How to defeat terrorism without creating new enemies?
By Jason Burke
LONDON: The investigators will start with minutiae. They will comb the sites of Thursday’s attack looking for the tiny particles that will reveal the construction of the bombs. Soon they will know what was used — probably a mix of ammonium nitrate ‘fertiliser explosive’, plastic explosives and gas canisters. They will try hard to find shards of the detonator cap, the initial power source — probably a car battery — and the trigger switch. By the time anyone comes to trial they will be able to tell the court the exact velocity of the shrapnel the blast sent hurtling through the air.
A few chunks of twisted metal will identify the delivery vehicles, especially if the bombers forgot to file off serial numbers on the engine block. Traffic camera footage will show how the bombs reached their destination.
Then the investigators will reach further back in time, meticulously piecing together the preparation of the strike. They will find out where the terrorists were through the summer, last year, 10 years ago. Details are still sketchy but the bombers are believed to be young Turks. Most are from the east of the country and they are thought to be connected, albeit loosely, to a local religious group that has existed for at least a decade.
In this they are typical of so-called ‘Al Qaeda’ attackers. Al Qaeda is now used as a label to describe any terrorist attack by Muslims. This is a sloppy and possibly counter-productive use of the term. Al Qaeda should be used only to describe a small group of men led by Osama bin Laden who came together in Afghanistan in the late 1990s and were dispersed by the US-led action that followed the September 11 strikes.
Their involvement in this most recent attack is likely to be tangential. They may, as the communique issued claiming responsibility for the blast indicates, have had some kind of overall strategic control, particularly of the timing of the attack. It is even possible that a senior adviser was on hand to organize and help the group. But the attackers themselves were all Turkish.
This should not surprise us. Exactly two years ago I found notebooks and letters indicating the presence of Turkish recruits in Osama bin Laden’s training camps. They were written by young men who had made considerable sacrifices to get training. One notebook, written in Turkish, described all the techniques, including the construction of massive truck bombs, a recruit had learned.
Thousands of such men made their way to the camps in Afghanistan — indeed they had been doing so long before Osama bin Laden arrived on the scene. Just because the camps were emptied, the recruits have not disappeared. Nor have the reasons underpinning their reasons for wanting to learn such appalling skills.
By the time the suspects have come to trial we will have a detailed picture of how the bombings happened. But we will not know why. And this is the crucial question if we are to defeat contemporary terrorism.
This does not mean we should condone their horrific actions but merely recognize that it is only by understanding the motivations of such men can we hope to counter them.
The militants believe they are fighting a defensive war. For them, and for much of the broader Muslim community, this legitimizes their actions.
Osama bin Laden has believed this for a long time. In many ways he acts like a traditional political activist. He has recognizable goals, though they are often framed within a mythic and religious narrative. Many were listed in the claim of responsibility issued after Thursday’s bombing. In among the anti-Semitic ranting there were recognizable demands, such as the liberation of the prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay and an end to US support for the ‘tyrannical governments’ in the Middle East. Such governments, the statement said, impede the creation of an ‘Islamic caliphate’. This latter demand had specific relevance to Turkey, as it was there that the 1,300-year-old caliphate, the supposedly unified state of Muslim communities, was dismantled 80-odd years ago.
But the communique ends with an exhortation to the ‘Muslim nation’ to ‘support the Mujahideen to victory’. And this is the key.
Osama bin Laden, like many political and religious agitators before him, has been profoundly frustrated by the failure of the masses to see things his way. He knows that to destroy the economic and military power of the West is impossible — unless he can rally the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims to his cause.
Back in the mid-Nineties Osama recognized the power of modern satellite media to broadcast his message to vast audiences. And he chose to do it through ‘propaganda by deed’, rather than just words.
He and his associates hoped that millions of Muslims would watch the men who sacrificed themselves so spectacularly and be galvanized to act themselves. Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden’s partner, spoke of the need to strip Muslims of their ‘false consciousness’. Osama bin Laden himself warned his followers against ‘sacrificing themselves in silence’. Every act he and his aides organized had one aim: to radicalize and mobilize the world’s Muslims. The message of these dramatic attacks is aimed not at us in the West, but at the Muslim world. And there is evidence that Osama bin Laden’s campaign is working.
All the attacks associated with ‘Al Qaeda’ can be placed on a scale. At one end are those which were directly commissioned, organized and executed by Osama bin Laden or his close aides. They would include the 1998 bombings in east Africa and September 11. At the other end of the scale are those that are in the style of Al Qaeda, on an agenda set by Al Qaeda but not actually organized by them. They are ‘Al Qaeda-ist’. These would include the blasts in Casablanca earlier this year and all strikes involving the new wave of militants flocking to Iraq.
Though there are exceptions, and the Turkey attack may prove to be one of them, most analysts and intelligence experts recognize that the trend is towards ‘freelance’ actions, distanced from Osama bin Laden and people around him.
In December 2001, after escaping from Tora Bora, Osama bin Laden said his own ‘life or death’ was irrelevant because ‘the awakening has started’. Tragically, he was right. The fact that a dozen or so Turks, living in a relatively prosperous, tolerant and pluralist Muslim society, were happy to blow themselves and dozens of others into oblivion is evidence of this. So is the ambivalent response of many Turks to being in the front line of the ‘war on terror’. So is the way that many in the Middle East now are convinced that the West never gave up on the crusades. So is the tacit approbation offered to Malaysia’s President when he talks of the Jews ruling the world ‘by proxy’.
In a new and profoundly dangerous age, millions of people in the Muslim world believe Osama bin Laden is right when he announces that the supposed ‘Zionist-crusader alliance’ is dedicated to the humiliation and subordination of Islam. This was not the case three years ago.
Jack Straw was right to say last week that increased security can never make us safe against terrorists of the sort we now face. This is a battle of visions, of perceptions, for hearts and minds, as much as a battle of guns, forensic detection and intelligence. Making progress in the latter, which it is possible we are doing, is nothing without progress in the former.
Of course a ‘war on terror’ requires a military component. But we need to eliminate our enemies without simply creating more. Last week Al Qaeda said that ‘the cars of death will not stop’. If we fail to counter their warped world-view then their threat will not be idle.—Dawn/The Observer News Service.
