AfPak: It's Complicated

The New York Times provides new details on how Pakistan's intelligence service provides funds, equipment and advice to the Taliban forces that the United States and its allies are fighting in Afghanistan. Much of the new info in the piece comes from American spies and electronic eavesdropping on Pakistani officials.

So the US is actively spying on one of its closest collaborators in the struggle against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. No surprise there. And it's also no surprise that this info came out when CIA director Leon Panetta was in the region--no doubt this leak was designed to put additional pressure on the Pakistani ISI and government. What might be a surprise is that it comes out the very same weak that the Obama administration announces its new AfPak strategy, which includes closer collaboration with, you guessed it, Pakistan.

Why the US wants to collaborate with Pakistan is straightforward enough--Pakistan controls (on paper) the territory from which the bad things originate and is best positioned to develop useful intelligence and to take action on the ground. But how the US can imagine such collaboration with an unreliable partner will succeed is less clear.

One solution might be for the US to insist that its intelligence agencies be allowed to closely monitor and to direct some of their Pakistani counterparts' actions. Such supervision, if sufficiently intrusive, would allow the US to, for example, investigate the background of ISI liaison officers, detail personnel to Pakistani intel and defense offices, mandate on the ground training. All of these could give the US a heads up on any unwanted Pakistani communication or coordination with the bad people.

The US has a lot of leverage to insist on such supervision, too. It's been giving the Pakistani's billions of counterterror dollars with no strings attached since 9/11. One string that could be attached is implementing such supervision. Interestingly, the new AfPak strategy includes benchmarks that would tie aid to improved performance. Most of the attention has focused on benchmarks for Afghan steps in the right direction, but this could be (and perhaps has been) quietly be extended to Pakistani intel activities.

Two cautions, though. First, it's not clear if the Pakistani's would put themselves in such a subordinate position. No doubt some in the military would see this as a threat to Pakistan's desire to secure some "strategic depth" against India. And if the public got wind of such an arrangement, expect criticisms of intrusions on Pakistani "sovereignty". (Ironic since there does not seem to be much sovereingty going on in many areas of Pakistan).

Second, supervision implies responsibility. What if the Pakistani military or intelligence agencies do things that some in the US don't like, such as take big bribes or violate human rights? Then the US administration is implicated in such abuses. Nothing is easy or simple for US policy in the region, and the pressure to get some traction against the Taliban may lead the US to collaborate with some organizations doing bad things.

GWOT, RIP

The Obama administration has decided to stop using the term "Global War on Terror," replacing it with the ambiguous and less 24-ish "overseas contingency operations".

How come? I suspect (although no one cited in the article linked above mentions this) that one motive is to de-link these operations (see, I'm already using the new frame) from the Bush administration's not so successful foreign policy record.

Perhaps another reason is the recent criticism leveled by the International Committee of Jurists against GWOT-speak. The ICJ's states that description of the conflicts as a war gave "spurious justification to a range of human rights and humanitarian law violations" committed by the United States since 9/11. Since the ICJ likes human rights, it sees this as a bad thing.

There's another reason, though, to drop the war language that has not received much attention. The war language justified human rights violations in the name of counter-terrorism. But it turns out that such violations actually fuel terrorism. My colleague Jim Piazza and I have a paper forthcoming at Comparative Political Studies that makes this argument. Violating human rights makes it more difficult to gather intellignece on terrorist groups from a population that fears the authorities. It complicates the government's counterterror effort by arousing domestic and international opposition to its violation of rights. In the empirics of the paper, we find that the relationship between abusing rights and more terror is robust to a bunch of control variables and statistical specifications, and that the substantive size of the effect is pretty large.

There is a policy lesson here for those who argue that we must trade off some rights for security from terrorism. Many have argued that this trade-off morally problematic. But even if you reject this line of thinking, and are fine with abusing rights to counter terror, it turns out that this is exactly the wrong strategy to pursue. Better to respect rights, which will weaken (or at least not strengthen) your terrorist opponents.

Terrorism is so 2004

How big a deal is terrorism today? After 9/11, of course, it was huge. But is it becoming passé? Are other problems more pressing for policymakers and academics interested in international affairs? One might think so. The Director of National Intelligence tells us that the number one threat to the United States, at least, is the ongoing economic drama. In a recent survey of international relations faculty, only one percent identified terrorism as likely to be a major problem for the next ten years. Attacks in Iraq are down. Attacks may be down around the world as well. Osama bin Laden may doubt his continued relevance.

It would be a good thing if this were the case, of course. But it might not be. There is considerable controversy about the last claim that attacks around the world have declined. The conflict in Iraq continues, and one can pretty easily imagine developments that lead to more terror there. And did you know that there were 581 terrorist attacks in India alone last year? We all remember Mumbai, but who even heard about the remaining 500+ attacks? (Not me--I had to look it up in WITS).

