When Terrorism and Counterterrorism Clash: The War on Terror and ...

This effect, as Lichbach citing Greene observes, can “lower the government’s legitimacy and raise the society’s revolutionary potential.”²⁵

When does force escalate terrorist activity? When does it have a deescalating effect? In “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars,” Andrew Mack argues that the key variable in asymmetric conflicts is resolve or will.²⁶ According to this logic, big nations lose small wars, including those against guerillas and terrorists, when their will falters or, as Colonel Ralph Peters put it in an interview in 2003, they are seen as “weak-willed.”²⁷ This line of argument is consistent with rational choice models that posit that rational actors will back down or shift into lower-level violence in the face of superior force or signaling of force.²⁸

Others have proposed that what is critical in such conflicts is “strategic interaction.” In his analysis of more than 200 asymmetric conflicts, Arreguin-Toft found that when strong actors used direct approaches (e.g., attrition and blitzkrieg) and weak actors used the same approach, strong actors almost always prevailed. However, when weak actors employed indirect approaches (guerilla war and terrorism) against direct attacks, they were usually able to sustain and escalate their activities. He attributed this result to the fact that in such interactions strong actors almost always became impatient and resorted to barbarism; that is, violation of the laws of war, and this outcome had an inflaming effect.²⁹

Lake has suggested that such an overreaction is precisely what terrorists and other insurgents want to provoke—to radicalize moderates and gain support. Taking a resource-mobilization model (which is consistent with Arreguin-Toft’s model but departs from the strict rational choice bargaining paradigm), he argues that terrorists resort to violence not because of misinformation or miscalculation of adversaries’ resources, will, or power, or even because of fundamental issues they want to bargain, but because “no bargain is acceptable to them under the current distribution of capabilities.”