TERRORISM AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY Bogdan Luminița Alexandra 1. INTRODUCTION In the months and years after the 9/11 attacks, a series of analyses… [629116]

TERRORISM AND INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
Bogdan Luminița Alexandra

1. INTRODUCTION
In the months and years after the 9/11 attacks, a series of analyses
published by Oxford Research Group offered a critical perspective
on the war on terror, arguing that the forceful military response was
both wrong and dangerous. It could even prove highly
counterproductive to US security interests and would certainly do
little to promote international peace and stability. While the response
to 9/11 was readily understandable , given the appalling nature of the
attacks but also the neoconservative overtones of the Bush
administration, it was argued that it was deeply mistaken and would
lead to a long period of war.
This paper examines the context of the decision to go to war af ter
9/11 and the anticipated results. It goes on to analyse the actual
consequences and seeks to explain why they have been so radically
different to original expectations by the United States and its closest
coalition partners such as the UK .
2. TERRORISM AN D INTERNATIONAL SECURITY
In seeking to understand the reasons for the forceful US response
to the 9/11 atrocities it is worth examining the context. Although
President George W Bush was elected in 2000 without gaining the
majority of the popular vote, expe ctations that his administration
would therefore adopt consensus politics were quickly proved wrong,
especially in the matter of foreign and security policy. Guided much
by the thinking of the New American Century project, the
administration followed a mar kedly independent and unilateralist line
on issues such as the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, missile
defence, climate change and the proposed International Criminal

Court. The approach was rooted in the view that the Clinton
Administration had lacked the ability to play an international
leadership role, having missed the opportunity that the collapse of the
Soviet bloc had provided for the United States. This implication of
American leadership, in the absence of a Soviet threat, did not imply
an absence of dangers. Throughout the previous ten years there had
been a recognition that multiple problems existed. It was
encapsulated by Clinton’s first Director of Central Intelligence,
James Woolsey, who characterised the post -Cold War era as one in
which the Uni ted States had slain the dragon but now lived in a jungle
of poisonous snakes. Much of the US military was transformed in that
decade from forces designed to fight a single global war to much
more diverse forces capable of fighting smaller wars in far -off places.
Even so, by the middle of 2001, the Bush administration was
confident that its policies would ensure a new era of American
leadership in which such threats could be controlled, enabling a free
market liberal democratic model to deliver peace and s ecurity for the
global community. In such an environment it could be dangerous for
the United States to be tied down by too many multilateral
arrangements, much as Gulliver had been tied down by the
Liliputians. The attitude was put most effectively by Cha rles
Krauthammer, writing shortly before the 9/11 attacks. It was in these
circumstances that the 9/11 atrocities had such a profound effect. The
destruction of the twin towers had a massive impact across the
country and the attack on the Pentagon, the mil itary headquarters of
the world’s only superpower, by people armed only with parcel
knives was particularly traumatic for the US military leadership.
From being in a state of near -absolute power and in the process of
creating the New American Century, the Bush administration
suddenly found itself knocked back with extraordinary force. The
result, perhaps inevitably, was a resolute determination to kill or
capture those who had planned the attack, to terminate the Taliban
regime that harboured them, and then extend the response to face
down other threats .

The termination of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan commenced
within a month and a combination of air power, Special Forces and
the large scale financing and re -arming of the Northern Alliance was
sufficient to disperse the Taliban and the al -Qaida paramilitaries. By
the end of 2001 there was a confident expectation that Afghanistan
would make a transition to a pro -western state which would accept a
long term US military presence at Bagram and Kanda har.
Furthermore, bases had been established in neighbouring countries to
the North, ensuring increased US influence in oil -rich Central Asia.
Western European powers were expected to aid in the reconstruction
of Afghanistan, including the provision of a f ew thousand
peacekeepers, but the dominant military force would be from the
United States.
The high point of the Bush administration’s war on terror came
with President Bush’s “mission accomplished” speech on the deck of
the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Li ncoln, on 1 May 2003. By that
time, the bases were being built in Afghanistan, the Saddam Hussein
regime was finished, and the alQaida movement was dispersed. Just
as important, Iran was now greatly constrained by the regional US
military presence and woul d cause little concern in Washington.
North Korea was still a problem and the al -Qaida movement was
dispersed rather than destroyed, but the Middle East and South
Central Asia were being refashioned in a manner of great value to the
United States. While th e 9/11 attacks had been deeply traumatic, the
New American Century was now back on track.
There has been some easing of the violence and insecurity in Iraq,
with US troops withdrawing from largescale involvement in urban
security. During the period 2006 -08, US military leaders adapted to
the bitter insurgency in which they found themselves and sought to
avoid actions that killed civilians. By late 2008, a combination of a
short -term surge in US troop numbers, the encouragement of a Sunni
militia movement op posed to the brutal methods of al -Qaida -linked
paramilitaries, a ceasefire by one of the main Shi’a militias and the
separating of many of the urban areas into distinct confessional

