We are very pleased to welcome tonight Louise Richardson, Executive Dean. She is the Senior Administrative Officer of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and is responsible for the coordination of academic and administrative activities and the strategic management of administrative operations. She is also a senior lecturer in government at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard and a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School. Louise Richardson's academic focus has been on international security with an emphasis on terrorist movements. For several years, she taught Harvard's large undergraduate lecture course, Terrorist Movements in International Relations. For this she won the Leavenson Prize, awarded by the undergraduate student body to the best teachers in the university. This class, along with a number of graduate courses on terrorist movements and European terrorism, were for many years the only ones offered on the subject at Harvard. But her knowledge of terrorism is not only academic, she grew up in rural Ireland and went to school in Dublin. Univeristy of Dublin. She was surrounded by the conflict between Catholics and Protestants and knew terrorism firsthand. Her longtime interest in terrorism has resulted in research that included not only numerous interviews over the years with terrorists, but involvement as disclosed in the book, The Secret Conferences with Groups of Diverse Terrorists. Dr. Richardson has authored When Allies Differ: Anglo-American Relations in the Suez and Falklands Crises, she's edited The Roots of Terrorism and co-edited Counter-terrorism: Lessons from the Past. And she joins us this evening to talk about her most recent book: What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat. I hope you will join me in welcoming Louise Richardson. Thank you very much, Chuck, for that generous introduction, and thanks to each of you for coming out on a night when I know you have other things to do, and lots to distract all of us this evening. Let me preface my remarks by saying what I mean when I use the term terrorism. One of the things I used to do when I used to teach a course on terrorism in the nineties was have my students collect usages of the term terrorism. Because the term has always been used so loosely that it comes to lose all meaning. So we used to collect references in the New York Times to currency speculation as economic terrorism, domestic violence as domestic terrorism, prank telephone calls as telephone terrorism, and so on. And so I'd like to rein in this definition, and by terrorism I simply mean the deliberate targeting of non combatants for a political purpose. In the book I go through a more complicated seven-point articulation of what I take to be the seven crucial characteristics of the term terrorism, but in the interests of having as much time for questions as possible, I'll spare you that and simply say, "The deliberate targeting of civilians for political purpose." So it's the means that are used and not the ends that are pursued and not the political context in which the act takes place that determines whether or not, in my view, a group is a terrorist group. And I would say that unless and until we're willing to label a group whose goals we consider legitimate but who deliberately target civilians in order to achieve those goals, a terrorist group, then we're not going to make progress in forging international collaboration against terrorism. I think the United Nations for the past thirty, forty years has been hamstrung on precisely this issue. Nobody's willing to label a group "terrorist group" if they approve of what the terrorists are trying to achieve. I think we have to be prepared to do that. Terrorism is a tactic. It's a tactic employed by many different types of groups in many different parts of the world. In pursuit of many different types of objectives. And I have to say that in my view it makes no more sense to declare war on the tactic of terrorism, much less the emotion of terror, than on any other tactic, be it precision-guided bombing or anything else. And I'm convinced that when the history of these five years comes to be written, it will be seen that the declaration of a war on terrorism was a colossal mistake. And in this book I argue that in this past five years we have made two major mistakes, and we have missed two important opportunities. The first mistake was to declare war on the tactic of terrorism. And the second mistake was to conflate our enmity with Osama bin Laden with our enmity with Saddam Hussein. The two missed opportunities were first the opportunity to mobilize the international community, as it was willing and able to be mobilized in the aftermath of September 11th, bearing in mind that citizens of 80 countries were killed that day. And finally, the opportunity to educate the American public about the nature of terrorism, about the deeply psychological nature of this threat, and also about the implications of our pre-eminent power position in the world. So I'm going to continue my talk in this vein of simply boldly making these assertions, I'm