Chapter Four
Countering Terrorism beyond Sovereignty
David. E. Long
From: Cusimano, Maryann K. 2000. Beyond Sovereignty: Issues for a Global Agenda. Pp. 96-107
The
thesis of this book is that with the end of the Cold War finding foreign policy
solutions to certain international problems such as terrorism has extended beyond sovereignty. At first
glance, however, terrorism appears to be the exception that proves the rule. A
good argument can be made that in recent years international terrorism has
become more rooted in the sovereign state system rather than less. This is in
sharp contrast to the Cold War years when there was a widely held assumption
that terrorism was primarily a product of an international conspiracy created
by the Soviet Union to spread communism and Soviet foreign policy.
That assumption was never totally accurate even during the Cold War,
and since then it has become clear that terrorism has always been motivated
more by parochial ethnic, national, and religious loyalties than by
universalist ideologies. Even the most prominent international terrorist threat
of today; from radical Islamist political organizations, are in reality
strongly rooted in the politics of individual sovereign political states.
Islamist groups involved in terrorism in Egypt, Israel/Palestine, and Algeria,
for example, are far more interested in creating revolutionary, Islamic
regimes in their own countries than in some utopian desire to submerge them
into a larger Islamic political entity. In Iran, where there is already a
radical Islamist regime, it is difficult to tell the difference between the regime's
stated foreign policy goal of spreading their Islamic revolution and age-old
Persian imperial political ambitions. Terrorism in the post‑Cold War
world is tied to the sovereign state system more than ever before.
How then can international terrorism be
considered a problem beyond sovereignty?
The answer lies more in state responses to terrorism than in the nature
of the terrorism itself. It is not the
motivations of terrorists per se that make terrorism a transsovereign problem,
but rather the official policy responses of multiple sovereign states, each with
only limited freedom of policy to effect an outcome favorable to its
interests. To the extent that terrorist activity crosses sovereign boundaries and that no single state can
successfully, contain international
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terrorism unilaterally,
it is truly beyond sovereignty. Like
other transsovereign problems, terrorism is facilitated by the very open
market, open society, and open technology dynamics that allow the legal
movement of goods, money, ideas, and people across borders. Before addressing policy responses to
terrorism, however, it is important to look at the nature of terrorism to
understand why unilateral state responses have had only moderate success in
reducing terrorism to manageable proportions.
THE NATURE OF TERRORISM
Terrorism can be described as
seeking, political goals through psychological means by the use or threat
violence that is neither sanctioned under the criminal statutes of most states
nor by international law. Understanding
how and why this occurs-the nature of terrorism-is no easy matter.
Of all the foreign policy problems facing the countries of the world in the
post-Cold War era, terrorism is one of tile most difficult to come to
grips with conceptually. In the past twenty years or so, media sensationalism
of terrorist acts and responses by politicians pandering to transient public
opinion have so greatly distorted public perceptions of terrorist behavior
that it is difficult to create common ground for informed discussion.
For
example, there are a number of commonly held perceptions that simply have no
basis in fact. One is that all terrorists are either evil or demented-either
sociopaths or psychopaths or both. Studies of captured terrorists have produced
a far different picture. According to one leading student of terrorist
behavior, "the outstanding characteristic of terrorists is their
normality." On the subject of morality, there are few more moralistic
people than fanatical followers of a radical political cause. It is not that
they believe that terrorism itself is moral, but that they have convinced
themselves that their cause is so sacred and so imperative that any means,
including terrorism, no matter how reprehensible is justified in seeking to
achieve their political ends.
A more
sympathetic but no less simplistic perception is that terrorists are poor and
downtrodden victims of economic, social, or political injustices. Although many
are, this stereotype is no more accurate than the first. The vast majority of
victims of such injustices do not resort to violence to assuage their sense of
grievance, and many terrorists have never suffered personally but rather
identify with others who they believe have. Moreover, the leaders of most known
terrorist organizations are not economically or socially deprived but come from
middle-class backgrounds and are relatively well educated with at least
some college training. Without such training, it would be difficult to develop
the political, organizational, and technical skills required to lead a successful terrorist group.
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Two
other traits appear to be prevalent among terrorists: low self-esteem and
a predilection for risk-taking. People with low self-esteem tend to
set unrealistically high goals for themselves; and when their goals are not
met, they tend to raise rather than lower their aspirations. Bitter at failure,
they are apt to blame external causes for their condition and join groups of
others with similar feelings.
