Scott Stewart
In this week's Geopolitical
Weekly, George Friedman discussed the geopolitical cycles that change with each generation. Frequently, especially in recent
years, those geopolitical cycles have intersected with changes in the way the
tactic of terrorism is employed and in the actors employing it.
The Arab terrorism that began
in the 1960s resulted from the Cold War and the Soviet decision to fund, train
and otherwise encourage groups in the Middle East. The Soviet Union and its
Middle Eastern proxies also sponsored Marxist terrorist groups in Europe and
Latin America. They even backed the Japanese Red Army terrorist group. Places
like South Yemen and Libya became havens where Marxist militants of many different
nationalities gathered to learn terrorist tradecraft, often instructed by
personnel from the Soviet KGB or the East German Stasi and from other
militants.
The Cold War also spawned al
Qaeda and the broader global jihadist movement as militants flocking to fight
the Soviet troops who had invaded Afghanistan were trained in camps in northern
Pakistan by instructors from the CIA's Office of Technical Services and
Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. Emboldened by the Soviet
withdrawal from Afghanistan, and claiming credit for the subsequent Soviet
collapse, these militants decided to expand their efforts to other parts of the
world.
The connection between
state-sponsored terrorism and the Cold War ran so deep that when the Cold War
ended with the Soviet Union's collapse, many declared that terrorism had ended
as well. I witnessed this phenomenon while serving in the Counterterrorism Investigations
Division of the Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) in the early 1990s. While I
was in New York working as part of the interagency team investigating the 1993
World Trade Center bombing, a newly appointed assistant secretary of state
abolished my office, declaring that the DSS did not need a Counterterrorism
Investigations Division since terrorism was over.
Though terrorism obviously did
not end when the Berlin Wall fell, the rosy sentiments to the contrary held by
some at the State Department and elsewhere took away the impetus to mitigate
the growing jihadist threat or to protect diplomatic facilities from it. The
final report of the Crowe Commission, which was established to review the twin
August 1998 bombing attacks against the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es
Salaam, explicitly noted this neglect of counterterrorism and security
programs, as did the 9/11 Commission report.
The 9/11 terrorist attacks
triggered a shift in international geopolitics by leading the United States to
concentrate the full weight of its national resources on al Qaeda and its
supporters. Ironically, by the time the U.S. government was able to shift its
massive bureaucracy to meet the new challenge, creating huge new organizations
like the Department of Homeland Security, the efforts of the existing U.S.
counterterrorism apparatus had already badly crippled the core al Qaeda group.
Though some of these new organizations played important roles in helping the
United States cope with the fallout of its decision to invade Iraq after
Afghanistan, Washington spent billions of dollars to create organizations and
fund programs that in hindsight were arguably not really necessary because the
threats they were designed to counter, such as al Qaeda's nuclear briefcase
bombs, did not actually exist. As George Friedman noted in the Geopolitical
Weekly, the sole global superpower was badly off-balance, which caused an
imbalance in the entire global system.
With the
continued diminution of the jihadist threat, underscored by the May 2011
death of Osama bin Laden and the fall in Libya of the Gadhafi regime (which had
long employed terrorism), once again we appear on the brink of a cyclical
change in the terrorism paradigm. These events could again lead some to
pronounce the death of terrorism.
Several developments last week
served to demonstrate that while the perpetrators and tactics of terrorism
(what Stratfor calls the "who" and the "how") may change in
response to larger geopolitical cycles, such shifts will not signal the end of
terrorism itself.
The Nature of Terrorism
There are many conflicting
definitions of terrorism, but for our purposes we will loosely define it as
politically motivated violence against noncombatants. Many terrorist acts have
a religious element to them, but that element is normally related to a larger,
political goal: Both a militant anti-abortion activist seeking to end legalized
abortion and a jihadist seeking to end the U.S. military presence in Iraq may
act according to religious principles, but they ultimately are pursuing a
political objective.
Terrorism is a tactic, one
employed by a wide array of actors. There is no single creed, ethnicity,
political persuasion or nationality with a monopoly on terrorism. Individuals
and groups of individuals from almost every conceivable background -- from late
Victorian-era anarchists to Klansmen to North Korean intelligence officers --
have conducted terrorist attacks. Because of the impreciseness of the term,
Stratfor normally does not refer to individuals as terrorists. In addition to
being a poor descriptor, "terrorist" tends to be a politically loaded
term.
Traditionally, terrorism has
been a tactic of the weak, i.e., those who lack the power to impose their
political will through ordinary political or military means. As Carl von
Clausewitz noted, war is the continuation of politics by other means; terrorism
is a type of warfare, making it also politics by other means. Because it is a
tactic used by the weak, terrorism generally focuses on soft, civilian targets
rather than more difficult-to-attack military targets.
