Reflections on Terrorism

Walter Laqueur

From Foreign Affairs, Fall 1986

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Summary:  Comments on (1) the difficulty of obtaining a widely-accepted definition of terrorism (2) the response to terrorism by democratic states (3) the particular case of state-sponsored terrorism. Stress that terrorism "makes a great noise, but so far it has not been very destructive".

Walter Laqueur is chairman of the research council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, author of Guerrilla, first published in 1976, and Terrorism, 1977, and editor of the Guerrilla Reader and the Terrorism Reader.

Fifty years hence, puzzled historians will try to make sense of the behavior of Western governments and the media in the 1980s regarding terrorism. They will note that presidents and other leaders frequently referred to terrorism as one of the greatest dangers facing mankind. For days and weeks on end, television networks devoted most of their prime-time news to covering terrorist operations. Publicists referred to terrorism as the cancer of the modern world, growing inexorably until it poisoned and engulfed the society on which it fed.

Naturally, our future historian will expect that a danger of such enormity must have figured very highly on the agenda of our period?equal, say, to the dangers of war, starvation, overpopulation, deadly disease, debts and so on. He will assume that determined action was taken and major resources allocated to fight against this threat. But he will be no little surprised to learn that when the Swedish prime minister was killed in 1986, the Swedish government promised a reward for information leading to the apprehension of his killer that amounted to less than ten percent of the annual income of an investment banker or a popular entertainer; that the French government offered even less for its terrorists; that West Germany was only willing to pay a maximum of $50,000 "for the most dangerous" ones. The United States offered up to $500,000, again not an overwhelming sum considering the frequency of the speeches about terrorism and the intensity of the rhetoric.

Surely (our historian will expect) major investments were made in the research and development of technological means to preempt and combat the terrorists. Again, to his consternation, he will discover that the sum the United States devoted to this purpose?about $20-30 million?was considerably less than any second-rank pharmaceutical firm allocates for research and development.

His confusion will further deepen when he learns that the number of Americans killed inside the United States in 1985 as the result of terrorist attack was two, and that the total number of U.S. civilians killed abroad between 1973 and the end of 1985 was 169. In countless articles and books, our historian will read about the constantly rising number of terrorist attacks. Being a conscientious researcher he will analyze the statistics, which are bound to increase his confusion, for he will find that more American civilians were killed by terrorists in 1974 (22) than in 1984 (16).

On the basis of these and other facts, our historian will lean toward revisionism. He may well reach the conclusion that there was no terrorism, only a case of mass delusion?or that hysteria was deliberately fanned by certain vested interests such as producers of anti-terrorist equipment, perhaps, or the television networks which had established a symbiotic relationship with the terrorists, who provided them with free (or almost free) entertainment for long periods.

These are, of course, the wrong conclusions. The impact of terrorism is measured not only in the number of its victims. Terrorism is an attempt to destabilize ...

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