By PLS
London was still in shock when I was discussing the bombings with an apparently well connected Pakistani journalist last week.
I confess that I was feeling badly outmatched during the early part of the conversation. Evidently he’s been to Wazirastan on the Afghan border, where he managed to talk with practically everyone but Bin Laden himself, who’s up there, somewhere, he insists. He’s in with Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service and the regular Pakistani military, too, or so he says.
I’ve got some background in the area. I’ve lived and worked and Pakistan, traveled in pre-Taliban Afghanistan, etc. But not recently. These days all I know is what I read. So I was feeling cowed early on, though I did my best to hold my own by asking reasonably well-informed and intelligent-sounding (I hoped) questions and nodding sagely and saying, “Hmmmm,” from time to time.
His theory about the London bombings centered on Iraq. “The insurgency is going to win by striking at the enemy’s heartland,” he said. “It worked with Spain,” he pointed out.
“It’s not that simple,” I replied.
“The anti-war party won the election. The new government announced a troop pull out.”
“There are nuances that have to be considered,” I said. “Besides the English are different. They don’t get scared. They get stubborn.”
At that point, the Pakistani reporter simply repeated his original theory, that the West would be defeated just as the Soviets were in Afghanistan, because the war would be won not in Iraq, but on the streets of Western cities.
My recollection of history suggested that his parallel wasn’t all that parallel, which I tried, probably lamely, to explain.
But I no longer felt at a serious disadvantage. He might know in detail what I sense only vaguely about innumerable violent or pacific factions in Islamic politics. But he, in turn, was woefully insensitive to equally critical differences in temperament among Westerners.
I was reminded of this conversation yesterday when I read that an anti-war group in Britain had attributed the London bombings to the Blair government’s having “played poodle” to the US in Iraq. Just like that. Very simple.
But the U.S. hadn’t invaded Iraq when a bunch of Saudis (not Iraqis) flew jets into the World Trade towers. And the bombers in London had connections to Pakistan, not Iraq.
Every since 9/11 those appalled by terrorism have being trying to find simple, essentially monocausal reasons for violent attacks on Western targets. The temptation is understandable. If all the violence has a single, apparently obvious cause, the response can be precisely, neatly tailored. We’ll have a quick and easy solution.
But Islam isn’t monolithic. Neither is Christianity. The Middle East is culturally diverse, and so is the West. There are internal and external economic and political grievances, some current, some historical, some ancient, some active, some latent. As always, there is the Palestine conundrum, which, I dare say, is no longer the central issue to jihadists, though it remains a useful rallying cry. Did I mention nationalism? And social psychology? And psychopathology? And plain old copycatism? And so on.
I suspect that retreat from Iraq, though desirable on many grounds, will not end the spate of terrorist attacks in the West. Elements of both Christianity and Islam are in a proselytizing mood, and those of us on either side who feel no need to convert non-believers are going to have to find some way to marginalize fanaticism.
Ah—an attack of monocausalism?
No. Just an illustration of how easy, how plausible it is to focus on one concern, one solution.
We terrorism analysts are like kids confronted with a connect-the-dots puzzle. We want to believe that there is only one way to connect the dots. If we follow the numbers right, we will end up with a cute little rabbit or an elf, at which point we will be happy, because we have succeeded.
But today we are confronted with an enormous universe of dots among which there are many possible connections. Each “solution” comes with a seductive hypothesis. Some people see rabbits. Others see elves–-or whatever. But so far no one seems to have found a solution that links all the dots in a way that makes good sense to everyone.
Maybe that’s not possible.
Or maybe it is, if all of us are willing to accept a solution that will be as fair as possible to everyone.
How many more deaths will it take before the rabbit people and the elf people agree to include the inconvenient dots they've left out of the picture?