The Australian
The dangerous illusion of independent terrorists
Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor | December 06, 2008
WHEN US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in India this week, all the talk was about "non-state actors" and the challenge they throw up to the international system. The assumption was that the Pakistan-based terrorists responsible for the murders of about 175 people in Mumbai, and the injuries to hundreds more, were non-state actors.
Yet it may be that since the 9/11 attacks in New York, the world has completely misconceived the age of terror.
The radical increase in the lethality, range, political consequence and strategic influence of terrorists comes not from their being non-state actors at all. Instead it comes from their being sponsored by states.
Sometimes they are the instruments of states and at other times they make strategic alliances with states.
A terrorist group operating without any state sponsorship is an infinitely less dangerous outfit than a terrorist group operating with the co-operation of even the most ramshackle state.
However, states not only co-operate with terrorists, in many cases they direct and even found the terrorists.
Consider the prime example, al-Qa'ida. For a long time al-Qa'ida was the very image of decentralised, non-state globalisation. Men in caves, it was said, could bring death and destruction in New York.
Yet that image, powerful and pervasive as it was, does not really capture the truth about al-Qa'ida. Al-Qa'ida began life in its campaign against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan, with the support of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
The US, too, was supporting the mujaheddin in Afghanistan, though it certainly did not support transnational terrorism. After Osama bin Laden fell out with the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, he moved the centre of his operations to Sudan. Al-Qa'ida and its leadership would not have been able to keep going, much less consolidate as a global, revolutionary terrorist movement, without the safe haven and other facilities that the Sudanese provided for at least the first half of the 1990s.
Then, from 1996 onwards, al-Qa'ida headquartered itself in Afghanistan, where its ideological soul mates, the Taliban, were running the country.
The infrastructure the Taliban provided to al-Qa'ida was crucial. Tens of thousands of jihadists went through terrorist training camps that al-Qa'ida ran on Afghan soil.
Even after the 9/11 attacks, the US did not move immediately to attack Afghanistan and depose the Taliban. Rather it gave the Taliban a choice: they could avoid US military action if they handed over bin Laden and the other al-Qa'ida leadership.
What saved al-Qa'ida was the refusal of its state sponsor in Kabul to give it up. When the Taliban leadership escaped from Afghanistan, the al-Qai'ida leadership escaped with it. Nonetheless, al-Qa'ida at least has an independent existence apart from its succeeding state sponsors.
In the case of Iran, this is not so clear. Iran sponsored Hezbollah as its representative force in Lebanon. Increasingly, Tehran has taken direct control of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah undoubtedly commands some genuine popular support in Lebanon, but increasingly it is run as a unit of the Iranian state. That is one of the reasons it has been relatively quiet in the past 12 months. Iran plays these games with a lot of precision.
Hezbollah is a particular type of terrorist organisation. It is certainly capable of suicide terrorism, but it has become in effect a standing terrorist army, with its most important investment being in medium and even hi-tech missiles that it can launch at Israel whenever Iran gives the order.
Thus Hezbollah is less a non-state actor, as the popular jargon has it, and more an instrument of state power that nonetheless provides its state sponsor with political distance or a level of plausible deniability.
When Hezbollah struck Israel, Israel struck back against Lebanon, including Beirut, but the real return address on the Hezbollah rockets was Tehran. If Israel had attacked Iran it would have been accused of starting a Middle East war, but Hezbollah's rockets have the capacity to paralyse the northern half of Israel.
Similarly, Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood organisation. But its primary capacity is a conventional military capacity, especially the rockets it is now acquiring. It receives support from one big state, Iran, but it also constitutes on its own a kind of state power in Gaza.
Terrorists have to operate from somewhere. There are three alternatives. They can operate in what is truly ungoverned space, such as much of contemporary Somalia. Or they can operate clandestinely, against the wishes of a governing authority, as say the terrorist groups that have gathered in London. But of necessity such operations tend to be small and furtive. It is the third option that allows terrorists to grow to their full potential: where they are operating as either allies or agents of a sympathetic government.
Which brings us to Mumbai.
Pakistan has for many years been a significant state sponsor of terrorism. Its military intelligence agency, ISI, founded the Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist group, initially to harass India in Kashmir. The ISI also founded the Taliban to ensure a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul.
Even when Pakistan allegedly turned against terror and rounded up a few al-Qa'ida leaders, it never captured a Taliban leader. Nor did it ever really try to.
Now US intelligence has determined that former leaders of the ISI and other former Pakistani military figures trained the terrorists who perpetrated the Mumbai massacres.
Even if the impotent Pakistani civilian Government was not directly involved in the Mumbai massacres, it makes sense to see the long campaign of terror against India as sponsored by at least part of the Pakistani state. Given the Pakistani state also pioneered the idea of the Islamic nuclear bomb, this should sound the gravest alerts.
Thus it may be that modern terrorism is not so much the emergence of non-state actors on to the strategic field but, rather, the latest refinement of state power, giving the option of state military and terrorist action with plausible, or at least politically useful, deniability. If anything, therefore, we have tended to underestimate the strategic importance of terrorism.
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges