Richard English is a professor of political science who has been studying the Irish Republican Army since the mid-1980s. His latest book, Terrorism: How to Respond
Q. What inspired you to write this book?
A. What happened was after my book on the Irish Republican Army came out in 2003, I was invited to do quite a lot of lectures about the IRA and how terrorism ends and how the campaign ended. At same time, after 9/11, there was a huge interest in the broader question of terrorism. Many of the measures introduced as policy after 9/11, I thought, from the lessons learned in the Irish case, were going down the wrong direction.
I wanted to look at to what extent the dynamics of the IRA case was similar to the dynamics of other terrorist campaigns, and to try to draw out what might be some of the lessons to learn. The book is about saying if there were a terrorist atrocity today, what could we do? Could we learn lessons? Could we provide a template for how to respond? And I hope it’s for a wider audience than just specialists in the field.
Q. In what ways do present-day terrorist campaigns differ from the IRA case, and how does this change our response?
A. I argue that in order to respond to any particular case, you need to respond to the specific context. If you’re dealing with Palestinian terrorists, look at the Palestinian context; if you’re dealing with Basque terrorists, look at the Basque context; if you’re dealing with Pakistani terrorists, look at the Pakistani context.
But there are what I would call familiar resemblances between these cases. There are resonances between the ways certain kinds of state responses work or don’t work. in the wake of terrorism, in many cases, states respond with a very formal kind of military response. You see this in Northern Ireland, in Algeria, in Israel, and obviously after 9/11 with Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems to me in many cases, while that can do some good, it also does considerable harm. It often stimulates those very small groups which you intended to stamp out. Civilians get killed, the military is seen as an occupying force, groups gain momentum or proportionate strength from the fact of intervention. Israeli actions in Lebanon, for instance, have strengthened Hezbollah. If you look at the American experience now, there has been a recognition of its negative effects, in a much greater way in 2009. It’s a shame that it took the U.S. the Iraq experience to realize it, rather than learning from the British experience with the IRA decades ago.
Q. Would you consider the terrorism we face today – like the examples you cited – a purely modern phenomenon, or is it quite old?
A. It’s a difficult question and a really really good question. Terrorism is something I would see as a 19th century onward phenomenon. You can look at violence in the Bible and call it terrorism. I don’t think that’s especially helpful. From the French Revolution onward you have versions of things which are close enough to what we would recognize as terrorism. Anarchy or revolutionary leftism in Europe in the 19th century, violence from vigilante groups in the build up to World War I, fascists in the interwar period, and the American domestic experience with radical groups in the 20th century – it could all be termed terrorism. If you look at the 19th and 20th centuries, obviously you see terrorism. Before that, it’s something different.
Most of what is written on the subject since 9/11 treats it as if all we need to think about is the 21st century dimension. But there is actually a very long history of terrorism, and it is going to outlive all of us. We need to look at the longer-term; most writing about terrorism now only really refers to the last 10 or 20 years experience, and we can learn things from a longer period, from the IRA campaign, from early 20th century history.
Q. You mentioned that terrorism will outlive us all – to what extent? How much terrorism is a sort of natural level we have to accept?
A. Terrorism as such will outlive us all. But particular terrorist campaigns will come to an end. We should contain each campaign as much as we can and bring them to a close when we can. There are historical moments when things will change, political realities will change, or a political deal will change things. When that happens, we close that chapter. The German hard left terrorism of the 1970s is basically long dead. That chapter came to a close, but obviously terrorism didn’t end just because the Baader Meinhof group ended. There will be terrorism. You should try to contain it, you should try to stop it, but we have to realize that this talk of getting rid of all terrorism – that’s not a realistic thing. It’s like saying we’ll get rid of all unhappiness. It’s desirable but unrealistic.
My approach is very practical. I think it is realistic to contain and limit terrorist violence, and to realize that small campaigns will come to an end. People like hearing politicians say terrorism is going to end, but history teachs us that terrorism itself isn’t going to end, it’s just going to be contained.
Q. To what extent is the terrorism we face today unique?
A. What we face is unique in two ways worth thinking about. One is that there is the danger that a terrorist group will have the inclination and the capacity to attack a nuclear facility, and the scale of that kind of attack would be so awful, and considerably worse than what we’ve seen. If there’s a number one priority, it’s guarding against such a terrorist attack. It’s much more of a danger today. The disintegration of the Soviet empire has made nuclear materials available, and there are terrorists who are willing to exterminate large numbers of people.
The second thing is, because America was drawn into the terrorist debate more directly, in practical terms, you have a very different dynamic from what you had in the 1980s and 1990s. you have the one remaining superpower in the world engaged in this anti-terrorist campaign throughout the world. Al Qaeda really is a puny group, it’s small, but what they managed to do is change the dynamics of politics by making the whole world involved in terrorism. For most of the Cold War, obviously, there were two superpowers in a standoff, and before that there was the British Empire, and terrorism was not its primary battle cry. This is the second difference of this particular terrorism – a superpower is making terrorism its global priority.
