1 erronsm ana U Fage 1 o i l 3

The Age of Sacred Terror

Daniel Benjamin & Steven Simon

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror (New York: Random House, 2002).

6: A Paradigm Lost

-after WTC 1993, some White House, CIA, and other officials start learning curve

-old paradigm on terrorism:

• fight terrorists to strengthen deterrence; let no one think U.S. will just take it

• work with other states to disrupt

• use force when sensible

• no concessions, pay-offs, appeasement (unlike Europeans and the one deviation, Reagan's
calamitous arms sales to Iran)

• no major int'l terrorist group had U.S. as its primary target

• most groups are state-sponsored or national-liberation fronts

• a second- or third-tier nuisance, not a strategic threat p. 220

-average annual fatalities were 26

-less likely than lightning strikes, bathtub drownings, or poisonous bites p. 220

-didn't threaten either U.S. power or large numbers of citizens

-Jan. 25/93: Mir Aimal Kansi, lone Pakistani gunman, shoots AK-47 into cars outside CIA HQ in
McLean, killing two

-Feb. 26/93: Ramzi Yousef attacks WTC in worst foreign terror attack on U.S. soil

-June 26/93: U.S. launches 23 Tomahawks at Baghdad's mukhabarat HQ after April 1993 plot to kill
former President Bush with car bomb on Kuwait visit

-first U.S. reprisal in 7 years, since Reagan's 1986 raid on Tripoli

-1994: 30+ killed in Israel by Hamas and PIJ in rage over Oslo

-July 1994: Hizballah bombs Buenos Aires Jewish center, killing almost 100

-CT aides see state sponsors as greatest threat

-after Pan Am 103, Bush tries U.N. sanctions and int'l pressure to get out of cycle
Search - 1 Result - ("barton gellman" and "was mostly ambition") Page 1 of 10

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The Washington Post, January 20, 2002

Copyright 2002 The Washington Post

washingionpost.com
The Washington Post

January 20, 2002, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A01

LENGTH: 5414 words

HEADLINE: A Strategy's Cautious Evolution; Before Sept. 11, the Bush Anti-Terror Effort
Was Mostly Ambition

BYLINE: Barton Gellman, Washington Post Staff Writer

BODY:

On a closed patch of desert in the first week of June, the U.S. government built a house for
Osama bin Laden.

Bin Laden would have recognized the four-room villa. He lived in one just like it outside
Kandahar, Afghanistan, whenever he spent a night among the recruits at his Tarnak Qila
training camp. The stone-for-stone replica, in Nevada, was a prop in the rehearsal of his
death.

From a Predator drone flying two miles high and four miles away, Air Force and Central
Intelligence Agency ground controllers loosed a missile. It carried true with a prototype
warhead, one of about 100 made, for killing men inside buildings. According to people briefed
on the experiment, careful analysis after the missile pierced the villa wall showed blast
effects that would have slain anyone in the target room. The Bush administration now had in
its hands what one participant called "the holy grail" of a three-year quest by the U.S.
government — a tool that could kill bin Laden within minutes of finding him. The CIA planned
and practiced the operation. But for the next three months, before the catastrophe of Sept.
11, President Bush and his advisers held back.

The new national security team awaited results of a broad policy review toward the al Qaeda
network and Afghanistan's Taliban regime, still underway in a working group two and three
levels below the president. Bush and his top aides had higher priorities — above all, ballistic
missile defense. As they turned their attention to terrorism, they were moving toward more
far-reaching goals than the death of bin Laden alone.

Bush's engagement with terrorism in the first eight months of his term, described in
interviews with advisers and contemporary records, tells a story of burgeoning ambition
without the commitment of comparably ambitious means. In deliberations and successive
drafts of a National Security Presidential Directive approved by Bush's second-ranking
advisers on Aug. 13, the declared objective evolved from "rolling back" to "permanently
eroding" and eventually to "eliminating" bin Laden's al Qaeda organization.
 Page 2 of 34

8/12/02 TIMEMAG 28 Page 1

8/12/02 Time Mag. 28
2002 WL 21959747

Time Magazine
Copyright 2002

Monday, August 12, 2002

Vol. 160, Issue: 7

Special Report: The Secret History

They Had A Plan ; Long before 9/11, the White House debated taking the fight to
al- Qaeda. By the time they decided, it was too late. The saga of a lost chance
Michael Elliott Reported by Massimo Calabresi, John F. Dickerson, Elaine
Shannon, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller and Michael Weisskopf/ Washington;
Hannah Bloch and Tim McGirk/Islamabad; Cathy Booth Thomas/Dallas; Wendy Cole
and Marguerite Michaels/Chicago; Bruce Crumley/Paris; James Graff/Brussels;
David Schwartz/Phoenix; and Michael Ware/Kabul

Sometimes history is made by the force of arms on battlefields,

sometimes by the fall of an exhausted empire. But often when
historians set about figuring why a nation took one course rather
than another, they are most interested in who said what to whom at a
meeting far from the public eye whose true significance may have
been missed even by those who took part in it.

