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Terrorism and the battle of
wits
By B Raman
As the
international community observes the second anniversary
of the terrorist strikes by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda
in the United States on September 11, it faces the harsh
reality that the war against jihadi terrorism is far
from won. Even before the US could extinguish the jihadi
fire in Afghanistan, which it itself started in the
1980s, it has started another in Iraq.
The
international coalition led by the US has definitely
scored significant tactical victories during the second
year of the war. Among these one could cite the capture
of Ramzi Binalshibh (September 2002), Khalid Sheikh
Mohammad (March 2003) and Waleed bin Attash (April 2003)
of al-Qaeda in Pakistan, made possible by excellent work
by the US intelligence community, the arrest of Hambali,
of the Jemmah Islamiya (JI) of Indonesia from a hide-out
at Ayutthaya in Thailand in August, made possible by
excellent cooperation between the intelligence agencies
of the US and some of the member-countries of the ASEAN.
Also important was the death of Ghazi Baba, a
Pakistani Punjabi, who was coordinating operations of
the Jaish-e-Mohammad (JEM) of Pakistan, a member of bin
Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF), in Indian
territory. He was killed during a raid on his hideout in
Srinagar, the capital of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), by
India's Border Security Force on August 30. Ghazi Baba
had masterminded the kidnapping of some Western tourists
in J&K in 1995, the attack on the J&K
legislative assembly in October, 2001, and on the Indian
parliament in New Delhi in December, 2001.
Among
the other successes in the war against terrorism,
mention may be made of the unearthing of Saudi-inspired
jihadi terrorist networks in Cambodia and Thailand while
they were still in the process of formation, and the
vigorous investigation of the cases against the
terrorists involved in the bombings in Bali in
Indonesia, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia and Casablanca in
Morroco by the security agencies of those countries.
Some convictions of the terrorists involved have
already been reported from Indonesia and Morocco within
a year of the commission of the acts of terrorism, which
redound to the credit of the investigative agencies of
these countries, who have been assisted by their
counterparts from other countries, such as Australia in
the case of Indonesia and the US in the case of Morocco.
Institutionally, while some of the jihadi
terrorist organizations, which form part of the IIF, are
in disarray, others have shown remarkable resilience
despite the setbacks suffered by them. Among those in
disarray one could cite al-Qaeda itself, whose surviving
leaders, including reportedly bin Laden himself, if he
is even still alive, are widely scattered in small
pockets, and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) and the
Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI) of Pakistan, and the
organizations of the Central Asian Republics. The JEM in
Pakistan has suffered a split due to quarrels among its
leaders over the division of its assets and cash chest.
Among the organizations which have shown
remarkable unity, operational coherence and resilience,
despite the set-backs suffered by them, are Pakistan's
Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) and Sipah-e-Sahaba, Pakistan
(SSP), both of which now operate under different names
to circumvent the ostensible ban on their activities
imposed by President General Pervez Musharraf,
Pakistan's military dictator, the Taliban and Chechen
terrorist groups in Russia. To these, one must add the
al-Aqsa Brigade of Yasser Arafat's Palestine Liberation
Organization, Hamas and the Hezbollah, which have been
causing death and destruction among Israeli civilians,
but these do not belong to the IIF and have kept away
from al-Qaeda.
The LET and the Taliban, which
continue to enjoy the patronage and support of elements
of Pakistan's military-intelligence establishment,
seemingly with the full knowledge and approval of
Musharraf himself and his corps commanders, have not
only managed to keep their terrorist/insurgent
infrastructure intact, but they have also been able to
make additional recruitment to their ranks, to have
their cadres re-trained, re-armed and re-grouped in
sanctuaries in Pakistani territory, with the complicity
of serving and retired officers of the Pakistani
military and intelligence agencies and to have their
coffers replenished despite the international action
against terrorist funding.
The Pakistani
military and intelligence establishment continues to
support the HUM, the HUJI, the LET, the JEM and the SSP,
despite the HUM, the LET and the JEM being designated as
foreign terrorist organizations by the US, despite the
continued involvement of the SSP in anti-Shi'ite
atrocities in Pakistan itself and despite the movement
of many trained and well-motivated cadres of these
organizations to Iraq to participate in the jihad
against the US-UK occupation forces there and their
Iraqi collaborators. This continued support is because
of the military's dependence on them for keeping alive
its proxy war in India.
