Terrorism has arguably been one of the defining factors of our age. It frequently makes headlines, threatening or attacking governments, private business and ordinary citizens. And in many parts of the world, it has been one of the most important threats to peace, security and stability. But what does this exactly mean? What is the nature of this threat? Who or what is threatened, how, by whom and why? What can be done about it or how can we at least limit the impact of terrorism and make sure that terrorists do not make headlines and manage to scare us? These are just a handful of questions that will be addressed in this course that consists of three parts. First it focuses on the essence of terrorism as an instrument to achieve certain goals, in addition to an exploration of this phenomenon and the difficulties in defining it. The second part provides an overview of the state of the art in (counter) terrorism studies. Since ‘9/11’ terrorism studies have grown exponentially, reflecting the rise in perceived threats. But what has academia come up with? What theories, assumptions and conventional wisdom has it produced that could be of help in understanding terrorism and dealing with it? The most interesting results are examined and compared with empirical evidence with the aim to either stress their importance or to debunk them as myths. The final part looks into the implications and possibilities for policy making. The course ends with a module specifically designed to address one of today's most topical issue: the foreign fighter phenomenon.
3.5 Assumption: Terrorism is successful
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From the course by Universiteit Leiden
Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Comparing Theory and Practice
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From the lesson
5 Assumptions on Terrorism
The subject of terrorism often falls prey to unfounded assumptions. Media, politicians, but also scholars frequently make far-reaching claims about this topic, such as the notion that terrorism is caused by poverty. In this module, we will critically investigate some of these assumptions to see if they are indeed true, partly true, false or perhaps even a myth (a widely held belief that is nevertheless still false).
Meet the Instructors
Edwin BakkerProf. dr.
Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University
Jeanine de Roy van Zuijdewijndrs.
Institute of Security and Global Affairs, Leiden University
[MUSIC]
In the previous video,
we discussed the assumption that terrorism is predominantly anti-western.
Arriving at the conclusion that it's partly true, or even falls.
In this video, we will investigate the idea that terrorism is successful.
Who's saying that terrorists are successful?
I guess I partly contributed to that by repeatedly stating that terrorism is
making headlines and it's high on political agenda.
That's true, and isn't that what terrorists want?
Is that a success?
Is it enough to be talked about in political forum?
Well, I guess that's not enough, and if you take the definitions of terrorism,
it very often contains the words political goals.
And that's helpful when determining levels of success for terrorism.
And if you agree that terrorism is an instrument
to achieve certain political goals by means of violence and
intimidation, the criteria should be two-fold.
First, does terrorism create attention and cause fear?
And then the second question, do terrorists achieve their political goals?
These are relatively simple criteria to measure their success, and
compared with empirical evidence, think of public opinion polls or
discourse analysis, and with academic literature.
And of course, there are many different criteria to measure the direct or
indirect success of terrorism.
Here are a few examples.
Terrorism might be called successful if they reach a high number of casualties.
Or when they are perceived as powerful actors with whom a government or
any other actor has to deal with, or negotiate with.
Or when the terrorists avoid capture or death, and
when the organization itself is able to survive.
And the continuity of the organization, if they last for
decades, is that as maybe not also an example of success.
Well, most academics have done there,
simply looked at the stated political aims of these organizations and
have just looked at whether or not they achieve these particular goals.
Well, I think that's too narrow.
And I think one also has to look at the level of fear and media coverage.
Perhaps these are not goals in itself, but they are important intermediate goals.
Without that attention,
without that levels of fear, the political goals will surely not come.
And I would also like to add that being feared and
being heard might be an important goal to some terrorist organizations on its own.
Well, we'll look at that later.
Let us first explore the level of success in terms of the achieved
political goals of terrorist organizations.
Why do most scholars primarily focus on political goals when trying to
determine whether or not terrorism is successful.
What can be linked to the very important rational or
instrumental approach in studying terrorism?
According to that approach, terrorism is an instrument to achieve certain goals,
employed by rational individuals who are making some sort of cost-benefit
analysis to determine their tactics and strategy.
And with this line of thought, it can be assumed that terrorists somehow think that
there is at least a small chance to achieve some of their political goals.
Well, of course, there are other approaches.
