How and Why Do Terrorist Campaigns End?

In order to assess terrorist groups within a broad historical and strategic framework, it is vital to assess how and why terrorist campaigns end. Moreover, if effective counter-terrorism is to be developed, then serious reflection is required regarding what happens during the final phase of terrorist campaigns, and why. This chapter therefore: first, analyses four classic strategies of terrorism and considers why Western democracies have particular difficulty responding to them; second, it reviews six historical patterns of endings for terrorist organisations that have emerged from scholarly research on hundreds of groups; third, it assesses (in light of these six patterns) which counter-terrorism policies have hastened al-Qaida’s demise and which have not, while also reflecting upon the rise of ISIS and its potential future significance.

Secrets and Lies

The response of Western governments to the threat posed by mass-casualty terrorism has resulted in a widening gulf between their theory and practice of counter-terrorism and their proclaimed commitment to the maintenance of fundamental human rights. A shocking picture has emerged of wrongdoing perpetrated under the broad terms of counter-terrorist measures adopted since 9/11. This chapter seeks to explain this outcome, especially in the light of the episodic and limited nature of attacks by jihadis on Western societies since 2001. It also examines how President Barack Obama has grappled with the argument that some of the measures designed to protect the public from terrorism pose a threat to constitutional government and to the rule of law. It notes that his readiness to accept that such dangers do indeed exist has been exceptional among Western political leaders and that reliance on secrecy, misinformation, and denial has been the norm.

What Should be the Limits of Western Counter-Terrorism Policy?

How governments understand and thus come to conceptualise and explain current and future threats and the calibration of their response across all the levers open to government at home and abroad is seen as key to sound strategy. The prevailing approach to domestic security planning after 9/11 as part of the British counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST, is seen as heavily influenced by the growing application of risk management as a planning tool in government generally and is contrasted with the US approach. The influence of unrelated external events, including the revelations of Edward Snowden, is examined as a factor disturbing the domestic calculus of the ‘thermodynamics’ of counter-terrorism: how the government can best exercise its primary duty to protect the public in the face of a severe terrorist threat and yet maintain civic harmony and uphold democratic values and the rule of law at home and internationally. This chapter argues that the overall challenge for the future is to maintain public confidence that it is possible for government having absorbed such lessons to discharge its responsibilities for public safety and security whilst behaving ethically in accordance with modern views of human rights, including personal privacy, in a world where deference to authority and automatic acceptance of the confidentiality of government business no longer holds sway.

Al-Qaida and the 9/11 Decade

The declaration of a Caliphate in June 2014 by an al-Qaida offshoot implied a strong sense of political–religious unity, but, in reality, the announcement reflected deep division at the heart of radical Islam. This article critically assesses al-Qaida’s progress on its four main objectives over the course of the 9/11 decade, and suggests that its principal setbacks were due to the fragmentation of Islamic authority. In particular, Osama bin Laden’s inability to reverse the misguided focus, by some affiliated groups, on the ‘nearer enemy’, began to portend al-Qaida’s downfall. However, after the Arab Spring, in the chokeholds of strong states and the chaos of weak states al-Qaida found advantage. Furthermore, with the rise of groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, a new pattern of radicalism emerged, in which the threat to ‘far enemy’, ‘near enemy’ and ‘nearer enemy’ were combined.

The Global Insurgency

The Pax Americana has produced remarkable political order in Europe and Northeast Asia. For decades, the US has sought to expand this international order into the Middle East. This effort, however, has sparked a backlash against the US, globalisation, and Westernisation. With state elites now largely co-opted into the Pax Americana, opposition takes the form of ‘private’, non-state actors using terrorist methods. The US response to the global insurgency has included counterterrorism and regime change, but state-building has become the dominant strategy. The core problem in state-building, however, is that though the US and its allies seek legitimacy for the states they build, they also aim to appoint local leaders willing to cooperate in the global war on terror and other elements of the Pax Americana. These ‘loyal’ leaders can govern only autocratically in ways that foment further opposition. State-building as counterinsurgency strategy is counter-productive. The first section of this chapter explains the spread of the Pax Americana; the second briefly describes the reaction to this expansion, focusing on the current global insurgency; the third probes the counter-reaction, highlighting the role of state-building; the Conclusion argues that given a choice between expansion or retrenchment, the US should lean towards the latter.

Introduction

The scholarly literature on terrorism has offered important insights into the dynamics of non-state terrorism, and also into the very varied responses that have been developed in reaction to it. Crucial within such debates have been the issues of definition, of terrorist efficacy, of appropriate state response, of non-state terrorist organisational development, and of the most fruitful hermeneutical framework within which to analyse terrorism and terrorists. This chapter summarises some of the most significant work to date on these issues. But it argues also for a new framework for analysis: one that looks synoptically at terrorism, counter-terrorism, and the relationship between them; and one that is genuinely multi-disciplinary and open to policy seriousness. It then introduces the different ways in which the book's contributors offer important and original analysis of the key areas that are covered in the book, analysis which is situated within this new framework.

Why Terrorist Campaigns Do Not End

Within debates on how terrorism ends, political historians will want academic analysis to reflect the frequently unpredictable messiness of such processes. When terrorist groups desist, they often do so in ways that involve violent spillage across the historical line which broadly divides conflict from peace. This chapter focuses on one significant case study in terrorist persistence: dissident Irish republican violence in the wake of the decision by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) to end its own armed struggle. I will offer a brief account of dissident republican activity, and then explain such activity by situating it within a wider hermeneutical framework of nationalism as such. The central argument will be that we can only properly understand and appropriately respond to dissident Irish republican terrorism if we interpret it as a recognisable species of nationalist zealotry, with family resemblances to many other nationalisms throughout politics and history in Ireland and elsewhere. Such an account normalises dissident republicanism and explains its (to some observers, surprising) durability; it does not ignore the non-ideological motivations and dynamics of Irish dissidents; nor does it offer any legitimising framework for such ongoing violent republicanism.

No Golden Age

From the moment of their emergence, democracies everywhere have been alive to the importance of their survival. This institutionalised anxiety has meant that radical critiques of power differentials and wealth-inequality (which survive in all democracies) have been vulnerable to being cast as challenges not to injustice but to the integrity of democracy itself. This is the deep root of counter-terrorism law today, now not applied to a plausible threat from the radical left but rather to extreme criminal acts which, however heinous, do not directly challenge the state. As inequality in democracies grows and opportunities for orthodox political change are reduced by the increasing power of money, so old style anti-radical laws are increasingly combined with contemporary terrorism laws to stifle extra-parliamentary dissent. This takes place through the deployment of political and legal devices the effect of which is to allow the continued appearance of democracy while reducing its egalitarian impact in practice.

Counter-Terrorism in the Post-9/11 Era

This chapter assesses the US-led counter-terrorism response to the September 2001 attacks on the American homeland in order to gauge the successes and failures of the Global War on Terror. It concludes that successes against transnational terrorist threats, as represented by al-Qaida and its affiliates, have been few and far between. Instead, the past decade has been marked by a failure to meet set goals for a number of reasons, including but not limited to: the shifting character of war, the unintended fallouts of the counter-terrorism policies adopted, and an inadvertent strengthening of al-Qaida’s material and ideological capabilities through the US macro-securitisation of the Global War on Terror–all of which point to the absence of a long-term strategic vision. However, our counter-terrorism failures hold crucial lessons for the future and the chapter concludes by outlining how they can enable us to translate our past failures into future successes.