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The Sources Of Terrorist Conduct
Robert L. Hutchings
Chairman, National Intelligence Council
Jefferson Literary and Debating Society
University of Virginia
19 March 2004
George Kennan, the dean of American
diplomats, celebrated his 100th birthday a
few weeks ago. We put on a full-day conference
at Princeton commemorating his life and legacy. Secretary
of State Colin Powell delivered the keynote address.
Discussion
among panelists centered, naturally, on the strategy of
containment, with which Kennan’s name is so inextricably
linked, and which defined an era in American diplomacy.
The conference was a wonderful commemoration, but I have
been thinking ever since that the most fitting tribute
to Kennan’s huge legacy would have been to apply his seminal
strategic contribution to the problems of our present
age. With utmost humility, that is what I would
like to try to do tonight.
The
strategy of containment was laid out in the so-called
“Long Telegram” that Kennan sent from Moscow in 1946 and
which was unveiled to the public, in abbreviated form,
in an article under the pseudonym “X” in Foreign Affairs
magazine in 1947. The “X-Article” was entitled
“The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” so the natural counterpart
for today’s world is the title of my lecture this evening:
“The Sources of Terrorist Conduct.”
The
differences between the two undertakings are apparent
at once. Kennan was dealing with the behavior
of a sovereign state with defined borders, an established
populace, recognized government, and official ideology. Terrorism,
by contrast, does not operate within boundaries, nor play
by any rules of diplomatic conduct. Thus “containment”
is not likely to prove an appropriate strategy for dealing
with such an elusive adversary. But neither,
I would venture to say, is “war” a fully adequate concept
for addressing terrorism as a long-term strategic challenge. Terror
is the tactic, not the adversary itself. To
deal with terrorism over the longer term, we have to focus
on underlying causes.
Indeed,
what does apply from Kennan’s strategic thought
is precisely the imperative to go beyond manifestations
of a problem and get at its sources, to go from consequences
to causes. So I will try to apply this basic
intellectual construct, making adjustments as they seem
warranted. (And if you are asking yourself
whether this speaker is incapable of improving through
his own insights on the thinking of a diplomat retired
for half a century, and whether he must look back to Kennan
for inspiration and instruction, the answer is yes.)
The X-Article
Let me begin
by sketching Kennan’s argument. This will take
a few minutes, but they will be minutes well spent.
In the X-article,
Kennan argued that Soviet power was the product of both
ideology and circumstances. “There can be few
tasks in psychological analysis,” he wrote, “more difficult
than to try to trace the interaction of these two forces
and the relative role of each in the determination of…
Soviet conduct. Yet the attempt must be made
if that conduct is to be understood and effectively countered.”
Substitute
“terrorist conduct” for “Soviet conduct” and you have
the task before us tonight. What is the ideology
that motivates terrorist behavior, what are the circumstances
that give rise to it, and how can it be countered?
Kennan traced
the historical evolution of Soviet ideology and its relation
to what we might call the “pathology of power” for its
adherents. He described an “innate antagonism
between capitalism and socialism,” which meant that the
United States was facing a long-term strategic challenge. Believing
in the infallibility of their belief system and the certainty
of its ultimate triumph, our adversaries were therefore
in no hurry to achieve their goals. But he
added, importantly, that we should not assume that they
were necessarily embarked on a “do-or-die” struggle to
the end.
The American
response to this challenge, Kennan argued, must be a long-term
and patient strategy of containment – the application
of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographic
and political points. Kennan later lamented
that containment came to be seen in almost exclusively
militaristic terms; what he had in mind was a multi-form
application of counter-force through all the means at
our disposal.
Kennan did
not see containment as a permanent holding operation but
rather as a means of addressing root causes. Taking
the longer view, he held out hope in the younger generation. He
did not assume that the ideology was so powerful that
it could not be overcome, or that the zealotry of the
present generation of leaders would necessarily be passed
to the next. He saw the intrinsic weakness
of the Soviet system and concluded that “the future of
Soviet power may not be by any means as secure as Russian
capacity for self-delusion would make it appear to the
men of the Kremlin.” Russia, he reminded us,
“is still by far the weaker party,” so the United States
could proceed with reasonable confidence that we would
ultimately prevail.
Remember
that Kennan was writing in 1947! If only we
could muster such foresight!
The possibilities,
Kennan concluded, “are by no means limited to holding
the line and hoping for the best.” Rather,
“it is entirely possible for the United States to influence
by its actions the internal developments… by which Russian
policy is largely determined.” The key question
was whether “the United States can create among the peoples
of the world generally the impression of a country… which
has a spiritual vitality capable of holding its own among
the major ideological currents of the time… for the palsied
decrepitude of the capitalist world is the keystone of
Communist philosophy.”
