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COMMENTARY
War and the 'deluge' of
terror
By Ajai Sahni
NEW
DELHI - As the war in Iraq intensifies, reports of peace
demonstrations as well as more explicitly anti-United
States and Islamist extremist protests are accumulating
across South Asia.
These have been given great
prominence in the media and have fed Western
apprehensions that the Iraqi campaign will give rise to
new armies of anti-US, anti-West, Islamist extremist
terrorists, and a radical escalation of terrorism in the
foreseeable future, as Muslims express their anger
against what they view as an unjust war.
It is
significant that the intensity, spread and participation
in these demonstrations across South Asia, and even in
Pakistan and Bangladesh, has been muted, and does not
compare with the violence in, for instance, Cairo,
Bahrain or even Brussels. More significantly, the scale
of protests witnessed in much of Europe has been
immensely greater - in the United Kingdom, for instance,
an anti-war demonstration in February brought together
an unprecedented one million protestors, and
demonstrations on Saturday again mobilized an estimated
200,000 to 400,000 protesters.
The most
significant and inflammatory of the protests in South
Asia have been in Pakistan, particularly in areas
currently under the political domination of the
fundamentalist and pro-Taliban Muttaheda Majlis-i-Amal
(MMA), including Balochistan and the North West Frontier
Province - areas that have been characterized by
substantial movement of pro-al-Qaeda elements as well as
suspected areas of major relocation of al-Qaeda and
Taliban cadres. But even the MMA's "million march" could
put together only several thousand protesters.
On Sunday in Karachi - the Pakistani port city
worst afflicted by sectarian and terrorist violence -
the largest of such protests took place, with the
participation of an estimated 70,000 protestors. It is
useful to note that a demonstration of this size, by
South Asian standards - a region that often witnesses
million-plus political gatherings and demonstrations -
is at best minor. There have also been small, though
provocative, meetings, with substantial inflammatory
rhetoric, at various locations in Bangladesh, India and
Nepal. In addition, sermons after Friday prayers in some
mosques across the region have tended to focus adamantly
against the US-led war, and at least some of these have
contained incendiary calls for violence against the US
and Western allies.
The anti-war demonstrations
have, however, gone well beyond the Islamist
extremist/fundamentalist constituency in South Asia, as
in much of the world. But this represents nothing more
than the broad political uncertainty and ambivalence
over the morality and legitimacy of the US-led campaign,
concerns that have been widely expressed even among the
people in the countries that constitute the primary
coalition partners - the US, the UK and Australia. These
wider demonstrations have articulated apprehensions
about, but do not, in any measure reflect or impact on,
the potential for escalated terrorist action as a
"reaction" to the Iraq War.
Apprehensions of a
deluge of terror in the wake of the Iraq campaign are,
however, substantially misplaced and are located in a
misunderstanding of the nature of terrorism in general,
and of Islamist extremist terrorism in particular. The
defeat of Saddam Hussein cannot be expected to provoke
any great rise in anti-US terrorism sourced in South
Asia. Indeed, the very opposite holds true, and evidence
of US weakness and vulnerabilities, either during the
coalition campaign in Iraq, or in general, would tend to
encourage greater militant opportunism, particularly
among the communities and countries where extremist
Islamist mobilization has already reached an advanced
stage, with Pakistan and Bangladesh as the core areas of
such risk in this region.
This does not exclude
possibilities of opportunistic strikes against Western
targets during or after the Iraq campaign. Such strikes
would exploit the existing pool and potential of trained
terrorists, but do not significantly reflect any
dramatic increase in this pool, or in recruitment to
terrorist ranks. The fact is, terrorists strike when and
where they have the capacity to strike, and they strike
at the maximal level of destructive force available to
them. That is the nature of terrorism. War or no war in
Iraq, the trajectory of terrorism will be defined by the
capacities of its executors.
These capacities do
not depend on any pool of shared "Muslim grievances" -
real or imagined. A sufficient - indeed inexhaustible -
pool of such grievances already exists and the actual
transformation of these into terrorist cadres and
actions depends on two specific variables: the intensity
and success of the process of terrorist mobilization,
including their demonstrable abilities to strike
critical targets and to instill a sense of confidence
and imminent victory in their sympathetic constituency;
and, conversely, the success and effectiveness, or
otherwise, of the world's counter-terrorism responses.
In the post-September 11 period, the frequency
of international terrorism has tended to decline, not
because the pool of Muslim resentment suddenly
contracted or evaporated, but rather because increased,
though still inadequate and selective, international
cooperation in counter-terrorism campaigns severely
circumscribed the capacities of terrorists to operate
and strike. This was also a consequence of international
pressure on supporters and state sponsors of terrorism,
which limited the impunity with which such entities
could be extended assistance in terms of safe havens,
infrastructure and opportunities for terrorist
recruitment, training, finance and supplies of weapons.
Fears of a radical intensification of Islamist
extremist terrorism located in South Asia in the wake of
the war in Iraq are, consequently, mistaken. The threats
emanating from extremist factions in Pakistan and
Bangladesh - and strongly projected by the state
apparatus in Pakistan as justification for the continued
dictatorship in that country - are no more than threats.
It is useful, in this context, to recall the
words of a Pakistani army brigadier, S K Malik, who
elaborated on his country's philosophy of terrorism in
his book, The Islamic Concept of War - a book
that includes an authoritative foreword by
then-President of Pakistan, General Zia ul-Haq: "Terror
struck into the hearts of the enemies is not only a
means, it is the end in itself. Once a condition of
terror into the opponent's heart is obtained, hardly
anything is left to be achieved. It is the point where
the means and the end meet and merge. Terror is not a
means of imposing decision upon the enemy [sic]; it is
the decision we wish to impose upon him."
If the
fanatics of the MMA and of the array of extremist and
terrorist organizations operating out of Pakistan, or
their affiliates in Bangladesh, India and elsewhere, had
the power to strike and destroy America or its allies,
they would already have done it. And if they are ever
able to convince themselves that they do possess such
power, it is certain that they would use it.
The
simple reason why they do not do so is because they lack
this power, and are aware of this deficiency. It is
precisely this deficit that will ensure that, even after
the Iraq war, they will continue with the excesses of
their rhetoric, but will fail to escalate their campaign
against US and Western targets.
The essence of
this failure is nothing more than the lack of the
necessary capacity. To the extent that they are able to
secure this capacity, they would target the US even if
America became the most pacific country in the world.
The Islamist terrorist agenda is more inflexible than
most of us imagine, and its ends are defined, not in
terms of the transient political parameters of the
discourse of international relations, but by a
perspective rooted in religious absolutisms that will
endure long after the reverberations of the crises of
transition in Afghanistan or in Iraq have come to an
end.
By Ajai Sahni, editor, South Asia
Intelligence Review; executive director, Institute for
Conflict Management, a non-profit society set up in 1997
in New Delhi committed to the evaluation and resolution
of problems of internal security in South Asia.
Published with permission from the South Asia
Intelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal
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