Double standards on terror: American or French lives are not more valuable than Indian lives

M J Akbar in The Times of India


After every terrorist outrage India asks a question that repeatedly withers on the dry sand of evasive clichés. How long will the apartheid of two laws for the same crime continue?

When America is stunned by 9/11, President George Bush pulverises Afghanistan, changes regime and exiles Taliban. When Paris is the scene of wanton murder, President François Hollande orders war machines to bomb regions held by ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Neither goes into a brown study to ponder the causes of terrorism, a manipulative phrase designed specifically to provide cover for perpetrators of terrorism. Neither American nor French public opinion would accept such a pussyfoot leadership.

But when India is attacked by barbaric terrorists operating out of nearby sanctuaries, Washington and Paris, closely followed by London and Brussels, rush to Delhi to advise restraint. Why? Is an Indian life less valuable than an American or French life?

We need an answer.

There is one. I am not being unmindful of potential consequences in a nuclear-military zone, although at some point the big powers will have to grapple with the possibility of Pakistan’s tactical nuclear weapons finding their way into the hands of terrorists. The time has come for a war doctrine against terrorism that has no space for alibis.

Anyone who provides sanctuary to terrorists – whether individuals or governments – must be punished, swiftly and decisively, through collective military action and economic sanctions. There has to be a cost to hypocrisy.

We have a precedent. Perhaps predictably, it has been set by America. Washington has pursued and eliminated its terrorist enemies in half a dozen countries. The death of Osama bin Laden, who had been provided a secure home next to a large military establishment, was only the most dramatic instance.

How is Hafiz Saeed, living without a hint of remorse in Lahore, and planning more attacks while protected by state security, any less guilty? The United Nations has evidence against him, as has America. But Washington takes a nuanced view between those who attack America and those who target other nations. This is a compromise that cannot be sustained.

It is curious that a priest had clarity about Paris while politicians and pundits hedged. Pope Francis got it right when he called the ongoing conflict a ‘piecemeal third world war’. My qualification is that it merely seems piecemeal. Its impact is pervasive. Paris is attacked and every city feels instantly vulnerable. The purpose is achieved.

At this moment, conventional systems of security are still groping their way towards what precisely it is that they are fighting. The objective of terrorism is terror; to terrorise people and government through random mass killings. It exploits the very freedoms – of expression, communication, movement available in societies it targets.

It maximises impact with minimal investment in human capital; suicide missions are undertaken by young minds vulnerable to illusions about this life or the next. It exalts hatred as heroism.

The Geneva Convention was not written for a struggle against shadow armies that glorify mass murder or refuse to distinguish between war and peace. We need a doctrine for permanent war, and we need signatories that are ready to implement this doctrine with all the muscle at their command.

Walter Nicolai, the now forgotten head of Germany’s intelligence services during World War I, told his country that if it wanted to succeed it would have to adopt a new theory: ‘war in peace’. A hundred years later, this seems a relevant basis for an effective counteroffensive. But before we can solve the problem we must learn to recognise it. Fudge will not serve.

America cannot long continue a policy of selective punishment in a war that also afflicts its allies, friends and like-minded nations. It must accept what Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been saying repeatedly: There is no good terrorism and bad terrorism; terrorism is terrorism. To measure Osama and Hafiz by different yardsticks is akin to America saying that it would fight only Japan in World War II.

Terrorists are clear about who their enemy is: The ‘near enemy’ are those who challenge their ideas and politics within their own countries, hence the multiple civil wars; the ‘far enemy’ are those who support the ‘near enemy’, broadly the West, including Russia; and those who have ‘usurped Islamic space’, like China or India. Do we have equal clarity about terrorists?

Modi also noted that we must delink terrorism from religion. The refugees who are escaping their tortured homeland are also Muslim; in fact they are more honest Muslims than the deranged ‘jihadis’. We must learn something from this epic tragedy.

