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Circuits of Conversion: From 14,000 to 1 Present Dangers Wading in the Deep: Supporting Emergent Anarchies Celebrating the End of the Cold War

International Relations and the Problem of Difference Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War The Global Economy as Political Space

The Rites of Dispossession (PDF) Cultural Constitution of Political Economy (PDF) A Medium of Others (PDF) Savage Smith and the temporal walls of capitalism (PDF) If Only You Could See What I Have Seen with Your Eyes: Staging an Encounting Between Social Science and Literature (PDF)

Two Approaches to the Meanings of Terror [1]

1. I will not ask you to define “terrorism” or “security;” nor will I define them. What I will try to do is to suggest two ways of understanding these terms, describing their advantages and disadvantages, so that you can come to your own understandings.

I start with a parable: My nine year old, Kamal, was playing with some other boys at recess when they saw a plane flying overhead. One of the boys, Mike, picked up a rock and performed an action consisting of three parts. He curses at the plane, saying “You damn Afghanistanis! Go back to where you came from!” At the same time he hurls a rock at the plane. And, he starts running in the direction of the plane. As the rock comes down, Mike ends up running into its trajectory. The rock hits him on the head.

The good news for Mike is that there is no real damage.

This parable contains many rich meanings. I focus on one: In the business of social science, what happened to Mike can be seen as the result of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Let me turn to the matter of defining terror.

2. First method: Good and Evil

We can tie our understanding of terror and terrorism to conceptions of good and evil; right and wrong; us and them.

Thus terror is someone else’s evil, someone else’s mistake, and someone else’s irrational calculation. Thus we hear in the current language:

- their acts of barbarism

- their taking of innocent lives

- acts of cowardice performed by perpetrators of evil.

The advantage of this method is that it permits us to ACT with a clear conscience, without doubts, and with great resolve.

Such an understanding of terror gives us a clearly ordered world, spells out for us the motivations of the perpetrators, allows us to draw a precise enemy, and most importantly, permits us to feel that we are making clear progress towards solving a problem.

The drawback is that it assumes our actions will produce the results we envision.

That is, we assume:

that if we make a correct diagnosis,

formulate and execute a good plan,

then the desired results will follow.

The desired result is, I assume, the creation of justice, peace, and a return to the order of mundane life. There are two reasons to doubt such a smooth movement from diagnosis to action and from action to result.

First, it seems likely, at least to me, that our enemy uses exactly this method. For example, in the bombings of Baghdad during the Gulf War, much of the world considered our acts barbaric, our actions led to the killing of innocents, our armed forces were seen as performing acts of cowardice and evil. If so, then what we can envision happening is a contest between our will and theirs; our resolve and theirs; our willingness to sacrifice and theirs.

In this scenario, our sense of order results only if we are victorious. The problem is that short of a sudden and total victory, our increased resolve may only strengthen their resolve. Thus a possible future is one in which we have an escalating spiral of resolve strengthening actions; a spiral of increasing entrenchment.

The unintended consequence of our actions might be that rather than getting closer to our goal, we get ever farther from curbing terror and restoring security.

The second problem with this method is even more troubling. When we create absolute distinctions between good and evil; us and them; then we find it increasingly necessary, and, increasingly acceptable to accommodate and eventually internalize small aspects of “evil” in order to deliver the larger good. Allow me two examples:

- the Northern Alliance, with whom the USA is now cozying, has committed criminal actions against fellow Afghans and civilians. Indeed, after the exit of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, it was the genocidal actions of the various Mujahideen leaders that, in late 1994, allowed Mullah Mohammad Omar and the Taliban to emerge and be seen as sober, self-less, Robin Hood like figures by the people of South and Southeastern Afghanistan. The need to find a cure for the corruption of groups such as the Northern Alliance is part of the reason the Taliban came into being. The Northern Alliance seem our newest allies.

- Another example: The Taliban and what are known as the Arab-Afghans – who have immigrated to Afghanistan and whose patron saint is Osama bin Laden – were the ideological and material creations of primarily three states: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the USA. In 1986, then head of the CIA, William Casey supported the initiative to bring Muslim “Freedom Fighters” from all over the world into Afghanistan in order to fight the evil of Soviet Communism.

The new evil is “terrorism” and we might wonder what kinds of small evils we will cozy up to in order to defeat this enemy. And we might wonder what new evil we will help to create.

Summing up this first method: The good-evil model gives us clear guidelines for action. Its major drawback is its inability to anticipate the gap between our intentions and the results of our actions. This gap can have the consequence that we fail to produce the result we desire. Worse, our actions can actually intensify the causes of the problem.

Will our current policy have the effect of intensifying the problem of terrorism? I do not know. Nor do I know anyone with that kind of predictive ability. The question is really whether we can afford to keep our eyes closed to the law of unintended consequences.

3. Second Method: Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

There is a second method of defining terror. Following the late Eqbal Ahmad – Professor of International Relations at Hampshire College, we can turn to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, in which terror is defined as:

a state of intense fear and,

Terrorism:

is the systematic use of intense fear, especially as a means of coercion

The advantage of this method of defining terrorism is that it seems evenhanded and non-politicized.

There are two costs of this method, however. First, it asks us to look at the full range of terror. We usually focus our energies on political groups such as:

Timothy McVeigh and his cluster
Ku Klux Klan
Osama bin Laden and Al-Qeida,
A dictionary definition suggests a broader focus: Following Eqbal Ahmad, we can identify five kinds of terrorism – I list them in order of the number of lives taken:

1.State terrorism, e.g. South Africa under apartheid

religious terror, e.g. Catholics versus Protestants; or Sunnis vs. Shias
criminal terror, e.g. the mafia
pathological terror, e.g. killing a president to gain attention
terror by political groups, e.g. those the government believes to be involved in the massacre of 9/11;
By his estimate the ratio of lives taken by state terror to terror by political groups is 100,000 to 1.

The second cost of this method is that it leads to posing some very difficult questions:

Let me start by posing two questions, that -- given the simple definition of terror -- do not seem difficult to answer:

- Does the massacre in NYC and DC count as terror? Yes.

- Does the bombing at Oklahoma City count as terror? Yes.

Those seem easy enough. But now it becomes bumpy:

- Do the State actions against the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas count as terror?

- Are the sanctions against Iraq, which include sanctions against medicines that result in the deaths of 5000 Iraqi’s per month -- are these sanctions terror?

- Does the ordering of assassinations of foreign leaders or the overthrow of foreign governments by the use of covert political and economic activities count as terror?

- Does the current bombing of Afghanistan count?

- Does the Taliban’s virtual house arrest of women count as terror?

- Does the constant and systematic threat of rape and violence experienced by women in this country count as terror?

Frankly, I am not sure how I would answer these questions. But I do want to stop because the list could get very long.

4. Close

I have presented two methods of thinking of terrorism. Both are simple, but both lead to complexity and paradox.

A separation between good guys and bad guys seems straightforward but leads to complications when we make alliances with small bad guys who might later turn out to be big bad guys and whose growth we have sponsored.

A dictionary definition of terrorism leads us to consider a variety of terrorisms, including state terror, which may move us to consider our participation in terror.

Both methods lead to the same troubling test: they challenge the assumption of our absolute innocence and our pure virtue. In Afghanistan, but not just there, both methods push us to recognize our complicity and collusion in the creation of Osama bin Laden, Mullah Muhammad Omar, Al-Qeida, and the Taliban. Both methods suggest that by being inattentive to the operations of the Law of Unintended Consequences we may have lost track of our long-term self-interest. Perhaps the ultimate source – certainly not the only source -- but the ultimate source of our insecurity, is our own short-sightedness.

I insist on only one thing: that you do not take my arguments and presentation of facts for granted. However, before much more is claimed on our behalf, I invite you to find out what has already been done and undone in our name.

[1] Presented at a town meeting on “Understanding How Our World Has Changed Since the Attacks on the World Trade Center.” Nottingham High School, Syracuse, NY, October 11, 2001.