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Dissertation S. Gorka PhD dissertation Doctoral School of Applied Political Science Sebestyén L. v. Gorka: Content and End-State-based Alteration in the Practice of Political Violence since the End of the Cold War: - the difference between the terrorism of the Cold War and the terrorism of al Qaeda: the rise of the “transcendental terrorist” Ph.D. Dissertation In-House Dissertation Adviser: Prof. András Lánczi Head, Political Science Institute, Corvinus University Budapest, HUNGARY External Dissertation Adviser: Prof. Stephen Sloan Center for the Study of Force and Diplomacy, Temple University Philadelphia, USA November 2007 1 S. Gorka PhD dissertation CONTENTS Dissertation Summary 5 Introduction 15 The Evolution of National Security 27 The Westphalian Inheritance 31 From a Predictable Threat Environment to a Cornucopia of Threats 35 Terrorism: the Fundamentals 39 Religiously Motivated Terrorism of the Past 50 The Zealots 51 The Assassins 53 The Thuggee Cult 55 The Death of Early Terrorism 57 Modern Terror: a Temporary Secularisation of Motivation 60 Analysing the Modern Terror Group 61 The Transformational Phases of Modern Terrorism 65 A New Period of Religiously Motivated Terror 69 What was al Qaeda? 73 The History of a Transcendentally Informed Terrorist: bin Laden 76 The Turn: Radicalisation from Freedom Fighter to Terrorist 80 The Organisation and Tactics of the Original al Qaeda 84 The New Al Qaeda 89 Generation One: the Original al Qaeda 90 Generations Two and Three: an Even Harder-Core Adversary? 91 Aspects of the New al-Qaeda 93 Al Qaeda as the Result of the Evolution of 20th Century Conflict 96 How to Secure against the New Enemy 107 The Unknown Chinaman and the By-Gone General 108 Terrorism as a Continuation of Policy? 111 20th Century Lessons Learnt 116 Scale of Response: The Police Model versus the Total War Model 123 The Motivation behind Irrational Terror 129 Strategic Lessons Learnt: Counterterrorism as a Form of Warfare 159 Doctrinal Confusion Replaces the Doctrinal Vacuum 167 Will our new Counterinsurgency Doctrine Defeat al Qaeda? 176 Counterinsurgency Resurgent 179 Managing the Disjunction: ‘SuperPurple’ 191 Conclusions: Rational versus Irrational Political Violence 200 Appendix I: Lethality of Terrorist Attacks, 1993-2003 205 Appendix II: The Leaked Rumsfeld Memo 206 Appendix III: The Evolution of the Nation-State according to Phillip Bobbitt 209 Appendix IV: Definitions of Terrorism 210 Appendix V: Frequencies of Definitional Elements in 109 Definitions of Terrorism 213 Appendix VI: Elements of a Definition of Terrorism and Their Frequency (Practitioners) 214 Appendix VII: Typical Structure of a Cold War Terror Group (IRA) 216 Appendix VIII: The Structure of al Qaeda (Generation I) 217 Appendix IX: Transcendental Terrorism in Action: Richard Reid 219 Appendix X: Contenders for the post-9/11 New Doctrine 224 Appendix XI: List of 20th Century Irregular Conflict Relevant to Counterinsurgency 229 Bibliography 230 List of Author’s Publications 239 2 S. Gorka PhD dissertation TABLES and DIAGRAMS Diagram One: Chain of Security Evolution 28 Diagram Two: The Mechanics of Terrorism 47 Diagram Three: Al Qaeda’s Iterations 95 Diagram Four: The 20th Century Anatomy of Conflict 106 Diagrams Five, Six, Seven and Eight: Dr. Marc Sageman’s Findings 135-136 Diagram Nine: Terrorism and the Scale of Conflict 166 Table One: The Inherited Architecture of Westphalian National Security 32 Table Two: Nation States and their Cold War National Security Division of Labour 34 Table Three: Cold War versus 1990s Western Perceived Threat Environments 36 Table Four: The Waves of Modern Terrorism According to Rapoport 69-70 Table Five: A Fifth Phase in Modern Terrorism: The Transcendental 72 Table Six: Classic Tenets of Counterinsurgency 183 Table Seven: Classic Counterinsurgency Case Studies 185 Table Eight: New Counterinsurgency Relevant Categories of Conflict 187 3 S. Gorka PhD dissertation ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The writing of this dissertation would not have been possible without the assistance and guidance of Prof. Ferenc Gazdag, my first research mentor; Col. Nick Pratt, director of the Program for Terrorism and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall Center, Germany; a grant from the Earhart Foundation; the professional inspiration of Chris Donnelly, formerly of NATO; the librarians of the Marshal Center, the United States Information Service and the Hungarian Parliament, Sharon Everett, and, of course, my family. 