Similarly, the Pakistani
establishment continues to provide funds, sanctuaries
and arms and ammunition to the Taliban and Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar's Hizb-e-Islami (HEI) in order to use them to
recover its lost influence in Afghanistan. The continued
terrorist activities of the HUM, the HUJI, the LET and
the JEM in Indian territory and the resurgence of the
Taliban in Afghanistan, with the help of the HEI, would
not have been possible but for Pakistani support.
As a result, the LET has emerged as the most
well-motivated, well-organized, well-funded, well-armed
and well-led terrorist organization of the region today
and as the standard-bearer of the IIF. Its presence and
activities extend as far east as Indonesia, to the whole
of the Indian sub-continent and the Persian Gulf. It has
managed to set up a presence even in the US, as revealed
by the recent detection of a LET cell there. Professor
Hafiz Mohammad Sayeed, its amir, reportedly enjoys the
full trust of bin Laden and is deputizing for him to
keep up the morale and the fighting capabilities of the
jihadi terrorist groups in different countries allied
with al-Qaeda in the IIF.
On the ground, while
there has been no qualitative change in the situation in
the Indian sub-continent, Southeast Asia, West Asia and
Chechnya in Russia, despite the above-mentioned
successes, with hundreds of innocent civilians
continuing to die at the hands of terrorists, affairs
have taken a turn for the worse in Afghanistan; and Iraq
has emerged as the new battlefield of jihadi terrorists
in their jihad against the US.
The return of the
Taliban from the cold after 18 months of re-grouping,
re-training and re-arming in sanctuaries in Pakistan's
North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Balochistan and
the rapidity and the frightening defectiveness with
which a plethora of Iraqi resistance groups, aided by
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia-based jihadis, have struck
back at the US dramatically illustrate the inadequacies
of US intelligence collection and assessment
capabilities, despite the successes mentioned above, its
inability to evolve a coherent strategy to deal with
jihadi terrorism, the persisting gaps in international
cooperation which continues to be inhibited by political
considerations, and the painful consequences of failing
to identify and act against the state sponsors of jihadi
terrorism.
Due to the US's mistakes of judgement
and acts of commission and omission, what started as a
war against terrorism in Afghanistan finds itself
transformed into a national liberation struggle against
the US in the eyes of growing sections of Afghans in the
Pashtun belt, and what was projected as a war against a
weapons of mass destruction-wielding tyrant in Iraq has
resulted in the near-destruction of a modern, secular
and anti-jihadi state in west Asia, despite its being
ruled by a tyrant who was no different from similar
tyrants enjoying US benediction elsewhere in the world.
Iraq, which was a rare beacon of secularism in the
Islamic ummah, has overnight become a cauldron of jihadi
terrorism.
The war against jihadi terrorism
cannot be won without the US leadership and resources.
But even under US leadership, it is unlikely to be be
won so long as the US continues with its misguided
policies and views the war merely through the narrow
prism of its interests and the lives of its citizens. A
few tactical victories will not ensure a strategic
triumph unless the misguided policies are admitted and
discarded.
How to restore Iraq to the genuine
control of its secular-minded elite as rapidly as
possible has to be the first priority in any policy
review. Action against Pakistan and other state-sponsors
of jihadi terrorism has to be the second. Neutralization
of the terrorist infrastructure and sanctuaries,
wherever they may be located, has to be the third. As I
have repeatedly point out, action against terrorist
funding alone will not produce enduring results unless
accompanied by action against sanctuaries and
infrastructure.
The new terrorism of the jihadis
defies conventional wisdom, which attributes terrorism
to economic and social causes such as unemployment,
social injustice, economic deprivation, perceptions of
persecution of the community of the terrorists etc.
Conventional wisdom also holds the madrassas or
Islamic religious schools to be the spawning ground of
jihadi terrorists.
But a study of the social
profile of the jihadi terrorist leaders shows that the
conventional wisdom does not hold good in their case.
Many of them come from middle-class or even affluent
families, were well educated and well placed in their
society and are not products of the madrassas.
Their terrorism is motivated by sheer murderous anger
and is unrelated to any particular political, economic
or social cause. The need for a new psychological
approach to prevent this anger from aggravating and
spreading further has to be the fourth priority.
Countering the new terrorism is as much a psychological
problem as it is a political, economic, social and
operational problem.
