The Art of Counter-Terrorism

Professor Boaz Ganor is Dean & Ronald Lauder Chair for Counter-Terrorism, Lauder School of Government; Founder & Executive Director, International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, Israel. On a visit to Australia in, Boaz Ganor addressed The Sydney Institute on Monday 29 October 2018 and gave a comprehensive analysis of the complexities of terrorist activity and the work of counter terrorist groups in combatting its dangers to global peace. Boaz Ganor’s visit to Australia was sponsored by AIJAC – the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council.

THE ART OF COUNTER-TERRORISM

BOAZ GANOR

Thank you very much. It’s a pleasure to be here again at The Sydney Institute and to talk about a subject matter which I find interesting. I hope that you will find it interesting as well.

As the title of my speech today suggests, it seems weird to connect art and counter- terrorism. How can we associate those two words – terrorism and art? I actually borrowed this term from the Chinese philosopher Sun Tzu who was talking about the art of war. And, since modern wars are the wars on terrorism, I think we deserve to use the phrase “the art of counter-terrorism”.

Practically, the art of counter-terrorism is the need to find the right balances between different solutions, different alternatives and different doctrines, sometimes even the contradictory ones, in solving the main dilemmas in counter-terrorism. I will try to share with you five of those dilemmas.

I started my interest in the subject matter of terrorism about 35 years ago. Like every Israeli youngster, I was drafted to the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) at the age of 18. My childhood wish was to become a pilot and I was lucky enough to be accepted into the pilots course. After a short period of time, I became a grave danger to an Israeli aircraft so they dismissed me from the pilot course. By coincidence, I then found myself at military intelligence as a young soldier, appointed to the counter-terrorism analysis department. As a young soldier and later young officer, I became fascinated with the subject matter of terrorism. Why? Because it was clear to me, back then, and much clearer today, that terrorism is one of the most interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary phenomena.

Think about any academic discipline that you have in mind, and you will find a relevance to terrorism. Psychology, sociology, political science, law, criminal or computer science, biology, chemistry, medicine, philosophy, you name it. Give me a discipline and I will show you a connection to terrorism. This is why it occurred to me, about 22 years ago, that there is a need to use academic perspectives, academic doctrines, and academic tools, to contribute to the understanding of the phenomenon of terrorism. From that, also to find better policies and better practices in counter-terrorism. That’s exactly what I’m trying to do with you today.

My lecture today will focus on those main dilemmas. It is a phenomenon spread all over the world today, unfortunately even in Sydney where you have had the “lone wolf” terrorism. Those individual attacks are being conducted by radical people. Everything I mention here is discussed in much more depth and detail in my books.

The first challenge or dilemma we need to deal with when discussing the matter of terrorism or counter-terrorism, is the question of: Who’s the enemy? Who are the terrorists? Because they do not all come from the same source. In this, we should distingiush three different types of perpetrators of terrorist attacks.

The first type of perpetrator is known under the name of “lone wolves”. Practitioners around the world today debate whether this is still a valid term. Why? Because they would argue that those guys are not really lone or lonely if you wish. Because they are associated with terrorist organisations and are being inspired by them. If a lone wolf terrorist is arrested before he has conducted an offence, he would say, most probably, that he is with ISIS, al-Qaeda, Hamas or Hezbollah. He identifies himself with a certain terrorist organisation, but practically he’s not.

The “lone wolf” terrorist was never actually recruited by such organisations. He was never trained by them and he never had operational ties to a terrorist organisation. So the definition that I would use for lone wolves, and I still would argue that it’s a valid term, is that the lone wolves are individuals who conduct terrorist attacks with no operational ties to a terrorist organisation. Meaning, they might be inspired by them. They might refer to those terrorist organisations as the model for imitation. However, they do not have operational ties to a terrorist organisation. I’ll go back to the lone wolf in a moment. One example is Mahadima Moush, one of the first European recent lone wolves who conducted a shooting attack in a Jewish museum in Brussels. This French terrorist knew he was under surveillance in France so decided to cross the border in the Schengen area in Europe which is quite easy. He then moved there and he conducted the attack in Brussels.