Beyond these generalizations,
it is virtually impossible to stereotype terrorist behavior, particularly
given the lack of meaningful social science research. Because most terrorist
activity is covert, this kind of research is obviously very difficult to
gather. Suffice it to say there are probably as many motives for becoming a
member of a terrorist group as there are terrorists, underscoring individual
psychology as a major motivating force.
From
the policymaker’s point of view, there is an even greater constraint in
combating international terrorism than public misperceptions of terrorists and
their behavior-the absence of any international consensus of a legal
definition of what terrorism is. It has often been claimed that the only
difference between terrorists and freedom fighters is what side they are on.
Cynical as that claim might appear, there is more than a little truth to it.
Whereas most international terrorism consists of criminal acts-murder,
arson, kidnapping, hijacking, sabotage, robbery, extortion-there is no
existing criminal definition of terrorism itself. The reason for this is not
hard to find. What sets terrorism apart from other international crimes of a
similar nature is that it is essentially a political activity, and no country
in the world is willing to have its sovereign right to respond to a foreign
political act subordinated to a legal definition.
The
political nature of determining under what circumstances a violent international
political act should be considered terrorism is illustrated by U.S. State
Department’s official list of states supporting terrorism. The list was mandated by Congress in what
was apparently an attempt to enable the United States to take the moral high
ground against terrorism with little political cost. With no objective criteria for deciding when countries should be
placed on or removed from the list, inclusion is a purely political decision. For example, Syria is still on the list
although the State Department testified in 1995 that it had no evidence of
Syrian involvement in terrorism since 1984.
Serbia, on the other hand, is not on the State Department list despite
its support of Bosnian Serbs committing mass atrocities and terrorist acts in
Bosnia.
Purely domestic terrorism does not usually encounter the same problem of definition as international terrorism, in large part because most terrorism involves some criminal act within virtually every criminal justice system, and each state reserves the sovereign right to determinism what is and is not a political crime with in its border. If that right is challenged by a third country, it is ipso fact no longer purely a domestic matter. In states with democratic political systems and the rule of law, domestic terrorism is thus generally treated as a criminal rather than political matter.
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beyond Sovereignty
Even states that ignore the rule of law by conducting special trials
for “political crimes” are constrained to some degree by international norms
of civil and human rights. The risk they take in flouting those norms
completely is that it could encourage other states to intervene in their
domestic affairs which then transforms the problem into an international one.
CHARACTERISTICS OF
TERRORISM
Despite the absence of an
international consensus on how
to define terrorism, there are a number of recognizable characteristics, some
combination of which are inevitably present when particular countries
characterize an act as terrorist. While they do not comprise a formal
definition, they are sufficient to provide a reasonable description of what
terrorism is. It is important to remember, however, that not all these
characteristics are mutually exclusive from either nonterrorist acts of
violence, such as murder, hijacking, or kidnapping, or other forms of nonsanctioned
political violence such as insurgencies, revolutions, or rebellions.
The
characteristics of terrorism can be grouped into five categories: goals,
strategies, operations, organization, and ideology.
As
has already been mentioned, the ultimate goals of all international terrorism
are political. This distinguishes it
from nonpolitical violence by criminal elements or the emotionally disturbed. Most terrorist goals involved s sense of
grievance, real or imagined, which the perpetrators seek to overcome either by
forcing political authorities to accede to their demands or by forcing them
from power entirely. Because the terrorists
are almost always convinced that their political grievances cannot be assuaged
by any other means, terrorism has been called a tactic of last resort, and by
itself is almost never successful in attaining it perpetrators’ stated goals.
Strategies
Terrorist strategy is basically psychological in nature. The first
step is to create mass terror, not mass destruction. Worldwide, there are far
more deaths each year attributed to hunting accidents than to terrorism. The
second step is to manipulate political disaffection created by this psychological
reaction either to intimidate governing authorities into acceding to specified
political demands, or else to get rid of the government entirely.
To
transform reasonable fear into irrational mass hysteria, it is also important
for terrorists to generate the maximum possible publicity for their acts after
the fact. The same principle applies as a tree falling in the forest; if there
is no one there to hear it, it makes no sound. Some terrorist groups are quite
adept at
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manipulating the news media,
which unfortunately are often far too willing to be manipulated in order to
arouse the prurient interests of their readers or listeners. The worldwide
television coverage of the "Munich Massacre" at the 1972 Olympics, in
which nine Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists. Helped to
create a new dimension in terrorist strategy as obscure radical political
groups around the world saw how they could get their message to a mass audience
through media manipulation.
