Future of policing

The Nation. 27November 19, 2007

CIA unit tracking him disbanded. Successful counter terrorism involves good diplomacy and good police work. A case in point is the plot last summer by young Muslim men in London to bomb several airliners simultaneously using liquid explosives in innocent-looking bottles and detonators hidden in dispos- able cameras. Contrary to the allegations of skeptics, the tech- niques they envisaged were perfectly workable. The plotters were determined enough to make chilling martyrdom videos.

The plot was broken up in part because some of the con- spirators were turned in to Scotland Yard by British Muslim acquaintances disturbed by their behavior. They had been alerted to the seriousness of radical views by the bombing of London’s public transport system in July 2005. British police infiltrated an undercover operative into the group. The Paki- stani security forces helped monitor a radical in that country, Rashid Rauf, who was in contact with the London group. That is, the foiling of this operation depended very largely on the good will of other Muslims. Such police and commu- nity awareness work has had proven re - sults. In contrast, in vading and occupy- ing Muslim states risks reducing the fund of good will on which success- ful terror prevention depends.

S ince resources are scarce, it is important that the magnitude of the threat not be exaggerat- ed. Al Qaeda has at most a few thousand members. It holds no

territory and its constituent organizations have been roundly de feated in Egypt, Algeria and other Muslim nations. Its command and con- trol networks have been effectively disrupted. Most threats now come from amateur copycats. Al Qaeda has no prospect whatsoever of taking over any state in the Muslim world. It probably would be dead altogether if Bush had not poured gasoline on the flames with his large-scale invasions and occupations. For John McCain to proclaim that Al Qaeda is a bigger threat to US security than was the Soviet Union, which had thousands of nuclear warheads aimed at this country, is to enter Alice’s Wonderland.

Very few Muslims are either violent or fundamentalist; most are traditionalist, mystic, modernist or secularist. Murder rates in the Muslim world are remarkably low. About 10 to 15 percent of Muslims throughout the world, or 130 million to 215 million, generally support a fundamentalist point of view, including the implementation of Islamic law as the law of the state. But they are not typically violent, and the United States has managed to ally with some of them, as with the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The fundamentalists are atypical. In a 2006 Pew poll, majorities in Egypt, Jordan and Indonesia were optimistic that democracy would work in their countries.

Because of its support for or acquiescence to Israel’s creep- ing erasure of the Palestinian nation and for Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006, and because of Washington’s own brutal war in Iraq, the United States is poorly positioned to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. In the last year of Bill Clinton’s

presidency, some 75 percent of the population of Indonesia (the world’s largest Muslim country) had a favorable view of the United States. By the time Bush had invaded two Muslim coun- tries, in 2003, America’s favorability rating there had fallen to 15 percent. It recovered a bit after US magnanimity during the tsunami but then fell back to less than half the pre-Bush level. In Turkey, the favorability rating has fallen from 52 to 12 per- cent in the same period (all polling figures from the Global Attitudes Project of the Pew Charitable Trust).

America does itself no favors by neglecting to promote knowledge of the United States, of its political philosophies and social and political system, in the Muslim world. The United States Information Service was gutted and folded into the State De partment in the late 1990s. There are very few American Studies programs at Arabophone universities, and

very little US political philosophy or history has been translated. Likewise, Congress funds the study of

the Middle East at American Universities at shockingly low levels, given the need for

Americans who understand the region and its languages.

Extremist Muslim networks have a specific history, almost entirely rooted in reaction to many decades of Euro- pean colonial domination or in the Reagan jihad against the Soviet Union, during which the United States gave

extremists $5 billion, pressured Saudi Arabia to do the same and trained the

extremists at CIA facilities in Afghanistan. Much of their subsequent violence can prop-

erly be seen as a form of blowback—black operations that go bad and boom erang on the initi-

ating country. Marc Sageman, a CIA case officer in Afghanistan in the late

1980s who is now at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia, has estimated the number of extremists who could and would do violence to the United States at less than a thou- sand. There is a larger group that supports the creation of Taliban-style rigid theocracies in their countries and who are willing to deploy violence to achieve that goal. While their ide- ology may be unpleasant, they do not necessarily pose a security threat to the United States.

American politicians should cease implying that Muslim nations and individuals are different from, or somehow more dangerous than, any other group of human beings, a racist idea promoted by the Christian and Zionist right. They should acknowledge that most Muslim nations are US friends and allies. A wise American policy toward the small networks of Muslim extremists would reduce their recruitment pool by the quick establishment of a Palestinian state and by a large-scale military drawdown from Iraq, thus removing widespread and major grievances. An increase in visible humanitarian and development aid to Muslim countries has a demonstrable effect on improving the US image.

