In the wake of the West’s frantic, humiliating exit from Afghanistan in August 2021, the defence and security community lost interest in terrorism. The exhausting and costly War on Terror could finally be drawn to a close.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine six months later deepened the sense that the international environment was turning in a different direction, where large-scale, state-on-state conflict would become the norm. The shocking events on October 7th last year and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza serve as a reminder that terrorism’s place in world politics is not over yet. As Gerry Adams said of the Irish Republican Army in 1995, “They haven’t gone away, you know.”
Terrorism intends to produce a visceral reaction to violence, to achieve political goals through feelings of horror, fear and resignation. Calmly evaluating the effectiveness of terrorism and governmental responses to it is thus a demanding task, one which Richard English has set himself over several decades.
This new book is a counterpart to his earlier study, Does Terrorism Work? (2016), and provides a masterful, concise analysis of counter-terrorism by comparing the post-9/11 War on Terror, the modern Northern Ireland Troubles and Israeli practice towards Palestine. For those familiar with one of these cases, the contrasts with less-known events elsewhere will prove deeply instructive.
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The relative ease with which enemies can be damaged by arrests, assassinations and other means has frequently deluded policymakers about the chances of these small gains adding up to a meaningful political endpoint
While English presents a balanced assessment without resorting to frequent moralising, he is not afraid to describe terrorist atrocities as atrocious nor state security forces as brutal, mendacious or incompetent. Indeed, a stand-out feature of the book is the decision to home in on what counter-terrorists might consider the “inherent rewards” in their work, whether satisfaction from a job well done, or bitter vengeance wrought on an enemy without consideration for the long-term consequences.
Beyond the emotional rewards sometimes derived by those who fight terrorism, English deploys a three-part framework to assess whether counter-terrorism might be said to work in any given setting.
Strategic victory is assured when a state achieves their primary goal against terrorists. Partial strategic victory means that central goal is reached to a certain extent, that secondary objectives are met instead or that the opponent is prevented from triumphing. Tactical success can involve undermining the enemy’s capabilities, gaining control over a population, achieving favourable publicity, securing temporary concessions from the opponent or strengthening one’s own organs of state. In practice, these forms of success can often be in tension with one another.
English addresses these different outcomes in a more historically minded way than is often the case in a field dominated by political science and psychology, disciplines concerned more with universal generalisations than context-specific nuance. Historians look at longer trajectories than time-pressed government employees can usually manage – one reason among many why this book is essential reading for those charged with safeguarding the state against terrorist threats.
The historical sensibility also draws out contingency over inevitability in ways which strengthen political accountability (who authorised what) and suggest alternative futures (past patterns need not determine the future).
After the September 11th attacks, no US president could have pursued a purely diplomatic path to neutralising al-Qaeda. America’s unmatched military power made that response as unlikely as did public outrage at the atrocities. George W Bush chose expansive aims for his war: “It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
In the view of South Africa, the punishment has reached the level of genocide and the International Court of Justice is investigating whether such a characterisation is accurate
English reminds us that the immediate measures taken to intervene in Afghanistan and overthrow al-Qaeda’s hosts, the Taliban, were remarkably successful. The real trouble came as the counter-terrorism mission morphed into something more ambitious, complex and contradictory: counter-insurgency, nation-building, a campaign against the opium trade, not to mention regional entanglements with Pakistan, India, Iran and other interested parties.
Only after protracted suffering did American leaders seriously ponder whether a Taliban regime might be persuaded to refrain from hosting international terrorists again. English suggests this realisation might have come sooner with a deeper understanding of Afghanistan’s culture and history.
A short chapter on Iraq shows the interconnections between the two theatres in the War on Terror, notoriously during the 2003 run-up to the invasion in an imaginary rather than real sense. The Iraq War clearly made the terrorist threat to western interests worse while unleashing catastrophic civil war dynamics within the country. Success in degrading Islamic State (Isis) from 2017 might be considered a rather limited consolation for the damage wrought by those who chose to topple Saddam Hussein.
Why did western intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq endure for so long when the limited gains being made were evident at the time? Here English rightly links these far-flung missions to politics back home, where normal life went on. In the United States, jihadist terrorist violence killed 19 people between 9/11 and 2015. Those who sacrificed themselves overseas did so as volunteers in professional armed forces, not as conscripts. Consequently there would be no meaningful public backlash against the “forever wars” remotely akin to the protests against Vietnam.
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Domestic counter-terrorism most often worked. Major attacks like those in Madrid in 2004, London in 2005 and Paris in 2015 were fortunately rare. In the longer term though, the War on Terror came back to bite apathetic citizens. Armoured vehicles and other War on Terror relics sold by the Pentagon to police forces featured prominently in the policing of protests across the US after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis in 2020. Counter-terrorism can affect societies for far longer than expected.
