War vs. Terrorism:
Recall that conducting war
means attempting to destroy the ability of the enemy to resist your demands.
In war, each side attempts to destroy (or incapacitate) the enemy’s means used
to wage war. This includes troops, weapons, equipment, non-medical support
personnel, as well as military production and transport capability.
When the losing side can no
longer wage even a defensive war, people on that side then must choose between
giving in to the victor’s demands or suffering whatever punishment the winning
side is willing to inflict on them. Wars end when the losing side meets the
demands of the victor: either voluntarily or because the victor occupies the
loser’s country and replaces its government with one that will meet the
demands.
Wars are by definition
fought between national governments. This differentiates wars from civil wars,
because in civil wars the current national government and some internal
group has taken up arms has managed to gain control of a substantial amount of
territory. Before they gain control over a portion of territory and act as its
government, such rebel groups are considered terrorists or criminals. Such
groups typically want either to
·
become (or get a share
of power in) the national government, or
·
have some of the
nation’s territory join a neighboring country, or
·
want independence for
some of the nation’s territory.
Terrorism is different from
war in that it involves trying to destroy
the will of the enemy group to resist
the terrorists’ demands.
Terrorists kill civilians
and attack non-military targets in order to make the enemy’s population and
elites fear that they or someone they love could be hurt next. Sometimes
terrorists attack buildings when people have already been evacuated because
they want to demonstrate their capability to harm (and to actually cause chaos)
rather than to actually hurt or kill people. This (and the heightened security
in response to it) is supposed to make lives of the people in the enemy group
so unbearable that they pressure their government to negotiate with the
terrorists and meet enough of their demands to make the attacks stop.
War starts to look like
terrorism when soldiers intentionally kill civilians in order to try to create
enough panic and terror that the enemy’ soldiers stop fighting. This happened
very plainly in aerial bombing and missile attacks on cities by both sides in
World War 2 It also happens on both sides in many wars of insurgents versus
governments all over the world. Sometimes this happens in huge amounts like in
Guatemala or El Salvador, and sometimes when the U.S. is directly involved (as
in Viet Nam) it happens less frequently than that. But it still happens. The
use of terror in war has not stopped just because some of the weapons that some
armies use have become more accurate. To this day, nuclear deterrence is based
on the threat of destroying an enemy’s cities and people, not their military
capability.
Terrorism is different from
war in that the reasons behind it may have little to do with the terrorists
wanting to make a government transfer the control of a piece of territory
(despite the fact that many terrorist groups say they favor independence for
Palestinians, or some other oppressed group). Terrorist groups are not
necessarily drawn from a particular place the way fighters in Civil Wars are.
Terrorists can have a lot of
different motives, but generally terrorists’ goals center around one or more of
the following:
Terrorists are not motivated
by the fact that they consider some other country to have a
decadent/immoral/too-free society.
Why do we have more terrorism now than before?
While terrorism can be
thought of as being like war or like crime (kidnapping, murder, extortion for
something other than money, etc.). It
is useful to think of terrorism as crime in order to understand why we have
more of it in the last few decades.
Anyone familiar with police
television shows may know the words means,
motive, and opportunity.
In order to find out who
committed a crime, police find someone with
Means—a tool or technique
needed to complete the crime successfully,
Motive—a reason to want to
do the crime, and
Opportunity—a plausible way
of actually being able to do the crime even if the person had the necessary
tool or technique).
One can extend this by
arguing that things which give
more people the means to
commit terrorism,
more people the motive to
commit terrorism, and/or
more people the opportunity
to commit terrorism
…will lead to more terrorism
being committed.
So how might technological
change be involved in the creation of increased availability of the motives for
terrorism?
I want to talk about motive
first, then move on to means and opportunity since the latter two overlap.
This begins with how war has
evolved because of technology. Remember that Bruce Sterling said in “War is
Virtual Hell” that a trained group of soldiers will defeat a much larger mob of
people every time. This is an instance of a larger truth. Just as businesses
with advanced techniques and tools can produce goods more with fewer employees,
armies with advanced training and equipment can destroy more things using fewer
troops. Since conventional war is about destroying things, the side that
destroys things more effectively wins.
