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In Praise of Terrorism Ajai Sahni*
In the wake of each major terrorist attack in India,
there is much brave posturing and stentorian denunciations, by those
holding exalted office, of the ‘dastardly deed’ and the ‘cowardly act’,
and declarations of firm resolution ‘not to be cowed down’ and to ‘fight
the terrorists with determination’. As such postures and pronouncements
emanate from the seat and fountainhead of national power, there is natural
expectation that the might of this ‘emerging global power’ will be directed
against, and will soon inflict harsh retribution on, the perpetrators
of such atrocities, and sow panic among their supporters and sponsors.
Inevitably, however, all manifestations of bellicosity, at best, produce
"a hurried rearrangement of the security furniture"1,
and then quickly lapse into much wringing of hands. In the meanwhile,
extremist depredations multiply and become the more devastating.
There is, of course, a complex of
reasons why this happens, including crippling and cumulative deficits
in capacities of response2 that drastically circumscribe
the very possibilities of effective remedial action. But these are
equally inexplicable, given India’s size and resource configuration,
unless we factor in the critical collapse of political and social
will that has been insidiously engineered through the injection and
entrenchment of a deep obscurantism, a muddying of clear and morally
vital distinctions, in some of the most perverse arguments that have
systematically undermined effective counter-terrorism capacity building
and efforts. It is the paralyzing burden of "constraints imposed
by our current doctrine and institutionalised inertia3"
that have prevented – and will continue to prevent – rational responses
to terrorism and other patterns of mass political violence, both within
India as well as in several other afflicted theatres across the world.
Despite apparent and often fierce
condemnations of terrorism, the reality is, these are almost never
unqualified. The near-universal revulsion against particular terrorist
acts is not translated sufficiently into strategy and action against
terrorists, or, crucially, into the acquisition of necessary and sufficient
capacities to fight the scourge. Indeed, there is a powerful stream
of justification that underlies the liberal democratic critique
of terrorism, and it is this backdrop that gives terrorism its greatest
force. Terrorism works. Given the moral ambivalence
of the liberal-democratic world, its practitioners bear no permanent
stigma and, under appropriate circumstances, are quickly able to re-invent
themselves as advocates of ‘peace’, as political leaders, world statesmen,
and even as worthy recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize – as was Yasser
Arafat. Recording a particular phase of intensive terrorism directed
against Israel by the Abu Nidal group and Hezbollah, which "set
new standards for publicized mass murder of civilians", one commentator
notes:
As the summer of horrors by these
two enemies of Tel Aviv mounted, pollsters (in the US) reported
no rise in sympathy for Israel; instead, their polls showed a
decline in American public support for Israel. More than half
of America believed Israel should do more to resolve the crisis…
Although none of the speakers ever described themselves as "yielding
to terrorism," their behaviour illustrated its psychological
and political effects4.
While this particular comment refers
to circumstances in the 1980s, the observation will have a familiar
ring across the world even today, with the most powerful advocacy
– both by terrorist ‘fellow travelers’ and the ranks of ‘good people’
mouthing politically correct platitudes – of conciliation, appeasement
and a range of inchoate political and developmental ‘solutions’, in
the face of unending carnage. Indeed, after decades of unremitting
terrorism in Jammu & Kashmir and the slaughter of tens of thousands
of the very people the jihadis claims to seek to ‘liberate’
(and the absolute denial of human and political rights to people in
Pakistan occupied Kashmir, including the denial even of Constitutional
recognition to the people of Gilgit-Baltistan), Pakistan is able to
rightly boast that it has been able to bring the ‘Kashmir dispute’
to the world’s attention through its deceitful and bloody jihad.
Contemporary terrorism draws enormous
strength from two factors: the ample and predictable rewards it secures;
and the legitimacy of extreme (terrorist) violence within particular
societies, certainly those that benefit from this reward system, but
also often including a number of societies that are directly threatened
or targeted by such violence. Among those who claim adherence to the
liberal democratic ideology, there is only an occasional voice that
has seen fit to defend the Constitutional order, and most have, willy-nilly,
become apologists for those who engage in extreme and indiscriminate
violence. With romanticised imagery and the strangest invention of
arguments, even serious academicians arrive blindly at entirely preconceived
conclusions5, in an "astonishingly philistine,
know-nothing posture, blocking any deeper understanding of the terrorist’s
mentality and motives6". These justifications
of terrorism, with little consistent evidence, continue to be advanced
by those who proclaim and see themselves as advocates of freedom and
non-violence, and who argue that the response to such terrorism should
not involve, or should minimize, use of force by the state. These
arguments enjoy immense popularity, and they are constantly undermining
the ability and capacity of democracies to effectively defend themselves
against a pattern of warfare – often supported by inimical foreign
powers – that constitutes an increasing threat to their very survival.
It is, consequently, imperative that
the legitimacy of such violence is questioned. There is a need to
realize that those who still demand the people’s blood in their quest
for political transformation or religious renewal, treat the people
as sacrificial animals, offered up to an unseen – secular or religious
– deity in the hope of an uncertain paradise. There is little difference
between the modern ideologies supporting terrorism and primitive blood
sacrifices – they are obscurantist in their ideological content and
their political intent; and they are just as unreliable as pathways
to the promised salvation. They continue, nonetheless, to hold large
masses of men – and among them, many a good mind – in thralldom.
It is necessary, consequently, to
examine some of the contemporary myths that have so effectively been
harnessed by the terrorists and their supporters, and that have been
uncritically internalized by so many ‘intellectuals’ within the liberal-democratic
fold, including powerful lobbies in national governments, paralyzing
international capacities of effective response to a scourge that threatens
the most fundamental structures and institutions of free societies.
Perhaps the most intuitively powerful
of these fables is the ‘theory of root causes’, the assertion that
terrorism cannot be countered by force, but demands an understanding
and redressal of ‘underlying’ grievances and sources that ‘provoke’
such violence. A great deal of deliberate obfuscation underpins this
‘theory’, and it is useful, at the outset, to clarify basic distinctions
between types of causes. It is, without exception, the case that a
causal chain can be traced out for every terrorist movement or incident
– there can, after all, be no ‘uncaused event’. But the assertion
that ‘root causes’ underpin violence is fundamentally different: it
amounts to the claim that there are certain unique and identifiable
necessary or sufficient conditions that instigate every
act and manifestation of terrorism. The most significant among ‘root
causes’ that have been opportunistically identified include poverty
and real or perceived deprivation. This thesis, however, has no empirical
basis and numerous studies have demonstrated its manifest speciousness
(though these have done little to diminish its appeal). Indeed, a
review of the literature on the search for ‘root causes’ of terrorism,
for instance,
…provides little reason for optimism
that a reduction in poverty or an increase in educational attainment
would, by themselves, meaningfully reduce international terrorism.
Any connection between poverty, education, and terrorism is indirect,
complicated, and probably quite weak… Moreover, premising foreign
aid on the threat of terrorism could create perverse incentives
in which some groups are induced to engage in terrorism to increase
their prospects of receiving aid7.
Some other distinctions in the notion
of causation help clarify the issue further. Certain factors may,
of course, constitute ‘predispositions’ to violence – but these predispositions
exist in every one of use. Who has, in a moment of grievous anger,
not imagined inflicting terrible retribution on an antagonist? Such
impulses, however, remain unrealized in most cases, unless suitable
‘triggering factors’ and facilitators are not brought into play. Even
where violence is initiated, in an overwhelming proportion of cases,
it quickly subsides. Its protraction or perpetuation depends on a
unique sustaining dynamic that is quite unrelated, both to the original
predispositions and to the triggering events or circumstances. This
means that, even if the original causes or triggers are ‘redressed’
such violence could continue if the sustaining dynamic – in the form
of a range of newly established equations of power and flow of resources
to particular and violent elites – is not neutralized. Conversely,
if this latter dynamic is, in fact, neutralized, violence has been
found, again and again, to end, even if the so-called ‘root’ or ‘triggering’
causes remain intact. The ‘root causes’ thesis is, in fact, an enormously
influential but essentially doctrinaire and unverified position which
has drastically circumscribed the range of policy options available
to counter-terrorism policy in moments of grave crisis.
Closely intertwined to the ‘root causes’
thesis is the dominance of the ‘developmental solution’, the assertion
that the challenge of terrorism cannot be addressed through security
responses, but must be resolved through the implementation of a range
of programmes for poverty alleviation and the ‘empowerment’ of disadvantaged
groups, to undercut the ‘recruitment pool’ of terrorist and violent
political groups. This is another unexamined shibboleth, essentially
based on the a priori reasoning that nations or regions that
have attained a high measure of prosperity tend to escape the blight
of terrorism. This is, in the first instance, historically inaccurate.
Some of the first terrorist movements of the post-World War era emerged
in the affluent nations of Western Europe and in a reconstructed Japan
(substantially fuelled by the export of extreme Left Wing ideologies
and material support from the Soviet Union), and Northern Ireland
is certainly not located in the Third World. Some of the most affluent
countries of Europe, today, find themselves susceptible to extremist
Islamist mobilization and terrorism, even, indeed, as does the US
(despite its minuscule Muslim population).
More significantly, however, developmental
strategies as a response to terrorism have not only failed in the
past, they are doomed, by their very character, to failure. These
are, in reality, politically correct but utterly impractical solutions,
based on half truths and a refusal to recognize the actual constraints
within which states respond to the challenges of terrorism. Essential
corollaries here are:
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You cannot develop what you do not control.
Significant levels of terrorism almost invariably provoke
the breakdown or weakening of governance across wide areas.
The principal source regions of terrorism and some
of their target regions as well, have large expanses of territory
that are divested of effective governance. In situations of
widespread breakdown of law and order, and of institutional
collapse, ‘leakages’ tend to account for the overwhelming
proportion of developmental expenditure, with little of the
allocated finance actually reaching intended beneficiaries.
As one commentator notes, "the weaker the democracy gets
the more the black economy flourishes8".
The state’s mechanisms of delivery of social services, administration
and relief in times of disaster are severely eroded, if not
non-existent, in areas afflicted by widespread terrorism,
insurgent violence and disorder. Overwhelming proportions
of developmental funds in areas of conflict are mis-utilised
or simply siphoned out without any measure of accountability.
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‘Development’ is not something that can be
ordered off a menu card. The states absolute capacities to
deliver an acceptable level of development to populations
in the principal ‘problem areas’ are themselves limited by
demographics, the available natural, financial and human resource
base, and structural infirmities. This makes developmental
transformations as an instrument of response to insurgency
and terrorism, within any realistic (prophylactic or remedial)
time frame, impossible. Simply put, no society in the world
has ever ‘out-developed’ an ongoing insurgency or terrorist
movement.
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Dangerously, the ‘developmental solution’
has progressively become an alibi for persistent failures
to address immediate tasks of response. The moment a security
response is conceded to be a necessary rejoinder to terrorist
depredations, administrations become immediately accountable,
and are required to demonstrate on a day-to-day basis what
they have done to improve capacities and protocols of response
to terrorism. On the other hand, once it is conceded that
the ‘solution’ principally lies in development – an outcome
that can only be achieved over the years and decades – administrations
are easily and indefinitely able to evade responsibility.
Crucially, the time frames of counter-terrorism and developmental
policy cannot be reconciled. Counter-terrorism demands immediate
responses; development is, by definition a long-drawn-out
process.
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While the rhetoric of ‘development’ dominates
the discourse in areas of major conflict, there is little
evidence of a sustained effort at development or good governance
in areas within affected countries – particularly in the rural
hinterland – where there is no significant manifestation of
insurgent or terrorist violence. Poor governance and the lack
of efficient implementation of developmental programmes does
not, for instance, only afflict the badlands of Pakistan’s
North West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal
areas, but is a reality virtually across the country, and
certainly across its entire rural expanse. Overwhelmingly,
where significant progress could be secured in the absence
of significant political violence, and that could act as a
bulwark against the expansion of terrorist mobilization, such
progress remains elusive in the face of governmental apathy,
ineptitude, corruption and complicity.
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Crucially, an overwhelming proportion of developmental
resources and aid actually flow into the vast underground
economy of terrorism, strengthening the very edifice that
they are intended to dismantle. This includes the numerous
and dodgy ‘charities’ and ‘non-governmental’ organizations
that facilitate a flow of funds to terrorist groups, as well
as such terrorist groups themselves, adding to vast revenues
they generate through extortion, organized criminal operations,
drug trafficking and the various powers of surrogate ‘governance’
that they assume in areas of dominance. Developmental aid,
moreover, flows directly into various complicit structures
of terrorism-sponsoring states.
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Critically, what is missed out in the developmental
debate is the fact that not every problem has a neat and easy-to-implement
solution. Indeed, the developmental deficits in the troubled
areas of the world are so enormous that any realistic assessment
would need to conclude that they will remain unmet in the
foreseeable future. More fundamentally, it should, by now,
be abundantly clear that meeting the needs of a global population
now approaching 6.9 billion – to grow to 9.2 billion by 2050
– at consumption standards that would be comparable even to
the lower classes of Europe, is an unsustainable goal, and
would potentially destroy the environment and would pollute
or exhaust most know natural resources.
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None of this is intended to imply that Governments
are free to ignore the tasks of development. But developmental
objectives must be pursued as inalienable responsibilities
of the state towards its citizens, and not as a response to
the challenge of terrorism.
The ‘root causes – developmental solution’
argument is, in fact, no more than a disguised and hollow tautology.
It rests, simply on the unverified claim that the lack of development
(poverty) is the ‘root cause’ of terrorism, and then prescribes the
‘elimination’ of this ‘cause’ as the ‘solution’, with no reference
either to available resource configurations and administrative capacities,
or to any rational assessment of the deficits that would need to be
met in order to secure ‘success’. This is analogous to suggesting
that the ‘solution’ to poverty is wealth; or the ‘solution’ to disease
is good health – both claims are impeccably true, but imagine the
reaction of a cancer patient being advised by his doctor to ‘go home
and be healthy’!
Another contemporary ‘idol of the
marketplace9’ is the insistence on a ‘negotiated’
or ‘political’ solution to terrorism – something that is currently
and greatly being emphasized in the pursuit of ‘accords’ in many theatres
of conflict across South Asia, but most urgently and disastrously
in areas of Taliban dominance on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan
border. There has, in many theatres of intractable conflict, been
an easy tendency on the part of mediators to seek to negotiate the
future of millions of victims of extreme and barbaric violence with
its worst perpetrators. There is, of course, a certain logic to this.
If you want to stop the killing, whom do you talk to, if not the murderers?
But this is facile. The ‘political realism of appeasement10’
has disastrous consequences, and this consideration is particularly
urgent within the context of the growing criminalization of what are
originally, or perceived to be, movements of political violence, and
of the emergence and proliferation of modern warlordism and rampaging
terrorism in many areas of persistent conflict. No democratic government,
and no principled international polity, can rightly hand over entire
populations to terrorist warlords through negotiated settlements on
the false hope that such populations will receive justice and a guarantee
of their dignity and freedoms under the successor regime. Moreover,
those who feel no twinge of conscience at the mass murder of civilians
can hardly be bound by the letter or spirit of a ‘peace accord’. They
are led by their ideologies and their ambitions and will follow the
imperatives of power, pursued by dramatic acts of carnage, wherever
this is expedient. Negotiated settlements with terrorists, except
where movements have been crushed or have been subjected to extended
attritional stalemates, have only contributed to further terrorist
consolidation. Unfortunately, the international pressure and the inclination
of governments – including those of many functioning democracies –
to work out ‘deals’ with terrorists and warlords appear to be increasing
in the desperation, simply, to ‘settle with’ the immediate and apparent
cause of conflict. But, it has been noted elsewhere in the context
of Kashmir,
The notion of ‘peace at all costs’
is self-destructive, and negotiations based on false premises and
projections, and on unrealistic or divergent assessments of realities
on the ground, inevitably result in greater escalation – though
they may produce a temporary and deceptive lull11.
A related area of advocacy is the
contention that the principal response to terrorism must be ideological,
rather than ‘military’; that Islamist extremist interpretations of
the Faith must be whittled away by ‘ideological contestation’, rather
than a direct assault against their violent adherents. This is another
unexamined, but vastly popular banality. There is little in the historical
record that could suggest any potential for success for such an approach.
As Fareed Zakaria has noted, "Military victory is indeed essential.
Radical political Islam is an ‘armed doctrine,’ in Edmund Burke’s
phrase. Like other armed doctrines before it – fascism, for example
– it can be discredited only by first being defeated12."
In any event, what kind of ideological contestation could anyone conceive
of with the Mullah in Swat who blows a man’s brains out because he
is wearing his salwar (trousers) cut below, and not (as God
evidently ordained and all men should know) above, his ankles13?
It is not possible,
here, to examine the full range of the pseudo-histories and false
sociologies, and the extensive scope of the tyranny of political correctness
that has obstructed rational assessments of, and policies in response
to, terrorism. There is the irrational quest for a ‘perfect definition’
of terrorism; the ludicrous affectation of the claim that ‘one man’s
terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter’; the simulated and unprincipled
discourse over demands for ethnic or communal separation, autonomy
and ‘self-determination’ – ideological bullock-carts that are irreconcilable
in a globalising world order that shares universal values of equality
and human rights; and the perversion of democratic processes to further
the power and interest of democracy’s most unwavering enemies. It
is clear that policy prescriptions based on abundantly falsified theoretical
perspectives and mistaken popular beliefs contribute directly to terrorist
butchery and to the persistence of movements of extremist violence
across the world. Indeed, these campaigns of deception have been so
successful, that each administration that is confronted with the challenge
of terrorism now appears to be programmed to start out from the ‘default
setting’ of these perverse perspectives, rather than any realistic
appraisal of the successes and failures of past counter-terrorism
strategy and tactics. It is only when the sheer virulence of terrorism
forces a greater rationality of responses, that these delusions are
reluctantly discarded. However, when counter-terrorism successes result
in some diminution in the intensity of violence, administrations tend
quickly to relapse into ‘default mode’ and resume talking about root
causes, and inchoate developmental and political solutions, once again
expanding spaces for terrorist consolidation.
Liberal democracies
have tended to underestimate the devastating and pervasive impact
of terrorism on the freedoms and institutions they most value, and
the enormity and complexity of the tasks of prevention and containment
of terrorist violence. The debate on the nature of terrorism is not
as complex as it is made out to be, but there are powerful vested
interests that do not seek clarity. The greatest power of terrorists
is not the numbers they are able to kill, but the legitimacy they
continue to enjoy, not only in communities directly supportive of
their cause, but in muddled constituencies among the advocates of
freedom and democracy. The delegitimization of terrorism – at the
level of the delegitimization of genocide – will have to precede any
coherent policies and strategies of effective responses.
FOOTNOTES
*Ajai Sahni is Executive Director,
Institute for Conflict Management; Editor, South Asia Intelligence
Review; Executive Director, South Asia Terrorism Portal; and Executive
Editor, Faultlines: Writings on Conflict & Resolution. He is
also a founding and Executive Committee member of the Urban Futures
Initiative.
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Bharat Karnad, "No
more handlolding, please", Hindustan Times, January 30, 2009,
p. 12.
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These deficits are
discussed in some detail in, for instance, Ajai Sahni, "Strategic
Vastu Shastra", South Asia Intelligence Review, Vol. 7, No. 24,
December 22, 2009.
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Robert Leonhard,
The Art of Manoeuvre, Dehru Dun: The English Book Depot, 1998,
p. 4.
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Christopher C. Harmon,
"What history suggests about terrorism and its future", in William
Murray & Richard Hart Sinnreich, The Past as Prologue: The Importance
of History to the Military Profession, New York: Cambridge University,
2006, p. 228.
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For some examples see, for instance, Ajai Sahni, "Social Science
and Contemporary Conflicts: The Challenge of Research in Terrorism,"
Faultlines: Writings on Conflict & Resolution, Volume 9, New Delhi:
ICM-Bulwark Books, July 2001, pp., 131-157.
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Michael Kinsley,
cited in the Uncommon Knowledge programme, "Pulling out the Roots",
filmed, November 11, 2002, transcript at http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/2996171.html.
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Alan B. Krueger and
Jitka Maleckova, "The Economics and the Education of Suicide Bombers:
Does Poverty Cause Terrorism?" The New Republic, 24.06.2002, http://www.alanalexandroff.com/nr-krueger.pdf.
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Arun Kumar, The Black
Economy in India, Delhi: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 188.
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Sir Francis Bacon,
Novum Organum, 1620.
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Eric Hobsbawm speaks
of the "political realists of appeasement" in the context of Europes
craven negotiations with Hitler in the face of his growing belligerence
after 1938. The Age of Extremes, New York: Vintage Books, p. 154.
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K.P.S. Gill & Ajai
Sahni, "The J&K 'Peace Process: Chasing the Chimera," Faultlines:
Writings on Conflict & Resolution, Volume 8, New Delhi: ICM-Bulwark
Books, April 2001, p. 7.
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Fareed Zakaria,
"How to Save the Arab World", Newsweek, December 24, 2001, p.
23.
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"Taliban gun down
teacher for not hiking 'salwar' above ankles", The Times of India,
January 23, 2009.
(Published Title: "Challenging
Terrorism", India & Global Affairs, April-June, 2009)
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