SOUTH ASIA’S COUNTERTERRORISM Can a war-based western model work here?

COUNTERING terrorism is now firmly enlisted on South Asia’s menu with talks of cross-border platforms. However, one also needs to look at various counterterrorism models elsewhere to see if they have worked. Most dominating is the US approach which doesn’t have a record of containing terrorism effectively as of now. It ignores the political background of conflicts between various state powers that often, if not always, ignite ‘terrorism’. Nor does it explore the desire of states to exploit international situations for making internal political gains. This confusion may have contributed to increased terrorism and counterterrorism, gaining a legitimacy of sort.
While there are many kinds of terrorism generated by nationalist conflicts, it is the Islamic extremism that dominates global thinking, partly because it is now seen as a non-state ideological force in conflict with the US, the world’s leading power.
Yet by unpacking terrorism, it shows that although it is thought of as an international non-state enemy with a religious ideology, ‘terrorism’ also appears everywhere as a pre-state or state aspiring force. ‘Terrorism’ has increasingly become a state in waiting because the ‘terrorists’ want to establish a state of their own, whether it’s Taliban’s Afghanistan, al-Qaeda’s khilafat or the Hamas’s Islamic Palestine. Or Tamil Tiger’s Eelam state.
Contemporary ideas on violence are built on the premise that violence can be used to dominate other violent forces. It appears that both the US and al-Qaeda more or less believes in the same method on this regard. Both also claim the moral high ground. This outdated mode of conflict resolution has led to enormous global insecurity and suffering.

The quizzical Israel-US security relationship
The creation of Israel has generated a long phase of violence in the region that continues to pose as the biggest generator of threats, no matter whatever the logic behind its birth is. Anti-Israeli Arab powers have responded with violence showing very little gain. Over the years, Israel has become militarily and economically much superior to its neighbours and an internally democratic state to boot but it has not brought peace to the region and that continues to generate violence including terrorism for the rest of the world.
Many commentators argue that the Jewish lobby in the US is manipulating policy and generating support for Israel. But while there are around six million Jews in the US, they are only 2.5 per cent of the total population so they can’t have any electoral impact. While many of them are in positions of power and influence, especially in the media and finance, the clout claim is not proven by any evidence.
It’s true that anti-Muslim feeling is high in the US and this goes back to long before the 1967 war. It’s partly part of the traditional Christian-Islam rivalry over world domination which has a long history in a deeply religious fundamentalist country like the US. Criticising Israel is a death knell for any politician in North America because that would be interpreted as pro-Muslim which has the highest animosity rating there. The US media has played the biggest role in demonising Muslims because it panders to an overwhelming hostility to Muslim population selling a lopsided image in a country where the majority are religious partisans.
On the other hand, many Jews in the US are not only liberal but recent events show that of them there is a strong pro-human rights element that are increasingly vocal against Israeli policies of occupation. In fact, they have emerged as the most vocal critic of Israel today.

Why the US supports Israel?
The US became a major resource supplier of Israel only after the 1967 war when Israel occupied Arab territories and decimated all Arab armies in the region. Aid has helped Israel to the point that even if no US aid arrives in the next so many years, Israel would be still fine. The US Jews are influential but nowhere near the fundamentalist Zionist Christian lobby that is about 25 per cent of the US vote and control key electoral states that sent many to the White House.
Zionists Christians are actually anti-Jew in general but they support Israel and the status quo there because they believe in the Bible’s Book of Revelation, which says Jesus will come to earth again as the Messiah during the time when Jews are in occupation of Jerusalem. That has already happened in 1967. The book further says this will be followed by many catastrophes such as wars and diseases. Next will be the biggest war of them all, called the Battle of Armageddon when Satan will declare war on Jerusalem through the ‘Anti-Christ’ who many Christians think may be a Jew. The Bible states that when all appears hopeless for the Jews, Jesus will come. Jerusalem will arise again and all the remaining Jews not killed in the Battle of Armageddon will convert to Christianity. So unless Jews are in control of Jerusalem, Jesus can’t come and Christianity can’t prevail.
So though they dislike Jews they have a common cause. The Jews don’t believe in the Revelations but are happy to be supported by such a powerful lobby which also hates them. For example, Europe created a new state for Jews but not in Europe but the Middle East, which was far away from the inevitable conflicts the state creation would generate. The Jews in Europe who were always outsiders in Europe were sent out of it permanently. It had more to do with reducing conflict possibilities in European mainland than any other cause.
The US support for Israel after 1967 was linked to the objectives of the Cold War. While Israel was a US ally, Arabs were supported by the Soviet Union. The Middle East became the testing ground for countering and learning about weapons produced by the Soviet Union in battlefields, testing newly developed US weapons and keeping regional Leftist radicalism in check, all part of the Cold War strategy.
Israel not only reduced the power of pro-Soviet Union regimes by defeating them but also weakened the radical elements within the Palestine movement which had strong Marxist tendencies. A lot of resources were spent in splintering the Fatah movement including encouraging the rising Islamic groups. For example Hamas, Fatah’s main rival, was a splinter of Egypt’s Islamic Brotherhood, a sworn enemy of socialism. Rumours of Israel’s help in launching Hamas have never gone away. At that stage of history, the US was more concerned with leftist radicalism and thought jihadists and the US had the same long-term objectives.
Finally, oil was another cause. In the aftermath of the 1967 war, oil prices spiked throwing the Western economies into turmoil. The US could no longer depend on endless and cheap supply of oil without some military guarantees and Israel did that along with its main oil ally, Saudi Arabia, a despotic regime that has a major al-Qaeda problem too.
None of the above shows any ‘clash of civilisation’ element but is largely about the effect and impact of the US’s Cold War with the Soviet Union and using voters’ sentiments at home. One can argue the jihadist phenomenon as a by-product of the Cold War.

