Happiness is....

[muse]

Al-Qaeda laid to rest? Not just yet
By Michael Scheuer

Whether said about the aging process or the implacable approach of writing deadlines, the old saw about "time flying" is certainly true. But seldom has it been truer than in the past three weeks.

At dawn on May 29, the 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate that said al-Qaeda was a major and gradually increasing threat to the United State was still valid; by late that afternoon, the secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had announced that the Lebanese Hezbollah was now the " 'A' team of terrorism" and that it made "al-Qaeda look like a minor league team".

Then, on May 30, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Michael Hayden said that al-Qaeda was strategically defeated in several important venues; that it was "facing setbacks globally", and that, overall, the US was doing "pretty well" against its Islamist nemesis. The next morning, the DHS secretary one-upped Hayden by issuing a "don't-worry-be-happy statement" that greatly downplayed the chances of al-Qaeda acquiring and using a nuclear device.

To make things even cheerier, all of these glad tidings rode in on the back of other claims that al-Qaeda's demise was, if not imminent, at least on the horizon. Three US terrorism experts published two articles in the last days of May which asserted that that Osama bin Laden's group is increasingly isolated in the Islamic world and alienated from Muslims because of criticisms and theological challenges - some of book-length - authored by repentant Islamic scholars.

At least one former "al Qaeda mastermind" - Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, aka Dr Fadl - penned a thoroughly damning anti-al-Qaeda tract, but happened to be locked away in an Egyptian prison at the time of publication and so was unavailable to talk to Western journalists. Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank ask why former al-Qaeda allies have turned against al-Qaeda's leaders:
To a large extent it is because al-Qaeda and its affiliates have increasingly adopted the doctrine of Takfir, by which they claim the right to decide who is a "true" Muslim. Al-Qaeda's critics know what results from this Takfiri view:


first, the radicals deem some Muslims apostates; after that, the radicals start killing them. This fatal progression happened in both Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s. Its is now taking place even more dramatically in Iraq, where al-Qaeda's suicide bombers have killed more than 10,000 Iraqis, most of them targeted simply for being Shi'ite. Recently, al-Qaeda in Iraq has turned its fire on Sunnis who oppose its dictates, a fact not lost on the Islamic world's Sunni majority [1].

Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker adds:
This August [2008], al-Qaeda will mark its 20th anniversary. That is a long life for a terrorist group. Most terror organizations disappear with the death of their charismatic leader, and it would be hard to imagine al-Qaeda remaining a coherent entity without bin Laden. The Red Army Faction went out of business when the Berlin Wall came down and it lost its sanctuary in East Germany. The Irish Republican Army, unusually, endured for nearly a century until economic conditions in Ireland significantly improved, and the leaders were pressured by their own members to reach a political accommodation. When one looks for hopeful parallels for the end of al-Qaeda, it is discouraging to realize that its leadership is intact, its sanctuaries are unthreatened, and the social conditions that gave rise to the movement are largely unchanged. On the other hand, al-Qaeda has nothing to show for its efforts except blood and grief. The organization was constructed from rotten intellectual bits and pieces - false readings of religion and history - cleverly and deviously fitted together to give the appearance of reason. Even if [Dr] Fadl's rhetoric [recanting earlier support for al-Qaeda] strikes some readers as questionable, al-Qaeda's sophistry is rudely displayed for everyone to see. Although it likely will continue as a terrorist group, who could still take it seriously as a philosophy? [2]

Amazing. In the 21 days since this author last wrote, bin Laden and al-Qaeda have been transformed from Salafists and Wahhabis to nihilistic, kill-'em-all Takfiris; have been demoted from veteran and talented insurgents to the level of the whack-jobs who manned the Red Army Faction; and have been defeated in a manner the world has not seen since "Mission Accomplished in Iraq" was declared in 2003.

How to explain this stunning turnaround? Well, the astounding claims made by senior US government officials that al-Qaeda is reeling from American blows seem easy enough to explain. After the US government was roundly damned for not destroying al-Qaeda before attacking Iraq, the spate of late-May pronouncements by top US officials - if one is permitted to be cynical - may be intended to assure Americans that al-Qaeda is beaten if in the next few months it becomes necessary for US forces to attack Iran.

The contention that there is a fierce debate occurring between and among al-Qaeda leaders and theoreticians and other Islamists is true enough, but hardly new. Passionate, learned and personally stinging inter-group and even intra-al-Qaeda debate is standard operating procedure among Islamists. What is unusual in the current round of argument is that: (a) It is more public than usual and (b) many heretofore credible Western analysts are indulging in wishful thinking and giving great credence to the words of al-Qaeda critics, even though the two sources they most often and most fully cite are of rather doubtful credibility.

One is a Saudi, Shaykh Salman al-Awdah, who wrote a public letter condemning bin Laden for taking the lives of many Muslims in al-Qaeda's attacks [3]. The other is an Egyptian, the above-mentioned and legendary jihadi theorist Fadl, who, from an Egyptian prison, is publishing - through the Egyptian security service's good offices - 180-degree retractions of pro-jihad works he once claimed were sanctioned by God.

Awdah was once a firebrand Islamist who preached jihad, mentored bin Laden, and spent five years in prison for opposing the US military presence on the Arabian Peninsula and suggesting the al-Saud family is un-Islamic. Today, Awdah is a member in good standing of the official Saudi religious establishment. He has his own website (islamtoday.net), hosts a television program and he is allowed to travel overseas to condemn violence conducted in the name of religion.

Fadl, while still in jail, has access to a fax machine and is getting special treatment. "His son says he has a private room with a bath and a small kitchen," complete with a refrigerator, newspaper delivery and a television set. Interestingly, Fadl lived freely in Yemen from 1994 until 2001, but it was only after he found himself in prison in Egypt, at some point after September 11, 2001, that he was seized by genuine remorse for his older jihadi writings and felt motivated by God to recant his earlier radical beliefs.

There is no doubt that the statements and arguments of Awdah and Fadl are splashed around all media venues and carry some weight with Islamists; they have and will provoke debate, both polite and bitter in nature. But their words would carry much more weight among Islamists and average Muslims - and would pose a much greater threat to the future of al-Qaeda and the Islamist movement - if it was not so starkly clear that both men are fully under the not-always-gentle thumb of the Saudi and Egyptian regimes, and that each has personally benefited from his willingness to recant former positions by publishing anti-Islamist statements and treatises both regimes want published and widely distributed.

The statements by Awdah and Fadl certainly will not help al-Qaeda; indeed, al-Qaeda heavyweights Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abu Yahya-al-Libi have both publicly said that they could deepen the defeatism which is so deeply engrained among Arabs, and which al-Qaeda has been trying to overcome since it was founded in 1988 [4]. Still, the statements are unlikely to rapidly kill off support for bin Laden and his group in an Islamic world where most Muslims recognize that nine times out of 10, such drastic recantations from previously held positions are prompted by monetary payoffs, threats to family and friends, or severe physical abuse.

More importantly, the theological challenges launched by Awdah, Fadl and others change nothing in regard to the fundamental motivation of al-Qaeda and its allies - the impact of US and Western policies in the Muslim world; the presence of US and Western military forces in the Arab region; and US and Western support for tyrannical Arab regimes. As long as this status quo lasts, al-Qaeda and its allies will continue fighting and their efforts will continue to win broad and probably increasing public support, or at least acquiescence.

In the face of this reality, individuals like Awdah and Fadl offer Muslims nothing but defeatism, a willingness to see the rule of Arab police states prolonged indefinitely and supine acceptance of what is viewed by much of the Muslim world as a mortally anti-Islamic "Crusader-Zionist" hegemony.

The always vituperative British journalist and author Robert Fisk described this reality neatly in the June 1 issue of The Independent of London. Although putting too much emphasis - as he often does - on the theme of Western oppression of Muslims, Fisk otherwise presents a valid and commonsense view of why al-Qaeda is not on the ropes and will not be any time soon. "So al-Qaeda is 'almost defeated', is it?", Fisk began:
Major gains against al-Qaeda. Essentially defeated. On balance, we are doing pretty well," the CIA's boss, Michael Hayden, tells the Washington Post. "Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally - and here I'm going to use the word ideologically - as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam." Well, you could have fooled me ... Yes, we've bought ourselves some time in Iraq by paying half of the insurgents to fight for us and to murder their al-Qaeda cousins. Yes, we are continuing to prop up Saudi Arabia's head-chopping and torture-practicing regime - no problem there, I suppose, after our enthusiasm for "water-boarding" - but this does not mean al-Qaeda is defeated.

Because al-Qaeda is a way of thinking, not an army. It feeds on pain and fear and cruelty - our cruelty and our oppression - and as long as we continue to dominate the Muslim world with our Apache helicopters and our tanks and our Humvees and our "friendly" dictators, so will al-Qaeda continue ...[The Independent, June 1

 

[muse]

An editorial from today's dailyTimes


EDITORIAL: Globalisation and Talibanisation

The latest group of youths caught near Islamabad with enough explosives to destroy a whole sector of residences in the city point to a campaign that regards the “culture” of the capital city as hostile to Islamic ideology. The use of terror, underpinned by ideology, goes back to the French Revolution when the word was first coined and used positively. “Ideology” too was a coinage of the French Revolution. And the slogan was: “Terror without virtue is evil; virtue without terror is helpless”. The Islamic Revolution in our case has come from outside and it is “virtue with terror”. We call it Talibanisation and see our cities falling to it one by one. The warriors of this revolution come from the Tribal Areas which have already been “conquered” and transformed into a mini-state or emirate of the Taliban Tehreek.

Scholars studying the phenomenon tell us that it is a spin-off of globalisation and its free movement of capital, ideas and enterprise. When jihad was inaugurated in Pakistan against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan it was a globalised war attracting warriors from as far west as Algeria and as far east as Indonesia. Money moved from the United States and Saudi Arabia and weapons were purchased in the open global market and sent to Pakistan. This created what many scholars have described as the first Islamist International. In the nineties, the Internet helped the Islamist cause further. Programmes not only revisited the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and Moscow’s humiliation there at the hands of the mujahideen but also pointed to the US injustices when they talked of the Palestinian tragedy. Madrassas had earlier been empowered with Saudi money which matched the Americans dollar for dollar. Thus was born the idea of a new hard Islam which clashed with Pakistan’s more liberal Muslim culture.

Globalisation of capital has been studied more critically — thanks to the surviving Left ideologues in the world — than the phenomenon of the globalisation of Islam. The foremost “non-economic” objection to globalisation has been its “monoculture” of the free market, which is really the imposition of an American capitalist way of life. Many writers in the Third World have written cautionary literature on this “foreign onslaught” against local cultures. Even the Planning Commission of Pakistan last year discussed the importance of culture in economic development, especially in terms of the “soft image” needed to attract foreign investment through indigenous culture. The term used was the “monoculture” of globalisation acting adversely on local cultures of tolerance.

But it should be clear to all Pakistanis that Talibanisation is also a “culture-killer”, the only difference being that under the threat of suicide-bombing what is produced is a non-culture of coercion. On the other hand, capitalist globalisation is based on the “pleasure principle”, seducing the cities into adopting a uniform “monoculture” to the detriment of the old culture. Capitalist globalisation affects the entire world. Even Europe feels itself Americanised despite the fact that, civilisationally, America is an extension of Europe. But Talibanisation is effective only in the Islamic world. In the non-Islamic world it arouses hatred and hostile legislation, making the life of the expat Muslims difficult. Why does Talibanisation succeed so well in Muslim societies?

If in the West, a terrorist act of Al Qaeda produces fear and loathing, in the Muslim world it produces sympathy. This “sympathy” has its psychological origin in the use of intimidation in the face of a state with weakened territorial control. (The weakened writ of the state in the case of Pakistan has been caused by twenty years of jihad through non-state armed warriors who were made a part of civil society, thus creating parallel centres of power.) Thus, for example, citizens threatened with the “divinely” ordained punishments of warlords like Mangal Bagh in the Khyber Agency react in two ways: under “intimidation” when they want to save their lives; and under “empowerment” which makes them participate in Talibanisation. The “kibitzing” population in the rest of the country supports Talibanisation and deprecates the efforts of the state to retrieve its lost sovereignty.

Al Qaeda has not been able to attack America after 9/11. Its sleeper cells in Europe are being uncovered and prosecuted. But its success in Pakistan is shockingly evident. Killing Muslims is easier and even brings Muslim support in its wake. Al Qaeda talks vaguely of a global khilafat but remains essentially an anarchist organisation, more geared to destroying the “unjust international order presided over by America”, than to creating a new order. The Taliban elements in the Tribal Areas pretend to have an order in mind but it mostly centres on the culture of punishments created by the Taliban government in Afghanistan under Mullah Umar. A majority of the population in Pakistan believes in this culture as sharia and assumes that coercion and violence will go away once an Islamic utopia is created.

