Yesterday was yet another dark day in the so-called War On Terror. London, quite possibly the best-defended city in the First World when it comes to terrorist attacks, was hit hard by terror bombings. Three decades of being a prime target of the IRA has made London and its residents good at preventing and reacting to terror attacks. Even so, attackers were still able to attack at a time and places of their choosing.

Liverpool Street was my tube stop when I lived and worked in The City. I lived through an IRA Campaign there and have felt first-hand the chill of being hustled out of a tube station while the Bomb Squad (some of the bravest/craziest people in the world) rushed in. I miss London, but

So from a Risks perspective, what can (or can’t) we do about it?

We assume that risk can be managed in various ways. They can be Accepted (This includes ignoring them, which is, unfortunately, the most popular option), Transferred, Mitigated, or Avoided. Every option is not always available, however. In the case of Terrorism, Mitigation isn’t really an option–we simply can’t protect everyone and everything. It’s not possible. And even if it were, the price both in dollars and in terms of impact on a Free Society is simply too high.

We can’t Transfer that risk somewhere else, say Iraq, despite what, the President of the US says:

We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities.

He seems to think that the quantity of Terrorists is somehow fixed and thus every one fighting in Iraq is one less fighting here. What he needs to realize is that the spike in large-scale attacks targeting the West is a Second-Order Risk created by the attempts to Transfer (draw “Foreign Fighters” like moths to the flame) or Mitigate (arrest and/or kill) attackers.

Unfortunately, the Citizens of London got to demonstrate for all of us how well that worked. The whole point of Asymmetrical Warfare/Terrorism is that the attacker gets to choose the time, place and method to strike.

So what’s left? We need to Avoid this Risk. I don’t know how to do this. I understand very little of what motivates terrorists. In my comfortable, post-modern Wester worldview, violence is simply not how people solve problems.

From what little I do understand, motivation for Terrorism is often a reactionary response to the scary, disorienting feeling that comes from intrusion of the “modern” world into traditional ways of life. Anyone who has ever staggered off an intercontinental flight into a foreign culture, knowing this was going to be considered “normal” for some period of the immediate future has felt a little bit of this. Now imagine that this happened to you when you did nothing more than get up and leave your house (or even your bed) in the morning. You’d be pissed, too. Combine that with extreme poverty and a religious belief set that idolizes martyrdom and you’ve got a scare combination.

We need to find ways to demonstrate that there’s an upside to the disruptions that modernity creates in people’s lives. Sure, change creates problems but it solves problems, too. Unfortunately, the Western world seems to be Really Bad at figuring out how to explain this to anyone but other Westerners.

On the bright side, at least some American generals, such as Three star General Wallace Gregson, currently commander of Marine forces in the Pacific, are ready to try something different:

We have a chance to start winning this war here and walk it back into the Middle East, but we can’t just continue to admire the problem,” Gregson said. “We have to start doing something and we have to start walking the propaganda back in the other direction and get ourselves on the right side of this issue.”

Providing doctors, engineers, dentists, veterinarians and other aid to enhance the lives of people living in very troubled parts of the world is “often far more important than projecting some type of force,” Gregson said.

This is sort of like the lesson of Wargames: Sometimes the only way to win is not to play.

One final thought. Four bombings in London are front-page, stop-the-presses news for two days straight. If that was Baghdad, only four bombings would have been a slow day. What message does that send the the Third World?

London, Perspective

At the end of a long, thoughtful post, Thurston writes: One final thought. Four bombings in London are front-page, stop-the-presses news for two days straight. If that was Baghdad, only four bombings would have been a slow day. What…

Great post! I just wanted to comment on “Combine that with extreme poverty…” While there are terrorists who are extremely poor, a great many are upper middle class, and well educated. The Sept 11 gang met at university in Germany. Zawahiri is a physician.

This pattern also showed in many, but not all of the European terrorist organizations, like Baider-Meinhoff, Red Army Faction and N17.

Nice analysis on the overall. There is however a small point on which I disagree with you.
When you say :
“motivation for Terrorism is often a reactionary response to the scary, disorienting feeling that comes from intrusion of the “modern” world into traditional ways of life…. Now imagine that this happened to you when you did nothing more than get up and leave your house (or even your bed) in the morning. You’d be pissed, too.”

I think it’s a very naive way of looking at things. Britain’s involvement in the war in Iraq, and its handing over of Palestine to the zionists (that’s not and will not be forgotten too!!) are more likely plausible and logical motivations for terrorism. Britain has made many mistakes in the middle east over the last century and what we see today is a consequence. It is stupid to continue to ignore the real reasons for these confrontations.

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All my sympathy to the victims of this terrible heinous crime. God bless them.

Here’s another thoughtful article by Robert Fisk
http://www.robert-fisk.com/articles517.htm

Your list of tactics lacks one: to Understand the Risk.

Unfortunately terrorism is widely misunderstood in the press, political and most military circles. Until this is rectified there will be no forward progress, and by simple statistics at least half the progress will be backwards. A simple example is Iraq, which if considered as an attack on terrorism is indeed a success for the terrorists. The theory of terrorism specifically, explicitly states that an intermediate goal is seeking an ‘Iraq’ (it’s been over a decade since I studied it, but from memory, phase 3 of 4 can be interpreted as just that: seek your ‘Iraq’).

The British anti-terrorism people understand this and you can see this in the strong attempt to control and subdue the media speculation, and to push the attention to ’scene of the crime’ and away from ‘war zone’. It’s not about just fighting propaganda with propaganda but understanding what the purpose of the propaganda is.

They are not unfortunately able to sway the political masters from using the mileage in whatever agenda is popular today. As you intimate, Bush and Blair are playing the terrorists’ game. The change needs to happen not in Iraq nor London but in the heads of those handing an easy game to the other side.