Michael cromartie

Key West, Florida

Bruce Hoffman, Director, RAND Corporation

Jeffrey Goldberg, Staff Writer, The New Yorker

This shift, moreover, is not confined strictly to terrorism that emanates from the world of Islam. During the 1980s, for example, two separate groups of messianic Jewish terrorists in Israel plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock in order to “cleanse” the Temple Mount of this Muslim shrine and so prepare the way for the rebuilding of the Temple and the coming of the Messiah. Christian white supremacists in the United States planned to poison the water in Chicago and Washington, and they stockpiled cyanide. But generally these religious terrorists at first could not come up with plots that were even quarter-baked. Fortunately, they just didn’t have the competence that Al Qaeda has.

In 1993 came the first World Trade Center bombing and then a plot to bomb tunnels and bridges in New York City. Followers of the blind Muslim sheikh Abdul Rahman were implicated in both. Religion clearly was on the verge of becoming a dominant trend in defining the most worrisome kind of terrorism, meaning the sort that aims mass-casualty attacks directly against the United States.

I define terrorism as “religious” when some liturgy, scripture, or clerical authority is involved in sanctioning the violent act. Now there are all sorts of groups around the world that use force and can be identified using religious terms but are not “religious” in the sense that I am using the term. In Northern Ireland, for instance, Protestants and Catholics fight using terrorist (or as they say locally, “paramilitary”) tactics, but theological justifications play little or no role. But in the Israeli plots or the World Trade Center bombing, religious authority in some form approved the assault, as when Sheikh Rahman blessed the 1993 attempt to blow up the twin towers.

By the mid-nineties, the growing prominence of religion as a factor in terrorism could be traced through a chart that RAND began keeping in 1968. In that year, there were only eleven active and identifiable terrorist groups worldwide, and they were overwhelmingly linked to irredentist or national-separatist causes. None was religious. In 1980, there were sixty-four identifiable terrorist groups active; just two were religious. Both happened to be made up of Shi’ite Muslims, which is not surprising given that the previous year had seen the rise to power of Khomeini in Iran.

By 1992, with the Cold War over, terrorist groups declined in number to forty-eight, of which eleven (or roughly a quarter) were religious according to my definition. And then things began to peak. In 1994, sixteen of forty-nine terrorist groups — about a third, that is — had a salient religious component. By 1995, it was twenty-six out of fifty-six, or almost half. With this surge of religiously motivated groups, terrorism was no longer the preserve of secular ideological leftists, nationalists, and irredentists. And by the mid-nineties we saw more cults, apocalyptic groups that added a different layer in Japan, in various parts of the United States, in Switzerland, and elsewhere.

So is religious terrorism a new phenomenon? No. Like most things involving terrorism, it has long historical antecedents. At least three of the English words that we often use to describe terrorists and what they do are derived from ancient or medieval times. A “zealot,” for instance, was originally a member of a radical Jewish splinter sect that was active in Roman-ruled Palestine between A.D. 66 and 73.
Then there are the famous “Assassins” in what is today Iraq, Syria, and Iran between about 1100 and 1250. These were members of a secret Muslim order that terrorized and murdered Christian Crusaders as well as others, typically in the open and with knives handled by killers who did not expect to get away. With the Assassins we see the dramatic ethos of martyrdom and violent self-sacrifice gaining legendary status in the Islamic community.

From earliest times right up until the nineteenth century rise of nationalism, religion was what motivated terrorism. But as democracy rose and governments moved away from the idea of rule by divine right, terrorism began to change, too, by embracing anarchism, nihilism, or revolutionary politics. Until 1980 — almost the end of the twentieth century — terrorism remained an almost wholly secular enterprise.

Since 1980 we have seen a resurgence of terrorism legitimized by religious authorities and precepts, in part because of Iran but also because of wider and more profound social effects flowing from faith and ideology. As in the case of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, violence becomes something justified by sacred texts. This historical reversion back to religious motives for terrorism is hugely important because, as three decades of research into how and why people become terrorists suggests, secular terrorists become such at the end of a long process that involves a political conversion, intensifying political activity, and gradually increasing radicalization until a dramatic line is crossed and people get killed. Religious terrorism, worrisomely, seems to make active converts more quickly. In the West Bank and Gaza, for example, many of the Hamas or Islamic Jihad bomb-carriers are recruited just weeks or even days before they carry out their suicide attacks.

