The Counterterrorism Efforts Need More Education and Less ‘Sloganeering’

What’s needed to grapple with terrorism is not “sloganeering” but a reasonable and balanced approach, says Stanford Professor of Political Science Martha Crenshaw, who with University of Maryland Professor Gary LaFree authored the recently released book, Countering Terrorism.
Terrorism is a conundrum for government officials because the risk exists but it is extremely low, and overplaying that risk can be counterproductive.

Crenshaw, a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, said the essence of terrorism is to try to arouse emotional reaction, to alarm a lot of people and to create fear, and that’s why terrorists attack innocent people at public places like marathon races and night clubs.

“We argue that you don’t want to overreact to terrorism,” Crenshaw said. “Often you’re just playing into the hands of the terrorists.”

She said she traced statistics of terrorism plots and attacks back to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and found 120 over the period of time since the ’93 bombing. It’s not a lot, but it’s enough to scare the public.

“The public wants a response. The public feels at risk,” she said. “The risk is low, but you can’t tell people that they’re more likely to be killed by lightning or a fall in the bath or a car accident, which is true. The government has to do a good job of communicating and explaining what the real risk is and put it into perspective.”

What does she mean by “sloganeering”? “Things that reduce themselves to a bumper sticker, like ‘The War on Terror.’ That was a bumper sticker. Nobody really thought hard about what we mean when we say we’re going to war on terror. A ban on Muslims is also a bumper sticker.”

Crenshaw said the public is not very well educated when it comes to these issues. For example, she said a lot of Americans probably know very little about where the countries (Libya, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Yemen and Somalia) named in the current immigration flap are, or their histories or social makeup.

She said many people from these countries are not Muslim and that India has the second or third largest Muslim population in the world. “These are facts that a lot of people are not aware of, and it’s up to our educational system and the government to keep explaining these things.”

Crenshaw said the book points out that adopting slogans like “all Muslims are violent” is dangerous and misleading. “Remember, not too long ago we went to war in the Balkans to defend Muslims against others.”

The fact that the jihadist ideology is foreign to most Americans adds to the fear. She said right-wing terror groups are less feared because the public knows they are a small segment of the population.

Crenshaw developed a map that outlines militant groups, their relationships with other groups and additional details she believes are important to understanding terrorism. “My argument is that relationships among these groups matter. We need to know who gets along, patterns, and rivalries or cooperation. We include profiles of the different groups, who they are, who supports them and who their leaders are.”

She said the book cautions against overreacting to terrorism because actions taken by the government are hard to undue.

“If you look at the reaction after 9/11, all the bureaucracies, the policies, the Patriot Act. Even when people began to think, ‘Oh, these measures have consequences that we don’t like,’ it proved to be very difficult, if not impossible, to roll back these policies for all sorts of reasons.”

She said as threats change and evolve, the nation’s response must also change and evolve, and that’s made hard by the policies that are so ingrained. “It’s no longer a squad of people coming in from the outside. It’s more homegrown people, who now listen to a message or get it through the Internet, and it’s really a bizarre set of people too. The policies make it difficult to shift and make government less adaptable.”