Terrorism
Cognitive Lesson Objective:
• Know the fundamentals of terrorism and its impact on US policy.
Cognitive Samples of Behavior:
• State the definition of terrorism according to Joint Publication 3-07.2.
• Describe the three typologies of terrorists and terror groups.
• List the six possible terrorist objectives as described in the lesson.
• State the most common terrorist tactic.
• State the four enduring policy principles that guide US counterterrorism
strategy.
• Outline the seven-step terrorist planning cycle.
Affective Lesson Objective:
• Respond to the importance of studying critical aspects of terrorism
and understanding the effect it has on US national objectives.
Affective Samples of Behavior:
• Independently read the assigned student reader.
• Discuss how combating terrorism is important to you as a member of
the US Armed Forces.
46 TERRORISM
Bruce Hoffman, A. B., B. Phil., D. Phil.
Vice President for External Affairs, Director of the Washington Office, Rand Corporation
T
errorism—the deliberate creation and exploitation of fear for bringing about
political change. All terrorist acts involve violence or, equally important, the threat
of violence. These violent acts are committed by nongovernmental groups or
individuals—that is, by those who are neither part of nor officially serving in the military
forces, law enforcement agencies, intelligence services, or other governmental agencies
of an established nation-state.
Terrorists attempt not only to sow panic but also to undermine confidence in the government
and political leadership of their target country. Terrorism is therefore designed to have
psychological effects that reach far beyond its impact on the immediate victims or object
of an attack. Terrorists mean to frighten and thereby intimidate a wider audience, such
as a rival ethnic or religious group, an entire country and its political leadership, or the
international community as a whole.
Terrorist groups generally have few members, limited firepower, and comparatively few
organizational resources. For this reason they rely on dramatic, often spectacular, bloody
and destructive acts of hit-and-run violence to attract attention to themselves and their
cause. Through the publicity generated by their violence, terrorists seek to obtain the
leverage, influence, and power they otherwise lack.
What is Terrorism?
The word terrorism was first used in France to describe a new system of government
adopted during the French Revolution (1789-1799). The regime de la terreur (Reign of
Terror) was intended to promote democracy and popular rule by ridding the revolution
of its enemies and thereby purifying it. However, the oppression and violent excesses
of the terreur transformed it into a feared instrument of the state. From that time on,
terrorism has had a decidedly negative connotation. The word, however, did not gain
wider popularity until the late nineteenth century when it was adopted by a group of
Russian revolutionaries to describe their violent struggle against tsarist rule. Terrorism
then assumed the more familiar antigovernment associations it has today.
Terrorism as a Political Act
Terrorism is by nature political because it involves the acquisition and use of power for
the purpose of forcing others to submit, or agree, to terrorist demands. A terrorist attack,
by generating publicity and focusing attention on the organization behind the attack, is
designed to create this power. It also fosters an environment of fear and intimidation that
the terrorists can manipulate. As a result terrorism’s success is best measured by its
Terrorism 47 ability to attract attention to the terrorists and their cause and by the psychological impact
it exerts over a nation and its citizenry. It differs in this respect from conventional warfare,
where success is measured by the amount of military assets destroyed, the amount of
territory seized, and the number of enemy dead.
Terrorists typically attempt to justify their use of violence by arguing that they have been
excluded from, or frustrated by, the accepted processes of bringing about political change.
They maintain that terrorism is the only option available to them, although their choice is
a reluctant—even a regrettable—one. Whether someone agrees with this argument or
not often depends on whether the person sympathizes with the terrorists’ cause or with
the victims of the terrorist attack. The aphorism “One man’s terrorist is another man’s
freedom fighter” underscores how use of the label terrorism can be highly subjective
depending upon one’s sympathies.
At the same time terrorist acts—including murder, kidnapping, bombing, and arson—have
long been defined in both national and international law as crimes. Even in time of war,
violence deliberately directed against innocent civilians is considered a crime. Similarly,
violence that spreads beyond an acknowledged geographical theater of war to violate the
territory of neutral or noncombatant states is also deemed a war crime.
Government Definitions of Terrorism
Legal statutes in most countries around the world regard terrorism as a crime. Yet there is
considerable variation in how these laws define terrorism, even in countries whose laws
derive from a common origin.
In the United Kingdom, for example, legislation titled Terrorist Act 2000 states that
terrorism is “the use or threat of action. . .designed to influence the government or to
intimidate the public or a section of the public. . .for the purpose of advancing a political,
religious or ideological cause.” The legal system and code of law of the United Kingdom
has influenced those of the United States, Canada, and Israel.
