Chapter II: THE NATURE OF THE THREAT

The Main Enemy: Islamism
Chapter II:  The Nature of the Threat

Over nine years after the traumatic events of 9/11, any serious attempt to appraise where the United States finds itself in the struggle against terrorism invariably veers off into partisan bickering that makes such a stock-taking nearly impossible.

On one side are those-mostly but not exclusively on the Left, including the Obama administration-who believe fervently that the failure of the Bush administration to bring the war in Iraq to a close during its tenure, its inability to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, and the worsening situation in Afghanistan signify that the whole effort was largely wasted.

Their ideological opponents on the Right point to the significant progress made in Iraq with the "surge" campaign and argue that victory was at hand at the time of the change of administrations and that, most importantly, the Bush administration kept America safe from terrorism.

Both arguments rest on the underlying, if not always stated, assumption that the war in Iraq and preventing terrorist incidents is an essential part of the struggle against Islamic extremism.

Few on either side have seriously examined the possibility that Iraq and indeed counterterrorism as such may be largely irrelevant to the larger war against Islamic extremism or Islamism.

This is not to say that there weren’t sound reasons to go into Iraq, given the nearly universal consensus at the time that Saddam Hussein was in possession of weapons of mass destruction which could have easily fallen into the hands of terrorists.

The problem was that once that brutal dictator was removed and we made sure that Iraq could no longer become a sponsor of terrorism against the West, the rationale for the Iraq campaign as part of the broader war on extremism became progressively more nebulous, more difficult to justify, and seemingly more removed from the issue of fighting radical Islam.

To that extent, whether or not the withdrawal of America troops ultimately leads to the establishment of a peaceful and orderly modus vivendi in post-war Iraq, it is very unlikely that the outcome will have a dramatic effect on the fortunes of our struggle against Islamism.

Even in the event of an ultimate U.S. failure in Iraq, leading to a violence-prone, post-withdrawal situation there, the overall effect on terrorism is almost certainly going to be marginal, especially in light of the ongoing terror-sponsorship by Iraq’s neighbors: Iran, Iran’s Hezbollah clients, and Syria.

Conversely, a peaceful and democratic Iraq will not affect things for the better unless it somehow leads to a trend toward regime change and representative governments in its neighborhood-a very unlikely scenario and one that the United States has apparently ceased contemplating.

The general inability of Washington’s political establishment to come to terms with the strategic implications of the war in Iraq stems from the more consequential failure of the U.S. government to grasp and adequately articulate exactly who the enemy is in the larger war beyond Iraq and exactly what kind of threat the nation faces.

Conventional wisdom and the government-popularized definition during the two terms of the Bush administration argue that the events of 9/11 forced the United States into "a war on terror," or in other words, a war designed to prevent similar terrorist attacks against America or its allies from happening again. If judged by this definition, the war to date has gone well.

There has been but one successful terrorist attack in the homeland since 9/11, which was committed by an American-born and raised jihadist, and only two significant terrorist incidents (March 2005, Madrid and July 2007, London) on the territory of our Western allies.

While the possibility of a major terrorist attack involving large loss of life and substantial economic harm cannot be excluded, it is unlikely that terrorism as such could cause systemic damage to the point of destabilizing our societies.

To that extent, even if we have not seen the worst of terror yet, Western societies are resilient enough to withstand even worse than 9/11 without ushering in critical instability.

But what if the conflict in which we are engaged is not a war on terrorism, which after all is a tactic rather than a strategy, but a war against a much more formidable foe that uses terror as just one of the instruments in its arsenal?

And what if this foe is as ideologically driven a movement as Nazism and Communism were, yet one able to mobilize even greater numbers of adherents and supporters, as well as larger financial resources?

And what if this foe continues rapidly expanding its influence around the world and is already well-ensconced in our own Western societies, something neither the Nazis nor the Communists ever accomplished?

Looked at this way, the war on terror is anything but a resounding success; indeed we are losing ground.

Whether it is called radical Islam, Islamism, Salafism, or Islamo-fascism, the adversary we face, even as we often refuse to identify it for what it is, is clearly on the march.