This is also a conflict between theocracy and democracy; between practitioners of faith-supremacy and believers in faith-equality as the basis of civilised behaviour. This war has to be fought at both military and ideological levels.

The answer to regression is not complicated: modernity. Modernity has four basic, non-negotiable principles. A modern nation must be democratic; it must believe in secularism; it must promote gender equality; and it must eliminate the curse of inequity and poverty. This is the charter for regions in chaos, which can save the future from ravages of the present.

France’s unresolved Algerian war sheds light on the Paris attack

Robert Fisk in The Independent

People weep as they gather to observe a minute-silence at the Place de la Republique in memory of the victims of the Paris terror attacksGetty


It wasn’t just one of the attackers who vanished after the Paris massacre. Three nations whose history, action – and inaction – help to explain the slaughter by Isis have largely escaped attention in the near-hysterical response to the crimes against humanity in Paris: Algeria, Saudi Arabia and Syria.
The French-Algerian identity of one of the attackers demonstrates how France’s savage 1956-62 war in Algeria continues to infect today’s atrocities. The absolute refusal to contemplate Saudi Arabia’s role as a purveyor of the most extreme Wahabi-Sunni form of Islam, in which Isis believes, shows how our leaders still decline to recognise the links between the kingdom and the organisation which struck Paris. And our total unwillingness to accept that the only regular military force in constant combat with Isis is the Syrian army – which fights for the regime that France also wants to destroy – means we cannot liaise with the ruthless soldiers who are in action against Isis even more ferociously than the Kurds.

Brother of Paris attack suspect has no idea where his brother is

Whenever the West is attacked and our innocents are killed, we usually wipe the memory bank. Thus, when reporters told us that the 129 dead in Paris represented the worst atrocity in France since the Second World War, they failed to mention the 1961 Paris massacre of up to 200 Algerians participating in an illegal march against France’s savage colonial war in Algeria. Most were murdered by the French police, many were tortured in the Palais des Sports and their bodies thrown into the Seine. The French only admit 40 dead. The police officer in charge was Maurice Papon, who worked for Petain’s collaborationist Vichy police in the Second World War, deporting more than a thousand Jews to their deaths.

Omar Ismail Mostafai, one of the suicide killers in Paris, was of Algerian origin – and so, too, may be other named suspects. Said and Cherif Kouachi, the brothers who murdered the Charlie Hebdo journalists, were also of Algerian parentage. They came from the five million-plus Algerian community in France, for many of whom the Algerian war never ended, and who live today in the slums of Saint-Denis and other Algerian banlieues of Paris. Yet the origin of the 13 November killers – and the history of the nation from which their parents came – has been largely deleted from the narrative of Friday’s horrific events. A Syrian passport with a Greek stamp is more exciting, for obvious reasons.

A colonial war 50 years ago is no justification for mass murder, but it provides a context without which any explanation of why France is now a target makes little sense. So, too, the Saudi Sunni-Wahabi faith, which is a foundation of the “Islamic Caliphate” and its cult-like killers. Mohammed ibn Abdel al-Wahab was the purist cleric and philosopher whose ruthless desire to expunge the Shia and other infidels from the Middle East led to 18th-century massacres in which the original al-Saud dynasty was deeply involved.

The present-day Saudi kingdom, which regularly beheads supposed criminals after unfair trials, is building a Riyadh museum dedicated to al-Wahab’s teachings, and the old prelate’s rage against idolaters and immorality has found expression in Isis’s accusation against Paris as a centre of “prostitution”. Much Isis funding has come from Saudis – although, once again, this fact has been wiped from the terrible story of the Friday massacre.