If the Western
powers could maintain their vigilance over a period of,
say, 10-15 years, Kennan believed, the Soviet system would
inevitably have to turn inward upon itself to deal with
its inherent vulnerabilities. As Kennan put
it, “No mystical, Messianic movement… can face frustration
indefinitely without eventually adjusting itself in one
way or another to the logic of that state of affairs.” Of
course, the ultimate demise of the Soviet Union took much
longer than Kennan’s 10-15 years, but already within that
notional time frame the more brutal aspects of Stalinism
had been repudiated and “peaceful coexistence” introduced
into the official ideology.
“X”
and Counterterrorism
The relevance
of Kennan’s masterful words should by now be apparent. Let
me tick off what seem to be the salient lessons:
-
We need to go beyond manifestations to plumb both the
ideology and the circumstances of the threat.
-
We should see this as a protracted and difficult struggle
but not necessarily a fight to the finish.
-
The challenge is not only, or even principally, a military
one.
-
Our adversaries are the weaker party, and we are the
stronger – not only in military terms but also in the
basic vitality of our belief system over that of theocratic
terror.
-
We should proceed with patience and also with confidence,
looking to the next generation and not accepting that
we are fated to a permanent clash of civilizations.
Kennan was
by no means “soft” on Soviet communism, any more than
our leadership today should be soft on international terrorism. The
terrorist acts that have been committed against our country
are intolerable – not to be excused by the injustices
that faraway peoples suffer. However imperfect
we may be as a nation, we did not bring this on ourselves. We
did not deserve this, and we have every right to defend
ourselves.
Since the attacks
of September 11, 2001, we have made great progress in
combating international terrorism. We have
disrupted many plots at home and abroad. Al-Qa’ida
is in disarray, with more than two-thirds of its senior
leaders dead or in custody. But al-Qa’ida and
other terrorist organizations remain active and fully
capable of mounting large scale and deadly attacks, as
we saw in Madrid last week. The terrorists
we face are patient, resilient, and sophisticated. For
the sake of our security and the kind of world we want
to live in, we must be as well.
But waging
war on this elusive foe named “terrorism” is not enough,
as Kennan’s counsel suggests. If this is a
war, it is not one that can be won in any final sense,
so long as we conceive of “terrorism” as our enemy. Our
challenge as a nation is to understand the sources of
this conflict and address those even as we are countering
its perverse manifestations.
The Ideology
of Terrorism
Before turning
to the ideology of Islamic extremism, let me stress that
international terrorism is not confined to Islam. Not
so long ago we were preoccupied with Leftist terrorism
from such groups as the Red Brigades and Bader-Meinhof
gang in Europe and Marxist guerrillas in Latin America
and elsewhere. But for the purposes of our
discussion tonight, I will focus on Islamic extremism
and on Al-Qa’ida in particular, for these are the sources
of terrorism that most concern us today.
To get at the
pathology of Radical Islam, let me begin with the grand
historical irony that Arab transmittal of the works of
Aristotle to Europe in the 12th and 13th
centuries was critical to preparing the Renaissance in
the West. Indeed, Aristotle and many other
progenitors of Western civilization might have been lost
to us forever had it not been for Arab scholars under
the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, who were avid commentators
on Aristotle.
When
Europe under Charlemagne was just emerging from its Dark
Ages (ca. 800), the court of Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad
had no rival for its patronage of the arts, philosophy,
and literature. And there was considerable
harmony and mutual respect between the West and the seat
of the Islamic world – which should serve to remind us
that a clash between these two great civilizations is
not inevitable.
The
Mongol sacking of Baghdad in 1258 brought to an end the
multi-ethnic, urbane Islamic civilization that had flourished
since the 9th century – an era of Islamic globalization,
if you will – and gave prominence to the idea of jihad
that has been passed down to today’s terrorists. In
traditional, or classical, Islam, jihad was primarily
a spiritual struggle to purify Islam and a physical struggle
to defend Islam against its enemies. Because
Islam was held by definition to be perfect, the destruction
of the caliphate could only be explained, in the thinking
of Islamic theologians like Ibn Taymiya (1263-1328), to
be imperfections in Islamic practice or to foreign – non-Islamic
– corruption of Islamic society. It is from
this puritanical form of Islam that al-Qa’ida’s ideology
descends.
Another
wellspring of al-Qa’ida ideology is Wahhabism,
a movement that emerged on the Arabian peninsula in response
to the infiltration of non-Islamic ideas and practices. The
18th century Saudi cleric Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab
denounced as blasphemous all deviation from the original
precepts and practices described in the Koran. Wahhab’s
contribution might have been fleeting but for his alliance
with the Saudi shayks who ultimately triumphed in their
struggle for power, when Ibn Saud consolidated control
of the Arabian peninsula in 1932.
