Jihadi Terrorism – Where Do We Stand ?
Second IRRI Conference on International terrorism
February 13, 2006

Jihadist Terrorism: The State of the Threat

Presentation by Paul R. Pillar

            As the initial substantive presentation at this conference, I will offer a fairly straightforward picture of the state and shape of jihadist terrorism today, with a summary of the reasons that it presents the threat that it does.  I take this modest and uncomplicated approach as appropriate for a lead-off presentation that, I hope, will provide a baseline for the discussions that follow.  If the approach might seem at times somewhat narrow and short-term in its focus, I take it knowing that there are distinguished speakers to follow later today who I expect will offer larger and grander observations about long-term trends in jihadist terrorism.  I will say a few things about future changes, but more in the nature of posing questions and highlighting relevant variables, rather than making specific forecasts.

            Jihadist, or jihadi, terrorism I understand to mean the variety of international terrorism that draws on extreme interpretations of Islam for its rationale, its ideology, and to varying degrees its motivation, and whose focus is not limited to any one national or ethnic milieu or that revolves around any one national conflict or campaign.  So defined, it is a diverse phenomenon that is taking many different forms—which I will discuss in a moment.  But it also is not to be equated with all Islamist terrorism.  There are major differences between, say, Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, which is the best known exemplar of jihadist terrorism, and the Palestinian group Hamas, which certainly is Islamist but whose objectives are focused not on bin Laden-type aspirations to re-establish the Caliphate but instead on issues of political power in Palestine.

            Two general propositions sum up the current state of the threat from jihadist terrorism.  The first is that jihadist terrorism is the pre-eminent type of terrorist threat today, by several measures.  It certainly is the variety of terrorism against which more western security services devote more of their counterterrorist efforts than against any other variety.  It is the brand of terrorism about which more western publics evince concern.  And those efforts and concerns are not misplaced.  The jihadist phenomenon comprises terrorist capabilities that have touched interests, and touched them recently, not only in the west but elsewhere around the globe. 

The objectives of jihadi terrorists are, by their nature, not subject to being quelled or satisfied through negotiations or agreements.  They involve, instead, objectives too extreme or far-reaching to leave anything to negotiate, or are aimed ultimately at political change in countries other than those that are the immediate targets of the terrorist attacks, or, for some jihadists—at least rank-and-file adherents, if not the leadership—are at least as much a matter of emotion and hatred rather than political calculation.

            The other general proposition is that jihadist terrorism is at least as robust today as it has ever been.  Any attempt to measure the strength of a terrorist group or movement is admittedly fraught with difficulty, even though there are constant demands, from the press and others, to make such measurements, as if the endeavors of terrorists and of counterterrorist elements that oppose them were some kind of athletic contest with a scoreboard that tallies points.  In the United States, the question often is asked whether we are “winning” the so-called “war on terrorism.”  When I am asked that, I usually deflect the question as being too oversimplified for any answer in direct response to it to be useful.

            A common and obvious measurement is terrorist attacks themselves.  That measurement has its limitations, and statistics on terrorist incidents are slippery enough that they can be manipulated to demonstrate just about any proposition that the user of the statistics wants to demonstrate.  Among other problems, terrorist attacks, at least significant ones, are rare—in the mathematician’s sense—events that punctuate our history at odd intervals in staccato fashion but do not lend themselves very well to analysis of trends, at least not without more passage of time and more of the perspective of history.

            Another question I am asked frequently is why there has not been another major terrorist attack by jihadists in the United States in the four and a half years since the attacks of September 2001.  I also usually deflect that question as well, on grounds that the very premise of the question conveys a misplaced sense of security.  There are some valid answers to that question, but none that should leave us at all surprised if another major jihadist attack were to occur in the United States tomorrow.  Enhanced security countermeasures have been a factor, of course.  At least as important is the long time frame of terrorists, in which planning for individual terrorist operations has been known to take a couple of years, and the process of adapting tactics and strategy to new security measures takes even longer.

            The point is that something like an absence of further major attacks on US soil since 9/11 should not be taken as a sign of weakness or weakening in jihadist terrorism.  My assertion about the current robustness of that phenomenon rests on several other, admittedly nonsystematic, nonquantitative indicators.  One is the pattern, especially geographic pattern, of jihadist terrorist attacks since 9/11, which have covered much of the globe, from Western Europe to Southeast Asia.  Another are indications of widening participation, extending to more nationalities, in this brand of terrorism, as exemplified by the British subjects who perpetrated bombings in London.  Another is the jihadist coloration assumed by much of the violence in conflicts that may have arisen for largely non-jihadist reasons, such as in Iraq or Chechnya.  And yet another are indications of a wider resonance that some jihadist themes have among broader populations, despite the ultimate bankruptcy of jihadism in ameliorating the problems that most concern those populations.

