BANGKOK — Chaotic gun battles in central Bangkok marked a new phase of the city’s spiraling violence Monday as residents hoarded food and the government warned die-hard protesters that they should leave their encampment or risk “harmful” consequences.
Protesters roaming the lawless streets of a strategically important neighborhood near the protest zone threatened to set fire to a gasoline truck as bonfires, some from piles of tires, sent large plumes of black, acrid smoke into the sky.
Security forces armed with assault rifles were deployed in greater numbers across the city after many firefights, including a nighttime grenade attack on the five-star Dusit Thani hotel, a landmark in the city.
The attack and a subsequent prolonged gun battle suggested that Thai security forces were up against more than just protesters with slingshots and bamboo staves. The mayhem of the crackdown, which follows two months of demonstrations by protesters who are seeking the resignation of the government, has made it difficult to understand who is battling whom.
A government official, Korbsak Sabhavasu, said late Monday that a protest leader had called him to discuss an end to the standoff, a development that offered a glimmer of hope that the violence might subside. The Associated Press reported that Mr. Korbsak said he had told the protest leader that the army would stop shooting if protesters returned to their base in the city.
But there have been many false starts in recent weeks, making a resolution to the crisis far from imminent.
The government suggested that Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister who was ousted in a 2006 coup, was behind the shadowy forces battling the army on Bangkok streets.
Satit Wongnongtoei, a minister in the prime minister’s office, spoke of a “commander who lives overseas” who is intent on “causing violence and loss of life as much as they can by using weapons of war.”
The government on Sunday issued a ban on certain banking transactions linked to companies and accounts held by Mr. Thaksin and his family.
The protest movement defiantly encamped in Bangkok began as a reaction to Mr. Thaksin’s ouster but has expanded to resemble a large social movement by less affluent segments of Thai society rebelling against what they say is an elite that tries to control Thailand’s democratic institutions.
On Sunday, Mr. Thaksin issued a statement through his lawyer that called on “all sides to step back from this terrible abyss and seek to begin a new, genuine and sincere dialogue between the parties.”
It seems plausible that some of the attacks in recent days have been carried out by disaffected elements of the military or police. The attack on the Dusit Thani hotel in the early hours of Monday may have been a retaliatory move by a faction loyal to Khattiya Sawatdiphol, a renegade major general allied with the protesters who was shot on Thursday. Security experts speculate that General Khattiya, who died on Monday, was shot by a sniper stationed at the Dusit Thani hotel, which has served as a base for hundreds of security personnel members in recent weeks.
The government has insisted that soldiers fire only in self-defense, but the death toll has been lopsidedly among civilians since violence intensified last Thursday. Government statistics said that 34 civilians and two soldiers — including General Khattiya — had been killed since Thursday, and 256 people been wounded, almost all of them civilians.
Protesters have attributed some of the deaths to snipers who are stationed in several places around the city on top of tall buildings.
The Foreign Ministry explained in a memo distributed on Monday that the sharpshooters had been deployed to “look out for danger and protect others.”
The memo summarized in chilling detail a video taken of a military sniper shooting someone suspected of carrying a “bomb,” the memo said, without more detail.
“The shot was made in a controlled manner,” the memo said. One of the soldiers in the video is then quoted saying, “Man is down! I see it!”
Most of the violence has occurred in the streets that surround the protesters barricaded encampment, where protest leaders appear increasingly anxious.
Nattawut Saikua, a hard-line protest leader, said he was prepared to negotiate without preconditions if the government would accept a cease-fire. He dropped the demand he had made Sunday for mediation by the United Nations.
The government responded that there would be no talks while the violence continued.
With the apparent involvement of various armed groups, the fighting may have moved beyond the point where any protest leader can declare an effective cease-fire.
The protest site, in the heart of Bangkok’s main commercial district, which at its peak was filled with tens of thousands of demonstrators, had thinned to perhaps 2,000 on Monday afternoon. Where entire families had camped in a festive atmosphere, mostly men remained. Garbage was strewn everywhere.
Army aircraft circled above the site dropping leaflets urging people to leave. Guards in black with red scarves escorted people who chose to leave. A man circulated among the guards handing out small packets of sticky rice along with 100 baht bills, worth about $3.
Protesters filled small Red Bull energy drink bottles with gasoline and then demonstrated their plan to propel them by swinging a golf club. Small groups of people occasionally looked up and pointed at surrounding department stores where they said they believed snipers were hidden.
Outside the site of the sit-in, on Rama IV road where much of the worst fighting has taken place, trucks loaded with tires raced in, unloaded them as if at a racetrack pit stop, and sped away. Crowds watching from a safe distance applauded. The tires were stacked by the road to replenish a continually burning barricade.
At one point in mid-afternoon, the crowd, at a new makeshift stage near the Khlong Toey slum, faced the burning wall of tires and sang the national anthem.
