First As Utopia then As Paradise

 IN THE SPRING OF 1984, analysts at the Rand Corporation were putting the final touches to a new report on trends in international terrorism. The California-based think tank earned huge sums from its contracts with the US government but frequently sought to challenge the assumptions of its principal client.

Since the early 1970s, governments had become more proficient at combating terrorism, the analysts wrote. It was now much harder to smuggle weapons aboard planes, embassies had become like fortresses and there were dedicated military or police units with specialised skills developed for use in hostage situations. Diplomats now travelled with bodyguards or in armoured vehicles.

Yet terrorist activity had risen inexorably over the last ten years, they warned. There were now three to four times as many terrorist attacks every year compared to the late 1960s, and each of them was generally bigger, more lethal and more indiscriminate. Even before the bombing of the US and French barracks in October, 1983 had qualified as ‘the bloodiest year’ since Rand had started recording casualties of terrorism a decade and a half earlier. Also, terrorists were now more likely to be ‘suicidal’ and their violence more frequently directed against ‘ordinary citizens—bystanders who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time’.

The report’s conclusions were stark: ‘Often overshadowed by events of grander scale—the Soviet invasion of Afghani­stan, the war between Iran and Iraq, the declaration of martial law in Poland—terrorists have continued to wage a hundred little wars on the boulevards and back streets from Beirut to Bogota.’ Terrorism remained ‘a worldwide problem’ which showed ‘no sign of abating and every sign of becoming less discriminate and more bloody’.

As terrorism had evolved, so too had the thinking about its nature and causes. Inevitably, both were a reflection of their times. Plane hijacking had once been a problem almost entirely limited to the US, but between the late 1960s and the mid-1970s, a new era of international terrorism had dawned in which it had become a global phenomenon. During this period, ideas about terrorism had evolved dramatically and a broad consensus had emerged among both experts and elected officials in the West that individuals and groups committed terrorist attacks because they sought radical transformative change—in other words, a revolution. Terrorist acts were routinely treated as criminal by the state, even if the idea that terrorism was an extension of politics went largely unquestioned. In West Germany, enormous state resources were invested in a (fruitless) effort to identify the social, economic, cultural or other fac­tors which led an individual into violent extremism. In many countries, academic experts in the new field of terrorism studies examined the same question at great length in a multitude of seminars, conferences and lectures.

By the early 1980s, however, a new thinking had emerged and a gap between the policy-makers’ approach and that of the experts—not just of academics but often of analysts within their own intelligence services—had widened. Books like those published by Binyamin Netanyahu and Claire Sterling in 1981 had argued that there was no link between politics—or at least ‘revolution’—and terrorism. Instead, they said, extremist violence was a product either of state sponsorship or of individuals who were mad, bad or misled. To propose that terrorism had anything to do with broader social, political or economic factors was seen as a moral failure, even cowardice. Despite its flaws and the many dissenting voices who opposed it, this new analysis rapidly became very influential in policy-making circles.

It was attractive for many reasons, but one was that it implied a simple solution to a difficult and complex problem: if states could be made to cease their support, and wayward individuals eliminated, there would be no more terrorism. Even better, the most powerful states could act pre-emptively to head off the danger before getting involved in the messy and complicated business of trying to retaliate after being attacked.

Five weeks after the last Marine had left Beirut, President Reagan issued National Security Decision Directive 138, ordering all major departments and security agencies of the US government to significantly increase their efforts to ‘attack the pressing and urgent problem of international terrorism’. The initiative was the most ambitious and wide-ranging effort yet by a US administration to tackle ‘a frightening challenge to the political stability of friends and allies’ that had, officials stressed, killed 6,500 people, including 2,500 Americans, in the past decade and 720 in the previous year alone. Quite what form this threat would take was unclear—experts had speculated recently about the use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons and one had even raised the possibility of ‘hijacked planes trying to crash into major buildings’ in the United States—but few doubted that it was clear and present.

Hawks within the US administration and Congress criticized NSDD138 and the accompanying legislation for being overly bureaucratic but some analysts pointed to a different problem. Brian Jenkins, the prominent expert who had said that ‘terrorism is theatre’ a  decade earlier, emphasised the risks of ‘a declaration of war against an unspecified terrorist foe, to be fought at an unknown place and time with weapons yet to be chosen’, and pointed to the mission in Lebanon as an example of an effort that had once been about ‘combating’ terrorists but had evolved into a much wider war ‘against terrorism’. Such an effort would be ‘long’ and politicians would ‘struggle to persuasively claim victory’, Jenkins warned.

Any objective survey of international terrorism would have reinforced such a conclusion. By 1984, continental western Europe offered the most positive example of what might be achieved in the fight against domestic extremist violence. Democracies like West Germany and Italy had been seriously destabilised by terrorism in the 1970s, but a combination of increasingly effective counter-terrorist tactics, a greater degree of international co-operation and a refusal to make immediate concessions to attackers, as well as consumerism, economic growth, wide-ranging reforms on crucial social issues, and careful if sometimes questionably constitutional use of legal process, had eventually contained the challenge posed by groups like the RAF, Revolutionary Cells or Red Brigades. The fading attraction of Marxist-Leninism, the end of the Vietnam war, the rise of alternative causes such as environmentalism and the genuine repulsion at so-called ‘revolutionary violence’ felt by most citizens helped too, as did the steadily diminishing support offered to violent extremists by Moscow and its satel­lites, particularly from 1981 onwards.

