Does Terrorism Work?

Over the last few months, I’ve been researching cognitive biases and how they influence our decision-making. I looked at the confirmation bias, which is the human tendency to seek out and process information that confirms our preexisting beliefs. I also examined the self-serving attributional bias; when we blame unfavorable outcomes on external causes but take credit for positive ones. A recent article I read talked about a different bias: correspondent inference theory.

Correspondent inference theory is the human tendency “to infer the motives – and also the disposition – of someone who performs an action based on the effects of his actions, and not on external or situational factors.” Paying attention to what those around you are doing makes “evolutionary sense” – most of the time, it pays to infer as quickly as possible the intentions of those around you.

But it doesn’t work all the time in building an accurate picture of what’s going on.

A recent paper, “Why Terrorism Does Not Work” by Max Abrahms, draws attention to how responses to terrorism are influenced by correspondent inference theory. First, let’s look at a lighthearted example to shed light on this.

In the 1985 movie comedy The Man with One Red Shoe (which, by the way, is a remake of the French film The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe), the CIA believes that a random civilian (Tom Hanks) is a spy so they set about investigating his life to prove it.

In one scene, CIA operatives tear Hanks’ flat apart to try and find anything that would establish he is a spy, like disconnecting pipes in the bathroom to see if anything is hidden inside. As they rush to piece everything back together, they inadvertently connect the toilet pipe to the sink. When Hanks returns home, he repeatedly flushes the toilet trying to figure out why water comes out the sink spout. CIA officers, listening to this via the bugs they’ve planted, infer that he’s flushing evidence down the toilet. By misinterpreting what Hanks is doing, the CIA needlessly send an officer into the sewer to find this “evidence”.

More seriously, Abrahms’ paper draws attention to the fact that it is sometimes assumed that the goal of terrorist activities is to kill innocent people and so instill fear or economic instability in a population. These assertions, according to Abrahms’ analysis of the policy objectives of 28 terrorist groups, aren’t necessarily correct.

Many terrorist groups have avowed strategic goals. For example, Abrahms notes that al-Qaeda’s goals have been consistent (like ending American support of Israel and eliminating U.S. interference in Saudi Arabia). These goals, however, haven’t been achieved. In fact, Abrahms claimed overall that, out of the 42 policy objectives for these 28 groups, only 7 percent were achieved. The rest of the policy objectives were not achieved.

What was the deciding factor between objectives that were achieved and those that failed? Abrahms’ data revealed that the target of the terrorist attacks was important. Groups that attacked military and diplomatic targets more than civilians were more effective in achieving their ends. Out of the 19 groups that primarily targeted civilians, there were 28 policy objectives between them. Twenty-five of these objectives were not achieved, and only limited progress was made toward achieving three.

Abrahms’ explanation for this effect rests on correspondent inference theory. High numbers of civilian casualties from terrorism lead citizens and governments alike to infer that the aim of terrorist groups is to kill innocent civilians and disrupt their way of life. This inferred “maximalist” agenda makes them more steadfast in their resolve not to negotiate with terrorists. As a result, the stated goals of the terrorist groups tend to go unmet.

Terrorism against civilians, it seems, isn’t a very effective tactic and, if Abrahms is correct, is even counter-productive if its aim is to compel governments to change their policies to meet the terrorists’ goals. Unfortunately, such terrorism goes on nonetheless.


Ashley Thornton


References

Wired Magazine, “The Evolutionary Brain Glitch That Makes Terrorism Fail”. 12 July 2007: http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/
securitymatters/2007/07/securitymatters_0712

Max Abrahms, “Why Terrorism Does Not Work.” International Security, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Fall 2006).
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/isec.2006.31.2.42

Photo by "shoothead" retrieved from Flickr.com.

Al-Qaeda’s Internet

In November 2001, Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist reporting from Afghanistan, watched “every second al-Qaeda member carrying a laptop computer along with a Kalashnikov” as they prepared to flee American bombing.

These are the first lines of an article I recently read in “Le Temps”, a Swiss newspaper, describing the growing role the Internet allegedly plays in al-Qaeda’s terrorist activities.

Terrorist organizations, and Al-Qaeda in particular, have not been caught on the hop by the fast development of recent technology. Quite the opposite: terrorist presence on the Internet is becoming ever more pervasive and sophisticated (last figures estimate the number of sensitive websites to 5’000).

As described in a report by Gabriel Weimann, the Internet is in many ways the “ideal arena” for terrorist activities. Evident advantages include its ease of access, anonymity, little or no regulation and the possibility of communicating to a vast potential audience. Moreover, the volatility of websites, which can close and re-open with a different URL every day, increases the difficulty of tracking terrorist activities.

In his report, Weimann describes the numerous uses terrorists make of the Internet. He divides them into 8 categories:

1. Psychological warfare: the Internet is used as a means of pressure or to instill fear (e.g. diffusion of execution videotapes).