The reason we fail to see that is because its objective is not terrorism, but the imposition of an uncompromising totalitarian interpretation of Islam worldwide by means of proselytism, subjugation, and violent jihad as need be.

Purely terrorist groups like al-Qaeda, which rely on terrorism as a first and only resort, however murderous, are a rather marginal factor in this essentially ideological struggle, and the fact that we have bestowed on them the status of principal enemy has prevented us from really understanding the nature of this war.

To understand the fallacy of this intellectual illusion, imagine for a moment that we have been able to kill Osama bin Laden and every single al-Qaeda member and ask yourself if this would mean the end of the war on terror.

The answer would clearly be negative, as long as the well established and funded worldwide networks of Islamism that ultimately produce the terrorists remain intact.

It is true that the imposition of Islamic rule around the world advocated by radical Islam may be a very long-term and seemingly utopian objective. But this should not prevent us from seeing that the Islamist enemy has made significant progress in a number of its intermediate goals.

As will be discussed in greater detail in subsequent chapters, these have included imposing radical Islamism as the dominant idiom in the practice of the Islamic faith, building large international networks promoting this idiom, and controlling the clerical establishment and institutions of Islam both in majority Moslem countries and outside of them.

With respect to the West, radical Islam has sought to encapsulate Moslem diaspora communities from mainstream society and indoctrinate them to reject completely the host society’s fundamental values and norms, including democracy, freedom of religion, human rights, gender equality, and separation of religion and state.

At the same time, radical Islam has made concerted and increasingly successful efforts to secure acceptance and legitimacy for sharia law as an alternative code of jurisprudence, with the effect of gradually undermining the core principle of democratic societies of equal justice for all.

Elsewhere, even a perfunctory look suffices to document the undeniable progress of radical Islam since the beginning of the war on terror.

In Pakistan, until recently under the leadership of military dictator and putative U.S. strategic ally Pervez Musharraf, Taliban-like fanatical Islamists increasingly control the North-West Frontier Province and have spread their influence far beyond, while an estimated 20,000 radical madrassas (Islamic schools) churn out hundreds of thousands of willing cadres for the dozens of jihadist organizations operating with impunity throughout the country.

The dominance of the jihadists in the border region with Afghanistan has allowed the resurgent Taliban unimpeded access to sanctuaries and supplies in Pakistan, posing a new and major threat to the hard-won freedom of the Afghan people.

Further east, Bangladesh now has a rapidly growing militant Islamist movement, and a violent Islamist insurgency is raging out of control in southern Thailand.

Malaysia, often cited as an example of an economically successful and moderate Moslem country, already has sharia imposed in several of its states, and a recent proposal by the chief justice aims to make it the law of the land in the entire country, a third of which is non-Moslem.[1]

In next-door Indonesia, long known for its tolerant and syncretic Islamic practice, radical Islamists are behind anti-Christian sectarian violence that has claimed at least ten thousand dead and are pushing for the introduction of sharia in a number of regions.[2]

The introduction of sharia has already taken place in northern Nigeria, where twelve provinces enforce a stringent form of sharia law on Moslems and non-Moslems alike.

Even in secular Turkey, the Islamist movement of Tayyip Erdogan, now in control of the entire government, is slowly but surely undermining the secular institutions of the state.

The inroads made by Islamism in the non-Moslem West, detailed later in this study, are no less impressive, if not as well known.

It would not be an exaggeration to argue that in both Europe and North America the leadership of traditional Islamic institutions such as mosques, Islamic centers, schools, and charities is for the most part in the hands of Islamists who espouse a radical ideology not only virulently opposed to basic Western norms, but also at odds with Islam as traditionally practiced for most of its history.

Next week in Chapter III: The Ideology of Radical Islam, we’ll discuss:
Sharia Law and Radical Islam
Sharia Law – Profile of a Radical Doctrine
Islamism’s Key Doctrinal Concepts: The External and Internal Enemy, and The Islamic Vanguard

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[1]  Thomas Bell, "Malaysia considers switch to Islamic law," The Telegraph, London, September 1, 2007.

 
[2]   Paul Marshall, ed. Radical Islam’s Rules, Rowman and Littlefield, 2005, pp. 10-11.