            To note the strength and robustness of the overall jihadist phenomenon does not say anything about the status of any individual jihadist terrorist group.  The group with which jihadist terrorism often is loosely identified, or even misleadingly equated—viz., Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda—is almost certainly not as capable as it was at the time of the 9/11 attacks.  Any such statement must immediately be accompanied by the caveat that the group is nonetheless still capable enough to inflict significant damage.  But bin Laden and his deputy Ayman Zawahiri are on the run and less able than they once were to direct operations, even if they obviously are very able to mock with video and audio tapes the inability of their pursuers to catch them.  Pressure and diligence by security services in the West as well as the Muslim world have struck major blows against the infrastructure of bin Laden’s group, with a large proportion of the senior and mid-level operatives who were at large four or five years ago now incarcerated or killed.  The principal jihadist terrorist threats today come not from Al Qaeda but from the children or cousins of Al Qaeda.

            So what are the reasons for the current strength and persistence of jihadist terrorism?  I would point to three complementary explanations, or sets of explanations.

            One is that jihadist terrorism is the most extreme manifestation of a far larger, and overwhelmingly peaceful, phenomenon we know as political Islam, which in turn is the most significant variety of political expression—especially, political opposition—in much of the Muslim world.  Whenever a particular ideology, or vocabulary or perspective (and political Islam is not a single ideology), becomes a dominant mode of political discourse, so too can the more extreme variants of that perspective be expected to dominate the sub-world of political extremism.  That would be true if, say, leftist or communist perspectives were still as prevalent as they were 20 or 30 years ago.  And it is true today of the political Islamist perspective.  That perspective may have come to acquire pre-eminence in large part by default, because other perspectives and ideologies, such as the secular Arab nationalism of Nasser, have been tried and found wanting.  But until a more promising and attractive alternative comes along, and until political Islam itself has been more thoroughly tried and found wanting, it can be expected to continue to prevail as a major form of discourse on much of the globe.

            A second and related explanation is that jihadist terrorism derives energy from friction along the fault line between the Muslim world and the West.  One does not have to accept totally hypotheses about clashes of civilization to see how much friction, based partly on differences of culture and of religion, is occurring along that line, or how that friction plays into some jihadist themes, including notions of cultural imperialism, oppression of Muslims, and lack of respect for religion.  The latest furor across that line, involving satirical cartoons of the Prophet, has shown the potential for such controversies to accentuate polarization, pushing people away from a moderate center and toward extremes.

            The third set of explanations concerns the social, economic, and political conditions in much of the Muslim world, especially the Arab heartland in the Middle East, that constitute roots of terrorism.  There has been a good deal of—not very helpful, in my view—commentary aimed at debunking some of the links between such conditions and terrorism, chiefly using arguments by counterexample.  We hear, for example, that economic hardship must not be a root cause of jihadist terrorism because terrorists such as the 9/11 hijackers were not conspicuously poor, and the most prominent jihadist of all, bin Laden, is conspicuously wealthy.  And we hear that authoritarian politics must not have much to do with it either because jihadist terrorism takes place at least as often as anywhere else within liberal democracies, in places like New York, Madrid, or London.

            But the economic arguments tend to erase important distinctions between abject poverty, which may not be associated with proclivity for terrorism, and frustration of ambitions for economic and social advancement, which is.  The arguments also tend to blur distinctions between the backgrounds of prominent leaders or practitioners and conditions that can affect broader patterns of sympathy and support for terrorism, and sometimes low-level participation in it.  The statistics commonly adduced in the political arguments say less about roots of terrorism than about the practical fact that terrorist operations tend to be easier to execute in open societies than in tightly controlled police states.  In my judgment, there is no question that the closed and confining economic and social structures that prevail in much of the Middle East, combined with closed political systems that severely curtail opportunities for peaceful expression of the grievances that such societies are bound to generate, have much to do with sustaining jihadist terrorism.

