A Broader Picture on Intelligence and Terrorism

Historian Christopher Andrew has a good article on some of the deeper problems associated with our intelligence agencies and counter-terrorism.

Intelligence analysis needs to look backwards before looking forward

Among the key points:

Those who prophesy the future have tended to fall into one of two categories, both of them mistaken: those who say we have seen it all before, that there is nothing new under the sun; and those who say the world is entirely new, we have to start completely afresh. Today's false prophets fall far more into the second category than the first. Most have been seduced by short-termism, the distinguishing intellectual vice of the late 20th and early 21st century. For the first time in recorded history, there is nowadays a widespread conviction that the experience of all previous generations save our own is irrelevant to present and future policy and intelligence analysis. Our political culture is dominated by an unprecedented malady: Historical Attention Span Deficit Disorder or HASDD (the only medical term and the only acronym I have ever invented).

Disrespect for the long-term past produces two serious intellectual disorders. First, the delusion that what is newest is necessarily most advanced-not a proposition which anyone with even an outline knowledge of the thousand years which followed the fall of the Roman Empire would take seriously. It took about fifteen hundred years before western plumbing and bathrooms, for example, got back to the standards set by the Romans. And second, the belief that interpreting the present and forecasting the future require an understanding only of the recent past. Little of real importance about future trends, however, can be deduced from the study of a mere generation of human experience. This kind of intellectual parochialism has, for example, led to the common belief that globalisation is an off-shoot of late 20th century American capitalism rather than the product of a long and complex interaction between the West and other cultures. For intelligence analysts, the most effective antidote to Historical Attention Span Deficit Disorder is to follow Winston Churchill's celebrated (though nowadays neglected) advice: 'The further backwards you look, the further forward you can see'

He also shows that the academy bears some responsibility for our blindness to the terrorist threat. (After all, CIA analysts receive much of their education before they join the agency).

In the quarter-century before 9/11 much academic research actually lessened our understanding of terrorism by extrapolating from short-term late-20th trends, as embodied for example by the IRA, rather than the long-term threat posed by holy terror and other fanatical, ideologically-based terrorism, which seeks to destroy its enemies rather than bomb them to the negotiating table. During that quarter-century, for example, only three issues of the generally excellent Journal of Strategic Studies, the premier British journal in the field, included articles on terrorism, presumably because it did not regard transnational terrorism as a problem of major strategic significance. Even more remarkably, during the decade before 9/11, International Security contained no article on terrorism at all.