Unlike these wars of choice, in Northern Ireland the British state had far less discretion over whether to give up and leave entirely. A persuasive case is made for the UK achieving partial strategic victory by reducing terrorist capacity, protecting the population to a substantial degree and maintaining order. There is no question that counter-terrorism tactics could be radically self-defeating – internment without trial, torture and the “shoot-to-kill” controversy over security forces shootings being only the most obvious examples.
English is firm, however, in his argument that over the longer term more refined, discriminating tactics played a part in undermining and containing the IRA, not defeating them – an important distinction. If both the British and republicans eventually recognised that the conflict was stuck in a stalemate position where only negotiation offered a way out, then informers, surveillance, arrests and the like contributed to that outcome.
Northern Ireland conformed to the broader pattern whereby the state becomes better at containing and enduring terrorism over a long time. But the trend cannot obscure the lingering failures, as the revelations about state complicity in murders surrounding agent Stakeknife attest.
The book’s final case study, Israel-Palestine, raises the question of when counter-terrorism ceases to explain what states are doing in international conflicts. Is Israel trying to deal with terrorist organisations in the occupied Palestinian territories? The Israeli Defence Forces might instead be applying collective punishment against the Palestinian people as a whole, with little or no regard for individual participation in terrorism.
In the view of South Africa, the punishment has reached the level of genocide and the International Court of Justice is investigating whether such a characterisation is accurate. Even if South Africa’s position about Israel’s current conduct is accepted, there is value in finding out how decades of counter-terrorism brought us to this point. The historian’s longer perspective pays dividends here. The 1930s Arab Revolt, Jewish desperation for a safe national home after the Holocaust, and Israel’s founding amid mass Palestinian displacement (of more than 700,000 people) form the essential context for today’s events.
Both the terrorist threat and Israel’s counter-measures changed over the years. Though efficiently executed and certainly terrorising, airliner hijackings and other operations outside Israel were abandoned by Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation after 1974, recognising the harm done to Palestine’s cause in international opinion.
Historians look at longer trajectories than time-pressed government employees can usually manage – one reason why this book is essential reading for those charged with safeguarding the state against terrorist threats
Israel’s slow progress in bringing the PLO into political dialogue bred complacency about the impacts of occupation and settler expansion in Palestinian lands, contributing to the emergence from 1987 of Hamas, a skilful social provider as much as a terrorist group. The 1993 Oslo Accords on the two-state solution came into play alongside continuing repression, such as mass incarceration and assassinations (159 of the latter between 2000 and 2004, for example). Hamas’s suicide bombings proved much harder to prevent than its missile strikes. On the whole, the Israeli approach has resulted in tactical effectiveness coupled with strategic self-harm, a judgment likely to be vindicated by the current offensive in Gaza, and only possible with US support.
Together, the three conflicts suggest pushing for total strategic victory over terrorism is a fool’s errand. Even partial strategic success, as in Northern Ireland and to a lesser degree the War on Terror, can come at a heavy price after many long, miserable years. Tactical success is much more common. The relative ease with which enemies can be damaged by arrests, assassinations and other means has frequently deluded policymakers about the chances of these small gains adding up to a meaningful political endpoint.
English is therefore rightly cautious in offering lessons for the future, stressing the need for realistic goals, containment over eradication and constant vigilance about terrorists’ desire to provoke governments into over-reactions. In the end, terrorists often do go away, when the state proves resilient enough to carry on, when the underlying social problems are addressed and when enough people sicken of violence. Does Counter-Terrorism Work? is an acute guide for all who want to understand why the misery inherent in terrorism often cannot be expunged as quickly as we should like.
Huw Bennett is author of Uncivil War: The British Army and the Troubles, 1966–1975 (Cambridge University Press)
Further reading
Terrorist Minds: The Psychology of Violent Extremism from Al-Qaeda to the Far Right by John Horgan (Columbia University Press, 2024)
We might want to believe anyone who engages in terrorism is simply deranged. Unfortunately, the truth is more complicated. John Horgan has spent decades studying terrorism and interviewing terrorists. This book gives an accessible entry into the terrorist mindset, bringing in examples as diverse as West Germany’s Baader-Meinhof group of radical leftists, far-right conspiracy theorists and Isis.
Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815 by Beatrice de Graaf (Cambridge University Press, 2020)
Terrorism is frequently treated as a contemporary problem and a very specific one. Delving back into the 19th century, de Graaf dissects the nature of political violence after the Napoleonic Wars and shows how European states co-operated to create a security order to stabilise the continent against major conflicts and violence from revolutionary movements.
A Woman’s Place: US Counterterrorism Since 9/11 by Joana Cook (Hurst, 2021)
How did women participate in and shape the War on Terror? Joana Cook provides the answers in a path-breaking book that smashes assumptions about militaries and terrorist groups as places where men always dominate. Both sides weaponised gender to gain tactical advantage, and women had to navigate and exploit the roles assigned to them.
