Not that it's such a bad thing. By now, he's had a chance to look at the journalistic reports and op-eds in much of the European and US media, and so he has some inkling how he might be able to say a few original and maybe useful things about the causes of the London terrorism, and what it portends for European developments in the years and decades to come as well as for US-European relations. For that matter, maybe even say a useful point or two about how to continue prosecuting the war on terrorism.
FIRST, SOME BACKGROUND COMMENTS
Earlier Buggy Articles
Prof Bug is no specialist on terrorism, far from it --- not that he's a wet-behind-the-ears ingénue on the subject. Consider the ways we've tackled the subject of Islamo-extremist terrorism since 9/11:
(i.) For one thing you might recall that he has written extensively on the growth of alienated and increasingly radicalized young men in the Muslim communities all over West Europe, angry, frustrated, and emotionally adrift --- noticeably at odds with the larger cultural and social currents around them in post-modernist European countries --- until they find a new mental anchor in extremist forms of Islamist fundamentalism. Desperate for an end to their confused, drifting lives --- torn, too, by guilt that derives from their aroused and irrepressible sexual desires amid the fleshpots and temptations of contemporary European life --- they are searching for a new, meaningful identity to end their inner anguish, and they find it in becoming "born-again" Muslim fundamentalists. The anything-goes secular societies into which they've been born has no appeal for them, just the opposite: it repels and leaves them with a sense of raw anger and empty alienation.
(ii.) For another thing, recall too the numerous buggy articles --- several of them --- on the causes behind the swiftly growing appeal of fundamentalist Islam in the Muslim world . . . essentially a reaction to the severe economic and political failures of Muslim countries, some 56 in number, almost all marked by low levels of per capita income; high levels of male unemployment; high levels of illiteracy; general ignorance of modern secular knowledge; scientific and technological backwardness; various degrees of female subjugation; the rule of political autocracy or other dictatorial systems; and the dominance in economic and political life of corrupt elites who are the boss-heads of closed, tightly run patron-client networks hierarchically organized --- sometimes competitive with one another, sometimes collusive, and sometimes with one set on top and the others conspiring in secret to seize control, and usually tribal- or clan-based.
It gets worse. Cronyism and corruption are pervasive features of all Muslim countries, even in the more successful. Promotion in key institutions based on clear performance and achievement --- including the military --- is rare. What counts is who you know and mutual back-scratching services up-and-down the hierarchical chains.
Further Sources of Hurt Pride and Humiliation . . . Grievances Galore
On top of that, it's not just the American superpower that easily defeats Arab and other Muslim militaries as in Iraq or Afghanistan. Tiny Israel, with 5 million Jews --- traditionally regarded as an inferior subject-people (dhimmi) in Muslim countries who had to acknowledge the superiority of Islam by paying poll-taxes yearly to Islamic authorities, standing when a Muslim sat and talked to them, and showing no public signs whatever of their own religion --- has repeatedly defeated massed Arab militaries in numerous wars. (On military backwardness in the Arab world, click here for an earlier buggy article)
That started in the early moments of the new Israeli state, when five Arab armies invaded the country in 1948, and were quickly routed by improvised Jewish military forces, and it continued through a series of wars over the next decades. What could be more humiliating than that? How could Muslims --- conditioned traditionally to regard the expansion, glory, and power of conquering Islam with the truth of their religion, an outlook that extends back to the middle of the 7th century and lasted for a thousand years of Arab, Ottoman, Tatar, and Moghul empire-building --- possibly explain these outrageous collapses of their militaries at the hands of a tiny country of formerly subject, deferential inferiors who amounted to 1/60th of the total number of Arab peoples alone?
Only in one way . . . the two sorts of buggy writings joining together. By paranoid fantasies about a Jew-run conspiracy that rules the world and threatens Muslims and Islam everywhere.
