Anticolonial, Ideological, and ReligiousTerrorism

Modern terrorism has undergone three fairlydistinct phases since World War II with differing ideas dominating each phase:anticolonial terrorism, ideological terrorism, and religious terrorism.

Anticolonial Terrorism

Many revolutionaries in European coloniesused terrorism as a tactic after 1945, targeting colonial administrators,foreign nationals, and natives sympathetic to the colonial power. Terroristsformulated their own theories of anticolonial revolution and based much oftheir activity on earlier revolutionaries such as the Irish Republican Army andthe Russian Peoples' Will. Anticolonial rebels used terrorism to make foreignoccupation too costly for colonial powers. In modern bureaucratic language,this process is known as asymmetricalwarfare.

Few scholars have summarized asymmetrical warbetter than Bruce Hoffman, one of the foremost terrorism experts of our day.Hoffman points to the changing nature of war in the past 50 years. According toHoffman, the fall of European colonial possessions to the Japanese in World WarII established a revolutionary idea throughout the colonial world. When Japandefeated colonial powers, it demonstrated to native populations in Africa,Asia, and Latin America that European systems were not inherently superior tonon-European governments. As a result, colonies clamored for freedom. Theircries intensified when the Western powers signed a declaration asserting theright of nations to control their political destinies. When Europe's colonialpowers refused to abandon their empires, even after declaring the right toself-determination, colonies took up the mantle of political revolt.

As violence spread across European colonies,revolutionary leaders quickly realized they could not fight Europeans in aconventional manner. European armies were simply too strong. As a result,revolutionaries found their strategy guided by other principles. The purpose,they reasoned, was not to win a military confrontation against a superior power;their goal was to win a political battle in the court of public opinion.Opinion could be influenced when relatively weak forces attacked strongerforces at their weakest link. Revolutionariesembraced the idea of asymmetry.

Warfare is continually changing, andasymmetry is not a new concept in international conflict. In conventional warfare, the purpose of battle is to bring moreresources, troops, and power to a point where the enemy is weak. Successfulmilitary leaders create asymmetrical situations. Terrorists essentiallyfollow this logic, with one major exception. Because they are too weak toattack military forces directly, they attack them when they are at rest, or they bypass military targets for civilians.It makes little sense for terrorists to fight in the open against a superiorforce.

Hoffman examines three anticolonial revolts in Palestine, Cyprus, andAlgeria to demonstrate the effectiveness of asymmetry. The process began in Palestine before WorldWar II. Two Jewish terrorist groups, the Irgun Zvai Leumi and the Stern Gang,found they could attack occupying British forces even though the Britishoutnumbered them. The keys to terroristsuccesses were threefold: (1) Terrorists looked and acted as normal citizenswhen not engaged in combat; (2) terrorists operated in an urban environment,allowing them to emerge from a crowd and to merge back into it; and (3)symbolic targets created an aura around each attack, making it appear to bemore significant than it really was. Terrorists demonstrated that superiornumbers of British soldiers could not keep the country safe, and the processcontinued after the war.

Long before the 24-hour news coverage of CNN,Hoffman argues, Zionist terrorists were able to focus world attention on arelatively obscure cause. When theterrorists murdered Palestinian Arabs or British soldiers, they did so for thesake of gaining notoriety. They hoped to wear down the security forcespsychologically, to create a political climate in Britain that would deem thecosts of occupying Palestine to be too high, and to keep the conflict beforethe eyes of the world. When the British left in 1948, it was partially as aresult of a successful terrorist campaign. Otherrevolutionaries took note: Asymmetrical war worked. Hoffman's analysis ofCyprus and Algeria reveals similar results. Cypriot terrorists had nodesire to kill British soldiers for the purpose of gaining a military victory. They wanted to demonstrate the ability of aweaker force to strike a stronger force at will. Again, the message wasasymmetry. The same lesson came into play in Algeria. One Algerian revolutionary leader stated that it was better to kill oneenemy soldier in front of the world's media than it was to kill ten of them ina forsaken desert. The purpose of killing was to gain attention. In addition,terrorism in Palestine, Cyprus, and Algeria legitimized civilian targets.Murdering civilians had the same impact as killing soldiers.

