GAME THEORY IN POLICY MAKING
Terrorism : A Game Theorist’s Perspective
Can Game Theory help in the fight?
On 23rd June 1985, Air India flight 182 operating on the Montreal-London-Delhi route was destroyed mid-air above the Atlantic Ocean, due to bombs implanted by a Canadian-Sikh terrorist organization. The incident took 329 innocent lives and is among some deadliest acts of aviation terrorism. Moving forward 16 years, the infamous 9/11 attacks took place in 2001 by the terrorist organization, Al-Qaeda. Similar attacks took place in 2008 in Bombay, which killed around 160 people.
Over the years, terrorist organizations have evolved and grown to a great extent. Their fanatical and violent behaviour is studied by nations to develop better counter-terrorism defence policies. In the early years, terrorist organizations were mainly focused on hijackings, which led to an increase in airport security. Terrorists then moved to kidnapping, which led to increased fund allocations for the safety of foreign diplomats. Eventually, the terrorist organizations resorted to suicide bombing.
We can clearly see that terrorist action is correlated to the counter-actions of the defence agencies. Now, that’s where game theory comes into the picture. This article here discusses some of these terrorist behaviour and their outcomes.
NEGOTIATIONS WITH TERRORISTS
Negotiations are activities we often see in our daily life. We have a whole article dedicated to game theory in negotiations at this publication. Negotiations between government agencies and terrorist cells are no different. A game theoretical model helps in describing when and if the government agencies should concede to terrorist demands.
DETERRENCE RACE
Let’s take a quick look at Prisoner’s Dilemma before elaborating on Deterrence Race. Two people are held by the police for a particular crime. Their confession is the only way they can be found guilty of that crime. Now there are certain conditions attached to this prosecution.
- If any one of them confesses, the one who confessed will be free and the other person will face imprisonment of 5 years.
- If none of them confesses, they get a lesser sentence of 1 year.
- If both of them confess, both get a sentence of 3 years.
This creates a dilemma for the players under custody and hence the name prisoner’s dilemma.
Now take the example of two nations A and B and a terrorist organization. Now the terrorist organization has 2 options to attack. Suppose nation A increases its defence budget, apart from strengthening its own defence, it will also make nation B an easier target for the terrorist organization. As a result nation B will increase its security, the iterative nature of this will make the two countries to overspend on their defence budgets.
This is a clear example of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The table below shows the payoff of the countries, in this case, lesser value means better payoffs.
Here, deterrence means having a defensive counterterrorism policy like increasing defence budgets and fortifying whereas preemptive strategies would be proactive strategies. In this scenario, both countries without cooperation engage in the deterrence race but optimally these countries should cooperate and preempt.
DECENTRALIZATION OF TERRORIST GROUPS
Terrorist groups at present are focusing on decentralization into smaller units, where every unit acts independently. This helps terrorist organizations keep a lowkey profile and optimse their resources better. For example, Al Qaeda has been decentralising its cadre since the invasion of Afghanistan. It functions with loosely attached units which work as a part of a fixed systematic hierarchy.
Now, these terrorist “sub-groups” so to say, compete amongst themselves for better allocation of funds and their interactions can be modelled into a simple game, with these terrorist cells as the active players.
Let’s understand this situation with the help of a simple example of two terrorist cells funded by a huge terrorist organization. For the sake of simplicity, we will call these cells A and B respectively. Now their master will allocate funds and resources to these subgroups based on their merit. In this particular model, the terrorist cells will have only two options. Firstly, to use their existing resources and plan an attack. The second is to not attack. The cost of an unsuccessful attack and other possibilities are ruled out of this game. We can make a payoff matrix to better evaluate the payoffs of each player.
We assume that for one successful attack, the parent cell allocated a total of $10 Million for subsequent attacks. If both the cells attack, the most amount of destruction is caused and the parent terrorist organization allocates $10 Million for each cell. If only one of the cells attacks, that particular cell gets $9 Million for its higher merit and the other cell gets $1 Million. In the last case, when no attack occurs, no funds are awarded.
In this game, the dominant strategy for both the terrorist cells is to attack. Considering the payoff of any of the subgroups, there is no incentive for a terrorist subgroup to not attack. So the Nash Equilibrium for this case is “attack-attack”. We can note that in a simple model, the terrorist groups will always choose to carry out an attack due to their better payoffs. Better models with more parameters can be employed for the same study but that would be beyond the motive of this article.
This article highlights the application of game theory in international issues like counter-terrorism. We can see that the action of these terrorist organizations can be studied using game theoretical models and better counter-terrorism policies can be devised as a consequence of these studies. Game theory here assuredly acts as an instrument of peace and harmony.
REFERENCES
Chlebik, Kevin. “Terrorism and Game Theory: From the Terrorists’ Point of View.” https://publicpolicy.pepperdine.edu/academics/research/policy-review/2010v3/content/terrorism-and-game-theory.pdf.
DANIEL G. ARCE M., and TODD SANDLER. “Counterterrorism A GAME-THEORETIC ANALYSIS.” JOURNAL OF CONFLICT RESOLUTION, vol. 49, no. 2, 2005, https://personal.utdallas.edu/~tsandler/website/Arce_Sandler_JCR_2005.pdf.
