Are There Clear Links between Failed States and Terrorism - Case Study Example

Are there clear links between failed states and terrorism? Introduction In discussions of the root causes of international terrorism, one of the frequently-cited sources of terrorism is failed states: countries in which central authority has broken down, extreme poverty and lawlessness prevail, and violent ideologies can easily take root. It is true enough that failed states—or at least some failed states—do serve various purposes for international terrorist groups; but an examination of the nature of today’s international terrorism shows that while failed states are useful to terrorists, they are hardly essential. In fact, much of the focus on failed states as part of the problem of international terrorism may be no more than a product of our need to comfort ourselves when faced with a danger we do not really understand. Defining state failure There is no single, “official” definition of state failure; but the most commonly used standard is the one created by The Fund for Peace, used to generate the annual list published by Foreign Policy magazine. The Fund for Peace defines state failure as follows: A state that is failing has several attributes. One of the most common is the loss of physical control of its territory or a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. Other attributes of state failure include the erosion of legitimate authority to make collective decisions, an inability to provide reasonable public services, and the inability to interact with other states as a full member of the international community… extensive corruption and criminal behavior, inability to collect taxes or otherwise draw on citizen support, large-scale involuntary dislocation of the population, sharp economic decline, group-based inequality, institutionalized persecution or discrimination, severe demographic pressures, brain drain, and environmental decay.1 Sadly, state failure is all too common; virtually all of central Africa consists of states considered “critical” by The Fund for Peace, with other “critical” countries scattered through the Middle East and parts of Asia. Failed states as resources and opportunities for terrorists Failed states offer terrorists a number of opportunities and resources that more successful states generally do not. One obvious resource plentifully available in many failed states is manpower. The combination of poverty, disaffection, violence, unemployment, and radicalization that is common in failed states would lead one to expect that terrorists would have an easy time recruiting in these countries. At the same time, there are factors—discussed below—that reduce the value of failed states as a source of new recruits for terror organizations. Even when they are of limited value as a source of recruits for terror organizations, failed states can be extremely useful as venues for training and logistics bases, for critical face-to-face meetings, and as refuges where local law enforcement agencies are either unwilling or unable to interfere with terror groups.2 Countries like Somalia, Afghanistan under the Taliban, and today the tribal regions of Pakistan, for example, have provided shelter and services to Al Qaeda.3 Failed states, and in some cases relatively lawless regions of states that are otherwise functional, can also be useful in terrorist fundraising. While terror organizations typically receive some of their operating funds in the form of donations from individuals and, to a decreasing but still significant extent, from governments, many of them also engage in various business activities to support themselves. For example, Al Qaeda is known to operate a wide range of more or less legitimate businesses; many of these are so well hidden behind multiple layers of shell companies that their own employees do not know that their ultimate boss is Osama bin Laden. Failed states are of obvious use in such enterprises, as they completely lack the kind of legal and financial transparency that would enable accurate determination of a business’s true ownership. The “tri-border” region in South America, with a large expatriate Lebanese community largely engaged in various forms of trade, is known to provide substantial funding for Hezbollah.4 Further, many terror organizations are heavily involved in the production and wholesale trading of illegal drugs; such groups include FARC in Colombia, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda, and many more. Failed states provide many of the raw ingredients for the international illegal drug trade, as well as the opportunity to refine and transport illegal drugs with minimal interference. The lack of strong, centralized authority in failed states often allows terror organizations to gain considerable power and influence—either by co-opting the government itself, or else by carving out a largely autonomous regions within the failed state. Somalia and Afghanistan have both exemplified the former situation, when their governments granted substantial aid and protection to Al Qaeda. FARC in Colombia was allowed to control a huge autonomous region of the country, and Hezbollah has created a “state within a state” in southern Lebanon, where the organization has most of the security powers, and provides most of the services, that would ordinarily be provided by the central government. Failed states as a counter-terrorist irrelevancy While failed states can obviously be very useful to terrorists, there are limits to this usefulness; and there is no convincing reason to believe that failed states are essential to today’s international terrorism. An obvious first observation is that failed states have not been particularly central in terror organizations’ recruiting efforts. For example, the 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and Egypt; both of these countries have their problems, but neither is a failed state. The London Underground bombers, far from being failed state recruits, were born and raised in England. This pattern appears to be generally true: while citizens of failed states are often involved in terrorism occurring within those states, they are much less common as perpetrators of international terror attacks. One reason for this may be that terror organizations simply do not have to recruit from failed states, because it is easy enough for them to recruit within more successful states—including the states that are their targets for attack. The Internet has become a tremendously important tool for terrorist recruitment, indoctrination, training, and command and control; and since the Internet crosses borders and Internet usage is especially common in Western countries, it can easily be used to create, nurture, and radicalize local groups who can be induced to attack their own countrymen. Another important terrorist recruiting tool, particularly in western Europe, has been a pool of “refugee” preachers who spread messages of alienation, intolerance, and hatred that can ultimately lead some young people to become terrorists. It is also worth noting that citizens of failed states are likely to be less desirable as recruits for international terrorism simply because, given their origins, they are apt to face increased scrutiny when they travel overseas. Citizens of more-or-less “friendly” states, like the 9/11 hijackers, or home-grown terrorist recruits, like the 7/7 bombers, are much more likely to be able to infiltrate their target without arousing the suspicion of the authorities. The other ways in which failed states can serve international terrorists are certainly significant, but they are probably not essential. “Successful” terror organizations are masters of survival, and the key to their ability to survive is adaptability and flexibility. Al Qaeda, for example, has survived the loss of both Somalia and Afghanistan as failed-state operational, training, and logistics bases; while the organization’s central leadership still uses parts of Pakistan and possibly Afghanistan as a refuge, it does not appear any longer to use or require the kind of massive training infrastructure it had formerly created in Afghanistan.5 Not all terror organizations are as consistently innovative as Al Qaeda, but it seems likely that in an age of advanced (and advancing) communications technologies, terrorism may become more and more a product of information and ideology spread electronically, and less and less a phenomenon tied to particular states, failed or otherwise. The failed state as a comforting myth of causality To some extent, focusing on such “causes of terrorism” as failed states, poverty, oppression, occupation, and the like may have as much to do with our need to find comfort in the face of a deadly and unpredictable enemy as it does with any real effort to understand and combat terrorism. It is certainly true that terror organizations make use of all these “causes” as part of their recruiting, indoctrination, and fund-raising efforts; but modern terrorism is in fact a consequence of ideology rather than a response to any set of objective grievances, no matter how legitimate. Since most citizens of Western countries do not easily comprehend such an ideological struggle—and since even the leading counter-terrorist experts have yet to formulate a really effective strategy for countering terrorist ideology—these concrete sources of grievance provide the only handle on the problem of terrorism that most of us can grasp. By locating the problem of terrorism in failed states, those of us living in functioning states provide ourselves with distance from the problem. As frightening as it is to be targeted by people from failed states far away, it is even more frightening to face the possibility of being blown up by citizens of one’s own country who hate us for no reason that we can understand. Further, if terrorism is primarily a response to objective problems like poverty, oppression, and lawlessness, it should be possible to eliminate terrorism by solving these problems. While eliminating all such sources of grievance may never be possible, this approach to combating terrorism is comprehensible, offers a positive and morally acceptable program for action, and conforms nicely to conventional notions of morality. If, instead, we view terrorism as the product of an ideology (or of a collection of ideologies) that will make use of whatever grievances and resources are available, but is not really dependent upon any of them, then we are stuck fighting a war we do not really know how to fight. Conclusion Failed and failing states provide a range of useful resources for terrorists; and given the horrible human consequences of state failure, the problem of failed states would be worth solving even if terrorism did not exist or had no connection to failed states. Further, a successful effort to remedy the problems of those failed states that are used by international terrorists for recruitment, sanctuary, training, and so on would certainly be inconvenient for the terrorists, and might somewhat reduce their capabilities. But there is no reason to believe that eliminating the problem of failed states would eliminate the problem of terrorism; and given the extreme difficulty of solving the problems of state failure, it seems unlikely that attempting to do so would constitute an optimal strategy for combating terrorism. Read More