Terrorism is a Tactic and It Must be Defeated
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
There are two dimensions to
fighting a War on Terror. One is fighting terrorists
and the other is fighting terrorism. In conventional
warfare there isn't that much of a difference
between fighting men and their tactics. There is a
wider space between fighting terrorists and their
tactics.
Conventional armies use
tactics to defeat enemy forces and seize territory.
Terrorists however use tactics to take over mental
territory. A suicide bomber is not out to take over
a particular block. He is out to change how the
enemy and his side think about that city block and
the larger conflict.
Terrorism has succeeded in accomplishing that goal
in Israel. The scale of terrorism turned every piece
of land into a mathematical equation. How many lives
was this village in Gaza worth? How many lives is
this West Bank town worth? How many lives is East
Jerusalem worth?
This emotional calculus is misleading because it is
an immediate response to a set of deaths. However
terrorists are not trading an end to violence for a
village or a town. They are calculating how many
deaths it will take to force Israel to abandon that
village or town. And once they have it, they will
use it to inflict more terror on another town or
village, this time using rockets.
Israelis were convinced that a price in lives had
been put on Gaza and that if they withdrew, the
killing would end. But Gaza was just the beginning.
Not the end. There is never an end.
The goal of a terrorist movement is to change the
relative perceptions of strength and the freedom of
movement of both sides. Terror tactics create the
perception that the winning side is losing. This
perception can be so compelling that both sides come
to accept it as reality. Terrorists manufacture
victories by trapping their enemies in no-win
scenarios that wear down their morale.
That is what has been happening to Israel. The
entire carrot and stick of the peace process and the
suicide bombing, the final agreement that never
comes and the final solution that is coming, were
designed to wear down Israelis, to make their
leaders and people chase down empty hopes and argue
among themselves over who is to blame because there
is still no peace.
The last few decades were meant to create a sense of
helplessness among Israelis.
Taking hostages is one form of the no-win scenario.
If the winning side can't cut the Gordian Knot by
rescuing the hostages, it faces a choice between
releasing terrorists or having to watch its own
people held captive or killed. Either one creates a
sense of helplessness and defeat.
Terrorists are not attacking land or buildings. They
are targeting morale. Their goal is to destroy the
mental and spiritual resistance of a people by
wearing it down with acts of terror, tying it down
with moral and legalistic debates, and finally
finishing it off with negotiations that are also
designed to wear down the other side without ever
concluding a final agreement.
As important as it is to defeat terrorists as
individuals, it is even more important to defeat
their tactics.
The first and best way to defeat terrorist tactics
is to refuse to negotiate with terrorists. Terrorist
tactics work best when they create complicity on the
other side. The first wave of complicity comes from
leftist activists and sympathetic terror lawyers
making human rights arguments. But the second wave
of complicity has to come from the authorities for
terrorism to be successful.
Negotiating with terrorists makes the negotiators
complicit in whatever plans the terrorists have.
Once negotiations begin, the terrorists will force
the negotiators to violate their own side's values
and to sell out portions of their own population or
those of allied countries. These tactics allow the
terrorists to divide and conquer the enemy. And to
use one enemy against another.
A terrorist group that seizes hostages from Country
X in exchange for Country Y freeing prisoners has
managed to turn two of its enemies against each
other with a small investment of resources. If
Country Y frees the prisoners, the terrorists win.
If Country Y doesn't free the prisoners, they still
win because Country X will now blame Country Y,
rather than the terrorists, for what happened.
Swap the two countries for two groups of people
inside a country and it becomes easier to understand
what the terrorists are trying to accomplish by
taking hostages.
Once you negotiate with terrorists, they will
leverage those negotiations to make you complicit in
their own violence against you. If you negotiate
with them long enough, you will end up defending
and even validating their acts of terror.
Israelis were convinced that
they could buy their way out of the problem by
betraying their fellow citizens living in the West
Bank and Gaza. And then by betraying the families of
terror victims. European leaders are convinced that
they can have peace in their time by pressuring
Israel and restraining America. American leaders are
convinced that peace will come if they can pressure
the Europeans and Israelis to stop offending
Muslims.
This is classic divide and conquer.
The greatest danger of fighting terrorists is
falling into a reactive pattern. The more you react
to what terrorists do, the more they set the agenda.
Taking hostages is the ultimate reactive trap. The
kidnapping of three Israeli boys has sent Israel
into the same predictable pattern, rounding up the
usual suspects, making temporary arrests and a
public outcry that, like the one surrounding Gilad
Shalit, can easily be turned into a campaign to pay
any price to free them.
The only way to defeat a terrorist tactic is to
invalidate it. The act of invalidating it is often
painful, but it's less painful than not doing it.
Refusing to negotiate with terrorists cripples their
ability to set the agenda. It's hard to divide and
conquer people who won't talk to you. It's difficult
to make them complicit in the terrorism against them
if they won't enter into a dialogue.
Human shields proliferate because they work. The
only way to invalidate them as a tactic is by
reacting to terrorists the same way, whether or not
they are using a human shield. Hostages are taken
because the terrorists have a realistic expectation
of striking a deal.
Eliminate the deal and the hostage taking ends.
Terrorists create a sense of helplessness by forcing
a society to experience pain without having any
control over it. The experience of being terrorized
is not merely horror and death, but the inability to
control how it happens. It is this need for control
that leads to Stockholm syndrome, identifying with
terrorists and accepting their agenda in exchange
for having some control over their terror.
It is not enough for a society to endure the pain
that terrorists inflict. Every person and every
culture has their breaking point. Instead a society
must be willing to inflict pain on its own body to
prevent greater pain and suffering. A society that
is no longer able to do this is caught in its own
sense of helplessness and is doomed. It is so
focused on avoiding pain that it can no longer fight
back.
War is a form of pain that we inflict on our society
to spare ourselves the greater pain of conquest and
defeat. Resistance to terrorism may also require
other smaller forms of martyrdom that allow a
society to assert control over its own destiny. One
of these is not negotiating with terrorists.
When a society is willing to defy the power that its
enemies wield over it by causing its own pain, it
destroys their power over it and escapes the
helplessness that will otherwise kill it. It breaks
free of the chain of concessions that will
inevitably lead it to betray its principles and lose
its soul.
Israel has already gone too
far down the road to helplessness. And it is not
alone. Every nation, society and culture confronted
with Islamic terrorism seeks ways to spare itself
the pain. But the pain can only end when the
terrorists are thoroughly defeated. A nation that
cannot rouse itself to defeating the terrorists in
an overwhelming and comprehensive campaign, must at
least learn to defeat their tactics.
Defeating terrorist tactics can be more important
than defeating terrorists. It is not that hard for a
modern nation to kill a terrorist. It is much more
difficult for it to take the harder route, to make a
difficult sacrifice, to violate its own sense of
itself and to challenge its own morality. Drones
allow us to kill enemies from a distance at the push
of a button. But drones cannot protect the morale of
a nation.
Every society must find its own reasons for
continuing on. A conflict forces us to question
whether we can go on. It demands that we rise to the
challenge with courage, determination and sacrifice.
And in doing so, we rediscover ourselves.