Part 1
This article aims to problematise the notion of declaring a “war on terror” from a linguistic perspective. While terrorism as a tactic is broadly understood and may be countered in specific instances, the rhetorical act of declaring a global war on terrorism and subsequently viewing terrorism through the prism of conventional war throw up a host of issues which are here explored. Above all this article shows that, as a counter-terrorism strategy, the construction of the struggle against terrorism as a conventional war is deeply flawed and essentially counterproductive.
At the time of publication it has been approximately 18-and-a-half years since the United States declared the “Global War on Terrorism,” and hence there are currently young people in that country’s armed forces fighting a war that began before they were born. This realisation begs the question, what exactly are they fighting for? The natural answer, and the one given by US President George W. Bush all those years ago, is that the objective of the “war on terror” is to defeat terrorism [1]. The aim of this article is to problematise the notion of “defeating terrorism” and to question the strategic value of declaring the war on terror.
Defining terrorism is an essentially political problem. If “terrorist” as a label is to have unequivocally negative connotations, then any group or individual at risk of acquiring that label has an incentive to avoid this by tweaking the definition. This issue is best exemplified by the struggle in the United Nations to create an acceptable definition:
The United Nations has been trying to define terrorism for some thirty years, and has given up in its quest for a definition that everybody can agree upon. A major problem is that Western governments wanted to make sure that state agents could never be considered terrorist, while Islamic countries wanted to make sure that national liberation movements in the Middle East and Kashmir could never be considered terrorist. [2]
The lack of definition is enough to make the object of a “war on terror” questionable. Isaac Taylor does not attempt to strictly define terrorism, yet he remarks that, somehow, we seem to know it when we see it [3]. While there is no “ideal type” terrorist organisation upon which to base a definition, all such groups are non-state actors who adopt tactics based on committing acts of violence against civilians in a way that spreads fear. As Jenny Teichman put it succinctly, ‘we will look pretty silly if we do not mention terror in our account of terrorism’ [4]. There is a divergence among terrorist organisations when it comes to the purpose of this fear: to extract political concessions, to seek revenge, for theological purposes, etc. We are thus limited to stating that terrorism amounts to attacks on civilians by non-state actors for the purposes of spreading terror, usually in order to extract political concessions from a state.
Terrorism, thus construed, is really more of a tactic than any other type of phenomenon - one which can be used or not used depending on the situation. If we now re-analyse the proposition to “defeat” terrorism in this sense then it is clear that such a proposition is, in a way, semantically clumsy. Terrorism is not the type of thing capable of being defeated like, for instance, an opposing combatant, army, or state. If terrorism is a tactic to be discretionarily used, then it makes sense to speak of adopting a counter-tactic in order to “defeat” it in the particular instance in which it is employed. For comparison, if laying mines at sea is a tactic then a counter-tactic might be minesweeping or degaussing the hulls of ships. What does it mean to defeat terrorism in the general sense, however? The question is pressing given that such a thing necessarily must be the objective of a general “war on terror”.
We can look at this question in two ways. In the first case, conditions are such that no one is motivated to commit any further acts of terrorism, making it obsolete. In the second, terrorism is successfully countered in every instance or stopped before it can happen, making it impossible.
Paul Pillar in Terrorism and US Foreign Policy argued that it is naive to think that we can create a world where grievance, alienation, and every other motivation for terrorism is absent [5]. A more optimistic stance would see the structural causes of grievance and alienation systematically addressed. However, such an approach is unlikely to be implemented so long as the world remains on a rhetorically constructed warpath against terrorism. Jingoistic policy towards terrorism all-too-easily leads to what is normally referred to in counterterrorism literature as “the kinetic approach”: ‘aggressive, offensive measures to eliminate or capture’ the members of terrorist organisations and their supporters [6]. Mark Malan argues that in the case of Islamist terrorism in Nigeria this kinetic approach has been ‘consistently brutal and counterproductive’, succeeding only in mobilising sentiment against the security forces as people come to fear the police and army more than Boko Haram [7].
In the second case, we must consider the effect on society were we to create the conditions wherein terrorism is impossible. Given that many governments around the world have reacted to Islamist terrorism by legislating reduced freedoms, increasing the size and scope of security apparatuses, and sanctioning the extrajudicial use of force, it is likely that a world where terrorism is simply impossible would simultaneously be a world with few or none of the freedoms we take for granted in a liberal democracy. Even if such a world were desirable, it remains that fully eliminating terrorism is beyond our present capabilities and failure to recognise this can have counter-productive effects. If the goal of counterterrorism is set at “eliminating terrorism for good,” then every successful terrorist attack becomes a demoralising setback. If a terrorist’s goal is to damage public morale, then setting our aspirations unreasonably high has the effect of amplifying the morale-damage a terrorist can inflict [8]. In reality, this is not the actual aim of the “war on terror”. Rather than actually seeking to end all terrorism forever, the war declared in the aftermath of 9/11 was specifically against Al-Qaeda, their affiliate groups, and those who sheltered them. This dissonance only heightens the absurdity of the rhetorical war-footing. Given that there are groups of actors whom the war actually targets, it was unnecessary in the first place to rhetorically escalate to a general war on terrorism. We can conclude from this analysis that seeking to outright “defeat” terrorism is an ill-thought-out strategy, the end of which is neither desirable nor reasonably attainable.
I have sought to problematise the discourse surrounding the War on Terror here in order to make clear what much of the world has learned the hard way over the past two decades: that neither the metaphor nor the strategies of conventional interstate warfare are suitable to the struggle against terrorism. As the conflict nears its third decade it would be prudent for policymakers and their speech-writers to remember this lesson.
Sources
[1] Cable News Network (2001) ‘Transcript of President Bush's address’, CNN.com, 21st September 2001. Available at: http://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/09/20/gen.bush.transcript/ Accessed 01/03/2020
[2] Govier, T. (2002), A Delicate Balance: what philosophy can tell us about terrorism. Boulder: Westview Press.
[3] Taylor, I. (2017), "Just war theory and the military response to terrorism" in Social Theory & Practice 43(4) : 717-740.
[4] Teichman, J. (1989), ‘How to define terrorism’ in Philosophy 64 (250) : 511
[5] Pillar, P. (2003), Terrorism and US Foreign Policy. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.
[6] Roberts, N. and Everton, S.F. (2011), "Strategies for combating dark networks" in Journal of Social Structure 12 (2), p3
[7] Malan, M. (2017), "Kinetic responses to global terrorism: Lessons from Africa" in African Security Review 26(4), p349-350
[8] Pillar, 2003.