There
are, however, parameters for media manipulation. The most extensive
international news coverage comes from the largest Western media organizations,
particularly those with worldwide coverage such as the Associated Press (AP)
and Cable Network News (CNN) in the United States, Reuters and the British
Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) in Great Britain, and their counterparts in
other major Western European countries. Each news organization has its own
priorities. Of course, government-owned media reflect the priorities if
not necessarily the views of their governments, and private-sector
organizations are influenced in what they cover by the interests of their
audiences at least as much as they are able to influence those audiences by
what they cover. Thus, it only makes good sense for a Third World terrorist
group to choose European and, particularly, American targets if they want
maximum international media coverage.
Operations
The basic characteristic of all
terrorist operations is that they employ violence, either the use or threat
thereof. Because terrorist violence is
unsanctioned under the rule of law, terrorist operations are nearly always
criminal in nature even though terrorism itself has no legal definition. Even terrorist acts sanctioned by state
authorities, such as the aborted Israeli assassination attempt on a Hamas
leader in Jordan on September 25, 1997, are criminal in nature because they are
committed outside the law.
Another characteristic of terrorism is that it is generally
non-combative. The distinction between
terrorism and unconventional warfare is far from precise. Combatants can become targets of terrorist
attacks and noncombatants can be targets of unconventional military forces
(guerrillas and insurgents), or even of goals or objective whereas regular and
irregular military forces do. When
terrorist organizations attack military targets, it is primarily to create fear
among the general population, not to undermine the enemy’s ability to fight.
Finally, despite a great deal of media publicity about
the threat of terrorists acquiring nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons,
which would require a very sophisticated organization with a great deal of
money, most terrorist weapons are extremely cheap and easily available. With a basic knowledge of electronics and
chemistry, an expert can manufacture a bomb powerful enough
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to blow up a city block with
materials purchased at a local fertilizer store and electronics shop for a few
hundred dollars. The implications of this are obvious: There is no practical way to deny to terrorists the raw
materials required to carry out their acts. That explains why groups with
limited means are attracted to terrorism to further their causes, and why
governments support them as a cheap, deniable, covert means of furthering
policy goals.
Organization
The most prevalent
organizational characteristic of terrorism is that it is nearly always carried
out by small groups. Occasionally, one or two individuals not affiliated with a larger
group carry out random acts of terrorism, such as appears to have been the case
in the Oklahoma City bombing, but this is comparatively rare. Because of the
covert, criminal nature of terrorism, small groups are better suited for
maintaining internal security and avoiding detection, and they also provide
better environment for personal bonding among the members.
Independent
small groups are often handicapped financially, however, lacking the means to
raise operating expenses. Many of the most effective terrorist groups,
therefore, are often cells or wings of or allied to larger political groups,
blurring the relationship between terrorism and politics. For example, the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), headed by Yasir Arafat, though often
branded a terrorist group, is in fact a purely political organization made up
of many quasi‑independent Palestinian groups. Some like al-Fatah,
also headed by Arafat, were primarily political in nature, although al-Fatah
created separate special units to conduct terrorism, including Force 17 and
Black September (the latter name was also used as an alias by the Abu Nidal
terrorist organization). Other member organizations of the PLO were almost
entirely dedicated to terrorism, including the Popular Front for the Liberation
of Palestine and its many spin-off groups. Now that the PLO has been
granted a political role in the Palestinian Governing Authority, it is no
longer involved in terrorist activities.
Similarly,
the Stern Gang, and to a lesser extent the Irun, conducted terrorist
activities as a relatively minor aspect of the Israeli military and political
struggle for independence. Following the creation of Israel in 1949, their
leaders also eschewed terrorist tactics.
An
example of a terrorist organization having a political wing rather than the
other way around is the Irish Republican Army (IRA), founded in 1916 to reunite
(mostly Protestant) Northern Ireland with the rest of (Catholic) Ireland. The
IRA created Sinn Fein as its political wing. In later years, however, the IRA
became increasingly politically oriented, and in 1969 the Provisional Irish
Republican Army (PIRA) broke off and has been responsible for most subsequent
unionist terrorist activity in Northern Ireland, while Sinn Fein has steadily
inched toward political legitimacy.