United States federal statute defines terrorism as “violent acts or acts dangerous to
human life that. . .appear to be intended (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
(ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect
the conduct of a government by assassination or kidnapping.” This definition appears in
United States Code, Title 18, Section 2331 (18 USC 2331). Canada’s Anti-terrorism Act
(Bill C-36) designates “terrorist activity” as “an act or omission. . .that is committed in whole
or in part for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause and in whole or
in part with the intention of intimidating the public, or a segment of the public, with regard
to its security, including its economic security, or compelling a person, a government or a
domestic or an international organization to do or to refrain from doing any act, whether
the person, government or organization is inside or outside Canada . . . .”
48 Israeli law does not address terrorism specifically. But in the Prevention of Terrorism
Ordinance No. 33, it defines a terrorist organization as “a body of persons resorting in its
activities to acts of violence calculated to cause death or injury to a person or to threats
of such acts of violence.”
Causes of Terrorism
Terrorism has occurred throughout history for a variety of reasons. Its causes can be
historical, cultural, political, social, psychological, economic, or religious—or any
combination of these. Some countries have proven to be particularly susceptible to
terrorism at certain times, as Italy and West Germany were during the 1970s. Terrorist
violence escalated precipitously in those two countries for a decade before declining
equally dramatically. Other countries, such as Canada and The Netherlands, have proven
to be more resistant, and have experienced only a few isolated terrorist incidents.
In general, democratic countries have provided more fertile ground for terrorism because
of the open nature of their societies. In such societies citizens have fundamental rights,
civil liberties are legally protected, and government control and constant surveillance of
its citizens and their activities is absent. By the same token, repressive societies, in which
the government closely monitors citizens and restricts their speech and movement, have
often provided more difficult environments for terrorists. But even police states have not
been immune to terrorism, despite limiting civil liberties and forbidding free speech and
rights of assembly. Examples include Russia under tsarist rule and the Communist-ruled
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, as well as the People’s Republic of China, Myanmar,
and Laos.
In broad terms the causes that have commonly compelled people to engage in terrorism
are grievances born of political oppression, cultural domination, economic exploitation,
ethnic discrimination, and religious persecution. Perceived inequities in the distribution of
wealth and political power have led some terrorists to attempt to overthrow democratically
elected governments. To achieve a fairer society, they would replace these governments
with socialist or communist regimes. Left-wing terrorist groups of the 1960s and 1970s
with such aims included Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang, Italy’s Red Brigades, and the
Weather Underground in the United States. Other terrorists have sought to fulfill some
mission that they believe to be divinely inspired or millennialist (related to the end of the
world). The Japanese religious cult Aum Shinrikyo, responsible for a nerve gas attack on
the Tokyo subway in 1995 that killed 12 people, falls into this category. Still other terrorists
have embraced comparatively more defined and comprehensible goals such as the reestablishment of a national homeland (for example, Basque separatists in Spain) or the
unification of a divided nation (Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland).
Finally, some terrorists are motivated by very specific issues, such as opposition to legalized
abortion or nuclear energy, or the championing of environmental concerns and animal
rights. They hope to pressure both the public and its representatives in government to
enact legislation directly reflecting their particular concern. Militant animal rights activists,
for example, have used violence against scientists and laboratory technicians in their
Terrorism 49 campaign to halt medical experimentation involving animals. Radical environmentalists
have sabotaged logging operations and the construction of power grids to protest the
spoiling of natural wilderness areas. Extremists who oppose legalized abortion in the
United States have attacked clinics and murdered doctors and other employees in hopes
of denying women the right to abortion.
National governments have at times aided terrorists to further their own foreign policy
goals. So-called state-sponsored terrorism, however, falls into a different category
altogether. State-sponsored terrorism is a form of covert (secret) warfare, a means to
wage war secretly through the use of terrorist surrogates (stand-ins) as hired guns.
The US Department of State designates countries as state sponsors of terrorism if they
actively assist or aid terrorists, and also if they harbor past terrorists or refuse to renounce
terrorism as an instrument of policy.
State sponsorship has proven invaluable to some terrorist organizations—by supplying
arms, money, and a safe haven, among other things. In doing so, it has transformed
ordinary groups, with otherwise limited capabilities, into more powerful and menacing
opponents. State sponsorship can also place at terrorists’ disposal the resources of an
established country’s diplomatic, military, and intelligence services. These services improve
the training of terrorists and facilitate planning and operations. Finally, governments have
paid terrorists handsomely for their services. They thereby turn weak and financially
impoverished groups into formidable, well-endowed terrorist organizations with an ability
to attract recruits and sustain their struggle.
