In fighting terrorism, we have to recognize that terrorism is a psychological tactic. Terrorists seek to terrify. Controlling fear should play as large a role in the struggle against terrorists as do the prevention of attacks and the arrest of plotters. We must, as Brian Michael Jenkins put it, “attack the terror, not just the terrorists.”
Attacking the terror means, first, avoiding statements that paint the threat as something greater than it is. In 2006, when German police stopped a plot to bomb two trains, former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote a newspaper column that began with an arresting sentence. “Attention nervous flyers: don’t think you can escape the terrorists by taking the train.” This effectively says the risk of being killed by terrorists while traveling by plane or train is significant. That’s not remotely true, but it is something terrorists would very much like us to believe.
Attacking the terror also means putting the risk of terrorism in perspective by supplying the statistics that politicians and the media have ignored. And it would mean dropping the talk of fighting a Third World War. Nazi Germany came terrifyingly close to permanently conquering much of the civilized world, wiping out whole peoples, and developing the first nuclear weapons. The Soviet Union, even in 1989, had six million soldiers equipped with vast quantities of tanks, jets, ships, and more than enough strategic nuclear weapons to reduce every major city in the United States and Europe to smoke and cinders in under half an hour. At its peak, al-Qaeda was a band of fanatics in possession of small arms and a network of camps in the Afghan desert. Today, they’re just a band of fanatics in possession of small arms—and they should discussed as such.
The same approach should be taken with weapons of mass destruction and worst-case scenarios, particularly a nuclear terrorist attack. We should certainly not dismiss dangers because they are improbable, but neither should we ignore their improbability—or the ability of modern countries to endure them and come out stronger than before.
There is a model for how a democratic government should talk about terrorism if it seeks to “attack the terror, not just the terrorists.” Oddly enough, it was provided by Tony Blair. After years of repeating the hyperbolic rhetoric of the Bush administration’s “war on terrorism,” Blair faced his own crisis on the morning of July 7, 2005, when the G8 summit he was hosting was interrupted by news that suicide bombers had struck London’s subway trains and a bus, killing fifty-six people. Blair was steady and stoical. “It is through terrorism that the people who committed this terrible act express their values, and it is right at this moment that we demonstrate ours,” he said. “They are trying to use the slaughter of innocent people to cow us, to frighten us out of doing the things that we want to do, of trying to stop us going about our business as normal, as we are entitled to do. They should not and must not succeed.”
“Far from elevating the rhetoric and engaging in the language of warfare or revenge,” notes Louise Richardson, Blair “spoke calmly of crime scenes and police work and of Britain’s quiet determination to defend its values and way of life.” Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, struck the same note in the dark hours after the attacks. “They seek to turn Londoners against each other,” he said. “London will not be divided by this.” The next day, Livingstone advised “those who planned this dreadful attack, whether they are still here in hiding or somewhere abroad, [to] watch next week as we bury our dead and mourn them, but see also in those same days new people coming to this city to make it their home, to call themselves Londoners, and doing it because of that freedom to be themselves.” Livingstone also announced he would take the subway to work, as always. And he did.
“London is not a battlefield,” declared Sir Ken Macdonald, the United Kingdom’s director of prosecutions, in a January 2007 speech. “Those innocents who were murdered on July 7, 2005, were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed in their ludicrous videos, ‘soldiers.’ They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this.” That perspective is crucial, Macdonald warned, because terrorists aim to portray themselves as a greater threat than they are and “tempt us to abandon our values. . . . We must protect ourselves from these atrocious crimes without abandoning our traditions of freedom.”
How we talk about terrorism is, of course, just the beginning of a response. Governments also have to act. And actions are measured in dollars and cents.
Between 1995 and 2001, counterterrorism spending by the U.S. federal government rose 60 percent. Between 2001 (prior to the 9/11 attacks) and 2007, it rose another 150 percent to $58.3 billion. These figures are for homeland security (defined as “a concerted national effort to prevent terrorist attacks within the United States, reduce America’s vulnerability to terrorism, and minimize the damage and recover from attacks that do occur”) . They don’t include military operations in Afghanistan or Iraq. If Iraq were included under the rubric of “fighting terrorism”—as the White House has always insisted it should be—total counterterrorist spending would soar. Estimates of the anticipated total cost of the Iraq war alone fall between $500 billion and $2 trillion.
There are also hidden costs. For example, security screening added since 9/11 has slowed passage through airports, border crossings, and ports, and anything that hinders the transfer of people, goods, and service hurts economies. Roger Congleton, an economist at George Mason University, has calculated that an extra half-hour delay at American airports costs the economy $15 billion a year.
Costs are not limited to the United States, of course. The 9/11 attacks shook up priorities across the developed world. So did pressure applied by the American government—changes in American port security standards, for example, effectively became international standards because ships coming from ports that didn’t meet the standards were barred from American ports. Globally, the hidden costs of counterterrorism efforts are unknown but undoubtedly immense, while direct spending on counterterrorism also surged to substantial levels in the post-9/11 era. “We have had a huge influx of resources in the last five years,” the national security adviser to Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper told a Senate committee in 2006. “We probably have as much as we are able to absorb in the short term.”
So how much is the developed world spending to reduce the risk of terrorism? No one can be sure, but the direct costs alone may top $100 billion a year, with a total bill considerably greater than that.
Does this make sense? Is this spending in proportion with the gravity of the terrorist threat? The only way to rationally answer that question is with a cost-benefit analysis—which simply means checking whether the benefits of a policy outweigh its costs, and giving priority to those measures that have the highest benefit-to-cost ratio. That sounds cold and technical, particularly when lives are at stake. But there’s a finite amount of money and an infinite number of threats to human life: To ensure money is doing the greatest good possible, cost-benefit analysis is essential.
Unfortunately, terrorism spending has never been subjected to a cost-benefit analysis, and we can only imagine what the results of such an analysis would look like. The risk of terrorism is certainly real. And while the risk of catastrophic terrorism is much lower than it is commonly portrayed, it, too, is real. We can also safely assume that if governments did nothing to fight terrorism, there would be a lot more terrorism and a lot more lives lost. So there’s no question that substantial spending would be justified under a cost-benefit analysis. But it’s much harder to believe that the scale of current spending would stand up.