4 S. Gorka PhD dissertation DISSERTATION SUMMARY For more than two generations the world was defined in international political terms by the label, the Cold War1. This phrase was shorthand for many phenomena, including the division of the East and West into two blocs and the ideologically- based definition of said blocs. Whilst we cannot state that the whole of the world was divided in an iron-clad fashion into two separate camps – the neutral and non- aligned nations representing a sizeable constituency – the fact remains that for North America, Western Europe, the USSR and the Soviet controlled satellite nations, the bipolarity of the Cold War geostrategic environment had an overarching impact upon several areas of policy, including national security, foreign affairs, defence and attitudes to the use of force. The influence of the bipolar stand-off had a significant shaping effect with regard to how government was organised on both sides of the Iron Curtain and on the ways in which threat perceptions were managed and influenced national policies concerning security. Fundamentally, the effect can be summarised as follows: Internally: National governments secured the law and order and domestic stability of their state system primarily through the agency of the police (or militia). These authorities were mandated to fight common crime and, in the West, to assist in the fight against terrorism. Additionally a threat was posed by the intelligence agents and subversives of the other bloc. As a result the domestic element of this threat was responded to with counter-intelligence agencies. Externally: The threat of a conventional war (World War III) meant that the armed forces of each bloc had to prepare for a possible bloc on bloc conflict in which classic concepts of territorial defence against an outside aggressor were central. The external threat was dealt with fundamentally by means of intelligence. It was not 1 The exact derivation and genesis of the phrase Cold War is disputed. Nevertheless, the first usage of the related seminal term, the Iron Curtain, is famously accredited to former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during a speech he gave in Fulton Missouri immediately after the end of World War II. 5 S. Gorka PhD dissertation adequate to simply prepare domestically for a war with the other bloc. To be able to deter and to prepare against the opposition it was necessary to gather pertinent information (intelligence) on the enemy. This intelligence could be either technical and military in nature – for example the nature and capabilities of a new piece of military equipment fielded by the opposing army – or political and economic, such as the inner workings and intentions of the enemy’s political elite, or government and the state given industrial sectors. This distinction led to the fact that each type of information was gathered by a separate authority, the former being military intelligence2 and the latter being civilian intelligence.3 Whilst there were at times overlaps and problems on the periphery of the various mandates, on the whole these demarcations functioned well in practice, at least on the western side of the Iron Curtain. The army prepared for war, the police maintained domestic stability (law and order) and the military and civilian intelligence authorities fed important information into the decisionmaking apparati of the political and military elites. Now, however, we must recognise that the environmental conditions that so determined the architecture of national security have either disappeared or been radically altered in the last 17 years since the systemic changes in Central and Eastern Europe that represented the end of the Cold War. We can no longer speak coherently of opposing blocs, either in the military or ideological sense. The West’s national and international security apparatus – the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation included – was predicated upon the existence of a very specific enemy: the USSR and the Warsaw Pact. Neither political construct exists today, the Warsaw Pact having been dissolved at the initiative of the first post-Communist Prime Minister of Hungary, József Antall, and the USSR having dissolved itself on Christmas Day 1991, to be replaced by a multitude of independent nations and the much smaller Russian Federation. Since the historic events of 1989-91, the evolution 2 For example in the US, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), or the Second Directorate of the General Staff in Communist Hungary. 3 For example the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in the US and MI6 in the United Kingdom. 6 S. Gorka PhD dissertation of the international security environment has continued at a fair pace, to the point at which several former Communist satellite states of the USSR, Hungary included, are full status members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the premier of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, is seemingly one of the closest allies of the world’s sole remaining superpower, the USA. Since it seems that the geopolitical environment has altered so radically, the question
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