Dealing with Terrorism: An Overview

For the United States the world has changed dramatically since September 11, 2001. Americans no longer feel secure, although they cannot measure the extent of the danger. Being less secure means, irresistibly, that the United States has to take steps, costly in any of a variety of ways, to help reestablish safety. ¹ What are the possibilities for stopping groups, organized largely abroad, from undertaking sustained campaigns in the United States of lethal terrorism? That--and not the more traditional problem of occasional, low-level terrorism--is the subject of this article. ²

The list of options depends on the human, financial, moral, and political resources the United States is prepared to invest in its capacities for prevention, consequence management, deterrence, and retaliation. This in turn depends on whether the United States should anticipate a sustained terrorist campaign--either by Osama bin Laden or by others inspired by his success--and to what extent any such campaign would involve other catastrophic attacks. Even discounting the threats of bin Laden himself, the case for a major investment in counterterrorism and homeland defense seems strong.

One way to approach how much danger Americans have to fear is to ask, as many have before, why the United States seemed so much better protected against terrorism within its boundaries than other countries such as Great Britain, Germany, France, and Spain (each of which has suffered sustained terrorist campaigns). If we knew what "prevented" such attacks in the United States before, and if we judge what September 11 has changed either in our understanding of that mystery or in terrorist capacities and attitudes, we might be better able to estimate the future.

Here are the possibilities. Perhaps the United States was better able than its allies to detect any plans of attack within its boundaries. Certainly the Federal Bureau of Investigation has aborted several major attacks. On the other hand, the bombing of the World Trade Center on two different occasions (the first in 1993) and the success in bombing U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and bases in Saudi Arabia in 1996 do not support this theory. Either U.S. targets were never better protected than those of America's allies that have been attacked, or terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda have developed new and unanticipated capabilities (such as a cadre of trained terrorists, some of whom are willing to die to target the attack more effectively). In either event, substantial investment is called for.

A second possibility looks at reputation, not reality. Perhaps terrorist groups believed, whether correctly or mistakenly, that it was not possible or it was too risky to engage in terrorism in the United States--at least any massive attack. Then, what the attacks on September 11 would have shown is that the United States had surprising vulnerabilities (particularly to suicide terrorists). Whatever psychological barrier of fear there was seems to have fallen with the World Trade Towers.

A third explanation of the rarity of attacks within U.S. borders by foreign-based terrorists is that they may have recognized that a condition of their organizational existence in a sheltering country such as Syria, Iraq, or Iran was not to bring down the wrath of the United States on their hosts. If so, the vigor of the U.S. response to the Taliban regime in Afghanistan is critical both because of what it does to that particular haven for terrorism and because of what it conveys to other potential havens.

As to massive attacks, terrorists have long been believed reluctant to engage in so lethal an operation, preferring the obvious benefits of a sympathetic audience to the anger generated by massive casualties. This fourth possibility, as well as the technical difficulty of the enterprise, may have explained the relatively low number of massive terrorist attacks in the past and may have prevented biological or nuclear terrorism. If so, the events of September 11 and the terrorist use of anthrax...