Scott Stewart
As we conclude our series on
the fundamentals of terrorism, it is only fitting that we do so with a
discussion of the importance of keeping terrorism in perspective.
By design, terrorist attacks
are intended to have a psychological impact far outweighing the physical damage
the attack causes. As their name suggests, they are meant to cause terror that
amplifies the actual attack. A target population responding to a terrorist
attack with panic and hysteria allows the perpetrators to obtain a maximum
return on their physical effort. Certainly, al Qaeda reaped such a maximum
return from the Sept. 11 attacks, which totally altered the foreign policy and
domestic security policies of the world's only superpower and resulted in the
invasion of Afghanistan and military operations across the globe. Al Qaeda also
maximized its return from the March 11, 2004, Madrid train bombings, which
occurred three days before the 2004 Spanish general elections that ousted the
ruling party from power.
One way to mitigate the psychological
impact of terrorism is to remove the mystique and hype associated with it. The
first step in this demystification is recognizing that terrorism is a tactic
used by a variety of actors and that it will not go away, something we
discussed at length in our first analysis in
this series. Terrorism and, more broadly, violence are and will remain part of
the human condition. The Chinese, for example, did not build the Great Wall to
attract tourists, but to keep out marauding hordes. Fortunately, today's
terrorists are far less dangerous to society than the Mongols were to Ming
China.
Another way to mitigate the
impact of terrorism is recognizing that those who conduct terrorist attacks are
not some kind of Hollywood superninja commandos who can conjure attacks out of
thin air. Terrorist attacks follow a discernable, predictable planning process
that can
be detected if it is looked for. Indeed, by practicing
relaxed, sustainable situational awareness, people can help protect
themselves from terrorist attacks. When people practice situational awareness
collectively, they also can help protect their communities from such attacks.
A third important component in
the demystification process is recognizing and resisting the terror magnifiers
terrorist planners use in their efforts to maximize the impact of their
attacks. Terrorist attacks will cause tragedy and suffering, but the targeted
population can separate terror from terrorism, and minimize the impact of such
attacks if they maintain the proper perspective.
Propaganda of the Deed
As we begin our examination of
perspective and terror magnifiers, let's first examine the objective of
terrorist planners.
Nineteenth-century anarchists
promoted what they called the "propaganda of the deed," or using
violence as a symbolic action to make a larger point, such as inspiring the
masses to undertake revolutionary action. In the late 1960s and early 1970s,
modern terrorist organizations began to conduct operations designed to serve as
terrorist theater, an undertaking greatly aided by the advent and spread of
broadcast media. Some examples of early attacks specifically intended as
made-for-television events include the September 1972 kidnapping and murder of
Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and the December 1975 raid on OPEC
headquarters in Vienna. Aircraft hijackings quickly followed suit, and were
transformed from relatively brief endeavors to long, drawn-out and dramatic
media events often spanning multiple continents. The image of TWA Flight 847
captain John Testrake in the window of his cockpit with a Hezbollah gunman
behind him became an iconic image of the 1980s, embodying this trend.
Today, the proliferation of
24-hour television news networks and Internet news sites magnifies such media
exposure. This increased exposure not only allows people to be informed
minute-by-minute about unfolding events, it also permits them to become
secondary, vicarious victims of the unfolding violence. The increased exposure
ensures that the audience impacted by the propaganda of the deed becomes far
larger than just those in the immediate vicinity of a terrorist attack. On
Sept. 11, 2001, millions of people in the United States and around the world
watched live as the second aircraft struck the south tower of the World Trade
Center, people leapt to their deaths to escape the raging fires and the towers
collapsed. Watching this sequence of events in real time profoundly impacted
many people. Its effect was far greater than if people have merely read about
the attacks in newspapers.
In the wake of 9/11, a wave of
terror swept the globe as people worldwide became certain that more such
spectacular attacks were inevitable. The November 2008 Mumbai attacks had a
similar, albeit smaller, impact. People across India were fearful of being
attacked by teams of Lashkar-e-Taiba gunmen, and concern spread around the
world about Mumbai-style terrorism.
Terror Magnifiers
Such theatrical attacks exert
a strange hold over the human imagination. The sense of terror they create can
dwarf the reaction to natural disasters many times greater in magnitude. For
example, more than 227,000 people died in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami
compared to fewer than 3,000 people on 9/11. Yet the 9/11 attacks spawned a
global sense of terror and a geopolitical reaction that had a profound and
unparalleled impact upon world events over the past decade.
As noted, the media magnifies
this anxiety and terror. Television news, whether broadcast on the airwaves or
over the Internet, allows people to experience a terrorist event remotely and
vicariously, and the print media reinforces this. While part of this magnification
results merely from the nature of television as a medium and the 24-hour news
cycle, bad reporting and misunderstanding can build hype and terror.
For example, a Mexican drug
cartel on March 19 detonated a small explosive device in a vehicle in Ciudad
Victoria. In the wake of this minor attack, the Mexican and U.S. media
breathlessly reported that cartels had begun using "car bombs."
Journalists on both sides of the border failed to appreciate the significant
tactical and operational differences between a small bomb placed in a car and
the far larger and more deadly vehicle-borne explosive device, a true car bomb.
The Colombian Medellin cartel employed car bombs in Bogota; it is quite
significant that the cartels in Mexico have not yet done so despite possessing
the necessary capabilities.