Their path to violence is much shorter, I think, because religion plays a large part. A secular leader with an audience that may not be sophisticated or even literate has to do a lot of convincing to sell his abstract political ideology about the evils of the government or some rival ethnic group. A leader with a religious title in front of his name, on the other hand, can say that God is commanding the use of force and offering rewards in the next life to those who obey. So you have this charismatic figure who says he speaks for God and who can draw on the pre-existing organizational cohesion of religion, all of which tends to cut the lag time involved in terrorist recruitment.

Religious terrorists generally tend to be deeply alienated people. They see themselves as fighting a total war, on the defensive and with no options. And yet, oddly, they often have very ambitious goals that go far beyond the usual political or ideological agenda. They also tend to dismiss those outside their religion and even their particular sect or offshoot, legitimizing actions against them as necessary in dealing with “infidels,” “mud people,” “dogs,” or “children of Satan.” The literature of religious terrorist movements is rife with such epithets, which dehumanize victims and make it easier to kill them. In some cases, religious terrorists have convinced themselves that they’re doing their victims a favor.

What we see in religious terrorism is the justification of mass, indiscriminate violence at a higher level than we had seen in secular terrorism. A string of incidents in the 1990s underscored this: the Hamas bus bombing campaign in February and March 1996 that killed sixty people; the thirteen almost simultaneously detonated car and truck bombs that Muslim terrorists used to convulse Bombay three days after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993; the December 1994 hijacking of an Air France plane in Algiers with the intent of crashing it into the heart of Paris, full of fuel and passengers — an earlier version of 9/11 that was prevented when French commandos successfully stormed the plane on the tarmac in Marseilles.

All this, then, is what I think distinguishes religious terrorism from secular terrorism. While I was working on my book Inside Terrorism, I tended to view religious terrorism as an end in itself. Now I’m not so sure. I still think religious motives for terrorism are important, but I see a profound cynicism in people like Bin Laden and Shoko Asahara, the leader of the Aum Shinrikyo cult that released sarin nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in March 1995, killing twelve people and harming nearly five thousand others. I don’t think that this throws my theory about religious terrorism out the window, but it does remind me that terrorism is idiosyncratic, if only because it has to change in order to retain its effectiveness.
Bin Laden and Asahara use religion as a means to promote internal cohesion and to appeal to wider and more diverse constituencies. They also create personality cults centered on themselves, but that’s not so different from cults in general. For these people, terrorism is about power; as they see it, the only means of achieving power is force. As C. Wright Mills wrote back in 1957, “All politics is a struggle for power, and the ultimate kind of power is violence.”

Bin Laden originally declared that he wanted to liberate the holy places of Mecca and Medina and to expel from Saudi Arabian soil the U.S military “crusaders” (to use Bin Laden’s term) whom the Saudi princes had invited to build bases there. But he drew relatively little attention and support in the Muslim world, so he began broadening his appeals and his message, suddenly taking an interest in the plight of the Palestinians, for instance. Since the defeat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda regime in Afghanistan he has had no choice but to cast the struggle in the widest way possible: as a clash of civilizations. Bin Laden has succeeded as no other terrorist chieftain before him at creating a fairly effective umbrella organization to bring together disparate Islamist groups that in the past had not had much to do with one another. That’s why his training camps and bases in Afghanistan were so important. They were for hands-on training, to be sure, but they were also places to make real Bin Laden’s vision of a global insurgency held together by religion.

Why do I find Bin Laden a cynic? To my knowledge, he has no theological credentials (his academic background, significantly, is in economics and public administration) but he issues fatwas — religious edicts. This betrays an instrumental and opportunistic attitude toward religion. His ultimate goal, like Asahara’s, is to seize power. He wants to defeat the House of Saud, and he wants to defeat the United States—not just because we’re infidels and Westerners but because, like many others in his part of the world, he sees us as an obstacle to revolution, both directly and through the governments we support. Over time, Bin Laden has sought to broaden his appeal with more religious rhetoric about restoring the greatness of Islam and so on, but in his mind, it comes down to power and revolution.
I think it is most useful to view him not as a traditional mullah, which he surely is not, but as a modern corporate CEO. He has vision, money, patience, cunning, and organizational skills. He has a long-range plan whose first major goal is to take over Saudi Arabia. One of the extraordinary things about Bin Laden and Al Qaeda is their patience. They spent at least four years planning the 1998 attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Lag times between other operations and their follow-ups seem to have been about a year or two. He has harnessed modern technology to a retrograde worldview based on religious precepts. A figure like him couldn’t have existed before satellite phones and computers; they’re what make his kind of worldwide terrorist operation possible. And like any savvy head of a multinational corporation, he has been good at taking advantage of globalization and changing technology.

