Published on Friday, September 21, 2001
Fight the Roots of
Terrorism
by Steve Niva
The current fight against
terrorism poses an unprecedented challenge. To succeed, the US must overcome
the desire for massive military retaliation in response to the horrific attacks
on September 11. It should adopt a strategy based on a more accurate
understanding of the perpetrators of these attacks and the roots of
anti-American sentiments in the Middle East.
For starters, that means
moving far beyond Osama bin Laden. The likely perpetrators of these murderous
attacks are the product of a fringe network of militants originally recruited
by the CIA and Pakistan from around the Arab and Muslim world in the 1980s
during the Soviet war with Afghanistan. After pulling its support once the
Soviet Union left, the US further angered these militants during the Gulf War
when it stationed troops and bases in the Arabian Peninsula near the holy sites
of Mecca and Medina. Consequently, anti-US bombings began increasing from the
1995 and 1996 car-bombings at US military installations in Saudi Arabia, to the
1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the recent attack
on the USS Cole in Yemen.
Osama bin Laden is not the
sole mastermind of these attacks as is often claimed in the media. He just
facilitates these groups with logistics and finances. His network has no
geographical location or fixed center. It appears to be a kaleidoscopic overlay
of cells and links that span the globe from camps on the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands
to immigrant ghettoes in Europe and the U.S.
What's more, this network
is largely disconnected from most Islamic opposition groups in the Middle East
who are fighting national struggles to create Islamic states. What drives their
hatred of the US is not Islam but more political factors. They believe that
Muslims have received the brunt of international violence over the last decade.
They point to the genocide against Bosnian Muslims, the Russian war in
Chechnya, the conflict between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the Israeli
occupation of Palestinian lands, and the UN sanctions against Iraq. In all of
these cases, they view US policies either tacitly condoning the violence or
actively supporting it.
Therefore, a military
strike on militant camps in Afghanistan may kill or capture bin Laden and a
number of his associates but it will not likely incapacitate the far-flung
networks of militants that may have produced the recent attacks. They will
remain in place, with new reasons to carry out more terror. Moreover, a massive
display of American military might brought to bear on a Muslim nation,
especially one that kills innocent civilians in the process, is precisely the
type of action that these militants hope will create the conditions for
unifying greater numbers of Muslims against the United States. It would confirm
their view that the US is an arrogant superpower that cares little about Muslim
lives.
A more effective
alternative to a military response must combine a massive international law
enforcement effort with a political strategy designed to isolate and undermine
these militant networks. The deliberate and murderous attacks on innocent
American civilians should be characterized and prosecuted as a crime not a war.
The United States must use all its resources to compel international
cooperation to ensure that the perpetrators have no place to hide. Identifying
bin Laden and his network as criminals who have violated international law will
make it extremely difficult for countries, especially those who fear being
allied with an American-led war, to refuse more discrete and effective
assistance to the US. Also, given the disperse nature of the networks, only
international cooperation will work to root them out. American declarations of
war inhibit rather than promote this cooperation.
This approach must be
bolstered by a political strategy that deepens the isolation of these fringe
networks from the vast majority of Arabs and Muslims, many of whom hold deep
and legitimate grievances with US policies but who do not support violence. In
words and deeds, the US must clearly make a distinction between Islam as a
religion and violent extremism. But the US must also critically reexamine its
policies in the Middle East.
The US should condemn the
serious human rights abuses committed by its allies with the same force as it
condemns other regimes in the region and condition its aid on progress in
opening up closed political systems. It should curtail the massive arms
transfers to the region and reduce its military presence, which have done
little to promote democracy or stability. The US must also recognize the
failure of the devastating sanctions regime on Iraq and support legitimate
Palestinian aspirations for an independent state alongside a secure Israel.
Such an approach is not a
concession to terrorism but a more realistic and effective response that is
closer to the values that the United States claims to uphold.
Steve Niva teaches
International Politics and Middle East Studies at the Evergreen State College.
He writes regularly for Middle East Report (www.merip.org) and is an Associate at the Middle
East Research and Information Project (MERIP) in Washington DC.
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Published on Saturday, September 22, 2001 in the Los Angeles Times