Over the last 35 years, there have been more than 360 incidents attributed to “Islamic extremism.”
This is, of course, only a slice of terrorist incidents around the world over that period, and it’s difficult to determine what should and should not be included. In 1982, five neatly dressed men waited outside the Great Synagogue of Rome. As worshipers exited the building, the men opened fire, killing one child and wounding 37 other people. Was this an act of “Islamic extremism?” No group claimed responsibility, and of those attackers identified only one had a relationship with a known terrorist group—the Abu Nidal Organization—which was known more for its association with socialism than Islam. Nevertheless, it’s on the chart. So are several dozen incidents in Israel, Palestinian areas, or Jordan that might better be thought of as part of the regional conflict that’s been ongoing since 1947, rather than as attacks based on some merciless interpretation of religious texts.
Even with the understanding that the list includes incidents that probably shouldn’t be there and surely fails to include some that should, it’s hard to avoid the interpretation that such incidents are increasing. Each decade has seemed to bring with it a fresh wave, and a growing panic that these waves will soon rise into a world-threatening tsunami.
But before we either construct a wall or go to war against the sea, let’s spend a bit of time looking at the past—and the future—of terrorism.
To understand what’s happening, it helps to look at things according to where they happened. The great majority of these events took place somewhere in the Middle East, with Israel alone accounting for about 20 percent. Reading through the toll of incidents in Israel in 2002 alone is daunting. In fact, the reason that 2002 represents a spike in reported incidents is almost entirely due to a series of attacks in Israel.
Attacks in Israel decline after 2002, but reports from two other areas are just beginning: Iraq and Afghanistan. At that point incidents of bombing in Iraq which might have been attributed to rebels, or even resistance during the 2003 to 2006 period, are added to the heap. Likewise, the set of incidents in what this graph treats as “Asia / Pacific” is bolstered not only by events that occurred in Pakistan or India, but also by Taliban attacks in Afghanistan. It’s worth noting that the attacks of the Mujahideen against the Soviets prior to their withdrawal from Afghanistan are not included on this list, even though the group served as the source for both the Taliban and al-Qaeda and the name “Mujahideen “ means one who is engaged in a Jihad.
Like the previous chart then, this one is … a mess. The “rising tide” of terrorist incidents is a salmagundi of Israel-Palestine conflict, plus the aftereffects of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with a extra goosing from the Syrian Civil War. It’s a list dominated by events that happened in areas under dispute and a list that conveniently ignores attacks against people that we thought of as enemies at the time.
So, take a selective reading of world events, and pick out only those you think fit the bill for terrorism. Then take that list and look for the equally subjective set you think fits the bill for Islamic extremists. The result is the spray of initials and slogans which we’ve come to associate with groups of inimical masterminds plotting to overthrow western civilization and replace it with … well, we’re not sure.
But we can be sure it’s an immensely invalid picture of what’s really happening.
None of these groups represent some universal desire among Muslims to form a “new caliphate” or wage jihad against the west.
These are groups that each grew in the face of war. In fact, it’s not hard to associate each of the major terrorist groups with a specific conflict. Islamic Jihad grew from groups involved the Lebanese Civil War during the 1980s, al-Qaida and the Taliban from groups fighting the Soviet invasion (with subsequent U.S. support) in Afghanistan, and of course ISIS ISIL Daesh is an amalgam of groups that resulted from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria. Each group is a specific assembly of militia forces that attracts attention for a period, before the world moves on to being sure that the group resulting from the next conflict is the real problem.
Terrorist groups are the weeds that grow when you plant the seed of war.
That’s not to say that these groups haven’t each claimed some over-arching mission of world domination. Bin Laden had a “seven phase plan” that would lead to an ultimate war between Islam and the west (a plan that called for Israel to be all but routed, western-friendly Arabic states toppled, and western influence removed from the Middle East by this point). Daesh advertises itself alternately as the seat of a new ruling power or an agent of apocalyptic end times.
But just because they make grand claims doesn’t give them grand powers. They’re Just your standard set of assholes with a trumped up cause.
None of them is as smart, as organized, As well-funded, as all-pervasive, or as dangerous as we like to pretend.
Looking through decades of reports, it’s easy to see trends. Islamic Jihad is responsible for everything! Al-Qaida is responsible for everything! Daesh is responsible for everything! Except, of course, they’re not.
