How We Can Prevail By Fareed Zakaria Newsweek | July 18, 2005 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8525976/site/newsweek/
The London bombings have failed. Barbarous in intent, brutal for a few hundred people, unsettling for all who watched in horror, they have nonetheless failed. In one day much of the city's transport system was up and running again, its Underground stations busy and its buses crowded with passengers. Most businesses stayed open, and people didn't panic. Right after the blasts, Britain was scheduled to play Australia in a cricket match at Headingley stadium in Leeds, 170 miles from London. The organizers decided that the game would go on. Britain won. The clear hope of the terrorists last Thursday morning was to disrupt economic activities at one of the world's financial centers. For years now, Al Qaeda's leaders, including Osama bin Laden, have urged that this be the goal of future attacks. But in 24 hours the London stock market was back to its pre-bombing levels. World markets bounced back even faster. All indications are that Britain will see a minimal drop in tourism and virtually none in trade. This is part of a larger pattern of global resilience that has been growing ever since September 11, 2001. After those attacks, global markets took two months to return to their Sept. 10 levels. After the Madrid bombings in 2004, the Spanish market took one month to recover. The broader economic picture is similar. After 9/11, the United States lost hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity. The Bali nightclub bombing in 2002 had a similarly dramatic effect on the Indonesian economy, with tourism vanishing and trade and investment drying up for months. But a year later, after another Indonesian bombing, this time at the Marriott hotel in Jakarta, the market dropped only briefly and there was little significant damage to the Indonesian economy. The bombings in Morocco and Turkey in 2003 similarly had little economic effect. After the Madrid attack, Spain grew faster than it had for three years. Economic activity is perhaps the best measure of the psychological response to terrorism. Do people get scared, stay home, refuse to travel and shop less? Or do they come to the view that life goes on? Overwhelmingly, much of the world appears to have arrived at the latter position. And in doing so, people have robbed the terrorists of their most potent weapon. The other important difference between the London bombings and 9/11 has been the response of the world of Islam. For months after 9/11, I kept writing that it was sad and disturbing that Muslims were reluctant to condemn the attacks. This time is different. Major Muslim groups in Britain have unambiguously denounced the bombings. Even "fundamentalist" organizations have condemned it. The Muslim Association of Britain, a hard-line group with alleged ties to militants in the Middle East, called the bombings "heinous and repulsive" and urged Muslims to help the emergency services and police. "We have faith in Britain and British people that we as a country will not be defeated by this," said its spokesman, Anas Altikriti. The response outside Britain has also been much stronger than ever before. The grand imam of Al-Azhar, Sheik Mohammed Sayyed Tantawi, condemned the bombers but went further, rejecting the argument that this attack could be justified as an attempt to force Britain out of Iraq. "This is illogical and cannot be the motive for killing innocent civilians," he said. More striking have been the condemnations from radical groups like Hamas, Hizbullah and Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, all of which have denounced the bombings. Many of them have, of course, coupled their attacks on the terrorists with denunciations of American and British policies in the Middle East, particularly regarding Iraq and the Palestinian territories. But that kind of rhetoric is old news. What is new here is the fact that no one, not even Hamas, can continue to condone or even stay silent about these barbarities. September 11 shocked the Arab psyche. For months afterward, Arabs and many Muslims went through phases recognizable to psychologists: shock, denial, anger. (Remember those absurd claims that 9/11 was a Mossad plot?) They are finally, slowly, moving toward recognizing that there is a great dysfunction in the world of Islam, which has allowed Muslims to concoct wild conspiracy theories, blame others for their problems and, worst of all, condone grotesque violence. Now things are changing. The day before the London bombs, a conference of 180 top Muslim sheiks and imams, brought together under the auspices of Jordan's King Abdullah, issued a statement forbidding that any Muslim be declared takfiran apostate. This is a frontal attack on Al Qaeda's theological methods. Declaring someone takfirand thus sanctioning his or her deathis a favorite tactic of bin Laden and his ally in Iraq, Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. The conference's statement was endorsed by 10 fatwas from such big conservative scholars as Tantawi; Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani; Egypt's