Ideological Terrorism

The second phase of modern terrorism evolvedfrom the legacy of anticolonialism. By 1960, ideological and nationalisticterrorists used anticolonial rhetoric to challenge Western society. This led tothe growth of left-wing and ethnic violence in the 1960s and 1970s. Asleft-wing and nationalistic violence swept the Middle East, Asia, LatinAmerica, and the West, an international ethos of revolutionary terrorism seemedto pit itself against the Western world.

The ideological terrorists of the left, andlater the right, used the rhetoric of anticolonialism, but their targets werethe economic and social symbols of Western democracies. Some indigenousrevolutionary radicals gravitated to these movements, and many more sympathizedwith them. The political climate spawned by the Vietnam War fueled violentideological terrorism in Europe and the United States. Third worldrevolutionaries claimed these new ideologues as their own, and nationalisticterrorist groups in Spain, Ireland, and the Middle East moved from the rhetoricof nationalism to call for international revolution. The revolutionariesclaimed to transcend nationalism, whereas their more conservative adversariestraced their support back to nation-states supporting terrorism. In the end,the ideological movements failed even before the collapse of the former SovietUnion. Nationalistic groups in Ireland and Spain lost much of their support,and groups in the Middle and Far East searched for new meanings.

Why had ideological terrorism failed? Why did militants in Palestine, Iran, andSri Lanka look for another cause? Corrado and Evans speculate that the impactof democracy was ultimately to blame. Left-wing intellectuals had no moralground in the Western political frame. Violence de-legitimated terrorism, andleft-wing ideas became part of the political dialogue. Dennis Pluchinsky pointsout that the extremist groups also ran out of steam. Their unwillingness tocompromise and disgusting fascination with violence turned public opinionagainst them. Pluchinsky also shows that Western political systems weresympathetic to both class and ethnic injustices. When mainstream politiciansstole the terrorist agenda, the terrorists had no reason to fight. The samelogic did not apply to Asia and Africa. When Western democracies trumped theideological terrorists, violent groups searched for another supportingstructure. They found it in religion.

The Advent of Religious Terrorism

Religious terrorism differed from previousexperiences because it introduced a cosmic dimension to violent politicalstruggles.Mark Juergensmeyer's groundbreaking work, Terror in the Mind of God, examinesthe uncompromising attitude of such philosophy. The mere existence of ademonized enemy is evil, and any deviation from the orthodox path potentiallyrepresents the work of the devil. Therefore, tolerance of differences isinconceivable. Violence is mandated, according to Juergensmeyer, as a result ofthe cosmic necessity to purify creation by purging evil. The call to violence is a call topurify the world from nonbelievers and those who interpret religious traditionincorrectly. If the holy warrior fails, God fails, so the strugglecalls for martyrs willing to accept the holy duty of sacrifice. Holy war comesthrough a tradition that allows only one way of thinking. If the holy warriorfalls in a losing cause, the warrior becomes a martyr for hope. On the otherhand, successful warriors represent a victory for God. Such holy wars representuncompromising principles of struggle and sacrifice. Violent domestic religiousgroups and international groups were never able to grow past regional issues,yet Al Qaeda differed, becoming a truly transnational terrorist group. A brief examination of recent historyexplains why.

Lebanon, Sri Lanka,and Afghanistan: Suicide, Religion, and Asymmetry

Holy terror began growing in the Middle Eastin the wake of the Iranian revolution (1978–1979). Iranian revolutionariesestablished a theocratic government based on the laws of Shia Islam. WhenIsrael invaded Lebanon in 1982, their tanks rolled through the Shiite villagesof Southern Lebanon. Militant Iranians flocked to Lebanon in response, and theyspawned a new type of terrorist group with a new tactic, the suicide bomber. Oldforms of terrorism gave way to the religious fervor of Hezbollah, the Party ofGod, as religious terrorists struck the Israeli invaders with human bombs.