The US Department of State has designated seven countries as state sponsors of terrorism:
Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Cuba, North Korea, and Sudan. (NOTE: As of publication date,
only Cuba, Iran, Sudan, and Syria remain on this list.) In the year 2000, it named Iran
as the most active supporter of terrorism for aid to groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas,
and Palestine Islamic Jihad. Although the former Taliban government in Afghanistan
sponsored al-Qaeda, the radical group led by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, the United
States did not recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government and thus did not list it as
a state sponsor of terrorism.
The Increasing Deadliness of Terrorist Attacks
Although the total number of terrorist incidents worldwide declined during the 1990s, the
number of people killed in terrorist incidents increased. Thus, while terrorists may have
become less active, they also became alarmingly more lethal. One key factor behind this
trend is the amount of terrorism motivated by religious views, as were the attacks on New
York City’s World Trade Center, the Pentagon in Arlington, VA, and the suspected attempt
on the White House - which resulted in a crash in a Pennsylvania field - on 11 September
2001. Terrorism motivated by religion has frequently led to acts of violence with higher
levels of fatalities than the relatively more targeted incidents of violence perpetrated by
many secular (nonreligious) terrorist organizations.
50 Another key factor that has contributed to terrorism’s rising deadliness is the ease of
access to a range of low-tech and high-tech weapons. At the low-end of the weapons
spectrum, terrorists rely on guns and bombs, as they have for more than a century. At
the high end of the spectrum, there is evidence that groups such as al-Qaeda seek to
acquire chemical, biological, and even nuclear weapons. Other terrorist groups, such as
Aum Shinrikyo, already have carried out terrorist attacks using biological and chemical
weapons. It is feared that the nuclear weapons stockpiles of the former Soviet Union
could produce an international black market in fissionable materials that terrorists might
potentially obtain. Finally, in the middle range of the weapons spectrum the world is awash
in sophisticated items available to terrorists everywhere, including plastic explosives and
hand-held, precision-guided surface-to-air missiles (SAMs).
An increase of suicide attacks has also contributed to terrorism’s rising death count.
Suicide attacks differ from other terrorist operations, because the perpetrator’s own death
is a requirement for the attack’s success. Suicide bombers, therefore, are typically highly
motivated, passionately dedicated individuals who decide voluntarily or upon persuasion
to surrender their lives in fulfillment of their mission.
A wave of suicide attacks began in 1981 in Beirut, Lebanon, when a group called Al-Dawa
used a car bomb to blow up the Iraqi Embassy. Al-Dawa, (“the call” in Arabic, as in “the call
for Holy War”) was a terrorist organization composed of Shia Muslims from Iraq who were
backed by Iran. (Muslims belonging to the Shia branch of Islam form a minority in Iraq
but the majority in Iran.) The Beirut attack killed 61 people and wounded more than 100
others. In 1983 a truck filled with explosives drove into the US embassy in Beirut, killing
49 and wounding 120 others. It was followed later that year by a suicide bombing of US
Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241 persons. A group called Islamic Jihad claimed
responsibility for both attacks. Another suicide bombing destroyed a Jewish community
center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1994, killing 96 persons. More recently, al-Qaeda
staged attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, causing nearly 300
deaths; on a US Navy warship the USS Cole in 2000, causing 19 deaths; and during the
tragic events of 11 September 2001, causing about 3,000 deaths. Many of the attacks
carried out by Palestinian organizations, such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in Israel and
the Occupied Territories have involved suicide bombings. Other terrorist groups also have
adopted this tactic, including Tamil separatists fighting in Sri Lanka and India, and Kurdish
separatists in Turkey. These separatists belong to ethnic minorities that seek to set up
separate homelands.
Terrorists today claim credit less frequently for their attacks than they once did, a fact
that also reflects terrorism’s increasing deadliness. Unlike today’s reticent terrorists, the
more traditional terrorist groups of the 1970s and 1980s not only issued communiqués
explaining why they perpetrated an attack but also boasted proudly after a particularly
destructive or deadly operation. The current trend toward less communication implies that
violence may be less a means to an end than an end in itself for some terrorist groups.
In other words, terrorists today may use violence simply as vengeance or punishment
rather than as a means to achieve political change. Therefore, their actions require no
explanation or justification outside the terrorist group itself or its supporters.
Terrorism 51 Characteristics of Terrorist Attacks
Planning and Organization. All terrorists share one characteristic: They never commit
actions randomly or senselessly. Every terrorist wants an attack to generate maximum
publicity because media attention helps achieve the intimidation needed for terrorism’s
success. Accordingly, terrorist acts are carefully planned. Testimony by a terrorist convicted
in the 1998 bombing of the US embassy in Kenya revealed that al-Qaeda spent nearly
five years planning the attack.
Several essential elements go into planning a major terrorist attack. Planning begins
with gathering detailed reconnaissance and intelligence about a target: its defenses,
vulnerabilities, and patterns of daily activity. Meanwhile, logistics specialists ensure that
all the supporting tasks are accomplished. These tasks include assembling the weapons
and other supplies and communications equipment needed for the operation, arranging
for safe houses and transportation for the terrorist attack team, and mapping escape
routes. A bombmaker or other weapons expert often joins the final planning phases.
Finally, after all the preparations have been completed, the operation is handed off to the
team that carries out the attack. For security reasons separate teams that do not know
one another execute each step, from planning to logistics, attack, and escape.
All terrorist groups share another basic characteristic: secrecy about their operations.
Terrorism operates underground, concealed from the eyes of the authorities and from
potential informants among the populace. To maintain secrecy, terrorist groups are often
organized into cells, with each cell separate from other cells in the organization but working
in harmony with them. A terrorist cell can be as small as two or three people, with only one
person knowing someone in another cell. Should the authorities apprehend a member of
one cell, they can obtain information only about the activities of that cell—or at most about
an adjacent cell—and not about the entire organization. For this reason terrorists prefer
this organizational structure of interconnected cells. The structure narrows, in pyramid
fashion, as it rises toward the group’s senior command structure and leadership at the
top, to whom very few have access.
Targets of Terrorism. Terrorism often targets innocent civilians in order to create an
atmosphere of fear, intimidation, and insecurity. Some terrorists deliberately direct attacks
against large numbers of ordinary citizens who simply happen to be in the wrong place at
the wrong time.
More selective terrorist attacks target diplomats and diplomatic facilities such as embassies
and consulates; military personnel and military bases; business executives and corporate
offices; and transportation vehicles and facilities, such as airlines and airports, trains
and train stations, buses and bus terminals, and subways. Terrorist attacks on buildings
or other inanimate targets often serve a symbolic purpose: They are intended more to
draw attention to the terrorists and their cause than to destroy property or kill and injure
persons, although death and destruction nonetheless often result.
52 Despite variations in the number of attacks from year to year, one feature of international
terrorism has remained constant: The United States has been its most popular target.
Since 1968 the United States has annually led the list of countries whose citizens and
property were most frequently attacked by terrorists. Several factors can account for this
phenomenon, in addition to America’s position as the sole remaining superpower and
leader of the free world. These include the geographical scope and diversity of America’s
overseas business interests, the number of Americans traveling or working abroad, and
the many US military bases around the world.
Demand of Terrorism. The demands of terrorist groups have ranged from such grand
schemes as the total remaking of society along ideological lines to far narrower goals such
as the release of hostages for money or the publication of a tract stating the terrorists’
goals. During the 1970s and 1980s Marxist-Leninist groups such as the Baader-Meinhof
Gang (later renamed the Red Army Faction) in West Germany and the Red Brigades in
Italy waged campaigns to remake society along communist lines. Radical Islamic groups
have pursued the creation of devoutly religious theocracies (governments under divine
guidance). These groups include Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, the Abu
Sayyaf group in the Philippines, and the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria. Other groups
seek narrower goals, such as the reestablishment of a national homeland within an existing
country, as does the Basque separatist movement active in Spain, or the unification of a
divided nation, as do Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland.
Impact of Terrorism. Although most terrorist groups have failed to achieve their longterm, strategic aims through terrorism, terrorism has on occasion brought about significant
political changes that might otherwise have been impossible. Moreover, despite the claims
of governments to the contrary, terrorism has sometimes also proven successful on a
short-term, tactical level: winning the release of prisoners, wresting political concessions
from otherwise resistant governments, or ensuring that causes and grievances that might
otherwise have been ignored or neglected were addressed.
Terrorism was used by some nationalist movements in the anticolonial era just after World
War II, when British and French empires in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East dissolved.
Countries as diverse as Israel, Cyprus, Kenya, and Algeria owe their independence to
these movements.
