The Best Ways To Beat Terror
Open societies will have to get used to some invasions of privacy. We need pre-emption but against individuals more than states
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek April 12 issue - Last week the British government foiled what it believed was the largest terrorist plot ever in that country. Police arrested eight men, and seized half a ton of ammonium nitrate, enough for an explosive five times as powerful as the Bali bombs that killed 200 people. The most striking aspect of the episode, however, is that the authorities see no involvement by Al Qaeda. In fact, not one of the suspects is foreign-born or had spent any time in the Afghan training camps. These are British, middle-class Muslim suburbanites who the authorities say became terrorists.
Most terror attacks over the past two years have been planned by groups like this one. They are inspired, not directed, by Al Qaeda, and draw their support from a variety of mostly private sources. Tackling the threat they pose is the key to security in this age.
Terrorism today doesn't need government backing because it is fueled by three broad forces: the openness of free societies, the easy access to technologies of violence and a radical, global ideology of hatred. It can be stopped only by responses at each level.
Western societies—and increasingly others as well—provide enormous freedoms to people living within them. Terrorists use these freedoms to hide. Now we have to find them. This means, as Tony Blair said last week, measures such as national identity cards and biometric identification systems. It also means much deeper cooperation between law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. People with known connections to terrorists should be picked up, at least for detailed questioning, if not detention. We need pre-emption, but of individuals more than of states.
Explosives that used to be difficult to obtain are now a phone call away. Esoteric know-how is posted on Web sites. We can't fight the dispersion of knowledge, but we can stop the dispersion of deadly materials. The errors over Iraq should not obscure the reality that terrorists are seeking chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and would not hesitate to use them. Counter-proliferation—using bribes, sanctions and even, on occasion, military force—needs to move to the center of foreign policy.
What drives terrorism, however, is not easy means but strong motives. Militant, political Islam has brainwashed thousands of young Muslims around the world who believe it is their duty to fight against the modern world. This ideology of hatred has grown as the Western-supported "moderate" regimes of the Middle East miserably failed to deliver economic opportunity or political freedom to their people.
Such ideologies are not caused but powerfully exacerbated by events taking place in the Middle East. Note, for example, how Israel's assassination of Hamas leader Sheik Yassin triggered outbursts of anti-Americanism—including violence—in Iraq. The American-appointed Governing Council, perhaps playing to the Iraqi masses, harshly denounced the assassination. So, Israeli-Palestinian tensions empower radicals and retard progress in Iraq. And elsewhere.
President Bush often speaks of a war against terror. And in a metaphoric sense he's right. The magnitude and urgency of this struggle go far beyond mere law enforcement. But to speak of a war also distorts thinking by suggesting there is an easily identifiable enemy and an obvious means of attack. The vast bulk of anti-terror operations, in America, Europe or elsewhere, is aggressive deterrence and prevention at several levels done by police, intelligence agencies and other nonmilitary bureaucracies.
After all, whom would we wage war on now? Germany for being home to some of the 9/11 plotters? Spain because the Madrid bombers lived and plotted there? Iran and Syria? Would that stop the next Madrid bombing?
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia might seem better candidates. But their connection to terror is complex. From its earliest days Al Qaeda has sought to overthrow the Saudi regime for being pro-American. And Al Qaeda's latest video is a plea—one of several—from Ayman al-Zawahiri to overthrow President Musharraf. If we attacked Saudi Arabia and Pakistan today, we would be doing Al Qaeda's work for it.
For years Saudi Arabia and Pakistan funded radical Islamists as a way of gaining legitimacy. (In the Pakistani case, the government also trained Kashmiri terrorists.) But now Islamic terrorism has become a Frankenstein's monster that has turned on the regimes that nurtured them.
The Saudi and Pakistani cases show that once you nurture radical ideologies, they become uncontrollable, even to the states that created them. That's why the only way to combat this new global terror is to fight the ideology that fires it everywhere. So the war on terror is really a war of ideas. And I'm not sure we are winning it.
Write the author at comments@fareedzakaria.com.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc. |
