Bombs Don’t Work

For the past seven years we’ve been playing a furious game of Whack-a-Mole with radical Islam. Even by conventional terms – tonnage of weapons dropped, etc. – this has been a major war.

What lies in the future may depend on who gets elected in the US in November. One guy looks pretty keen on keeping these wars ticking over and maybe adding one, perhaps even two, while stirring the embers of another Cold War to boot. The other guy – who knows? He doesn’t appear as bellicose but there are no guarantees.

We’re at the threshold of an era of multi-dimensional, global change. We’ve launched a massive expansion of Eastern economies, particularly the giant states of China and India.

There are a lot of problems looming that will eclipse Islamic fundamentalism. There’s anthropogenic global warming and all the associated climate change issues – droughts, floods, storms; species extinctions and migrations (ours too); desertification; freshwater exhaustion; land, air and water pollution; the spread of insects and diseases. Then in an increasingly busy world we’re going to have to tackle frictions over resources caused by the exhaustion of renewables and depletion of non-renewables. Add to that all the related problems associated with overpopulation and we’ve got a heaping plateful of existential challenges even without looking for wars to wage.

I don’t think we can afford wars any longer, at least not like we used to in the 20th Century. They suck up too many resources and deplete the energies we need to deal with everything else that’s knocking on our door at the moment. They’re an unacceptable distraction.

Take Islamist terrorism, for example. That’s “Islamist” as in radical Islam as in Wahabism. As the Muslim world goes, the Islamist movement is relatively small but we’ve done an awfully poor job at combating it.

Muslim kids go in the front door of these Madrassas and out the back door all fired up and ready for the Islamist training camps. Our approach has been to bomb’em into extinction once they’ve gone through this process. However to succeed in our approach, we have to wipe them out faster than they can come through the religious indoctrination level and we’re not even coming close on that score.

If the Islamist movement has a fundamental vulnerability it lies in its inability to sustain itself. It needs money and the active support of sympathizers, most of whom are not Islamists. We need to sort out what drives ordinary, rank and file Muslims, the “Arab Street,” to support these extremists.

I think there’s no end of reasons for the ongoing support of this extremism. A very powerful one is historical. The West has been powerfully meddling in Arab affairs for more than a century – shaping the place to suit our interests with little regard for theirs. We bundled together places like Pakistan and Iraq and Syria out of the spoils we picked up from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following WWI. We even parcelled the Kurds out among at least six nations, sort of like sending the orphan kids off to live with various, distant relatives. In the process, we have persistently lied to and betrayed these people. We have persistently manipulated them to suit our purposes.

We’ve been astonishingly racist toward Arabs. We’ve treated them as though because they’re Arabs or Muslims or something they don’t need or aspire to the same things we insist upon – little things like human rights and democracy. Think I’m kidding? Look at the state of human rights and democratic movements in the West’s two closest Arab states – Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Do you think it’s just oversight that we constantly focus on the anti-democratic repression in Muslim states we don’t like – places like Iran and Syria – but seem not to mind when the oppressors are on our side?

Do you think the Arab people don’t see this? Do you think they don’t see that we support the status-quo that keeps them down, just so long as the tyrants are our pals?

We’ve contributed to a state of affairs in which radical Islam is the only vehicle of change remaining to so many of these Arab peoples. Okay, so we’ve done our bit to narrow their options down to one. Why are we surprised when they’re drawn to it?

The Islamists – whether you call them Hezbollah, al-Qaeda or any of the lesser groups – get a lot of their support because they stand defiant of the very order that oppresses these people. It’s more a “my enemy’s enemy” sort of thing than a genuine alliance of immersed interests. They know the Islamists aren’t working for democratic change but they’re also the only bunch that’s taking a swing at their common foes.

For a while we gave the Arab Street reason to believe we were coming to spread democracy through their region. Now that’s something we’ve promised them before and they’re painfully aware of our past betrayals but when they did get a chance to exercise democracy we rushed right in to shut it down.

