SOME LITTLE SECRETS ABOUT TERRORISM

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The almost universal Western reaction to the terror attack on the United
States has been anger, revulsion and a desire to make sure it never
happens again.

U.S. President George W. Bush has declared "war on terrorism." The other
18 NATO countries, including Canada, have given at least formal blessing
to this enterprise.

In Washington, government officials and politicians are emphasizing
their country's steely resolve, their determination not to buckle under
and their certainty that those who planned these attacks will face a
stern and unforgiving retribution.

But history demonstrates two dirty little secrets about terrorism,
neither of which governments are anxious to admit. The first is that
terrorism is almost impossible to prevent unless its root causes are
seriously and systematically addressed.

The second is that, quite often, terrorists get what they want. "We can
do things that will help lessen the possibility of a terrorist attacks,
but eliminate it we can't," says historian Hal Klepak, a professor of
war studies at Kingston's Royal Military College. "To talk of a war
against terrorism is not helpful."

The terrorists who hijacked four airliners "apparently did it with
X-acto knives," says Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the University of
Toronto's Centre for the Study of Peace and Conflict. "What are we going
to do, strip-search everyone boarding an airplane to see if they're
carrying X-acto knives?"

"There are an infinite number of terrorist targets," adds Jim Hanson,
associate executive director of the Canadian Institute for Strategic
Studies and a retired brigadier general. "You guard one target and these
guys will pick another one. In a free, democratic society, there's not
much you can do about it."

We tend to think of terrorism as a new phenomenon. It is not. Terror is
an old strategy in warfare from the medieval European practice of
placing the heads of captured enemies on pikes, to the savage raids
against women and children that characterized the French-English
frontier wars of 18th-century Canada.

Terror is cheap. It's easier to kill civilians than soldiers. And, if by
doing so, the enemy is sufficiently frightened, he may end up doing what
the perpetrator of terror wishes.

Throughout much of history, terror was the tool of the state. In
revolutionary France, the instrument of terror was the guillotine; in
revolutionary Russia, it was the firing squad. But in modern times, as
Klepak points out, terror became the instrument of the weak. From the
Serbian and Macedonian terrorists, whose campaigns against
Austro-Hungary and Turkey helped plunge Europe into World War I, to the
Jewish extremists who battled the British in pre-1948 Palestine,
terrorists have used fear to counteract the far stronger military might
of their adversaries.

And quite often, the terrorists appear to have succeeded. France quit
Algeria in 1962 after waging a vicious and ultimately unwinnable war
against the terrorist National Liberation Front.

In 1946, Jewish terrorists agitating for their own state in
British-occupied Palestine blew up Jerusalem's King David Hotel, killing
91. Two years later, an independent Israel was established. "There were
a lot of innocent British women and children killed there," says Hanson.
"But in the end, it worked; the British left."

Some, like University of Toronto international relations professor
Wesley Wark, vehemently deny that terror ever succeeds. Wark says Jewish
terror attacks, for instance, had nothing to do with Britain quitting
Palestine and the subsequent establishment of Israel. "Anyone who says
that doesn't know anything about the Middle East," he snaps. "I do not
believe any terrorist campaign has ever achieved its political goals."

Others disagree. "Israel was born in terror," says Klepak. "It knows
what terror is; it was active in creating it. I don't mean this as an
insult. It is simply what happened."

What does seem indisputable, however, is that definitions of what
constitutes terror and terrorism change with the times.

In British-occupied Palestine, Menachim Begin, then a leader of the
underground Irgun organization which blew up the King David Hotel, was
treated as a terrorist. A few decades later, Begin was prime minister of
Israel and accorded the greatest respect by his former enemies.

Ditto for another Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. In the 1940s,
he also was a terrorist, a leader of the Stern Gang that took
responsibility for selective assassinations of British and U.N.
officials.

So, too, Yassar Arafat. Israel's government may not like the Palestinian
leader these days, but it does deal with him and with a Palestinian
Liberation Organization it once denounced as a gang of terrorists.

Certainly, changing definitions of terror are not confined to the Middle
East.

In the 1950s, Jomo Kenyatta spent time in jail for his role as a leader
of the terrorist Mau Mau movement fighting the British occupation of
Kenya. A few years later, Britain left Kenya and Kenyatta became the new
country's first prime minister.

In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was branded a terrorist until 1990, when
the white-supremacist government realized it had no choice but to deal
with him. Now, at home and abroad, Mandela is treated as the embodiment
of free South Africa.

The list goes on. The U.S. State Department branded the Kosovo
Liberation Army as a terrorist organization until 1999. That's when it
enlisted the ethnic Albanian nationalist organization's help in NATO's
brief war against Yugoslavia.

Ironically, Osama bin Laden who has been marked as the main suspect in
the attack on the U.S. was, just a few years ago, feted as a freedom
fighter by U.S. ally Saudi Arabia for his role in driving the Soviet
Union from Afghanistan.

In those days, only the Soviets referred to the Afghan resistance as
terrorists -- including bin Laden and his friends in the Taliban, who
now rule most of the country. In those days, the West treated such
claims as Soviet propaganda. So, other than the fact that times change,
what is the lesson from all of this?

To Homer-Dixon, it is that a military response alone is not sufficient.
"You can't do anything with such people (terrorists) except isolate
them," he says. "But the circumstances which give rise to their appeal
can be addressed. Like the refugee camps outside Afghanistan: They
produce the environment in which these things breed."

Klepak agrees. Like Homer-Dixon, he has nothing against the U.S. hunting
down and killing those responsible for the latest terror attacks as long
it doesn't overreact. And he agrees that North American governments
should do what they can to make air travel more secure.

But once that's done, Klepak says, the grievances that inspire such
hatred of the U.S. and the West have to be addressed. "Terrorism is bred
when you have people in despair, people with nothing to lose, people
with no other way to fight back .... "Sure, plenty may be bonkers. But
plenty are not. Plenty are brutalized by living in these (refugee) camps
and watching their mothers die in a bombing raid and by watching
hopelessness. What they feel is abject injustice."

Homer-Dixon feels the international economic system must be reformed to
remove what he calls "the fundamentally inequitable structural
impediments to development. "We are implicated in this," he says.
"What's the first thing we do with a financial crisis? We rush in to
ensure that the banks and the bondholders are all right. Once we've
dealt with that, we don't care."

He points out that in the 1998 Asian economic crisis, the Western world
bailed out the banks and then left countries like Indonesia in the
lurch. "Or look at Mexico. We solved the Mexican financial crisis (of
1995). But for the average Mexican, there's been no improvement; all of
the economic growth has gone to the wealthy. For most people, things are
worse."

To Klepak, the answer could be found in a global conference in which the
big nations use their muscle to ensure that the breeding grounds of
terrorism are cleaned up. Such a conference, he says, might force
Israel, the Palestinians and other Middle East nations to cut a deal.
"It may be necessary to discipline Israel and the Arab nations," he
says. "It may be necessary to say to Israel, 'You couldn't hold all of
that territory (the occupied territories) in 60 B.C. and you can't hold
it all now'."

While the attacks on Washington and New York were devastating, they were
also relatively primitive, involving the old terrorist standbys of
hijacking, suicide missions and explosive force. The next one, Klepak
warns, could involve poisons, or nerve gas such as that used in the 1995
Tokyo subway attack. Or it could involve deadly biological agents.

"We've got to be serious about this. We can't take too many more attacks
like . We certainly can't take attacks involving chemical or biological warare. "It may
sound awful to say this, but maybe we should treat what happened as a
wake-up call. We must get it right .... We must cut off the desperation
at the root. If we don't, we are ferociously vulnerable."