The National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), a Department of Homeland Security Center of Excellence housed at the University of Maryland, offers a course looking at the who, what and how of Terrorism Studies, by introducing students to cutting-edge research from the social and behavioral sciences and the experts investigating these topics. The course will begin with a unit looking at widely held myths about terrorism and utilizing empirical data to discuss the realities of broad trends and patterns in terrorist attacks over time. The course will then review the psychological factors at play in individual radicalization and recruitment into terrorism, followed by an analysis of terrorist group dynamics. The course will next look at terrorist group operations, including their attacks and some of the supporting behaviors that allow them to carry out attacks, including use of media, financing, recruitment, and training. The course will conclude by looking at the factors that drive terrorist group persistence or endurance versus terrorist group desistance, and will bring the varied course concepts together through a detailed look at the case of Al-Qa’ida. Throughout the course, students will have the opportunity to study and work with the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database (GTD), the largest database of terrorist incidents in the world, learning its capabilities and developing basic skills in searching and displaying terrorism data.
4.C: Peter Krause (Boston College & MIT),"Effectiveness of Terrorist Operations"
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Understanding Terrorism and the Terrorist Threat
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Module 4: Terrorist Operations
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Dr. Gary LaFreeDirector
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Bill BraniffExecutive Director
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism
Kate IzsakEducation Director
National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Reponses to Terrorism
Joyce Rasing
Hello, my name is Peter Krause.
I'm an assistant professor of Political Science in Boston College, and
a research affiliate at MIT in the Security Studies program.
Today, I am going to talk to you about the effectiveness of terrorism,
a growing area of interest, as well as a topic at the core of my own research.
You've learned about the causes of terrorism.
But what about its effects and effectiveness?
This is an important topic in its own right, but
it also sheds light on causes, strategies, and the uses of media by terrorist
organizations that you've learned about in other parts of the course.
Let's start with a couple historical examples.
Looking on the left,
these are some pictures from my own travels in Northern Ireland and Israel.
This is a mural that's commemorating,
in a negative sense, attacks by the Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland.
This is a mural on the Shankill Road in a loyalist Protestant area of Belfast.
On the right,
we have a commemorative plaque commemorating attacks by the Etzel or
the Irgun, which is a Zionist organization that was trying to establish the state of
Israel, fighting against, using terrorist attacks against both the British during
the punitive Palestine mandate, as well as against the Palestinians.
This plaque was actually put there by the Israeli government.
So, in a broader sense, we want to ask, were these attacks and
were these campaigns actually effective?
Did they achieve the goals that the groups intended them to achieve?
To do this, we don't want to just think about, was it effective, or
did it work in a single aggregated sense.
Instead, we want to disaggregate effectiveness into three levels of
analysis, tactical, organizational, and strategic, as you see on the table here.
At the tactical level of effectiveness, terrorism is designed to try to
kill people, to kill civilians, destroy infrastructure, and inspire fear.
On the other end of the spectrum, strategically, terrorist organizations
are generally part of broader movements with whom they share a common objective.
In this case, it's often a public good, something like
ending an occupation that many people don't like or establishing a new state.
And so, the extent terrorism is strategically effective
is contributing to this broader collective goal.
In between tactical and strategic effectiveness,
you have organizational effectiveness.
What this means is a group that's launching a terrorist attack, just like,
to some extent, Amazon or McDonald's or
whatever else, has to actually continue its operations.
To do that, it needs recruits.
It needs more members, particularly if members are being killed.
It needs money to be able to fund weapons and give people salaries.
And it needs popular support often times to be able to function,
have beds to stay in when they're trying to flee from the police, or
have people who are at least not dropping a dime and turning them in.
So, in this sense, terrorism can be effective, or
ineffective tactically, organizationally, or strategically.
Going forward, we're going to use this framework to try to understand when and
why terrorism is actually effective.
Let's start at the tactical level.
Let's ask a couple of questions of ourselves first.
How many people
are actually killed by terrorist attacks each year in the US or globally?
Maybe take a second and write down your guess.
What about compared to other causes of death?
The flu, car accidents, lightning, domestic violence.
Do you think terrorism kills more or fewer Americans than these other causes?
Well, let's look at the data.
Car accidents and the flu both kill about 35,000 Americans per year.
Domestic violence kills about 1,300 Americans per year.
