BEWARE THE JACKALS : Technology is not a sure defense

Commonweal, Sept 28, 2001 by William Pfaff

The first thing that must be said about the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 is that they demonstrated the vulnerability of the United States, and of any modern society, to an intelligently prepared and determined attack.

Military officials, and the uniformed and civilian analytic agencies attached to the U.S. defense establishment, have for decades formulated speculative scenarios of attack on the nation, but their work has been dominated by the high-technology mindset of the Pentagon and by the engineering ethos of American society. The planning has always suffered from the experts' assumption that an enemy would attack in a manner symmetrical to the defenses they already had in place, or that they planned to have.

Thus, the defense planners concentrated their speculation and planning on the danger of attack by weapons of mass destruction, probably using more or less high-technology methods. The discussion has almost entirely concerned missile attacks, rogue nuclear weapons, and chemical and biological agents. The planners were not interested in rogue commercial aircraft.

The first real lesson--which was not learned--was provided nearly sixty years ago, shortly before the end of World War II, when a U.S. medium bomber, lost in the fog, crashed into the Empire State Building, then the country's highest skyscraper, in New York City. The lesson: Exotic methods and high technology are not necessary to produce devastating results. On September 11 the lesson was validated. You merely need to crash three old-fashioned airliners into vulnerable targets in order to produce mass panic, shut down most of the government, and force the evacuation of the centers of Washington, New York, and other major cities.

A second lesson: The psychological and political consequences of such an event are not measured primarily by the scale of the casualties, but by the unexpectedness and drama of the attack. As long as the attack remains anonymous, fear and panic escalate.

The sought-after effect is to demonstrate the vulnerability of those targeted--and the continuing vulnerability of those who might be targeted the next time. And to show that high-tech defenses, of the kind in which the United States takes pride, can be circumvented by using simple methods. It is to show that no real defense exists against an anonymous attack which makes use of the ordinary functioning of civilian society.

Such an attack is possible so long as commercial airplanes fly, trains run, power systems and public utilities function, people go to work, and business and markets continue to operate. Each can be subverted, or intervened in, or exploited in ways that damage their users and the larger society.

Even a totalitarian security state cannot deal with this, although it suppress basic civil liberties. It is extremely important to understand this, since there will be two natural reactions to what has happened, both of them essentially futile.

First of all there will be continuing calls for revenge against those responsible, presuming that the instigators are eventually identified or identify themselves. The practical uselessness of revenge has been illustrated repeatedly and continues to be shown in the Middle East, since those who employ terrorism are not functioning on a pragmatic scale of reward and punishment. As the Israelis find, making martyrs of your enemies invites further martyrdom.

The second reaction will be that the United States needs even more elaborate defenses than now exist. Certainly the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the rest of the American apparatus of national security proved incapable of preventing the September 11 attacks. They are incapable of preventing a repetition in some other version. There are no technological defenses, as such, against this sort of thing. Surely, if nothing else comes out of Tuesday's attacks, they ought to have demonstrated to Americans the irrelevance of national missile defense.

There are ordinary security measures that can be taken or improved, but the nature of attacks mounted from within the regular functions of society means that no comprehensive or conclusive defense exists. The entire history of terrorism in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has proved this.

The final and most profound lesson of these events is one that it will be hardest for government to accept, and this government in particular: The only real defense against external attack is a serious, continuing, and courageous effort to find political solutions for national and ideological conflicts that involve the United States. The immediate conclusion nearly everyone has drawn about the origin of these attacks is that they come out of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle. It is reasonable to think that this is so, although there is as yet no proof.

For more than thirty years, the United States has refused to make a genuinely impartial effort to find a resolution to that conflict. It has involved itself in the Middle East in a thousand ways but has never accepted a responsibility for dealing impartially with the two sides--locked in their shared agony and their mutual tragedy.