How Terrorism Ends: Understanding the Decline and Demise of Terrorist Campaigns

by Audrey Kurth Cronin

Decapitation CATCHING OR KILLING THE LEADER [T]he cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it. —Mao Tse-tung1

LEADERS OF TERRORIST GROUPS are often captured or killed in the final months of terrorist campaigns, dealing a death blow to the group and precipitating the demise of the movement. But the specific techniques of targeting vary, and the long-term effects of decapitation are inconsistent. While many campaigns end as a result, others barely falter and may even gain strength.

The immediate effects of removing a leader vary, depending on the structure of the organization, the degree to which it fosters a cult of personality, the availability of a viable successor, the nature of its ideology, the political context, and whether the leader was killed or imprisoned. This chapter employs comparative case studies of the arrest or assassination of top leaders so as to probe the complex relationship between their removal and the ending of terrorist campaigns. A clear finding in what follows is that arresting a leader damages a campaign more than killing him does, especially when the jailed leader can be cut off from communicating with his subordinates yet also paraded in humiliation before the public. More surprising, however, a crucial consideration in determining whether the removal of a leader will succeed in ending a campaign is not the type of action a state uses against him or even his operational effectiveness, as we might logically expect, but rather the effects of his removal on potential supporters of both the terrorist campaign and the counterterrorist operation. Killing the leader of a group that has widespread popular support either has no measurable effect or is counterproductive. In this case, as in many others, the reaction of terrorism’s multiple audiences proves crucial.

First, whatever the political motivation, terrorist attacks demand a rationale that overshadows moral qualms about targeting civilians.

Second, supporters must believe that there is no alternative to killing.

Third, followers must be convinced that civilians who are killed as a result of terrorist attacks are not really innocent, but represent “the Enemy.”

Finally, a compelling personality thrusts followers beyond the threshold of personal doubt. The leader convinces them that they are not only right in their actions and convictions, but innocent of the harm that they do.

Terrorism is emblematic violence that regularly employs a human mouthpiece: it makes sense to attack the head, if only to shut him up, exact vengeance, and demonstrate resolve. The history of terrorism yields inconsistent outcomes for this approach.

Even leaders who exercise an operational role in the early years of a group may not continue to do so as an organization and its campaign of violence (and response to violence) unfold and evolve.

For the purposes of this study, decapitation refers to the removal by arrest or assassination of the top leaders or operational leaders of a group. States that decide to target the leadership of a terrorist campaign must first determine whether the goal is to take the leader alive or not.3 Decisions about whether to capture or to kill the chief may depend on local conditions; but in their effects on a campaign they embody the classic dichotomy between the so-called law enforcement paradigm and the so-called war paradigm in counterterrorism. Capturing the leader reflects the view that he is a criminal, lawfully entitled to a trial; killing him is treating him as a combatant, fair game for attack. Thus, decisions about whether and how to target leaders reflect philosophies in a state’s counterterrorism approach, and historical case studies indicate that these tactical choices have significant strategic implications for the outcomes of campaigns.

Capturing a leader, putting him or her on trial and then presumably behind bars, emphasizes the rule of law, profiles leaders as criminals, and demonstrates the appropriate application of justice. All else being equal, it is much better to arrest and jail a terrorist leader so that his fate will be demonstrated to the public. There is nothing glamorous about languishing in jail. When terrorism is primarily treated as a criminal offense, either by the state or the international system, the existing legal mechanisms for responding to it are reinforced. If there is a fair trial, terrorist violence carried out in the name of a political cause is labeled strictly according to the illegality and immorality of the act. The cause for which the attacks were carried out may or may not have legitimacy, but the violent acts performed in its name definitely do not, as the use of legal mechanisms clearly demonstrates.

Major cases of campaigns that were either destroyed or deeply wounded by the incarceration of a charismatic leader include the Peruvian group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey, the Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA), and Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo (Aum). These four cases have been selected for analysis because they represent disparate regions of the world, different motivations, have been thoroughly documented, and yield reliable data about the campaigns before and after their leaders’ arrest.

Ironically, Sendero Luminoso began to engage in violence just after extensive land reform and the restoration of democracy in Peru.

Check this for context.