Tension radiated from battle zone, and at one point unknown gunmen carried out an attack on a hospital.
Hundreds of businesses and bank branches were closed after the violence caused the government to declare a national holiday and postpone the opening of schools.
The American Embassy in Bangkok canceled a “town hall” meeting about the security situation scheduled for Tuesday because of the risk that those attending would be put in “harm’s way,” a statement from the embassy said Monday. Embassy officials will instead address concerns of Americans living in Bangkok on the Internet.
One American photographer, Paula Bronstein of Getty Images, described being trapped in the Dusit Thani when the attacks occurred.
“If you’ve ever heard the sound of a grenade, it’s really loud if it goes off really close,” she said. “It didn’t take long before we realized the hotel was under attack. The gunfire was just indescribable. It was just nonstop. And it was coming from both directions.”
After the attack guests were told to go into the basement of the hotel, where they remained until morning.
“There was a woman who had fainted, and they were trying to make her come to and it was really just more confusion and everyone was yelling,” Ms. Bronstein said.
The hotel closed its doors to guests Monday afternoon.
By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly
Special orders do upset us: One of three Detroit men arrested for a series of fast food restaurant robberies turns out to be TSA screener . . . Order in the court: Citing the high volume of threats it receives, Supreme Court seeks more federal security funds . . . Don't tread on me: California woman standing trial today for allegedly hitting the TSA agent who tried to seize her mother's applesauce. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.
Know nukes: “Almost from the invention of the atomic bomb, government officials were alarmed by the threat that compact nukes would be smuggled into the United States by Soviet agents and detonated,” The New York Times surveys. “Obama’s proclamation of unilateral nuclear disarmament [has] nullified America’s willingness and ability to defend itself . . . when worldwide nuclear proliferation abounds,” an American Thinker contributor condemns — as Al Jazeerasees Iran’s supreme leader telling a nuclear disarmament conference in Tehran on Saturday that the United States’ atomic weapons “are a tool of terror and intimidation.” The Christian Science Monitor spotlights a Pentagon memo fretting that the United States lacks a long-term plan to deal with Iran — while Defense’s Gates tells the Post: “The memo was not intended as a ‘wake-up call.’”
Close air support: One of three Motor City men arrested for a series of fast food restaurant robberies turns out to be a TSA screener at Detroit Metro Airport, the Free Press reports — while ABC 15 News uncovers hundreds of internal e-mails, audits and other documents revealing a pattern of failures involving security contractors at Phoenix’s air hub. A California woman is slated to stand trial today for allegedly hitting a TSA agent who tried to seize her mother’s applesauce at a Bob Hope Airport checkpoint, The Burbank Leader relates. “The lesson of the Jihad Janes is that our safety requires vigilance that exempts few groups, if any,” a Post reader writes. Logan airport, meantime, is in line for 60 more explosive trace detectors, The Boston Globe, again, has DHS’s Napolitano announcing during Friday’s junket.
Qaeda Qorner: The destruction of nearly 100 videotapes showing the harsh interrogation of two al Qaeda detainees in 2005 triggered concerns within the CIA over whether it was adequately cleared, CNN notes. Osama Bin Laden requested a satellite TV dish be installed in his Afghanistan hideaway so he could watch the 9/11 attacks unfurl, but the signal was blocked by the mountainous terrain, The Daily Mail mentions — while FOX News notes Facebook moving to shut down a social-networking page purportedly put up by the chatty terrorist mastermind. A new video by the al Qaeda-linked Al Shabaab shows the Somali militant group indoctrinating children, some of whom appear to be toddlers, The National Post notes — while the Timeshas the group outlawing school bells in a southern town after deciding that they conflicted with Islam.
Over there: Pakistani authorities beat confessions out of some of the five northern Virginia men accused of planning terrorist acts there, the mother of one defendant tells The Associated Press — and check the Times, again, for a broader profile of that family. Former Pakistani P.M. Benazir Bhutto’s 2007 assassination might have been prevented had security forces taken adequate steps after death threats were made against her, Bloomberg has a U.N. probe finding. India is further tightening security before the October Commonwealth Games after State issued a warning to American citizens about possible militant attacks on hotels and markets in India, Reuters reports — as France 24 has at least 10 people hurt Saturday when two bombs exploded at a cricket stadium in Bangalore.
A few days after the September 11th attacks—which killed seven times as many people as any previous act of terrorism—President George W. Bush declared that the United States was engaged in a global war on terror. September 11th seemed to confirm that we were in a clash of civilizations between modernity and radical Islam. We had a worldwide enemy with a cause that was general, not specific (“They hate our freedoms”), and we now had to take on the vast, long-running mission—equal in scope to the Cold War—of defeating all ambitious terrorist groups everywhere, along with the states that harbored them. The war on terror wasn’t a hollow rhetorical trope. It led to the American conquest and occupation first of Afghanistan, which had sheltered the leaders of Al Qaeda, and then of Iraq, which had no direct connection to September 11th.
