Learning to Live With Terrorism

Original article from the Economist can be found here.

The bombings will change London, but not in the ways most people expect

“OUR lucky day” was the judgment of one British newspaper on the second attempt in as many weeks to murder users of London's transport system. Unlike the four men who blew themselves up on July 7th, killing 52 others, the plotters who struck a fortnight later failed to take lives. But the second bombing hinted, unnervingly, at a long-term campaign. Before July 21st, London was recovering from a past atrocity. Since then, it has been coping with an enduring menace. Two terrorist bombings, it turns out, are more than twice as bad as one.

If spreading fear was the terrorists' objective, they have succeeded. A poll for The Economist shows that 90% of Britons (and almost the same share of Londoners) believe the city will be targeted again within a year. Fully 59% reckon that travelling in the capital has become more dangerous, while only 1% believe the opposite.

But what will be the lasting effect of the bombings? There is a simple rule of thumb. If it is difficult to imagine something ever returning to normal, it is likely to do so quickly. The sources of long-term disruption and damage are more subtle. Much of the harm will come only indirectly from the attacks, and will be caused by the responses to terror rather than the terror itself.

Any fear and anxiety whipped up by the bombings will dissipate quickly. “Most people recover of their own accord in just a few weeks,” says Anne Eyre, a consultant who specialises in trauma and disaster management. While some people who were close to the bombings or have experience of traumatic events will find it harder to recover, the great majority will not require counselling or therapy.

That was so even in New York, where the attacks of September 11th were far more deadly and visible than the London bombings. Project Liberty, a federally funded outfit, deployed thousands of counsellors to meet some 1.2m people. Just 6% were referred for further treatment, mostly for minor symptoms such as sleeplessness. Another survey found that the share of local people reporting symptoms of trauma fell by two-thirds in the six months following the attacks.

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Meanwhile, the police carry on. Their conduct over the next few months poses the greatest long-term threat, as well as the best hope for stopping further attacks. So far, London's Metropolitan Police have a mixed record. Mosques have been visited and politically incorrect talk avoided. But the shooting of a man mistakenly thought to be a terrorist (see article) has set some Muslim nerves on edge.

The danger is that Muslims'relations with the police will sour, rather as happened with Afro-Caribbean men in the 1980s. Black anger stemmed from the seemingly prejudiced use of street searches—a tactic that, ominously, was increasingly directed against Asians even before the London bombings. Between 2000-01 and 2003-04, the number of Asians stopped and searched rose by 60%, compared with an 8% rise among the population of England and Wales. Fewer of these searches led to an arrest than searches of any other ethnic group.

In the aftermath of terrorist attacks, the extravagant use of such police powers might seem tolerable, or even desirable. In the long term, the consequences are more likely to prove otherwise.

I'm not going to say that greater law enforcement and a broader interpretation of the police's power to search, investigate, and prosecute crimes is bad (especially since this article refers specifically to London and the UK, while here in the United States our police are bound by the 4th amendment to the constitution). This is a difficult issue and will continue to be waged by the public, media, policy makers, and the courts.

The most important point to me of this article is the statement I bolded: that the causes of long-term change are subtle, and often fly under the public radar. Just as the fall of the Berlin wall was a visible but late-coming incident that reflected the many subtle changes that had occurred over the previous 40 some-odd years--particularly the prior 10-15 as the institutions and governments that practiced communism fell increasingly into disarray--these large terrorist acts are simply emblematic of the many subtle changes affecting our lives.

I can only hope that in the future more of these "emblematic acts" are positive rather than tragic.