War without end Magic, propaganda and the hidden functions of counter-terror.pdf

Journal of International Development

J. Int. Dev. 18, 87–104 (2006)

Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/jid.1264

POLICY ARENA

WAR WITHOUT END? MAGIC,

PROPAGANDA AND THE HIDDEN

FUNCTIONS OF COUNTER-TERROR

DAVID KEEN*

Development Studies Institute (DESTIN), London School of Economics and Political Science,

London, UK

Abstract: This paper suggests that current tactics in the ‘war on terror’ are predictably

counterproductive, and that these ‘failing’ tactics actually serve a range of political, economic

and psychological functions for diverse actors who make up the ‘war on terror’ coalition. It

compares the ‘war on terror’ to civil wars, especially in Africa, where experience shows that

predictably counterproductive tactics are common and the aim is not necessarily to win.

Current violent responses to terror—which represent ‘magical thinking’ in important ways—

are based on the fallacy of a ﬁnite group of evil people who can be physically eliminated;

more productive would be a genuine attempt to understand the processes that lead people to

embrace violence and an attempt to engage with processes of exclusion, humiliation and

discrimination. This is something that needs to be built into any developmental initiative;

otherwise, we are left with a vast pool of anger and a counter-terror reﬂex that only

exacerbates the problem. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: Terror; terrorism; state; civil wars; rebels; functions; Arendt; psychology;

propaganda

1 INTRODUCTION

In terms of current public understanding of the ‘war on terror’ and the Iraq war in

particular, many people now understand that they were sold the war on false pretences and

that turning ‘victory’ in Iraq into peace and democracy is a long way off. Rather less well

understood is the way contemporary terrorism (and the growing importance of ‘bottom up’

violence more generally) renders attacks on states redundant and counterproductive. This

*Correspondence to: David Keen, Development Studies Institute (DESTIN), London School of Economics and

Political Science, Houghton Street, London, WC2A2AE. E-mail: D.Keen@lse.ac.uk

88 D. Keen

paper tries to examine some of the assumptions and belief-systems behind the ‘war on

terror’, suggesting that predictably counterproductive tactics—as in the realm of civil war—

have hidden economic, political and (not least) psychological functions. (Keen, 2005).

2 THE WAR ON TERROR AS PREDICTABLY COUNTERPRODUCTIVE

The war in Iraq was sold as a war that would make the world safer in the wake of 9/11. Iraq

was supporting terrorism and Saddam’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’ were a threat. Yet

the logic here was profoundly illogical. Recent military interventions are predictably

counterproductive in terms of the expressed objective of ending terror.

First, despite some scraps of evidence hyped up by the Bush administration, no

substantial connection between Saddam and al-qa’ida (let alone 9/11) has ever been

proven: indeed, al-qa’ida seems to have strongly opposed the largely secular regime of

Saddam, and Osama bin Laden denounced Saddam as an ‘inﬁdel’. Second, no weapons of

mass destruction have been found. Third, the attack on Iraq is likely to be profoundly

counterproductive in combatting terrorism. It has signiﬁcantly deepened the anger that is

fuelling terrorism among Islamist militants in particular. Iraq has become to some extent a

magnet and a cause celebre for these militants— much in the same way that Afghanistan

did during the struggle against the occupying Soviet forces. Anger and fear have also been

stoked by more general proclamations from the US government of a right to unilateral

military action and ‘preventive self-defence’. Fourth, the attack obviously produced

signiﬁcant violence inside Iraq, including attacks on and by coalition troops attempting

to occupy and govern the country. Fifth, as Chomsky has stressed, the original 2003 attack

on Iraq was itself a source of terror; so too is violence associated with the continuing

occupation. Terror to end terror makes no sense.

Similar problems surrounded the earlier attack on Afghanistan, in the immediate

aftermath of 9/11. First, the connection with terrorism was dubious: some al-qa’ida

camps attacked by the US were reported to be empty (Woodward, 2002); and the 9/11

attackers were mostly Saudis, not Afghans. The attack on Afghanistan tended to disperse

rather than eliminate al-qa’ida. Insofar as key leaders have been killed or put out of action,

this seems to have contributed to a decentralization of command within al-qa’ida and its

(loosely) afﬁliated networks (Burke, 2003; Taylor, 2005). The attack fuelled anger among

many Muslims, and prompted signiﬁcant and continuing resistance inside Afghanistan.

Finally, the attack itself was again a source of terror, something that was hardly concealed

when the coalition tried to use humanitarian aid to sugar the kill —or, as Bush put it in a

memorable phrase, ‘Can we have the ﬁrst bombs we drop be food?’

Through studies of individuals and of countries, we now understand quite a lot about the

processes by which a terrorist is radicalised and the role of world events in this process.

Everything we know suggests that a perceived abuse of American power (including

attacks on Iraq) has fuelled this process of radicalisation.

There are important lessons to be learned from attempts to combat the use of terror within

a range of civil wars, drawing on the author’s experience in researching and documenting

these (notably in Africa). One crucial lesson has been that proliferating weapons and deep-

seated anger at political and economic exclusion have fuelled conﬂicts that cannot be

adequately understood, or addressed, as the struggle between two teams, let alone between

good and evil. Another is that the nature of counter-insurgency profoundly shapes patterns

of violence and terror, often by attracting new recruits to an otherwise-weak rebellion.

J. Int. Dev. 18, 87–104 (2006)

War Without End ? 89

While some US administration ofﬁcials have optimistically compared al-qa’ida to a

snake which will die when the head is cut off, other analysts argue more plausibly that the

network resembles a mould: you have to tackle the environment in which it grows. Rather

than imagining that terrorists are a discrete group of evil individuals, we need to look at

processes of becoming. This demands a sense of history. It also demands a willingness to

face up to the damaging effects of one’s own nation — in particular, the role of military

interventions over a long period (and of largely unconditional support for Israel) in

fuelling anger. Yet history, for Bush and to a large extent for Blair, has been ‘narcissised’

and projected into the future: when they speak of history, it is usually in terms of how

history will judge their interventions.

The atrocities of 9/11 produced a need to hit back, and this is natural enough. Yet it is

precisely this impulse to retaliate which should show us why a ‘war on terror’ cannot be

won. Why would other people not feel similar emotions and impulses when they are

attacked, when their innocent people are bombed or shot in the name of somebody else’s

‘justice’? Are they not human too? 9/11 and the overthrow of Saddam are not moral

equivalents. But stating repeatedly and publicly that you expect your ‘war on terror’ to

make the world a safer place in effect sends a message that you do not believe the victims of

your violence—and there are always innocent victims—are the same as you with the same

emotions (including the same all-too-human desire to retaliate). To your victims, your very

conﬁdence in your own tactics may proclaim your racism and your failure to recognise their

humanity. Indeed, like Shylock in the Merchant of Venice, they may demand revenge in

part to remind you that they are human (‘If you prick us, do we not bleed? ... And if you

wrong us, shall we not revenge?’) To the extent that an entire group (Arabs? Muslims?) is

stigmatized and even dehumanized, this impulse is redoubled. Signiﬁcantly, whilst Shylock

presents his violent revenge as a manifestation of his humanity, he is also ready to adopt the

inhuman persona he has been saddled with: ‘Thou call’dst me dog before thou hadst a

cause; But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs.’

The American sense of near-invulnerability has been dramatically undermined by

September 11th. The resulting feeling of powerlessness seems to have been addressed by

the clumsy but spectacular assertion of US military power. This dangerous and damaging

process in effect ofﬂoads (or exports) these feelings of powerlessness onto other countries,

notably in the Middle- and Near-East. Of course, many people there may be similarly

tempted to remedy powerlessness with a feeling of power-through-violence.