Q. To what extent has the way the U.S. responded to terrorism been mistaken?
A. What happened on 9/11 produced an understandable and explicable response which in many ways was probably unfortunate. I do think something had to be done about Afghanistan, it had to be engaged, Al Qaeda had their base there. The Iraq engagement, particularly in the name of terrorism, really was a disaster. There may have been other reasons for getting engaged in Iraq, and it could be judged necessary, but in terms of terrorism, Iraq wasn’t a significant problem, though of course it is now. The Afghanistan fight got much more difficult after the U.S. invaded Iraq. If you talk to American military in Afghanistan, they will fairly uniformly say that because certain people who were expert in dealing with Afghanistan were redeployed, the Afghanistan battle became much more difficult.
The other thing about the response to terrorism that was unfortunate, which you see again and again in history, there is an undeniable urge to extend the legal framework when you’re fighting terrorism. They think, such an awful thing was done, we need more and more power, but that tends not to have a beneficial effect. We already have in place extensive power to deal with terrorists. We don’t need a new law to say murdering is a crime. Some counterterrorist activity, with intelligence gathering and convictions through the court, most of this can happen through the normal framework of the law, and through police rather than military. What is happening in Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib – the changing of legislature in the U.S. – made it look as though the U.S. was more oppressive than it was, but really it didn’t have a huge benefit. It’s rare that torture produces information you need. We know that from Afghanistan and Ireland and Spain. It’s just not what happens. It only makes you look like a state that tortures. You look more ambiguous morally than you otherwise would.
Q. To what extent is terrorism just a law enforcement problem? Should the military ever get involved?
A. I think it can vary. You need to do some things with the army. If you have a situation in a civil war, with such severe disorder, you need the military. But in most cases I’ve studied, the most effective counterterrorism on the ground is done by the police. Police tend to know much better the way the community works, the dynamics of it, who are the sources of information, who is an outsider. You quite often find – and I’m not blaming them, it is just what happens – when you put soldiers in situations where they can’t be trained for the more frightening aspects, damage always occurs. If you can’t tell who the enemy is, some civilians will get killed, innocent people will die, and that will work against the military rather than against the terrorists. We’ve seen this in Afghanistan, and you can lose on this basis alone – if you kill a bunch of people at the wedding. That will be the only information most people encounter about the Americans. The military is not unimportant, and I’m not trying to condemn them. I would just say it is too big and muscular and formally aggressive in dealing with a problem. Put the U.S. army against any state, and the battle ends. If you put them against a people difficult to identify, it’s much more difficult to see the effects of the military.
Q. What is the most challenging terrorist campaign we face today?
A. Most significant is what’s happening in Palestine – partly because it is so persistent, one of the longest-running and most difficult to solve. It’s one of those issues that acts as a kind of magnifying lens for terrorism. So many groups, including Osama bin Laden himself, consider it their rallying cry. It is so persistent and so complex; it is also the most depressing, it’s a far more difficult problem to solve than Northern Ireland or Marxist terrorism or Basque terrorism or even Chechnya actually. In the Israeli-Palestinian case, you have incredible difficulties, and of course part of the issue has to do with the quite understandable pro-Israeli sentiment dominant in American politics. Not much of what happens on Israel is about Palestine; it’s about domestic political power in the U.S. That makes it much more difficult to address. If I could wave a magic want, that’s the one issue I’d pick to solve. I’m too puny to do that, but that’s the one I would do. It would be a huge achievement for the region. It would remove the number one long-term grievance of terrorists when they’re trying to bomb the U.S.
Q. To end on a more optimistic note, what campaign other than the IRA you already mentioned has been solved, that we could look to for inspiration?
A. There is one that has been solved and one capable of being solved soon. The one that provides great comfort in a way is left-wing terrorism in 1970s and 1980s. When I was growing up living in England, there was a great panic about the Red Brigade, and this unstoppable leftist terrorism. A mixture of good police work and a sane population stopped it. This backs up the point I made earlier-pessimists say that terrorism lasts, optimists say that individual campaigns die. The one I’d point to that can be resolved it the Basque case. The ETA is still carrying out violence, but they’re coming toward the sputtering end of their campaign.
One other optimistic note is that, in the wake of an atrocity, we think the world is crumbling. But the history of most campaigns shows that the states being attacked endure pretty resiliently. Rather than terrorist violence making life for a particular country more and more unbearable, states and people and populations learn to live with it. This could happen, unless there’s a huge attack, in the U.S. It’s a very encouraging lesson. Terrorism is more puny sometimes than our rather shrill anxieties suggest.
*Photo courtesy Jule Berlin.
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