|
| 1. THE WAR AGAINST ISLAMISM AND GLOBAL TERRORISM | ||
| Since the Madrid bombings, people have begun to see - as many of them did not before - that we ARE involved in a global war and that the enemy is far more capable than they had thought. However, many are still failing to grasp the real nature of the enemy; that what we are confronted with is an armed global totalitarian revolutionary Islamist political and guerrilla movement currently employing terrorism on a global field and which is comprised of many fluid, clandestine networks linking often loosely structured organisations, cells and even individuals acting with often a great deal of decentralised tactical freedom. Putting this another way, it might be said that the al Qa'ida leadership would see al Qa'ida as an Islamist, revolutionary political movement waging a global guerrilla war currently through terrorism, political action and ideological and political proselytising. This global movement has gradually developed across the world over the past 25 years. The aims of the movement and its networks are political and religious and their weapons political, religious and military. Their motivations and origins are to be found in such totalitarian and puritanical theologies as Wahhabism which seek a return to (what they believe to be) a seventh century "purified" Islam which rejects modern science and modernity in general and to which every single person must adhere or be called an apostate and thereby killed (this is similar to Lenin's concept of non-persons who were, he said, to be squashed like ants). | ||
| Grand Strategic Objective | Their grand Strategic Objective, however fanciful, is to conquer the world and establish global and regional caliphates. They dream of ridding the world, through conversion or extermination, of all non-believers or infidels, including Islamic ones, who do not adhere to their totalitarian theocratic strictures, often expressed in intolerant versions of Shariah Law. Accordingly, Osama bin Laden has said he wants to destroy the US and turn all Americans into Muslims. In a similar vein, the Grand Mufti of Australia, Sheikh Hilaly, recently said that he sees the White House one day being a mosque. | |
| Strategy | Their Strategy to achieve that grand objective is very long term and essentially threefold:
| |
| They hope that through this long term strategy of protracted war, the West will eventually break down and break apart, while millions of Muslims will convert to Wahhabism and other forms of radical Islamism, overthrowing moderate Islamic regimes around the world. However, as we said when we first outlined this Islamist/al Qa'ida strategy shortly after 9/11, guerrilla warfare and terrorism are the weapons of the weak and ultimately they can't win, perhaps not anywhere, but they can cause us a lot of damage over many years and especially should they obtain weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| Distinctions | It is important to understand that we are not fighting just a collection of Islamic terrorist networks motivated by grievances stemming out of things like poverty and the hatred of American foreign policy. The response to such an enemy would be essentially a law enforcement one accompanied by, perhaps, appropriate diplomatic adjustments. | |
| The enemy we actually face is much greater and far more complex than that - as we have sought to explain - and our response must have primarily political and ideological aims. This war must be waged both within Islam and against governments and any other entity which supports Islamist guerrillas and terrorists and will involve, where necessary, the use of military force to attain those political objectives - as in Afghanistan and Iraq. | ||
| The nature of the conceptual problem we have been trying to address here has been highlighted as we write. For in the The Age (Melbourne, 6/4/2004) we read that Mr. Cofer Black, the US State Department co-ordinator for counter-terrorism and a former head of the CIA's Counter-terrorism Centre said that the US war on terrorism after Iraq "may transition from defeating a group to fighting a movement". He went on to say that groups such as Jemaah Islamiah have "gravitated to al Qaida in recent years where before such linkages did not exist". Obviously he is totally unaware that Abu Bakar Bashir and Jemaah Islamiah were sending Asian recruits to Afghanistan from the late 70s onwards to be trained as cadre and terrorists and to fight alongside Osama bin Laden. | ||
| 2. REGIONAL ELECTIONS COMMENT | ||
| The decisive win of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi and the Barisan Nasional coalition in the Malaysian parliamentary elections has been a major defeat for the radical Muslims in the Parti Islam seMalaysia (PAS) and elsewhere. It has also given Badawi a clear mandate to continue his programme of cleaning up the country and repairing the damage done to many of its institutions by Dr. Mahathir Mohammad and his corrupt cronies. Whether he actually does this, now that he's won the election, remains to be seen. | ||
