|
|
|
|
CIAO DATE: 03/02
International Affairs:
A Russian Journal
The Terrorism Goes Global
E. Satanovskii *
There are landmarks in world history that become watersheds, separating one era off from another. In the 20th century, those were the two world wars, the October 1917 Revolution, and the days of August 1991. It would seem that mankind has just passed one such watershed. There is no more of the stable world order based on a balance of forces that evolved after World War II - weakened, but not destroyed by the breakup of the Soviet Union. The world began to change irreversibly in the wake of the September 11, 2001 tragedy in the United States. We can only speculate on which trends will prevail in it when the process of change is over and a new balance of forces and international relations emerges, but it will never be the same again.
There are several key factors, general and particular, in the international situation as of the early 21st century. They are as follows:
Globalization, which has turned around the world economy and politics, has profoundly affected the security of the entire world community, increasing the danger that it is exposed to at the present stage in its confrontation with international terrorism. The Black Tuesday in the United States showed that the whole of the civilized world has ended up under attack.
Terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center have shown beyond any doubt what only yesterday seemed a remote possibility: The world is not just on the verge of World War III, but the war is already on - across the globe, from China to Algeria. Cashmere and Afghanistan, Chechnya and the Balkans, and Palestine and Sudan are some of the battlefronts in this war. A year ago it came to the Russian capital. On September 11, it reached the political and economic capitals of the United States. It is impossible to tell where new battlefronts will emerge tomorrow - in Berlin, Paris, or London. It can only be said with confidence that not a single state will be able to stay out of it. This war has as little to do with all the forecasts and scenarios made at the general headquarters of the great powers and repeatedly aired in the media as all world wars have to do with the forecasts and scenarios made for them. There is no global confrontation between the world's ideological systems or military-political blocs and unions nor are there missile strikes from space. What there is, however, is a war of "new barbarians" against the "old civilization" - a war of total annihilation, waged for objectives in the name of which wars are usually waged, nor according to the rules to which they are usually waged. Today the question is not whether particular methods of fighting terrorists are good or bad. The question is about the sheer survival of modern civilization that includes not only the so-called North but also China, India, and Southeast Asian nations.
It is well known that the only effective way of combating terror is complete physical elimination of terrorists. That was how, in the Middle Ages, the Mongols exterminated the Middle Eastern sect of "assassins" and how, in the modern era, the British exterminated Indian thugs. A key role is also played by an array of measures to deprive terrorists of a social base: advancement of "Third World" economies, their integration into the world economy, etc. Still, it has to be recognized that to ensure their own survival, the so-called developed countries, at the present stage, need such a degree of control over the current situation in a number of "Third World" countries that perforce calls up associations with the times of colonial division of the world and gunboat diplomacy. For all the problematic nature of this approach, it has to be said that in their aspiration to economic advancement and prosperity, "Third World" countries in the 20th century opted for two basic strategies: some (states of the Pacific Rim and Latin America, and also India and China), toward development of their own economies and their integration into the world economy, while others (a considerable part of countries in Africa and the Near and Middle East), toward making aggressive claims to countries of the "golden billion." The latest case in point is the course and outcome of a recent UN conference on racism in Durban, which laid down an ideological and political base for this confrontation on a global level. It seems that Durban will play the same role in the future history of World War III as Munich did in the history of World War II.
In identifying America's enemy in the war that is just about to break out in the Near and Middle East, the U.S. president pointed to international terrorism. Long before that, the Russian president identified it as this country's main enemy. Analysis of the historical roots and the present-day condition of international terrorism, as distinct from the terrorism of past decades, leads to indicative, rather disturbing conclusions.
