But some, like Mark Pollitt from the FBI laboratory in Washington, find these black fantasies a little too hysterical. After all, the levels of supplement needed to contaminate a cereal so severely that it became harmful would soon be noticed by the suppliers; moreover it is hard to see how so much overloading of an ingredient would not change the taste, and hence come to everyone's attention. Engineering overdoses of bad-tasting additives might not, perhaps, be the best example of what could be achieved by an individual hell-bent on causing widespread suffering.
And as for sabotage of the air-traffic-control system, Pollitt thinks it inconceivable that the human element of ATC, along with all operational rules for protecting against just this kind of contingency, could be ignored. The computers in the system control nothing; they are tools of the controllers; moreover, the rules are designed to work with no ATC at all. Then again, these reassuring and moderate opinions predate 11 September 2001, after which it is harder to regard the human element as a constant force for good in anything, including directing air traffic. And more generally, human commonsense and rationality is certainly not a persuasive defence against catastrophe.
Whether the terrorist is using nanotechnology, biotechnology or IT, he or she has the colossal advantage of anonymity. In addition, cyber-terrorism, like its biological counterpart, is so effective because of our dread of the unknown: we, the potential targets, have no control over what might happen, and in any case we are selected as targets at random. If present trends in the hostile applications of the advancing technologies continue, it is hard to imagine how our daily lives will not be affected, at the very least in terms of the precautions we will have to take each day. After all, there is no point in pouring $40 billion into counter-terrorism technology, as the USA has just done, when 9/11 provided the terrible proof that terrorist acts could be perpetrated with knives and paper-cutters alone. The only way to combat terrorism is to understand it – not just to get under the skin of the terrorist, but to get inside their mind.
So, why do terrorists do what they do? After all, their ultimate aim is not to harm innocent victims for some mysterious, sadistic reason but rather to communicate a political message to a third party, invariably their real enemy. It is hard for the rest of us to identify with such a mindset, especially when terrorists are even ready to accept their own certain death. But low-tech 21st-century terrorists may not, at first glance, appear that different from their predecessors. Terrorism may seem to be an utterly modern phenomenon but its roots lie in the 1st century AD, when Jewish radicals were struggling to free Palestine from Roman rule. A contemporary historian, Josephus, described brigands (sicarii) who took their name from the small daggers they carried under their cloaks, and whose favoured method of operating was to mingle covertly in crowds and stab opponents, apparently causing the reaction of simultaneous fear and outrage that is all too familiar today. However, it was not until 1795, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, that the term ‘terrorism’ first became popular, to capture the fear and intimidation instilled in the general population by the newly empowered Republicans. Remarkably, the Reign of Terror was at first viewed as a positive political system, reminding citizens of the importance of virtue through instilling fear. Soon, however, it began to take on the profoundly negative connotations that it still possesses today.
Fanaticism, total fixation on one idea and the determination to carry it out at all costs, has in the past been considered a characteristic of the loner: for example, the anarchist who killed President William McKinley in Buffalo in 1901, or the Serbian terrorist who shot Archduke Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo in 1914, thereby ringing up the curtain on the First World War. But such single-mindedness can also be shared collectively. George W. Ball, an Under Secretary of State in the Kennedy and Johnson years, said of the defeat of the USA in Vietnam: ‘What misled a group of able and dedicated men was that, in depersonalizing the war and treating it too much as an exercise in deployment of resources, we ignored the one supreme advantage possessed by the other side: the non-material element of will, of purpose, and patience, of cruel but relentless commitment to a single objective. Yet that was the secret of North Vietnamese success. A rebuke of the spirit to the logic of numbers.’
But now this disregard for logic, whether practised by an individual or collectively, is increasingly conspicuous in ethno-religious causes and single-issue terrorism, such as that perpetrated by animal-rights activists. In the UK some activists have issued death threats to scientists experimenting on animals, whilst others have destroyed fields of GM crops.
Our notion of terrorism and its subversive violence is in principle, perhaps, no different from the terrorism of the bygone anarchists in the Austro-Hungarian Empire with their hand-held bombs, yet modern terrorists are infinitely more deadly for three reasons. Firstly, they are often well funded by a shadowy network or supporting state. Secondly, contemporary terrorists may soon have access to weapons of mass destruction. Thirdly, they are even more committed to their cause than the lone assassins of the past.
Another difference now is that the line between terrorism and classical warfare is more smudged. Whilst war has primarily been an activity between armed forces, albeit with collateral civilian casualties, terrorism indiscriminately and deliberately threatens civilians. Yet around the world we are increasingly witnessing ‘low intensity’ conflict – terrorism and guerilla operations – in contrast to total war that takes over everyone's lives, as it did in, say, the Second World War, or the nuclear wipe-out that haunted the years of the Cold War. The coalescence of war and terrorism coincides with a blurring of the more fundamental notions of war and peace. India and Pakistan or the Israelis and Palestinians are arguably examples of communities that are neither locked in formally declared war nor at peace. And both the Indian sub-continent and the Middle East are hotbeds of terrorism.
