The Military’s Role in Counterterrorism: Examples and Implications for Liberal Democracies Geraint Hug etortThe LPapers The Military’s Role in Counterterrorism: Examples and Implications for Liberal Democracies Geraint Hughes Visit our website for other free publication downloads http://www.StrategicStudiesInstitute.army.mil/ To rate this publication click here. hes Strategic Studies Institute U.S. Army War College, Carlisle, PA The Letort Papers In the early 18th century, James Letort, an explorer and fur trader, was instrumental in opening up the Cumberland Valley to settlement. By 1752, there was a garrison on Letort Creek at what is today Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania. In those days, Carlisle Barracks lay at the western edge of the American colonies. It was a bastion for the protection of settlers and a departure point for further exploration. 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Letort Paper THE MILITARY’S ROLE IN COUNTERTERRORISM: EXAMPLES AND IMPLICATIONS FOR LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES Geraint Hughes May 2011 The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Joint Services Command and Staff College, the United Kingdom (UK) Ministry of Defence, or any other UK government agency, the U.S. Department of the Army, the U.S. Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. Authors of Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) publications enjoy full academic freedom, provided they do not disclose classified information, jeopardize operations secu- rity, or misrepresent official U.S. policy. Such academic freedom empowers them to offer new and sometimes controversial per- spectives in the interest of furthering debate on key issues. This report is cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited. ***** This publication is subject to Title 17, United States Code, Sec- tions 101 and 105. 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ISBN 1-58487-489-9 iii CONTENTS Foreword ........................................................... vii About the Author .................................................xi Summary ........................................................... xiii Maps .................................................................... xv Introduction ..........................................................1 Is Terrorism A Military Problem? ..............................................................13 The Military’s Role In Counterterrorism ................................................37 Problems Arising From Military Involvement in Counterterrorism— The International Context ..................................58 Problems Arising From Military Involvement in Counterterrorism— The Domestic Context ........................................87 Conclusions ........................................................120 Endnotes .............................................................143 Glossary and Abbreviations .............................185 Military Operations Cited in the Text .............203 v FOREWORD On the morning of September 11, 2001 (9/11), al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft, crashing three of them into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, killing up to 3,000 people in the process. Just under 3 years later, a group of predominantly Chechen gun- men took over School Number One in Beslan, North Ossetia, beginning a siege that ended with the death of nearly 400, including 156 children. On the evening of November 26, 2008, 10 members of Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) began a series of bomb and gun attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai, killing more than 170 people over a 48-hour period. For Americans, Russians, and Indians, each of these attacks was warlike in its pro- portions and, after each, popular and political opinion demanded a militarized response. Dr. Geraint Hughes’s Letort Paper reminds us that in repeated cases in which liberal democratic states have used their armed forces to fight terrorism- -notably Israel against successive Palestinian groups, Britain in Northern Ireland from 1969-98, or indeed America and its allies against al-Qaeda and affiliated groups currently--the employment of military means in counterterrorism has been inherently controversial. As Audrey Kurth Cronin notes, terrorism picks at the vulnerable seam between domestic law and foreign war, and conceptually it does not fit the paradigms of either criminality or warfare.1 Although a particular state or a coalition of powers may use its militaries to protect its citizens in counterterrorist campaigns, the threat posed by specific terrorist groups has to be vii treated sui generis, and the applicability of military means in counterterrorism depends on a series of factors--these include whether the terrorist threat is a domestic or an international one, the lethality of the groups concerned, and the threat they pose to state stability. Furthermore, the involvement of armed forc- es in counterterrorism can be problematic. One has only to look at the post-2001 “War on Terror” and the criticisms expressed by foreign governments, mem- bers of Congress, human rights activists, journalists, and academics regarding the treatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in air-strikes in Pakistan; and the ci- vilian casualties caused by U.S. and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military operations in Afghanistan. Dr. Hughes examines the challenges of deploying the military in counterterrorism from both a historical and a contemporary perspective, outlining not only the specific roles that armed forces can perform either to prevent terrorist attacks or to mitigate their conse- quences, but also the strategic, constitutional, practi- cal, diplomatic, and ethical problems that have arisen from a variety of counterterrorist campaigns, be they in Palestine, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Kashmir, Af- ghanistan, Pakistan, or the North Caucasus. Clause- witz reminds us that in “war everything is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult,”2 and this observation is as true of counterterrorism as it is of interstate warfare. For example, the British Army interned Republican terrorist suspects in Northern Ireland from 1971-75,