By Robin Wright
In the run-up to the 9/11 anniversary, I reached out to experts who identified the ways terrorism evolves, fades, or dies—and under what conditions it succeeds.Photograph by Kevin Trageser / Redux
The current spasm of international terrorism, an age-old tactic of warfare, is often traced to a bomb mailed from New York by the anti-Castro group El Poder Cubano, or Cuban Power, that exploded in a Havana post office, on January 9, 1968. Five people were seriously injured. Since then, almost four hundred thousand people have died in terrorist attacks worldwide, on airplanes and trains, in shopping malls, schools, embassies, cinemas, apartment blocks, government offices, and businesses, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. The deadliest remains the 9/11 attack, sixteen years ago this week, which killed almost three thousand people—and in turn triggered a war that has become America’s longest.
I’ve covered dozens of these terrorist attacks on four continents over that half century. After the Barcelona attack and the U.S. decision to send more troops to fight the Taliban, I began to wonder how terrorism ends—or how militant groups evolve. In her landmark study of more than four hundred and fifty terrorist groups, Audrey Kurth Cronin found that the average life span of an extremist movement is about eight years. Cuban Power carried out several other bombings, but, in the end, it didn’t last a whole year.
I’ve also witnessed some transitions that I never thought would happen. I interviewed Yasir Arafat several times when the United States considered him a notorious terrorist. He was a paunchy man of diminutive height, a bit over five feet, with a vain streak. He always wore plain fatigues, crisply pressed, and a checkered kaffiyeh headdress to conceal his bald pate. He was linked, directly or indirectly, with airplane hijackings, bombings, hostage-takings, and more. Israel thought that Arafat was defeated after its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. I watched from the Beirut port as the chief of the Palestine Liberation Organization and his fighters sailed off to new headquarters in Tunisia, a continent twenty-five hundred miles, by land, from the frontlines.
Eleven years later, I was in Washington when Arafat and Yitzak Rabin signed the 1993 Oslo peace accords. They shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. President Bill Clinton hosted Arafat more than any other head of state. I flew with the next four secretaries of State to see Arafat, to discuss the next steps for an enduring peace, in the Palestinian Authority. A quarter century later, it’s far from over. But it did begin.
In the run-up to the 9/11 anniversary, I reached out to eight terrorism experts who’ve long studied the phenomenon at the C.I.A., the F.B.I., the National Security Council, the State Department, the Rand Corporation, and in academia. They identified six ways terrorism evolves, fades, or dies—and under what conditions it succeeds.
Fewer than five per cent of terrorist groups succeed outright, Cronin told me. Among the most notable was Irgun. The Jewish group bombed Britain’s colonial offices in Palestine and diplomatic sites abroad, as well as local Arab targets. Its most famous attack was in 1946, when members, dressed as waiters, planted a bomb, concealed in milk cans, in Britain’s headquarters in Jerusalem’s King David Hotel; ninety-one were killed. The group was then led by Menachem Begin. Two years later, Irgun realized its goals when British troops withdrew and the state of Israel was founded. Three decades later, Begin, then the Prime Minister, shared the Nobel Peace Prize for détente with Egypt.
Another was in South Africa. In 1961, Nelson Mandela founded the armed wing of the African National Congress. Its first attack was five bombings on government facilities on the same day, in Johannesburg, Durban, and Port Elizabeth. Mandela was arrested and sentenced to life for sabotage. Decades later, as apartheid floundered, the white-minority government ceded power.
Extremist groups are more likely to succeed when objectives are limited or attainable, “such as independence, a role in government, or a piece of territory,” Richard Clarke, the national coördinator on counterterrorism under the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations, told me. “If a group can increase the pain point to the decision-makers, they will give in. That was true of many independence movements, including the American Revolution.”
“Then they go straight,” Clarke added. “They trade off their radicalism to become a government that is not that out of line with other governments of the world.”