Organized groups of people
who are really angry about something and are willing to kill and die to try and
change the situation that angers them, face an imperative on their behavior.
Remember that the first Japanese soldiers who fought with guns greatly
endangered themselves if they introduced themselves just before fighting an
enemy armed with a sword, because of the sword’s advantage at close range. Any
group that wants to fight against another group armed with superior technology
faces a similar problem. The less advanced side will always lose in a
traditional battlefield fight between massed forces where the more
advanced side can apply all of its technology. This inequality of ability to
fight conventional war is the situation of asymmetric warfare.
The historian of war Martin Van
Creveld makes the following series of points at the end of one of his books.
This led to the creation of
tactics of insurgency warfare, gradually refined between the 18th to
the 20th Century. Traditional insurgency involves the weaker group hiding
out in the countryside among civilians or in concealing terrain. The
insurgents then periodically link up near their target, put on uniforms, do
a conventional military attack vulnerable defended government troops or
officials. The insurgents then disperse and remove their uniforms
and go back into hiding. If this keeps up and the insurgents manage to recruit
civilians and win popular support, the insurgents may be able to take control
of territory. If they keep taking territory, they can eventually overthrow a
government.
What changed was that as the
military planners of the countries with advanced technology gradually made more
use of telephone and radio to quickly report attacks and troop transport
helicopters to very rapidly bring reinforcements to try and encircle insurgents
who did the attack, preventing the insurgents’ escape. The more available advanced communications
and transport were, the more this hurt the insurgents.
In response to this situation,
those people willing to kill and die to bring about a change (but only if they
stood a chance of succeeding), had to change tactics. They had to go into the
cities where the government could not use its powerful weapons without also
hitting non-combatants and where it was possible to get back into hiding much
more quickly before the government could try to encircle the insurgents after
an attack. This is the shift from rural guerilla warfare to urban guerilla
warfare.
This shift also meant that the
insurgents would be approaching targets in cities where there were lots of
people, cops, and government troops around. Therefore, insurgents could not
both wear uniforms that identified them on the way to an attack and still have
any hope of and carrying out that attack. Nor could they mass in large numbers
since that would also be obvious and foil their plans. They learned that their
best chance required attacking while in civilian clothes, in small numbers, and
preferably attack in ways where they would not be caught.
What this means is that the weaker
side in an unequal armed conflict will break the law of war that says
combatants shall wear uniforms and fight away from civilians if they want to
keep fighting effectively. Remote-detonated bombs and long range attacks
with concealed vehicle mounted artillery [mortars] have been popular forms of
attack. More recently, suicide bombings in foot or by vehicle have become
popular. As have the attacks with suddenly revealed launchers for Rocket
Propelled Grenades (RPGs).
The “law of war” about wearing
uniforms was created to protect civilians by making it obvious who is dangerous
to soldiers and who is not, so soldiers don’t confuse civilians for insurgents
and shoot (arrest, imprison) civilians by accident.
As more wars are fought in
environments of fast communication and transport that makes traditional
guerilla war impractical, people wanting to fight against a government will
adopt tactics which seriously endanger civilians by making government troops
extra nervous around all civilians who might just be insurgents. Note the
incidents of innocent Iraqis being shot when driving towards road checkpoints
in U.S. occupied Iraq. This happened because the U.S. troops couldn’t
distinguish those civilians from suicide bombers and the civilians didn’t
respond to orders to stop.
Most people think urban guerilla
warfare hardly resembles war, and it often gets called terrorism. Note though
hat the British didn’t think the way the U.S. army fought in the War of
Independence resembled war either. Certainly, the fact that urban guerilla
warfare endangers civilians more than modern conventional wars do is certainly
a reason to condemn it and pressure the “weak” sides of conflicts to find
different tactics. But wherever there are societies that don’t have an adequate
way for angry groups with conflicting goals to resolve their disputes
peacefully, there will be armed conflict. So don’t expect disapproval and
“anti-terrorist” measures alone are going to solve the problem.