In the 1990s many corporate bosses made their businesses “flatter” with less top-down decision-making. Bin Laden did the same thing for terrorism. Al Qaeda does not seem to have the pyramidal hierarchy of most other terrorist organizations. Bin Laden does act as the president or CEO — he gives orders and probably has final say. But he also functions as a venture capitalist. People come to him with ideas, and he decides which ones to back. This is what makes Al Qaeda so formidable. It doesn’t have just one set modus operandi; it operates on at least four levels. On one, you’ve got a CEO, trained operatives, and tremendous planning. We know that Bin Laden looked at surveillance photographs of the Nairobi embassy and said, “Put the bomb right there.” We know from the home video found in December 2001 that he micromanaged the September 11 operation. These people are highly dedicated, well trained, and well funded.

And then on the second level you have the amateurs like Ahmed Rasalum, the would-be “millennium bomber” who was arrested in Port Angeles, Washington, in late 1999. When he finished his training at an Al Qaeda camp, he was simply told: “We’d like you to attack some commercial aviation target; it’s up to you to decide which one. Here is $12,000 in seed money. Commit crimes to raise more, then recruit your own cell and go and do mischief.”

On the third level, you have the walk-ins: radical Muslims in Jordan, for instance, who noticed in 1999 that lots of Americans and Israelis stayed at the Radisson Hotel in Amman and presumably went to Bin Laden saying, “Can we attack these American and Israeli tourists during the Y2K festivities?” They were bankrolled to do that. In Milan, a cell involved in similar planning for attacks on tourists was recently broken up.

Finally, the fourth level contains like-minded insurgencies such as the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Lashkar Jihad in Pakistan, and Jama Islamiya in Indonesia. Some of these groups, including the Jaish-e-Muhammad in Pakistan, have been tied to Al Qaeda.

Let me add a few more points in closing. First, in an era when history and the social sciences have diminished the role of the individual and focused instead on impersonal, global economic and political forces, Bin Laden has shown once again the power of the individual. He’s very savvy in his media messages. Within hours of the first air strikes in Afghanistan, he had his message out on video.

Bin Laden has also shown that terrorists use violence as part of a plan and are not mere irrational fanatics motivated by pure bloodlust. I’ve heard people from assistant FBI directors to senators opt for that second understanding. They are mistaken: there is always a purpose. We may not understand the inner logic motivating terrorism, and we certainly do not sympathize with it, but there always is some rationality behind it.

Second, terrorism is and always will be a form of psychological warfare. The killing and destruction are designed to send a broader message, to harm the economy, to sap our will to absorb casualties, and, last but not least, to undermine confidence in leaders and the government.

Make no mistake: the United States will remain vulnerable. You can’t defend everything everywhere at every moment. What I find most worrisome about our official response so far is the stress on this or that threat du jour rather than any long-range systematic analysis of what’s most vulnerable and consequential, and how to protect it. Certainly terrorists will remain able to inflict a lot of pain with slender resources, a basic asymmetry that is central to terrorism’s appeal.
The enmity towards the United States is hardly going to diminish. We have scared a lot of people and shown our resolve, but at the same time, powerful motives of revenge can now be factored into whatever motivation Bin Laden had before. And he probably sees the way we fought the ground war in Afghanistan — with air power, native Afghan proxies, and a minimum of U.S. troops — as evidence that we remain highly averse to casualties and therefore psychologically vulnerable.

The hard truth is that fighting terrorism is a perennial, ceaseless struggle. Terrorism has been around for more than two thousand years, so perhaps saying we are fighting a war on it suggests a finality that may be beyond our reach. As the focus of conflict shifts away from Afghanistan, it is very likely that terrorism will shift and change accordingly. Terrorism is the archetypal shark in the water. It must move forward. It must change constantly to survive.

I would like to know what Bruce thinks about the argument, made separately by Martin Kramer and Bernard Lewis, that 9/11 happened because certain Muslims had contempt for America, thinking we wouldn’t respond, or would respond weakly because we fear more losses. To put it crudely, what Kramer and Lewis argue is that we need to inspire fear, or in Arabic, hayba. We must make ourselves widely feared; the might of America must be brought to bear on the Muslim world. Then they might still hate us, but their fear will be stronger than their hatred and they will leave us alone. Do I buy this? I don’t know. But I’m curious to know what Bruce thinks about it.

The United States is as much in his gun sights as Saudi Arabia, and to an extent always has been. Part of his reasoning, and it’s a view shared by many in the world today, is that the local government he hates wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for American support. Strike the puppet master, he seems to be thinking, and the puppets will tumble.

For him, not losing is winning; the strongest country in the world wants him dead, but he is still around.