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Some Reflections on the Future of War
Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2000 by Martin van Creveld
From Afghanistan (where the Soviet army was broken after eight years of fighting) through Cambodia (where the Vietnamese were forced to retreat) and Sri Lanka (which the Indian army failed to bring to order) to Namibia (granted its independence by South Africa after a long and bitter struggle) to Eritrea (which won its independence against everything that the Ethiopians, supported by the USSR, could do) and to Somalia (evacuated by most United Nations forces after their failure to deal with the local warlords), the story was always the same. Each time modern (more or less), heavily armed, regular, state-owned forces took on insurgencies, they were defeated.
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The above examples could easily be reinforced by many others. They show that from 1945 on, the vast majority of the larger guerrilla and terrorist campaigns in particular have been waged in third-world countries--where people were either trying to form states of their own or where established states had failed to assert monopolies over violence. Still, it would not be true to say that the developed countries have remained immune to terrorism or that the problem does not exist within them. Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Britain, even Japan--where Tokyo in 1995 witnessed two deadly poison-gas attacks--have witnessed terrorist acts on their territories. Often the attacks have been deadly, with dozens, even hundreds, killed or wounded; the number of people killed by, or in operations against, the Irish Republican Army stood at three thousand in early 1996, before the organization wounded two hundred in a single explosion (in Manchester) in May of that year. In these and other countries, the list of people and targets attacked includes prominent politicians, railway stations, railway tracks, buses, hospitals, shopping centers, office blocks, hotels, beer gardens, airports, aircraft in flight, ships, and of course foreign embassies and diplomatic personnel.
Some of the attacks have represented spillovers from struggles that were taking place in other countries. For instance, Kurds fought Turks on German and Swiss territory, and Palestinian guerrillas and Israeli secret agents chased each other in places as remote from the Mideast as northern Norway and Latin America. In other incidents the terrorists, though probably not without foreign connections, have been native born or at least native bred. Good examples are the late German and Italian Red Army Factions, which maintained ties with each other; the IRA, with its links to the United States and Libya; ETA (representing the Basques) in Spain and France; and the various Moslem organizations that have been operating in France and that in early 1996 made Paris look like a fortress. Often they are rooted in the ethnic minorities that, whether legally or not, have entered the countries in question--in France, Germany, and Britain together there are now approximately ten million persons whose faith is Islam.
If only because they have to make a living, terrorist organizations are likely to engage in ancillary criminal activities like drug smuggling, arms trading, and, from the early nineties on, dealing in radioactive materials, such as uranium and plutonium. They have proven repeatedly that they are capable of commanding fierce loyalties; in the Middle East and Turkey, it has not been very difficult to find even people willing to commit suicide (and go to heaven as their reward). The attacks by foreign-bred terrorists on the World Trade Center in New York in 1993 and by native ones on the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 showed that not even the two largest oceans on earth can protect a country against terrorists--with the result that at the Atlanta Olympic Games, security officers outnumbered athletes two to one. [35]