It is important to note here that
there is a distinction be tween groups with a political agenda trying to kill
civilians and cause fear to get the result they want versus groups trying to
find a way to kill enemy soldiers without getting counter-attacked. The latter
has some connection to what people think of as war. Bombing from aircraft, missiles,
and artillery are used precisely because they are a way of destroying enemies
without giving the enemy a chance to immediately counter-attack. It is the
decision to intentionally or recklessly harm civilians in order to create fear
and chaos that distinguishes terrorism from war.
Globalization and perceived
threats to community and identity
The other part of increased
motive to carry out terrorism doesn’t have to do with the requirements on
effective use of force, but rather with what is making people in certain groups
so angry they’re willing to kill and die.
Rifkin writes about the bad
effects of more efficient production technology leading to increased
unemployment, crime, ineffective demand, withdrawal from community by the
wealthy, and widening gaps between rich and poor. As bad as those problems are
in the developed world (U.S., Japan, Europe) they’re worse in most developing
countries. The main difference is that the sector losing jobs is agriculture
(particularly small-scale farming), and it is industry jobs that are not being
created fast enough to fill the lost agriculture jobs, and there is effectively
no “social safety net”.
Sometimes more intensive
contact with the outside world can be what starts epidemics of disease (like
AIDS) or drug addiction in communities of people that never had those problems
before. Sometimes increased contact with people from the outside world during a
period of economic depression and high unemployment can lead to increased
prostitution and organized crime. This can cause people to become desperate to
find a solution to what is destroying their society. And if they think their
government is responsible to the problem they might resort to political
violence.
Sometimes widespread
exposure to the news and entertainment media created by the developed world,
can encourage a desire in viewers to want to live lives more like the lives of
the people they see in the media: with more material things, and more freedom
and equality in their lives. How this could lead people to demand more honest
and more democratic government is well understood and accepted. But these same
sorts of desires also lead individuals to become less “traditional”. This means
they challenge long-standing relationships of power and control in their
society; between man and woman, elder and junior, cleric and lay person. The
people who used to have most of the power in these relations (men, clerics,
elders) and are beginning to lose that power and are frequently angry about
their loss of power in these relationships.
These upset groups believe
that something must be done, by force if necessary, to restore their rightful
authority for the good of their society. Since there are many religious people
in the developing world, this desire to restore old power relationships may be
combined with a belief that these new relationships in their society are
somehow offensive to their religion (which sanctions those old power
relationships). They think loss of the old relations is morally wrong because
the changes violate long-held religious moral codes. Angry people see things
like rising drug addiction, prostitution, materialism, corruption, social
inequality, or crime and this only reinforces their beliefs. Sometimes
nationalist feelings can lead people to hate their government for not being
more successful (or interested) in dominating neighboring countries.
These are some of the ways
that people become attracted by the idea of using force to restore the old
ways, when life was better and the “right” people had the power. This is how
potentially violent fundamentalist movements with a grudge against the modern
world get started. Governments then frequently do things for a variety of
reasons that can aggravate such groups’ hatred and desire to use force.
Globalization: developed nations with global interests getting involved in developing countries’ internal power struggles
In recent times large
powerful countries like the U.S. have accumulated international investments and
trade relationships they depend upon all over the world. Such countries may
have security and/or economic interests in seeing a political group they favor
gain control or maintain control in another country. (Though it is a very good
idea to reflect on who really benefits whenever the words “national interest”
are used)
For example: The U.S.
government has a fear that unfriendly leaders might gain control over large
portions of the oil supply and manipulate world energy prices in order to harm
the U.S. economy and force the U.S. to do something. Preventing this from
happening has shaped U.S. Middle East policy.
If a powerful country has an
interest in what happens in a relatively weak country, the powerful country may
be able to use force or military aid to ensure that their favored group rises
to power or fights off challengers in that country. People in that weak
country who suffer because of the corruption or use of force by that “favored
group” are going to blame that powerful country backing that “favored group”
for their suffering. Such angry people may decide to attack civilians from
that powerful country to express their anger at those outside countries’
military support of a hated government.
Globalization: Increased
mobility of people, money, and computer access across continents.
People from these countries who
are angry about social changes and/or support for hated governments have an
easier time traveling to developed nations to carry out their attacks since international
travel is increasingly cheap and common. Once they arrive these people do
not necessarily attract attention to themselves because of their ethnicity.