The Palestinians elected Hamas because they saw Fatah as atrophied, hopelessly corrupt and willing to sell them out to Israel and the US. They saw in Hamas their only real hope for change. And how did we react? We pretended like they didn’t vote, as though they didn’t choose. We acted as though Fatah had won. We even channeled money and arms to Fatah to stage a coup to oust Hamas.

Lebanese elections ended with Hezbollah winning a number of seats. We were outraged, it was unacceptable!

But wait a minute. Weren’t many of Israel’s early leaders key figures in its own, nationalist terrorist movements? Some of them were butchers, real murderers. Did that stop us from dealing with them? No, of course not. Now you may not have that little inconsistency in the forefront of your mind but you can bet the farm that it’s always in the minds of the Arab Street.

We Westerners celebrate all the struggles our ancestors went through to create the democracies we supposedly cherish today. Why do we find those same aspirations so outrageous when they involve the Arab peoples? One reason is because we’ve been groomed to be blind to it. We’re told, again and again, that all the Muslim people want to do is conquer the world – our world, that is – for Islam, for the Prophet. We’re told they’re on a suicide mission from their God to wipe us out because they can’t stand our Western societies, our freedom, our very democracies. Okay, anyone believing that, line up on the right under the sign that reads “Morons.”

Those arguments deny these people their essential humanity. This thinking presents Arabs as less than human. No, no, they don’t want to raise families, send their kids to school, have a few nice things and live in peace. No, Johnny, only human beings want those things, not Arabs. Sure some of them live in concentration – er, “refugee” camps, but that’s because they’re okay with it.

If there is a Christian God, what must he think of his adherents who act this way?

But I digress. If we want to get Arab terrorism under control, we have to repair the Arab Street. We have to accept that the only real leadership they have – at the moment – is in the radical movement, just as the Israeli leadership was birthed.

Then, and here’s the hard part, we have to believe in democracy and place our faith in its power. Yes, Arab peoples may begin electing outfits like Hamas and Hezbollah and, yes, the early years of their democratic experiment are apt to be uneven, at times even turbulent, but we have to believe that democracy will defeat extremism because it removes the common bond between Islamist extremists and the Arab Street without which the fundamentalists wither and die.

It’s time to do some major arm twisting in Cairo and Riyadh. It’s time we threw our support behind democracy movements in Egypt and Saudi Arabia – economic and political support. If we can make change happen there, we really have the basis of spreading reform through the rest of the Middle East – by example, not by gunfire.

Or let’s just keep doing what’s worked out so wonderfully for us these past seven years. Bomb, bomb, bomb; bomb, bomb Iran.

 

A Window Into the Muslim Mind

In the view of some experts, the reason the west keeps screwing up in the Muslim world is because the west keeps screwing up the Muslim world. We’ve meddled there so much for so long that just about everything we now touch there turns sour.

Georgetown University Prof. John Esposito and Dalia Mogahed, executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, helped organize a survey of 50,000 Muslims from 35-countries and churned their findings into a 200-page report. US News & World Report published a few excerpts from their book, Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think:

We did a survey of Americans in 2002, asking what they knew about the beliefs and opinions of Muslims around the world. Fifty-four percent said they knew nothing or not much. We asked that same question in 2007, after we’ve had two wars and a great deal more media coverage of Muslims, and this time 57 percent said they knew nothing or not much. We are no closer to truly understanding this part of the world, even as we are more engaged with it.

Asked what they most admired and most resented about the West, they answered first technology and second, democracy. People would mention their support for freedom of speech, the rule of law, and the transparency of government. What they most disliked was the perceived moral laxity and libertinism of the West, which, interestingly, is exactly what Americans said when we polled them on those two questions. There is common ground on that issue.

Even in places like Iran and Saudi Arabia, there were only percentages in the single digits that said they admired nothing about the West. When we asked Americans what they admired about the Muslim world, the most frequent response was “nothing.”

Compared with the entire population of Muslims, those who don’t condemn the 9/11 attacks are no more likely to say that they are religious. But they are much more likely to say that the United States is not serious about promoting democracy in their part of the world and that the United States will not allow them to fashion their own political future. When we asked their greatest fear, while the general population will talk about personal safety, this radicalized group most fears political domination and occupation. They have a heightened sense of being threatened and dominated by the West. But those same people are also far more likely to say that greater democracy will help Muslims progress. So, they have a greater desire for autonomy and a greater sense that freedom is being denied.

The important thing about this survey is that it confirms that Islamic radicalism is fueled by those who most want democracy in their homelands. They’re not motivated by some irrational hatred of us. They pretty much want similar democratic rights to those we enjoy. Yet, by our insistence on propping up undemocratic, repressive regimes (Egypt and Saudi Arabia for example) we actually fuel the radicalism that is so essential to the future of Islamist terrorism.

Surely our own experience teaches us that democratic movements aren’t easily crushed and may, if necessary, become revolutionary. This Islamic democracy movement isn’t radical of its own choosing but out of necessity. It’s also ripe for the picking if we want to drive a wedge between Islamist terrorism and its base of support.

When are we going to learn?

 

Isn’t It Time Muslims Defended Islam?

If you’re never heard of Takfiris you soon will for they’re the Muslim equivalent of ninjas and they’re about to really stir things up in Pakistan.

Like the legendary ninja, the Takfiri is an assassin, but one religiously motivated to slaughter fellow Muslims they judge apostate for failing to embrace Islam strictly as revealed by Muhammed and his companions. Anyone deviating from the path is considered no longer Muslim and, hence, an infidel deserving of assassination.

Asia Times Online warns that a Takfiri force is about to be unleashed in Pakistan:

On the one side are US-backed President Pervez Musharraf and political parties such as Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (now headed by her 19-year-old son Bilawal) and Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League.

Against them are al-Qaeda ideologues such as Egyptian scholar Sheikh Essa, who are determined to stamp their vision on the country and its neighbor, Afghanistan.

Prior to 2003, the entire al-Qaeda camp in the North Waziristan and South Waziristan tribal areas of Pakistan was convinced that its battle should be fought in Afghanistan against the foreign troops there, and not in Pakistan against its Muslim army.

That stance was changed by Sheikh Essa, who had taken up residence in the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan, where his sermons raised armies of takfiris (those who consider all non-practicing Muslims to be infidels). He was convinced that unless Pakistan became the Taliban’s (and al-Qaeda’s) strategic depth, the war in Afghanistan could not be won.

In a matter of a few years, his ideology has taken hold and all perceived American allies in Pakistan have become prime targets. Local adherents of the takfiri ideology, like Sadiq Noor and Abdul Khaliq, have grown strong and spread the word in North Waziristan. Former members of jihadi outfits such as Jaish-i-Mohammed, Laskhar-i-Toiba and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi have gathered in North Waziristan and declared Sheikh Essa their ideologue.

This is the beginning of the new world of takfiriat, reborn in North Waziristan many decades after having first emerged in Egypt in the late 1960s. On the advice of Sheikh Essa, militants have tried several times to assassinate Musharraf, launched attacks on the Pakistani military, and then declared Bhutto a target.

This nest of takfiris and their intrigues was on the radar of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the day after Bhutto’s killing Sheikh Essa was targeted by CIA Predator drones in his home in North Waziristan. According to Asia Times Online contacts, he survived, but was seriously wounded. Sheikh Essa had only recently recovered from a stroke which had left him bedridden.

Someone has to smash this radical, fundamentalist threat. The West already has its hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan. Venturing into Pakistan could be a terrible debacle. Isn’t it time the very nations next in line to be targetted by these extremists – countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt – finally took some responsibility for defending Islam and moderate Muslim states from the ravages of these Islamist Jihadis? It’s not as though these countries don’t already feel threatened by the Wahabis, they do. The capricious Sauds have been playing both sides of this street for so long that they’re vulnerable to the very monster they themselves empowered. It’s not only Pakistan’s survival that’s at stake, it’s their own.