When Leaders Die, Terror Still Thrives

It appears that the rebellion in Libya is approaching a major turning point. As the rebels consolidate control of Tripoli, Qadhafi has apparently gone into hiding, and members of the Qadhafi family have been arrested. As this period of Libya’s history comes to a close, it is natural for Americans and western powers to desire a stable Libyan state which is favorable to their interests. There exist many temptations towards further intervention in Libyan affairs, but they should be resisted. The great powers should continue to support the prohibition against the killing of civilians, but should avoid the temptation to interfere in Libyan affairs for other reasons.

In spite of its checkered past, state building enjoys considerable support within policy circles, and there is a temptation towards state building in Libya. While the Iraqi experience has turned many of of the idea of regime change, many of those same thinkers continue to embrace the fundamental ideas underlying regime change and state building. In essence, people desire to ‘fix it all the way, now’ rather than continue to embark on a process of interaction and adjustment into the future. Naturally, a stable and friendly state is the best, and perhaps only way to completely resolve issues in troubled areas, but the process of creating friendly stable states is costly, dangerous, and fairly frequently futile.

The desire to establish a stable state in a troubled area takes two forms, which are motivated by the same logic, and differentiated only by methods employed. ‘Hard’ state building favors direct and military intervention. Direct intervention allows for greater control, and also provides a more concrete sense of accomplishment. John McCain is currently the most vocal advocate of hard state building. The soft form of state building prefers less direct methods, such as economic sanctions, diplomatic involvement, and public pressure. Both are unified in the idea that a stable, democratic state with interests aligned with the United States and the west is the best way to permanently resolve issues in an area or country that is plagued with violence. Indeed, in many ways the only difference between the two is the clothing worn by the foreigners upon the ground.

While soft state builders may feel that they are in some way morally superior to hard state builders because of the absence of military force, both are fraught with risk. Hard state building can trigger direct military blowback, and hostility not just in the country being built but also in the general region. Soft state building may also create the same hostility as people within the country being built feel that their arms are twisted with a smile by the implied threat of force. Furthermore, soft state building as much as hard state building can delegitimate the state building efforts of locals who cooperate with outside aid as their adversaries portray them to the local populace as quislings bending to the will of foreigners, instead of patriots working to rebuild their country. In the end, regardless of the methods selected, any state building effort carries with it the intrinsic cost of state building, and the built in hazards which make success unlikely.

Already with regards to Libya, we see and hear appeals to both methods of intervention within the country. Those who advocate diplomatic pressure or military intervention to ensure that Libya develops into a democracy are both hoping to guarantee that the western states achieve their best possible outcome. Giving into that temptation would be unwise and could lead to a protracted disaster like Iraq, or Somalia, depending on the methods of involvement we select. Caving to such temptations would be a tragic case of making the perfect the enemy of the good.

Libya is a minor power even within the oil world, and whether or not it is pro- or anti-American or European matters little to the great powers. It was purely for humanitarian reasons that NATO intervened, and the western powers need to maintain that single minded focus on the avoidance of mass killing within Libya. It is highly improbable that Libya will create a democracy like France, the United Kingdom, or the United States. However, any attempt by those powers to help them in that direction will make it even more unlikely that Libya will be able to succeed at stabilizing itself. Libya must be allowed to find its own way.

As a part of civilized society, however, it is incumbent upon both the Libyan government and the western world to ensure that Libya has not simply traded one bloodbath for another. If the murderous Qadhafi regime is simply substituted with another murderous regime, or a bloody chaos, then all has been for nought. Therefore the U.S. and the western powers should scope the terms of acceptable behavior very widely, allowing Libya to determine its own fate, so long as civilians are protected from depredation. Only in the case of civilian mass killing should the U.S. and the western powers again consider intervening, and even then only to stop the killing of civilians. Even non-military tools should be used sparingly and best not at all, because the lightest thumbs upon the scales of power still risk upsetting whatever stable balance may be achieved.