More Concretely Put . . .
there's a sense of pervasive victimization in the Muslim world, conspiratorial in nature, with Islam seen under attack from all its global enemies: the US, international Jewry (which controls the US), the West, Russia, Hindu India, and China. This conspiratorial image has a far wider appeal to the world's 1.2 billion Muslims than to radical Islamist fundamentalists alone, never mind the more dangerous ones actively or likely to engage in terrorism, and it was tapped into explicitly at the Conference of Islamic Countries in late 2003 by Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, who --- to the loud applause of the assembled heads of the 56 Islamic countries --- assured the gathering that they were all under assault by a conspiracy of world-Jewry that ran globalization, the US, and the West, had invented capitalism, democracy, human rights, communism, and socialism to ensure their survival and dominance, and had a clear objective of keeping Muslim countries backward and humiliated:
"I will not enumerate the instances of our humiliation," Mr. Mahathir said. "We are all Muslims. We are all oppressed. We are all being humiliated. . . . Today we, the whole Muslim [community], are treated with contempt and dishonor. . . . There is a feeling of hopelessness among the Muslim countries and their people. They feel that they can do nothing right." He added: "Our only reaction is to become more and more angry. Angry people cannot think properly."
TWO DOMINANT SOLUTIONS TO MUSLIM BACKWARDNESS AND
THE PERVASIVE SENSE OF RAW HUMILIATION
What distinguishes Mahathir's and mainstream Muslim governments from fundamentalist Islamist extremism on how to deal with the Jew-driven threat is easy enough to set out.
- Mahathir and Muslim governments almost everywhere hope that somehow --- without wrenching changes in their local cultures, customs, institutions, and corrupt-laden patron-client networks that dominate their political and economic systems, never mind their own authoritarian rule ---the Muslim countries can modernize, industrialize, and become wealthy and powerful. By a series of such rapid modernizing change --- which seems in the Mahathir version to be a matter of will-power; nothing less --- the 1.2 billion humiliated Muslims around the world would be able to avenge themselves against the current Jewish world-cabal that has been keeping them in a condition of ego-wounding backwardness, frustration, and resentment . . . or so Mahathir told his applauding fellow authoritarians in attendance at the Islamic Summit meeting.
- - Overcoming their scientific, technological, and economic backwardness, however, weren't the end goals in themselves that Mahathir stressed in his speech to the 55 othe heads of Muslim states. Islamic humiliation and the threats that produce it can only be avenged by Muslim states acquiring the means to make modern weapons in order to fight and defeat the Muslim people's numerous enemies . . . led, it seems, by "Jews who rule the world by proxy":
"We need guns and rockets, bombs and war planes, tanks and warships for our defense. But because we are discouraged from learning of science and mathematics as giving us no merit in the afterlife, we have no capacity to produce our own weapons for our own defense. We have to buy our weapons from our detractors and enemies," he said.
-- What could be plainer? Even the goals of overcoming backwardness that pervade the Muslim countries of the world aren't goals in themselves: rather, they have to have a military objective of war-like vengeance and presumably the destruction of Islam's "numerous detractors and enemies" . . . a line of thought, as you will find in this buggy series on terrorism, fully in line with mainstream Islam's Koranic and Hadith-legacies that the world of Islam is locked in deadly battle with the infidel world. And of course it will all be done in defensive ways.
-- Or as two heads of a British Islamic group put it after the 7/7 London bombings --- one of whom had publicly condemned the death of "innocents":
Zachariah --- [a Muslim speaker who said the kuffar (infidels) were trying to "wipe out Muslims from the face of the earth" and urged Muslim martyrs to spread the land with their blood] --- referred to the London passengers: "They're kuffar [infidels]. They're not people who are innocent. The people who are innocent are the people who are with us or those who are living under the Islamic state."
Omar Bakri Mohammed, the sect's leader, who publicly condemned the deaths of "innocents," but at the Selby Centre in Wood Green, north London, on July 22 referred to the 7/7 bombers as the "fantastic four" and explained that his grief for the "innocent" applied only to Muslims. "Yes I condemn killing any innocent people, but not any kuffar."
- Radical Fundamentalist Muslims --- starting with bin Laden's Al Qaeda and echoed by hundreds of wider, often less violent Islamist movements supported galore by imams, mullahs, mufti, ayatollahs, and Saudi and Iranian oil money --- have a far different, much more violent and menacing solution: they harp on the theme that Islam has declined in glory and power because contemporary Muslim populations and their rulers have been tempted by westernized and globalizing influences to reject pure Islam and Sharia-law and to compromise their integrity by leading sinful, westernized lives . . . a disastrous decadence and decline that has left them weak and exploited and will have to be reversed by jihad and holy war against not just the Jew-dominated West and globalization but against all the "Zionist Puppet-Regimes" that rule over the bewildered, sin-living Muslim peoples.
