Book Review - Globalisation and the New Terror: The Asia Pacific Dimension

Globalisation and the New Terror: The Asia Pacific Dimension

Written by: David Martin Jones (ed.), 

Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK,2004, 

ISBN: 9781845427771, xv + 316pp.

Reviewed by: Michael Evans, Head of the Land Warfare Studies Centre and coeditor of the AAJ.

The study of terrorism is a field that often lends itself to sensationalism and instant books based on breathless narrative and journalistic impression. None of these features characterises Globalisation and the New Terror. On the contrary, the latter book is one of a number of considered studies to emerge in the wake of the tragedy of 11 September 2001. These studies include Walter Laqueur’s No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century, Paul Berman’s meditation on Islamic fascism, Terror and Liberalism—both published last year—and Lee Harris’s Civilization and its Enemies (2004).

Composed of essays from a 2002 conference sponsored by the University of Tasmania, the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Office and the Standing Advisory Committee on Commonwealth/State Cooperation for Protection Against Violence, Globalisation and Terror explores the anatomy of millennial New Terrorism. Collectively the seventeen essays in this timely and informative book highlight the rise of mass-casualty terrorism as part of what US Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, once called ‘the war of the future’. In the 20th century, most terrorist groups sought ‘the oxygen of publicity’. They wanted millions watching their propaganda by deed; they did not want, nor did they possess the means, to kill thousands. Moreover, many 20th-century terrorist groups—from the Croatian Ustasha of the 1930s to the German Red Army Faction of the 1970s to the Basque ETA of the 1980s—were secular in their aims and ideology.

In the wake of the end of the Cold War, all of these dynamics have changed. In the early 21st century, terrorism has become more religious and millenarian in its character. Twentieth-century counter-terrorism concentrated on prosecution and punishment; today in the new millennium we must focus on prevention, containment and response. Moreover, at the beginning of the 21st century, over half of the FBI’s list of most dangerous groups are overtly religious and employ the strategy of suicide bombing. The activities of such groups, which range from al-Qa’ida to the Chechens, are assisted by the spread of global information technology and the interconnected character of modern society. As David Martin Jones and Mike Smith note in their introduction, a worldwide terrorist network such as al-Qa’ida functions as ‘a de-territorialised franchising agency for jihadist activity on a global basis—a Kentucky Fried Chicken of Global Terror’.

The range of the book is extensive. Australian security analyst, Grant Wardlaw, explores the character of anti-globalisation protest. The leading terrorist specialist, Rohan Gunaratna, examines the networked and de-territorialised threat of al-Qa’ida and warns that defeating such a movement will require multi-agency, multidimensional responses by democratic states. The ANU’s Clive Williams provides a thumbnail sketch of the ideology of Islamic extremism, particularly the Wahabbist variation. Moving from theory to practice, other essays examine the weaponry and asymmetric strategy of modern terrorism. In his contribution, Angus Muir analyses the evolution of the use of the bomb in terrorist tactics, a methodology that has given the world the suicide cadre. Gavin Cameron and Francois Haut assess the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) threat while the essays of Kevin O’Brien and Michele Zanini explore the nature of information-age terrorism, focusing on ‘netwars’ and cyber-terrorism.

Part III of the book will be of particular interest to Australian scholars and security practitioners since it concentrates on the implications of global terrorism for the Asia-Pacific. In this section it is the infrastructure of regional terror that is brought into the academic spotlight. Professor James Cotton analyses South-East Asia as the ‘second front’ in the global campaign against terrorism; Andrew Tan scrutinises armed Muslim separatism in regional trouble-spots such as Aceh, Mindanao and Pattani. Former Australian Federal Police officer, John MacFarlane, explores the nexus between organised crime and terrorism, focusing on such groups as Abu Sayaf that straddle a frontier between terrorism and criminality. The focus on the relationship between terrorism and crime is continued by the RAND analyst, Peter Chalk, who provides a useful assessment of the heroin trade as a manifestation of both transnational crime and the rise of the phenomenon of narco-terrorism in South-East Asia.

The book’s final section highlights the problem of devising suitable legal responses by Western countries to global terrorism. ASIO chief, Dennis Richardson, provides a useful overview of the way in which Australia’s intelligence agencies have braced to meet the new challenge. Finally, former UN Ambassador, Richard Butler, presents the case for a counter-terrorist strategy based on improved global relations, counterproliferation and an appreciation of the use of information technologies.

For this reviewer, Part I of this book, which concentrates on ideology and the problem of theorising about the New Terror, represents the most interesting aspects of Globalisation and the New Terror. In the West, there is arguably too much concentration on the instrumental character of mass-casualty terrorism, when our real need is to understand the existentialist Islamist ideology that motivates young men to fly jetliners into skyscrapers, killing thousands of innocents. Here the essays by Paul Schulte, Rohan Gunaratna and Clive Williams provide some useful insights. In particular, British analyst, Schulte, points out that in some respects the War on Terror represents a struggle between an affluent, post-heroic and ageing West and an angry, poor, young and belligerent South and East.

The subtext of these essays suggests that, if we seek to eradicate Islamo-fascism’s suicide soldiers, we need to study the works of the Egyptian, Sayyid Qutb, the key theologian of relentless global jihad. Qutb, who was executed by Nasser in 1966, believed that the West’s tradition of freedom and rationality derived from classical Greece was the mortal enemy of Islam based on faith and eternal truth, and must be resisted by permanent jihad. It is Qutb’s ideology that fuels what Schulte calls ‘megalomaniac hyper-terrorism’, based on religious fanaticism, internationalism and modern network-centricity.

On one level, al-Qa’ida emerges as a protest against modernity, a global Mahdist movement prepared to kill its enemies anywhere and everywhere. Defeating such a ruthless movement requires a sophisticated response, ranging from dissuasion through deterrence and detection to defence. For the West to triumph in what will be a long twilight struggle, we will need national resilience, careful risk management, political resolve and above all judgment and skill in the application of force. The sad truth that is revealed by the essays in this important study is that our interlinked cosmopolitan societies make poor fortresses against global, mass-casualty terrorism. As Schulte notes, in order to defend the heritage of Athens, symbolised by our cities and urban civilisation, we may have to build modern versions of the famous Long Walls. We may also have to accept that defending our modern Athens may mean that increasingly we have to adopt the martial values of Sparta.