The second type of perpetrator is what I call “local independent networks” of terrorists. On the face of it, this sounds like a contradiction in terms. Here we are talking about two or three, or a small number of people who created the independent network. With no operational ties to a terrorist organisation, they would have been radicalised together online or by associating with the wrong people all together. Then, one day they decide to commit an attack. When we talk about those independent networks, in many cases we are talking about family members, or as in the case of San Bernardino in California, a husband and a wife. It could be the attack in Israel a few years ago in Sarona, a Jewish centre in Tel Aviv. This involved two Palestinian cousins with no connection to Palestinian organisations. They had been inspired by ISIS and radicalised by its propaganda, having no links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad or any other Palestinian terrorist organisation.

The third type of terrorist is a different ball game. This is the organised terrorist cell. This is the traditional terrorism that we know for centuries, definitely decades. Here we are talking about people who have been recruited by a terrorist organisation and trained by it. They have created a cell, which could be a sleeper cell in their home town, or it could be an infiltration cell; i.e., a cell that had actually been prepared outside the target, or the country of target, and infiltrated for the purpose. For example, the 9/11 attacks were conducted by an organised terrorist cell.

Now, when I compare those two ends of the range – the lone wolf and organised terrorism – I have good news and bad news at the same time. In reference to the lone wolf, the good news is that, in most cases – of course there are exceptions, and the attack in Nice was an exception – the number of casualties that they inflict are quite limited. How many people can they stab before they’ll be arrested or killed? Even in a running down or ramming attack, how many people?

If you compare that to 9/11 or many other types of organised attacks, their impact is very low. Most of the casualties are from organised terrorism and not from lone wolf attacks. That’s the good news. But I have bad news. The bad news is that we used to believe – and I’ll explain in a moment why I use past tense now – that intelligence is incapable of dealing with those lone wolves around the world. So, why did we believe that intelligence is incapable of dealing with this phenomenon?

Let’s double click on intelligence for one moment. What does it mean? How does intelligence work, traditionally, all over the world? Intelligence is usually based on two legs, or two arms if you wish. HumInt and ComInt. HumInt is human sources intelligence, that is you have an agent in the room who reports to his supervisors. ComInt is communications intelligence meaning you are wiretapping the discussion or you are listening to the computer conversation or whatever. The common denominator of these two types of intelligence is the fact that you have at least two people, sometimes more, who have a discussion. And they share a secret in the discussion. The secret of the attack. Now you can intercept the discussion either by having an agent in the room or by listening to the discussion over the phone conversation. In lone wolf attacks, in many cases there is no discussion whatsoever. Everything starts and ends with the sick mind of one person, the lone wolf attacker. He has been radicalized; he is planning the attack; and he is executing the attack. If there is no conversation you cannot intercept it and therefore you cannot have prior warning. I will explain why this is wrong in a moment. Today, we understand that there is some kind of new or old type of intelligence which fills the gap of humInt and ComInt.

The first challenge was identifying the enemy; the second challenge was understanding the rationale of the enemy, understanding the rationale of the terrorist.

If I were to leave this building and randomly pick one citizen outside and ask “are terrorists rational actors?”, most probably the answer would be no. How could they be? A guy who is ready to strap himself with a suicide belt, commit suicide, and kill others? This is a rational behaviour? No way. Well, I beg to differ. Terrorists in general, I would argue, are rational actors. This is true of the head of a terrorist organisation, the commander, the chain of command but also the suicide attacker himself. How can I say that? How can I say that terrorists are rational?

