Question

how can we stop terrorism

Answer 1

There is no way to entirely “end terrorism” We can only do our best to defend against terrorist attacks.

“Terrorism”, as opposed to conventional warfare, is defined by attacks deliberately targeted specifically against innocent non-combatant civilians in order to intimidate others into compliance with the terrorists’ agenda, is as old as the human species and probably much older. Our closest living relative to our species is the common Chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, and chimps terrorize neighboring troops in order to protect their troop’s territory or conquer territory from other troops. A group of adult males will gather together and move off, very quietly and stealthily towards the neighboring troop’s territory, then attack and kill chimps who have become separated from the other troop. If they find a female in estrus they will force her to accompany them back to their troop, sometimes. (Sound familiar?)

Terrorism is a behavior hardwired, genetically, into the human genome. Terrorists may believe they are motivated by religion, nationalism, revenge or injustice but anthropologists, historians, archaeologists, and sociologists have very convincingly correlated periods of violent human upheavals, mass migrations, civil wars, revolutions, and regional and international wars to crises in resources brought about by periods of climate extremes like droughts and cold periods like Europe’s” little ice age”.

At this time in history we are dealing with Islamist terrorism and ME/NA religious, civil and tribal wars that the most respected scholars and scientists who study the causes of human conflicts say are the result of the ME/NA being hit by the “terrible trifecta” of (1) climate change (years of drought), (2) a population explosion, and (3) the fact that the ME/NA population explosion consists of a demographic “youth bulge”, meaning that a huge proportion of the population of the ME/NA are younger people. A “youth bulge” has long been known to cause social instability, especially when too many young people are poor; faced with scarce or too-expensive resources and few opportunities to better their lives.

While the human genome will always produce aggressive psychopathic megalomaniacs like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, OBL and al Baghdadi, these individuals would not be able to gain enough followers sufficient to carry out their ambitions on a large scale unless there are enough angry, frustrated people who feel they have little to lose and are vulnerable to being motivated by religion, bigotry, injustice, nationalism, or revenge or some combination of all-of-the-above.

Terrorism can be used along with the tactics of conventional warfare, but if an aggressor does not have the ability or capacity to wage conventional war, terrorism may be the only tactic they can use. ISIS uses both conventional warfare and terrorist attacks but OBL used only terrorism in his attempt to achieve his ambitions. As ISIS becomes weaker, ISIS is using more terrorist attacks.

Humanitarians and pacifists have the deep conviction that if we can get to a point where everyone’s needs are met, both conventional and terrorist wars could end. I doubt this because there will always be subset of people who will always want more power, more wealth, more territory, more of everything and have no moral constraints about taking what they want from others by violence. Their leaders may be adult males like Pol Pot or al-Baghdadi, but their footsoldiers are composed primarily of young, frustrated, aggressive thrill-seeking men who have sociopathic tendencies and are still too young to have the full use of their pre-frontal cortex, which when fully mature moderates impulsivity and aggression and enhances the ability to judge risks vs. benefits. That’s why young men are referred to as “cannon fodder”.

Albert Einstein: “Older men make war but younger men fight them”.

War, fought conventionally and fought with terrorism or with a combination of both methods will always, always be with us.