14: Securing Against Terrorism Daniel Benjamin I’m Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the around the world. So the threat remains. We Center for Strategic and International Studies have seen a large number of rather limited at- in Washington DC. I was formerly Director tacks, limited compared to September 11, in for Counter-Terrorism on the National Secu- which causalities tended to be in the double or rity Council staff of the United States, and I triple digits. We have not seen a spectacular at- am co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror. I want tack. It is hard to explain why that is the case. to talk a little about where we are on the war Perhaps it is because Al Qaeda has been so on terror today and what some of the tasks badly damaged. Perhaps it is because they in- that lie ahead are. vest a great deal of time before they carry out a In terms of the tactical war against Al spectacular attack. Qaeda, in particular, which poses the greatest We just don’t know, and we should not be threat to the United States and its allies, we overly confident, because — again — they do have made a surprising amount of progress. invest a lot of time and because also we often Indeed, I would argue we have made more use the wrong metaphors to discuss terrorism. progress than anyone had a right to expect We should not think of it, as it is often referred on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. The to, as an army that has been decimated. One number of Al Qaeda operatives who have needs only to remember that it takes just a few been arrested or in other ways taken off the uncompromised cells to carry out a major at- street — some have been captured and incar- tack. So the analogy with a military operation is cerated, some have been killed — is usually incorrect. You need to maintain a great deal of put at around 3,000. Somewhere between one your military strength to have a capable army in third and two thirds of the senior leadership the field, but terrorism is quite a different thing. of Al Qaeda is either under arrest or has been So the danger remains. The record appears killed. Much of the remaining senior leader- to be quite good, but we should not have any ship is under considerable pressure and hav- false sense of security. At the same time, how- ing a very hard time co-ordinating attacks. ever, at the strategic level, I feel that we have Osama Bin Laden and his lieutenant Ayman probably slipped backward in the longer-term Al-Zawahiri are believed to be in the lands that struggle against radical Islamist terror. border Pakistan and Afghanistan. It’s very dif- Why do I say that? Because the ideology that ficult for them to operate there, and they are is at the heart at Al Qaeda has not been deci- presumably spending an enormous amount mated. Indeed, it has probably made greater of their time and energy on personal security. inroads in parts of the global Muslim popula- That said, we have lived through and con- tion than anyone had hoped for. This has been tinue to endure one of the most remarkable in part a result of the United States invasion of waves of terrorist activity in the postwar pe- Iraq, which had the unfortunate effect of vali- riod. By my assessment, the amount of vio- dating Al Qaeda’s argument that the United lence, the amount of terrorist violence and the States seeks to destroy Islam and occupy Mus- amount attempted, since September 11 has lim lands. We have seen from polling data that significantly outstripped the closest parallel there is a very large percentage of the Muslim period, which was in the early 1980s and in- population in many countries, both in Muslim volved Hezbollah in Lebanon and elsewhere countries and in the Muslim diaspora, that
THIS INFORMATION IS PROVIDED BY THE G8 RESEARCH GROUP AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO. www.g8online.org ©2004 increasingly believes that. Whether they believe Israeli conflict any time soon. Yet, at the same that because Bin Laden says it or because they time, the United States needs to show deter- have come to think so independently is hard mination and goodwill and its concerns for to say. But this tendency is nonetheless the suffering of Palestinians, if it is going to be extremely worrisome. accepted as a fair interlocutor by the Muslim That suggests there is an awful lot of work world. One of the things we have noticed in still to be done in a struggle that most coun- recent years is the globalization of Muslim ter-terrorism experts believe will last a genera- grievance. It is not surprising now to find Indo- tion or more. What kind of work does this nesians expressing their discontent with what involve? The tactical work of counter-terror- is going on in the Middle East in the same way ism must go on, of course. But we have not yet that countries far closer to the action do. begun to formulate a comprehensive foreign In order to make progress on these issues, it policy or international agenda for dealing with needs to be a genuinely international effort. this kind of radicalism. Terrorism truly is a global problem. It’s a prob- Some of the issues that need to be on that lem that deals with sub-state entities or, as we agenda include reforming education in many usually call them, non-state actors. The Al countries in the Muslim world where educa- Qaeda network probably exists in 50 or tion has either collapsed or is woefully inad- 60 counties in different forms, and there are equate. It includes ending incitement in these many different organizations that have either countries, which is to say the tendency toward integrated into the Al Qaeda network or that blaming the west, or Israel or America, for have adopted the agenda or ideology. problems that are really indigenous and are Indeed, one of the worrisome things, in ad- often not the result of any outside enemy — dition to strategic slippage, is the number of despite the best efforts of either the press or groups that appear to be adopting the ideol- the government to deflect criticism and not to ogy and preferring to carry out attacks now establish that kind of outside bogeyman. against the United States and other western We need also to work on governance. There targets, even though they have historically had needs to be more democratization, although very little connection with Al Qaeda. democratization should not come too quickly It is very important that this be an interna- because in many countries a radical period of tional effort. The United States cannot win this change would probably result in outcomes that struggle by itself. Indeed, when the war on ter- we don’t like, with radical groups coming to rorism is considered exclusively America’s war power. on terrorism, it undermines the effort; it fo- In order for us to push this agenda, we need cuses the Muslim sense of grievance on the to remember that the United States, the inter- United States and it fails to make palpable to national community and the western allies everyone the extent to which this is a struggle need to re-legitimate themselves in the Mus- between civilization and barbarity. lim world. There has been a profound sense We have a problem. The international com- of disappointment and disillusionment with munity is not well organized to take on such a the U.S., and its image has taken a beating. struggle. In particular, the United Nations sys- In order to do that, a number of things are tem, for all its virtues, has a difficult time, be- going to be required. First and foremost, a far cause one of the things we need to do is raise deeper engagement with Muslim society is the standards and the norms of behaviour of needed, as is, frankly, a reinvigoration of the many different countries so that terrorists have Middle East peace process. I don’t expect that less area to operate in, have a harder time get- there could be a solution to the Palestinian- ting weapons and are tracked more effectively.