Soviet Union’s contribution
The final collapse of the Soviet Union was triggered by its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The US responded by creating a new contra force in the region, the Mujahideen. A war which was national in character was marketed as a holy war/jihad across the entire world putting the Soviets under great pressure. It became the ultimate proxy war before the Cold War finished and took Islamic extremism beyond borders.
Osama bin Laden was a major figure from Saudi Arabia in the Afghan war and lionized by Western media but once he saw the alliance between the Saudi royal family and the US — again a nationalist problem — as detrimental to his reading of Arab nationalism, he went on with his violent journey that had begun in Afghanistan.
The narrative of pan-Islamic nationalism has several roots but Arab world’s internal conflicts are an essential element of that. The US initially benefited from Islamic radicalism’s rise by damaging secular Leftist movement and the pro-Soviet regimes in the Middle East proper and also in Afghanistan by bringing the Soviet Union to its knees.
History also shows that sperming violent forces to counter an enemy doesn’t work out always as many turn out to be the new enemy once the old one is gone. The jihadists and Taliban provide the best example of this fact. Like socialism, the roots of jihadist radicalism is located in unresolved national issues which need attention before one can end the problem, an issue which the dominant US brewed model rarely if ever addresses unable to read much beyond Islamic radicalism.

South Asian terrorist woes
Some land-based wars can still perhaps be won but ‘terrorist’ wars can’t be fought well, let alone won, using conventional military logic. Major hotspots such as the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the ethnic insurgents in the Indian North East and of course Kashmir all have land-based national questions at its heart. Land-based wars can be won temporarily such as the one against the LTTE though at an extremely high price such as including the altered nature of the state. And now without any territorial base, this LTTE war may spread all over Sri Lanka. Mobile wars have greater ability to cause damage than frontal battles especially as economies show their increasing disability to fund long wars.
The conflict resolving model used during the Cold War has not only ended Soviet Union but continues to erode the US too. In Gaza, the latest Israeli incursion has seen the worst depletion of its allies globally including from within the Jewish population both in the US and Israel. Many Jews today reject the role of an occupying power. Inside Israel, the traditional security management role through occupation is losing unquestioned popularity. Given the lack of success, can south Asia take this road?
In this age of unwinnable wars, South Asia shouldn’t be involved in the ancient and now redundant logic of traditional security specialists. Anti-terrorism can be products of internal political compulsions and quickly go counter-productive as history has shown. Even the worst terrorist enemy starts gaining a human face when violence is perpetrated against unarmed people as the Gaza incident shows. The war gets lost in the battle field of public sympathy for the sufferer.
In this context, Bangladesh can provide a positive example. It may have a flawed peace but the CHT peace accord (1997) did achieve peace. Peace can satisfy the most selfish national objectives because it is not just an outcome but a security tool too. South Asian leaders need to move away from its West influenced security mentality of violence and counter violence which India, Pakistan and other countries are paying now by following them.
Peace is not a moral choice but a practical option where it’s as potent and powerful as any war. South Asia must think for itself as it approaches large scale cross border anti-terrorism.