Terrorist targeting preferences and methodologies in counter-terrorism intelligence strategy

Terror Targets

Terrorism is a complex and widely used term in today's lexicon. What started out as a tactical approach to warfare has seemingly morphed into a label for loosely organized Muslim militias. Being branded as a terrorist is certainly relative, where one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Regardless of these distinctions, terrorist organizations, at least perceived in Western culture, are threats to peace and stability. The purpose of this essay is to explore the significance of terrorist targeting preferences and methodologies in order to understand how terrorist choose targets contributes to counter-terrorism operations, policies and practices. I will explore this topic by examining and interpreting literature relevant to this topic.

Drake (1998) explained how terrorist targets, while once thought to be indiscriminate, are essentially extremely specified. He explained that "target selection is instead determined by a number of factors, and the terrorists' ideology is central to this process, not only because it provides the initial dynamic for the terrorists' actions, but because it sets out the moral framework within which they operate." This approach makes more sense, and gives counter-terrorism outfits a way to understand how to combat these attacks. By focusing on ideology, and ignoring the indiscriminate factors in motivation, some sort of counter-plan may be developed.

When ideology's are presented as motivating factors, counter-terrorist organizations have access to their playbook. Drake used the example of communist revolutionary terrorists to explain this point. He suggested that "Arrigo Cavallina of the Armed Proletarians for Communism recalls how he systematically read the complete works of Marx, Lenin, and Mao in a vain attempt to turn himself into a 'professional revolutionary.'" By expressing motivations for terrorist attacks, these groups essentially give their foes an opportunity to peek inside their minds, allowing for appropriate and effective countermeasures.

Carpenter (2009) reported in an interview with Loretta Napoleoni, a reporter who has been granted unique access to terrorist organizations, that terrorists seem to know what they are doing regardless of stereotypical portrayals. She claimed that terrorist leaders are much like cult leaders and possess great amounts of charisma which allows for militants to be conditioned into performing violent or suicidal acts. Napoleoni realized however, that combating these 'cults' are more difficult than it seems because of the ever-changing platform of the battlefield. She regretfully mentioned " that whatever I say today about this will be different in six months."

Another key point in the terrorist battlefield deals with the idea of disinformation. If terrorist organizations are indeed powerful and competent groups, then surely wrong information is intentionally leaked to confuse and bewilder their enemies. Libicki et al. (2007) report seems to be a disinformation campaign aligned to confuse. This article portrays Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization that prefers to maliciously kill innocents for political reasons. I find this argument difficult to swallow due to the West's current reliance on al Qaeda to perform destabilizing missions for their governments.