On September 21, 2001, the U.S. Institute of Peace convened a Current Issues Briefing -- "Coping With Terrorism: Challenges and Responses" -- featuring eight experts on terrorism to discuss the transforming crisis of September 11 and its implications for U.S. national security policy. This briefing was intended to inform and advance public discussion of effective approaches to dealing with the heightened threat of mass violence perpetrated by terrorist organizations. The summary below, written by Institute staff members Jon B. Alterman and Tom McConnell, draws on those discussions and previous meetings convened by the Institute under the aegis of the International Research Group on Political Violence.

The views summarized here reflect the discussion at the briefing; they do not represent formal positions taken by the Institute, which does not advocate specific policies.

The events of September 11 have forced the United States, along with the international community, to rethink the existing international world order and what constitutes an effective approach to deal with the heightened threat of terrorism. The United States has begun a process of revising its national security structure, initially with the creation of a cabinet-level Office of Homeland Security. It must now fashion a new security strategy that weaves together a number of complex components. The U.S. response to the September 11 attacks must be comprehensive and draw on all strengths within the government. To respond solely with military action could complicate the role of states that want to work with the United States, polarize the international community, and -- if not effective -- strengthen the position of terrorist groups.

The coordinated terrorist attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 were unanticipated in terms of method and timing. The assaults pose a new level of threat because of the terrorists' skillful use of technology, broad and meticulous network-based organization, and the willingness of the perpetrators to die in the name of a global, millennial cause.

Understanding a New Security Challenge

To understand the character of terrorist threats, one must understand the interests and objectives of those carrying out such violent acts. Traditional use of political violence has been tied closely to governments, national liberation movements, or political ideologies with relatively narrow goals. Such acts are used to force negotiations, end negotiations, or intimidate or topple governments. The attacks of September 11, however, do not appear to be part of a campaign to pressure a specific response from the U.S. government. Not only has no one taken credit for the violence, some of the prime suspects have rushed to disavow it. The goal of this "strategic" terrorism is to destroy the aura of power of the United States and in the process demonstrate that big governments like the United States can be defeated by small but highly committed organizations.

Apparent links of the perpetrators of the attacks on New York and Washington to the al Qaeda organization of Osama bin Laden suggest that the basic objective of the assault was not to do battle with the U.S. government. Rather, the target was a broader popular audience in Southwest Asia and in the greater Middle East. The objective was to symbolically expose the vulnerability of the United States, thereby diminishing its credibility in the Muslim world and enhancing the credibility of the terrorists' own political and religious movement. The United States provided the immediate target but was only of secondary interest to the perpetrators. More important to them was attacking the "idea" of the United States and positioning themselves to challenge their most important targets -- moderate Middle Eastern governments who maintain friendly relations with the United States. Weakening America's will to remain a security presence in the Islamic world, where it helps to protect friendly governments, was an associated objective. The bin Laden group wants the United States out of the Islamic world, the better to pursue their aim of creating more radicalized Islamic states.

In combating terrorism, the U.S.-led coalition must develop long-term strategies that focus, in part, on bin Laden's success in harnessing the anger of the Muslim world against the West. Responses must contain approaches to inhibiting potential terrorists from joining such groups, fomenting dissention within terrorist organizations, encouraging those in the organization to leave it, and isolating the groups from their support networks.

Implications of September 11th for U.S. National Security

Up to now, complex and highly organized suicide missions like those of September 11 have been rare. Only a limited number of groups have employed such drastic action: the Sri Lankan group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam; the Palestinian groups Islamic Jihad and Hamas; Hezbollah in Lebanon; and bin Laden's syndicate.

Nevertheless, speculation that the United States could be subjected to a catastrophic terrorist attack led many American security experts to call for a new focus on "homeland defense." Until the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, most experts looked toward nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons as the most likely vehicles for catastrophic attacks.

In 1999, the U.S. National Commission on Terrorism concluded that terrorist groups with broad "ideological" or religious interests are more dangerous than those with narrow political agendas. The traditional paradigm was of groups with specific political objectives focusing on killing small numbers of people in order to gain negotiating leverage. The new threat, by organizations such as bin Laden's al Qaeda, is broadly destructive violence in pursuit of a millennial goal. They seek maximum carnage in order to undermine political will, and to diminish U.S. standing as the leader and protector of Western values.

Destroying the leadership of these organizations is not sufficient to eliminate the threat of terrorism. The goal must be to eliminate the terrorists' networks and to undermine the political and religious legitimacy of their use of violence.

