Terrorism is a Strategy of Weakness

Terrorism is a strategy of weakness adopted by those who lack access to real power. At least in the past, terrorism worked by spreading fear rather than by causing significant material damage. Terrorists usually don’t have the strength to defeat an army, occupy a country or destroy entire cities. Whereas in 2010 obesity and related illnesses killed about 3 million people, terrorists killed a total of 7,697 people across the globe, most of them in developing countries. For the average American or European, Coca-Cola poses a far deadlier threat than al-Qaeda.

“How, then, do terrorists manage to dominate the headlines and change the political situation throughout the world? By provoking their enemies to overreact. In essence, terrorism is a show. Terrorists stage a terrifying spectacle of violence that captures our imagination and makes us feel as if we are sliding back into medieval chaos. Consequently states often feel obliged to react to the theatre of terrorism with a show of security, orchestrating immense displays of force, such as the persecution of entire populations or the invasion of foreign countries. In most cases, this overreaction to terrorism poses a far greater threat to our security than the terrorists themselves.

Terrorists are like a fly that tries to destroy a china shop. The fly is so weak that it cannot budge even a single teacup. So it finds a bull, gets inside its ear and starts buzzing. The bull goes wild with fear and anger, and destroys the china shop. This is what happened in the Middle East in the last decade. Islamic fundamentalists could never have toppled Saddam Hussein by themselves. Instead they enraged the USA by the 9/11 attacks, and the USA destroyed the Middle Eastern china shop for them. Now they flourish in the wreckage. By themselves, terrorists are too weak to drag us back to the Middle Ages and re-establish the Jungle Law. They may provoke us, but in the end, it all depends on our reactions. If the Jungle Law comes back into force, it will not be the fault of terrorists. 

WHY EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD READ THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST

This year I find myself thinking of the opening lines of a novel published in 2007. “Excuse me, sir, but may I be of assistance? Ah, I see I have alarmed you. Do not be frightened by my beard: I am a lover of America.” So begins Mohsin Hamid’s Man Booker-shortlisted The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel which follows the transnational journey of Changez, a young man from Pakistan, as he leaves Lahore and becomes a successful businessman in New York City. Later, Changez, who has begun to feel welcome in New York due to the city’s ethnic diversity, witnesses 9/11 on television while on a business trip in Manila, and his life abruptly changes. Changez is not a practicing Muslim—Hamid goes as far as to suggest, in an article in The Guardian, that Changez may be an atheist—yet everyone perceives him as Muslim due to his ethnicity and place of birth, which results in Changez having to take a series of major, unexpected steps. All of this he tells to an unnamed American—the “you” of the opening, though it is also, of course, perhaps aimed at “assisting” American readers more broadly.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist, to me, is a novel we should read, or reread, in 2016 as much as in 2007. While hardly the only novel to address 9/11, terrorism, and religious tensions, it is certainly one of the most accessible books to do so. Here is a novel that resists a single, moralistic interpretation; instead, how one reads the ending largely depends on what one assumes about Pakistan and America. We can shape events, and, perhaps more importantly, events can reshape us, can recreate us, like impulsive gods, in their own image.

There were few Muslims in Dominica, the island I grew up in, but there was one well-known Muslim family, well-known largely because they had opened a famous store for electronics in our capital city simply called “The Muslim Store.” I went to the shop every so often as a child with my mother, and, aside from the name of the store and the fact that the male employees wore gray or black thobes and that once in a while I saw women near the store in hijabs or niqabs, I never saw the store-owners as anything particularly different from anyone else; the family there just seemed like so many other families in Dominica, a part of the eclectic mix that made up the island. The idea that I should fear or despise someone for following Islam was utterly foreign to me until 9/11, which I watched on television at home in Dominica. Muslims were never “the Other” until the American media and my own ignorance, briefly, convinced me that they should be.

