Jihadi Terrorism – Where Do We Stand ?
Second IRRI Conference on International terrorism
February 13, 2006

OLD AND NEW TERRORISM - LESSONS LEARNED
Keynote speaker: Prof. Martha Crenshaw, Wesleyan University

The topic that I am addressing is the purported distinction between the "new" terrorism - presumably jihadist - and the "old" one. In the United States, policy leaders and government officials have come to believe that terrorism associated with religion and particularly with Islam is radically new, fundamentally different from the terrorism that went before. From this viewpoint, our understandings of the "old" terrorism are not only irrelevant, but also misleading and dangerous. Applying the old paradigms to the new threat will lead to misguided policies. Proponents of the "new" terrorism argument include former government officials, such as Steven Simon and Daniel Benjamin, and a number of policy makers in the Bush administration. Examples of their arguments can be found in official speeches, in particular those of President Bush.

I wish to criticise this point of view. Terrorism has changed over time, but the difference represents an evolution of the phenomenon and not a radical break between the past and the future of terrorism. From my point of view, the distinction between the "old" and "new" terrorism suffers from at least two flaws: a failure to make a clear distinction between these two concepts and a failure to apply these distinctions to the facts.

People arguing that there is a new terrorism are often vague and contradictory about which groups belong in which category. Whereas the "new" terrorism is always associated with religion, not all religious groups are deemed to be "new" terrorists. For example, the category of "new" terrorists often includes not only contemporary jihadi groups, but also Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese cult responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subways in 1995, and, most curiously, Timothy McVeigh, responsible for the bombing of the Oklahoma City Federal Building in 1995. Sometimes Hezbollah is also put in the category of the "new" terrorists, but not Hamas. The concept thus appears arbitrary. On the other hand, "old" terrorists are not specified with any more detail. Are they groups that acted before 1993 or are they simply all secular and non-religious groups? The explanation is not clear, which makes it hard to apply the distinction in practise.

The distinction between the old and new terrorism is said to lie along three lines. The first has to do with the goals or objectives of the groups; the second has to do with the methods that they use; and the third is the way terrorism is organised. I will deal with each of those.

The goals.
The "new" terrorists are said to be fanatical millenarians who have no concrete political objectives but simply want to destroy, while the "old" terrorists are said to be or to have been pragmatic in their objectives. Their demands were negotiable and could be met. They were reasonable. By contrast, the goals of the "new" terrorists are unlimited. Does this description fit the facts?

First consider the old terrorists. Their objectives were not always reasonable and limited. Clearly, the following are groups that would fall under anybody's definition of the "old." Sendero Luminoso in Peru was a secular organisation that sought to destroy the existing social and political order in order to create a Maoist regime. It had a strong anti-imperialist agenda. The Peruvian government did not regard its demands as negotiable. The Abu Nidal organisation, a secular nationalist Palestinian group, was scarcely a group that had reasonable demands. German and Italian groups in the '70s and '80s thought that they could bring about a revolution at home and destroy NATO and Western imperialism. Look back further in history at the anarchist movement, for whom no bourgeois was innocent.

The applicability of the "new" terrorism concept to the facts is also problematic. Even the strict jihadi groups are not necessarily without strategy or concrete political demands. It is not certain that their goals are exclusively religious; many are tinged with nationalism. In the database maintained by the Oklahoma City Memorial Institution for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) and the Rand Corporation, few groups are classified as purely religious. Most defined as religious are also classified as national-separatist. Many such groups at least began with specific goals: expelling the USSR from Afghanistan, overthrowing the regime in Egypt, or removing American troops from Saudi Arabia. The recent letter (summer 2005) sent by Zawahiri to Zarqawi in Iraq is quite calculating about the way in which terrorism can or cannot lead to an Islamic regime in Iraq.

The means.
According to the "new" terrorism point of view, religious terrorism is inextricably related to the pursuit of mass casualties. Because their goals are religious, the "new" terrorists seek to kill as many people as possible. Thus means and ends are conflated. By extension, such groups are thought to seek "weapons of mass destruction," or "WMD," in order simply to kill more people. Lethality is their hallmark.

By contrast, the old or secular terrorists are said to be discriminating. Their violence is said to be carefully calibrated, going just far enough to achieve their objectives. They were (or are, since it is not clear whether or not they still exist) restrained by their political objectives. They could have killed more people, but they chose not to, because indiscriminate killing would not produce success.

Were the old secular terrorists really so discriminating? Actually it is possible to draw up a long list of attacks that were not selective at all. Certainly, no attack by underground terrorist movements in the preceding years was as destructive as the catastrophe of 9/11. But there were numbers of incidents that produced well over a hundred casualties (e.g., the midair bombing of Pan Am 103, attributed to Libyan agents, or Air India, attributed to Sikh extremists who wanted an independent Punjab).

