Psychology of Terrorism |
| Written by A. R. Siddiqi • September 2011 |
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Dr. Unaiza Niaz’s masterly work on the roots of wars, insurgencies and terrorism is the first of its kind by a Pakistani author. It is also one of the best and comprehensive guides on the subject. The painstaking research and incisive intellectual extrapolation going into the work, often hard to assimilate, is recompensed by the smooth flow of the narrative. Readability emerges unscratched through the tangled wood of technical verbiage and technical jargon often unavoidable in a serious work like this. The book is a ‘collage’ of guest writers - foreign and national from Pakistan, Afghanistan the Middle East, Africa and all countries where there are Muslim populations. It is a ‘voice’ from the Muslim world to create awareness of the ‘silent sufferers’ of the malady worldwide. Title: Wars, Insurgencies, and Terrorist Attacks: The battleground today lies within the civilian domain rather than on a distinct battlefield. Hence the tyrannical term ‘Collateral Damage’ to cover up and justify the use of air power in FATA headed by Drones, helicopter gunships, Chinooks and Black Hawks – even F-16 fighters/bombers, where necessary. A young Pathan intellectual, a Ph.D candidate at Harvard, whom I happened to meet in Peshawar, believes that besides the ‘psycho-trauma’ there would not be many amongst the survivors in Waziristan, North and South, without a limb or an eye missing, worse still completely blinded and disabled. According to one of the contributors, Jessica Stern, rampant terrorism originates in the vicious hypothesis of using it as a ‘mean of demoralizing the enemy.’ The fourteenth century Chinese strategic sage Sun Tzu’s dictum ‘killing one to frighten ten thousand,’ a justification for hundreds of Drone victims. It seeks only to keep bloodshed to the minimum, in effect, to avert war altogether. Sun Tzu would rather have war without ‘bloodying one’s sword.’ Dr. Niaz identifies ‘Wahabism’ at the root of radical/political Islam and the driving force behind the growth of terrorism in most of the Arab and Islamic world. Wahabism is mainly directed against Western powers, for their unqualified support of Israel and Muslim deviants from pristine Islam. Nearer home, the festering Kashmir dispute and the running war (Jihad) and the virtual occupation of Afghanistan by NATO/ISAF under American command waters the poisonous ivy of terrorism. Palestine has an even sorrier tale to tell. The Israeli occupation of bonafide Palestinian parts of territories, of the Jordanian West Bank along with the Syrian Golan Heights and recurring invasions of Lebanon are the worst kind of terrorism under the deceptive label of war. As a result the region remains torn by perpetual conflict. The terrorists often take advantage of images of groups of masked individuals coercing and intimidating their captive to ‘convey the message’ that the act is a ‘collective display of the group’s power rather than an individual criminal act.’ The ‘randomness and ubiquity’ of the threat tends to give the ‘impression’ of vastly greater capacities substituting the group for the state. Much could be said of U.S. torture cells like Abu Gharib in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Coverage of the state-run horrors committed over there, brings irresistibly back to mind images of medieval torture cells. Bruce Hoffman, Director of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence, writes specially of the ‘religious terrorist for whom violence (militant Jihad) is the first and foremost duty’ in pursuance of some ‘theological demand or imperative.’ Of particular relevance to Pakistan is Hoffman’s observation that ‘religious terrorists’ see themselves not as ‘components of a system worth persevering but as outsiders seeking fundamental changes in the existing order.’ The confirmed terrorist’s overmastering passion remains destruction at all costs. He invokes his ‘Samson Option’ to blow up a Philistine temple and himself with it. Samson the mythical Nazarite, hated the Philistines for oppressing the Israelis (Jews). Several, almost all, active ‘ideological’ groups in Pakistan, on the suicidal path could be accused of exercising the ‘Samson option’ to create chaos and destruction all around. Pitifully the ‘mechanisms’ of conflict management are ‘apparently redundant’ in Pakistan. The civil and military arms of the state have yet to reach the terrorist core to engage and eliminate it for good. Worst of all, the tendency of ‘intolerance’ has invaded all levels of the state institutions and is not simply restricted to the non-state actors. Behind the rising graph of violence and the shrinking writ of the state all over the place, had been two major factors - the Kashmir war and Afghan Jihad. The Jihadi spirit found its enduring base in the Soviet-Afghan war, essentially a nationalist armed uprising against the Godless Soviets by an ungodly America and a dollar-hungry Pakistan. Besides the author’s, names of some of the principal contributors to the ‘collage’ are as follows:  Brigadier A.R. Siddiqi is an eminent regional security expert, a defense analyst and former spokesperson for the Inter Services Public Relations. Comments (0)
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