By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, LaGrange College
On this anniversary of 9/11, there are no shortage of critiques of the war on terror and its limits. But few even question the same of the tactic of terrorism. It kills, but rarely accomplishes the goals it sets out to achieve.
To be sure, terrorism kills. To compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges, I looked at all terror attacks in the 25 years preceding 2001 (going back to 1976). Whether it was the Unabomber, the first World Trade Center attack, or the truck bombing of the Murrah Federal Building, there were a little more than 200 deaths from terror attacks. There are about 1.5 times as many since the conclusion of September 11, more than 350.
Those who think it was worse before will ask why the bombing of Pan Am 103 is not on the list, or the killing of Americans abroad in embassies. By the same token, the post-9/11 list only includes American continental territory, and does not account for the killing of soldiers and civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, which would surely augment the death toll. Terrorism kills, but does not change the outcome.
A popular question is whether the War on Terrorism was successful or not. “It produced tactical excellence that strategic drift and broken faith squandered,” claims Omer Rafiq, a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East programs. “The threat has splintered into forms harder to detect and, in several key domains, more lethal. Naming what victory requires, and keeping faith with those who fight for it, remains unfinished business.”
Yet surprisingly few question whether terrorism, even that of 9/11, accomplishes anything. That’s because we assume by its very existence, that it “worked” because if even one person was killed or injured, then it is seen to have been successful. Therefore, it becomes a mechanical question. Did the bomb go off? Did the gun fire? Did someone die? Then of course “it worked.”
But did the terror group achieve its aims? Did someone take, or leave, a given territory? Did a regime collapse or stabilize? Did a policy change or remain the same? Only then can we say it worked or not.
My students and I looked at this very question before the pandemic, now published in The Conversation. And we found that there were shockingly few groups that used terrorism that achieved their goals. We didn’t just consider whether terror groups achieve their goals or not. We also compared them to groups that sought to achieve their goals without terrorism, which worked about 50% of the time. For terrorists, they accomplished their goals less than 20% of the time.
When I presented this research at an international conference in Ecuador, it was met with a lot of skepticism, though it garnered a lot of attention. Critics kept mentioning stock answers for “successful” groups, each conflating an explosion with an accomplishment of higher objectives. But even the Irgun in Israel, the NLF in Algeria, Hamas after the Oslo Accords, Hezbollah in Lebanon, or Al-Qaeda in Spain which got a foreign entity to leave or shifted an election, did not objectively succeed in their groups’ greater goals. It’s the same with the 9/11 terrorists. They did not achieve regime change, a shift in U.S. policy of interventionism in the Middle East, or support for Israel and Saudi Arabia. And I see that the Rand Corporation, START, Project MUSE and numerous other studies have also concluded the clear shortcomings of terrorism.
Terrorism kills but rarely wins. Even those cases where there’s an arguable victory, they often amount to a pyrrhic victory for the group that sponsored the tactic. That’s a lesson we should be promoting on 9/11.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Georgia. His views are his own. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu or on “X” at @johntures2. His first book “Branded” a thriller novel where corporate greed, media manipulation and academic intrigue collide in a deadly game of product placement, has been published by the Huntsville Independent Press (https://www.huntsvilleindependent.com/product-page/branded). His second novel, “Independent Thought,” about a third-party candidacy that brings America to its knees, is published by HIP (https://www.huntsvilleindependent.com/product-page/independent-thought).