Atamar Anagul and Aleksandr Kozhevnikov have been asked to contribute their thoughts on the lessons of 9/11. It should be stressed that any views are those of the Mr Anagul and Dr Kozhevnikov themselves, not endorsed by the website or the author or publishers of Bleedback.

 

By Atamar Anagul

The two extremes feed each other

To increase the number of young Muslims in your country being recruited to ‘terrorist’ movements, give your nationalistic, Islamophobic elements free rein. Make your politicians fuel suspicion and hatred of Muslims.

That’s probably the most efficient thing you could do to make terrorist recruitment worse.

The message from Al Qaida, Daesh (‘Islamic State’) and those who recruit for them:

• The West is at war against Muslims and against Islam itself
• Muslims can’t live in the West and still follow Islam. Desert your religion or leave your country.
• Non-Muslims hate Muslims.
• You will never be valued in your country; never be allowed to participate, contribute and succeed.
• Given half a chance, non-Muslims will persecute you.
• They might seem nice. But all it takes is a demagogue to bring the hatred out, and your ‘friends’, neighbours, and colleagues will turn against you (Anwar al-Awlaki argued this very convincingly using specific, true examples like Bosnia).

If you want to stop terrorist recruiting, prove that message wrong. Show young people that they are valued and have something to contribute.

And what you say has to be true. Otherwise, forget it. You have no credibility.

Superficial attempts at ‘messaging’ or ‘counter-narratives’ don’t work. There is enough evidence to prove that list of messages right. Your valuing of Muslims must drown out all the hatred they experience in your country. Good luck with that.

This principle works in both directions. Aggression by Muslims against non-Muslims living their way of life (their dress, their drink, their culture), as well as violence and attacks, whips up anti-Muslim hatred. Muslims in the West: you can fuel that ‘war on Islam’ that you believe exists. Or you can overcome it.

Your choice.

 

Military solutions don’t last in this ‘war’

Armies and conventional warfare are made for conventional nation-states of the twentieth century. Nation-states are finite:

• They have geographical boundaries.
• They have specific, limited population groups.

Not so for this struggle. You cannot destroy a population that has no boundaries. More can be recruited. And the more savage your response, the more will be recruited.

Unjust solutions imposed on a population – even if they are a conventional nation-state – are unstable. Otherwise the drives, the aspirations of the human spirit, are too great to endure injustice and oppression for generation after generation.

Together, these mean that you cannot bomb your way to stability and success. This is true for both military and para-military groups.

If nation-states were to ‘carpet-bomb’ the Middle East in an attempt to eradicate Daesh, they would force takfiri jihadism into a new evolution.

Case in point: the emergence of Daesh itself. It was born of the Bush-Blair war on Iraq. It has now supplanted Al Qaida.

Daesh in turn will be supplanted by a Third Wave – if aggressive Western military action destroys what is left of Syria and Iraq.

 

Governments have killed more civilians than the terrorists have

More civilians in the Middle East and Central Asia have been killed by the US government action than were killed in the Twin Towers.

Governments have much greater military capability and more killing capacity than paramilitary, guerilla, terrorist organisations.

There are many arguments about the moral and operational differences between recognised state action and ‘terrorist’ action. I grant that. But until you recognise that more of us are being killed by the ‘legitimate’ governments around the world than by the ‘terrorists’, you will never approach a solution to the problem.

Atamar Anagul