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71 The War on Terror GWYN PRINS Terrorism is very strange, very frightening, and appears amorphous, so I want to try to bound the problem. We need to know what it is that we are talking about. Just before 9/11, I chaired a study for the U.K. Ministry of Defense that gave us the opportunity to review what everybody was saying at that time in the open and in some of the not-open literature. In the open literature , without any question, the best study on terrorism that was published before September 11, 2001, was by the Norwegian Defense Search Agency. It pointed out that we were moving into a world in which the security threat to industrial countries from terrorism was most likely to come from what they called “lowprobability high-impact events,” precisely the sort that happened on that September morning. What we did in the study, however, was to define quite closely what we mean by terrorism and what we do not mean by terrorism. So the first part of the proposition is that a terrorist act is, by definition, an act by a nonstate actor. That means that the loose talk about state terrorism is strictly nonsense; it cannot happen. States cannot be terrorists. States do something much worse; they commit Terror with a capitalT: the Committee on Public Safety in the French Revolution, Stalin, Mao. Terror has killed in history far more people than terrorism, and today there is no change from the trends of the 1990s, which is that terrorism as a secular phenomenon in the world is in decline in terms of absolute numbers of attacks and numbers of people killed also. Second, terrorist acts are acts that are aimed deliberately at randomly chosen victims. These are not targeted assassinations. The very point of the terrorist act is that everyone should know that he or she is a potential target because, third, the acts are committed with the intention of compelling involuntary political change; people being made to do things that they would not otherwise want to do. And I suggest that those three are actually rather useful bounding parameters for the concept. Terrorism, in the narrower sense that I have defined it, comes in two variants: conditional and unconditional. Conditional terrorism occurs when a terrorist has a political demand that can be satisfied; that was the position with the FLN in Algeria—they wanted the French out, they wanted an independent Algeria. It was the position with the IRA in Northern Ireland—they wanted the British out; they wanted a united Ireland. It is the position with the Tamil Tigers, and so on. From the EPIIC Symposium at Tufts University, “Dilemmas of Empire and Nationbuilding,” February 2004 72 GLOBAL UNCERTAINTIES Conditional terrorists are quite different from unconditional terrorists in the way in which they behave and the way in which they have to be handled, because unconditional terrorists are people who have no specific demand of you and me because we are infidels and we deserve to die. As the convicted leader of the Aum Shinri Kyo cult in Japan pointed out at the beginning of his trial, the only thing that they were trying to do was to kill very large numbers of people. They did not succeed, fortunately, but that was what they were trying to do. Now what tactics are available? Clearly type-A, conditional terrorism can be addressed in a number of ways because if you are the British government and you are confronted with the IRA you could capitulate. There are many people who think that that is exactly what Tony Blair did with the so-called Good Friday Agreement, that he effectively gave the IRA what they were asking for and therefore they stopped doing further nasty things. Another interpretation of the Good Friday Agreement is that you can bribe a conditional terrorist, you can offer that person something to desist; it may be political, it may be other. If you do not want to deal with the person at all, you can contain that sort of terrorist; you just throw a cordon of some sort such that they cannot get out and they cannot hurt others. Possibly, you can deter such a terrorist. I say “possibly” because I think it is much less clear that deterrence is an open course of action. And, of course, you can get to them before they get to you. You can...

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