NO. 14 • PAGE 2 There are a number of different measures which is expected to carry out revolutionary that have been passed, or ratified, or signed by change in the Muslim world, particularly in much of the international community and the Near East, but without any institution there are a dozen different counter-terrorism grounding to do so. Additionally, we have a conventions. But there is no implementation real problem in that the political relationships mechanism. And within the UN system it is between many members of the G8 right now hard to imagine that such a thing will be de- are not very good. We have excellent police and veloped, because it operates so much by con- intelligence co-operation these days between sensus. In that regard, the G8 has an advantage members of the G8 and the vast majority of because it is smaller, it tends to bring together countries in the world. But when issues are more like-minded partners, and the wealth and kicked up to a higher level, to the political level, political importance of its members can do an it is very hard to find any common ground to enormous amount of good. The G8, at the agree on policies and to move ahead — pre- same time, is handicapped by its lack of a per- cisely because of lingering hard feelings over manent secretariat for dealing with issues that Iraq. need to be dealt with on a continuing basis. I am hopeful that this G8 will be a mile- In fact, the G8 has been dealing with terror- stone in putting that behind us. However, ism issues since at least the Lyon Summit in I think a realistic attitude suggests that it will 1996, yet the kind of concrete progress we need be a while before other national leaders are to see has not yet developed. prepared to spend their political capital on I am glad that terrorism is as high as it is on these kinds of issues at a moment when Ameri- the G8 agenda. This is important, and it is ca’s standing is rather low in public opinion. important that the G8 provide a forum for dis- This, it seems to me, is the big challenge cussing issues such as the greater Middle East before us: to healing the rifts from Iraq and initiative, which the Bush administration arrive at a common understanding of what we wants to bring to its partners at the coming need to do in order to take on the deeper causes summit. of terrorism and focus on it as the primary se- My own sense is that we need a good deal curity threat that we will face for the next few more than the greater Middle East initiative, decades.•
References and Recommended Reading Bayne, Nicholas (2000), Hanging in There: The Kirton, John (1993), “The Seven-Power Summit G7 and G8 Summit in Maturity and Renewal as a New Security Institution,” pp. 335–357 in (Ashgate: Aldershot). David Dewitt, David Haglund, and John Kirton, Bayne, Nicholas (2001), “The G8’s Role in the eds., Building a New Global Order: Emerging Fight Against Terrorism.” Remarks to the G8 Trends in International Security (Oxford Univer- Research Group, Toronto, November 8 sity Press: Toronto)
NO. 14 • PAGE 3 Discussion Questions Quiz To come. 1. Some suggest a significant amount of terror- ism stems from the fact that the northwest- ern hemisphere controls global policy, speculating that the September 11 terrorist attacks were retaliation for U.S. interference in Middle Eastern affairs. Can a European- and U.S.-dominated G8 achieve change out- side of their geographical boundaries? How?
2. Is the G8 the appropriate forum to develop anti-terrorism strategies? Does its small size make it more efficient and effective, or would a more globally exhaustive group, such as the United Nations, achieve greater long-term success?
3. How successfully can a concert equality of democratic institutionalist model make strides in the war on terrorism? Must there be one evident leader, with a legitimate motive (for example, the U.S. with the events of September 11) to achieve results?
4. The U.S., Canada and England were all found to have failed in successfully imple- menting the agreed-upon standards to fight terrorism. How important is it that these countries show action and leadership domestically versus internationally, when the majority of terrorist activity and the root of the problem are both considered to fall outside of the western world?
5. Can the G7/G8 and other international gov- ernance bodies successfully target crime and the drug trade, which fund terrorist activi- ties, through strategies similar to the ones they have employed to share financial in- telligence and shut down terrorists’ assets?
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