It’s not just discouraging – it’s dangerous
Ideas – good or bad — are bulletproof. And if they can survive wars and airstrikes, clearly we’re still doing something terribly wrong.
As Jerome Valeska laughed his last laugh on the CW’s show “Gotham”, he took with him the hopes of TV viewers watching with bated breath. With the chilling cackle and the demented smile, he’d convinced quite a few that they were witnessing the birth of the Joker in the TV series that was offered as a prequel to the Batman franchise. But as his death was broadcasted live to the inhabitants of the fictional Gotham City, and more and more Gothamites quickly succumbed to hysterical fits of laughter and bouts of unprovoked violence, viewers were forced to accept that the Joker’s legacy of death, madness and destruction hadn’t ended with one life. It had, instead, been in a way immortalised and spread like a plague. Because the Joker, as the show’s creators explained later, was more than a person – he was a mindset, an ideology of sorts. And as a very famous fictional anarchist once pointed out “ideas are bulletproof”.
Less fictional and far more destructive, the phenomenon of the self styled Islamic State is – in a word – nightmarish. The entity has taken credit for several large scale terrorist attacks, including the very recent Paris bombings. Like Gotham’s Joker, the difficulty in ending the organisation doesn’t stem from the fact that they have the western and Middle Eastern powers outmanoeuvred. It is because isn’t a geographically bound entity, it’s – as a mentor of mine put it — a phenomenon.
“He called it a phenomenon,” said Raoof Hasan, a prominent analyst and executive director of the Islamabad-based Regional Peace Institute, “I call it a mindset.”
Less fictional and far more destructive, the phenomenon of the self styled Islamic State is – in a word – nightmarish. The entity has taken credit for several large scale terrorist attacks, including the very recent Paris bombings
He’s not the only one who thinks on these lines; editorials in some of the world’s most read newspapers have echoed the same sentiment. In doing so, they’ve also raised the all important question in everyone’s minds: how do you fight a mindset?
Well, there have been some ideas.
In 2014, President Obama outlined a four-point strategy that the US planned to implement in order to tackle ISIS. Less than 24 hours later, in an interview with an online media group, IPS fellow Phyllis Bennis explained that the US’s military strategy wasn’t going to work. As she put it:
“Sending more weapons into Syria is only going to put more weapons in the hands of ISIS”.
“That’s exactly what has happened,” Raoof Hassan agreed.
Something else Dr Bennis said back then caught my attention: Barrack Obama’s call to create a “coalition of the willing” – what he hoped would galvanise the international community into the kind of cooperation and coordination that as recently as this week (a year after the original strategy was unveiled) these sovereign nations have yet to achieve. It sounded right – a call for better sharing of intelligence, for setting aside individual state interests in order to tackle a bigger, badder and significantly more pressing menace. It was also a phrase, however, that stirred bad memories. As Bennis pointed out, it had originally been used by former President George Bush, when the international community was being mobilised to aid the US in its war on terror.
“What they’re talking about,” the author deadpanned, “is a ‘coalition of the killing’, once again, just like Bush did.”
The idea of repeating a military strategy like Bush’s — which called for a war on terror in the aftermath of 9/11 and has yet to actually achieve its purpose – is so disturbing that a layman could call it out for what it is: a really bad idea.
So how does one fight this particular terrorist threat then? Logic dictates that you extinguish its source but in the case of ISIS, that’s significantly more difficult than one would imagine.
ISIS forces are built out of defectors and religious zealots. Many have lost their homes, their lives and loved ones to the Middle East’s sectarian violence – which as Bennis had pointed out in 2014, was the main contributor to ISIS’s ground support. Defectors from the west’s enabled outfits like the “Free Syrian Army” and the like don’t just bring man power – they bring weapons. And those are weapons the west supplied, as a part of what had been labelled the “increase in support to forces fighting terrorists on ground” and in support of those who believed – or appeared to believe — in the west’s notions of democracy, enough to try to topple their existing regimes.
