Sri Lanka attacks mark the birth of Terrorism 3.0
UNTIL last Sunday, few Americans could likely find Sri Lanka on a map, nor even dimly remember its British colonial name, Ceylon.
But the Indian Ocean island flashed across news screens over the Easter weekend, with a highly sophisticated and lethal series of bombings across the nation of some 20 million.
The attacks were conducted by suicide bombers with improvised explosive devices, executed at a level that seems far beyond the capabilities of the Sri Lankan radical Islamic splinter group, National Thowheeth Jama’ath that has claimed responsibility.
Previously, the group had specialised in comparatively benign defacement of Buddhist statues; 70% of Sri Lankans are Buddhists.
The idea that this organisation could suddenly plan and conduct a nationwide, precisely timed series of nine bombings seems highly unlikely. Thus suspicion grows that the Islamic State (IS) in Iraq and Syria was involved at an operational level – a modus operandi associated with their increasing globalisation.
Welcome to Terrorism 3.0.
A way to think about the evolution of global terrorism is a bit like new computer software releases, improving over the decades.
Terrorism 1.0 in the modern era was in the 1980s – the Red Brigades of Italy, the Baader-Meinhof gang of Germany, Sendero Luminoso of Peru and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, among others. By and large, they were disconnected and nationally focused.
Terrorism 2.0 emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and is embodied by the rise of radical groups including Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabaab and Boko Haram – essentially, regional groups with sporadic international reach.
In Terrorism 3.0, we see IS – a globally dispersed, highly lethal, financially capable, deeply innovative organisation.
While the West has been able to compress its occupation of territory, effectively knocking it out of a geographical caliphate in Iraq and Syria, it has morphed into an Internet-based organisation that continues to conduct highly sophisticated attacks and establish cells across the globe.
In a business context, IS is like an international conglomerate that has untethered itself from the costly, time-consuming business of operating retail bricks and mortar.
A global map showing attacks inspired or conducted by IS is revealing, far beyond anything Al-Qaeda has managed. Without question, it will continue to conduct lethal attacks, seeking over time to obtain weapons of mass destruction – chemical, biological, radiological and cyber.
Even as the United States has begun to pivot away from counter-terrorism operations to face new challenges in global great-power politics from China and Russia, IS has no intention of calling a time-out or ceasing operations, despite the loss of its territory.
So the question remains how America, and its allies in Europe and beyond, can address this ongoing threat, recognising that more resources must be devoted to “high-end” potential conflict with near-peer competitors like China and Russia. In order to deal effectively with these ever more ambitious groups and their emerging Internet-based strategy, we will need three key lines of effort.
The first is to continue to internationalise the fight against IS. The coalition against IS has over 70 nations and international organisations participating at one level or another, and was a legacy of the Obama administration that was picked up by the Trump team.
Unfortunately, its key architects, retired general John Allen and diplomat Brett McGurk, have been discarded by President Donald Trump. The US will need to appoint new professionals to guide this effort, and for it to reassert itself as the leader.
Second, a higher level of inter-agency cooperation – in intelligence, military action, diplomacy and developmental activities, such as those by the US Agency for International Development – is needed. The US’ counter-terrorism efforts are still highly stove-piped. The US National Counter-terrorism Centre is a good inter-agency fusion cell, but needs more real convening and operational power to be truly effective.
A good start would be developing a national strategy to eliminate ISIS and other affiliated global terror organisations, written and executed in parallel to other official strategies like homeland security, cyber security and missile defence.
A third key ingredient is private-public cooperation. This includes working – and sharing intelligence to some degree – with private non-governmental organisations. These include Interpol, the Red Cross and Red Crescent, Doctors Without Borders, Operation Hope and other entities that try to address base conditions of poverty and disease. Such conditions help create recruiting opportunities for terrorist organisations.
It also includes working with the tech giants – notably Google, which has done signal work in this space – on depriving terror organisations of access to social networks.
Terrorism 3.0 will continue to spread like a global cancer, enhanced by the accelerative power of the Internet. We need not only classic hard-power solutions as we saw in Syria and Iraq, but a combination of other 21st-century tools as well, if we are to contain and eventually conquer it.