If the ‘war on terror’ is so counterproductive, how then are we to explain the persistence

and appeal of such counter-productive tactics?

3 THE WAR SYSTEM: POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS

It is important to examine the hidden political and economic functions of the war on terror

and to realise that its beneﬁciaries are located not only in the US and the UK but also in a

variety of dubious regimes whose co-operation is required. Given these beneﬁts, the desire to

defeat terror cannot necessarily be taken for granted—whether at a micro-level (for example,

the often-collusive behaviour of Russian troops in Chechnya where Russian generals have

made a lot of money) or at a macro-level. Crucially, as in civil wars, demonisation of a

particular enemy creates space for abuses by those who claim to be ﬁghting this demon.

After the end of the Cold War, new enemies have been repeatedly identiﬁed— not least

to justify the very high levels of spending on the military. The current Pentagon budget

J. Int. Dev. 18, 87–104 (2006)

90 D. Keen

represents nearly twice the defence spending of the rest of the world’s military powers

combined. Since the fall of the Berlin wall, the enemy has been variously identiﬁed as:

rogue states (the viliﬁcation of which long preceded 9/11), drugs (and ‘narco-guerillas’),

and most recently terrorism. With any of these enemies, the point may not be so much to

win as to ﬁght: preserving or fomenting the conﬂict has hidden beneﬁts. Nor can oil be

discounted as incentive for picking sides —in either Afghanistan or Iraq.

While the idea of a ‘war on terror’ legitimises violence with the label of war, the status of

‘prisoners of war’ has been denied to ‘the other side’. Thus, we are invited to believe that this

is simultaneously a war and not a war. This mirrors the schizophrenic ofﬁcial discourse in

many civil wars where the state habitually delegitimises rebel violence as ‘criminal’ (see,

notably, Mark Dufﬁeld’s (2001) ‘Global Governance and the New Wars’) while legitimising

its own violence as ‘war’ (and usually favouring a military rather than a policing response).

My research on contemporary civil wars focuses on the idea that these wars can be

better understood as systems than as contests: In other words, the aim in a war is not

simply ‘to win’ (a position that assumes that there are ‘two sides’ with aims are essentially

political or military and set ‘at the top’); rather the aims in a war are manifold, with many

of the most important actors more interested in manipulating (and perhaps prolonging) a

declared ‘war’ for local and immediate beneﬁts (often economic or psychological) than

they are in ‘winning’. In contemporary civil wars in Africa and elsewhere, both

government and rebel forces have repeatedly engaged in attacks on civilian populations

which have predictably radicalised these populations and attracted support for the enemy.

We have also seen many instances of soldiers selling arms to ‘the other side’. Within a

framework focussed on ‘winning’, these actions can be seen as irrational (or perhaps as

‘mistakes’). However, aims other than winning have often been important and they

include: carrying out abuses under the cover of war, making money, and even perpetuating

a war because of the political and economic beneﬁts of such a ‘state of emergency’. In

these circumstances, even predictably counterproductive tactics may have a good deal of

‘rationality’ —at least for many of the key actors producing the war.

Signiﬁcantly, the global war on terror and contemporary civil wars share many of the

same dynamics, and both may usefully be considered as systems rather than simply as

contests. Some of these similarities seem to reﬂect the nature of war itself, and the

opportunities it naturally and perhaps inevitably creates. Other similarities reﬂect the fact

that similar global forces (like weapons proliferation and expanding illegal international

trading) have impacted on both types of war.

Let me look ﬁrst at some shared dynamics within the insurgency/terror network. First,

the proliferation of weapons makes it very difﬁcult to isolate a ﬁxed and ﬁnite group of

rebels or terrorists whose elimination would not be followed by the emergence of more

armed rebels or terrorists. Second (and related to this proliferation), the access which

terror/rebel organisations enjoy to lucrative global markets again makes these movements

very difﬁcult to destroy whilst simultaneously encouraging relatively decentralised

patterns of command since it further assists ‘followers’ and not just ‘leaders’ in getting

access to weapons and building organisational capability. Al-qa’ida, incidentally, has been

tied into some networks sustaining civil wars, notably the diamond-trading networks in

West Africa. Third, the violence is driven primarily by anger, anger which is only

exacerbated by particular (abusive) kinds of counterinsurgency.