mufti, Ali Jumaa, and the influential Al-Jazeera TV-sheik, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Signed by adherents of all schools of fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), it also allows only qualified Muslim scholars to issue edicts. The Islamic Conference's statement, the first of its kind, is a rare show of unity among the religious establishment against terrorists and their scholarly allies. This hardly puts an end to the struggle within Islam. The same day the Jordanian statement was issued, Al Qaeda in Iraq said that Egypt's ambassador to that country, Ihab al-Sherif, would be killed as an apostate. The day of the London bombings, an Internet message purportedly from Zarqawi's group said the "ambassador of the infidels" had been killed. These kinds of events will continue. There should be much, much greater condemnation from mainstream Islam. Moderates must adopt a zero-tolerance policy on terrorism, regardless of what they think of Iraq, Palestine or any other policy issue. But those clamoring for such condemnations should bear in mind that this will not solve the problem. Even if the moderates win and overwhelm the extremists, there will always be some number of unconverted jihadists, who either out of depravity or conviction seek to do evil. If 99.99 percent of the Arab world rejects terrorism, that still leaves 20,000 people to worry about. If 99.9 percent of the Muslim world is against the terrorists, there's 1 million people out there who are dangerous. And the technologies of destruction ensure that they will, on occasion, be successful. To realize victory, we have to understand this struggle is more complex than we have been led to believe. Simple slogans telling us we fight terrorists in Iraq so that we will not have to fight them here, are just that: slogans, not comprehensive policies. In fact, as London shows, terrorists can fight in two places at the same time. Or three. Or 10. And the great danger, of course, is that they can fight with dangerous weapons. The calculus of terror would change irrevocably if one of these splinter groups were ever to get its hands on nuclear materials or biological pathogens. So far the Bush administration has not given this danger the priority it urgently requires. The broader shift that needs to take place, however, is a better definition of victory. America's political leaders continue to give their citizens the impression that victory means ensuring that there will be no other attack on American soilas long as we go on the offense abroad, get perfect intelligence, buy fancy new technologies at home, screen visas and lock some people up. But all these tough tactics and all the intelligence in the world will not change the fact that in today's open societies, terrorism is easy to carry out. The British authorities, perhaps the world's best at combating terror, admit they had no warning about last week's attack. The American response to the London bombs has been a perfect example of U.S. grandstanding. We immediately raised the alert level, scaring Americans, with no specific information about terror attacks in America. Why? Because were something to happen here, politicians and bureaucrats want to be able to say, "Don't blame us, we told you." Real victory is not about preventing all attacks everywhere. No one can guarantee that. It's really about preventing the worst kinds of attacks, and responding well to others. And on this score, America remains woefully unprepared. "The British attacks failed because Britain has excellent response systems and its people are well prepared on how to respond. America has neither advantage today," says Stephen Flynn, a homeland-security expert and author of "America the Vulnerable: How Our Government Is Failing to Protect Us From Terrorism." "We need good education and training for transit workers and citizens, good communication mechanisms among government agencies and the people, and most important, a good public-health infrastructure." We have little of this today. In the years after 9/11 we have wasted much time, effort and money on other priorities rather than engaging in the massive investment in the systems of response that we need. Our leaders remain unwilling to speak honestly about the world we live in and to help people develop the mentality of response that is essential to prevailing. The bombs were meant to show that the terrorists were strong and we were weak. In fact they have shown the opposite. But to realize victory fully, we must know what victory means. (With Carla Power and Rana Foroohar in London, Rukhmini Punoose in New York and Christopher Dickey and Eric Pape in Paris) -- This is ZESTGlobal. Post articles on international affairs to [email protected] If you got this mail as a forward, subscribe to ZESTGlobal by sending a blank mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] OR, if you have a Yahoo! ID, by visiting http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/join/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ZESTGlobal/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