no doubt provoking you to disagree with me, which I hope you will, but so I should say, in the book I go to great pains to defend these positions but in the interests of time I'm simply going to assert them. I'm happy to defend them. I believe that if you take a longer and a broader perspective, you find that many of the accepted verities about terrorism today are in fact misplaced. And I would like to challenge four of these. First, the notion that terrorism is new. Second, that it is in some sense a peculiar perserve of Islam, third that terrorists are irrational, and fourth that terrorists are amoral. I don't think any of these are true. First of all, terrorism is not new. Indeed, the recent emergence of terrorists with a religious and political motive is not new either. These cases have been documented at least as far back as the first century after Christ. We have the Sacari and the zealots in the first century after Christ. In the Medieval times there were the assassins, in the 19th century we had the Russian anarchists, and Irish nationalists, and in the 1970s of course we have the social revolution movements throughout Europe. Nor is terrorism the sole or even the primary preserve of Islam. There have been Christian terrorists, like the IRA in Ireland or the ETA in Spain, there have been Jewish terrorists, like the Stern Gang, or the Sacari, there have been Hindu terrorists, like the Fugi, we know that there are Muslim terrorists. There have been atheist terrorists, like the 19th century anarchists, or the 1970s social revolutionaries, and there have been, most commonly, secular terrorists, like the Talmud Tigers or the PK in Turkey. The third point I would dispute is that terrorists are irrational. Psychologists who have interviewed terrorists and imprisoned terrorists and former terrorists are unanimous in this point, insofar as we understand the term normalcy, terrorists are as normal as the rest of us. It's possible undermining this point to point out that large numbers, disproportionate numbers, of the leaders of terrorist groups are academics. I would even argue that suicide terrorists are not irrational, and I hope we have time to talk about suicide terrorism. Certainly from an organizational point of view, this is a very rational tactic, in terms of expending the minimum effort for maximum impact. And indeed when the leaders of the groups who deploy what they call martyrdom operatives, not suicide terrorists, talk about the tactic, they talk in precisely these cost-benefit terms, though the volunteers themselves tend to be less calculating. And fourth, I do not think that terrorists are amoral. I have never met a terrorist who did not believe passionately in the morality of his cause and the immorality of his adversary. Indeed, the fact was simply an effort to justify terrorist action. Al Quaeda pronouncements and those of bin Laden in particular, regularly seek to justify their actions. We saw this perhaps most chillingly in the recent case in London, when you had the 30 year old Sadik Hand, who was the leader of the four men who attacked the London Underground. This was a man who was a widely respected and much loved teacher of socially and behaviorally challenged children. He was married to a university educated wife, he had one child and was expecting another. Anyway, a tape was issued on BBC 3 months after his death in which he talked, he justified the attacks on the London Underground in terms of classic just war doctrine. A journalist, Alan Colluson, who is a journalist for the Wall Street Journal and a friend of mine, was in Afghanistan right after the American troops went in, and he was in a car accident, so his computer was destroyed. So he went to the market and bought some hot computers, and it turned out that two of the computers he bought had actually been owned by Al Quaeda, and he, at the insistence of his bosses, had to turn them over to the CIA, but not before seeing some of the documents. And one of them was a document written by Ramsey Ben Al Sheep, who is now in our custody as he is a member of Al Quaeda. And it was a document written for internal consumption within Al Quaeda to justify the actions of September 11th to the converted, not to the rest of the world. And in this Ramseay Ben Al Sheep spoke of the importance of not killing more than 4 million westerners, or not displacing more than 10 million westerners, in order to keep the contest reciprocal. Now, I appreciate that it's hardly encouraging that Al Quaeda is justified in killing 4 million of us, but it certainly does speak to the fact that they operate under self-imposed constraints. A few points on the causes of terrorism, because this really is a fundamental point. I think there are two reasons why it's very difficult to explain the causes of terrorism. And the first is because there are so many terrorists. How can you find a single explanation for the behavior of a Peruvian peasant, a Talmud teenager, a German professor, a radical Saudi, or a cricket player from Leeds. The second reason why it's so difficult to explain the causes of terrorism is actually because there are so few