Most of the developed nations are multicultural societies which already have
large peaceful immigrant populations from the same country/region that
terrorists comes from. Note too that domestic terrorism (for example the
radical left/right domestic terrorists in the U.S./Europe, or the sectarian
bombings in Northern Ireland) shows that terrorists don’t just come from
abroad, and keeping people out won’t make the problem go away.
Wealthy people in these weak
countries who wish to help pay for attacks against the strong countries can take
advantage of the advanced global system for moving money from one place to
another very quickly. This makes it easier for terrorist groups to acquire
the equipment, weapons, documents, etc. they need for their attacks.
Technically skilled people
in these weak countries can use the internet to launch attacks meant to disrupt
the operation of sensitive computer systems that can cause harm and chaos if
those systems malfunction. Systems like electrical power grids, long-distance
telephone networks, large internet service providers, drinking water or sewage
treatment plants, traffic light systems, banks, etc. The really high security
systems like at nuclear power plants and air traffic control centers may be
well protected now, but many less important systems have weaker security.
Increased dependence on large scale centralized technologies that must work as expected, all the time
The search for ever greater
efficiency and convenience has led to the adoption of technologies with
inherent risks. These risks, and the harm done when risk becomes reality, are
part of the price paid for efficiency and convenience. Note that one of the
reasons the Amish don’t use cars is they don’t want to be involved in
potentially lethal high-speed traffic accidents. Modern society is filled with
instances where many people can be harmed unless systems work correctly.
·
Planes can crash if
something on the plane or in the traffic control system fails.
·
Tall buildings can
collapse and crush occupants if damaged sufficiently.
·
In large population
centers, where there is not enough Well water to support everyone like in
thinly populated areas, people can get sick and possibly die from contaminated
water if centralized water treatment systems fail.
·
People at home whose
health depends on using electrical devices can be harmed by a power outage in the
electrical grid that makes their devices stop working.
·
Angry employees at
manufacturing plants that use large amounts of toxic chemicals can vent huge
amounts of lethal substances into the air or water near cities and towns. This
actually happened in Bhopal, India.
·
Sometimes the systems
designed to contain highly toxic substances can fail and cause massive
contamination even when nobody wants that to happen. This actually happened at
the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl and nearly happened at Three Mile Island.
·
The wide installation
of Microsoft operating systems (OS) on computers (as opposed to Linux operating
systems offered by other companies) means that a virus or worm that is good at
attacking and taking over computers with Microsoft OS will quickly spread to a
large number of machines since all the Windows machines share the same
vulnerabilities. Some of those Microsoft OS computers might be serving
important functions that people depend on.
·
The wide planting of
genetically identical seeds (that maximize crop yields and profits) in farmers
fields across the country means that the growing corn, wheat, etc. are all
vulnerable to precisely the same pests and diseases. This creates additional
danger to the food supply from a very widespread blight (fungus disease) or and
explosion in the kinds of pest populations because there are no genetic
“breaks” to stop the spread of what is destroying the crops. If the U.S. is has engineered diseases to
attack drug crops like poppy and coca, it is not hard to imagine people
engineering diseases to attack our most widely planted food crops.
Terrorists can use the
centralized, monolithic, and fragile nature of such systems to do a lot of
damage with minimal effort. But centralized, monolithic, and fragile systems are
also the most profitable to operate and may often be the cheapest for the
consumer except when the system fails. That’s why such systems are so common in
a market economy.
The TV program “Dateline”
has been parodied for their tendency to play on audiences’ fears of sudden
death in order to get them to watch the program. This is an instance of the
larger “if it bleeds, it leads”, attitude of TV news producers who believe
viewers are fascinated by violence and conflict. TV networks are large
expensive businesses that want to maximize the number of viewers to increase
ratings and advertising rates. The network news divisions do their part for the
company by emphasizing stories that will draw people’s attention and keep it.
This means that terrorist
attacks’ ability to induce fear and communicate their demands is magnified.
When attacks are covered by an unrestricted and profit-driven news media, the
media will report on such events heavily every time. And even people far away
from the location of the attack can see what happened there and hear the
reasons the terrorists give for the attack.