The reconstitution of the United States Information Service as an independent body would allow better public diplomacy. Promoting American studies in the Muslim world, in its major languages rather than just in English, would help remove wide-

The Nation.28 November 19, 2007

O ne sunny morning in September 1993 I sat on the White House lawn, watching bemused as American po litical notables lined up for a “grip and grin” photo with Yasir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. For twenty-five years previously—and until just days before that morn-

ing’s signing of the Oslo Accord—Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organization had been judged by the US government to be a “foreign terrorist organization.” On Capitol Hill and in most of the mainstream media, the excoriation of Arafat and the PLO had been long-lasting and virulent. But now, here were scores of Congressional leaders and media bigwigs lining up to be part of the new pro-Oslo zeitgeist.

What made the difference was that the Israeli government had shifted its stance. When that shift was made public, virtu- ally the entire US political class turned on a dime. Today two very significant forces in the Middle East—Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon—are in nearly the same position the PLO was locked into before the early 1990s. Indeed, this time the United States is more directly participating in hostile ac - tions against the current “untouchables” than it ever was against the pre-Oslo PLO. After Hamas won the Palestinian parlia- mentary elections in January 2006, the Bush Administration or chestrated a harsh boycott of the new Hamas-led govern- ment, which left Washington’s “pro-democracy” stance in the Middle East in tatters. Then in summer 2006, when Israeli air- planes and artillery were trying to wipe Hezbollah—and much of Lebanon’s national infrastructure—off the map, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice worked overtime to prevent the Se cu- rity Council from calling a cease-fire.

Our country’s diplomacy has been held hostage to Israel’s preference to fight rather than engage with these two signifi- cant movements. But the United States has its own extremely pressing interests in the Middle East. Key among these are the need to find a way to withdraw from Iraq and radically de- escalate tensions with Iran in order to minimize US losses and lethal disorder in the region. There are many close links between the Persian Gulf and the Arab-Israeli theater. As the Baker-Hamilton report of last year rightly noted, if Wash ing- ton wants to avoid catastrophe in Iraq, it must be prepared to undertake a vigorous and effective push for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Recently, the Bush Administration has attempted to look as if it is doing something on this issue. Bush and Rice are trying to organize a November summit in Annapolis to be attended by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The Administration is also hoping for high-level representation from the Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia. But Washington has deliber- ately excluded Hamas. Indeed, the current moves are intended to weaken Hamas, which is often portrayed as merely a tool of an irredeemably hostile Iran.

Hamas and Hezbollah have both been on the State De - partment’s list of terrorist organizations for many years. After 9/11, that designation became even more constricting as the Administration threw huge new resources into attacking the financing and propaganda/information mechanisms of a range of Islamist groups it had designated as targets in the “war on terror.” The launching of this new concept completely blurred the distinction between those groups that, like Al Qaeda, aptly fit the description of “rootless cosmopolitans” and those that, like Hamas and Hezbollah, are deeply rooted within stable national communities to which they provide real services and to which they hold themselves accountable.

During the wave of decolonizations that occurred in the three decades after 1945, nearly all the decolonizing govern- ments ended up negotiating the transition with leaders of move- ments that for years had been excluded from political participa- tion (and usually also ruthlessly repressed and attacked) on the grounds that they were “terrorists.” In the more recent past, the successful peace processes in South Africa and North ern Ireland started in earnest only when the ruling governments agreed to talk with opposition groups previously designated as terrorists. In both cases, the only criteria for inclusion were that partici- pants agree to a cease-fire and participate in elections. The movements concerned—the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies in South Africa, and Sinn Fein and the Irish Re pub- lican Army in Northern Ireland—were notably not required, as a prerequisite for the inclusion of the political wing in negotia- tions, either to disarm or to change their founding platforms in any way. South Africa’s Pan Afri canist Congress (PAC) took part in the talks without being required to change their simple plat- form of “One [white] settler, one bullet.”

In Palestine, Hamas participated peacefully, in good faith and with notable success, in the 2006 elections. From early 2005 onward it had, along with the other big Palestinian or - ganization, Fatah, adhered to a unilateral cessation of attacks against Israel—which was not, alas, reciprocated by Israel. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has participated peacefully and skillfully in every national election since 1992, most recently winning

spread misconceptions about the United States among edu- cated Muslim observers. Increasing federal funding for Middle East studies at home would better equip this country to deal with this key region. More adept diplomacy with the Muslim states, most of which are as afraid of terrorism as we are, could lead to further cooperation in the security field. Better police work and cooperation with the police of Middle Eastern states would be much more effective than launching invasions. It would also help if we stopped insulting Muslims by calling their religion “fascist.” Q

Facing Hamas and Hezbollah Refusing to negotiate is an unrealistic policy.

Helena Cobban, author and publisher of JustWorldNews.org, a blog, is a Friend in Washington for the Friends Committee on National Legislation.

by HELENA COBBAN