April 4, 2017: Our speaker was John Scott Cowan who spends winters at our club and the remainder of the year at his home in Canada. John has been a professor of physiology, chair on the medical faculty, then Vice President of the University of Ottawa and later Vice Principal of Queen’s University. He spent 9 years as Principal of the Royal Military College of Canada and chaired the Defense Advisory Board of Canada.
Two days after 911, he was appointed chair of the Asymmetric Threat Study for the Department of Defense and is the principal author of the foundation documents for Canada’s counter-terrorism strategy. He has flown 64 types of aircraft.
John’s thesis starts with the fact that 911 created a world -wide emphasis on counter-terrorism and asks the question “is an effective campaign to eradicate terrorism possible? How would a war on terrorism be designed, and how would such a plan differ from what we are actually doing?”
History gives us some clues if we study the practice of piracy which date back to the earliest times and notes that the piracy of four centuries began to a halt in 1790 and by 1890 was no longer a major threat. What is terrorism: “Any action is terrorism if it is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm with the purpose of compelling a government to do or abstain from doing any act”. Four factors made piracy an unacceptable activity:
- States stopped giving letters of action that aided said states to increase their military.
- States recognized that piracy was detrimental to necessary international trade.
- Great numbers of people from a range of classes were traveling by sea and put pressure on their governments to remove the risk of piracy.
- Piracy had become interconnected with slave trade with victims of piracy often becoming slaves; governments declared that the movement of slaves by sea was in itself an act of piracy. Thus the pressure against piracy became a human rights issue.
Within three generations, piracy went from being semi-accepted as a form of irregular warfare, to becoming almost gone. There established international pirate culture became relegated to dressing as pirates at Halloween.
Terrorism today may be at the point where piracy was in the 1800”s. Terrorism is at its most horrible form in genocide and ethnic cleansing. Politically motivated terrorist acts by individuals and small groups are not new. Such an act triggered WW1 and acts by partisans, supported by the Allies in WW2, fall into the terrorist definition. Arguably, so would reliance during much of the Cold War on city-killer nuclear weapons be held to be a plan for terrorism. A case can be made that 1989 represents the same watershed date for an end of state endorsements of terrorism that 1790 would represent for state endorsement of piracy. By 1790, the world was primed to stamp out piracy. Letters of Marque were rarely issued. No privateering meant no more ships and bases functioning as officially sanctioned schools for those who would later go rogue and strike out on their own. It had long been recognized that the slave trade and piracy were intertwined. First, slaves were the most valuable property to seize. Second, captured crew or passengers could be sold as slaves anyway. Third, early in the 19th century the slave trade had become illegal in stages. While many examples of country by country curtailment are documented the long war on piracy worked where earlier efforts had bailed because:
- Developed states stopped using piracy as a convenience.
- A multilateral effort was grounded in a shared popular conviction that piracy had to end.
- The use of force alone was not effective but accompanied by diplomacy and even bribery did work.
- Laws were important, provided that governments chose to enforce them.
These lessons may be applicable to the design of a war on terror. But multilateralism is awkward. It involves constant negotiation and compromise. It is slow. But it is critical to closing off safe havens.
The war on terror is not a military exercise. It is a political, diplomatic, economic and social exercise in which military force must always be available and occasionally used. Some argue that it’s different this time because the majority of terror incidents today are related to a revolutionary movement within Islam, a movement unlikely to respond to the subtleties of the proposed approach. But consider this: There is a fierce struggle underway for the soul of Islam. We on the outside are not mere bystanders, but we are also not central to the issues at stake. We need to fight a holding action to prevent that struggle from ruining our lives, and will need to do so until the community of Islam has been able to resolve this internal conflict.
This revolutionary movement deeply believes in a return to an imagined short Golden Age, the 29 years after the death of the Prophet. It is a movement distinct from customary Islamic orthodoxy. It espouses certain values that most of us on the outside see as anti-human, and it is these striking and extreme postures which in the end may cause it to fail and may cause other more adaptable theologies within Islam to prevail. No one living today will see the end of that struggle.
But terrorism is not central to it. It is the tool of the moment. If the ulama, the intellectual and theological leaders within orthodox Islam, were to become convinced that terrorism was an unsuitable and inherently inappropriate tool for believers, even the most radical fundamentalist leaders would start to look for other methods to pursue jihad.
The techniques for persuading states and non-state actors that it is time to put terrorism behind us are similar to those multifaceted but muscular techniques that made piracy a minor activity. The struggle for the soul of Islam may be partly a violent struggle right up to the point that it is resolved, but the unethical and unappealing tactics of terror may be discarded by all protagonists long before the greater questions are resolved. It is to producing the pressures to discard such practices that we must apply ourselves. And the Long War on Piracy points the way.
— Fred Sales, Keyway Committee