And lightning kills about 55 Americans per year.
Where does terrorism fit in on that hierarchy of causes of death?
Well, about 7,500 people are killed each year in terrorist attacks, looking at
the data from 2001 to 2010, although, that number is seemingly increasing.
If we look at 2011,
we have 13,288 people who are killed globally in terrorist attacks.
Now, I say seemingly increasing, because it's also possible not only that attacks
have gone up, but our ability to capture data accurately has gone up.
And so, in that sense, we're capturing more attacks than we did before.
But regardless, in 2011,
only 17 of the people who were killed were private US citizens.
So, in that sense, terrorism in the United States kills certainly fewer people yearly
than the flu, or car accidents, or domestic violence, and
most years even fewer Americans than lightning does.
If we look at a period from 1970 to 2010, from the beginning of the GTD up until
close to the present day, nearly 500 people have been killed in terrorist
attacks in the United States, excluding 9/11.
Of course, if we include 9/11, it goes up to about 3,500 Americans.
But nonetheless, not a massive number, not nearly even as many as one
tenth as amount of Americans who die each year in car accidents or the flu.
And you might say, well maybe that's gone down because we have better
counter-terrorists methods since 9/11.
Okay, if we look historically at the GTD in figure one here, we see that terrorist
attacks in the United States by year have been going down since the 1970s.
There's little blips here and there, but fewer terrorist attacks and
fewer fatal attacks today than the 1970s, the 1980s, 2001, and before.
Okay, you might say, well, what about international attacks?
I'm not just concerned about attacks, many of which are domestic,
I care about international attacks from actors like Al-Qaeda or otherwise.
If we look at this chart from the Harris Foundation using data from Rant,
we actually see again,
the number of international attacks reached its peak in the 1980's and 1990's,
you know, went up for a little blip around 2000, 2001, but again has descended down.
So, in terms of terrorism as being a major tactical threat or
having tactical effectiveness in the United States doesn't seem to be major and
certainly seems to be on a downward slope.
Now, one of the things we need to think about is effectiveness versus impact.
If we're talking about the impact of an attack, that's any type of effect it has,
regardless of the intentions of the attackers.
Effectiveness, though, includes intentions.
It basically means have you achieved the goals
that the intenders of the attack are trying to achieve?
So, let me give an example.
If you look at the 9/11 attacks, one of the major
impacts that it had was to severely weaken the IRA and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
Why? Because after 9/11, the United States and
a number of international bodies instituted harsher laws on financing for
terrorist organizations.
This bled and dried up a lot of the financial support for the IRA and for
the LTTE, which relied a lot on the extra support for these organizations.
So, you could say that one of the impacts
of 9/11 was to severely weaken the IRA and the LTTE.
But, you wouldn't say it's part of the 9/11's effectiveness.
I haven't seen any evidence and
I can't imagine there's any evidence that Osama bin Laden and
Al Qaeda were trying to bleed the IRA and the Tamil Tigers with the 9/11 attacks.
This is important going forward when we think about organizational and
strategic effectiveness.
Okay, let's go to strategic effectiveness first.
When and why is actually terrorism strategically effective?
Now there's a debate in academia about this.
On the one hand, there's a number of prolific scholars who say terrorism,
quote, does not work.
It is not strategically effective for achieving goals.
On the other hand, you have a number of scholars who say terrorism actually does
work, is strategically effective.
Let's look at this debate.
Robert Pape who's one of the most prolific and
prominent scholars who's argued that terrorism can be quite effective,
claims that suicide bombing works 50 % of the time.
On the other hand, we have Max Abrahms, who wrote an article called,
Why Terrorism Does Not Work, claiming that terrorism only works 7% of the time.
So, how do we square the circle here?
It seems like these two sides are quite far apart.
Well, if you actually go down into the data and
look at the historical case they're looking at, there's two reasons that they
have these different estimates for terrorism's effectiveness.
The first is case selection.
They don't look at the same number of cases.
They don't look at the same historical cases.
So in Pape's case, he's looking at groups who've used suicide bombing.
It's under 20 total cases and 20 total campaigns.
Many of these are run by groups who are quite capable and quite strong.
So, they're likely to be more effective anyway.
In Abrahm's case, he's including a larger number of terrorist groups,
including small groups like the Revolutionary Nuclei,
who are not likely to be effective in any case, and
that drives down his percentage of groups that are strategically effective.
