History News Network, WA
Aug 14 2005

Series: What America Needs to Do to Achieve Its Foreign Policy Goals
.. Dealing with Terrorism (4).
By William R. Polk

Mr. Polk taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1961 when he was appointed a
member of the Policy Planning Council of the US State Department. In
1965 he became professor of history at the University of Chicago
and founded its Middle Eastern Studies Center. Subsequently, he also
became president of the Adlai Stevenson Institute of International
Affairs. Among his books are The United States and the Arab World,
The Elusive Peace: The Middle East in the Twentieth Century,
Neighbors and Strangers: the Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs and
the just-published Understanding Iraq. Other of his writings can be
accessed on

What is now being done about terrorism has proven ineffective. We
begin with misunderstanding what “terrorism” is.1 It is not a thing,
a place or a group. To speak of waging war on it is vacuous. It is
simply a tactic which is used in desperation by those who do not
have power comparable to those they regard as their enemies. It is
the weapon of the weak.

There are several reasons for our failure to develop a strategy to
counter it. The fundamental reason is that large numbers of people
believe that it is their only means of action. Most believe themselves
to be under alien occupation and are fighting desperately to liberate
themselves. In Iraq the struggle is against our occupation. In what
is left of Palestine it is against the Israeli occupiers (who most
non-Americans see as American surrogates) . In Cecnya it is against the
Russians. This form of nationalist struggle is age old. Our ancestors
used terrorism in the mainly guerrilla war we call the American
Revolution; the Armenians used it against the Ottoman Empire in the
first decade of the 20 th century; the Irish used it for centuries
against the British; various underground resistance movements in
Europe used it against the Germans during the Second World War. In
recent times, it has been played out against the British ( Kenya
and elsewhere), Belgians (The Congo), French ( Algeria) and Chinese
( Tibet and Sinkiang or ” Turkistan”). When we approved the cause of
any one of these groups, we regarded them as “freedom fighters.” When
we did not, we called them “terrorists.”

A second kind of motivation arises when groups of people regard
their governments as corrupt, anti-national and/or unreligious. The
predominant current example is the collection of different ethnic
groups we lump together as al-Qa cida and believe to be controlled
by Usama bin Ladin. These groups target us because they believe that
we are the upholders of regimes they regard as tyrannical. Having
despaired of secular nationalism, these people have espoused religious
fundamentalism – they think of their movement as salafiya.

The word means both to “return” and to “advance.” It is roughly the
mindset of the European and American Puritan movement which similarly
adopted the notion that they were delegated by God to cleanse the
world. Its beliefs are strikingly similar, with the change of a few
names and dates, to religious fundamentalism among Hindus, Buddhists,
Jews and Christians.

The nature of the groups that participate in this form of violent
theology and/or violent politics is complex. In my study of all the
major examples of guerrilla warfare since the Second World War, I
concluded that in every episode, it was possible and useful to identify
five major groups. The first, obviously, was made up of combatants or,
as the French called them in occupied France and colonial Algeria,
resistants. They are necessarily few in number. In the Algerian war,
they never numbered over about 13,000 at any given time; in occupied
France that was about the number before the German collapse; in Iraq,
the number is about the same today. In the Palestine Mandate, they
are far fewer. They are the people the great practitioner of guerrilla
warfare, Mao Zedong, referred to as the “fish.”

Supporting them are people Mao called “the sea.” While they carry
on their normal functions in society, they supply, hide and give
information to the combatants. They also are the recruiting ground
from which killed or captured combatants are replaced. This group
numbers many times the actual fighting force. Its numbers vary with
the intensity of the conflict but usually can be estimated to at
least 20 times the number of combatants.

The third group is an opportunistic criminal element which is
given scope by the breakdown of public order that is an inevitable
consequence of guerrilla warfare. It is usually quite small but
overlaps with and is tolerated or encouraged by the combatants both
because it distracts their enemies and because it often is a source
of funds. Occasionally, it merges into the ranks of the combatants.

Armenian terrorists in Istanbul occasionally robbed banks; the IRA has
done the same; and, in Iraq today, criminal gangs kidnap people from
whom ransoms can be collected. In Afghanistan, Cecnya and Colombia,
drug dealing plays a similar role.

The fourth and largest group is made up of those who simply want
to be left alone. They can be radicalized by the policies of the
occupying power, by nationalism or by religion but, as a group, they
are generally passive victims. The fifth group is made up of those
who support the regime. In the American Revolution, these people
were called “Loyalists” and in Algeria they formed the basis for the
French-empowered harkis (auxiliary or light troops). In the defeat
of the dominant regime, they are usually forced into exile as the
Loyalists were to Canada and the harkis and others were to France.

