Unwelcome Lessons of Terror

President Bush committed himself last week to the first war of the 21st century. “It’s a new kind of war,” said the president. But “now that war has been declared on us, we will lead the world to victory. Victory.” In fact, America has been fighting a rearguard action against this modern evil for most of a decade. The conflict began in earnest in February 1993, when Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a Kuwaiti-born munitions expert, tried to topple the World Trade Center’s towers with a huge bomb. Yousef, who received succor and support from the fugitive Osama bin Laden, had been hoping to cause upward of 250,000 fatalities. His bomb killed six people and injured more than 1,000.

When a squad of elite agents from the FBI/NYPD Joint Terrorist Task Force began hunting Yousef, he went on the run in the Far East. Within months he was plotting a series of attacks code-named “Bojinka,” or “the explosions,” in which he planned to simultaneously destroy 11 airliners over the Pacific, causing thousands of deaths. One of Yousef’s conspirators trained as a pilot at U.S. flight schools, before graduating from an academy in North Carolina with a temporary commercial pilot’s license. In a chilling precursor to the attacks last week, Yousef wanted his friend to fly a plane loaded with chemical weapons into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Va..

Yousef is now held in isolation at the Supermax prison outside Florence, Colo., on the most secure wing of the most secure prison in the world. But despite his lonely incarceration, Yousef’s grand terrorist schemes may prove to have been the inspiration for the attacks last week.

Yousef was the first of the new breed of terrorist, men with no restrictions on mass killing and the cunning to spend months preparing a devastating atrocity. To go to war against such an enemy, the U.S. needs to clearly define the target. The problem with Yousef, Osama bin Laden and their ilk is that they know no boundaries and often hide in the shadows before launching their attacks. Supporters of Bin Laden do not reside in a single military base in the foothills of Afghanistan. Instead, they and other dangerous militants are spread across dozens of countries.

Military strikes against them have failed before. After the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa, a shower of American cruise missiles fell on Afghanistan and Sudan. But they achieved little more than a huge lawsuit from an aggrieved Sudanese factory owner. The missiles made America look incompetent and encouraged dozens, if not hundreds, of young militants to join the organization headed by Bin Laden.

Last week’s carnage appears to bear Bin Laden’s imprint once again, and evidence may emerge in days or weeks that he directly sanctioned the attack. But even if this lone bogeyman is captured or killed, a task that will be exceptionally difficult without the help of the Taliban militia in Afghanistan and the government of Pakistan, it will not prevent more terrorist attacks on the U.S. Arrest Bin Laden and return him to the U.S., and he will become a hostage to be released when his followers hijack a plane or threaten to detonate another bomb. Kill him and he will become a martyr, for Bin Laden is as much a cult figure as a terrorist leader. Disaffected and militant young men listen to his vitriolic speeches on tapes and television broadcasts, and they are inspired to commit atrocities in pursuit of his aims.

Even with Bin Laden out of the picture, the president’s new war on terrorism will not stop. The next challenge will be to identify and move against his followers. But they are members of a loosely knit, “disorganized organization” without a rigid structure, spread through the Balkans, Egypt, Pakistan, Chechnya, Tajikistan, Somalia, Yemen, the Philippines, Algeria and Eritrea. Governments of those countries have been spectacularly unsuccessful at tackling their home-grown terrorists, despite the use of state torture and assassination. It is unlikely the American military can succeed where they have failed.

An alternative to battling these groups around the world would be for the U.S. to follow the Israeli example and launch a targeted assassination campaign against militant leaders. In 1972, the world was stunned when 11 Israeli athletes were killed at the Munich Olympics. In response, Israel launched an assassination campaign aimed at all those it deemed responsible for the attack. In one assault on three militants, future Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, disguised as a woman carrying grenades in his bra, led the Israeli equivalent of Delta Force into Beirut.

Voices have already been raised in Washington supporting a similar operation, but terrorism today is very different from the world post-Munich. The Israelis could identify many of their targets because they lived openly in Western Europe. Bin Laden’s supporters and most other militants hide in the shadows and may never appear on the intelligence radar screen prior to an attack. Even if they could be identified, many would glory in assassination as a means of securing martyrdom.

Some countries would certainly offer enthusiastic support for an American assassination campaign. The governments of Algeria and Egypt, responsible for reprehensible acts of brutality that encourage the growth of Islamic militancy, will be quick to identify some of their own troublesome citizens as men with tenuous links to Bin Laden, perhaps with the aid of enthusiastic interrogation techniques. No doubt they will be delighted to have those individuals killed in an American-sanctioned campaign, regardless of their guilt.

But if assassinations and the use of military force have inherent risks, this does not eliminate the need for some action to prevent future atrocities. Terrorists will see the attacks last week as an enormous success and may try to emulate them by hijacking other jets in the U.S. or abroad and turning them into guided missiles. Airlines must consider the need for armed guards on planes, and some suggest it may be necessary for pilots to be sealed in their cabins behind bullet-proof doors during flights.

Some politicians have said it is time to seal borders, to cut America off from the outside world and retreat into isolationism. On the contrary, it is clear that terrorists proliferate amid chaos, in countries such as Afghanistan and Algeria, and in regions ravaged by conflict. In the long term, the United States must work more diligently to encourage conflict resolution and to support economic development inside these troubled nations.

The need for development assistance is not limited to countries such as Afghanistan. Across the border in Pakistan the lack of a decent state education system has encouraged the proliferation of thousands of small madrassas, or religious schools. Most are unregulated and many preach an aggressive form of Islam. Students leave these schools with rudimentary knowledge of the world but a fanatical belief in Islamic supremacy. More than 300,000 former students of madrassas retain military connections with their old schools and many have joined extremist groups.

Some militant Islamic leaders hope the former students of Pakistani madrassas will one day form a “revolutionary guard” that replaces the regular army. Even Naseerullah Babar, Pakistan’s former interior minister and police chief, has said the madrassas are “hotbeds of terrorism.” Providing funding to help the Pakistani government establish more state schools would remove young men from the clutches of militants and be an infinitely more productive use of counterterrorism funds than dropping bombs on the region. In the long term, it would reduce the risk of further terrorist attacks against American targets.

However, offering overseas aid will not calm the current outpouring of public fury in the U.S. about terrorism. The most likely response from the Bush administration will be some form of invasion of Afghanistan or airstrikes on targets in the capital of Kabul, which are bound to cause civilian casualties. The Afghan people did not invite Bin Laden into their country. Nor did they elect the vicious Taliban militia. Their country has been ravaged by decades of conflict. So, it is a further tragedy that the Afghan people may now suffer because of Bin Laden--just as thousands of innocent Americans suffered last week.