Author: Greg Sheridan, Foreign editor
Publication: The Australian
Date: December 6, 2008
URL: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24757395-7583,00.html
When us Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
was in India this week, all the talk was about "non-state actors"
and the challenge they throw up to the international system. The assumption
was that the Pakistan-based terrorists responsible for the murders of about
175 people in Mumbai, and the injuries to hundreds more, were non-state actors.
Yet it may be that since the 9/11 attacks
in New York, the world has completely misconceived the age of terror.
The radical increase in the lethality, range,
political consequence and strategic influence of terrorists comes not from
their being non-state actors at all. Instead it comes from their being sponsored
by states.
Sometimes they are the instruments of states
and at other times they make strategic alliances with states.
A terrorist group operating without any state
sponsorship is an infinitely less dangerous outfit than a terrorist group
operating with the co-operation of even the most ramshackle state.
However, states not only co-operate with terrorists,
in many cases they direct and even found the terrorists.
Consider the prime example, al-Qa'ida. For
a long time al-Qa'ida was the very image of decentralised, non-state globalisation.
Men in caves, it was said, could bring death and destruction in New York.
Yet that image, powerful and pervasive as
it was, does not really capture the truth about al-Qa'ida. Al-Qa'ida began
life in its campaign against the Soviet Union's occupation of Afghanistan,
with the support of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
The US, too, was supporting the mujaheddin
in Afghanistan, though it certainly didnot support transnational terrorism.
After Osama bin Laden fell out with the ruling family in Saudi Arabia, he
moved the centre of his operations to Sudan. Al-Qa'ida and its leadership
would not have been able to keep going, much less consolidate as a global,
revolutionary terrorist movement, without the safe haven and other facilities
that the Sudanese provided for at least the first half of the 1990s.
Then, from 1996 onwards, al-Qa'ida headquartered
itself in Afghanistan, where its ideological soul mates, the Taliban, were
running the country.
The infrastructure the Taliban provided to
al-Qa'ida was crucial. Tens of thousands of jihadists went through terrorist
training camps that al-Qa'ida ran on Afghan soil.
Even after the 9/11 attacks, the US did not
move immediately to attack Afghanistan and depose the Taliban. Rather it gave
the Taliban a choice: they could avoid US military action if they handed over
bin Laden and the other al-Qa'ida leadership.
What saved al-Qa'ida was the refusal of its
state sponsor in Kabul to give it up. When the Taliban leadership escaped
from Afghanistan, the al-Qai'ida leadership escaped with it. Nonetheless,
al-Qa'ida at least has an independent existence apart from its succeeding
state sponsors.
In the case of Iran, this is not so clear.
Iran sponsored Hezbollah as its representative force in Lebanon. Increasingly,
Tehran has taken direct control of Hezbollah.
Hezbollah undoubtedly commands some genuine
popular support in Lebanon, but increasingly it is run as a unit of the Iranian
state. That is one of the reasons it has been relatively quiet in the past
12 months. Iran plays these games with a lot of precision.
Hezbollah is a particular type of terrorist
organisation. It is certainly capable of suicide terrorism, but it has become
in effect a standing terrorist army, with its most important investment being
in medium and even hi-tech missiles that it can launch at Israel whenever
Iran gives the order.
Thus Hezbollah is less a non-state actor,
as the popular jargon has it, and more an instrument of state power that nonetheless
provides its state sponsor with political distance or a level of plausible
deniability.
When Hezbollah struck Israel, Israel struck
back against Lebanon, including Beirut, but the real return address on the
Hezbollah rockets was Tehran. If Israel had attacked Iran it would have been
accused of starting a Middle East war, but Hezbollah's rockets have the capacity
to paralyse the northern half of Israel.
Similarly, Hamas is the Palestinian branch
of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood organisation. But its primary capacity
is a conventional military capacity, especially the rockets it is now acquiring.
It receives support from one big state, Iran, but it also constitutes on its
own a kind of state power in Gaza.
Terrorists have to operate from somewhere.
There are three alternatives. They can operate in what is truly ungoverned
space, such as much of contemporary Somalia. Or they can operate clandestinely,
against the wishes of a governing authority, as say the terrorist groups that
have gathered in London. But of necessity such operations tend to be small
and furtive. It is the third option that allows terrorists to grow to their
full potential: where they are operating as either allies or agents of a sympathetic
government.
Which brings us to Mumbai.
Pakistan has for many years been a significant
state sponsor of terrorism. Its military intelligence agency, ISI, founded
the Lashkar-e-Toiba terrorist group, initially to harass India in Kashmir.
The ISI also founded the Taliban to ensure a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul.
Even when Pakistan allegedly turned against
terror and rounded up a few al-Qa'ida leaders, it never captured a Taliban
leader. Nor did it ever really try to.
Now US intelligence has determined that former
leaders of the ISI and other former Pakistani military figures trained the
terrorists who perpetrated the Mumbai massacres.
Even if the impotent Pakistani civilian Government
was not directly involved in the Mumbai massacres, it makes sense to see the
long campaign of terror against India as sponsored by at least part of the
Pakistani state. Given the Pakistani state also pioneered the idea of the
Islamic nuclear bomb, this should sound the gravest alerts.
Thus it may be that modern terrorism is not
so much the emergence of non-state actors on to the strategic field but, rather,
the latest refinement of state power, giving the option of state military
and terrorist action with plausible, or at least politically useful, deniability.
If anything, therefore, we have tended to underestimate the strategic importance
of terrorism.