WFFD - Terrorism and Security
Tuesday morning focuses the discussion of democracy on current challenges to national security, “Terrorism and Security.” The panel, moderated by James Loy, former deputy secretary of Homeland Security, included: Ali Ansari, director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at St. Andrews University; Martha Crenshaw, senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University; Mitchell Reise, former U.S. envoy to the Northern Ireland peace process; and Charles Robb, a former Virginia Governor and Senator and Professor of Law at George Mason University.
In his opening remarks, Ansari warned of the dangers to society of subverting rights for short-term security concerns. In the West there is the inaccurate belief that these rights are secure. As just one example, Ansari said the debate about allowing torture in exceptional circumstances in Britain or the U.S. provided ammunition to the hardliners of Iran to also officially sanction such techniques. A knee-jerk reaction can make policy, but not strategy, he said.
One of the most difficult challenges in the War on Terror comes with weighing collective security against individual liberties. The two do come into conflict and the priorities are not always clear. Over the next several weeks, we’ll look more closely at the issue of torture and the major questions posed by rising global threats.
Crenshaw said that terrorism is a multi-national problem and it’s impossible for a single nation to handle it alone. This calls for building multi-national relationships and using the power of persuasion. Countries that act unilaterally are rarely successful in meeting their problems, even with homegrown problems.
Crenshaw pointed out that democracies can breed terror threats even when they do not restrict civil liberties. This is a phenomenon observed in Germany, Italy, Spain, the U.S., and India, among others. She thinks democracy is not an antidote to terrorism.
As in yesterday’s panels, we are again faced with the question of whether the urge to promote democracy should trump questions of national security. If the country is made safer by partnering with authoritarian governments abroad, should it do so? Maybe even conspiring to restrain democracy?
Robb emphasized the uncertainty that even the most senior government officials still face when considering terrorism. The Cold War security infrastructure, pervasive though it was, did not include the capability to address non-state actors. It is frustrating that a much weaker adversary than the Soviet Union can appear so much harder to neutralize.
Robb’s comments highlight a challenging part of anti-terrorist policy making. The intense desire to defeat terrorists can create fear mongering and creeping restrictions on civil liberties as policy makers try to throw the book at terrorists. If it is simply beyond the means of this country to defeat terrorism without making fundamental changes to civil liberties, as a nation we face a difficult decision about our priorities.
So what is the intellectual framework for fighting the War on Terror? Reise said the Cold War was simple; it provided an enemy, an ideology to defend, and one to fight against. It was easy to understand what the fight was. Terrorism has no such organizing principle, and so it is hard to wean at risk individuals away from fundamentalism, and it is hard to get allies on the same page.
Should Western values dictate the principles fighting the War on Terror? If so, how can Western powers elicit the global support? We will be discussing the role of the West in upcoming commentary.
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