FOUR months ago, British terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna was addressing
high-ranking military officers in Washington about Osama bin Laden and what his
next target might be. He likes prestige targets, said Gunaratna, so maybe an
aircraft carrier. Impossible, countered an admiral鈥擜merican carriers are
too well protected. Not against a plane falling out of the sky, said
Gunaratna.
Last week, four planes fell. And while rescue teams search the rubble of the
World Trade Center, strategists are already hunting for clues to the next
attack. The political and military task ahead is as awesome as the scale of last
week鈥檚 assault. Can anyone now prevent mass-casualty terrorism becoming the
plague of the 21st century?
Experts on terrorism fear European and Asian countries aligned with the US
could be targeted, and that the most immediate threat is more hijacks.
鈥淭errorists copy each other,鈥� says Gunaratna, who is at the Centre for the Study
of Terrorism and Political Violence at the University of St Andrews. Last
October鈥檚 suicide attack on the USS Cole in Aden, which killed 17 American
servicemen, was followed by similar incidents within a month by two separate
groups鈥擧ezbollah in Israel and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka.
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Just as dangerously, terrorists everywhere will have seen in stark detail
just what happens when attackers are willing to inflict mass murder. The Rubicon
has been crossed. Spurred on by the impact of the mayhem in New York, terror
groups may in future be more likely to use chemical or biological weapons, warns
Gunaratna. And having seen airliners turned into smart bombs, they鈥檒l be looking
for other civilian technologies or installations to corrupt. Industrial plants
that use hazardous chemicals might be sabotaged as a 鈥渟hort cut鈥� to chemical
weapons, fears Amy Smithson of the Stimson Center in Washington.
The attacks confirm what many experts were already saying: terrorism has
changed. In the past, terror groups tended to claim responsibility for attacks
because they wanted clear concessions such as the release of prisoners. Now they
seek only carnage, not concessions, and so prefer to kill anonymously and on a
scale their predecessors would have rejected as bad PR.
鈥淲e used to let [hijackers] in the cockpit, and played for time,鈥� says Randy
Larsen, a former US Air Force general and head of the ANSER Institute for
Homeland Security near Washington. But that was when terrorists wanted to
bargain. Now pilots鈥� associations are calling for cockpits that lock from the
inside and even for weapons
(see 鈥淒efeating the highjackers鈥�).
In the wake of last week鈥檚 horror, the US has already brought in stricter
controls on baggage and people in airports, and the European Union will toughen
its air safety rules and unify them across member states. Later this month, the
EU will also propose new global safety rules at the International Civil Aviation
Organization in Montreal.
But even if these measures make flying safer, they won鈥檛 stop suicide bombers
stepping onto commuter trains or into crowded shopping malls. Can anything? In
Brussels, EU ministers have pledged to adopt a coordinated anti-terrorism
strategy and make police warrants valid across the EU, while the US is preparing
for the biggest reorganisation of government agencies and defence spending since
the Second World War.
At present less than 4 per cent of the US鈥檚 $300 billion defence
budget goes on counter-terrorism, and coordination is widely acknowledged to be
dire. This is set to change. Legislation already before Congress proposes that
the 43 different agencies that are supposed to protect the US from terrorist
threats鈥攅verybody from border guards to the CIA鈥攂e brought together
under one 鈥淗omeland Security鈥� agency.
Not before time, say security experts. In the US, strategists have long
called not just for better defences against mass-casualty terrorism but also
more lateral thinking on what weapons are likely to be used. Having assumed that
any large-scale attack would have to involve nuclear, chemical or biological
weapons, the US government was unprepared for fanatics armed with knives and
flight manuals.
鈥淲e haven鈥檛 even been making regular assessments of the threat,鈥� says John
Parachini of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, let alone devising
strategies to meet it. 鈥淣one of that smallpox vaccine we stockpiled did us any
good last Tuesday,鈥� adds Larsen. Nor, of course, did the billions the US spends
each year on intelligence. Most experts believe the US has relied far too much
on high-tech methods such as satellite spying and monitoring communications. Yet
one of the first security responses last week was to make wiretaps easier and to
install Carnivore software at Internet service providers to monitor suspect
e-mail addresses.
But what we really need, says Gunaratna, are human agents to penetrate the
terrorist groups. To get them, the CIA will have to train a whole generation of
spies in languages other than Russian and perhaps lift its restrictions on
hiring agents with an 鈥渦nsavoury鈥� past. 鈥淭he people we need don鈥檛 exactly
frequent the cocktail circuit,鈥� says Frank Cillufo of the Center for Strategic
and International Studies in Washington.
And however intelligence is gathered, it is worthless if no one spots the
warnings it contains. The authorities missed several warnings of last week鈥檚
attacks. The starkest was in 1994, when groups thought to be allied to bin Laden
tried to bomb 10 American airliners. After they were thwarted in the
Philippines, one of the plotters reportedly confessed plans to crash a hijacked
airplane into CIA headquarters. No one took him seriously.