Today, few consider the global war on terror to have been a success, either as a conceptual framing device or as an operation. President Obama has pointedly avoided stringing those fateful words together in public. His foreign-policy speech in Cairo, last June, makes an apt bookend with Bush’s war-on-terror speech in Washington, on September 20, 2001. Obama not only didn’t talk about a war; he carefully avoided using the word “terrorism,” preferring “violent extremism.”
But if “global war” isn’t the right approach to terror what is? Experts on terrorism have produced shelves’ worth of new works on this question. For outsiders, reading this material can be a jarring experience. In the world of terrorism studies, the rhetoric of righteousness gives way to equilibrium equations. Nobody is good and nobody is evil. Terrorists, even suicide bombers, are not psychotics or fanatics; they’re rational actors—that is, what they do is explicable in terms of their beliefs and desires—who respond to the set of incentives that they find before them. The tools of analysis are realism, rational choice, game theory, decision theory: clinical and bloodless modes of thinking.
That approach, along with these scholars’ long immersion in the subject, can produce some surprising observations. In “A Question of Command: Counterinsurgency from the Civil War to Iraq” (Yale; $30), Mark Moyar, who holds the Kim T. Adamson Chair of Insurgency and Terrorism at the Marine Corps University, tells us that, in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s pay scale (financed by the protection payments demanded from opium farmers) is calibrated to be a generous multiple of the pay received by military and police personnel (financed by U.S. aid); no wonder official Afghan forces are no match for the insurgents. Audrey Kurth Cronin, a professor of strategy at the National War College, reminds us, in “How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns” (Princeton; $29.95), that one can find out about Al Qaeda’s policy for coördinating attacks by reading a book called “The Management of Barbarism,” by Abu Bakr Naji, which has been available via Al Qaeda’s online library. (Naji advises that, if jihadis are arrested in one country after an attack, a cell elsewhere should launch an attack as a display of resilience.) In “Radical, Religious, and Violent: The New Economics of Terrorism” (M.I.T.; $24.95), Eli Berman traces the origins of the Taliban to a phenomenon that long preceded the birth of modern radical Islam: they are a direct descendant of the Deobandi movement, which began in nineteenth-century India in opposition to British colonial rule and, among other things, established a system of religious schools.
What is terrorism, anyway? The expert consensus converges on a few key traits. Terrorists have political or ideological objectives (the purpose can’t be mere profiteering). They are “non-state actors,” not part of conventional governments. Their intention is to intimidate an audience larger than their immediate victims, in the hope of generating widespread panic and, often, a response from the enemy so brutal that it ends up backfiring by creating sympathy for the terrorists’ cause. Their targets are often ordinary civilians, and, even when terrorists are trying to kill soldiers, their attacks often don’t take place on the field of battle. The modern age of suicide terrorism can be said to have begun with Hezbollah’s attack, in October of 1983, on U.S. marines who were sleeping in their barracks in Beirut.
Once you take terrorists to be rational actors, you need a theory about their rationale. Robert Pape, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, built a database of three hundred and fifteen suicide attacks between 1980 and 2003, and drew a resoundingly clear conclusion: “What nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.” As he wrote in “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism” (2005), what terrorists want is “to change policy,” often the policy of a faraway major power. Pape asserts that “offensive military action rarely works” against terrorism, so, in his view, the solution to the problem of terrorism couldn’t be simpler: withdraw. Pape’s “nationalist theory of suicide terrorism” applies not just to Hamas and Hezbollah but also to Al Qaeda; its real goal, he says, is the removal of the U.S. military from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries. Pape says that “American military policy in the Persian Gulf was most likely the pivotal factor leading to September 11”; the only effective way to prevent future Al Qaeda attacks would be for the United States to take all its forces out of the Middle East.
In “Talking to Terrorists: Why America Must Engage with Its Enemies” (Basic; $26.95), Mark Perry describes a little-known attempt to apply Moyar’s model in Iraq. The book jacket identifies Perry as “a military, intelligence, and foreign affairs analyst and writer,” but his writing conveys a strong impression that he has not spent his career merely watching the action from a safe seat in the bleachers. Much of the book is devoted to a detailed description, complete with many on-the-record quotes, of a series of meetings in Amman, Jordan, in 2004, between a group of Marine officers based in Anbar province, in western Iraq, and an Iraqi businessman named Talal al-Gaood. Gaood, a Sunni and a former member of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, suggested he could broker a deal that would make the horrific, almost daily terrorist attacks in western Iraq go away.
