
Terrorism is not about terror - kiba
http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror
======
run4yourlives
Kill One, terrorize a thousand - Sun Tzu.

Wistful meanderings in to pop-sociology aside, terrorism is a component of
general guerrilla warfare. Guerrilla warfare itself is a valid and often very
successful strategy to winning a conflict where there are vast resource and
power projection differences between combatants. Two episodes in US history
are pretty accurate portrayals of this - the American Revolution and the
Vietnam War.

Terrorism's number one use is still simply a tactic of a regional conflict
where one side is employing guerrilla strategies, exactly inline with Sun
Tzu's teachings.

The more modern "common" use of the word is simply an extension of the
conflict to the global scale; Jihadists and others are involved in an epic
guerrilla war against the entire planet - they are looking to remake the world
in their vision. It's rather simple and straightforward to see where terrorism
fits in this respect.

The article is academic to the point of meaninglessness.

~~~
gwern
> Two episodes in US history are pretty accurate portrayals of this - the
> American Revolution and the Vietnam War.

I couldn't have asked for a better example of selection bias. Do you have any
idea how many revolts or revolutions the English empire had to deal with over
the centuries? And you pick _one_ and claim this vindicates the method? And as
for Vietnam, the Vietcong were largely destroyed after the Tet offensive - it
wasn't the Vietcong who conquered South Vietnam, it was the regular troops.

~~~
run4yourlives
I picked those examples because I figured most people are familiar enough with
them. I'm in no way asserting that guerrilla warfare is a perfect method of
fighting or that it somehow guarentees success. At best it's 60/40.

That being said, I'm not quite sure what you are arguing. If you are
suggesting that the US was victorious in Vietnam you're missing the point.
Winning the battle but not the war, as it were.

If you think Vietnam is too unique, feel free to substitute the boer war, the
war in Angola, the soviets vs. the afghans, etc etc etc. It's not like there
are a lack of examples.

~~~
gwern
> I'm in no way asserting that guerrilla warfare is a perfect method of
> fighting or that it somehow guarentees success. At best it's 60/40.

And to reiterate my point about selection bias, I think you are wildly
optimistic about its success and that a proper sample of hundreds of conflicts
- include the less known ones - will show a lower success rate.

> It's not like there are a lack of examples.

You've named like, 10. That's better than most people could and I applaud it,
but it's still nowhere near an answer.

~~~
run4yourlives
Listen, if you want to force me to conduct an exhaustive review of every
conflict in human history, you better at least provide something other than
your opinion as a counterpoint.

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rickmb
One could analyze peaceful political movements based on their stated original
goals, ignore all results that only partially meet those goals, and conclude
that the vast majority are hardly more effective than terrorism.

Not to mention the fact that "terrorism" itself is a propaganda term. No
organisation calls itself "terrorist", and it is used to label a broad range
of tactics. There are plenty of terrorist organisations that have never killed
anyone or never targeted innocent civilians.

This focuses completely on the most extreme forms of terrorism, the islamic
extremists with their suicide attacks. A form of terrorism that has been quite
rare in the West, despite all of the publicity. And one could argue that those
have been quite successful so far: with only a few successful attempts,
they've gotten our full, almost daily, attention for over a decade now.

~~~
gwern
> One could analyze peaceful political movements based on their stated
> original goals, ignore all results that only partially meet those goals, and
> conclude that the vast majority are hardly more effective than terrorism.

Could you point to where in the studies they ignore the results? Go ahead,
I'll wait.

> There are plenty of terrorist organisations that have never killed anyone or
> never targeted innocent civilians.

Name three.

> This focuses completely on the most extreme forms of terrorism, the islamic
> extremists with their suicide attacks. A form of terrorism that has been
> quite rare in the West, despite all of the publicity.

If you look, you'll find plenty of non-suicide attacks; and the suicide
attacks are not all Islamic - the Tamil Tigers (1979-2009) are an excellent
example of terrorist failure.

> And one could argue that those have been quite successful so far: with only
> a few successful attempts, they've gotten our full, almost daily, attention
> for over a decade now.

Well, I'm glad their ambitions were just to beat Snooki in ratings - like
Osama bin Laden before his late demise, they can take consolation in watching
Fox News.

~~~
ucee054
> Name Three

PETA, GreenPeace and IHH have all been called "terrorist".