Years later, I thought of this Dominican family again. Now, I, who had been raised Roman Catholic and briefly become a Wiccan, was an atheist, and had learnt on my own more about how Islam, like all religions, came in varieties: Ahmadiyya, Sunni, Shia, Islamism, and so on. I had learnt about the Islamic Golden Age, which not only produced important intellectual contributions in astronomy, mathematics, and more, but without which the European Renaissance may never have occurred. The memory of the simple shop surprised me. It was a reminder of something obvious, yet all too easy to forget: hate is something we learn, something colored, like romanticizing, by our memories. Hatred, as William Hazlitt reminds us in his perversely delightful essay from 1826, “On the Pleasure of Hating,” is complex; “hatred alone is immortal,” he writes, and it may well be impossible to live without some degree of hostility towards something in us. But in so many cases, hatred is also a failure, not of love, but of nuance, of complexity. It is easy to hate when we make the world small and simple; it is harder to hate large groups when we are able to understand the variety that lives in said groups.

Of course, love is too simple an answer. The opposite of hating, after all, is not loving; it is understanding.

The simple revolutionary idea—which I, like many others, find myself needing to relearn sometimes—is that even radical difference, sometimes, can be benign.

* * * *

I’ve always opened my undergraduate course, Intro to Global Literature, with Hamid’s novel, a book I myself first read after my best friend recommended it. Many of the American students confess to me they came into the class with a negative image of Muslims. Yet the novel showed them something new. Instead of “the West” talking about “the East,” which is most often the kind of narrative they know, The Reluctant Fundamentalist flips the script by having a Pakistani man narrate the entire tale, denying “the American” a direct voice. A few of my American students say that this feels uncomfortable; some even initially accuse Changez, whose name Hamid chose to echo Genghis Khan, of being “anti-American.” This, of course, is the point—to show how it feels to be in a one-sided narrative. Changez’s occasional political asides to “the American” intrigued and unnerved some students, like his idea that “terrorism…was defined [by the American government] to refer only to the organized and politically motivated killing of civilians by killers not wearing the uniforms of soldiers.” And what makes the book rise above simple moralism is its lack of certainty: Changez is an unreliable narrator, who openly admits he cannot remember the specifics of certain memories, and he is both likeable and questionable. He is what we sadly often don’t get in so many fraught discussions about religion, race, and violence: a believable human figure.

In many ways, The Reluctant Fundamentalist depicts the opposite of Orientalism, which refers to a set of beliefs, stereotypes about, and depictions of “the East,” broadly, from Westerners, a sort of language or template for describing a vast range of countries and people. The term was made famous by the Palestinian-American critic Edward Said’s 1978 book, Orientalism. Orientalism is the source of many stereotypes about “the East” in Western texts from the 18th century up to even the present; crucially, it is virtually always Westerners writing about the East within the system of Orientalism, with some Orientalists never having even set foot within the countries they claimed to be experts on. Orientalist rhetoric influenced how many Westerners imagined the Middle- and Far-East, creating a system whereby people can be reduced to what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “the single story.” It’s a bit like looking at the moon with poor eyesight and seeing a perfectly smooth orb, which was a dominant view of what the moon was in the Western world for centuries, whereas, as Galileo pointed out, the moon’s surface is actually hilly and pockmarked, a lunar carpet no less beautiful for its pattern looking different through a better lens. The bad lens of Orientalism is where the over-the-top language of texts like Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu series comes from. Hamid’s novel, by reversing who gets to talk and who is reduced to stereotypes, attempts to fix this problem by shifting its weight.