More common—about eighteen per cent—are terrorist movements that end up negotiating to achieve their political goals. “They are the groups that hang on the longest. Their life span as terrorists is usually twenty to twenty-five years,” Cronin told me. “Usually, the talks trundle along. They often take years, and some lower level of violence continues,” she said. “But they rarely fail outright.”
The P.L.O. negotiated. This summer, Colombia’s farc guerrillas ended a half century of kidnappings and killings in a historic peace deal. Northern Ireland’s Provisional Irish Republican Army was party to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. It had attacked London’s financial district, in 1993; the British Prime Minister’s residence, at 10 Downing Street, in 1991; and the hotel where Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party was meeting, in 1984. Today, Sinn Féin—the I.R.A.’s political wing—is the most popular party in Northern Ireland, Bruce Hoffman, the author of “Inside Terrorism,“ noted. “The leaders of the moderate Catholic party—the Social Democratic and Labor Party—won a Nobel Peace Prize, but it’s Sinn Féin that is being elected now.”
Negotiations respond to other factors. The P.L.O., farc, and the I.R.A. were weakened by military campaigns against them and ebbing momentum. Israel, Colombia, and Britain, in turn, altered course as costs mounted over decades and public support waned.
But when extremist groups walk away from negotiations—as happens ten per cent of the time—they often get crushed. Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers pioneered the suicide vest. It was the only terrorist group to assassinate two world leaders—India’s Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991, and the Sri Lankan President Ranasinghe Premadasa, in 1993. At its peak, it controlled strategic chunks of the country. But years of sporadic peace talks broke down in 2006. In 2009, the Sri Lankan military crushed the Tigers in a relentless offensive.
A third pattern is terrorist “reorientation,” when groups alter tactics, sometimes even entering politics. I lived in Beirut when embryonic precursors of Hezbollah launched the first suicide bombing against an American Embassy, in 1983. After the attack, the seven-story building, which was down the hill from my office, looked like a doll’s house with its façade blown off. Sixty-four died, including some of my friends. Six months later, a bomber drove a Mercedes-Benz truck into the barracks of U.S. Marine peacekeepers in Lebanon. Two hundred and forty-one marines died in the largest loss of U.S. military life in a single incident since the Second World War. I still recall the roar of that bomb waking me up on a balmy October morning, and watching for weeks as the bodies of my countrymen were recovered from under tons of debris.
A decade later, Hezbollah emerged from the underground to run for Parliament, build a network of social services, and greatly expand its support base. Today it has seats in Parliament, Cabinet positions, an alliance with Lebanon’s President, and the largest military force outside the army, as well as hospitals, schools, and welfare agencies. I spent several hours interviewing its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in 2006, and his deputy, last October. Yet Hezbollah still calls for Israel’s destruction. The United States considers it one of the most dangerous terrorist groups.
“Hezbollah doesn’t rule Lebanon, but it controls it. The message is that terrorism pays. It is translated into power,” Hoffman told me.
Cronin added, “This is the least satisfactory pattern.”
The fourth path is state repression, the most instinctive reaction. It worked against the Tupamaros, in Uruguay, in the nineteen-seventies. But the results often produce massive destruction, unintended consequences and mutations. Russia’s campaign against Chechen extremists made vast swaths of Grozny uninhabitable, and Chechen militants moved elsewhere. Since 2014, thousands of Chechens have joined isis in Syria and Iraq.
“Military repression usually backfires,” Jessica Stern, the co-author of “ISIS: The State of Terror” who was a national-security staffer in the Clinton Administration, told me. “Even when they seem to end, they keep merging, splitting, renaming. When a particular group is banned or defeated in one area, it may very well appear in a new guise, under a new name.”
Other terrorist movements collapse as the national and international political dynamics that fuelled them fade. “Either they implode, burn out, and collapse, or they lose popular support and fizzle out,” Cronin said. “They may succumb to infighting, disagreements about ideology, arguments over tactics, or other kinds of internal dissent,” including fratricide.