Perry’s tone calls to mind a Tom Clancy novel. Tough, brave, tight-lipped officers do endless battle not just with the enemy in the field but also with cowardly, dissembling political bureaucrats in the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House. The crux of his story is that a promising negotiation was tragically cut short, just as it was about to bear fruit, when the key negotiator, a Marine colonel, was “PNG’d”—declared persona non grata—by Washington and denied entry to Jordan. Not long after that, Gaood died suddenly, of a heart ailment, at the age of forty-four (according to Perry, he was so beloved that his wake had to be held in a soccer stadium), putting an end to any possibility of further talks. It’s startling to read about American military commanders in the field taking on a freelance diplomatic mission of this magnitude, and to imagine that there was a businessman in Amman who, on the right terms, could have snapped his fingers and ended what we back home thought of as pervasive, wild-eyed jihad.
What dominates the writing of experts about terrorism, however, is a more fine-grained idea of terrorists’ motives—at the level of ethnic group, tribe, village, and even individual calculation. Pape thinks of terrorists as being motivated by policy and strategic concerns; Cronin, of the National War College, shares Pape’s view that most terrorists are, essentially, terroirists—people who want control of land—but she is also attuned to their narrower, more local considerations. The odds are against them, because of the natural forces of entropy and their lack of access to ordinary military power and other resources, but, if they do succeed, they can be counted upon to try to ascend the ladder of legitimacy, first to insurgency, then to some kind of governing status. (Examples of that ultimate kind of success would be the Irgun and the Stern Gang, in Israel, Sinn Fein and the Provisional I.R.A., in Northern Ireland, and the Palestine Liberation Organization, in the West Bank and Gaza.)
Cronin goes through an elaborate menu of techniques for hastening the end of a terrorist campaign. None of them rise to the level of major policy, let alone a war on terror; in general, the smaller their scope the more effective Cronin finds them to be. She believes, for instance, that jailing the celebrated head of a terrorist organization is a more effective countermeasure than killing him. (Abimael Guzmán, the head of the Shining Path, in Peru, was, after his capture in 1992, “displayed in a cage, in a striped uniform, recanting and asking his followers to lay down their arms.” That took the wind out of the Shining Path’s sails. A surprise ambush that martyred him might not have.) Negotiating with terrorists—a practice usually forsworn, often done—can work in the long term, Cronin says, not because it is likely to produce a peace treaty but because it enables a state to gain intelligence about its opponents, exploit differences and hive off factions, and stall while time works its erosive wonders.
Cronin offers a confident prescription, based on her small-bore approach to terrorism, for defeating the apparently intractable Al Qaeda. The idea is to take advantage of the group’s highly decentralized structure by working to alienate its far-flung component parts, getting them to see their local interests as being at odds with Al Qaeda’s global ones. “Bin Laden and Zawahiri have focused on exploiting and displacing the local concerns of the Chechens, the Uighurs, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, the Salafist Group for Call and Combat in Algeria, and many others, and sought to replace them with an international agenda,” Cronin writes. The United States should now try to “sever the connection between Islamism and individualized local contexts for political violence, and then address them separately.” It should work with these local groups, not in an effort to convert them to democracy and love of America but in order to pry them away, one by one, from Al Qaeda. (“Calling the al-Qaeda movement ‘jihadi international,’ as the Israeli intelligence services do,” she writes, “encourages a grouping together of disparate threats that undermines our best counterterrorism. It is exactly the mistake we made when we lumped the Chinese and the Soviets together in the 1950s and early 1960s, calling them ‘international Communists.’ ”)
Eli Berman, an economist who has done field work among ultra-orthodox religious groups in Israel, is even more granular in his view of what terrorists want: he stresses the social services that terror and insurgent groups provide to their members. Berman’s book is an extended application to terrorism of an influential 1994 article by the economist Laurence Iannaccone, called “Why Strict Churches Are Strong.” Trying to answer the question of why religious denominations that impose onerous rules and demand large sacrifices of their members seem to thrive better than those which do not, Iannaccone surmised that strict religions function as economic clubs. They appeal to recruits in part because they are able to offer very high levels of benefits—not just spiritual ones but real services—and this involves high “defection constraints.” In denominations where it’s easy for individual members to opt out of an obligation, it is impossible to maintain such benefits. Among the religious groups Iannaccone has written about, impediments to defection can be emotionally painful, such as expulsion or the promise of eternal damnation; in many terrorist groups, the defection constraints reflect less abstract considerations: this-worldly torture, maiming, and murder.
Berman’s main examples are Hamas, Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army, in Iraq, and the Taliban, whom Berman calls “some of the most accomplished rebels of modern times.” All these organizations, he points out, are effective providers of services in places where there is dire need of them. Their members are also subject to high defection constraints, because their education and their location don’t put them in the way of a lot of opportunity and because they know they will be treated brutally if they do defect.
