Summing up, there are people who choose to attend the extreme mosque

Legitimacy Arenas, Counter-insurgency and terrorist recruitment mechanisms

INTRODUCTION

The concept of legitimacy is central to the analysis of the relationship between terrorism and counter-terrorism and to the success and failure of policies adopted by both sides. As long ago as 1978, Anthony Arblaster, in a major review of books on terrorism, argued that the concept of terrorism involves a challenge to the legitimacy of the state so it cannot and should not be discussed without reference to the concept of legitimacy. In Weberian terms, the existence of terrorism represents a challenge to the state’s claim to possess the monopoly of legitimate coercive force over a given territory. However, where Weber was essentially concerned with the state’s right to use force within its own territory, calculating the legitimacy of force in present conditions is more complex, for example, where states are seeking to intervene beyond their politico-territorial boundaries to change governments or to attack facilities, individuals and groups that they claim to be the source of “terror” used against them. [Israel in the Lebanon, South Africa and the frontline states, now the USA in a number of venues ] or where states seek to overturn governments they consider unacceptable [Vietnam in Kampuchea, the USSR in Afghanistan, France against the Central African Empire, Tanzania against Uganda, the USA in Grenada]. (BILL-I think the word ‘globalisation’ is unnecessary here, especially as your examples don’t really relate to it) If, as in the current American led war in Iraq, legitimacy is perceived to be lacking by various national or international constituencies, this is likely to strengthen the very terrorism that the employment of force is intended to reduce. Yet, because ‘legitimacy’ may be seen by governments as too vague and indeterminate a concept for them to take much account of in their policymaking, they are likely to ignore it in favour of what may appear simpler calculations of force effectiveness, such as enemy casualties. As the American interventions in both Vietnam and Iraq demonstrated, such apparent simplicity is misleading, in large part because, where the use of force is increasingly seen as illegitimate, terrorist/guerrilla/national liberation/insurgency groups will be able to recruit at least as many fighters as they are losing. This was a lesson learned the hard way by the British in Northern Ireland, where the security forces took many years to recover from what was seen as their indiscriminate use of force in the early stages of that conflict. We suggest here that it is possible to take a systematic approach to ‘measuring’ legitimacy by adapting certain factors used by police organisations when deciding whether and when to intervene forcibly in high-crime or ethnic minority areas. The first stage of our argument, then, is to outline a number of ‘legitimacy indicators’ derived and adapted from police practice that states need to take account of in calculating the impact of their policies. This enables us to produce what amounts to check-lists for states seeking to embark upon a “war against terror” outside their own boundaries. The checklists may be seen as a mechanism for risk-profiling the implications for legitimacy of individual policies at macro and micro level. We complete the article by applying those indicators to a number of case studies.

The discussion will focus largely on the US entanglements in the Middle East, and the rise of ‘jihadism’ in response; this is defined as a form of Muslim extremism that advocates war as an extension of religious adherence, and is complicated in Iraq by the role of US troops as an occupying force. While not unaware that actions and responses are globalised, and that jihadism is often portrayed in terms of a clash of civilisations between the Muslim world and the West, the scope of the article will generally be limited to Iraq, although with important exceptions – recruitment to religious extremism is, for example, a global phenomenon, as evidenced by the numbers of Western-born young men who fought against US-led troops in Afghanistan.

Those who choose religious extremism are akin to those late 1960s or early 1970s political activists who chose the Maoists, the Anarchists or the Trotskyites on the left, or on the right Ordine Nero or HWSC. These individuals constitute the “supply” that keeps the organisations operational and the amount of supply is affected by their perception of the legitimacy of American actions and the responses of local Muslim politicians. As long as supply exceeds attrition, the organisations can continue and even grow.

Like most political activists there is a tendency for religious extremists to be educated and middle class. All studies show that the middle class is more likely to participate in politics than other classes. Different recruitment mechanisms are operational: Leaders may personally recruit cronies that they trust. Often these individuals will take over internal security . Specialists may be recruited directly or employed for a particular operation. But the majority join via attendance at the mosque or at meetings of whatever the organisation is. From this initial action there follow a series of steps that move individuals further up the ladder towards the point at which they become fully fledged terrorists and cell members. So how can we measure the factors that impact upon this process and the way the various actors increase or decrease their own and others’ legitimacy in the eyes of potential recruits to terrorism? The next section will confront this and related questions.

