What Do Terrorists Want?

I am living in a rather peaceful locale, but which is never without connections with terrorism or terrorists.  When Mas Selamat bin Kastari escaped from Singapore prison, he swam his way across the Singapore-Malaysia border and settled in a place in Johor.  Mas Salamat is said to be a Jemaah Islamiah (JI) in Singapore.  He was suspected of plotting to bomb Changi Airport in Singapore in 2002.  He was captured more than a year after his escape in 2008.

Just in September 2009, Noordin Mohammad Top was killed in Indonesia.  Born in Kluang, Johor, Malaysia, he was thought to have been a key bomb maker and/or financier for Jemaah Islamiah (JI), and later on set up a more violent splinter group Tanzim Qaedat al-Jihad.  He was suspected to be the mastermind of the 2003 JW Marriott hotel bombing in Jakarta, the 2004 Australian embassy bombing in Jakarta, the 2005 Bali bombings and the 2009 JW Marriot-Ritz Carlton bombings.

These – and similar developments across the globe – prompt me to search for framework with which I can make sense out of questions, such as: what are these people who are labeled as terrorists fighting for?  What motivates them?  What are they trying to attain? Definitely, Mas Selamat is and Noordin Top was not just crazies.  They, for sure, have their goals.  We might learn from Hannah Arendt who wrote that “violence being instrumental by nature is rational to the extent that it is effective in reaching the end that must justify it.”

Louise Richardson, in his book that attempts to understand terrorist threats, posits that all terrorists have two kinds of goals: short term organizational objectives and long-term political objectives requiring significant political change.

Understandably, the long term objectives differ across different groups of terrorists.  For instance, ethno-nationalist groups look for traditional territorial gains like independence and secession.  We may mention the PLO in Palestine, the PKK in Turkey, the LTTE in Sri Lanka, and the IRA and ETA in Europe.  Social revolutionary groups seek to render capitalism obsolete.  To this aim, we may categorize the Red Brigades in Italy, the RAF in Germany, Action Directe in France, and the CCC in Belgium.  The Shining Path in Peru, the NPA of the Philippines and the Communist Party of Nepal and similar Maoist groups intend to remake or re-engineer society.  There are religious sects, such as Aum Shinrikyo in Japan, that endeavored to replace secular law with religious law.