Give the dog a bad name:By:Lt.Gen(R)Asad Durrani

Give the dog a bad name
Lt Gen (R) Asad Durrani

(This is a cross post)
An adage has lately done more than its share of rounds: “when God wishes to destroy a people, He first makes them mad”. We are no God. Before going for our foes therefore, all that we can do is to give them a bad name. Miscreants; traitors; separatists: we have heard them all. Having run out of all the bad names though, one had to put a bad spin on some of the not so bad names.
It probably started with “Fundamentalism”. The evangelists of the 1920s, the first of the creed, stood for separation of church from the state. “Islamic Fundamentalism” on the other hand, as posited by scholars like Olivier Roy and John Esposito, is more about “opposition to the perceived corrupting influence of the Western culture" and “Islamic revivalism”. Even Bernard Lewis, hardly ever accused of sympathy for anything Islamic, considers the use of this term as unfortunate and misleading. In one of the German think tanks, the term was taboo.
Our detractors however not only use it, they also associate it with “political activism, extremism, fanaticism, terrorism, and anti-Americanism” (Esposito again). Any Islamic Movement that makes them uncomfortable can thus be conveniently reviled as “fundamentalist”. Ape-like, we have followed suit and that with a vengeance. Anyone even remotely suggesting that the religion might provide an answer to some of our recurring confusion is now a “Fundo”.
Jihad, like Crusade, was a concept that expressed fortitude to fight ills in society- ignorance, illiteracy, bigotry, and all the rest. The use of arms indeed had its place, especially- some would say, exclusively- in self defence. No more. The mere mention of the word can now send chill up our spines, assuming of course there was still some left. No one even dare suggest that Jihad can also be waged sans arms, in its more sublime form. The UN may sanction armed resistance against foreign occupation, but if waged in the name of Jihad it must be condemned, and a Jihadi prosecuted as a “terrorist”.
You guessed it. Terrorism is the latest and the deadliest form of this name calling game.
There were times one could sensibly discuss this phenomenon. Remember how passionately we used to distinguish it from the ‘freedom fight’, and insisted that the state terrorism must also count for something! No longer. Post 9/11, terrorism has become an instrument of state policy. Any of them- Chechens, Uyghur, Hamas, Hezbollah, Kashmiris, and indeed the Taliban of all hues straddling the Durand Line- once labelled as “terrorist” are fair game. In response, the non-state actors (NSAs), with little chance to match the state in the war of semantics, have improved upon the tactics of war.
Yes, that is what it is. Terrorism, in its broadly accepted sense- “deliberately targeting non-combatants to achieve a political objective”- has been practiced as a “technique” by the state as well as by the NSAs. With Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Vietnam, and recently Fallujah in Iraq and Operation Balussa in Afghanistan, America leads the pack of states. The UK with its carpet bombing of Dresden is not far behind. (Phil Rees, a documentary film maker who has done stories on terrorists, or, as he prefers to call them, militants, says: “if we don’t want to describe Britain and America as terrorist nations, then the only principled alternative is to purge the word from the lexicon”.) In a way we did worse in the former East Pakistan- killed our own unarmed citizens.
The NSAs in their war against the state- rightly described as a form of “asymmetrical warfare”- target the non-combatants all the time. Inability to effectively engage the combatants is their excuse. The state, whenever it cares to rationalise such acts, blames the militants for hiding behind the civilians, or shrugs them off as “collateral damage”. The rest of us may lament the loss of innocent lives or ponder over moralities and legalities, the two belligerents carry on with terrorism regardless.
Overtime, the NSAs have discovered the “ultimate weapon”. The human being embraces most of the attributes desired in a perfect weapon system. He can carry a warhead and manoeuvre around obstacles; is hard to detect and intercept; can identify the target; choose the time to release his lethal cargo; and if needed abort the mission without much fuss. There still remains though this matter of motivating him to make the ultimate sacrifice. Depending upon the individual, money, a cause worth its while, and indoctrination are some of the tools available. In military terms, too, it is cost effective- many of the foes for one of theirs, with terror as the collateral, in fact the real, benefit.
No wonder, seeking a fatwa to exorcise suicide bombing does not work. (The Israelis also toyed with this idea in the mid 1990s.) It has nothing to do with religion, only with achieving a war aim. Though a myth of the 65 War; when it went around that some of our soldiers tied to explosives would jump in front of the Indian tanks, we did not invoke any religious injunction. Looking at “terrorism” as a war fighting technique may also explain its ever expanding practice. Its usage has increased many times over since we declared a “war on terror”. How does one fight the ‘means’ of waging a war, is indeed a different matter.
We still have the right to disagree with the use of such means and call the perpetrators names, even the ones not quite apt. The problem is that in this clash of asymmetric forces, the dice is heavily loaded in favour of the irregular warriors. Those amongst them with adequate support amongst the population can prolong it for years and decades. More often than not, the state is forced to compromise and thus the terrorists of yesterday become patriots of today and at times leaders of tomorrow. For that reason alone, it was prudent to keep a window open for some of those whom we had lumped under the “Taliban”. From Moderate to Reconcilable and back to Mujahedeen is but closing an historical cycle.
One has often wondered why a dog has to be given a bad name before it is killed! It already has one. Moreover, you are not supposed to kill bad dogs, only mad ones.

(Lt. Gen(r)Asad Durrani is Former Head of the Pakistani Intelligence Agency Inter-Services Intelligence).