Let’s discuss what is a rational decision-making process altogether. A rational decision-making process is a process in which one has different alternatives, different policies, and different behaviours that he can choose from. He has goals that he’s setting himself. Now, he’s asking himself in reference to each one of those alternative ways of behaviour, policies if you wish, which policy is more beneficial and which policy is more costly in order to achieve the goal that he set to himself. That’s a rational decision-making process. You calculate the cost(s) and benefit(s) of different alternatives and you choose the  alternative which you believe is more beneficial than costly. That’s what you do every morning. Even the decision of what tie you are choosing is exactly a rational decision-making process.

I’m doing that, you’re doing that. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, is doing that as well. The only difference is that, although the process is generic, the context is subjective. This prism of cost-benefit analysis changes from culture to culture, from religion to religion, from individual to individual, from time to time.

So when we talk about this cost-benefit analysis it is an outcome of a combination of a) the culture of the person; b) the religion of the person; c) the history, the experience of the person; d) the interest of the person, or the organisation. You can put entity instead of person if you wish for that matter.

If you ask me what is one of the biggest challenges of every expert of counter-terrorism, every artist of counter-terrorism, from around the world, it is to be able to open his own head and take out from his head his own calculations of cost benefit which is based on his culture, on his religion, on his experience in life, on his goals. Understand the terrorist’s culture, understand his set of beliefs and understand his cost-benefit calculation together. When we talk about rationality, we need to understand that it’s always in the eye of the beholder. That’s one of the challenges in counter-terrorism.

But the problem is even bigger than that. It is not simply that there is a Western rationale and, opposed to that, a terrorist rationale. It’s not the case. The rationale of ISIS, I would argue, is different from the rationale of al-Qaeda. And the rational of al-Qaeda is different from the rationale of Hamas. The same goes for Hezbollah and so on and so forth. They have different cultures, different experiences, and different goals that they are trying to achieve.

It’s different from organisation to organisation. There is no one generic rationale for any terrorist organisation. The rationale of ISIS today is different from the rationale of ISIS a year ago. Why? Because circumstances have changed. A year ago ISIS was what we call a ‘hybrid terrorist organisation”. A hybrid terrorist organisation is a terrorist organisation that controls both territory and population. The considerations of a hybrid terrorist organisation, which is responsible for the services to the people in his territory, are different from a skeleton terrorist organisation – a traditional terrorist organisation which is under the radar, which doesn’t control territory, doesn’t control people and so on. So the calculus of ISIS has changed in the last year.

Up till now, I have been talking about something that is easier to understand. I am talking about the rationale of organisations. What about the rationale of the lone wolves? I could show you four pictures. The common denominator is that all of the pictures are of Palestinian lone wolves taken just after they have stabbed somebody in Israel or they have run over somebody with their car.

In those pictures they are handcuffed and walking to a police car, probably in order to spend their life in jail. That’s the common denominator. I could give you forty or more such pictures. But there is another common denominator in those pictures. You will see the smile on their face. All of them have big smiles. Each one is going to spend his life in prison. However, they all have a big smile on their face. It’s not a photo opportunity. It’s not a coincidence. It’s not just typical for Palestinian terrorists by the way. European victims who have been stabbed by terrorists, by ISIS-affiliated terrorists, report as well that as they were attacked, the terrorists had a big smile on their face.

That smile tells us a lot. It actually reflects the inner calculus of cost-benefit. They are telling to themselves that, although I’m going to jail, what I did right now was the beneficial thing to do. Of course, they had been exposed to propaganda. They had been exposed to radical material and they had been brainwashed to believe that it’s worthwhile to spend life in jail because what they did was the beneficial thing to do.

I would like to suggest another explanation for the smile. And I would use one word in order to describe it. Honour. These guys tell themselves that what they did is not just the beneficial thing to do, it’s the honourable thing to do. Because again, that’s what they were educated to believe in. This is the honourable thing to do.

