An international perspective on global terrorism - Opinion - Column

UN Chronicle, Sept-Nov, 2001 by Ramesh Thakur, Hans van Ginkel

On Tuesday, 11 September, global terrorism struck in the homeland and at the headquarters of globalization. The history of United States international involvement could be split along the dividing line of the attacks: the age of innocence before; and the fallen world of postmodern terror after. No one can condone the terrorist attacks, and we wish to extend our deepest condolences to all families who lost loved ones in the tragedy. As part of coming to terms with the trauma, it is important that we in the global academic community look at the civilizational imperatives, and challenge, in our collective fight against terrorism.

What do the terrorists want? To divide the West from the Arab and Islamic world, to provoke disproportionate and merciless retaliation that will create a new generation of radicalized terrorists, and to destroy the values of freedom, tolerance and the rule of law. More than anything else, they want to polarize the world into hard divisions, to break harmony into strife, to replace the community of civilized countries with the flames of hatred between communities. They must not be allowed to succeed.

In their insular innocence--and, in the views of some, in their insolent exceptionalism-Americans had embraced the illusion of security behind supposedly impregnable lines of continental defence. To be sure, the United States too had suffered acts of terror--but not as a daily fear, an everyday reality, a way of life that has become commonplace in so many other countries over the past few decades. And no one, anywhere, had suffered terrorist carnage on such a devastating, mind-numbing scale.

Osama bin Laden's evil genius has been to fuse the fervour of religious schools (madrassas), the rallying power of the call to holy war (jihad), the cult of martyrdom through suicide (shahid), the reach of modern technology, and the march of globalization into the new phenomenon of global terrorism.

Although the monuments to American power and prosperity were shaken to their foundations, the foundation of a civilized discourse among the family of nations must not be destroyed. Responses that are crafted must be carefully thought out and their consequences fully thought through, with a balance between retaliatory counter-measures and long-term resolution, and bearing in mind the lessons, among others, of the involvement of the British and Soviet empires in Afghanistan, the Germans in the Balkans and the Americans themselves in Viet Nam. The rhetoric and metaphors of frontier justice from the days of the Wild West in the United States, or from the time of the Crusades, may rouse domestic fervour but also fracture the fragile international coalition.

Like the two world wars, the "war" against terrorism is one from which America can neither stay disengaged nor win on its own, nor one that can be won without full United States engagement.

America has been the most generous nation in the world in responding to emergencies and crises everywhere else. Now that the attack has happened in their heartbreak-land, Americans should be heartened by the spontaneous, warm and overwhelming response from everyone else. The world has grieved and suffered and mourned along with Americans as one.

Nevertheless, the rhetoric of "war" is fundamentally misleading for many reasons: no state is the target of military defeat, there are no uniformed soldiers to fight, no territory to invade and conquer, no clear defining point that will mark victory. The border between "global terrorism" and global organized crime has become increasingly tenuous. In many important respects, terrorism is a problem to be tackled by law-enforcement agencies, in cooperation with military forces; its magnitude can be brought down to "tolerable" levels, but it can never be totally "defeated", just as we cannot have an absolutely crime-free society; and it is part of the growing trend toward the lowered salience of the State in the new security agenda that emphasizes human as well as national security.

The world is united in the demand that those responsible for the atrocities of that tragic Tuesday must be found and brought to justice, but the innocent must be spared further trauma. All allies and many others have already expressed full support, which has been warmly welcomed by Washington. This should encourage and help Washington to re-engage with the global community on the broad range of issues, not disengage still more through in-your-face rejections of international regimes. Global cooperation is not a one-way street: the relationship requires long-term commitment on all sides.

The global coalition to combat threats to international security, of any type, is already in place. We call it the United Nations. It did not rate a mention in the American President's address to the joint session of Congress. There is a fresh opportunity to rededicate the terms of American engagement with the international community in protecting the world from deadly new threats immune to conventional tools of statecraft. The nation of laws must turn its power to the task of building a world ruled by law. An order that is worth protecting and defending must rest on the principles of justice, equity and law that are embedded in universal institutions.