Does Counter-Terrorism Work?

Abstract

Al-Qaʿida’s attacks on September 11, 2001, were likely the most cost-effective use of military force in history. Conducted at the grand expense of several hundred thousand dollars, the attacks and the American overreaction cost the US Treasury some seven trillion dollars, and counting, in addition to the horrific loss of civilian and military lives on that tragic day. They did not, however, accomplish al-Qaʿida’s strategic objective of separating America from its allies in the Middle East, and al-Qaʿida was gravely damaged in the aftermath of the attacks even as the American efforts to remake Iraq and Afghanistan foundered.Were the trillions of dollars America spent in the wake of al-Qaʿida’s catastrophically successful masterstroke a smart investment in the security of the American people? More briefly, does counter-terrorism work? Richard English, of Queen’s University Belfast, answers with a qualified “sometimes” in his short new book, already in press by the time Hamas replicated al-Qaʿida’s’ terror strike with one of its own on October 7, 2023, in Israel.English is a longtime student of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland who, in the wake of September 11, broadened his focus to encompass other conflicts around the globe. In Does Counter-Terrorism Work? he provides a comparative analysis of US (and, to a much lesser extent, UK) counterterrorism efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader “War on Terror”; British CT in Northern Ireland, where he is on familiar ground; and Israeli counterterrorism. The comparison extends interest in his work from the United Kingdom to the United States and the Middle East, and as is sometimes the case, foreign eyes can see things that Americans and Israelis too often miss.English oddly treats his cases in reverse chronological order, beginning with Afghanistan, Iraq, and ISIS before turning to Northern Ireland and then finally Israel in what I assume is a bid to attract American readers. The result reads awkwardly and upends his otherwise commendable claim to adopting a historically minded approach; if Israeli and British counterterrorism efforts provide lessons that could inform American strategy, why not cover them first? The damage is not fatal, but it is an entirely self-inflicted wound that mars an otherwise valuable study.English argues that strategic victory in counterterrorism, while possible, is unlikely; instead, partial strategic success is more likely, while tactical success can and often does come at the expense of accomplishing strategic goals. This is a truth that cannot be overemphasized; the 2006 U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual noted that an operation that removed three terrorists from the battlefield while inciting another dozen previously uncommitted civilians to join the insurgent cause was a net loss to the effort.1The same can be true on a broader scale—tactical counterterrorism successes can have negative strategic effects and often have done just that in the cases he presents. This is perhaps the most valuable argument English makes and one he returns to repeatedly, with America and especially Israel receiving severe criticism; English notes that “in Israeli counter-terrorist experience overall, there is a striking tension between tactical brilliance and strategic self-harm” (162), analysis that the ongoing “mowing the lawn” CT operations in Gaza have only reinforced.2The American response to the September 11th attacks was a lightning fast “by, with, and through” counterterrorism campaign that used Northern Alliance Afghan ground forces supported by Central Intelligence Agency and Special Forces operators to topple the Taliban with airpower and chase bin Laden out of Afghanistan, rendering his organization largely combat ineffective and arguably defeated by the end of 2001.3 It did not fall prey to this particular error of tactical success at the expense of strategic failure, ending particularly badly for other reasons. The most critical of all of America’s many failings in Afghanistan was the unnecessary and bungled invasion of Iraq in 2003. The decision to invade Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with September 11 and did not harbor terrorists prior to the invasion, meant that already in 2022 “Afghanistan slipped down the list of priorities, and the Iraq-based distraction and self-delegitimization proved extremely pernicious for the War on Terror” (27).An America that chose not to mobilize for war in the wake of September 11th simply did not have the resources to fight two grinding counterinsurgency campaigns at the same time. Top American officials made no secret of the fact that Iraq took priority over Afghanistan; Admiral Mike Mullen, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the House Armed Services Committee in December 2007 that “In Afghanistan, we do what we can; in Iraq, we do what we must.”4English notes that “the US withdrawal [from Afghanistan] unquestionably represented a setback in terms of