It's unlikely that terrorism is going away. But the attention we give to terrorism seems to vary far more than do the number or scale of attacks. How come? As Cass Sunstein, Donald Kettl, and many others have pointed out, terrorism tends to attract either too little attention or too much. Before 9/11, for example, it was on few political leaders' radar screens. And after, everything was connected to terrorism for a while. This underattentiveness and over-attentiveness to terror is a result of the fact that people and institutions have difficulty thinking clearly about rare events, such as major terrorist attacks. Individuals underestimate the (already small danger) of terrorism when it is not on their radar screens, but a salient attack such as 9/11 or Mumbai leads them to immediately and greatly overestimate the threat that they face. Conflicting interests and different organizational cultures always make it difficult for government agencies to effectively coordinate their response to a policy problem. The difficultly of accurately assessing the true threat from terrorism compounds these problems substantially, making it even harder for the relevant bureaucracies to achieve on consensus estimate of the risks of terorrism and the most effective responses. Political leaders, who already face short time horizons and many competing demands for their attention and resources, will pay little attention to terrorism until a salient attack occurs; after this, their political survival may depend on their ability to be seen as doing everything possible to prevent another attack.

The point of all this is that the actual risk posed by terrorism may diverge quite substantially from the perceived risk. A rational policy would not be driven in major ways by a salient attack or attacks. Instead, it would treat terrorism as a risk or threat that always exists, but that cannot be predicted with much accuracy. It would also assume that the overall trend in terrorism likely is moving more slowly that the pace of salient attacks would suggest.

What does this imply for people that study terrorism (like, say, me)? Is the study of terrorism a fad, soon to be replaced by global warming, global economic contagion, or something else in the minds of scholars of international politics? It might be. I imagine that the attention academics devote to an issue is driven in part by the same biases that influence individual and governmental attention. So if terrorism is perceived to be on the decline, those that analyze it might expect fewer resources and attention.

Any such effect, though, is likely to be smaller for academics studying terrorism. Interest in this area surged after 9/11. But it took a few years at least to result in good work. Academics shifting to this area needed to school themselves on the literature, develop new ideas, test these in a sophisticated way, submit them to journals or presses (which can take a long time to accept submissions and an even longer time to actually publish them). So this cumulative work is not going to disappear soon. Also, there are important economies of scale in the production of scholarship--once you become knowledgeable about terrorism (or anything else), it's easier to generate good ideas and to write them up than it would be to switch to the new hot area of inquiry. So even if popular and government attention to terror declines, we're likely to see a lot of work on the topic continue to make its way into journals and books. And this stream of scholarship might be really good, since there's been a large body of researchers working on this topic for the last eight years who are starting to generate really novel ideas.

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SWOTT 2009

Summer Workshop on Teaching about Terrorism

The University of Oklahoma announces the fifth annual Summer Workshop on Teaching about Terrorism (SWOTT). The workshop will be held July 9-16, 2009 at the University of Oklahoma. Professors and advanced graduate students from all disciplines are eligible to apply.

Applications can now be submitted online at http://www.swott.com/apply09.html through Friday, April 3, 2009. Seats are limited and participants are selected on a competitive basis, based on our desire to have a group with a mixture of experience, interests, and professional goals.

SWOTT was developed to: 1) offer an intensive short-course on understanding the fundamentals of terrorism; 2) introduce professors and graduate students to new and innovative techniques utilized to conduct research and teach about terrorism; and 3) strengthen the community of terrorism scholars. The workshop seeks to not only acquaint participants with the current issues that dominate US foreign policy and much of the world's attention (e.g. weapons of mass destruction, suicide terrorism, and state sponsorship of terrorism), but also promises a greater appreciation of the classic literature in the field.

Several speakers have verbally committed for this summer, including:

* Victor Asal, State University of New York-Albany
* Erica Chenoweth, Wesleyan University
* Kelly Damphousse, University of Oklahoma
* Lewis Griffith, Air Command and Staff College
* Jennifer Holmes, University of Texas-Dallas
* David McIntyre, Texas A&M
* Brigitte Nacos, Columbia University
* Dan O'Hair, University of Oklahoma
* Ami Pedhazur, University of Texas-Austin
* David Rapoport, University of CA-Los Angeles
* Todd Sandler, University of Texas-Dallas
* Stephen Sloan, University of Central Florida
* Chris Taylor, Mission EP
* Fred Wehling, Monterey Institute for International Studies
* Leonard Weinberg, University of Nevada-Reno

Additional speakers have been invited and we are still waiting to hear back from them. Check the website at http://www.swott.com for updates as we confirm additional speakers.

The workshop fee is:
* $1200 for graduate students and non-tenure-track faculty
* $2000 for tenure-track and tenured faculty.

