APPENDIX 3
Memorandum submitted by Professor Ian
Bellany (23 September 2002)
What is absent from this document, even taking
into account the fact that it is for publication and presumably
therefore not intended to be unreservedly candid, is the admission
that terrorist strikes of the September 11, 2001 variety cannot
be defended against. Even if it is conceded there may have been
an element of sheer bad luck in the enormously high ratio of US
civilian losses to terrorist losses on that day, the terrorist
bomber and especially the suicide bomber will always get through
(only slightly to paraphrase Stanley Baldwin). True, very heavy
security at airports and elsewhere, with armed guards on aircraft
and finger-tip body searches of all passengers, could make a difference,
but these will not be tolerated for long by the public, especially
given the inevitably large number of "false positives"
and consequent alarms occasioned by drunk or deranged but otherwise
innocent travellers. And threats to shoot down "rogue"
aircraft that may have been hi-jacked by terrorists, in spite
of talk in the New Chapter of Quick Reaction Alert capabilities,
are frankly incredible without the air-to-air equivalent of rubber
bullets being available, and about these the New Chapter is silent.
So what can be done?
The New Chapter mentions deterrence as a possibility.
But it is, and can only be, of the very indirect "proxy"
sort which threatens to punish governments believed to be (in
rough descending order of delinquency) either promoting, or hosting,
or tolerating, or failing properly to eradicate the terrorist
group believed to be responsible. The proxy method, which Israel
seems to have invented in the context of its own regional problems,
has apparently been keenly adopted by the USA. There is normally
(see below) something to be said for Britain not straying too
far out of line with its allies, but proxy deterrence now works
(qua deterrence of terroristic attacks) rather badly for Israel
(after an admittedly promising start), and adoption elsewhere
anyway carries the seeds of its own failure. Its uncritical adoption
by Britain or its allies opens up the possibility of embroilment
in other countries" domestic unrest, and on the wrong side
of the contest.
Consider two scenarios. A remarkably large number
of states have a domestic terrorist problem. So a policy of proxy
deterrence could actually encourage an Egyptian (or Russian, or
Indian or Pakistani or Filipino or Indonesian etc etc) terrorist
group to attack Britain or British interests since we would then,
under the deterrence rubric, at a minimum make stiff representations
to the Egyptian government which had failed to prevent this. The
terrorists' enemy would become our target.
Again, given the large number of places with
an internal terrorist problem and the international links between
some terrorist organisations, an internationally mobile terrorist
group hostile to British interests might be able to select as
a convenient base from which to launch operations, the territory
of a state with which Britain enjoyed especially good relations,
thereby pre-empting the possibility of effective retaliation.
But there is a method of defence which relies
on the fact that the capacity of terrorist groups to sustain a
high rate of long-range strikes is very limited. Presenting the
terrorist with a large set of targets spoils him for choice, and
the chance of any one target state being hit in any given interval
of time is proportionately reduced. If every terrorist group saw
itself opposed by every member state of, eg NATO, equally, the
chance of Britain being the target of the next outrage might be
reduced by a factor of about 1 in 10. Thus there is still safety
in numbers even when there is no defence and deterrence is moot.
Numbers do not have to be enormous to make a real difference.
It is often overlooked that one reason why the collapse of France
in 1940 so alarmed Britain was simply that British targets were
for a while the only ones left for German bombers.
All is still not perfectly plain sailing. A
reasonably united NATO front is needed, and a united NATO front
on anything has never been exactly easy to obtain when there is
a bugle-call to action. Whilst it remains true that defence is
impossible, airports with absolutely no security measures would
naturally be preferred by terrorists looking for access to aircraft,
so something like a NATO standard minimum of airport (and other
"nodal point") security would be needed. On the other
hand, it would not do for NATO states to embark on a race to implement
domestic anti-terrorist measures, since some would fall behind
and become the targets of choice or, worse, tempted to renege
on the collective anti-terrorism stance. It would be the job of
truly communautaire intra-alliance diplomacy to ensure that every
member had a satisfactory minimum of measures in place, and to
discourage "devil take the hindmost" policies. No ally
is going to thank a neighbour who seems to take a pride in the
extent of anti-terrorist precautions surrounding his nuclear power
installations, for instance. To that extent the requirement is
to share the burden of risk.
Whilst the New Chapter (para. 65) seems to concur
in the importance of international responses to terrorism, it
strikes a hostile note (para 50) with respect to "containment"
as a strategy for lending shape to these responses. In fact, containment
must be allowed to have certain advantages.
True, it can look uncomfortably like doing nothing.
It might be more easily "sold" under the name of "containment-plus",
to allow for "roll-back" expeditions along Afghan lines
when circumstances justify them. On the other hand, containment
has a good cold war record and containment-plus a good record
with regard to Iraq since 1991. Public memories are not always
as short as is sometimes said. Containment is certainly compatible
with deterrence. Containment is of course for the long run, and
the long run is certainly the timescale needed for effecting those
political and economic changes that may themselves attack terrorism
at its roots, even if it is a beginner"s mistake to think
of terrorism as being directly correlated with political and economic
underdevelopment. And an honest embrace of containment will help
correct popular misconceptions that terrorism is a recently arrived
nuisance, serious of course, but something that can be as quickly
got rid off by correct policies. Moreover, containment is less
risky than putting all eggs in the basket of future Afghan-style
"roll-back" efforts, not least in that the latter are
bound to be relatively divisive in alliance terms and if conducted
in the same way as the Afghan war, likely to prove militarily
rather indecisive anyhow.[59]
And the possibility needs to be borne in mind that further terrorist
outrages, which can certainly be anticipated to put a strain on
containment strategies, may be designed precisely to do that in
order to provoke something more dramatically proactive, which
may be feared less by the terrorists than containment itself.
Furthermore, containment provides a logical
(and familiar) framework within which to embrace a range of practical
international activities designed to deny terrorists access to
funding and banking facilities, or to "strategic" items,
or raw materials related to weapons of mass destruction.
Finally, unlike the "war on terrorism"
with its absolutist and principled overtones, containment has
come to have a useful pragmatic ring to it. It is absurd to wage
war on all "terrorism" just as it was absurd during
the cold war to contain all "communism". Even NATO"s
resources are finite. The original strategy of containment, for
instance used Tito (at least as hostile to Western capitalism
as Stalin was) against Moscow rather than anathematising him as
an object of equal abhorrence. Some terrorist targets will be
more important than others and it may be sometimes expedient to
support (or at least turn a blind eye towards) terrorism in the
short run in order to combat it in the long run. The Afghan expedition
found Britain in alliance with regional agents (Northern Alliance)
whose own record of resort or non-resort to terroristic methods
we would have been unwise to scrutinise too closely.
59 The New Chapter admits the inevitable indecisiveness
of active operations against foreign concentrations of terrorists
(as in e.g. Afghanistan), whilst placing the blame on avoidance
of pitched battles by the enemy, when our own (Anglo-American)
policy of casualty-avoidance was at least as much to blame. Back
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