| In view of this result, it is interesting to contemplate what Malaysian academic Dr. Farish Noor, had to say about Dr. Mahathir's "Islamisation" of the Malaysian polity in a paper presented to a conference in Jakarta last December 2004. Among other things, it indicates how far 9/11, Bali and the rise of Islamist terrorism globally influenced the election. Here, in slightly edited form, we quote him: | ||
". . . the Islamic worldview of Dr. Mahathir was one that divided Muslims into 'moderate progressives' and 'misguided fanatics'. | ||
"UMNO's brand of modernist-developmentalist Islam was based on a chain of equivalences that equated Islam with all that was positive in its eyes. Islam was equated with modernity, economic development, material progress, rationality and liberalism (but not democracy or human rights). . . UMNO's understanding of Islam was also framed against a negative chain of equivalences that equated PAS's Islam with obscurantism, extremism, fanaticism, intolerance, backwardness and militancy. This was the 'wrong' version of Islam to which UMNO's Islam was the answer. The aim of the state's Islamisation policy was to normalise and institutionalise the 'right' version of Islam against the 'wrong' version promoted by PAS. To this end Dr. Mahathir managed to recruit a number of Islamist activists to his cause, his biggest coup being the co-opting of the Islamist leader Anwar Ibrahim into UMNO in 1982. | ||
| Shifting Focus | "Thus it was during Dr. Mahathir's era that Malaysian foreign policy was also redirected to shift its focus to the Muslim world. The governmental apparatus was also redesigned to cater to Muslim interests and a number of overtly Muslim projects were initiated. During the 1980s and 1990s Malaysia created the International Islamic University, introduced Islamic banking and insurance, created the Hajj (Pilgrimage) funds for Muslims going to Mecca, and built Islamic think tanks and research institutes like the Malaysian Institute for Islamic Understanding (IKIM) and the Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilisation (ISTAC). | |
"However, the net result of these moves was not to dampen the Islamic opposition but rather intensify the battle between the government and PAS over the form and content of Islam itself. What is more, it led to the inflation of Islamic discourse in Malaysia and blurred the line between religion and state. | ||
"Today, Malaysians will have to live and deal with this unstated legacy of the Mahathir era. Two decades of state sponsored Islamisation has not moderated the Islamists, but rather made them even more determined to gain power and turn the country into an Islamic state. Malaysian society is caught between two unpalatable choices. On the one hand the state's version of 'modernist Islam' that is focused on economic development but is negligent of democratic concerns; and one the other hand, the fundamentalist version of Islam offered by the Islamists of PAS who came out in support of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban in 2001-2002. | ||
"Mahathir's successor, Abdullah Badawi, has long been seen as the 'Mr. Clean' of UMNO, and is respected for his own knowledge of Islam and his family's Islamic credentials. But it will take more than that to reverse the Islamisation race that has accelerated over the years and which has distorted Malaysian politics beyond recognition. Dr. Mahathir may go down in history as the modernist who dragged his country into the modern hi-tech age, but his other enduring legacy is his attempt to create a modernist school of Islamic thought which, in the end, failed and only brought the Islamists closer to power." | ||
| All interesting stuff, but unfortunately Noor misunderstood the dire electoral consequences for PAS of 9/11, Bali and the party's open support of bin Laden and the Taliban. As we now know, the thousands of UMNO voters who moved across to PAS in the 1999 elections in a protest against Mahathir, his policies and crony capitalism have rushed back again, taking many other disillusioned moderate PAS voters with them. PAS might now be dead in the water - killed by al Qa'ida. | ||
| Aware | The Chinese voters who deserted the predominantly Chinese opposition social democratic Democratic Action Party (DAP) in 1999 and voted for the Chinese MCA in the Barisian Nasional in fear of what they saw as a surging PAS, obviously perceived or sensed what al Qa'ida had done to PAS and so moved back to the DAP, enabling Lim Kit Siang and Karpal Singh to regain their seats. Malaysia will be the better for that. It is interesting that despite all of Mahathir's pathetic anti-Western diatribes denouncing Bush and others for, among other sins, their 'war against Islam', a sophisticated Malaysian electorate understood exactly what was happening. | |