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-
terrorism#Groups_accused_of...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eco-
terrorism#Groups_accused_of_eco-terrorism)

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IHH_(Turkish_NGO)>

Yeah, GreenPeace kill innocent civilians every day.</sarcasm>

~~~
gwern
I didn't say called terrorist, I said are terrorist; what laws apply to them?
Are they on anyone's watch lists? Are they treated by anyone as terrorists?
Greenpeace has disavowed its more violent early days; BTW, the citation in
Wikipedia doesn't actually say what you think it says:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080311231725/http://www.fbi.gov...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080311231725/http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress02/jarboe021202.htm)
C-f for 'Greenpeace':

> Since 1977, when disaffected members of the ecological preservation group
> Greenpeace formed the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and attacked
> commercial fishing operations by cutting drift nets, acts of "eco-terrorism"
> have occurred around the globe. The FBI defines eco-terrorism as the use or
> threatened use of violence of a criminal nature against innocent victims or
> property by an environmentally-oriented, subnational group for
> environmental-political reasons, or aimed at an audience beyond the target,
> often of a symbolic nature.

So it was 'disaffected members' 40 years ago and the acts themselves only are
'eco-terrorism'. This is not a ringing endorsement of your claim that
Greenpeace has been called a terrorist organization.

There is no citation for PETA.

And people have died in their Greenpeace activities and IHH's activities have
led to even more deaths, so if you want to be a stickler about innocent
civilians...

~~~
ucee054
I want to be a stickler about logic:

"Innocent civilian IHH members have been killed" != "IHH members have killed
innocent civilians"

"Innocent civilian IHH members have been killed" != "IHH members are
terrorists"

Stop being ridiculous.

------
liber8
The blog post starts from the premise that Max Abrahm's 2008 paper is correct.
The paper states:

 _The strategic model—the dominant paradigm in terrorism studies—posits that
terrorists are political utility maximizers. According to this view,
individuals resort to terrorism when the expected political gains minus the
expected costs outweigh the net expected benefits of alternative forms of
protest._

So sure, terrorism is pretty ineffective you really believe that it's about
affecting meaningful political reform. And, maybe he can find examples of that
in the past. But that doesn't seem to jibe with today's reality vis a vis
islamic jihadists. Does this kid really believe Al-queda is full of totally
rational political activists, not just brainwashed losers who have an excuse
to inflict pain on people?

Frankly, Alfred's quote from The Dark Knight is a much better theory of what
motivates these guys than Abrahms' "rational political actor" theory.

~~~
gwern
> Does this kid really believe Al-queda is full of totally rational political
> activists, not just brainwashed losers who have an excuse to inflict pain on
> people?

I don't believe they are either. Terrorists are not all psychopaths or
sadists; not even more than a few of them, no more than US soldiers shooting
Japanese prisoners or prying gold teeth out of skulls were psychopaths or
sadists.

Sorry, but life is not as simple as movie quotes might have you believe.
They're _stories_ , _fiction_ , and people invoking them for real-world
discussions when there is plenty of actual data to discuss is one of the most
disturbing aspects of fiction for me. Some people seem to think they are real.

------
patrickgzill
Without a discussion of the extensive use of false flag terrorism, I think it
is best to say that this article is "facile".

E.g. Lavon Affair (Israeli attempts to plant bombs and blame them on Muslim
Brotherhood), <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag#As_pretexts_for_war>
and so forth.

~~~
tkahn6
I suppose that statement is true iff you believe false flag terrorism is not
uncommon.

~~~
ktizo
Historically it seems reasonably common as it comes from a well used tactic
during the days of privateers. It seems unlikely that the governments of the
world would suddenly give up such an obviously useful tactic through some sort
of singular moral awakening, yet still go wage war with ever increasing levels
of mechanised death.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
And yet the number of specific incidents for which we have evidence of a
false-flag attack being carried out is relatively small.

------
mcantelon
Seems similar to the appeal of gangs: giving a sense of purpose, "family"
ties, and the promise of action. Both gangs and terrorism organizations
flourish in poor areas.

~~~
JoachimSchipper
And yet the 9/11 attackers were not exactly poor.

~~~
waqf
The _funders_ of the 9/11 attacks were not poor. Don't lump the suicide
volunteers in with the masterminds, whose victims they are as much as anyone.

~~~
tkahn6
No. The 9/11 hijackers were educated and not poor.

------
angrow
These groups already know that blood and guts terrorism is politically self-
defeating. Well-funded material attacks are only made on valuable targets,
like oil pipelines after you've stockpiled call options. Political objectives
are pursued in other ways. Here's an article on Inspire magazine:
[http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/11...](http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2010/11/note-
on-innovation-in-warfare.html)

It's funny that the author says they were inspired by Robin Hanson, because he
certainly is one of the best examples for a kind of person who confuses their
intelligence for a kind of universal expertise, one that requires no
schooling, no study, no direct experience or theoretical grounding. "It's
better to come to the field from the outside," they say, "so I can better
disrupt it!"

