What We Must Do

by Paul de Armond

The world hasn't suddenly changed -- it's only that the scales have fallen from our eyes. Our illusion of invulnerability is gone, as is the notion that events outside our borders really don't affect us. Those and other fantasies of the past crumbled along with the buildings.

Difficult questions confront us. Will we make the world a safer or more dangerous place by what we do next? History is cluttered with examples of wooden-headed failures to learn from experience. And right now, U.S. anti-terrorism policy is as outmoded as the horse cavalry was at the outbreak of WWI.

The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Aum Shinrikyo nerve gas attacks in Japan and the Oklahoma City bombing were watershed events of the "new terrorism." During the Cold War, the major powers were mostly successful in keeping terrorism in check. But that relative success of blocking state-sanctioned terrorism led to an evolution in terrorist behavior:

• The biggest change came in the shift of players and their motivations. Where terrorists once wanted to steer their nation's policy, the new actors were sub-national groups pursuing religious and cultural goals.

• During the Cold War, terrorist groups looked like little mirrors of their governments, with a hierarchical leadership. Now the groups were diffuse networks without clearly defined centers of power or chains of command

• There was an increase in the lethality of terrorist attacks. While terrorist incidents have declined substantially over the last several decades, the number of casualties associated with major incidents has increased substantially.

This trend towards rare but more deadly terrorism was called "catastrophic terrorism" -- the other end of the scale from "local incident" terrorism, which was typical during the 1960s and 70s. Local incident terrorism involved few casualties and was confined to a small area, such as a single room or vehicle. Coping with the tragedy was well within the capabilities of local authorities. A "mass-casualty" incident involves hundreds of casualties, making it harder for emergency services to cope. Until last week, no terrorist incidents had ever gone past the mass-casualty threshold. The prevailing wisdom about mass casualty attacks is summed up by Brian Jenkins famous dictum that "terrorists wand a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead." What we witnessed September 11 was catastrophic terrorism: The scale and scope of the attack completely overwhelmed our immediate ability to respond. The terrorists wanted a lot of people dead.

Experts discussing catastrophic terrorism always saw scenarios involving chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons. That was understandable; our only experience with mass murder came during major wars, and since WWII, the industrialized powers were always the attackers, never the victims. As a result, strategic thinking was based on our own capacity for committing these acts -- a blind spot now tragically revealed. Failing to understand your opponents is forgivable; believing that they are just like you is the kind of fatal mistake that leads to disaster.

But as we focus attention and spend billions of dollars on catastrophic terrorism, we are concentrating resources on low-probability/high-consequence events. The result is that we don't spend enough money on essential (but not very sexy) defenses like airport security and rescue services. Also, the emphasis on catastrophic terrorism worked has worked against us -- it has advertised our greatest fears and vulnerabilities.

Even before the inauguration, president-elect Bush was warned of the dangers in a report from the RAND think-tank. Bruce Hoffman, vice-president of RAND and head of their terrorism studies group, strongly criticized existing national policy on terrorism, noting that there's been no real evaluation since wrenching changes that were rushed into place after the Oklahoma City bombing: "the collective U.S. policy mindset in responding to terrorism remains arguably locked in a 1995-96 time frame" which also included the World Trade Center bombing and Japanese nerve gas attacks.

We really haven't learned much from past terrorist experiences, and that's a serious mistake. For example, Hoffman notes, "...attention needs to be paid to the psychological as well as the physical effects of a terrorist attack. Nearly three quarters of the 5,000 casualties who received medical treatment as a result of the 1995 nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway, for example, in fact suffered from adverse psychological effects including shock, emotional upset and psychosomatic symptoms." But after last week's attack, there was no preparedness for that kind of psychological damage, and the entire nation exhibited signs of precisely such shock and upset.

The RAND report also (prophetically) remarked that we have aided Osama bin Laden by not offering his supporters and sympathizers an alternative message. Much of the "new terrorism" is coming from communities that have been heavily brutalized. The swath of war and destruction that has swept back and forth over the Islamic world for the last fifty years has eroded for many a basic sense of security, peace, and safety. Violence becomes part of the culture, and citizens feel considerable rage, isolation and powerlessness. From this population are terrorists recruited.

Another serious mistake is that we assume that the terrorists fit our own image. We have a well-funded military force that follows a rigid chain of command. And almost immediately, the Bush administration assumed that they were cut from the same cloth -- that they were a sizeable organization directed by a commander (Osama bin Laden) that had lots of money and an extensive support structure. If that's true, it is completely unlike what we know -- and have known for some time -- about groups behind these types of incidents.

