When Terrorists attack democratic societies, they cannot hope to win on the battlefield. They do not seek military victory because they cannot achieve it. Instead, they seek to crack the democracies' will to resist their demands. They attack civilians and seek to cause fear, not simply because civilians are unarmed and vulnerable, but also because it is civilian consent that sustains resistance to terrorist demands--and civilian consent can be shaken by a growing sense of futility. If terrorists can succeed in convincing the public that it is helpless in the face of attacks, they can propel governments in one of two directions: either towards escalation or towards appeasement.
Either way, the terrorists take control of the government's decisions. As the government response to terrorism escalates, civilian support for torture, house demolitions, and targeted assassinations will begin to crack. Such measures will always be controversial in a democratic society. There are limits to what a democracy has the will to do in its own defence. People start believing that the cure is just as bad as the disease, that the community is being destroyed in the name of saving it.
French forces were rarely beaten by the Algerian terrorists during the independence struggle of 1954-62, but the terrorists did succeed in creating a sense of futility among French citizens, accompanied by widespread revulsion at the torture, extra-judicial killing, and repression practiced by French forces. From this sense of futility and disgust grew a strategy of appeasement: or at least it was perceived as such by the million French colonists in Algeria. A negotiated solution granting independence to Algeria began to seem like the only way out. In this case, terrorism won, not on the battlefield, but in the minds of the French electorate.............
