Twenty-First Century Terrorism - Essay Example

RUNNING HEAD: TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY TERRORISM Twenty-First Century Terrorism [Name of the Writer] [Name of the Institution] Twenty-First Century Terrorism Introduction The 21st century launch a new age of terrorism, marking the interlocked essentials of religious zealotry, globalization, and the American superpower position (Merari, 2000). First, 21st-century terrorism is declared on a fight to change the world, with responsibility only to a deity or a lofty idea and a wish for martyrdom (Laquer, 2003; Merari, 2000). Information on terrorism spots to the Muslim world as particularly leaning toward brutal confrontation with further civilizations, most remarkably the West (Barber, 2001; Merari, 2000). surround economic, political, and intellectual grievances within sacred doctrine produces an unstable formula that can be oppressed to mobilize hold, not for national control or pan-Arabism, but for a global Islamic domination. Second, globalization has damaged national borders (Barber, 2001; Jensen, 2001; Merari, 2000). Globalization is explained by worldwide assimilation through the association of capital and goods, growth of individual rights, broadcasting of information, and rearrangement of large numbers of citizens. It follows that states may be destabilized, particularly those whose synchronized economies, political size and authority, and demographic equilibrium are challenged. damaged nations often face a conflict of national identity that rouse dormant racial and religious identities, which may become altered into chauvinistic and fundamentalist aggression directed at the West due to its apparent role in retreating national self-esteem. In addition, virtual economic difference may fuel individual and civil dissatisfaction. Although globalization has lifted up the absolute standard of existing worldwide (Barber, 2001), it has broadened the distance between the rich and poor (Jensen, 2001). Anti-globalization expression motivates aggression because it rests on resentment and offense, whereas terrorism proposes the promise of assistance from abuse and scarcity (Barber, 2001; Laquer, 2003). Finally, as an unconcealed superpower, the U.S. has ever more interfered internationally, whether during peace keeping efforts, pressurizing both democracies and autocracy seen as friendly to American welfare, or establishing corporations to access markets and contemptible labor (Jensen, 2001). As a result, terrorists target U.S. benefits, hoping to impetuous a forceful response that will threaten or radicalize modest who contains the key obstacle to terrorists’ political goals. The Terrorism Analysis View Scholars and analysts of violence generally consent that good intelligence is dangerous: the National Committee on Terrorism, for example, finished that ‘no other lonely policy attempt is more significant for stopping, obstructing and responding to attacks’ than intelligence. (Laqueur, 2003) But terrorism analysts tend to share several assumptions regarding intelligence that are not all held by traditional scholars of intelligence failure. First, there is harmony that terrorism delivers a particularly difficult difficulty for intelligence (as well as for rule and process). Because terrorist groups are often small, dispersed and do not rely on the large infrastructure of a conventional state-based threat, intelligence is limited in its ability to use traditional tools and techniques to gain insight on terrorist intentions and capabilities. Second, the main limitation for intelligence is supposed to be its need of Human ability. For example, terrorism experts still today frequently complain that decade ago, then-Director of Central Intelligence Stansfield Turner turned the community away from Humans and toward technical intelligence. The importance of Human in the fight beside terror, in fact, is one guess that unites psychoanalysts of intelligence, such as Richard Betts, and of violence, like Paul Pillar. Third, terrorist assaults are not likely to be lead by planned warning. This has been the finding of several official investigations following terrorist attacks, such as the Crowe Commission that studied the Kenya and Tanzania US Embassy bombings and criticized the intelligence and policy communities for having relied too much on tactical intelligence to determine threat levels. (Bell, 1975) And fourth, in a position linked to the strain on human intelligence, writers on violence tend to disburse comparatively little concentration to the significance of intelligence scrutiny. They focus instead on the need for better collection, particularly from human sources, and for increased counter-terrorist operations in the form of counter-intelligence and covert action. This is not, however, to argue that great powers never will support violent nonstate actors. It is easy to imagine that most of the great powers will support such groups at various times, just as they have in the past. However, it perhaps is unlikely that the major states will promiscuously support such groups in the fashion that, for example, the Soviet Union did during the Cold War. (Bell, 1975) That Soviet Union supported terrorist groups, rebels, and other violent nonstate actors focused on a bewildering variety of causes; virtually any group that promised to create difficulties for one or more of the USSR’s foes could find a friendly ear in Moscow. Soviet leaders could be so promiscuous in their support, frankly, because they could be confident that their clients were either incapable or uninclined to do so much damage to Western interests that a Third World War might result. (Laqueur, 2003) Similarly, the United States supported actors such as the Nicaraguan Contras and the Afghan mujahedeen, even though the latter were in combat with Soviet troops, with little fear that such activities would provoke