In
Celebration of Walter Laqueur’s 90th Birthday: Reflections on His
Contributions to the Study of Terrorism and Guerrilla Warfare
Bruce
Hoffman
Scholars today researching and writing
on terrorism and guerrilla warfare face a daunting challenge. Walter Laqueur. While it would be fatuous to state that
Walter has said or written every thing that there is to say or write about
either of those two phenomena; such a claim is not entirely inaccurate. For nearly forty years, in a dozen or so books
and countless articles and reviews, Walter has indefatigably shed new light on
both subjects while simultaneously dismembering the conventional wisdom and
dismantling the latest, vogue-ish, but substance-less, methodological fads. He has systematically demolished myths and
corrected popular misconceptions. In
doing so, Walter has laid claim to having the first or final word——and often
both——a throughout his long and intellectually luxurious career.
A modest sampling of Walter’s engagement
with these two fields’ most pressing policy and intellectual issues would
include:
• the fool’s errand of divining a
universal definition of terrorism;
• the posited, but historically,
exaggerated invincibility of the post-modern guerrilla;
• religion’s salient role in
contemporary terrorism;
• the nexus of terrorism and technology;
• the causal link between poverty and
terrorism and with guerrilla warfare as well; and,
• whether in fact a war on terrorism can
ever be won in any meaningful sense.
Walter’s prodigious
scholarly output is the product not only of his discipline and focus, but
significantly also of his personal generosity and kindness and his
fundamentally open and inquiring mind.
His magisterial command of multiple European and Semitic languages endow
his work with uncommon breadth and depth.
His insatiable thirst for knowledge and daily consumption of a vast
variety of print and digital media has given him a uniquely broad and dynamic
perspective. Walter’s fervent embrace of
cutting edge technology at once maintains his unrivalled access to information
and opens up new intellectual paths to pursue.
And, his interest in culture and society is pivotal to all the
above.
But perhaps
most important is Walter’s passion as teacher and mentor. He has long enjoyed intellectually close and
affectionate relationships with both established and especially younger
scholars. It is, accordingly, not an
infrequent occurrence to pick up a book and scan its acknowledgements page to
find Walter mentioned.[i]
The power of Walter’s analysis, clarity
of his thinking, and fluidity of his prose is perhaps best encapsulated by the
review of Guerrilla: A Historical and
Critical Study that appeared in London’s Sunday Times, upon its publication in 1976. Written by Professor Sir Michael Howard, the
world’s preeminent military historian and authority on strategy and warfare, it
seems now, in retrospect, as the perfect summation of Walter’s scholarship and
contribution to the literature——despite the fact that this was his first
substantial foray into what is collectively known as violence by non-state
actors. “[This] huge and ill-defined
subject,” Sir Michael wrote has probably been responsible for more
incompetent and unnecessary books than any other outside the field of sociology. It attracts phoneys and amateurs as a candle
attracts moths. When an experienced
historian like Dr Laqueur announced his intention of tackling it, his admirers
could not conceal their qualms. Could
even he more than flounder in this Serbonian bog? The answer is that he can and does, with a
mixture of massive learning and brisk commonsense.[ii]
Indeed, at the time, most treatments of
guerrilla warfare and terrorism were either anecdotal or, if within the
academy, uselessly theoretical. It was
thus a field of study to which shady memoirists, superficial journalists and
abstruse political scientists mostly seemed to gravitate. Guerrilla
was thus a veritable breath of fresh air and, as would characterize all of
Walter’s subsequent work on these subjects, a useful rejoinder to those lacking
the historical perspective necessary to understand events and trends that were
neither as new nor unique as the more gullible or parochial believed them to
be.
The scholarly authority and masterly
command of history apparent throughout Guerrilla
is perhaps evidenced by the fact that, more than thirty years since it’s
publication, the twelve core principles of guerrilla warfare elucidated by
Walter in its concluding chapter,[iii]
remain at the foundation of the insurgency and counterinsurgency courses today
taught at Georgetown University, where he was “University Professor”——the most
distinguished chair and title on that campus, and where Walter taught for the
longest single period——twelve years. The
importance of geography to the guerrilla; the timeless demographics and
socio-economic backgrounds of leaders and foot-soldiers alike; the serial
recurrence of guerrilla warfare in the same countries and regions; the inverse
correlation between guerrilla warfare and economic development along with
education and opportunity; the guerrilla’s perennial use of terrorist tactics;
and, personal motives of hate and fanaticism were among the pre-eminent
characteristics of this mode of warfare that Walter identified then which have continued
relevance today.[iv] His overall pronouncement given this
concatenation of empirical observations is hardly comforting and not terribly
optimistic. “Graduates of this school,”
Walter recently wrote in his own reflections of a career spent studying guerrilla
warfare and terrorism, “do not become apostles of humanism after victory.”[v]
It is though
in the study of terrorism where Walter has both had the greatest influence and
indisputably established his lasting legacy.