So what are the motivations of the lone wolves? We’ve researched this phenomenon. Let me show you our understanding based on the research of what motivates lone wolves around the world. It’s a group of motivation. Part of it has to do with ideological motivations. It could be idealistic or religious grievances. It could be political grievances. Others can be motivated by personal grievances. For example, economic crisis or interpersonal crisis, between him and her – a crisis in the family. Others might be conducting those attacks as an outcome of psychological situations – a death wish, suicidal goals, or mental disorders. Of course, as I mentioned before, the honour factor as well.

At the end of the day, I would like to argue that you would hardly find a lone wolf that would be motivated by just one of those grievances. Usually it’s a combination of all of the above. In order to explain that in a very concrete manner, I took a picture of a bath. Or, if you wish, a container with liquid or water. Think about the situation that each one of those grievances contributes something to the overall motivation to conduct a terrorist attack. As the water pours in from crisis in the family or religious differences, or whatever, you see the level going up and up and up until there is a spillover. The spillover is the attack. We can learn another interesting thing from that.

That the height of the wall of the bath is very important. Because the height of the wall of the bath is the ability of the person, the psychological ability of the person, to contain the frustration, to contain the anger. The question that we should ask ourselves is: Why this guy and not the other guy conducted the attack?

Let’s say a lone wolf attacker has five or six brothers and sisters. They live in the same conditions. They are exposed to the same grievances; it’s the same education; it’s the same atmosphere; it’s the same economical breakdown of the family. But only one of them is conducting the attack, why? Because his container is different from the others. His psychological profile is different from the others. And I would like to argue that this wall is dynamic. It can go down if you are being exposed to triggers. A trigger could be that the person is watching TV and seeing another guy conduct a terrorist attack. He wants to imitate it, that’s a trigger. Or extreme anger because this or the other isn’t. That’s a trigger. So that’s a way to understand the complexity of the overall motivations that give birth to lone wolves around the world.

All of that is of course fertilised by incitement, by radicalisation material, and by propaganda material (mainly, but not limited to online material). This actually leads to a misuse all of these grievances to provoke the terrorist to conduct attacks.

When we talk about lone wolf attacks, we talk about different types of modus operandi. It could be starting from sabotage, stoning, molotov cocktails, or stabbing which is very common. Then there is vehicular ramming and, unfortunately, (what we have in Israel) bulldozing, which is vehicular ramming with a bulldozer. Shootings and IED bombings are also very common. We hardly see one type of modus operandi such as suicide attacks. Many experts will differ with me on that. They would say many of those lone wolves want to die, and prepare themselves to die: So how come you say they are not suicide attackers?

When I talk to my students in Israel and I teach them about terrorism and counter terrorism, I tell them that terrorism is a risky business. So, my recommendation to them is, don’t become terrorists. Forget about the moral reason but also from the practical side of it. Most probably you will die in the attack or you will be arrested. “So it’s not a good deal, don’t become terrorists”.

What I’m trying to say is that the life expectancy of a terrorist, regardless which terrorist, is not very high. I would insure his life. The fact that you have a high risk doesn’t mean that this is a suicide attack. The definition I use for suicide attacks is an attack that the very act itself is dependant on the death of the perpetrator. What does this mean? Think about a terrorist that has a suicide belt, and he knows very well that “I need to press the button”. By doing that, he’s killing himself and therefore killing others. Or he doesn’t press the button, he doesn’t kill himself but nothing happens. So, he cannot fulfill his mission without dying. That’s not a lone wolf attack, that’s not a stabbing attack, not a ramming attack and so on. All those suicide attacks were globally, until now, not conducted by lone wolves. All of them were organised terrorist attacks. And this is an important piece of information.

I use the term “jihadi zombies” in order to explain that phenomenon. Why do I use the term jihadi zombies? Because zombies don’t have any shred of honour. And I want to make it very clear to youngsters that are thinking about this type of activity, there is no shred of honour in this. You are behaving like a zombie. A jihadi zombie will come from left to right with an orange t-shirt. One of these attacks occurred in Israel 800 metres away from the campus of my own university. The Jihadi attacked all the people, all the civilians who were waiting for the public bus. If this is not the behaviour of a jihadi zombie, I don’t know what is.

So you would say, okay, this is an Israeli problem. Well, it’s not. It’s a global problem. One jihadi zombie in London killed a British soldier by the name of Lee Rigby. The attacker could have run away, but he didn’t. He stayed there; he mixed his hands with the blood of the victim. Then he could run away, he didn’t. He went to the bystanders and he asked them to take out a cellular phone and to have a video clip in which he wanted to explain to the world why what he did was the honourable thing to do. It’s not an honourable thing to do.

So okay you’ll say, it’s Israel and Britain. No, there is another example. There was an attack in the United States in which an African American guy converted to Islam, took an axe, and attacked NYPD officers in the suburbs of New York City. This is global, this is happening everywhere. And, there are more and more converts that are doing this. Those are not people who are genuine Muslims, they are not very well acquainted with Islam, but they want to show how dedicated they are. They jump from one side to the extreme other side and they are ready to commit those types of attacks. This, in my view, proves a total misunderstanding of what Islam or any religion is about.

I said earlier that we used to believe that intelligence was incapable of dealing with those types of attacks. That’s wrong. There is kind of a compensation. What is this kind of compensation? Instead of HumInt and ComInt, it’s OSINT. It’s open-source intelligence. Many of those terrorists give, and actually point out their intentions to commit a terrorist attack over the social network discourse. You might say: Why, why do they do that? It’s not that smart. Well, they have to do it. What’s the difference between a terrorist attack and some other types of attacks? You know, let me in brackets talk about the Pittsburgh attack just recently. The Americans do not refer to that as terrorism. They refer to that as a “hate crime”. I don’t understand what the difference is between a hate crime and terrorism. Yesterday, I heard the attorney general of the United States explain that if you are attacking because of racism and ethnic affiliations this is a hate crime.

But if you have an ideology, this is terrorism. What’s the difference between anarchist ideology and fascist ideology? It’s the same thing. So there is no meaning for that. And you also can see that, although this is a different kind of terrorist attack. This is a white supremacist terrorist and not an islamist jihadist terrorist, but the behaviour is the same type, because he gave prior warnings over the internet using Twitter for that purpose.

Why is it important for them to give a prior warning? Because without explaining, without giving the message as to why they do it, it’s useless. There is no meaning for that, there is no shred of honour in just killing people. There must be a cause – anarchism, fascism, communism, nationalism. Then it’s all quite clear why it is the honourable thing to do.

Organised terrorists, the third type, don’t need to give this information before the attack. Why? Because, after the attack, the terrorist organisation will offer a video clip from before the attack, announcing its intentions. The lone wolves cannot do that. After the attack they will be dead or arrested. So, they have to do it before the attack. Today, a lot of intelligence agencies and police departments are using big data – AI or artificial intelligence technology and other types of technology, machine learning in order to be more effective in tracing those messages over the social network. I’ll give you an example from a lone wolf attack in Israel. Just before the attack he put some ISIS propaganda on his website. He wrote in his Facebook page “in the name of Allah, the merciful and compassionate, Allah today I decided to conduct shuhada. To become a martyr”.

The internet is also being served as a guide on how to conduct such attacks efficiently . How to use this type of knife and not the other type? After the attack, supporters of the attacker put him up as a model on the internet. So the internet becomes, at the end of the day, a very negative platform in which the person is being radicalised with incitement, and then he decides to commit the attack, give justification, political statement before the attack, and become an imitation model to serve as a fertilizer for further incitement.

The third challenge the artist of counter-terrorism needs to take into consideration is understanding the equation of terrorism. If you would ask me to summarise everything I’ve learnt about terrorism in the last 35 years into one sentence, the sentence would be: the formula of terrorism. If you figure out this formula you are a counter-terrorism expert.