Diagram 1

The stages of becoming a terrorist

Passive support

Reading literature, listening to speaker, occasional participation in demonstration

Active peaceful support

Attending public meetings regularly, contributing money

Active organised support

Joining party/ legal association

Moving towards violence

Asking about training/ doing jihad duty

Deinhibiting/ learning to be violent

Training abroad

paramilitary

Return and organise/join cell

Recruits operate at various different levels in a terrorist organisation. There are those who simply provide support for the movement; these people read the literature published by the organisation, they listen to speakers for the cause, they may join demonstrations, but they are only occasional participants. The next level of involvement is attendance at public meetings of the organisation, followed by providing money. Further commitment might entail joining a legal political party associated with the movement. The next step would be asking about training, then going for training abroad and then finally returning and organising or joining a new cell or an existing cell. This is familiar ground from the literature about political participation.

(BILL-GIVEN THAT YOUR TABLE BELOW USES YOUR LEGITIMACY INDICATORS, I SUGGEST INTRODUCING THAT SECTION HERE:)

Legitimacy in different arenas.

For effective counterinsurgency, the defender must to have greater legitimacy than the attackers. It is ultimately popular support that will determine the outcome of this sort of conflict, not least because it is popular support that will determine whether citizens will fight for their new government and will supply the intelligence necessary to capture the government’s opponents. Equally, in a world where the US wishes to intervene and then go home, it is learning that it cannot do so unless security can be guaranteed in the state it leaves behind. Security is guaranteed only by a legitimate government (i.e. one with a monopoly over the legitimate use of force). Difficulty arises, however, in establishing legitimacy and a monopoly over the use of force in what is effectively an occupied country. A framework must be constructed for a legitimate government, which cannot be seen as an agent of an occupying power, and to which power and responsibility for security may successfully be transferred.

But the government concerned increasingly needs legitimacy in arenas other than the domestic. Whether present conditions are best characterised as globalisation or as American hegemony, US intervention and its consequences need to be related to a number of conflicting and even contradictory arenas if the outcome is to be a legitimate government and a successful return home.

Firstly, the US domestic arena. If there is one lesson to be learned from Vietnam it is that if a country does not have the support of its own public, particularly that sector of the population from which armies are recruited, it cannot successfully fight a conflict. This may eventually ameliorated by technological advance; if the US doesn’t need very many people to fight a war, and those that it does need are fairly specialised and highly trained, then it is possible not to focus on this section of the population into account. But an occupation is hungry for manpower, and an executive needs to take enough of the population with it in a democracy to win elections. So domestic legitimacy is vital for any form of war on terror.

A second domestic arena is that of the country in which the intervention has taken place. Without legitimacy a new government will be unable to survive. Troops will have to remain and the government will appear to be a puppet. As intervention becomes occupation, the new government may lose whatever small amounts of legitimacy it possessed in the first place. If the government has no legitimacy, no monopoly of force, then rival power centres including organised crime will emerge and there will be no security for the population. Equally there will be no security for foreign investment, economic activity is disrupted, further and spiralling economic and military costs are engendered.

Thirdly, the international arena as a whole must be taken into account. If there is no international support then the US has to bear the total and economic military costs of an intervention. The intervention will have to last longer because the UN cannot be called in to take over after an initial military success. If NGOs are reluctant to participate then everything has to be done by American personnel and American funded institutions. If aid agencies withdraw, the standard of living and the daily life of the population of the country in which intervention is taking place will fail to improve, which in turn affects the legitimacy of an occupying force. Equally, opponents of the intervention in the country where intervention has taken place will find it easy to obtain support from neighbouring and other states and it will be difficult to bring pressure to bear on these states to withdraw that support. This arena can be subdivided into formal and informal areas: formal being the international institutions, such as the UN, the IMF, the World Bank and World Trade Organisation; informal including for example public opinion in states allied to the intervening country.

