Crawling from the Wreckage (12 page)

Terrorism is a tool, not an ideology. Its great attraction is that it offers small or weak groups a means of imposing great changes on their societies. Some of those changes you might support, even if you don’t like the chosen means; others you would detest. But the technique itself is just one more way of effecting political change by violence—a nasty but relatively cheap way to force a society to change course, and not intrinsically a more wicked technique than dropping bombs on civilians from warplanes to make their government change its policies.

Neither terrorism nor military force has a very high success rate these days: most people will not let themselves be bullied into changing their fundamental views by a few bombs. Even in South Africa’s case,
MK
‘s bombs had far less influence on the outcome than the economic and moral pressures that were brought to bear on the apartheid regime. But that is not to say that all right-thinking people everywhere reject terrorist methods. They don’t.

What determines most people’s views about the legitimacy of terrorist violence is how they feel about the specific political context in which force is being used. Most Irish Catholics felt at least a sneaking sympathy for the
IRA
‘s attacks in Northern Ireland. Most non-white South Africans approved of
MK
‘s attacks, even if they ran some slight risk of being hurt themselves. Americans understandably see all terrorist attacks on the United States and its forces overseas as irredeemably wicked, but most Arabs and many other Muslims are ambivalent about them, or even approve of them.

We may deplore these brutal truths, but we would be foolish to deny them. Yet in much of the world at the moment, it is regarded as heretical or even obscene to say these things out loud, mainly because the United States, having suffered a major attack by Arab terrorists in 2001, has declared a “global war on terror.” Rational discussion of why so many Arabs are willing to die in order to hurt the United States is suppressed by treating it as support for terrorism, and so the whole phenomenon comes to be seen by most people as irrational and inexplicable.

And meanwhile, on a former farm near Johannesburg that was long ago subdivided for suburban housing, they have torn down all the new houses and are systematically digging up the ground with a backhoe in search of the pistol that Saint Nelson Mandela, would-be terrorist leader, buried there in 1963. If they find it, it will be treated with as much reverence as the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. The passage of time changes many things.

They never did find the pistol. But here’s another valuable find …

What are they thinking, those terrorists who hate America’s values, as the United States prepares to vote in the 2006 mid-term Congressional elections? Do they think that a terrorist bombing somewhere in the United States in the next few days would drive Americans back into President Bush’s arms, or discredit his strategies further? And which result would they prefer: do they want the Republicans to lose control of Congress, or not?

To discuss these questions sensibly, you must first accept that terrorists are not just hate-filled crazies. They are people with political goals and rational (though vicious) strategies for achieving them. So put your prejudices aside for a moment, and try to think like a terrorist.

Happily, a document has come into my hands that will help us to figure out their strategy. True, it reads like a script written for an amateur dramatic society, but it comes from one of the Western intelligence agencies that certified the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so there can be little doubt about its authenticity. I have taken the liberty of translating it into English.

On second thought, I do wonder if this document is entirely genuine. There’s something about the style that doesn’t sound quite right. But the logic is exactly right: this is how terrorists think.

The 9/11 attacks on the United States were meant to provoke an American military response. The point was to lure Washington into invading Afghanistan (where Bin Laden’s bases were), so that they would become trapped in another long guerrilla war like the one he and his
colleagues had waged (with U.S. support) against the Soviet invaders of Afghanistan in the 1980s. The images from such a war, of high-tech American forces smashing Afghan villages and families, would reverberate across the Muslim world and radicalize so many people that the Islamist revolutions Bin Laden dreamed of would at last become possible.

George W. Bush dodged that bullet by overthrowing the Taliban regime without causing vast destruction in Afghanistan (it was done almost entirely by American Special Forces and their local allies), so there was no guerrilla war there at first. Bin Laden’s gamble had failed. But then Bush invaded Iraq, providing Arab extremists with the guerrilla war they wanted and images of horror in profusion. He even abandoned most of the effort to rebuild Afghanistan in order to concentrate on Iraq, so the Taliban got the chance to recover there, too.

That’s where we are now, and Osama Bin Laden has little incentive to try to discredit President Bush with the American electorate by carrying out further terrorist attacks. The project is on track, and the Americans will be largely gone from the Middle East in a few years anyway.

And besides, there are no sleeper cells in America. There never were.

One of the abiding themes of the last decade has been the American courtship of India as a potential alliance partner in the “containment” of China. Washington wasn’t really sure that it would end up in a military confrontation with China, and was also pursuing a policy of “engagement” with Beijing—the twin policies being known colloquially as “congagement”—but it wanted India on its side as an insurance policy
.

India had a tradition of non-alignment, but it was tempted by the U.S. offer: privileged access to the next generation of American military technology, and an end to the U.S. ban on the export of nuclear-power technology to India that had been imposed when New Delhi tested its nuclear weapons in 1998. It took most of the decade to manoeuvre that deal through the U.S. Congress and the Indian parliament, and even now it is not a full-fledged alliance. But it was quite enough to make China paranoid
.

