Battles are important to win, but war is the most important to win simply because winning one or more battles while losing war is a glaringly ignominious defeat, and losing one or more battles while winning war is a glorious victory.
Over the past decades, the world has been waging an internecine war on terrorism, be it military, economic and ideological, inflicting a spate of heavy defeats, but all did not pay off to eradicate terrorism. The said reality is well revealed by quantitative indicators that show a felt decline in the risks of terrorism; however, qualitative analyses indicate that the demise of terrorism is beyond the horizon. This is explained by the fact that terrorism employs two contradictory elements to revitalize and readapt itself following the series of defeats it has sustained: political conflicts and economic problems, which all strike vulnerable regions across the world, catering for an environment conducive for terrorism, supported by cutting-edge technology that makes it snowball into a transnational and intercontinental threat.
STEADILY EXPONENTIAL INCREASE
Since the war on terrorism was declared in the wake of the 9/11 Attacks, 2001, the spread of terrorism across the world countries has been on the increase, and the number of terrorist groups has been doubled. A research study by the US Institute of Peace reveals that the western intervention has led to an increase in the number of terrorist groups, especially in countries experiencing conflict. Foreign interventions have rendered the government institutions more vulnerable to conflict and terrorism. Against such a backdrop of vicissitudes, terrorist groups have been fortunate in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). Although ISIS lost its so-called caliphate, it still has affiliated structures in more than a dozen provinces in West Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. As a matter of fact, ISIS branch in Khurasan has been the fourth most notoriously destructive terrorist organization across the world in 2018.
Climate change devastating the livelihoods of millions in Asia and Africa is of great help to terrorist groups in recruitment efforts, as they use food and water as a tool of war. For instance, the extremists of the Fulani pastoral tribes killed 1,158 people in Nigeria, which is an increase of 308% over the number of their victims in 2017, and surpassed Boko Haram that killed 589 people, which is a decrease of 42% from the number of its victims in the previous year, due to their conflict with farmers on grazing and farming areas, which are increasingly shrinking due to climate change.
Hate waves escalate in different ways across the world, making up another factor contributory to terrorism in recent years; far-right groups or White Supremacist Groups (WSG) are widely spread in Europe and America, and terrorist attacks launched by these groups in America have been the predominant terrorism in the past ten years. These groups weave global networks from Australia and New Zealand to Europe and America, thus constituting a transnational challenge, and their growth is likely to continue in the coming years, driven by ongoing conflicts, racist speech and increasingly growing immigration, and Ukraine along with the right-wing extremist groups is a case in point.
MANY GROUPS AND ONE TERRORISM : TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN
Jihadist groups and extremist right-wing groups share many characteristics albeit ideologically different. They believe that they are jostling for their existence, and that self-preservation can be realized only through violence; both intentionally prejudice and harm their communities and exacerbate existing divisions. Research has shown that terrorist attacks on both sides are on the rise, as if they were working in tandem in an implicit alliance to undermine communities, and they do not seem to embody a rebirth of traditional cultures; rather, their action is a deconstruction of such legacy. Remarkably enough, the main bedrock of such groups is youth who desperately struggle for a social identity that can bring them glory and existential meaning.
The Global Survey of Values Project reveals that religious values are those that maintain the integrity of the individual as much as they do so to the safety of community in the Middle East, and that most Europeans do not consider democracy to be of absolute importance, and are not readily willing to sacrifice anything for it. The said reality makes it imperative to create alternatives, and not to make defense full of sincere patriotism and a specific preference in values, including religious values, a mere mandate entrusted to extremist groups. Equally important, it should be emphasized that there is no message facing extremists in a social vacuum, while idling away cross-handed and twiddling thumbs when merely engaged in juggling with theoretical ideology; the ability to understand and address the reality of youth in different regions and contexts will be crucial in confronting the scourge of cross-border terrorism.
TECHNOLOGY AND TERRORISM
The Irish Republican Army (IRA) commanders would address their foes: “We only need to be lucky once, while you need to be lucky all the time”. This is true; when terrorists use the internet to publish one video footage or one statement, it could have global consequences. A notoriously telling example is the extremist right-wing terrorist who perpetrated an appalling massacre, killing 51 Muslims when they were doing their prayers in a mosque in New Zealand in March 2019, as he brazenly broadcast his crime live on Facebook, and his post was shared one and a half million times.