The situation in the world extremist movement in the late 20th-early 21st century recalls that in Samurai Japan of the three Shogunates era or the Minamoto and Taira wars. Following the breakup of the Soviet Union, groups of militants (mainly leftist revolutionaries) that were supported by the Soviet Union in the struggle against the United States (and in the Middle East, also against Israel), lost their "master," turning free-lance (or, in Japanese terminology, becoming ronin). On the other hand, those that were nurtured by the United States as a force against the Soviet Union (including Islamic fundamentalists) lost their importance to their former patron, ending up in the same situation. Talking about Islamic or rather, Islamist, extremism, we have to recognize its superiority, at the stage of disintegrating relations with the erstwhile patrons, over the now bankrupt leftist ideology that prevailed among extremist trends throughout the 20th century. That was not least due to the Islamists' reliance on "eternal values" enshrined in the Koran, not on fickle considerations of political expediency, including such a postulate as jihad (Islam - the youngest and politically most vibrant of monotheistic religions of the Abraham triad - has been easily lending itself to extremist interpretation). A key factor in the expanding influence of political Islamism is the vast human potential, as represented by 1 billion Muslims, for the most part living in poor "Third World" countries.
A major role in developing and strengthening Islamic terrorism was also played by the existence of mighty patrons in the shape of oil producing monarchies in the Islamic world with their colossal financial resources, the influence of the Islamic clergy, and the readiness of ruling regimes to sacrifice a part of their revenues to steer Islamic extremism against external adversaries, away, as was the case in its time in Iran, from opposition to the ruling dynasties. In Iran itself, in Sudan, and in such countries of former "socialist orientation" as Libya, Iraq, Yemen, and Syria, support for Islamists operating outside those countries became part of national policy. It is noteworthy that these states ruthlessly suppressed any anti-governmental Islamic action in their own territory.
At present, there is ample evidence pointing to the emergence of the Islamic "Green International" as a global force, arousing severe criticism on the part of Islamic leaders who accuse experts and politicians of fomenting strife between states of the developed world and those of the Islamic world: Nonetheless, the emerging trend is pronounced enough to be seen as a pattern. Analysis of the evolution of political Islam over the past two decades or so leads to the following conclusions.
Modern politicized Islamic fundamentalism has not only prevailed in a number of states (Iran, Afghanistan, Sudan), but is expanding its sphere of influence, including through the use of military force. Sure, this is happening with different levels of intensity since Sudan and Afghanistan have yet to emerge from a civil war while Iran's Islamic revolutionary activism, considerable under Ayatollah Homeini, is now largely moderated by internal political conflicts, and Iran with its strong parliamentary traditions, more than two decades after the overthrow of the shah, is renouncing active support for the idea of the "export of Islamic revolution," very much as the Soviet Union within approximately the same historical time frame parted with the idea of "world revolution."
In the late 20th century, political Islamism took a rising profile in regions where precedents of military confrontation between Islam and the non-Islamic world were set in the 19th century, mainly in overlapping spheres of influence of former empires: the Ottoman, Russian, and British empires (in Lebanon, Kosovo, Chechnya, Israel, Palestine, Iran, and Afghanistan), seizing positions there, one after another.
In a number of Islamic states, political Islamism successfully opposes the ruling elite (Algeria) or can achieve unqualified success in the foreseeable future (Egypt, Jordan), including the seizure of power.
Aggressively revolutionary and moderately revolutionary regimes of the Arab world (Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya) support Islamists both organizationally and financially, tightly controlling their activity on their own territory.
Even such a secular, pro-Western country as Turkey, where anti-Islamism, relying on the entire power of the armed forces, is part of the fundamental state structure, supports the spread of moderate Islam in its export form (in the post-Soviet area), as a foreign policy component.
Modern political Islamism has mastered pseudo-democratic rhetoric and enjoys substantial support in the world media, including liberal Western media, trading on the popular theory of cultural diversity and the traditional opposition of the (predominantly) leftist intelligentsia across the world to the ruling authority, relying not only on support from non-Islamic regimes, oftentimes led by erstwhile allies in revolutionary and national-liberation movements (South Africa and other African and Asian countries), but also on information/political (Chechnya, Israel, and Palestine) and even military (Kosovo) assistance from the West.
Modern extremist groups using the strategy of terror and armed revolutionary struggle, in particular, national-liberation (separatist) movements (in Chechnya, Palestine, and Kurdistan), cooperate, in case their interests coincide, with Islamic groups on a full scale.
Conservative Islamic monarchies pay off their own Islamists, by supporting their activity outside their national territory (funding Afghan Arabs, Islamists in Kosovo, Chechnya, Palestine, and Israel).
Modern political Islamism is equally active in the socio-political, religious, ideological, and military spheres. That said, in the military sphere it successfully uses guerrilla, terrorist, and sabotage tactics, including in an urban environment. This sphere of activity is unlimited: Targets of attack can with the same probability be Moscow, New York, Jerusalem, or Cairo.
The armed forces of states that are targets of Islamic attack (the United States, Russia, Israel) are at present ineffectual in fighting Islamists since they are designed to conduct full-scale interstate wars, not to suppress guerrilla/terrorist activity, including in built-up areas and often with participation of civilian population (sometimes on a mass scale). As for police forces, they are too weak for that.
History shows that only the ruling regimes of Middle Eastern countries, using the practice of total extermination (Libya, Syria, and Iraq), were successful in their action against political Islamism (as well as against separatism and any anti-governmental extremism). A case in point is the Soviet Union under Stalin. A milder approach (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel) has been unsuccessful. This practice, however, is unacceptable to countries that are the main targets of Islamic attacks at the present stage.
The practice of economic sanctions and territorial blockade as a political instrument making it possible to check the spread of extremism by non-military means, used by the United States in the Middle East (and to a far smaller extent, by Israel, which copied U.S. experience), does not justify itself. Moreover, it has never been justified throughout the 20th century (including in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, etc.)
Modern transport and communication technology, the general availability of information technology, the appearance of a world information area, and the emergence of vast regions as partially overlapping zones of free movement of people, goods and services remove most of the obstacles to the physical movement of terrorists or make it unnecessary for delivering strikes on targets of attack. A special role in this is played by the possibility of terrorist activity relying on the use of high technology, especially dangerous in the environmental and electronic/information spheres, including in the financial sphere, control of conventional and unconventional weapon systems, and management of large production facilities, damage from which, as experience shows, can be comparable to that caused as a result of military action. The aftermath of the September terrorist attack on the United States does not need any additional commentary. Also indicative in this respect, with the beginning of intifada, is the emergence of Arab hackers on the international arena.
This also renders unnecessary a single command and control point or headquarters to wage a full-scale, effective, and productive struggle against over-bureaucraticized, over-regulated and as a result, ineffectual political and military systems that are targeted by highly mobile and easily coordinated political Islamic groups. On the other hand, the existence of a large number of decision-making centers, whose leadership can be easily replaced while operative groups dispersed to single individuals, complicates effective struggle against them, if not making it impossible in principle.
The latter fully applies to Islamist action against Israel, Russia, and Western countries: Well trained terrorists can lead a private life for as long as need be, without maintaining any contacts with any members of their former entourage, at the same time making independent decisions to carry out terrorist attacks, using improvised means and not having to coordinate these decisions with anyone, which makes it impossible to detect and neutralize them at preparation stage.
Globalization of the world economy enables extremist, in particular Islamist, groups without much problem to build their cadre, financial, economic, and technological base into countries and regions that are a target of their subversive activity - that is to say, to act not from the outside but from within a system that is subject to attack and destruction.
Civilian population, including women, teenagers, and children, is easily recruited by modern extremists, separatists of any description, and especially Islamists (the martyrdom factor), and is a highly effective combat force, acting all the more successfully since military action against the civilian population creates a strong counter-propaganda effect, including on the international level. This factor also has a major impact on the national liberal intelligentsia, provoking its opposition to the ruling regime (Russia during the first war in Chechnya) or its direct confrontation with the regime (the far-left in Israel), including action leading to its self-liquidation (Israel, South Africa).
It has become the norm in modern political Islamist practice to pay considerable financial compensation to the family of a person who has died for faith. Thus, the death of one family member enables the family as a whole to get livelihood, which is critical amid a perennial economic crisis, as is the case in a large part of the Islamic world. Present-day Palestine provides an illustrative example of recruitment of suicide terrorists, including underage terrorists, not only by Islamists but also by the administration of the Palestinian national autonomy, on a financial basis, exploiting devotion to the family, traditional in the East, and the low value that is put on human life.
The possibility of the physical elimination of a large mass of its own population is not only a restraining factor for the leadership of extremist, in particular, Islamist, formations, but in fact can be deliberately provoked by them for tactical purposes (propaganda or as a pretext to introduce foreign peacekeeping forces into a conflict zone, when government troops are losing out in direct military confrontation with terrorists).