Weapons of Mass
Destruction are those which are
usually too destructive and uncontrollable in effect to serve any conventional
military purpose. But they are relatively cheap ways of killing a very large
number of people and causing a lot of chaos. These include nuclear,
radiological, chemical, and biological weapons.
Dual-Use Technologies are technologies that can be used for both peaceful
applications and to build weapons. Some dual-use technologies can be used to
make weapons of mass destruction.
Nuclear weapons are based on small explosives compressing enough
weapons-grade uranium or plutonium into a small enough volume that uncontrolled
fission starts and a nuclear explosion results. Weapons like this can be built using engineering knowledge and
equipment associated with a nuclear power generators, plus a trivial bit of
research on non-secret sources on nuclear weapons. If the terrorist isn’t
worried about getting the largest possible explosion from the bomb, then much
of the nuclear engineering knowledge and facilities are optional.
The only real hurdle is the
acquisition of weapons-grade fissionable material or the equipment needed to
create weapons grade material out of non-weapons grade material. Thus the
location, use, and transfer of these things are very tightly controlled and
monitored by the UN and the powerful countries that already have nuclear
weapons. The current dispute with Iran is their reluctance to cooperate in that
monitoring system. There is also the fear that existing nuclear weapons in the
hands of weaker national governments might somehow leave the government’s
control and end up in the hands of terrorists.
Radiological weapons are designed to use conventional explosive to
disperse highly radioactive isotopes into the air in powdered form. Contact
with this powder will cause radiation sickness and cancer. It will also create
a very slow and expensive decontamination effort. Radiological weapons worry
governments a great deal because even if they don’t destroy large areas and the
contaminated area may be smaller than with an atomic bomb (assuming fleeing
people don’t spread the contaminant by carrying it on their clothes) it is not
nearly as difficult to make a radiological bomb because there is no need for
weapons-grade fissionable materials.
Chemical weapons disperse in the air either man-made chemicals or
artificially-concentrated versions of natural chemicals which have some effect
on people that contact the substance. Chemical weapons can be non-lethal like
tear gas or pepper gas or very lethal like mustard/chlorine gas, or nerve gas.
Usually when people say chemical weapons they mean the lethal kind.
Chemical weapons are less
attractive for governments to acquire because it’s a hard technical problem to
put them on warheads of very long range missiles and make them disperse correctly
on impact. So they aren’t good alternatives to a nuclear deterrent. Nor are
they particularly useful in conventional warfare because most enemy soldiers
carry chemical protection gear and winds are unpredictable. They’re also banned
for use in warfare and using them will have international repercussions. This
hasn’t stopped some governments including the U.S. from producing such weapons
though.
Producing lethal chemical
weapons is significantly easier than nuclear weapons because it is harder to
limit access to all the necessary materials and equipment to make it. This is
hard because the same materials and equipment and knowledge to make common
forms of nerve gas can also be used to make pesticides for agriculture. As
pesticide production spreads around the world to developing countries wanting
to increase their food production, so will opportunities to make chemical
weapons. This increasing ease of production of chemical weapons will happen
even though the powerful countries are trying to control access to the
“precursor” chemicals which can most easily be turned into chemical
weapons.
Biological Weapons are based on disease causing, usually contagious,
micro-organisms like viruses, spores, and bacteria. Some commonly mentioned
ones are Smallpox and Anthrax, but the list of possible organisms is long and
the effects of several of them are very ugly. These are even less attractive to
governments than chemical weapons because they’re slow to work, the duration
and area of the weapon’s effect is unknown, and they’re very hard disperse them
over a wide area with an explosion without killing most of the
spore/virus/bacteria.
But (some) bio-weapons are
even easier to produce than chemical weapons, and they can be highly
contagious, and hard to treat victims of. Small amounts of bio-weapons can kill
a much larger number of people in a densely populated area and cause more chaos
than an equivalent amount of chemical weapon, partly because of the delayed
effect and contagion. This seems likely to make such weapons attractive to
terrorists.
Some of the equipment and
skills used in drug and vaccine research/production can also be used for
growing large amounts of spores/viruses/bacteria, assuming a sample of is
available.