And that is going to cost them, as Dr Taimur Rahman, a professor of Political Science at LUMS pointed out:
“You went ahead and supported the Free Syrian Army over there, in the thought that these were the best methods through which you could defeat the Assad regime. The result is defections and members of FSA joining ISIS. The west needs to understand something about the Bashar al-Assad regime: whatever you think of it — and I don’t think much of it — if they make overthrowing the government their priority, then they’ll never defeat ISIS.”
“They need to stop trying to overthrow regimes,” agreed Raoof Hassan.
Another way forward is, as Hassan called it, to “break the chain of funding”. The funding for ISIS however, as Rahman and Hassan pointed out, comes from US allies. ISIS also has control over oil supplies in Iraq, which it sells both on the black market and to sovereign countries. Why isn’t the USA pressurising its allies to clean up their act?
“Since there is a vested interest involved there,” explained Hassan. The interest he spoke of was of course an economic interest – oil, the largest source of the world’s oil supply is in the hands of a country that multiple reports have concluded sponsors terrorism, and is – ironically enough – also one of the most brutal autocratic regimes in the contemporary world. Or, as Dr Taimur put it: “Basically because it’s an ally and they’ve got oil, so they can do whatever they wish, however they wish.”
While it is the responsibility of the government of each sovereign nation to protect its country’s interests, the truth is that those vested interests are costing the international community as a whole. At the same time, while it is easy to point fingers at the west – which is admittedly not without blame –Muslim countries aren’t blameless themselves. Turkey – often heralded as a progressive beacon by fellow Muslim nations — is one of the countries buying the oil ISIS controls, and is rift with sectarian violence itself. While it isn’t wrong to say the US’s involvement in the Middle East planted the seeds for ISIS — and similar outfits — to grow, the truth is that besides unilateral efforts to contain and defeat militancy within own borders, there hasn’t been a united effort by even Muslim countries to present a united front to this menace. And there is a growing danger that many have overlooked, one that Bennis and others predicted before: the people left behind after the dust from the fire fight has settled. Anger, fear and the thirst for revenge are powerful motivators, and so is disillusionment – particularly for this generation, that grew up with words like “suicide vest” and “jihadist” and “terrorist”. And they’re definitely motivating these people – they’re motivating and propelling them – refugees from the war torn Middle East and educated men and women from Europe alike — straight to boot camps.
The conclusion we can draw is simple, at least on paper: the world needs to identify and unite against a common enemy, in times that need diplomacy more than they need air strikes or regime changes
That’s not rhetoric – that’s a fact. And nothing practical seems to be done about it. In Europe alone, the Belgian capital of Brussels has been identified by at least one publication as the continent’s prime supplier of jihadist recruits. And even people who fled their ravaged countries won’t find solace: a report looking at how successful or unsuccessful countries had been in integrating their migrant population found that migrant children in France felt the most alienated — with Belgium close behind. It also discovered that second generation immigrants felt more disenfranchised than those who had just arrived. That isn’t just discouraging – it’s dangerous.
Or, if addressed properly, it could be part of the solution. While agreeing on the need for more coordination and cooperation, Dr Taimur said that, in his opinion, a more inclusive policy towards migrants would go a long way in not only reducing the chances of recruitment from within the west’s borders, it would also help establish the much needed moral high ground the west could use to motivate Middle Eastern countries to work on an alternative to how they’re tackling their domestic problems – which could go a long way in solving regional conflicts that resulted in recruitments and growth of terrorist cells in the first place. It’s a pattern, a cycle.
And if there’s one thing the west needs to do to stop ISIS, it’s to understand this vicious cycle. Well, that, and to stop trying to topple regimes, as Hassan pointed out.
The conclusion we can draw is simple, at least on paper: the world needs to identify and unite against a common enemy, in times that need diplomacy more than they need air strikes or regime changes. Organisations like the OIC need to play their part in taking away the focus from checking militants’ faces off of to do lists, and towards shutting down the idea instead. Because if history has taught us anything it is another “war on terror” isn’t the answer.
After all, to quote Phyllis Bennis: “Terrorism survives war- people don’t.”