Within the counter-insurgency/counter-terror networks, there are two main shared

dynamics. The ﬁrst is the prevalence of tactics that are counter-productive in the sense

that they induce additional military and political opposition. Of central signiﬁcance here is

J. Int. Dev. 18, 87–104 (2006)

War Without End ? 91

the phenomenon of abusive and at least partially indiscriminate violence that creates the

enemies it claims to be interested in defeating. 1 Abusive counter-insurgency and counter-

terror tend to knit together the diverse grievances of those whose targets might otherwise

be resolutely local. Hugh Roberts, for example, has stressed that anti-American feelings

are neither natural nor or long-standing in countries such as Algeria and Egypt, but that

aggressive US actions tend to superimpose an American enemy on top of local

grievances. 2 In Sudan, we have often seen the radicalisation of populations through

attacks on areas not sympathetic to the SPLA, frequently attacks with an economic

rationale. Also signiﬁcant in many countries has been a persistent tendency for key rebels/

terrorists to escape capture — despite the very signiﬁcant inequality of resources between

the demonised rebels/terrorists and the forces ranged against them. We can see this in

Sierra Leone, Guatemala and Uganda, for example. Finally, there has often been some

kind of business relationship (perhaps including arms trading) between ostensible

enemies, either before or during a given conﬂict.

The second shared dynamic in the counter-insurgency/counter-terror networks is that

these networks’ violence (and notably the ‘counterproductive’ violence which induces

additional political and military opposition) actually has functions for the diverse coalition

creating the violence. These functions are economic, political and psychological. In both

civil wars and the current global ‘war on terror’, we can see an abundance of opportunities

for political, economic and psychological ‘pay-offs’ among actors collaborating — or

claiming to collaborate —with a particular war effort but not necessarily sharing the aim of

eliminating the named terror.

Part of this is because both counter-insurgency and global counter-terror operate

through a kind of licensing of violence by diverse groups. The limits to US power on a

global stage tend to create collaborative strategies that mimic the strategies of govern-

ments pursuing counter-insurgency within weak states. This means that the aims of the

‘counter-insurgency’ or ‘counter-terror’ are very diverse (although certain parties, for

example the US in the case of the ‘war on terror’, have clearly had a disproportionate

inﬂuence in shaping these aims). In civil wars, counter-insurgency has often taken the

form of encouraging violence between ethnic groups. The licensing of violence (whether

by governments who encourage ‘tribal violence’ as part of a counter-insurgency, or by

Washington allowing allied governments to present their own struggles as counter-terror,

or by coalition partners involving private ﬁrms in the running of Iraq and its jails), has the

advantage that it enlists support and creates many opportunities for ‘deniability’ when

abuses are revealed. It may also minimise the exposure to violence of a government’s own

forces (whether draftes on voluntarily enlisted).

The political functions of even militarily-counterproductive violence include the political

pay-off from uniting a country around a common and clearly identiﬁed enemy. There may

also be political advantages in intimidating a wider group of potential victims.

British playwright David Hare is among those who have stressed the function of the

2003 Iraq attack as a demonstration of US power:

The intention to destroy the credibility of the United Nations and its right to try and

defuse situations of danger to life, is not a byproduct of recent American policy. It is

Insurgents/terrorists have also frequently carried out abuses that predictably create opposition, though having the

‘advantage’ of advertising their own power and their ability to stand up to a greater power (compare Eric

Hobsbawm, 1972 [1969]).

2 See also, Michael Mann, 2003.

J. Int. Dev. 18, 87–104 (2006)

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