Guzmán, whose supporters also called him President Gonzalo, was a brilliant strategist and excelled at organization. His elaborate philosophy for violence, developed during 17 years of organizational planning, was known as Gonzalo Thought, a form of Marxist-Leninist theory applied to a Peruvian context, characterized by clear moral codes, rote memorization, and oversimplified ideological explanations for every act.14

The organization had an elaborate, tiered membership structure, wherein members served first as sympathizers, then activists, then militants, then commanders, and finally members of the central committee.17 But the leadership also remained highly personalized: new militants were required to write a letter of subjugation, in which they pledged their lives, not only to the cause, but to Guzmán personally.18 Guzmán’s role as the cultish, even deified intellectual leader was never in doubt; nonetheless Sendero Luminoso’s organizational agility and depth seemed impenetrable and impersonal.

Org structure

The Kurdistan Workers’ Party (Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan, or PKK) also suffered a crushing blow with the capture of its charismatic leader. The PKK was founded in 1974 by a group of university students in Ankara, led by Abdullah Öcalan, whose initial goal (like Guzmán’s) was to provoke a rural peasant-based Maoist revolution in Turkey. Through a people’s uprising against the Turkish state, Öcalan hoped to establish an independent Kurdish homeland, encompassing southeast Turkey, and probably also northern Iraq and parts of Syria and Iran. The PKK was structured as a Marxist- socialist organization, with a general secretary and party assembly.24

On the day of the sentence, riots and demonstrations broke out among Kurdish populations throughout Europe and Central Asia. Facing his own demise, Öcalan advised his followers to refrain from violence, and the PKK essentially ceased its attacks as a result.28

The Real Irish Republican Army (RIRA) split from the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1997 because it refused to participate in the peace process with the British government.

Aum Shinrikyo, currently also known as “Aleph,” is essentially a religious cult founded in 1987 by Shoko Asahara, a half-blind Japanese mystic. Asahara (whose real name is Chizuo Matsumoto) claimed that the world was approaching apocalypse. He used an eclectic blend of Tibetan Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, and Christian thought to attract a following, primarily in Japan but also in Australia, Germany, Russia, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and the United States. Asahara’s argument was that the United States would soon initiate Armageddon by starting World War III against Japan, necessitating extraordinary measures to prepare for the attack. By precipitating the apocalypse, Asahara argued, the group could take over Japan and the world, and hasten the emergence of a new order out of the chaos.

Holding terrorist leaders is difficult, and a potential liability for the state and its citizens. Should leaders of organizations that carry out terrorist attacks instead be identified, targeted, and killed?

It may seem a quaint consideration in these post-9/11 days, but in the wake of the 1975 Church Committee’s report criticizing abuses by the U.S. intelligence community, presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan all signed assassination bans. The most recent, Executive Order 12333, Section 2.12 states, “No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.”

To those charged with ending attacks, the debate over whether to kill the leader of a terrorist group may seem a naive intellectual luxury. After all, terrorist groups themselves target not just random civilians but also specific high-profile individuals.

In the face of such an obvious threat to civilian state leaders, why should counterterrorist forces not employ the same tactics? There are a number of reasons. Most importantly, governments are at a serious disadvantage, especially in democratic states: public figures cannot be perfectly protected; indeed, a major aspect of most elected politicians’ jobs is to be visible and available, making them more vulnerable to assassination than the leaders of clandestine organizations.

More to the point, adopting the tactics of terror hardly serves the interests of the state, whose long-term primary goal must be to demonstrate that terrorism is illegitimate and wrong. Engaging in terror tactics strengthens the perception that states have no more right to a monopoly on the use of force, no more legitimacy in how they employ it, than do international and substate entities. As Brian Jenkins observes, if terrorism is always wrong, how can a government’s use of terror be right?38

unlike many who carry out terrorist attacks, those who advocate state assassination policies must think not only tactically but strategically, analyzing the second- and third-order effects of the removal of terrorist leaders. Killing a head may result in a fight for succession within a group. Who is the new leader likely to be? The original charismatic leader may indeed be irreplaceable, or he may not: the old cliché about the devil you know appl...

If, on the other hand, there is a fight for succession, will it serve the state’s interests? Removing the leader may reduce a group’s operational efficiency in the short term, or it may raise the stakes for members of a group to “prove” their mettle by carrying out dramatic attacks. Will the killing of a leader result in martyrdom and more inspired recruits?

killing terrorist leaders increases the level of recruitment to Palestinian terrorist organizations more effectively than the deaths of ordinary Palestinian civilians killed in Israeli attacks.

Killing a charismatic leader leaves no one individual for a state to negotiate with. Will the killing of the leader result in the fractionation of the group? This can occur because members of the group suspect each other as informers or because the lack of a firm leader results in proliferating perspectives as to how a group should carry on. Fractionation may be a good or a bad thing. Smaller factions may be weaker and less able to carry out attacks than the original group, or they may be more violent than the mother organization, and more anxious to announce their presence and prove their capacity to kill. Even if a group does not break into factions, the killing of the leader may push it to adapt, and the outcome may be a more effective, flatter, stronger, more decentralized organization that is harder to destroy. In any case, before a group is decapitated, such second- and third-order outcomes must be carefully considered.

On the positive side, arguments for targeted killings include keeping terrorist leaders on the run, reducing their ability to carry out attacks, eliminating skilled operatives who are difficult to replace, and providing some means for Israeli political leaders to respond to domestic pressure. Some assert that the strategy also acts as a deterrent to terrorist action.68 Targeted killings have probably prevented specific strikes and saved some Israeli lives. Many point to evidence of a drop-off in the frequency and lethality of terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians, although determining the degree to which this outcome reflects “targeted killings” as opposed to better defensive measures (such as the border fence separating Palestinian areas from Israeli areas) is impossible. On the other hand, targeted killings have created Palestinian martyrs, drawn recruits to terrorist organizations, and resulted in retaliatory attacks against Israeli civilians.

Whether the removal of a leader results in the demise of a group or not, the event normally provides critical insight into the depth and nature of a group’s popular support and is usually a turning point in its evolution. The degree to which terrorist organizations rely upon a leader, either literally or figuratively, affects the degree to which removing him is likely to devastate the group; however, the level of popular support for the cause is just as important to the outcome. Popular support is the invisible element, the third side to the terrorist “triad” that can confound efforts to kill individuals and make a group virtually immortal. If an organization’s cause is well mobilized, enjoying active or passive support among widespread constituencies, then decapitation is unlikely to succeed.

On the basis of the historical record, arresting a leader is more effective in damaging a group than killing him. From a counterterrorism perspective, rather than leading to a group’s demise, the killing of the leader can backfire, resulting in increased publicity for the group’s cause and the creation of a martyr who attracts many new members to the organization (or even subsequent organizations).

Capturing a dangerous leader is arguably much harder than killing him; the results reflect the care put into the operation and the local conditions of the arrest. What happens to the leader after arrest is also crucial: a humanely treated, humbled, and deromanticized former “god” can reverse the mobilization for a cause. But even a publicized, humiliating arrest can backfire if the incarcerated leader continues to communicate with the group from prison.

In any case, if a leader is captured and jailed, it is critical to undermine his or her credibility and cut off inflammatory communications.

In short, while anxious populations may want a government to show strength and crush a group, state-directed assassinations result mainly in tactical gains, because the resulting tit-for-tat equivalence between state and group over time hurts the strategic position of the government as the rightful actor.

Perhaps the most important consideration is whether the use of violence to remove the leader will further alienate supporters of both terrorism and counterterrorism, leading to a shift in position on both sides. Although terrorism is always abhorrent and wrong, it is both an ethical and a strategic error to assume that retaliatory killings by those associated with the victims’ state are therefore ipso facto legitimate.

Sometimes the hardest course for a democratic state is to demonstrate tactical restraint: there may be situations where it is best to leave a leader in place. He may be losing legitimacy within the group, a leadership struggle may be under way that will lead to the undermining of the group, or the leader may already have decided to end the campaign by pursuing negotiations or making other conciliatory gestures. He thus may be as needed by the counterterrorist forces as by his followers. Is there a chance that internal rivals will remove him themselves, leading to the fracturing of the group and the bringing of chaos to the campaign? If not, who or what will his replacement be? How will the evolution of the group change as a result of his demise? And what are the opportunity costs of devoting a large percentage of a state’s military and intelligence resources to tracking him down? As argued here, unless second- and third-order effects are considered in a wise and dispassionate way, the dynamic of terrorism and counterterrorism may drive events just as easily toward escalation as de-escalation. Human nature is such that, when a cause is well established and has built a significant following, killing its mouthpiece and organizer will not end its viability. Terrorist campaigns do not end through the targeting of the leader unless the state has an accurate and sophisticated understanding of the nature of the group and the narrative that drives it, in addition to a well-thought-...