Fourthly, in the cases we are discussing at present, the Muslim or Islamic world needs to be thought of as a legitimacy arena. On a smaller scale we could have talked in the past of overseas constituency of support such as that possessed by the IRA amongst the Irish in the United States and Australia, or by the Basques and ETA from the people living in France or Latin America. We need to think of there being a constituency from which the opponents in the war on terror or whatever war is yet to come seek to recruit activists, suicide bombers, to obtain funding, to change the mind set of people towards rejection of Western values and the reassertion of traditional and Islamic values. These activities pay no heed to state boundaries and can be taking place as much in the United States and Western Europe as in what we think of as the Muslim world.

There is also a fifth arena of legitimacy: the legitimacy of the market. The bankers and the chief executive officers of trans-national companies are the final arbiters and judges of the appropriateness and legitimacy of policy responses. They are the people who move the money around and take the investment decisions. If they don’t like what is going on they won’t invest, or they invest elsewhere. They will also take decisions that will affect the purchasing power and exchange value of the dollar and other currencies.

Diagram 2 Factors affecting the likelihood of a particular policy producing more or fewer terrorists

Baby terrorist production

indicators

Feedback loops

production

more

less

Us domestic

policy

internat

Legitimacy

arenas

In country

Muslim

world

Market

The diagram above presents pictorially the process by which policy may affect the likelihood of there being more or fewer terrorists. It is obviously an adaptation of David Easton’s input-output diagram. Policy affects legitimacy in various arenas, which in turn affect the indicators for which the checklist is provided. This in turn increases or decreases the likelihood of terrorist recruitment. The number of terrorists and the actions they take feed back into the policy process.

Legitimacy and Illegitimacy: some indicators

When analysing legitimacy it is necessary to look at two different sets of indicators, what we might call indicators of legitimacy and indicators of illegitimacy. Indicators of illegitimacy can be derived from the classical police “tension indicators”. These have been developed by police forces in order to know when certain sorts of actions taken by them are likely to produce riots in certain sectors of the community. Legitimacy indicators may be more difficult to identify since to some degree the absence of illegitimacy indicators may be a sign that legitimacy exists. The argument is similar to that over whether police foot patrol prevents crime in that it is very difficult to prove that a given action has prevented a crime that hasn’t happened. Some attempt, however, has been made to argue in counter-insurgency literature that legitimacy exists when a population previously antagonistic engages in spontaneous demonstrations of support for the new regime.

It is also necessary to remember that the “war on terror” involves global legitimacy as well as traditional Weberian concepts of legitimacy within the nation state. The traditional proposition is that the more legitimacy a government possesses the less it has to use force to obtain compliance with its instructions and laws. Legitimacy is a concept linked to that of authority which could be said to be the ability to exercise power without resort to coercion. The existence of terrorism demonstrates that there is a challenge to legitimacy and to the state’s claim to hold a monopoly of coercive power. There is no international state and there is no monopoly of coercive power in the international system. States are the institutions normally thought to hold a monopoly of coercive power, so that the emergence of global institutions has, it has been argued, created hollow states. Political obligation has become multi-faceted and political obedience is not simply to the government of the state in which a citizen lives.

Organisations like the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank challenge any claim that the state still possesses to be able to take authoritative decisions for the population of a territory. Add to that the appearance of multi-state organisations such as the EU, ASEAN, etc and the neoconservative doctrine that the US should use its military superiority to enforce its policy priorities and it is clear that the role of the state in the present world situation is problematic. Just as the EU suffers from a democratic deficit, so too do transnational institutions and so does the United States when it seeks to take decisions that affect citizens far beyond its territory. There is thus a double issue of legitimacy here: the legitimacy of the emergent global institutions and older ones such as the United Nations; and the legitimacy of the actions of a superpower willing pre-emptively to defend its perceived interests.

Assessing the degree to which politics by peaceful means is possible and the degree to which the only way to lobby institutions is to use violence provides two major indicators as to whether legitimacy is growing or waning in a particular political system. There is some resistance to the idea of legitimacy being a relative term. To say that there are ways of measuring whether one state is more legitimate than another is seen as a futile exercise. This does not invalidate the creation of a simple checklist against which the impact of a particular policy can be profiled and an informed view taken as to whether the policy will create more or fewer terrorists in the future. Similarly, assessment can be made as to whether a policy, law or action will create more public support, less public support or cause the public to become neutral in its attitude towards both government and terrorist/insurgent.