One such meeting took place in the White House situation room
during the first week of January 2001. The session was part of a
program designed by Bill Clinton's National Security Adviser, Sandy
Berger, who wanted the transition between the Clinton and George W.
Bush administrations to run as smoothly as possible. With some
bitterness, Berger remembered how little he and his colleagues had
been helped by the first Bush Administration in 1992-93. Eager to
avoid a repeat of that experience, he had set up a series of 10
briefings by his team for his successor, Condoleezza Rice, and her
deputy, Stephen Hadley.

Berger attended only one of the briefings--the session that dealt

with the threat posed to the U.S. by international terrorism, and
especially by al-Qaeda. "I'm coming to this briefing," he says he
told Rice, "to underscore how important I think this subject is."
Later, alone in his office with Rice, Berger says he told her, "I
believe that the Bush Administration will spend more time on
terrorism generally, and on al-Qaeda specifically, than any other
subject."

The terrorism briefing was delivered by Richard Clarke, a career

bureaucrat who had served in the first Bush Administration and risen
during the Clinton years to become the White House's point man on
terrorism. As chair of the interagency Counter-Terrorism Security

Copr. © West 2003 No Claim to Orig. U.S. Govt. Works

//--:-.<. 1.1 .— r^lA,

 ATLANTIC MONTHLy:

THE LOGIC OF
SUICIDE TERRORISM
r First youfeel nervous about riding the bus. Then you wonder about going to a mall.
Then you think twice about sitting for long at your favorite cafe. Then nowhere
seems safe. Terrorist groups have a strategy—to shrink to nothing the areas in which
people movefreely—and suicide bombers, inexpensive and reliably lethal, are
their latest weapons. Israel has learned to recognize and disrupt the steps on the
path to suicide attacks. We must learn too

BY BRUCE HOFFMAN

die Palestinians nor unique to its geostrategic position. The

N
early everywhere in the world it is taken for grant-
ed that one can simply push open the door to a
restaurant, cafe, or bar, sit down, and order a meal
or a drink. In Israel die process of entering such a place is
more complicated. One often encounters an armed guard
who, in addition to asking prospective patrons whether
they diemselves are armed, may quickly pat them down,
feeling for die telltale bulge of a belt or a vest containing
explosives. Establishments that cannot afford a guard or are
unwilling to pass on the cost of one to customers^simply
keep their doors locked, responding to knocks with a quick
glance through the glass^and an instant judgment as to
whether this or that person can safely be admitted. What
would have been unimaginable a year ago is now not only
routine but reassuring. It has become the price of a
redefined normality.
In the United States in the twenty months since 9/11
we, too, have had to become accustomed to an array of
new, often previously inconceivable security measures—in
airports and other transportation hubs, hotels and office
buildings, sports stadiums and concert halls. Although
fundamental characteristics of suicide bombing, and its
strong attraction for die terrorist organizations behind it, are
universal: Suicide bombings are inexpensive and effective.
They are less complicated and compromising dian odier
kinds of terrorist operations. They guarantee media coverage.
The suicide terrorist is die ultimate smart bomb. Perhaps
most important, coldly efficient bombings tear at die fabric
of trust that holds societies together. All these reasons
doubdess account for die spread of suicide terrorism from
die Middle East to Sri Lanka and Turkey, Argentina and
Chechnya, Russia and Algeria—and to the United States.
To understand die power diat suicide terrorism can have
over a populace—and what a populace can do to counter it-
one naturally goes to die society diat has been most deeply
affected. As a researcher who has studied die strategies of
terrorism for more dian twenty-five years, I recendy visited
Israel to review die steps the military, die police, and the
intelligence and security services have taken against a direat
more pervasive and personal dian ever before.
was looking at x-rays widi Dr. Shmuel Shapira in his

some are more noticeable and perhaps more inconvenient
dian odiers, the fact remains diat diey have redefined our
own sense of normality. They are accepted because we feel
>.
:•.-;$
more vulnerable dian before. Widi every new threat to in-
ternational security we become more willing to live widi
stringent precautions and reflexive, almost unconscious
1
•li3 wariness. Widi every new threat, that is, our everyday life
becomes more like Israel's.
The situation in Israel, where last year's intensified suicide-
bombing campaign changed die national mood and people's
personal politics, is not analogous to that in die United States
today. But die organization and die operations of die suicide
bombers are neither limited to Israel and its conflict widi
I
office at Jerusalem's Hadassah Hospital. "This is not a
place to have a wristwatch," he said as he described die
injuries of a young girl who'd been on her way to school one
morning last November when a suicide terrorist detonated a
bomb on her bus. Eleven of her fellow passengers were
killed, and more than fifty odiers wounded. The blast was so
powerful diat die hands and case of die bomber's wristwatch
had turned into lethal projectiles, lodging in die girl's neck
and ripping a major artery. The presence of such foreign
objects in the bodies of his patients no longer surprises
Shapira. "We have cases with a nail in die neck, or nuts and
bolts in the thigh ... a ball bearing in the skull," he said.

