Counterterrorism laid bare

IN THE NEWS
Yesterday, I mentioned that the Atlantic Monthly's lead article on two British spies in the IRA was a "must read" item. This important piece of the story about how the British government drove the IRA to the ceasefire shows how counterterrorism is simultaneously simple and hard.

The two spies in question, Fulton and Scap, took parallel paths in both the IRA and British intelligence. Both rose through the IRA's ranks to important positions, one in the IRA's bomb-making unit, the other in its internal security branch. Both had to continue doing the work of terrorists—building and deploying bombs, assassinating suspected spies within their ranks, etc.—despite the fact that they were working for the British government. In fact, their bloody work at a high rate of success had to continue because they were spies.  Otherwise, they could not achieve and maintain positions of importance and trust in the IRA, from which they could pass on critical intelligence about IRA members, resources, methods, and operations. Unfortunately, this hard reality occasionally made the British government an invisible co-conspirator with the IRA. At one point, Fulton's British handlers help him travel to the United States to purchase new infrared remote detonators, a terrorist innovation that has been passed on to other terrorist groups, including some of those attacking British and American targets in Iraq. Both Fulton and Scap contributed to Great Britain's counterterrorism campaign that eventually persuaded the core IRA (not the splinter groups) that the armed struggle wasn't going to achieve the political outcome they had expected.

As I discussed in my first "Counterterrorism is easier" post, this steady campaign of infiltration is a familiar story to any government who has fought organized crime. You need people "on the inside," since no electronic surveillance can ever hope to capture the full picture of who the terrorists are, and what they are doing. (Terrorists, like Mafiosi<, are normally very skilled at keeping few written or electronic records, speaking in code, and confusing their activities with those of "legitimate businessmen.") Infiltrators provide the critical information that, at the tactical level, shows how to defeat terrorists at the tactical level, revealing their methods for bombing, kidnapping, assassination, planning, financing, and recruiting; at the operational level, by alerting the government to planned terrorist operations; and at the theater and grand strategic levels, by dismantling terrorist organizations through raids, arrests, convictions, psychological operations, and other means. Violence has its place: for example, British soldiers have shot and killed IRA terrorists just before they detonated their bombs. However, violence still has to follow the Clausewitzian logic at each level of strategy to its conclusion. There's no point in killing top leaders of the IRA, Al Qaeda, or ETA if the organization survives.

Recruiting and running a network of infiltrators is difficult, even when you speak the same language. However, this and other aspects of counterterrorism are not arcane, representing a new form of warfare that defies every convention. In fact, Britain's worst moments in fighting the IRA happened when it broke these conventions. The American officials who support the maintenance of indefinite "detention" facilities in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan, Thailand, and elsewhere should study carefully the cost the British government paid for the indefinite imprisonment of suspected IRA terrorists and supporters, a practice that the British abandoned when it was clear how counterproductive it was (not to mention illegal).

The slow, patient, and dangerous work of infiltrating terrorist organizations is not the hardest part of counterterrorism, however. Instead, the most demanding aspect is the moral dimension, for which many people—and not just in the United States. When people say that terrorism is arcane, they often add, "especially for Western democracies." According to this view, the shadowy world of counterterrorism is antithetical to democratic institutions, which demand openness and accountability, and to Western values, which try to impose some version of the just war doctrine on every kind of conflict.

In fact, the moral challenge of counterterrorism is unique to neither terrorism nor the West. Fulton and Scap's British handlers had to let them build bombs that would be detonated in public places, killing civilians, and assassinate people in the British government and the IRA's own ranks. In some cases, Scap killed people he knew were innocent of spying to keep the IRA from suspecting him. If you were the mother of a child killed by a bomb on the way to school, or the wife of a leader in a terrorist group's political front who was wrongly fingered as a spy, how much would it matter that your loved one died in the name of the "greater good" of defeating terrorists? The government's agents in the terrorist group, and often the government itself, had foreknowledge of a terrorist operation. They may have tried to sabotage it. Unfortunately, in all too many cases, to preserve the infiltrator's position, both he and his government handlers let the attack proceed. Would the grief or outrage be any less if the victims were Nigerian, Burmese, or Colombian?

This moral fault line starkly divides counterterrorism from counterinsurgency. To defeat guerrillas, you need infiltrators. The guerrillas' strategy, attacking the government to impress, mobilize, or intimidate the population, is much different from the standard terrorist programme, attacking the population to coerce the government into capitulation to the terrorists' demands. Therefore, counterinsurgency's moral morass is neither as deep nor as noxious as counterterrorism's. At least the guerrillas can claim they were fighting an unjust government by attacking that government. (Again, it's worth noting that we're talking about the ideal types of terrorism and guerrilla warfare. In practice guerrillas sometimes resort to terrorist methods, such as the NLF's shelling of villages during the Vietnam War. However, there is a point of no return, once your primary target becomes the population, that defines the difference between terrorists and guerrillas.)

This moral fault line is nowhere more clear than in the direct or indirect blessing terrorists often demand before an operation. Hamas suicide bombers confer with sympathetic religious figures before an attack, receiving confirmation that, despite the Quran's taboo on suicide and its own version of the just war doctrine, killing civilians is both justified and necessary. Timothy McVeigh was an avid reader of Christian Patriot tracts, whose authors include a disproportionate number of pastors and ministers. Even secular terrorists like the Red Army Fraction and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine look for a similar "blessing" from grand historical forces of dialectical materialism or nationalism.

To a more limited extent than the terrorists themselves, governments become enmeshed in the same moral universe as the terrorists by recruiting infiltrators who participate in terrorist operations. If you want to fight terrorists, there is no alternative; you can only limit the moral and spiritual damage inflicted on those directly involved, and those who supported this campaign—which includes, by necessity, the general public. That's a good argument for defining your targets clearly, so that you don't have to face more moral crises than you strictly need, or can handle.

Comments

[tequila]

An interesting (if bloodier) parallel would be the apparent (still unconfirmed) use of infiltrators and agent provacateurs by the Algerian military regime in its war against the FIS and GIA. For years there have been allegations that some of the bloodiest attacks carried out by the GIA were at the instigation of government forces, or were false-flag operations carried out by the government forces themselves. Some of these have come from former Algerian officers. There were noted examples of massacres occurring within a half mile of government garrisons with no action taken by the troops within. These attacks played a key role in splintering the FIS and destroying its public support.