To look at the success of terrorism and
our other authors will have a different take on this.
This holds, for instance, for Max Abrahms,
who has repeatedly challenged this rational or instrumental approach.
In his publication, why terrorism does not work, he analyzed
28 terrorist organizations that are on this
list of designated terrorist organizations of the United States, Department of State.
Well, he analyzed these groups and his analysis yielded two distinct conclusions.
First, the groups accomplished their policy objectives only 7% of the time.
Only 7% of the time.
Second to the level of success depends on tactical choices,
in particular target selection.
And he shows that group whose attacks on civilian targets
are outnumbered the attacks on military targets
systematically failed to achieve the policy objectives.
These findings suggest that terrorist groups are rarely
achieve their policy objectives and
that the poor success rate is inherent to the technique of terrorism itself.
You fail if you attack civilians.
That's really the bottom line.
And according to Abrahms, the outcome of this study challenges the dominant
scholarly opinion that terrorism is strategically rational behavior.
How can it be if terrorism obviously provides very
limited political return for the efforts of the terrorists.
Other authors have reached similar conclusions about a lack
of success for terrorists.
Raising, of course, the question why do they continue their struggle
if it doesn't lead to achieving political goals?
Paul Wilkinson, for instance, noted that some terrorists appear to believe that
terrorism will always work for them in the end,
by intimidating their opponents into submitting to the terrorists demands.
But he also observes that terrorists only very rarely succeeded in
achieving some of their strategic goals.
And he mentioned that there are only a few exceptions.
In recent history which occurred and
appeared of anti-colonial struggles against the British and the French.
And he gives the example of the Frente de la Liberación Nacional in Algeria,
which he considers a success, but I'm not sure if you want to label that terrorism.
And it appeared after that, in the post-colonial period, there's not a single
case of a successful terrorism in terms of seizing control in any country.
And Wilkinson says that the use of terrorism as a weapon by
insurgent has backfired and alienated the local population.
Another important author that has looked into the success of terrorism
is Brian Jenkins.
In an article in 2006, he expresses worries over increased professionalism
of terrorists and the increase in casualties caused by terrorism.
But he's skeptical about their success.
He observes that terrorists have escalated their violence,
developed new methods of financing their operations.
Exploited new communication strategies, and created new organizational models.
But he also notes, they have yet
to achieve their own stated long range objectives.
And he calls that the paradox of terrorism.
Terrorists often succeed tactically, and
thereby gain attention, cause alarm, and attract recruits.
But their struggle has brought them no success,
measured against their own stated goals.
In that sense, terrorism has failed, but the phenomena of terrorism continues,
according to Jenkins.
How do these findings relate to the case of Al-Qaeda?
Is Al-Qaeda successful?
Or is it likely to succeed in achieving a state of goals in the future?
Or one of the problems is that, it's difficult to define Al-Qaeda.
Are we talking about core Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan?
Or Al-Qaeda in its closest affiliates?
In Iraq, the Magra, the Arab peninsula.
Or are we also talking about the network of Al-Qaeda including a wide-range
of organizations that somehow are ideologically linked to the organization?
And what about this political goals?
Well, I guess we look at core Al-Qaeda and its closes affiliates.
What were or are their political goals?
Well, the problem is that they are rather vague and seem to chase all the time.
They include or have included the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate,
the overthrow of non-Islamic regimes,
and the expulsion of all foreigners from Muslim countries.
And of course, the killing of Jews, Americans, and other so-called infidels.
Well, how successful has Al-Qaeda been?
When looking at these cores, what do you think?
I think they failed miserably at the cost of many lives of
innocents from Washington to New York and from Baghdad to Riyadh and Amman.
So the very, very high price.
Nonetheless, Al-Qaeda has meant to drag the United States and its allies into
a costly war in Afghanistan and military operations in other parts of the world.
And many authorities in many countries still have to invest in countering
the threat posed by Al-Qaeda, its affiliates, and its sympathizers.
Despite the fact that many of its leaders have been captured or killed,
Al-Qaeda is still making headlines.
And this raises the question whether or
not one should only measure the success of terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda by
solely looking at the extent to which they have reached their stated political goals.
