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“The West’s focus on armed violence gets in the way of understanding the phenomena of radicalisation and the commission of acts in its name. It presupposes a continuum between religious radicalisation, proclamation of jihad and international terrorism, as though going from the first to the third stage were inevitable, and conversely, as though international terrorism created local jihadism. Such reasoning leads to any reference to sharia law and any call for holy war being read as a precursor to global attacks.
In this view, Islamist movements’ supposed proximity to terrorism is the sole criterion for determining western policy towards them. This proximity is defined on a scale of intensity that measures references to religion as much as — if not more than — actual acts of violence: the more Islamist groups mention sharia and the more they challenge the policies of the great powers, the more they are seen as a terrorist threat. Hence the principle of preventive war: we attack them before they attack us.
Counterinsurgency policy solely on the model of deployment of armed force does not work.
Keeping radicals at bay long enough to build a stable, democratic state based on the rule of law and good governance. All such attempts have failed.
The reasons for these failures are barely examined, except for introducing the usual culturalist arguments.
The idea that terrorism is a reaction to western armed interventionism in the Middle East, which has always been Al-Qaida’s argument, is not entirely wrong, but it is inadequate.
There is no systematic link between local jihad and international terrorism. The Taliban, as mentioned, have never exported violence beyond Afghanistan.
The case of Mali is even more paradoxical. Why hasn’t France’s presence there so far provoked a single terrorist attack?
Why do so many second-generation young people of North African origin mobilise for Syria and Iraq, but not for the Sahel, which is geographically closer to their parents’ country of origin?
To date, eight years of French fighting in Mali have not provoked a single terrorist attack in France.
The emergence of jihadist groups — from Mali to Mozambique, via northern Nigeria, Chad and Sudan, and from the Afghan and Pakistani tribal areas to Yemen, via northeastern Syria and (Egyptian) Sinai — is always rooted in the political makeup of their societies.
Some political anthropology may come in useful: all the local jihads that endure do not simply kill and rule by terror. The Taliban owe their influence mainly to their ability to manage micro-conflicts (3)(over land, water, vendettas etc); jihadist activity in the Sahel can only be understood in terms of its connections with pre-existing conflicts that states have failed to resolve (over land, water, grazing, ethnic and social tensions).”
My emphasis, N.M.
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