Another 9/11?

In an article written before the US Homeland Security Department put out a heightened security alert, Mohamed Sid-Ahmed warns of a possible terrorist attack on America in the near future

---

Three years into the Bush administration's all-out "war on terror", no one can claim with any degree of certainty that the threat of a terrorist attack of an equal or even greater magnitude than 9/11 has been averted. According to the report released last Thursday by the bipartisan congressional committee set up to investigate the intelligence and judgment failures leading up to that fateful day, the worst failure of all was not a lack of information but of imagination. Information of an imminent terrorist attack inside the United States was available -- a fact reluctantly admitted before the commission by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice -- but no one imagined that passenger planes could be used to wreak such havoc. That is, no one but the terrorists themselves who, with few resources but a great deal of imagination, turned themselves and the planes they had hijacked into lethal missiles to destroy some of the most prominent symbols of American economic and military might: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Emboldened by their spectacular success in 2001, they could well be planning an equally daring and imaginative encore in the days to come.

Last week, the Democratic Party held its convention in preparation for the presidential election on 2 November. This will be followed by the Republican Party convention on 30 October. Polls suggest the race for the presidency will be a close one, and the confrontation between the candidates is likely to be rough. The debate will not centre exclusively on the internal front; it will also touch heavily on the global front, in particular on the issue of terrorism.

The war on terror has so far not addressed the root causes of terrorism. It is being waged as a conventional war in which the entire international community has been mobilised. This has fed the sense of alienation that drives terrorists to commit desperate acts of destruction and strengthened their resolve to fight to the end. There has been no attempt on the part of the global establishment to restructure the world system with a view to eliminating the reasons behind the phenomenon of global terrorism. Nor to question why there is such an uneven distribution of wealth worldwide, with some segments of the global population living in extreme prosperity and others in abject poverty. Nor to understand that such disparities feed the sense of alienation and despair that drives terrorists to fight against the system with whatever weapons they can muster, including their own lives. Instead, the authorities are themselves resorting to terror in their war against the terrorists, flouting established conventions and laws in favour of repression and persecution. This short-sighted policy, which found its most flagrant expression in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, can only breed greater hatred, the will to take revenge and further increase the turmoil.

At a news briefing held on the occasion of the release of the 9/11 Commission's report, Commission Chairman Thomas Kean warned that a major attack on American soil is "possible, even probable". I would go even further and say that for such an attack to have the greatest possible impact it will have to take place before the 2 November elections; that is, within the coming three months. If it does not materialise, this will not be because its planners back down but because of a technical hitch, or because the police will have managed to abort it.

If it is to succeed, the attack will require determination, outstanding performance and, especially, the ability to catch people by surprise. In other words, it is unlikely to be a replay of the 9/11 scenario which depended on the successful hijacking of passenger planes, but something altogether new and unexpected. Hijacking planes is not new. For many years it has been the traditional form of terrorist acts. Airport authorities have become experts in fighting this form of terrorism, especially after 9/ 11. But the same cannot be said concerning forms of terrorism that are more sophisticated.

Combating more original forms of terrorism requires superior intelligence-gathering abilities. Certainly the present information revolution can achieve miracles in this field. But gathering intelligence is one thing, processing it is another. Here the human imagination, or, more generally, the human mind, comes into play. Unfortunately, it is not necessarily more powerful than state-of-the- art machines in performing certain functions. For example, computers have defeated champion chess players.

Then there is the element of speed, the need to gather information rapidly in order to foil terrorist attacks. Does this justify running roughshod over basic human rights, as was the case in Abu Ghraib and other centres of detention, notably Guantanamo Bay? We are here facing a deep moral dilemma. Terrorist operations today can kill thousands of people at a time and the speed with which information is gathered can be crucial in preventing such catastrophes. That is the argument used to justify the rough treatment meted out not only to convicted terrorists but to anyone who is even suspected of terrorism.

Under the bipolar world order, there existed some type of mutual deterrence between the two superpowers. Their uneasy but effective balance of terror prevented them from using weapons of mass destruction against one another. In today's unipolar world order, in which one superpower is militarily superior to all the other world powers taken together, the rules of the game are very different. Given the absence of any type of parity, there is the danger of growing disparities and therefore reasons for more frequent collisions between states. It thus appears that the global balance of power is distorted, not only in the long term, but also in the short.

Throughout the Cold War, the threat of mutual annihilation kept the conflict at bay thanks to a balance of terror between two world poles enjoying a degree of military parity. The protagonists in the war on terror enjoy no such parity, and we are consequently left without the security blanket of mutual deterrence. Moreover, if one side is vastly superior in terms of conventional weapons, this is more than offset by the weaker side's access to and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction.

It is worth noting that if a clash is to occur it will most likely break out in the Broader Middle East region, where conflicts overlap. One of the most volatile hot-spots in the world, it is overloaded with conflict situations. There is Iraq, where the confrontation between the provisional government and anti-coalition resistance groups is becoming more acute every day. There is the Palestinian problem and the difficulties facing the creation of a stable government. There are the ominous threats Washington is now directing at Iran for its supposed "collaborative" relationship with Al-Qaeda. There is Israel's insistence on continuing construction of its security fence in defiance of the International Court of Justice ruling and the UN General Assembly resolution condemning it as illegal. There is the friction between the Turks and the Kurds and the war of nerves Washington is waging against Damascus. In short, the region is a tinderbox primed to explode.

Rather than close ranks in the face of the many challenges it is facing, the Arab world is more divided among itself than it has ever been. Terrorist organisations have sprouted all over the place, the disarray in Arab ranks has crippled the Arab League and two Arab leaders, Arafat and Saddam, are in captivity, one under house arrest, the other in a maximum security facility. The ingredients of a major explosion are in place; all it will take to set it off is a spark. Should any of these trouble spots explode, it will set off a chain reaction throughout the region. It will not be possible to separate the Iraqi conflict from the Palestinian, Syria from Lebanon, the Kurdish problem from the Turkish and so on.

Moreover, the spark that sets the whole region ablaze need not come from within the region itself. The Middle East is still reeling from the aftershocks of 9/11, and another deadly terrorist attack is certain to strongly impact the region. And, as long as the root causes that engender terrorism are not addressed, as long as all efforts are directed at treating the symptoms not the disease itself and, last but by no means least, as long as the Arab world remains divided, the Middle East will continue to serve as the main arena of conflict in our time.