Have the intelligence and
security agencies and the political leadership of the
victim states learnt the right lessons during the first
two years of the war against terrorism?To a limited
extent, yes; to a large extent, no.The importance of an
effective and performing intelligence setup has been
recognized, but not much has been done to make it so.
The even greater importance of an effective physical
security setup, which will deny repeated successes to
the terrorists, has also been recognized, but the
followup has been poor. The political leadership in many
countries, including India, continues to think that it
can deal with jihadi terrorism through rhetoric and
bravado alone.
Four major terrorist successes
with car bombs in Baghdad (3) and Najaf within a few
weeks show how poor physical security is there despite
the concentration of US troops and their ruthless
methods of operations. How merrily the jihadi terrorists
have been penetrating into one security establishment
after another in J&K by just wearing army or police
uniforms does not reflect well on India's physical
security. In one instance at Akhnoor, they managed to
kill a brigadier in his den, and almost succeeded in
killing two lieutenants-general.
If rhetoric and
bravado alone can crush terrorism, there should have
been no terrorism in India by now. No government in
India has indulged in more rhetoric and bravado than the
present one, but no government has paid as little
attention to improving the nuts and bolts of
counter-terrorism management as the present one.
Intelligence and security agencies cannot be effective
in dealing with terrorism unless there is a political
consensus on the necessary nuts and bolts of the job.
Such a consensus is all the more necessary since the
country has been ruled by a coalition since 1996, and
since different parties are in power at New Delhi and
the victim-states, but no effort has been made either by
the ruling coalition or the opposition to work towards
such a consensus. As a result, counter-terrorism has
been largely politicized.
In national security
matters, the present government came to office with new
ideas, but they have not been satisfactorily
implemented. It set up a National Security Council
(NSC), but it has hardly met twice or thrice. It set up
a non-governmental National Security Advisory Board.
Three boards have come and gone. The fourth one is
presently in office. Their reports and recommendations
do not appear to have received the attention they
deserved. The NSC Secretariat, which replaced the Joint
Intelligence Committee in 1999, has hardly any experts
with experience in counter-terrorism analysis. Before
September 11, the Central Intelligence Agency's
counter-terrorism center had reportedly 400 analysts.
Their number has been doubled since then. The Research
& Analysis Wing (R&AW), the Indian external
intelligence agency, has just four. That in a country
that has suffered the largest number of civilian
casualties at the hands of terrorists since 1981.
Terrorism has been the most important national
security problem of India since 1999 and will continue
to be so until jihadi terrorism is vanquished. One would
have, therefore, expected that counter-terrorism
professionals would be occupying the commanding heights
of the newly-created national security management
infrastructure in the country. But this is not so.
Successful counter-terrorism also means
intelligent psychological warfare (psywar). Its
objective is to strengthen the credibility of the state
and weaken that of the terrorists. Principle No 1 of
counter-terrorism psywar is never to project a
terrorist, however dreaded, into a larger than life
figure. Never make him appear to his community as a hero
worthy of emulation. Project him as a contemptible
serial murderer who deserves to be ruthlessly eliminated
and speedily forgotten. Look at the way our security
agencies have been projecting Ghazi Baba in a larger
than life measure, using expressions similar to those
used by President George W Bush with reference to bin
Laden in the early months of the war. The US has since
realized that by projecting him so they were only
creating in others the urge to follow on his foot steps.
Other states have modified their psywar techniques, but
not our security agencies.
Look at the way the
Mumbai police carted around a suspect last year,
projecting him as an al-Qaeda man who had undergone
flying training in Australia. How badly this weakened
their credibility when they could not prove it. Look at
the way they have been coming out with one contradictory
version after another in relation to the investigation
of the Mumbai blasts of last month. Terrorists, too,
indulge in psywar to weaken the credibility of the
security agencies. When our security agencies themselves
are so adept in weakening their own credibility through
their ill-advised and hasty claims and statements, what
is the need for the terrorists to have their own psywar
apparatus?
Is there any introspection in New
Delhi about our counter-terrorism capability? One hardly
finds even the weakest sign of it.
B
Raman is Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet
Secretariat, Government of India, and presently
director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai; former
member of the National Security Advisory Board of the
Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of
the counter-terrorism division of the Research &
Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency,
from 1988 to August, 1994.
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