Fighting Terror with Terror?

by John Thompson

September, 2002

Fighting fire with fire? If all else fails there may be other choice; and sometimes it even works. The same is true in countering terrorism; but this is a dangerous path.

Friedrich Nietzsche warned "He who fights monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." The natural impulse when challenged by the atrocities and outrages presented by terrorism is to strike back against the terrorists in the same manner.

Naturally, terrorists are elusive but the community that generated them is often identifiable. Terrorists know this and often hope that atrocities and outrages committed by authorities will polarize their communities and generate even more support for them. Moreover, terrorists are often pleased to see police and soldiers behaving as foully as they do — and make as much propaganda of it as they can. Some theories of revolution even rely on the effects that sufficiently aggravated authorities can generate.

Authority, particularly in the Western world, is bestowed by the consent of the governed, and a government whose agents beget terror is one whose authority and legitimacy is in severe danger. This ideal is not always held in the rest of the world, but European and American audiences judge all governments by our standards, and our public opinion carry a lot of weight with those who need our support — just ask the late Shah of Iran.

In a war against terror, there are excellent reasons not to fight fire with fire. But in the sordid world of counter-terrorism; fighting fire with fire sometimes works when nothing else has.

When the Algerian FLN began its war against the French in the 1950s, it sought to use terror to provoke a similar response — but choked on it. The murder of 123 French and Muslim sympathizers in Algiers by the FLN resulted in a vicious backlash that killed somewhere between 1,200 and 12,000 FLN supporters in the city. Thereafter, the war left the city and moved into the countryside (where it could be fought by more conventional means), although the French lost much international support for their actions.

Later, as France left Algeria, outraged former French Algerians and ex-soldiers of the OAS twice nearly killed De Gaulle and committed hundreds of terrorist acts inside France itself. Faced with this severe threat, the authorities threw their legal codes out the window and stamped out the OAS by adding murder and torture to their repertoire. The world stayed mute — proving the point that if terrorists are too dangerous (and politically unpopular), then anything is justified.

In a more restrained sense, the British seemingly used a similar tactic against the IRA. When the latter had done something particularly outrageous (like the murder of Earl Mountbatten or killing the dependents of British soldiers), something outside of the normal rules would apparently occur to IRA members — all of whom usually relied on Habeas Corpus and rules of evidence as part of their protection.

Killing everyone in an attacking IRA team in an ambush, or even kidnapping a particularly effective sniper and leaving him dead in a ditch, was a way of sending a message about limitations on the form of the conflict. By and large, this tactic appears to have worked — probably because these responses were carefully planned and executed by very professional soldiers. Contrast this to the uncontrolled amateurism of death squads and vigilantes in Latin America. Fighting fire with fire only works under careful and expert management, otherwise the violence can rapidly spiral into a senseless orgy of carnage that can banish all hope of peace.

There is another successful case in fighting terror with terror — again in Ulster. The Protestant paramilitaries used random attacks in pubs associated with Republican Catholics to terrorize the IRA’s most fervent supporters in the early 1990s. Diplomats and politicians like to think reason and good will started the peace process; they forget that terror had a role there too. Again, the Protestant paramilitary’s terrorism was successful, because they tended to be extremely selective about their targeted sites.

The threat posed by Al-Qaeda is a long way from being seriously diminished. They’ve lost their base sanctuaries and many of their networks have been reduced; but their ability to operate will not be impaired

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca