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Marc Grossman, U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, responded to a question posed during the State Department's annual conference for leaders of nongovernmental organizations in a manner that baffled the audience. The Oct. 26 event naturally focused on Afghanistan and terrorism, and the questioner sought an explanation of the motives for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Grossman said he was "not interested in al Qaeda's motives." The perpetrators, he continued, were "just mass murderers ... the people's motives were murder."
Some among the 400 or so in attendance glanced at each other in puzzlement. Perhaps Grossman did not want to engage in a long discussion over the difficult issues of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, Iraqi sanctions, or the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio. Perhaps he did not want to admit that, if the United States addressed these motives, Washington would appear to confirm their validity.
Motives Matter
But his answer avoided what virtually all counter-terrorism experts consider to be a key element in any effort to eradicate a particular terrorist organization. According to Ehud Sprinzak, dean of the Lauder School of Government at Hebrew University, "most terrorists possess political objectives."
One of Rand Corp.'s leading experts on terrorism and a current advisor to the Bush administration, Bruce Hoffman, is more emphatic. Hoffman told interviewer Nicholas Lemann ("What Terrorists Want," The New Yorker, Oct. 29, 2001), "Terrorism has a purpose. Writing it off as mindless and irrational is not useful." Lemann concluded his interview with this observation:
"Hoffman's view is that all terrorists have goals, and that it is dangerous to see them only as madmen bent on destruction. In other words, one should not only recognize their capacity for mass murder but also make a serious effort to understand how they think in order to anticipate their next move; we need a new theory of what terrorists want."
Regardless of the truth or validity of what terrorist leaders declare they want — what moves them to engage in violence — political motives are essential for terrorist leaders.
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Motives provide the rationale for their pursuit of political power. Terrorist leaders want power and have chosen violence to get it.
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Motives dispel cognitive dissonance by reconciling the risks with the cause (violence requires a purpose in harmony with the action or otherwise it cannot be understood as rational). Such dangerous behavior, many psychologists have observed, needs an important cause to justify the huge risks.
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Motives also serve to recruit followers to become fighters in the field. Followers include both true believers in the cause and what researchers call opportunists, those who like the action and feelings of belonging. Terrorist leaders rarely engage in actual operations; they rely on trained, usually young, recruits.
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Finally, motives develop a comradery to ensure group solidarity, loyalty, and self-protection in difficult times. Terrorism is group behavior, and research indicates that maintaining the group is a significant value for its members.
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Without political motives, terrorists can only see themselves and be seen by others as nothing but common criminals, a label all terrorists reject.
Terrorists are in the business of advancing their cause, as one expert put it, by using a strategy of the weak to weaken the strong and strengthen the weak. Terrorists see themselves as undeserved underdogs on a mission.
The Nature of Terrorist Motives
Terrorist motives all exhibit one overriding theme, and that is injustice. Terrorists emerge from and identify with a large group of people whom they perceive to be unfairly repressed. The repressive political authority is known and hated. Whether Northern Ireland's IRA, the Basque ETA, Kashmiri Harakat-ul-Mujahidin, Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamal Eelam, the Lebanese Hezbollah, Palestinian Hamas and Islamic Jihad, Algerian Armed Islamic Group, or exiled Saudi Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda, all these terrorist organizations proclaim to represent a group not getting its due. And their due is usually portrayed as an independent political system organized according to a desired ideology. They all proclaim to suffer under the heel of an alien, corrupt, or illegitimate power.
Terrorism is not inherently irrational behavior. Research on terrorism has shown that the activity has been particularly effective in anti-colonial struggles for independence, although far less so in international wars, revolutions, and changing hated government policies (although political assassinations, such as those of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and President John F. Kennedy, have had profound policy ramifications). In short, terrorists believe what they are doing can be effective strategy.