1 What would be the impact of a given policy on the various legitimacy arenas identified below?

2 How would it affect the ability of terrorists to recruit and to obtain finance?

3 What will the impact be on employment, particularly graduate employment? A startling number of terrorists turn out to be graduates. This is particularly so at leadership and middle management levels, but a surprising number of suicide bombers have also turned out to be very well educated.

4 Will there be any impact on the relationship between organised and petty crime? Petty criminals are another source of terrorist recruitment. A hypothesis might be that the more petty criminals that are excluded from their normal activities by growth in organised crime the more likely it is that they will turn to politics or religion for some sense of self preservation and identity.

5 Will the policy facilitate the growth of civil society?

6 Where we are talking about a new law how will the enforcement of that law affect the relationship between the public and the police? This will affect the legitimacy of the whole criminal justice system and perceptions as to whether the government, or governing authority, is just. It will also affect intelligence gathering.

7 How will a policy affect the way states in the third [better check what that is. Think we intended to spell it out] legitimacy arena relate to each other and to the US?. How will it affect their willingness to provide personnel and material?

8 Will it lead to a general increase in prejudice, ignorance and stereotyping in the US and the third legitimacy arena? Or put another way to a decrease in tolerance? These are singled out as important variables by Seligson in his paper on legitimacy and democracy in Latin America.

9 What risks are there to other long term commitments?

10 What is the impact on democracy? In all the areas concerned in terms of how attractive it looks to the various protagonists? [will debate the deletion of this. Note that you have done so]

11 Are local media sources likely to be supportive? The media can be vital to creating and maintaining legitimacy if their own is robust.

Law and criminal justice as components of legitimacy

Seligson has attempted to develop a theory of the political culture of democracy that explicitly incorporates measurement of attitudes of legitimacy to the political system . He argues that if citizens do not believe that their political system is legitimate it is not likely to be very stable. He argues that reliance on the “trust in government” scale devised by the University of Michigan has held back the achievement of a scale to measure legitimacy, reasoning that the scale relies too heavily on measuring dissatisfaction with the performance of incumbent politicians rather than on generalised dissatisfaction with the system of government.[Wasn’t there just a survey in Africa on attitudes to democracy in general as well as attitudes to particular polities? Must search IRIN [that’s your comment]] He argues that the “political-support alienation scale” has provided a more valid and reliable analytical tool for measuring legitimacy. The scale asked respondents their attitude to the courts and the degree to which they guaranteed a fair trial, their respect for political institutions of the country, whether they felt that basic rights were well protected by the political system, whether they felt proud to live under the political system and whether they felt that they ought to support the political system. All these relate to a variable he calls system support which he claims Easton derived from Parsons in order to define legitimacy in terms of system support or diffuse support. The second variable is political tolerance, or the degree to which citizens are prepared to respect the political rights of others, especially those with whom they may disagree.

The legitimacy of a civil authority is central because military responses are expensive and in the long term create few friends. A police response needs to be introduced as soon as possible. Once the invasion is complete the military is in the role of “Military Aid to the Civil Power. [MACP] Fourth generation warfare specialists assume this as well. So whereas the indicators used above are relevant at a macro-level, there are micro-level concerns that need to be addressed as well.

Legitimacy is a central concept for policing because it is impossible for the police to investigate every crime or incident of public disorder. The police depend on the co-operation of the rest of the public. In the case of public disorder they depend upon a large proportion of the crowd recognising the right of police to stop disorder, to then take the decision to stop participating in the disorder and either leave the scene or become spectators rather than participants. In the case of crime, the police depend upon citizens to report crime, usually via the telephone, although occasionally by arriving at a police station. They also depend on the citizen to be prepared to provide evidence and to undergo cross-examination, either by the procurator in inquisitorial systems or, under the English adversarial system, by barristers for the defence.

