About Newsweek’s surrender to the global jihad, see also here and here. But this one really takes the cake.
“Learning to Live With Radical Islam: We don’t have to accept the stoning of criminals. But it’s time to stop treating all Islamists as potential terrorists,” by Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, March 9 (thanks to all who sent this in):
Pakistan’s Swat valley is quiet once again. Often compared to Switzerland for its stunning landscape of mountains and meadows, Swat became a war zone over the past two years as Taliban fighters waged fierce battles against Army troops. No longer, but only because the Pakistani government has agreed to some of the militants’ key demands, chiefly that Islamic courts be established in the region. Fears abound that this means women’s schools will be destroyed, movies will be banned and public beheadings will become a regular occurrence.
These are not just things that people are afraid might happen. Girls’ schools are being bombed and torched in Swat; video stores are being destroyed; and government sympathizers have been beheaded. Why is Newsweek presenting all this as something that people are afraid may happen, instead of something that is happening already?
The militants are bad people and this is bad news. But the more difficult question is, what should we””the outside world””do about it? That we are utterly opposed to such people, and their ideas and practices, is obvious. But how exactly should we oppose them? In Pakistan and Afghanistan, we have done so in large measure by attacking them””directly with Western troops and Predator strikes, and indirectly in alliance with Pakistani and Afghan forces. Is the answer to pour in more of our troops, train more Afghan soldiers, ask that the Pakistani military deploy more battalions, and expand the Predator program to hit more of the bad guys? Perhaps””in some cases, emphatically yes””but I think it’s also worth stepping back and trying to understand the phenomenon of Islamic radicalism.
I fully agree: military solutions alone are not the answer. We have to wage a full-scale, unapologetic ideological battle — but that is not what Fareed Zakaria has in mind.
But first, he gives us a Tiny Minority of Extremistsâ„¢ Update. Remember: in the mainstream media jihadists are a tiny handful of insignificant whackjobs among Muslims, until it becomes expedient that they become a larger force, as here:
It is not just in the Swat valley that Islamists are on the rise. In Afghanistan the Taliban have been gaining ground for the past two years as well. In Somalia last week, Al-Shabab, a local group of Islamic militants, captured yet another town from government forces. Reports from Nigeria to Bosnia to Indonesia show that Islamic fundamentalists are finding support within their communities for their agenda, which usually involves the introduction of some form of Sharia””Islamic law””reflecting a puritanical interpretation of Islam. No music, no liquor, no smoking, no female emancipation.
The groups that advocate these policies are ugly, reactionary forces that will stunt their countries and bring dishonor to their religion.
In this Zakaria assumes that Islamic texts and teachings do not teach that there should be no music, no liquor, no female emancipation. Unfortunately, traditional Islamic law teaches all three.
But not all these Islamists advocate global jihad, host terrorists or launch operations against the outside world””in fact, most do not. Consider, for example, the most difficult example, the Taliban. The Taliban have done all kinds of terrible things in Afghanistan. But so far, no Afghan Taliban has participated at any significant level in a global terrorist attack over the past 10 years””including 9/11. There are certainly elements of the Taliban that are closely associated with Al Qaeda. But the Taliban is large, and many factions have little connection to Osama bin Laden. Most Taliban want Islamic rule locally, not violent jihad globally.
On what basis does Fareed Zakaria make this assertion? The Taliban is a hardline Islamic group. There has never been any indication that any Taliban faction rejects any element of traditional Islamic teaching, and traditional Islamic teaching includes the requirement that Muslims wage war against unbelievers and subjugate them under the rule of Islamic law. While Taliban factions in Swat pose no immediate threat to impose Sharia on Des Moines or Dubuque, does Fareed Zakaria have any real basis for thinking that they would not want to, given the chance, and would not help in such efforts in any way they could? In fact, he does not.
How would you describe Faisal Ahmad Shinwari, a judge in Afghanistan? He has banned women from singing on television and called for an end to cable television altogether. He has spoken out against women and men being educated in the same schools at any age. He has upheld the death penalty for two journalists who were convicted of blasphemy. (Their crime: writing that Afghanistan’s turn toward Islam was “reactionary.”) Shinwari sounds like an Islamic militant, right? Actually, he was appointed chief justice of the Afghan Supreme Court after the American invasion, administered Hamid Karzai’s oath of office and remained in his position until three years ago.