40
 Terrorism and Weapons of the Apocalypse
David C. Rapoport
O N 20 MARCH 1995, AUM
Shinrikyo startled the world by
launching a nerve gas attack
in the Tokyo subway. Many felt that ter-
rorists finally crossed a threshold by
producing and using an apocalyptic
weapon, the "poor man's atomic bomb"
as the literature so often suggests.' A sec-
ond conclusion was that Aum confirmed
a belief widespread among students of
terrorism that religious groups are par-
ticularly attracted to these weapons.
The first conclusion, that a threshold
has been crossed, runs wildly against the
facts. No one in the near future is going
to see cities destroyed where tens of thou-
sands die. Conventional explosives, like
those used to create the Nairobi or Okla-
homa City atrocities, will continue to
inflict the overwhelming bulk of the ca-
sualties. The plain fact is neither chemical
nor biological weapons presently are truly
weapons of mass destruction in the way
atomic weapons are; and they are cer-
tainly not so in the hands of terrorists.2
Misreading the Aum Shinrikyo experi-
David C. Rapoport is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the University of California, Las Angeles, and
Editor of the Journal of Terrorism and Political Violence. Professor Rapoport is also Fomulmjj Director of
the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA.
49
ence, inter alia, could waste tens of bil-
lions of dollars. 1
With respect to the second conclu-
sion, we have closed the book too quickly
on who might be attracted to these weap-
ons. The historical record indicates
secular groups have sought to use such
weapons more often t h a n religious
groups. This will likely continue into the
future too.
DIFFICULTIES IN
DISCUSSING THE PROBLEM
Before we turn to the reasoning, it will
be useful to explain why this issue is so
difficult to discuss. First, one cannot say
much that is either new or certain about
the matter, partly because there have
been so few incidents, and we know so
very little about those events. Groups
gathered materials and sometimes made
threats to use them but they did not
employ them, and we do not know why.4
Beyond the absence of information, there
is a second problem. We are dealing with
Studies in Conflict & Terronsm, 25:303-316, 2002
Copyright © 2002 Taylor & Francis
1057-610X/02 $12.00 + .00
DOI: 10.1080/105761002901223

Rethinking Terrorism and

Counterterrorism Since 9/11

BRUCE HOFFMAN
RAND
Arlington, VA, USA

This article examines what has been learned since 11 September 2001 about the
nature of twenty-first-century terrorism, the challenges that it poses, and how it
must be countered. It attempts to better understand Usama bin Laden and the ter-
rorist entity that he created and to assess whether we are more or less secure as a
result of the U.S.-led actions in Afghanistan and the pursuit of the al Qaeda net-
work. The article considers these issues, placing them in the context of the major
trends in terrorism that have unfolded in recent months and will likely affect the
future course of political violence.

A few hours after the first American air strikes against Afghanistan began on 7 October
2001, a pre-recorded videotape was broadcast around the world. A tall, skinny man with
a long, scraggily beard, wearing a camouflage fatigue jacket and the headdress of a
desert tribesman, with an AK-47 assault rifle at his side, stood before a rocky backdrop.
In measured, yet defiant, language, Usama bin Laden again declared war on the United
States. Only a few weeks before, his statement would likely have been dismissed as the
inflated rhetoric of a saber-rattling braggart. But with the World Trade Center now laid
to waste, the Pentagon heavily damaged, and the wreckage of a fourth hijacked passen-
ger aircraft strewn across a field in rural Pennsylvania, bin Laden's declaration was
regarded with a preternatural seriousness that would previously have been unimaginable.
How bin Laden achieved this feat, and the light his accomplishment sheds on under-
standing the extent to which terrorism has changed and, in turn, how our responses must
change as well, is the subject of this article.

The September 11 Attacks by the Numbers

The enormity and sheer scale of the simultaneous suicide attacks on September 11 eclipsed
anything previously seen in terrorism. Among the most significant characteristics of the

Received 29 March 2002; accepted 29 May 2002.