Like most other terrorism experts, Berman sees no crevasse between insurgents and terrorists. Instead, he considers them to be members of a single category he calls “rebels,” who use a variety of techniques, depending on the circumstances. Suicide bombing represents merely one end of the spectrum; its use is an indication not of the fanaticism or desperation of the individual bomber (most suicide bombers—recall Muhammad Atta’s professional-class background—are not miserably poor and alienated adolescent males) but of the supremely high cohesion of the group. Suicide bombing, Berman notes, increases when the terrorist group begins to encounter hard targets, like American military bases, that are impervious to everything else. The Taliban used traditional guerrilla-warfare techniques when they fought the Northern Alliance in the mountains. When their enemies became Americans and other Westerners operating from protected positions and with advanced equipment, the Taliban were more likely to resort to suicide bombing. How else could a small group make a big impact?
The idea of approaching terrorists as rational actors and defeating them by a cool recalibration of their incentives extends beyond the academic realm. Its most influential published expression is General David Petraeus’s 2006 manual “Counterinsurgency.” Written in dry management-ese, punctuated by charts and tables, the manual stands as a rebuke of the excesses of Bush’s global war on terror.
“Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” the introduction to the manual declares. “They must be prepared to help reestablish institutions and local security forces and assist in rebuilding infrastructure and basic services. They must be able to facilitate establishing local governance and the rule of law.” The manual’s most famous formulation is “clear-hold-build,” and its heaviest emphasis is on the third of those projects; the counterinsurgent comes across a bit like a tough but kindhearted nineteen-fifties cop, walking a beat, except that he does more multitasking. He collects garbage, digs wells, starts schools and youth clubs, does media relations, improves the business climate. What he doesn’t do is torture, kill in revenge, or overreact. He’s Gandhi in I.E.D.-proof armor.
Petraeus has clearly absorbed the theory that terrorist and insurgent groups are sustained by their provision of social services. Great swaths of the manual are devoted to elaborating ways in which counterinsurgents must compete for people’s loyalty by providing better services in the villages and tribal encampments of the deep-rural Middle East. It’s hard to think of a service that the manual doesn’t suggest, except maybe yoga classes. And, like Berman, the manual is skeptical about the utility, in fighting terrorism, of big ideas about morality, policy, or even military operations. Here’s a representative passage:
REMEMBER SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL Another tendency is to attempt large-scale, mass programs. In particular, Soldiers and Marines tend to apply ideas that succeed in one area to another area. They also try to take successful small programs and replicate them on a larger scale. This usually does not work. Often small-scale programs succeed because of local conditions or because their size kept them below the enemy’s notice and helped them flourish unharmed. . . . Small-scale projects rarely proceed smoothly into large programs. Keep programs small.
One problem with such programs is that they can be too small, and too nice, to win the hearts and minds of the populace away from their traditional leaders. The former civil-affairs officer A. Heather Coyne tells the story, recounted in Berman’s book, of a program that offered people in Sadr City ten dollars a day to clean the streets—something right out of the counterinsurgency manual. The American colonel who was running the program went out to talk to people and find out how effective the program was at meeting its larger goal. This is what he heard: “We are so grateful for the program. And we’re so grateful to Muqtada al-Sadr for doing this program.” Evidently, Sadr had simply let it be known that he was behind this instance of social provision, and people believed him. For Berman, the lesson is “a general principle: economic development and governance can be at odds when the territory is not fully controlled by the government.” That’s a pretty discouraging admission—it implies that helping people peacefully in an area where insurgents are well entrenched may only help the insurgents.
One could criticize the manual from a military perspective, as Mark Moyar does, for being too nonviolent and social-worky. Moyar admires General Petraeus personally (Petraeus being the kind of guy who, while recuperating from major surgery at a hospital after taking a bullet during a live-ammunition exercise, had his doctors pull all the tubes out of his arm and did fifty pushups to prove that he should be released early). But Moyar is appalled by the manual’s tendency to downplay the use of force: “The manual repeatedly warned of the danger of alienating the populace through the use of lethal force and insisted that counterinsurgents minimize the use of force, even if in some instances it meant letting enemy combatants escape. . . . As operations in Iraq and elsewhere have shown, aggressive and well-led offensive operations to chase down insurgents have frequently aided the counterinsurgent cause by robbing the insurgents of the initiative, disrupting their activities, and putting them in prison or in the grave.”
Because terrorism is such an enormous problem—it takes place constantly, all over the world, in conflict zones and in big cities, in more and less developed countries—one can find an example of just about every anti-terrorist tactic working (or failing to). One of the most prolific contemporary terrorist groups, the Tamil Tigers, of Sri Lanka, appears to have been defeated by the Sinhalese Buddhist-dominated government, through a conventional, if unusually violent, military campaign, which ended last spring. In that instance, brutal repression seems to have been the key. But the Russians have tried that intermittently in Chechnya, without the same effect; the recent suicide bombing in the Moscow subway by Chechen terrorists prompted an Op-Ed piece in the Times by Robert Pape and two associates, arguing that the answer is for Russia to dial back its “indirect military occupation” of Chechnya.
