To Tackle Global Terrorism, Target the Local Roots

TERRORISTS strike in Mumbai and Baghdad, in Jakarta and Jerusalem, killing hundreds of innocent people, including international public servants and infants.

In the meantime, stock markets around the world rise, reaching heights not seen in more than two years, amid increasingly convincing signs of a global economic recovery.

What is going on? Why this disjunction?

Do investors have their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge that the scourge of terrorism has yet to be defeated?

Or does the disjunction reflect an accurate assessment of the situation: that terrorism remains a threat, but a containable one; that Sept 11 was the high-water mark, not the first of many similar, or more horrific, strikes?

In a strange way, Sept 11 set a new standard for horror. Central banks, finance ministries and investment houses now routinely put out forecasts with the proviso 'barring another cataclysm', or some such words - by which they mean, something as horrific, or exceeding, Sept 11.

From the point of view of the United States, in particular, what would exceed Sept 11 is terrorist groups getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and using them. Thus the Bush administration's singular focus on the WMD threat, leading it to invade and occupy Iraq, among other things.

In part because terrorist groups do not seem to have got hold of WMDs - and in part because they have not struck the US since Sept 11 - US President George W. Bush proclaimed recently that Al-Qaeda is on the run, that the US is winning the war against terrorism.

It does not look that way to people in Jakarta or Jerusalem, Mumbai or Baghdad.

Al-Qaeda is not by any means behind all these attacks. The strikes did not all issue from a single collective cause. Hamas in Jerusalem has different aims from Jemaah Islamiah in Jakarta, which in turn has a different agenda from whichever group it was that struck in Mumbai. But together, the strikes indicate that terrorism is alive and kicking in many parts of the world.

For Washington, it is terrorist groups 'with global reach' which are the chief problem - the US being more or less coterminous with the globe in Washington's eyes. For Indonesia, India and numerous other countries, the local is the global.

For Washington, it is WMDs that are catastrophic. For Indonesia, India and others, a single car bomb can have catastrophic effects, economically and politically.

Together, the recent attacks also illustrate what the focus on WMDs - or the 'next' Sept 11 - may have led some to forget: namely, that individual terrorists themselves, and the culture that breeds them, are as much a problem as the weapons they wield.

Suicide bombers, in particular, illustrate that the ultimate weapon of terror are the terrorists themselves.

A suicide bomber is a committed individual - the act that consumes him, together with his victims, being proof of his commitment. And he (and increasingly she in Palestine) can only believe his act transfigures him into a hero because his immediate society validates that belief.

As Dr Brian Jenkins, a terrorism expert at Rand Corporation, put it recently: 'The fact that they've been able to sustain the tactic suggests that this tactic is applauded in the community, and it reflects a society under considerable stress.'

What the recent spate of attacks reminds one above all, is that terrorism ultimately has its source in culture, that it is a psycho-pathology with deep roots in particular societies, in particular histories.

Attacking the problem 'globally' or strategically - by rolling up Al-Qaeda's network or denying it WMDs or resolving the Israeli-Palestinian dispute - makes sense, for there is undoubtedly a global dimension to terrorism.

But that one won't be enough, for terrorism is a global problem with numerous local roots, which have to be uprooted one by one.

Quite apart from capturing Hambali, or even Osama bin Laden, there have to be numerous local cultural, political and security root-canal operations, as even Washington is beginning to realise in Iraq.