What about the "new" terrorists? Does religion lead them deliberately to seek mass casualties? Are they more lethal? Analyzing the so-called "new" or jihadi terrorism in terms of total numbers of deaths, the 9/11 attacks are an exception. It was, fortunately, a rare event. Other attacks perpetrated by jihadi groups are extremely and tragically destructive (bombings in Bali, Madrid, and London, for example), but they are not out of proportion to previous or "old" terrorism.

Organisation.
The "new" terrorists are often described as a network rather than an organization. They are said to act out of inspiration rather than at the bidding of leaders issuing orders. The organization of the "old" terrorists, by contrast, is thought to have been hierarchical and centralized. The "new" terrorism is said to be horizontal and flat, whereas the "old" terrorism is vertical and pyramidal.

In reality the "old" terrorist conspiracies are not often as tightly structured as they appear to be. The West German terrorists of the '70s and '80s were composed of different groups often with varying political objectives. They were not monolithic. Many groups permitted the cells that used terrorism to exercise extensive autonomy. Again, returning to the 19th century, the anarchists were certainly not a centralised organisation. They formed a transnational conspiracy that acted on inspiration and shared ideology, not on the basis of direct orders given from the top of an organisation.

Furthermore, jihadi terrorism may be more organized than it appears. The original Al Qaeda operation was a top-down structure. It came into being because Bin Laden kept a list of moudjahidin who had fought in Afghanistan. Certainly, the operations of Zarkawi in Iraq are organised in terms of cells. There is central direction. It is thus a mistake to assume that there is no structure to today's terrorism. It may have more self-generating tendencies than some earlier forms of terrorism (not all: consider the anarchists) but it is not without direction.

This leaves us with the final question: "Why is this point of view so popular in the United States?" I can offer four possible explanations:

The first was the shock of 9/11. The US had enjoyed a state of exceptionalism that was as much a matter of perception as reality. Most Americans did not seem to think that they were vulnerable to mass-casualty terrorism at home. In 1993 and especially in 1995, they began to realise that they were not immune. However, the shock of 9/11 brought the reality of terrorism home in a way the other attacks had not. The combination of simultaneous strikes on major symbols of American power, the surprising method, and the excessive number of casualties was unprecedented. Perhaps the idea that the threat was entirely new was a way of explaining away the country's lack of preparedness.

Furthermore, the assumption that there is a new terrorism provides intellectual support for American policy after 9/11. Justifying a policy shift to a "global war on terrorism" involving military intervention not only in Afghanistan but in Iraq required a new interpretation of the threat.
Furthermore, the assumption of a "new" terrorist threat facilitates decision-making and the construction of counter-terrorism policy. Terrorism is an enormously complicated phenomenon. Understand the worldwide threat in all its complexity, involving many different political and social contexts, requires knowledge of detail. A fully informed assessment would recognize that confusion, incomplete and inconsistent information, and contradictions are common. It is much simpler to have a policy framework that defines the threat (the adversary's intentions and methods are assumed) and prescribes an appropriate response, which is their defeat. It permits top-down processing of information. It replaces ambiguity with certainty.
A last possible explanation is also related to the potential usefulness of simplifying the issue. If those who analyze terrorism, inside and outside of the government, assume that the terrorism that matters dates only from the 1990s, if not 2001, then they are spared the effort of studying the long and complicated history of the phenomenon. Their task is thus made much easier. Analysis can start fifteen years ago, at the most. There is no need to compare the present to the past.

Let me conclude with two thoughts about why the new terrorism interpretation might be dangerous.

The first is that it can obscure an understanding of the real causes of change in terrorism. Many changes have to do with the environment in which terrorism occurs rather than the intentions of actors. Two major changes stand out. One is the set of processes we term globalisation, which provides terrorists access to resources and opportunities. Small non-state conspiracies gain capabilities that are disproportionate to their size and level of popular support. They can communicate, organize, and mobilize assets across borders with ease. The ideas and images that motivate terrorism are transmitted across the globe almost instantaneously. Second, specific historical events and circumstances have determined the trajectory of terrorism. Just as the civil war in Lebanon provided a hospitable environment for groups as disparate as the Japanese Red Army and the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia, as well as Palestinian and Lebanese groups, so did the chaos that followed the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan permit the establishment of Al Qaeda. Iraq may provide similar opportunities.

Second, the "new" terrorism thesis tends to blame terrorism on religion. Two consequences follow: (1) Although its proponents acknowledge that many different religious doctrines have been associated with terrorism, Islam receives by far the most attention. There is thus a risk of encouraging stereotyping and prejudice. (2) This interpretation also neglects the political and social aspects of terrorism. It thus provides at best a partial picture.

Instead we should regard contemporary forms of terrorism as the result of an evolutionary process. Extremist groups tempted to use violence have adapted to changing circumstances. Change has been gradual, not abrupt, despite the shock of the 9/11 attacks. We should be careful not to infer patterns from rare events.