The latest attack is a sign of weakness


The killing of eight people and the injuring of eleven on the streets of New York City by a man driving a truck has once again shown that in an open society, there is no lack of soft targets that can be attacked by anybody at all. We have to ask ourselves what purpose such attacks on ordinary people serve. One is of course to create fear among the population. But that has no strategic benefit and indeed has negative blowback.

When it comes to major groups like al Qaeda and ISIS, they tend to want to use attacks to show their power and as a recruiting tool. The attacks of 9/11 had an audacity and level of careful planning that was clearly meant to impress their enemies and thus encourage potential recruits to join up with them because people tend to align themselves with strong groups. Similar motivations apply when those groups attack highly fortified targets like military installations and government buildings. But attacking extremely soft targets, like pedestrians in the street using a truck, will be seen as a sign of weakness because it is such an easy thing to do that it is unlikely to produce anything like admiration in potential recruits. When those people claim to have done it in the name of ISIS, as this person supposedly said, they are in fact diminishing that group’s prestige, not enhancing it, because it sends the message “Is this the best that you can do?”

One sees similar patterns play out in many insurgent guerilla wars around the world. The insurgent groups first attack the government and military targets and this can garner it admiration and sympathy from those who feel that they are being oppressed by both. The real test is what the guerilla groups do when they do not get immediate results. The groups that become eventually successful are those that remain disciplined and confine their attacks to difficult targets and protect ordinary people, thus gaining further support. But many groups seem to get frustrated and start killing random civilians in order to strike terror and that usually signals the beginning of the end for the groups. Few people like innocent people being killed, whatever the reason or cause, and will turn against the guerrilla groups.

The fear produced by random attacks on civilians tends to be short-lived because it quickly becomes clear that it is isolated and not the precursor to anything major. As Jean Hannah Edelstein writes, people in New York continued to go about their Halloween activities undeterred, even after hearing about yesterday’s attack. People in Las Vegas are going about their daily routines. That is as it should be and people in other countries that have experienced random acts of violence against the public do the same thing.

When militant groups shift their attention from hard to soft targets, it is a sign of frustration due to declining power and influence.

Comments

  1. Jenora Feuer says

    Well, the latest attack probably qualifies as ‘stochastic terrorism’: poison the discourse enough and somebody with an axe to grind will eventually step up and do something about it, while the people doing the poisoning can sit back and decide whether or not they want to accept responsibility for what happened.

    And, really, from what I’ve seen of ISIS/Daesh, for them, poisoning the discourse is the main idea. They don’t care as much about their own prestige so much as they care about making sure that Muslims are so distrusted by everybody else that they have nowhere else to turn. They want Muslims everywhere to be disenfranchised, as that makes them easier to radicalize.

    And one thing that I heard on the CBC radio this morning, which should get talked about more: pointing out that this guy lived in the U.S. entirely legally for the last seven years while going for a green card, so if he was radicalized, he was radicalized within the U.S..

  2. jrkrideau says

    We may be seeing more such attacks as ISIS has lost the war in Iraq/Syria. The “Caliphate” is no more.

    @ Jennora Feuer
    from what I’ve seen of ISIS/Daesh, for them, poisoning the discourse is the main idea

    I partially disagree. The early Daesh leadership had the firm intention of establishing/reestablishing the Caliphate on the territory of the old one. The fact that they seemed to have no idea what the old Caliphate was like was irrelevant.

    The “poisoning the discourse” approach is more a desperate fall-back as they were being destroyed as a functioning military and civil power. The more they are being turned into a bunch of rag-tag fleeing terrorists, the more the promotion of purely terrorist attacks against soft targets.

    As Mano says, attacks on soft civilian targets is an admission of weakness. On the other hand, with a nut-job like Trump (occasionally) in the White House, something like this gives a big return for a minimal investment.

  3. John Morales says

    jrkrideau,

    As Mano says, attacks on soft civilian targets is an admission of weakness. On the other hand, with a nut-job like Trump (occasionally) in the White House, something like this gives a big return for a minimal investment.

    I think Jenora has put it well. Without sufficient mutual resentment to feed radicalisation on both sides, their goal cannot be achieved. It’s “the idea” in the sense that it’s the main strategic

    And so long as this resentment exists, recruits and supporters will be available, weak or no.

