Compare the American death toll, with or without 9/11, to other preventable causes of death. Every year more than 40,000 Americans are killed in traffic accidents, 20,000 in falls, 18,000 in homicides, 3,000 by drowning (including 300 in bathtubs), 3,000 in fires, 24,000 from accidental poisoning, 2,500 from complications of surgery, 300 from suffocation in bed, 300 from inhalation of gastric contents, and 17,000 by “other and unspecified nontransport accidents and their sequelae.”184 In fact, in every year but 1995 and 2001, more Americans were killed by lightning, deer, peanut allergies, bee stings, and “ignition or melting of nightwear” than by terrorist attacks.185 The number of deaths from terrorist attacks is so small that even minor measures to avoid them can increase the risk of dying. The cognitive psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has estimated that in the year after the 9/11 attacks, 1,500 Americans died in car accidents because they chose to drive rather than fly to their destinations out of fear of dying in a hijacked or sabotaged plane, unaware that the risk of death in a plane flight from Boston to Los Angeles is the same as the risk of death in a car trip of twelve miles. In other words the number of people who died by avoiding air travel was six times the number of people who died in the airplanes on September 11.186 And of course the 9/11 attacks sent the United States into two wars that have taken far more American and British lives than the hijackers did, to say nothing of the lives of Afghans and Iraqis.
The discrepancy between the panic generated by terrorism and the deaths generated by terrorism is no accident. Panic is the whole point of terrorism, as the word itself makes clear. Though definitions vary (as in the cliché “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”), terrorism is generally understood as premeditated violence perpetrated by a nonstate actor against noncombatants (civilians or off-duty soldiers) in pursuit of a political, religious, or social goal, designed to coerce a government or to intimidate or convey a message to a larger audience. The terrorists may want to extort a government into capitulating to a demand, to sap people’s confidence in their government’s ability to protect them, or to provoke massive repression that will turn people against their government or bring about violent chaos in which the terrorist faction hopes to prevail. Terrorists are altruistic in the sense of being motivated by a cause rather than by personal profit. They act by surprise and in secrecy; hence the ubiquitous appellation “cowardly.” And they are communicators, seeking publicity and attention, which they manufacture through fear.
Terrorism is a form of asymmetrical warfare—a tactic of the weak against the strong—which leverages the psychology of fear to create emotional damage that is disproportionate to its damage in lives or property. Cognitive psychologists such as Tversky, Kahneman, Gigerenzer, and Slovic have shown that the perceived danger of a risk depends on two mental hobgoblins.187 The first is fathomability: it’s better to deal with the devil you know than the devil you don’t. People are nervous about risks that are novel, undetectable, delayed in their effects, and poorly understood by the science of the day. The second contributor is dread. People worry about worst-case scenarios, the ones that are uncontrollable, catastrophic, involuntary, and inequitable (the people exposed to the risk are not the ones who benefit from it). The psychologists suggest that the illusions are a legacy of ancient brain circuitry that evolved to protect us against natural risks such as predators, poisons, enemies, and storms. They may have been the best guide to allocating vigilance in the prenumerate societies that predominated in human life until the compilation of statistical databases within the past century. Also, in an era of scientific ignorance these apparent quirks in the psychology of danger may have brought a secondary benefit: people exaggerate threats from enemies to extort compensation from them, to recruit allies against them, or to justify wiping them out preemptively (the superstitious killing discussed in chapter 4).188
Fallacies in risk perception are known to distort public policy. Money and laws have been directed at keeping additives out of food and chemical residues out of water supplies which pose infinitesimal risks to health, while measures that demonstrably save lives, such as enforcing lower highway speeds, are resisted.189 Sometimes a highly publicized accident becomes a prophetic allegory, an ominous portent of an apocalyptic danger. The 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant killed no one, and probably had no effect on cancer rates, but it halted the development of nuclear power in the United States and thus will contribute to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future.
The 9/11 attacks also took on a portentous role in the nation’s consciousness. Large-scale terrorist plots were novel, undetectable, catastrophic (compared to what had come before), and inequitable, and thus maximized both unfathomability and dread. The terrorists’ ability to gain a large psychological payoff for a small investment in damage was lost on the Department of Homeland Security, which outdid itself in stoking fear and dread, beginning with a mission statement that warned, “Today’s terrorists can strike at any place, at any time, and with virtually any weapon.” The payoff was not lost on Osama bin Laden, who gloated that “America is full of fear from its north to its south, from its west to its east,” and that the $500,000 he spent on the 9/11 attacks cost the country more than half a trillion dollars in economic losses in the immediate aftermath.190
Responsible leaders occasionally grasp the arithmetic of terrorism. In an unguarded moment during the 2004 presidential campaign, John Kerry told a New York Times interviewer, “We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law-enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution. We’re never going to end illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where it isn’t on the rise. It isn’t threatening people’s lives every day, and fundamentally, it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”191 Confirming the definition of a gaffe in Washington as “something a politician says that is true,” George Bush and Dick Cheney pounced on the remark, calling Kerry “unfit to lead,” and he quickly backpedaled.
