Strategic terrorism

T.P. Thornton describes terrorism as the deliberate creation of a sense of fear, usually by
the use or threat of use of symbolic acts of physical violence, to influence the political
behavior of a given target group. His analyses describes three facets of this phenomenon: the
violent quality, the nature of the violence and the symbolic character of the violent act.

Strategic terrorism tries to produce certain effects on a specific set of people in order to attain
an objective of policy. The aim is to reak the spirit and create a sensation of fear within a
target group, which then, they hope cause it to initiate political change.

Terrorism has many similarities to guerrilla warfare, for example they are both dedicated to
triggering the asking of a question by the target group. They both same the same objectives
and are categorized as “irregular” warfare. The difference is that strategic terrorist believe
that the use of symbolic violence alone will be sufficient to achieve the desired political ends.

The process of achieving their aims can be explain in three stages:

Stage 1 disorientation represents the division of citizens from the authorities, in order to
diminish the power and legitimacy of the state, making them look incapable to respond
adequately to such a situation of chaos and danger.

Nowadays, the state is considered the main provider of stability and security, as long as the
people trust in the security offered by the state, the ideas of a terrorist group are perceived as
dangerous and wanting to destroy the already created society. Thus, disorientation is the key
objective and they use violence to disrupt society and to replace stability with suspicion, in
order to show that the authorities are not capable of defending their citizens. Their goal is to
separate citizens from society, hoping that they will either join them, become more open to
the political program offered, or they will remain neutral.

This tactic has been successfully applied throughout history, for example in 1957 the
Algerian Front de la Liberation Nationale (FLN) massacred a group of villagers for
supporting a rival nationalist group. FLN didn’t took responsibility for the atrocity and they
just placed the blame on the French authorities. The French, had a history of attacks against
Algerians, therefor most Algerians now preferred to believe the FLN’s version of events. The
legitimacy of French rule diminished in Algeria because of this atrocity that had been carried
out by their staunchest enemy.

Another case, is the terrorist bombing attack of a police station in Baghdad in 2004 were the
US forces were blamed because some American planes were seen flying over the city around
the time of the explosion. In a matter of minutes, angry crowds blamed America for this
aggression. Later, it become clear that the attack was carried out by the Iraqi terrorists but
that didn’t made much of a difference. American forces were still the ones to blame in the
citizens eyes because they didn’t provide enough security.

In both of those cases, the result was a loss of legitimacy and credibility for the authorities in
power, not the terrorists that actually committed the assault.

Second stage, target response, inducing the government to respond in a way that is more
favorable to the agitator’s case, like provoking it to an illegal reaction or repressive
overreactions in order to destroy the political middle-ground.

The text presents a number of hypotheses that can provide an idea of what the terrorists try to
achieve with target response.

The first hypothesis is target overreaction, this also is a big part of disorientation. The
terrorists want to push the authorities into using methods that go beyond the legal system and
go into using extra-legal action. The government way use special police and judicial
measures which will affect the normal citizen’s life like curfews, road blocks, house searches
etc., and those type of actions can make the file of a citizen unbearable and that can cause
him to turn against the government. The text suggests, that usually the governments may be
tempted to overreact in order to showoff the power that they hold and crush any questions or
challenges to its authority. This type of response can be seen during the 1960s and 1970s in
the government’s response toward terrorists or in the US and Soviet reactions to the
disobedience faced in Vietnam and Afghanistan. They tried to dehumanize the insurgents but
even though they had massive resources, they didn’t get satisfactory responses. By
overreacting, they had de-legitimized they beliefs and it resulted in increasing the support of
the rebels.

The second hypothesis, power deflation, represents the counterpart of the first one and it’s the
scenario where a target loses public support because it appears incapable of dealing
adequately with the terrorist threat. The target lacks support in its policy in dealing with the
terrorist, although it possesses greater power. In those cases, the terrorists play with the fear
of the target that if they respond, the terrorist will match they response therefore creating
more damage.

