Politicians Feed Terrorism
    By Brian Myles
    Le Devoir

    Thursday 31 May 2007

"Had the Iraq folly not been committed, everything that looks like bin Ladin and his ilk would have faded away very quickly."

    Were it not for the blindness of the political class - with the Bush administration first in line - Islamist terrorism would have quickly been given a pounding. At least that's the opinion of Xavier Raufer, an internationally reputed criminologist who was going through Longueuil yesterday on his way to a colloquium on terrorism at Sherbrooke University. According to Mr. Raufer, it would be sufficient for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq war to arrive at peaceful outcomes to send Islamist terrorism into an irremediable phase of decline.

    "Had the Iraq folly not been committed, everything that looks like bin Ladin and his ilk would have faded away very quickly," deems Mr. Raufer, who is in charge of courses at the Criminology Institute of Paris II University. "The fanatics are in the process of being returned to what they were originally. Historically, in the Muslim world, they are not very numerous," he added.

    Mr. Raufer, author of around 20 books on organized crime and terrorism, refuses to point his finger at the big Western countries' intelligence agencies for past failures in the war against terrorism. He rightly emphasizes that Osama bin Ladin's intentions were very clear. As of August 1996, OBL published a declaration of war against the United States that everyone could read on the Internet. There was nothing secret about it: The mujahideen had turned on their American ally after successfully chasing the Soviet occupier out of Afghanistan. "The American administration did not want to see 9/11 [coming], although its ally in Afghanistan mutated into America's enemy right under its nose and it was public knowledge!" Xavier Raufer opines. "That's why I have serious qualms when I hear that the problem is intelligence."

    He observes the question of Iraq with the same dismay. In his recent book, former CIA Director George Tenet revealed that the war had been launched without any real debate within the Bush administration. Mr. Tenet tried to minimize the accusations brought against the Iraqi regime with respect to its suppositious connections to al-Qaeda, notably because the CIA was unable to back up certain assertions. According to the former CIA boss, that attitude earned him the hostility of Vice President Dick Cheney and of then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice. "One of the problems with intelligence is the consideration of that intelligence by the political authorities, who often demonstrate their own blindness," summarizes Mr. Raufer.

    The Invisible Enemy

    Contrary to what the political class wants to believe, al-Qaeda is not Terrorism Central, a sort of new incarnation of the Communist International with leaders, decision-making bodies and a hierarchical command structure. "It's much more fluid, anarchical and disorganized than people want to believe."

    Not since the barbarian invasions marking the end of the Roman Empire has the world been confronted with a more elusive enemy, according to Xavier Raufer. In fact, terrorist organizations are less structured and stable than they were in the past. Abu Nidal was a permanent fixture during the 1970s: The intelligence services knew his claims and his identity. Today, the groups are much more difficult to figure out. In Algeria, the Armed Islamist Group (GIA) has changed its leader seven times this year, Mr. Raufer underscores. "We live in a world in which the enemy brusquely appears, commits a series of deadly acts and disappears. And after that, we don't see any more of him," he says.

    Since the 9/11 attacks, close to 5,000 individuals presumed to be al-Qaeda members have been arrested in 58 countries around the globe, according to the criminologist's calculations. And that does not include those arrests and extraordinary renditions conducted in the greatest possible secrecy. If al-Qaeda had been a big, centralized, hierarchical organization, its operational capacities would have been reduced to nothing. Yet, Mr. Raufer counts 11 attacks attributed to al-Qaeda that killed 683 people between 2003 and 2006. Those responsible for the March 2004 attacks in Madrid "had never seen anybody from al-Qaeda in their lives," Mr. Raufer says.

    That said, the terrorist groups are no less dangerous for all of that. Like organized crime, they find a productive crucible in "failed" states and megalopolises sinking into anarchy. In Afghanistan as in Sierra Leone, in Karachi as in Lagos, thousands of square miles of territory and millions of inhabitants are delivered into the control of mafias, terrorists and drug traffickers.

    When the Great Powers stop investing in their military arsenals - in the obsolete logic of the Cold War - they could concentrate on the eradication of terrorist phenomena as soon as their first symptoms appear. "It's an intellectual problem. We must effect a change in our posture and perform early-stage detection. To use a metaphor: We must look at the buds rather than wait until the baobab is a hundred feet high before we pay any attention to it." Xavier Raufer is hopeful. "Every terrorist phenomenon has a beginning, an apogee, a decline and an end," he concludes.