by A.J. Caschetta
The grievance-based approach to counter-terrorism is a fantasy of the peace studies & conflict resolution crowd.
Jamal al-Harith didn't look very aggrieved in the moments before beginning his suicide mission.
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When
a British jihadi named Jamal al-Harith became an Islamic State (ISIS)
suicide bomber last month, he killed not only Iraqi soldiers but also
the naïve theory that nations can effectively fight terrorism by
listening to the complaints of terrorists and then making the
appropriate conciliatory adjustments.
Harith (born Ronald Fiddler) was granted every conceivable concession, but none of them stopped him from becoming the latest smiling suicide bomber.
What Melvin E. Lee calls
the "grievance-based approach" to counterterrorism holds that by
addressing the stated grievances of terrorists, their motivations for
committing acts of violence can be stopped and further acts preempted.
It is a surprisingly popular idea among both academics and politicians.
But evidence in the real world suggests that it is little more than a
fantasy of the peace studies and conflict resolution crowd.
The grievance-based approach to counter-terrorism is a fantasy of the peace studies & conflict resolution crowd.
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The
grievance-based approach can be applied both on a structural (group)
level and on an individual level. On the group level, for decades it was
the preferred approach taken by the government of Sri Lanka with the
Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). Successive Sri Lankan
governments negotiated continuously with the Tamil Tigers since the
1980s, and whenever there was an impasse, the Tigers struck. It was not
until 2009 when president Mahinda Rajapaksa ended negotiations and with
his brother Gotabaya, who ran the military, declared war on the LTTE that peace came back to the island state.
Israel
was locked into a decades-long grievance-based approach in its struggle
with the Palestinian people. The memories of Oslo make it unlikely that
major concessions are forthcoming. However, the Jewish state is under
tremendous pressure from the UN, the EU and for the past eight years,
the US, to make yet more concessions.
On
the individual level, the grievance-based approach is at the heart of
the erroneous explanation that poverty and lack of education are the
"root causes" of terrorism, despite the plethora of engineers and
medical doctors who have joined the global jihad. It was also favored by
the Obama administration. In 2015 State Department spokesperson (and
current Fox News analyst) Marie Harf suggested
a grievance-based approach when she opined that a jobs program might
effectively keep unemployed Muslim men from becoming jihadists. Harf
explained that we need "to go after the root causes that lead people to
join these groups, whether it's lack of opportunity for jobs."
Poverty and lack of education are not the 'root causes' of Islamist terrorism.
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But
Harith didn't need a job. In fact, he was a millionaire. He was an
original al-Qaida member who joined when the fledgling group was still
in the Sudan and then moved to Afghanistan when Osama bin Laden
relocated his operations there. Harith was captured in Afghanistan in
March 2002 by US troops and sent to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp.
Since he was a British citizen, his government lobbied
for his repatriation. When the Bush administration complied in 2004,
Harith was sent back to Britain and granted his freedom. He faced no
charges in spite of the circumstances of his case.
But
that wasn't enough. Harith sued the British government and won a
million-pound settlement. Not only were his grievances thoroughly
redressed, but he was compensated with a fortune.
If
the theory upon which the grievance-based approach is based were
correct, Harith's new fortune and freedom would have ended his jihad.
But it didn't. And in another apparent case of insufficient government
surveillance of a known terrorist threat, Harith fled to Turkey
in 2014 and then to Syria to join ISIS under the name Abu Zakariya
al-Britani. Becoming a millionaire did not temper his taste for jihad
and his thirst for martyrdom.
The
idea that a job or money could stop Harith from rejoining the global
jihad could only be entertained by someone who does not understand his
reason for becoming an al-Qaida member to begin with.
Negotiating
with terrorists is rarely a good idea, but nations that reach out to
Islamist terrorists, as Melvin Lee explains, "misunderstand the enemy
and its nature."
Harith
gleefully embraced his death, convinced of the rewards he would reap
upon completion of his attack. This element of the jihadi mindset has
eluded us since 1983 when witnesses were baffled by the smiling suicide attacker who drove his explosive-laden truck into the US Marine barracks in Beirut.
Until we fight the ideology that attracts men like Harith, addressing specific grievances is futile.
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The
grievance-based approach to terrorism asks what else might have been
done for Harith or given to Harith to dissuade him from his attack. It
looks at his life and asks how society might have made it better, so
that he would never have contemplated jihad against the West.
Until
we acknowledge the ideology that attracts men like Ronald Fiddler, and
then fight that ideology, addressing specific grievances of specific
individuals or groups is futile. Or as Melvin Lee put it, "Acquiescing
to political grievances will not alter the fundamental incompatibility
between Lockean precepts of tolerance and current interpretations of
Islam: Only Islam's fundamental reform will resolve the conflict."
Until then the suicide bombers will continue. Smiling like Harith.
A.J. Caschetta is a Shillman-Ginsburg fellow at the Middle East Forum and a senior lecturer at the Rochester Institute of Technology.
Source: http://www.meforum.org/6593/an-end-to-the-grievance-based-approach
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Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.
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