Posted: Fri Oct 09, 2009 10:42 am Post subject: War against terror will increase attacks on the West
War against terror will increase attacks on the West finds new study
The US-led 'war on terror' is likely to increase, rather than decrease, Islamic terrorism against the West, according to a new scientific analysis of international terrorism.
The report, written by Professor Eric Neumayer of the London School of Economics and Political Science and Thomas Plumper of the University of Essex, analyses details of terrorist attacks across the world from 1969 to 2005 and concludes that Western countries are in a 'no-win situation'.
It says: 'If they retreat from the Muslim world, this will be celebrated as a victory by the terror leaders and a toppling of pro-Western regimes dependent on Western support might follow. However, with continuing Western military intervention in the Muslim world, Islamic terror leaders will maintain and possibly increase their attacks on Western targets.
'Unless the "war on terror" leads to the military defeat and destruction of terror groups, which seems unlikely based on what we have seen since 9/11, then it is likely to increase, rather than decrease, Islamic terrorism against the West. Not only does the "war on terror" raise the strategic benefits of perpetrating terrorist acts on Western targets, but, in addition, every Muslim hurt or killed in this war may facilitate the recruitment of new followers by Islamic terror leaders.'
Professor Eric NeumayerThe report, International Terrorism and the Clash of Civilizations, is published in the latest edition of the British Journal of Political Science. It challenges the influential ideas of the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington whose 'clash of civilizations' theory is that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. Foreign policy hawks and conservatives, particularly in the US, have embraced Huntington's theory, formulated in the early 1990s.
Huntington's central idea was that the dominant source of conflict will shift from the clash of ideologies during the Cold War period – liberal democracy versus communism – to the clash between nations and groups of different civilizations after the end of the Cold War. He distinguishes seven or possibly eight civilizations – Western, Sinic (Chinese), Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin America, and, possibly, African.
His most controversial argument was singling out Islamic civilization as being more involved in terrorism than people of other religions and resulted in his use of the infamous phrase 'the bloody borders of Islam'. He perceives Islam as a 'religion of the sword' with an absolutist ideology that makes co-habitation with other religions extremely difficult.'
Neumayer and Plumper argue that Islamic terrorists target Westerners not because of civilizational conflict, but because of Western interference in countries of the Islamic civilization whose support is often crucial in preventing Islamic terror groups' bid for political influence.
Their report says: 'Western aid, military assistance, military personnel as well as economic and political support play a pivotal role in stablising the regimes in many Muslim countries like Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and, nowadays, Afghanistan and Iraq, thus preventing Islamic terror leaders from reaching their goals.'
Their conclusions are based on a scientific analysis of information about acts of terror between 1969 and 2005, known as 'International Terrorism: Attributes of Terrorist Events'. This includes the nationality of the terrorists and the victims, the annual sum of terrorist incidents and the annual sum of the number of people killed. They also analysed foreign support for domestic governments using economic aid data taken from OECD and data on arms transfers from major weapons exporters, data on foreign intervention in domestic civil wars and military alliances between countries.
The report says: 'We find clear support for our strategic theory of international terrorism. More terrorist incidents and killings emanate from countries, which depend more on foreign economic aid and on arms imports against citizens of the foreign country sending aid and arms. More terrorism also is directed against foreigners from countries that have entered into a military alliance with the terrorists' home country and that intervene in civil conflicts in the terrorists' home country on the side of the government.
It adds: 'We find no significant effect with respect to terrorism from the Islamic civilization against nationals of all other civilizations in general.'
It goes on: 'There are strategic reasons why, for example, Canadian and Scandinavian citizens are far less likely to be targeted by Islamic terrorists than Americans and why these terrorists are far more likely to come from, say, Saudi Arabia, or Pakistan than from Malaysia.'
It concludes: 'The dynamics of Islamic terrorism against the West reveal an upward trend in the 1990s, but only for terrorist killings, not for incidents. Furthermore, this trend is also consistent with a strategic logic of international terrorism, which would suggest that Islamic terror on Western targets goes up when the West becomes more actively militarily involved in the Islamic civilization as part of the US-led 'war on terror'.'
'If Huntington is right, then we will see more of anti-Western inter-civilizational terrorism, more of Islamic terrorism against other civilizations, and particularly, a further rise in Islamic terrorism against Western targets. The implications from our own theory of terrorism do not suggest any such upward trend.'
Terrorism policy flaws 'increased risk of attacks', says former police chief Comments about 'neo-conservative' direction of fight against terror mark five years since 7 July bombings
Britain's fight against terrorism has been a disaster, because its "flawed, neo-conservative" direction alienated Muslims and increased the chances of terrorist attacks, a former leading counter-terrorism officer has told the Guardian.
Speaking to mark today's fifth anniversary of the 7 July attacks in London, Dr Robert Lambert said the atrocity had led the Labour government to launch not just the publicly declared battle against al-Qaida, but a much wider counter-subversive campaign that targeted non-violent Muslims and branded them as supporters of violence.
Lambert, now an academic, served for 30 years as an officer in Scotland Yard's special branch, dealing with the threat from Irish Republican terrorism through to the menace from al-Qaida.
He was head of a counter-terrorism squad, the Muslim contact unit (MCU), which gained intelligence on violent extremists, and won praise from Muslims, even those who have criticised police.
Lambert said the Labour government adopted a "flawed, neo-con analysis to react to 7 July. The view was that this is such an evil ideology, we are entitled to derogate from human rights considerations even further."
The effect of this, said Lambert, was to cast the net too wide: "The [British] analysis was a continuation of the [US] analysis after 9/11, which drove the war on terror, to say al-Qaida is a tip of a dangerous Islamist iceberg ... we went to war not against terrorism, but against ideas, the belief that al-Qaida was a violent end of a subversive movement."
Lambert said this approach alienated British Muslims, as those who expressed views such as opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, also held by non-Muslims, feared that holding such beliefs made them suspects.
"The best way of tackling al-Qaida is to reassure the communities where it seeks support and recruits, is to show those communities that their grievances can be expressed legitimately," Lambert said.
His comments come as Andy Hayman, the former assistant commissioner who led the 7/7 investigation, warns in the Times that Britain remains "under severe risk" from terror attacks.
"There are now probably more radicalised Muslims, their attack plans are more adventurous and the UK still remains under severe risk," Hayman said.
Five years ago today, four Britons inspired, and some trained, by al-Qaida exploded homemade bombs on three London Underground trains and a bus. They killed themselves, murdered 52 people and injured 750 more.
Lambert said the government was desperate to deny that British foreign policy drove sections of the Muslim community to support or sympathise with al-Qaida. He continued: "What the bombers did, and what al-Qaida does successfully, is to exploit widely held grievances. That should not be difficult to grasp. The last government spent most of the last five years denying that, looking for other narratives to explain what had happened."
"All this is happening under the shadow of military action … with terrorist groups planning to legitimise their attacks in the UK on the basis of what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan."
Lambert said the government's decision to go down the wrong path took the police with them. Senior officers could have done more to tell the government their policies were making the task harder by alienating Muslims. "We could see the Bush-Rumsfeld approach would be counter-productive and impact on us as police officers in London. "There is still a duty on the police to let government know what the impact of their policies are, a duty on the police to report the damaging impact on Muslim community support."
Lambert was awarded an MBE for his work heading the MCU and retired in 2007. He said the fight needed to focus solely on the terrorists, and not on those who may share some of their political views, but who will express them peacefully. He said that British policies handed the terrorists propaganda victories. Such policies included the Iraq war, civilian casualties in Afghanistan, the torture of terror suspects at Guantánamo and elsewhere, rendition, the muted response to Israel's attack on Lebanon and the attempt to hold terror suspects in the UK for 90 days without charge.
Al-Qaida and Taliban threat is exaggerated, says security thinktank Strategy institute challenges idea that troops are needed in Afghanistan to stop export of terrorism to west
The threat posed by al-Qaida and the Taliban is exaggerated and the western-led counter-insurgency campaign in Afghanistan risks becoming a "long, drawn-out disaster", one of the world's leading security thinktanks warned today.
According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), the west's counter-insurgency strategy has "ballooned" out of proportion to the original aim of preventing al-Qaida from mounting terrorist attacks there, and must be replaced by a less ambitious but more sensible policy of "containment and deterrence".
The critique of the US- and British-backed military policy is contained in the latest strategic survey from the IISS, a respected but usually uncontroversial body. IISS officers made clear today they have departed from their normal practice because of the serious threat to the west's security interests in pursuing the current Afghan strategy.
In an effort to ignite a fresh debate and bring about a new approach towards Afghanistan, they challenge claims, not least from David Cameron, that the presence of thousands of British troops in Afghanistan is necessary to prevent al-Qaida from returning and thus increasing the threat to the UK.
"It is not clear why it should be axiomatically obvious that an Afghanistan freed of an international combat presence in the south would be an automatic magnet for al-Qaida's concentrated reconstruction," the IISS director-general, John Chipman, said.
Al-Qaida is now "engaged in Pakistan in very small numbers", not remotely comparable to the situation in Afghanistan pre-September 2001, Nigel Inkster, an IISS director and former deputy chief of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, said. No such threat is likely to come from al-Qaida elsewhere, including Yemen and Somalia, he added.
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