The traditional news media are
not alone in the role of terror magnifier. The Internet has become an
increasingly effective conduit for panic and alarm. From hysterical (and false)
claims in 2005 that al Qaeda had pre-positioned nuclear weapons in the United
States and was preparing to attack nine U.S. cities and kill 4 million
Americans in operation "American Hiroshima" to 2010 claims that
Mexican drug cartels were smuggling nuclear weapons into the United States for
Osama bin Laden, a great deal of fearmongering can spread rapidly over the
Internet.
Website operators who earn
advertising revenue based on the number of unique site visitors have an obvious
financial incentive to publish outlandish and startling terrorism stories. The
Internet also has produced a wide array of other startling claims, including
oft-recycled e-mail chains such as the one stating that an Israeli
counterterrorism expert has predicted al Qaeda will attack six, seven or eight
U.S. cities simultaneously "within the next 90 days." This e-mail
first circulated in 2005, and periodically has reappeared since then. Although
it is an old, false prediction, it still creates fear every time it circulates.
Live tweets from attack sites,
cell phone calls from people trapped by terrorist attacks to news outlets and
the proliferation of cellphone videos on outlets like YouTube also have helped
increase the vicarious-victim aspect of terror attacks. In some locations,
state media will attempt to suppress media coverage, but these alternate media
sources still get the news out to the wider world.
Sometimes even governments act
as terror magnifiers. Certainly, in the early 2000s the media and the American
public became fearful every time the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
raised its color-coded threat level. Politicians' statements also can scare
people. Such was the case in 2007 when DHS secretary Michael Chertoff said his
gut screamed that a major terrorist attack was imminent and in 2010 when the
head of French internal intelligence noted that the threat of terrorism in
France was never higher.
These warnings produce
widespread public concern. A number of reasons exist for providing such
warnings, from trying to pre-empt a terrorist attack when there is incomplete
intelligence to a genuine concern for the safety of citizens in the face of a
known threat to less altruistic motives such as political gain or bureaucratic
maneuvering (when an agency wants to protect itself from blame in case there is
an attack, for example). As seen by the public reaction to the many warnings in
the wake of 9/11, including recommendations that citizens purchase plastic
sheeting and duct tape to protect themselves from chemical and biological
attack, such warnings can produce immediate panic, although, over time, as
threats and warnings prove to be unfounded, this panic can turn into alert
fatigue. This fatigue resulted in the DHS scrapping their color-coded alert
system in 2011.
Those seeking to terrorize can
and do use these magnifiers to produce terror without having to go to the
trouble of conducting attacks. The empty threats bin Laden and his inner circle
issued about preparing an attack larger than 9/11 -- threats propagated by the
Internet, picked up by the media and then reacted to by governments -- are
prime historical examples of this.
Stepping Back from the
Spectacle
Groups such as al Qaeda
clearly recognize the difference between terrorist attacks and terror. This is
seen not only in the use of empty threats to sow terror but also in the way
terrorist groups claim success for failed attacks. For example, al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) declared the failed Christmas Day 2009
"underwear" bombing a success due to the effect it had on air travel.
In a special edition of Inspire magazine published in November 2010
following the failed attack against cargo aircraft using IEDs hidden in printer
cartridges, AQAP trumpeted the operation as a success, citing the fear,
disruption and expense that resulted. AQAP claimed the cargo bomb plot and the
Christmas Day plot were part of what it called "Operation Hemorrhage,"
an effort to cause economic damage and fear, not necessarily to kill large
numbers of people.
As noted above, practitioners
of terrorism lose a great deal of their ability to create terror if the people
they are trying to terrorize place terrorism in perspective. Terrorist attacks
are going to continue to happen because there are a wide variety of militant
groups and individuals willing to use violence to influence either their own or
another country's government.
Terrorist attacks are
relatively easy to conduct, especially if the assailant is not concerned about
escaping after the attack. As AQAP has noted in its Inspire magazine, a
determined person can conduct attacks using a variety of simple weapons, such
as a knife, axe or gun. And while the authorities in the United States and
elsewhere have proved quite successful in foiling attacks over the past few
years, any number of vulnerable targets exists in the open societies of the
West. Western governments simply do not have the resources to protect
everything; not even authoritarian police states can protect everything. This
means that some terrorist attacks invariably will succeed. How the media,
governments and populations respond to those successful strikes will shape the
way the attackers gauge their success. Obviously, the response to 9/11 meant
the attackers probably were far more successful than they could have hoped. The
London bombings on July 7, 2005, after which the British public went to work as
usual the next day, were seen as less successful.
The world is a dangerous
place. Everyone is going to die, and some people are certain to die in a manner
that is brutal or painful. Recognizing that terrorist attacks, like car crashes
and cancer and natural disasters, are part of the human condition permits people
to take prudent, measured actions to prepare for such contingencies and avoid
becoming victims (vicarious or otherwise). It is the resilience of the
population and their perseverance that determine how much a terrorist attack is
allowed to terrorize. By separating terror from terrorism, citizens can deny
the practitioners of terror the ability to magnify their reach and power.
Scott Stewart, Stratfor, March 22, 2012
Click here for The Myth of the End ofTerrorism.
Click here for Detection Points in the Terrorist Attack Cycle.
Click here for DetectingTerrorist Surveillance.
Click here for A Practical Guide to Situational Awareness.
Click here for Jihadismin 2012: A Persistent, Low-Level Threat.
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário
Não publicamos comentários de anônimos/desconhecidos.
Por favor, se optar por "Anônimo", escreva o seu nome no final do comentário.
Não use CAIXA ALTA, (Não grite!), isto é, não escreva tudo em maiúsculas, escreva normalmente. Obrigado pela sua participação!
Volte sempre!
Abraços./-