Moreover, the September 11 attacks highlight the difficulty of using target hardening as a primary strategy to fight terrorism. Weapons can be used in diverse ways. Hardening against one kind of threat or one kind of target can be countered by a terrorist merely shifting his aim to a softer target or working around extant defenses. Indeed, the perpetrators of the 1998 African embassy bombings may have chosen those targets precisely because they were less well protected than other American government targets around the world.

Immediate Next Steps

The panel of experts outlined several steps that U.S. policymakers should implement in the short term to deal with the immediate threat of global terrorism.

Step One: Strengthen Homeland Security

Building upon the recent appointment of Governor Tom Ridge, regaining physical security must be the country's first priority, if only to reestablish public confidence and ease the pressure on the economy. Airline security and border control require immediate and extensive improvement in order to prevent future terrorist attacks.

In addition to upgrading ground security efforts, airlines should return to the policy of locking the cockpit, arm the airline crew with non-lethal weapons such as stun guns or mace, and adopt proven airport security measures used in other countries, such as security personnel at each gate rather than at one central point. However further federal assistance such as the posting of air marshals on flights may also be needed.

A comprehensive review of immigration policies and their enforcement is next in order. The National Commission on Terrorism noted that 250,000 foreign students are presently in the United States. Although rarely enforced, current immigration policies require that education centers track the activities of their sponsored students. All institutions that petition for foreign entries, for work or otherwise, must be held accountable for reporting the status of those individuals to the relevant authority.

Step Two: Remove Barriers to Maximizing U.S. Intelligence Capabilities

One lesson of September 11 is the need to address the deterioration of U.S. intelligence capabilities -- which can be dated back to the late 1970s. Sixty percent of the intelligence gathered by U.S. agencies focuses only on military intelligence. The current U.S. national security structure is a product of the Cold War and may not be appropriate for threats of the 21st Century. In that regard, the panel discussed the following measures, consistent with American values of due process and protecting civil rights and individual privacy:

 

• Rescind restrictions on human intelligence recruitment in the field;
  
• Enhance the ability of the FBI to conduct wire taps and phone traces by streamlining the process required to obtain court orders;
  
• Improve foreign language capabilities within both intelligence and diplomatic agencies;
  
• Improve dissemination of intelligence among government agencies, with a particular focus on improving dissemination by the FBI, which is frequently constrained by rules of evidence and grand jury restrictions; and
  
• Rethink intelligence-gathering priorities; although there continue to be military threats for the foreseeable future that require a defense focus, the priorities in gathering intelligence must allow for better intelligence on non-military threats.

Step Three: Ensure There Are No "Safe Harbors" for Terrorists

The traditional pattern of response to a terrorist attack is for public outrage to fade in a matter of weeks as people seek to regain a sense of normalcy. A strategy of sustained offensive action must be developed to constantly disrupt terrorism through better security, improved intelligence, and offensive operations, but vulnerabilities will always exist. Seizing and retaining the offensive will be the most effective approach to disrupting the terrorists' ability to plan operations, conduct training, and execute future attacks.

Active American engagement is essential to stabilizing the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia. If the United States waivers, moderate Muslim states will be more vulnerable to attack by radical Islamic forces. Regional polls show that the Palestinian issue is one of the most important affecting views of the United States in the Arab world. Renewed and intensified U.S. efforts to reactivate the Middle East peace process are important to preventing Israeli-Palestinian differences from becoming engulfed in the fight against terrorism, and defusing Muslim hostility toward the United States.

Panelists stressed that Afghanis, with or without the help of others, must overthrow the Taliban regime, which harbors at least five terrorist groups in addition to al Qaeda. Accomplishing this goal will require strengthening the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, destroying the ability of terrorist groups to train in and operate outside of Afghanistan, and building an international coalition to support regional activity.

Step Four: Build International Coalitions

The response to the attacks of September 11 must be seen as a war on terrorism, not an assault on Islam. Even so, sustaining a broad international coalition of states in the war against terrorism will be difficult. Short-term successes tend to diminish the threat and weaken the resolve of governments to cooperate. Armed with a UN sanction against the terrorists and their supporters, the United States should lead this proposed anti-terrorism coalition from the back seat, to make clear that the threat of terrorism is not just an American problem but a global challenge.

Traditionally friendly governments -- from Pakistan to the United Arab Emirates -- have been under pressure to accommodate bin Laden's supporters within their own borders. Cooperation with the United States is likely to arouse domestic opposition to moderate governments and threaten their base of power. U.S. efforts to fight terrorists in Afghanistan very likely will lead to their supporters trying to topple governments in states supporting the anti-terrorism coalition. Even those states that decline to overtly join a coalition can participate by intelligence cooperation or by taking political actions to delegitimize terrorists' use of violence. The worst outcome of a broad assault on terrorism would be the fall of one or more moderate Islamic states and the rise in their place of Taliban-type regimes.