* * * *

And something needs to be fixed in America. Anti-Muslim bigotry has become, unfortunately, the kind of thing I now expect to see in the news each day—the kind of bigotry whereby a man in Virginia is applauded in 2015 for yelling out “every Muslim is a terrorist. Period,” the kind of bigotry where Ben Carson can say a Muslim is not fit to be President of the United States, the kind of bigotry where Donald Trump can in fascistic fashion call for a ban on all Muslims entering America, the kind of bigotry where Katrina Pierson, Trump’s spokeswoman, can go on CNN and support Trump’s ban by, incredibly, saying, “So what? They’re Muslim,” the kind where Milo Yiannopoulis, darling of the alt-right, claims that he feels safer as a gay man under a Trump presidency because he assumes that all Muslims are homophobic fanatics. Merely transcribing Trump’s speeches produces something resembling the crudest form of Gonzo journalism, even as I doubt Trump has read Hunter S. Thompson, and even as Thompson’s Gonzo, at least, is art. Such bigotry is a masterpiece of Othering from a man who, by his own admission, knows little about politics in the world—Trump recently did not know the difference between Hezbollah and Hamas—and the same appears to be true for many of his supporters. Of course, Trump supporters have many individual motivations, but it’s disquieting when polls suggest nearly 90 percent of such voters support Trump’s proposed Muslim ban.

To be sure, anti-Muslim sentiment far predates 9/11. The idea that Islam represents the “Other” to Christianity and to “the West” was a large part of the Crusades’ ideological foundation. It constitutes much of Orientalism. It appears frequently in Western literature: in the famous Chanson de Roland from the 11th or 12th century that depicts Charlemagne fighting “barbaric” Muslims; in Ludovico Ariosto’s 1582 mock-epicOrlando Furioso; in the original (later edited) version of the song that Disney’s Aladdinopens up with, “Arabian Nights,” which calls the fictional Arab world of Agrabah—and, implicitly, the Arab world broadly—a “barbaric” place where “they cut off your ear / If they don’t like your face.” A very similar image of barbarism appears in Shirley Jackson’s famous story, “The Lottery,” only it is applied to a New England town rather than to “the East”—yet to too many Western readers, Jackson’s story seems shocking, while vast generalizations about Muslims slip under the radar.

But isn’t contempt easier, when it’s already the story we so often have in the back of our minds?

Even the title “Muslim” is not as simple as “follower of Islam.” Even fundamentalism, as a concept, has a history, has shades of meaning. We can accept this without supporting the actions of fanatics—actions that many Muslims would not support, either. Many religions, like most things in life, contain multitudes; there is even a group of Christians, the theothanatologists, which briefly became famous in 1966 when Time ran a feature on them, who literally believe that God has died, yet still use the label “Christian.”

Contemporary anti-Muslim bigotry is not about criticizing violence or intolerance, things I support speaking out against. And it is not about freedom of speech, either, since I believe in protecting that right, even if it means that speech can be used against me. I believe in teaching people why it is overly simplistic or simply wrong to say certain things rather than simply banning people from saying said things, since the latter usually causes more problems than it solves. Othering, at its most extreme, is a step towards accepting a kind of loose solipsism, a step towards making you believe that everyone else is somehow not really as human as you. That is a path to enabling, if not at worst endorsing, fascism. And make no mistake—Trump’s comments both enable and endorse fascism. “Political correctness” cannot be a cover for ignorant prejudice.

Fear is the mind-killer, as the Bene Gesserit recite in the Dune series. So, too, is hatred.

* * * *

“For me,” Hamid wrote in The Guardian in 2011, “writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don’t intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as introductions to dance.”

Perhaps life is like Hamid’s novels: puzzling, but with a hand out for a dance. And, should we take its hand without assuming the dance we will be led into, everything may seem lovelier: music, steps, synergy. Of course, this is a romanticization. Some of us do not really get to choose who we dance with, or if we can dance at all. But perhaps the key to the puzzle is realizing that many of us who can dance might do it better, if we only loosened up and let go, for a bit. For me, literature is about learning the contours of the self, about putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, be they ballet flats, snowboard boots, espadrilles, shoes that bind your feet, or no shoes at all. Literature is about learning to accept all human experience as human, whether or not it ties with our codes of morality or beliefs about the universe. “Human” doesn’t mean good, of course—but it is frightening how easily some of us can forget that “human” means just that—“human,” and not “monster.”

Novels may not solve problems, per se, but I think we need Hamid’s novel now, all the same, and others like it. And, perhaps, with it, we may find ourselves in a better, more well-lit place, a place many of us know of but which we all often struggle to find the door to: understanding.

Gabrielle Bellot

source:lithub.com

Sonuç Vermeyen Dış Yardımlar

11 Eylül 2001’deki El Kaide saldırılarının ardından Birleşik Devletler’e ait kuvvetler El Kaide’nin kilit isimlerine yataklık edip bunları teslim etmeye yanaşmayan Afganistan’daki baskıcı Taliban rejimini süratle devirdi. Aralık 2001’de, Birleşik Devletler kuvvetleriyle işbirliği yapan Afgan mücahitlerinin eski liderleri ile aralarında Hamit Karzai’nin de olduğu Afgan diasporasının kilit isimleri arasında gerçekleştirilen Bonn Anlaşması’yla demokratik bir rejim inşa etmek için bir plan hazırlandı. Atılan ilk adımlardan biri yurt çapında bir büyük meclis olan ve geçici hükümete liderlik etmesi için Karzai’yi seçen Loya Jirga’ydı. Afganistan için işler yoluna girmeye başlamıştı. Afgan halkının büyük çoğunluğu Taliban’ı geride bırakmaya can atıyordu. Uluslararası toplum Afganistan’ın tüm ihtiyacının geniş çaplı bir dış yardım olduğunu düşünüyordu; çok geçmeden Birleşmiş Milletler temsilcileri ve birkaç önemli STK başkent Kabil’e üşüştü.

Sonraki gelişmeler, özellikle de son 50 yılda yoksul ülkelere ve başarısız devletlere yapılan dış yardımların fiyaskoyla sonuçlandığı dikkate alındığında şaşırtıcı olmamalıydı. Şaşırtıcı olsun ya da olmasın, her zamanki ritueller tekrar edildi. Çok sayıda yardım görevlisi beraberindekilerle birlikte özel jetleriyle kente geldi; ülke kendi gündemlerinin peşindeki her türlü STK’nın akınına uğradı; hükümetlerle uluslararası toplumu temsil eden delegasyonlar arasında üst düzey görüşmeler başladı. Afganistan için milyarlarca dolar yoldaydı. Fakat bunun çok az bir kısmı altyapı inşasına, okullara ya da kapsayıcı kurumların geliştirilebilmesi hatta yasa ve düzenin sağlanabilmesi için elzem olan başka kamu hizmetlerine harcandı. Altyapının büyük kısmı harap bir halde kalırken paranın ilk kısmı BM ve diğer uluslararası kuruluşların yetkililerinin gelip gitmesi için bir havayolu şirketinin hizmete sokulmasına harcandı. Sonraki ihtiyaçları şoförler ve tercümanlardı. Böylece rayicinden kat be kat fazla maaş vererek İngilizce konuşan az sayıda bürokratı ve Afgan okullarının elde kalan öğretmenlerini sağa sola giderken kendilerine şoförlük ve taşeronluk yapmaları için tuttular. Sayıları zaten az olan vasıflı bürokratlar dış yardım heyetinin hizmetini görmek için görevlendirilirken, dış ülkelerden aktarılan yardımlar da Afganistan’ın altyapısına harcanacak yerde kalkındırıp güçlendirmeleri gereken Afgan devletinin altını kazmaya başladı.