How citizens view the police is thus an important variable in the criminal justice system. This is equally important for the success or failure of the political system. The way in which the police deal with crowds, especially those which are engaged in political activity, has a major impact on the legitimacy of the political system. A police service that avoids violent confrontation and places a high premium on the safe passage of the citizen on the public highway will have more legitimacy than a police service that engages in a competition in violence. Where politicians use their police force as a means to an enable them to ignore legitimate public demands, both the political system and the police suffer. It is true that politicians and senior police officers have counter-argued that sometimes they have to police a violent culture. It is often difficult to disentangle whether that violence is a result of police action or the raison d’être for police action. Legitimacy is also sensitive to the public perception of what constitutes justifiable police action. The definition encompasses efficiency and discretion. A good police service that is not efficient in catching criminals will lose the confidence of the public as will a police service that is perceived as petty, and always enforcing minor rules.

Indicators of illegitimacy: tension indicators

After the UK riots of the early 1980s, the police adopted a series of tension indicators that could be adapted to assist in assessing the impact of counter-terrorist policy in the new international situation. Unfortunately individual forces developed their own and there is no one system that can be recommended as best practice. The US has a similar system. The US Department of Justice has a regularly revised report on the police use of force which addresses the need to analyse tension indicators. This area is concentrated primarily on dealing with race-related incidents, although in the UK similar analysis is applied to the possibility of football-hooliganism-related events.

Renewal.net suggests the following:

· a rise in racist attacks (both white on black/Asian, black/Asian on white and Asian on black/other Asian)

· a rise in racist graffiti in all areas

· a rise in racist activity on the internet, and

· a rise in the activities of the Far Right (BNP/National Front)

Information needs to be gathered both by police observation but also in liaison with other agencies. The community’s view of what is normal and what exceptional needs to be taken into account in order to prevent a misjudged response by the police. Police officers in day to day touch with the community should be consulted and should consult each other regularly “to establish the level (if any) of tensions between different gangs, ethnic groups, schools, and religious and cultural groups”.

In the context of Iraq the renewal.net category of “rise in racist attacks” would be represented by a rise in conflict between Shia and Sunni or Sunni and Kurd or most alarmingly Shia and Kurd. A “rise in graffiti” would also be relevant although, of course, this requires Arabic-literate individuals who can read and distinguish between what is anti American, anti Western or Islamic Jihadist graffiti and what simply acclaim for a football team, a film or an attempt to sell a consumer durable. Internet activity will be more difficult to monitor and Internet activities specific to a particular geographical area even more so. There is a requirement to know what sites and chatrooms are visited by people from the area concerned. In a relatively small community like the UK it may be possible to monitor right wing chatrooms but Jihadism is globalised and the chatrooms used may be based in the United States or elsewhere. In Iraq a “rise in the activities of the far right” may be akin to a rise in attendance at the more extreme preachers at Friday prayers. There is a problem for the Coalition working out who are the community leaders to consult in different parts of Iraq. Community leadership may be in a process of change. It has been assumed that tribal elders are important but the cities and communities have been penetrated by foreign Jihadist organisations at various stages of the insurgency, and until the election takes place it is difficult to know how far Moktada al-Sadr has support in individual Shia communities.

Applying these criteria to counter-terrorist intervention is obviously not an exact science, but if we substituted “anti-American or anti-Westerner or anti-foreigner” for “racist” and “militias” for “the Far Right”, then the creation of tension indicators is in the starting blocks.

The US Department of Justice also created a list of “Distant Early Warning Signs”. Again these are primarily intended for assessing racial tension, but they could be adapted for assessing the degree of illegitimacy existing and thus the likely reaction to a policy at local level.

Table 2 DEWS system

· Increased disturbance calls in a particular area

· Increased number of interracial assaults

· Increased number of assaults against police

· Increased Citizen complaints of excessive force

· Decreased levels of community involvement with local police department and officers

· Presence of or increase in hate groups

· Scheduled major event likely to attract protestors [opening of a controversial movie, music concert, athletic event etc.]

· Media reports exacerbating racial issues, tensions, conflicts, or incidents

· Increased school-based racial incidents

· Increased incidents of racial graffiti

· Major racial or ethnic population changes

· Harsh weather conditions creating unusual hardships and stress

· Crowding in housing, schools, and community facilities

· Critical, polarising, or provocative comments from community leaders heightening racial tension

· High unemployment and underemployment

· Perceived disparities in social services and welfare

· Demonstrations which reflect racial and ethnic polarisation

· History or presence of unresolved racial conflict

· Rationing of gas, food, water, electricity, etc.

