This past week had something of a clash of civilizations feel to it. A series of powerful bombs — credited to Islamist groups in Kashmir — tore Bombay’s trains apart. The Russians had their Zarqawi moment, blowing up the elusive, pirate-looking Chechen terrorist (and militant Muslim) Shamil Basayev, lustrous beard, false leg and all. And the next Middle East war began when Israel attacked Gaza and Lebanon after the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers.
It doesn’t take an especially perceptive mind to notice the common equation in all these events: Modernized, secular state powers versus terrorist groups guided by Islam.
The simplicity of this equation is what makes it easy for us to think of a “global war on terrorism” a conflict that, like the last conflict between communism and capitalist democracy, subsumes regional issues and engages every part of the earth in the same struggle. It’s a pleasant way to think, because it sets up a narrative of good versus evil — and it’s an attractive way, with leaders of besieged countries far from the United States taking up the phrase to lend their own domestic struggles a little more gravitas.
But it’s too easy a way to understand the events of this past week. Our war and Putin’s war, for instance, are not the same.
Putin will, undoubtedly, use the Basayev’s assassination to tout his engagement in the war on Islamist terrorism. But likening Basayev’s termination to Zarqawi mixes up two men with similar methods, but verydifferent goals.
As Christopher Swift has written, “rather than threatening a global conflagration, Basayev’s Islam mobilized a discrete population for limited, localized ends. … For Zarqawi’s jihadis, Islam is radically cosmopolitan. … It eschews Iraqi nationhood in favor of establishing a regional caliphate. … Rather than promoting self-determination, Zarqawi’s Islam catalyzed burgeoning Arab resentment for unlimited, globalized ends.” While Zarqawi succeeds in recruiting the disillusioned from all over, Basayev’s fighters are indigenous. Basayev’s early hero was not Osama Bin Laden, but Che Guevara.
Chechnya’s relationship to the global war on terrorism confuses our moral clarity. Muslim separatists in Chechnya downed planes and attacked an elementary school, terrorist acts all. But before most of that, Russia conducted liquidation campaigns in the finest Stalinist tradition, deliberately targeting civilians and halving the population. We’ve got a people whose original goal — autonomy — seemed legitimate in name and sincere in spirit, but whose tactics have automatically made them the moral allies of our enemies. Until recently, instead of fitting their cause into the usual global war on terrorism narrative, we consigned ourselves to trying a political version of loving the sinner but hating the sin.
The regional history of Hindu versus Muslim conflict in India has been similarly complicated, and similarly area-specific.
The tools of terrorism are a global scourge, quick to spread and agonizingly slow to snuff out. But similar tools do not indicate similar ends, any more than our possession of nuclear weapons means we want the same things as North Korea. Looking at these disparate conflicts through the same lens bars us from seeing them for what they are — and, maybe, encourages small-fry, home-grown extremists to see themselves as part of a more exciting and grandiose struggle.
In India, a man telephoned news agencies on Thursday to congratulate the Bombay bombers. He said he represented al-Qaida — not the al-Qaida in Afghanistan or Iraq, but a newly-founded branch of it in Kashmir. Like McDonald’s, al-Qaida is beginning pop up everywhere, and like McDonald’s, its metastasizing is bound to make a big bang. It’s possible al-Qaida will even enter the void left in Chechnya — a more comprehensible but far scarier scenario than Shamil Basayev.
Eve Fairbanks is a reporter-researcher at The New Republic.
