Fear is the Key

Terrorism, which is a near ubiquitous phenomenon today, raises its ugly and sinister head every now and then with frightening precision and disastrous consequences. Terrorism can be defined as the deliberate targeting of civilians to terminate or lessen their support of their political leaders.

In American military historian Caleb Carr’s controversial ‘The Lessons of Terror’ (2002), he analyses and describes how initially, this method was used by the Romans till the late eighteenth century under the name of destructive war. The Romans indulged in what they called punitive war (military campaigns that were carried out as punishment for treachery or rebellion) which were part of destructive war. These destructive expeditions were implemented to overawe newly conquered people with the fearsome power of Rome and thereby discourage any support for indigenous leaders. Also, there was an imperative need to permit the largely underpaid Roman legions to plunder and rape as a reward for their support and constant presence in the heat of battle.

Rome’s imperialism was replete with devastating warfare against civilians and savagely destructive tactics. This sort of warfare against civilians when waged without provocation resulted in retaliation in kind, and when resorted to for retaliatory purposes perpetuates a cycle of revenge and outrage that can ensue for generations. This is the most observed consequence of warfare against civilians. History suggests that violence is a poor servant and a worse master. Many of Rome’s most formidable rebels were products of Roman training itself. The implication is that states that cultivate violent auxiliaries often discover that such forces cannot be neatly dismissed once their utility fades.

The same pattern recurred later. Christianity and Islam preached restraint, yet emerged amid martial cultures that piety alone could not erase. The Crusades, begun with lofty intentions, degenerated into wars in which civilians became routine victims. Terror, once unleashed, proved self-sustaining.

Medieval Italy offered a milder variant. Mercenary captains (‘condottieri’) raised professional armies not to maximise slaughter but to minimise it. Even so, the lesson was that organised violence rarely remains under tidy control.

Piracy reached its zenith in the sixteenth century because of Spain’s rise to pre-eminence at that epoch, funded mainly by the gold and silver it extracted from the New World after the conquest and decimation of the Aztecs and Incas. Privateers like Sir Francis Drake, in the pay of Queen Elizabeth, first began to raid Spanish commerce with the Americas. Drake however displayed an admirable sensitivity in his dealings with his men and with captured enemies.

Oliver Cromwell, England’s only military dictator, first restored domestic stability and then the international might and prestige of England, all of which had waned under King Charles and the civil war. He accomplished this through strict military discipline. Stern officers drilled soldiers hard, punished them severely for infractions and forced them to wear uniforms.

However, when pursuing royalists in Ireland, Cromwell violated all the rules that he had established at home by violently punishing royalists, their Irish sympathizers and slaughtering civilians. His actions later fostered modern Irish terrorism.

Frederick the Great’s notion of limited conflict gave way, under Napoleon, to total war. Even America was not immune: British depredations in the War of 1812 including attacks on civilians and the burning of Washington, left many American officers convinced that enemies were to be crushed, not merely defeated.

Carr is unsparing about the legacy of 1919. The League of Nations, born at Paris, presided over a peace that humiliated Germany into future vengeance while smothering Arab aspirations under a patchwork of mandates and protectorates. Independence was deferred; Western access to oil was secured. The bill for those arrangements, Carr suggests, is still being paid in a region that has since become a fertile ground for terrorism.

The author ends by stating that the United States, in its war against terror, should not respond to unlimited warfare against civilians with similar behaviour. He also strongly advocates that the United States cease to arrogantly interfere in the internal affairs of other countries by limiting and eliminating covert operations by American intelligence agencies, particularly the CIA. A willingness to “fight a dirty enemy with dirty methods,” could, in Carr’s opinion lead to the collapse of the United States.

Finally, Carr concludes by saying that “evangelical Western capitalism must learn greater restraint and respect for other cultures, and Western governments, specifically the American, must acknowledge that the days of gunboat diplomacy are over. The American armed forces should protect American people, not American business.”

The book’s larger warning is sharper still: terrorism is not defeated by swagger or firepower, but by restraint. History shows that violence indulged abroad has a habit of returning home, usually with interest.

(The writer is a Mumbai based educator. Views personal.)