More than two decades into the past, many researchers predicted that the internet would become a political tool for terrorists, multinational criminals, and revolutionary organizations, and that they would employ it for their organizational, ideological and social agendas to enhance their power. This prediction has become a reality; the internet acts as an access point for terrorists to areas that were once exclusive to governments. Although big networks such as Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are seeking desperately to remove terrorist content, and are investing in artificial intelligence-based counterterrorism programs, we find that the terrorists are still slithering away to use alternative methods to spread their messages.
TERRORISM HEADS
According to the Greek mythology, the Hydra is a serpentine monster with ten heads; if one head is cut off, a new head then grows! It seems that terrorism in our times has become another non-mythological Hydra; once a terrorist group is eradicated, more others will sprout up.
Over the past two decades, we have witnessed a recurring counterterrorism pattern, which is more like a vicious circle. As soon as the threat of terrorism crops up in a region, the global community would hastily or slowly send troops to confront it, or would instead support the country concerned, making such a threat diminish, and the forces involved withdraw and the support stops. Terrorism soon rises to the surface again in the same region, or in the immediate vicinity, and things get into a vicious circle repeatedly. As this pattern drags on, it is expected that a large part of global terrorist activity will continue to be generated over the coming years.
While squarely confronting the brutality of terrorist groups, some countries often respond with further harassment and violence that may not be limited to terrorists, giving the opportunity for such groups to recruit more followers. In some countries of Sub-Saharan Africa, some terrorist groups are supported by tribal and social sectors, taking advantage of the reactive blunders of governments, and the grievances of some sectors of the population, according to a research study conducted by Nathaniel Allen of the American Institute of Peace, Unusual Lessons from an Unusual War: Boko Haram and Modern Insurgency. In the same vein, French-American Anthropologist Dr. Scott Atran, Director of Research at the National Center for Scientific Research in France, and Professor at Oxford University and Michigan University, also warns in his research in conflict zones, that the exploitation of terrorist groups of sacred values, both religious and national, enables some of them to achieve victories over armies that are financially more powerful, relying on standard incentives, such as wages, promotion and punishment. The most notorious example in this regard is the control of ten thousand ISIS fighters on Mosul (third of the area of Iraq) and how ISIS expelled the Iraqi army from Mosul in a few days, even though the army is fully equipped with munitions and ISIS pales in comparison with its power.
OBSTACLES AND LESSONS
Counterterrorism efforts are hindered by various obstacles, including geostrategic competition and having double standards. If we look at the large gap in the impact of terrorism between the advanced industrial countries and the developing countries, we will feel a great contradiction. In Africa, South Asia and the Middle East, terrorism kills entire regions and countries, while no significant damage was caused by terrorism in Europe, East Asia and the Americas; rather, it is almost confined to the three mentioned regions (The Middle East, South Asia, and Africa), which witnessed 93% of terrorist damage between 2002 and 2018, according to the Global Terrorism Index (GTI) in 2019, and that nearly 90% of all terrorist activities occur in ten countries, not including any western countries.
Around 4.4% terrorist attacks were carried out between 2000 and 2014; only 2.6% of the deaths were in western countries. The death rate of terrorism (2016) in the OECD which accounts for 80% of global trade and investment did not exceed 1%, compared to 0.1% in 2010!
Despite these evident facts, any terrorist attack that takes place in London, Brussels, or Paris tops the international media headlines, has a major influence on global politics and security and directs the rudder of global counterterrorism policies more than hundreds of attacks in Kabul, Baghdad, Lahore or Mogadishu do. Such contradiction, albeit riddled with flaws, can be of great importance to us when it comes international cooperation in counterterrorism.
The first lesson is that the great interest in global terrorist activity in several regions only, and at the hands of a few terrorist groups, clearly means that any major increase in international security pressure on one or two of these groups reduces global terrorism by a high rate; therefore, intensifying international efforts towards ISIS has led to a decline in terrorism rates worldwide in the past three years.
The second lesson is that terrorism in Europe and the United States and in the developed world in general defines the global counterterrorism strategy at the level of the United Nations, and sets its priorities and concerns in issues that may not be related to the counterterrorism priorities in countries and communities in the Middle East, South Asia, Central and East Africa, which suffer incomparably heavy burdens from direct losses stemming from terrorism, and do not have the counterterrorism resources required, or even helpless to implement the international counterterrorism measures that they have signed, and there is an urgent need to bridge this gap or at least to narrow it down.
The third lesson is that terrorist activity is almost limited to a set of regional armed conflicts and civil wars in fragile or vulnerable countries. This fact provides evidence of the need for a qualitative upgrade of international efforts to better promote a real solution to this type of conflict, which contains the bulk of global terrorism. If such a recommendation comes into play, it will be one of the most successful and sustainable global counterterrorism measures.