Evidence of terrorist success has come more recently in the examples of Gerry Adams
and Martin McGuinness in Northern Ireland and Yasir Arafat in the Middle East. Adams,
president of the political wing of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland, and
his deputy McGuinness both won election to the British Parliament in 1997. Arafat, as
leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), won international recognition for
the PLO. Through tactical victories and political achievements, each of their organizations
demonstrated how a series of terrorist acts can propel to world attention long-standing
causes and grievances.
Terrorism 53 At the same time, for every terrorist success, there are the countless failures. Most
terrorist groups never achieve any of their aims—either short-term or long-term. The life
span of most modern terrorist groups underscores this failure. According to one estimate,
the life expectancy of at least 90 percent of terrorist organizations is less than a year, and
nearly half of the organizations that make it that far cease to exist within a decade of their
founding.
Terrorism is designed to threaten the personal safety of its target audience. It can tear
apart the social fabric of a country by destroying business and cultural life and the mutual
trust upon which society is based. Uncertainty about where and when the next terrorist
attack will occur generates a fear that terrorism experts call “vicarious victimization.” A
common response to this fear is the refusal to visit shopping malls; attend sporting events;
go to the theater, movies, or concerts; or travel, either abroad or within one’s own country.
The public’s perception of personal risk, however, often does not dovetail with the
observable dimensions of the terrorist threat. Even though the United States was the
country most frequently targeted by terrorists from 1968 to 2000, fewer than 1,000
Americans were killed by terrorists, either in the United States or abroad, during that 32year period, according to figures tabulated by the US State Department and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. Although more than three times that number were killed on 11
September 2001, the fact remains that the perception of the terrorist threat far outweighs
the likelihood of being the victim of a terrorist attack. Nonetheless, terrorism’s ability to
engender so acute a sense of fear and unease is a measure of its impact on our daily life.
According to official Canadian government sources, no reliable list of terrorist incidents
in Canada exists. An unofficial estimate, however, puts the number of Canadians killed
by terrorists both in Canada and overseas since 1968 at roughly 294 persons. This figure
includes 279 Canadian citizens among a total of 329 persons killed in 1985 when a bomb
exploded aboard an Air India flight en route from Montréal, Québec, to London, England.
History
Early Terrorism. More than 2,000 years ago the first known acts of what we now call
terrorism were perpetrated by a radical offshoot of the Zealots, a Jewish sect active in
Judea during the first century A.D. The Zealots resisted the Roman Empire’s rule of what
is today Israel through a determined campaign primarily involving assassination. Zealot
fighters used the sica, a primitive dagger, to attack their enemies in broad daylight, often
in crowded market places or on feast days—essentially wherever there were people
to witness the violence. Thus, like modern terrorists, the Zealots intended their actions
to communicate a message to a wider target audience: in this instance, the Roman
occupation forces and any Jews who sympathized or collaborated with the invaders.
54 Between 1090 and 1272 an Islamic movement known as the Assassins used similar
tactics in their struggle against the Christian Crusaders who had invaded what is today
part of Syria. The Assassins embraced the same notions of self-sacrifice and suicidal
martyrdom evident in some Islamic terrorist groups today. They regarded violence as a
sacramental or divine act that ensured its perpetrators would ascend to a glorious heaven
should they perish during the task.
The French Revolution to World War I. Until the French Revolution (1789-1799),
religion provided the main justification for the use of terrorism. This situation changed,
however, as nationalism, anarchism, Marxism, and other secular political movements
emerged during the 1800s to challenge divine rule by monarchs.
Modern terrorism was initially antimonarchical, embraced by rebels and constitutionalists
during the late stages of the French Revolution and in Russia by the People’s Will
(Narodnaya Volya) organization.
The People’s Will was active between 1878 and 1881. Its revolutionary, antigovernment
orientation became the model for future terrorists. The group selected targets that
represented the state’s oppressive instruments of power, and it embraced “propaganda
by the deed,” using the terrorist act to instruct. It sought thereby to educate the public
about the inequities imposed on them by the state and to rally support for revolution.
Among the terrorists’ targets were the governor general of Saint Petersburg, the head of
the tsarist secret police, and even the tsar himself. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by
a member of the People’s Will in March 1881.
The assassination of Alexander II, in particular, inspired a group of political radicals who
met in London four months later, in July 1881, to discuss how to achieve revolution that
was worldwide, not just national. Their idea was to create an Anarchist International, also
called the Black International after the black flag they adopted, to coordinate and support a
global terrorist campaign that would overthrow both monarchies and elected governments
of democratic states, including the United States. Between 1881 and the first decade of
the twentieth century, anarchists assassinated an American president (William McKinley);
the president of France and Spain’s prime minister; Empress Elisabeth of Austria and
King Humbert I (Umberto I) of Italy.