If the implication of his remarks is that we should sit down and talk with Mr Adams and the Provisional IRA, I can say only that that would turn my stomach and those of most hon. Members; we will not do it. . . . I will not talk to people who murder indiscriminately. —British prime minister John Major, in reply to a question from MP Dennis Skinner, November 1, 19931

The idea of negotiating with groups that deliberately kill civilians to advance their political goals is repulsive to most people. Who could blame them for such a view?

Wtf my very first thought is to negotiate with terrorists lol

Showing firmness in the aftermath of terrorist attacks, refusing to talk to the perpetrators or consider their demands, could contribute to the future safety of other potential victims, by removing incentives for future attacks and demonstrating that terrorism “does not pay.”2 It also avoids granting recognition to a group that uses terrorism, satisfying a righteous impulse to reject and condemn such tactics. Holding the line against terrorism makes a great deal of sense, especially because talks with terrorists are risky and often unsuccessful.3 In fact, however, democracies do negotiate with terrorists: virtually all democratic governments facing terrorist campaigns have been forced to negotiate at some point, and many have even made concessions, although of course there are differences in degree.4 As distasteful as they are, talks of one form or another have been common.

After groups survive past the five- or six-year mark, for example, it is not at all clear that refusing to “talk to terrorists” shortens their campaigns any more than entering into negotiations prolongs them. On the other hand, negotiations can facilitate a process of decline but have rarely been the single factor driving an outcome. While existing academic research demonstrates that civil wars that include terrorist tactics are the most difficult to resolve, terrorist campaigns themselves are harder still.5 As this chapter demonstrates, the record indicates that wise governments approach negotiations as a means to manage terrorist violence over the long term, while a group declines and ceases to exist for other reasons.

First, there is a direct correlation between the age of groups and the probability of talks, but that does not

mean that most groups negotiate: only about one in five groups of any age have entered into talks on strategic issues. Second, the vast majority of negotiations that do occur yield neither a clear resolution nor a cessation of the conflict.

Third, about half of the groups that negotiated in recent years have continued to be active in their violence as the talks unfolded, usually at a lower level of intensity and frequency—a factor that governments should take into account before talks begin.

While talks frequently falter along the way, the opening of negotiations engenders a range of effects, from improved capacity for intelligence and the probing of political agendas, to the splintering of organizations on both sides of the table, to the stopping and starting of talks and even increases in short-term violence before the end of a campaign. Groups (or parts of groups) have commonly transitioned to political legitimacy and away from terrorist behavior, at least eventually, after the formal opening of a political process.

Direct parallels between inter- or intrastate conflict and terrorism, made by academics and policymakers alike, are often incorrect or misleading when it comes to terrorism.

negotiations are not the obverse of fighting terrorism through other means.

To expect the opening of talks to mean the instant cessation of violence is naive and sets up expectations among the broader population that are counterproductive. The historical record indicates that terrorist attacks and government countermeasures typically continue to occur, usually at a lower level, into a period of negotiations, but the initiation of contact provides a possible avenue for long-term reductions in terrorist violence along a scale that ends in zero (for a given campaign).

Governments or their representatives often directly or indirectly communicate with members of terrorist organizations, even as they may deny that they are doing so: the public may find this distasteful, but in most cases the government (or its proxies) would be shirking their responsibility if they did not.

Potential tactical motivations for such talks are numerous. First, of course, negotiations hold the potential for a short-term pause in the violence, if only because it is harder to carry out effective attacks when efforts are focused elsewhere. Second, making contact with terrorist groups can provide important intelligence, particularly about the structure, hierarchy, or connections among members of a group.

Third, since the primary role of the terrorist leader is to appeal to his actual or potential constituency and build support (as discussed in chapter 1), the strident demands broadcast in the wake of terrorist attacks may bear little relationship to reality—or to what different elements of a group actually want or will settle for.