Terrorists don’t have to blow up an airplane to win. They don’t even have to make an attempt. They’ve won the minute they persuade the authorities that they ought to make airline passengers take off their shoes before boarding a plane.
This shouldn’t be a revelation, but based on what I’ve heard on the talk show circuit in the last couple of days, it is. I’m bringing it up because July 4 has passed without any terror attack perpetrated or even attempted on U.S. soil, or anywhere in the world against Americans or American installations. This would be good news, if only it didn’t prompt various security services to take credit for it. But they do, attributing the absence of terrorist attacks to the ever-vigilant authorities having successfully turned the transportation hubs of the Western world into armed camps.
Spokespersons for U.S. Homeland Security, police forces, intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, and their media consultants took to the airwaves as soon as Independence Day passed. They pat themselves on the shoulder for being so well prepared, and out in such force, that all the terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) could do was to fume and make bloodcurdling threats on social media. The massive show of security, they explained, discouraged terrorists from even thinking about “starting something.”
I’ll try to break the news gently to security people. The terrorists in ISIL and similar groups were not discouraged. If anything, they felt encouraged and rewarded by the sight of long lines of shoe-less octogenarians and body-searched grandmothers at airports, and submachine gun-toting, body-armoured policemen in public squares. Terrorists started something, all right, and they started it the minute America and other countries turned themselves into replicas of Alcatraz. The terrorists started something, even if the massive forces deployed against them prevented them from finishing it.
They couldn’t have cared less. We were finishing it for them.
Considering the disruption and expense to terrorism’s targets, to say nothing of the inconvenience and humiliation, I doubt if ISIL’s masters are all that keen on finishing what they start. Threats cost the terrorist nothing and can cause the target as much harm as a completed act. Blowing things up takes a great deal of effort and expense for relatively little benefit. The terrorist’s main reward comes from turning the target into a porcupine.
Terrorism is neither labour- nor capital-intensive. A “lone wolf” terrorist or fifth columnist with a home-made bomb can paralyze a city — not by the damage his explosive causes but by the ill-advised counter-terrorism measures he engenders.
Following 9/11, for instance, authorities had the bright idea to compel temporary visitors to the United States from 13 countries to register with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Male visitors between the ages of 16 and 45 from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Eritrea, Lebanon, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Qatar, Somalia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen were required to report to the authorities to be fingerprinted, photographed and have their documents inspected.
This was already the second round, in 2003. The first round — involving temporary visitors from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Sudan — had a registration deadline of Dec. 16, 2002. By Feb. 21, 2003, a third round required visitors from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia to register, as well.
There had been many objections to the program, some valid, some spurious. A few immigrants were handcuffed and jailed by the ham-fisted authorities when they turned up to register, even though these people weren’t suspected of terrorist involvement of any kind, only technical breaches of visa regulations or incomplete paperwork. Bureaucratic bungling aside, many human rights advocates compared the entire process to the wartime hysteria that resulted in the detention of Japanese-Americans after the attack on Pearl Harbour.
Charges that such regulations are “racist” or “anti-Muslim” seem inane to me. America’s immigration authorities didn’t wake up one morning thinking it would be a jolly wheeze to target male visitors from the Middle East; they responded to the U.S. being targeted by people who tend to recruit Middle Eastern or Muslim males to carry out terrorist acts. If Buddhist or Icelandic terrorists had destroyed the World Trade Centre, it would be Buddhist or Icelandic visitors who’d be subject to similar INS regulations.
The problem is different. First, such programs are hurtful and humiliating to innocent people, wherever they’re from, who had no intention of ever doing anything wrong. Second, such regulations can’t help but put a repressive stamp on civil society. They create an ugly statist ambience: un-American (or un-Canadian) and unwelcome. Third, they have the potential of turning some foreigners, who weren’t at all hostile to America or Western values to begin with, into adversaries of America and other Western societies.
The obverse of, “if you can’t lick them, join them,” is, “if you can’t join them, lick them.” By putting ineffectual but humiliating hurdles in visitors’ ways, we may only complete their alienation from our societies and recruit them for our enemies.
Doing nothing isn’t the answer; coming up with smarter ways of detecting and eliminating fifth columnists is. If there’s a lesson for Canada in the U.S. experience, it’s that half-measures seldom work. Full measures, on the other hand, are bitter medicine. They include eliminating all immigration and visitation from countries that support or shelter terrorists. There would be no political support for such measures yet, but if present trends continue, one day there will be. Such a prospect isn’t as far-fetched as it was before the 21st century began.