Although some current conflicts have clearly been triggered by territorial disputes, the struggle of ideologies seems set to be the dominant issue in the future. In 1999 the President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, declared the nation-state ‘a dangerous anachronism’. And strange though it might at first appear, a backward glance at history reveals just how transient, and relatively new, the concept of a nation actually is. Civilization initially established a feudal order extending from land-owning aristocrats down to bonded slave labour, a system that was eventually eroded by the mandate of growing commerce and the printing press. By the 19th century small city-states were starting to join forces, since the best scale and power base to accommodate economies, culture and communications was a nation.
And now, within the continent of Europe, the 19th-century boundaries that distinguished the then-new nations such as Italy or Germany are fading: instead, common laws and a common currency form the bedrock of a much looser and larger federal state. Within that state old principalities and dukedoms may well resurge, not as a revival of feudal governance but rather as a celebration of local dialects, customs and cuisine, which, as they always have done, give us a sense of tribal identity. The general concept of the ‘polis’, the city-state that characterized ancient Greece, is promising to become once again the unit of society with which we humans are most comfortable, as devolution becomes a watchword and demands for Basque and Chechen independence become more bloody, whilst the more civilized, less desperate secession of Scotland, Wales and even Cornwall from the UK becomes a more tangible dream.
But the new tribal order is not just a throwback, an atavistic exercise in ring-fencing smaller-sized territories. We live in an increasingly multicultural society; the ageing of the population in the developed world, coupled with soaring birth rates in the much poorer countries, will lead to even greater economic migration generating an admixture of religions, languages and traditions. The divisions that differentiate society in the future may well be within borders rather than across them. In many developed nations there is already a groundswell of constituencies characterized by ethnicity,
religion and race. As the sense of belonging to a nation fades, affiliations to a tribe defined not by nationality but by other desiderata might become very strong. In the uneasy twilight between war and peace into which we are now drawn differences between different religions, cultures and races come into focus. If we are living increasingly cheek by jowl in societies which are heterogeneous in these conspicuous regards, then it follows that terrorism will be more appropriate than pitched battles for fighting the enemy within, their beliefs and attitudes. But in the fight for hearts and minds victory will be harder to define and recognize. So what exactly does a terrorist hope to achieve?
Acclaimed military strategist and author Ralph Peters, a retired lieutenant colonel in the US army, distinguishes between the ‘practical’ and the ‘apocalyptic’ terrorist. The practical terrorist aims for their ideology to influence mainstream thinking rather than overtake it. He or she is concerned with rights and status, not with a paradise in the afterlife; and though they may perhaps be prepared to die, such activists would rather live. The IRA and the Stern Gang are examples of this outlook, along with some single-issue activists, such as animal-rights extremists. They wish to reshape society not annihilate it, and hence there are certain lines they will not cross. By contrast, the apocalyptic terrorist is divorced from the real world, with all its compromises and shades of values, so that, as Ralph Peters eloquently puts it, ‘the practical terrorist has dreams, but the apocalyptic terrorist is lost in a nightmare’; the aims and values of the apocalyptic terrorist are of the next world, not this one. The Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was a practical terrorist, whilst those who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Washington were of the apocalyptic genre.
Though violent, neither type of terrorist is aggressive in the way that a psychopath might be. For a psychopath violence is the end rather than the means. Psychologists distinguish between ‘emotional’ and ‘instrumental’ aggression. Emotional aggression, as its name suggests, is a short-term reaction: you immediately want to lash out at someone who has hurt you. Instrumental aggression is more subtle; it is not the instinctive reaction of, say, road rage but the calculated use of aggression as a means to an end. The terrorist aims to create widespread fear and uncertainty among very large populations; aggressive acts against the innocent are the means not the ends.
How might the apocalyptic terrorists hope to achieve their ends? Their methods may be influenced by an inevitable cut-back in the future of conventional forces. Even now, science is challenging the premium traditionally placed by armies on size and firepower alone to gain advantage on the battlefield. By 2025 it will be possible to find, fix or track and target, in nearly real time, anything of consequence anywhere on earth. And in response ‘stealth’ technology – the art of making weapons almost invisible to the enemy – is progressing apace. ‘Low-observable’ paints are emerging, made of composite materials to optimize camouflage, whilst clever redesign of shape and structure now enables a two-metre missile to have the radar cross-section of a marble.
As we saw in the previous chapter, automation is increasingly taking the individual skill and human-error elements out of much of what we do, including scientific research; so everyday military routine will become ever more mindless, benefiting from the illusory simplicity of modern weapons that is actually due to their increased technical sophistication. There will be no reason why 21st-century foot soldiers should not make up a 24-hour, 3-shift fighting force, carrying on as the day ends with night vision. But why use fighters who need light to see? Brilliantly qualified instead for the potentially exhausting, non-skilled and non-thoughtful activity of fighting in the future are robots.