Salafism
is a related movement that began in the 19th
century and harks back to the principles of the first
generation of Muslims known as the salaf al-saliheen
– literally, the “pious ancestors.” Both Wahhabism
and Salafism, though not terrorist in their origins, have
developed radical tendencies and spawned violent offshoots.
The
Context of Contemporary Terrorism
This
brings us from consideration of the underlying ideology
to the particular circumstances that have
given rise to Islamic extremism in our own time.
Political Islam
has had its current salience since the Iranian revolution
of 1979. The changing shape over the past half
century of the discourse of political opposition in the
Middle East, passing through secular Arab nationalist
and leftist phases before giving way to its currently
dominant Islamic coloration, suggests the potential for
further evolution. There is good reason to
believe, however, that the current coloration will be
longer lasting. Nasser’s brand of Arab nationalism
was the product of a particular post-colonial moment,
and the leftists were the legatees of the now-discredited
Marxist experiment. Modern political Islam
actually is a product of 13 centuries of evolution. The
core concept of the radical Salafi brand of political
Islam, as we have seen, is a return to earlier roots.
There were
other circumstances that combined with these trends to
produce a particularly virulent strain of Islamic extremism. First,
the decade-long anti-Soviet struggle in Afghanistan served
both as a training ground for terrorists and as a model
of the successful expulsion of a foreign occupier. Then
the presence of U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia after
the first Gulf War of 1990-91 gave the Jihadists a rallying
cry for expelling “the Infidel” from Muslim holy lands. And
now, of course, while Muslims had no affinity for the
secular despotism of Saddam Hussein, they now are deeply
affronted by the Western occupation of the historic seat
of Abbasid glory in Baghdad. And of course
there was the behavior of authoritarian regimes in many
Muslim countries, their cynical use of Islam over the
years to enhance their legitimacy, their failure to pursue
economic and political reforms, and their unwillingness
liberalize their educational systems or offer alternatives
to the message of radical Islam.
Finally,
there is the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although
the history is complex and beyond the scope of this lecture,
the Palestinian struggle has come to be seen as a – perhaps
the – symbol of Muslim humiliation and therefore
has resonated not only in the Arab world but also among
Muslims far beyond. It is portrayed by Islamic
extremists as a manifestation of a “Zionist-Crusader Alliance”
directed against Islam.
The
Politics of Alienation
Such are the
circumstances of the pathology of Islamic terrorism today. But
let me conclude this part of the story with an observation
that may surprise you: much of Al Qa’ida’s pathology has
nothing to do with Islam.
Al-Qa’ida is,
to a large extent, a cipher of social dislocation. All
traditional societies are disrupted by more powerful,
more modern ones when those two societies meet. The
more modern and dynamic society undermines the traditional
society’s values, practices, and allegiances. Yet
as the traditional order is threatened, the new one remains
alien and often inaccessible.
For many, the
dislocations become existential, as their sense of identity
is threatened. A surge in millenarian beliefs
is a recurring response to an existential crisis. An
inclination toward nihilistic violence frequently accompanies
this crisis of faith. Identification with an
idealized, purified, and largely imaginary original culture
frequently occurs among groups cut off from their cultural
heritage, particularly when that culture seems to be under
assault. And as we have seen in countless struggles
before, terrorism is the quintessential weapon of the
weak against the strong.
As Tom Friedman
has pointed out, the “contrast between Islam’s self-perception
as the most ideal” and the “conditions of poverty, repression,
and underdevelopment in which most Muslims live today”
leads to a “poverty of dignity” and a corresponding “rage.” Many
Muslims interpret this set of circumstances as the denial
by outside forces of the rightful opportunity of Muslims
to live with honor and dignity.
Yet these conditions
need not be permanent or irremediable. As we
think about the terrorist challenge over the longer term
– about the sources of future terrorism over the next
20-25 years – remember that we are talking in some cases
about individuals who are not yet born. Surely
we are not condemned to be mortal enemies with them, too!
A Strategy
of Engagement
It is worth
recalling that Kennan made a sharp distinction between
the Soviet leaders and the Russian people. His
strategy of containment was aimed at the regime, whose
aggressive impulses needed to be countered. But
he also argued for a strategy of engagement with the Russian
people, whom he refused to see as our permanent enemies. Hard
as it may be to get beyond the anti-American sentiment
so prevalent in the Muslim world today, it is important
for us to undertake a similar strategy of engagement –
and to do so with reasonable hopes of finding a meeting
place.
