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What to Do? Toward a New Policy with the Muslim World

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Defining Terrorism in the Real World
No one can ever bring terrorism to an end on this earth. It is one of the many—
and one of the more vicious—forms of politics by other means. But it can be
controlled and limited. Unfortunately, current US policies are not going to do
that; in fact, they have exacerbated the problem. The first mistake is US
government use of a legalistic and self-serving definition for terrorism that does
not address the real-world problem. Admittedly, the problem of gaining
international consensus on defining terrorism has long been thorny.
Governments in effect end up saying that “terrorism is what I say it is,” that is, a
subjective, self-serving definition to meet the needs of the moment. The 2004
definition offered by the US Department of Defense is particularly slanted: “The
calculated use of unlawful violence or threat of unlawful violence to inculcate
fear; intended to coerce or to intimidate governments or societies in the pursuit
of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological.”
The political hooker in this statement is the phrase “use of unlawful
violence.” No definition is offered for the term “unlawful,” but it appears to
mean “not sanctioned by government.” Yet isn’t this precisely what political
struggles usually revolve around—the exact definition of lawful? Modern
Western political thinkers tend to define the state as possessing the sole
legitimate monopoly on the use of violence. Thus “state” = “lawful.” That
equation may be appropriate in most Western democracies where governments
rule by consent, but it is a far shakier argument in authoritarian states that
exclude and persecute political opposition and where change often never comes
about except through some kind of “unlawful” activity. Such governments seek
to ensure that all opposition is “unlawful.” And such activity is often countered
by what, in effect, are forms of state terrorism directed against a significant
group of its own citizens.
The events of 9/11 and the Global War on Terror hugely empowered all states
facing any kind of domestic insurgency, enabling them to brand their opponents
with the charge of “terrorism.” “Terrorism” is, of course, the clinching argument;
once it is invoked, no political approach or negotiation is required, and the state
has full moral authority to apply maximum violence to wipe out the opposition.
Regimes all over the world found a windfall in joining Bush’s Global War on
Terror, placing themselves in the camp of the morally righteous against the
forces of evil, with whom there could be no compromise. Michael Walzer deftly
summarizes the problem: “First oppression is made into an excuse for terrorism,
and then terrorism is made into an excuse for oppression. The first is the excuse

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of the far left; the second is the excuse of the neoconservative right.”
Everyone would agree that political violence in any society is undesirable.
Terrorism is a form of political violence. But in much of the world, political
violence is routinely exercised by repressive regimes themselves against their
domestic opponents. Illegitimate regimes will inevitably be faced with political
violence. That is the basis for the language in the American Declaration of
Independence:
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers
from the consent of the governed…. That whenever any Form of
Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the
People to alter or to abolish it… when a long train of abuses and
usurpations… evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism,
it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to
provide new Guards for their future security.
In the contemporary Muslim world—and we are not just talking about
Muslims here, but about the entire developing world—there are at least three
conditions under which the use of political violence becomes arguable:
overthrow of despotic regimes, struggle for national liberation, and armed
resistance against foreign occupation.
1. Overthrow of despotic regimes: The Muslim world has a high proportion of
despotic regimes, many supported by the West for decades. They are skilled
at suppressing political opposition through multiple means, including
violence and imprisonment. Does political violence against the regime
constitute terrorism, thereby justifying its total suppression? If the state is
oppressive, how justified is armed struggle and rebellion? Regrettably few
states produce Mahatma Gandhis or Nelson Mandelas.
2. The struggle for national liberation: For historical reasons, including
imperial redrawing of colonial borders in Africa and Eurasia, hundreds of
ethnic groups find themselves divided by artificial borders, or included
within a state culturally alien to them, which is often suppressive of their
identity and cultural rights, and they were never consulted about
incorporation within these states. These ethnic groups include Chechens;
Kashmiris; Uyghurs and Tibetans in China; Sri Lankan Tamils;
Palestinians; Sikhs in India; Kurds in Turkey, Iran, and Iraq; Moros in the

