In today’s era of terrorism, at times one can almost feel a longing for a simpler time.
The 1970s, with their airline hijackings, their hostage-takings, their elaborate negotiations and sudden rescues, seem almost an age of innocence, a time when terrorists and their opponents alike were testing not only methods but limits. On both sides, a crucial question was, “How far can we go without losing touch with our original ends and becoming obsessed with means?”
As the terrorist war grows grimmer and dirtier, it becomes important to seek the key to why that has happened. A favorite approach is to focus on technology, to consider the impact on terrorism and counter-terrorism of cellphones, computer databases, video surveillance and seemingly easy access to more deadly weapons and materials. That’s an attractive idea, but hardware remains secondary. Technology may influence the conduct of terrorism but does not determine its nature.
Terrorism in its original modern form, as it developed after World War II, had two distinguishing characteristics. It was nationalist and it was separatist. Terrorist groups might exchange training and methods, or cooperate for a specific purpose. On the whole, however, each organization had its own particular end. It might be independence for Israel or Algeria, Cyprus or Kenya. It might be reunion of Ulster with the Irish Republic. It might be to compel Israel to abandon territory occupied during the 1967 war. Those ends were also separatist. They might better be described as negative, in that their immediate aim was to impel or compel a perceived occupying power to go away.
The usual result was an asymmetric conflict. The terrorists were staking everything they had against an adversary that could at any time put down its cards and walk away, usually more than making up for any economic or strategic loss by moral gain. So, terrorists and their opponents had a common underlying goal: negotiation. Talks could extend for months, sometimes years. The eventual outcome was increasingly certain: a ceremonial switching of flags and a new member of the United Nations.
What one might call the second-wave terrorism that began in the 1990s differs in a single, essential matter. Negotiation does not play an essential role in its processes. That in turn can be traced back to the fundamental fact that Islam offers its followers the good things of this world as well as the next.
The responses to it have taken two forms. One involves adopting and adapting Western movements of reform and modernization. At the turn of the 20th century, Arab nationalism was the driving force. With its inability to withstand Western imperialism during and after World War I, in the interwar years authoritarian and fascist systems, particularly the Baathists, took pride of place. Particularly in Third World countries, the fascist model has had a long half-life as a means of mobilizing limited domestic resources for purposes of public development. That approach, however, had at best limited success – so limited that the Arab Middle East consciously turned to scapegoating Israel to camouflage its own failures.
The second form of response to the Islamic world’s decline has been religious. Here two taproots emerged. Wahhabism in its original form is a typical Muslim reform movement, seeking purification by returning to the fundamentals of a desert nomads’ creed, down to details of dress. The second, The Muslim Brotherhood, has its roots in Egypt and with its many spin-offs and imitators seeks to reconcile the high-tech 20th century to traditional Islam by subordinating it.
What the two approaches have in common is a comprehensive, principled, internally motivated hostility to the West. There have been no signs of a general challenge to either position. If anything, the so-called “moderates” appear to be a minority whose influence is restricted. What is significant is the West’s difficulty, not to say refusal, to take the hostility seriously.
To a degree, the West’s reaction has its roots in three aspects of the Cold War:
During those years it was an article of faith in the academic, media and political communities that the ideological element of Soviet policy was essentially rhetoric, not to be taken seriously. The same people, and their immediate successors, dominate their respective establishments today. It is unlikely that a general change of mind can be expected merely because the challenge is different.
An overwhelmingly secular establishment finds it difficult to accept the religiously infused grandiosity of Islamic spokesmen – nor does their typical dress and grooming enhance credibility in an Armani-suited culture. Maps of Palestine on which Israel does not exist, talk of transforming Notre Dame or the Vatican into mosques viscerally seems nonsense to Western ears – nonsense easier overlooked than addressed.
Third, a Cold War era that restricted information from the Eastern bloc encouraged mirror-imaging and introspection in the West. Lacking relevant data, often lacking the linguistic and cultural training to utilize such data effectively, it became easier to contemplate the West’s collective navel: to seek and emphasize internal shortcomings and misjudgments. Two conclusions seem legitimate based on the above analysis. Analyzing Islamic hostility in terms of Western behavior is futile. That hostility is a function of internal developments in the Islamic world. That has removed negotiation as the central factor it was in first-generation terrorism. It may shock diplomats and professors alike, but for the present there is nothing to talk about. The best the West can do is to raise the price of becoming a target. That situation need not be permanent.
Understanding Islam, however, calls for comprehensively revising the kind of thinking developed during the Cold War. It’s not what you don’t know that kills you – it’s what you think you know that in fact isn’t true. The challenge lies in convincing the men and women who develop, implement and critique policy in the Western world.
