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 TERRORISM’S ENDGAME
Tactical Nuclear Games: Counters & Politics
Lyle Brecht15 May 2004
Terrorism’s Endgame:Tactical Nuclear Games
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 TERRORISM’S ENDGAME
Tactical Nuclear Games: Counters & Politics
Lyle Brecht15 May 2004
 Tactical Nuclear Games
What is desperately needed today is a new counter-terrorism strategy, a counter-terror strategythat does not make the U.S. itself look like the terrorists it is fighting in its “war on terrorism.”
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 Such a rethinking of counter-terror strategy is especially necessary before the U.S. or its allies ishit with a terrorist attack using CBRN weapons of mass destruction that kills or injures 30,000 or 300,000 people, rather than 3,000 people as in the 9/11 attacks.The following discussion portrays the present “global war against terrorism” the U.S. is engagedin as an analyzable game competitively “played” by two opposing sides.
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What this discussion
Terrorism’s Endgame:Tactical Nuclear Games
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 For example, in a January 25, 2002 memo from Alberto R. Gonzoles to President George W. Bush enti-tled: “Application of the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war to the conflict with al Qaeda and theTaliban,” the White House attorney is concerned that Bush administration officials could be prosecutedfor ‘war crimes’ as a result of the measures to combat terror adopted by the administration in response tothe 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda.
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 The benefits of re-thinking the “war on terrorism” is not to arrive at a final solution or descriptive analy-sis, but to alter perspectives so that creative, potentially productive alternatives to conventional wisdommay be explored and included in a multifaceted counter-threat strategy. Here the exercise is to model ter-rorism as a game that is being played in real-time by two opposing sides. This exercise potentially uncov-ers salient aspects of the “fitness landscape” or underlying structure that is required for any counter-threatsystem to adequately address different threat scenarios. This approach also highlights relative levels of funding required for the various components in an interlinked network of components (the “counter-threatsystem”) to produce specific results. In no way does the dispassionate manner in which terrorism dis-cussed here suggest that the author does not view terrorism as a horrific and morally reprehensible tacticto achieve political aims.
 
argues for is a holistic approach to “war on terrorism” strategy based on the inclusion of allmeans at the disposal of the state; not only counter-intelligence and military might, but also dip-lomatic, economic, political, moral, and justice-seeking measures appropriate for the type of po-litical conflict that engenders terrorism as a tactic to achieve political objectives.
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 Instead of thinking about this as a “war against terrorism,” this can be more accurately thought of as a “proxy war” fought by privatized groups of individual actors (e.g. al Qaeda is presently a prime example of such a group) who use terrorism as a technique to achieve political objectivesthat have the intention of producing structural changes in power-sharing relationships that areinternational in scope.
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 It is a “proxy war” in that al Qaeda, for example, is fighting as an agent on behalf of its “spon-sors” rather than for its own power or territorial objectives.
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This proxy war, from the perspec-
Terrorism’s Endgame:Tactical Nuclear Games
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 For example, well-funded hard-power components such as counter-intelligence and military power pro-duce less value for dollar expended if other soft-power components such as diplomatic, economic, politi-cal, moral and justice-seeking measures are not also optimally employed as part of an overall counter-threat systems approach. See Joseph S. Nye,
Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics
(Publi-cAffairs, 2004). 
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 Terrorism as used here is systemized violence against a predominantly civilian population that may takethe form of lethal force, symbolic violence, economic disruption,and other forms that impinge or impedeon the normal human freedoms that are reasonable, normative, and expected by such civilian population.Thus, terrorism has been a common a tactic of war used, for example, by the Germans against the Jewish populations of Poland, Germany, etc. during WWII; by the U.S. in its fire-bombing of Tokyo, etc. (e.g.100,000 civilians were k illed in one night’s air raids) against Japan in WWII; the U.S. “pacification” pro-gram in Vietnam; Pol Pot’s “ruralization” project in Cambodia that systematically killed millions of Cam- bodians; as a tactic of the U.S.-supported mujahideen in the Soviet-Afghan war; Sadam’s use of WMDagainst the Kurds in northern Iraq in the 1980’s; etc. “International” describes the fact that the combatantsare not fighting a domestic civil war within their respective domestic nation states, but internationally,across state boundaries. “Privatized” describes the fact that the terrorists are privately funded and are notcontrolled by the policies or directives of any particular nation state.
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 This is a real war, at least from the perspective of the U.S., in that the U.S is engaged in the maximumuse of “force to compel our enemy to do our will.” Carl von Clausewitz,
On War 
, edited and translated byMichael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 75.
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