This phase of Libya’s history has reached its end, but Libya is not out of the woods yet. In this important period when everything is in flux, the temptation is great to seek the best possible outcomes for great powers. However, whether or not Libya is friendly or not is of little importance in international security to the great powers. Regardless, there is a great humanitarian interest in not seeing mass killings, and if the great powers focus single-mindedly on that issue, not only are they more likely to succeed in preventing that worst possible outcome, but they are less likely to upset and disrupt the growth of Libya into a stable member of the international community.

I suspect in most cases, especially the Mormon, Jewish and Atheist cases which seem to be greatly oversampled, the poll is capturing the relative partisanship of those religious groups. Nevertheless, unfortunately the poll also shows that large minorities within other religious groups accept that American Muslims may have some sympathy for Al Qaeda in spite of the general disapproval of violence.

Hamid Karzai visits Arlington National Cemeter / isafmedia / Used under the Creative Commons License

Hamid Karzai was probably at the pinnacle of his support when he was elected in 2004 with 55% of the vote. Five years later, in the highly contested Afghani elections, it seems quite clear that he would not have won reelection in a fair contest. Given such a strong signal of weakness, it should come as no surprise that now Hamid Karzai’s supporters, and family, are increasingly targets of attacks.

There have been many signs of the decay of support for Hamid Karzai along the way. According to the Brookings Institution, civilian casualties caused by fighting between pro-and anti-government forces in Afghanistan has risen from fewer than a thousand in 2006 to nearly two-thousand five hundred in 2010. The population in prison has gone from about 4,600 in 2004 to 18,000 in 2010. At the same time, the United States has steadily increased its presence in Afghanistan, and correspondingly has encountered and inflicted ever greater violence. All is not without hope, however, because polling indicates that as late as 2010, 58% of Afghans felt that Hamid Karzai was doing a good or excellent job, although that was a 22% drop from the 80% who thought so following his election.

None of this is particularly surprising, given that many governments lose popularity as they are faced with, and periodically fail, at dealing with the exigencies of government. This is currently particularly true across the world as the global credit crisis destroys economies and jobs. Afghanistan is only shielded somewhat from this crisis because Afghanistan is not advanced enough to have a developed credit market. Hamid Karzai would have inevitably faced a decline in popularity, and to the extent that he is tied with the quite unpopular American presence, will also suffer even greater losses of support. Furthermore, Hamid Karzai might still maintain a majority of support but lose control of the country. Significant within Karzai’s popularity is his lack of standing within the Pashtun community, of which he is nominally a part. However, the Pashtun south has long been a bastion of support for the Taliban, while Karzai drew his support from the North and West, areas which had opposed the Taliban and Pashtun dominance prior to the U.S. invasion in 2001. It was in an attempt to ameliorate these problems that the U.S. promoted the Karzai presidency, hoping that a Pashtun who was not closely tied to the Taliban could get past ethic loyalties and political tensions.

Causes and questions notwithstanding, we are left with a situation where as Hamid Karzai is increasingly seen as illegitimate he will come under increasing attack. Those attacks may be fairly selective like assassination attempts, or they may be larger attempts to disrupt the government or the economy. The United States has, for the time being, hitched its wagon to the Karzai star. The measures which Karzai and the U.S. must take to maintain control of Afghanistan may become increasingly costly, in blood and treasure, or increasingly distasteful.

In a recent speech he said the following:

For those of you who did not watch the video, Adm. Mullen claims ‘…China’s rise does not imply America’s decline.’ This is patently false.

When considering the power of various countries, the calculations are always in relative terms. This is because in a world where power determines outcome (i.e. the one we live) the greater the power of one country to achieve their goals, the less power another country has to stop them. China has always been ‘rising’ in absolute terms. Indeed, almost every country is increasing their absolute power, including the U.S. However, it is only because the U.S. is losing relative power to the Chinese (i.e. declining) that this is an interesting story at all.