The point of social science is to be careful, dispassionate, and analytical, to get beyond the lure of anecdote and see what the patterns really are. But in the case of counterterrorism the laboratory approach can’t be made to scan neatly, because there isn’t a logic that can be counted upon to apply in all cases. One could say that the way to reduce a group’s terrorist activity is by reaching a political compromise with it; Northern Ireland seems to be an example. But doing that can make terrorism more attractive to other groups—a particular risk for the United States, which operates in so many places around the world. After the Hezbollah attack on the Marine barracks, in 1983, President Ronald Reagan pulled out of Lebanon, a decision that may have set off more terrorism in the Middle East over the long term. Immediate, savage responses—George W. Bush, rather than Reagan—can work in one contained area and fail more broadly. If the September 11th attacks were meant in part to provoke a response that would make the United States unpopular in the Muslim world, they certainly succeeded.
Even if one could prove that a set of measured responses to specific terrorist acts was effective, or that it’s always a good idea to alter terrorists’ cost-benefit calculations, there’s the problem implied by the tactic’s name: people on the receiving end of terrorism, and not just the immediate victims, do, in fact, enter a state of terror. The emotion—and its companion, thirst for revenge—inevitably figure large in the political life of the targeted country. As Cronin dryly notes, “In the wake of major attacks, officials tend to respond (very humanly) to popular passions and anxiety, resulting in policy made primarily on tactical grounds and undermining their long-term interests. Yet this is not an effective way to gain the upper hand against nonstate actors.” The implication is that somewhere in the world there might be a politician with the skill to get people to calm down about terrorists in their midst, so that a rational policy could be pursued. That’s hard to imagine.
Another fundamental problem in counterterrorism emerges from a point many of the experts agree on: that terrorism, uniquely horrifying as it is, doesn’t belong to an entirely separate and containable realm of human experience, like the one occupied by serial killers. Instead, it’s a tactic whose aims bleed into the larger, endless struggle of people to control land, set up governments, and exercise power. History is about managing that struggle, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, rather than eliminating the impulses that underlie it.
For Americans, the gravest terrorist threat right now is halfway across the world, in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. On paper, in all three countries, the experts’ conceptual model works. Lesser terrorist groups remain violent but seem gradually to lose force, and greater ones rise to the level of political participation. At least some elements of the Taliban have been talking with the Afghan government, with the United States looking on approvingly. In Iraq, during the recent elections, some Sunni groups set off bombs near polling places, but others won parliamentary seats. Yet this proof of concept does not solve the United States’ terrorism problem. Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan all have pro-American governments that are weak. They don’t have firm control over the area within their borders, and they lack the sort of legitimacy that would make terrorism untempting. Now that General Petraeus is the head of the Central Command and has authority over American troops in the region, our forces could practice all that he has preached, achieve positive results, and still be unable to leave, because there is no national authority that can be effective against terrorism.
Long ago, great powers that had vital interests far away simply set up colonies. That wound up being one of the leading causes of terrorism. Then, as an alternative to colonialism, great powers supported dictatorial client states. That, too, often led to terrorism. During the Bush Administration, creating democracies (by force if necessary) in the Middle East was supposed to serve American interests, but, once again, the result was to increase terrorism. Even if all terrorism turns out to be local, effective, long-running counterterrorism has to be national. States still matter most. And finding trustworthy partner states in the region of the world where suicide bombers are killing Americans is so hard that it makes fighting terrorism look easy.
And yet he talked about Doku Umarov, who claimed responsibility for last month’s double bombing in Moscow’s subway, as if the rebel leader were standing in the room.
“His time will come,” said Mr. Yevkurov, 46, who is scarred from an assassination attempt last June that Mr. Umarov claimed to have organized.
“Whether it’s tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, whether he dies of natural causes in the woods or in a cave, whether he is blown up or shot up, or if he is caught and locked away in a death cell,” Mr. Yevkurov said. “If he is still alive and walking around, that does not simply mean he has managed to survive. The Almighty is giving him the chance to find the strength to acknowledge the evil he has brought to people.”
“But he is not using this chance,” he said. “Retribution will reach him sooner or later.”
Moscow suddenly focused on Mr. Umarov last month, after he announced that he had ordered the bombings that killed 40 people in the subway. Russian leaders scrambled to sever his links to the public by pressing Google to remove his video messages, and they circulated a bill in Parliament that would ban the media from quoting him.
