As I recall, this fiasco began as "a war on terrorism", following the hijacking of four aircraft which culminated in the destruction of much of the World Trade Center and surrounding area in New York, and damage to one fifth of the Pentagon. The target was terrorists, whosoever they may be. One marketing-initiative later, the language used by (primarily conservative and emerging neo-conservative) press officers, ministers, and presidents became "the War on Terror". For some reason, most Western media had adopted it within three months. It was a subtle shift, but a skilful one. The message was this: We're no longer at war with a specific, but distributed, organised cabal of terrorists, we're at war with an ideology.
I pose this question: Was the world-wide terrorist threat posed at the start of September 2001 any more dangerous than it had been in September 1999? Or 1989? Or 1949? Since any sub-national group with guns and an agenda can apparently be accurately labelled a terrorist (eg, Hezbollah, IRA), and any national group that agrees with their politics is a "rogue state", it is easy to point out that there has been a high level of terrorist activity on most continents since the end of World War Two, or for that matter, since before the rise of the Roman Empire! There are many nations who have what would today be defined as terrorism to thank for a defining point in their history, if not their very independence or federation. (Eg, Israel, United States, France, Soviet Union, China, I could type my fingers off...) The point of this is that in posing the question "was terrorism in 09/2001 a greater threat than before then?", you are committing somehow tallying up all the terrorists, or rating the level of their threat based on entirely subjective and arbitrary criteria. It's an impossible and (more to the point) meaningless task.
At this point, it becomes a matter of perogatives: There are certainly terrorists out there (call them what you will), and indeed, many of them wish me harm. If I wanted to live in a repressed religious oligarchy, I'd renounce my evil ways and move to the Vatican. Thus, while terrorists will assert their perogative to kill and maim people in order to impose their ideals on me, the government of my country (for all its shortcomings) happens to be good at asserting the perogative of itself and its citizens in defending our perceived national interests. We probably won't be overwhelmed, because we have bigger guns.
But nor can we ever win.
In changing "the enemy" from an organised group of nutjobs with guns, an agenda, and a name ("Al Quaeda") to an ideology, participating nations guaranteed themselves a war that they could never win. Short of total media control (I'll leave that one for another day), there is no way to kill off a virulant idea or philosophy once the cat is out of the bag. For example, even with WW2 a sixty-plus-year old memory, no-one has even tried to exterminate the idea of Nazism. It's certainly been demonised and is not particularly popular these days, but the ideology exists all the same, and it's there for anyone who happens to like it to adopt.
This brings me back to my original question. Was the terrorist threat truly greater in September 2001 than ever before? My guess is not really. Previously, the policy of most governments had been to meet direct challenges directly and without remorse, which is a good way of asserting yourself as a nation and a power. We'd launch a few missiles, or a few hundred, cut off their supply lines, and then ignore them. Remember the face that launched a thousand missiles? No? *shrug* My point is this: In turning a war on terrorism to the War on Terror - an inherently and intentionally unwinnable conflict - the participating governments gave their (very real) enemies the biggest and best publicity job they ever could have. There have always been terrorists everywhere. There always will be. But after the United States' war on terrorism became the worldwide War on Terror, the various struggles of sub-national groups against nations the world over (for national independence, or by way of protest against neglect by ruling government) became polarised to ONE conflict. There was a very deliberate, and very successful recruitment effort by the Islamist factions who were the principle parties of just one fairly small civil war that was extended to all the others. Now in Aceh, Chechnya, and Darfur there are strong rebel movements with Islamist goals, who have coherent links of weapons, funding, and soldiers to each of the others.
This hasn't always been the case though. Aceh was about independence from the oppressive facist policies of the Surkano and Suhato regimes (which were, interestingly enough, backed by the US government to prevent the previous "evil" ideology from spreading South through Asia.) Darfur has been problematic since famine in the 1970s, and the economic neglect of the region by the Sudanese central government was the cause. The Chechen dispute cropped up at the same time as the former Soviet satelites were declaring independence during the breakup of the Soviet Union. Chechnya's problem? They were too small to stand as a nation, either as Moscow's friend, or as an enemy, and their independence would be both a security threat to Russia from without, and from within, should any other the other hundreds of little client-nations that Russia is made from want to follow their example and secede. The thing these three conflicts do have in common is Islam: There are significant Muslim populations in all three areas, and has been since well before their respective conflicts started.
The nature of rebellion is that you don't have a lot of friends. By becoming a rebel, you're declaring your opposition to the people in charge. All your admirers abroad (if you have any) have to go through the guy you're fighting if they want to do business at all. For this reason, most rebel movements are lucky to get any meaninful support from a well established nation: It's just not politically or financially expedient to be seen to be trying to dethrone the guy you're selling your merchandise to. You could risk a direct, covert approach (Eg, the fun excursions taken c/- the CIA chequebook), or more likely, wait to see if the rebels win, and if they do, recognise and start doing business with them. They call this "diplomacy". While the rebels in Chechnya and Aceh certainly had the "moral support" of some Western governments in the past, it couldn't translate into any meaningful backup for reasons just outlined.
...And then some fellow from Afghanistan showed up with $100,000 worth of diamonds in his suitcase, some literature, and a sales-pitch that was too good to refuse: "Would you like to join our club? We have funding, weapons, and we're the same religion as you. You already know who we are and what we can achieve: We blew up Americans in the towers. When was the last time the Americans helped you, I wonder?" They already had all the good press they needed, and with so much attention turned their way, they went from being obscure rebels fighting some hopeless never-ending civil-war in a frozen, mountainous desert to being the core of an ever more popular conflict of downtrodden Muslims everywhere against an arrogant aggressor.
The War on Terror is conflict of ideologies manufactured to be unwinnable. Born from the fires of the last such war (Communism vs. Demo... okay, Communism vs. Not Communism) it is a very real and very dangerous war. On one side are a group of disturbed individuals who intend to exercise their perogative of a holy war to convert or destroy all who refuse their dominion. On the other are the governments of the West, some elected fraudulently, others genuinely, others not at all. They intend to fight a war forever, but never win, as it serves as an ideal justification for imposing their will on the people they lead, with the declared aim of protecting them, and acting for their safety. The threat and war are both real, there's no conspiracy there. But it's only the war it is because people were so eager to be shocked into paying so much attention to begin with. Chances are, the less attention it's paid, the less important it will become.
Now I pose this question: Is terrorism a greater threat now than it was on September 12, 2001?