2. Propaganda: via the Internet, terrorist organizations can directly control the messages they want to communicate in ways that are cheap and instantaneous.

3. Data mining: Internet is used to gather information about a target. In his book “Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyberterrorism”, Dan Verton claimed that:

al-Qaeda cells now operate with the assistance of large databases containing details of potential targets in the U.S. They use the Internet to collect intelligence on those targets, especially critical economic nodes, and modern software enables them to study structural weaknesses in facilities as well as predict the cascading failure effect of attacking certain systems.

4. Fundraising

5. Recruitment: the Internet, and some online forums in particular, have been used as platforms to recruit specialists, not to mention candidates to be suicide bombers.

6. Networking: Through the use of the Internet, loosely interconnected terrorist groups are able to maintain contact one with each other (for more info about terrorist networks, have a look at this former post).

7. Sharing information: Internet is used to provide technical advice, from the way to create a detonator with a cell phone, to bomb recipes and encryption methods.

8. Planning: the Internet can be used to coordinate terrorist activities. For instance, bombings in Casablanca, Morocco in 2007 occurred in an Internet café, where the bombers were waiting for last-minute instructions from over the web about their intended target.

In response, some government security agencies have implemented software, such as “Magic Lantern” or “Carnivore”, which aim to locate terrorist websites by scanning the Internet. These agencies have also recruited “cyberspies”, whose job is to infiltrate chat rooms and forums.

These initiatives, however, are limited in number and scope, and usually lack much financial support because policymakers tend to underestimate the migration of terrorism from the physical space to cyberspace. According to Le Temps, the Swiss government, for instance, doesn’t have a specialized agency to combat terrorist activities in cyberspace – instead it uses existing services to combat cyber-crime and pedophilia when needed.

Of course, adapting existing expertise and experience within governments to respond to new threats can be very effective. But in this context it may also indicate lack of attention. Meanwhile, the nature of terrorism will evolve with and take full advantage of new developments in technology and communication unless countered. Governments take heed.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Le Temps, “Internet, la nouvelle base arrière du terrorisme”, 3 July 2007 (Swiss newspaper).

Gabriel Weimann, How Modern Terrorism Uses the Internet, The Journal of International Security Affairs, Spring 2005 - Number 8, check that link.

Dan Verton, Black Ice: The Invisible Threat of Cyberterrorism, McGraw-Hill/Osborne, 2003.

Photo retrieved from Flickr.com.

Can network theory help track terrorists – or small arms?

Al Qaeda is often referred to as an atypical organization without central authority that operates like a swarm. In a 2005 interview, Spanish counterterrorism judge Baltasar Garzón said that, following the loss of key leaders during the first year of the U.S.-led global war on terrorism, Al Qaeda convened a strategic summit in northern Iran in November 2002, at which the group’s consultative council decided that it could no longer operate as a hierarchy, but instead would have to become a decentralized network.

Can network theory help us destabilize or even neutralize terrorist groups?

Well, it seems to be possible. In a recent article in The Boston Globe (see reference below), I read that the Pentagon asked a team of scientists from Boston to look at the potential of “social network analysis” to study the web of relationships among terrorist organizations, arms scientists, and suppliers in order to help prevent terrorists from acquiring or developing weapons of mass destruction.

By reconstructing the web of the cultural, political, and financial connections among terrorists, it’s possible to identify the individuals who are most highly socially connected. These key players – also known as “hubs” – are not necessarily the leaders of the organization: they are the nodes that hold the network together. By knocking down a critical hub, you may disable the whole network.

This method has been used retroactively by Valdis Krebs, a Cleveland consultant, to determine the key role of Mohamed Atta among the 19 hijackers involved in 9/11 terrorist attacks. Network theory was also at the center of the U.S. military programme called “Mongo Link”, whose aim was to chart Saddam Hussein’s relationships and which eventually led to his capture near his hometown of Tikrit.

Determining hubs and relationships in terrorist networks is a major challenge. Although some networks are obvious in hindsight, the real difficulty is to disable them before they act.

Network theory also may have wider applicability to other security issues, in which relationships are important to understanding what’s going on. (John Borrie and I discussed this in our chapter in the Disarmament as Humanitarian Action project’s third volume of research, see reference below.) In particular, a potential use for this tool could be to identify the significant nodes and critical connections of illicit small arms proliferation networks.


Aurélia Merçay


References

Bryan Bender, “Antiterrorism agency taps Boston-area brains: Analysts plumb arms networks”, The Boston Globe, March 27, 2007.

Aurélia Merçay and John Borrie , “A Physics of diplomacy? The Dynamics of Complex Social Phenomena and Their Implications for Multilateral Negotiations”, Thinking Outside the Box in Multilateral Disarmament and Arms Control Negotiations, UNIDIR, 2006, pp. 129-164, available online here.