Western democracies still had much to worry about, of course, even in 1984. But by the time the Rand Corporation published its report on ‘Trends in Terrorism’ the threat from the extreme left that had once seemed so significant had faded.

IN THE MIDDLE EAST, there was no similar victory to boast of. Here, every form of terrorism had flourished: that de­ployed by states against other states, by regimes against their own populations or parts of them, and by those seeking radical change against governments or their supporters. Though most such violence was indeed rooted in ‘localised political, ethnic or religious conflicts’, most international terrorism was ‘a spillover’ from these smaller struggles. This in turn suggested that ‘the battle between democracy and totalitarianism’, shorthand for the Cold War, was unlikely to have any impact on terrorism in the West. Instead, it would be ‘developments… around such issues as the Palestinian problem, pan-Arabism and Muslim Fundamen­talism’ that would determine not only the level of ‘indigenous ter­rorism’ in the Middle East but also of its international variant too.

The reality was that almost nowhere in the Middle East had any leaders made significant reforms or concessions that might have diverted individuals or groups from violence, whether domestic or international.

Instead, any discontent was dealt with by manipulating divi­sions between communities, buying off potential dissidents with sinecures or lucrative contracts, the promotion of an aggressive nationalism and, above all, through coercion, fear and control. Leaders of movements calling for radical change were killed, tortured and incarcerated for decades, their writings banned, their speeches prohibited, but no serious effort was actually made to answer their criticism, let alone redress their grievances. The consequences were inevitable: a radical minority among the alienated and angry found extremist ideologies attractive, a small number of these turned to terrorism and this, as the CIA pointed out, prompted violence across the region and the world.

Simultaneously, many of the same rulers who were threat­ened with domestic terrorism turned to its international variant as a strategy to advance their own interests. Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad were perhaps the most notorious, but others such as the radical regime in Tehran used terror­ism as a tool of statecraft, sending assassins thousands of miles to conduct spectacular killings of high-profile enemies or abducting dozens of civilians in a bid to gain advantage over the US. The combination of domestic ‘spillover’ from the Middle East and inten­tional use of terrorist violence as a continu­ation of diplomacy (or war) by other means was behind much of the continuing rise in numbers of dead and wounded outlined by the Rand Corporation.

Those rulers that had successfully target­ed secular, leftist and Arab nationalist groups which sometimes used terrorism had rarely won more than a Pyrrhic victory. The left-wing groups that had led the violent opposition to the shah had been destroyed by his security services well before the revolution of 1978, but this had allowed the radical clerics to take a much more prominent role in the campaign against his rule and eventually seize power. In Egypt and Iraq, any activists suspected of genuine com­mitment to Marxist-Leninist ideologies had been the focus of brutal repression while Islamists had been tacitly en­couraged, until President Sadat had been killed by them.

Even in so-called ‘revolution­ary states’, including Algeria, Syria or Yemen, opposition to suppos­edly socialist or outright Marxist regimes had been co-opted or destroyed. The Arabian peninsula had been effectively purged of the few leftists or Arab nationalists who had survived the 1960s, while an intolerant and implicitly revolutionary strand of religious observance was deliberately strengthened. In Libya, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi forged his own idiosyncratic, autocratic path, allowing no dissent while sponsoring scores of ‘revolutionary groups’ and commissioning scores of terrorist attacks. He too would reap the Islamist whirlwind.

The early and mid-1980s saw further expansion of Islamic militancy which would soon mount direct challenges to these regimes. As Islamists in prison in Egypt had told interviewers shortly before the assassination of Sadat, they enjoyed natural advantages in societies where most people were raised as Muslims, particularly following the resurgence of faith from the late 1960s. Communism and socialism offered social justice but ignored identity. Political Islam, and its violent fringe, offered both. This was true in Lebanon, where the coalition of Shia groups now known widely as Hezbol­lah continued to grow in strength and would soon oust the more moderate AMAL to assume the leadership of the Shia communi­ties of the country. It was true in Gaza, where Islamists were fast making inroads, including the ostensibly quietist activists who would eventually form the armed and violent Harakat al-Muqa­wama al-Islamiyya, or Hamas, before the decade was over. It was true too in Jordan, Turkey, Afghanistan, Sudan and more or less everywhere else from northern Nigeria to the Philippines.

Western media continued to portray these ‘Islamo-fascists’ or ‘fundamentalists’ as a curiosity, either romanticising them as defenders of tradition or dismissing them as crazed fanatics. Within Western security agencies, attitudes varied. In 1984, even as they ramped up support for the mujahideen fighting Soviet troops in Afghanistan, US agencies produced lengthy reports on those in the Islamic world who were turning ‘to militancy and terrorism to unseat unpopular secular leaders or “impure” Muslim leaders’ and highlighted the threat they might pose to US allies. But there was little sense in London or Wash­ington of any danger to their own citizens, at least those who stayed at home. The Islamists might become a local threat, it was generally believed, but not an international one. When in 1984 Mossad specialists who had long exchanged information with Britain about Palestinian factions began warning their British counterparts that the UK could be a target, they were met with scepticism and some suspicion. Like most Western intelligence services, their focus remained elsewhere: on the latest radical leftist splinter groups, nationalist separatist organisations and specific teams of assassins or bombers sent by Middle Eastern regimes, including the few veterans of the 1960s or 70s who somehow remained at large and active.

(This is an edited excerpt from The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s by Jason Burke)