Motives and Counter-Terrorism
Counter-terrorism must take into account terrorist motives in order to develop one key element in an effective strategy — the isolation of the hard-core terrorists. Historian Sir Michael Howard, speaking to the Royal United Services Institute in late October, emphasized this essential objective in British counter-terrorism strategy. "The object was to isolate the terrorists from the rest of the community," Howard said, "and to cut them off from external sources of supply." Those hard-core factions who are so committed to violence rarely end their terrorist pursuits, even with the removal of the repression under which they claim to have suffered. In a sense, terrorism becomes habit forming for them. Terrorism is what hard-core terrorists are good at, what gives them a sense of purpose, and what is necessary for self-preservation. Once hard-core terrorists are isolated, it is correct to refer to them for what they are, common criminals, nihilists, and murderers. They can then be hunted down according to law and with popular support. "Terrorists can be successfully destroyed," Howard told his audience, "only if public opinion, both at home and abroad, supports the authorities in regarding them as criminals rather than heroes."
To repeat, terrorism thrives in a sea of perceived injustice.
By understanding how the injustice is perceived, those designing counter-terrorism strategies can focus on removing that perception. If intelligence is the key weapon to thwart terrorist acts, pursuing justice is the key method to make them disappear.
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Campaigns to bring justice can erode terrorist propaganda. The danger, of course, is that it may appear to reward terrorism by redressing the stated grievances of the terrorists. But counter-terrorism involves a propaganda contest where the appearance of injustice must be dealt with. The terrorists' line must be made invalid — without, of course, ever saying that the redress of grievances is a product of a terrorist attack. Ignoring the perceived injustice tends to be seen as a tacit admission that the terrorists have a point. This is why the Bush administration has dealt with the Islamic issue by proclaiming that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam, and why it tried to neutralize al Qaeda's "issues" of U.S.-Israeli repression of Palestinians by re-engaging the peace process and declaring the necessity of a Palestinian state. Prior to Sept. 11, Secretary of State Colin Powell sought to soften the harsh sanctions on the Iraqi people by proposing (unsuccessfully, as it turned out) that "smart sanctions" focusing on military imports replace sanctions that depress Iraq's civilian economy.
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Redressing grievances undermines risk taking. If the group that perceives itself as being repressed sees an alternative peaceful political process for redress in contrast to its highly dangerous and destructive terrorism, chances are that many of its members will turn to politics and abandon terrorism. The current peace process in Northern Ireland, for example, has re-directed the IRA and its Sinn Fein political wing towards decommissioning, negotiations, and parliamentary politics. Violence in that troubled land, while not absent, has been reduced roughly in inverse proportion to the peace effort.
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Progress on bringing justice shrinks the pool of new recruits. Progress gives the "cause" less emotional appeal; people can turn to more personal or productive endeavors. For example, Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Eliot Trudeau in the 1960s and 1970s, by instituting greater Quebec autonomy and elevating the status of the French language, severely crimped the recruitment efforts of the Front for the Liberation of Quebec (FLQ) to the point where its hard-core leadership became isolated, vulnerable, apprehended, tried, and jailed.
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Dealing politically with the motives of terrorists invariably creates divisions among the terrorists. The fact that amnesty and the prospect of peaceful political process can become more attractive than terrorism to some terrorists produces a crisis in leadership and policy direction. Moderate leaders can then emerge who can abandon terrorism, survive, and even attain power. This very process occurred in South Africa when President F. W. DeKlerk abandoned apartheid, released Nelson Mandela from jail, and legalized the African National Congress. Terrorism virtually disappeared and Mandela, who was once called a terrorist, became president.
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Conclusion
Working for justice is a prerequisite for tracking down and bringing to account those who reject the pursuit of justice. It facilitates and legitimizes the use of force against hard-core terrorists. Without taking into consideration the motives of terrorists and dealing with those grievances that may have merit, counter-terrorism is compelled to rely on brute force — an activity likely to generate more terrorism and terrorists and elevate their cause.
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