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The
Letort Papers
In the early 18th century, James Letort, an explorer
and fur trader, was instrumental in opening up the
Cumberland Valley to settlement. By 1752, there was
a garrison on Letort Creek at what is today Carlisle
Barracks, Pennsylvania. In those days, Carlisle Barracks
lay at the western edge of the American colonies. It was
a bastion for the protection of settlers and a departure
point for further exploration. Today, as was the case
over two centuries ago, Carlisle Barracks, as the home of
the U.S. Army War College, is a place of transition and
transformation.
In the same spirit of bold curiosity that compelled the
men and women who, like Letort, settled the American
West, the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) presents The
Letort Papers. This series allows SSI to publish papers,
retrospectives, speeches, or essays of interest to the
defense academic community which may not correspond
with our mainstream policy-oriented publications.
If you think you may have a subject amenable to
publication in our Letort Paper series, or if you wish
to comment on a particular paper, please contact Dr.
Antulio J. Echevarria II, Director of Research, U.S. Army
War College, Strategic Studies Institute, 632 Wright Ave,
Carlisle, PA 17013-5046. The phone number is (717) 245-
4058; e-mail address is [email protected].
We look forward to hearing from you.
Letort Paper
THE MILITARY’S ROLE IN
COUNTERTERRORISM:
EXAMPLES AND IMPLICATIONS
FOR LIBERAL DEMOCRACIES
Geraint Hughes
May 2011
The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do
not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Joint
Services Command and Staff College, the United Kingdom (UK)
Ministry of Defence, or any other UK government agency, the
U.S. Department of the Army, the U.S. Department of Defense,
or the U.S. Government. Authors of Strategic Studies Institute
(SSI) publications enjoy full academic freedom, provided they do
not disclose classified information, jeopardize operations secu-
rity, or misrepresent official U.S. policy. Such academic freedom
empowers them to offer new and sometimes controversial per-
spectives in the interest of furthering debate on key issues. This
report is cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited.
*****
This publication is subject to Title 17, United States Code, Sec-
tions 101 and 105. It is in the public domain and may not be copy-
righted.
*****
Comments pertaining to this report are invited and should
be forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army
War College, 632 Wright Ave, Carlisle, PA 17013-5046.
*****
The author owes his thanks for critical input from and con-
versations with colleagues within the Defence Studies Depart-
ment (DSD) of King’s College London, in particular Drs. Tim
Bird, Huw Bennett, Katherine Brown, Warren Chin, Tracey Ger-
man, Jon Hill, Bill Park, Kenneth Payne, Patrick Porter, Christian
Tripodi, and Rachel Vincent. He has also derived immense ben-
efit from the staff and students at the Joint Services Command
and Staff College (JSCSC), both from the British armed forces and
from several foreign services with whom he has had the pleasure
of teaching and working with over the past 5 years.
The Military’s Role in Counterterrorism has been written for
both a professional military and a nonspecialist civilian reader-
ship. Readers should note that with certain languages (such as
Arabic and Urdu), there is no standard method of transliteration
into English. The author’s rendition of certain names and phrases
therefore may not match those employed by his sources (for ex-
ample, the author uses “al-Qaeda” rather than “al-Qaida,” and
“Qasab” rather than “Kasab”). All material cited in this paper is
in the public domain, and any factual errors in the text that have
escaped the author’s attention are his own responsibility.
This Letort Paper is humbly dedicated to the memory of all
Coalition military and civil affairs personnel killed on operations
in Afghanistan since October 2001.
*****
All Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) publications may be
downloaded free of charge from the SSI website. Hard copies of
this report may also be obtained free of charge while supplies last
by placing an order on the SSI website. The SSI website address
is: www.StrategicStudiesInstitute.army.mil.
ii
*****
The Strategic Studies Institute publishes a monthly e-mail
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ISBN 1-58487-489-9
iii
CONTENTS
Foreword ........................................................... vii
About the Author .................................................xi
Summary ...........................................................xiii
Maps ....................................................................xv
Introduction ..........................................................1
Is Terrorism A Military
Problem? ..............................................................13
The Military’s Role In
Counterterrorism ................................................37
Problems Arising From Military
Involvement in Counterterrorism—
The International Context ..................................58
Problems Arising From Military
Involvement in Counterterrorism—
The Domestic Context ........................................87
Conclusions ........................................................120
Endnotes .............................................................143
Glossary and Abbreviations .............................185
Military Operations Cited in the Text .............203
v
FOREWORD
On the morning of September 11, 2001 (9/11),
al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked four passenger aircraft,
crashing three of them into the World Trade Center in
New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC,
killing up to 3,000 people in the process. Just under 3
years later, a group of predominantly Chechen gun-
men took over School Number One in Beslan, North
Ossetia, beginning a siege that ended with the death
of nearly 400, including 156 children. On the evening
of November 26, 2008, 10 members of Lashkar-e-Toiba
(LET) began a series of bomb and gun attacks in the
Indian city of Mumbai, killing more than 170 people
over a 48-hour period. For Americans, Russians, and
Indians, each of these attacks was warlike in its pro-
portions and, after each, popular and political opinion
demanded a militarized response.
Dr. Geraint Hughes’s Letort Paper reminds us
that in repeated cases in which liberal democratic
states have used their armed forces to fight terrorism-
-notably Israel against successive Palestinian groups,
Britain in Northern Ireland from 1969-98, or indeed
America and its allies against al-Qaeda and affiliated
groups currently--the employment of military means
in counterterrorism has been inherently controversial.
As Audrey Kurth Cronin notes, terrorism picks at the
vulnerable seam between domestic law and foreign
war, and conceptually it does not fit the paradigms of
either criminality or warfare.1 Although a particular
state or a coalition of powers may use its militaries
to protect its citizens in counterterrorist campaigns,
the threat posed by specific terrorist groups has to be
vii
treated sui generis, and the applicability of military
means in counterterrorism depends on a series of
factors--these include whether the terrorist threat is a
domestic or an international one, the lethality of the
groups concerned, and the threat they pose to state
stability. Furthermore, the involvement of armed forc-
es in counterterrorism can be problematic. One has
only to look at the post-2001 “War on Terror” and the
criticisms expressed by foreign governments, mem-
bers of Congress, human rights activists, journalists,
and academics regarding the treatment of detainees at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the use of unmanned aerial
vehicles (UAVs) in air-strikes in Pakistan; and the ci-
vilian casualties caused by U.S. and North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) military operations in
Afghanistan.
Dr. Hughes examines the challenges of deploying
the military in counterterrorism from both a historical
and a contemporary perspective, outlining not only
the specific roles that armed forces can perform either
to prevent terrorist attacks or to mitigate their conse-
quences, but also the strategic, constitutional, practi-
cal, diplomatic, and ethical problems that have arisen
from a variety of counterterrorist campaigns, be they
in Palestine, Northern Ireland, Quebec, Kashmir, Af-
ghanistan, Pakistan, or the North Caucasus. Clause-
witz reminds us that in “war everything is simple, but
the simplest thing is difficult,”2 and this observation is
as true of counterterrorism as it is of interstate warfare.
For example, the British Army interned Republican
terrorist suspects in Northern Ireland from 1971-75,
gaining valuable intelligence about the United King-
dom’s (UK) adversaries, but this policy also enraged
viii
