Is military force the best means to defeat terrorist groups?

Aug 20, 2008 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Many studies have asked how terrorist groups are born; relatively few have described how such groups are best put out of business. A recent effort to do the latter, by RAND Corporation, an American think-tank, is therefore welcome.

It considers the fate of some 650 groups (defined widely), between 1968 and 2006, asking in particular what put an end to them. In the process it casts some useful light on a hoary old question of counterterrorism: whether military force or smart policing is the more effective method for tackling terrorists and insurgents.

Proponents of military force have quite a bit to cheer at the moment. Most notably there is the success of the military surge in Iraq in tackling al-Qaeda and other insurgents (other changes, such as a shift in allegiance of Sunnis, have helped too). In Sri Lanka, in January, President Mahinda Rajapakse formally scrapped a cease-fire agreement that had been signed in 2002 with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.

The campaign against the separatists has been growing more intense, with the government forces claiming that the Tigers will be defeated next year. On Friday August 15th Sri Lankan soldiers said that they had killed 26 rebels in fighting in the far north of the island.

Colombia’s President, Alvaro Uribe, has similarly pursued the military option against the FARC, managing to kill thousands of the group’s members, including several leaders. In March Colombian forces (with American training and a heavy dose of intelligence work) bombed a jungle camp in Ecuador, killing Raul Reyes, an important figure in the movement, and recovering computers containing valuable information.

Then in July Colombian forces freed Ingrid Betancourt, a former candidate for president, and 14 others who had been held hostage by the FARC for several years. Mr Uribe had resisted calls for negotiations to secure their release.

According to RAND, some 20% of the insurgencies it considered have been ended through the use of overwhelming military might. But such force seems to tell only in particular situations. Where opponents are large, organised like armies and occupy territory, military methods are likely to be more effective.

Insurgencies, however, are a specific set of conflicts, comparable to civil wars where hundreds or more have died on both sides involved.

When it comes to terrorist groups more broadly, military might is less useful. As the RAND study points out, the vast majority of terrorist groups have fewer than 100 members. It considered groups ranging from the tiny, such as the Oklahoma City bombers, to the massive, such as Aum Shinrikyo, the movement responsible for a nerve-gas attack on Tokyo’s subway in 1995. For isolated cells and other groups, conventional military weapons are unwieldy and often ineffective. The think-tank says that military action put an end to only 7% of the terrorist groups that it looked at.

RAND concludes that police sleuthing and more intelligence work are often more useful methods when tackling smaller groups and organisations—perhaps including al-Qaeda – that operate in the shadows.
Of the 268 terrorist organisations that folded, the most common reason was a change of method in favour of a political process.

This happened in 43% of cases and was mainly possible where groups had specific goals that might be accommodated. A similar number of groups – some 40% – were dismantled with the help of police and intelligence work.

The think-tank, which regularly conducts research for the Defence Department, therefore suggests that the current American strategy against terrorism is flawed.

The report’s authors urge a “fundamental rethinking” of policies against al-Qaeda, arguing that America’s campaign should no longer be waged as a “war on terror” but instead conducted as a “counter-terrorism” mission. The authors say that “there is no battlefield solution to terrorism”, saying intelligence and policing should get more attention.

One intriguing suggestion is that groups might be encouraged to splinter through outsiders’ intervention. Many observers have recently started to look at methods that might encourage disaffected members of terrorist groups to defect.

A recent book by one of the founders of al-Qaeda, Sayyid Imam al-Sharif (better known as Dr Fadl) dismisses al-Qaeda’s message and renounces the violence and aggression of the September 11th attacks.

Others have looked into whether financial reasons and clashes with leadership can lead terrorists to leave.
The recommendations of the report are not just of interest to anti-terrorist organisations; their opponents may be worried that the insights can help to bring about their own demise.

Possibly to guard against this possibility one jihadist apparently translated much of the RAND report and posted a copy online within only a few days of its original publication.

Chris Spies

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