The ups and downs of terrorism, then, are a critical part of the history of violence, not because of its toll in deaths but because of its impact on a society through the psychology of fear. In the future, of course, terrorism really could have a catastrophic death toll if the hypothetical possibility of an attack with nuclear weapons ever becomes a reality. I will discuss nuclear terrorism in the next section but for now will stick to forms of violence that have actually taken place.
Terrorism is not new. After the Roman conquest of Judea two millennia ago, a group of resistance fighters furtively stabbed Roman officials and the Jews who collaborated with them, hoping to force the Romans out. In the 11th century a sect of Shia Muslims perfected an early form of suicide terrorism by getting close to leaders who they thought had strayed from the faith and stabbing them in public, knowing they would immediately be slain by the leader’s bodyguards. From the 17th to the 19th century, a cult in India strangled tens of thousands of travelers as a sacrifice to the goddess Kali. These groups did not accomplish any political change, but they left a legacy in their names: the Zealots, the Assassins, and the Thugs.192 And if you associate the word anarchist with a black-clad bomb-thrower, you are recalling a movement around the turn of the 20th century that practiced “propaganda of the deed” by bombing cafés, parliaments, consulates, and banks and by assassinating dozens of political leaders, including Czar Alexander II of Russia, President Sadi Carnot of France, King Umberto I of Italy, and President William McKinley of the United States. The durability of these eponyms and images is a sign of the power of terrorism to lodge in cultural consciousness.
Anyone who thinks that terrorism is a phenomenon of the new millennium has a short memory. The romantic political violence of the 1960s and 1970s included hundreds of bombings, hijackings, and shootings by various armies, leagues, coalitions, brigades, facti
ons, and fronts.193 The United States had the Black Liberation Army, the Jewish Defense League, the Weather Underground (who took their name from Bob Dylan’s lyric “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”), the FALN (a Puerto Rican independence group), and of course the Symbionese Liberation Army. The SLA contributed one of the more surreal episodes of the 1970s when they kidnapped newspaper heiress Patty Hearst in 1974 and brainwashed her into joining the group, whereupon she adopted “Tanya” as her nom de guerre, helped them rob a bank, and posed for a photograph in a battle stance with beret and machine gun in front of their seven-headed cobra flag, leaving us one of the iconic images of the decade (together with Richard Nixon’s victory salute from the helicopter that would whisk him from the White House for the last time, and the blow-dried Bee Gees in white polyester disco suits).
Europe, during this era, had the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Ulster Freedom Fighters in the U.K., the Red Brigades in Italy, the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, and the ETA (a Basque separatist group) in Spain, while Japan had the Japanese Red Army and Canada had the Front de Libération du Québec. Terrorism was so much a backdrop to European life that it served as a running joke in Luis Buñuel’s 1977 love story That Obscure Object of Desire, in which cars and stores blow up at random and the characters barely notice.
Where are they now? In most of the developed world, domestic terrorism has gone the way of the polyester disco suits. It’s a little-known fact that most terrorist groups fail, and that all of them die.194 Lest this seem hard to believe, just reflect on the world around you. Israel continues to exist, Northern Ireland is still a part of the United Kingdom, and Kashmir is a part of India. There are no sovereign states in Kurdistan, Palestine, Quebec, Puerto Rico, Chechnya, Corsica, Tamil Eelam, or Basque Country. The Philippines, Algeria, Egypt, and Uzbekistan are not Islamist theocracies; nor have Japan, the United States, Europe, and Latin America become religious, Marxist, anarchist, or new-age utopias.
The numbers confirm the impressions. In his 2006 article “Why Terrorism Does Not Work,” the political scientist Max Abrahms examined the twenty-eight groups designated by the U.S. State Department as foreign terrorist organizations in 2001, most of which had been active for several decades. Putting aside purely tactical victories (such as media attention, new supporters, freed prisoners, and ransom), he found that only 3 of them (7 percent) had attained their goals: Hezbollah expelled multinational peacekeepers and Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 1984 and 2000, and the Tamil Tigers won control over the northeastern coast of Sri Lanka in 1990. Even that victory was reversed by Sri Lanka’s rout of the Tigers in 2009, leaving the terrorist success rate at 2 for 42, less than 5 percent. The success rate is well below that of other forms of political pressure such as economic sanctions, which work about a third of the time. Reviewing its recent history, Abrahms noted that terrorism occasionally succeeds when it has limited territorial goals, like evicting a foreign power from land it had gotten tired of occupying, such as the European powers who in the 1950s and 1960s withdrew from their colonies en masse, terrorism or no terrorism.195 But it never attains maximalist goals such as imposing an ideology on a state or annihilating it outright. Abrahms also found that the few successes came from campaigns in which the groups targeted military forces rather than civilians and thus were closer to being guerrillas than pure terrorists. Campaigns that primarily targeted civilians always failed.