- - Once these goals are achieved by jihad terrorism, the foreign occupiers will and their Zionist Arab agents will be driven out of the Middle East and an Arab super-state will be erected that controls the world's major oil resources, with a new Islamic caliphate and Sharia law dominant over the regenerated Muslim populations who live lives of true purified Islam. These achievements aren't the end goal of jihadi terrorists and their fundamentalist sympathizers though; far from it. As we'll see later today and in the next articles in this buggy series --- they are only the initial step.
-- Soon afterwards, thanks to the new caliphate and its oil riches and purified Muslim populations, the super-state will supposedly acquire nuclear weapons, oversee the further destruction of apostate Islamic governments and their replacement by purified Islamic rulers around the globe, and manage the eventual expansion of true Islam world-wide by various forms . . . not least by continued jihad terrorism, but also by the continued growth of Islamic populations, by immigration to the West (especially West Europe with its declining native populations) and by the manipulation of oil-prices as a major weapon of diplomatic leverage over all non-Islamic countries. With, of course, the ultimate weapon available to the caliph and his subordinate Muslim rulers if those non-Islamic governments balk at any of this: tersely put, the use of suicide terrorists who will, if need be, blow up whole cities in Europe, India, Russia, North America, or Asia with suitcase nuclear weapons.
A Preliminary Assessment
The former Mahathir solution, besides being paranoid and wildly conspiratorial, is extravagantly naive. The latter Islamist view is apocalyptic and extravagantly megalomaniac and fully supportive of jihad terrorism and holy war . . . whether or not any particular fundamentalist clerics or spokesmen and their followers explicitly support and engage in jihad terrorism and holy war. The view isn't just apocalyptic and megalomonical. It is crackpot and nutty to the core --- not that this prevents it from enjoying widespread sympathies in large parts of the Muslim world. Just the opposite. Several months after 9/11's terrorism, to single out a blatant case, a Gallup opinion survey found that over 60% of Arab people in several Arab countries were convinced that Muslims weren't even involved in the terror attacks. It was all stage-managed by the usual suspects --- Jews, Israel, the Mossad, the Jew-directed CIA, the Jew-managed White House . . . what have you.
Note quickly. This widely shared conspiratorial mind-set charged with paranoia continues at work in the Arab Middle East and elsewhere. Just this August, 2005, Abd Al-Sabour Shahin ---a well-known Egyptian professor who lectures at Cario University and heads the Sharia (lslamic Law) faculty at Al-Azhar university, "most prestigious seat of learning in Sunni Islam" --- told the viewers of Saudi TV's Channel One,
"Our enemies weave many lies about us, which we are not necessarily aware of. For example: One day, we awoke to the crime of 9/11, which hit the tallest buildings in New York, the Empire State Building (sic). There is no doubt that not a single Arab or Muslim had anything to do with these events. The incident was fabricated as a pretext to attack Islam and Muslims. The plan was to take over the world's energy sources, and to achieve this control by force and not by agreement or negotiations, by interests, free trade, or anything like that. This is what they wanted.
"So this incident was fabricated - and Allah knows that the Arabs and Muslims are innocent of it - in order to serve as a pretext to attack Islam and the Muslims. . . .
'I believe a dirty Zionist hand carried out this act. Zionism has taken the opportunity to escalate the war in Palestine, killing hundreds of thousands so far, while we watch from the sidelines in astonishment and ask: What's going on?"
Does it get any more lunatic? Well, yes. There's the Saudi state's Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice in Saudi Arabia that prohibited Barbie dolls, claiming they were really clever Jewish dolls and should be banned because . . .
"Jewish Barbie dolls, with their revealing clothes and shameful postures, accessories and tools are a symbol of decadence to the perverted West. Let us beware of her dangers and be careful . . . " .
Then there's the imam at Werribee Islamic College in Australia who recently warned his students not to eat bananas because "the Jews were putting poison in [them]". And there's . . . well, why go on? You get the idea.
ANY ALTERNATIVES TO THESE LUNACIES?
Are there other, more realistic solutions proposed by moderate Muslim groups to Muslim backwardness and the related sense of grievance, hurt-pride, and raw crackling humiliation?