In acting under the flag of protecting the Muslims, international Islamic terrorist organizations, with the aim to expand their own organizational, cadre, and political base, provoke their opponents into delivering large-scale strikes on the civilian population and imposing sanctions on their own Muslim citizens. Loyal to the ruling authority, the civilian Muslim majority becomes hostage and victim to Islamic terrorism. This causes a colossal destructive effect. It is hardly surprising that Russia, the United States, and Israel are deploying such efforts to prevent the fight against terror from turning into a fight against Islam and the war with terrorists, into a war against Muslims.
To escalate the jihad and provoke Islamic countries into pulling out of antiterrorist coalitions, terrorists (especially Islamists' secular allies) are likely to stage large-scale acts of provocation in the Islamic world itself. Reaction by Muslims to destruction or an act of vandalism with respect to holy Islamic sites or a terrorist act against one of the largest mosques in an Islamic capital is not hard to predict, especially considering that organizers of such a provocation can easily leave any trail.
Political Islamism at the present stage is the vanguard of new barbarism in its fight against old civilization. A global conflict with it and with its allies is in fact a determining factor in whether interaction between the economically developed, industrial and post-industrial North (a loose term since it includes Russia, China, India, and a number of countries in Latin America and Southeast Asia) and the resource-supplying South (also a loose term since it primarily refers to countries of Africa and the Middle and Near East) will follow the path of cooperation or mounting confrontation.
As far as Russia is concerned, the most important battlefronts in this war, undeclared de jure but de facto in progress, in its hot phase are as follows: Chechnya, the border between Afghanistan and post-Soviet Central Asian republics, Yugoslavia (Kosovo), and the Israeli-Palestinian knot.
The main testing grounds in confrontation between the world community and extremism, including Islamic terrorism, today are Israel and Chechnya. Up until now substantial human, military-technical, financial, and propaganda resources at the disposal of the Green International and its allies, including those re-deployed from other hot spots, have been amassed in these regions.
The Palestinian-Israeli model is one of the most complete and indicative models of confrontation between the international community and international terrorism. In their fight against Israel, oriented toward an ultimate goal (complete victory with a possible destruction of Israel), Palestinian extremists and their allies, including Islamist groups, do not balk at anything, justifying that by an unequal correlation of forces. For its part, Israel is limited in its retaliation options both by pressure from the international community and by internal political factors. As a result, Israel is at present losing out in this confrontation, failing to come up with an effective response to actions by its adversary. The state military system, designed for confrontation with other states, is not adapted to waging an antiterrorist war in its own territory, in the course of which its basic components cannot be tapped. This is evident not only from the course and results of the peace process of the 1990s but also from the outcome of al-Aksa intifada. As a result, short term, there is a great danger of a large-scale regional war, jeopardizing all U.S. and Israeli peace efforts and the effectiveness of territory for peace concessions of the recent period, including in Egypt and Jordan. Long term, this calls into question the existence of Israel as a state per se (which is not such a fantastic scenario after all, recalling the fate of Rhodesia, South Africa, Yugoslavia, or the Soviet Union). The disintegration of some countries or the advent of groups in these countries relying on international terrorism is fairly likely. This scenario is in principle possible both in Russia and in Western countries with their multi-million Islamic populations.
Perhaps the most painful but absolutely necessary measure in the international community's fight against terrorism is a partial, temporary limitation of rights and freedoms of loyal citizens under martial law regulations. This refers above all to imposition of state control in countries exposed to terrorist attack over freedom of information, including in the mass media, financial flows, and citizens' privacy, including contacts and movement as well as increasing state economic regulation. All of this of course is at odds with the mainstream evolution of the world order in the past few decades, based on expanding human rights and liberal values.
It has to be said, however, that even if liberal democracy is losing out in the direct confrontation with an enemy such as the one that the United States came up against on September 11, 2001 (and Russia and Israel, much earlier than that), it is winning out morally and posthumously. The international community criticized Russia (and, through inertia, continues to criticize) for its deviation from liberal values. Nonetheless, the New York tragedy raised the question about the price at stake. Despite the existing danger of incoming information being misused owing to a corrupt state apparat, there is no alternative to these unpopular but necessary measures - or rather, the alternative is the victory of terrorism and the establishment of a totalitarian or theocratic dictatorship patterned after the Taliban regime.