FOR MORE INFORMATION

Countering the New Terrorism 1998 FBI press release and federal indictment of Osama bin Laden The Great Superterrorism Scare Rational Fanatics Revisiting the Superterrorism Debate Critical Incident Stress Reactions information

Contrary to White House claims, these terrorists didn't require massive funding or extensive infrastructure. The attackers are currently known to number between three and six per aircraft, which means a total of 15 and no more than 24. The limiting factor on the number of attacks is probably the availability of people with minimal flight training. The support network for a terrorist operation suggests the total number of people directly involved in the attacks was probably somewhere between 50-75.

Some of the attackers are known to have been in the U.S. since December, and more than two dozen are reported to have received flight training costing between $10,000 and $20,000. This expense, combined with living expenses for nine months (reportedly, the identified attackers lived quite modestly) and the cost of travel works out to around $30,000 per person for the entire period -- a little more than $100/day. That's a fraction of the cost of fielding military personnel for the same amount of time.

So here's a clue as to whom they were: Their modest budget is likely an indication of the size of the network behind them. And given the sophisticated strategy of coordinated attack, it's also logical that if they had more resources, more planes would have been hijacked. This is additional circumstantial evidence that the responsible organization is splinter, or faction group.

Nor has any concrete evidence emerged to directly point the finger at Osama bin Laden. It is very likely that the supposed "connections," "links," and "ties" to bin Laden are not really very solid. Instead, it is most likely that intelligence and policy analysts seized on bin Laden as the most visible and well-financed node in a complex and continually shifting network of sympathetic terrorist groups and factions. To date, the only publicly presented evidence of a "connection" to bin Laden is the reported interception of communications after the attacks informing bin Laden's organization of the success -- information that was already spreading over the world media at the same time.

It comes down to a simple fact: The more like terrorists we are, the less effective we can be. This means we must answer rage with restraint, violence with anti-violence, grandiose paranoia with humility, and isolation with bridge-building. Doing that successfully will mean deep changes to our national policy, and recent history shows that we don't want to hear that message.

In 1993 and 1996, A. Mary Schiavo, Inspector General for the U.S. Transportation Department, tested security at major airports. The testing found major deficiencies in airport security. In 1996, Congress funded an inadequate upgrade to airport securities measures, based in part on Schiavo's findings, and she resigned in protest. In 1999, she took her concerns public and enlisted the help of WCMH-TV in demonstrating the porosity of security in U.S. airports. The response of the FBI was to target her and the television reporters for an investigation of possible violations of federal law. The Federal Aviation Administration banned investigations of security flaws by news media.

The cover-up and retributive FBI investigation of Schiavo is only one example of how the politics of security policy are conducted. Failure to consider alternatives is folly; terrorists, after all, conduct extensive intelligence operations while planning attacks. These actions by the FBI and the FAA are an object lesson in how the suppression of dissenting opinion undermines security.

On a national scale, it is clear that a searching re-evaluation of foreign and domestic policy is needed before we lurch off into military or political actions with grave and lasting consequences.

On the local front, attention needs to be paid to the inevitable erosion of democracy that follows in the wake of militaristic nationalism. We must shift into post-disaster consequence management: watch for psychological trauma, media disinformation, protect civil liberties, and stand against scapegoat attacks on ethnic groups.

Developing civic policy to guide media and public officials in managing the traumatic aftermath is something that we can do here and now -- a local action which may provide an example to others across the country and around the world. A personal story: On the day of the attack, I was downtown here in Bellingham, Washington. In the course of one half hour, I witnessed several people who were clearly suffering from shock and exhibiting the classic signs of pale, drawn faces and listless manner. I saw a pedestrian blunder across the street against the traffic lights and a car turn the wrong way down a one-way street. Later that afternoon, I saw several near-miss traffic accidents. At no time did I hear from any of the local or national media any word of the need for people to take precautions against the psychological fallout from the attack.

The mobilization to respond to the psychological dimensions of the attack came twenty four hours later. It was led -- as all disaster recovery efforts are led -- by the convergent responders, ordinary citizens caught up in the events who react with wisdom and common sense in organizing mass vigils and church services to deal with the aftermath. The institutional response followed a day later. It will take at least a month to even begin to see the scope of the public health consequences resulting from the psychological dimension of this attack.

In the march to war, keep these facts in mind: Our own blunders have led to this crisis. We must ask at every step whether our acts will make violence more or less likely in the future. The key question is whether or not we have the wisdom, the will, and the courage to adapt and go forward.

Changing our policy on terrorism will be hard, particularly with the current drum-beating for national unity (meaningless, since there is no political division on the need to respond to the attacks). But most human folly can be attributed to stupidly pursuing bad policy when wiser alternatives exist.

Such change will take courage, but it must be done. Otherwise a terrible future beckons.