Abstract
9/11 is the unquestionable symbol of present terrorism, and the 9/11 US national commission report is the most important analysis of the phenomenon, symbolising the remarkable capacity of the US democracy to undertake a thorough analysis of the challenges it is confronted with. While the report appropriately envisages “the American homeland as the Planet”, the strategy coming out of it has certainly been more fruitful in a US internal short-term security perspective (American homeland) than in its long-term global one. This happens, since its recommendations were contradicted (as the one of not targeting Iraq) or its analysis is ignored (as the close link of Pakistan to the masterminds of the attack) or else kept secret (as the chapter on Saudi Arabian officials’ connections to the attackers) or still not acted upon (as the evidence of Iranian regime implication on the attack). The analysis is very sharp and critical on the political and bureaucratic levels of the administration, but does not sufficiently consider public opinion. The “war on terror” is not only a semantic error—one does not wage a war against a method—but a reflex of an appeasing phenomenon which refuses to identify the culprit and reacts blindly injuring bystanders rather than the real culprits. The attempt to create a new legal framework, somewhere in between the national criminal law and the international law, to deal with a phenomenon perceived to belong to neither, as symbolised by the use of the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, failed to prosecute efficiently the perpetrators of the crime. The “war on terror” on its crucial global dimension is seen as a failure, as Jihadism is stronger and more threatening today than it was then.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, the following recent articles http://www.economist.com/news/china/21706511-china-still-struggles-stuff-great-helmsman-underground-abide-mao (accessed on 17/03/2017) and http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21708881-mr-putin-not-setting-about-it-best-way-take-care-russia (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 2.
During a conference in Brussels on 14 September 2016, “Why counterterrorism is so difficult” Professor Martha Crenshaw presented the first difficulty as “the rarity of terrorist acts”. From her subsequent explanation, one could understand she was referring either “only” to the USA or “only” to the West, as if terrorist activity in someone else’s backyard would be none of our business. We therefore doubt that the global nature of the phenomenon has been perennially included in our mindset.
- 3.
Most in particular, in the chapter entitled “Evolution and rise of contemporary jihadism: from the Muslim Brotherhood to IS”.
- 4.
The Islamic Republic of Iran was already on the original list of states sponsoring terrorism which meant important penalties to its interests, but was otherwise spared the much more stringent consequences of being included entirely or partially as a designated foreign terrorist organisation. Years later, the US authorities placed sections of the Iranian revolutionary guards on the designated foreign terrorist organisations list.
- 5.
Hoffman (1998, p. 85) identifies both Iranian-backed organisations Al Dawa and the “Committee for Safeguard the Islamic Revolution” as the earliest religious terrorist organisations, already active in 1980. Casaca, 2008, identified direct explicit threats of the Iranian Iraqi satellite organisations to the USA that were simply ignored. The Lebanese Hezbollah was in fact the only peripheral organisation to the Iranian theocracy included in the list. The European Union, as has been the case in nearly every move, did not dare, at the time, to go as far as to place Hezbollah in its own terrorist lists. Otherwise, the organisation who directly assumed the protection of Al-Qaeda—the Afghan Taliban—was never blacklisted by the US authorities, see for instance http://www.state.gov/j/ct/rls/other/des/123085.htm (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 6.
See http://articles.latimes.com/1997/oct/09/news/mn-40874 (accessed on 17/03/2017); see also United States of America Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 109th Congress, First Session, Volume 151, Part 6, April 21, 2005 to May 5, 2005, pp. 8084–8085.
- 7.
People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, Petitioner v. United States Department of State and Hillary Rodham Clinton, In her capacity as Secretary of State, Respondents, United States Court of Appeals for the district of Columbia circuit, 16 July 2010; see also https://www.asil.org/insights/volume/16/issue/34/us-court-issues-writ-mandamus-effectively-removing-organization-terror (accessed on 17/03/2017); see also United States of America Congressional Record, Proceedings and Debates of the 112th Congress, First Session, Volume 157, Part 10, September 13, 2011 to October 5, 2011 p. 14070; see also http://caselaw.findlaw.com/us-dc-circuit/1531607.html (accessed on 17/03/2017); http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKLQ200287 (accessed on 17/03/2017) and https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/538297/20160715-Proscription-website-update.pdf (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 8.
