Writing from Paris in The New York Times Olivier Roy asks, "has Britain (and Spain as well) been 'punished by Al Qaeda for participating in the American-led military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan?"
He answers no. He sees the roots of Islamic terrorism beyond Middle Eastern conflicts.
I feel Roy comes too close to undervaluing Afghanistan and Iraq as significant, not root, causes of terrorism. There's now general consensus among the military, diplomatic, and intelligence communities that the invasion and occupation of Iraq have resulted in an increase in global terrorism, because the conflicts in Iraq and the (smoldering and increasingly hot) one in Afghanistan provide literal training and recruiting grounds for new terrorists to strike both in those lands and beyond.
Roy is correct that from "the beginning, Al Qaeda's fighters were global jihadists," that for them "every conflict is simply a part of the Western encroachment on the Muslim ummah, the worldwide community of believers," and that their "vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are." But, those truths are not mutually exclusive of the truths that the invasion and occupation of Iraq has, at least in the short term, made the world less safe against terrorism, and may very well prove to have been a Bad Idea.
It's not that Roy dismisses Iraq or other Middle Eastern conflicts utterly. He does state that they "have a tremendous impact on Muslim public opinion worldwide," and that terrorists' references to them provide "popularity or at least legitimacy among Muslims;" they are good opportunities for propaganda. But Roy perhaps skips too lightly over the significance of that fact.
Nonetheless, on his main theme that Iraq and Middle East conflicts are not root causes--and, to be fair, NYT op-eds don't really give the writer opportunity to follow more than one main theme--Roy has great arguments.
He points out that "Americans went to Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, not before. Mohamed Atta and the other pilots were not driven by Iraq or Afghanistan," and not likely by the "plight of the Palestinians," either, whose "second intifada began in September 2000, at a time of relative optimism in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations," well after the 9/11 attack plans were hatched.
Critically important, I think, is Roy's observation that Bin Laden by the time of even the first invasion of Iraq was "a veteran fighter committed to global jihad," who had left "the Middle East to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980's," and that except for a smallish Egyptian faction of Al Qaeda, Lin Laden & company "were not involved in Middle Eastern politics." In fact, "Abdullah Azzam, Mr. bin Laden's mentor, gave up supporting the Palestinian Liberation Organization long before his death in 1989 because he felt that to fight for a localized political cause was to forsake the real jihad, which he felt should be international and religious in character."
Roy presses on powerfully:
[I]f the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine are at the core of the radicalization, why are there virtually no Afghans, Iraqis or Palestinians among the terrorists? Rather, the bombers are mostly from the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, Egypt and Pakistan - or they are Western-born converts to Islam. Why would a Pakistani or a Spaniard be more angry than an Afghan about American troops in Afghanistan? It is precisely because they do not care about Afghanistan as such, but see the United States involvement there as part of a global phenomenon of cultural domination.
And:
Even [the terrorists'] calls for [Western troop withdrawals] from Iraq ring false. After all, the Spanish police have foiled terrorist attempts in Madrid even since the government withdrew its forces. Western-based radicals strike where they are living, not where they are instructed to or where it will have the greatest political effect on behalf of their nominal causes.
So, for Roy, the root causes of terrorism are at the nexus between globalization and radical religion. He writes that the Westernized converts so often found among the members of terrorist cells convert "because they felt excluded from Western society (this is especially true of the many converts from the Caribbean islands, both in Britain and France)." They are "looking for a cause," they are "not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations."
Olivier Roy is a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, and is the author of Globalized Islam.
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