The Israeli Institute for Counter-Terrorism developed a thoroughdescription of the process Hezbollah developed to conduct suicide operations. TheICT argues that preparation for a suicide bombing comes from two separateunits. The first is a standard military group that focuses on reconnaissance,logistics, and planning. The second unit has a psychological function. Itrecruits and isolates a suicide bomber, preferably a young man or woman,brainwashing the victim until martyrdom seems to be the only logical course ofaction. When the victim is ready, the psychological unit turns the martyr(shahid) over to the military unit. The military unit straps the suicide bombon the victim and directs the shahid to the target. This two-step process became theHezbollah model for suicide bombings from 1983 until the mid-1990s.

Other Middle Eastern groups found themselvescopying the Hezbollah religious-based model. Violent Palestinian groups brokeaway from the ethno-nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization and formedreligion-based groups such as Hamas. A splinter religious group from theEgyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, openly praisedHezbollah and followed its example in suicide bombing. Religious terroristgroups sprang up in Egypt and other parts of North Africa. Suicide became a volatile tactic, and other groups found new ways toemploy suicide bombers.

New methods of suicide bombing developed in Sri Lanka and Kurdistan. The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elaam (LTTE orTamil Tigers) of Sri Lanka waged a campaign of terror based primarily onethnicity, but they capitalized on religious differences between Buddhists andHindus. Embracing suicide bombings, the LTTE modified the formula posited byHezbollah and other Middle Eastern groups. They recruited, conscripted, andkidnapped children, isolating them in training camps and socializing them foryears in a cult of martyrdom. As the children matured, they turned into willingcandidates for suicide operations. Socializationbecame a new method to prepare suicide bombers. The Kurdish Workers' Party(PKK) avoided religion altogether, selectingsuicide bombers and telling victims that both they and their families would bemurdered unless they carried out the attack. The PKK was especiallysuccessful at disguising young women, packing explosives around their stomachsto make them appear pregnant. The suicide terror spawned by the LTTE and PKKwas deadly and devastating.

Learning from previous experiences withsuicide bombings, another variation ofreligious terrorism developed in Central Asia. In December 1979, the formerSoviet Union invaded Afghanistan to bolster a fading Communist regime. Theconflict became a surrogate superpower struggle, with Soviet forces engagedagainst Afghan guerrillas who, in turn, were supported by the United States. Inthe eyes of the world, the Soviet Afghan War (1979–1989) represented the lastbattle of the Cold War. In the eyes of the Afghan guerrillas, however,resistance against the Soviets was a holy war, a battle between God's holywarriors—the mujihadeen—and the godless Marxists of the former Soviet Union.When the Soviets retreated and the USS.R. collapsed, the mujihadeen believedGod had defeated the Communists. Some of them prepared to take their battle toother enemies.

Afghanistan also reinforced the modern allureof asymmetrical warfare. The mujihadeen could rarely match the Soviet army inthe field, but they could lure it into situations where they had temporarysuperiority. In addition, they fought on terrain conducive to their hit-and-run tactics. The battlesbetween the Soviets and the mujihadeen became classical examples of asymmetry,representing a weak force pitted against a stronger power with the weaker forcecarrying the day.

There were several religious guerilla groupsin the Afghan War, and they believed God stood behind their victory. Martyrdomand suicide operations became a standard course of action. No leaders seemed to understand this more than the chiefs of alQaeda—Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri. Building on the experiences ofprevious suicide operations in the Middle East, Kurdistan, and Sri Lanka, theyenhanced the effectiveness of their martyrs. Rather than brainwashing youngpeople into committing suicide or forcing unwilling victims, al Qaeda leadersallowed experienced warriors to volunteer for “martyrdom operations.” When theshahid joined a terrorist cell, he found himself in the presence of a charismatic leader and other warriorswho had volunteered for death. Continually emphasizing martyrdom, a themereinforced in both Christian and Islamic traditions, charismatic leaders wereable to maintain a cult of martyrdom where suicide became the highest form oforganizational and religious sacrifice. This allowed al Qaeda to place sleepersuicide agents in deep cover, sometimes lasting for years.