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July 13, 2005

Ending Jihadi Terrorism

Background has begun to come out on the terrorists who committed the 7/7 London attack. Wretchard, of course, is all over it, with his usual insightful analysis. Wizbang, Danny Carlton, Captain's Quarters, and My Pet Jawa all have more. There's one aspect of this story that I haven't seen much addressed, though: the tradeoff between freedom and safety.

If you wanted maximum safety, to make sure that no suicide bombings were ever carried out by domestic terrorists, you would have to be able to do a few things: identify the terrorists before they could commit a terrorist act; ensure that you didn't miss any terrorists; take the identified "proto-terrorists" out of circulation before they committed a terrorist act; vigorously follow up any terrorist act netting anyone who was likely involved. This is a non-trivial set of tasks.

To begin, how do you identify the potential terrorists? If you look at the known information on the London terrorists, and the 9/11 terrorists, and the numerous other terrorists that have operated outside of predominantly-Muslim countries, you find that they are by and large middle-class, educated, not particularly rigidly observant, young Muslim men, entranced by the ideology of particularly rigidly observant and intolerant old Muslim men. There happen to be a large fraction of the immigrants to Western nations (particularly Europe) who are middle-class, educated, not particularly rigidly observant young Muslim men who are not entranced by the ideology of particularly rigidly observant and intolerant old Muslim men. So how do you separate out people whose only distinguishing characteristic is what they believe and whom they follow?

Cast the net too narrowly, and terrorist attacks will be carried out by native or immigrant terrorists living freely in society. Cast the net too broadly, and you sweep up a great number of innocents along with the guilty - a much greater number, in fact, than of the would-be guilty, let alone the actually guilty. But in order to distinguish the would-be terrorists, you would have to be terribly, terribly invasive of your citizens' rights: shadowing them as they attend religious events, planting agents in domestic religous places to observe the worshippers, secretly invading their homes to search for evidence while they weren't there (lest you accidentally arrest a not-guilty person). This would not be tolerated by the public at large, and for good reason. And even were it tolerated, you would still miss some.

So you have to cast the net more broadly, to avoid being overly invasive or missing potential terrorists. But this means that you will, as noted above, be netting more innocents than terrorists. After a very few incidents of this come out, casting the net broadly is right out, and for very good reasons.

But let's say that you somehow managed to figure out a way to get more or less all of the proto-terrorists without getting so many non-proto-terrorists that the backlash ended all of your efforts. How, then, do you keep these men out of circulation? You cannot charge them with crimes they have not committed, nor (particularly if they are citizens) can you hold them without charge. And if they are citizens, you cannot expel them. Would the courts revoke a person's citizenship on suspicion that they might, at some point, commit terrorist acts domestically? I certainly hope not! Because if they did, we'd already be at the point of no longer being a free society.

I suppose you could wait until you could catch the terrorists red-handed, but that runs into a problem as well: you will often be too late to catch them. Look at the furor over the ill-named PATRIOT Act, which does little to prevent terrorism, but does make it easier to investigate terror attacks and round up the cell mates who weren't killed or captured in the attack: this mild measure allowing for some domestic surveillance has raised intense (and often ill-informed) anger. Would any system actually capable of detecting preparations of a terror attack be allowed at all? And if so, could you catch every terrorist after they had incriminated themselves enough to be convicted in court, but before they had carried out their attack? Not likely.

So it's inevitable that even the most vigorous possible attempts to detect terrorists and prevent terrorism will fail, and some terror attacks will be committed by native or immigrant terrorists. At least you can clean up afterwards. Big help to the victims and their families, but maybe you can prevent future attacks. I suppose, but the problem there is that you still have to convict the conspirators, and that has proven remarkably difficult. Terrorism is designed to fit into the holes in our system: it frequently leaves too little evidence to overcome reasonable doubts, particularly amongst the planners and agitators, as opposed to the attackers and bomb makers.

And I haven't yet covered the "useful idiots" of the terrorists, who do everything possible to help the terrorists win, for noble or (mostly) ignoble reasons, including simply that the wrong political party is in power. (And there are enough buchananites that it's likely a Democrat administration would face the same kind of opposition.)

So in the end, it is simply impossible to prevent domestic terrorism. How, then, we deal with terrorism? There are a few options: surrender, retreat and accomodation, engagement and accomodation, and genocide. Which we choose depends on the enemy's goals and his means, as well as our will.

The enemy's strategy and goals are clear enough: the jihadis intend to establish a unified theocratic Muslim state (Caliphate) in all Muslim majority countries, then all Muslim minority countries, then all countries. His means are currently limited to small arms, infantry weapons and crude artillery (mortars and rockets), improvised bombs and suicide attacks. The enemy can move more or less freely in democratic countries, and fundraising is only somewhat impaired, due to the Western unwillingness to see Islamic charities for what they are. Similarly, conversion is unimpaired, due to Western unwillingness to interfere in religions or to target jihadi ideologues, planners and sponsors who are also religious figures. State sponsorship is somewhat available at present, but at the point that the enemy gains control of a Sunni state (as opposed to Shia Iran, which distrusts the Sunni jihadis who are after all always preaching that the Shia are apostate, though they allow the Shia are probably not infidels as such), the enemy's means will expand exponentially. The jihadis already seek chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; once they have a state under their control, they will almost certainly get those weapons in short order.