Robots could, at the very least, carry fuel, water, support radar or weapons systems, clear minefields and tow other robot parts or smaller robots. They could eventually even stand in for humans. Traditionally, ‘walking the point’ – leading a patrol – has been one of the most dangerous jobs a soldier had to do. Now a robot will take over. For example, ‘Spike’ and ‘Gladiator’, the brainchildren of RoboTrix, a company developing prototype robots for the US military, are the size of washing-machines and can travel unmanned into the most dangerous situations. The army plans that, in the future, such robots will handle all jobs that are dangerous, dirty and dull. Some predict that a truly autonomous robot is merely ‘a decade away’.
However, the ultimate robo-battle, rather like the robot football game, might somehow miss the point. If you are not inflicting death, misery and fear on your enemy, then the only point of a physical fight would be to cause economic hardship as the costly machines were destroyed. But you would also be at great financial risk yourself. Even territorial gain, which will be increasingly less relevant in battles of ideology, could probably be achieved more subtly as the century unfolds. There are many other high-tech ways of striking at enemy resources than staging a pitched battle between humanoids requiring highly complex organization. Moreover, the technology for these other cyber-based strategies is way ahead of the robotics that would be required, and so much cheaper.
So, imagine greatly decreased conventional forces, because of the advent of high-tech precision apparatus; the IT-masters, who would then be key players, would be easily captured so that they, and indeed their families, could serve as hostages and human shields. The big difference between Us and Them is the sacrosanct status of the individual in our society: hence our huge disadvantage in future struggles with apocalyptic terrorists. This deep-seated discrepancy in priorities is demonstrated by the emergence of what have been dubbed ‘warrior societies’, in which death is considered preferable to dishonour.
Such an outlook is so alien to most of the rest of us that it is inconceivable how and why these ‘warrior societies’ have come to see the world in the way they have. Fanatics and fundamentalists may have rational reasons behind their deliberate actions and deeply devoted sentiments, but then so do we all; they differ from the rest of us in the degree to which they hold their convictions. In many cases, the apocalyptic terrorist is not just ready but wants to die. Yet, irrespective of their degree of commitment and of the lengths to which they are prepared to go, terrorists are very rarely out of their minds. Rather, their minds have been shaped in a very particular way – as human minds are by education and any and every happenstance in the wider environment. ‘Terrorism is a product of its own time and place… We don't see the process of indoctrination that terrorists go through,’ writes psychologist John Horgan, of University College, Cork.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the community in which potential terrorists live is an important factor. For example, 78 per cent of Palestinians claimed in a recent poll to support the suicide-bombing campaign in Israel. The extreme or militant terrorist may be the tip of an iceberg consisting of a disaffected community giving passive acquiescence and support, to varying extents, to a prevailing culture of martyrdom and a promise of an afterlife that is painted as a literal paradise. Despite this supportive society, the prospect of belonging to a close family, effectively a cult, is an additional lure. Terrorism has more in common with cults than with organized religion, the current militant Muslim extremists being as remote from mainstream Islam as the followers of Heaven's Gate were from mainstream Christianity. Irrespective of the atrocious violence that characterizes terrorism, the key feature of such movements, as of more peaceful cults, is mind control so extreme that followers can be persuaded to commit suicide.
Professor Martha Crenshaw, from Wesleyan University in Connecticut, agrees that a key feature of terrorism, often overlooked in the aftermath of indiscriminate violence, is the cult-like perspective. ‘What is important is that terrorism is typically a group phenomenon,’ she says. The organization is a ‘total institution’: people join out of psychological need rather than political commitment. In contrast to psychiatric conditions such as depression or schizophrenia, there is no ‘typical’ personality type, although many of the young men who become terrorists may suffer
from low self-esteem and accordingly are attracted to groups with charismatic leaders. But there is undoubtedly the unpalatable attraction, which most of us have experienced at some psychologically frail times in our lives, of relinquishing the need to act on one's own initiative. On a recent visit to China I was strolling in the sun in the massive area of Tiananmen Square, with gigantic pictures of Mao beaming down from his mausoleum and incomprehensible loudspeaker music stuttering all around and I was struck for a moment by the appeal of being at one with the rest of a massive crowd, of being accepted, and the lure of simple lack of hassle – of just being told what to do and mindlessly accepting.
There is no denying that the need to belong, to feel part of a group of people ‘just like you’, is very strong and deeply ingrained in human nature – from gangs in the playground to teenagers wearing the same trainers to the bar in the golf club. But what if a close-knit cyber-tribe starts to fulfil the roles of extended families or clubs; might cultural differences eventually be diluted and sanitized simply into the different ways we surf the net, no longer an incentive for hatred?
The critical issue that determines when the feel-good factor of belonging sours into superiority and intolerance might be the degree to which membership of one circle actually precludes an affiliation with any other. Most of us belong to many groups. Our loyalties are in a nested hierarchy of increasing dilution, from immediate family outwards to distant relatives, one's company or profession, religious group, sports club, geographical region and so forth. By participating in many different types of relationships we cater for all our many and diverse basic human desires. By contrast, enormous power can be exerted over someone once they are removed from such other areas of allegiance. For example, the army cuts trainees off from their previous lives so that the combat unit becomes their family, and fear of letting down comrades worse than dying. Non-violent cults, such as the Moonies, as well as terrorist groups famously use the same tactics.
Tomorrow's People Page 29