This document was drafted by an experienced Mennonite mediator.
This is a first draft.
The Challenge of Terror: A Traveling Essay
John Paul Lederach
So here I am, a week late arriving home, stuck between Colombia, Guatemala and Harrisonburg when our world changed. The images flash even in my sleep. The heart of America ripped. Though natural, the cry for revenge and the call for the unleashing of the first war of this century, prolonged or not, seems more connected to social and psychological processes of finding a way to release deep emotional anguish, a sense of powerlessness, and our collective loss than it does as a plan of action seeking to redress the injustice, promote change and prevent it from ever happening again.
I am stuck from airport to airport as I write this, the reality of a global system that has suspended even the most basic trust. My Duracell batteries and fingernail clippers were taken from me today and it gave me pause for thought. I had a lot of pauses in the last few days. Life has not been the same. I share these thoughts as an initial reaction recognizing that it is always easy to take pot-shots at our leaders from the sidelines, and to have the insights they are missing when we are not in the middle of very difficult decisions. On the other hand, having worked for nearly 20 years as a mediator and proponent of nonviolent change in situations around the globe where cycles of deep violence seem hell-bent on perpetuating themselves, and having interacted with people and movements who at the core of their identity find ways of justifying their part in the cycle, I feel responsible to try to bring ideas to the search for solutions. With this in mind I should like to pen several observations about what I have learned from my experiences and what they might suggest about the current situation. I believe this starts by naming several key challenges and then asking what is the nature of a creative response that takes these seriously in the pursuit of genuine, durable, and peaceful change.
Some Lessons about the Nature of our Challenge
Always seek to understand the root of the anger. The first and most important question to pose ourselves is relatively simple though not easy to answer:
How do people reach this level of anger, hatred and frustration? By my experience explanations that they are brainwashed by a perverted leader who holds some kind of magical power over them is an escapist simplification and will inevitably lead us to very wrong-headed responses. Anger of this sort, what we could call generational, identity-based anger, is constructed over time through a combination of historical events, a deep sense of threat to identify, and direct experiences of sustained exclusion. This is very important to understand, because, as I will say again and again, our response to the immediate events have everything to do with whether we reinforce and provide the soil, seeds, and nutrients for future cycles of revenge and violence. Or whether it changes. We should be careful to pursue one and only one thing as the strategic guidepost of our response: Avoid doing what they expect. What they expect from us is the lashing out of the giant against the weak, the many against the few. This will reinforce their capacity to perpetrate the myth they carefully seek to sustain: That they are under threat, fighting an irrational and mad system that has never taken them seriously and wishes to destroy them and their people. What we need to destroy is their myth not their people.
Always seek to understand the nature of the organization. Over the years of working to promote durable peace in situations of deep, sustained violence I have discovered one consistent purpose about the nature of movements and organizations who use violence: Sustain thyself. This is done through a number of approaches, but generally it is through decentralization of power and structure, secrecy, autonomy of action through units, and refusal to pursue the conflict on the terms of the strength and capacities of the enemy. One of the most intriguing metaphors I have heard used in the last few days is that this enemy of the United States will be found in their holes, smoked out, and when they run and are visible, destroyed. This may well work for groundhogs, trench and maybe even guerilla warfare, but it is not a useful metaphor for this situation. And neither is the image that we will need to destroy the village to save it, by which the population that gives refuge to our enemies is guilty by association and therefore a legitimate target. In both instances the metaphor that guides our action misleads us because it is not connected to the reality. In more specific terms, this is not a struggle to be conceived of in geographic terms, in terms of physical spaces and places, that if located can be destroyed, thereby ridding us of the problem. Quite frankly our biggest and most visible weapon systems are mostly useless.
We need a new metaphor, and though I generally do not like medical metaphors
to describe conflict, the image of a virus comes to mind because of its
ability to enter unperceived, flow with a system, and harm it from within.
