Forgotten Lessons of Counterterrorism
10/08/14
Paul R. Pillar
Terrorism Iraq Syria, Middle East
International
terrorism has evolved in significant ways even just in what could be
called its modern era, over the past 45 years or so. Policies and
practices in responding to it also have evolved during the same period.
Useful lessons have been learned and applied. Enough time has gone by,
however, and there have been enough discontinuities both in preferred
terrorist methods and in official responses, that some of the lessons
have been forgotten. This has been especially true in the United States,
where much of the public appears to believe that the whole problem of
international terrorism began on a September day 13 years ago.
In
the 1960s, 1970s, and on into the 1980s, international
terrorists—including Middle Easterners, as well as Western leftist
radicals who were still active then—periodically seized headlines and
public attention, in the United States as well as Europe. They most
often did so by seizing hostages and threatening to kill or otherwise
harm them if certain demands, often relating to release of previously
captured terrorists, were not met. Sometimes the hostage-taking occurred
on the ground, such as with the takeover of a meeting of OPEC leaders
in Vienna in 1975. Sometimes it was accomplished by hijacking a
commercial airliner along with its passengers and crew. Some of the
hostage-taking incidents became extended dramas that played out over
days. One that involved Americans, for example, was the hijacking by
members of Lebanese Hezballah of TWA Flight 847 in 1985. The hostages
were held (and one of them killed) during three days in the plane while
it crisscrossed the Mediterranean and then for another two weeks in
Lebanon before they were released.
Groups
that employed such tactics were using them as theater. Getting their
demands, such as release of incarcerated comrades, met was surely a plus
for them, but at least as important was the impact on larger audiences,
in the sense either of intimidation or of getting attention for a
cause. Brian Jenkins, one of America's earliest genuine experts on
terrorism, summed up this principle with the observation, “Terrorists
want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.”
Read full articlehttp://nationalinterest.org/blog/paul-pillar/forgotten-lessons-counterterrorism-11438
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