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Arm of the terrorists is not that long
Jonathan Power Comment
IT is little comfort to the families of those murdered but the
evidence is that the life cycle of a terrorist group is 40 years and
of many much less, and very rarely goes into a second generation.
Policymakers and the media skim over the built-in weaknesses of
terrorist groups. The highlighting of their dastardly deeds gets
full play, but the potent evi-dence that points to infighting and
fractionalising is downplayed. The opening of recent archives shows
that even heads of government including the president of the US have
not been given the raw material on this by their intelligence
services to make up their own mind.
Members of the West German Second of July Movement (an ally of the
Baader-Meinhof group that caused mayhem in the 1970s) shot a
colleague because they be-lieved he had botched a bombing and become
a police informant. A few weeks later a member was murdered because
he had refused to murder a colleague. Simi-larly, Le Front de
Liberation du Quebec self-destructed because of bitter inter-nal
disputes. In 1969 fourteen members of the Japanese Red Army were
tortured and killed by their compatriots because they disagreed over
ideological issues.
Competing terrorists jockey with each other for position as between
Palestine groups in the second intifada, strengthening the upper
hand of the Israelis.
Terrorists often overreach, losing what civilian sympathy they may
have built their strength on. Al Qaeda is the best example. Its
support is a poor shadow of what it had at the time of 9/11. Finding
support for it in the Muslim world to-day is almost akin to finding
a needle in a haystack. The splinter group of the IRA, the Real
Irish Republican Army, never recovered its standing after the Omaha
bombing that killed women and children after the Good Friday truce.
When in 1978 the Italian Red Brigades murdered the former prime
minister, Aldo Moro, that was their end as far as public opinion was
concerned. Soon after, all their leaders were rounded up. But public
opinion is fickle, ill informed and easily manipulated by the
authorities and the press and, among young people, too often subject
to the romanticising of would-be revolutionaries. Che Guevara
re-mains even today an icon in tens of thousands of
student-frequented coffee shops all ?over the world.
Osama bin Laden put it neatly when he said in a videoptaped message
in 2004, “All we have to do is to send two mujahedin and raise a
piece of cloth on which is written “Al Qaeda”, to make the generals
race and to cause America to suffer, human, economic and ?political
losses.”
By hiding with a few dozen followers in Afghanistan he brought the
wrath of the Western war machine onto a people who, despite their
warrior reputation, are es-sentially peace loving and politically
quiescent.
This has done more than Al Qaeda could ever have done on its own to
give the movement life-all at the ex-pense of mainly innocent
people. Now the main unspoken reason for continuing fighting in
Afghanistan is to preserve the esprit de corps of the western
mili-taries. The shadow of the Vietnam defeat is a long one.
In time Al Qaeda is likely to destroy itself by its own internal
feuds, admit-tedly only under pressure. But that must be implemented
not by armies and inac-curate drones but by tough policing.
The many Al Qaeda-type cells in Europe, Canada and the US have been
broken by solid police work. At the heart of Al Qaeda is a belief in
a single Salafist strand of Islamic teaching. According to How
Terrorism Ends by Audrey Kurth Cronin, “One long-standing source of
dispute is the argument between those who adhere to the be-liefs of
revered Salafist and Hadith scholar, Shaik al-Albani, who argues
that jihad should entail elements of compromise and those who, like
Ayman Zawahiri, bin Laden’s deputy, who argue that anything less
than killing the infidels is “appeasement”. Likewise, a divisive and
passionate element of discord is the is-sue of whether or not it is
acceptable to kill Muslims, particularly the eld-erly, children and
women.
In Iraq the cruelty of the Al Qaeda affiliate with its
assassinations, enforced suicide bombings, beheadings and forced
marriages repelled Iraqi Sunnis. Zawa-hari wrote a letter to Abu-Musab
al Zarqawi, the local leader, asking ?him to desist. Good police
work, a la Israeli effort to capture Adolph Eichmann, is the way to
go with Osama bin Laden and his merry men. Anything else contains
the seeds of its own failure.—Khaleej Times
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