What is a Terrorist?

(By way of preface, I'm Anderson Brown, recruited by Phil to be the "house philosopher." It may be that after a while Ars Notoria will evolve into a coherent set of writers - hopefully individually coherent as well of course - such that we can be seen to have a "house philosophy," but such things evolve naturally. In the meantime, I will sometimes let go with some abstruse philosophy, sometimes with political musings (I only rant by prearrangement) or something else. Discussions will emerge but meanwhile this is "What I'm Thinking About Right Now," served up once a week here on Ars Notoria.)

Hillary Clinton is in Pakistan, and yesterday she faced a group of local people from an area heavily attacked by "predator drones," unmanned aircraft that have been heavily used to hit targets in Waziristan, allegedly an Al-Qaeda stronghold and the site of an ongoing Pakistani military operation. All of the comments from the locals reported in the article are along the same lines: the presence of the Americans, and the civilian casualties from the drone attacks, are alienating the population.

Specifically, one woman asked Clinton if she considered drone attacks and the suicide bombing that killed more than 100 people in Peshawar this week to both be acts of terrorism. "No, I do not," Clinton replied. This gets to the definition of the word "terrorism." As the name of a political-military tactic, Clinton is right: "terrorism" in this sense is defined by two features: 1) the use of deliberate attacks on civilians ("non-combatants") in order to foment political destabilization and 2) the resort to such attacks in lieu of the ability shared by established states to finance, organize and apply conventional military power. Speaking strictly in this way, if civilian deaths are a consequence ("collateral damage") of a military attack, but not its intention, then such attacks are not acts of terrorism as they were not intended to cause these deaths. Staying strict, the bombing of cities in World War II, although intended, among other aims, to beat societies into submission by deliberately targeting civilians, were not the resort of otherwise powerless combatants but rather one option out of many available to established states, and thus were not terrorism under our definition.

This last point is important because the basic defense of terrorism as a morally justified activity is that it is a justified resort of parties to political violence who do not have any other means of projecting force. Thus one might hold that aerial bombing intended to (using the word in its idiomatic sense) terrorize civilians by states is not morally justified as states have alternatives, whereas a subject people, say, may not and thus might legitimately resort to terrorism.

My view? I think that the issue here is violence itself. The woman who questioned Clinton was making a rhetorical point: your blowing up innocents is not morally superior to anyone else blowing up innocents. Waving the bloody shirt of "terrorism" does not change this. Notice that that cuts both ways. This is the insight of pacifism: the only (even possibly) moral question is, who will break the cycle? Who is willing to renounce violence altogether? This is a different point than the point that the Americans' use of force in Pakistan and elsewhere does not appear to be achieving American ends (that is, it's a bad strategy). It's a much deeper point. The ultimate moral point and the situational strategic point come together in a very worn adage: "Live by the sword, die by the sword."