a superpower war. (Alexander, 2001) Support for violent nonstate actors, in essence, was seen by the Cold War superpowers as a means of conducting proxy conflict on a limited scale. Supporting Islamist or similarly apocalyptic-minded groups, however, presents great dangers. Indeed, the Americans almost certainly would not have supported the mujahedeen if they had known that so many of them eventually would morph into extremely dangerous anti-Western terrorists, and the dangers of “blowback” now are well appreciated. Beyond this, however, is the even more appalling possibility that one might support an actor who “goes too far.” (Bell, 1975) The USSR likely spent little time worrying whether the Irish Republican Army (IRA) would plant a radiological device in London; regardless of whether such an attack was within the IRA’s capabilities, the IRA leadership could be assumed to understand that an assault of this kind would not be in its interests. Given the events of 11 September 2001, prudent states are unlikely to be so sanguine in the future. (Laqueur, 2003) To support terrorists who occasionally detonate car bombs on a foe’s streets is one thing, but to be indirectly responsible for an extraordinarily devastating attack is quite another. The latter event can be expected either to lead directly to war or a very dangerous tit-for-tat, as the aggrieved enemy undertakes to respond in kind, perhaps, for example, by providing WMDs for a nonstate actor to use against one’s own homeland. (Laqueur, 2003) The emerging environment is, in short, one in which restraint by great powers would be universally beneficial, and this is the sort of situation that can give rise to informal or normal constraints on the behavior of those states. The alleged creation of a taboo against nuclear use is perhaps the best example of this; none of the great powers have used nuclear weapons in warfare since 1945. (Bell, 1975) Most likely, however, constraints on the support of violent nonstate actors would not be nearly as sweeping as the nuclear taboo, which restricts the use of nuclear weapons of all descriptions, including relatively small and “clean” weapons. (Laqueur, 2003) Instead, self-imposed limitations on support for nonstate actors likely would be narrow, perhaps only restricting support for violent groups which endeavor to commit violent acts on the homeland of a great power. Thus, it would still be possible for a major state to support groups which “make trouble” in various ways, but threatening the security of a foe’s homeland might be regarded as unacceptable. This would enhance the security of all the great powers because all of these policies are vulnerable to WMD-armed terrorists or rebels. Of course, great powers also would be surrendering possible gains which they would derive from the support of apocalyptic terrorists, but there is at least weak precedent for this: it appears that for more than sixty years, the great powers generally have been quite reluctant to support violent proxy operations on the territory of their peers. This price, however, may appear eminently reasonable—after all, it is unlikely that any of the great powers would be able to use non-state actors to secure critical goals, but all could suffer grievous harm at their hands. It thus would be sensible for all the great powers to refrain from supporting nonstate actors which threaten the soil of their peers. There is, however, no guarantee that all these states will choose to be reasonable; they may find that the temptation to support terrorists sufficiently strong that it overcomes their more cautious instincts. Indeed, it might only necessary that one great power be willing to support terrorist actions against a foe’s homeland to destroy mutual restraint, as it is unlikely that its peers would be willing to grant the troublemaking state an enormous asymmetrical advantage. (Laqueur, 2003) At the equal time, it is always essential, after, of course, abolishing the direct terrorist threat, to analyze the joint relations between the terrorists and the third party on whom they create their orders in order to fetch to light the enthusiasm behind terrorist acts and comprehend their causes. The resist against terrorism cannot be efficient without acting on its grounds. Not rarely, one finds basics in the contact between the terrorists and the third party that offer rise to criminal performance, with both sides to one level or another, or even largely the third party, to blame for the appearance and worsening of these rudiments. (Laqueur, 2003) In exacting, the third party may place sure groups of the inhabitants under agonizing living circumstances, in which such grouping and their legislature see no other way to declare their privileges and lawful benefits. A state of this kind is worsen, on the one hand, by demolition of the regime of legitimacy, and, on the other hand, by the “self-isolation” of the assembly anxious in difficult conditions and by their isolation from the cultural setting, education, and civilized principles. Of great significance in such a condition are the capability and willpower to use legal bars to change the state of associations, the facts of how to do this, and buoyancy that legal means will show Effective. This perception of terrorism and this model of response to it assume that only the law enforcement organization and not the army are used in the resisting against it. It is vital not to react to terrorism with acts of a terrorist nature, in the route of which damage is inflicted not on the terrorists themselves but on guiltless people, including the terrorists’ associations. In the heat of antiterrorist actions, unpredicted victims are inexorably harmed. State bodies have the responsibility to examine, in harmony with the standards of civil legislation, the costs of all such actions without exemption and charge and reimburse the harm done. Conclusion