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We have
seen that most individuals become involved and continue to be active in
terrorist groups for highly personal reasons in reaction to some real or imagined
political, economic, or social grievance. We have also noted that a major
characteristic of individual terrorists is their normality and can conclude
that with the exception of a few sociopaths, most members of terrorist groups
consider terrorism to be morally reprehensible in itself, only justifiable as
a means to a morally imperative end. To rationalize such a justification,
nearly every terrorist group espouses some sort of ideology. These ideologies
can be roughly divided into two categories: nationalistic and ethnic ideologies
that seek independence or autonomy for a specific ethnic or national group,
and universalist ideologies that seek political conformity to a specific
religious or secular political dogma or creed.
These categories are not mutually exclusive. For example, Hamas is a
radical Islamist organization that has employed terrorism in the cause of
creating an independent Islamic Palestinian state. Moreover, the two greatest
proponents of universalist doctrinal terrorism in recent times, the former
Soviet Union and republican Iran, used the export of communist and radical
Islamic doctrines respectively as tools of their foreign policies.
With the end of the Cold War, communist terrorism has ceased to be a
major international threat, though left-wing groups still exist. There is
a substantial body of opinion, including those in the U.S. foreign policy-making
establishment, who believe that communist terrorism's place has been taken up
by revolutionary Islamist terrorism, masterminded by Iran. While there is some
truth to the notion that Islamism is the leading doctrinal ideology among
terrorists today, that Iran supports such groups and that they do engage in
limited tactical cooperation, the political dynamics of the Islamist terrorist
groups are overwhelmingly nationalist and ethnic in scope.
In
February 1993 the World Trade Center was bombed, demolishing the underground
parking garage. More then one thousand
people were injured, six were killed, and over $500 million in damage was done.
The perpetrators of the attack were a group of loosely related Islamic
extremists living the New York City area.
The mastermind, Ramzi Yusif, was able to enter the Untied states by
requesting political asylum. Yusif’s
and his coconspirators’ capability to execute this terrors attack was greatly
enhanced by the open societal, technological, and economic forces which are
shaping states and their societies.
Taking
advantage of the civil liberties provided by the United States’ open society,
Yusif was allowed to enter and stay in the country while awaiting his asylum
hearing. The other conspirators were
able to enter and live in t United States by taking advantage of the fact that
the “free movement” of people is a component of
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the country’s open societal and
economic system. The conspirators were able to associate freely together
because of the protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution of their rights
to assemble and to freedom of religious expression.
In
addition, the technology needed to carry out the terrorist attack was readily
available in the United States. The know-how to construct the fertilizer bomb
was widely available in printed form and on the internet, and the means to
deliver the bomb was only as difficult as renting a van at a Ryder Truck rental
office. Finally, the ability of some of
the terrorists to leave the United States so quickly after the bombing was facilitated
by the ease of today's international air travel.
The
terrorist attack on the World Trade Center can be understood as an attack on
the open societies. technologies, and economies that are spreading throughout
the world. Ironically, these forces not only enhance the ability of terrorists
to carry out their attacks, they also can be understood as part of the
motivation for their actions. The operation of open societal, technological,
and economic forces are eroding the very thing that people like Yusif want to
protect, namely, distinctive ethnic, religious, or national identities based
on the sovereign state.
The way countries
organize to fight terrorism has changed radically in the last several decades,
particularly since the end of the Cold War, and is likely to change even more
as we enter the next century. Before looking to the future, however, let us
first review the components of terrorist policy in general and the evolution of
counter-terrorism policy to its present state.
The Components of
Counter-terrorism Policy
The components of
counter-terrorism policies are fairly standard throughout the world. They
include public policy, diplomacy, law enforcement, public security,
intelligence, and the use of force, including covert action. Public policy and
diplomacy have to do with the political aspects of terrorism; law enforcement
and public security have to do with the criminal aspects; intelligence has to
do with the fact that terrorism is largely covert action and to combat it, governments
must know who their foes are and when and where they plan to strike; and the use of force is proactive in contrast to the mainly
reactive tactics of law enforcement and public security.