It does not appear that the American government fully understands
what motivates these separate groups or how they interact.

In Iraq, the major American thrust has been against the combatants.

This tactic has never worked. As individuals are put out of action,
jailed or killed, others replace them. Consequently, terrorism or
guerrilla warfare can last for centuries (as it did in Ireland and
has in Cecnya). America and other powers have been operating at the
wrong end of the challenge. Even if the repression is absolutely
brutal, as practiced by the British in Kenya, the French in Algeria,
the Russians in Cecnya ( Chechnya) and the Israelis in Palestine,
the more hatred is generated and the more people move from the group
that is passive to the group that is supportive of the combatants.

History shows that the only way to stop the fighting is to dry up
the “sea.” That is, when enough of the society believes that it has
achieved a satisfactory result of the struggle, it ceases to support
the combatants. That is not the result of such gimmicks as “civic
action” or even of genuine aid projects but only when the irritant,
the outside power, leaves. The sequence is: sovereignty comes before
security, not, as we are attempting in Iraq, to achieve security
before according sovereignty. That is what happened in Ireland in 1921,
in what became Israel in 1948, in Algeria in 1962. Northern Ireland,
in Cecnya, Occupied Palestine and Iraq illustrate what happens when
the dominant power attempts to reverse the order: the war continues.

In short, it is evident that terrorism or guerrilla warfare arises
from political motivations and therefore must be addressed in
those terms. Unless the dominant power is willing to engage in
genocide, as the Romans did against the Britons, (occasioning
Tacitus’s famous remark that the Romans “create a desolation and
call it peace”) it cannot be defeated by military means. Indeed,
the more powerful and pervasive the military suppression, the more
members of the “sea” become “fish.” We see this in Iraq. There,
virtually the entire non-Kurdish population is made up of people who
have lost relatives, friends, neighbors and their property in the
counter-guerrilla/terrorist war. The numbers illustrate the point. In
2003, American intelligence estimated the active combatants at a few
hundred; in early 2004, the estimates had risen to a few thousand;
today they stand at 15-20 thousand.

The longer the clash lasts, the more profound its aftereffects. A
prolonged clash inevitably distorts, wounds and dehumanizes both the
dominant power and its opponents. The chaos it creates breeds warlords,
gangsters and thugs as we see so clearly today in Afghanistan and
Cecnya. Algeria still has not recovered from the brutal war it fought
against colonial France from 1830 to 1962.

Worse, in fighting the inevitably dirty war, the dominant power engages
in tactics that corrupt its own values. The very civilization of France
was nearly ruined by the Algerian war; the early Zionists would be
horrified by what is happening to the Israelis in their occupation of
the Palestinians; and I shudder to think of the effect of American
tactics (and individual fear) on the young Americans engaged in
Iraq. Humiliating actions, torture, even murder become habitual.

The American government, forgetting our own “freedom fighters,”
proclaims terrorism irredeemably evil. But, understandably, it does not
always and everywhere oppose terrorism. We and the British supported
attempts at terrorism against the occupying Nazi forces in various
parts of Europe during the Second World War. We were intimately
involved with terrorist groups in Central America during the Reagan
Administration. More recently, it appears the US government is giving
covert arms assistance to a Colombian anti-FARQ paramilitary group
which it has labeled terrorist.2 This is dangerously short-sighted
as was our condonance of the Nicaraguan Contra rebels and Guatemalan
death squads.

What America needs to do is to align its policies in accord with
President Woodrow Wilson’s proclamation on self-determination of
peoples. We live in a world of states but there are many nations
that have not achieved statehood. That is, they are communities
which are linked by culture, ethnicity and neighborhood but live in
states where they are regarded and regard themselves as alien. Most
of the tumult so evident in our times is a result of this anomaly:
the politically deprived groups struggle to achieve self-determination.

The histories of the Kurds, Palestinians, Cecens are only the more
familiar of the experiences of dozens of unfulfilled nations. Once,
America was a beacon of hope for them. We should aspire to become
that again. But, above all, we must avoid actions that others will
see as an attack on their sense of nationhood. That is where we must
begin the “war on terrorism.”

1 Although partly for reasons different from mine, this is the point
made by the former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke
in Against All Enemies ( New York: Free Press, 2004).

2 Frank Smyth, “US Arms for Terrorists?” (The Nation, June 13, 2005.)