If only America didn’t have those high-tech hammers

The head of the British electronic spy agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Robert Hannigan, created a minor flap last week in an article he wrote for the Financial Times. In effect, Hannigan argued that more robust encryption procedures by private internet companies were unwittingly aiding terrorist groups such as Daesh (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) and Al Qaida by making it harder for organisations like America’s National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ to monitor online traffic. The implication was clear: The more our personal privacy is respected and protected, the greater the danger we will face from evildoers.

It is a serious issue and democracies that want to respect individual privacy while simultaneously keeping citizens safe are going to have to do a much better job of reassuring us that vast and (mostly) secret surveillance capabilities overseen by unelected officials such as Hannigan wil not be abused. I tend to favour the privacy side of the argument, both because personal freedoms are hard to get back once lost, but also because there is not much evidence that these surveillance activities are making us significantly safer. They seem to be able to help us track some terrorist leaders, but there is a lively debate among scholars over whether tracking and killing these guys is an effective strategy.

The fear of being tracked also forces terrorist organisations to adopt less-efficient communications procedures, but it does not seem to prevent them from doing a fair bit of harm regardless.

So here is a wild counterfactual for you to ponder: What would the US, Britain and other wealthy and powerful nations do if they did not have these vast surveillance powers? What would they do if they did not have armed drones, cruise missiles or other implements of destruction that can make it remarkably easy (and in the short term, relatively cheap) to target anyone they suspect might be a terrorist? Assuming that there were still violent extremists plotting various heinous acts, what would these powerful states do if the internet was there, but no one knew how to spy on it?

For starters, they would have to rely more heavily on tried-and-true counterterrorism measures: Infiltrating extremist organisations and flipping existing members, etc., to find out what they were planning, head attacks off before they occurred and eventually roll up organisation themselves. States waged plenty of counter-terrorism campaigns before the internet was invented and while it can be difficult to infiltrate such movements and find their vulnerable points, it is not exactly an unknown art. If America could not spy on them from the safety of Fort Meade, it would probably be doing a lot more of this.

Second, if we did not have all these expensive high-tech capabilities, we might spend a lot more time thinking about how to discredit and delegitimise the terrorists’ message, instead of repeatedly doing things that help them make their case and recruit new followers. Every time the US goes and pummels another Muslim country — or sends a drone to conduct a “signature strike” — it reinforces the terrorists’ claim that the West has an insatiable desire to dominate the Arab and Islamic world and no respect for Muslim life. It does not matter if US leaders have the best of intentions, if they genuinely want to help these societies, or if they are responding to a legitimate threat; the crude message that drones, cruise missiles and targeted killings send is rather different.

If America did not have all these cool high-tech hammers, in short, it would have to stop treating places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and Syria as if they were nails that just needed another pounding and it may have worked harder at marginalising its enemies within its own societies. To do that, it would have to be building more effective partnerships with authoritative sources of legitimacy within these societies, including religious leaders. America’s failure to do more to discredit these movements is perhaps the single biggest shortcoming of the entire war on terror and until that failure is recognised and corrected, the war will never end.

Third, and somewhat paradoxically, if America did not have drones and the NSA, it would have had to think more seriously about boots on the ground, at least in some places. But having to think harder about such decisions may be a good thing because it would force the US (or others) to decide which threats were really serious and which countries really mattered. It might even lead to the conclusion that any sort of military intervention is counterproductive. As we have seen over the past decade, what the NSA, CIA and Special Ops Command do is in some ways too easy: It just does not cost that much to add a few more names to the kill list, to vacuum up a few more terabytes of data, or to launch a few more drones in some new country and all the more so when it is done under the veil of secrecy.

I am not saying that America’s current policy is costless or that special operations are not risky. My point is that such activities are still a lot easier to contemplate and authorise than a true “boots on the ground” operation. By making it easier, however, the capabilities make it easier for American leaders to skirt the more fundamental questions about interests and strategy. It allows them to “do something”, even when what is being done will not necessarily help.

Lastly, if US leaders had to think harder about where to deploy more expensive resources, they may finally start thinking about the broader set of US and western policies that have inspired some of these movements in the first place. Movements like Daesh, Al Qaida, Jabhat Al Nusra, Al Shabab or the Taliban are in some ways indigenous movements arising from local circumstances, but they did not spring up out of nowhere and the US (and other countries) bear some (though not all) blame for their emergence and growth. To say this is neither to defend nor justify violent extremism, nor to assert that all US policies are wrong. It is merely to acknowledge that there is a causal connection between some of what America does and some of the enemies it faces.

However, if some of the things the US (or its allies) is doing are making it unpopular in certain parts of the world, and if some of that unpopularity gets translated into violent extremism that forces America and its allies to spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to protect themselves, then maybe they ought to ask themselves if every single one of those policies makes sense and is truly consistent with US interests and values. And if not, then maybe the US ought to change some of them, if only to take some steam out of the extremist enterprise.

What I am suggesting, in short, is that the “surveil and strike” mentality that has dominated the counter-terrorism effort is popular with government officials because it is relatively easy, plays to America’s technological strengths and does not force it to make any significant foreign-policy changes or engage in any sort of self-criticism at all.

If we can solve the terrorist problem by throwing money at it and enriching some defence contractors and former government officials in the process, what is not to like?

To be clear: I am not suggesting America dismantle the NSA, fire all the cryptographers and revert to Cordell Hull’s quaint belief that “gentlemen [or ladies] do not read each other’s mail”. But until we see more convincing evidence that the surveillance of the sort Hannigan was defending has really and truly kept a significant number of people safer from foreign dangers, I’m going to wonder if we aren’t overemphasising these activities because they are relatively easy for the West and because they have a powerful but hard-to-monitor constituency in Washington and London. In short, the West is just doing what comes naturally, instead of doing what may be more effective.

— Washington Post

Stephen M. Walt is a professor of international relations at Harvard University.