A version of this article was presented at the "Workshop on the New Dimensions of Terror-
ism," sponsored by the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological Uni-
versity, Singapore, 21-22 March 2002.
Address correspondence to Dr. Bruce Hoffman, RAND, 1200 S. Hayes Street, Arlington,
VA 22202, USA. E-mail: hoffman@rand.org

303
 Martha Crenshaw is the Colin and Nancy Campbell Professor of
Global Issues and Democratic Thought in the Department of Gov-
ernment. Wesleyan University.

Hie United States

and Coercive Diplomacy Coercive Diplomacy and
edited by Robert J. Ait
the Response to Terrorism
and Patrick M. Crouin IVLVKTIIA CHENS 1 1 AW

KHKOKISM II \,s |'HO\KI> TO UK A DIIT'K.Ii(T TK.ST for coercive

diplomacy. U.S. counlcrlerrorism policy cannot routinely meet
the basic requirements ol the slralegy. When coercive diplo-
macy is applied, (he conditions (hat would make it successful are
rarely met. \\hile (he United Slates has sometimes been effective in
changing (he policies ol slates (hat instigate or assist terrorism, it has
not found an appropriate mix of threat and reward (hat could con-
strain (he behavior of nonstate adversaries.
This chapter Ionises on the U.S. response to terrorism from 1993
to the "war on terrorism" launched in 2001. It first outlines the gen-
eral contours of the threat as il developed after the Cold War. Tin's
overview is followed by analysis of (he general concept of coercive
diplomacy in relation to terrorist strategies. The propositions thus
generated are then ((-sled against (he instances of post-Cold War
counterterrorism policy that most closely lit (he definition of the con-
cept of coercive diplomacy. These cases, when military force was used
or threatened, provide (he best basis lor evaluating (be success or fail-
ure ol (be slralegy. They include the retaliatory strike against Iraq in
1993, threats against Iran following (he bombing of U.S. military facil-
ities in Saudi Arabia in 1996, cruise missile attacks against Sudan and
UNITED STATES INSTITUTE OF PEACE PRESS
Afghanistan in I99M, and efforts to compel the Taliban to yield Osama
Washington, D.C.
The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us? by Fareed Zakaria Pagel of 12

Fareed Zakaria com

About

The Politics of Rage: Why Do

Articles
They Hate Us?
To dismiss the terrorists as insane is to
Books.
delude ourselves. Bin Laden and his
fellow fanatics are products of failed
societies that breed their anger.
America needs a plan that will not only
Contact
defeat terror hut reform the Arab
world
By Fareed Zakaria
Interviews, Etc

A o the question "Why do the terrorists hate us?" Americans could be pardoned
for answering, "Why should we care?" The immediate reaction to the murder of
5,000 innocents is anger, not analysis. Yet anger will not be enough to get us
through what is sure to be a long struggle. For that we will need answers. The
ones we have heard so far have been comforting but familiar. We stand for
freedom and they hate it. We are rich and they envy us. We are strong and they
resent this. All of which is true. But there are billions of poor and weak and
oppressed people around the world. They don't turn planes into bombs. They
don't blow themselves up to kill thousands of civilians. If envy were the cause of
terrorism, Beverly Hills, Fifth Avenue and Mayfair would have become morgues
long ago. There is something stronger at work here than deprivation and
jealousy. Something that can move men to kill but also to die.

Osama bin Laden has an answer—religion. For him and his followers, this is a
holy war between Islam and the Western world. Most Muslims disagree. Every
Islamic country in the world has condemned the attacks of Sept. 11. To many,
bin Laden belongs to a long line of extremists who have invoked religion to
justify mass murder and spur men to suicide. The words "thug," "zealot" and
"assassin" all come from ancient terror cults—Hindu, Jewish and Muslim,
respectively—that believed they were doing the work of God. The terrorist's
mind is its own place, and h'ke Milton's Satan, can make a hell of heaven, a
heaven of hell. Whether it is the Unabomber, Aum Shinrikyo or Baruch
Goldstein (who killed scores of unarmed Muslims in Hebron), terrorists are
almost always misfits who place their own twisted morality above mankind's.

But bin Laden and his followers are not an isolated cult like Aum Shinrikyo or
the Branch Davidians or demented loners like Timothy McVeigh and the
Unabomber. They come out of a culture that reinforces their hostility, distrust
and hatred of the West—and of America in particular. This culture does not
condone terrorism but fuels the fanaticism that is at its heart. To say that Al
Qaeda is a fringe group may be reassuring, but it is false. Read the Arab press in
the aftermath of the attacks and you will detect a not-so-hidden admiration for
bin Laden. Or consider this from the Pakistani newspaper The Nation:

"September 11 was not mindless terrorism for terrorism's sake. It was reaction

http://www.fareedzakaria.com/articles/newsweelc/101501_why.html 6/7/2004