Francois Hollande announces plans to change extend anti-terror powers

And then comes Syria, whose regime’s destruction has long been a French government demand. Yet Assad’s army, outmanned and still outgunned – though recapturing some territory with the help of Russian air strikes – is the only trained military force fighting Isis. For years, both the Americans, the British and the French have said that the Syrians do not fight Isis. But this is palpably false; Syrian troops were driven out of Palmyra in May after trying to prevent Isis suicide convoys smashing their way into the city – convoys that could have been struck by US or French aircraft. Around 60,000 Syrian troops have now been killed in Syria, many by Isis and the Nusrah Islamists – but our desire to destroy the Assad regime takes precedence over our need to crush Isis.

The French now boast that they have struck Isis’s Syrian “capital” of Raqqa 20 times – a revenge attack, if ever there was one. For if this was a serious military assault to liquidate the Isis machine in Syria, why didn’t the French do it two weeks ago? Or two months ago? Once more, alas, the West – and especially France – responds to Isis with emotion rather than reason, without any historical context, without recognising the grim role that our “moderate”, head-chopping Saudi “brothers” play in this horror story. And we think we are going to destroy Isis...

A bird’s eye view of terror

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

DIWALI pollution sends droves of Delhi residents scouring for somewhere to breathe. I thus learnt of the Paris outrage watching migratory birds 190 kilometres from the country’s smog capital, off the Agra highway. Sharing the news with a French couple at the Bharatpur avian sanctuary that morning offered a learning curve. They were from the embassy in Delhi. The man scanned the BBC bullet points on my mobile phone and translated the story to his wife. He then took a deep breath, shrugged his shoulders wryly and resumed fixing the telescope on a steel tripod.

The couple had seen a gaggle of rare ducks on the far side of the sanctuary the previous morning, the Frenchman informed me helpfully. The woman sat down silently on a bench atop the watchtower, where we met, as she resumed observing the cormorants in flight. Her knitted eyebrows were a giveaway though to concealed emotion.

That afternoon, in Delhi, still trying to figure out the composed response of the French couple to what I thought was a shocking carnage in their country, I scanned some more of the news. The approach of so many French people was uniformly similar to that of the two bird watchers of Bharatpur.

As Parisians struggled to make sense of their new reality, a report in the New York Times described parents whose children slept through the ordeal while they grappled to fudge the explanation to offer them in the morning why so many planned activities had been cancelled.

To my Indian sensibilities so used to one prime minister declaring aar-paar ki ladai (a fight to the finish) and another flaunting his supposedly 56-inch chest in response to terror provocations, the philosophical demeanour of Bertrand Bourgeois, a 42-year old French accountant, was eye-catching.

He was lost in thought as he cast a fishing line beneath the Invalides bridge. Bourgeois, the NYT told us, normally avoids fishing in Paris. Instead, he preferred the quieter sections of the Seine near his home in Poissy. But after the violence, he said he felt drawn to come into the city out of a sense of solidarity.

What an amazing response compared with the televised clamour in India after a similar attack on Mumbai. Shrill opinion vendors called Prime Minister Manmohan Singh a weakling for refusing to carpet-bomb Pakistan. Singh saw through the insane chorus, as did the ordinary Indian people. They elected him for a second consecutive term just for keeping his nerve and for continuing to talk to Pakistan.

Drum beaters of war anywhere might want to benefit from the insights of Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari.

“As the literal meaning of the word indicates, terror is a military strategy that hopes to change the political situation by spreading fear rather than by causing material damage,” Harari wrote in The Guardian after the Paris attacks. “This strategy is almost always adopted by very weak parties, who are unable to inflict much material damage on their enemies.”

Whatever be the score of the casualties inflicted by an act of terror it can never be even a fraction of the losses from a conventional war. “On the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1 July 1916, 19,000 members of the British army were killed and another 40,000 wounded,” reminded the author of the international bestseller Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.

“By the time the battle ended in November, both sides together had suffered more than a million casualties, which included 300,000 dead. Yet this unimaginable carnage hardly changed the political balance of power in Europe. It took another two years and millions of additional casualties for something finally to snap.”

What was the reaction of President Hollande to the coordinated strikes in Paris? He threatened merciless retribution, but against who? If helpless Syrian or other refugees get caught in the crossfire between the government and the terrorists, well that’s playing to the wrong script.

To avenge the Paris attacks, French warplanes carried out heavy bombardments of the militant group that calls itself Islamic State. Should they not have been doing the bombings without the Paris carnage as justification? Would the terror command centres and fuel hubs not be touched if Paris were not attacked? Hollande can do no more than look over his shoulder to see the Le Pens and the Sarkozys mock him. But that is not the point.

Western powers have struck up a compromise with Russian President Putin for a coordinated strategy in Syria. Have the terrorists in Paris inadvertently cooked the goose of Kiev? What are the chances that a number of states in the Middle East that were seen as a source of strength to the Islamists, led by Israel and Saudi Arabia, accept the conditions implicit in a no-holds-barred targeting of Daesh?

In any case, what is in store in all this for South Asia, more so for Pakistan? We have discussed the hypocrisy of delinking Al Nusra from Al Qaeda. How many shades of extremists has Pakistan got in its arsenal to deal with India and Afghanistan or even Iran? Will a school in Peshawar remain more worthy of protection from future harm than schools in the neighbourhood?

As I was leaving the bird sanctuary, a guide pointed to a row of marble tablets with names embossed of viceroys, maharajas and even of Gen J.N. Chaudhuri. They had shot helpless migratory birds for sport. Lord Linlithgow — 4,273 birds with 39 guns led the field. Gen Chaudhuri shot 556 birds for half a day with 51 guns. That was in September 1964. Had the India-Pakistan war broken out a year before it did, at least the birds might have been spared a predatory assault. Such is the circuitous logic of terror and its remedies. Most people seem to know this though their governments may not.

Gibraltar and the Falklands deny the logic of history

These relics of empire pay hardly any UK tax – but when the neighbours cut up nasty, they demand the British protect them

• 
• • Simon Jenkins
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 14 August 2013

La Linea. ‘People living in the colonies have a right to be considered, but this has never overridden political reality. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty

Nothing beats a gunboat. HMS Illustrious glided out of Portsmouth on Monday, past HMS Victory and cheering crowds of patriots. Within a week it will be off Gibraltar, a mere cannon shot from Cape Trafalgar. The nation's breast heaves, the tears prick. The Olympic spirit is off to singe the king of Spain's beard. How dare they keep honest British citizens waiting six hours at Spanish border control? Have they forgotten the Armada?

The British empire had much to be said for it, but it is over – dead, deceased, struck off, no more. The idea of a British warship supposedly menacing Spain is ludicrous. Is it meant to bomb Cadiz? Will its guns lift a rush-hour tailback in a colony that most Britons regard as awash with tax dodgers, drug dealers and right-wing whingers? The Gibraltarians have rights, but why British taxpayers should send warships to enforce them, even if just "on exercise", is a mystery.

Any study of Britain's currently contentious colonies, Gibraltar and the Falklands, can reach only two conclusions. One is that Britain's claim to them in international law is wholly sound, the other is that it is nowadays wholly daft.

Twenty-first century nation states will no longer tolerate even the mild humiliation of hosting the detritus of 18th- and 19th-century empires. Most European empires were born of the realpolitik of power, mostly the treaties of Utrecht (1713) and Paris (1763). The same realpolitik now ordains their dismantling. An early purpose of the United Nations was to bring this about.

Of course those living in these colonies have a right to be considered, but such rights have never overridden political reality. Nor has Britain claimed so, at least when circumstance dictated. The residents of Hong Kong and Diego Garcia were not consulted, let alone granted "self-determination", when Britain wanted to dump them in the dustbin of history. Hong Kong was handed to China in 1997 when the New Territories lease ended. Diego Garcia was demanded by and handed to the Pentagon in 1973. The Hong Kong British were denied passports, and the Diego Garcians were summarily evicted to Mauritius and the Seychelles.