WHAT CAN BE DONE TO REDUCE MEANS, MOTIVE AND OPPORTUNITY TO COMMIT TERRORISM
The
proliferation
(spread) of dual-use equipment and skills to the developing countries means that if
nothing is done, the available means for a few people to hurt a lot of people is
going to increase. So doing nothing probably means increasing terrorism. So what can
be done to reduce means, motive, and opportunity to commit terrorism?
Reducing Motives for terrorism:
In the long run, with the
proliferation and advance of technology, the fact is that there will be an ever-increasing
number of practical ways for a few people to kill a lot of people (for more on
this see here).
This means that simply spending more and more on security (at the expense of
things like education and the environment) and giving up more and more of our
right to privacy is not going to protect us, just erode our quality of life.
Terrorists think of ways to defeat new security measures, that’s what they do.
So we have to move towards a world that creates fewer terrorists who want to do
us harm and fewer people willing to support them.
The single best way to
accomplish this is for the U.S. (and U.S. businesses operating in foreign
countries) to stop getting involved in the internal power struggles of other
countries. This may result in the U.S. having some problems with unfriendly
governments coming to power in those countries. Such unfriendly governments may
frustrate U.S. foreign policy goals, be abusive of some of their people’s human
rights, and that government may be corrupt.
None of that will be
pleasant to sit by and let happen. It is always more enjoyable to get one’s way
than to not get one’s way. However, the important benefit of non-intervention
should not be forgotten: that the U.S. will not be blamed and targeted for
terrorist attacks by groups that the U.S. helped repress. In addition, the U.S.
won’t face the situations like the one between the U.S. and Iran where a group
the U.S. had tried to keep out of power wound up taking control of the country
anyway, and has been hostile to the U.S. ever since.
Corporations with a
developed nation origin also have been known to get involved in the internal
politics/society of developing countries, assisting some groups and helping
them against other groups in order to get more a more favorable business
environment. This also creates future enemies for the country such corporations
are identified with.
The governments of powerful
countries and powerful corporations could decide to stop interfering in the
politics of weak nations to serve their own interests. If there is a legitimate
international humanitarian or security crisis in a weak country, the U.N. or
regional multilateral organizations (like those in Africa or Latin America) are
the appropriate way to use force to respond to that crisis. The collective
nature of such organizations should usually prevent the use of military force
for selfish reasons by one or two countries.
Reducing the motives for terrorism arising from the negative effects of globalization
Powerful countries should
identify those groups in weak countries who feel like everything they care
about politically or morally is being destroyed. People who feel that way are
far more willing to use terrorism (and particularly the
harder-to-defend-against suicide variety). Once we identify such groups, we
have to talk to them to see if there may be something the U.S. can do to
address their grievances that doesn't offend our values or hurt our interests
too much.
Those on opposite side of
the right to abortion question in the U.S. have begun dialogues with their
enemies despite their severe and at times violent disagreement. They have been
cooperating some on encouraging adoption and birth control, something they can
both generally support. And maybe they’ve developed a less hateful and
demonizing view of their opponents in the process.
All this rhetoric by Bush
and others to the effect of "they attacked us because America stands for
freedom" is misleading because it obscures the terrorists' specific
political grievances.
Yes, it is true that many
believers in radical Islam want very un-free theocratic societies in
predominantly Muslim countries. But sometimes people will settle for less than
they want. Some fundamentalists might instead settle for slower change in their
societies that continue to respect their beliefs. This means that society may
have to change a bit slower in introducing of things into their culture that
are an anathema to their traditional systems of morality. Equal rights for women is something we may
not be able to negotiate on, but there could be room on helping them keep
things their religion says is bad (such as pork, alcohol, and pornography) out of
their countries. And by talking we might uncover other possible areas of
compromise.
I mentioned toward the
beginning of the article that there may be some changes occurring in a
developing nations’ society such as rapid increases in disease and crime that
groups like these may also deeply resent. Or they may resent the corruption of
government officials. Developed nations should have no moral problem in helping
developing countries to solve those problems and give people fewer reasons to
resport to terrorism.
