The international terrorist conspiracy

SOME things are so obvious that you feel almost embarrassed to repeat them - but if you don’t say them, the propagandists win. So, then:

Terrorism is a political technique, not an ideology, and any group willing to use violence in pursuit of its political goals may resort to it. There are left-wing terrorists and right-wing terrorists; nationalist terrorists and internationalist terrorists; Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and atheist terrorists. In theory, you could have a “war against terrorism”, but it would involve trying to kill everybody who uses this technique anywhere in the world. The United States is not trying to do that, so it is not fighting a “war against terror”.

What President Bush’s administration does claim to be fighting is a war against an international “Islamist” terrorist conspiracy. The motives of this shadowy but powerful network are anti-Western but curiously vague. They “hate our freedoms”, says Mr Bush. They want to destroy our values and our way of life, adds his partner, British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

There is no shadowy but powerful network waging a terrorist war against the West: the whole thing is a fantasy. There are isolated small groups of extremists who blow things up once in a while, and there are web-sites and other media through which they can exchange ideas and techniques, but there is no headquarters, no chain of command, no organisation that can be defeated, dismantled and destroyed.

There never was much of an Islamist “terrorist network” anyway – certainly nothing to compare with the extensive co-operation between the extreme left-wing “urban guerrilla” groups of the developed world (Germany’s Baader-Meinhof Gang, Italy’s Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, etc.) and the various Palestinian groups of secular nationalist radicals in the 1970-1985 period. Even in al Qaeda’s heyday, before the US invasion of Afghanistan effectively beheaded it in 2001, there were only a few hundred core members.

According to US intelligence estimates, between 30,000 and 70,000 volunteers passed through al Qaeda’s training camps in Afghanistan in 1996-2001, but their long-term impact on the world has been astonishingly small. The average annual number of Islamist terrorist attacks in Arab and other Muslim countries has been no greater in the past five years than in the previous ten or twenty. For most of the people who went to Afghanistan in those years, it was a rite of passage or an exotic form of ideological tourism, not the start of a lifelong career as a terrorist.

The West has been even less affected. The 9/11 attacks on the United States were a spectacularly successful fluke, killing almost 3,000 people, but there have been no further Islamist attacks in the US. The two subsequent attacks that did occur in the West, in Madrid in 2004 and in London last year, cost the lives of 245 people. And those attacks were both carried out by local people with no links to any “international terrorist network”.

The contrast between the received wisdom – that the world, or at least the West, is engaged in a titanic, unending struggle against a powerful terrorist organisation of global reach – and the not very impressive reality is so great that most people in the West believe the official narrative rather than the evidence of their own eyes. There must be a major terrorist threat; otherwise, the government is wrong or lying, the intelligence agencies are wrong or self-serving, the media are fools or cowards, and the invasion of Iraq had nothing to do with fighting terrorism.

But there isn’t a major terrorist threat; just a little one. The massive over-reaction is due to the fact that 9/11 hit a very big and powerful country that had the military resources to strike anywhere in the world, and strategic interests that might be advanced by a war or two fought under the cover of a crusade against terrorism. If 9/11 had happened in Canada, it would all have been very different.

A kind of 9/11 did happen in Canada. The largest casualty toll of any terrorist attack in the west before 2001 was the 329 people who were killed in the terrorist bombing of Air India Flight 182, en route from Toronto to London, in 1985. Two hundred and eighty of the dead were Canadian citizens. Since Canada has only one-tenth the population of the United States, it was almost exactly the same proportionate loss that the United States suffered in 9/11.

It was immediately clear that the terrorists were Sikhs seeking independence from India, but here’s what Canada didn’t do: it didn’t send troops into India to “stamp out the roots of the terrorism” and it didn’t declared a “global war on terror”. Partly because it lacked the resources for that sort of adventure, of course, but also because it would have been stupid. Instead, it tightened up security at airports, and launched a police investigation of the attack
The investigation was not very successful, and 21 years later most of the culprits have still not been punished. But Sikh terrorism eventually died down even though nobody invaded the Punjab, and nobody else got hurt in Canada. The US would have had to lean on the Afghan regime quite hard to get the al Qaeda camps shut down after 9/11, but that, on the whole, would have been the right reaction to that attack, too. And nothing more.

n Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.

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