Anarchist elements also became involved in, and were accused of fomenting, labor unrest
in the United States. Sometimes these disputes turned bloody as a result of anarchist
agitation. The most infamous incident was the 1886 Haymarket Square Riot in Chicago,
where a bomb exploded in the midst of a demonstration by some 3,000 striking factory
workers and their supporters. In the confusion that followed, both the police and armed
demonstrators opened fire on one another. Seven policeman were killed and at least 60
others were wounded. At least four demonstrators were also killed, but no accurate tally
of their death count exists.
Terrorism 55 An act of terrorism involving the assassination of a royal heir is credited with lighting
the fuse that ignited World War I. On 28 June 1914, a young Bosnian Serb radical
named Gavrilo Princip, seeking to free his country from Austrian rule, murdered Austrian
archduke Francis Ferdinand, who was on an official visit to Sarajevo, Bosnia. The militant
student group to which Princip belonged had close ties to the intelligence service and
military forces of Serbia, Austria’s archenemy in the Balkans. Like many contemporary
state sponsors of terrorism, Serbia also provided arms, training, intelligence, and other
assistance to a variety of revolutionary movements in neighboring nations.
Government Terror: From the 1920s On. During the 1920s and 1930s, terrorism
became associated more with the repressive practices employed by dictatorial states than
with the violence of nonstate groups like the anarchists. The word terrorism was used to
describe the wanton violence and intimidation inflicted by the Nazi, fascist, and totalitarian
regimes that respectively came to power in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union. The
repressive means these governments employed against their citizens involved beatings,
unlawful detentions, torture, so-called death squads (often consisting of off-duty or plainclothes security or police officers), and other forms of intimidation. Such practices by
governments against their own citizens continue today.
Recent history records the use of such measures by the military dictatorships that took
power in Argentina, Chile, and Greece during the 1970s. But these state-sanctioned acts
of violence are more generally termed terror to distinguish them from violence committed
by nonstate entities. As noted previously, the word terrorism is generally reserved for acts
committed by groups outside government.
Anticolonialist Terrorism. After World War II, terrorism reverted to its previous
revolutionary associations. During the 1940s and 1950s, “terrorism” was used to describe
the violence perpetrated by indigenous nationalist, anticolonialist organizations that arose
throughout Asia, Africa, and the Middle East in opposition to continued European rule.
Countries such as Israel, Kenya, Cyprus, and Algeria, for example, owe their independence
at least in part to nationalist movements that used terrorism.
The most spectacular terrorist incident of the anticolonial period was the 1946 bombing of
Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, by a Jewish underground group known as the Irgun Zvai
Le’umi (National Military Organization). The hotel was attacked because it served at that
time as the military headquarters and offices of the British administration in Palestine.
Ninety-one people were killed and 45 others injured: men, women, Arabs, Jews, and
Britons alike. The bombing ranks among the most deadly terrorist incidents of the
twentieth century. The Irgun’s commander at the time was Menachem Begin, a future
prime minister of Israel and 1978 Nobel Peace Prize cowinner.
Begin is not alone among those once called terrorists who later ascended to the highest
levels of power in their newly independent countries. Others include Kenya’s president
Jomo Kenyatta, Cyprus’s Archbishop Makarios, and Algeria’s president Ahmed Ben Bella.
56 The Late 1960s and 1970s. During the late 1960s and 1970s terrorism assumed more
clearly ideological motivations. Various disenfranchised or exiled nationalist minorities—
as exemplified by the PLO—also embraced terrorism as a means to draw attention to
their plight and generate international support for their cause. The PLO sought to create
a state in what was historically known as Palestine: the land that became Israel in 1948
and the West Bank and Gaza Strip—territories occupied by Israel since the Six-Day War
of 1967. A Palestinian group, in fact, was responsible for the incident that is considered
to mark the beginning of the current era of international terrorism. On 22 July 1968, three
armed Palestinians belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)
hijacked an Israeli El Al commercial flight en route from Rome, Italy, to Tel Aviv, Israel.
Although commercial planes had often been hijacked before, this was the first clearly
political hijacking. The act was designed to create an international crisis and thereby
generate publicity.
Two years later, the PFLP staged an even more dramatic international incident, when it
hijacked three commercial airliners—two American and one Swiss—although an attempt
to seize a fourth plane, a British aircraft, was foiled. The planes were flown to a remote
airstrip in Jordan and blown up after the passengers were evacuated, as television
cameras recorded the incident for a worldwide audience.
The murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games provides one of the most
notorious examples of terrorists’ ability to bring their cause to world attention. Members
of a Palestinian group called Black September seized the athletes at the Summer Games
held in Munich, Germany. A global audience that had tuned in to watch the Olympics
found themselves witnessing a grisly hostage situation that ended in a botched rescue
attempt by German authorities in which both the terrorists and their captives were killed.
The PLO effectively exploited the publicity generated by the Munich hostage taking. In
1974 PLO leader Yasir Arafat received an invitation to address the UN General Assembly
and the UN subsequently granted special observer status to the PLO. Within a decade,
the PLO, an entity not attached to any state, had formal diplomatic relations with more
countries (86) than did Israel (72)—the actual, established nation-state. The PLO would
likely never have attained such recognition without the attention that its international
terrorist campaign focused on the plight of Palestinians in refugee camps.
At a time of growing ethnic and nationalist awareness worldwide, other nationalist groups
began to emulate the Palestinian example to increase recognition of their grievances.
In Canada, for instance, a group of French-Canadian separatists kidnapped James
Cross, the British trade commissioner to Québec, and Pierre LaPorte, Québec’s Minister
of Labor, in October 1970. The group called itself the Front de Libération de Québec
(FLQ), or Quebec Liberation Front. Although Cross was released unharmed, LaPorte
was brutally murdered. Fearing more widespread unrest, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre
Trudeau invoked the country’s War Powers Act in Québec, which suspended civil liberties
and accorded the army extraordinary powers to maintain order in the province and uproot
the FLQ.
Terrorism 57 Also during the late 1960s and early 1970s, political extremists began to form terrorist
groups that opposed American intervention in Vietnam and what they claimed were the
fundamental social and economic inequities of the modern capitalist liberal-democratic
state. These extremists were drawn mostly from radical student organizations and leftwing movements then active in Latin America, Western Europe, and the United States.
Terrorist groups such as the BaaderMeinhof Gang in Germany and the Red Brigades in Italy received training at Palestinian
camps in the Middle East. Among Baader-Meinhof’s most famous acts was the 1977
kidnapping and murder of Hanns Martin Schleyer, a wealthy Germany industrialist. The
Red Brigades achieved their greatest notoriety for the kidnapping and execution of former
Italian Premier Aldo Moro in 1978.
The 1980s and 1990s. Right-wing, or neo-fascist and neo-Nazi, terrorism movements
also arose in many Western European countries and the United States during the late
1970s in response to the violence perpetrated by left-wing organizations. However,
the right-wing groups lacked both the numbers and popular support that their left-wing
counterparts enjoyed. Thus the violence of these right-wing groups—while occasionally
quite deadly—was mostly sporadic and short-lived. The three most serious incidents
connected to right-wing terrorists occurred in Bologna, Italy; Munich, Germany; and
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In Bologna a 1980 bombing of a crowded rail station killed
84 people and wounded 180 others. The date of the bombing coincided with the opening
of a trial in Bologna of right-wingers accused of a 1976 train bombing. Also in 1980 a
bomb planted by a member of a neo-fascist group exploded at Munich’s Oktoberfest
celebration, killing 14 and injuring 215 others. In 1995 white supremacists carried out a
truck-bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which claimed
the lives of 168 people.
Two of the most important developments in international terrorism during the 1980s
were the rise in state-sponsored terrorism and the resurgence of religious terrorism. An
example of an attack believed to be state sponsored was the attempted assassination in
1981 of Pope John Paul II by a Turkish citizen who allegedly was working for the Soviet
and Bulgarian secret services. Other examples include the Iranian-backed car- and truckbombings of the American embassy and US Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983
and Libya’s role in the in-flight bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in
1988. Religion was used to justify and legitimize, if not actually encourage, terrorist violence in
the assassinations of Egypt’s president Anwar al-Sadat in 1981 by Islamic extremists and
of Israel’s prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1994 by a Jewish militant. In both cases the
assassins considered it a religious duty to halt the peace efforts of their victims. Muslim
terrorists carried out the bombing of New York City’s World Trade Center in 1993, and
an obscure Japanese religious sect was behind the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo
subway. Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization carried out simultaneous suicide
58 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998; a suicide attack in
2000 on a US navy warship in the harbor of Aden, Yemen; and the suicide attacks of 11
September 2001.