Traditionally,
public policy is the responsibility of the political leadership; diplomacy, the
responsibility of foreign ministries; law enforcement and public security, the
responsibility of police arid public forces; and intelligence and the
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use of
force is the shared responsibility of intelligence agencies (intelligence collection
and covert action) and the military (military and paramilitary operations and
intelligence collection). Because terrorism is a multifaceted phenomenon,
however, responsibility for combating it crosses over traditional bureaucratic
boundaries. The military gets involved in diplomacy, diplomats get involved in
covert action, and roles of law enforcement and intelligence agencies
constantly overlap.
The first requirement in creating effective counter-terrorism policy,
therefore, is to realign institutional responsibilities. This is not always
easy. Agencies that have jealously guarded their bureaucratic turf must share
responsibilities with rival agencies and cooperate in ways they have never done
before. Domestic intergovernmental bureaucratic rivalries are often an even
greater handicap to effective counter-terrorism policy making than difficulties
in cooperating with other countries.
Problems in coordinating counter-terrorism policy extend beyond
bureaucratic
politics. There is an old saying, "where you stand on an issue depends on
where you sit." Each agency has a bureaucratic point of view as well as a
bureaucratic stake in exercising policy. For politicians, diplomats, and
civilian intelligence officers, terrorism is above all a political issue; for
law enforcement and public security officials, it is primarily a criminal
justice issue; and for military officers, terrorism is considered a type of low-intensity
conflict at the opposite end of the spectrum from nuclear war. None of these
perceptions is incorrect, but none of them alone is sufficient for a well-balanced
policy. The only normative judgment in regard to these different perceptions
is that, in the international arena the political nature of terrorism
predominates.
The Evolution of International
Counter-terrorism Policy
Terrorism has been around as long as recorded
history. Before there were high-tech
explosive devices, there were knives and poisons. In the eleventh to the thirteenth
centuries, a tribe living between Syria and Persia made their livelihood from
political violence, and their name-the Assassins-has stood fro political murder
ever since. In fact, Assassin is a
Western deviation of the Arabic Hashashin, the name given to them because they
regularly imbibed hashish before doing their bloody business, and ironic
reminder that drugs and terrorism have been linked for centuries.
The
evolution of terrorism as a major international policy issue, however, occurred
only in the last quarter century.
Before that it was generally viewed as ancillary to some other
problem. For example, Middle East
terrorism was generally viewed as a subset of the Arab-Israeli problem. IRA terrorism was viewed as a subset of the
Northern Ireland problem, and so on. At
the same time, the
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Cold War created the impression
in the West that the greatest threat of political violence came from communist
insurgent groups supported by the Soviet Union intent on overthrowing
anticommunist regimes. The perception
of a threat distinct from an insurgent threat emerged in the late 1960s from
the worldwide student antiwar protest movement in reaction to the Vietnam War.
It spawned such terrorist organizations as the Bader-Meinhof Group in Germany,
the Italian Red Brigades, and the Japanese Red Army. Following the humiliating
Arab defeat in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, radical Palestinian groups also
began actively using terrorist tactics.
The
United States was the first country actively to view terrorism as a generic
problem. It is easy to see why. The
United States during the Cold War was the favorite
whipping boy of all left-wing dissident groups; and there were more
potential overseas American targets than those from any other country-highly
visible government and private business personnel and their families, as well
as installations. Moreover, targeting Americans abroad and close to the
terrorists’ bases of operations was far less risky than attempting attacks in
the United States. In addition, targeting American persons or installations was
almost certain to generate more media coverage than non-American targets.
Initially, most other countries tended to respond only to incidents in their
own countries, treating them as domestic issues.
Ironically,
the first major contemporary terrorist incident that was truly international in
scope neither involved Americans nor was it the result of the Cold War. In
September 1972, members of al-Fatah's Black September terrorist wing
kidnapped Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. German security forces badly bungled rescue
operations, and as the world looked on in horror the Israelis were killed. As a
result of the incident, the major powers began to review their capabilities
should such an attempt occur within their borders.
While
international cooperation increased in intelligence sharing and security
aspects of counter-terrorism, there was still a gap in political cooperation.
Many countries continued to view terrorism that did not involve their citizens,
property, or territory as someone else's problem; and so long as terrorist organizations
did not conduct operations against them, they would not be bothered residing
within their borders. Those attitudes began to change in the 1980s when a
number of spectacular attacks captured the world's attention, and it became
apparent that without political cooperation, all countries would be at risk. By mid-1995, there were eleven major treaties and
conventions against various kinds of terrorist acts, including such specific
crimes as airline and maritime sabotage, hijacking, hostage-taking,
security of fissionable materials, and protection of diplonlats. As a result,
when the Cold War ended, there was probably more overall cooperation against
international terrorism than against any other global issue.
