WE'VE MADE YEMEN UNSAFE?:

The “war on terror”: two years on: The United States’s response to the atrocity of 9/11 was immediate. But the overthrow of the Taliban regime and Saddam’s Iraq has not crushed al-Qaida nor deterred militant resistance to United States forces. In his 100th column for openDemocracy, Paul Rogers assesses the political and human costs of the “war on terror”. (Paul Rogers, 9/10/03, Open Democracy)

The level of organisation that al-Qaida has been able to sustain is indicated not simply by the attacks it has carried out in these two years, but the ones it planned which were intercepted and aborted as a result of intelligence and security work by government authorities.

These planned attacks include:

December 2001: the attempted bombing of a US passenger jet;
December 2001: a major attack in Singapore, perhaps even on the scale of 9/11, using multiple truck bombs, aimed at embassies, Changi airport and the financial district;
February 2002: bombings of United States embassies in Rome and Paris;
May 2002: the development of radiological weapons for use in the US;
June 2002: an attempt to shoot down a US warplane in Saudi Arabia;
June 2002: a plan to attack western naval ships in the Straits of Gibraltar.

While these planned attacks have been prevented, many more have gone ahead. Together they show a capability that, despite two years of a “war on terror”, is greater than in the two years before the 9/11 attacks. They include:

March 2002: an attack on worshippers at a church in the diplomatic compound in Islamabad (Pakistan), killing 5 people and injuring 46;
May 2002: the killing of 11 French naval technicians and 3 Pakistanis in Karachi, injuring 23 people;
April 2002: the bombing of a synagogue in Djerba (Tunisia), killing 14 German tourists and 7 local people and injuring 24;
June 2002: a bomb attack on the US consulate in Karachi (Pakistan), killing 11 people and injuring at least 45;
October 2002: the killing of a US special forces soldier in the Philippines, and frequent bomb attacks there;
October 2002: a bomb attack on the Limburg tanker off Yemen;
October 2002: the murder of a US diplomat in Amman (Jordan);
October 2002 to January 2003: four attacks on US soldiers in Kuwait;
October 2002: a devastating bomb attack on the Sari nightclub in Bali, killing 202 people including 88 Australians and 38 Indonesians and injuring 300 people;
November 2002: an attack on a US oil company’s helicopter taking off from Sana’a airport in Yemen;
November 2002: an attempt to shoot down an Israeli tourist jet taking off from Mombasa airport in Kenya;
November 2002: the bombing of the Paradise Hotel at Kikambala (Kenya), killing 11 people and injuring 50;
May 2003: the multiple bombing of western targets in Casablanca (Morocco), killing 39 people and injuring 60;
May 2003: the multiple bombing of western residential compounds in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), killing 29 people and injuring 200;
August 2003: the bombing of the Marriott Hotel in Djakarta (Indonesia), killing 13 dead and 149 injured.

It is evident from this list of incidents that it would be quite wrong to see al-Qaida as a single rigid and hierarchical organisation. While there is evidence of connections between a number of groups, including a degree of coordination, what is much more significant is the extent of transnational support and the ability of national and regional groups to generate and undertake attacks. [...]

In the past two years, many members of al-Qaida and its associated movements have been killed or detained, the Taliban and Iraqi regimes have been terminated and some paramilitary attacks have been prevented.

Against this, there have been far more attacks on western interests across the world than in the equivalent period before 9/11, killing or injuring over 1,000 people. In fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US forces have killed at least 9,000 civilians and injured tens of thousands more. Afghanistan is deeply unstable with Taliban forces still present, and the security situation in Iraq is frankly dire. There are near-weekly warnings of terror attacks, which heighten the sense of alert symbolised by the London Underground simulation of a gas attack and the warnings of anti-aircraft missile attacks on British Airways planes in the last few days alone.

In this global context, it is very hard to accept any argument suggesting that a successful military campaign is being prosecuted and there is every reason to question what is being done. For the moment, there is a singular unwillingness in Washington to face up to the reality of the American predicament. But given the state of affairs in Iraq and Afghanistan and the beginnings of serious political questioning in the United States, such a dose of reality might be forced on the Bush administration much sooner than might be expected.

What really stands out about this list of particulars is that attacks in the West have uniformly failed, while the West's attacks on Islamicists have been largely successful. Meanwhile, the Islamic world continues to experience an extraordinary level of violence (some of it directed at Westerners) and instabilty (directed at itself). If in the long term Islamic violence was just turned inward, that would be a satisfactory end result to the entire War on Terror. Islamicism is, after all, fundamentally an Islamic problem, one that will ultimately have to be defeated by decent Muslims.

MORE:
What's Going Right (Jim Hoagland, September 11, 2003, Washington Post)

Terrorism operates from a template. It is intended to provoke paralyzing fear, anger and humiliation and to break the will of a population on which atrocities are visited. But the reaction to terror once the initial outrage and horror fade is far less predictable than the terrorists imagine.

Some societies do break apart on existing fault lines, as Lebanon did in the 1970s and as the car bombers of Baghdad and Najaf hope Iraq will. But other nations adjust and contain the terrorist threat, as Britain did against the Irish Republican Army, as India has in Kashmir and as the United States now does in the greater Middle East.

There is, of course, a crucial difference when the world's only remaining superpower is doing the responding. America's actions reshape the international environment and force other nations to adjust, whether they want to or not. Bush's brash, no-nonsense leadership style added to the sense of injury felt at the United Nations and elsewhere as he moved inexorably to invade Iraq last March. [...]

The world is beginning to absorb and adapt to the changes that the determined U.S. response to 9/11 has created abroad. This is a moment when more disciplined political leadership and more skillful diplomacy from Washington can bring dividends and should be pursued.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 11, 2003 9:05 PM