The chilling cadences of the rhetoric
of the man who has become the most iconic among the terrorists
of our age ring out once again, shattering the world of the wishful
thinkers who had hoped that Osama bin Laden had been killed at
Torah Borah (or had later succumbed to his kidney ailment):
For how long will fear, massacres,
destruction, exile, orphanhood and widowhood be our lot, while
security, stability and joy remain your domain alone? It is
high time that equality be established to this effect… As you
kill, so will you be killed, and as you bomb so will you likewise
be bombed.1
Bin Laden’s new declaration of
war against what he now describes as "the White House gangsters"2,
and against those who ally with America, comes at an important
time, when many in the world had already begun to grow complacent
about terror once again. The old apologists – the ‘limp liberals’3
– who seek to purchase peace by offering concessions to those
who systematically use the murder of civilians to secure their
political or ‘celestial’ ends, were once again trotting out their
arguments about addressing the ‘root causes’ of terrorism instead
of fighting it on the ground. There are, however, realities outside
the comforting world of moral relativism that cannot be ignored,
and these have delivered reminder after brutal reminder since
9/11, but have succeeded in barely and briefly irritating the
crust of our indifference – scarcely as long as the body bags
of the last terrorist outrage can be kept on our television screens.
This is the character of terrorism
that needs most to be understood. Its danger is not the number
of people it kills, but the confusion and paralysis it induces,
the manner in which it divides its victim or target communities,
the complacence it encourages in such communities during the intervals
between attacks, and the moral ambivalence it preys on to go beyond
and to violate all morality.
There is, perhaps, no power that
is innocent of evil, and America is certainly no exception. It
is true that an examination of the histories of nations that,
today, protest and ally against terrorism would produce evidence
of great wrongdoing, of colonial oppression, of racial, ethnic
and even, occasionally, genocidal violence, at some point in their
past. Many of these complex injuries and injustices seep into
the present structure of the world as well, and there is no community
or nation that has not been both oppressor and victim at some
stage, and that is not so, in some sense, even today. These are
the moral interstices that the terrorist enters, exploits and
expands.
In meeting the argument that we
must redress these ‘historical wrongs’ – both real and imagined
– to ‘solve’ the problem of terrorism, it is, consequently, necessary
to remind ourselves that terrorism, in explicitly targeting non-combatants,
itself compounds such wrongs and commits, again and again, the
evils it finds unforgivable in others.
Significantly, moreover, the terrorist
does not base his campaigns on any accurate, objective or valid
reading of history, but rather on a fictional past (as well as
a falsified present and future) that is substantially invented
to confirm his ideological posture and his campaigns of undiscriminating
violence. Zbigniew Brzezinski notes that,
The specifics of the region’s
political history need not be dissected too closely because
terrorists presumably do not delve deeply into archival research
before embarking on a terrorist career. Rather, it is the emotional
context of felt, observed or historically recounted political
grievances that shapes the fanatical pathology of terrorists
and eventually triggers their murderous actions.4
Crucially, again, there is no
set of correctives that can, within the structures of the existing
world order, really fulfil the escalating and contradictory aspirations
of the many and diverse peoples of the world. To take a random
example, the ‘fulfilment’ of the ‘Islamist’ aspirations of Muslim
radicals would certainly militate against the rights and hopes
of a preponderance of women in the ‘Muslim world’. Equally, it
is necessary to understand that the current and common aspirations
of the ‘liberal democratic’ world – often projected as ‘universal’
and applied even to the unwilling in more ‘traditional’ communities
– are also substantially beyond the scope of fulfilment within
the global resources available to man. These aspirations are overwhelmingly
shaped by the excessive consumption patterns of the American middle
class – patterns that simply cannot be sustained for even a very
brief period for the current (and growing) global population of
6.3 billion people5, without utterly
devastating the earth. In sum, it is clear that inequalities,
and hence injustices and grievances, will persist in one part
of the world or the other, well into the foreseeable future. While
sympathy and correctives need to be directed towards those who
lose out in this structure and in the processes of modernisation
and globalisation, these cannot be accepted as justifications
for terrorism. We must, of course, understand the causes and the
motives of terrorism in order to bring this evil to an end, but
"the intellectual enquiry into the causes of terrorism ought
never to be allowed to be used to condone terrorism, to become
an excuse, a justification, for terrorism."6
A successful counter-terrorism
strategy demands an extraordinarily high degree of clarity, consistency
and continuity. And these, regrettably, are far from evident in
the current global response, and will so remain unless a more
comprehensive integrating vision evolves. The political, intelligence,
military and policing responses, which presently dominate our
counter-terrorism perspectives, have to be reframed within clearly
articulated ideological contexts, not the inchoate rhetoric of
‘ridding the world of evil-doers’,7
or of the emotive imagery of freedom versus enslavement – which
create entirely different ideas in the minds of different peoples
around the world, depending on their collective ‘historical’ memories
and subjective or cultural inclinations and affiliations. Such
contexts will have to address the nature of globalisation and
its impact on marginalized communities, the necessity, character
and limits of legitimate violence, and, crucially, the advantages
of even imperfect democracies – and democratic methods of grievance
redressal and transformation – over the autocracies that the extremist
vision seeks to impose.
The war against terrorism
is, at present, insufficiently seen and addressed as an intellectual
war, a war of minds and of ideologies. It is a war, moreover,
that is still dominated by paradigms that have outlived their
utility – including the Cold War mindset. While the terrorists
have truly globalised their operations and ideological vision,
counter-terrorism perspectives remain trapped in rigidly nationalistic
positions, and in a high degree of a lack of awareness of terrorist
movements and activities that are not seen to impinge upon the
‘interests of state’ of the dominant world powers, or that are
thought to lie outside their spheres of influence.
An enormous effort of will
is now required to focus on creating the necessary integration
in research, intelligence- gathering and information generation,
coordination between nations and agencies, and, eventually, the
dominant vision that is to guide the global war against terrorism.
If anything, such an integrated vision and effort has been continuously
diluted after an initial crystallisation in the wake of the 9/11
tragedy, and has been entirely vitiated since the US decided to
aggressively advocate war against Iraq on grounds that were regarded
by many of its allies as uncertain and unconvincing.
The crucial decisions of the global
war against terror must be taken by security professionals who
are fully apprised of the contours and consequences of their actions,
and who operate within paradigms and information systems that
are meaningful within the current world context. These decisions
cannot be left to politicians with axes to grind, or to individuals
so far distanced from the events and circumstances on the ground
that their judgements can simply not be relied upon to define
effective and appropriate responses. These decisions must, moreover,
be taken within the context of a clearly articulated and widely
accepted global strategy of counter-terrorism that recognises
the necessity of securing a clear and demonstrable victory over
those who adopt this reprehensible method to secure their ends.
There are far too many advocates of compromise with terror today,
who would like us to believe that it is possible to bribe mass
murderers away from their totalitarian goals with economic and
political concessions. It is useful, indeed necessary, in this
context, to recollect that, "the longest periods of peace
usually follow from decisive victories which prove aggression
to be suicidal."8
Ajai Sahni
New Delhi
November 20, 2002
- David R. Sands
and Bill Gertz, "US says tape shows bin Laden alive,"
The Washington Times, November 13, 2002, http://www.washtimes.com/world/20021113-2474169.htm.
- JoannaMcGeary
and Douglas Waller, "Why can’t we find bin Laden?"
Time, November 17, 2002, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101021125-389601,00.html.
- Polly Toynbee,
"Limp liberals fail to protect their most profound values,"
The Guardian, Manchester, October 10, 2001, http://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith//courses01/rrtw/toynbee.html.
- Zbigniew Brzezinski,
"Confronting Anti-American Grievances", The New York
Times, September 1, 2002.
- "Human Population,"
http://math.berkeley.edu/~galen/popclk.html.
- L.M. Singhvi,
"Global Terror: The Challenge of Ideologies," in K.P.S.
Gill and Ajai Sahni eds., The Global Threat of Terror: Ideological,
Material and Political Linkages, New Delhi: ICM-Bulwark Books,
2002, p. 29.
- "Bush vows
to rid the world of ‘evil-doers’", cnn.com, September 16,
2001, http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/16/gen.bush.terrorism/.
- Victor Davis Hanson,
"Wishing War Away?", National Review Online, April
5, 2002, http://www.nationalreview.com/hanson/hanson-archive.asp.
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