One of the most disturbing specifics of modern political terrorism is the ease of its proliferation. As a rule, any terrorist act provokes copying, which is made all the easier by the fact that information about it, down to minute details, is disseminated by the world mass media. The latter in this context acts as unwitting terrorism instructors. Perpetration of terrorist acts not by organized groups that can in principle be detected and neutralized but by mentally unbalanced terrorist wannabees or religious fanatics acting single-handedly foils all efforts to curb terrorism as a whole and organized, including Islamist, terrorism in particular. A major role in provoking the emergence of homegrown terrorists is played by religious sects and in the Islamic world, by theologians and clerics who provide ideological support for terrorists in the course of sermons at mosques, medreses, and Islamic universities, by issuing fetwa glorifying jihad and the shahid, or suicide terrorists, and so forth.
Up until recently it has been traditionally assumed that the world community can stand up to any attempts to destroy the established world order within the framework of the existing world political system with the UN as its foundation. How viable is it in fact? It has to be said that the UN structure, reflecting the lineup of forces as of the end of World War II, became largely obsolete and increasingly ineffectual during the confrontation of the world's two ideological systems. It is hardly accidental that the UN is being increasingly superseded in world political spheres requiring effective action, by economic, military, and diplomatic structures of other organizations (including NATO) or by individual countries. Furthermore, the numerical domination at the UN of Third World countries, a substantial part of which are natural allies of international terrorist, in particular Islamist, organizations, in their struggle to destroy the existing world order, results in that certain UN structures and the organization as a whole are increasingly turning into their propaganda and agitation tribune while the UN's stabilizing role is turning into its opposite.
It should also be borne in mind that the legitimacy and stability of state borders at the present stage increasingly hinges on internal political processes and the existence of bilateral, mutually acceptable interstate agreements on conflict matters, not on multilateral international treaties and agreements, whatever their level. A case in point is the ongoing re-drawing of borders (which began in the 1990s) across a colossal area in Eurasia - Germany, Yugoslavia, and the Soviet Union - in defiance of all international treaties, including the Helsinki Act, as well as the disintegration of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, the Warsaw Pact, and ultimately the Soviet Union itself. Thus, only real political developments that will occur in the world in the foreseeable future will show whether the resolutions of a weakening and over-bureaucraticized UN, adopted in the 20th century, are worth more than the paper they are written on in the 21st century.
It is especially important to assess the role of NATO in the situation that has evolved as well as prospects for a change of the alliance's relationship with Russia. The strengthening of the North Atlantic alliance and its eastward expansion following the breakup of the Soviet Union, on one hand, led to NATO enlargement in the post-Soviet area and the emergence of a strategic contradiction between NATO and Russia; on the other hand, it involved the Near and Middle East in the sphere of NATO interests. An active role that the bloc played in operations against Iraq (with U.S. leadership) and local conflicts in Yugoslavia as well as a network of initiatives (joint exercises, standardization of weapons, and so forth), linking its military infrastructure with the defense systems of moderate countries in the Middle-East Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf give cause to expect that far from staying on the sidelines in the unfolding large-scale regional military conflict in close proximity to key oil transport and freight and passenger routes, NATO will in fact take a most active part in it, even if it ultimately localizes in Afghan territory.
This, however, calls into question the viability of the alliance within its present format. After all is said and done, it was created to stand up to the Soviet Union while NATO's relationship with Russia in the 1990s was not entirely rosy. Yet in the new conditions, Russia is not only not an adversary of Western countries, but is perforce becoming their natural ally - moreover, one that has for several years now already been fighting on its own battlefronts in the war that the United States and the West as a whole are only going to enter. NATO member states have de facto to join Russia in this war - an undeclared war, but no less bloody and devastating.
Nonetheless, the prospect of a new strategic geopolitical balance imposes on NATO and the U.S. administration considerable obligations to review their position toward Russia and its national interests that up until now have at best been ignored. Time will show to what extent the Western political establishment will be able to abandon outdated dogmas going back to the Cold War era, for the sake of its own survival.
Endnotes
Note *: Evgenii Satanovskii is president of the Institute of Israeli and Middle East Studies Back