Implausible Deniability

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, politics, terrorism, statecraft

I lived about a year in East Los Angeles in the 1970s, in the Barrio...don't ask me why! I got to know a kid named Tony who was the leader of a gang of youngsters all under 16 years old. All the older kids were already in jail or prison, so these kids pretty much ran the place. I lived with nine others. We were college students, renting two houses. We suffered a little petty trespassing and thievery, then one day a more major theft from our premises. We went looking for Tony.

Tony usually ran with a couple guys, bodyguards I suppose, but that day there were eight of us. Tony of course denied any of "his guys" were responsible. But we simply told him, we didn't care who did it, we knew all the kids for a half mile around were under him. Anything more happened, we were coming after him. We made it clear we could "take" any number of "his guys" he cared to throw at us, but that we would be sure he, personally, suffered, very much. End of story.

Would that it were so easy to deal with a nation like Syria that trains, supports, and offers sanctuary to several groups of terrorists, perhaps numbering a thousand or so. After the Twin Towers attack of 9/11/01, we couldn't just make the Taliban leaders suffer. They seemed to welcome that. We had to annihilate their military capability. I'd say we did just that, about 95%. A small number of Taliban fighters are still waging a guerilla war against us.

In Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism, Daniel Byman analyzes for the general reader (i.e., political innocents like me) the connections between several of today's more important sponsors of terrorism, including the rather unique case of the Taliban with Al Q'aida (there are so many ways to spell this, I just picked one). Here is what I take away from the book.

• Terrorism is the warfare of the weak.
• Sponsoring terrorist groups is typically (not always) the foreign policy of a state too weak to affect events directly.
• "Passive sponsorship," usually turning a blind eye, is a result either of being too weak to drive the group out, or of political naivety, thinking they pose little threat.
• States that sponsor terrorists often claim they are not responsible for their depredations. Nobody is fooled.

States that sponsor terrorism for ideological reasons (Syria, Iran, and the Taliban are the sharpest modern examples) are the least likely to change their ways, because they think they are doing God's work (I discuss the question "Does the Devil know he is evil?" in a post of about ten days ago). The only state to seemingly about-face on the issue, that formerly was an ideological sponsor, was Libya, just in the past couple of years. It took Qaddafi some thirty years to come to such a point, and even the minor changes in stance we have seen in Iran since the mid-1980s took thirty years and the passing on of the earlier, more radical leaders.

Modern religious terrorism is not a simple problem, and in my opinion, the current crop of terrorist organizations will be defeated only over one to two centuries of effort...if at all! But they most likely will die away over that time, even if they are not militarily eliminated, just because later generations have less fire than their forefathers, and later zealots don't join old groups, they start new ones.