What Pakistan is moving towards is not an Islamic utopia but a process of retribalisation of the more diversified urban culture under the Constitution. Just outside the big cities jirgas and panchayats are taking over the authority of the state. Somalia was more suited for an Al Qaeda emirate simply because it was quintessentially tribal. Pakistan has however proved an easier choice and can be tribalised to suit the blue print of terror.

 

[muse]

The business of dialogue —Farish A Noor


Dialogue is a funny business, particularly when it happens to be of the inter-civilisational and inter-religious kind. Having just attended yet another dialogue between Islam and the West in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I find myself compelled to pen these thoughts before my blood pressure rises any further and I risk doing serious damage to myself and the furniture in my office.

The theme of the dialogue conference I attended was ‘Islam and the West: Bridging the Gap’. If we were to begin the dialogue process by stating that there exists a gap between the western and Muslim worlds, then in a sense we have already introduced the very same problem we wish to rectify in the first place.

How and why has such a gap emerged between the West and Islam; what are the historical and more importantly, political processes and mechanisms that contributed to this gap; and do Muslims and westerners perceive there to be a gap in the first place?

It is important to emphasise again and again that the western and Muslim worlds have been among the oldest civilisational neighbours in the history of humanity. After all, the Muslim world has lived side-by-side next to western Europe for more than 1,400 years; and if after such a long period we still do not understand each other then we really must be the worst of neighbours.

History, however, is replete with examples and instances of genuine dialogue and interaction in all forms and all registers: from the cultural-intellectual borrowing and cross-fertilisation that took place in both communities leading to the renaissance of both the European and Muslim worlds to the enduring traces of cross-cultural contact and appreciation that exists in the hybrid pop culture of both societies until today.

A cursory look at the modern urban landscape of every single postcolonial Muslim-majority country today would testify to the fact that modern Muslims live in a hybrid social space where the public domain is just as much coloured by Islamic norms as it is by western norms and values: Muslims dream of living in suburban homes, owning two cars, having two kids, two pets, membership to the country club and spending their weekends going to the mall and eating western fast food (when they can afford it).

Likewise Europeans and North Americans have no problems eating kebabs and biryani, listening to Rai music, appreciating the poetry of Rumi and the aesthetic delights of Ottoman or Moghul art (when they can afford it). So where on earth is this ‘gap’ between the West and Islam?

On a societal level it is hard to see how and why westerners and Muslims should look askance at each other, for social interaction and dialogue have, in fact, been going on for centuries. If there is a gap to speak of, it is a political one and one that is determined by the workings of power and power-politics on the global stage.

The aim of such dialogues, we are told, is to correct the misunderstandings and misperceptions of Islam in the eyes of the West that have arisen as a result of the escalation of ‘religiously-inspired’ terrorism in the name of Islam.

But ask yourselves this question: Prior to the creation of the state of Israel, prior to the intervention into Arab political and social affairs by the American government, prior to the imposition of the Washington economic consensus on the economies of the Arab-Muslim world, were there so many instances of Arab-Muslim ‘terror’ against the West?

And if and when these instances of ‘terrorism’ occur, who and what are their targets? Why is it that the attacks on the West seem primarily directed towards the symbols and emblems of American political, military and economic hegemonic power? Why is it that it is western oil companies, embassies and military bases that are attacked time and again?

Surely it can be seen that much of what fuels this resentment towards the West, and towards America in particular, is the perception that the elites of western societies have an agenda based on manipulating, controlling and dominating the economic and political systems of the Muslim world. And much of this can and should be seen as a political response to what is primarily a political-economic problem, and not a theological one.

So why is Islam put on trial? My concerns about these dialogue conferences are manifold, but they can be summed up as follows.

Most of these dialogues are held on an inter-governmental level, and they involve the participation of elites from both western and Muslim societies. Hence the predominance of ministers, prime ministers, presidents and princes at these high-level meetings that take place in 5-star, 6-star or even 7-star hotels and resorts.

Yet these are precisely the very same elites who are collaborating in the skewered geo-political process that has created and perpetuated the gap of power and power-differentials in the first place; and in many ways it is the politics that they practice that is the source of the problem, and not the solution.

My second concern is how rarely these dialogues ever take off on an even footing, where both sides engage in meaningful, frank exchanges on an equal basis. In fact, more often than not, the same coterie of Muslim apologists is invited to ‘explain’ Islam to the West, and to ‘explain’ why Muslims take the course of violence by recourse to some theological explanation.

Such an approach places all the blame of Muslim theology and none of the blame on geo-politics and the workings of global capital.

But consider the oddity of it all: When a Muslim walks into McDonalds to order a BigMac, nobody asks him if Islam compels him to do that, or suggests that it is the Qur’an that determines his tastes and preferences! Yet when a Muslim protests against American oil companies exploiting the resources of his country, the explanation for this anger and indignation has to be found in Islam somehow.

So how then do we account for the protests against America that have been taking place in Mexico, Venezuela, the rest of Latin America and Africa; where Muslims are few and far between and Islamic religious scripture has little impact? The only conclusion I can come up with is that Islam is once again being set up as the nasty culprit responsible for every act of defiance against western hegemony that we see in the Third World today.

These high-level inter-religious and inter-civilisational dialogue conferences have become an end in themselves. A waste of time they certainly are, but more than that they also mean big bucks for those who have to foot the bill. The funny business of dialogue has become a business, in the end.

Dr Farish A Noor is a senior fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

 

[muse]

Just a fun read:
The man who was Thursday —G k Chesterton


Syme was shabby in those days. He wore an old-fashioned black chimney-pot hat; he was wrapped in a yet more old-fashioned cloak, black and ragged; and the combination gave him the look of the early villains in Dickens and Bulwer Lytton. Also his yellow beard and hair were more unkempt and leonine than when they appeared long afterwards, cut and pointed, on the lawns of Saffron Park. A long, lean, black cigar, bought in Soho for two pence, stood out from between his tightened teeth, and altogether he looked a very satisfactory specimen of the anarchists upon whom he had vowed a holy war. Perhaps this was why a policeman on the Embankment spoke to him, and said “Good evening.”

Syme, at a crisis of his morbid fears for humanity, seemed stung by the mere stolidity of the automatic official, a mere bulk of blue in the twilight.

“A good evening is it?” he said sharply. “You fellows would call the end of the world a good evening. Look at that bloody red sun and that bloody river! I tell you that if that were literally human blood, spilt and shining, you would still be standing here as solid as ever, looking out for some poor harmless tramp whom you could move on. You policemen are cruel to the poor, but I could forgive you even your cruelty if it were not for your calm.”

“If we are calm,” replied the policeman, “it is the calm of organised resistance.”

“Eh?” said Syme, staring.

“The soldier must be calm in the thick of the battle,” pursued the policeman. “The composure of an army is the anger of a nation.”

“Good God, the Board Schools!” said Syme. “Is this undenominational education?”

“No,” said the policeman sadly, “I never had any of those advantages. The Board Schools came after my time. What education I had was very rough and old-fashioned, I am afraid.”

“Where did you have it?” asked Syme, wondering.

“Oh, at Harrow,” said the policeman.

The class sympathies which, false as they are, are the truest things in so many men, broke out of Syme before he could control them.

“But, good Lord, man,” he said, “you oughtn’t to be a policeman!”The policeman sighed and shook his head.

“I know,” he said solemnly, “I know I am not worthy.”

“But why did you join the police?” asked Syme with rude curiosity.

“For much the same reason that you abused the police,” replied the other. “I found that there was a special opening in the service for those whose fears for humanity were concerned rather with the aberrations of the scientific intellect than with the normal and excusable, though excessive, outbreaks of the human will. I trust I make myself clear.”

“If you mean that you make your opinion clear,” said Syme, “I suppose you do. But as for making yourself clear, it is the last thing you do. How comes a man like you to be talking philosophy in a blue helmet on the Thames embankment?”

“You have evidently not heard of the latest development in our police system,” replied the other. “I am not surprised at it. We are keeping it rather dark from the educated class, because that class contains most of our enemies. But you seem to be exactly in the right frame of mind. I think you might almost join us.”

“Join you in what?” asked Syme.

“I will tell you,” said the policeman slowly. “This is the situation: The head of one of our departments, one of the most celebrated detectives in Europe, has long been of opinion that a purely intellectual conspiracy would soon threaten the very existence of civilisation. He is certain that the scientific and artistic worlds are silently bound in a crusade against the Family and the State. He has, therefore, formed a special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers. It is their business to watch the beginnings of this conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense. I am a democrat myself, and I am fully aware of the value of the ordinary man in matters of ordinary valour or virtue. But it would obviously be undesirable to employ the common policeman in an investigation which is also a heresy hunt.”

Syme’s eyes were bright with a sympathetic curiosity.

“What do you do, then?” he said.

“The work of the philosophical policeman,” replied the man in blue, “is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime. We were only just in time to prevent the assassination at Hartle pool, and that was entirely due to the fact that our Mr. Wilks (a smart young fellow) thoroughly understood a triolet.”

“Do you mean,” asked Syme, “that there is really as much connection between crime and the modern intellect as all that?”

“You are not sufficiently democratic,” answered the policeman, “but you were right when you said just now that our ordinary treatment of the poor criminal was a pretty brutal business. I tell you I am sometimes sick of my trade when I see how perpetually it means merely a war upon the ignorant and the desperate. But this new movement of ours is a very different affair. We deny the snobbish English assumption that the uneducated are the dangerous criminals. We remember the Roman Emperors. We remember the great poisoning princes of the Renaissance. We say that the dangerous criminal is the educated criminal. We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.”

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874 — 1936) was an influential English writer of the early 20th century. His prolific and diverse output included journalism, philosophy, poetry and detective fiction. This is an excerpt from his book The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, first published in 1908. The book has been referred to as a metaphysical thriller, and begins in a surreal turn-of-the-century London where Gabriel Syme, a poet, is recruited to a secret anti-anarchist taskforce at Scotland Yard

 

[Flintlock]

Thanks muse, that was a great read.

 

[muse]

Another Lal Masjid?

Monday, June 23, 2008
Ahmed Bilal

In April I had to make an emergency trip to Pakistan due to the declining health of my father. It was after more than two years that I was visiting Pakistan, most of the four weeks to be spent in my hometown Bahawalpur. When I had visited in 2005, it had been a visit after four years, so new roads and cell phones in every hand were a fresh sight. This time, little seemed to have changed since my last trip. On my way home from the airport, it looked like the same old desert town with its date palms, the dust and the desert wind.

However, as the car stopped at the main gate of my parents’ house, a poster pasted on the gate caught my attention. The title of the poster was “Azmat-e-Quran Conference,” and the key speaker was going to be someone named Masood Azhar. Why did the name sound familiar? I thought about it for a moment, but then as the car moved in, the happy feeling of meeting my parents again overwhelmed me and I quite forgot about it all. The next few days were spent making courtesy calls and getting over the jet lag.

Then came the day when I was fresh again to go out and meet relatives and family friends in the city. As I went out, I saw the same poster pasted all over the city with a lot of white flags hoisted on all major intersections. I wondered what was going on, and the name Masood Azhar brought some old memories of watching this man on the news. Yes, this is the same Masood Azhar who founded the Jaish-e-Muhammad organisation and served time in Indian jails before getting freed by hijacking an Indian Airlines jet.

Bahawalpur was always a laidback small town where everyone knew everyone else. Masood Azhar was a neighbour of my cousins and used to have a small house which wasn’t even visible from the road. I remember when he was released. The BBC wanted to film his return, from the terrace of my cousins’ house, but they refused due to privacy concerns. Since then we heard little about him, in the news or in local gossip. In general, people didn’t give him much credibility.

My attention was drawn to the graffiti around me. Gone were the usual slogans of old times, directing people to visit miraculous witchdoctors for the solution of all their problems. The walls were filled with anti-West hate slogans, with “Al-Jihad al-Qital” (holy war, bloody battle) written everywhere around the central mosque. This was not the Bahawalpur I knew.

As we got closer to the mosque, I saw the adjacent ground filled with bearded men in white robes, with more of them reaching there in buses, chanting the slogans written all over the city. A number of men were uniformed, and they had closed the road to facilitate the movement of the buses into the place. The purpose of the conference was to distribute a new book of Masood Azhar, which had supposedly substantiated that the jihad these men thought they were preparing for was actually sanctioned by the verses of the Holy Quran, based on their strict politically-motivated interpretation.

We reached the house of our family friends with mixed thoughts. Disturbed by these developments, I asked them what was going on in the city. They said it had been silently going on for a long time. Over the years, Masood Azhar had converted his small house into a multi-storied concrete compound housing 700 armed men, who freely did target practice there. All this was located in a central part of the city, ironically called Model Town. The police dared not touch these men, and instead of putting pressure on them to stop their activities, local politicians actually hired these men as bodyguards during the elections.

After leaving their house, as we got closer to my cousins’ house, a strange tall building with the same white flags on top was visible from a distance. This was Masood Azhar’s compound. A few blocks away from my cousins’ house our car got stuck in a crowd of the same bearded men in white robes who flocked outside the compound and watched us suspiciously as we drove through them. For a moment, I felt like a stranger in my own hometown. Everyone at my cousins’ house thought of all this as something normal and didn’t seem to be bothered.

Talking to people about this, I had some interesting conversations with some of the people who were involved in local politics and the internal politics of Islamabad. Their understanding was that Masood Azhar was like Abdur Rashid Ghazi of Lal Masjid. The way they explained it, the CIA gets money channelled into Pakistan through the ISI. Some of it goes to fund extremists, some of it goes to eliminate them, and most of it goes into shady bank accounts. The agencies get their money, the US benefits from the instability in the region to maintain a military presence here, Musharraf gets to stay in power by showing his performance in the war on terror, and the bearded men in white robes think they are doing some great service to religion by dedicating their lives to militancy. So this was clearly a win-win situation for all parties, at the expense of the fabric of Pakistani society.

Although I took their explanation with a grain of salt, I thought a lot of it did make sense. On my way back home, a huge billboard at the heart of the city grabbed my attention. It showed a passenger plane on fire with a slogan on it: “Another victory for Muslims.” I had a flight back to the US coming up, and the plane on the billboard resembled the 777 I took to fly to Pakistan. I wondered if the ones behind this billboard actually realised what they were portraying. Beneath the billboard, the cityscape was filled with common Pakistanis going about their everyday struggle for survival.

The writer works in the IT industry in the US. Email: ahmad.bilal@ hotmail.com

 

[muse]

US is still an unpopular country
Gulfnews: US is still an unpopular country

06/27/2008 12:07 AM | By Pascal Boniface, Special to Gulf News



There is good news and bad news for the US President George W. Bush. The good news is the US image is getting better. The bad news is the change is largely due to Bush's departure from the White House by the end of this year.

This is the conclusion the Pew Research Centre has arrived at after it conducted polls in 24 countries to ascertain world opinion on the United States.

Five years after the invasion of Iraq, the unpopularity ratings of the US are still high compared to the beginning of the 21st century. But for the first time since American forces landed in Iraq, it is improving slightly in 10 countries. And almost everywhere, the public opinion indicates the upcoming election of a new president is the best thing that could happen to the US.

In almost every country, two-thirds of those surveyed believe that Bush's departure will lead to a better US diplomacy. There are more people who prefer Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama to the Republican candidate John McCain. According to the survey, Obama is twice as popular as the Republican candidate. But we have to keep in mind that in 2004, although an overwhelming number of voters in other parts of the world (only virtually) voted for John Kerry, American voters re-elected Bush.

There is a new worrying factor about US foreign policy. The major fear is no longer the launch of a new war, with devastating strategic results similar to the Iraq war. From now on, the downgrading of the US economy has become the new main concern and reason for anxiety. Countries worldwide mistrust consequent side effects on other national economies. In 18 countries, the people interviewed think their national economy is facing a hard time and believe the US is partly responsible for it.

The Chinese are as confident in their economy as Americans are troubled about their own. Nevertheless, the people's perceptions of those two powers are the same on one point. Both are being criticised for their unilateral approach to international relations and for using excessive influence (viewed as negative) on other countries.

Growth

Public opinions take into consideration the growth of China into an economic and military power. With its growing influence in the world comes more responsibilities. But, according to the polls, Beijing seems to disregard these responsibilities.

China and the US are considered the main contributors to climate change and global warming.

The survey found that only in eight countries did the US enjoy a good reputation. They are United Kingdom, India, Lebanon, Nigeria, Poland, South Africa, Tanzania and South Korea. However, it should be borne in mind that the survey was conducted before the crisis between Seoul and Washington over the free trade agreement, which was largely rejected by South Korea.

In the Muslim world, the popularity of the US hit the nadir. Only 22 per cent of Egyptians, 19 per cent of Jordanians and Pakistanis, and 12 per cent of Turks support the US. Even in European countries, which are the historic US allies, negative opinions are dominant.

In Germany, only 31 per cent of the population are happy with the US. This rate is 34 per cent in Spain, and 42 per cent in France. In a third of the countries in which the study has been done, people consider the US more as an enemy than as a friend, even in official US allied countries such as Turkey and Pakistan.

On the question of foreign forces in Afghanistan, only those in the UK, the US and Australia supported their presence there. Most felt that the best option is to withdraw them as soon as possible.

Pessimism is also strong concerning Iraq and any short-term possibility of transforming this country into a real democracy.

A majority of the countries also criticised China for not respecting the basic civil and political rights of its citizens. In Western countries, China and Iran have the same negative rating when it comes to upholding human rights. But in Nigeria, Pakistan, Tanzania, and Indonesia, most people have a positive opinion on China's concern for personal freedom.

Polemics

Despite the recent polemics on China's disrespect for human rights, both at home and abroad, there is hardly any global concern. China is not seen as an enemy by the vast majority of people in the countries that were surveyed. Even in Japan, where perceptions of China are highly unfavourable, only 23 per cent of the respondents described China as an enemy. Moreover, China is often considered a favoured partner, particularly in Africa, Nigeria (78 per cent), Tanzania (74 per cent) and South Africa (53 per cent).

Most people surveyed have a bad opinion of Iran, except in Pakistan, Indonesia, Russia and Nigeria.

In all countries, even in Muslim countries, there is a strong opposition to Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. Pakistan is the only one which supports it.

Dr Pascal Boniface is the founder and director of IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratgiques). He has published or edited more than 40 books dealing with international relations, nuclear deterrence and disarmament, European security and French international policy.

 

[muse]

June 16, 2008 Issue
The American Conservative



Moscow Hangover


Soviet Communism no longer enslaves Russia, but the West
has yet to exorcise Lenin’s ghost.


by Peter Hitchens

What a pity it is that there will be no new Cold War. How useful it would be for the cause of freedom if we could once again hang the Kremlin and the Gulag round the radical Left’s neck. But we cannot. The Kremlin is now swept clean of dogma, the Gulag is gone, and Russia is just another sordid despotism.

And so, freed from embarrassing associations with Lenin, Stalin, five-year-plans, purges, famines, and the KGB, the world’s radical reformers are far stronger, and far harder to resist, than they used to be. As long as the words “progressive,” “Communist,” and “Socialist” brought to mind images of Soviet oppression, Soviet shortages, and Soviet intolerance, millions of people were inoculated against them.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn used to complain that the Iron Curtain kept everything out of Russia except what he called the “liquid manure” of Western trash culture, which somehow seeped beneath the barriers. In a strange and subtle way, it also prevented the spread of revolution in the advanced world.

It is an interesting lesson in real power to see how much mightier left-wing ideas and movements have become since they lost the support of all those Russian tanks. Far from helping the revolutionary cause, the columns of T-72s showed to the dimmest observer that socialism is not a gentle, kindly thing but an arrogant, ironclad, goose-stepping bully, which answers doubts with bayonets as soon as it has the power to do so. There was never any need to ask how many divisions the Communist Party had because it was so anxious to show them to us.

I watched the last proper Soviet tank parade as it thundered across Red Square on Nov. 7, 1990. There were red flags, rigid salutes, slanted faces, jackboots, and lush, totalitarian music. Just behind me and to my right, a shifty and diffident Politburo huddled on top of Lenin’s tomb in the harsh wind. The thing they were uncertainly celebrating was called the Glorious October Socialist Revolution, that colossal failure that would have killed idealism off for good if we ever actually learned anything from history.

They were not enjoying themselves much because they knew just how bad everything was and suspected their days were almost over. I was enjoying it immensely because, in those days, I harbored the vain idea that the world might learn something useful from the unmitigated disaster of the Soviet Utopia. For thousands of miles in every direction, undeniable and no longer denied, lay the rusting, leaking, sagging evidence that this revolution had failed and that international socialism was a discredited, bankrupt idea.

A couple of months later, I saw some of the same tanks snarling down a midnight highway in Vilnius, capital of Lithuania, which was then battling to regain independence from Moscow. I was in a group of journalists following them, until they swung their barrels toward our taxi in a way that seemed to lack a sense of humor. Earlier that day, Soviet soldiers had opened fire on civilians, so we thought it wise to drop back. We caught up with them later and also with the corpses they had caused, officially classified as “traffic accidents.” They were part of a little known and failed attempt by Mikhail Gorbachev to seize control of the city while the world was distracted by the first phase of the recapture of Kuwait.

I saw the tanks for the last time in August 1991, when a squadron of them trundled up my Moscow street in the early morning sunshine, part of a fumbled KGB putsch against Gorbachev. The drunken collapse of this coup ended the Soviet Communist Party forever. All over Moscow, the trashcans were full of half-burned Communist Party membership cards. This was not a temporary setback but the death of an ideology. Soviet Communism had made a fool of itself and had gone. After that, of course, there could be no more Red Square parades, no more anniversaries of Glorious October, though they had one more excursion, in 1993, shelling the Russian parliament on behalf of Boris Yeltsin.

Oddly, the Communist Party, or rather its bewildered true believers, survived. No normal person continued to belong, but these rather touching, rather serious old people—far from contemptible, often incorruptible and serious, frequently decorated veterans of war—could not abandon the faith they had been brought up with. For one brief moment, when millions had their savings wiped out and were thrown out of their jobs, they seemed about to recover. But it passed, and now they linger as a sort of echo, useful to the regime as a harmless, impotent opposition.

Then it was announced that the tanks were coming back. As part of the inauguration of President Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian army would once again be allowed to drive its armor through Red Square. Had the clock really been turned back 18 years? There had been—and still is—much chatter of a return to the old hostilities.

Russia has certainly discovered that it can use its energy power to threaten its neighbors and buy Western politicians. It snarls, with good reason, over the West’s strange anti-Serb policy in Kosovo. It intervenes blatantly in the politics of Ukraine. It menaces former Soviet republics, now nervously independent, on the Baltic coast and in the Caucasus.

And Vladimir Putin, now prime minister, has effectively suffocated political and press freedom, suppressing serious dissent in parliament, banning unwelcome independent candidates from running for office, and creating a creepy mass youth movement and a creepier personality cult.

The mysterious murder of independent journalist Anna Politkovskaya, the still stranger murder of former KGB officer Alexander Litvinenko, and the rigged trial and imprisonment of the businessman Mikhail Khodorkhovsky are seen by most people as signs of the ferocious intolerance of the new regime, which officially maintains that Khodorkovsky’s trial was fair and denies any connection with the two deaths.

There is a temptation to conclude that we have returned to the days of the Evil Empire. Have we? And if so, whose fault is it? My own view, formed in Moscow during the final months of Gorbachev, is that the U.S. and its allies missed a great opportunity in Russia. We continued to be absurdly suspicious, and needlessly triumphalist, as Gorbachev dismantled his country. We forced Russia back to the humiliating borders imposed on her by Kaiser Wilhelm II at the Carthaginian Peace of Brest-Litovsk in 1917. We brought the NATO alliance up to Russia’s front door. We meddled in the Caucasus and Central Asia. But we had neither the military power nor the long-term commitment to these places to sustain these actions. Russia, sadly for the people of Georgia, Ukraine, and the Baltic Republics, will still be there waiting, long after Washington has lost interest in their fate.

And while we engaged in this maddening hubris, we thronged Moscow with experts on the free market and the outward forms of democracy but none on liberty or the rule of law. Many Russians to this day sneer at the very idea of democracy, associating it with the Yeltsin years of suppurating corruption combined with bankruptcy, when their savings were wiped out and their wages and pensions went unpaid, while oligarchs prospered. Instead of saying “demokratiya,” the normal Russian word for “democracy,” they say, with a twist of the mouth, “dermokratiya,” which translates politely as “the rule of excrement.” It is hard to blame them.

When Britain scuttled from her African colonies nearly half a century ago, she, too, was obsessed with the appearance of democracy and left behind toy parliaments, complete with opposition benches and maces. These—lacking the centuries of experience, civil war, and weary, cunning compromise that lie beneath the original—soon became laughable parodies or were simply extinguished. Interestingly, the courts Britain bequeathed lasted far longer. The idea of an independent judiciary, and of a law that is above power, appeals to something universal in the human soul. But that was never even attempted in Russia, though it would have been possible immediately after the fall of Communism.

Partly thanks to us, partly thanks to the horrible moral consequences of totalitarian socialism and the near extermination of God by systematic commissars, the new Russia is a lawless snake pit. It is dominated and populated by men stripped of morality by more than 70 years of cynical Leninism. But though the new rulers are the products of Marxism, they lack its driving purpose—or any real purpose except the gaining and keeping of wealth and power.

So Moscow, once the sacred heart of world Communism, has become a sort of Babylon, the most exhilarating, tasteless, and expensive city in the world, where you can procure anything for money and the nasty negative charisma of gangsters and spivs is on constant display. I cannot think of any other advanced capital in which you can see, side by side, all the manifestations of modern civilization and the symptoms of anarchy—ostentatious bodyguards, fenced-off compounds.

As a former resident from 18 years ago, I view the transformed city with seriously mixed feelings. It is thrilling to see the restored beauty of the churches and monasteries, sparkling with gold leaf and carefully tended, when all too recently they were semi-ruins, deliberately desecrated as reformatories for teenage louts or tatty warehouses for unwanted junk. It is a delight to stroll in the 19th-century lanes just south of the river, painted and cherished for the first time in 90 years, revealing a gracious and light-hearted Russian streetscape that was previously only visible in old prints and faded photographs.

The cleanliness of the air, compared with the brownish substance that we used to have to breathe, is another joy. Windows are washed, sidewalks are free of sudden chasms and open manholes, rats no longer sport around the entrances to the railway stations. The ambulances are no longer encrusted with dried blood, and the police, though still menacing, manage to be a little less slovenly. Even the great gloomy Stalinist skyscrapers, scrubbed and floodlit by night, seem to have turned into truthful historical monuments of the era that conceived them.

On a fresh May morning, surrounded by all these pleasures, it is hard to remember that a squalid and repressive state is in charge, that corruption is commonplace, and that one chilly pygmy—in spirit as well as in actual size—has just been succeeded by another as president. In fact President Medvedev is even smaller than the 5’5” Vladimir Putin. An unkind rumor says that during his inauguration he never donned his chain of office for fear that it would dangle absurdly around his knees.

It was even a pleasure to watch the tanks growling through the one narrow entrance to Red Square that they can now use. In 1990, they had two ways in, but thanks to the restoration of one of Russia’s holiest places, the northern one is closed. In 1929, the shrine of the Iberian Virgin had been torn down, its holy and revered icon flung into a storehouse. Now it is back, and the military must go another way. There is a special pleasure in this for those who know about the long, violent state persecution of faith begun by Lenin and continuing well into the 1980s. It is over.

Along with the tanks came great bulbous strategic rockets, unpleasant things to see at any time, and marching young men dressed nostalgically in the uniforms of Stalin’s Red Army, a conscious attempt to resurrect national feeling among the war generation. For the previous week, Russian TV had been showing classic war films of the Stalin era, many of them much loved, for the same purpose.

I asked several Russians what they thought of this strange parade. One granddaughter of a Red Army general said that her mother, an old-fashioned patriot, was impressed, and I have no doubt that many older, less informed people were. But others were not. An old friend whose father was a submarine captain in Admiral Gorchkov’s blue-water navy and who spent his youth close to Soviet military equipment, laughed, “I hope you enjoyed our display of strategic scrap metal.”

He was not far off. The tanks and rockets on display were, at best, prototypes of machines that the Russian arms industry cannot produce in any numbers. The old system has broken down and cannot be replaced. The soldiers are part of a shabby army, as corrupt as the state it serves, that is not remotely comparable, in fighting skills or technology, to a serious Western force.

Attempts to create a professional force have so far stalled. The draft is breaking down as young men bribe their way out of service or sign up for dubious academic courses, many of them created solely to qualify students for exemption.

The display was intended to promote a picture of a modern, united Russia. But the country is still backward and disorganized, kept going only by the windfall from the high price of oil and gas. The road system is still rudimentary. Agriculture is in ruins—60 to 70 percent of food is imported—and the country manufactures nothing but weapons, vodka, and tourist knick-knacks.

There is the standard Third World division: a few monstrously rich people —130 billionaires—and a gigantic, growing class of ultra-poor, with a quarter of the population living on $2 a day. The traditional Russian response to despair is to get drunk, and alcoholism is now worse even than in the days of Leonid Brezhnev, who used a previous oil boom to ensure that his haggard people at least had enough sausage, medals, and vodka to keep them placid.

But there is one huge, important difference. Private life is now free. You may say and think what you like and nobody will put you in a camp or claim that you are insane and pump you full of mind-altering drugs. Only if you offer a direct, open challenge to authority will you be troubled—and then generally by the tax police or the fire authorities who would rather put you out of business than into jail.

Most people, understandably, are willing to accept this squalid but comfortable bargain. The fanciful idea that prosperity would automatically engender freedom, that if you give a man a Mercedes he will want a civil society, is as untrue in Russia as it is in China.

As I walked through this strange, rejuvenated city, the heart of an authoritarian tyranny that threatens itself but no longer the heart of a totalitarian ideology that threatens us, I remembered the many things about it that had most disturbed me in Soviet days but have now faded.

I recalled the little mosquito-haunted park with its statue of Pavlik Morozov, the Communist martyr. Morozov, a mythical creature who may not even have existed, denounced his father to the secret police for some anti-party crime. The horrible creature’s grandfather then, not unreasonably, murdered this unnatural brat. Morozov was turned into a national hero for putting his loyalty to party above loyalty to family.

A Russian friend once shamefacedly confessed to me that she had been taken on ritual pilgrimages to honor Morozov’s statue. His school, in the Urals, became an actual shrine. This respectable lady, who without any embarrassment would regularly lay flowers on a nearby monument to the KGB chief Yuri Andropov, felt that the worship of the Morozov cult was the most disturbing and shocking facet of her upbringing.

I remembered the horrible little nurseries, baby farms where Moscow mothers would park their children while they went off to spend their days at compulsory jobs. Life was arranged so that families needed two Soviet salaries to pay for the necessities of life, so hardly any mothers could afford to stay at home. I remembered the way that almost every adult I met was divorced. I remembered the way that abortion was the favored method of birth control.

I recalled the contempt and loathing for religion that had been successfully drummed into almost every professional person, combined with a gross ignorance of what the great faiths actually said. Above all, I concluded that the two things revolutionaries hated most were the stable married family and religious faith.

And I remembered coming back to the West, full of optimism, in 1992. And then I remembered seeing, year by year, in my own country and the U.S., new versions of all these subtle horrors: the “children’s rights” movement that encourages denunciation and sets children against their parents, the shoving of infants into daycare from an incredibly early age, the need for two salaries to pay the basic bills, the epidemic of divorce, the pandemic of abortion, the growing spiteful rage against faith. I saw all around me the construction of a system of thought that dismissed conservative, individualist points of view as intolerable and pathological. I saw public servants, academics, and broadcasters having their careers ruined—and in Britain being questioned by the police—for expressing incorrect opinions. Private life, in the modern West, is now becoming significantly less free than it is in post-ideological Moscow.

I have begun to suspect that the bacillus of revolution, once confined inside the borders of the USSR, did not die with Communism. On the contrary, it adapted itself and escaped in a new form. Now it rages busily in a world where, instead of storming the Winter Palace, the post office, and the railroad station, the enemies of freedom infiltrate the TV studio, the college campus, and the school. There is a new Cold War after all, but it is being fought inside our borders, without tanks or missiles.
_________________________________

Peter Hitchens is a columnist for the London Mail on Sunday and blogs at Mail online - Peter Hitchens.

 

[muse]

From todays DAWN


Anti-Americanism & Taliban
By Pervez Hoodbhoy


THE recent killing of eleven Pakistani soldiers at Gora Prai by American and Nato forces across the border in Afghanistan unleashed an amazing storm.

Prime Minister Gilani declared, “We will take a stand for sovereignty, integrity and self-respect.” The military announced defiantly, “We reserve the right to protect our citizens and soldiers against aggression,” while Army chief, Gen Pervez Ashfaq Kayani, called the attack ‘cowardly’. The dead became ‘shaheeds’ and large numbers of people turned up to pray at their funerals.

But had the killers been the Taliban, this would have been a non-event. The storm we saw was more about cause than consequence. Protecting the sovereignty of the state, self-respect, citizens and soldiers against aggression, and the lives of Pakistani soldiers, suddenly all acquired value because the killers were American and Nato troops.

Compare the response to Gora Prai with the near silence about the recent kidnapping and slaughter by Baitullah Mehsud’s fighters of 28 men near Tank, some of whom were shot and others had their throats cut. Even this pales before the hundred or more attacks by suicide bombers over the last year that made bloody carnage of soldiers and officers, devastated peace jirgas and public rallies, and killed hundreds praying in mosques and at funerals.

These murders were largely ignored or, when noted, simply shrugged off. The very different reactions to the casualties of American and Nato violence, compared to those inflicted by the Taliban, reflect a desperate confusion about what is happening in Pakistan and how to respond.

Some newspaper and television commentators want Pakistan to withdraw from the American-led war on Al Qaeda and the Taliban, to stop US fuel and ammunition supplies into Afghanistan, and hit hard against Afghan troops when provoked. One far-right commentator even urges turning our guns against the Americans and Nato, darkly hinting that Pakistan is a nuclear power.

There is, of course, reason for people in Pakistan and across the world to feel negatively about America. In pursuit of its self-interest, wealth and security, the United States has for decades waged illegal wars, bribed, bullied and overthrown governments, supported tyrants, undermined movements for progressive change, and now feels free to kidnap, torture, imprison, and kill anywhere in the world with impunity. All this, while talking about supporting democracy and human rights.

Even Americans — or at least the fair-minded ones among them — admit that there is a genuine problem. A June 2008 report of the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs entitled The Decline in America’s Reputation: Why? concluded that contemporary anti-Americanism stemmed from “the perception that the proclaimed American values of democracy, human rights, tolerance, and the rule of law have been selectively ignored by successive administrations when American security or economic considerations are in play”.

American hypocrisy has played into the hands of Islamic militants. They have been vigorously promoting the notion that this is a bipolar conflict of Islam, which they claim to represent, versus imperialism. Many Pakistanis, who desperately want someone to stand up to the Americans, buy into this.

This is a fatal mistake. The militants are using America as a smokescreen for their real agenda. Created by poverty, a war-culture, and the macabre manipulations of Pakistan’s intelligence services, the militants want more than just to fight an aggressor from across the oceans. Their goal is to establish their writ over that of the Pakistani state. For this, they have been attacking and killing people in Pakistan through the 1990s, well before 9/11. Remember also that the 4,000-plus victims of jihad in Pakistan over the last year have been Muslims with no connection at all to America. In fact, the Taliban are waging an armed struggle to remake society. They will keep fighting this war even if America were to miraculously evaporate into space.

A Taliban victory would transport us into the darkest of dark ages. These fanatics dream of transforming the country into a religious state where they will be the law. They stone women to death, cut off limbs, kill doctors for administering polio shots, force girl-children into burqa, threaten beard-shaving barbers with death, blow up girls schools at a current average of two per week, forbid music, punish musicians, destroy 2000-year statues. Even flying kites is a life-threatening sin.

The Taliban agenda has no place for social justice and economic development. There is silence from Taliban leaders about poverty, and the need to create jobs for the unemployed, building homes, providing education, land reform, or doing away with feudalism and tribalism. They see no need for worldly things like roads, hospitals and infrastructure.

If the militants of Pakistan ever win it is clear what our future will be like. Education, bad as it is today, would at best be replaced by the mind-numbing indoctrination of the madressahs whose gift to society would be an army of suicide bombers. In a society policed by vice-and-virtue squads, music, art, drama, and cultural expressions would disappear. Pakistan would re-tribalise and resemble a cross between Fata and Saudi Arabia (minus the oil).

Pakistanis tolerate these narrow-minded, unforgiving men because they claim to fight for Islam. But the Baitullahs and Fazlullahs know nothing of the diversity, and creative richness of Muslims, whether today or in the past. Intellectual freedom led to science, architecture, medicine, arts and crafts, and literature that were the hallmark of Islamic civilisation in its golden age. They grew because of an open-minded, tolerant, cosmopolitan, and multi-cultural character. Caliphs, such as Haroon-al-Rashid and Al-Mamoun, brought together scholars of diverse faiths and helped establish a flourishing culture. Today’s self-declared amir-ul-momineen, like Mullah Omar, would gladly behead great Islamic scholars like Ibn Sina and Al-Razi for heresy and burn their books.

Pakistan must find the will to fight the Taliban. The state, at both the national and provincial level, must assert its responsibility to protect life and law rather than simply make deals. State functionaries, and even the khasadars, have disappeared from much of the tribal areas. Pakistan is an Islamic state falling into anarchy and chaos, being rapidly destroyed from within by those who claim to fight for Islam.

Pakistanis must not be deceived. This is no clash of civilisations. To the Americans, Pakistan is an instrument to be used for their strategic ends. It is necessary and possible to say no. But the Taliban seek to capture and bind the soul and future of Pakistan in the dark prison fashioned by their ignorance. As they now set their sights on Peshawar and beyond, they must be resisted by all possible means, including adequate military force.

The writer teaches at Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad

 

[muse]

Any implications for Pakistan?


Want democracy in Iraq? Culture matters.
Consider what happened with US occupation in Haiti, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.
By Lawrence E. Harrison
from the July 1, 2008 edition



Vineyard Haven, Mass. - Sen. John McCain recently suggested that pacification of Iraq and the departure of American forces was feasible by 2013. But pacification of Iraq is not how President Bush defines success.

The president recently restated his goal: to transform Iraq into democratic-capitalist modernity, much as Germany and Japan had been transformed during the military occupations that followed their defeat in World War II.

But Iraq is an Arab country, and no Arab country has yet been able to consolidate democracy, and that includes Jordan and Lebanon, the two that are most developed. Literacy rates illustrate the difficulty of modernizing Iraq: in 2003/04, 57 percent of women in 15 Arab countries were literate. World Bank data show just 30 percent of Iraqi females as literate in 2003.

And, of course, democratization in Iraq is vastly complicated by the longstanding hostility between the majority Shiite and the minority Sunni, and between those two Arab sects and the Iraqi Kurds.

By contrast, Germany and Japan were highly developed industrial nations with fully integrated and educated populaces. And their governments had both surrendered unconditionally.

Our military occupations of three underdeveloped countries in the Caribbean basin in the early decades of the 20th century may have far greater relevance for Iraq.

Motivated chiefly by concern over German presence in unstable Caribbean countries at the time of the opening of the Panama Canal, President William Howard Taft ordered the military occupation of Nicaragua, which lasted from 1912 to 1933. Woodrow Wilson followed suit in Haiti (1915-34) and the Dominican Republic (1916-24).

As in Iraq, these interventions combined elements of realpolitik and what Franklin Roosevelt's Latin America expert Sumner Welles subsequently described as the role of the Evangel: to reform the conditions of life and government of the sovereign republics of the American hemisphere.

But Mr. Welles concluded with respect to US-imposed democratic reform, "All sense of proportion was lost."

The dubiousness of the Bush credo "These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society" is underscored by the aftermath of those prolonged military occupations:

Nicaragua: The US Marines occupied Nicaragua from 1912 to 1933 and attempted to install democratic institutions. But the occupation provoked an insurgency led by Augusto César Sandino, who became a symbol of resistance to US intervention. In step with Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor policy, the Marines left in 1933.

In 1936, Nicaragua's National Guard commander General Anastasio Somoza García initiated a dictatorial dynasty that would last for 43 years. A successful revolution led by the leftist Sandinistas – "children of Sandino"– forced Anastasio Somoza Debayle into exile in 1979, leading to another US military intervention through aid to the contras in the 1980s. Democratic continuity was established in the elections of 1990, but it is fragile and marred by extensive corruption.

Haiti: The Marines' occupation of Haiti also provoked a militant reaction – the "Caco" insurgencies. The first insurgency was put down by the end of 1915. But a second insurgency, prompted in part by abuses of the US-trained Haitian Gendarmerie, erupted late in 1918. The Gendarmerie was unable to contain it, but the First US Marine Brigade succeeded in ending the uprising.

Atrocities committed by US military during the second Caco campaign led to Senate hearings during 1921-22.

The Marines left Haiti in 1934. Haitian politics soon returned to the authoritarianism, exploitation, and corruption that had characterized most Haitian governments going back to independence in 1804. The American military returned in 1994 to reinstall President Jean-Bertrand Aristide – and again in 2004 to escort him out and help try to make order out of chaos.

Dominican Republic: The democratic institutions installed by the United States soon started to unravel after the Marines left the Dominican Republic in 1924, and Rafael Leonidas Trujillo, who had been groomed by the Marines to lead the Dominican National Guard, assumed dictatorial powers in 1930 that would last for more than three decades. Trujillo was assassinated in 1961. The instability that followed precipitated another US military intervention in 1965 motivated principally by concern that the revolution would lead to a "second Cuba" in the Caribbean. The crisis passed, and democratic continuity was more or less established in 1966.

These three examples demonstrate how good intentions expressed through military force and money can be frustrated by cultures that are not congenial to democratic institutions. The Bush administration's idea that "These values of freedom are right and true for every person, in every society" ignores the lessons not only of these three cases, but also of the more generalized problems of democratization in the Islamic world, Africa, and Latin America.

Surely past and present Bush advisers such as Paul Wolfowitz and Condoleezza Rice have read Alexis de Tocqueville's classic "Democracy in America." But they – and Senator McCain – must have forgotten its overriding lesson: When it comes to the viability of democracy, more than anything else, culture matters.

Lawrence E. Harrison directs the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. His most recent book is "The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change a Culture and Save It from Itself."

 

[muse]

"All wars of the 20th century have been religious wars"



Anniversary of a prophesy
By H.D.S. Greenway Published: July 8, 2008

Fifteen years have passed since Foreign Affairs published Samuel Huntington's "The Clash of Civilizations?" in its summer issue. It has subsequently become the most sought after article for reprints in the magazine's history.

The essay, and the book by the same title minus the question mark, caused a storm among political scientists, many of whom simply refused to believe that, after the end of the Cold War, future conflicts would be over something so old fashioned. Only George Kennan's article on how to contain the Soviet Union after World War II, bylined X, can compete with Huntington's in terms of influence.

"The dominant source of conflict will be cultural," Huntington famously predicted, and "fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future."

Stroke, a failing heart and complications from diabetes have reduced Huntington, whom Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins University called "arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century," to bed and a wheelchair these days.

Now in his 81st year, he has good days and not so good days in the world of what has come to be called assisted living. His facility is a shingled building on Martha's Vineyard that resembles a turn of the century summer cottage.

His wife of 50 years, Nancy, lives nearby in a house built on the royalties of "Clash," as everyone calls Huntington's scoop of perception. Letters and e-mails still pour in, and the book has been translated into many languages, the latest being Albanian.

Perhaps the most articulate criticism of "Clash" came from Ajami who wrote, in 1993, that Huntington's thesis had not taken full account of modernization, that civilizations were no longer pure and unique; not "buried alive, as it were, by the Cold War."

Ajami, also writing in Foreign Affairs, quoted Joseph Conrad in whose novels characters, going out east of Suez for the first time, would observe: "the East spoke to me, but it was in a western voice."

Conrad, however, lived in a time when the Western domination of the East was at its height. Huntington saw that with the end of imperialism and the end of the Cold War, the East might begin to push back. Huntington recognized that of all the distinguishing characteristics demarking civilizations, religion was the most powerful.

Huntington noted that the Spanish Civil War had "provoked intervention from countries that politically were fascist, communist, and democratic (while) the Yugoslav conflict is provoking intervention from countries that are Muslim, Orthodox and Western Christian."

Ajami, however, wrote that "Huntington underestimates the tenacity of modernity and secularity in places that acquired these ways against great odds..."

The last 15 years have not seen conflict along all the fault lines that Huntington predicted, but his theories are looking ever more prescient, especially "along the boundaries of the crescent shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia," as he wrote in 1993.

This January, writing in The New York Times, Ajami graciously admitted he had been wrong. "Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history's compliance than he could ever have imagined." Ajami wrote that Huntington had understood the "youth bulge" that was "unsettling Muslim societies, and that young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism."

Their rise had overwhelmed the order between Muslims and other peoples. "Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated...had faded." Huntington, Ajami wrote, had always swam "against the current of prevailing opinion" which, 15 years ago, held that globalization and modernization would sweep all before it.

"It would be unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say 'I told you so,"' Ajami wrote, and perhaps that's true. But a copy of Ajami's confession is pinned over Huntington's bed, and the very mention of it brings a grin to his face, even on days when he doesn't feel like speaking.

 

[Flintlock]

Thanks Muse. You're putting together a great collection of articles.

 

[muse]

"It's broken, It no longer functions to solve problems - that's what it's supposed to do, solve problems"


From todays Khaleej Times


A dead end in Asian politics
BY FARISH A NOOR (Asian Edge)

10 July 2008
It has become the common blight of many a postcolonial state that the discrepancy between political idealism and the realities on the ground grow wider by the day. It has also been my singular misfortune that the nature of my work as a political scientist who studies the uneven development of many such nation-states means that I have grown somewhat jaded by such contradictions that are all too evident when one is distant from the country in question.

Over the past decade I have travelled across South and Southeast Asia looking at the painfully slow pace of development in countries like Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia and the rest of Southeast Asia. The political elite of these countries talk on and on about development, progress, emancipation (both economic and mental) and yet remain beholden captives to the racialised ideologies of the colonial past.

Their feeble attempts at deconstructing the legacy of Empire often dwindles down to little more than a vulgar pastiche of reversed Orientalism at best, (as if the racism of Asians is somehow better than the racism of the European colonialists who came before); and their steadfast refusal to adapt to changes around them is irritating and infuriating to witness at close range.

In India and Pakistan I watched as my fellow academic friends who play the role of public intellectuals and who have been calling for peace and reconciliation between the two countries have been systematically denounced as 'race traitors', 'cowards', the fifth column within, etc.

Some of the best minds that secular democratic India has produced have been pilloried and harangued by right-wing Hindutva fundamentalists who have called them 'traitors' to the great Hindu cause, labelled them 'Muslim-lovers' or worse still, apologists for the great Western conspiracy against the motherland.

The same level of puerile non-debate can be seen in Southeast Asia too: Thai pacifists who have called for a settled end to the hostilities in the Muslim south have been denounced as apologists for Muslim extremists; in Malaysia academics who have called for the re-working and re-negotiation of the social contract have been labelled 'race traitors'; in Indonesia moderate Muslim intellectuals who have defended Indonesia's plural society and culture have been branded enemies of Islam. So what gives?

The country that is closest to my heard is, of course, Malaysia and the recent developments in the country has given me reason to be worried about its future. Religious and racial sectarianism remain the dominant features on its political landscape and there is the apparent need for some form of national reconciliation and healing.

Yet events over the past two weeks have made a mockery of Malaysia's claim to be a developing country with first world ambitions: Despite the skyscrapers that claw at the heavens above Kuala Lumpur, the mega-malls that devour their consumers by the thousands, the massive highways that are crammed with cars; the state of Malaysian politics today beggars belief.

At a time when all of Asia is on the brink of a global recession sparked by the rising costs of oil and gas and the collapse of the American Dollar, the issues that count ought to be structural-economic ones instead. But what has transpired over the past two weeks have shown that despite the flashy suits and corporate videos broadcasting the bold and brazen image of Malaysia Inc., the country's politics remains trapped in the swamp of the banal and ridiculous.

For a start sodomy season has returned to Malaysia with a vengeance with allegations of sodomy being levelled against Anwar Ibrahim, de facto head of the Peoples Justice Party (PKR) and adviser to the Peoples Alliance opposition coalition. Not to be outdone, those close to Anwar have also made disclosures about the alleged sexcapades of Malaysia's ruling elite and senior politicians in the country; but only to have the very same allegations withdrawn a day later.

The rally to protest the rise in oil prices on 6 July that was aiming to gather a million Malaysians only managed to bring together 25 to 30 thousand, and was marred by an equally embarrassing incident when conservative Islamists stormed the stage during the performance of a punk rock band, the lead singer of which decided to moon the crowd.

In the midst of this, have we forgotten our economic essentials? And the real reason behind this global economic meltdown, which happened to be the skewed uneven global economy, we have all inadvertently created thanks to our dependency on the US economy? Or has politics been reduced to bottoms and sodomy for now?

All of this has made it increasingly difficult for me to explain the nature of Malaysian politics to my European colleagues where I am currently on the seminar circuit. How, pray tell, does a global economic crisis degenerate to the level of sodomy allegations and why on earth does the personality of politicians matter more at a time when the overbearing global economic structures have taken on a life of their own?

Voodoo politics was a term once fashionable in the 1970s and we seem to have returned to our political myths and ghost stories with relish. As oil and gas prices are set to soar across Asia, the manifestations of public outrage and frustration is bound to spill into the streets. But in Malaysia, as in the case of Indonesia, the results are freaky and unpredictable at best. Why, in Indonesia the ones who seem to have benefitted the most are the Islamist parties that have been scoring hits at all the local elections. So once again, what gives?

Politics has always been influenced by elements that are variable and sometimes even irrational; but this time round the weird and wonderful manifestation of collective anger and frustration may take us to the end of politics itself, and with that our aspirations for development, progress and political maturity can be dumped into the bin as well. How terribly sad![/B]

Dr Farish A. Noor is Senior Fellow, Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Research Director for the Research Cluster 'Transnational Religion in Contemporary Southeast Asia', Nanyang Tech Uni, Singapore

 

[muse]

Understanding Jihadi Networks
Strategic Insights
by Marc Sageman, M.D., Ph.D.

Introduction

The terrorist threat to the United States of America comes from a violent Islamist revivalist social movement, united by a utopian vision of justice and fairness. Our efforts to deal with this threat are hampered by the wide variety of commonly held beliefs about terrorism. Conventional wisdom offers up several explanations: terrorists are a product of poverty and broken families; ignorance; the lack of skills and opportunities; thelack of occupational or family responsibilities; weak-mindedness and vulnerability to brainwashing; mental illness, psychopathy or sociopathy; plain criminality; religious fanaticism; or simply evil. My current study attempts to empirically test this conventional wisdom through the accumulation and analysis of biographical data on real terrorists who have sought to harm the United States.[1]

Traditionally, the study of terrorism has been hampered by attempts to define terrorism. Indeed, a common quip is that one man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter. So, my first task was to identify whom to include in this sample. My study was interested only in those terrorists connected to the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks. Therefore, it has excluded other terrorists such as the Palestinians or the Tamil Tigers—who are often lumped together, but who are not specifically linked to the anti-American perpetrators of 9/11. In order to delineate who belongs in my sample, it was necessary to define the threat to the United States.

The terrorists who flew into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and crashed into the fields of Pennsylvania on 9/11 were part of al Qaeda. The term al Qaeda is confusing, because it refers both to a specific organization and to a more diffuse and global social movement at war with the United States. The formal al Qaeda organization is the vanguard of this violent Islamist revivalist social movement. But I chose to include in my sample people who belong to this terrorist social movement, which I called the global Salafi jihad, because many of the terrorists are not formally in al Qaeda—in the sense of swearing an oath of loyalty to Osama bin Laden, its leader—but they are nevertheless fellow travelers with them. In order to define who belongs to this social movement, it is important to understand its nature.

The Evolution of the Global Salafi Jihad Ideology

The terrorist social movement is held together by a common vision. This arose in the context of gradual Muslim decadence over the past five hundred years, during which Islam fell from its dominant position in the world. Because Islam claims to be the last and perfect revelation from God, this decline presents a problem. Many explanations, secular and religious, have tried to deal with this obvious mismatch between claim and reality. One of the more popular religious explanations is simply that Muslims have strayed from the righteous path. The source of strength of the original and righteous Muslim community was its faith and its practices, which pleased God. Recapturing the glory and grandeur of the Golden Age requires a return to the authentic faith of the ancient ones—namely the Prophet Mohammed and his companions, the Salaf, from the Arabic word for predecessor or ancient one. The revivalist versions of Islam advocating such a return are called Salafi. Their strategy is the creation of a pure Islamist state, which would create the conditions for the reestablishment of such a community.

Most Salafists advocate a peaceful takeover of the state, either through face-to-face proselytism or the creation of legitimate political parties. Their peaceful strategy was undermined by President Nasser’s brutal crackdown in the name of a pan-Arabist socialist project. Some Islamists like Sayyid Qutb concluded that Nasser would never give up power peacefully, and preached his violent overthrow.[2] He argued that Muslim countries had reached a state of decadence, injustice and unfairness, which was similar to the state of barbarism, jahiliyya, prevailing in the Arabian Peninsula just before the revelations of the Quran. This was due to a “crisis of values,” namely greed, corruption and promiscuity, which could only be redressed from above, by capturing the state. Because their rulers were accused of having abandoned true Islam, they were branded apostates, and the Quranic punishment for apostasy was death. Mohammad Abdal Salam Faraj[3] further claimed that the violent overthrow of these rulers, the “near enemy,” was the forgotten duty of each Muslim, a sixth pillar of Islam.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan internationalized the militant Islamist movement. Sheikh Abdallah Azzam preached a traditional jihad against the Soviet invaders. Many militants from all over the Muslim world answered his call. As the Soviets withdrew, Azzam extended the defensive jihad into a more global one. He preached that all former Muslim lands dating back to the fifteenth century, from the Philippines to Spain, had to be liberated from the infidels. After the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, these militants focused on the other lands under infidel occupation. They gathered in the Sudan where they held intense discussions about their failure to capture a core Arab state and transform it into an Islamist state. Some militants, led by Osama bin Laden, argued that this failure was due to the United States propping up the local regimes.

The strategy that the most militant advocated was to switch priorities and fight the “far enemy”—the United States and Jews—in order to expel them from the Middle East, so that they could overthrow the “near enemy”, their own regimes. This argument split the Islamist militant community, for many did not want to take on and provoke a powerful enemy like the United States. But Osama bin Laden and his followers returned to Afghanistan and declared war on the United States.[4] In February 1998, bin Laden extended his “Jihad against Jews and Crusaders” to civilians outside the Middle East, ruling that “to kill the Americans and their allies—civilians and military—is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it.”[5]

With the evolution of this ideology and social movement in mind, it becomes possible to select the terrorists that belong in this sample: They are those who use violence against any foreign or non-Muslim government or population (the “far enemy&#8221 to establish an Islamist state in a core Arab region.

The History of the Global Salafi Jihad

The immediate historical roots of the present terrorist Islamist revivalist social movement go back to Egypt in the 1970s—when President Anwar al-Sadat encouraged the formation of Islamic Societies at the universities to counter the leftist supporters of Nasser. Some of these militants adopted the radical views of Qutb and Faraj and turned against Sadat himself when he made peace with Israel. They were responsible for his assassination in 1981. Most of these militants were arrested and tortured in a crackdown after Sadat's assassination. Those not directly involved were released three years later, and found their way to Afghanistan in support of Sheikh Azzam’s jihad against the Soviets.

The presence in Afghanistan and Peshawar of so many Islamist militants from all over the world transformed the jihad—from a collection of local attempts to overthrow their governments to a more international movement reclaiming former Muslim lands lost to the infidels over the past five centuries. After their victory in Afghanistan, most of the foreigners returned to their home countries. But those who could not, mostly because of prior terrorist activities at home, stayed behind and became the nucleus of al Qaeda, the organization.

After many Middle Eastern countries complained to Pakistan that it was harboring terrorists, Pakistan expelled them. The most militant went to the Sudan, invited by the new militant regime of Hassan al-Turabi, who tried to unify the disparate local Islamist terrorist movements under one umbrella. His greatest supporter in this enterprise was Osama bin Laden, who set up camps in the Sudan and Afghanistan for the training of terrorists coming from the whole world. During this Sudanese episode, the most militant terrorists switched priorities to target a common enemy, the United States.

The imposition of international sanctions on the Sudan after it supported a serious assassination attempt on Egyptian President Mubarak during a state visit in Addis Ababa forced the Sudan to expel the terrorists. The few who agreed with bin Laden’s strategy of going after the “far enemy” returned to Afghanistan, and within two months of their arrival, declared war on the United States. So the threat to the United States came from a process of self selection—in which the most militant of the most militant of the most militant switched their targets from their own governments to the United States.

Their return to Afghanistan heralded the start of a close collaboration with the Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who provided sanctuary to the now-global Salafi jihad. This allowed Osama bin Laden to gain control over this social movement through his monopoly on training and funding support for the various local Islamist terrorist groups scattered around the world. This gave the appearance of a hierarchical organization, with al Qaeda (Osama bin Laden’s organization) at the top with strong command and control over the whole movement. During the five years leading to 9/11, this was mostly true—as bin Laden and his lieutenants provided training for local Islamist terrorists, housed them and their families in protected areas in Afghanistan, supported them with logistics and funds, and gave advice on their operations. In a real sense, for about five years, Osama bin Laden achieved in Afghanistan what Turabi had tried to do in the Sudan.

The U.S. reaction to the 9/11 terrorist operation changed the movement. The elimination of sanctuaries in Afghanistan, the destruction of the training camps and the disruption of the financial “golden chain” for the jihad undermined bin Laden’s and al Qaeda’s control over the social movement, which degraded back into smaller local networks of operatives, now linked through the Internet. To the extent that these smaller clusters of terrorists respond to the Salafi vision and general guidance from al Qaeda, they are still part of this global Salafi jihad. But there is no more need for a strong command and control structure. Now, this social movement is self generated from below, very similar in structure and behavior to the World Wide Web itself, which shows that there is no need for top down control for the network to grow and prosper.

Methodology

My present study is based on the collection of biographical details of people who belong to this global Salafi jihad. There is a paralyzing assumption in terrorism research that there is no good data for research, based on three presumptions:
1. That terrorists would not grant interviews to serious researchers for security reasons;

2. That states would not grant access to captured terrorists for national security reasons; and

3. The one can never besure whether the terrorists would be honest with the interviewer.

This has prevented the emergence of evidence-based terrorism research. However, with the development of the Internet, open source data has become more available—even in one’s home. Indeed, all the data collected for this study came from the public domain. I did not have direct access to the terrorists or to any government’s secret reports. But despite the problems listed above, I found there is enough information in open sources to support an empirical analysis of the global Salafi jihad.

My sources included the documents and transcripts of legal proceedings involving global Salafi terrorists and their organizations; government documents; press and scholarly articles; and Internet articles. The information was often inconsistent, so I considered the source of the information when assessing facts. In decreasing degrees of reliability, I favored transcripts of court proceedings subject to cross examination; government documents such as the 9/11 Commission Report; reports of court proceedings; corroborated information from people with direct access to the information provided; uncorroborated statements from people with direct access to the information provided; and, finally, statements from people who had heard information secondhand. “Experts” fall into the last category—for their reliability as sources of information depends on their diligence as historians.

The collected information suffers from several limitations:
1. First, the terrorists selected are hardly representative of the global Salafi jihad as a whole. Journalists and scholars tend to focus on the unusual: leaders, people they can investigate and unusual cases. This bias toward leaders and unusual cases tends to ignore those who cannot be investigated and downplays the rank and file.

2. Second, reliance on journalistic accounts is fraught with danger. In the rush to publish, the initial information may not be reliable. Lack of direct access to information feeds the wildest rumors, and journalists are born storytellers, who fill in the gaps in knowledge. These initial inaccuracies can be corrected by following the developing stories over time, rather than simply relying on initial reporting.

3. Third, reliance on retrospective accounts from principals and witnesses are subject to the biases of self-reporting and flawed memory. These accounts were often the only available information, and were only very occasionally able to be corroborated with existing contemporaneous documents.

4. Finally, there is a lack of a relevant control group that would allow the generation of statements specific to the terrorists. It is difficult to make specific statements about these terrorists without comparison to a group of Muslims with similar backgrounds and activities who did not participate in terrorism despite having had an opportunity to do so.

Nevertheless, the hope is that even though each piece of information may be of questionable validity, the emerging pattern would be accurate given the large numbers involved. A description of the potential sample might be able to support or refute the conventional wisdom about al Qaeda terrorism. Using the definition of a terrorist elaborated in the previous section, I was able to identify 394 terrorists—on whom there existed enough background information to include them in empirical generalizations as to age, origin, religious commitment, and education. I was able to codify them into a matrix with 34 variables, most of which dealt with their relationships to each other and are not relevant to this Strategic Insight .

Profiles of the al Qaeda Terrorists

As mentioned above, the common stereotype is that terrorism is a product of poor, desperate, naïve, single young men from Third World counties, vulnerable to brainwashing and recruitment into terror. Unpacking this formula, the geographical origins of the mujahedin should be not only the Third World, but some of the poorest countries of the Third World. It also implies that they come from the lowest socio-economic strata. Their naïve vulnerability implies that they either are brainwashed early into hatred of the West, or are relatively uneducated and susceptible to such brainwashing as young adults. In this sense, they are relatively unsophisticated and local in their outlook. A broad experience of the world might be protective against the alleged brainwashing that presumably led to their conversion to terrorism. The desperation implies that their occupational opportunities are extremely limited. They are single, for any strong family responsibilities might prevent their total dedication to a cause that demands their ultimate sacrifice.

But in fact, most of the global Salafi terrorists come from core Arab countries, immigrant communities in the West, Indonesia or Malaysia. They do not come from the poorest countries in the world, including Afghanistan.

Surprisingly, there are no Afghans in my sample. In terms of socio-economic background, three-fourths come from upper and middle class families. Far from coming from broken families, they grew up in caring, intact families, and were mildly religious and concerned about their communities. In terms of education, over 60% have some college education. Most are in the technical fields, such as engineering, architecture, computers, medicine, and business.

This is all the more remarkable because college education is still relatively uncommon in the countries or immigrant communities they come from. Far from being immature teenagers, the men in my sample joined the terrorist organization at an average age of 26.

Most of the terrorists have some occupational skills. Three-fourths are either professional (physicians, lawyers, architects, engineers, or teachers) or semi-professionals (businessmen, craftsmen, or computer specialists). They are solidly anchored in family responsibilities. Three-fourths are married and the majority have children. There was no indication of weak minds brainwashed by their family or education. About half of the sample grew up as religious children, but only 13% of the sample, almost all of them in Southeast Asia, were madrassa educated. The entire sample from the North African region and the second generation Europeans went to secular schools. About ten percent were Catholic converts to Islam, who could not have been brainwashed into Islam as children.

Another popular set of explanations of terrorism centers on mental illness or innate criminality. Such popular explanations are based on the belief that “normal” people do not kill civilians indiscriminately. Such killing, especially when combined with suicide, is viewed as irrational.

The mental illness thesis is dealt a strong blow by the fact that only one percent of the sample had hints of a thought disorder, which is below the base rate for thought disorder worldwide. A variant of the abnormality thesis is that terrorists are sociopaths, psychopaths, or people with antisocial personality disorders. These terms are used to mean that terrorists are recidivist criminals, due to some defect of personality. Such recidivism implies that this personality defect had some antecedents in childhood. Out of the third of my sample where I had some fragment of childhood data, less than eight percent showed evidence of a conduct disorder. The rest of this group seems to have had normal childhood without any evidence of getting in trouble with the law.

On a logical basis, although antisocial people might become individual terrorists, they would not do well in a terrorist organization. Because of their personalities, they would not get along with others or fit well in an organization, and indeed would be least likely to join any organization that would demand great sacrifices from them. They would be weeded out early if they attempted to join. Likewise, very few people in my sample had any criminal background. Those who did came from the excluded North African immigrant community in Europe and Canada, where they resorted to petty crime to survive. But there were no previously violent criminals in this sample. Therefore, it is more parsimonious to argue that in an organized operation demanding great personal sacrifice, those least likely to do any harm individually are best able to do so collectively.

The failure of mental illness as an explanation for terrorism is consistent with three decades of research that has been unable to detect any significant pattern of mental illness in terrorists. Indeed, these studies have indicated that terrorists are surprisingly normal in terms of mental health[6].

Group Dynamics

The above findings refute the conventional wisdom about terrorists. The global Salafi terrorists were generally middle-class, educated young men from caring and religious families, who grew up with strong positive values of religion, spirituality, and concern for their communities. They were truly global citizens, conversant in three or four languages, and skilled in computer technology. One of the striking findings of this sample is that three-fourths of the terrorists joined the jihad as expatriates, mostly as upwardly mobile young men studying abroad. At the time, they were separated from their original environment. An additional ten percent were second generation in the West, who felt a strong pull for the country of their parents. So a remarkable 84% were literally cut off from their culture and social origins. They were homesick, lonely, and alienated. Although they were intellectually gifted, they were marginalized, underemployed and generally excluded from the highest status in the new society.

Although they were not religious, they drifted to mosques for companionship. There, they met friends or relatives, with whom they moved in together often for dietary reasons. As their friendship intensified, they became a “bunch of guys,” resenting society at large, which excluded them, developing a common religious collective identity, and egging themselves on to greater extremism.

By the time they joined the jihad, there was a dramatic shift in devotion to their faith. About two-thirds of those who joined the jihad did so collectively with their friends or had a long time childhood friend already in the jihad. Another fifth had close relatives already in the jihad. These friendship or kinship bonds predated any ideological commitment. Once inside the social movement, they cemented their mutual bonds by marrying sisters and daughters of other terrorists. There was no evidence of “brainwashing”—the future terrorists simply acquired the beliefs of their friends.

Joining this violent social movement was a bottom-up activity. Al Qaeda had no top-down formal recruitment program. There was neither a central committee with a budget dedicated to recruitment nor any general campaign of recruitment. There was no need for either. There were plenty of volunteers who wanted to join the jihad. Al Qaeda’s problem was never recruitment but selection. It was akin to applying to a very selective college. Many apply but few are accepted. Likewise, al Qaeda was able to assess and evaluate potential candidates who showed a desire to join by coming to Afghanistan for training. It invited only about 15 to 25 percent of that group to join the jihad. However, this reliance on self-recruits had a drawback: namely gaps in the distribution of the jihad. One of these gaps was the United States.

The few volunteers from the United States who came to Afghanistan to join the jihad were shocked by the anti-Americanism in the training camps, which was based on beliefs and ideas about the United States that they knew from personal experience to be false. Some, like the Lackawanna Six, tried to leave early or simply forget about their experience. Because of this gap, al Qaeda had to import terrorists from elsewhere to wage their war on U.S. soil. This was easier to do before 9/11 when there was easy access for Saudi citizens. But since 9/11, the United States has hardened the entry to the country, and increased its vigilance against suspicious foreign activities—making such operations much more difficult. The lack of an indigenous terrorist population (“sleeper cells&#8221 and the hardening of the U.S. target account for the lack of major al Qaeda operations in the United States since 9/11. In contrast, most of the global Salafi jihad operations conducted elsewhere in the world after 9/11 relied heavily on indigenous global Salafi terrorists.

The process just described is grounded in social relations and dynamics. To look at it through individual lenses, as a Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island narrative, is to miss the fundamental social nature of this process. And this is where women play a critical role. So far, the account of the global Salafi jihad seems to be a pure male story of heroic warriors fighting the evil West. Yet women also play a critical role in this process. They provide the invisible infrastructure of the jihad. As influential parts of the social environment, they often encourage their relatives and friends to join the jihad. Many Christian converts or secular Muslims joined because of marriage to a committed wife. Indeed, invitation to join the Indonesian Jemaah Islamiyah depends on the background of the spouse of the applicant. And once in the jihad, single members often solidify their participation by marrying the sisters of other members. This further separates the new recruit from the rest of society and increases his loyalty to the social movement.

So far, this account has neglected the religious ideological contribution to the transformation of alienated young Muslims into fanatical terrorists. The specific interpretation of Islam that promoted this violent strategy with respect to the United States played a crucial role in this transformation. It provided the script to follow for these distressed cliques of men. But very few mosques worldwide preached this aberrant strategy to transform society using the utopian Salafi community as a model. Indeed, about ten mosques worldwide generated about 50 percent of my sample. This is a very small number, suggesting that the global Salafi jihad is a small collection of localized networks of people, rather than a more widely and randomly distributed one.

This script, stressing the justice and fairness of the original Muslim community, appeals to gifted young men who are excluded from the higher rewards of society. Combined with natural group processes, it transforms their values to conform to those of their ever closer friends. Faith and commitment are grounded and sustained in intense small group dynamics as friends and peers provide support and strength to help cope with any potential hardship. These born again believers welcome struggles in this life as a test of their faith. Over time, “authentic” Islamic spirituality and religious growth replace dominant “Western” values of career advancement and material wealth, which had contributed to their original feelings of exclusion, frustration, unfairness and injustice. They embrace Qutb’s diagnosis that society faces a “crisis of values,” for its main problems are not material but spiritual. The progressive detachment from the pursuit of material needs allows them to transcend their realistically frustrated aspirations, and promotes satisfaction with spiritual goals more consistent with their limited resources and opportunities—relieving the malaise arising from their exclusion and marginalized status. Their sacrifice and participation in this Islamist vanguard provide them with a sense of moral superiority, optimism and faith in the collective future. Their activism and firm belief in the righteousness of their mission generate a sense of efficacy that enables them to overcome the apathy and fear that would otherwise inhibit high risk terrorist operations.

Over time, there is a general shift in values: from the secular to the religious; from the material to the spiritual; from short-term opportunity to long-term vision; from individual concerns to communitarian sacrifice; from apathy to active engagement; from traditional morality to specific group morality; and from worldly gains to otherworldly rewards. This transformation is possible only within intense small group face-to-face interactions. The values and fellowship of these groups not only forge intense bonds of loyalty and a collective identity, but also give a glimpse of what a righteous Islamist society could be like. The small size of these cliques and the mutual dedication of their members allow them to spontaneously resolve their problems among themselves. The quality of these small and dense networks promotes in-group love, transforming self-interest into self-sacrifice for the cause and comrades. The militants’ experience in these groups deludes them into believing that social problems would also be spontaneously resolved in a righteous Islamist society, accounting for their curious lack of concern about what this ideal society would actually look like or how it might function politically or economically.

On a less positive perspective, these same group dynamics account for their hatred of Jews and the United States, as illustrated from the police wiretaps of their apartments in Montreal, Hamburg and Milan. This hatred is grounded in their everyday experience of humiliating exclusion from society at large and promoted within the group by a vicious process of one-upmanship of mutual complaints about the alienating society. This “bunch of guys” phenomenon escalates resentment into a hatred and rejection of the ambient society itself. They expressed their hatred by cursing its symbols and legitimizing myths and by endorsing a conspiracy theory of Jews corrupting a now totally degenerate and unredeemable society. The wiretaps give a hint of this visceral hatred that seeks to destroy society even at the cost of their own lives. This virulent rejection of society finds a home in the doctrine of takfir or excommunication of society, which is popular in militant circles and sanctions the commission of crimes against infidels in the pursuit of the jihad.

This trajectory from low-risk participation with an increasingly closer set of friends, to medium-risk proselytism for an ideal way of life, to high-risk terrorist activities is a progressive and insidious one. This progression embraces an ideology that frames activism as a moral obligation demanding self-sacrifice and unflinching commitment to the jihad. This particular interpretation of Islam stands apart in challenging the validity of mainstream Islamic faith and practices, and it isolates the new adherents to this doctrine. Their self sacrifice is again grounded in group dynamics. The terrorist is ready to show his devotion to his now exclusive friends, their group, and their cause by seeking death as a way to show his devotion to all of them. In-group love combined with out-group hate is a strong incentive for committing mass murder and suicide.

Network Analysis

The above analysis suggests that this form of terrorism is an emergent quality of dense networks rather than an aberration based in individual pathology. Doing a qualitative social network analysis on this sample generates statements that simply cannot be generated from a more individualistic perspective.

The topology of the network representing the interpersonal links in the global Salafi jihad is divided into four major clusters of terrorists that evolved individually into four different structures. There are many links between members within a specific cluster, but very few spanning two large clusters.

At the center is the Central Staff cluster, which used to connect to the rest of the clusters before the United States' fall 2001 campaign against al Qaeda dramatically interfered with its communication to the social movement, and broke its operational links to the other clusters. This Central Staff consists mostly of Egyptian Islamist militants who were released from prison after Sadat’s assassination and who went to Afghanistan to join the jihad against the Soviets.

They formalized their bonds of friendship and kinship into al Qaeda proper after the Soviets announced their intention to withdraw. They provide the leadership, training and ideological guidance to the movement. The structure of this cluster is difficult to describe, as most of their relationships date back to the 1970s in Egypt. It is both an informal self-organizing group of friends forged during their militant activities in Egypt and during their fight against the Soviets, and a hierarchical organization with bin Laden as its emir—supported by a shura composed of about a dozen members and dominated by Egyptians. The al Qaeda staff is divided into four committees, consisting of finances, military affairs, religious affairs, and public relations.

A second cluster consists of the Southeast Asian part of the social movement, dominated by the Jemaah Islamiyah, which is hierarchically organized around the leadership of Abu Bakar Baasyir. This cluster evolved out of the recruitment of Baasyir’s students at his two schools, Pondok Ngruki in Indonesia and Pesentren Luqmanul Hakiem in Malaysia. As would be expected from top-down recruitment of former disciples, this cluster looks like a rigid pyramid, where all the significant decisions are taken at the top and showing very little local initiative. This cluster is vulnerable to decapitation if the political will to destroy this cluster existed. This cluster has been mostly eliminated in Malaysia through aggressive government counter-terrorist action but still exists in Indonesia due to internal political reasons. This type of structure may also promote splinter group formation in the future, as has been the case in the Philippines.

The other two clusters constitute the great majority of the global Salafi terrorist social movement. They consist of Core Arabs coming out of Core Arab countries from the Arabian Peninsula, Jordan and Egypt; and Maghreb Arabs coming out of Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco and their expatriate communities, mostly in France. These clusters organized themselves spontaneously around local charismatic members, often in the vicinity of very radical Salafi mosques. This preferential attachment to the jihad resulted in a small world or cellular structure, which is decentralized with much local initiative and flexibility. As such, it is very robust, resistant against random attacks such as random arrests of its members or decapitation of its leadership.

This small world structure provided for rapid diffusion of terrorist innovation through popular social hubs and provided for flexible communication in all directions, rather than slow and vulnerable vertical communications required in strict hierarchical organizations. This communicative flexibility, based on pre-existing social bonds (kinship, friendship and later informal cliques), was a major contributing factor in the successful execution of terrorist operations. These informal communications bypassed the various rules of tradecraft advocated in the terrorist manuals, which reflected a more theoretical orientation to operational security, based on the “need to know” principle. This principle implies a hierarchical topology, with strict vertical communication. Such a communicative topology would ensure the failure of any operation because it would flood the vertical links of communication and prevent people in the field from talking to each other to overcome the inevitable obstacles arising in the field during the execution of a terrorist operation. Informal communications among intimates who knew each other, often from birth, and bypassed this security regulation violated this rule of tradecraft.

This explains an apparent inconsistency found when comparing the actual execution of global Salafi terrorist operations to policies found in their manuals. The execution of their operations was characterized by very poor tradecraft on the part of the terrorists—leaving behind documents which would immediately identify them, not using aliases but real names, using their personal phones when they knew they could be monitored, and so on. Paradoxically, it is this poor use of tradecraft that made their success possible, especially when the authorities were not paying attention to the threat. In the new post-9/11 environment, this poor tradecraft makes their detection possible and hampers their operation.

After the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan eliminated al Qaeda command and control, this social movement reverted back to its original morphology. Now, its boundaries have become very fuzzy. These new terrorists no longer formally belong to a terrorist organization. They are often a “bunch of guys” inspired by al Qaeda messages on the Internet. There is no fixed number of terrorists. The pool of potential terrorists fluctuates according to local grievances and the world situation. Activated cliques of militant friends swarm together for a specific operation. They do not respond to central command and control anymore, but are self-organizing from the bottom up, fueled by local initiative. Like the Internet, they function very well with little coordination from the top.

Gaps in the network don’t last long, but become opportunities for the most aggressive to step up and fill the voids created by the elimination of the old leadership. While the old leadership has been gradually eliminated through death and capture, a complete new leadership has been reconstituted, different from the old one. Aggressive new leaders, lacking the training and support of their predecessors, conduct more frequent, reckless and hurried operations. Often, the time between conception and final execution of the operation is just weeks, not years as was true before the 9/11 operation. The difficulty of communication between the central staff and these local groups has degraded the ability of the social movement to mount operations with the same degree of sophistication and coordination of 9/11 hijacking and 1998 East African embassies bombings. The wave of future terrorist operations will be similar in scale and execution to the bombings in Saudi Arabia, Casablanca, Istanbul and Madrid.

The distribution of the global Salafi jihad is based on the presence of militant mosques preaching the specific script advocating violence against Western civilians. This script interprets U.S. foreign political action, and transforms local grievances into global ones. Groups of friends, who had no or very distant previous connection to the movement, may elect to answer these exhortations for violence and carry out terrorist operations. This makes them very difficult to detect beforehand, for the first indication of their participation in the jihad might very well be the successful execution of their operation. This has been the scenario in Casablanca, Istanbul and Madrid.

The global Salafi jihad is a unique terrorist social movement. Traditionally, terrorist organizations consist of people from A, living in country A and attacking the government of country A. The global Salafi jihad consists of people from country A, living in country B and targeting country C. This imparts a very different dynamic to this terrorist social movement as opposed to more traditional ones. One of the major differences is that because the terrorists are completely disconnected from their target, they are not socially embedded in the society they target, as is the case of more traditional terrorist organizations. This embeddedness refers to the rich nexus of social and economic linkage between the terrorists and the society they live in.

These multiple bonds act as a limit to the damages the terrorists can bring to their environment. The lack of such bonds frees them from these responsibilities and local concerns. Unrestrained by any responsibility to their target, this free-floating network is free to follow the logic of its abstract ideology and escalate the scale of terror, culminating in the 9/11 operations. This lack of embeddedness in the target society makes possible a strategy of vast devastation and damages against the target, including the use of weapons of mass destruction, which more traditional terrorists would avoid in order not to destroy their own society. This makes the global Salafi jihad especially dangerous to the United States and its allies.

New information technology has made the global Salafi jihad possible. Prior to the 1991 Sudanese exile, Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants could not have led this social movement from the remoteness of Afghanistan. By the time he returned in 1996, technology had solved his communication problems.

Satellite telephones allowed him to speak extensively with his followers in Yemen, England and Saudi Arabia; facsimiles carried his press releases to his London public relations firm; and laptops and e-mail made quick and extensive communication possible. The Internet also had a strong impact on the new, more sophisticated recruits by diffusing the violent Salafi message of the jihad, bypassing traditional imams. Since most of these computer savvy recruits had little prior religious training, they were most vulnerable to the appeal of such sites that encouraged a very aberrant interpretation of Islam and rejected traditional interpretations of Islam. The more traditional religious teachers simply could not compete with the more sophisticated militant websites, which did not require much knowledge in religion but a great deal of technical knowledge. The egalitarianism of chat-rooms on these sites also fostered a feeling of unity with other members, creating a virtual Muslim community on the Web, sustaining and encouraging extreme interpretation of the Quran and world events.

The vulnerability of the new electronic devices to interception has given the Internet more prominence in the global Salafi jihad. After the 1998 embassies bombings, bin Laden discovered through a media leak that the United States was monitoring his satellite phone conversations. He abandoned its use and communicated with his followers via his lieutenants. The post-9/11 crackdown further eroded his ability to communicate with their subordinates in the field. The old al Qaeda leadership started using Islamist websites on the Internet as indirect means of communication. This allows it to continue to provide general guidance even if it no longer exerts direct command and control over operations. For instance, it appears that the Madrid bombings were inspired by a document anonymously posted on the Internet advocating the use of bombs just before the Spanish election in order to influence the government to withdraw its troops from Iraq. In the future, this trend will continue and the leadership of the global Salafi jihad will rely more and more on the Internet to broadcast its message and to discuss tactics, as is already done in the proliferating virtual magazines. Since it is difficult to detect people who read these postings, identification of future terrorists will become even more difficult.

Conclusion

The global Salafi jihad has now become a fuzzy idea-based network, self-organizing from below, inspired by postings on the Internet. It will expand spontaneously from below according to international political developments, without coordination from above, except for general and blind guidance. From a counter-terrorist perspective, such a loose and ill-defined network does not present hard targets for military options. More subtle methods should be used to disrupt the formation of these networks by changing the social conditions promoting them, and challenging the ideas encouraging their mobilization for the United States to address the ideology uniting this social movement. This is something that the American public is loath to do as it believes in transparency, namely that the facts speak for themselves.

Any attempt to engage in a war of ideas raises the specter of disinformation or propaganda. But the United States cannot afford to concede this ideological war, waged on the battlefield of interpretations, to the militant Islamists. It needs to develop a coherent and comprehensive strategy to deal with this new and unique threat. This involves discrediting the legitimacy of the leaders and the ideology behind the global Salafi jihad and replacing it with an inspiring vision of a just and fair partnership with Islam.

Unfortunately, the United States is poorly set up to wage such a war. Our free media broadcasts statements targeted for domestic consumption which angers international audiences, for in politics the domestic agenda will always trump foreign concerns.

Such an ideological war would also require the United States to regain the credibility that it has lost in the Muslim world in the past four years because of its lack of evenhandedness in the Israeli-Palestinian problem, its invasion of Iraq on false premises, and its support of repressive Muslim regimes. U.S. words, public diplomacy, would need to be matched with deeds to regain this lost trust and credibility. Otherwise, any statement, no matter how laudable, would simply be dismissed as hypocritical and further encourage the spread of the global Salafi jihad.

About the Author
Marc Sageman is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduating from Harvard, he obtained an M.D. and a Ph.D. in sociology from New York University. After a tour as a flight surgeon in the U.S. Navy, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency in 1984. He spent a year on the Afghan Task Force, then went to Islamabad from 1987 to 1989, where he ran the U.S. unilateral programs with the Afghan Mujahedin. In 1991, he resigned from the agency to return to medicine. He completed a residency in psychiatry at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1994, he has been in the private practice of forensic and clinical psychiatry, and has had the opportunity to evaluate around 500 murderers. After 9/11, he started collecting biographical material on about 400 al Qaeda terrorists to test the validity of the conventional wisdom on terrorism. This research has been published as Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Sageman has testified before the 9/11 Commission and serves as a consultant on terrorism to various government agencies.

References
1. Sageman, Marc, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.)
2. Qutb, Sayyid, Milestones (Cedar Rapids, Iowa: Mother Mosque Foundation, n.d.)
3. Faraj, Muhammad Abd al-Salam, "Al-Faridah al Ghaibah," in Johannes Jansen, The Neglected Duty: The Creed of Sadat’s Assassins and Islamic Resurgence in the Middle East (New York: Macmillan, 1986, 159-234.)
4. Bin Laden, Osama, Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places. Published in al-Quds al-Arabi (London, 1996) on August 23.
5. Bin Laden, Osama, et al., Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, dated February 23, 1998.
6. Silke, Andrew, “Cheshire-Cat Logic: The Recurring Theme of Terrorist Abnormality in Psychological Research,” Psychology, Crime and Law, 4: 51-69, 1998; and Silke, Andrew, ed., Terrorists, Victims and Society: Psychological Perspectives on Terrorism and its Consequences (Chichester, England: John Wiley & Sons, 2003.)

 

[muse]

God is on our side?


The dialogue delusion
Ejaz Haider



King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia has inaugurated an interfaith dialogue conference in Madrid Spain. It’s a grand event, as such events are supposed to be. Will it succeed? No.

Cutting through the high ceremonial flourish and photo-ops, the conference is really an attempt to tell the world that Islam can live peacefully with other religions and the current drift towards chaos can be prevented by emphasising belief in God as the common link between all religions.

Yes, Islam can be at peace with all religions, including non-monotheistic ones; no, belief in God as a commonality will not stop humanity’s march towards multiple clashes within the paradigm of irregular war that, over time, may lead to a big one, what eschatological fatalism describes as the Armageddon.

The reason is simple. Interfaith dialogues, which have become the vogue since 9/11, are based on a wrong premise i.e., Islam (or any religion) can be the cause of war. The fact is that no conflict is the product of religion. Religion (or ethnicity) is never the cause of any war or conflict even as it lends itself readily to constructing a discourse about common identity, common travails, sense of persecution, the need to band together and a common destiny, all of which are supposed to cut across other parochial identities — ethnic, tribal, linguistic, racial and so on — and bind disparate peoples together.

In the army (and this is common to all armies) they say, and trenchantly, that there is no atheist in a foxhole. But the soldier in the foxhole, even when he believes, is not there because of his belief. The cause(s) of a conflict is to be found elsewhere, in the mundane world, in matters political, economic or social or a combination of them.

Belief can motivate and sustain, and it does. Fighting requires organisation, training, motivation and morale. The first two are objective categories and can be qualified and quantified; the latter two are subjective psychological ingredients, though no less vital than good organisation and training. They are begotten of and sustained through various devices: religion, nationalism, honour, the flag, regimental, clan and familial traditions, personal courage, et cetera.

All of this informs the discourse which creates institutionalised memory and way of thinking. The discourse, as scholars have noted, creates boundaries, limits speech, defines modes of thinking and by doing so billets the process of thinking itself. On the plus side, it allows group identity and cohesion, organisational integrity in the face of external pressures, and the ability to counter internal and external threats.

So yes, all believers, regardless of the nature of belief, monotheistic or pantheistic, believe in God. Within respective groups they can use religion to live peacefully or to kill each other — just like they can and do on the basis of ethnicity or tribal traditions. But while the conflict may be called religious, ethnic, sectarian etc, its causes lie elsewhere. It depends on what kind of marker is being used for group identity and when and why. It makes sense to use one that shall guarantee the best possibilities of morale and motivation by suppressing parochial interests and pressures.

Take the example of the Taliban. What would be the best way of controlling a territory comprising tribes, sub-tribes, clans and sub-clans, a mosaic of multilayered solidarity groups? It can either be done by appealing to the larger Pashtun sense of group identity or an even higher ideal, Islam, or a combination of the two, the Pashtun identity being complemented by Islamic identity.

Afghanistan has seen both and the multi- national and ethnic warriors and ideologues of Al Qaeda have played an important role in developing the larger identity.

Take the case of sectarian clashes in the NWFP, especially in the areas of upper and lower Miranzai valleys. A Sunni Bangash can only link up with a Sunni Orakzai to kill a Shia Bangash if the tribal bonds have weakened and the sectarian identity, a higher layer, has subsumed the more parochial, tribal layer.

Add to it another variable. In 1998, within a day of sectarian clashes in Hangu, this writer travelled to Kohat, Hangu and Tal. It was a sight and an insight to see the name of a Punjabi, Azam Tariq, carved in bold white letters on one of the mountains facing the town of Hangu!

The sectarian affiliation had not only suppressed the Pashtun tribal identity and sense of solidarity but had clearly cut across even the larger, trans-tribal Pashtun identity to subsume another ethnic group traditionally considered less martial by the Pashtun.

But while conflicts are not born of religious, sectarian, ethnic and other such reasons, once the discourse takes over, is iterated, and the conflict gets underway and begins to claim lives, these markers of group identity come into play and, quite often, make it impossible to bring the conflict to an end. Since such conflicts unfold among the people, even in the ebb, passions can simmer and manifest themselves through confrontations. The process seems never-ending.

It is good to have interfaith dialogues. They are most useful for academic information and offer great optics. But to expect them to influence what is happening on the ground, which is the stuff of hardcore realpolitik, is to put undue premium on optimism.

Any situation on the ground develops its own complexities, wheels within wheels. Protracted conflicts also develop a vicious action-reaction cycle; information is hard to come by and when it does brings its own slant. Sifting the grain from the chaff becomes nearly impossible. Conflicts also develop their own vested interests and economies. None of this has anything to do with God but He is invoked and claimed by all sides in all His glory, both transcendent and imminent.

It is interesting that while inaugurating the conference King Abdullah, who is also footing the bill of this extravaganza, declared that previous such attempts had failed to achieve their objectives. He hoped, however, that the present effort would succeed. How, if the premise is wrong, is a moot point.

Ejaz Haider is Consulting Editor of The Friday Times and Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk