by Gwynne Dyer
George W. Bush spoke the truth, briefly, at the end of August, when he said that the “war on terror” cannot be won. It cannot be won or lost because it is only a metaphor, not an actual war. It is like the “war on crime,” another metaphor—but nobody ever expects that the “war on crime” will one day end in a surrender ceremony where all the criminals come out with their hands up, and afterwards there is no more crime. It is a statistical operation, and success is measured by how successful you are in getting the crime rate down. Same goes for terrorism.
You could do worse than to listen to Stella Rimington, the former director of MI5, Britain’s intelligence agency for domestic operations: “I’m afraid that terrorism didn’t begin on 9/11 and it will be around for a long time. I was very surprised by the announcement of a war on terrorism because terrorism has been around for thirty-five years … [and it] will be around while there are people with grievances. There are things we can do to improve the situation, but there will always be terrorism. One can be misled by talking about a war, as though in some way you can defeat it.” As Mr. Bush said before his handlers got the muzzle back on.
One small fact that will help to clarify the following story: London was awarded the 2012 Olympics on July 6, 2005, the day before the suicide bombers struck several targets in the city.
July 7, 2005
LONDON: NOT EXACTLY THE BLITZ
Tony Blair flew down from the G8 summit in Scotland to be with Londoners in their time of trial, and you can hardly blame him. It’s not that we needed him to take charge—it was only four smallish bombs, and the emergency services were doing their job just fine—but the tabloid newspapers would have crucified him if he hadn’t shown up and looked sympathetic in public.
No doubt he was feeling sympathetic, too, but the words he used rang false. The accent was British, but the words were the sort of thing that comes out of the mouth of George W. Bush—all about defending British values and the British way of life. He didn’t mention God, so he’s still British under it all, but I’m pretty sure I even heard him use Mr. Bush’s favourite words, “freedom” and “resolve.” I’m also pretty certain that this cut very little ice with most Londoners.
This is a town that has been dealing with bombs for a long time. German bombs that fell during the Blitz in September–December 1940 killed 13,339 Londoners and seriously injured 17,939 more. In 1944, London was the first city in the world to be hit by cruise missiles (the V-1s or “buzz bombs”) and, later that same year, it was the first to be struck by long-range ballistic missiles (the V-2s, which carried a ton of high explosives).
During the Second World War about thirty thousand Londoners were killed by German bombs and three-quarters of a million lost their homes. Then, between 1971 and 2001, London was the target of 116 bombs set by various factions of the Irish Republican Army, although they only killed fifty people and injured around one thousand. And not once during all those bombings did people in London think that they were being attacked because of their values and their way of life.
It was quite clear to them that they were being attacked because of British policies abroad, or the policies of Britain’s friends and allies. The people who organized the bombings wanted Britain out of the Second World War, or British troops out of Northern Ireland, or the British army out of the Middle East (or maybe, in this instance, the whole G8 to leave the rest of the world alone). Nasty things, bombs, but those who send them your way are usually rational people with rational goals, and they almost never care about your values or your way of life. It’s political, not personal.
Londoners understand this, and such knowledge has a remarkably calming effect: once you have grasped this basic fact, you are no longer dealing with some faceless, formless, terrifying unknown, but a bunch of people who are willing to kill at random in order to get your government to change its policies. Moreover, they can’t hurt all that many people. In a large city, the odds are very much in your favour: it will almost always be somebody else who gets unlucky.
This knowledge breeds a fairly blasé attitude towards bombings, which was much in evidence this morning when I had to go in to Harley Street at noon to pick up my daughter from school. (They didn’t let school out early; it was just the last day.) The buses and the London Underground weren’t running and a lot of streets were blocked off by the police, but everybody was finding ways round them, on foot and in cars. You pull over to let the emergency vehicles pass, and then you carry on.
What happened to the victims of the bombs was horrible, and the British media did their best to stir up panic and fury, but it didn’t work. In fact, several times during the day, I overheard people say something along the lines of “Bloody terrorists. Always get it wrong. If only they’d done this two days ago then we wouldn’t be lumbered with the bleeding Olympics.”
One would-be terrorist eventually got the Nobel Peace Prize.
July 4, 2006
MANDELA THE TERRORIST
The oddest bit of news this week has been the tale of the hunt for Nelson Mandela’s pistol, buried on a farm near Johannesburg forty-three years ago. It was a Soviet-made Makarov automatic pistol, given to Mandela when he was undergoing military training in Ethiopia. (He also went to Algeria, to learn from the revolutionaries who had just fought a savage eight-year war of independence to drive out their French colonial rulers.) A week after he buried the gun, he was arrested by the apartheid regime’s police as a terrorist and jailed for life.
It’s very hard now to imagine Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. He is the most universally admired living human being, almost a secular saint, and the idea that he had a gun, and was prepared to shoot people with it, just doesn’t fit our picture of him. But that just shows how naïve and conflicted our attitudes towards terrorism are.