But Mr. Yevkurov was addressing an old enemy. He and Mr. Umarov, 46, were born within months of each other, in closely related ethnic groups that share an archaic wariness toward Moscow. Both were in their 20s when the Soviet Union fell, forcing young men in the Caucasus to choose sides in a separatist war. There they diverged, and two decades later the loyal Russian soldier and the battered rebel are still fighting.
Now the prize is something more slippery than territory: the loyalty of a generation that grew up in the chaos of those wars.
“In the Caucasus, a leader’s personality really matters,” said Ramzan R. Ugurchiev, 29, the chairman of Ingushetia’s youth committee. “There is a saying: If the leader is a wolf, we will be a pack of wolves. If the leader is a jackal, we will be a pack of jackals.”
Mr. Ugurchiev, like any young man here, could reel off a list of acquaintances who had “gone to the forest,” or joined the rebels. He guessed that 15 percent of his classmates had done so, vanishing with so little warning that their parents could never accept that they left voluntarily.
In some cases, he said, a voice simply reached them at the right time. Rebel recruiters like Said Buryatsky, killed in a special forces operation last month, tapped into the sense of injustice seething beneath the surface here, where the official unemployment figure is around 50 percent and young men chafe at heavy-handed treatment by federal counterterrorism troops.
“The harder you press down, the more we will press up against you,” Mr. Ugurchiev said. “It’s the Caucasus. It was always this way.”
Mr. Yevkurov — one of 12 children born to a peasant family — seemed to address this resentment head-on. He refused a lavish inauguration, saying he preferred to greet the public at evening prayers, and combines the suit and tie of a Moscow-backed bureaucrat with a traditional skullcap. Though counterinsurgency operations continued, he won over much of the opposition with open-handed gestures like giving out his cellphone number and responding to complaints personally.
That was part of his strategy. A career military intelligence officer, he said he had long believed that counterterrorism was mainly a matter of soft power.
“The most severe punishment, that should make up 1 percent,” he said. “Ninety-nine percent should be persuasion, persuasion, persuasion.”
His project was interrupted by a roar of flames last June, when a suicide bomber swerved into his motorcade, killing two in his party and badly wounding his brother. Mr. Yevkurov was still in a coma when the rebel Web site Kavkaz Center published a letter saying the bombing was ordered by Mr. Umarov, a former separatist leader who has embraced global jihad as his new ideology.
The letter professed special hatred for Mr. Yevkurov because he fought for Moscow in the second Chechen war, calling him “the faithful dog of Russia.”
“From the moment Yevkurov came to power,” the letter read, “we wanted to kill him.”
The attack gave Mr. Yevkurov a reason to hate Mr. Umarov — but he had reasons already. The Ingush people share a religion and a language with Chechens but have traditionally been more loyal to the federal center; they bristle when Chechens try to take control of their territory, as Mr. Umarov has. He also attended school in Beslan, where in 2004 separatists took more than 1,000 children and teachers hostage.
Mr. Umarov, meanwhile, has good reason to fear Mr. Yevkurov and his experiment in persuasion, said Sergei M. Markedonov, a Caucasus expert at the Institute for Political and Military Analysis, in Moscow. To survive, the insurgents need the support of 15 or 20 percent of the public, combined with a mood of “passive neutrality,” he said. Mr. Yevkurov is bidding for this percentage — and, critically, for the allegiance of people in their teens and 20s.
“That is the main force, of course,” Mr. Markedonov said. “Whoever wins over the young generation will win.”
That competition goes on, invisibly, in the pauses between explosions. When a counterterrorism operation in February killed four civilians who were in the forest gathering wild garlic, Mr. Yevkurov expressed regret over the deaths. He said that 180 garlic pickers had been evacuated in a sincere attempt to avoid killing civilians and that 18 militants had been killed in the attack.
But he was not the only one who recognized a public-relations moment. Moscow was still reeling when Mr. Umarov announced that the bombings there were revenge for the garlic pickers, “mercilessly destroyed, killed by those bandit groups under the name of the F.S.B.,” Russia’s security service.
Mr. Yevkurov responded with disdain, saying Mr. Umarov “portrays himself as a kind of Robin Hood, who defends people.”
“An opponent is an opponent,” he said.
“Had he been some enemy who came from outside I might have valued him, respected him,” he continued. “But this is an enemy who kills his own people and covers it up with ideas. I have no respect for him, despite all his abilities to hide.”
By David C. Morrison, Special to Congressional Quarterly
Don't believe the hype: Transnational cybercrime, actually a far more serious concern than "cyberwar" attacks against the electrical grid, e.g., cyberczar says . . . Duck and recover: California shelter firm offers guaranteed survival of bioterror, nuclear terrorism, chemical attack, etc. at only $50,000 per head . . . Taxpayers beware: It would take trillions of Uncle Sam's dollars to decontaminate the site of a major biological attack. These and other stories lead today's homeland security coverage.