terrorists. You cannot convincingly use a meta explanation for what is a micro-phenomenon. So if poverty, for example, caused terrorism, there would be far more terrorism in the world today, and there would be terrorism in many parts of the world where there is none, in the poorest countries in the world. As you may remember the 1970s saw social revolutionary movements all over Europe. This was widely explained as the result of the alienation of young people, and yet there were far more alienated young people in Europe, in Germany, in France, in Italy, in Belgium, than there were terrorists. So terrorism, then, is a complicated phenomenon, and the search for simplistic explanations is understandable. I think often ideologically driven. And unlikely to be successful. One characteristic that terrorists share is a highly over-simplified view of the world. A view that sees the world in black and white terms. It seems to me that there's no reason that those of us trying to understand this phenomenon need to adopt this very limited perspective. Even if I believe over the past five years our leaders have tended to mirror our adversaries by responding in over-simplified terms. So rather than poverty and inequality in causes of terrorism, I prefer to see them as risk factors. They increase the likelihood of terrorism. And once a terrorist group forms, they increase the likelihood that that group would garner adherence. And certainly terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezzbolah have been extraordinarily successful in exploiting the social conditions around them in order to gain adherence for their cause. So my own view is that what causes terrorism is a lethal cocktail with three ingredients. A disaffected individual, a complicit community, and a legitimizing ideology. Now this conflict is more likely to be intractable if the ideology is a religious one, but it certainly doesn't need to be a religious one. Many of the most long standing and the most brutal terrorist groups have indeed been secular. One of the things that does keep me awake at night, one of the most sinister aspects of the current Jihadi movement, I think, is that through their exploitation of the high-tech aspects of the varied globalization of which they're so critical, they're able to create virtual communities to support their adherence. Whether these adherents are in Leeds and Chechnya or in Detroit, so no longer do you have to operate within a complicit community which until now one has had to, but increasingly through their use of the internet, they're able to create virtual communities of support for their young recruits. This I see as a very troubling development that we're going to have to come to grips with. To get to the title of my talk, one of the disadvantages of giving a book a catchy title like What Terrorists Want is that people, not unreasonably, expect you to have an answer. And I think that quite a lot of hot air has been expended, not least in the university where I come from, and in debating the point whether or not terrorism works. But one cannot sensibly decide whether or not terrorism works without first establishing what it is terrorists want. And I find it helpful to think in terms of terrorists having both primary and secondary motives or underlying and immediate motives. So primary motives differ across different types of groups. So nationalist groups like the Talmud Tigers like the IRA, will want autonomy or secession or independence. Religious groups, whether they're Jihadi groups or...will want the replacement of secular law with religious law. Social revolutionary groups will want to overthrow capitalism and so on. But the secondary motives, on the other hand, are held across all types of groups. And it has to be said that in seeking these secondary motives, terrorists have been altogether more successful than in seeking the fundamental political change that they also are trying to effect. So the key secondary motives are what, at the risk of over-simplification for the sake of alliteration, I call the three R's. Revenge, renown, and reaction. This is what I believe the terrorists want. First of all, revenge. By far the most common motive for their actions, asserted by current terrorists, by former terrorists, terrorists of every ideological hue from every part of the world, is the desire to exact vengeance. Sometimes this is revenge for something that they personally have suffered, but more often it's the group with which they identify. Far from matching our description then of them as selfishly pursuing their own ends, they generally identify with others, and see themselves as sacrificing themselves for others. One of the most fascinating cases to me is the case of the Englishman, Homer Schafe, this is the man who has been convicted of the brutal murder of Daniel Pearl. Homer Schafe is a well-educated Englishman who went to public schools, which is to say private schools in England and then went to the London School of Economics. While he was a freshman at the London School of Economics one day he was at a London Underground station with a number of other people, and an