the War on Terror and its objectives” (23) since “the 2021 imbroglio (presented by the Taliban as a victory over the US) might yet lay the foundations for more terrorism” (24). Counterterrorism expert and CNN national security analyst Peter Bergen agrees, calling the August 15, 2021, fall of Kabul to the Taliban the best day for global jihadis since September 11 itself and noting that since the Taliban’s resumption of power Afghanistan has become a magnet for jihadis, including at least 400 members of an al-Qaʿida that gained new life from the American defeat in Afghanistan.5Indeed, the American invasion of Iraq—what Tom Ricks in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq described as “one of the most profligate actions in the history of American foreign policy”—“stimulated more anti-Western, jihadist terrorism internationally (exactly the phenomenon that it was supposed to be eradicating).”6 English cites US counterterrorism official Richard Clark noting that George W. Bush’s invasion succeeded in turning Iraq “from a nation that was not threatening us into a breeding ground for anti-American hatred” (36). The war in Iraq cost the United States tens of thousands of casualties, trillions of dollars, thousands of Americans (and tens or hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) killed, all while weakening the main regional counterbalance to strongly anti-American Iran, which now arguably controls Iraqi politics and has stationed significant numbers of proxy forces inside Iraq’s borders.7 English sums up the ledger of the American war of choice in Iraq: “Terrorism actually grew as a consequence of the Iraq War; the country became a magnet for jihadists, a site of violent struggle and lasting chaos, a justification deployed in defence of terrorist attacks elsewhere, and part of the complex sequence of events which generated the ISIS crisis” (36). Other than that, and distracting attention from Afghanistan and contributing to America’s defeat there, it was fine.The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq should be understood not in isolation from each other but as part of what President George W. Bush proclaimed as a “Global War on Terror” in the wake of September 11th. This meta-attempt to defeat an enemy tactic through global counterterrorism failed both in its component campaigns and overall; indeed, it was a pipe dream to think that even the United States, the most powerful nation in world history, could eradicate all terror from the face of the earth. In his excellent conclusion, English argues that “the actual causes behind al-Qaida’s assault on the US were misdiagnosed, the historical inheritances of Afghanistan and Iraq were not appropriately respected, and the known knowns of effective counter-terrorism were overlooked” (180). Instead of the clumsily named GWOT, English recommends realistic goals, consistently pursued; he argues that “a more realistic approach probably involves learning to live with and to contain terrorism, rather than pledging to eradicate it” (163). This is doable because even the most horrific terror attacks in living memory—September 11th in the United States, October 7th in Israel (proportionally a heavier blow)—were intended to “kill one, terrorize one thousand,” and succeeded. But “terrorism rarely embodies an existential threat to a state” and “the actual danger posed in practice can be comparatively trivial” (164); indeed, in most years deer kill more Americans than do terrorists. In point of fact, right-wing domestic terrorism is now a greater threat to Americans than radical Islamic terrorism; FBI Director Christopher Wray noted in March 2021 that the threat to Americans from white supremacists was on the same level as the threat to Americans from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, an al-Qaʿida successor organization.8English’s book loses some steam after its opening chapters on “The Post-9/11 War on Terror”; it is hard, after all, to maintain momentum when you begin with perhaps the biggest mistake any nation has made since Napoleon and Hitler chose to roll the iron dice on the frozen steppes of a Russian winter. Both the British forces in Northern Ireland and Israeli counter-terrorism forces have certainly made their share of mistakes in their campaigns against terrorists, often due to an early overreliance on force in response to terrorist provocations. English notes that this is entirely intentional on the part of the insurgents: “Provoking over-reaction by the state is one of the longstanding aims of terrorist organizations. . . . For states, the clumsy use of military force can give a huge lift to terrorist opponents” (166). This is true even for the “heroes” of English’s book, the British in Northern Ireland, whose “military heavy-handedness in Irish nationalist areas was often productive of terrorist sympathy” (166).But the British, in the best tradition of successful counterterrorism, learned and adapted over the course of their long campaign against the Irish Republican Army. As is almost always