            The combination of the strength of the overall jihadist phenomenon, with the significant weakening of bin Laden’s Al Qaeda group, have made jihadist terrorism a more decentralized phenomenon than it was just a few years ago.  It is decentralized organizationally, with the next major jihadist attack in the West not likely to be conceived and directed by the likes of bin Laden and Zawahiri hiding somewhere in South Asia.  It is decentralized geographically, with the perpetrators and not just the selected sites for operations being more worldwide than every before.  And with organizational and geographic breadth comes a greater variety of motivations and ideological variants, with truly transnational jihadist goals being mixed in various proportions with more parochial national concerns.

            Besides Al Qaeda, jihadist terrorism today includes offshoots, splinters, or fragments of Al Qaeda.  It includes groups, such as that led by Abu Musab al Zarqawi in Iraq, that have found it advantageous to benefit from the Al Qaeda brand name even though they are autonomous.  It includes groups with other names, such as the Southeast Asian Jamaat Islamiyya, having a transnational jihadist ideology melded with regional or country-oriented concerns.  And it includes many nameless cells, as well as individuals, many no doubt yet unknown to security services, that believe in the jihadist message and are candidates for, if not yet outright participants in, terrorist behavior.  The picture of the overall jihadist movement is immensely complicated, with innumerable links that are difficult to untangle, and lines of influence that are unclear.

            The breadth of potential targets for terrorist attacks reflects the worldwide breadth of the jihadist movement itself.  There is a tendency to overanalyze terrorist target selection, which as often as not is more a matter of operational opportunities than of any specific message that the terrorists are attempting to send.  Western Europe may be one region where both the operational opportunities (given the openness of the societies and uncertain loyalties of some resident Muslim populations) and possible intended messages (given something like the current animosity over the cartoons of the Prophet) suggest it will be a location for increased numbers of jihadist attacks in the years ahead.

            What is the overall trend of jihadist terrorism—up or down?  That question is subject to debate, and with good reason, for there is not a definite answer.  History suggests that—while terrorism is a timeless tactic that has been used, and will continue to be used, by many different groups for many different purposes operating under many different ideological banners—any particular brand of terrorism is not timeless.  The American scholar David Rapaport has written of “waves” of different varieties of terrorism, each of which has lasted for forty years of so, and has died out largely for reasons other than the counterterrorist efforts mounted directly against it.

            The current wave of jihadist and other Islamist terrorism could be said to have begun around 1979, with the Iranian revolution and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that led to the jihad in Afghanistan.  By that calendar, it’s been going on for over 25 years and we have reason to hope that its decline is within sight if not already underway.  But from another perspective, the radical Sunni variety of jihadist terrorism that worries us the most didn’t really emerge until early in the 1990s, after the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan had ended.  Taking that view, maybe the phenomenon still has substantially longer to run.

            My own sense is that jihadist terrorism has not yet peaked, although some of the trend lines in the strength of the movement itself may be masked by the effects of heightened counterterrorist measures taken against it.  Even if it has peaked and already is on a downward slope, there still may be a lot of slope, with a lot of attacks and bloodshed, before we get to the bottom of the hill.

            Part of what makes this kind of prognostication so uncertain is that the course of jihadist terrorist over the next several years will depend heavily on events extraneous to terrorism itself.  Particularly important will be political change in the Middle East, including anything affecting what I described earlier as roots of terrorism.  Even if such change has no effect on terrorist leaders such as Zarqawi or bin Laden, it will have an effect on followers and sympathizers.  The policies of Western governments, especially the United States, will have effects, both insofar as they affect the roots and as a direct shaper of jihadist attitudes toward the Western powers themselves.  The course of certain salient conflicts, particularly those over Palestine and Iraq, also will have effects, even if jihadist interest in them is mostly a matter of exploiting operational and propaganda opportunities, rather than being at the core of their objectives.  And outside the Middle East, there will be many things shaping the attitudes, and proclivity for extremism, of Muslim populations in Europe and South and Southeast Asia.

            I conclude with two thoughts.  One is that we need to avoid the tendency, all too common in popular discussions of terrorism in the United States, to equate jihadist terrorism with terrorism in general.  That was one of the mistakes the 9/11 Commission in the United States made, in devising an intelligence organization that will have to be relied upon to catch whatever is the next wave of terrorism.  The other thought is that countering jihadist terrorism is not only a matter of programs, including intelligence, military and security measures, that bear the label of “counterterrorism.”  It includes as well a large number of political, diplomatic, and economic policies that affect the roots and rationales of jihadist terrorism and will have a large effect on its future.