Today Khaled Nasir addresses the issue of Radicalizing Homegrown Muslims on the American Thinker blog. As a part of a larger discussion, regarding the internet, he argues:

The Internet plays an important role during the radicalization process. The internet serves chiefly as the person’s source of information about Islam and a venue to meet other seekers online. With the aggressive proliferation of the jihadi ideology online, it is nearly impossible for someone to avoid this extreme interpretation of Islam.

While Mr. Nasir has clearly thought a great deal about the issue of radicalization, his proposition about the internet actually leaves me a little befuddled. He goes to great lengths to describe the size and density of the Muslim community within Britain. Why then, is the internet the primary avenue for information about Islam? Would someone not be more likely to learn about their families religion from their family, or perhaps the family Imam first? Furthermore, the assertion that one can hardly avoid ideas seems spurious. After all, no one can seriously argue that there are more websites dedicated to radical Islam than there are to pornography, and yet pornography is imminently avoidable.

Self-radicalization in this case seems far too simple an explanation for individuals actions. The idea that “the internet made me do it” does not fly when it comes to things like vandalism, murder, adultery or any of the other things someone may wish to pin on it, why then should we believe that the internet is culpable for terrorism? Furthermore, the internet does not turn itself on, nor search for things on its own, someone has to do that themselves. It seems highly unlikely that someone surrounded by people who oppose violence would merely by sitting at a computer become violent. If that were the case we should expect a correlation with terrorism and internet usage, which we do not see. A second possibility is that people who are “radicalized” through the internet are getting caught doing things so early in the planning, that they are not actually all that radical.

The ‘homerun’ case that Mr. Nasir relies upon is illustrative. According to Mr. Nasir, Aabid Hussein Khan became radicalized “In 1997 [when] at only 12 years old, Khan quickly became an avid fan of anything he could find on the Internet relating to jihad and the mujahedeen.” To put that in perspective, in 1997 there was no Google,Youtube, or Flickr etc. Geocities was hi-tech. Yahoo! was brand new. Photos were mostly exchanged one at at time through news groups. Almost everyone still used dial-up modems to connect to the internet. The World Wide Web had only been invented two years before! And yet somehow the internet was the culprit for Mr. Khan’s radicalization. It seems more plausible that Mr. Khan’s father, who had to be removed from the courtroom shouting that “This is just hype. These are anti-Muslim laws”, who had hours of access to his son every day, and no limits on bandwidth, would have a lot more effect than the internet. If not him, friends, other family, and the local community.

At the same time, it should be remembered that Mr. Khan did not actually attack anyone. This is not to absolve him of his culpability, but to point out that he had a long way to go before he became an effective terrorist. He collected a wide variety of admittedly repulsive videos, but as far as was presented in court, had not acted on them yet. In other words, he only started to think about fighting the law, and the law won. If that is all the better that al Qaeda can do, then I think we can all sleep a lot more soundly tonight.

Here’s to bin Laden’s demise. The world is a better place without him. I hope he enjoys his 70 Virginians.

Fazal Ur Rehman, the head of Jamiat-e-Ulama-e-Islam, was headed to a rally in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province when a man walked up to his convoy and blew himself up, authorities said.

The bast killed 12 people, including three policemen and two women, said Nisar Murrawat, the police chief of the Charsadda district where the attack took place.

Also reporting on the incident is the Telegraph which elaborates on Ur Rehman’s political and religious persuasions.

The JUI-F chief, a former leader of the opposition in Pakistan’s National Assembly, has been a consistent supporter of upholding Islamic laws in Pakistan, including the controversial blasphemy laws, and a constant critic of American drone attack on militants in the country’s tribal areas close to the Afghan border. He is also believed to be close to some pro-Islamabad Taliban factions.

Rest assured that we will be following this one closely.
h/t Global Post