Time after time, we have allowed the terrorists to win

Every time terrorists strike, the civilized world vows not to let them win. Yet time after time, we give them exactly the victory they seek.

In the Middle East, Palestinian terrorists have attacked repeatedly in hopes of disrupting peace efforts; time after time, they’ve gotten their way.

In the attacks on Sept. 11, Osama bin Laden made it clear that he was trying to provoke the United States into an overreaction; by invading Iraq, an oil-rich Islamic country that had nothing to do with 9/11, we gave him just what he wanted. Iraq became a great recruiting tool and rallying point for al-Qaida.

So it’s pretty simple: If you want to deny victory to terrorists, you figure out what they’re trying to get you to do. Then you don’t do it.

But given the emotional impact of terrorism, that can be extraordinarily hard, as the people of India know.

The goal of the terrorists who attacked Mumbai last week was not to kill hundreds of victims. “Victims are just the language of war,” as Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, the mastermind of Sept. 11, told his captors.

Muhammad and other terrorists are engaged in “assymetric warfare,” in which a much weaker party faces a much stronger opponent. Unable to win a head-on struggle, the weaker party tries to provoke its opponent into reacting in anger or fear, an overreaction that weakens it in the eyes of the world, reduces its legitimacy and makes it vulnerable.

To the Mumbai terrorists, those many dead innocents were a means of achieving their goal, which was to undermine relations between Pakistan and India and provoke the two nuclear-armed nations to war. The world is now trying to ensure that rising anger in India —- anger that is natural and justified —- doesn’t give the murderers what they sought.

Ironically, one of the best lessons about how to respond to terror can be drawn from a seemingly unlikely source, the career of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

In his own, very different form of assymetric warfare, he too tried to provoke his more powerful opponents into an overreaction that would weaken them, with the very important moral difference that King chose to provoke through nonviolence. And as King discovered, some foes are too smart to play along.

In 1962, King was drawn into the struggle to desegregate the town of Albany, Ga. He led protests and marches, trying to provoke local officials into an overreaction that would reverse the power dynamic. But the Albany sheriff, Laurie Pritchett, had studied King’s tactics and refused to give King what he sought. As Pritchett later explained, he met nonviolence with nonviolence.

King would organize mass demonstrations; Pritchett’s deputies would arrest the demonstrators, but they would do so calmly and professionally. King and his lieutenants would get themselves arrested, hoping to become high-profile martyrs; Pritchett would secretly arrange to let them go.

“I’ve been thrown out of a lot of places in my day, but never before have I been thrown out of jail,” King’s assistant, the Rev. Ralph David Abernathy Jr., complained after his release.

Through patience, Pritchett denied King the images of brutal repression that could be broadcast worldwide by the media, images that would build sympathy for the underdog. Frustrated, King left Albany with segregation still in place.

But a year later in Birmingham, King met a more cooperative foe in Police Commissioner Bull Connor. When demonstrators marched, Connor responded just as King hoped, with firehoses and nightsticks and police dogs sicced upon children.

The images out of Birmingham of the strong attacking the weak horrified the nation and forced federal intervention. Within days, legal segregation in Birmingham was ended forever. The weak had beaten the strong.

“We were witnessing police violence and brutality Birmingham-style,” as John Lewis put it. “Unfortunately for Bull Connor, so was the rest of the world.”

Military force is a legitimate and necessary tool to defend ourselves and loved ones. When we can find terrorists, we should kill them, and where possible we should deny them sanctuary.

But it is important to remember that the civilized world is far stronger than they are. Whatever power they have is power that we give them through the anger and fear we allow them to provoke.

It’s hard to cite a segregationist sheriff as a role model, but Laurie Pritchett had it figured out.

jbookman@ajc.com

Blog with Jay Bookman all week at ajc.com/opinion.