U.S. Global War on Terrorism

U.S. Global War on Terrorism

Counterterrorism

Al Qaeda's actions on September 11, 2001, demonstrated the use of a new form of warfare, requiring relatively modest resources and aimed at achieving maximum disruption of the morale and the economic core of Western society. Security in this new age will not be achieved by a policy that seeks to safeguard an almost infinite number of individual targets at all times. Instead, we must protect these foundations by developing public and, equally important, private-sector measures that deny the terrorists the leverage they seek in disrupting our societies.

Lets began by talking about risk management and security. Virtually every current method of risk management begins with the assumption that individual assets (e.g., buildings, aircraft, people) are the proper focus for investments in security. Even where the characteristics of an asset (or of its environment) are dynamic-for example, a presidential motorcade-risk management focuses on the methods for protecting against threats such as theft or destruction. Indeed, both our legal system and insurance (and reinsurance) industries-the institutional foundations of risk management in Western society-base their policies and procedures on calculations of the risk-adjusted value of specific identified assets. In the face of the potential for ongoing terrorist attacks from al Qaeda (and potentially others), the objective of risk management must now be shifted to a focus on protection from the leverage that attacks on assets can achieve with respect to the continued functioning of our society. Assets of any type may be the specific targets-they are the concrete focus of terrorist actions that provide the leverage needed to cause "unconstrained disruption"-but it is the ability of Western society to continue to rely on the vitality and utility of these functions and systems that is really in al Qaeda's sights.

Al Qaeda's actions on September 11 were certainly horrific, but they were not catastrophic. The destruction of what risk managers would regard as the targeted assets-the four airplanes, the passengers and crew, the three major buildings, the occupants of the buildings, and so on-was the source of the horror. But even the number of deaths (exceeding the strike on Pearl Harbor), the destruction of the World Trade Center and airplanes, and the damage to the Pentagon were not catastrophic for the nation or for the West. And as difficult as it is for us to comprehend, the death and destruction were, in fact, incidental to the terrorists' goals. Al Qaeda's objective was simply to use the attacks on those assets as the means to gain the leverage needed to disrupt and destabilize the governments, economies, and social structure of the West. Aside from al Qaeda's interest in retribution through death and destruction, the assets employed and destroyed were merely the means to pursue the broader goal of neutralizing the West. Osama bin Laden has been extraordinarily clear about the goals of al Qaeda: restructuring-and purifying-Islam and creating a modern version of a caliphate. To achieve this goal, al Qaeda's leadership recognizes that the West must be neutralized in the role it plays in the world-and the Middle East in particular. Or, in bin Laden's words (from his 1998 fatwah):

"The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies-- civilians and military-- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."

Seen through this new lens, the actions on September 11 were only marginal tactical successes. As was the case after the failure of the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, however, al Qaeda has not changed its ultimate goals. The leadership and member cells of al Qaeda may bide their time before initiating new major attacks, but they certainly have not been eliminated as a threat. We must therefore begin to work on protecting the West and our global partners from the potential threat to the "commons"-to society's commonly held assets-by redirecting the focus of risk management so that it can, in fact, offer standards and guidelines in the face of the this new form of terrorism. Rather than focusing on the management of risks to specific assets, we must now ask "How can we restructure risk management (and counterterrorism and homeland security) procedures, standards, and methods to account for leverage protection? How can the methods of risk management be extended to supply estimates of the relative value of security investments aimed at mitigating the effects of the leverage provided by attacks on assets?" Put another way, the assets that are the focus of virtually all current risk management methods are, in effect, simply a means to an end with respect to terrorism. The real targets of the type of terrorism that we face today are the derivative values of these assets: the systems of production and government, the means of economic exchange, and the vitality of and confidence in our social organizations and institutions.

Although often forgotten in the face of its message about the disastrous condition of the world's rivers and air, Garrett Hardin's now classic call-to-arms for the environmental movement, The Tragedy of the Commons, opens with a quotation from Wiesner and York on the dilemma of national security in the nuclear age:

"Both sides in the arms race are ... confronted by the dilemma of steadily increasing military power and steadily decreasing national security. It is our considered professional judgment that this dilemma has no technical solution. If the great powers continue to look for solutions in the area of science and technology only, the result will be to worsen the situation. (Wiesner and York [1] in Hardin [2])". Both Hardin's analogy and his conclusions about the need for a better means for making choices where there are common critical interests have been given new life by changes in international terrorism. Hardin's "commons," a shared town pasture used by all farmers to graze their livestock, but owned and cared for by no one, finds its analogue in our shared infrastructure and the core critical functions necessary to the operation of Western society. In most cases, such