| Having said that PAS might now be dead in the water, the same, unfortunately cannot be said of Islamist terrorists in Malaysia - in fact, they might be inspired to greater efforts through their anger at seeing PAS humiliated by Malaysian Islamic 'infidels'. | ||
| Whatever the outcome of the possible recount in the Taiwan presidential election, the result has shown that the native Taiwanese want to be themselves and rule themselves. It's been a long time coming. In the 2000 election, President Chen Shui-bian, a native Taiwanese and the then leader of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) won the presidency with a tick under 40% of the vote against a divided Kuomintang (KMT) which split and produced two Nationalist 'mainlander' candidates. This time, the nationalist candidates, Lien Chan and James Soong united against Chen and thought they'd win easily. But the native Taiwanese, who comprise about 85% of the population, and most of whom today regard themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese, had other ideas. (The KMT which came from China has always been identified with the Mainland Chinese and their descendants, while the DPP is a home grown product, which in its early days was brutally suppressed by the 'colonialist' KMT.) | ||
| We have been intrigued to read that President Chen's democratic victory and strong showing could be a threat to world peace because, it is said, he is moving Taiwan "towards a willingness to confront China over the island's future" (Hugh White, The Australian, 25/3/2004). It is said that the US and China "have found common cause in wanting to defend the status quo against Chen's evident agenda to move closer to full-scale independence for Taiwan" (again White, ibid) and thereby provoke China. Well, in today's actual status quo Taiwan IS independent and, despite some international constraints imposed upon it through the lack of diplomatic recognition, most Taiwanese would call it a fully independent sovereign state. China and most nations around the world for diplomatic reasons having to do with a fear of upsetting the great dragon, might claim that Taiwan is a part of China, but it hasn't been that for a very long time. Indeed, native Taiwanese will tell you that Taiwan was never in all history an official part or province of China until 1887 and that that status lasted only eight years when China ceded Taiwan to Japan "in perpetuity" in the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki. Japan then ruled Taiwan for 50 years until WWII when it was taken over following Japan's defeat by the fleeing KMT forces of Chiang Kai Shek who set up the Republic of China. Taiwan, therefore, has existed separately from China for 109 years and the Taiwanese maintain that China has no claim to it in historical fact or international law. Nevertheless, Beijing insists that Taiwan is theirs and that, if necessary, it will take it by force. To this end, it has mounted hundreds of ballistic missiles along its coast across the straits and fired a few of them across the waters in attempts to intimidate the Taiwanese. | ||
| This raises the question: Could China invade Taiwan? Highly unlikely according to our military experts. We are told that it would require an operation greater in magnitude than the Normandy landings. This is because of the width of the Straits, the weather and currents in the Straits and nature of the coast and beaches along Western Taiwan. Could they first fire all those missiles in the hope of devastating Taiwan, and then invade it? Still very difficult, for with the firing of the first missile, Japan and the US would come to Taiwan's defence. Japan might even open another front further north and seize the opportunity to try to take out China's nuclear weapons. Even if the Chinese managed to invade Taiwan, they would face an horrendous guerrilla war waged by the Taiwanese with the support of foreign allies. | ||
| Integration | Of course, while the Taiwanese do not want to be ruled by the Chinese, that does not mean that they might not be interested in some form of integration or federal arrangement in the future for economic, political and strategic reasons. In fact, as China liberalises and adopts a market economy, 'integration' is informally happening already, with trade and other barriers breaking down own across the straits and all sorts of lines of communication opening up. In the meantime, the Taiwanese are happy to keep talking with Beijing about the future - with some KMT figures usefully mentioning the word 're-unification' occasionally - while running their independent, sovereign state. After all, they don't want to upset the Great Dragon either. To date, however, the Beijing leadership has refused to talk publicly and unconditionally with Chen, because, it is said, they didn't think Chen would last long in office and they imagined that Lien Chen or James Soong would be more amenable. Whatever one thinks of that, it is absolutely certain that at least at lower levels, and in various places around the world, there are other lines of communication between Taipei and Beijing and especially at times when the Taiwan president wants to say or do something for domestic political reasons and which it is thought might be sensitive in Beijing. | |