Yes, certain progressive movements in some Arab countries and in Iran and Indonesia and Turkey that look forward to instilling democracy and human-rights and educational reforms where they don't flourish or expanding them where they have taken modest roots as in the latter two countries --- Indonesia with its 220 million inhabitants and Turkey with its 70 million. How influential they will become in the future isn't at all clear. What is going on is a clash of civilizations at the very heart of the Muslim world --- between regressive and jihad-supporting Islamist fundamentalisms and smaller influential democratic and modernizing movements, with the autocratic Arab and other Muslim regimes usually trying to play off both sides while double-dealing with the US and the West: which means cracking down ruthlessly on home-grown terrorist threats while encouraging the more primitive fundamentalists to direct their hurt-pride and paranoid impulses outward toward the fantasized conspiratorial enemies.
Mathathir's conspiratorial ramblings at the Islamic Summit in late 2003 fit this model to a T, as did the jubilant applause of the 55 other heads of Muslim countries who were in attendance.
As Prof Bug Commented At the Time of Mahathir's Outburst
"This demented anti-Semitism is rife in the Muslim world, featured in state-controlled media everywhere, including on TV; is mouthed by ignorant or subservient journalists in newspapers --- open too, both TV and newspapers, to shrill fanatical fundamentalist imams and spokesmen --- in fervent manner; is voiced in countless mosque sermons and gabfests, in school textbooks, and up and down the so-called Arab street, where it's now part of popular culture. The Saudis even officially banned Pokeman, the kid's game, claiming it was part of a Jewish plot to undermine traditional parental control, encourage Muslim children to gamble, and hence further the Jewish plot of world domination. Yes, Pokeman! For wider background analysis on how raging Jew-hatred has become inseparable from state-controlled propaganda and popular Arab culture, see this link. In one of the Arab oil-rich Gulf States, state-controlled . . .
" '. . . Abu Dhabi TV has decided to seek its market share by launching "Plots of Terror." Aired each night of Ramadan as Muslim families gather to break their fast, this family-oriented "satirical comedy" stars a well-known Kuwaiti comedian as Israel's Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon. Between ads for Procter & Gamble shampoo, chocolate and computers for kids, viewers are introduced to an Israeli leader depicted as a vampire who craves the blood of Arab children and markets "Dracu-cola." The "prime minister" is shown personally leading the massacre of helpless prisoners and, in the most horrific scene of all, is shown overseeing the tossing of Arab babies into a bonfire. Sharon tells his money-grubbing, ear-locked assistant how the late Prime Minister Menachem Begin fulfilled his 20th birthday wish by providing the blood of 20 Arab kids. "So we drew their blood and drank it. It was one of my best nights," the fictional Sharon fondly recalls.' "
"Repulsively lunatic as it was, the Nazi propaganda machine never got that far down into the sewer for its own heinous Jew-hating propaganda. Not out of reluctance, mind you; rather, because the more literate German population would have expected more fanatically sophisticated hogwash, such as Jews simultaneously dominating Communist Russia and capitalist America as part of its drive toward world mastery. When you're dealing with the worst literate populations in the world, by contrast, the more crazed the conspiratorial Jew-hating stuff happens to be, apparently the better. And note, this viciously insane hatred of Jews --- depicted in the popular media throughout the Arab world in this wildly preposterous manner --- is not an aberration, confined to Abu Dhabi TV. As a New York Times investigation showed,
". . . Such anti-Semitic imagery is now embedded in the mainstream discourse concerning Jews in much of the Islamic world, in the popular press and in academic journals. The depictions are not limited to countries that are at war with Israel but can be found in general-interest publications in Egypt and Jordan, the two countries that have signed peace agreements with Israel, as well as in independent religious schools in Pakistan and Southeast Asia . . . The use of Nazi imagery, the newspaper caricatures of Jews with fangs and exaggerated hook noses, even the Arab textbooks with their descriptions of Jews as evil world conspirators — all of that, Arab leaders often insist, reflect a dislike for Israelis and Zionism but not for Jews and Judaism. Yet in many Muslim countries the hatred of Jews as Jews, and not only as citizens of Israel, has been nurtured through popular culture for generations."
Remember, That Was Almost Two Years Ago
All these comments and quotes appeared on the buggy site in late autumn of 2003. Since then, the recent Pew Global Attitudes Survey --- which included six Muslim countries (Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Morocco, Lebanon, and Jordan) --- found that
Anti-Jewish sentiment is endemic in the Muslim world. In Lebanon, all Muslims and 99% of Christians say they have a very unfavorable view of Jews. Similarly, 99% of Jordanians have a very unfavorable view of Jews. Large majorities of Moroccans, Indonesians, Pakistanis and six-in-ten Turks also view Jews unfavorably.
