International Terrorism: How Dangerous, How Real?
To state that International Terrorism does not exist, is dangerous because it is untrue. To state that International Islamist Terrorism exists as a structured organism with a command and control apparatus that poses a serious danger seems unrealistic. To state that the Islamist Terrorist threat will be easily destroyed in a question of a few years is simplistic.
What is the difference between a terrorist and a common murderer? The first has a cause and claims to fight for an ideal, and murders. The second murders. The first murders indiscriminately, not caring whether his/her victims are men, women or children. The second is more likely to target fellow criminals, people associated with him/herself, and most likely, adult males.
Therefore we see that there is nothing heroic about the terrorist, for the terrorist fights from under cover, perpetrates his attacks against the defenceless, against innocent members of society and only makes his presence known moments before it is too late to do anything about it. Nothing brave, nothing courageous, nothing mystical, nothing manly.
International terrorism
In a sense, to have a cause, a terrorist organization must necessarily have a broad base of support among a sector of society, be this within a state or at a supra-national level. In the 1970s and 1980s, the IRA enjoyed support and financing not only within Ulster and to a certain extent in the Republic of Ireland, but fundamentally from the Irish diaspora in the USA, where well-wishing NORAID contributors in New York in fact were funding terrorist attacks.
The same attacks were to go full swing and hit New York in the face on 9/11. While there was a certain amount of covert collusion among the Celtic terrorist movements, the IRA in Northern Ireland/UK and the Armee Revolutionnaire Bretonne (ARB), in Brittany, France, there was far more collaboration between ARB and the Basque separatists, ETA, in the 1980s and 1990s and during these decades, in Europe, International Terrorism was reduced to supplies of semtex explosives and financing operations.
The real international terrorism however was being fostered by those who supported Islamic extremist movements in Central Asia creating movements hostile to the Soviet Union. To make the break from simply Islamic (following Islam) to Islamist (radical Islam), these movements needed – and found – a common focal point in Wahhabism, a movement based around a stricter following of the Qu’ran, as professed by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), and which identified as ‘takfir’ those whose behavior was considered anti-(Orthodox) Islamic.
What had been largely a Saudi religious, social and cultural phenomenon, gained roots elsewhere in the Middle East and Central Asia, including Russia’s southern flank (Chechen Wahhabis and the Mujaheddin movement, launched from the Madrassah of Pakistan with the CIA’s total and wholesome support).
To claim that the United States of America created a monster by meddling in complex issues entirely beyond the grasp of those who dictated the country’s external politics (traditionally business lobbies not known for their cultural interests and more famous for chortling clubbishly while peppering each other’s buttocks with buckshot) would be an understatement. Washington created the Mujaheddin, Washington used bin Laden, directly or not. Yet to claim Washington knowingly created the Taliban and Al Qaeda is an overstatement as unfair as it is untrue. The monster was created when the Mujahedin Jihad leadership (Maktab al-Khadamat) morphed into Al Qaeda. By then the master had lost control.
From Wahhabism to Al Qaeda
If Wahhabism was to Islam what the Presbyterian or Quaker movements were to Christianity (and one must take into account the socio-cultural-historical comparative vectors followed by both religions over the time of their evolution), then bin Laden, and Al Qaeda, if not the Taliban themselves, have committed the same psychopathic blasphemous mistakes as countless Christian heretics have done. For Usama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden and Al Qaeda (the Islamists), the takfir is now the enemy, the infidel, the non-follower of the word…dictated by the Islamists.
Yet it was precisely in the CIA/bin Laden Afghanistan Jihad launched against the Soviet Union, where the roots of Islamist International Terrorism lie, for bin Laden, Ayman al- Zawahiri and Mullah Omar were the focal point around which Islamic zealots from Chechnya, from Uzbekhistan, from Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere gathered, first to form the Mujahedin. After a period of in-fighting among various factions, the Pashtun-based Taliban movement appeared dominant and this was the eventual winner emerging from the struggle, which bin Laden latched his Al-Qaeda onto. Or rather, the leaders of the Jihad became Al Qaeda (1988-1990) and the Taliban became their foot soldiers…without necessarily being one and the same thing at the beginning and over the past decade, far from it, with the Taliban and Afghan warlords having their hands firmly on the revenue from opium production and these days sectors of the Taliban movement being poised to return to Government. The divorce between the Taliban and Al Qaeda appears to be more or less complete and final.