This is the genius of people like Osama Ben Laden. He understood the power
of a free and open system, and has used it to his benefit. The enemy is not
located in a territory. It has entered our system. And you do not fight this
kind of enemy by shooting at it. You respond by strengthening the capacity
of the system to prevent the virus and strengthen its immunity. It is an
ironic fact that our greatest threat is not in Afghanistan, but in our own
backyard. We surely are not going to bomb Travelocity, Hertz Rental Car, or
an Airline training school in Florida. We must change metaphors and move
beyond the reaction that we can duke it out with the bad guy, or we run the
very serious risk of creating the environment that sustains and reproduces
the virus we wish to prevent.
Always remember that realities are constructed. Conflict is, among other
things, the process of building and sustaining very different perceptions
and interpretations of reality. This means that we have at the same time
multiple realities defined as such by those in conflict. In the aftermath of
such horrific and unmerited violence that we have just experienced this may
sound esoteric. But we must remember that this fundamental process is how we
end up referring to people as fanatics, madmen, and irrational. In the
process of name-calling we lose the critical capacity to understand that
from within the ways they construct their views, it is not mad lunacy or
fanaticism. All things fall together and make sense. When this is connected
to along string of actual experiences wherein their views of the facts are
reinforced (for example, years of superpower struggle that used or excluded
them, encroaching Western values of what is considered immoral by their
religious interpretation, or the construction of an enemy-image who is
overwhelmingly powerful and uses that power in bombing campaigns and always
appears to win) then it is not a difficult process to construct a rational
world view of heroic struggle against evil. Just as we do it, so do they.
Listen to the words we use to justify our actions and responses. And then
listen to words they use. The way to break such a process is not through a
frame of reference of who will win or who is stronger. In fact the inverse
is true. Whoever loses, whether tactical battles or the war itself, finds
intrinsic in the loss the seeds that give birth to the justification for
renewed battle. The way to break such a cycle of justified violence is to
step outside of it. This starts with understanding that TV sound bites about
madmen and evil are not good sources of policy. The most significant impact
that we could make on their ability to sustain their view of us as evil is
to change their perception of who we are by choosing to strategically
respond in unexpected ways. This will take enormous courage and courageous
leadership capable of envisioning a horizon of change.
Always understand the capacity for recruitment. The greatest power that
terror has is the ability to regenerate itself. What we most need to
understand about the nature of this conflict and the change process toward
amore peaceful world is how recruitment into these activities happens. In
all my experiences in deep-rooted conflict what stands out most are the ways
in which political leaders wishing to end the violence believed they could
achieve it by overpowering and getting rid of the perpetrator of the
violence. That may have been the lesson of multiple centuries that preceded
us. But it is not the lesson from that past 30 years. The lesson is simple.
When people feel a deep sense of threat, exclusion and generational
experiences of direct violence, their greatest effort is placed on survival.
Time and again in these movements, there has been an extraordinary capacity
for the regeneration of chosen myths and renewed struggle. One aspect of
current U.S. leadership that coherently matches with the lessons of the past
30 years of protracted conflict settings is the statement that this will be
a long struggle. What is missed is that the emphasis should be placed on
removing the channels, justifications, and sources that attract and sustain
recruitment into the activities. What I find extraordinary about the recent
events is that none of the perpetrators was much older than 40 and many were
half that age.
This is the reality we face: Recruitment happens on a sustained basis. It
will not stop with the use of military force, in fact, open warfare will
create the soils in which it is fed and grows. Military action to destroy
terror, particularly as it affects significant and already vulnerable
civilian populations will be like hitting a fully mature dandelion with a
golf club. We will participate in making sure the myth of why we are evil is
sustained and we will assure yet another generation of recruits.
Recognize complexity, but always understand the power of simplicity.
Finally, we must understand the principle of simplicity. I talk a lot with
my students about the need to look carefully at complexity, which is equally
true (and which in the earlier points I start to explore). However, the key
in our current situation that we have failed to fully comprehend is
simplicity. From the standpoint of the perpetrators, the effectiveness of
their actions was in finding simple ways to use the system to undo it. I
believe our greatest task is to find equally creative and simple tools on
the other side.
Suggestions
In keeping with the last point, let me try to be simple. I believe three
things are possible to do and will have a much greater impact on these
challenges than seeking accountability through revenge.