These indicators, properly adapted can assist in assessing the amount of force likely to be required to implement a particular policy and, as we have argued, the more force required the less legitimacy possessed. They can also assist in predicting the likelihood of a violent response and thus the likelihood of creating further terrorists. Police experience shows that timing is important in policy implementation. When the indicators of illegitimacy are running high, caution is of the essence and policy should be aimed at bringing them down prior to intervening forcefully.

One of the major problems for the coalition as it seeks to rebuild the Iraqi military and police is the way that the police in particular have collapsed under pressure on one or more occasion and in more than one city. One of the tasks that needs to be performed by the Iraqi police is the provision of tension indicator information back to the coalition military. It would make sense to maintain call logs both for telephone be it landline or mobile and actual calls in person. Study of the fluctuations in these would provide a basic indicator how the relationship between the police and the public is fluctuating. Decisions need to be taken as to where “police primacy” can be established, where “military primacy” is of the essence and where joint police-military activity needs to take place. There are lessons here that could be learnt from Northern Ireland, but whether the US military is trained to perform a role in support of the police is a matter for question. It took years for British Army units to accept such a role.

On the DEWS list the final point “The rationing of gas, food, water, electricity etc” absence of these services and commodities are associated with the presence of people on the street. This links with the point about harsh weather conditions creating unusual hardships and stress. The only thing worse than crowds on the street is the complete absence of people from the street. Each is equally a warning of violence to come.

But these indicators should not be used in the first instance simply to analyse relationships between police and the public. They should be used to analyse relationships between the interveners and the community where intervention is to be made. Nevertheless one might like to note that if it is true that the Haj pilgrims will be crossing Iraq on their way to Saudi Arabia at the end of January simultaneous with the date for the elections, a little bit of environmental scanning might have prevented the possible conflicts that will take place.

Not really happy with the way these DEWS indicators have been applied in the paper, if indeed they have been applied. Do we need more examples? I note that today’s Washington Post, ie 25th November, 2004, says they are thinking of removing the Iraqi police as they are totally inappropriate to the present stage of the insurgency and so my earlier ramble may be totally irrelevant! That won’t be the first time either.

� A. Arblaster : "Terrorism: Myths, Meanings and Morals" Political Studies vol XXV. No.3. pp413 - 424

�

�

� A. Arblaster : "Terrorism: Myths, Meanings and Morals" Political Studies vol XXV. No.3. pp413 - 424

� Pipes, also The Origin of Holy War in Islam by Reuven Firestone (New York:

> Oxford Oxford University Press 1999); See also, Bernard Lewis, What

> Went Wrong

�

�

�

�

�

�

� Thompson “Defeating Communist Insurgency” Chatto and Windus London 1974

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

�

� Tupman W.A. “Violence and the British Political System”

�

�

� See Tupman “The Development of Appropriate Responses to Organised Crime in Transition Societies” Ledneva A.V. and Kurkchiyan M eds. Economic Crime in Russia Kluwer 2000 pp275-287 for a discussion of the relevance of civil society to policies against organized crime and terrorism

� N.A.Seligson “Toward a Model of Democratic Stability: Political Culture in Central America” EIAL 11 No2 July-December 2000 on the World Wide Web at: � HYPERLINK "http://www.tau.ac.il/eial/XI_2/seligson.html" ��http://www.tau.ac.il/eial/XI_2/seligson.html�

� Seligson p.3

� Seligson p.4

�

�

�

�

�

� HMIC “assessing the risk of disorder” section 1.3 p 18 http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/hmic/disord1.pdf

� US Department of Justice Community Relations Section “The Police use of Force” Revised September 2003 available at: http://www.usdoj.gov/crs/pubs/policeuseofforce092003.htm

� renewal.net “Communty Cohesion –the Police Role” http://www.renewal.net/documents/Solving the Problem/Communitycohesionpolice.doc

� “Distant Early Warning signs: Indicators used to assess tension in a community” http://www.usdoj.gov/crs/pubs/dewslast.pdf

1