The only thing that stops the post from being truly Hansonian is it stops
short of openly arguing for solving the problem by "giving" women to
dispossessed young men.

~~~
gwern
> The only thing that stops the post from being truly Hansonian is it stops
> short of openly arguing for solving the problem by "giving" women to
> dispossessed young men.

One of Hanson's flaws is ignoring any consideration of numbers or proportions;
I like to think I'm better in that respect, and for those reasons I would not
advocate it: the base rate for becoming a dispossessed young man becoming a
terrorist is so low that it's not a good use of young women (not that Middle
Eastern countries make good use of young women to begin with), while if you
can target it to known terrorists, you'd be better off just imprisoning or
executing them.

Black September is interesting for what the effect of marriage says about
their _motivations_ , not as a useful suppression strategy - most countries do
not have the same relation to terrorist groups that Fatah had to Black
September and do not need to peacefully civilianize them while looking like
friends, as it were.

------
NaturalDoc
If you want to know how effective terrorism really is, just try to take a U.S.
domestic flight to anywhere. Terrorism is so effective even law enforcement
now call drug dealers "narco-terrorists" in an attempt to incense the people
against them. Right, wrong, or indifferent, these are the facts. Since Sept.
11, the U.S. has changed dramatically willfully giving over basic rights in
the name of security. And terrorism doesn't work?

------
crusso
Terrorism is about causing destruction against Goliaths of the world in order
to increase recruiting and thus the power of the leaders of the terrorist
movement.

------
drivingmenuts
“There is comparatively strong theoretical and empirical evidence that people
become terrorists not to achieve their organization’s declare political
agenda, but to develop strong affective ties with other terrorist members. In
other words, the preponderance of evidence is that people participate in
terrorist organizations for the social solidarity, not for their political
return.”

Great, it's social networking with bombs instead of tweets.

------
known
A terrorist is a freedom fighter who isn't on your side.

~~~
GFKjunior
I have to agree. Part of my family was exiled from Spain for being heavily
involved in the ETA, the spanish consider us terrorists for blowing up cars
and refusing to speak spanish. In Mexico another part of my family lost many,
many young men during the Mexican Revolution. We still have pictures of
ancestors standing side by side with Pancho Villa and call them heroes like
the rest of the nation does.

The winners write the history books as they say.

~~~
cema
You were not a terrorist because you did not participate in the terrorist
activities, and refusing to speak Spanish is not a terrorist action (and
should not be a criminal offense anyway, just complicates life). Exiling the
whole family of a terrorist may be too harsh, depending on the circumstances.
But the people who were blowing up civilian cars, buses and trains were
terrorists, by the definition, whether you agree with their actions or not.

------
ilaksh
I'm sorry, but a terrorist is just someone that the hegemony does not like or
is using to scare you.

I am 100% serious. <https://vimeo.com/13726978>

~~~
Tangaroa
You are 100% wrong. The term is often misused by people who wants to discredit
their opponents, but it refers to people who use violence to discourage other
people from exercising their lawful rights.

~~~
ilaksh
Did you watch the video?

------
ucee054
If terrorism is unsuccessful explain Mao and Lenin. Does anyone seriously
think that Trotsky followed Lenin because he just "wanted the chicks man" and
didn't _really_ want revolution?

Oh I see what the author's done, he's _defined away_ the problem: the
successful aren't _terrorists_ , they're _guerrillas_.

So he's right _by definition_. Cheap trick, pathetic.

~~~
slurgfest
Why do you only mention Communists? Why not also probe into the motivations of
Mussolini, Hitler, Quisling, Pinochet, Franco? That is assuming that you
haven't _defined away_ the problem: the right-wing aren't _terrorists_ ,
they're _freedom fighters._

~~~
stfu
But what about the Nicaraguan Contras, the Tibet Autonomous region, or the
Chechnyan rebels. How could he have missed these?

ucee054 was making an example of how the argument of the original post is
having substantial flaws. Not everything remotely related to politics is
intended as some ideological political statement.

~~~
gwern
> But what about the Nicaraguan Contras, the Tibet Autonomous region, or the
> Chechnyan rebels. How could he have missed these?

What about them? Tibet is still ruled by China, and Chechnya is, last I
checked, still ruled by Russia. The only of the three even remotely successful
is the Contras, and the president elected after their dissolution doesn't seem
to have owed much to them or do much that they would have wanted.