Why can’t he be an Islamic militant and chief justice of the Afghan Supreme Court? After all, the new Afghan Constitution upholds Sharia as the supreme law of the land, and we saw that that provision had teeth when a convert from Islam to Christianity, Abdul Rahman, was put on trial for apostasy a few years ago. Zakaria is assuming, again with no evidence, that the Karzai government is inhospitable to hardline Sharia rule.
Were he to hold Western, liberal views, Shinwari would have little credibility within his country. The reality””for the worse, in my view””is that radical Islam has gained a powerful foothold in the Muslim imagination. It has done so for a variety of complex reasons that I have written about before. But the chief reason is the failure of Muslim countries to develop, politically or economically.
Yes, that’s why the desperately poor nation of Saudi Arabia is so radicalized.
Look at Pakistan. It cannot provide security, justice or education for many of its citizens. Its elected politicians have spent all of their time in office conspiring to have their opponents thrown in jail and their own corruption charges tossed out of court. As a result, President Asif Ali Zardari’s approval rating barely a month into office was around half that enjoyed by President Pervez Musharraf during most of his term. The state is losing legitimacy as well as the capacity to actually govern.
All true, but the idea that Islam and Sharia are the solutions to all this does not come from the corruption and inefficiency itself. It comes from the widespread understanding in Pakistan that only Sharia rule is legitimate, and that departures from it bring misery and poverty. This is a Qur’anic idea — it is only natural that Sharia advocates would point to the corruption of the state as part of their case. But their case does not depend upon that corruption.
Consider Swat. The valley was historically a peaceful place that had autonomy within Pakistan (under a loose federal arrangement) and practiced a moderate version of Sharia in its courts. In 1969 Pakistan’s laws were formally extended to the region. Over the years, the new courts functioned poorly, with long delays, and were plagued by corruption. Dysfunctional rule meant that the government lost credibility. Some people grew nostalgic for the simple, if sometimes brutal, justice of the old Sharia courts. A movement demanding their restitution began in the early 1990s, and Benazir Bhutto’s government signed an agreement to reintroduce some aspects of the Sharia court system with Sufi Muhammed, the same cleric with whom the current government has struck a deal. (The Bhutto arrangement never really worked, and the protests started up again in a few years.) Few people in the valley would say that the current truce is their preferred outcome. In the recent election, they voted for a secular party. But if the secularists produce chaos and corruption, people settle for order.
If this analysis were accurate, why do Muslims push for Sharia in Britain and Western Europe, where secular courts function with relative efficiency?
The militants who were battling the Army (led by Sufi Muhammed’s son-in-law) have had to go along with the deal. The Pakistani government is hoping that this agreement will isolate the jihadists and win the public back to its side. This may not work, but at least it represents an effort to divide the camps of the Islamists between those who are violent and those who are merely extreme.
This is just a difference of tactics, not of overall goals.
Over the past eight years such distinctions have been regarded as naive. In the Bush administration’s original view, all Islamist groups were one and the same; any distinctions or nuances were regarded as a form of appeasement. If they weren’t terrorists themselves, they were probably harboring terrorists. But how to understand Afghanistan and Pakistan, where the countries “harbor” terrorists but are not themselves terrorist states?…
Here again is illustrated the limitation of defining the conflict in terms of terrorism in the first place. The problem, ultimately, is not that jihadists want to blow things up in Western countries. The problem is that they want to impose Sharia — a system inimical to Western notions of freedom of speech and equality of rights of all people before the law — on Western countries. How they are going about this has gotten all the attention, when that attention ought to be focused on what they are trying to do, with analysts working to stop them in all the ways they are operating.
We have placed ourselves in armed opposition to Muslim fundamentalists stretching from North Africa to Indonesia, which has made this whole enterprise feel very much like a clash of civilizations, and a violent one at that….