Britain's security does not need these places. It does not depend on coaling stations in the Atlantic. France survives without any longer owning Senegal and Pondicherry, and Portugal without São Tomé and Goa. When the Indians seized Goa in 1961, the world did not object. Indeed the Argentinian invasion plan for the Falklands in 1982 was called Operation Goa, as Buenos Aires assumed it would likewise be seen as a post-imperial clear-up.

Relics of the British empire now mostly survive in the interstices of the global economy. They are the major winners from the fiscal haemorrhage that has resulted from financial globalisation. Many have become synonymous with sleaze. American tax authorities wax furious over Bermuda. George Osborne is out to get the tax dodgers of the Caymans and British Virgin Islands.

Spain has long held grievances over Gibraltar's role in aiding people smuggling, money laundering and offshore gambling beyond its own regulatory reach. This culminated in a 2007  IMF report on shortcomings in the colony's financial regulation. Gibraltar's status as a tax haven has brought it surging wealth, fuelling Spain's rage at so much money pouring untaxed through what it regards as its own territory.

Such colonies claim to be "more British than the British", except that they pay no UK tax and act as tax havens for funds from Britain. Gibraltar has made a particular specialism of internet gambling. Colonies claim allegiance to the crown, but not to its exchequer, or its financial police. They are Churchillian theme parks of red pillar boxes, fish and chips and warm beer. But they want the smooth without the rough. When the neighbours cut up nasty, they demand that those whose taxes protect them should send soldiers, diplomats and lawyers to their aid.

The legal argument between Britain and Spain is in Britain's favour. Though Britain failed to join the Schengen area with free border crossings, all EU states supposedly ease the movement of their citizens. Spain's proposed £43 admission charge is excessive. It might seem ironic for Tory ministers to plead their cause before the hated European courts, but that is the right place to go. Law-law is better than play-acting at war-war.

That said, it is beyond belief that an honest broker could not resolve this centuries-old dispute. Britain has, on several occasions, sought a compromise deal on Gibraltar's sovereignty. Thatcher initiated talks in 1984, after successfully settling both Rhodesia and Hong Kong. The Spaniards offered Gibraltar fully devolved status, like the Basques and Catalans, respecting language, culture and a degree of fiscal autonomy. As Hong Kong has shown, sovereignty transfer does not mean political absorption.

The curse has been Spanish ineptitude feeding Gibraltarian intransigence. Border hold-ups are counterproductive to winning hearts and minds, as were blundering Argentinian landings on the outer Falklands. Spain demanded sovereignty now – despite itself having colonies in north Africa. This pushed British governments to the wall and made them vulnerable to colonial lobbyists wielding the demand for self-determination. A 2002 Gibraltar referendum gave 98% support for continued colonial status – a Falklands vote gave a similar result. It's a far cry from Thatcher's readiness to surrender Hong Kong and accept "sovereignty with leaseback" from both Madrid and Buenos Aires.

The truth is that Britain's tax-haven colonies feel more secure than ever, blessed by history with British protection and free to skim the dark side of the global economy for cash. This has bred a tribe of gilded "Britons" who live in a perpetual other-world. When I asked a Gibraltarian who claimed to be "150% British" why he should not at least pay 100% British taxes, he replied: "Why should I pay for people thousands of miles away?"

While they deny the logic of history and geography, neither Gibraltar nor the Falklands will ever be truly "safe". One day these hangovers will somehow merge into their hinterlands and cease to be grit in the shoe of international relations. This day will be hastened if world governments take action to end tax havens.

Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Gibraltar can go on voting "to stay British" as long as they like. But if they do not accept the taxes and disciplines most Europeans accept, while sucking business from Europe's financial centres, they can hardly expect one EU state to protect them from another. An occasional six-hour queue at La Linea is a small price to pay for declining to join the real world.

• This article was amended on 14 August 2013. It originally stated that the US department of state had called Gibraltar "a major European centre of money laundering". In fact, it was referring to Spain. This has now been corrected.