Terrorism and the Decline of the Nation-State Warfare Model, Essay Example

In Mark Mazzeti’s book The Way of the Knife: The CIA, A Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth the author’s thesis is that the War on Terror has marked a shift in how warfare is carried out: war is no longer constituted by inter-state conflict, but is now characterized by the emphasis on asymmetrical warfare. This means that there is a new focus on, for example, killing terrorist leaders and disabling terrorist cells. This marks a change in how warfare is performed, since the terrorist organization is not necessarily rooted in the political organization of the state: the terrorist organization is mobile and may appear anywhere. It is for this reason that the CIA has grown in importance as actually performing acts of war and killing, since the nature of the conflict stresses espionage and intelligence, i.e., knowing where certain individuals are located, what organizations plan to do, and how to disrupt these plans regardless of existing state political boundaries.

The problem with such a type of warfare is that it overlooks the roots of terrorism. Namely, terrorism is the result of various political/historical grievances. Simultaneously, terrorist organizations are amorphous. Hence, killing one terrorist leader is not necessarily the end of a terrorist organization. Furthermore, the civilians who die in such operations merely creates more terrorism. In this regard, what could have been done differently in the War on Terror is not to merely construe this conflict as a military war, however asymmetrical. Rather, the causes of terrorism are much more diverse, therefore, policy also has to be diverse. Political and diplomatic options must be exercised in order to address the complexity of the causes of terrorism as well as the complexity of terrorism’s manifestations, which are not bound to nation-state relations.