Nelson Mandela never did kill anybody personally. He spent the next twenty-seven years in jail, and only emerged as an old man to negotiate South Africa’s transition to democracy with the very regime that had jailed him. But he was a founder and commander of Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the military wing of the African National Congress (ANC), and MK, as it was known, was a terrorist outfit. Well, a revolutionary movement that was willing to use terrorist tactics, to be precise, but that kind of fine distinction is not permissible in polite company today.
As terrorist outfits go, MK was at the more responsible end of the spectrum. For a long time, it only attacked symbols and servants of the apartheid state, shunning random attacks on white civilians even though they were the main beneficiaries of that regime. By the time it did start bombing bars and the like in the 1980s, Mandela had been in prison for twenty years and bore no direct responsibility for MK‘s actions—but neither he nor the ANC ever disowned the organization. Indeed, after the transition to majority rule in 1994, MK‘s cadres were integrated into the new South African Defence Force alongside the former regime’s troops.
There’s nothing unusual about all of this. Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Archbishop Makarios in Cyprus, Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, and a dozen other national leaders emerged from prison to negotiate independence after “terrorist” organizations loyal to them had worn down the imperial forces that occupied their countries. In the era of decolonization, terrorism was a widely accepted technique for driving the occupiers out. South Africa was lucky to see so little of it, but terrorism was part of the struggle there, too.
Terrorism is a tool, not an ideology. Its great attraction is that it offers small or weak groups a means of imposing great changes on their societies. Some of those changes you might support, even if you don’t like the chosen means; others you would detest. But the technique itself is just one more way of effecting political change by violence—a nasty but relatively cheap way to force a society to change course, and not intrinsically a more wicked technique than dropping bombs on civilians from warplanes to make their government change its policies.
Neither terrorism nor military force has a very high success rate these days: most p
eople will not let themselves be bullied into changing their fundamental views by a few bombs. Even in South Africa’s case, MK‘s bombs had far less influence on the outcome than the economic and moral pressures that were brought to bear on the apartheid regime. But that is not to say that all right-thinking people everywhere reject terrorist methods. They don’t.
What determines most people’s views about the legitimacy of terrorist violence is how they feel about the specific political context in which force is being used. Most Irish Catholics felt at least a sneaking sympathy for the IRA‘s attacks in Northern Ireland. Most non-white South Africans approved of MK‘s attacks, even if they ran some slight risk of being hurt themselves. Americans understandably see all terrorist attacks on the United States and its forces overseas as irredeemably wicked, but most Arabs and many other Muslims are ambivalent about them, or even approve of them.
We may deplore these brutal truths, but we would be foolish to deny them. Yet in much of the world at the moment, it is regarded as heretical or even obscene to say these things out loud, mainly because the United States, having suffered a major attack by Arab terrorists in 2001, has declared a “global war on terror.” Rational discussion of why so many Arabs are willing to die in order to hurt the United States is suppressed by treating it as support for terrorism, and so the whole phenomenon comes to be seen by most people as irrational and inexplicable.
And meanwhile, on a former farm near Johannesburg that was long ago subdivided for suburban housing, they have torn down all the new houses and are systematically digging up the ground with a backhoe in search of the pistol that Saint Nelson Mandela, would-be terrorist leader, buried there in 1963. If they find it, it will be treated with as much reverence as the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. The passage of time changes many things.
They never did find the pistol. But here’s another valuable find …
October 30, 2006
THINKING LIKE A TERRORIST
What are they thinking, those terrorists who hate America’s values, as the United States prepares to vote in the 2006 mid-term Congressional elections? Do they think that a terrorist bombing somewhere in the United States in the next few days would drive Americans back into President Bush’s arms, or discredit his strategies further? And which result would they prefer: do they want the Republicans to lose control of Congress, or not?
To discuss these questions sensibly, you must first accept that terrorists are not just hate-filled crazies. They are people with political goals and rational (though vicious) strategies for achieving them. So put your prejudices aside for a moment, and try to think like a terrorist.
Happily, a document has come into my hands that will help us to figure out their strategy. True, it reads like a script written for an amateur dramatic society, but it comes from one of the Western intelligence agencies that certified the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so there can be little doubt about its authenticity. I have taken the liberty of translating it into English.
A heavily guarded compound in Waziristan. Three bearded men in robes enter the courtyard.
Osama bin Laden (for it is he): So do we blow something up in America before the election this time, or not? We skipped 2002 and 2004. Surely it wouldn’t hurt to do something this time.
First Henchman: Well, I don’t know, boss. Not blowing more stuff up in America has worked for us so far. Bush got the credit for keeping the terrorists away, and that gave him the freedom to invade Iraq, and so the Americans never put enough troops into Afghanistan, and now they’re losing both wars. I say leave him alone. It’s coming along just fine.
Second Henchman: Besides, we don’t really have …
Osama bin Laden (interrupting): I bought that argument in 2002, and I bought it again in 2004, but now it’s different. Bush will be in power until 2008 no matter how Americans vote, so the U.S. soldiers will still be pinned down in Iraq until then anyway. He’s not going to pull them out. And he’s not going to send a lot more troops to Afghanistan, either, no matter who controls Congress, so our Taliban friends will be all right. We have nothing to lose. Let’s blow something up. It will humiliate the Americans and make us look good.
Second Henchman: That’s all very well, but …
First Henchman (interrupting): You know, I think the boss is right. It can’t hurt now. Activate the sleeper cells in America, and have them blow up a few car bombs.
Second Henchman: Will you stop talking and listen for a minute! We don’t have any sleeper cells in America. We never did. We had to bring the 9/11 guys in from abroad, and they’re all dead. This whole discussion is pointless, and furthermore … [At this point the transcript ends]
On second thought, I do wonder if this document is entirely genuine. There’s something about the style that doesn’t sound quite right. But the logic is exactly right: this is how terrorists think.
The 9/11 attacks on the United States were meant to provoke an American military response. The point was to lure Washington into invading Afghanistan (where Bin Laden’s bases were), so that they would become trapped in another long guerrilla war like the one he and his colleagues had waged (with U.S. support) against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The images from such a war, of high-tech American forces smashing Afghan villages and families, would reverberate across the Muslim world and radicalize so many people that the Islamist revolutions Bin Laden dreamed of would at last become possible.
George W. Bush dodged that bullet by overthrowing the Taliban regime without causing vast destruction in Afghanistan (it was done almost entirely by American Special Forces and their local allies), so there was no guerrilla war there at first. Bin Laden’s gamble had failed. But then Bush invaded Iraq, providing Arab extremists with the guerrilla war they wanted and images of horror in profusion. He even abandoned most of the effort to rebuild Afghanistan in order to concentrate on Iraq, so the Taliban got the chance to recover there, too.
That’s where we are now, and Osama Bin Laden has little incentive to try to discredit President Bush with the American electorate by carrying out further terrorist attacks. The project is on track, and the Americans will be largely gone from the Middle East in a few years anyway.
And besides, there are no sleeper cells in America. There never were.
8.
SOUTH ASIA
One of the abiding themes of the last decade has been the American courtship of India as a potential alliance partner in the “containment” of China. Washington wasn’t really sure that it would end up in a military confrontation with China, and was also pursuing a policy of “engagement” with Beijing—the twin policies being known colloquially as “congagement”—but it wanted India on its side as an insurance policy.
India had a tradition of non-alignment, but it was tempted by the U.S. offer: privileged access to the next generation of American military technology, and an end to the U.S. ban on the export of nuclear-power technology to India that had been imposed when New Delhi tested its nuclear weapons in 1998. It took most of the decade to manoeuvre that deal through the U.S. Congress and the Indian parliament, and even now it is not a full-fledged alliance. But it was quite enough to make China paranoid.
June 11, 2007
INDIA: THE PRICE OF CHOICE
Choices usually involve a price, but people persist in believing that they can avoid paying it. That’s what the Indian government thought when it joined the American alliance system in Asia in 2005, but now the price is clear: China re-announced its claim to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, some eighty-three-thousand square kilometres of mountainous territory in the eastern Himalayas containing over a million people.
China has actually claimed Arunachal Pradesh for a century and, during the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, Chinese troops briefly occupied most of the state before withdrawing and inviting India to resume negotiations. However, most Indians thought the dispute had been more or less ended during Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to New Delhi
in April 2005, when the two sides agreed on “political parameters” for settling both the Arunachal Pradesh border dispute and another in the western Himalayas.
Indians assumed that the new “political parameters” meant that China would eventually recognize India’s control of Arunachal Pradesh. In return, India would accept China’s control of the Aksai Chin, a high-altitude desert of some thirty-eight-thousand square kilometres next to Kashmir. And that might actually have happened, in the end—if India had not signed what amounts to a military alliance with the United States.
Informed Indians knew perfectly well that Wen Jiabao’s visit was a last-minute attempt to persuade India not to sign a ten-year military co-operation agreement with the United States. Two months later, Pranab Mukherjee, then India’s foreign minister, went to Washington and signed the thing. Still, most people in New Delhi managed to convince themselves that Wen’s concessions during his visit were not linked to India’s decision about the American alliance.
In June 2006, I spent two weeks in New Delhi interviewing Indian analysts and policy-makers about India’s strategic relations with the U.S. and China. With few exceptions, their confidence that India could “manage” China’s reaction to its American alliance remained high. “India knows what it is doing,” insisted Prem Shankar Jha, former editor of the Hindustan Times, citing confidential sources close to Prime Minister Singh. “It is not going to make China an enemy.”