Choices usually involve a price, but people persist in believing that they can avoid paying it. That’s what the Indian government thought when it joined the American alliance system in Asia in 2005, but now the price is clear: China re-announced its claim to the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh, some eighty-three-thousand square kilometres of mountainous territory in the eastern Himalayas containing over a million people.

China has actually claimed Arunachal Pradesh for a century and, during the Sino-Indian border war of 1962, Chinese troops briefly occupied most of the state before withdrawing and inviting India to resume negotiations. However, most Indians thought the dispute had been more or less ended during Chinese premier Wen Jiabao’s visit to New Delhi in April 2005, when the two sides agreed on “political parameters” for settling both the Arunachal Pradesh border dispute and another in the western Himalayas.

Indians assumed that the new “political parameters” meant that China would eventually recognize India’s control of Arunachal Pradesh. In return, India would accept China’s control of the Aksai Chin, a high-altitude desert of some thirty-eight-thousand square kilometres next to Kashmir. And that might actually have happened, in the end—if India had not signed what amounts to a military alliance with the United States.

Informed Indians knew perfectly well that Wen Jiabao’s visit was a last-minute attempt to persuade India not to sign a ten-year military co-operation agreement with the United States. Two months later, Pranab Mukherjee, then India’s foreign minister, went to Washington and signed the thing. Still, most people in New Delhi managed to convince themselves that Wen’s concessions during his visit were not linked to India’s decision about the American alliance.

In June 2006, I spent two weeks in New Delhi interviewing Indian analysts and policy-makers about India’s strategic relations with the U.S. and China. With few exceptions, their confidence that India could “manage” China’s reaction to its American alliance remained high. “India knows what it is doing,” insisted Prem Shankar Jha, former editor of the
Hindustan Times
, citing confidential sources close to Prime Minister Singh. “It is not going to make China an enemy.”

On the face of it, India got a very good deal in the lengthy negotiations that led up to the military cooperation agreement. It gained access not just to current U.S. military technology but to the next generation of American weapons (with full technology transfer), and the Indian military are predicted to spend
$30
billion on U.S. hardware and software over the next five years. They also got all sorts of joint training deals, including U.S. Navy instruction for Indian carrier pilots. And Washington officially forgave India for testing nuclear weapons in 1998.

This was the only part of the deal that got much attention in Washington, where the Bush administration waged a long struggle (only recently concluded) to get Congress to end U.S. sanctions against exporting nuclear materials and technologies to India. The Bush administration was aware that stressing the military aspects of the new relationship with India would only rile the Chinese, who would obviously conclude that it was directed against them, especially since America’s closest allies in the Asia-Pacific region, Japan and Australia, have also now started forging closer military relations with India.

It took a while, but China was bound to react. Last November, just before President Hu Jintao’s first visit to India, the Chinese ambassador firmly stated that “the entire state [of Arunachal Pradesh] is a part of China.” This took New Delhi by surprise, defence analyst Uday Bhaskar told the
Financial Times
last week: “The Indians had taken the [2005] political parameters [for negotiating the border issue] as Chinese acceptance of the status quo.” They should have known better.

It’s mostly petty irritants so far, but they accumulate over time. Last month, for example, Indian Navy ships took part in joint exercises with the U.S. and Japanese navies in the western Pacific, several thousand kilometres from home and quite close to China’s east coast. Admiral Sureesh Mehta, chief of naval staff, said the exercise had “no evil intent,” and two Indian warships also spent a day exercising with the Chinese navy to take the curse off it—but Beijing knows which exercise was the important one.

Also last month, India cancelled a confidence-building visit to China by 107 senior civil servants. Why? Because Beijing refused to issue a visa to the one civil servant in the group who was from Arunachal Pradesh: he was already Chinese, they said, and did not need one.

A year ago, Indian foreign-policy specialists were confident that they could handle China’s reaction to their American deal. In fact, many of
them seemed to believe that they had taken the Americans to the cleaners: that India would reap all the technology and trade benefits of the U.S. deal without paying any price in terms of its relationship with its giant neighbour to the north.

But there was confidence in Washington, too: a quiet confidence that once India signed the ten-year military cooperation deal with Washington, its relations with China would automatically deteriorate and it would slide willy-nilly into a full military alliance with the United States. Who has taken whom to the cleaners remains to be seen.

Benazir Bhutto must have known she was risking her life when she returned from exile to run in the Pakistani election in December 2007. It was a deal brokered by the United States to shunt General Pervez Musharraf aside and put a civilian, U.S.-friendly prime minister in power, and it was bound to anger the Islamists. She was ready to be a martyr, if necessary. But she was not really ready to be prime minister
.

Benazir Bhutto, a woman who very much liked her privileges and luxuries, did five years of hard time in prison, much of it in solitary confinement, after her father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, was overthrown and hanged by the worst of Pakistan’s military dictators, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.