Are There Encouraging Changes Afoot in the World of Islam More Recently?
To say much more here is to plunge ahead of our argument, Part One of which sets out some necessary preliminary remarks about terrorism in general. It's only in Part Two today that we begin to focus on what is new and doubly dangerous in the Islamist terrorisms that the whole world now confronts, including more and more Muslims themselves . . . increasingly shocked to see what is happening in the name of their religion. The Pew Global Attitudes survey just cited finds a couple of slightly encouraging trends here: as more and more Muslim countries are themselves subject to jihadi terrorism, support for such terrorism is on the wane in most of the six Islamic countries included in the survey --- most but not all; and the US reputation in Muslim countries has improved somewhat. The survey-researchers attribute the slight improvement to a growing perception that the Bush administration is genuinely pushing for democratic openings in the Arab countries (in Indonesia, the improvement was mainly related to the impressive American role in the Tsunami relief effort last winter). Hence the importance of winning in Iraq and continuing to exert pressure on the Arab dictatorships to move toward democratic systems.
WILL THESE PARTICALLY FAVORABLE TRENDS IN MUSLIM OPINION CONTINUE?
We can only hope so, because until there is near-unanimous condemnation in the Muslim world with no hedging whatsoever of jihadists and their fanatical terrorism will future recruits to Islamist extremism and terrorist activities diminish strongly. Whether that unequivocal condemnation by, say, 95% of the Islamic peoples will happen is another matter. Even if it does, we can't be fully optimistic.
Why Mixed Evidence At Best? The Terrorist Problem
According to the recent testimony of the Director General of European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center, about 5% of the 20 million Muslims there are attracted to such fundamentalist extremism and about a 3% of those 5% lean heavily toward actual jihad terrorism. A British intelligence report put out in May 2004 used a higher estimate, at least for Britain: it said that there were probably 10,000 likely or potential terrorists in that country, roughly three times higher than the 1/33 of 5% estimate used by the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center. Worse, one recent opinion survey in Britain, taken right after the July 7th 2005 bombings, revealed that a quarter of Britain's Muslim population sympathized a lot (13%) or at least a little (11%) with the bombers' murderous motives --- that is, a quarter of the roughly 1.6 to 2.0 million Muslims there (nobody is certain of the exact total: two writers for the Economist magazine refer to 3.0 million British Muslims --- the figure that Muslim spokesmen claim is the case). More worrisome yet, though there are few in-depth studies involving field work in Muslim communities by academics in Europe, some exceptions do exist, and in Germany, according to one study,
"the sociologist Wilhelm Heitmeyer and his colleagues at the University of Bielefeld found that almost one-third of those polled agreed that Islam must become the state religion in every country. Even though they live in Europe, 56 percent declared that they should not adapt too much to Western ways, but should live by Islam. More than a third insisted that if it serves the Islamic community, they are ready to use violence against nonbelievers. Almost 40 percent said that Zionism, the European Union and the United States threaten Islam
But consider. Even if the Director General of the European Intelligence and Security Century is right, we're still talking about a powder-keg of 1 million extremists in West Europe alone, most of whom are young . . . with about 33,000 of them potential terrorists. World-wide it's more worrisome still. World-wide, that would mean 60 million of the 1.2 billion Muslims are extremists of various ages, and 2.0 million of them are potential or likely jihad terrorists.
More generally, the same hesitation to be fully optimistic applies to the far wider conspiratorial outlook that prevails in the Islamic world, marked as it is by all the predictable resentment, sense of humiliation, and raw rippling desire for revenge that such paranoid fantasies invariably entail. The prospects for an alternative to the paranoid outlook aren't dismal, but neither are they markedly encouraging.
The Chief Reason?
The alternative would require sustained introspection and an honest dialogue in Muslim countries as to the deep-rooted cultural and religious reasons for their massive problems, all self-created: high levels of illiteracy (the 21 Arab countries have the highest levels in the world), their resistance to modern knowledge, their economic backwardness, the inferior status of women, and the pervasive corruption and tribal-, clan- or other forms of patron-client networks that prevail in their economic and political systems. It would also require a candid confrontation of the age-old traditions in Islam that justify jihad and holy war and on which, to the clear discomfort of most Muslims, extremists like those in Al Qaeda can draw to justify their terrorism.
