Conclusión
| Autor | Huw Bennett, Rory Cormac, Michael S. Goodman, and Claudia Hillebrand |
| Páginas | 293-297 |
Page 293
Irregular threats have been a major concern to Western states since 11 Sep-tember 2001. Contemporary defence and foreign policies indícate this will remain the case for some time to come. The articles in The Threatfrom Be-low remind us that subversión, terrorism and insurgency have been priorities for intelligence agencies in the past as much as they are today. Despite sig-nificant alterations in the international security landscape since the 1940s — the earliest period assessed in this special edition — many basic chal-lenges about how intelligencers should respond remain intractable. The aim here has not been to prescribe universal remedies for these problems, but rather to illuminate how governments have addressed them in the past and to this day.
Ranging from British intelligence in the decolonisation era, to Cold War counter-subversion, and counter-insurgency from Malaya to Iraq and Af-ghanistan, the articles in this volume have naturally presented much idiographic evidence. Nonetheless, several persistent themes may be discerned which arguably characterise intelligence confronting irregular, non-state opponents. Firstly, states can struggle to anticípate attacks from groups which seemingly emerge from nowhere. Secondly, understanding insurgents and terrorists is arguably more difficult for governments than analysing the actions and intentions of other governments. Thirdly, whilst accurate intelligence is vital to the state's response, from foreign policy formation right down to military tactics, situating the intelligence dimension's effectiveness within wider policy is equally important. Fourthly, irregular threats appear
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to require a high degree of international co-operation to counter them. Fifthly, the cases examined in this volume show how intelligence can be a forcé for either restrained government practice, or ethically troubling be-haviour.
The articles in this volume have demonstrated how states are prone to under-estimate irregular threats at times when they are mainly concerned with serious state opponents. Adam Cobb's article on American intelligence in Afghanistan strongly suggests that even vastly increased intelligence gath-ering cannot overeóme the analytical barriers inherent in a global network facing múltiple divergent threats. In this sense, predictive failures will continué to be inevitable. Shmuel Bar rightly points out that low-priority geo-graphical regions or thematic áreas can suddenly...
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