US State official: Terrorists now targeting businesses

A US State Department counterterrorism expert warned yesterday that terror groups are now shifting to "soft targets," particularly business establishments that are perceived to be icons of American or Western culture.

Douglas Allison, executive director of the Overseas Security Advisory Council (OSAC), said the shift in the tactics of international terror groups, particularly al-Qaeda, had alarmed investors and forced governments to tighten regulations. Traditional targets of terrorist attacks are embassies and military facilities.

"We saw a shift from the targeting of the public sector towards the low-hanging fruit, which are the easier targets, the softer targets, the business community," Allison told a gathering of counter-terrorism experts, diplomats, law enforcement officials and business executives at a forum dubbed "Protect 2006: Doing Business Amidst New Threats II" at the World Trade Center in Pasay City.

"You can still make a great impact on the news if you attack American icons or brand names that people recognize. You want to shift towards the easier targets from a terrorist standpoint," he said.

Executive Secretary Eduardo Ermita said the Anti-Terrorism Task Force, which he heads, reported that there have been more terror attacks on civilians than on military targets since 2003.

"Terrorism’s brutality has evolved in such a short time these past years," Ermita said. "This restrategizing on the part of terrorists entails a rethinking of our security operational policies."

He called for more information sharing between the government and the private sector to deter attacks.

Allison said civilian targets of recent terror attacks since Sept. 11, 2001 included the Hong Kong Shanghai Banking Corp. office in Istanbul, Turkey; the JW Marriott Hotels in Jakarta, Indonesia; a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Karachi, Pakistan; passenger trains in Madrid, Spain and in Mumbai in India.

He said the terrorists’ shift to civilian targets began in 1998 when the US government, using massive resources, stepped up security in its overseas facilities like embassies in response to "watershed attacks" on American facilities in Nairobi.

Allison said other nations also shuddered from terror attacks on civilian facilities like public transportation, fuel and energy depots, and even retail stores.

Using the analogy of the pebble in the pond, Allison said that "if the pebble is terrorism, the ripples spread and touch every shore and they touch every sector."

He said countries where successive terror attacks occurred suffered loss of investors’ confidence.

Allison said businesses feel the impact of the terror attacks in terms of "loss of production, loss of transactions, loss of customer base, loss of employees, loss of facilities, loss of movement, freedom of movement, or constriction of movement, an increase in government regulations, and responses to those attacks, loss of confidence at least in the short term."

OSAC, Allison said, was created in 1985 by former US State Secretary George Schultz after he was approached by businessmen who were concerned that terrorism was affecting businesses’ competitiveness in the international market.

He said the OSAC, which is dominated by private sector representatives, provides timely security and threat information to member-business organizations to help them in decision making. It also conducts consultations and produces regular analyses on the security environment.

He said it would be hard to make an estimate on how much lives and business resources were saved worldwide due to OSAC’s work but stressed that greater private-government participation had actually helped deter terror activities.