In the course of four seminal books spanning as many decades——Terrorism (1977); The Age of Terrorism (1987); The
New Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (1999); and, No End To War: Terrorism In The Twenty-First
Century (2003)——Walter identified, explained and illuminated the most
pressing threats coming from this vexatious category of non-state actor. Not surprising, perhaps, is that the
springboard for these scholarly inquiries was doubtless the academic course on
terrorism that Walter conceived and taught at Georgetown University in the
early 1970s: the first to be offered at a university in the United States.[vi]
Walter brought a unique sobriety and
clarity to the study of this often visceral, febrile, subject. In both editions of
his monumental work on the subject (Terrorism
and The Age of Terrorism), he urged
scholars to move beyond their paralytic attempts to define terrorism: arguing
that it was neither possible nor really worthwhile to try to do so.[vii] Responding to a mid-1980s survey on the state
of terrorism research, Walter repeated this admonition. “Ten years of debates on typologies and
definitions,” he argued, “have not enhanced our knowledge of the subject to a
significant degree.” His empirical,
commonsense, conclusion was that the “study of terrorism can manage with a
minimum of theory.” Walter’s point was
supported by the twenty-two different word categories occurring in the 109
different definitions that 100 terrorism scholars were asked to provide.[viii]
Walter has been equally energetic and
persuasive in his debunking of theories about poverty, lack of education, and
unemployment as explanations for the eruption of terrorism.[ix] In the aftermath of the September 11th
2001 attacks this debate over the “root causes” of terrorism acquired new
relevance and greater urgency. A
succession of global leaders seemed to fasten on poverty, illiteracy and lack
of education as the sources of worldwide terrorism and insurgency.[x] Nearly a decade later, such arguments are
still heard. In February 2009, for
example, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani attempted to rally
support for his government’s controversial truce with Taliban fighters in the
Swat Valley by claiming that, since illiteracy is the source of terrorism and
insurgency, greater peace and stability in the region would now enable
Islamabad to improve education there and thereby eliminate political violence.[xi] Then, following the attempted inflight
bombing of North West Airlines flight 251 in December 2009, President Barack
Obama implied such a causal connection with respect to al Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula’s resurgence in Yemen.[xii] And, last May, a column by Nicholas D.
Kristof in the New York Times claimed
that building schools in Pakistan is “just about the best long-term
counterterrorism investment available.”[xiii] Walter, however, has repeatedly pointed out
that both the historical and contemporary empirical evidence fail to support
such sweeping claims.[xiv] “It has been widely argued that a direct
correlation exists between terrorism and poverty——that poverty, especially in
what used to be called the third world,” he wrote in No End To War, is the most
important factor responsible for terrorism.
However, the historical evidence does not bear out such categorical
statements . . . in the forty-nine countries currently designated by the United
Nations as the least developed hardly any terrorist activity occurs.[xv]
For this reason, unlike many analysts and commentators
who were shocked that Umer Farouk Abdulmuttalab——the Christmas Day 2009
would-be bomber——was well-educated and from a wealthy family, Walter was
not. Similarly, when many expressed the
same surprise when in May 2010 Feisal Shahzad was apprehended after attempting
to detonate a vehicular bomb in New York City’s Times Square, and it was found
that he held a Bachelors of Science degree in computing and a Masters in
Business Administration, Walter was not surprised either. As he had correctly explained seven years
earlier, for terrorists to survive, much less thrive, in today’s globalized,
technologically savvy and interconnected world, they have to be educated, have some technical competence and be able
to move without attracting attention in alien societies. In brief, such a person will have to have an
education that cannot be found among the poor in Pakistani or Egyptian villages
or Palestinian refugee camps, only among relatively well-off town folk.[xvi]
In his seminal 1996 Foreign Affairs
article titled, “Postmodern Terrorism,” Walter rightly argued that we were on the cusp of a new era of terrorism for
a new century. Religious imperatives and
theological justifications and perhaps even the use of weapons of mass
destruction, he wrote, would usher in a new wave of
terrorist violence——even bloodier and more destructive than before.[xvii] In another context——and another debate during
the years following September 11th 2001 attacks, he took little
solace in arguments that “soft power,” or non-kinetics in military parlance,
offer any particularly novel or effective solution to terrorism. In characteristically piquant, but prescient,
prose, Walter explained that “it is not the terrorist idea that constitutes the
threat but their weapons.”[xviii]
Last year, around the time of the ninth
anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks, some
commentators began to suggest that we may have overreacted to the events that
tragic day and thus created a self-destructive “climate of fear.”[xix] Walter, with his perspective on history and
analytical acuity is rightly less certain.
In Best Of Times, Worst Of Times,
he explains that, “Terrorism acquired its negative connotations as it became
more cruel, savage and bloodthirsty. The
enemy was not just to be annihilated; he also had to suffer as much main as
possible in the process.” He then draws
an historical parallel to the Russian revolutionaries of the late nineteenth
century who abjured from assassinating the czar and his ministers when there
was any risk of harming innocents. A
century later, he continues, the Tuparmaros in Uruguay enforced a code of
behavior whereby the shedding of innocent blood was to be avoided at all
costs. “Today, however, terrorism has
become inhuman,” Walter observes.[xx] Not a terribly comfort thought but a critical
one given that, he continues,
For the first time in human history very
small groups have, or will have, the potential to kill a great number of
people, to cause immense destruction, and perhaps to paralyze normal life for
considerable periods . . . .
