A new kind of warfare

On the JihadWatch site Raphael Israeli, professor of Islamic, Middle Eastern and Chinese history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and author of 25 books, including Islamikaze: Manifestations of Islamic Martyrology and his latest, Arabs in Israel: Friends or Foes? (excellent, as ever), cites another al Qaeda theorist (see my Mail piece today) to explain the Mumbai atrocities in their wider and terrifying context:

Qurashi, who has obviously studied the most recent Western research in matters of the future battlefields and war doctrines, has come up with conclusions that are alarming: first, that the era of massive wars has ended, because the three war models of previous generations have been eroded; second, the fourth-generation wars of the 21st century will consist of asymmetrical confrontations between well-armed and well-equipped armies, who have a turf, a way of life and material interests to defend, and therefore are clumsy, against small groups armed with light weaponry only, who have no permanent bases and are on the move at all times. Third, in these wars, the main target is not the armed forces, but civil society that has to be submitted to harassment and terror to the point of detaching it from the army that fights in its defense; and fourth, that television is more important than armored divisions in the battlefield. The Twin Towers, the terrorist explosions in London and Bali, the Israeli confrontation with Hamas and Hizbullah on its borders, and now Mumbai all show how these doctrines can be rendered operational.

This war doctrine lies in the gray zone between war and peace. Those who initiate this kind of war, e.g. by wanton terrorism, would not declare it openly, and would leave it to the defenders to announce war and thereby become the “aggressors”. The terrorists themselves would create atrocities that are sure to attract the attention of television so as to “strike fear in the heart of the enemy” (a Qur’anic prescription -- 8:60), and enable them to retreat to their bases, if they can, or sacrifice themselves in what the dismayed victims wrongly call “suicide bombings”, for there is no suicide there, only large scale killing of the enemy even if it involves large scale self-sacrifice. But when the victim strikes back in self-defense, television can again be counted on to show the “abuses” of the “aggressor” and create sympathy for the cause of the terrorists, as in Afghanistan and Gaza. On television, the huge armies which crush everything in their path will always look more threatening than the “poor”, “frustrated” “freedom fighters” who are “oppressed” and “persecuted” by far superior troops. Thus this writer could show that small groups of poorly equipped Mujahideen have been able throughout the past two decades to defeat super- and lesser powers: the Soviets in Afghanistan, the US in Somalia, Russia in Chechnya and Israel in Lebanon and then in Gaza.

... There is, however, a way to counter every deed or doctrine, with a view of reducing its effect, thereby immunizing Western society from its deadly threat and eliminating the terror it imposes on all civilized people. For example, if the terrorists intend to detach Western societies from their armed forces, an area where they have been partly successful by inculcating doubts into the public by supporting protest movements from within, perhaps it is time for these societies to realize that they have been used by their enemies to attain their ends. These ends are to dismantle national unity and to incite populations against their governments, thus playing into the hands of the terrorist subversive doctrine. If television is a declared means to discredit Western societies and their systems of defense, the media should not be allowed to the battlefield until the end of hostilities. Perhaps it is better for governments to be accused of obstructing the media than to let them document the asymmetry between the established strong defenders of freedom and the weaker terrorists in the field.

This new kind of warfare, which exploits the grey area between war and peace, military and civilian, is precisely why Britain and America have found it so difficult to use their existing structures to bring terrorists to book and defend their society (see the mess over Guantanamo, for example, or the massive rows over extending pre-charge detention in the UK). Until and unless we develop new structures to deal with this changed method of warfare, we will continue to be lethally out-manoeuvred. Meanwhile, the psy-ops strategy of war employed by the jihadi armies has been stunningly successful in de-moralising their western targets (including Israelis) in precisely the way Raphael Israeli describes. That is why people in Britain, America and elsewhere cannot grasp the significance of Mumbai; that is why they bay against America's alleged ‘crimes’ of self-defence against those who wish to murder American citizens; that is why they persist in viewing Israel, the six decade-long target of annihilatory aggression, as the oppressor in the region.

The difficulty, and it is extreme, lies in persuading a civilisation that is fast losing the power to reason at all of the objectively verifiable truth -- in whose very existence, however, the relativist west has long ceased to believe.