elderly man fell off the platform onto the tracks as a train was coming in to the station. Alone of the people on the platform, Homer Schafe jumped down onto the tracks, put himself between the train and the elderly man he did not know, pulled him to safety, and saved his life, for which he won Accommodation for Bravery from the London Underground. Later, when he was in India, he was actually in India scouting out Western tourist kidnap. While he was there, his roommate moved out of his apartment. And Homer Schafe thought it was quite unfair that he should have this big bedroom while there were homeless people out on the street, so he went out into the market and invited a beggar that he had passed every night on his way home in to share his apartment with him. So this is the man who brutally mur-- who has been convicted of the brutal murder of Daniel Pearl. He actually denies that he murdered Daniel Pearl though he boasts of having committed many other terrorist atrocities. So while we see terrorists as aggressors and ourselves as defenders, they see us as the aggressors and themselves as the defenders. They see themselves as altruistically fighting for a cause, they see themselves as playing David to our Goliath. All other terrorist groups, whether for internal or external consumption, are suffused with the language of revenge. I think it is really difficult to overestimate the power of the desire for vengeance as a motive for terrorists. And the second motive is renown. Now, publicity has always been a central objective of terrorism, it brings attention to the cause, it spreads the fear that terrorism instills, but renown implies more than simply publicity, it also implies glory. And terrorists seek both individual glory and glory for the cause, in an effort to redress the humiliation they believe themselves to have suffered at our hands. For the leaders this glory comes on a national or increasingly a global stage and it's precisely this desire for glory that I think is behind these repeated videotapes and audiotapes that the leadership of Al Quaeda releases. But for the followers, glory in their own community is enough. By joining a terrorist group one's social status in one's community is often improved. The third point is reaction. Terrorists, no matter what their ultimate objectives, invariably are action oriented people, operating in an action oriented in-group. It's through action that they communicate with the world. This used to be called "propaganda by deed" when the Russian anarchists did it. Action demonstrates their existence and their strength, so in taking action then, they're trying to elicit a reaction. It's how they demonstrate, or how we demonstrate, their importance, because action is all they have. Now terrorists often have wildly optimistic notions of the reactions their action will elicit. American and Israeli withdraw from the Middle East, British withdraw from Northern Ireland I have this chronic tendency to invoke Irish examples, I have no idea where it comes from the collapse of capitalism...It actually appears as though they rarely have a very coherent idea of what kind of reaction they will get. I mean, we actually don't know what bin Laden was anticipating when he planned the September 11th attacks. There's two schools of thought on this. One was that he believed as he constantly said that we were a paper tiger. That we were so corrupt and so decadent we wouldn't retaliate, we would simply withdraw from the Middle East. And the other school of thought is that he was deliberately trying to provoke us into waging war on Islam. He was deliberately trying to provoke a war of Islam agaisnt the West, or the West against Islam. I suspect that he probably concluded that one of these two reactions would occur, and either one would suit him. So long as there was a reaction, the terrorist purpose is served. So I think when one understands, or if I can persuade you of the powerful appeal of revenge, renown, and reaction, then the ever escalating tactic of suicide terrorism I think becomes much more readily comprehensible. Those who train the volunteers for martyrdom operations, as they prefer to call them, they understand this, and they use this training period to guarantee glory to their young recruits. In the West Bank, in Gaza, this is glory in the forms of songs, posters, wedding type celebrations on the occasion of their death. In Sri Lanka, it's more a case of getting orders to the martyrs and having a national day in which the martyrs are commemorated. So the trainers recognize amongst the young recruits this appeal of renown. Being a martyr is a quick route to being a superstar. Adlai Sudaman is a young woman who according to her trainer said, She wanted the assurance that after she died, she would be famous all over the Arab world. This was a young woman whose bedroom had been covered with posters of Western pop stars, but after the first woman, Wafa Idris, who was a 26 year old Red Crescent volunteer, had blown herself up, Andlai ripped down the posters of Western superstars and replaced them with posters of Wafa Idris. So if you don't look like Britney Spears or you don't play soccer like Sidane, being a martyr is a quick route to becoming a superstar. I think seen in these terms too we realize that the desire for glory, the belief that one is fighting for a just cause and the intense loyalty to one's small band of brothers that you find amongst suicide terrorists, is not that unlike the motives that have animated soldiers for centuries. Why did young men go out in the trenches? Why did young men go out in the foxholes in Vietnam? Everything we read suggests that they did so out of an intense loyalty to their small band of brothers, out of a belief in a cause for which they were fighting and a willingness to sacrifice themselves for this cause. I would also argue that if I'm right, that terrorists are motivated by this desire to exact vengeance, attain renown, and elicit a reaction, then declaring war on terrorism is playing directly into their hands. By declaring war on terrorism, we're providing both more opportunities to exact vengeance by the full deployment of our troops, but also more issues to be avenged, or more actions to be avenged, as a natural consequence of the conduct of warfare. It's perhaps worth remembering that within 6 months of our invasion of Afghanistan, an act which had widespread international support, but within 6 months of our invasion, more civilians, more Afghans, have died than had died on September 11th. Now of course there is a moral distinction between those who die as a result of a deliberate strategy and those who die as an unintended consequence of warfare, but I suspect this distinction is not that important to the families of those who died. When the most powerful countries in the world declare war on what was, after all, a motley collection of extremists, living under the protection of one of the poorest governments on the planet, they are elevating the stature of these terrorists to a height of which they could have only dreamt. The goal of defensive warfare, it seems to me, is to deny the adversary the objectives he seeks. I believe that in declaring war on terrorism, we're conceding these very objectives. Now I think that the urge to declare war in response to an atrocity on the scale of September 11th is very powerful, and the decision to do so is very understandable. I believe it's also unwise. I would say that I think any administration of any political party or ideological persuasion would have been under considerable pressure to respond precisely in this way. I think we have responded in accords with a pattern that we've seen in other democracies. Where you have an initial wave of horror, pressure on the government to react in a fairly draconian way, government invariably rushes through an emergency legislation which tends not to prove as effective as hoped, and people with misgivings about this legislation are swayed by being told that it's temporary. I can assure you that one of the iron laws of temporary emergency legislation is that it is never temporary. This period is then followed by a period of polarization, and then finally, finally, then a period of learning, in which there is an effort to learn from the mistakes that have occurred. And I think I see us entering this third phase now. I believe we should adopt an alternative strategy. One that replaces the overly ambitious goals to rid the world of evildoers, or to root terrorists out of the world, in the words of the president, with a much more modest, and I believe achievable goal, of containing the threat from terrorism. This strategy would be based on the following six principles that are derived from the experience of other democracies in successfully countering terrorism. I think I'll simply list these terrorist rather-- these principles, rather than defend them again, in order to give you the maximum time for discussion. The first principle is to have a defensible and achievable goal. The second is to live by your principles. The third is to know your enemy. Fourth is to separate the terrorists from the communities from which they derive support. Fifth is to engage others with you in the campaign against terrorists, and finally, have patience and retain your perspective. In fighting against terrorism, we have, I believe wrongly, assumed that our side had a monopoly on virtue. We have assumed that the purity of our motives was self-evident. We have casually assumed that being tough on terrorism means being effective against terrorism. And so political debate has been hamstrung by the fear of opposition parties, that they might be labeled soft on terrorism. Instead of worrying about what's tough on terrorism or what's soft on terrorism, I think we should focus exclusively on what is effective against terrorism. Every time we consider a new counter terrorism law or policy, I think we should ask ourselves one question: Is it effective? And only if the answer is yes, we should then ask ourselves the second question: At what cost? Because I believe that ultimately our democracy cannot be derailed by people planting a bomb in our midst. It can only be derailed if we conclude that it is inadequate to defend us. Thank you.
member. 
