(Why) Does Terrorism Work?
Evidence that it Doesn't Work
I looked at this question briefly in The Problem of Political Authority. The evidence I found from political science suggested that terrorism is rarely effective - i.e., terrorist groups hardly ever attain their stated political goals. In many cases, their goals are set back because of their attacks. This is especially true when they target civilians (cases of successful terrorism tend to be attacks on military targets).
The reason is basically that terrorist attacks, especially on civilians, increase public support for hardline, hawkish politicians, who tend to do the opposite of whatever the terrorists wanted. E.g., the 9/11/2001 attack resulted in two decades of hawkish politicians in America, in which nearly everyone in both parties agreed on a highly aggressive stance in the Middle East. It caused America to invade two countries and topple their governments, killing hundreds of thousands of (mostly Muslim) civilians, in addition to bombing many more people in multiple countries in the Middle East. So, even though the attack succeeded in causing harm to Americans, it was a spectacular failure from the standpoint of benefiting Islam or people in Muslim countries.
Wtf Are They Thinking?
I think if you're planning to kill people, you're obligated to think hard about it first, and to try very hard to verify that your plan will actually produce the (putatively) good consequences that you anticipate.
The stuff I said above about 9/11 was not hard to anticipate. It was completely obvious that the U.S. government was not going to swiftly withdraw from the Middle East and that it would instead go to war in the Middle East. Any idiot could also tell that this war or collection of wars would be extremely destructive to the people in the Middle East.
The general empirical facts about terrorist success are no secret either. Anyone who was thinking about doing some terrorism could do some investigation -- "Hm, I wonder how often this works?" -- and they would find out that it rarely works and often backfires.
So, one can only conclude that terrorists don't make serious efforts to verify that their killings will advance, rather than hinder, their stated goals.
That's odd. Why would you go kill a bunch of people, and even sacrifice your own life, when you have approximately no evidence for thinking that it will help your cause, and it may instead harm the cause?
I am not sure. But this makes me suspect that terrorists' actual motives are not what they often say. E.g., Islamic terrorists don't care about advancing Islam, or helping Muslim people, or even reducing foreign intervention in Muslim countries. None of that. They don't want to help the ingroup. They just want to hurt the outgroup. In other words, their motive is hate.
A lot of human behavior is like that.
Wait, Maybe it Worked
As I say, I thought that 9/11 was an excellent example of how a "successful" terrorist attack (as in, the operation was carried out according to plan) can be a complete failure from the standpoint of advancing the motivating cause. I thought that in 2012, when I wrote that book.
More recently, it occurred to me that the 9/11 attack might have worked, to a certain extent. The U.S. didn't get out of the Middle East, no, and things have gotten worse for Muslims in the Middle East. But Islam has made cultural inroads in the West. Bizarrely enough, I think Islam is more popular in the West, much better respected in certain (non-Muslim) circles, than it was before that attack. I would not have predicted this at all.
More specifically, Islam has become popular among left-wing people. (Of course, not among right-wingers.) Muslims are now one of their favored identity groups - along with women, blacks, Latinos, etc.
I think this is due to 9/11, because as I recall, before 9/11, Islam was not on the radar screen of mainstream U.S. society. People did not talk about it. 9/11 evoked some "Islamophobia" (as people say), which in turn evoked a counter-reaction from the left, turning a fair number of them pro-Islam.
As a case in point, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Muslim apostate who escaped from severe and very tangible oppression in Somalia and has gone on to speak out boldly and insistently, and at great risk to her own physical safety, against the oppression of women in the Islamic world.
Hirsi Ali spoke at CU-Boulder on Monday evening. She spoke of how her home country was riven with tribal conflict, and of her concern that America and the West are descending into tribalism and abandoning the values that made us peaceful and prosperous.
You might assume that Hirsi Ali would be a hero for feminists and social justice crusaders across the world. Instead, many progressives are more interested in attacking her as an "Islamophobe" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayaan_Hirsi_Ali#Criticism) - in effect siding with the oppressors against an oppressed woman of color.