Freud was partly correct. War, at least between great powers, has
become far less likely for rational reasons.
But his argument does not apply to terrorism, motivated not by political
or economic interests but by fanaticism with an admixture of madness.[xxi]
All of Walter’s arguments and
conclusions presented in this brief essay attest to the fact that both
guerrilla warfare and terrorism are timeless phenomena that cannot be forcibly
eradicated; decisively defeated in conventional military terms; or
simplistically solved. Recognition of
their intractability and appreciation of their complexities are thus essential
first steps in managing these two particular forms of conflict. “[T]here can be no
victory, only an uphill struggle,” Walter wisely counsels us, “at times
successful, at other times not.” Nearly
ten years into the war on terrorism, this is not necessarily what many
Americans wish to hear, but it is perhaps what they need to hear. As with everything that he studies, Walter
looks at the world as it is and not as one might wish it to be. Incisive analysis based on the cumulative
process of acquiring knowledge and then weighing the empirical evidence remains
at the heart of Walter’s approach: which is why, on guerrilla
warfare and terrorism at least, he is as close
to an oracle as any of us here are likely ever to meet.
¨ Presentation delivered at the
“Conference in Honor of the 90th Birthday of Walter Laqueur,” The
Joseph & Alma Gildenhorn Institute for Israel Studies, University of
Maryland, College Park, MD, 8 March 2011; and at “Celebrating Walter Laqueur,”
Center for Peace and Security Studies, Edmund A Walsh School of Foreign
Service, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, 2 May 2011.
[i] See, for instance, the
acknowledgements page in Judith Tydor Baumel, The “Bergson Boys” and the Origins of Contemporary Zionist Militancy
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2005), p. xxvii, where the first
person recognized, not surprisingly, is was Walter——“whose patience and
advice,” this author wrote, “know no bounds.”
[ii] Quote from the Sunday Times (London) book jacket,
Walter Laqueur, Terrorism (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977).
[iii] Walter
Laqueur, Guerrilla: A Historical and
Critical Study (Boston and Toronto: Little, Brown, 1976).
[iv] Ibid., pp. 393-404.
[v] Walter
Laqueur, Best Of Times, Worst Of Times:
Memoirs of a Political Education (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press,
2009), p. 176.
[vi] Ibid., p. 187.
[vii] Laqueur,
Terrorism, p. 7; idem, The Age of Terrorism (Boston and
Toronto: Little, Brown, 1987), pp. 11, 142-156. See also, idem, Best Of Times,
Worst Of Times, p. 189.
[viii] Alex
P. Schmid, Albert J. Jongman, et al., Political
Terrorism: A Research Guide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1984),
pp. 3-6. See also, Laqueur, Best Of
Times, Worst Of Times, p. 189.
[ix] See Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism, p. 7; and, idem, The New
Terrorism: Fanaticism and the Arms of Mass Destruction (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
p. 8.
[x] See, for instance, Scott Atran,
“Who Wants to Be a Martyr,” New York
Times, 5 May 2003; BBC News, “Poverty ‘fuelling terrorism’,” bbc.co.uk, 22 March 2002 accessed at: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1886617.stm;
and, Nicholas D. Kristof, “Behind The Terrorists,” New York Times, 7 May 2002 accessed at:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A0CE1DA1730F934A35756C0A9649C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1
[xi] Saadia
Khalid, “Illiteracy root cause of
terrorism, extremism: PM,” The
International News, 21 February 2009 accessed at:
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=163751.
[xii] Peter
Baker, “Obama Says Al Qaeda in Yemen Planned Bombing Plot, and
He Vows Retribution,” New York Times,
2 January 2010.
[xiv] Laqueur,
Terrorism, p. 222; idem, The Age of Terrorism, p. 4; idem, The New
Terrorism, p. 80;
idem, No End To War: Terrorism In The
Twenty-First Century (New York and London: Continuum, 2003), pp. 15-18;
and, idem, Best Of
Times, Worst Of Times, pp. 181-182
& 185.
[xv] Laqueur, No End To War, p. 15.
[xvi] Ibid., p. 17.
[xvii] Walter Laqueur, “Postmodern
Terrorism,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 75,
no. 5 (September-October 1996), pp. 24-36. See also, idem, “Left, Right, and Beyond——The
Changing Face of Terror,” in James F. Hoge Jr, & Gideon Rose (eds.) How Did This Happen? Terrorism And The New War (New York:
Public Affairs, 2001), pp. 71-82. See
also, Laqueur, Best Of
Times, Worst Of Times, p. 182.
[xix] See Ted Koppel, “Nine years
after 9/11, let’s stop playing into bin Laden’s hands,” Washington Post, 12 September 2010; and, Fareed Zakaria,
“Post-9/11, we’re safer than we think,” Washington
Post, 13 September 2010.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 199.
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