groups all served to decrease the overall levels of violence. Even so,
bombings continue, including devastating attacks on government
buildings, the world’s largest embassy has been constructed by the
United States in Baghdad, over 120,000 US troops remain in the
country and the major bases show signs of permanence whatever the
Obama administration says about complete withdrawal within two
years. Moreover, if one of the original aims of the war was to contain
Iran, the opposite has happened as Iran has substantially increased its
influence in Iraq and has done so without exhibiti ng much evidence
of direct involvement in the violence.
At the end of the first decade of the 21st century there have been
some welcome changes in outlook compared with the attitudes of the
1990s. The anti -globalisation campaigns of that decade were
multif aceted and largely uncoordinated but still raised serious
critiques of the failings of free -market globalisation. Even if they had
little impact on the workings of the world economy and were largely
submerged by the impact of 9/11, they left a legacy of un ease. Now,
the financial crisis of the past two years has raised again the deep
inadequacy and dangers of the current system and its persistent
failure to promote human well -being across society. Climate change
has also risen rapidly up the political agend a, especially in the past
five years, and is acquiring a political salience as a result of the hard
evidence of the rapidity of change and of the dangerous and possibly
even existential consequences if it is not brought under control. There
are many exampl es of changing attitudes. The Chinese political
leadership shows signs of recognising the disastrous costs to China
of unrestrained climate change, and is now investing heavily in
renewable energy systems including heavy investment in
photovoltaics and sol ar heating systems as well as the rapid and
substantial installation of wind turbines. A recent study of global
energy requirements from Stanford University and the University of
California at Davis suggest that the human community’s entire
energy needs co uld be met from renewables by 2030, and the
extraordinarily rapid spread of mobile phone systems across the

South is a powerful reminder of just how fast new technologies can
spread. There is tremendous potential to improve energy conservation
ranging from effective insulation to improved space heating
efficiency and radical changes in transport through to far more
energy -efficient agriculture and manufacturing industry. The
potential for new technologies includes the development of third
generation photovo ltaics, undersea turbines, greatly improved
electricity distribution systems and a hydrogen -based energy storage
economy. Underlying all of this is the need for a substantial re –
thinking of how modern economies can be transformed to ensure
sustainability w ith emancipation. Even so, the responses required to
counter the potentially disastrous consequences of the wealth -poverty
divide interacting with an ecologically constrained global system are
truly radical. As such, there is the basic risk that the world’ s trans –
national elite communities will opt for actions that fall far short of
what is required and will, instead, concentrate primarily on
maintaining the status quo. Inevitably this means endeavouring to
remain in control and countering reactions from th e marginalised,
even if this requires military responses as exemplified by the conduct
of the war on terror. This is why the very failure of such “old
thinking”, clearly exemplified by the experience of the war on terror,
is so important. In a divided and increasingly constrained world, an
elite minority will not be able to prosper at the expense of the majority
– a transition to a sustainable security paradigm rooted in
emancipation and justice is essential. The war on terror has been a
disaster, but recog nising its failure might at least help us develop our
understanding of global security in a manner appropriate to the 21st
Century.
3. CONCLUSIONS:
The terror ism has so far had results that have been massively costly
in human terms and deeply counter -product ive for the United States.
This leads on to the issue of whether such failure will result in
fundamental changes in what might broadly be called the western
security paradigm, a paradigm centred on maintaining control and

successfully suppressing that jung le full of poisonous snakes. If the
experience of the war on terror suggests that “the jungle” cannot be
controlled by the largely traditional application of military force, then
an opportunity may exist for a radical re -appraisal of the current
western un derstanding of global security.
The trend towards a widening socio -economic divide should, on
its own, be of fundamental concern, not just because of its
implications for stability, but much more for the pervasive injustice
that it involves. But it is whe n this trend is put in the context of global
environmental constraints that the major future security challenges
arise.
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