Wtf Are We Thinking?
This is on its face odd, because Islam is not exactly a progressive belief system. The Islamic world is, let us say, not full of liberal feminists and LGBTQ activists. (What if progressives were protesting against people who criticize Trump, calling them "Trumpophobes"?) So what's going on?
One possibility: appeasement. Left-wing individuals seem to like the idea of appeasement more than right-wingers. Maybe terrorism has worked on the progressives in exactly the way the terrorists intended: left-wing Westerners have been frightened into deferring to Islam.
That is the charitable read. Here is another possibility. Remember how I said above that the motives of terrorists are not what they say? That they don't care about benefiting their own side, but only about harming their enemies?
The same may be true of a significant portion of Western progressives: they don't mainly want to help their favored groups; they mainly want to harm their disfavored groups. They don't, for example, aim to help the poor, or women, or blacks, but simply to harm the rich, men, and whites. Of particular import here: they don't want to help other countries; they want to hurt America.
That would explain how progressives could be on the same side as Islamic extremists - how they could, for example, side with Muslim traditionalists against Hirsi Ali. If progressives just wanted to help oppressed minorities, they would join people like Hirsi Ali in calling for an Islamic reformation. But if they mainly wanted to hurt America, then they would probably side with the Islamic extremists.
Hostility to One's Own
Obviously, the above would apply only to some leftists. Many others would in fact side with (e.g.) Hirsi Ali, just as one would expect a feminist or advocate for social justice to do.
You may still think that I have given an excessively uncharitable interpretation, even of just a significant number of progressives. If you're tempted to say that, then you probably haven't read enough academic political discourse. So let me help you out.
The following is an excerpt from an essay by Ward Churchill, formerly a Professor of Ethnic Studies at my own university (before he was fired for plagiarism). Churchill wrote this the day after the 9/11 attack, discussing the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center (https://cryptome.org/ward-churchill.htm):
They did not license themselves to "target innocent civilians."
[...]
Let's get a grip here, shall we? True enough, they [the people in the World Trade Center] were civilians of a sort. But innocent? Gimme a break. They formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire – the "mighty engine of profit" to which the military dimension of U.S. policy has always been enslaved – and they did so both willingly and knowingly. [...] To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see. More likely, it was because they were too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants. If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers, I'd really be interested in hearing about it.
Caveat: This is anecdotal. But, reading the above passage, I get a really strong sense that (a) the author hates America and a large portion of Americans, (b) the author is happy about the 9/11 attack, (c) the author puts himself on the same side as the terrorists.
Granted, that is an extreme case (which is why it caused a great controversy when people noticed the article). But it is not unusual in the academic world to read texts with a strong anti-American (and anti-white, anti-male, anti-wealthy, etc.) emotional tone. My subjective impression is that my fellow academics do not merely criticize America (or men, white people, etc.) in the hope of improving these things. Many have a deep-seated emotional hostility that they just need to let out.
I'm not going to talk now about whether such hostility is justified. My point right now is that this could explain how terrorism might succeed: violent attacks on a society could further one's cause, if a sufficient number of influential people within that society are actually extremely hostile to their own society. Those people might then gain sympathy for the terrorists and their cause.
I think it would be a very rare circumstance that this would work -- it is very unusual that a significant portion of influential people are that hostile to their own society. But, strange as it seems, I think that has happened to us.
They're Not on Your Side
I guess I have one more point to make, on the off chance that this isn't completely obvious to everyone reading this. If you're a progressive, and you think Islamic terrorists are on your side, then you're an even bigger fool than the people who read Donald Trump's tweets and believe them. The Islamists - the ones who blow up buildings and issue fatwahs - would not hesitate for one second to kill you, if they somehow had the power in your society. They would have no problem with murdering people for being gay, either, or for being atheists, or for criticizing a theocratic government, or for being victims of rape.
So I think we in the West need to put a leash on our self-hatred long enough to realize that not everyone who attacks us does so in the name of justice.