On most of the evidence, such introspective candor and honest dialogue would be too painful and provoke massive resistance . . . not least because such self-scrutiny and dialogue would require a major modernizing transformation of Islam itself, so that it came to terms more effectively with the modern world. Even Turkey, the most progressive and Western-oriented of the 56 Muslim countries, fails badly on some of these scores.
Note that the article today is only the first of what will likely be a three-article series on the jihadi terrorists.
PART ONE
TERRORISM DEFINED:
We need a good working definition that seems to fit all kinds of terrorism, not just the radical Islamist sort behind the attacks in the US on 9/11 or Spain in March 2004 or in Britain this July . . . to single out just the industrial democratic countries that have been attacked the last four years. Once a general definition is laid out, then we can focus on what seems to be new and particularly menacing about the Islamo-terrorist kind. And so let's offer up this formula:
Terrorism refers the use of violence by non-state groups carried out for political or ideological purposes, particularly against unarmed civilians in the target national society. The initial aim of the terrorist attacks --- which can go on for years, with various levels of civilian casualties --- is always psychological in nature: to frighten the population and disrupt its everyday routines, then --- as the attacks continue --- to generate widespread fear and anxiety and erode the majority's belief that the authorities can successfully protect it from future attacks.
Once that state-of-mind becomes widespread, terrorists expect that the government of the day will have to meet their demands or --- in a democratic system --- face imminent electoral disaster. If the government happens to be an authoritarian dictatorship, then --- so the terrorists apparently hope --- it will be overthrown sooner or later by force and a more compliant government take power.
Simple enough to grasp, no? --- especially with these clarifying remarks and examples thrown in.
1. To generate maximum psychological impact, the terrorists tend to choose civilian targets --- markets, cafes, sports arenas, buildings, or transport, communications, and energy networks --- that induce repeated shocks in the targeted population.
Once in a while, it's true, terrorists may single out the military and police as targets too --- including Coalition Forces in Iraq today --- but there is no known case of terrorist bombings or shootings of the security forces alone ever achieving the terrorists' long-term political or ideological aims. What's more, in time, the security forces learn how to protect themselves better against attacks. We can be categorical here: only if terrorism were to spark a full-fledged insurrection could attacks on the military have any chance of succeeding, and in that case we're talking about a revolution or a civil war.
Hence the reason terrorists always concentrate on civilian targets. Only their repeated destruction promises to create the maximum psychological shock that leaves the population increasingly anxious and on edge, frightened of going to and from work, shopping, eating in restaurants, attending concerts or cinemas, or performing any of the other workaday routines that make up the lives of national societies these days.
Iraq is a good example of the failure of terrorism to work effectively against well-armed, well-organized military forces. Since last fall, American military casualties have averaged less than two per day. By contrast, the bursting tempo of suicidal bombings against the civilian population has led to a casuality daily rate of 33 Iraqis.
2. Once public morale and confidence plummet --- a point that might take years of attacks --- the terrorists' political or ideological aims come to the fore. Sooner or later, they hope, the terrified population will force their political leaders to carry out the changes in the state's policies or its political system that they, the terrorists, have demanded.
In a democratic system, stubborn, non-compliant political leaders will --- or so the terrorists seem to expect --- be replaced by more compliant leadership in the next general election.
And if the political system is non-democratic? The terrorist hope is then more problematic.
For a start, a dictatorial state can and will use levels of repression and counter-terrorism against the terrorists that make its overthrow far more difficult. Algeria in the 1990s and into this decade is a case in point, Egypt in the early 1990s another. In both cases, the Islamist terrorists were ruthlessly rooted out, jailed, tortured, and killed off. As the recent attacks in Egypt last week showed, though, new Islamist terrorists continue to expect that they can disrupt the country's economy, frighten off tourism, put the population on edge, and lead eventually to some sort of change in the dictatorial regime. How? Apparently, in one of two ways. Either more accommodating members of the dictatorship --- say, army officers --- will eventually assassinate the discredited leadership in a coup, take control, and be more compliant with the terrorists' political or ideological aims; or if a coup fails to succeed, then the population --- the terrorists apparently hope --- will have no choice but to rise up and overthrow the dictatorial regime in some sort of revolutionary struggle, however brief or long.
