'Terror and Consent'

Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-first Century

Shortly after I took up my study of War in the Modern World, David Betz pointed me to a book by Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles, which I duly acquired. Reading it took me the better part of a year, and in the end I was a bit disappointed. Hindsight is famously 20/20, and Bobbitt's tale of how societies evolved into nation-states, and how those were now evolving into "market states," was endlessly fascinating and mostly convincing. It was when he used this paradigm to forecast the future that it seemed to fall apart. What good is a template that can only predict the past?

But ah! Dr Bobbitt has now dropped the other shoe: Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. I've only just begun to read, but evidently he is arguing that "Wars against Terror" (a subtly different formulation than the Bush administration's War on Terror") will define the 21st century, much as the Long War of 1914-1991 defined the 20th. Here are some preliminary notes:

"I believe that almost every widely held idea we currently entertain about twenty-first century terrorism and its relationship to the Wars against Terror is wrong and must be thoroughly rethought...." (p.5) (For example: that one can't make war against terrorism; that its "root causes" are poverty etc.; that it is a police and not a military problem.)

The campaign against al Qaeda has been fairly successful: "Much of the senior leadership ... has been killed or detained. Nearly 3,500 of its fighters are either dead or in prison. Two-thirds of the persons known to intelligence agencies at the outset of this war have been sequestered. The planners behind the ... attacks on American embassies in 1998, the USS Cole in 2000, and the September 11 atrocities have been killed or arrested, along with Osama bin Laden's regional coordinators in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. What remains of al Qaeda's leadership ... is in hiding." (p.13-14)

"It hardly matters whether the forces of destruction arise from militant Islam, North Korean communism, or Caribbean hurricanes. Rather the sort of terror that threatens [us] ... is endemic to the unique vulnerabilities of globalized, networked market states." (p.19)

Based on their past experience, "Europeans assure Americans that terrorism is nothing new, and that, with proper police and investigative work, it can be managed. This assurance ... assumes that terrorism is fundamentally unchanged.... The end of the ideological wars of the twentieth century nation states ... and with them the end of great power sponsorship of national liberation movements ... have brought forth a new form of terrorism, an unusually horrific homunculus, the unintended creation of the technology-wielding twenty-first century market state." (p.44)

"[Ayman] Zawahiri ... explicitly recognizes that the decisive historical shift was not September 11, 2001, but the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, which increased the power and influence of the U.S., and thus also the stability of the regimes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia that were supported by the Americans," and to whose destruction he and bin Laden were committed. "The al Qaeda strategy had to be to attack the United States directly in the hope that it would abandon the states it had supported....
     "In many respects it was Zawahiri who made al Qaeda into the first market state terrorist organization: his use of outsourced suicide bombers; his choice of their targets ... ; his use of heroic videos and tape recordings of the martyrs; his disdain for claiming responsibility for an attack ...; his recognition that violence against the United States could be used as a rallying call to unite Muslims globally." (p.79)

"Mullah Omar and his ally bin Laden did succeed in provoking the U.S. and its allies into [attacking Afghanistan]. But as they scuttle from cave to cave, remembering the good old days when a child could be shot for flying a kite or a woman stoned for reading a magazine, one wonders whether they do feel they have in fact taken the `first trick,' as Sir Michael [Howard] puts it, by having been thrown out of Kandahar and Kabul by a campaign in which aerial bombing played a decisive role." (p.131-32)

"Both terrorism and warfare are undergoing a radical transformation. The large-scale, `industrial' warfare of nation states is being replaced by the targeting of civilian populations as a direct objective, rather than a collateral cost. The purpose of this warfare is not to seize territory ... but rather to terrorize a civilian population into acquiescence." (p.132)

"What caused the Wars against Terror, however, was a war for terror, and what caused that onslaught was the emergence of market states, a development that enraged and empowered those who created al Qaeda.
     "Two new factors brought forth the asymmetric attacks.... First was the overwhelming conventional strength of the United States and its allies....
     "The second factor was the source of that strength: a relatively open and increasingly globally linked society whose wealth derives from its exploitation of information. Both of these factors are a consequence of the victory of the parliamentary states in the Long War [1914-1990] of the twentieth century that defeated fascism and communism." (p.134-35)

Bobbitt calls preemptive wars preclusionary: "This is the meeting point between market state terrorism and war. The war aim is to protect civilians and their officials so that, behind this military shield, the political development of governance based on consent can take place outside a climate of terror. Preclusion is the `new deterrence,' i.e., it will be the central doctrine of warfare for the states of consent." (p.138)

"The American attempts to halt terrorism by arrest, rendition, and trial may even have inadvertently weakened our defenses against the attacks of September 11 because ... this approach prevented information being shared between prosecutorial agencies like the FBI ... and other agencies such as CIA and the White House. Realizing we are fighting a war and not just pursuing criminals shifts the focus to strategy, which does not seek to correct matters after the fact, as do prosecutions, but rather tries to anticipate and neutralize hostile action before the fact." (p141)

"Terrorism involves the use of what would otherwise be ordinary criminal acts--arson, kidnapping, extortion, murder--for political goals." (p143)

Force protection: "For many reasons, the citizens of a market state are more sensitive to the value of individual life and less tolerant of sacrifice." (p149)

"The forces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere are simply not configured, trained, or deployed principally to protect civilians; to battle street by street with light arms; to mingle with the population.... [T]hey are too few ..., they rely on ... tanks and planes ..., and they are not trained for this kind of war.... [T]hey are not the sort of force required to restore and maintain law and order." (p.153--obviously written before the changes wrought in Iraq by Bush, Gates, and Petraeus)