The early twenty-first century most likely will see the proliferation of political movements that use terrorism. Most of the terrorist groups active in Western countries no doubt will present only a small threat to domestic and international order, becoming heirs to the tradition of incompetent terrorism pioneered by organizations such as the Weathermen and Baader-Meinhof Gang, but it is quite probable that one or more terrorist groups will emerge that are as dangerous as al Qaeda but have no ideological association with Islamism. (Alexander, 2001) At this point, it is unknowable which, if any, political movements will eventually spawn significant terrorist activity; while antiglobalization, environmentalism, and animal rights movements all are noteworthy contenders, they merely are today’s obvious candidates. No one can know what new ideologies will be created by the accelerated by technological and social change, but a violent “neo-Luddite” response to genetic engineering, artificial computer intelligence, and other advances is utterly predictable. In any event, it is probable that terrorism will continue to be a significant threat to the world’s major states. It is, nonetheless, unlikely that terrorism will be a critical factor, much less the factor, shaping great power politics in this century. One should not, however, dismiss terrorists and other nonstate actors inevitably as being minor players whose activities ultimately will matter little to the major states. Rather, their future importance largely will be determined by the interaction between such states and entrepreneurial nonstate users of violence. If the former shy away from using the latter as cat’s paws against their peers, then nonstate violent actors probably will not shape profoundly the century’s politics. This would not mean that they would never again succeed in attacks similar in scale to 9/11; indeed, nonstate actors may even succeed in constructing (or obtaining from a roguish less than-great power) and using weapons of mass destruction. (Alexander, 2001) However, a limited number of terrorist attacks—no matter how horrible—will not determine the destinies of mighty states to any substantial degree. Although the destruction of downtown New York or Washington is a monstrous prospect, such an act would not permanently undermine US military or economic power, though it certainly would inflict very substantial temporary damage on the American economy. The same can be said of the destruction of downtown New Delhi, Beijing, Moscow, or Tokyo; any observer who does not believe this would do well to consider the stunning damage inflicted on Russia/the Soviet Union from 1914 to 1945, and the fact it was enormously more powerful at the end of that period than it was at its dawn. (Bell, 1975) If, however, the great powers do choose to freely make use of nonstate actors to inflict damage on their peers, they will be opening a Pandora’s Box. In that case, violent nonstate actors may be very important indeed, and their actions likely would have a key impact on global politics. In that case, the overall damage inflicted by terrorist attacks likely would be far greater than would otherwise be the case, as great power patrons could supply weapons (including, if they chose to do so, WMD), intelligence, and other resources in abundance. Also, great powers which, by proxy, attacked the homeland of their peers would be courting outright war, with ever-greater escalation quite possibly leading to a major conflict. It should be recalled that the catalyst for the First World War was a Bosnian Serb assassin whom a great power believed to be sponsored by a state, even though Serbia was a minor polity and the murder of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was more significant as a potential blow to Austrian prestige (insofar as to not take action would make Vienna appear weak) than in terms of direct damage to Austria’s vital interests. (Bell, 1975) A world in which all the great powers had reason to fear that one or more of their peers might be plotting to use a proxy to inflict a devastating attack on them would be all the more unstable. Such conditions likely would make the international environment one in which paranoia would be all too- likely to trump sweet reason when great powers made decisions relating to war and peace. In short, the great powers have a practical choice to make—whether to show restraint in the support of violent nonstate actors who may act against their peers or take their chances “riding the tiger,” hoping to gain by the actions of their proxies while themselves avoiding critical damage. It is impossible at this point to know which course they will choose. References Arce. Daniel, and Todd Sandler. (2005) Counterterrorism: A Game-Theoretic Analysis./journal of Conflict Resolution 49:183-200 Alexander, Yonah & Swetnam, Michael S, Usama Bin Laden"s Al-Qaida: Profile of A Terrorist Network (Ardsley, NY: Transnational Publishers, 2001) Department Of Homeland Security. (2004) Budget in Brief, Fiscal Year 2005. Available at http://www.dhs.gov/interweb/assetlibrary/FY_2005_B 1 B_4.pdf. (Accessed April S, 2004). Barber, B. R. (2001). Jihad vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s challenge to democracy. New York: Ballantine. Bell, J B, Transnational Terror (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975) ENDERS, WALTER, AND TODD SANDLER. (2005) After 9/11: Is It All Different Now} Journal of Conflict Resolution 49:259-277. Jensen, C. J., III. (2001). Beyond the tea leaves: Futures research and terrorism. American Behavioral Scientist, 44, 914–936. Laqueur, W, No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-first Century (London: Continuum, 2003) Merari, A. (2000). Terrorism as a strategy of struggle: Past and future. In M. Taylor, & J. Horgan (Eds.), The future of terrorism (pp. 52–65). Portland, OR: Cass. Read More