In her book How Terrorism Ends, the political scientist Audrey Cronin examined a larger dataset: 457 terrorist campaigns that had been active since 1968. Like Abrahms, she found that terrorism virtually never works. Terrorist groups die off exponentially over time, lasting, on average, between five and nine years. Cronin points out that “states have a degree of immortality in the international system; groups do not.”196
Nor do they get what they want. No small terrorist organization has ever taken over a state, and 94 percent fail to achieve any of their strategic aims.197 Terrorist campaigns meet their end when their leaders are killed or captured, when they are rooted out by states, and when they morph into guerrilla or political movements. Many burn out through internal squabbling, a failure of the founders to replace themselves, and the defection of young firebrands to the pleasures of civilian and family life.
Terrorist groups immolate themselves in another way. As they become frustrated by their lack of progress and their audiences start to get bored, they escalate their tactics. They start to target victims who are more newsworthy because they are famous, respected, or simply numerous. That certainly gets people’s attention, but not in the way the terrorists intend. Supporters are repulsed by the “senseless violence” and withdraw their money, their safe havens, and their reluctance to cooperate with the police. The Red Brigades in Italy, for example, self-destructed in 1978 when they kidnapped the beloved former prime minister Aldo Moro, kept him in captivity for two months, shot him eleven times, and left his body in the trunk of a car. Earlier the FLQ overplayed its hand during the October Crisis of 1970 when it kidnapped Québec labor minister Pierre Laporte and strangled him with his rosary, also leaving his body in a trunk. McVeigh’s killing of 165 people (including 19 children) in the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 took the stuffing out of the right-wing antigovernment militia movement in the United States. As Cronin puts it, “Violence has an international language, but so does decency.”198
Attacks on civilians can doom terrorists not just by alienating potential sympathizers but by galvanizing the public into supporting an all-out crackdown. Abrahms tracked public opinion during terrorist campaigns in Israel, Russia, and the United States and found that after a major attack on civilians, attitudes toward the group lurched downward. Any willingness to compromise with the group or to recognize the legitimacy of their grievance evaporated. The public now believed that the terrorists were an existential threat and supported measures that would snuff them out for good. The thing about asymmetric warfare is that one side, by definition, is a lot more powerful than the other. And as the saying goes, the race may not be given to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.
Though terrorist campaigns have a natural arc that bends toward failure, new campaigns can spring up as quickly as old ones fizzle. The world contains an unlimited number of grievances, and as long as the perception that terrorism works stays ahead of the reality, the terrorist meme may continue to infect the aggrieved.
The historical trajectory of terrorism is elusive. Statistics begin only around 1970, when a few agencies began to collect them, and they differ in their recording criteria and their coverage. It can be hard, even in the best of times, to distinguish terrorist attacks from accidents, homicides, and disgruntled individuals going postal, and in war zones the line between terrorism and insurgency can be fuzzy. The statistics are also heavily politicized: various constituencies may try to make the numbers look big, to sow fear of terrorism, or small, to trumpet their success in fighting terrorism. And while the whole world cares about international terrorism, governments often treat domestic terrorism, which kills six to seven times as many people, as no one else’s business. The most comprehensive public dataset we have is the Global Terrorism Database, an amalgamation of many of the earlier datasets. Though we can’t interpret every zig or zag in the graphs at face value, because some may represent seams and overlaps between databases with different coding criteria, we can try to get a general sense of whether terrorism really has increased in the so-called Age of Terror.199
The safest records are those for terrorist attacks on American soil, if for no other reason than that there are so few of them that each can be scrutinized. Figure 6–9 shows all of them since 1970, plotted on a logarithmic scale because otherwise the line would be a towering spike for 9/11 poking through a barely wrinkled carpet. With the lower altitudes stretched out by the logarithmic scale, we can discern peaks for Oklahoma City in 1995 and Columbine in 1999 (which is a du
bious example of “terrorism,” but with a single exception, noted below, I never second-guess the datasets when plotting the graphs). Apart from this trio of spikes, the trend since 1970 is, if anything, more downward than upward.
FIGURE 6–9. Rate of deaths from terrorism, United States, 1970–2007
Source: Global Terrorism Database, START (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 2010, http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/), accessed on April 6, 2010. The figure for 1993 was taken from the appendix to National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, 2009. Since the log of 0 is undefined, years with no deaths are plotted at the arbitrary value 0.0001.
The trajectory of terrorism in Western Europe (figure 6–10) illustrates the point that most terrorist organizations fail and all of them die. Even the spike from the 2004 Madrid train bombings cannot hide the decline from the glory years of the Red Brigades and the Baader-Meinhof Gang.
What about the world as a whole? Though Bush administration statistics released in 2007 seemed to support their warnings about a global increase in terrorism, the HSRP team noticed that their data include civilian deaths from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which would be classified as civil war casualties if they had taken place anywhere else in the world. The picture is different when the criteria are kept consistent and these deaths are excluded. Figure 6–11 shows the worldwide annual rate of death from terrorism (as usual, per 100,000 population) without these deaths. The death tolls for the world as a whole have to be interpreted with caution, because they come from a hybrid dataset and can float up and down with differences in how many news sources were consulted in each of the contributing datasets. But the shapes of the curves turn out to be the same when they include only the larger terrorist events (those with death tolls of at least twenty-five), which are so newsworthy that they are likely to have been included in all the subdatasets.
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined Page 52