The latest
Pew Research survey of attitudes around the world revealed
sharply rising anti-Americanism, especially in the Muslim
world, but it also found that people in Muslim countries
place a high value on such democratic values as freedom
of expression, freedom of the press, multiparty political
systems, and equal treatment under the law. Large
majorities in almost every Muslim country favor free market
economic systems and believe that Western-style democracy
can work in their own country.
As President
Bush put it in a speech to the National Endowment for
Democracy last November,
It
should be clear to all that Islam – the faith of one-fifth
of humanity – is consistent with democratic rule…. More
than half of all the Muslims in the world live in freedom
under democratically constituted governments. They
succeed in democratic societies, not despite their faith,
but because of it. A religion that demands
individual moral accountability… is fully compatible
the rights and responsibilities of self-government.
Taking note
of hopeful signs of reform in Morocco, Bahrain, Yemen,
Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, and Jordan, the President stressed
that “modernization is not the same as Westernization. Representative
governments in the Middle East will reflect their own
cultures. They will not, and should not, look
like us.”
What these
countries and peoples need from us is not a “Made in USA”
blueprint but rather encouragement and support for initiatives
coming out of the region itself, as was the agenda of
the U.S.-Muslim World Forum in Doha, Qatar, this January. The
last two UN Arab Human Development Reports also provide
an authentic agenda for change written by prominent Arab
scholars, policy analysts, and government officials. Such
efforts can help produce a set of core principles, consistent
with democratic aspirations and universal human rights
yet also authentic and in harmony with Muslim faith. This
should include reaching out not only to pro-reform elites
within governments but also to nongovernmental activists
and civil society leaders.
This strategy
of engagement also needs an economic component, for the
alienation of many Muslims is fueled by the failure of
their countries to reap significant economic gains from
globalization. The Middle East Partnership Initiative,
announced by Secretary of State Colin Powell in December
2002, aims to help extend those benefits to this regions,
as does President Bush’s initiative (May 2003) to create
a U.S.-Middle East Free Trade Zone. We need
to recognize, however, that the problem is not just one
of poverty but the legacy of closed, state-dominated political
and economic systems that breed apathy, alienation, and
anger. Overcoming those legacies is not the
work of a few years but of a generation or longer.
There is also
a need to help build a regional security framework. NATO
can potentially play an important role here, through a
deepening and broadening of its Mediterranean Dialogue
with North African states. What is needed over
the longer term, however, is something analogous to the
Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe – a region-wide
framework that was created in the 1970s and helped pave
the way for the end of the Cold War. It was,
in a sense, the logical culmination of Kennan’s strategy
for Europe, and it could be applied with profit to the
Middle East as well.
Finally, again
borrowing from Kennan, we need to build cross-cultural
contacts – not in the sense of a p.r. campaign to “sell”
our policies, but as part of a longer-term effort. Just
as our cultural and exchange programs in Europe after
World War II helped overcome old animosities, a new wave
of programs needs to be put in place as an investment
in the future of our interaction with the Muslim world.
Conclusion
That brings
me to my core conclusion: we should not assume that “we”
and “they” have nothing in common. Usama bin
Laden and his followers deplore what they perceive as
the depravity and vacuity of modernity. So
do many in the West. Terrorists and their supporters
rage against the inequities and degradation brought on
by globalization. So do many thoughtful critics
who would not dream of resorting to terrorism to achieve
their goals.
Many of the
grievances that terrorists express and exploit – economic
disadvantage, alienation brought on by globalization,
a sense of cultural humiliation, and others – are remediable,
at least potentially. It was one of the core
failings of Communist ideology that Marx failed to see
that many of the class antagonisms he identified could
be – and were – overcome by peaceful means rather than
the class struggle he took to be inevitable. (I
learned this at the feet of the late Lewis Feuer right
here on this campus.)
Our frame of
mind – even as we are waging a resolute campaign against
international terrorism – should be that we are not engaged
in a fight to the finish with radical Islam. This
is not a clash of civilizations but rather a defense of
our shared humanity and a search to find common ground,
however implausible that may seem now. Such
an effort is no more possible with Usama bin Laden than
it was with Stalin back when Kennan was writing, and it
will be an elusive goal for years to come, but we have
reason to be optimistic if we take the longer view, as
Kennan did.
Let
me conclude, as I began, by citing the X-Article:
The
issue… is in essence a test of the overall worth of
the United States as a nation among nations. To
avoid destruction the United States need only measure
up to its own best traditions and prove itself worthy
of preservation as a great nation.
If these words
sound somewhat melodramatic, I ask you to remember how
vulnerable, uncertain, and fearful we felt as a nation
on September 11, 2001. We have come a long
way since then, but we still have a long way to go before
we can recover the security and tranquility that was so
brutally shattered that bright morning two and a half
years ago.
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