Additionally, though, it has to do with how each scholar defines success.
For Pape, Pape says success is doing one
inch better than you were before you started using terrorism.
For Abrahms, it's the opposite, it's looking at did you achieve, or
to what extent did you achieve your ultimate strategic goal?
Something like ending an occupation or establishing utopian socialism.
So, you can understand why, if you're looking at that objective like
Abrahms does, you would have quite a small number of groups being effective.
Whereas if you're looking at just doing one inch better than you were before like
Pape does, you would say terrorism is actually often quite effective.
So, if you reconcile these two and you standardize these definition of success
and the case selection for these scholars and for other scholars, you actually come
out with a lot of agreement on how effective terrorism is, strategically.
And what we find is the majority of terrorist campaigns
get no significant political concessions.
And most that do get significant concessions are part of broader movements.
So, it becomes quite difficult for
us to tell was it actually the terrorist attacks that led to success or failure, or
was it other organizations' actions within the same movement?
If you're interested in this issue,
you can check out Page Fortna's article in 2013,
2014, that compares civil wars that do and don't have terrorist groups operating.
Now, this brings up a puzzle,
which is, if most terrorist attacks do not generate political concessions,
why does a group employ terrorist attacks in the first place?
Do terrorists know these statistics and if they do,
why do they continue to use such seemingly ineffective methods?
The answer is located at the organizational level of analysis.
Let's explain how.
Terrorism can be quite effective organizationally,
even though there is variation even at this level.
The way it does this is, it gets often notoriety for a group
that can lead to influxes of donations or recruits for that organization.
But again, notoriety is a double-edged sword.
On the other hand, notoriety can lead to mass condemnation for an organization.
And it can lead to a regime taking notice of that organization's existence and then,
repressing and destroying it.
So, if we think about this not just in the abstract, but
in terms of its specific example.
I did a study called, The Structure of Success, that looks at
the Palestinian National Movement amongst others, and tries to understand both
organizational and strategic effectiveness for political violence.
So, if we look at the Palestinian National Movement in 1965, this is a movement who
claims the same territory as the Israelis as their own state, and
they're trying to achieve the state of Palestine both in the West Bank Gaza and
in Israel proper at that time.
Now, if you look at this chart in the hierarchy of groups that started
the campaign, you see Fatah, which was still at that time led by Yasser Arafat,
but it's actually the weakest of these four organizations in the movement,
in terms of it's total number of members, popular support, funding, etc.
The PLO, the Palestine Liberation Organization which today we think of
as somewhat synonymous with Fatah, actually was a major rival of Fatah.
It was much more powerful than it at the time.
What Fatah does is, it uses violence starting on January 1,
1965 against the Israelis.
And try to put its name on the map to try to drum up support
amongst the Palestinians for the organization.
What's interesting is that, the PLO and
other Palestinian groups condemn Fatah for this.
They say, this is a bad idea, it's going to hurt us strategically,
it's going to start a war that we're not ready for.
And nonetheless, Fatah continues with his attacks, PLO and
others continue to condemn.
What happens is exactly what the PLO and others suggested that was going to happen.
These attacks helped to instigate the 1967 war,
which is a disaster for the Palestinians.
At least to Israel capturing the West Bank and Gaza, at least to Israel severely
weakening a lot of the Palestinian backers of the Egyptians and the Syrians,
it leads to the creation of hundreds of thousands of more Palestinian refugees.
So, strategically, this is an out-and-out failure,
as you see in the coding of the strategic outcome of the campaign.
But, it's not a total failure, it's not a total lack of effectiveness.
If we look at the chart in 1969, 1970, Fatah has actually catapulted itself to
become the strongest group in the Palestinian National Movement, and
its use of violence is one of the key factors in that change.
Because of the fact that Fatah was using violence, it led many Palestinians to say,
well, at least this group is sacrificing for us and sacrificing for the cause.
The PLO was kind of in bed with the Arab regimes, and they failed.
And so, in many ways, Fatah's use of violence was organizationally effective,
even though it helped generate strategic ineffectiveness and strategic failure.
If we think about these two levels here, which kind of is political effectiveness.
Are you organizationally effective?
Are you strategically effective?
We can think of four outcomes for all campaigns of terrorists.
