LONDON: As we head towards the second anniversary of September 11, it may seem eccentric to emphasis how weak the Al Qaeda organization headed by Osama Bin Laden is — indeed, how weak it has always been.
Clearly, the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were unprecedently savage, both in terms of impact and the number of fatalities. It is also perfectly true that there has never been a terrorist act to match it, before or since. But consider the various things that have not happened since that terrible event. And consider too the nature of the response: is it threatening our fundamental freedoms?
First, and most importantly, since September 11 2001 there has been no systematic terrorist campaign against the United States and its allies. Of course the US has been thrown into a series of “terrorist” panics, concerning potential threats, poisonous substances in the post, determined killers at large and the like, but none of this has been connected to Al Qaeda.
It might have been thought that the US attack on Afghanistan would have been the ultimate provocation to an organization sheltered by that country’s then Taliban government, but no repeats — or even pale imitations — of the World Trade Center assault followed. The invasion of Iraq, at least partly based, in the United States if nowhere else, on alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, has likewise been consequence-free, so far, in terms of terrorism attacks in the US.
It is entirely possible that the police and intelligence authorities have foiled a number of attacks in America, and it is certainly the case that there have been occasional atrocities, and many warnings about potential incidents abroad, Bali being the most terrible example. But if this really were a war on terrorism, and there really was a coherent, determined, well- organized enemy out there committed to asymmetrical strikes, then the main warrior-nation would surely have expected the first dramatic engagement of this supposed war to have been followed up, even if the agents of terror operate on their own more deliberate timescale.
DAYDREAM: Secondly, the generalized Arab revolt, hoped for and incited by Osama bin Laden, has not occurred. The wishful thinking of Al Qaeda in this regard represents a kind of daydream that is common in revolutionary thinking. Terrorism has often been engaged in by organisations that are convinced a single strike will be enough to cause the revolutionary zeal of the people to flare afresh, bringing down whatever structure of government it is that the subversives judge unacceptable.
The many attempts on the lives of the Tsars in nineteenth- century Russia were driven by this kind of simplistic reasoning, though the one successful action merely precipitated increased repression. This is exactly what has happened in Osama bin Laden’s target Muslim nations. Instead of revolution there have been a series of clampdowns, some accompanied by great brutality, all imposed without the popular reaction on which Al Qaeda strategists pinned their hopes.
ROOTLESS: Thirdly, Osama and his cohorts have been unable to retain any part of the globe that they can truly and safely call their own. Having been obliterated in Afghanistan, they may be able to wander about in the outbacks of that country or in the remoter regions of Pakistan. But they can never again rest or throw down roots, developing indigenous community support, as they once did in Sudan and Afghanistan, and as Muslim radicals are doing so successfully at present in Palestine. Deprived of the local, their global reach lacks all conviction, the organization resembling a displaced person pretending to be an international business traveller.
WEAK: All terrorist groups are weak, and Al Qaeda is and always has been no exception. This kind of subversive organisation turns to isolated political violence of the type we now describe as terrorism not out of choice but because they believe they have no military alternatives, and in this they are usually absolutely right.
US President George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon do not need to resort to terrorist violence because they have at their disposal two of the most powerful and effective military forces the world has ever seen, securely garrisoned in countries in which they are widely accepted. That is not to say that their forces do not deploy the weapon of political terror, merely that in doing so they are not described as terrorists.
Guerrilla organizations, of the type we have seen in places like Sri Lanka and Algeria in recent years, may not be as strong as national armies but they resemble them more that they do the classic terrorist group. They control areas of land within hostile nation states, can operate more or less openly, and enjoy support that extends beyond their membership to embrace elements of an existing or potential civil society.
What makes guerrilla campaigns so worrying to governments everywhere is that they look like governments in waiting. This is the case even if they engage in occasional, or even frequent, acts of terror; it is sadly the case, as millions of the world’s civilians have found to their cost, that the killing of innocents for political purposes is something that states do far more efficiently and bloodily than any subversive organization can. It follows that such violence is not something that is any kind of bar to a government’s political legitimacy.
At the bottom of the militant political food chain are the terrorists, organizations with neither armies nor strong popular support to hand, who have neither the inclination nor, in many cases, the opportunity patiently to build political structures as an alternative to subversive violence. For such groups, terrorism presents a tempting route to action for the sake of action, a way of being seen without the burden of having to think seriously about outcomes and consequences.
Al Qaeda fits this description well. Its ability to use contemporary gadgetry and to manipulate industrial machinery to deadly effect should not blind us to its antiquated, pre-modern ideology. The commitment is to a fantasy version of the past that is entirely unrealisable in the future.
Forsaken by the people it claims as its own, and incapable of any action apart from a sporadic fling at the defenceless passer-by, it is to be feared as the playground bully is feared: noisy anger and flailing about hiding, but only barely, pathological vulnerability.
Like the Russian anarchists whose terrorism ushered in repression, and the 1960s South American radicals whose violent subversion precipitated opportunistic state killings on a horrible scale, the enduring legacy of Al Qaeda might well lie in the depth and nature of the response that it has stimulated, mainly from America, but also right across the industrialized world.
It has already been the sole reason for the invasion and effective colonisation of one country — Afghanistan — and a major impetus behind the seizing of another: Iraq. It has led to a rush of anti-terrorism legislation across the world, giving greatly enhanced powers to domestic security agencies. Military governments, for whom counter-terrorism has long been an alibi for repression, draw strength from the decline in the freedom of the peoples from whose governments they have faced the sharpest criticisms. The human rights model of western civilisation is being openly questioned by those who see security of the realm rather than dignity of the person as the central political objective of our time.
TENSIONS SURFACE: These are pretty extraordinary consequences for an organisation like Al Qaeda to have brought about, and of course that organization is not solely responsible for them. Rather, the events of September 11 have brought into the open tensions that have long been inherent in the way that advanced industrial society is organised.
It is often forgotten quite how tentative the acceptance of democratic forms of government has been by the forces of liberal capitalism. Throughout the democratic era, various wars have challenged the democratic model in a way that has produced a truncation of civil liberties, or as we would call them today, human rights. Sometimes these wars have been hot, sometimes they have been cold.
The current “war” is against “terrorism”, and from the national security perspective it has many advantages over past conflicts. It is against an unseen enemy rather than one whose empirical strength can be objectively verified. The “war” is one in which no action is required: if an atrocity occurs then there is clear evidence of the war, but if nothing happens then the fear of the possible, of what might happen, is sufficient to keep the “conflict” ongoing.
Finally, and most ominously, it is a war without any obvious means of being brought to an end. There is no country to be occupied, no army to be broken up, no despot to depose. Instead there is an invisible enemy whose incoherence means it can never be fully brought to book.— Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
(Conor Gearty is Professor of Human Rights Law and Rausing Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics)
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