Orta Afganistan’daki bir vadinin ücra bir bölgesinde yaşayan köylüler bir radyo anonsunda bölgelerindeki barınakları yenilemeyi hedefleyen milyon dolarlık yeni bir programdan bahsedildiğini işittiler. Aradan epey bir vakit geçtikten sonra mücahitlerin eski kumandanlardan, Afgan hükümet üyesi İsmail Han’ın nakliyecilik karteline ait kamyonlarla birkaç ahşap kiriş teslim edildi. Fakat hiçbir amaçla kullanılamayacak kadar büyüktüler; hal böyle olunca köylüler de onları olanakların elverdiği biçimde değerlendirdiler; yakacak odun olarak. Peki, köylülere vaat edilen milyonlarca dolara ne olmuştu? Vaat edilen paranın yüzde 20’si Cenevre’deki BM genel merkezinin masrafları olarak alınmıştı. Geri kalan meblağ taşeron bir STK’ya verilmiş, Brüksel’deki kendi genel merkezinin masrafları için bir yüzde 20’de o almıştı; bu böylece üç kez daha tekrar etmiş ve taraflar her seferinde kalan meblağın yaklaşık yüzde 20’sini almıştı. Afganistan’a ulaşan azıcık para batı İran’dan kereste almak için kullanılmış, bu paranın çoğu da fahiş nakliye ücretlerini karşılamak için İsmail Han’ın karteline ödenmişti. Koca koca ahşap kirişlerin o köye ulaşması bile bir bakıma mucizeydi.

Afganistan’ın ortasındaki bu vadide yaşananlar münferit bir olay değildi. Pek çok araştırma yardımların yalnızca yüzde 10’unun ya da en fazla yüzde 20’sinin hedefine ulaştığını öngörüyor. Hem BM yetkililerinin hem de yerel yetkililerin yardım paralarını hortumlamakla suçlandığı düzinelerce yolsuzluk soruşturması devam ediyor. Fakat dış yardım israfının çoğu yolsuzluktan değil beceriksizlikten kaynaklanıyordu; hatta daha da kötüsü, tüm bunlar yardım kuruluşları için olağan şeylerdi.

Diğer örneklerle kıyaslandığında Afgan yardımı deneyimi aslında başarılı bile sayılabilir. Son 50 yılda tüm dünyada pek çok hükümete “kalkınma” yardımı kapsamında milyarlarca dolar para aktarıldı. Bu paranın büyük kısmı Afganistan’da olduğu gibi genel giderler ve yolsuzluklar nedeniyle heba oldu. Daha da kötüsü, önemli bir bölümü hem rejimi destekleyecek yandaşlar bulmak hem de kendini zengin etmek için Batılı patronlarından gelecek yardıma bel bağlayan Mobutu gibi diktatörlere harcandı. Sahra-altı Afrika’nın geri kalan kısmının çoğunda durum aynıdır. Kriz zamanlarında geçici bir çare olarak başvurulan insani yardım, örneğin yakınlarda Haiti ve Pakistan’a yapılan yardımlar, her ne kadar bunların ulaştırılmasında da benzer sorunlarla karşılaşılsa da kesinlikle çok daha yararlı olmuştur.

“Kalkınma” yardımının geçmişteki bu pek de iç açıcı olmayan performansına rağmen dış yardım Batılı hükümetlerin, Birleşmiş Milletler gibi uluslararası kuruluşların ve farklı türden STK’ların dünya genelinde yoksullukla mücadele yöntemi olarak tavsiye ettikleri en gözde politikalardan biridir. Ve elbette, dış yardımın başarısızlık döngüsü kendini tekrar edip durdu. Zengin Batılı ülkelerin Sahra-altı Afrika, Karayipler, Orta Amerika ve Güney Asya’daki yoksulluk sorununu ortadan kaldırmak için yüklü miktarda “kalkınma yardımı” yapmaları gerektiği görüşü, yoksulluğun nedeni konusundaki yanlış bir kavrayışa dayanır. Afganistan gibi ülkeler sömürücü kurumları yüzünden yoksuldur; bu kurumlar mülkiyet haklarının, yasa ve düzenin ya da iyi işleyen bir hukuk sisteminin olmamasına yol açtığı gibi, ulusal ve –daha çok– yerel elitlerin ekonomik ve siyasal hayat üzerindeki boğucu hâkimiyetine neden olur. Benzer kurumsal sorunlar da dış yardımın fayda etmeyeceği; yağmalanacağı ve gitmesi gereken yere ulaşamayacağı anlamına geliyor. En kötü ihtimal ise, yapılacak yardımların bu toplumların sorunlarının asıl kaynağı olan rejimleri destekleyecek olmasıdır. Sürdürülebilir ekonomik büyüme kapsayıcı kurumlara bağlıysa, sömürücü kurumların başındaki rejimlere yardım etmek çözüm olamaz. Bu, insani yardımın da ötesinde, okulu olmayan bölgelere okul inşa eden ve başka türlü ücretsiz çalışmak zorunda kalacak öğretmenleri maaşa bağlayan belirli yardım programlarının kayda değer yararları olduğunu inkâr etmek anlamına gelmiyor. Kabil’e akın eden yardım kurumlarının çoğu sıradan Afganların hayatını kolaylaştırmak için çok az şey yapsa da, okul inşasında büyük başarılar da elde edildi, özellikle de Taliban idaresinde, hatta öncesin“de, eğitimden tamamen mahrum bırakılan kızlar için.

