from power by a combination of US-led and ex-Mujahidinforces during the
‘War Against Terrorism’ in November 2001 proved popular within Afghani-
stan and internationally (seeAfghan War).
Terrorism
Following the end of theCold War, the threat of ‘international terrorism’ was
widely seen as the greatest affecting Western society. This sentiment increased
following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon in September
- The USA proclaimed a ‘War on Terrorism’ in response, although this
term itself provoked questions—critics asked whether it was desirable or
indeed possible to declare war on a concept, particularly one so ill-defined
as terrorism.
It is probably impossible to give a general definition of terrorism that would
not be too general to be useful. The best that can be said is that terrorism
includes any use of violence towards political, moral or religious ends which is
not carried out by the official military institutions of a state. Because the
concept is, too often, used with an implicitly evaluative undertone, it is, as
political theorists say, ‘inherently contestable’. Simply put, one person’s ter-
rorist is another’s ‘freedom fighter’. Merely to say that terrorists use terror as a
weapon, which is why it has the evaluative tone, is to say nothing—even
orthodox military strategy has relied at times on simply terrifying civilian
populations. It is thus better to concentrate on the distinction between actions
of an official uniformed military and other actors lacking the international
recognition of statehood.
That being said, terrorist operations differ from most orthodox military
strategy in two ways. First terrorists do, very frequently, strike at unarmed
civilian groups with no direct responsibility for state policy. In part they do this
because such civilians are easier targets than those offered by a nation’s military,
or its well-guarded political e ́lite. The main reason for such targeting, however,
relates to the second difference from militarystrategy. The actual aim of a
terrorist campaign is to influence the civilian population, rather than to
damage the military capacity of the enemy. Even when military personnel
are attacked, as with the IRA attacks on the British army in Ulster, the aim is
still to influence civilian attitudes, not seriously to reduce the strength of the
army, which would be well beyond a terrorist group’s capacity. Terrorist
activity aims to hurt the general population of the enemy state so much that
out of fear, impatience with inconvenience, or unwillingness to take the
economic and human consequences of the attacks, they withdraw public
support for the government policies objected to by the terrorists. Something
like this is true even when dealing with such groups as extreme Islamic
Terrorism