prime Minister is staying.
4. Three men talking about planting a bomb in the hotel where the Prime Minister is staying.
5. One man looking for bomb recipes online and writing handwritten notes about carrying out a bomb attack on the Prime Minister.
6. A violent attack on a senior police officer, carried out by two masked men carrying guns.
7. A violent attack on a senior police officer, carried out by an unarmed man.
8. A violent attack on a soldier on patrol.
9. An attack on an undefended town in wartime.
10. A night attack on an army camp in wartime, killing off-duty soldiers.
11. The kidnapping of a government minister by a group who threaten to subject him to a "people's trial".
12. The kidnapping of a government minister by a group who demand a ransom.

Can you define "terrorism" in a way that fits all the examples you selected, and doesn't fit any of the others?

Week 1: Introducing the unit

Greetings!

This is the first post on the new unit blog for The Security Society. As the term progresses, I'll be using this space to reflect on each week's teaching and discussions, focusing on any aspects of what we've covered which seem particularly important or particularly difficult.

I think the key point to stress from this first week is that terrorism is very far from being a neutral topic: when it comes to talking about terrorism, the discussion is almost always political in some way. Definitions of terrorism, in particular, are always political. You can see why when you consider that how heavily loaded the word 'terrorist' is: it's not a label that very many people would want to claim for themselves. Usually, in practice, it's a label that governments apply to their political enemies.

In the lecture, I looked at four different ways of defining terrorism, all of which have their problems. One approach is to use a broad definition, either by using vague and general terms ("acts of violence with political motives") or by putting several different precise definitions together ("the use or threat of personal violence or property damage to achieve political or religious ends"). The problem with this kind of definition is that it includes far too much: you can't take it literally without classifying Bryan Ferry's son Otis as a terrorist, for example.

The obvious alternative to a broad definition is a narrow definition: an example is Paul Wilkinson's definition (quoted in the lecture), which can be paraphrased as "the premeditated use of violence aiming to cause fear in non-combatants so as to induce them to change their political behaviour". This is fine as far as it goes - it 'catches' a wide variety of terrorist actions but leaves out a lot of things we wouldn't call terrorist. The (inevitable) problem is that it also leaves out a lot of things we would, usually, call terrorist. Some analysts of 1970s European extreme-left 'urban guerrilla' groups have argued that the word 'terrorist' should be reserved for neo-Fascist armed groups, because extreme left groups were usually a lot more precise in their use of violence: when they shot a prison officer or a politician, it was generally because they wanted to kill or injure that person, not to terrify or intimidate anyone else. But this is also true of most actions by the IRA in the North of Ireland - and it would be very odd to write about terrorism in Ireland and leave out the IRA, on the grounds that their violence wasn't indiscriminate enough.

In practice both the broad definition and the narrow one implicitly rely on an extra, unstated qualification. Terrorism in practice is defined as "all acts which meet the broad definition, as long as they're the kind of thing we call terrorism" - or else as "only those actions which meet the narrow definition, unless they're the kind of thing we call terrorism".

This brings us on to the label-based definition, which I associated with the 'weak' version of critical terrorism studies. According to this definition, there is no definition. 'Terrorism' is nothing other than a label applied by governments; all it means is "the kind of thing we call terrorism". From this standpoint, the choice of 'terrorism' as a label is entirely political: a 'terrorist' act, or a 'terrorist' group, may be less violent than one which doesn't carry that label. A particularly important point is that the labelling is done by governments (and their sympathisers) and applied to groups they regard as their enemy. (An extreme example of this approach was the American journalist who wrote in 2005 that the occupying forces in Iraq had killed "many thousands of terrorists".) As a result, actions carried out by governments, even unfriendly governments, will very rarely be classified as terrorist; actions carried out by our own government never will.

If you adopt the label-based definition - and there are certainly worse options - it gives you one big problem: you can't use the word 'terrorist' yourself. If you feel that certain acts simply, unarguably are terrorist and you want to be able to say so, you may be better off with the fourth, critical definition. According to this final definition, 'terrorism' is a meaningless and highly politicised label, but we can make it meaningful by giving it a consistent definition. This definition should be something similar to the narrow definition, but applied across the board and without any unstated qualifications. So terrorism, according to the critical definition, would be "the premeditated use of violence aiming to cause fear in non-combatants so as to induce them to change their political behaviour, whatever the source of the violence is". A history of terrorism in Ireland written using the critical definition would not only exclude many actions by the IRA - it would include many actions by the British Army. This, from the point of view of an adherent of the critical definition, would be a good thing.

As I said at the outset, all definitions of terrorism are political - some are just more obviously political than others.

Read Richard Jackson's article - his argument is more subtle than my brief paraphrase suggests - and have a look at the Ganor paper, which takes a more traditional view. Also, do a bit of research on definitions of terrorism for the portfolio activity, and - most importantly - think about it for yourself: what do you think a definition of terrorism should include and exclude?