  4. says

    Too bad our “leadership” does not recognize this and, consequently, overreact to such attacks. That probably not only helps ISIS get more prestige than they deserve for such a weak and cowardly attack, but punishes innocent Muslims by increasing xenophobia. But I don’t want to repeat too much what has already been said by the other commenters.

  5. jrkrideau says

    # 3 John Morales
    I agree with Jonora’s position but while “poisoning the discourse” strategy was always there but the mutual radicalization not a major element in the early days.
    i
    My reading is that ISIS was happy to radicalize foreigners to boost recruiting but really did not care about radicalizing the rest of the population against themselves or Islam in general. A few terrorist attacks might boost recruitment but the attacks were not a major component of their strategy.

    ISIS, overall, was not a big promoter of terrorism while they were in their expansionary phase. As they were being defeated they moved into the soft target attack phase and definitely “poison the discourse” is becoming an increasingly important part of their strategy. It may be about all they have left.

  6. jrkrideau says

    As at afterthought, ISIS had no need to “poison the discourse” in the early years of its existence. The USA in Iraq had done all the work for them. Abu Ghraib photos and other atrocities were more than sufficient for their recruiting campaign.

  7. Pierce R. Butler says

    The groups that become eventually successful are those that remain disciplined and confine their attacks to difficult targets and protect ordinary people, thus gaining further support. But many groups seem to get frustrated and start killing random civilians in order to strike terror and that usually signals the beginning of the end for the groups.

    I dunno -- massacres of soft targets worked successfully for the Nicaraguan contras, for example.

  8. Mano Singham says

    Pierce,

    I don’t think that the Contras were a success story. There terrorist activities against civilians did not win them popular support and it was only US military and political support that kept them active for so long. The 1990 elections that saw the right wing victory over the Sandinistas had many explanatory factors, the most salient of which was that the US had threatened to keep the squeeze on that country if the Sandinistas won.

  9. jrkrideau says

    @ 7 Pierce R. Butler
    I dunno – massacres of soft targets worked successfully for the Nicaraguan contras, for example.

    If you are fighting as a proxy for the greatest economic and military force on the planet, you may have some resources that ISIS (hopefully) does not. You need to be able to put armed troops in the field. My understanding is the Contras were an armed insurgency with the ability to withdraw into sanctuary countries and well financed and supplied.

    You should be planning to take over the country and have enough political support in the country to capitalize on your terror attacks and atrocities.

    The NYC attack, assuming it has anything to do with ISIS other that the attacker fantasizing that he was an ISIS warrior, is nothing but a minor pinprick to the USA. There are no masses of ISIS troops waiting off-shore to storm the beaches of Staten Island.

    It is no threat to national security. The USA deals with things like this just about every week. The only differences are that the perpetrators are “white” and they usually use guns so by “definition” it cannot be terror.

  10. Pierce R. Butler says

    Mano Singham @ # 8 & jrkideau @ # 9 -- Agreed, there were lots of extraneous factors aiding the Reagan/Bush mercenary terrorists, but just about every observer seems to agree that they (lightly repackaged) did get more votes in 1990 (even though running the first serious woman candidate in their macho country’s history). I doubt Nicaraguans suffer the collective amnesia of the US electorate, and evidently many who voted for Violeta Chamorro expected the Sandinistas to win and only wanted to goose them a bit, but the fact remains that their atrocities did not ruin them politically.

    I might also mention the Khmer Rouge, whose frenzies of bloodshed did not seem to weaken their standing as a serious political force (though not put to an electoral test). ISIS/Daesh does seem to have an air of weakness, but I suggest that comes from Big Battle defeats rather than exploiting demented small fry for opportunistic minor attacks in remote (to them) nations.

  11. sonofrojblake says

    The groups that become eventually successful are those that remain disciplined and confine their attacks to difficult targets and protect ordinary people

    The obvious counterexample is the IRA. They were murdering children from early on and right up to the end of what they refer to as “the armed struggle”, and they got into government. Can’t argue that wasn’t success, and they murdered ordinary people left right and centre for three decades.

    But then, to use jkrideau’s phrase, they were “fighting as a proxy for the greatest economic and military force on the planet”, so that helped.

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