Given those characteristics, surrender is unthinkable. Surrender would mean converting to Sunni Islam, and adopting its most stringent tribal or philosophical forms (Wahabbi or Pushtun or Silafist); overthrowing our entire cultural and religious heritages; adopting strict Shari'a law (including such fun characteristics as stoning adulterers and homosexuals, treating women as chattel, accepting total theocratic regulation of every aspect of life and beheading those who don't go along with all of this); ending most representational art, music and non-religious literature; giving up on science because it might discover things that contradict the Koran (I've seen one Saudi science teacher explain that oxygen and hydrogen come together to make water if god wills it!); and totally submitting to the most reactionary, extremist, and illiberal ideology extant in the world today.

But surrender is not only unthinkable: it will not bring peace. Ignoring the casual violence of the Muslim world, such as killing your daughter for dishonoring the family by getting raped by her uncle, there is still the problem that even the most extremist Islam - the jihadi sects - is not unified. There are differences between the different groups, as there are differences between Sunni and Shi'a. And if there's one thing that the jihadis don't do, it's tolerate differences. Even after we surrender, those differences would lead to the kind of blood feuds and raiding that is common in tribal Muslim societies. Give a bit of credit to the Communist pan-Arabists: they did at least dampen these tendencies in countries where they took hold, though it was at the cost of, well, becoming Iraq and Libya and Syria and Egypt and the Arab areas of Palestine as we know them today.

If even surrender will not bring security, what about retreat and accomodation? This is what people are recommending we do when they say that we should pull our troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, stop supporting Israel, stop supporting Arab dictatorships and the like. This amounts to geographically-defined surrender: we will give up on all Muslim-majority countries, and let the locals fight it out, while we deal with the spillover attacks in Western countries (whether London-scale or 9/11 scale or really anything short of nuclear attacks - and maybe even then for people like George Galloway). The problem with this is that it's how we got here: we tried in the 1980s and 1990s to take a very even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; we defeated the Serbs who were killing Bosnian and Albanian Muslims; we tried to help the starving in Ethiopia (really Eritrea) and Somalia; we stopped the Israelis from completing their conquest of the PLO in Lebanon; we kept Saddam Hussein from holding Kuwait. All of these led to more and more brutal attacks, which we promptly ignored. Which led us to 9/11, when we finally decided that was enough. There is no evidence that retreating now will do anything other than embolden the jihadis to attack us even more strongly in the future.

Worse than that, it is very likely that a policy of retreat would lead to genocide as the Israelis defended themselves in a world where all their neighbors were once again literally gunning for them and where they had no assurance at all of outside support.

So we come to the position of the Coalition: engagement and accomodation. The idea here is to overthrow the governments most supportive of terrorism, replacing them with representative governments. Since the jihadis are, so we are continually assured, a "small minority" of Islam, that should theoretically lead to countries that are basically free and considerably more prosperous. And basically free and prosperous countries don't tend to be very hospitable to creating jihadis, theoretically. In other words, provide an alternative means of political expression to jihadi ideology, and combine this with productive ways to use time, and over time the threat will diminish radically. In the meantime, we accept that there will be some terrorist attacks on us in our home countries, that we will deal with as best we can.

This strategy has some obvious problems, the most important of which is that there is evidence, most recently in London and Madrid, but also from California and elsewhere in the US, that Muslims can be radicalized and converted to jihadis even in prosperous, free nations like England, Spain and the US. Still, if we can remove the possibility of the jihadis gaining control of a state, and can end support from existing states (particularly Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and potentially Pakistan, China and N. Korea), we may be able to reduce the enemy to the point that law enforcement methods, keeping pressure on finances, and denying lawless territory to the enemy would be sufficient to reduce attacks to a level where we could accomodate them, as we did with Leftist terrorism in the 1970s.

If this fails, though, eventually we are once again led down the road to genocide, ours or theirs. If we won't surrender, and they won't stop, and we cannot reduce the attacks to the point where they don't threaten our existence as free and prosperous societies, it is virtually inevitable that genocide will occur. And given the imbalance of power, which itself is the reason that a stalemate will never happen as long as the West is threatened, the likelihood is on the side of the Arabs/Muslims being the targets of the genocide. Short of surrender or us being the targets of genocide, that's the worst outcome I can imagine.

All of this is why I deeply, sincerely hope that the President's strategy is correct, and that we can stay with the strategy long enough for it to have determinative effect. The alternatives range from aweful to unthinkable to unconscionable.

Posted by jeff at July 13, 2005 11:03 AM

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Comments

Posted by: Dave Schuler at July 14, 2005 1:44 PM