This is all very impressive. It’s very important. It may be the beginning of something good. It places co-operation against the most violent terrorism the world has seen ahead of any sense of Islamic State representing a broader view of Sunni Islam. Soon enough, possibly within days, Australian planes will join strikes in Iraq. But the terrorists understand exactly what is happening. And although what we are doing is important and necessary, we are also doing in some measure what the terrorists expected us to do, and what they wanted us to do.
This week we have heard eloquent appeals to Muslims everywhere. Obama reached out to Muslim youth and said: “You come from a great tradition that stands for education, not ignorance; innovation, not destruction; the dignity of life, not murder. Those who call you away from that path are betraying this tradition, not defending it.”
Last month, Saudi Arabia’s Grand Mufti, Sheik Abdul Aziz al-Sheikh, made the religious view of terrorism plain. He said: “The ideas of extremism, radicalism and terrorism do not belong to Islam in any way, but are the first enemy of Islam and Muslims are their first victims, as seen in the crimes of the so-called Islamic State and al-Qa’ida.”
Abbott told the UN: “These terrorists aren’t fighting for God or religious faith. At the heart of every terrorist group is an infatuation with death. What else can explain the beheadings, crucifixions, mass executions, rapes and sexual slavery in every town and city that’s fallen to the terrorist movement that’s now entrenched in eastern Syria and northern Iraq? A terrorist movement calling itself Islamic State insults Islam and mocks the duties of a legitimate state towards its citizens.”
Calling this group by its preferred name is a big problem. Obama and Abbott call it ISIL to avoid the problem. The French president, Francois Hollande, calls it Daech, a derogatory term used in the Middle East and which Islamic State objects to strongly.
Britain’s Cameron gave an indication of the broader problem, when he said: “We must stop the so-called non-violent extremists from inciting hatred and intolerance in our schools, our universities and, yes, even our prisons.”
All this international unity seems impressive. But stop for a moment and consider. A year ago, outside the Middle East, only specialists had heard of the then Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. Now it controls territory the size of Britain and a population bigger than Scotland’s. It has probably more than 30,000 trained and well equipped soldiers. It has huge financial resources from illegal oil smuggling, kidnapping operations, taxes on its subject population, gold and currency in the countless banks in the territories it has taken. And it has captured billions of dollars worth of Iraqi weaponry.
But even this bald catalogue vastly understates the true strength of Islamic State. And it leaves out all the other terror and extremist groups of which Islamic State is only one part. You cannot assess it’s threat in isolation.
Islamic State is for the moment the spear of terrorism but it is only one part of a broader terrorist movement. You cannot begin to understand its long-term threat until you take into account the long, historical gestation of its ideology, the wide geographic spread of its support, and the technically brilliant way it has mastered the techniques of mass communication and information technology.
The Australian counter-insurgency expert, David Kilcullen, this week nominated four security threats it posed: one, radicalising local Middle East populations; two, recruiting foreign fighters who would go back to their homelands, including Australia, and carry out terrorist acts there; three, the destabilisation of nation states within the Middle East, especially Syria and Iraq; and four, the re-invigoration by inspiration of other terror groups around the world.
Kilcullen’s is a powerful but far from exhaustive list. Islamic State not only inspires other terrorist groups but sets up a sense of competition among them. If it can do this, what can we do, is a typical response by other terror groups. It has also refined terror techniques in several ways. Exemplifying the operational flexibility which is central to the success of modern terrorism, Islamic State represents a new stage in the evolution of terror groups into semi-professional armies, a path which Hezbollah pioneered.
And, through the filming of beheadings, it has changed the manner in which terror groups can get mass impact. The 9/11 terror attacks in the US achieved mass impact through mass casualties. They have not been repeated because of the strenuous efforts of Western intelligence and police agencies. But Islamic State has shown it is possible to achieve a mass communications objective with a low tech attack involving extreme barbarity. In doing this it took forward the lessons, from the terrorist point of view, of the low tech but deadly attacks on random Mumbai civilians four years ago.
And by attracting at least a couple of thousand Western foreign fighters to its conflicts, it has provided the broader terrorist movements now with a big base population of trained recruits with Western passports.
Islamic State poses a strategic challenge in another way as well. It vastly complicates the management of traditional, or pre-existing, geo-strategic tasks. Can the US really devote enough energy and resources to containing Russian aggression in Ukraine while it has to go back again to Iraq? Perhaps more importantly, no one is talking much about Iran’s nuclear program. Yet the overall Western intelligence assessment is that the possession of nuclear weapons capability is the end point of that program. In the meantime, Iran is an important actor in containing Islamic State. As a result, Iran’s nuclear program goes off the boil as an issue for the international community to address.
Moreover, it is wrong to think the terror threat resides wholly in Islamic State. For the moment, it is a competitor with al-Qa’ida. But al-Qa’ida has done remarkably well in the decade since 9/11. It has affiliates all over North Africa and the Middle East. All these names with which we have become familiar over the past decade: al-Qa’ida in the Islamic Maghreb, al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula, Boko Haram, al-Shabab. Al-Qa’ida can barely keep up with all the groups that want to affiliate with it. It has adapted itself brilliantly, decentralising across its heartlands. Most of all, it has sold its interpretation of history, and its operational response, to tens of thousands of young men.
Meanwhile, it maintains an alliance with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which remains very strong. When Western troops leave the Taliban will take back a lot of territory. The southern part of Afghanistan will be dominated by southern Pashtun groups, many of which have working relationships with al-Qa’ida. The world has seen what a pro-terrorist state can wreak; 9/11 was planned and organised from Afghanistan. But far from solving this problem, there has been a proliferation of ungoverned spaces, spaces where the national government’s writ does not run and terrorists rule the roost in nations in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.
History, geography and information warfare are keys to understanding the modern terrorist threat. The ideology of jihadist terrorism has long been brewing.
The leader of Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, emerges from a hyper extreme interpretation of the Wahabbi Islam practised in Saudi Arabia. But there are two other dominant strands of jihadist thought. One is the writings of Syed Qutb, the most influential thinker in the early days of the Muslim Brotherhood. He argued that Islamic nations had become slack and lacking in piety. But he also developed a deep hatred of Western society, especially its licentiousness and the temptation which it offered to Muslims. And then there is Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’ida, which builds on both these traditions and sees existing Islamic governments as not authentically Islamic, but also sees the West as essentially, and intrinsically, an enemy of Islam.
This is a critical conceptual point, because it means there is no action, in this cosmology, which Western governments can take which can earn them any credit. That is why it is literally impossible to appease these views.
But it is the mastery of the techniques of contemporary information technology which has made terrorism such a potent threat today. In previous battles governments had an information advantage over insurgents. They knew more and they could communicate with entire populations more effectively.
This is no longer the case. Islamic State can reach into living rooms in any Western city. It can reach the bedrooms of troubled young men and tell them a story of good and evil. It can instruct them in the substance of its ideology as well as offer them the thrill of sacrifice and an affirmation of identity and purpose. This is a process which expertly engages the emotions as well as the intellect.
It is as if the West has turned up for a boxing match but the terrorists are practising judo. The West’s strength in some ways works against it. The West must intervene to preserve some order and stability in the Middle East, to avert preventable genocide and to prevent the formation of terrorist states. But for the terrorists, merely to have engaged the West in conflict is to have an enormous victory, the first victory of credibility.
In the end, the best thing the West can do in the Middle East is empower local actors who will not commit genocide and not support terrorism.
But because of the central place of hostility to the West in the jihadist world view, this conflict we are embarked upon is going to last for a very, very long time.