This fee includes: lodging for 7 nights at a hotel near campus; workshop materials (including a program, thumb drive with readings, and t-shirt); local transportation; a field trip to the Oklahoma City Bombing Memorial and the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism; staff and speaker fees and expenses; and several meals (in addition to breakfasts, snacks, and drinks available throughout the day, we host a meet-and-greet, welcome reception, one informal group dinner, and a closing banquet). This fee does not include transportation to Oklahoma, lunches, the remaining dinners, and incidental expenses.

More details about the workshop as well as an FAQ are available on the SWOTT website or you may contact the workshop staff at info@swott.com if you have any questions.

Fundamentalism and Terror

I participated in a couple of panels on terrorism at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association in New York last month, and want to highlight some of the more interesting papers presented there; most should be available from the ISA's online archive.

The first paper, "One God For All: Fundamentalist Religious Groups and Terorrism" by Johanna Birnir and Nil Seda Satana, takes on the contention that religion drives terror. As the authors' point out there is an important stream of literature which argues that the "new terrorism" of today is driven primarily by religous groups, particularly Islamic religious groups.

The new terrorism argument is certainly in line with popular, and much policy, thinking about the causes of terrorism today. But empirical support for this idea is not iron-clad. Birnir and Satana, for exmaple, show that the religious identity of a country alone does not produce consistently more or less terrorism. Instead, they argue, it is the existence of fundamentalist religious groups that drive terror. Such fundamentalist groups exist in any world religion, and are dedicated to changing the religious worldviews of others. Fundamentalist movements that are in a majority in their country use terror to intimidate the minority into changing its beliefs; those in the minority use it to strike out at what they percieve as an oppressive majority. The empirics in the papare provide strong support for this argument--countries with fundamentalist movements do seem to experience more terror.

The paper is especially interesting because it both disconfirms the conventional wisdom about religion and terorrism, but extracts from this CW the novel and more specific argument about fundamentalism. In this sense it marks a potentially very important advance in thinking about the confessional bases of terror. Unlike much of existing literature on this topic, it is usefully self-concious about data (and its limitations) and method. At the same time, there do seem to be at least two fundamental (ha ha) issues that could be addressed. The first is that specific operationalization of fundamentalism employed here suggests that the resort to political violence is at least part of what makes a group fundamentalist in the first place. In other words, it might be arguing that fundamentalism leads to terror, when in fact the definition of fundamentalism is resorting to terrorism. The authors did discuss this in their presentaiton and promised more and better data in the future. Second, I wonder if the paper overstates the difference between what it finds and the conclusions of the "new terrorism" literature. While I have not resurveyed this literature, it does strike me that at least some of the new terrorism work might actually agree about the importance of fundamentalism rather than religous difference which what the authors argue here. Even if this is the case, however, the paper is a real advance because it makes this distinction more clear, and generalizes it to many cases.

The Year in Hate

The Southern Poverty Law Center has just released its annual report on hate groups in the United States. It includes a searchable database of reported hate incidents and an interactive map of known hate groups.

Transnational Terror and Human Rights

An article with this title I wrote with Jim Piazza just appeared in International Studies Quarterly. We found, to general surprise, that countries attacked by transnational terror groups generally do not respond by restricting human rights. You can read the full article here (gated free issue) or here (ungated). Below is the abstract if you want more details before clicking a link:

Do terrorist attacks by transnational groups lead governments to restrict human rights? Conventional wisdom holds that governments restrict rights to forestall additional attacks, to more effectively pursue suspected terrorists, and as an excuse to suppress their political opponents. But the logic connecting terrorist attacks to subsequent repression and the empirical research that addresses this issue suffer from important flaws. We analyze pooled data on the human rights behavior of governments from 1981 to 2003. Our key independent variable of interest is transnational terrorist attacks, and the analysis also controls for factors that existing studies have found influence respect for human rights. Repeated terrorist attacks lead governments to engage in more extrajudicial killings and disappearances, but have no discernible influence on government use of torture and of political imprisonment or on empowerment rights such as freedom of speech, assembly, and religion. This finding has important implications for how we think about the effects of terrorism and the policy responses of states, non-governmental organizations, and international institutions interested in protecting human rights.

Initial Post

Welcome to "Back Channels." I use this blog to write about how social scientists understand the sources and consequences of political violence. I'm particularly interested in causes of terrorism, how governments do and should respond to political violence, and why states abuse human rights and the consequences of such abuse.

I'll mostly be using this blog to highlight and comment on books and papers that address these issues from a social science angle. I imagine I'll spend less time dealing with immediate policy issues, since I don't really live in the policy world. I do think, though, that good social science can improve discussions of policy issues. This is especially true in areas such as counterterrorism, intelligence, and human rights, which get less social scientific attention that they should.

Those are my goals at this stage. I hope they will evolve based on your feedback, so do let me know what I'm doing well and poorly. I would especially welcome suggestions about new and interesting takes on the issues laid out above, so if you know of something along these lines (or have written something along these lines), please do pass it along.