3. Enter the terrorists' political or ideological aims. Needless to add, they vary from one terrorist cause to another, but three general ones can be distinguished according to the terrorists' ambitions.
(i.) The least heady ambition is to force a change in a significant state policy that, if it were to occur, would end the terrorism. That doesn't mean the policy in question is insignificant for the existing state leadership and population, only that it's limited in scope.
The IRA bombed Britain in the 1970s and 1980s to compel British governments to withdraw from Northern Ireland, a goal that in the British view would sunder the territorial integrity and boundaries of their country. Muslim terrorists have had similar objectives in Kashmir, ruled by India --- or they did anyway until Al Qaeda and other Islamist terrorist groups entered the fray, since which time their ambitions seemed to have soared. Ditto the terrorists in Chechnya. Possibly, too, some of the Palestinian terrorist groups initially thought about compelling Israeli forces and civilians to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza, preparatory to creating a Palestinian state. Possibly. But even Yasser Arafat and many of the other PA leaders seemed to think that an Israeli withdrawal, should it occur, would be only one stage in a long-run campaign --- maybe taking decades to unfold --- to destroy the Israeli state either by isolating it, or overwhelming it demographically, or by some combination plus off-and-on terrorism.
(ii.) A more ambitious political or ideological aim would be to force an overthrow of the existing political system --- say, replacing a pro-Western authoritarian regime as in Pakistan or Egypt now with some sort of Islamist regime.
The success of the Taliban in destroying the pro-Soviet regime in Afghanistan during the 1980s is no doubt the model in mind of the existing Islamist terrorist groups still operating there or in Pakistan or in Saudi Arabia. As the Taliban success in the early 1990s showed, though, the terrorist wing --- Al Qaeda included --- occurred only in the midst of a large, prolonged civil war that involved outside help . . . mainly from Pakistan militarily, from Saudi Arabia economically, and from CIA trainees on the ground.
Otherwise, to repeat, terrorism by itself seems unlikely to overturn all but the most rickety of political systems. Civil war or revolution --- whether involving guerrilla tactics or not --- seems indispensable.
Take two examples, one successful, one not, that involved struggles for national independence.
The successes of the Algerian terrorists against the French colonial government and military in that country in the late 1950s and early 1960s were only part of a long urban and rural guerrilla war that, in time, forced a change in the French political system itself --- Charles de Gaulle coming to power in 1958 when the French army threatened to stage a coup against the French 4th Republic's government --- and a surprise turnabout in de Gaulle's policies toward Algerian independence. Two thousand years earlier, the Zealots --- a small but highly motivated group in a noticeably divided Jewish population, cleaved into various factions and policies --- used terrorist tactics against Roman rule and its military that, once Roman repression increased, then sparked a general uprising and a brutal Roman-Jewish war in the late 60's C.E. and extending into the next decade that led to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and a severe, mass-murdering suppression of all resistance. (A hundred years later, a similar uprising took place by the Jewish population against Roman rule, the whole of Jerusalem was destroyed, and the Jews forced into exile outside their land.)
(iii.) At the extreme, the terrorists' ideology may be the extinction of the targeted population. So far, however fanatical some terrorist movements have been in the past, they haven't been able to do this, though the efforts of Al Qaeda to acquire WMD --- nuclear or biological --- may change this prospect in the future, all depending.
Generally, the extinction of a national minority or majority has been accomplished only by organized military forces representing some state --- Spanish Conquistadors killing off several million Latin American native Indian populations, especially in the large urban empires of the Incas and Aztecs. Even then, it was mainly disease that proved the main instrument of their destruction. The Soviet regime was able to target certain ethnic minorities like the Volga Germans, force them into Siberian slave-camps, and let them die in the vast Gulag system. Nazi Germany exterminated 6 million Jews in the Holocaust, along with more than a million Gypsies.
4. Should one talk of state-terrorism then?
The term is muddled, besides being frequently used for ideological purposes. In existing international law, only recognized sovereign states can use force legitimately . . . and even then only under specified circumstances of national or collective defense. States, of course, can terrorize their own populations --- most of them or certain groups. The best quantitative estimates show that about 170 million people were slaughtered by their own brutal dictatorial states during the 20th century, a finding that is far higher than the number of people killed in all that bloody century's wars. But there are plenty of terms used in international law to single them out as systematic human-rights violators, including at the extreme the aim and tactics of genocide.