Deterring Terrorism

Brad Plumer links to a piece in The New Yorker on nuclear war-theorist Herman Kahn. Kahn wrote some pretty disturbing stuff:

The most infamous pages in "On Thermonuclear War" concern survivability. What makes nuclear war different, Kahn points out, is not the number of dead; it's a new element—the problem of the postwar environment. In Kahn's view, the dangers of radioactivity are exaggerated. Fallout will make life less pleasant and cause inconvenience, but there is plenty of unpleasantness and inconvenience in the world already. "War is a terrible thing; but so is peace," he says. More babies might have birth defects after a nuclear war, but four per cent of babies have birth defects anyway. Whether we can tolerate a slightly higher percentage of defective children is a question of trade-offs. "It might well turn out," Kahn suggests, "that U.S. decision makers would be willing, among other things, to accept the high risk of an additional one percent of our children being born deformed if that meant not giving up Europe to Soviet Russia."

The book proposes a system for labeling contaminated food so that older people will eat the food that is more radioactive, on the theory that "most of these people would die of other causes before they got cancer."

But Kahn didn't write this stuff for the hell of it; he wrote it for a very strategic reason: if we were going to deter the Soviets by threatening them with nuclear war, we had to act like we thought we could win a nuclear war, despite its horrors, and so we'd be willing to fight the war - making the threat credible. As Plumer wrote, "the Soviet Union had to believe that we were actually crazy enough to fight—and accept the costs of—the worst of nuclear apocalypses".

So Plumer asks an interesting question:

Now the interesting, and maybe less appalling, question is whether a similar deterrence strategy could work today, against terrorism. What if the United States made it clear that September 11-type attacks were no big deal. What if the general tenor of national security discourse ran: "Okay, well even 12,000 or 20,000 dead is tragic, but life will go on, and society won't collapse." Would that change anything? Say I'm a terrorist trying to achieve X amount of terror; ideally I'd like to do it in the cheapest way possible—perhaps by exploding a suicide bomb in a mall. But if I know that American society is perfectly willing to absorb a minor attack like that, then the stakes are raised. A bomb in a mall would be useless. To achieve X amount of terror, I would have to go blow up a chlorine tank or something. Or try to get my hands on a nuclear suitcase. If America had a cavalier attitude towards terrorist attacks—rather than the fairly frantic one we do have—would that persuade some terrorists to try to up the ante and think up even more deadly attacks, or it would it discourage some terrorists from even trying?

I think the answer is "no", for two reasons.

The first: we could probably dissuade some terrorism, but not very much. Most terrorists act in order to alter the cost/benefit ratio of a particular course of action. When the Stern Gang wanted the British to evacuate the Palestine Mandate so as to found a new Jewish state, they started mailing bombs to British officials and blowing up hotels. This changed the cost/benefit ratio for the British - they already didn't really want to be in Palestine, and this terrorism raised the costs of staying (or lowered the benefits) to the point where they simply left.

But this is a fairly isolated example of terrorism having success. Most terrorist campaigns to achieve some political goal - independence, autonomy, political ascendancy, etc. - have failed totally or have dragged on for decades without achieving their goal. See: Colombia, Spain, Northern Ireland, and Sri Lanka for some long-running terrorist campaigns that have failed to do anything but kill a lot of people.

So, in other words, in a case where people have low tolerance for tolerance and little incentive to fight, terrorism works. In cases where people have a high tolerance or a high incentive to fight, terrorism will fail. But this doesn't stop terrorists from trying, since many fight for decades. And, in these cases, terrorism usually has the opposite of the desired effect: it usually galvanizes and unifies a population and leads them to support harsher responses than they would normally.

We've faced this sort of terrorism from al Qaeda and its buddies in the Middle East before, as in Lebanon in the 1983 attack on the marine barracks which killed 241, or in Saudi Arabia in the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers which killed 20. The goal of this sort of terrorism is as I discussed before: to make staying in the Middle East not worth the cost to the US, in the hopes that we'd withdraw from the region.

But the sort of terrorism we faced on September 11 was different. That attack was much more complicated in its intent. If we decided, after the attack, to withdraw from the Middle East, then al Qaeda would have achieved one of its goals and could concentrate on overthrowing regimes in the region now lacking US support. But, this was not the primary motivation (nor was it, as some have claimed, simply because "they hate us" or "they want to destroy us" - sure they hate and want to destroy us, but they're crazy, not stupid, and they know that one attack will not destroy America). Al Qaeda decided some time ago to concentrate not on its "near enemies", the regimes they are attempting to overthrow, but rather their "far enemy", us. No, the primary motivation was precisely to provoke an attack on a Muslim country which could be seen as an attack on Muslims or Islam in general and which would radicalize Muslims - rallying them to al Qaeda's cause.

How do we know this? Because they told us so.

So pretending that we don't care about terrorism will not dissuade al Qaeda, since they would simply continue escalating their attacks until they got massive and destructive enough that we'd respond as they're hoping we'll respond.

We probably couldn't deter al Qaeda strategically, but we can deter individuals from wanting to fight us in the first place - we just need to continue capturing and killing enough of them to change an individual's own cost/benefit analysis, and make it way too costly to want to fight us.

The key will be to respond in such a way that we don't create the conditions that al Qaeda is already seeking - we have to fight al Qaeda without doing things that could radicalize Muslims the way al Qaeda wants to. This means not doing things like killing more Iraqis than al Qaeda is, or torturing cab drivers, or generally convincing Muslims that we're fighting them and not just al Qaeda. Oh, we're already doing those things? Woops.

Digby reminds us of a Pentagon flier advertising a showing of The Battle of Algiers in an attempt to avoid the French mistakes in trying to put down an insurgency in Muslim Algeria:

How to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas. ... Children shoot soldiers at point blank range. Women plant bombs in cafes. Soon the entire Arab population builds to a mad fervor. Sound familiar? The French have a plan. It succeeds tactically, but fails strategically. To understand why, come to a rare showing of this film.

Second reason: we'd actually have to pretend that, after we conquered two countries after having been attacked, we didn't care about terrorism. Bush can't open his mouth without invoking September 11. Matthew Yglesias points to a Cato report which states: "in almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists anywhere in the world is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States." There are a lot of things which hurt more people than terrorism - car accidents being one of them. But we're not going to declare war on bathtubs or traffic accidents. Our society has utterly and totally fetishized terrorism - and there's not going to be any way, after our reactions over the last few years, that we're suddenly going to convince anyone that we don't care anymore or are willing to tolerate casualties.