The type of weapon used does
not define terrorism. For example, using a vehicle-borne improvised explosive
device against an International Security Assistance Force firebase in
Afghanistan would be considered an act of irregular warfare, but using it in an
attack on a hotel in Kabul would be considered an act of terrorism. This means
that militant actors can employ conventional warfare tactics, unconventional
warfare tactics and terrorism during the same campaign depending on the
situation.
Terrorist attacks are
relatively easy to conduct if they are directed against soft targets and if the
assailant is not concerned with escaping after the attack, as was the case in
the Mumbai attacks in 2008. While authorities in many countries have been quite
successful in foiling attacks over the past couple of years, governments simply
do not have the resources to guard everything. When even police states cannot
protect everything, some terrorist attacks invariably will succeed in the open
societies of the West.
Terrorist attacks tend to be
theatrical, exerting a strange hold over the human imagination. They often
create a unique sense of terror dwarfing reactions to natural disasters many
times greater in magnitude. For example, more than 227,000 people died in the
2004 Asian tsunami versus fewer than 3,000 on 9/11, yet the 9/11 attacks
produced a worldwide sense of terror and a geopolitical reaction that has had a
profound and unparalleled impact on world events over the past decade.
Cycles and Shifts
A number of events last week
illustrate the changes happening in the terrorism realm and demonstrate that,
while terrorism may change, it is not going to end.
On Feb. 17, the FBI arrested a
Moroccan man near the U.S. Capitol in Washington who allegedly sought to
conduct a suicide attack on the building. The suspect, Amine el Khalifi, is a
clear example of the shift in the jihadist threat from one based on the al
Qaeda core group to one primarily deriving from grassroots jihadists. As
Stratfor has noted for several years, while these grassroots jihadists pose a
more diffuse threat because they are harder for national intelligence and law
enforcement agencies to focus on than hierarchical groups, the threat they pose
is less severe because they generally lack the terrorist tradecraft required to
conduct a large-scale attack. Because they lack such tradecraft, these
grassroots militants tend to seek assistance to conduct their plots. This
assistance usually involves acquiring explosives or firearms, as in the el
Khalifi case, where an FBI informant posing as a jihadist leader provided the
suspect with an inert suicide vest and a submachine gun prior to the suspect's
arrest.
While many in the media tend
to ridicule individuals like el Khalifi as inept, it is important to remember
that had he succeeded in finding a real jihadist facilitator rather than a
federal informant, he could have killed many people in an attack. Richard Reid,
who many people refer to as the "Kramer of al Qaeda" after the
bumbling character from the television show Seinfeld, came very close to taking
down a jumbo jet full of people over the Atlantic because he had been equipped
and dispatched by others.
Still, the fact remains that
the jihadist threat now predominantly stems from unequipped grassroots wannabes
rather than teams of highly trained operatives sent to the United States from
overseas, like the team that executed the 9/11 attacks. This demonstrates how
the jihadist threat has diminished in recent years, a trend we expect to
continue. This will allow Washington to increasingly focus attention on things
other than jihadism, such as the fragmentation of Europe, the transformation of
global economic production and Iran's growing regional power. It will mark the
beginning of a new geopolitical cycle.
Last week also brought us a series of events highlighting how terrorism
may manifest itself in the new cycle. On Feb. 13, Israeli diplomatic vehicles
in New
Delhi, India, and Tbilisi, Georgia, were targeted with explosive devices.
In Tbilisi, a grenade hidden under a diplomatic vehicle was discovered before
it could detonate. In New Delhi, a sticky bomb placed on the back of a
diplomatic vehicle wounded the wife of the Israeli defense attache as she
headed to pick up her children from school.
On Feb. 14, an Iranian man was
arrested after being wounded in an explosion at a rented house in Bangkok. The
blast reportedly occurred as a group was preparing improvised explosive devices
for use against Israeli targets in Bangkok. Two other Iranians were later
arrested (one in Malaysia), and Thai authorities are seeking three more Iranian
citizens, two of whom have reportedly returned to Iran, alleged to have
assisted in the plot.
While these recent Iranian
plots failed, they nonetheless highlight how the Iranians are using terrorism
as a tactic in retaliation for attacks Israel and Israeli surrogates have
conducted against individuals associated with Iran's nuclear program.
It is also important to bear
in mind as this new geopolitical cycle begins that terrorism does not just
emanate from foreign governments, major subnational actors or even
transnational radical ideologies like jihadism. As we saw in the July 2011
attacks in Norway conducted by Anders Breivik and in older cases involving
suspects like Eric Rudolph, Timothy McVeigh and Theodore Kaczynski in the
United States, native-born individuals who have a variety of grievances with
the government or society can carry out terrorist attacks. Such grievances will
certainly persist.
Geopolitical cycles will
change, and these changes may cause a shift in who employs terrorism and how it
is employed. But as a tactic, terrorism will continue no matter what the next
geopolitical cycle brings.
Scott Stewart, Stratfor, February
23, 2012
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