Moderate Arab leaders are reacting today as they did during the Gulf War. Then, they felt sufficiently threatened by Iraq to join a U.S.-led coalition; now, they are asking themselves if they want to live in Osama bin Laden's world. Islamic countries should not only participate but take the lead in the fight against terrorism. This would include calling on Muslim religious and political leaders to cease glorifying terrorists, in particular suicide bombers, and to delegitimize the use of political violence as anathema to the teachings of Islam.

Terrorism is Political Warfare: Military Responses Will Have Only Limited Effect

Al Qaeda -- the bin Laden network -- has few tangible assets. Based in a desperately poor country with little infrastructure and a government that is under international sanctions and is recognized by only one other government, both the network's leaders and its hosts appear to have little to lose in a physical sense. More than anything, the perpetrators' most valuable assets are the ideas they represent, which enable them to mobilize people for what they characterize as a righteous struggle against evil infidels and foreign invaders. While military action can defeat well-defined physical targets and vulnerable individuals and groups, other forms of response will be needed to undermine the terrorists' appeal. Unsuccessful, inconclusive, or ineffective military operations by the U.S. and its allies against the terrorists' network would bolster the group's prestige, by either making it appear invincible or, at the very least, a fair match for the world's major powers.

In order to be effective, American military strikes must have appropriate targets. Cruise missile attacks on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in the Sudan in 1998, in response to the bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, were roundly criticized as being either ineffective or having hit a mistaken target. As well, the barrage of missiles directed against a bin Laden training camp in Afghanistan in 1998 appears to have had little effect on the organization and its goals, and the destroyed property was far less valuable than the missiles used to destroy it. The real task before the U.S. and friendly governments is to uproot the network and destroy the political credibility of terrorists who use violence in the name of Islam. That will require effective diplomacy in building and maintaining an international coalition for an extended period, the cooperation of law enforcement services, intelligence services, financial experts, communications specialists, and others. The work will be long and arduous, and many of the successes in this struggle will not be evident to the public.

Biographies: Coping With Terrorism Speakers

Daniel Benjamin is a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former senior fellow and guest scholar at the U.S. Institute of Peace. In 1998-99 he was director for transnational threats on the National Security Council, coordinating U.S. counter-terrorism policy. From 1994-97, he served as special assistant to President Clinton and presidential speechwriter.

L. Paul Bremer III is managing director and senior advisor for Political and Emerging Risks for MMC Enterprise Risk, part of Marsh McLennan Companies (MMC). He is the former chair of the National Commission on Terrorism. A veteran diplomat, he has served in many positions over his career including as ambassador at-large for counter-terrorism.

Martha Crenshaw is the John E. Andrus Professor of Government at Wesleyan University, and President of the International Society of Political Psychology. She is the author of Revolutionary Terrorism: The FLN in Algeria, 1954-1962, Terrorism and International Cooperation, and edited Terrorism, Legitimacy and Power.

Jerrold Post founded and directed the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior, an interdisciplinary behavioral science unit that provided assessments of foreign leadership and decision making for the President and other senior officials. He is co-author of Political Paranoia: The Psychopolitics of Hatred.

Bruce Hoffman is vice president for external affairs and director of the RAND Corporation Washington, DC office. He was the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Dr. Hoffman is editor-in-chief of Studies in Conflict and Terrorism, and a member of the advisory boards of both Terrorism and Political Violence and Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs. He currently chairs the International Research Group on Political Violence, a cooperative jointly sponsored by the Institute and the Airez Neave Trust in London.

H. Allen Holmes is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University. Holmes served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict from November 1993 to January 1999. As Assistant Secretary, he was responsible for the overall supervision, including oversight of policy and resources, of the U.S. Special Operations Command, as well as the special operations and low-intensity conflict activities of the Department of Defense.

Richard H. Solomon has been president of the U.S. Institute of Peace since September 1993. During 1986-89, he served as director of Policy Planning at the Department of State, and previously headed the Political Science Department at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA.

Shibley Telhami holds the Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, College Park, is a member of the U.S. Institute of Peace Board of Directors, and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He served as advisor to the United States delegation to the United Nations during the Iraq-Kuwait crisis, and has been a member of the American delegation of the Trilateral American/Israeli/Palestinian Anti-Incitement Committee mandated by the Wye River Agreement.