|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||
|
|
|
|||||
|
|
|||||||
Cutting Al Qaida's Support Base
An excellent post on Back to Iraq about the Madrid bombing has led to a short discussion in the comments section about the causes of terrorism. I started writing a reply, but halfway thru I realized that it better be written as an essay in itself. Rather than pinning terrorism on one or two phenomena, I think that terrorists kill for a variety of reasons—nationalism (e.g. the ETA, the LTTE), religion (e.g. Al Qaida), spreading socialism (e.g. the Red Brigades), etc. That, however, does not really matter, because in every society that does not exercise thought control there are bound to be violent extremists.
The success of Britain's counter-terrorism campaign in Malaysia in the 1950s teaches us that terrorism works if and only if the population supports it. The Malays opposed communism; hence, the Malay communists failed. While few Muslims support Al Qaida, they do not support the United States any more and many are filled with national pride when the USA loses (recall the rejoicing in the West Bank right after 9/11); hence, Al Qaida flourishes in the Islamic world and particularly near the Afghani-Pakistani border, where the population actively harbors it. Therefore, the target of an anti-terror campaign should be ensuring that the people do not support the terrorists, even passively.
This brings us to the most important question: why do the people support the terrorists?
There are several theories that try to explain this. One is the Clash of Civilizations theory: Muslims feel threatened by Western civilization, and hence they support the organization that has the highest chances to defeat it. The feeling of a threat need not be real; one can draw parallels to American behavior during the 50s and early 60s, when the USA felt threatened by communism even though it wasn't. This theory explains several campaigns of terrorism beside Al Qaida: it explains every minority group that feels that the majority presses it to assimilate (and that includes the Basques), and it takes into account the power of a conservative tradition to incite violence. The problem with it is that it does little to explain many other successful terror campaigns, including virtually all violent anti-colonial struggles.
As far as Al Qaida’s support base goes, this theory puts the greatest emphasis on religion. Therefore, assuming it is completely correct, the best antidote is to convince people that the United States is not engaging in a cultural war against the Muslim world. The first and easiest thing to do is to drop the “crusade” rhetoric. Beyond that, I honestly don’t know the best tactics; the strategy should be to reduce the influence of religion and conservatism in the Islamic world, preferably without making people think that this is being done. In fact, the easiest way to do so is from within the Islamic world, in order to ward off all accusations of cultural imperialism, with organizations such as Secular Islam being the best vehicle to achieve this goal.
A second theory is the economic poverty theory: the people hate the United States because the new world order gives them the short end of the stick. Religion may be important in the support of terrorism, but the people succumb to it only because they are poor. This theory of religion works very well in South America, where the church’s power derives at least partly from its being the only massive charity in the region, as well as in China, where Mao found that he could get the peasants to support communism in exchange for subsistence. This theory is adept at explaining the success of socialism and communism in these areas where they succeeded, as well as at explaining terror campaigns by oppressed minorities; its weakness is its inability to account for the fact that many people will give up everything, including their life, for their way of life, although it does account for the additional fact that this willingness to give up everything diminishes as one has more to lose.
If this theory is completely correct, then combating terrorism is much easier than if the first theory is completely correct. According to the poverty theory, combating terrorism requires eliminating absolute poverty in the Islamic world, which means that the West needs to mount a massive aid campaign. This may require much more money—the amounts I am talking about are at least in the high hundreds of billions, at most in the low trillions—but the tactic is going to be straightforward: work to abolish absolute poverty in the Islamic world (and preferably in the rest of the third world as well, but this is optional for the purposes of curbing terrorism), and, on a more Machiavellian level, create some sort of dependence on the success of the West that will make people less likely to terrorize that which their prosperity relies on.
A third theory is the pure oppression theory: the people hate the United States because they feel oppressed not necessarily by Western and particularly American ideas but rather by the West and the particularly the United States. This theory applies very well to Israel, which the Palestinians terrorize not because they are poor or fundamentalist but because they are oppressed. It explains related terrorist campaigns that have little to do with a perceived clash of civilizations, such as the India-Pakistani conflict, and is best at explaining most violent independence campaigns. Its weaknesses are that like the second theory, it underestimates the power of religion to influence people’s decisions, and that it does not explain why many Al Qaida supporters come from countries in which the United States has no bases and little influence.
If this theory is completely correct, then the best way to pull the carpet under the legs of Al Qaida is to at the very least create in the Islamic world the perception of independence, or better yet, really stop intervening. The problem is that withdrawing may backfire; even if this theory is correct, withdrawing from the Middle East runs the risk of encouraging more terrorism, only that this new wave of terrorism will be offensive rather than defensive.
In reality, of course, none of the three theories is completely correct. Conservatism, nationalism, and poverty all play important roles in causing the people to support terrorism. It is crucial to find the precise combination of reasons, because the solutions that work in each theory only aggravate the situation in the others. In the rest of this article, therefore, I will discuss various solutions that work in the real case, in which all three theories are partly correct. Not all theories apply equally to all people in the Islamic world. The mass support base for Al Qaida supports the organization almost wholly due to economic reasons; this is evident since in democracies, typically the poorest members of society are those who turn to extremist factions such as fundamentalism, fascism, and communism.
Capitalism has the wonderful ability to make shambles of conservative traditions simply by making people too rich to care, but it has the equal and opposite ability to impoverish people and scare them into supporting various reactionary organizations such as Al Qaida even more. Besides, Singapore has set a worrying trend, namely this of developing economically while remaining very conservative and authoritarian; China’s ability to do the same and be even more authoritarian is even worse. However, particularly to the extent that poverty causes terrorism, massive aid and in particular projects to promote free enterprise can be very beneficial in reducing the support base of terrorism. However, they will at the same time expand Al Qaida’s support among other fundamentalists; in other words, their mass passive support base will shrink, but their active support base—that is, people who help them directly with funding, harboring, or even moral support, rather than just sit there and cheer whenever they succeed—will expand.
One way to cut the active support base is thru cutting the main recruitment stations for Islamic terrorism, namely the madrasas. In other words, the west should on the one hand crack down on madrasas, particularly those that promote jihad, and on the other build secular schools in their stead to prevent a drift to fundamentalism. There are two problems here: one, it is going to be hard to crack down on many madrasas at once; and two, this solution can only work in the long run, as it will take several years for the cutting off of new recruits to hurt the power of Al Qaida and other Islamic terrorist organizations. I must emphasize that this solution requires the building of secular schools to serve the population affected by the closure of the madrasas, or else there will just be disgruntlement directed against the west. Education—real education as opposed to religious brainwashing—is one of the best cures to terrorism, in the long run.
In Palestine, we have a worrying situation, namely this of terrorism that receives some support from more educated people. The question is whether Palestine is simply another nation that does not have its own state and hence terrorizes the occupying power, and just happens to be Arab, or on the contrary Palestinian terrorism shows that nationalism is very important a cause of terrorism. I tend to believe that the former as more correct. This is because desperation is the main reason why some Palestinians bomb Israeli buses and cafés, and in fact applies directly to the suicide bombers and not just the support base. With Al Qaida, the situation is totally different; a desperate Palestinian tired of the Israeli occupation may don several tens of kilograms of explosives and blow himself up in Tel Aviv, but it takes a real fanatic to spend several months learning to fly planes just to fly a plane once and hit a building with it.
Cutting off Al Qaida’s funding may help a little, but only in the short run, and even then the damage done to the organization will be minimal. Bin Laden has 300 million dollars in personal wealth, and as terrorists do not tend to hold their money in banks, even a complete cut of oil money to Al Qaida will not hurt them significantly. In the medium-to-long run, the organization will find other sources of funding; drug trafficking, for instance, is the favorite source of funding of many other terrorist groups, and there is no reason to believe that Al Qaida will not use it if it cannot get oil money from Saudi Arabia.
One suggested solution that is unfortunately tried more than anything else is the “bomb the shit out of them” approach. It will not help. First, the United States lacks the intelligence that gives it the capability to kill Bin Laden and other leaders of Al Qaida. Second, Bin Laden may be an excellent terrorist and strategist, but he is far from the only religious zealot who has the will and the ability to use terrorism to further his cause. And third, unless the United States learns to hit top terrorists without killing innocent civilians, the use of violence will only increase Al Qaida’s support base.
What will work, however, is an approach that is distinctly non-violent and combines elimination of poverty with schemes to cut the support and recruitment bases of Islamic terrorism in general and Al Qaida in particular. Perhaps these will even catalyze an Enlightenment in the Islamic world, which, judging by the influence of religious fanatics on politics, is in dire need of one. But whoever tries to implement these ideas, regardless of whether it is a western organization or a secular movement in Islam, must tread carefully, for relatively small mistakes run the risk of only fueling terrorism even more.
This site has gotten
hits since 2003-12-25.