So, in the upper left hand corner, we have total failures.
These are campaigns where the use of terrorist violence both does not help or
perhaps hurts the organization launching the attacks, as well as strategic failure,
meaning that it did not help the broader movement achieve its collective goal.
In the bottom right hand corner, we have total successes.
In this case, violence is actually helping the organization become more powerful,
as well as the violence is helping the broader movement achieve its political
collective objective of ending occupation or founding a new state.
In between these two, we have kind of greyer areas.
In the bottom left hand corner of this chart, we have selfish success.
What that means is the use of violence by the organization
actually does help propel it to get more recruits and get more popular support.
But, it actually does not help and perhaps hurts the broader movement.
This is kind of the example of Fatah during this period.
It would be coded as a selfish success.
On the other hand, you have selfless success.
What that means is a use of violence that actually hurts the organization.
It makes it weaker but for
whatever reason, it helps repel the broader movement forward.
It helps it to achieve its broader objectives.
To be clear, most organizations are neither fully selfless nor fully selfish.
You have certainly selfless acts by people all the time.
But, most groups are trying to achieve both organizational, strategic objectives.
This is just talking about their outcomes.
Now, if we code these for a number of interesting historical cases,
we can start to get a better handle on when and
why terrorism is actually politically effective.
So on the upper left hand corner, we have Al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya,
the Islamic group which launched a terrorist campaign in Egypt to try to
overthrow the regime of Hosni Mubarak in the 1990s.
This was a total failure.
The group both suffered extensive backlash as a result of numerous
attacks in Egyptian museums and elsewhere.
So the Egyptians kind of turned against them.
As well as the Hosni Mubarak regime cracked down, imprisoned,
and killed much of this organization.
And the regime itself not only survived,
it was many ways strengthened by these attacks.
So, that was a total failure.
Bottom right hand corner, total success.
The FLN in Algeria in the 1950s did two things.
The first is its attacks against not only the French who, were occupying Algeria and
saying Algeria was part of France.
But, also gets other Algerian groups help propel the FLN from one
of the weaker groups in the movement to the strongest group in the movement.
And then, actually the group that ruled Algeria for decades after Algeria gets
independence, which the FLN also helps to achieve by its use of violence.
So in this case, it's a total success, independence, and
the FLN becoming the dominant organization.
Bottom left hand corner, we have a selfish success going back to the first example,
the IRA during the troubles in 1960s and 1970s.
In this case, the IRA's use of violence helps repel it
from one of the weaker Republican groups to the strongest Republican group.
But, it does not help the broader movement achieve the IRA's goal,
which is a unified Ireland.
To this day, Northern Ireland is still part of the United Kingdom so,
in that sense, the IRA was not able to achieve a strategic objective.
Upper right hand corner, again going back to one of the initial examples,
we have the Irgun.
Now again, the Irgun was not trying to be selfless.
They were certainly trying to be politically powerful, but
their use of violence did not achieve that goal.
The Haganah and
the labor parties actually were the more powerful ones inside the Zionist movement.
They're the ones who ruled Israel for
three decades after Israel got its independence.
Nonetheless, many historians can make the argument, and
they do, that the Irgun's violence against the British actually helped to coerce them
to leave the Palestine Mandate earlier than they otherwise would have done.
So, in this case, you could say the Irgun's terrorist violence
could be an example of selfless success.
Okay, to sum up what we've learned, first and
foremost when we talk about the effectiveness of terrorism, we don't
want to aggregate it into a single concept of terrorism works or does not work.
We want to break it down to tactical, organizational, and
strategic effectiveness and then, gauge it across each of those three levels.
Secondly, we want to make sure we gauge the intentions of the attackers,
because if we're trying to talk about effectiveness and not just impact, we need
to know what the attacks were actually designed to achieve in the first place.
Thirdly, when we think about trying to make general statements about
whether terrorism is or is not effective.
We want to make sure we pay attention to what are the cases that we're
selecting to study, as well as, what is our definition for
success in terms of actually coding, whether something did or did not work.
Finally, we didn't have enough time today to talk about this.
But, now that we've kind of established the variation,
the various types of variation in the effectiveness of terrorism,
we want to start to think about, what would actually cause variation?
Why would one group be more successful and more effective than another?
This is a question I leave to you.
Best of luck with the course going forward.
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