Global Terror - Manipulating the Root Cause?

The Global War on Terrorism and moulding the world’s perception about the same is essentially swept by the West. Post 9/11, any mention of terrorism’s ‘root cause’ was seen as justification of terrorism, thus becoming an object of refrain. This has been primarily on the assumption that there could be no explanatory account of terrorism, beyond the evil mind set of the terrorist, motivated by a fanaticism that was inherent to Islam.

By 2004, this account of terrorism was showing its limitations. No longer believing that killing and capturing could by themselves bring success, governments in West began looking for a new discourse that could provide a sense of direction to the global counter-terrorism efforts.The taboo about discussing the root causes had to be broken.

The concept of radicalisation emerged as a tool for policy makers to explore the process by which a terrorist is made. This was to provide an analytical grounding for preventing strategies that were to go beyond the use of state violence. Experts and officials started referring to the idea of radicalisation whenever they wanted to talk about “what goes on before the bomb goes off”.[1] This phenomenon made Islam the nodal point, seen as the driver of conflicts, especially affecting the West. 

The scholars, political activists and policy makers associated with the terror war have evolved two broad approaches in making sense of the ‘Islamic extremism’. The first school of thought sees the Muslim community as failing to adapt to modernity as a result of their Islamic culture. Islam, as per them, fails to separate religion from the political sphere of the state, thereby dangerously bringing in religious fanaticism into the public domain. It is held that religious reformation of Islam is the only way to end terrorism. It is foolish to insist that the violent act of Islamic extremists can be divorced from the religious doctrine that inspires them, instead of the fact that they are driven by a political ideology embedded in Islam itself. On this view, liberation for Muslims consists in leaving their culture behind rather than autonomously changing it from within.[2]

The second approach views extremism as a perversion of Islam’s message. The proponents twist the teachings of Islam into an anti-modern and totalitarian political ideology. The ideologues attempt to provide an alternative to modern values of liberalism and democracy. As per this approach, the war on terror is not a clash of civilisation between West’s modern values and Islamic fanaticism; instead it is a clash between traditional and apolitical Islam that is compatible with modern values and totalitarian approach that has projected Islam as a violent political ideology. This approach has found traction amongst the world leaders and as a way out, strengthening of Muslim moderate voice is advocated, without any clarity on defining moderate Muslims. Presumably, they are meant to put their capacity for reason above the religious blind faith but not let it lead to criticism of West; and they have to publicly condemn using violence to achieve political ends except when their governments do so. No wonder, moderate Muslims are hard to come by.

Notwithstanding the differences, the concept of religious ideology as root cause of terrorism is central to both the above approaches. The ideology’s predominant bias is ultimately derived from Cold War views, when political violence of any kind was linked to a specific ideology – communism or left extremism in most of the cases, then.[3] In all this, the role of Western powers in co-producing the terror is obscured.

As an objective approach, terrorism needs to be seen as the product of an interaction between state and non-state actors who together constitute themselves in a relationship of conflicts. It is always the interaction between players in conflict that contextualises the use of violence as a valid tool to achieve ends.[4] An ideology (Islamic, in the current case) is taken as sufficient explanation for existence of conflicts, thereby undermining the cruciality of socio-political and economic facets that are at play in shaping the outcome; for convenience and often as an alibi.

Religion in most of the cases could merely be a facilitator providing breeding grounds. It has been a matter of debate as to whether religious radicalisation succeeds various other forms of alienations arising out of economic and socio-political context, or otherwise. Although, it is established beyond doubt that terror incidents in West have cumulatively increased after the global war on terror was declared, in the aftermath of 9/11. Similarly, while it is convenient for Israel to claim that Hamas is violent because of its Islamist ideology, and therefore needs to be met by force rather than dialogue, the truth is also explained in the context of the decade-long Israeli occupation.[5]

As mentioned earlier, the narrative of religious radicalisation that has come to occupy the centre stage, vis-à-vis the war against terrorism, was from the beginning, circumscribed to the demands of the state. Rather than being an attempt to objectively analyse the genesis, evolution and manifestations of terrorism, it was more in synchronization with demands of counter-terrorism policy makers.

The lacunae with the religion centric approach is that it absolves the western powers of any causative role; instead the emphatic onus is on individual, psychological or theological facets that are largely removed from state policies and its manifestations. So long as the circumstances that produce declared grievances of Islamic radicals, are not taken into account, it is inevitable that these radicals will often appear as a ‘rebel without a cause’.[6]

A French sociologist has argued that it makes more sense to separate theology from violence: “The process of violent radicalisation has little to do with religious practice, while radical theology, as Salafism, does not necessarily lead to violence. The leap into terrorism is not religiously inspired but should be better seen as sharing many factors with other forms of dissent, either socio-political or behavioural”.[7]

In pursuing this path, radicalisation analysts supply what the policy makers demanded. After all, for the West, addressing the wider political context of terrorism was a non-starter with government officials, for whom the basic parameters of foreign policy in West Asia, in Africa, Af-Pak, in South Asia were written in stone as infallible state policies.

Today, counter-radicalisation with its religious genre, is a career, as scholars enter the mini-industry of national security think tanks, terrorism studies departments, law enforcement counter-terrorism units and intelligence services to work on formatting and modelling radicalisation. The result is that radicalisation scholars systematically fail to address the reality of political conflicts they claim they want to understand. But true scholarship also involves a duty to question the underlying assumptions that reflect geo-political realities of governments that are themselves parties to the conflicts under investigation.[8]

Instead a concept has been created deliberately, that introduces biases and prejudices into the official thought process. This thinking shapes government policies and structures that are introduced to combat radicalisation, resulting in discrimination and unwarranted restrictions on civil liberties – leading to further alienation and radicalisation, in a vicious manner.

Such a model of radicalisation has encouraged the national security agencies to believe that they can preempt future terrorist attacks through intensive surveillance of spiritual and mental lives of Muslims. On the contrary, the youth that undergoes radicalisation, is already primed for the same due to various reasons, which have very little to do with religion. Most importantly, often, the manifestation is in defiance of traditional Ulema.

For law enforcement agencies, as organs of the state, the best approach would be to investigate the active incitement (to be seen beyond the prism of sectarianism), financing or preparation of terrorist violence rather than the wider belief system which are wrongly assumed to be its precursors. The state agencies have to rise above their supposed charter of being able to identify tomorrow’s terrorists; a mindset that surely incubates alienation.