On September 11, 2001 when two hijacked airliners ripped through the New York World Trade Center towers, the real horror was only beginning. Saturday’s simultaneous attacks on three crowded restaurants in the Indonesian resort island of Bali killing 30 people is, but a continuation of a chain of such violent devastation that the world has come to expect. Oct 12, 2002: Just before midnight, bombs explode in a nightclub district on Bali, killing 202 people, most of them foreign tourists. The July 7 series of explosions that ripped across central London, killing at least 33 people and injuring hundreds; the devastating train attacks in Madrid in March 2004, killing 191 people and leaving at least 1,800 injured. Does anybody have the answers to such madness?
In his now prodigious hypothesis ‘The Clash of Civilization’ Samuel P. Huntington states that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or economic. He goes on to say that the great divisions among human kind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural, that is conflicts over the question of political and religious values. The Clash of civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.
While Huntington’s assumption may not be wholly correct, there are already possible indicators of the clash that his premise draws upon and more so after 9/11 and 7/7.
In the backdrop of such terror, what remains to be seen though is how the US and its allies will approach the global war on terror, the crisis in Iraq and Afghanistan without triggering further violence. While religious doctrine and beliefs may rally a cause, it has also to be borne in mind that the underlying causes of terrorist violence lie in politics, not seventh-century religious dogmas.
It is said that terrorists are not born but they are made and this holds true in this particular context of terror networks growing across the Muslim world particularly among the Arabs. There exists a sense of grievance, resentment, envy and hostility towards the west and in particular the Americans whose action against Iraq since 1991 and the continuing close ties with Israel have not gone down too well in the region. This has found a convenient breeding ground to produce modern 21st century jihads, people like Mohammad Atta who turned passenger airplanes into weapons of mass destruction or more recently Azahari Husin, a former student who went on to became Jemaah Islamiah’s chief bomb maker. Husin, 47, the key suspect in a series of terrorist attack in Indonesia, became a born-again Muslim and later converted to radical Islam and embraced terrorism.
The Cold War analogy carries a clear warning. Although the West eventually won, it paid a high price along the way. Even complete success in the pending military operations in Iraq will not mean victory. This is already apparent in the rising insurgent violence in and around Baghdad. Ultimately, a successful campaign against terrorism requires other non-military elements. One of them is resolving conflicts particularly in West Asia the breeding ground for discontent and hostile groups to emerge with a political message of their own. Further there should be an intensified support for economic development especially in areas of Central Asia, the Arab world and northern Africa where repression and poverty provide breeding grounds for international terrorism. In the longer run, improvements in the social, economic and political conditions in Muslim countries would be necessary for bringing to an end anti-Americanism and dry up support, funding sources, and recruiting channels for terror groups like al Qaeda and their co-horts.
