International Terrorism: How Dangerous, How Real?
How dangerous, how real?
The debate rages on about how true it is that a chain of command and control can be linked directly from New York/Washington to the mountains of Afghanistan, about the role the diverse American and foreign agencies inside and outside the USA played in the outrage which was 9/11. As usual, the victims were innocent civilians going about their daily lives.
If in 2001 Al Qaeda had the capacity to perform the most spectacular marketing coup in the history of terrorism (9/11), building on its previous attacks (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya in 1998; Aden, Yemen in 2000), since then it has been perpetrating ever more rudimentary, though deadly, events: Istanbul, Turkey 2003; Madrid 2004, London, 2005 being the most widely referred yet since 2001, no less than 14,776 terrorist attacks have been carried out by Islamists, murdering 60,000 people and injuring 90,000 others in the widest myriad of geographical destinations.
While the spectacular terrorist events make the front pages due to the appalling effectiveness of their atrocities, the thousands of others which murder a handful of people or injure a few kids do not, unless they take place in Western Europe or the USA or against their interests.
Increased intelligence and covert operations by the authorities and increased vigilance by common citizens (the front line in the fight against terrorism) have reduced Al Qaeda’s intercontinental operating strategy to the realms of the lone, demented shoe bomber and some poor mixed-up Nigerian kid who set fire to his underpants.
Those who compare these events with the strategic brilliance of the 9/11 operation (however horrific its effects may have been) conclude that the capacity of Far Enemy Jihadism to strike successfully at massive targets has waned.
Conclusions
It is clear that International Islamist Terrorism exists and continues to pose a potential threat, while increased attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan on its leadership, and intelligence elsewhere, has seen Al Qaeda’s ability to constitute the level of effectiveness it had from 1998 to 2001 reduced to crude attacks with little more than home-made equipment and far more Islamist terrorist attacks being perpetrated against regional competitors than against international foes.
International, yes. Dangerous, yes. Real, yes. Room for complacency, no. But does the spectre of an Al-Qaeda capable of carrying out massive terrorist strikes still exist? Time will tell. Until then, vigilance and intelligence at all levels, down to the common citizens, is the best form of prevention, while at a higher level, the leadership of the cause can be undermined through dialogue, through political inclusion and addressing the heart of the problem with a single weight and measure: the question of the Middle East.
The bottom line underpinning all of these strategies is to deprive the leadership of its foot-soldiers and this can only come through development. While the Soviet Union was internationalising development, the West was doing what it could to sabotage its models. The need for development is the constant factor in the fight against international terrorism.
Timothy BANCROFT-HINCHEY
PRAVDA.Ru
