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ABSTRACT
Do states contributing military forces to the Global War on Terror leave their citizens vulnerable to retaliatory terrorist attacks? Despite the vast amount of coverage dedicated to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, few studies have empirically tested whether this is the case. Taking a country-specific approach, this research investigates the military success of the Global War on Terror on a very specific objective − reducing the frequency of terrorist attacks from Al-Qaeda and its affiliates against the citizens of coalition states − to determine if military participation makes a state a target for retaliatory attacks via a backlash effect. Examining terrorist attack data against 53 contributing nations from 1998–2011, this study constructs a general framework for terrorist vulnerability from transnational attacks at the state level and tests whether military contributions to the GWOT, specifically boots on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, result in a greater frequency of terrorist attacks from Al-Qaeda and Al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations. The results show evidence of a backlash effect from Al-Qaeda core and affiliates, casting doubt on the effectiveness of military interventions to reduce transnational terrorism.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Fairleigh Dickinson University for providing a grant in furtherance of this project.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.
Notes
1. Whereas governments only construct levees in areas prone to flooding, such rationality is often not present in counterterrorist policy. President Trump’s Executive Order 13769, for example, banned people from countries that posed no increased terror risk (Nixon, Citation2017).
2. Conflating insurgency tactics with terrorism can lead to misleading conclusions. Zenko and Wolf (Citation2015) note that this error results in attributing 80% of Americans killed by terrorists between 9/11 and 2015 were killed during combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
3. Though the empirics test military action in the GWOT, the model is general enough to be extended to any form of state military intervention abroad.
4. For example, in 2007 John McCain (R-AZ) strongly believed in a substantial increase in US troop presence in Iraq as the only way to mitigate the increasing terrorist threat, while Democrats believed the increase would, “ … only endanger more Americans.” (Curry, Citation2007).
5. In theory, it is possible to apply military force sufficient to permanently disable the capabilities of a terrorist organization, but in practice this rarely occurs (Jones and Libiki, Citation2008).
6. Attacks are attributed to a coalition state based on the nationality of the victim.
7. Though the Islamic State is a splinter of Al-Qaeda that formed as a result of the invasion of Iraq, most of its operations take place within the context of the Syrian Civil War. While the existence of the Islamic State and their global attacks provide additional support for backlash terrorism, in order to formally test within the framework of this study, monthly troop deployments to Syria from all global partners would be needed, which is beyond the scope of this paper.
8. Of the 3,245 transnational terrorist attacks against coalition forces in the sample, only two were carried out by unidentified individuals with evidence that they were inspired by Al-Qaeda – the killing of a BBC cameraman in Riyadh and the shooting of American contractors in Kuwait.
9. It is likely that retaliatory terrorism occurs in response to these campaigns as well. The author notes that the local insurgencies of Al Shabaab in Somalia and Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb expanded their operations after US intervention.
10. This city was chosen due to the high frequency of both Al-Qaeda bases and attacks within and around Afghanistan. Estimates utilizing Baghdad, Iraq, as the baseline yield similar results.
11. Models were also run with the tertiary NATO alliance affiliations Partnership for Peace and Individual Partnership Action Plan and produced similar results.
12. Across all models used, the alpha parameter is statistically non-zero, indicating that negative binomial is preferred over Poisson. Models were rerun utilizing random effects and generate similar coefficients.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kyle T. Kattelman
Kyle T. Kattelman is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Metropolitan Campus of Fairleigh Dickinson University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2013. He specializes in security studies and terrorism.