The international deal that led to the relocation of Al-Qaeda into Afghanistan is described with some detail by Wright (2007). In reality, Taliban’s Afghanistan was masterminded by Pakistan, and Pakistan was the real negotiator on the delocalisation of Al-Qaeda, as well as its main contractor, as Al-Qaeda was supposed to be used in the Kashmiri Jihad against India.
- 9.
The assessment is only partly correct as it quotes a “broad support” to its enemies in the “Arab and Muslim world” but fails to identify its friends and allies in this world or, indeed, to identify the singularities of the several “worlds” in this “Arab and Muslim world”.
- 10.
See http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/11/20011113-27.html (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 11.
See http://bigstory.ap.org/article/2aef2bda129649b1a307151af13606b2/testimony-families-911-victims-sought-guantanamo (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 12.
See the official report of the US National Intelligence here https://www.dni.gov/index.php/newsroom/reports-publications/reports-publications-2016/item/1628-summary-of-the-reengagement-of-detainees-formerly-held-at-guantanamo-bay-cuba (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 13.
Namely those high level Taliban operatives traded against a former US military.
- 14.
See http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/specialseries/2015/12/uighur-guantanamo-22-151206112137598.html (accessed on 17/03/2017). Actually, as the most important ‘supposed’ ally in the struggle against terrorism was Pakistan, the country sheltering Osama bin Laden, this is hardly surprising.
- 15.
See for instance https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/dec/09/cia-torture-report-released (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 16.
See for instance, http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/18/the-dark-ages (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 17.
Laqueur adresses these issues in chapters “Political Violence revisited: The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam” and “The War on Terror”; the two chapters are titled, respectively, “The far right” and “Anti-Americanism” as if the far right would be less anti-American than the far left, a point of view that the description of Laqueur does not confirm at all. The widespread reference to Marxism as a source of “Anti-Americanism” is particularly difficult to understand, as Karl Marx admiration and praising of the USA was remarkable, (admittedly, differently from most of his followers) either in his writings or in his actions.
- 18.
Jeffrey Goldberg, “The Obama Doctrine” http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/ (accessed on 17/03/2017). For further analysis, see ARCHumankind policy brief 3; http://www.archumankind.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/20161019.Dangerous.liasons.JPC_.pdf (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 19.
We consulted it in Voice of America, http://docs.voanews.eu/en-US/2016/07/15/7c46eb0b-4e0b-4f4d-81da-32e6fbc43c0f.pdf (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 20.
See: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/world/asia/15policy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 21.
See SADF Policy Brief on the issue: http://sadf.eu/new/blog/combatting-jihadism-in-afghanistan/ (accessed on 17/03/2017).
- 22.
India has a different policy, but it is unlikely it will have the capacity only by itself to reverse the present trend.
- 23.
Casaca, 2008 follows several of them. A critical story of this kind was the one of Curveball made public in several press reports, as for instance, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/9936180/Iraq-anniversary-war-intelligence-was-a-lie-BBC-Panorama-documentary-to-say.html (accessed on 17/03/2017) or https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/feb/15/defector-admits-wmd-lies-iraq-war (accessed on 17/03/2017). The highest Portuguese authority at the time of the decision of the invasion of Iraq told me he relied fundamentally on German intelligence, and the German intelligence, as was later understood, relied heavily on this charlatan known as Curveball. One of the most astonishing facts on these bogus stories on Iraq is that they mostly made their way from European intelligence services to the USA.
- 24.
See Broussard, 2005, namely pp. 146 and 164.
- 25.
In a gross demonstration of ignorance of the realities on the ground, this view also condoned the so-called federalisation of Iraq, ignoring the intense intermingling of ethnic and religious groups from the South to the North of the country.
- 26.
On the first of September 2013, Hossein Madani was assassinated in camp Ashraf together with other dozens Iranian refugees by an Iraqi special operation corps acting as an informal death squad.
- 27.
This is the name of Zarqawi’s old organisation in Jordan.
- 28.
Among the press reports on this, we can consult, for instance, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-generals-allen-idUSBRE8AD03O20121114 (accessed on 17/03/2017), From April the 5th 2004, date of my first trip to Iraq, I made public appeals for the West to engage with Iraqi tribes as the most reasonable policy to be followed.
- 29.
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Casaca, P. (2017). The War on Terror. In: Casaca, P., Wolf, S. (eds) Terrorism Revisited. Contemporary South Asian Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55690-1_8
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