[Originally published in the Randolph Herald.]
Since 9/11, the Bush administration has changed the way America looks at the two phenomena of terrorism and insurgencies. It has blurred the lines between the two and in doing so, has created some long lasting foreign policy problems for the United States simply because there is a vast difference between a pure terrorist group like Al Qaida and an insurgency that practices terrorism.
The US Code defines international terrorism as “violent acts or acts dangerous to human life that are a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or any state…. (and which)….appear to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping and occur primarily outside the territorial jurisdiction of the United States or transcend national boundaries in terms of the means by which they are accomplished, the persons they appear intended to intimidate or coerce, or the locale in which their perpetrators operate or seek asylum. [18 U.S.C. § 2331(1)]
The Department of Defense defines insurgency as “an organized movement aimed at the overthrow of a constituted government through the use of subversion and armed conflict”.
It is important to carefully differentiate between terrorism and insurgency because, once classified into either group, a dissident movement will be given a level of treatment either formally or by general international consensus from which it will be difficult for it to extricate itself.
Historically, it has been easier to deal with terrorism than insurgencies. When terrorist movements are left to run their course they tend to last around a dozen years. The good news about them is that, unlike insurgencies, which rarely lose, terrorism never seems to win. Terrorism is a short-term, dramatically violent irritant and not much more.
Terrorist organizations cannot survive unless local populations support them. Recently Al Qaida has been losing support from mainstream Muslims because it indiscriminately kills civilians in defiance of the teachings of the Koran.
Insurgents, on the other hand, generally have fairly widespread support from their local populations, largely because they are normally fighting against a repressive ruler or occupier. That is why they tend to endure and succeed.
How does any ruler or occupier protect itself under those conditions? They simply focus their military might on the assumed enemy positions and pull the trigger. Insurgents have no uniforms, barracks or bases. They live and work in and around the rest of the civilian population, whether in Pakistan, Lebanon, Afghanistan or Iraq. Under attack, there is bound to be a lot of collateral damage which is likely to be seen as collective punishment and equally likely to encourage more indigenous support of the insurgency. It is a difficult enemy to vanquish.
The Bush administration is prone to brand any group which threatens any status quo, including insurgencies, as a terrorist organization, without any thought to the origins of or reasons for the struggle being waged. If a group of dissident Egyptians, tired of their repressive government, decided to try to overthrow the Mubarak regime, how would we label them? How would we label indigenous dissidents trying to overthrow the “friendly”, but not necessarily democratic government of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan or any other “friendly” country? It’s not a stretch to say that they would be labeled terrorists overnight.
What this does is de-legitimize what are or could be legitimate national liberation movements involved in insurgencies, much like the American War of Independence in 1775-1783. It goes back to the old saw, “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter”.
If America wishes to be seen as a supporter of the democratic process in the world, which the Bush administration constantly avows it does, then it can’t pick and choose where and when to support it without risk of being immediately labeled as hypocritical. Our decision to not even acknowledge the existence of Hamas in Palestine, even though they were elected as the result of a democratic process, is a perfect example of the pitfalls involved in the selective application of democratic principles. It earned us a diplomatic black eye, as has our similar attitude toward Hizballah in Lebanon.
If we are going to support the democratic process, we will not be able to randomly label indigenous insurrections as terrorist movements simply because we don’t like their politics or because we think that the status quo government in power in their country, however repressive or undemocratic, is a better alternative. The rest of the world is not dumb enough to let us get away with that kind of hypocrisy. And yet, we continue to try!
Haviland Smith is a retired CIÅ station chief who served in East and West Europe, the Middle east and as Chief of the counterterrorism staff. A longtime resident of Brookfield, he now lives in Williston.