Right-wing extremists were never able to sustain themselves, Hoffman said. “They made a lot of noise, but they had no message or cohesiveness. And they didn’t get the support that every terrorist group needs from state sponsors or enablers.”
Leftist and Marxist terrorists in Europe—Italy’s Red Brigades, Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang, France’s Action Directe—produced big headlines in the nineteen-seventies and eighties. They sought to overthrow capitalist governments. In 1978, the Red Brigades kidnapped the former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, after killing his five bodyguards. The group held Moro hostage for fifty-four days and, when the government refused to release political prisoners, put him in the back of a car, covered him in a blanket, and shot him eleven times. In 1981, it kidnapped U.S. Brigadier General James L. Dozier, a senior nato official, from his apartment in Verona. He was rescued forty-two days later.
“The fanciful European groups of the nineteen-eighties had a political cause and practiced violence. But they were more like cults than terrorist groups,” Clarke said. “They never had a chance of succeeding. What happens with the cults is that the leadership gets arrested, other people pull out or go to ground. The groups become so discredited as whack jobs that they have no new adherents.”
The Soviet Union’s collapse was their death knell. “They faced a perfect confluence of fatal factors,” Hoffman said. “The citadel they worshipped no longer existed, so there was no rationale to sustain their movements. With the end of the Cold War, they had no message.”
As has happened through the millennia, Hoffman added, “The world changes, and groups become less relevant.”
Finally, the decapitation of leaders—by capture or death—can also deflate or finish off movements. For a dozen years, Shining Path terrorized Peru. It bombed government ministries, assassinated politicians, and even massacred peasants, its support base. It collapsed after the 1992 capture of its leader, Abimael Guzmán, in a dance studio in Lima. Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo, which was responsible for the 1995 chemical-weapons attack on a Tokyo subway, declined after founder Shoko Asahara was arrested and, in 2004, sentenced to death. It once had an estimated ten thousand members in thirty-six branches and offices overseas, including in Manhattan.
“Decapitation is not a silver bullet,” Cronin warned. “Sometimes it backfires and creates a martyr that can mobilize public opinion.” The killing of Osama bin Laden, in 2011, hurt Al Qaeda, although its five affiliates are still a deadly menace in North Africa, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Which pattern might apply to isis and the Taliban? “I’m less confident those lessons apply to the groups we face today,” Brian Jenkins, the author of “Will Terrorists Go Nuclear?,” said. “We’re dealing with adversaries who, tactically, organizationally, and strategically, have given the same amount of thought to terrorism as we have. They have adapted, and, as a consequence, many of them have survived. The idea of ending terrorism looks more complex than it did in the nineteen-seventies.”
As an assistant F.B.I. director, Oliver (Buck) Revel headed the Bureau’s counterterrorism program for years. In 1987, he led Operation Goldenrod, an F.B.I.-C.I.A.-Navy program to nab a Lebanese hijacker. It was the first U.S. capture of a foreign terrorist overseas. I covered the trial of Fawaz Younis, who was convicted in a Washington courtroom on three of six counts of hijacking and sentenced to thirty years in prison. I interviewed him after his conviction. He served sixteen years and returned to Lebanon. For thirty years, Revel has tracked how terrorist groups end, or “bleed out.”
“As we’ve seen in Afghanistan, it’s hard to bleed them out,” he told me. “They continue to grow when you don’t solve the underlying issues. But what they want is totally inconsistent with Western values. How can you turn around and negotiate with a group that engages in atrocities? Therefore, is the only option to kill? I don’t know. As long as you subjugate the rest of society, there will be friction that will result in terrorism and then war.
“It’s a conundrum,” Revel said. “As Americans, we like to think there is nothing that is unsolvable. But it’s foolish to think we’ll ever be able to eradicate all of the causes that produce violence.”
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