Çözümlerden biri –kısmen kurumların refahla hatta yardımın ulaştırılmasıyla bir ilgisi olduğunun anlaşılması nedeniyle şu sıralar daha revaçta– yardımı “şartlı” hale getirmektir. Bu görüşe göre, dış yardımın devam etmesi muhatap hükümetin belirli koşulları sağlamasına bağlı olmalıdır; örneğin piyasalara serbestlik tanıması ya da demokratikleşme yönünde adımlar atmasına. George W. Bush yönetimi gelecekteki yardım ödemelerini ekonomik ve siyasal kalkınmanın çeşitli boyutlarında gerçekleştirilecek nicel gelişmelere bağlayan “Millennium Challenge Accounts”u başlatarak bu tür bir şartlı yardım için en büyük adımı attı. Fakat koşullu yardımın verimliliği koşulsuz olandan daha iyiymiş gibi görünmüyor. Bu koşulları sağlayamayan ülkeler de genellikle karşılayanlar kadar yardım alıyor. Bunun basit bir nedeni var; ister insani amaçlı ister kalkınmaya yönelik olsun daha fazla yardıma ihtiyaçları var. Ve kolayca öngörülebileceği gibi, koşullu yardım bir ülkenin kurumları üzerinde çok az etkilidir. Ne de olsa Sierra Leone’de Siaka Stevens ya da Kongo’da Mobutu gibilerin yalnızca biraz daha fazla dış yardım alabilmek için aniden sömürücü kurumları tasfiye etmeye başlaması biraz şaşırtıcı olurdu. Dış yardımın pek çok hükümetin toplam bütçesinin önemli bir kısmını oluşturduğu Sahra-altı Afrika’da bile ve hatta şartlılığı artıran “Millennium Challenge Accounts”tan sonra bile bir diktatörün bizzat kendi iktidarını sarsmak suretiyle elde edeceği ek yardımın miktarı hem azdır hem de ne ülkesi üzerindeki hâkimiyetini ne de hayatını riske etmeye değmeyecektir.

Conditional Change

When my father was at home, he and his friends sat on the roof at dusk and talked politics endlessly. There was really only one subject – 9/11. It might have changed the whole world but we were living right in the epicentre of everything. Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, had been living in Kandahar when the attack on the World Trade Center happened, and the Americans had sent thousands of troops to Afghanistan to catch him and overthrow the Taliban regime which had protected him.

In Pakistan we were still under a dictatorship, but America needed our help, just as it had in the 1980s to fight the Russians in Afghanistan. Just as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan had changed everything for General Zia, so 9/11 transformed General Musharraf from an international outcast. Suddenly he was being invited to the White House by George W. Bush and to 10 Downing Street by Tony Blair. There was a major problem, however. Our own intelligence service, ISI, had virtually created the Taliban. Many ISI officers were close to its leaders, having known them for years, and shared some of their beliefs. The ISI’s Colonel Imam boasted he had trained 90,000 Taliban fighters and even became Pakistan’s consul general in Herat during the Taliban regime.