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Agenda
Looking to the Future
The end
of the Cold War created hopes among many for a
"new world order" in which international tensions would be lowered
and terrorism would fade away. Sober reflection would have indicated that this
was not likely. Despite the broad appeal of communist doctrine among the
politically disaffected during the Cold War, the root causes of terrorism were
then and still are largely local. While the end of the Cold War did reduce
global tensions, it also reduced the discipline of a bipolar world order facing
nuclear holocaust and kept in check by mutually assured destruction.
The breakdown of bipolar discipline has enabled many age-old
national and sub-national ethnic and religious conflicts to reemerge. Terrorist
organizations are much more fragmented, random and thus harder to track than
they were in the Cold War years. The terrorist threat has moved away from externally
financed, highly sophisticated terrorist groups to smaller, less sophisticated,
and more transient groups. Global economic integration has also greatly
facilitated
the freedom of movement of persons, goods, and money; making the logistics of
international terrorism vastly easier.
Relaxation of global tensions has led to a concurrent relaxation of
safeguards against weapons of mass destruction falling into clandestine hands.
Nuclear, chemical, and biological terrorism has never been highly likely. Not
only are weapons relatively hard to manufacture, transport, and conceal, but
all political organizations, even terrorist groups, need constituent support
from a segment of die population. The threat or use of weapons of mass
destruction would be almost certain to risk that support. Nevertheless, the
risk of such an event taking place is so dreadful even to contemplate that
doomsday terrorism must be taken seriously.
Finally,
the end of the Cold War has ironically undermined the interest of sovereign
states in becoming involved in combating terrorism on a
global scale. The strategic threat of such attacks escalating into global
confrontation has all but disappeared, at least for the time being. During the
Cold War, terrorist campaigns were often seen as proxy wars
between the superpowers. What happened in Cuba or Afghanistan or
Vietnam thus took on global strategic dimensions. With the end of the
Cold War, governments are increasingly asking how a terrorist campaign in some
far away part of the world affects their vital interests. This has emboldened
dissident organizations to adopt terrorist tactics by convincing them that no
great power will consider itself any longer sufficiently threatened to justify
intervention.
For all
these reasons, the need to strengthen multilateral approaches to
counter-terrorism policies is greater than ever before. Just because terrorism s no longer a threat
to trigger a global war does not mean it is no longer a major international
threat to peace and stability. It is
not only extremely destructive politically, economically, and socially wherever
it is found, but because violence
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begets violence,
international terrorism always has the potential to spread far beyond the
initial geographical area in which it started.
CONCLUSIONS
AND RECOMMENDATIONS
From this brief overview, we
can reach several conclusions. First, perhaps the greatest change in the
environment of terrorism since the Cold War has been the marked increase in the
ability of people and materials to avoid surveillance in crossing international
borders. This change has made international cooperation all the more vital to
the success of counter-terrorism efforts. Second, there has also been a marked
decline in the national interest of states in combating terrorism now that it
is no longer linked to East-West confrontation. In the absence of the
discipline imposed by the Cold War, it is all too easy to refuse to acknowledge
blatant acts of terrorism that do not directly affect a state and would be both
politically and economically costly to oppose, particularly if a state
supporting
the terrorists applies economic sanctions.
Despite
a lower commitment of many states to counter-terrorism cooperation, however,
the considerable degree of international cooperation against terrorism
developed prior to the end of the Cold War is still in place. Any policy to
increase international cooperation must build on this base. There are many
avenues for doing this, nearly all of which involve creating an international
consensus for not tolerating such acts no matter what the justification.
Probably the most difficult but most important aspect of such a course would be
no longer to tolerate even tacit support of friendly states for terrorist acts.
A first step in creating such a consensus could be a concerted, multinational
effort to depoliticize international terrorism and seek to treat it as a
predominantly criminal justice issue, just as many countries treat domestic
terrorism. The means to conduct terrorism are too cheap, too available, and too uncomplicated to eradicate
it entirely, but by seeking to depoliticize it, perhaps terrorism can eventually be reduced to manageable
proportions.