the case, better intelligence operations were essential to locating the fish swimming in the sea of the people; as a result of better information networks and more precision in targeting terrorists, a PIRA that had killed more than one hundred people annually during the 1970s took the lives of less than half that many on average over the decade that followed. English argues convincingly that “the UK used its intelligence networks to try to encourage movement towards more political and less violent modes of struggle in the republican movement” (97). In a portrait of counterinsurgency operations that will be familiar to many veterans of the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, English argues that “operations, interim concessions, publicity, the undermining of opponents, control over relevant populations, and the strengthening of the state” (112) all contributed to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 that by his estimate saved more than 2,400 Irish and English lives in the quarter-century since its signing. It is, he argues, “a partial strategic success for the state” (112) as well as additional proof, as if any were needed, that waging war on rebellion is messy and slow.English’s treatment of Israel’s long counterterrorism campaign against Palestinian forces is more interesting in light of the attacks of October 7th; although he titles his sixth chapter “From the Six-Day War to the Gaza Tragedy,” the Gaza tragedy of which he writes is Operation Protective Edge, which killed more than 2,000 Palestinians and wounded more than 20,000 in 2014 (144); there has obviously been a far greater tragedy in Gaza since. Still, the analysis English provides remains useful, particularly his note that “Ultimate Israeli counter-terrorist success would involve the eradication (or the partial yet substantial eradication) of the basis for terrorism itself” (153). While events since the publication of Does Counterterrorism Work? make it harder to see a path forward, English is not alone in suggesting that “it still remains possible that a two-state resolution could be reached in Israel/Palestine and, while this would be unlikely to eradicate all political violence, it might prove the long-term basis for decisively lowering levels of terrorism and could be considered a partial strategic success if it did so” (156).9The finale of Does Counterterrorism Work? is as marked-up with stars and exclamation points as any chapter in any book I can remember reading recently; English’s summary comments are exceptionally valuable and could have saved many lives and immense amounts of treasure had they been internalized earlier in my country, in England, in Israel, and in dozens of other countries around the globe that have been afflicted with terrorism. He focuses, again, on the counterproductive tendencies of states to overreact to terror attacks, offering the rule of law as a counterbalance to excess: “Legal restraints and processes are crucial here, if counter-productive tactics are to be avoided; and the rule of law offers a strong foundation for the successful limitation of terrorism” (167).He notes that terrorists seek that overreaction and counsels against it: “The disjunction between what most Muslims actually think and what groups like al-Qaida want them to think can either be reinforced or reduced by states’ actions and approaches” (170). Indeed, drawing on the cases he discusses in the book and many more globally, English argues that counterterrorism alone is insufficient. Channeling his inner Clausewitz, English is correct to note that “where counter-terrorism has most effectively dried up the reservoir of support for terrorist violence (such as in Northern Ireland), it is because it has been part of a wider political approach to the relevant root causes, an approach which does not focus exclusively on the terrorism” (171).In one of his best lines, English says that “Terrorism is a blood-stained symptom of the more important issues at stake” (171); a different analyst correctly called war “the continuation of politics by other means.” This means that if you want to do more than mow the lawn—punish today’s terrorists while sowing the seeds of tomorrow’s—you have to provide some resolution of the core issues for which terrorists are fighting. Thus, “effective counterterrorism must therefore be conceived of in terms of the wider politics ultimately at stake in these situations. Counter-terrorism must be integrated into such broader politics, and failure to recognize this will lead repeatedly to failure” (173).William Westmoreland noted in his memoirs that he kept a copy of Mao’s Guerrilla Warfare on his bedside table during his service in Vietnam but was generally too busy doing general officer things to read it. The architects of counterterrorism policy in Israel and the United States should take a few hours out of their schedules to read English’s short book, lest their policies end in the abject failure that marked the American counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam.