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In forgotten corners of Museums
in the erstwhile European colonies of the Third World, often in
uncovered lots, exposed to the elements, neglected, mouldering
and overgrown, stand the once-proud icons of the great Empires
of the 19th and 20th Centuries. Many of
the nations and peoples that spawned the great civilisations of
earlier ages are today impotent and culturally pauperized, peddling
the remnants of their ancient histories to wealthy tourists from
countries that dominate the present age. A power that once boasted
that the sun never set on its realm has now shrivelled into its
own tiny Island confines, basking in a tainted light derived from
its often obsequious association with the world’s current and
sole ‘hyperpower’.
That hyperpower is presently on
a global rampage that refuses to recognize its own limitations,
the finitude and transience of power, and the ficklenesses of
history’s "cunning passages and contrived corridors."
A young power, it has combined arrogance with uncertainty; great
technical proficiency with abysmal ignorance of cultures, psyches
and ways of life other than its own; and an overriding and impetuous
belligerence with an unwillingness to stay the course or to pay
the price of its ambitions, its aspirations and, crucially, its
necessary role and responsibility in the contemporary world order.
The unravelling of Empires through
the ages is studied closely by historians, but seldom by politicians
and administrators. There are powerful lessons to be learned,
today, by policy makers, strategists and counter-terrorism warfighters,
from the slow erosion of great powers through history, and from
the patterns of relentlessness and ruthlessness that have allowed
decidedly smaller forces to prevail over dominant but progressively
enervated, sometimes dissolute and self-indulgent, nations and
‘great powers’. It is significant, in this context, that some
recent critics have noted that "America has become a "feel-good"
society unwilling to face unpleasant reality."1
The ‘barbarians’ of our age benefit
from another asymmetry. Moral, legal and cultural constraints
often bind the more evolved, or at least more settled and stable,
civilisations, but impose no limits on their challengers. This
is particularly the case with contemporary constitutional democracies
– of which the ‘sole hyperpower’ is one – whose institutional
guarantees and mechanisms are assiduously exploited by radical
challengers. These challengers simultaneously engage in a war
of attrition, using the most extreme force, including unremitting
terror, to wear away the margins of their manifestly superior,
though evidently neither overwhelming nor invulnerable, targets.
An inability to comprehend and
accommodate these processes and realities underlies much of the
failure of current counter-terrorism practices, including the
diverse campaigns and initiatives under the so-called ‘Global
War on Terror’. Much of the discourse within democracies remains
crippling and largely confined to politically correct dogmas and
to a hand-wringing sentimentalism, utterly divorced from the realities
of the ground. It is countered by an alternative conformism –
a militarist doctrine that seeks quick resolution through the
use of overwhelming and focused conventional force – that is equally
out of touch with the complex realities of the present and protracted
wars of terror.
A rational strategy and response
to terrorism is also obstructed by another democratic peculiarity:
a timetable that is entirely extraneous to the nature of the protracted
war in which the world is currently embroiled, and that is imposed
by the electoral cycle. Democracies appear incapable of thinking
‘strategically’, and of engaging in actions within a long-term
context that may have no bearing on, and may, indeed, undermine,
electoral prospects of incumbent parties and leaders in the immediate
term. Policies and action are, consequently, framed and followed
with an eye to influence popular, often populist, sentiment, not
the strategic goals and imperatives of the protracted war in which
radical groups and their state backers have plunged the world.
Indeed, the only forces who appear, today, to have a strategy,
a plan and a worldview (however perverse), seem to be the forces
of extremism and terror. The nations and societies targeted by
terror remain trapped in cycles of action and reaction, with the
initiative lapsing constantly to the side of the radical elements.
It is a strategic commonplace to note, in this context, that the
party that secures and retains the initiative would incline, eventually,
to prevail.
Unless the democratic powers of
the world are able to act in concert, with coherence and consistency
over extended periods of time, in order to define and create a
future consistent with democratic values, they run the risk of
succumbing to a future that is even now being imposed upon them.
The enormous and varied history
of the experience of counter-terrorism campaigns across the world
contains powerful lessons for the future. This experience – both
of success and of failure – must constitute the basis of future
strategies and tactics, and must quickly supplant the patterns
of wishful thinking or the formless gambles that have characterized
some of the world’s largest recent initiatives in the name of
the ‘war on terror’.
Ajai Sahni
New Delhi, January 20, 2007
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George Soros, The Age of Fallibility, New
York: Public Affairs, 2006, p. xxiii, http://www.georgesoros.com/index.php?q=free_excerpts_from_the_age_of_fallibility.
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