Терроризм 21 века (english)

21 st Century TerrorismBy BruceHofimanFive bombings in four weeks. The targets a downtownshopping mall, a military housing complex and three apartment buildings. Thevictims civilians or the families of serving military personnel either asleepin their beds or out for an evening on the town. The death toll at least 350 persons, with scores more injured andmaimed. The perpetrators unknown. The reason for the attacks unclear.

Welcometo terrorism, 21st century-style.At a time when the United States is obsessed with moreexotic threats like bioterror, cy-berteiror and agroterror, these incidents inRussia and Dagestan underscore how terrorists can still achieve their dual aimof fear and intimidation through conventional means and traditional methods using bombs to blow things up. This has important implications forcountert-errorism preparedness.

As fanatical and irrational as terrorists oftenappear, they remain conservative operationally. In other respects, too, the string of deadlyexplosions that has convulsed Russia is not without precedent. Nor can it bewritten off as some isolated phenomenon inspired by recondite historicalenmities. Rather, the bombings conform to a pattern of terrorism evidentthroughout the 1990s The most heinousand lethal attacks, those directed against civilians, go unclaimed.

Thisdevelopment contrasts with the modus operandi of the first generation of modernterrorists who surfaced during the 1970sand 1980s. They not only proudly claimedcredit for particularly bloody attacks, but generally issued detailedcommuniques explaining precisely why they had carried out their operations.True, a large number of terrorist attacks have goneunclaimed. According to a Rand report published in 1985, upward of 60 percentof international terrorist incidents

recorded between 1980-82, and 39 percent ofthose that occurred in the 1970s, werenever claimed. The most deadly terrorist incidents of the 1990s have never been credibly claimed, muchless explained or justified as terrorist acts once were.Among these are the series of car and truck bombingsthat rocked Bombay in 1993, killing 317 persons the huge truck bomb thatdestroyed a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1994, killing86 the truck bomb that demolished

the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Buildingin Oklahoma City, leaving 168 dead in 1995 the series of bombings in Paris thatoccurred the same year between July and October and left eight dead and 200 wounded and last summer s bombings of theU.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, in which 224persons perished and thousands more were wounded. The 1988 in-flight bombing of Pan Am 103,in which 270 persons perished, is anespecially notorious example.

Although two alleged Libyan government intelligenceoperatives were identified and accused of placing the suitcase containing thebomb that eventually found its way onto the plane, no believableclaim ofresponsibility has ever been issued.That terrorists today do not feel as driven to takecredit for their acts may be related to their belief that their message,whatever it may be, is still reaching its intended audience. As the renownedterrorism expert Walter Laqueur has observed,

If terrorism is propagandaby the deed, the success of a terrorist campaign depends decisively on theamount of publicity it receives. In this respect, terrorists are stillgetting all the publicity they crave, but they are manipulating and exploitingit in different ways. By maintaining their anonymity, terrorists may believethey are better able to capitalize on fear and alarm. Attacks perpetrated byenigmatic, unseen and unknown assailants may thus be deliberately designed

tofoment greater insecurity and panic in the target audience. In this way, theterrorists ability to portray themselves as being able to strike whenever andwherever they please, while highlighting the government s inability to protectpotential targets, is appreciably heightened. The terrorists appear stronger,the government weak and powerless to stop the mayhem.Terrorists have long sought to embarrass governmentsand undermine public confidence in their leaders.

Even when they issue noclaim, the perpetrators may believe they are still effectively harming theirenemy and achieving their ultimate objective. They may also be confident thateven if their message is not clearly understood, the suspicion aroused by evenan anonymous attack is sufficient reward in itself.The current situation in Russia illuminates thechallenges faced by other countries confronted with terrorist threats. Thepotentially corrosive effects of fear and uncertainty on civil liberties andconstitutional

safeguards are already evident Russian authorities and theRussian public have singled out Chechen, Dagestani, Ingush and other swarthy,dark-haired immigrants from the Caucasus. Discriminated against in the best oftimes, they have been subjecte.d to withering scrutiny despite assurances fromPresident Boris Yeltsin that no one ethnic group or people would be targetedfor attention.The ease with which Russia has been thrown into panicby a handful of men using entirely conventional

terrorist weapons and tacticssuggests that terrorists can still ably achieve their objectives of fear andintimidation without having to resort to more exotic weaponry or futuristictactics.This is an important lesson for the United States,where the focus of current counterterrorism efforts has been onlow-probability, high-consequence terrorist incidents using weapons of mass ofdestruction. Attention on this high-end threat, therefore, should not be at theexpense of higher-probability, lower-

consequence incidents, such as ordinaryterrorist bombings.Bruce Hoffman is the director of the RandWashington office and author of Inside Terrorism. He contributed this comment to the Los Angeles Times. Fight AgainstTerror Don t Resort to itThe great Russian poet Alexander Pushkin once wrotewith bitterness that the only

European in Russia is the government. And this despite how he suffered at the hands of the tsar s government andespecially the tsar s censorship. I recalled the genius paradoxical phrasewhen a few days after theanti-Caucasian bacchanalia in the press Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced, We can t confuse the bandits whoare operating on the territory of Chechnya with the Chechen people, who arealso their victims.

A war against terror must not be turned into terroragainst the people. We lost the Chechen war of 1994-96precisely because from the very beginning with the massive, senseless bombing of Grozny the war was turned against the people, leading to thedeaths of tens of thousands of civilians. We won the August war in Dagestanprecisely because it was fought in the people s defense.In order to win a war with bandits and terrorists inChechnya, we have to clearly announce to ourselves

and to the Chechens what thegoals and tasks of our policy in Chechnya are to be. This means guaranteeingthe safety of our borders and the liquidation of the cradles of terrorism inChechnya. We have to convince the majority of Chechens to support theseintentions. We have to give Chechen President Asian Maskhadov a chance. We mustcease threatening

Chechnya every day from the pages of newspapers andtelevisions with the wholesale destruction of its residents. Then, after wehave accomplished these tasks jointly with Chechnya s legal government, we candiscuss the region s status, including its sovereignty.We must also say that we don t plan to forcibly holdChechnya as part of the Russian Federation against its will, nor do we plan topunish it should it wish to leave.

On this subject, Dagestan defensivereaction to the Chechen troops pouring over its borders shows that we are notin danger of a domino effect should Chechnya secede.The great Russian civilization cannot roll down thepath to the destruction of an entire ethnicity, no matter how difficult thelast 100 years of relations with thisethnicity have been. Here, the matter is not world public opinion. As concernsworld public opinion, we wouldn t have any

trouble at all.For example, in 1996,in the heat of the crudest and most senseless bombardments of Chechnya,President Bill Clinton, on a visit to Moscow, publicly supported PresidentBoris Yeltsin and compared him to Abraham Lincoln, struggling to hold the uniontogether.And now, the quotes of Western politicians especially off the record ones are beginning to reflect the motif ofunderstanding

Russia s role as a shield protecting civilization from the barbarian hordes. But here we risk more than just falling into atrap. We are in danger of geopolitical catastrophe. With every publicpronouncement sounding in Russia about the wholesale destruction of the Chechenethnicity, with every mistake that happens during surgicalstrikes on terrorist bases, we are begetting thousands more potentialsuicide bombers who will

come to our cities. Such a final solution to the Chechen question would once and for all turn all Islamic opinionagainst Russia. Satan No. 2 as theAyatollah Khomeini used to call the Soviet Union would be graduated in the eyes of the Moslem world to Satan No. 1, crowding the United States out of itshonored position.