No, they have placed themselves in armed opposition to us. And they have pushed the clash of civilizations idea. But Zakaria shares the malady that so many Western analysts, liberal and conservative, share: the bedrock assumption that any conflict between the West and any other entity must be the West’s fault.
Events have taken a different course in Nigeria, where the Islamists came to power locally. After the end of military rule in 1999, 12 of Nigeria’s 36 states chose to adopt Sharia. Radical clerics arrived from the Middle East to spread their draconian interpretation of Islam. Religious militias such as the Hisbah of Kano state patrolled the streets, attacking those who shirked prayers, disobeyed religious dress codes or drank alcohol. Several women accused of adultery were sentenced to death by stoning. In 2002 The Weekly Standard decried “the Talibanization of West Africa” and worried that Nigeria, a “giant of sub-Saharan Africa,” could become “a haven for Islamism, linked to foreign extremists.”
But when The New York Times sent a reporter to Kano state in late 2007, she found an entirely different picture from the one that had been fretted over by State Department policy analysts. “The Islamic revolution that seemed so destined to transform northern Nigeria in recent years appears to have come and gone,” the reporter, Lydia Polgreen, concluded. The Hisbah had become “little more than glorified crossing guards” and were “largely confined to their barracks and assigned anodyne tasks like directing traffic and helping fans to their seats at soccer games.” The widely publicized sentences of mutilation and stoning rarely came to pass (although floggings were common). Other news reports have confirmed this basic picture.
Oh, mutilation and stonings were only “rare”! Then everything is ok!
Residents hadn’t become less religious; mosques still overflowed with the devout during prayer time, and virtually all Muslim women went veiled. But the government had helped push Sharia in a tamer direction by outlawing religious militias; the regular police had no interest in enforcing the law’s strictest tenets. In addition, over time some of the loudest proponents of Sharia had been exposed as hypocrites. Some were under investigation for embezzling millions.
I’m not sure what Zakaria’s point is here. Any hardliner who gained control there could reverse this: by ascribing the kinder, gentler atmosphere in Kano to the fact that “the regular police had no interest in enforcing the law’s strictest tenets,” Zakaria shows that he realizes that it isn’t that another version of Sharia is being enforced — one that is more “moderate” — it is simply that some elements of Islamic law are being ignored. But any law that remains on the books can always be enforced again.
We have an instant, violent reaction to anyone who sounds like an Islamic bigot. This is understandable. Many Islamists are bigots, reactionaries and extremists (others are charlatans and opportunists). But this can sometimes blind us to the ways they might prove useful in the broader struggle against Islamic terror. The Bush administration spent its first term engaged in a largely abstract, theoretical conversation about radical Islam and its evils””and conservative intellectuals still spout this kind of unyielding rhetoric.
What planet is Zakaria on? Bush spent his first term, and his second, insisting that Islam was a religion of peace and that the conflict against “terrorism” had nothing to do with Islam. Where was this “largely abstract, theoretical conversation about radical Islam and its evils”? It wasn’t anywhere in the Bush Administration.
By its second term, though, the administration was grappling with the complexities of Islam on the ground. It is instructive that Bush ended up pursuing a most sophisticated and nuanced policy toward political Islam in the one country where reality was unavoidable””Iraq.
In reality, Bush allowed Sharia provisions to go into both the Iraqi and Afghan constitutions, and the drafting of these constitutions took place during both terms.
Having invaded Iraq, the Americans searched for local allies, in particular political groups that could become the Iraqi face of the occupation. The administration came to recognize that 30 years of Saddam””a secular, failed tyrant””had left only hard-core Islamists as the opposition. It partnered with these groups, most of which were Shiite parties founded on the model of Iran’s ultra-religious organizations, and acquiesced as they took over most of southern Iraq, the Shiite heartland. In this area, the strict version of Islam that they implemented was quite similar to””in some cases more extreme than””what one would find in Iran today. Liquor was banned; women had to cover themselves from head to toe; Christians were persecuted; religious affiliations became the only way to get a government job, including college professorships.
