Attacks in Turkey, Pakistan Ended Illusion of Safety in Worldwide Terrorist Watch

The summer lull in worldwide terrorist incidents that ended in Turkey and Pakistan was mostly illusion, masking a continued and intensifying terrorist drive, students of terrorism said Saturday.

They agreed that the Karachi hijack attempt must be considered a failure from the terrorists’ viewpoint, a demonstration that target nations have learned much about how to counter such attacks. But it will probably be viewed as a tactical failure rather than as a discouragement to the strategy of terrorism, the experts said.

Since the U.S. bombing raid on Libya on April 15, there have been no incidents linked to Libyan leader Moammar Kadafi and relatively few other terrorist attacks. At U.S. urging, European nations expelled more than 100 Libyans, “and all of that gave Kadafi’s apparatus real pause,” said Donald P. Gregg, national security adviser to Vice President George Bush, who heads a special task force on terrorism. “We won a round, but we didn’t win the battle.”

Instead, hard-core independents and other terrorist groups made more weapons purchases over the summer, set up new training programs and regrouped the support networks that provide them with false travel documents, explosives, weapons and information, Gregg and other observers said.

U.S. intelligence networks picked up a surge in planning activity about two weeks ago and issued a general worldwide terrorist alert, but had no warning that the attempts would take place in Pakistan and Turkey, intelligence officials said. It is too early to know whether the two attacks are related, they said.

Still, “these incidents fit into the pattern we’ve been seeing” of conventional-arms assaults and hostage-taking efforts, rather than breaking ground in either technique or targets, said Robert B. Oakley, head of the State Department’s office of counterterrorism and emergency planning. “No one with common sense ever pretended that terrorism had gone away.”

Middle East terrorists “see this as a long-term war against the West, a war of 100 or 200 or even 300 years,” said Yonah Alexander, director of the Institute for Studies in International Terrorism at the State University of New York.

Each group’s goals are different, however. If the Palestine Liberation Organization seeks only a Palestinian homeland, other groups insist on obliterating Israel as well, while the the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist group would like to radicalize all the Arab states, Alexander said.

The failure of terrorism to achieve any political goals so far is viewed as temporary and irrelevant, he continued. In conversations with terrorists and political figures in the Middle East this summer, Alexander said he found “a new phase opening of intensified planning for terrorist activities both by self-sustained and by state-supported groups.”

He said he had seen evidence, which he did not describe, of increased involvement by the Soviet Union and Syria in supporting terrorist planning. He also said he had spoken with Lebanese youths who said they had been sent to the Soviet Union for training in terrorist techniques.

The young militants tended to interpret the U.S. attack on Libya as a success for their cause because of its aftermath: a drastic decline in the number of U.S. tourists in Europe this summer. “From their perspective, terrorism works: It is cheap; it intimidates people,” Alexander said. “There is no doubt they will try again and again.”

The experts said it will be more difficult to find those responsible for terrorist attacks because terrorist splinter groups have themselves splintered and reformed. “Our intelligence has improved markedly in the last two years on Arab terrorists, but there are many fanatics who seem to enjoy this and it’s hard to keep track,” one Administration analyst said.

The number of people involved does not seem to have increased significantly, in part because “action against them tends to dissuade others from joining up,” the official said. Some groups seem to have leaders who react to Western defensive measures by changing tactics, while other groups behave as if they had no leaders, he said.

For example, the Istanbul terrorists used suicide tactics against which there has never been an effective defense. But the Karachi terrorists showed sophisticated planning and tactics in dressing as airport security officers, renting a vehicle similar to those used by the security department and painting it to match, the official said.

Defensive security had also improved to the point of foiling the Karachi attempt: The jetliner’s cockpit crew escaped, the plane remained grounded and a potentially much larger death toll was avoided. “People got killed and that is very unfortunate, but the important thing is that the terrorists didn’t win--they didn’t get their political objectives and they didn’t get away,” Oakley said.

He agreed that individual fanatics cannot be discouraged, but said experience in the United States and Italy has shown that terrorist groups could be dismantled, their support networks broken up and their individuals’ impact neutralized by a combination of governmental cooperation, increased security and intelligence-sharing and “the willingness to use force in the event of a direct attack.”

Gregg said Bush’s task force issued recommendations this year which, if they had been fully implemented, might have helped avert the loss of life in Karachi. The recommendations included full advance deployment of rapid response teams that could have provided quick on-the-ground aid to the Pakistanis, Gregg said.

Alexander recommended that terrorism be placed on the agenda at U.S.-Soviet arms talks in Geneva this month. “Strategic planning is lacking at the moment,” he said. “If we continue to treat it as an irritant, we’ll remain hostage to terrorism for years to come.”