While none of these groups appeared in response to some vast call for an Islamist revolution, each of them in turn has become both a catch-all for the dark ambitions of pissed off young men, and a handy receptacle for the fears of both governments and media. Ten years ago, a shooting on a bus in Kabul or a bomb in a Baghdad cafe might have been blamed on the Taliban or al-Qaida. Now both are tallied against Daesh (which is, of course, quick to claim credit). Likewise, individuals who might otherwise have been seen as murderous bastards become instant international terrorists by attributing their acts to some Holy Cause.
A Japanese businessman is shot in Bangladesh in a way that seems superficially similar to how an Italian aid worker was killed some months earlier. The killers are caught and turn out to be mask-wearing local toughs. None of them has any known connection with any terrorist group. Still, Daesh claims credit. And we give them credit. It’s in the chart. Hey, those guys aren’t bandits, they’re terrorists! Much scarier.
The same thing happens at a group level. When al-Qaida gained prominence, smaller organizations around the world were quick to latch on. What had been merely a local group instantly became 500 percent scarier by tacking “al-Qaida in ...” to their name. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the central figure in the creation of Daesh, pledged that group as a local al-Qaida chapter until the civil war in Syria offered the chance to spill across the border and begin the pretense of the “Islamic State.” Now al-Qaida chapters in both Yemen and Libya have changed their signs to Daesh. However, using the name doesn’t make ISIL in (insert an area here) a franchise of the central organization, and it shouldn’t imply either control or funding.
However, even in the case of events where there is a clear desire by those involved to carry out acts of violence in the name of some terrorist faction, most events were neither planned, coordinated, or funded by any central group. These are events, not a battle plan.
None of them is the second coming of the Nazis.
No matter how convenient that analogy is for either war-hawks or fear-peddlers, none of these groups is a threat to the existence or governance of any state, except possibly those destabilized nations in which their main force is located. They are not equipped with massive armies or power air forces.
In fact, the destabilization of the Middle East, which was a goal of both East and West throughout the 20th century, is the reason these groups have a place in which to grow. The Taliban was able to acquire Afghanistan in the dust following the Soviet retreat. Daesh has a handful of towns along a couple of hundred miles of highway only because both Syria and Iraq are so dysfunctional. To a large extent these groups aren’t that different from the people they replaced. Local warlords and regional strongmen. That’s the Middle East as we made it. Like I said, weeds.
Daesh, which so many are trying to build into a horrible threat, has not even managed to topple Bashar al-Assad even though he was half-toppled before they made themselves known. Their threat to the government of the United States, or to any stable nation, is essentially nil. Their control is a lot less than total. Their funding wouldn’t pay the bills in Davenport, IA. Even if you take the higher estimates, the number of fighters they can field is about one tenth the size of the Iraqi Army (a real army, with real tanks, etc) in 2003. It’s about 1/40th the size of the Iraqi Army when it was crushed in the first Gulf War.
What Deash does itself is not a threat. What we do… that’s a different story.
Here. Let’s look at it in another way.
Rather than a list in which someone shouting “Allahu Akbar” from a car gets the same value as the Paris attacks, consider the impact of these events in human lives. Just how many people have actually died in terrorist incidents over the last thirty five years?
One thing that stands out immediately is the singular nature of the attacks on September 11. Of everything that happened over this period, this is the one act that defined how we think of terrorism … but at the same time, it’s utterly unique. Unique in the extent of it’s planning, the true international funding, and certainly unique in the scale of the destruction it brought.
Still, since 1981 just under 16,000 people have died in incidents that have either been attributed to, or claimed by, Islamist groups such as al-Qaida and Daesh. On one hand, that’s a terrifying number. That’s another five 9/11s worth of sorrow and pain. Even then, it’s probably at least a 9/11 short, in that it doesn’t capture all the deaths that probably should be laid at the feet of the central African group Boko Haram since its re-emergence in 2010.
But then, 16,000 is about the number of people who die from flu in the United States each winter. Or, looked at another way, if every death from terrorism that occurred worldwide over the last 35 years had actually taken place in the United States, you would still have a better chance of being shot accidentally by a friend or relative than you would of being killed in a terrorist attack. You’d also stand a much better chance of being killed by the police over that period.
And of course, those are miserable comparisons. A loved one lost to disease or happenstance is just as lost, but we don’t react to illness or accident as we do to intentional violence. Intent matters. Violence comes with a level of fear and disruption. It comes with anger; with a need to respond. It also comes with fear. With a need to pull back, hunker down, cast off rights, and strike out at the harmless. The real measure of a terrorist act isn’t in the damage it does to individuals, but in the reaction it generates from groups, from nations, from the whole world.
Which is exactly why terrorists do it. Terrorism works. It generates terror. It provokes a level of response hugely disproportional to the effort it requires (especially when you can count on a good percentage of politicians to run on a platform of fear, fear, fear). It elevates the status of those at its center from unknown thugs into household names. And when it happens somewhere that has deep meaning to many people—like Paris—that anger is magnified.
Which leads to the real threat from terrorism.
The response
Over the same period as the attacks charted above, the world has been through some battering conflicts. In the summer of 1994, one million Rwandans were killed in a matter of weeks, many of them hacked, beaten, or burned to death. Civil wars in Sri Lanka, in Angola, in Yemen, and Darfur, and Somalia and … (it’s a long list) killed several million more. Mexican drug lords killed as many people in just three years as died from international terrorism in over three decades. And yet … none of those things spurred the United States to act.
On the other hand, the estimated number of deaths in the Afghanistan conflict since the U.S. invaded following September 11 is around 110,000. Another 110,000 deaths are documented in Iraq, but the estimates of total deaths range from 650,000 to more than one million. Another 700,000 Afghanis have been displaced from their homes. In Iraq, more than three million have been displaced internally, while a similar number have fled. Those displacements and the actions in Afghanistan and Iraq helped unsettle neighboring countries, turning the constant simmer of a group of nations artificially created along lines that ignored traditional boundaries up to a full boil. They triggered a domino effect, just as the war hawks had predicted, only those falling dominoes didn’t throw up flowers and parades. They threw up … Daesh, dozens of other groups, and millions of displaced refugees.
Oh, and in achieving temporary military control of these regions, 4,279 U.S. military personal have been killed in combat.
If our efforts in Iraq or Afghanistan had led to long-term stability, then perhaps they would be worth the lives and the $6 trillion outlay. But take a look at the chart. That’s not what’s happening. Look at it again before you agree to any action in Syria.
Over the past 35 years, we’ve had just one response to terrorism. We’ve tried to… what’s the word? “bomb them back to the Stone Age.” Thank you, Mr. Cruz. As inaccurate as it may be, take a look at the chart.
WE’VE SEEN DAESH BEFORE.
So now what? Well, there’s no doubt we’re going to want to do something about Daesh.
There are a lot of pundits claiming that Daesh is different from—and greater than—the threat from al-Qaida or previous groups for one big reason: Daesh has territory. They have that “Islamic state” where people can visit, learn to be evil, then be sent forth to spread disaster.
Only … we’ve seen that film before. It was called the Taliban. The Taliban not only held territory, they held much more territory, with many times the population of the towns held by Daesh. They did it openly, as the more-or-less recognized government of Afghanistan for five years. They were the caliphate before the caliphate was cool.
But that need to control territory makes Daesh uniquely vulnerable. You can’t be the Islamic State if you’re just a state of mind. Scattering the forces of Daesh is far from the biggest military challenge we’ve faced. It not only can be done, it almost certainly will be. And soon. It will be expensive in just about every way imaginable, not least of all expensive to our morality. But will will happen. I suppose that’s the good news. Only… the bad new is, it won’t make a difference.
So long as a swatch of the world from Libya to Afghanistan is controlled by governments that are either too weak to provide basic services or only in existence thinks to the air support of foreign powers, the situation will not improve. These turmoils will continue to burn, and some of them will throw off sparks that will land in Sharm el-Sheik. Or Mali. Or Paris.
Only stable governments that have the support of their own populations and the ability to enforce law within their territories will end this bout of terrorism. We do not know how to create these governments by force. No one does. It’s going to take time, and humanitarian support, and quite likely a redrawing of boundaries that were intended from the outset to prevent states from being stable.
In the meantime we’re going to have to do much more to support those fleeing these conflicts, ignore the entreaties of bad guys even when it seems they might offer some momentary respite, tend to the needs of the good guys even when it seems they haven’t a chance, continue to take police action when we can to thwart those striking out violently, and we’re going to have to do the hardest thing of all… be patient.