ENGLISH DEYEA NEWS

By Tisaranee Gunasekara "Terrorism is like a tree. Terrorists are leaves on that tree…. As many terrorists you kill, leaves will grow back. Organisations are branches…If you cut a branch the tree will still remain". - President Asif Ali Zardari of Pakistan(in his first TV interview after the Mumbai attack)

So on which side of the 'War on Terror' does Pakistan stand?

Pakistan has been a consistent ally of Sri Lanka in her struggle against Tiger terrorism. The same Pakistan is supposed to have sheltered the men who masterminded and carried out the Mumbai attack. Lashkar-e-Taiba (The Army of the Pure) was a creation of Pakistan’s powerful Inter Service Intelligence (ISI), to be a proxy in the Kashmir conflict. It was held responsible for the 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. Though under a nominal ban after 9/11, Lashkar-e-Taiba still functions in Pakistan and the Mumbai attackers are believed to be Pakistani nationals belonging to it.

So what is Pakistan – a state that aids and abet terrorism or a state that is opposed to terrorism?

Pakistan is unambiguously anti-Tiger. Since Tigers are terrorists Pakistan should be categorised as an opponent of terrorism. However, according to media reports, the Mumbai attack was masterminded from two Pakistan cities, Lahore and Karachi by two Pakistanis, Yusuf Muzammil and Zaki-ur-Rehmen Lakhvi "It now appears that both men were in contact with their charges as they sailed to Mumbai from Karachi, and then continued guiding attacks even as they unfolded, directing the assaults and possibly providing information about the police and military response in India. Some of the calls appear to be conversations about who would live and who would die among the gunmen’s hostages …" (New York Times – 4.12.2008).

If this information turns out to be accurate, India would be justified in treating Pakistan as a terrorist-friendly state, and consequently a legitimate target in the 'Global War on Terror', because according to the Bush credo 'if you are not with us, you are against us'. And in the doctrine of 'Global War on Terror', there are friends and there are enemies, with no intermediate space - a flat-earthiest vision shared by extremists of all persuasions from George Bush to the Rajapakses, from Christian fundamentalists to the JHU, from Osama bin Laden to Vellupillai Pirapaharan.

A Misnomer

'The War against Terror' is a catchy slogan, particularly when a country is as shell-shocked and terrified as America was after 9/11. But as a policy and as a strategy it has been a disaster. The world is a complex place. Any attempt to render it in black and white cannot succeed because it does not fit in with the living reality. The truth about Pakistan is also the truth about many other countries, including the US and India – Pakistan is the enemy of some 'terrorists' and a friend to other 'terrorists'. Pakistan is opposed to the LTTE but tolerates Lashkar-e-Taiba; India tolerates the LTTE but is opposed to Lashkar-e-Taiba.

The determinant factor here is not whether an organisation practices terror or not but whether the organisation is opposed to one’s own interests or not. The Indian PM has agreed to send Foreign Minister Mukharjee to ask for a ceasefire in Sri Lanka because he needs the support of Tamil Nadu to win the next election (and perhaps even to stay in power until then). In Pakistan, where the Armed Forces (including the ISI) have a law unto themselves, the main concern is ensuring that the military remain predominant, even when a civilian government is nominally in power. It is now generally accepted that the Iraqi war was motivated by oil and ideology, by a vision in which super profits and the dreams of a permanent American empire were conjoined.

The 'War on Terror' is a misnomer, as the developments in the aftermath of the Mumbai attack remind us. There is no doubt that those who attacked Mumbai are terrorists; it is also likely that these terrorists were backed by Pakistan, which is opposed to other terrorists groups such as the LTTE. This contradiction underscores one of the main lacunae in the 'War on Terror' doctrine - the identification of terrorists. One nation’s terrorist is another nation’s freedom fighter, even after 9/11, even after Mumbai.

For the Bush administration which spearheaded this 'war' for the past seven years terrorist was almost synonymous with Islamic fundamentalist (an understandable proclivity given its close links to Christian fundamentalists, myopia common to Zionist, Hindu and Sinhala-Buddhists fanatics). This incorrect identification was one of the main causes of the Somali misadventure which has led to, according to the conservative New York Times columnist William Kristol, a worse humanitarian disaster than Dafur. When a new Islamic administration took power in Mogadishu, Ethiopia, with the backing of the US, invaded Somalia, under the banner of the 'Global War on Terror'. Today that invasion has gone as badly as the invasion of Iraq; Somalia has succumbed to anarchy and violence and its people have become virulently anti-American making it an ideal breeding ground for future suicide bombers.

The mere term 'War on Terror' de-prioritises the political, the economic and the social, without which even military successes become ephemeral. The case in point is Afghanistan, where an early success story has been turned into a chronicle of failure – because not enough attention was paid to the task of rebuilding. This enabled the Taliban to make a comeback, using the lost hopes of the civilian population as a bridge. The lack of focus on the non-military tasks happened partly because the locus of the ‘War on Terror’ shifted to Iraq and partly because the term ‘War on Terror’ itself and the mindset it creates make inevitable the de-prioritising of non-military tasks.

The terminology also enables its practitioners to justify conduct which is irrational, stupid or criminal. The Augustinian concept of 'just war' was used to justify wars which were the antithesis of justice and fair-play (such as some acts of the Crusaders and the wars on ‘heretics’ particularly Cathars). The ‘War on Terror’ too was believed to be just innately, making otherwise abhorrent practices permissible in its cause. This led to the justification of such atrocities as the use of torture against prisoners and the killing of unarmed civilians.

Matthew Alexander (a pseudonym), a US Air Force official for 14 years led an interrogations team tasked with tracking down Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq. He recently wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post arguing that torture is not just immoral but also counterproductive. Instead of using torture and other extreme methods considered by the Bush administration as essential, he and his team worked at "building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information….. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them….. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias…. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond" (The Washington Post – 30.11.2008).

The novel approach worked. A Zarqawi associate was persuaded to reveal his leader’s location. The lesson is obvious – torture is not just wrong; it is unnecessary. And counterproductive: “I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq…... It's no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse” (ibid).

Lessons for Sri Lanka

Terrorism must be defeated. But, as evidence demonstrates, the current ‘Global War on Terror’ has not succeeded in that task. If India launches a retaliatory strike on terrorist targets in Pakistan, she will be remaking the mistakes of George Bush. Such a course of action will create more fanatics willing to kill and die against India. Having correctly responded to the attack per se with force, the sensible policy in the aftermath would be to correct security lapses and understand the root causes of the attackers’ visceral hatred, including the worsening situation in Kashmir (for example the recent rape of a 13 year old girl allegedly by Indian soldiers) and 2002 anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat. Not to do so would be as stupid and as counterproductive as the refusal by the Rajapakses to come up with a political solution to the ethnic problem until the LTTE is defeated.

Alexander Hamilton has recorded the response of a hardcore terrorist suspect to not being tortured by his American interrogators: "I thought you would torture me, and when you didn't, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That's why I decided to cooperate" (ibid). One main reason for the failure of the 'Global War on Terror' was its de-prioritising of the psychological factors, its conspicuous failure to win the hearts and minds of the people in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in the Islamic world. When the practitioners of the ‘War on Terror’ resort to tactics which are terroristic by any objective criteria, they discredit their own cause and strengthen the enemy, morally and politically. A similar process in self-delegitimisation is underway in Sri Lanka, thanks to some of the abhorrent practices of the Rajapakse administration such as extra-judicial killings, disappearances, the denial of the plight of the refugees and the refusal to permit international humanitarian agencies to assist them. A particularly worrying development is the charge that the Air Force dropped cluster bombs on a refugee camp in a supposedly safe zone. If true, such atrocious conduct would turn both the Tamil people and most of the international community against us.

The Pakistani example shows the danger of permitting the military to operate outside the laws of the country, as a state within the state. There is reason to believe that the civilian government of Pakistan wants to cooperate with India, but the military in general and the ISI in particular is not permitting such a course of action. In his first interview after the Mumbai attack, a visibly worried President Zardari refuted the Indian charges of Pakistani involvement, in a bald volte face from his previous conciliatory position. Clearly the military is not permitting the more conciliatory approach he himself seemed to favour. This is the danger of a military with a law unto itself, and a capacity to overrule civilian rulers. Is a similar situation in the making in Sri Lanka, under this President, this Defence Secretary and this Army Commander?

Terrorism should be resisted, by using force when necessary but never by using counter-terror. Winning over potential terror recruits is as important as killing or imprisoning current terrorists. Terrorism does not fall from the sky; it is created on this earth from political, economic, military, socio-cultural and psychological wellsprings. The existence of root causes does not justify terrorism. But terrorism cannot be defeated if the root causes are not understood correctly, if they are not grappled with consistently. The 'Global War on Terror' failed partly because it failed to undertake this necessary task, because it saw the entire exercise as a struggle between 'good' and 'evil'. But, as we have seen in the aftermath of the Mumbai attack, all too often there is no clear line of demarcation (let alone a Chinese Wall) between supporters and opponents of terrorism. The good can side with the evil, because opportunism is the real name of the game.