I recently received a mail from a reader concerning definitions and the fight against terrorism. The reader was confused that the US hadn’t been able to destroy al-Qaeda despite having overwhelming technical and military superiority. The question raised issue over the harmony of terrorists and how governments used the tag, terrorist, to identify its modern day enemies.
Terrorism is a phenomenon that is not easily defined or does it fit into any particular framework. When attempts are made to do so, arguments are made against it and counter examples generally prove to be successful in showing that a particular group or incident is not terrorism but another type of attack. So when analysing the effect of terrorism we are in fact analysing the effect of attacks on civilian or military interests by groups with set ideologies and motivations. Looking at the Middle East analysing particular countries we are confronted with numerous groups, which strangely enough are usually associated with al-Qaeda. This group has been blamed for hundreds of attacks, and groups either aligned with it or motivated by it are said to be diffuse. Yet this raises a number of problems. The most obvious being, do all these groups share a common ideology? The answer surely, must be no. With differing nationalities, immediate priorities are largely ignored by analysts and media commentators to the detriment of proper analysis. This has largely been a factor of government's pigeon holing groups into easily identifiable structures so that they can easily present the 'enemy' to their civilian populations. It is a political consequence more than a scientific one and to understand 'terrorist groups' one must understand this function, this flawed function.
Terrorism is a phenomenon that is not easily defined or does it fit into any particular framework. When attempts are made to do so, arguments are made against it and counter examples generally prove to be successful in showing that a particular group or incident is not terrorism but another type of attack. So when analysing the effect of terrorism we are in fact analysing the effect of attacks on civilian or military interests by groups with set ideologies and motivations. Looking at the Middle East analysing particular countries we are confronted with numerous groups, which strangely enough are usually associated with al-Qaeda. This group has been blamed for hundreds of attacks, and groups either aligned with it or motivated by it are said to be diffuse. Yet this raises a number of problems. The most obvious being, do all these groups share a common ideology? The answer surely, must be no. With differing nationalities, immediate priorities are largely ignored by analysts and media commentators to the detriment of proper analysis. This has largely been a factor of government's pigeon holing groups into easily identifiable structures so that they can easily present the 'enemy' to their civilian populations. It is a political consequence more than a scientific one and to understand 'terrorist groups' one must understand this function, this flawed function.
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