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 ven
before the events of September 11, military experts were warning
of the dangers posed by the brand of terrorist warfare adopted by
Osama bin Laden. The theory of "asymmetrical war" is a
strategy employed by the weaker side in a conflict to compensate
for — and even to profit from — its enemy's strengths.
A small bomb
placed near the ammunition room, for instance, might cripple a battleship.
In fact a small bomb, ferried to the ship in a tiny supply boat,
did damage the USS Cole in Aden. Such modest expenditures
by the terrorist not only cause costly damage. They also force the
stronger side to embark on expensive precautions over a wide expanse
of territory while the terrorist can choose his point of attack
from an almost infinite number of opportunities.
In his poem
"Arithmetic on the Frontier," Kipling caught the financial
asymmetry exactly:
A scrimmage
near a border station/
A canter down some dark defile/
Two thousand pounds of education/
Falls to a ten rupee jezail./
At first glance
the events of September 11 — in which the terrorists, armed
only with primitive box-cutters seized four planes and drove three
of them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center, killing thousands
— seem to demonstrate the usefulness of such warfare. Look
more closely, however, and a very different picture emerges.
Almost every
action taken by the terrorists was dictated by their need to evade
the regular safety precautions of the airlines and the FAA. They
used box-cutters because X-Ray machines made it too risky to bring
guns or grenades on board. Because box-cutters might not be sufficient
to intimidate a planeload of people inclined to resist, they had
to cow other passengers by sheer force of numbers-adding potentially
arousing suspicion. And, finally, because a bomb had proved insufficient
to bring down the World Trade Center six years earlier, they had
to transform the hijacked planes into flying bombs, aim them at
the buildings, and "suicide" themselves in the process.
An advocate
of asymmetrical warfare might still judge the operation a success
— cold-blooded and ruthless perhaps but also relatively cheap
and very ingenious. Again, however, look more closely.
The operation
may have been cheap in financial terms — $300,000 is one estimate
— but it cost the lives of 19 terrorists who had been expensively
trained in munitions, architecture, and flying modern airliners.
(Any future such hijackings will require new suicidal devotees and
new training courses.) It also demanded years of meticulous planning
to outwit what until a month ago were often casual safety precautions.
Consider, by
contrast, the extraordinarily rapid response of ordinary Americans
to this terrorist "success." Less than 90 minutes after
the planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,
the passengers on the fourth plane rebelled against their captors
and brought it down in Pennsylvania, sacrificing their own lives
to save perhaps thousands of others and the White House.
Supporting
this heroism, as Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review has pointed
out, were two recent developments in American life: cell-phones
and round-the-clock news. Within minutes of the attack on the twin
towers, the world learned about it via radio, television, and the
web. And the passengers on two of the four planes learned the news
from family and friends over their cell phones.
Those passengers
now found themselves in a uniquely horrific situation. Unlike all
other hijackers up to that moment, they could not assume that they
would suffer a few days inconvenience and humiliation before negotiations
released them. They knew that they were the doomed inhabitants of
flying bombs.
The first plane
hit the Pentagon at almost exactly the same time as the passengers
learned of their fate and before they had time to react. The second
was brought down by heroic passengers. And that courageous response
took not years of meticulous planning and indoctrination but minutes
of spontaneous cooperation by ordinary people used to the everyday
procedures of a self-organizing civil society.
Any future
hijacker must now contemplate not only improved official security
precautions but also the likelihood that the passengers will resist.
It sharply increases the odds against him. Asymmetrical war has
produced an asymmetrical response.
And the lesson
goes beyond hijackings. In making war on modern civilization (a.k.a.
"the West"), Osama bin Laden has taken on two forces that
together are probably invincible — the first is the patient,
methodical, bureaucratic procedures of the modern state, the second
the spontaneous organizing power of ordinary people in a democratic
society.
What took Osama
years of meticulous planning in his remote cave was rendered obsolete
within minutes by the courage of a randomly selected group of American
travelers. He may not know it yet; he may even score a few more
victories; but the Cave Man is already extinct.
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