From the NYT: "What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat."

I seldom reprint articles from other sources, but today’s an exception.

Without express written permission, here is “Threat Assessment,” from the September 10, 2006, New York Times Sunday Book Review. The author is Martin Walker, “editor of United Press International and a senior fellow of the World Policy Institute at the New School.”

WHAT TERRORISTS WANT; Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat.
By Louise Richardson.
312 pp. Random House. $25.95.

Karl Rove’s observation that virile conservatives march forth to defeat their terrorist enemies while epicene liberals seek to understand them was memorable for its partisan venom. Yet the fact is, without making a thorough effort to comprehend the motives, fears and capabilities of Al Qaeda’s militants, we can hardly hope to defeat them.

Modern terrorists — whether operating in the United States, Europe or the Middle East — have sought to understand us and the vulnerabilities of our open societies. It is high time we sought to understand them. Louise Richardson, a lecturer at Harvard, has now produced the overdue and essential primer on terrorism and how to tackle it. “What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat” is the book many have been waiting for. Richardson’s approach is clear and simple, and is deeply informed by the personal insights of one who, as a student in Dublin, was briefly recruited by the political wing of the I.R.A. She has since organized seminars and war games that have brought together academics, former terrorists and those she calls “activists.”

It may be objected that there is a fundamental difference between Al Qaeda and the I.R.A., a European national independence movement with Christian roots that was prepared to use terrorist tactics as a rational means to achieve a political end. The I.R.A. wanted to bomb its way to the conference table, while Al Qaeda seeks to blow up the table as a symbol of Western cultural oppression. The I.R.A. usually abjured suicide attacks since its militants wanted a sporting chance of experiencing victory (the death of Bobby Sands and his compatriots by hunger strike was an exception). By contrast, Al Qaeda is commonly seen as a nihilist group with no negotiable objectives; with an ideology that embraces and glorifies suicide bombings; as so many mad dogs who can only be hunted down and killed.

Richardson points out that this is a dangerous misconception. Al Qaeda is neither unique in its organization nor unprecedented in its scale and reach, or in its readiness to inflict mass casualties. The Aum Shinrikyo perpetrators of the nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, for instance, hoped for thousands of deaths. With admirable clarity and deep erudition, Richardson suggests that like all terrorist movements, Al Qaeda requires three components: alienated individuals, a complicit society or community, and a legitimizing ideology. Its troops are motivated by some mixture of three key goals: revenge, renown and reaction from the enemy.

Richardson goes on to argue that the policies of the Bush administration have provided Al Qaeda with great renown and monstrous overreaction — precisely the stimulants it needs to prosper. By declaring “war” on terrorism, the White House has defined the struggle against Al Qaeda essentially as a military problem, best managed by the Pentagon. This flies in the face of all available evidence from successful antiterror campaigns. These include the British operations in Malaya in the 1950’s, the penetration of Shining Path by the Peruvian police, the defeats Turkey has inflicted on the Kurdish P.K.K. and, most recently, the co-option of the I.R.A. leadership into electoral politics through the cooperation of the London and Dublin governments.

These successes have a number of features in common. They were led primarily by police intelligence units working in very close coordination with other arms of the state, including the military and the judiciary, as well as local economic development teams. Government officials all came to understand that they were faced with what was fundamentally a political challenge, and that the prime objective was to separate the terrorists from their base in the community. This meant addressing the grievances of that base seriously, and it meant cooperating with moderates in that community who might have shared some of the terrorists’ goals but shrank from their tactics.

A successful counterterrorist campaign, Richardson explains, seeks to empower and legitimize the nonviolent moderates, thus isolating the terrorists. Success requires governments to hold the moral high ground, convincing the undecided that the state and its agents are the good guys, who enforce democratic principles and civil liberties even among their own troops and police officers. In other words, with an effective antiterrorist policy there would be no Guantánamo, no detention without fair trial, no secret wiretapping programs and no “renditions” of suspects to friendly but foul regimes that practice torture. Intelligence organizations would operate under clear and strict judicial guidelines, with transparent political oversight.

In its determination to display resolve, Richardson says, the Bush administration has so far failed to learn these lessons. She points out that most governments go through an initial phase of draconian measures with full public support, a second phase of polarization, when liberals bleating about human and civic rights are treated as semitraitorous wimps, and a third phase that comes with the understanding that the tough tactics are not working as expected and that (as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld seems to have realized in Iraq) they are creating new terrorists faster than the old ones can be killed or neutralized.

This third phase leads to a reassessment, and then to a search for ways to divide the enemy and exploit the merest hint of division or ideological argument. Probably going further than this administration can yet swallow, Richardson recommends discreetly opening negotiations with Ayman al-Zawahri, the ideologist of Al Qaeda; it’s known that Zawahri had gently scolded Al Qaeda’s man in Iraq, the late Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, for killing Iraqi Shiites in order to foment a civil war. And there may be rivals of Osama bin Laden whom the administration could reach out to — in any event, it would be helpful to insert such a worrisome worm of suspicion into Al Qaeda’s leadership. Richardson suggests that British intelligence was so adroit at developing informants and fomenting splits in Northern Ireland that there was a period when the I.R.A.’s counterinfiltration teams killed off more of their own militants than the British did.

Al Qaeda, for its part, has already shown itself quite adept at the tactic of dividing the enemy, exploiting differences between Washington and its European allies. And if senior figures in the Bush administration are even bothering to read bin Laden’s speeches, they should have noticed that he condemns the United States for its rejection of the International Criminal Court and for turning a blind eye to the profiteering of the Halliburton Company. As Richardson points out, this suggests that bin Laden has taken to heart “Lenin’s key contribution to terrorist strategy ... the importance of exploiting every fragment of local alienation for its own ends.”

Richardson’s weakest point is that she does not fully address the most profound problem Washington faces. Domestic politics and wider geostrategic considerations have locked the United States into a seemingly unquestioning support for Israel and for unsavory but pro-Western regimes that will make it very difficult to win over moderate Arab opinion and isolate the terrorists. Still, improving America’s image overseas is not rocket science: witness the transformation among Indonesians after the magnificent relief effort that Washington led following the great tsunami. Now that many Americans as well as a number of officials inside the administration are going through the third phase of reassessment, the campaign against Al Qaeda can, perhaps, begin to succeed.