There are also political
goals Islamic terrorist groups hold that are not necessarily antithetical to
freedom. While we want to avoid looking like we are rewarding terrorism, the
U.S. eventually has to get Israel to stop and, later, undo the settlement of
Jews in occupied territories Israel took over after their victory in 1973.
Israeli settlement of the occupied territories has done more than anything else
to deny the freedom of the Palestinians living there, radicalize Palestinians
(and their friends) and destabilize a region that the U.S. very much needs to
be stable.
Developed nations are
already working to identify the religious schools that advocate hate and
terrorism. Once such schools are identified governments can try to shut them
down (or get the local authorities to do so) and keep the people running them
from opening new schools. This should be continued but there should be a fair
and open appeal process so that governments don’t simply shut down schools simply
because they strongly criticize U.S., Israeli, or the local country’s policies.
Recall that above it was
noted that the spread of some of the technology and expertise needed for making
things like nuclear power, pesticides, vaccines and drugs can also be used to
produce weapons of mass destruction.
It is probably not practical
to prevent everyone who might eventually become a terrorist from getting access
to of knowledge or equipment that are basic to a modern society. There are
often going to be people willing to undermine such controls on the sale of such
equipment or who would be willing to let someone come to their country to learn
how to use such technology for their normal uses.
Consider what happens if
only some of the countries with this technology ban the export of such dual-use
technology and do not permit people from certain countries to study this
technology at the developed nation’s universities. When other countries permit
both of these things despite the ban, the banning country will lose both export
sales and the contributions foreign students and visiting scholars make to the
institutions they attend.
Such broad technology
proliferation bans while not very effective, will increase the cost to acquire
such technologies for the countries targeted by such bans. This is likely to
antagonize the people from the countries targeted by the ban, which may have
valid reasons for wanting to learn about and to produce pesticides, drugs,
vaccines and in some cases perhaps even nuclear power, to meet real needs their
countries have.
However, it is probably
possible to identify some core pieces of equipment and materials which are only
irreplaceable for someone wanting to build weapons of mass destruction. An
effort should be made to get as many as possible of the producers and owners of
such things to participate in a system designed to keep such things out of the
hands of terrorists. But except in the case of nuclear weapons and the need for
fissile material or uranium enriching equipment, there aren’t any real “magic
bullets” which will greatly hinder efforts to develop weapons of mass
destruction.
Recall that improvements in
the transport of people and money were two of the things that increased the
opportunities for terrorism. It is not practical or ethical to restrict the use
of transportation by all people who share the ethnicity or citizenship of
people in terrorist groups. Ethnic profiling is likely to anger many
non-terrorist people from the same ethnic group as the terrorists which
authorities are trying to protect against. This is likely to be
counter-productive. It also underestimates the risk of people from outside the
targeted group (like Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber).
Using no-fly lists of names
of known or suspected terrorists to restrict their travel to or within the U.S.
has supposedly kept some dangerous people off of planes. But no-fly lists also
create a system where innocent people who happen to share the name of people on
the list (even if they are different ethnicity and/or gender!) can no longer
fly or can fly only if they are willing to put up with a severe amount of
hassle. Such systems have been consistently very bad at helping such innocent people
hurt by them, because governments won’t share their reasons for watch-listing
people and are very reluctant to remove people from these lists.
It is most practical and
hurts the fewest innocent people to increase the transparency in financial
systems and have investigators follow the money. This will make it easier for
police to trace the flow of money to terrorists so that organizations that
serve as conduits for money to known terrorist groups and people who fund
terrorists can be shut down and the terrorists’ funding sources gradually dried
up.
Recall that it was noted
earlier that terrorists can exploit the centralized, monolithic, and fragile
nature of a variety of technological systems including (among other things)
computer networking software, agricultural production, and electrical power
generation. The fragile nature of such systems allow terrorists to produce a
lot of harm and chaos with relatively little effort. It is time to start
changing how we operate those systems to make them les centralized, less
monolithic, and less fragile, even if that hurts consumers who want the
absolute lowest prices and Microsoft, the big power companies, and big
agribusinesses that are heavily invested in these vulnerable systems and profit
from them as they currently exist.
© Shayne Weyker, 2003