The formula of terrorism is a very simple mathematical formula that has two factors: motivation and multiple operational capability. It means that when a certain group of people has both motivation to attack, regardless of which type of motivation, and operational capability that allows it to materialise the motivation, then a terrorist attack or a terrorist campaign will appear. From the formula of terrorism we can conclude what should be the formula of counter-terrorism: the same formula. If you really want to be effective in counter-terrorism you should find a way to lower the motivation that gives birth to terrorism and lower the operational capability of the terrorists. It is easier said than done.

You would understand this more than anyone else, because you are Australians. And you know why? Because when you are lowering the operational capability of the terrorists, you fight them and, if necessary, you kill them, you arrest them, you confiscate their funds, you destroy their weapons. The more effective you are in doing all of that, the more you raise their motivation to retaliate against you. We call it the boomerang effect in counter-terrorism.

How to find a solution for this boomerang effect in counter-terrorism is the question. This is the art of counter-terrorism.

The next dilemma is the democratic dilemma in counter-terrorism. It comes from a contradiction that you can be most effective in counter-terrorism if you disregard democratic values and if you are a dictatorship.

There is a contradiction, unfortunately, between security efficiency and liberal democratic values. We need to acknowledge that. The solution is, again, finding the right balances whereby we hold to our liberal democratic values and do not lose them because of terrorism or counter- terrorism. Understand that we lose some efficiency when we stick to our liberal democratic values. At the same time, conduct enough efficient counter-terrorism activity, knowing that you might sacrifice some of your liberal democratic values.

Finding the right balance is very difficult. Security services and practitioners have their own interests in preventing terrorism. That’s their mission. And they might, under severe conditions, turn a blind eye to liberal democratic values. Human rights activists are fighting for liberal democratic values but they don’t bear the responsibility for the prevention of terrorism. We need to find the right balance: What should be permitted and what should not be permitted?

The last dilemma is the tension between resilience and awareness. Israel’s big success in counter-terrorism is that it is educating the public to be aware of its surroundings. I was in the United States and I was teaching police officers there. I told them that they should understand differences in the mentality of security forces. In Israel, we have more security than they have in the United States.

In Israel, the guards are checking the bags of the people who are entering the mall, you are checking the bags of the people inside the mall. We are checking the bags of the people who are getting into the mall; we are checking the bags of the people getting out of the mall. This is the difference in security mentality. You are looking for thieves, we are looking for terrorists. The problem is that if you keep your surroundings too aware of the security measures, terrorism wins. Terrorism is a psychological warfare. They are not interested in the killing, as such; they are interested in terrorizing by killing and by inflicting fear and anxiety.

Then comes resilience. The people need to be resilient. What does this mean? Going about your day-to-day life in spite of terrorism. In the 1990s we had a severe phenomenon of suicide attacks in Israel. I want to share with you this anecdote from the 1990s.

A Thursday afternoon at 4pm, we had a suicide attack in Israel on a bus. Many people died and many more were injured. Immediately after, I got a phone call from an American journalist. He was asking me the regular questions. Who do you think is responsible for the attack? Why now? What is the essence of that? The regular questions. But then he surprised me with another question. What are you going to do about this attack? What do you mean what am I going to do, me as Boaz Ganor, or Israel? Forget about Israel. You, as Boaz Ganor, what are you going to do about this attack?

Bear in mind I was much younger back then. I told him that every Thursday afternoon I played basketball with my friends. But I was not in the mood to play basketball after the attack. Many people had died not far from the place where I lived. We didn’t know the names of the victims, and I didn’t know whether someone I cared for had died. But my personal, civilian message to the terrorists, was that they would not interfere with my life, with my day-to-day activities. So, without wanting to, I told him I was going to play basketball right then.

As an outcome of that he wrote an article about me with the title “Fighting terrorism on the basketball courts”.