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| Author: | Max Boot, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies |
|---|
October 31, 2002
Financial Times
The news on the terrorism front seems pretty alarming. Just look at the recent headlines: 750 theatre-goers taken hostage in Moscow and more than 100 of them killed in a ham-fisted rescue operation. A nightclub blown up in Bali, killing at least 181 people; a French supertanker attacked off Yemen; US Marines shot in Kuwait; and a US diplomat killed in Jordan.
But before you flee in panic to a cave somewhere, it is worth focusing on two pieces of good news that are not getting enough attention. First, these attacks have not been occurring in the US, arguably the terrorists' top target. Immediately after September 11 2001, many people had an image in their heads of America-as-Israel, plagued by non-stop bombings of restaurants, stores and buses. But the expected attacks have not materialised - at least not yet.
Why not? It is impossible to know unless you have a hotline to Osama bin Laden, wherever he may be. One possibility is that al-Qaeda is small and incapable of carrying out serious terrorist acts in quick succession. So it may simply be a matter of time before al-Qaeda attacks the US again.
But we should not ignore the strong likelihood that the Bush administration's vigorous response to terrorism, assisted by important allies such as
Tony Blair, has made a big difference. After September 11, a lot of sophisticates opined that any war on terror that did not address "root causes" was doomed to failure. That may be true in the long run but, in the short term, going after symptoms rather than causes seems to have worked pretty well.
It is true some al-Qaeda leaders and followers escaped Afghanistan but their base of operations was destroyed, prisoners were captured for interrogation and valuable intelligence was gathered. Combined with domestic law-enforcement, this has allowed the US government to snare reputed would-be terrorists - Jose Padilla and the Buffalo cell - before they could strike.
Second, by attacking so many other countries, the Islamist terrorists make it easier for America to forge a coalition against them. France and Russia have self-serving reasons for withholding support for US action against Iraq. But in light of the recent events, how can Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin justify to their own voters putting narrow commercial interests above the global fight against terrorism and the states that sponsor it?
The Islamist militants - who are increasingly allied with Saddam Hussein's secular regime in battling against their common enemies in the west - may have reserved their deadliest blow for the US. But they have made clear in recent months that they do not distinguish among infidels - Russians and French and Australians may be murdered if there are no convenient American or Israeli targets.
The backlash has already set in. Until recently, the Indonesian government had ignored pleas from Washington to crack down on Jemaah Islamiah, its local radical Islamist group. But after the Bali bombing - which killed mainly foreigners but damaged Indonesia's economy - President Megawati Sukarnoputri has at last detained Jemaah Islamiah's suspected leader, Abu Bakar Bashir.
Likewise, the government of Yemen, which has twice been embarrassed by terrorism incidents, is joining the anti-terror coalition. President Ali Abdallah Salih has dispatched troops trained by US special forces into the vast Empty Quarter, where their hunt for al-Qaeda suspects is assisted by American surveillance aircraft. The Australian government, which has been at the forefront of the anti-terror campaign all along, is not backing off after losing so many citizens in Bali.
It is important to remember that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. It can flourish only if large states do relatively little to stop it. That was the case with Islamist violence directed against the US, from the hostage-taking in Tehran in 1979 to the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. After each incident, the US's response was largely symbolic and ineffectual. But after September 11 it got serious and, along with its allies, drained terror swamps in Afghanistan and beyond. It was especially important that western European countries that had tolerated Islamist operatives, including the Hamburg cell that planned the September 11 attack, at last decided enough was enough.
Now, we can only hope that other states too will get serious in their war on terror. By indiscriminately targeting innocent people of so many nationalities, the terrorists may be sowing the seeds of their own destruction.
The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.
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