The Military's Role in Counterterrorism - Examples and Implications for Liberal Democracies (2011)

2011·1.8 MB·English

by  Strategic Studies Institute

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The
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Letort Paper
THE MILITARY’S ROLE IN
COUNTERTERRORISM:
EXAMPLES AND IMPLICATIONS
FOR LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES
Geraint Hughes
May 2011
The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Joint
Services Command and Staff College, the United Kingdom (UK)
Ministry of Defence, or any other UK government agency, the
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War College, 632 Wright Ave, Carlisle, PA 17013-5046.
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The author owes his thanks for critical input from and con-
versations with colleagues within the Defence Studies Depart-
ment (DSD) of King’s College London, in particular Drs. Tim
Bird, Huw Bennett, Katherine Brown, Warren Chin, Tracey Ger-
man, Jon Hill, Bill Park, Kenneth Payne, Patrick Porter, Christian
Tripodi, and Rachel Vincent. He has also derived immense ben-
efit from the staff and students at the Joint Services Command
and Staff College (JSCSC), both from the British armed forces and
from several foreign services with whom he has had the pleasure
of teaching and working with over the past 5 years.
The Military’s Role in Counterterrorism has been written for
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therefore may not match those employed by his sources (for ex-
ample, the author uses “al-Qaeda” rather than “al-Qaida,” and
“Qasab” rather than “Kasab”). All material cited in this paper is
in the public domain, and any factual errors in the text that have
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Coalition military and civil affairs personnel killed on operations
in Afghanistan since October 2001.
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iii

CONTENTS
Foreword ........................................................... vii
About the Author .................................................xi
Summary ...........................................................xiii
Maps ....................................................................xv
Introduction ..........................................................1
Is Terrorism A Military
Problem? ..............................................................13
The Military’s Role In
Counterterrorism ................................................37
Problems Arising From Military
Involvement in Counterterrorism—
The International Context ..................................58
Problems Arising From Military
Involvement in Counterterrorism—
The Domestic Context ........................................87
Conclusions ........................................................120
Endnotes .............................................................143
Glossary and Abbreviations .............................185
Military Operations Cited in the Text .............203
v

FOREWORD
On the morning of September 11, 2001 (9/11),
al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft,
crashing three of them into the World Trade Center in
New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC,
killing up to 3,000 people in the process. Just under 3
years later, a group of predominantly Chechen gun-
men took over School Number One in Beslan, North
Ossetia, beginning a siege that ended with the death
of nearly 400, including 156 children. On the evening
of November 26, 2008, 10 members of Lashkar-e-Toiba
(LET) began a series of bomb and gun attacks in the
Indian city of Mumbai, killing more than 170 people
over a 48-hour period. For Americans, Russians, and
Indians, each of these attacks was warlike in its pro-
portions and, after each, popular and political opinion
demanded a militarized response.
Dr. Geraint Hughes’s Letort Paper reminds us
that in repeated cases in which liberal democratic
states have used their armed forces to fight terrorism-
-notably Israel against successive Palestinian groups,
Britain in Northern Ireland from 1969-98, or indeed
America and its allies against al-Qaeda and affiliated
groups currently--the employment of military means
in counterterrorism has been inherently controversial.
As Audrey Kurth Cronin notes, terrorism picks at the
vulnerable seam between domestic law and foreign
war, and conceptually it does not fit the paradigms of
either criminality or warfare.1 Although a particular
state or a coalition of powers may use its militaries
to protect its citizens in counterterrorist campaigns,
the threat posed by specific terrorist groups has to be
vii
treated sui generis, and the applicability of military
means in counterterrorism depends on a series of
factors--these include whether the terrorist threat is a
domestic or an international one, the lethality of the
groups concerned, and the threat they pose to state
stability. Furthermore, the involvement of armed forc-
es in counterterrorism can be problematic. One has
only to look at the post-2001 “War on Terror” and the
criticisms expressed by foreign governments, mem-
bers of Congress, human rights activists, journalists,
and academics regarding the treatment of detainees at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the use of unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs) in air-strikes in Pakistan; and the ci-
vilian casualties caused by U.S. and North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) military operations in
Afghanistan.
Dr. Hughes examines the challenges of deploying
the military in counterterrorism from both a historical
and a contemporary perspective, outlining not only
the specific roles that armed forces can perform either
to prevent terrorist attacks or to mitigate their conse-
quences, but also the strategic, constitutional, practi-
cal, diplomatic, and ethical problems that have arisen
from a variety of counterterrorist campaigns, be they
in Palestine, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Kashmir, Af-
ghanistan, Pakistan, or the North Caucasus. Clause-
witz reminds us that in “war everything is simple, but
the simplest thing is difficult,”2 and this observation is
as true of counterterrorism as it is of interstate warfare.
For example, the British Army interned Republican
terrorist suspects in Northern Ireland from 1971-75,
gaining valuable intelligence about the United King-
dom’s (UK) adversaries, but this policy also enraged
viii