A View From The other Side

Friday 18th January

For a while it seemed that the ‘war’ against Al Queda had been successful; Bin Laden was dead; the war in Afghanistan had settled into a sort of stalemate; no more planes being flown into buildings.  But what the West has never really understood is that Al Queda was simply a manifestation of an idea not a real movement, very little organisation, a loose collection of individuals rather than say the IRA in the seventies and eighties with its internal ranks and discipline.  And though we may kill a few leaders, bomb so-called training camps, and infiltrate the ‘organisation’, we cannot actually kill the idea.

And please understand I do not agree with the idea myself, but I do think we should try to understand it. The so-called Arab spring, which may or may not be happening now in Pakistan is as much about this idea as it is about democracy.  The leaders who were so hated were hated not only for oppressing and murdering their own people but also for their collusion and corruption by the West.  These people, fundamentalists, Jihadists, terrorists, call them what you will – are fighting for a way of life that they see as threatened by us – the decadent and irreligious West, with our technology and our greed.  Infidels was the word used in the Middle Ages, and it is as good now as it was then.

And so we shouldn’t be surprised when ‘Islamists’ (the latest buzz-word for terrorist) try to take over or hold on to territory in Mali, when a simple glance at the straight lines drawn through the Sahara which mark its boundaries tells us so much about its recent colonial past.  Or, terrible as it is, oil installations in nearby Algeria are attacked and hostages taken.  Deep down these people may well suspect that at best what they are fighting is a rear-guard action and that in the long sweep of History they may in truth be swept away.  But you never know…and the idea of pure Muslim states unsullied by pollution from the West may become a reality.  The one thing they have on their side is time, because we in the West are less determined and will maybe give up at some point or other.

But the one thing I do know is that we will not beat them with bombs, or execution squads, or water-boarding or any number of Gunatanamo Bays.  No matter how much you despise it you cannot kill an idea.