The next response presented is the failed repression of the moderates, basically the
suppression of the moderate non-violent oppositions by the government, like banning
political parties, closing newspapers or even extreme cases like arrest, torture of killing
moderates. The problem is that if the repression is not efficient, then the moderate will
become more extreme and will search for groups, especially, violent groups to join and create
a solution. One good example is the SAVAK, the Shah’s secret police, that was not efficient
in repressing the opponents of the regime, the ones that escaped created groups in order to
coalesce against the regime. Because of this pressure, in 1978, Shah attacks a group of
protestants in order to try to stop the cycle and it resulted in the deaths od 1000 protestants.
Later he was overthrown.

The last hypothesis, is the appeasement of the moderates, a response that it’s not usually used
in my opinion. This represents the understanding of the political authority of the terrorists
group grievances. The target, introduces reforms in order to redress those problems in hope to
undercut support for the terrorist and stop others to be attracted to violent actions.The main
idea is to try to isolate the hard-liners from moderates. This type of policy has some
dangerous aspects like it can be seen as a form of weakness or it may lead to ‘ pro state
terrorists’ that will complicate the targets position by creating another violent group like the
Organisation Armee Secrete during the Algerian war of independence, the Loyalist factions
in Northern Ireland or the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia.

The third and last stage is gaining legitimacy. After alienating citizens from the government,
terrorists must attract citizens to their side, by presenting an attractive alternative in which
citizens have a response to the deficits of the other regime. This promotion is usually done
through media. This can be achieved in two ways. The first is skillful manipulation of the
media, and this is done by presenting a good story in order to get attention. For example,
hostage taking which is always broadcasted and gains a lot of attention. With each minute of
attention, they can explain their vision more and maybe attract some more people. One
example is the 1970’s October crisis, when the Canadian Front de Liberation du Quebec
kidnapped a British diplomat and the Deputy Prime Minister of Quebec. They issued a series
of communicates to the media, they got a chance to be broadcasted and gain a lot of publicity.
Most of the negotiations were done through the media. More of 50% of the callers on Radio
Canada were as a matter of fact sympathetic.

The second way to acquire legitimacy is through grassroots political agitation. This basically
means the creation of a political group backed by the terrorist group in order to attack people
that usually would not be susceptible of their ideology. Those type of people are usually
attracted by a charismatic leader of the services or they get attracted by their involvement
with on the community. In Western Europe, terrorist groups have more political partis like
the Heri Batasuna which is the political wing of the Basque terrorist organization ETA, Sinn
Fein which is the IRA’S political front.

The main problem with the strategy of terrorism is the very element which is meant to make
terrorism such a powerful weapon, the manipulation of the psychology of fear. Terrorism,
tends to be based on a series of strategic terrorism assumptions about individual, collective
and institutional behavior provoked under stress which are either false or wholly unproven.

A main assumption of strategic terrorism is that the target group’s determination to hold on to
a particular policy or possession will collapse once it has been exposed to terrorist violence.
This assumption is based on the colonial experience, when terrorists demonstrated that the
will of the target group can be undermined, government repression induced and support for
the terrorist cause gained. Situations of foreign occupation are the most favorable from the
terrorists’ point of view, because the authorities’ legitimacy can be assumed to be very low to
begin with, but this is highly questionable whether these conditions can easily be imitated in
different contexts.

Another assumption, follows the idea that a terrorist campaign will instill a degree of fear
within the target population. The truth is that, even if the terrorists manage to generate an
atmosphere of fear and apprehension, this will most likely not be channeled in the direction
the terrorists would hope. Instead of becoming disoriented, the public usually blames the
terrorists for the deteriorating situation.

From a military point of view, for a terrorist group to have success, its campaign must be
sudden, brutal and indiscriminate, the aim has to be sock and disorientation. If a campaign
gets prolonged, the only option is to escalate the campaign to a new, higher level of
destruction sufficient to maintain a sense of terror. An that comes with a lot o problems like,
lack of money and personnel, total loss of public sympathy, counter-escalation from the
target government, which will result in the destruction of the insurgent movement.
Terrorism holds many weaknesses, but the main one has to be that they try to overcome
deficiencies in a military power by using manipulation of emotional impact resulted from
relatively small-scale attacks. They relay to much on the exploitation of the psychological
rather than the destructive effects of armed action.