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Philippines; Bengalis in Pakistan (pre-Bangladesh); Igbos in Nigeria;
Eritreans in Ethiopia (before achieving independence); Albanian Kosovars
in Serbia—the list is long. These communities can be either ethnic or
religious.
History reveals how many states now accepted as fully legitimate have
been born out of “unlawful violence,” usually against anticolonial or anti-
imperialist struggle: Turkey, Israel, China, Mexico, Algeria, Indonesia,
Greece, Bulgaria, Cuba, Vietnam, Kenya, South Africa, and the United
States, just to name a few major ones. If the criterion of the Pentagon today
had been applied to the “unlawful violence” practiced by American
revolutionaries in 1776 against the perceived legitimacy of British rule, we
would not have an American Republic. We should not forget the terrorist
origins of leaders like Jomo Kenyatta in Kenya, Menachem Begin in Israel,
or Nelson Mandela in South Africa, all of whom came to be viewed as
serious and respected statesmen after their victories.
American policies in the modern era have pretty consistently been
toward support of the status quo and the state, including even state
repression to preserve the status quo—albeit with occasional transient
twinges of conscience. The major exception is when the state facing
separatist insurgency is hostile to Washington, in which case issues of
principle break down: US policy then demonstrates greater sympathy or
support for the separatists: Kurds in Saddam’s Iraq; Baluch in Iran;
Ukrainians, Latvians, and others in the USSR; Tibetans in Mao’s China,
and so on.
3. Armed resistance against foreign occupation: Most recently, resistance
against the US invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia. Yet terrorist
resistance against the Red Army in Afghanistan in the 1980s was
enthusiastically supported by Washington. Do not occupied peoples in war
have the right of armed resistance? States at war, even democratic ones,
generally refuse to deal openly with such questions about what constitutes
acceptable violence. They will prefer to bend universal definitions to the
immediate need of the state to justify their acts. In its own eyes, the state is
always right, the state is always moral.
Questions of proportionality of response lie also within classic arguments for
just war. When several soldiers are killed by terrorists, for example, can a
response entailing one hundred times the deaths be considered morally

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legitimate? What of the informal Israeli support for the tactic of “one hundred
eyes for an eye,” as a form of deterrence? Or the morality of “shock and awe”?
Of regime change by military invasion? Or the bombing of civilian populations?
Here, we are caught again on the slippery slope of relativism and subjectivity: is
it licit to drop bombs from fifty thousand feet in the effort to kill terrorists—with
predictable widespread deaths of innocents—but immoral for a single suicide
bomber to kill the enemy from five feet in the struggle for national liberation,
also killing innocents? No doubt some acts of terrorism are quite indiscriminate
and specifically designed to spread fear and demoralization; but what then of
Dresden, Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, in which the major purpose of the exercise
was to terrify and demoralize—in modern parlance, to create “shock and awe” to
win the conflict? All of these questions are directly relevant to multiple crises in
the Muslim world—and outside. There is nothing at all “Muslim” about these
situations—except that Islamic solidarity may well strengthen the will to resist.
Despite these questions, it would be wrong to simply define away the
existence of terrorism through facile and slippery definitions of relative justice.
Terrorism does exist and is a scourge upon society. People who commit terrorist
acts are often brutal and psychotic, on the fringes of society, engaged in criminal
activities, or powerfully driven ideological zealots. But not all, by any means.
Severe conditions such as oppression and war elicit a violent response from
undesirable social elements, as well as from many other citizens. The definition
chosen for terrorism must be consistently applied. Washington’s self-serving and
selective use of the term casts doubt over its legal, analytic, and persuasive
validity and largely undermines its case in the eyes of the world, not to mention
in the Muslim world.
Nor should lack of consensus on definitions create paralysis of will. What is
essential is policy acknowledgment of international norms—how most of the rest
of the world regards these issues. In Iraq, the reality was that vast portions of the
world did not see these issues as Washington saw them, or as the narrow
spectrum of US mainstream news coverage reported—or ignored—them. Failure
to acknowledge regional realities and treat existing grievances will guarantee the
certain failure of President Obama’s policies as surely as under the Bush
administration. Most Muslims fighting in the name of nationalist grievances, like
other nationalists, must not be treated as “terrorists” but as political opponents
whose needs require some kind of political treatment or negotiation. Insurgency
may be “illegal,” but it is the essence of human response to unjust conditions.
Nearly everyone agrees that the killing of another human being is morally
wrong. Yet within that framework, Western law draws careful distinctions
among first-degree, second-degree, and third-degree murder, manslaughter, and

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negligent homicide; it also condemns certain killers to death, others not. Policy
must distinguish among a variety of gradations in the sphere of political violence
and terrorism as well. Nearly all statesmen would acknowledge distinctions
between (a) Hamas, which employs guerrilla and terrorist tactics within the
narrow geographical limits of occupied territory of Palestine and Israel, or (b)
Iraqis and Pashtuns fighting American military occupation on their own soil, or
(c) groups like al-Qa’ida, which confront the West in its totality, as did the Red
Brigades, Baader Meinhof group, or Aum Shinrikyo.

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