Order in the court: “There is little debate that Justice John Paul Stevens’ terrorism-related opinions and influence have checked a broad and bold assertion of executive power,” Marcia Coyle comments in The National Law Journal. If DHS’s Janet Napolitano gets tapped to replace Stevens, “it would bring a fresh perspective to a body made up exclusively of former appeals court judges who have never held elected office,” legal eagles tell The Arizona Republic’s Erin Kelly — and check her speech today at Harvard. FOX News, again, tenders “a list of disputes” involving A.G. Eric H. Holder, most of the beefs terror-related — while the Post’s Dana Milbank proclaims him “a Guantanamo Bay prisoner.”
Chasing the dime: Until recently, few Mexican criminals dared touch the border’s teeming multinational factories, but amidst a raging cartel war those are no longer untouchable, The McAllen (Texas) Monitor relates.For $50,000 per person, a California company offers clients a berth in an underground shelter guaranteed to survive nuclear attacks, bioterrorism and chemical warfare, NPR spotlights. The Chertoff Group, helmed, of course, by the ex-DHS chief, has hired Richard Falkenrath, who is retiring as NYPD counterterrorist at month’s end, SecurityInfoWatch relays. Raytheon Co. says it’s received an $88 million TSA contract to install passenger screening equipment, BusinessWeekrelays.
State and local: A GOP candidate for Oklahoma governor who endorsed a state citizen militia is retreating from his earlier position that it be used to oppose the federal government, The Oklahoman relays — as The Bay City Timesnotes the second installment in a two-part NPR report on the cop-threatening Hutarees profiling a “kinder, gentler” side to Michigan militias. Members of The Dallas Morning Newseditorial board, meantime, debate the merits of installing metal detectors and X-rays at the Texas Capital. A House homeland hearing in Plant City, Fla., on Monday will examine security of pipelines, including hundreds of miles of gas and oil pipe in the Tampa area, the Tribune relates.
Bugs ‘n bombs: Whether McAlester, Okla., would be ready for an “incident involving chemical exposure and mass casualties” was answered in the affirmative by last weekend’s terror exercise, the News-Capital leads. “For years, specially trained dogs have run their noses over objects to screen for explosives. But vapor wake dogs can detect explosives in the air despite crowds, cross-currents and other odors,” CNN spotlights. It would take trillions of Uncle Sam’s dollars to decontaminate the site of a major biological attack, Global Security Newswire finds a new report alerting. Following al Qaeda threats to the World Cup soccer match, State is “providing extensive training to South African police to deal with potential bioterror or nuclear attacks,” BioPrepWatch reports.
Coming and going: “Two detailedreports on risks to surface transportation offer intriguing insights,” Homeland Security Newswire promises. “Beijing’s subway security has reached the highest level in history, with all of its nine subway lines’ entrances, passages, stations and security checkpoints being guarded by armed police, SWAT teams [and] police dogs,” China Daily leads. Arizona lawmakers have approved what foes and supporters agree is the toughest measure in the country against illegal immigrants, the Los Angeles Times relates. Ranchers fed up with border violence in southern Arizona, meantime, are demanding action to close the border and restore order, The Arizona Republic recounts.
Welt Zeitgeist: A TV spot by a Colombian ad agency proclaims “Desinfex household cleaner will do to germs what bombs do to suicidal terrorists. It’s that effective!” Gothamist relays. “Scotland Yard has bowed to Islamic sensitivities and accepted that Muslims are entitled to throw shoes in ritual protest — which could have the unintended consequence of politicians or the police being hit,” The Times of London tells. “Roars, growls and galloping hooves replaced music Tuesday on some of Mogadishu’s radio stations in a protest of a ban on music imposed by Islamic extremists,” CNN leads. Iraqi authorities have uncovered 9/11-esque plans by al Qaeda to fly hijacked planes into the country’s Shiite mosques, Agence France-Presse reports. The Brit Army stands accused of “gross insensitivity” for erecting seven mosque-like structures on a firing range, The Daily Mail mentions.
Bauer-ing Inferno: “Only days after canceling the television series ‘24,’ FOX Entertainment announced today that it had reversed its decision and decided to pick the show up for a ninth and final season,” Glossy Newsnotes. “The announcement came just as tabloid Web sites were reporting that Kiefer Sutherland, star of the popular action thriller, had begun intimidating and threatening executives at FOX over the show’s early demise. The suits say there is ‘absolutely no truth’ to the rumors and that the renewal was just a change of heart on their part. ‘We realized the show is amazing and that we had acted a bit prematurely in canceling it,’ said head of programming Kevin Reilly. ‘We love “24,”and we love Kiefer. I also love my family. I love them very, very much.’Asked what that non-sequitur had to do with the FOX show, Reilly broke down crying.”
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