11 September Attacks. The events of 11 September 2001, have no precedent in the
history of terrorism. On that day 19 terrorists belonging to bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization
hijacked four passenger aircraft shortly after they departed from airports in Boston,
Massachusetts; Newark, New Jersey; and Washington, D.C. The first plane crashed into
the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City shortly before 9:00 am. About
15 minutes later, a second aircraft struck the south tower. Shortly afterward, a third plane
crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. A fourth aircraft crashed into a field in
rural Pennsylvania after its passengers, hearing by cell phone of the other hijackings,
attempted to take control of the plane from the hijackers before they could strike another
target. Before 11 September, terrorists had killed no more than about 1,000 Americans,
in the United States and abroad, during the modern era of international terrorism, which
began in 1968. Approximately three times that number perished on 11 September.
The attacks also showed a level of patience and detailed planning rarely seen among
terrorist movements today. The hijackers stunned the world with their determination to kill
themselves and take the lives of the hijacked passengers and crews as well as the lives
of thousands of people working in or visiting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The United States reacted by declaring a global war against terrorism. In the first phase
of the war, US forces launched a massive attack on al-Qaeda’s training and logistics
bases in Afghanistan and toppled Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban movement. The Taliban
had provided bin Laden and his followers with sanctuary and an opportunity to plan and
orchestrate their worldwide terrorist campaign.
The 11 September attacks prompted intense scrutiny of why the United States government
had failed to detect or thwart the attacks—and what it should do to prevent future attacks.
In 2003 a congressional inquiry detailed systemic problems in the US government’s
counterterrorism efforts prior to the attacks. It revealed how the terrorists had entered
and remained in the United States without raising suspicions, and how key opportunities
to disrupt the attack were missed because of poor communication between the FBI, CIA,
and other government agencies.
In 2004 an independent, bipartisan commission released an exhaustive account of
the circumstances surrounding the attacks. The 9/11 Commission, known in full as the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, found “failures of
imagination, policy, capability, and management” across the government. Government
leaders, it said, had failed to fully appreciate the sophistication and lethality of al-Qaeda
and the probability that the group would launch an attack on US soil.
The commission recommended a three-pronged strategy for preventing future attacks:
(1) continuing to root out and attack terrorists, (2) preventing the further growth of Islamist
terrorism, and (3) developing better protections against terrorist attacks. As part of this
strategy, the commission recommended several changes in government structure. It
Terrorism 59 proposed the creation of a national intelligence director to coordinate all intelligencegathering work. It also urged the establishment of a National Counterterrorism Center to
analyze all terrorism-related intelligence and to plan counterterrorism operations.
The Future of Terrorism
Terrorism has existed for at least 2,000 years and is likely to remain a fixture on political
agendas, both domestic and international, for years to come. Terrorism provides a means
by which the weak can confront much stronger opponents. It therefore has an enduring
appeal to the alienated and the disenfranchised, the aggrieved and vengeful, the
powerless and the would-be powerful. In addition, it is relatively inexpensive to conduct
while offering a vast potential payoff: the ability to evoke fear and alarm and inflict pain
and suffering in the hope of compelling agreement to demands made.
Terrorism, moreover, is evolving constantly to overcome governmental countermeasures
designed to defeat it. Terrorism thus involves an ongoing search for new targets and
unidentified vulnerabilities in its opponents. This quest also raises the possibility that
terrorists may pursue unconventional means of attack, such as chemical, biological, or
radiological (radioactivity-spreading) weapons, or nuclear weapons. Future terrorist tactics
could include cyberterrorism (sabotage using computers to destroy computer networks or
systems) or electronic warfare that targets critical infrastructure, such as communications
and power facilities, or societies in general.
Throughout the world, terrorism reinvents itself in new and more dangerous forms. As
older groups are defeated or exhausted, more radical and more violent successors often
take their place. Although terrorism likely can never be completely eradicated, countering
its threat requires continuing vigilance. The highly individual nature of terrorism’s causes,
the diversity of its perpetrators, and the complexity of its fundamental characteristics
present enormous challenges to those who must effectively counter this menace.
______________________________
Bibliography:
1. Hoffman, Bruce. Terrorism, Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2008. http://
encarta.msn.com (accessed 23 January 2008). (Article reproduced IAW Microsoft
Service Agreement.)
2. Palestine Under Herod’s Will and in the Time of Christ. http://www.creationism.org/
images/SmithBibleAtlas/BibleAtlas13sPalestineChrist27AD.jpg.
3. Storming of the Bastille. http://history.state.gov/milestones/1784-1800/FrenchRev.
4. JP 3-07.2, Antiterrorism, 24 November 2010.
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