What about high levels of fear?
Or the enormous investments they force to counterterrorism?
Or the fact that threat posed by terrorism is still high on the political agenda?
Should that not also be considered a sign of success?
And if so, how successful have terrorism and
terrorist organizations been in recent years?
If we look at the success of terrorism in terms of making headlines,
it's clear that terrorists are very good at that.
Well, maybe I should rephrase that and say that terrorists and
the media are very good at that.
After all it's not the terrorist that write the headlines,
it's the journalists that do so, because there is demand for it.
Because you and I expect them to do that.
Well, there are quite a number of studies that have
looked into the use of the word terrorism in the media and various media reports.
And it shows that terrorism has indeed been making headlines
almost on a daily basis in many parts of the world.
And there's this study by Iyengar and
Kinder in 1987 that shows that between 1981 and
86 more news stories were broadcast by the three TV networks in the United States,
ABC, CBS and NBC on terrorism than on poverty,
unemployment, racial inequality, and crime together.
This is a study from a couple of years before 9/11,
actually quite a number of years before 9/11.
So in the mid-1980s, even then, terrorism was making headlines more
often than poverty, unemployment, racial inequality, and crime together.
And there are many other studies that have looked into media coverage in
general about terrorism and, of course, the media coverage of about after 9/11.
Well, in the immediate aftermath of
these unprecedented attacks on the United States in 2001.
The general conclusion is that the reporting of it was also unprecedented.
It went on for days, and really all parts of the world were confronted with
the images, the horrible images, but you have probably seen them.
But also the attack on the Boston Marathon managed to make headlines
worldwide even though the attack was a relatively minor one.
Three fatalities, of course,
three too many and there are too many injured as well.
But it is a minor attack compared to terrorist instance in Iraq,
Colombia, India, or other places.
Nonetheless, even on the other side of the planet, in Fiji it made headlines.
And the Fiji Times reported about it and produced a lengthy article with pictures.
And it read as follows, Fijians living in Boston, United States, remained indoors
as authorities began investigations into two bomb blasts targeting thousands
of people participating in the Boston Marathon yesterday.
So, unfortunately, terrorists managed to make headlines,
quite easily, even with very limited means.
If you want to investigate the success of terrorism in terms of spreading dread and
fear, we have to look at public opinion posts of recent years.
Take for instance, the famous Gallup polls.
Several times each year they have asked Americans how worried they
are that they or a family member could become a victim of terrorism.
And about a quarter of the Americans held this concern in April 2000, which was
a decrease compared to a figure of 39% in the mid-1990s in 1996.
And it then registered highs of 58 and
59% in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, in it first weeks after these events.
But has then since varied between 28 and 48%.
In early 2013, after the Boston Marathon bombing this number was 40%,
which is still more or less the same as the level of 1996.
Well, one could argue that the Americans are more or
less back to pre-9/11 levels of worries over terrorism.
Still a pretty high number I should say.
Well, the same holds for Europe.
The Eurobarometer, which is in public opinion poll by the European union,
shows that a concern over terrorism also had its ups and downs in the past decade.
And then it's back at pre-9/11 levels,
which are significantly lower than in the United States.
Nonetheless, even today in many Western countries a terrorism
is among the top ten worries of its populations.
Unfortunately, there are few public opinion
polls outside the Western world that specifically focus on terrorism and
it asks questions about terrorism on a regular basis.
So what to make of all these ideas and
facts about the level of success of terrorism?
Well, it depends very much on your definition of success.
Very few terrorist organizations achieve their stated political goals.
But they do manage to attract a lot of media attention.
The levels of fears caused by their actions, however, do not last forever.
They gradually fade out after a few years.
So, the terrorists get the attention they seek, but
otherwise, they are not very successful.
I think therefore that we should label this assumption as partly true.
In this video, we tried to measure the success of terrorism.
We learned that terrorist organizations
are not very successful in achieving their political goals.
But they do manage to attract attention and
some terrorist attacks can lead to high levels of fear.
Therefore, we label the assumption that terrorism is successful as
only partly true.
Next, we will investigate five assumptions on counterterrorism and
compare them with empirical evidence and academic literature.
I hope to see you back next week.
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