While some of this puritanism is now mellowing, southern Iraq remains a dark place. But it is not a hotbed of jihad. And as the democratic process matures, one might even hope that some version of the Nigerian story will play out there. “It’s hard to hand over authority to people who are illiberal,” says former CIA analyst Reuel Marc Gerecht. “What you have to realize is that the objective is to defeat bin Ladenism, and you have to start the evolution. Moderate Muslims are not the answer. Shiite clerics and Sunni fundamentalists are our salvation from future 9/11s.”
Good luck with that.
The Bush administration partnered with fundamentalists once more in the Iraq War, in the Sunni belt. When the fighting was at its worst, administration officials began talking to some in the Sunni community who were involved in the insurgency. Many of them were classic Islamic militants, though others were simply former Baathists or tribal chiefs. Gen. David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency strategy ramped up this process. “We won the war in Iraq chiefly because we separated the local militants from the global jihadists,” says Fawaz Gerges, a scholar at Sarah Lawrence College, who has interviewed hundreds of Muslim militants. “Yet around the world we are still unwilling to make the distinction between these two groups.”
Is this really a distinction with a difference? Is it really likely to be a useful distinction in the long run? Or is it one that will lead to the West going the way of John VI Cantacuzenes, who probably thought that he could make a distinction between good jihadists and bad jihadists also.
Would a strategy like this work in Afghanistan? David Kilcullen, a counterinsurgency expert who has advised Petraeus, says, “I’ve had tribal leaders and Afghan government officials at the province and district level tell me that 90 percent of the people we call the Taliban are actually tribal fighters or Pashtun nationalists or people pursuing their own agendas. Less than 10 percent are ideologically aligned with the Quetta Shura [Mullah Omar’s leadership group] or Al Qaeda.” These people are, in his view, “almost certainly reconcilable under some circumstances.” Kilcullen adds, “That’s very much what we did in Iraq. We negotiated with 90 percent of the people we were fighting.”
Tribal leaders and Afghan government officials told him. But did they tell him how the two groups differed ideologically? Did they explain to Kilcullen which elements of traditional Islamic teaching about jihad and Islamic supremacism these tribal fighters and nationalists rejected? Unlikely.
Beyond Afghanistan, too, it is crucial that we adopt a more sophisticated strategy toward radical Islam. This should come naturally to President Obama, who spoke often on the campaign trail of the need for just such a differentiated approach toward Muslim countries. Even the Washington Institute, a think tank often associated with conservatives, appears onboard. It is issuing a report this week that recommends, among other points, that the United States use more “nuanced, noncombative rhetoric” that avoids sweeping declarations like “war on terror,” “global insurgency,” even “the Muslim world.” Anything that emphasizes the variety of groups, movements and motives within that world strengthens the case that this is not a battle between Islam and the West. Bin Laden constantly argues that all these different groups are part of the same global movement. We should not play into his hands, and emphasize instead that many of these forces are local, have specific grievances and don’t have much in common.
Great. But where is the multiplicity in Islamic teaching about jihad and unbelievers that would justify this?
That does not mean we should accept the burning of girls’ schools, or the stoning of criminals. Recognizing the reality of radical Islam is entirely different from accepting its ideas. We should mount a spirited defense of our views and values. We should pursue aggressively policies that will make these values succeed. Such efforts are often difficult and take time””rebuilding state structures, providing secular education, reducing corruption””but we should help societies making these efforts. The mere fact that we are working in these countries on these issues””and not simply bombing, killing and capturing””might change the atmosphere surrounding the U.S. involvement in this struggle.
So we should work with these people while deploring and opposing their values. Well, it was done with Stalin. But I’m not sure we have the societal will or cultural confidence to pull such a thing off today.
The veil is not the same as the suicide belt.
No, but both arise from the same foundation.
We can better pursue our values if we recognize the local and cultural context, and appreciate that people want to find their own balance between freedom and order, liberty and license. In the end, time is on our side. Bin Ladenism has already lost ground in almost every Muslim country. Radical Islam will follow the same path. Wherever it is tried””in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in parts of Nigeria and Pakistan””people weary of its charms very quickly. The truth is that all Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world. They do not have a world view that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women. We do. That’s the most powerful weapon of all.
That’s true. And we need to articulate that world view as over against Sharia.