| The Philippines presidential election is due on 10 May. At this stage it is has come down to a two horse race between President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (GMA) and Fernando Poe Jr (FPJ) a B grade actor who is the candidate of one of the opposition groups associated with the disgraced former president Joseph Estrada and the Marcos forces. Some opinion polls have GMA narrowly in front, others Poe. Some observers think that Gloria will pull ahead in the straight, others are not so sure. The prospect of Poe, an uneducated high school drop out with absolutely no experience of politics or government, becoming president horrifies many people, especially in this age of global terrorism. So far, Poe has refused to debate Arroyo saying he is a man of action, not words. He was asked last December what he thought was the most important recent event in Philippine history. He said that was a tough question because until recently his life had been "all movies" with no interest in politics or current affairs. He had never read a history book or been inside a parliament. | ||
| This is a very serious matter, not only because of al Qa'ida and its training camps in Mindanao, but because the Philippines has major economic problems, and a mounting domestic difficulty with narco-politics which could get out of hand. The region - if not the world - should be concerned. After all, some of the 9/11 terrorists operated out of Manila. | ||
| 3. BRIEFS | ||
| John Pilger, Iraq and East Timor | We note that John Pilger and Tariq Ali are actively supporting the al Qa'ida backed Sadammite resistance in the Sunni Triangle against the US and Iraqi coalition trying to establish a democratic system in Iraq. They are falsely portraying the Saddamite resistance - comprised of desperate Saddamites with nowhere to go politically in the new Iraq and foreign al Qa'ida terrorists - as an heroic patriotic struggle waged by genuine Iraqi nationalists against American imperialism. Pilger's attraction to totalitarian forces and states is, it seems, never ending. We hardly ever hear a word from him in condemnation of Saddam's attempted genocide of the Kurds and Marsh Arabs, the tens of thousands of bodies being dug up in mass graves and other atrocities. Nor, on the other hand, do we hear any apologies from him for accusing the Indonesians in East Timor of a worse-than-Cambodia genocide of the East Timorese - indeed he made a 'cult' film about it - now that no mass graves have been found in that new nation. | |
| The Pesantren System | As a result of the widespread publicity given to the fact that the Bali bombers and terrorists in other countries had been indoctrinated in Islamic boarding schools, (called pesantren in Indonesia and maddrasses in other countries) that whole schooling system has become suspect in the eyes of some foreigners. Yet the pesantren involved in terrorism, that is those preaching Wahhabism and other forms of Islamism, and recruiting cadre to al Qa'ida and similar movements, were always a tiny minority. The pesantren is in fact an excellent system of schooling. As the US ambassador to Indonesia, Ralph Boyce, recently observed, the pesantren should be seen not as a part of the Islamist problem, but a part of the solution to it. | |
| Nur Misuari and GMA | One of the more fascinating stories to come out of the Philippine elections campaign is that former Muslim Marxist guerrilla, Nur Misuari, has come out in favour of the re-election of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, exhorting his followers to support her. What is so extraordinary about this is not that he is in jail, but that he was put there by GMA when Misuari staged an armed rebellion after her operatives - reportedly led by her current National Security Advisor, Norberto Gonzales - created the conditions that led to Misuari's defeat as head of the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) and as Governor of the Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao (ARMM). Misuari was reported as saying that GMA was the best candidate to lead the country out of its current economic problems and against Islamist terrorism. (Gonzales is a former head of the Philippine Democratic Socialist Party (PDSP), in which capacity he built close links with the MNLF and other Muslim bodies in Mindanao during the seventies and eighties. He is a long time associate of the Asia Pacific Strategy Council1). | 1 The Asia Pacific Strategy Council is the group behind the Asia Pacific Report |