The global war on terror from the inside

By Seth Mandel
Dec. 7, 2007

Sebestyen Gorka listened intently as high-level military officials discussed, for two days in Florida, the most up-to-date methods for defeating al-Qaeda.

On the third day, Gorka, the director of the Institute for Transitional Democracy and International Security (ITDIS) and a prolific author and policy analyst on terrorism and democracy, was asked to speak.

"Gentlemen, we are six years after 9/11," Gorka said, repeating the comments he made in Florida to a New York City audience Nov. 29. "You're discussing whether al-Qaeda is an organization, a movement, a network, an ideology, or something else. In 1944, we weren't debating who Hitler was."

Gorka was the guest speaker at a luncheon held at the Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan Nov. 29. The event was co-sponsored by ITDIS and the Hudson Institute New York Briefing Council, the N.Y.-based public policy discussion arm of the Washington D.C.-based futurist think tank.

In Gorka's address, titled "The War on Terror: The View from Europe," he lamented the fact that the term Islamo-fascism was all but dropped after some objected to the term on the grounds that the Salafists, the fundamentalist followers of Abd Al-Wahhab's Islamist reform (sometimes called Wahhabis) don't possess a nation-state, and therefore fascism is a difficult conceptual fit.

"I don't care," Gorka said. "We need something that's understandable, and we have to understand that it is a dictatorial regime that we are talking about."

And that illustrates one of the problems with the war on terror, he said: Currently, the global narrative of the issue is being controlled by Osama bin Laden. On that note, Gorka posited that if he asked residents the Middle East and Asia with whom they associated the concept of the caliphate, the first name would be bin Laden.

But what if those same people were asked with whom they associate liberty, freedom, and democracy?

"This may sound corny, but for my parents, on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, when you said 'freedom, democracy, liberty' in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, and '80s, one thing came to mind: the Statue of Liberty and America," Gorka said. "And we have to get back to the point where we control the dialogue."

Not only is bin Laden controlling the dialogue, Gorka said, but he also means what he says. To this end, Gorka produced two maps (see graphics on this page); the first was a map charting the pattern of post-Cold War Islamist violence in North Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia. The second map was the area controlled by the last caliphate -- the Abbasid Dynasty that existed until 1258 C.E.

"It is no accident, ladies and gentleman, that the violence that has been executed in the name of Salafi jihad since 1992 almost corresponds exactly to the ancient caliphate," Gorka said. "But these gentlemen do not wish to leave it at that. They wish to see a global caliphate -- a complete melding of religion and politics on a worldwide scale."

There are parallels, Gorka said, between the Islamist terrorism campaign being waged against the West and the 20^th century fight against the Soviets, such as the us-or-them nature of the battle, or the fact that extremist leaders claimed to represent their people.

But there are stark -- and important -- differences as well.

"Although Khrushchev may have taken his shoe off, banged it on the table in New York and said, 'We will bury you', he never did," Gorka said. "Bin Laden killed 3,000 people in 120 minutes on U.S. soil. It made Khrushchev look like a rank amateur."

It is also necessary, Gorka believes, to look at the terminology and patterns of radicalization, as was done by the New York Police Department in a recent two-year study of radicalization trends.

One of the conclusions of the study was the relevance of 9/11.

He said before Sept. 11, 2001, if you wanted to volunteer for jihad, you would go to Afghanistan, Georgia, Chechnya, or Bosnia.

That, he said, was the dynamic of the classic mujahed -- but that dynamic has been redefined by 9/11. For two current examples, Gorka looked to the perpetrators of the 2005 London subway bombing and the 2004 murder of Dutch director Theo van Gogh.

"These individuals all volunteered to be mujaheds," Gorka said. "But when they got to bin Laden and al-Qaeda, (al-Qaeda leaders) said "Hey, you speak German, you speak English, you've got a job in London; we're not sending you to Afghanistan or Chechnya, we're going to send you back, and you're going to kill white people in your own country."

Gorka advised the audience not to buy into a perceived European weakness on terror or the idea that on terrorism Americans are divided into two sides separated by a canyon-sized chasm.

The true division, he said, is among the political elite, and they are divided over one concept.

"The question is: Do we believe religion is relevant to this war?" Gorka said. "The overarching Democrat, liberal argument is that it has nothing to do with the fight -- 9/11 is not about religion, it's about poverty, it's about sins of the West, you name it, anything else except religion.

"I think you cannot understand 9/11 without understanding religion, and I think that is a grave mistake if the next administration moves in that direction."

But the citizens of Muslim nations can answer that question for us: Gorka presented the results of a Gallup poll that asked whether religion was an important part of the respondents' lives.

In Indonesia, 99 percent of respondents answered to the affirmative; in Iran, that number was 74 percent; in Turkey, it was 86 percent; in Pakistan, it was 95 percent; and in Egypt, it was 98 percent.

After his speech, Gorka was asked to further explain the relevance of theology to the current conflict. He spoke about the significance of the 1979 Iranian revolution, and the miniature caliphate in Afghanistan.

But the most significant example, he said, was the siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca -- Islam's holiest site -- by 500 Salafist extremists. Gorka said that following the retaking of the mosque with the help of the French special forces, the Saudi government made a secret pact with the Salafists that if they cease such activities, the Saudi crown would help fund their institutions and give them general freedom and influence.

"This going to bed by the Saudi regime with the Salafists after the hostage taking in Mecca is perhaps even more important than Iran and Afghanistan put together," Gorka said.

Other audience members asked Gorka about how to fight the Salafists both at home and abroad.

Fighting them here, Gorka said, consists of finding ways to stop the Islamist leaders from recruiting on our soil, as well as gathering intelligence to insulate ourselves and stay one step ahead -- or at least keep pace with -- Salafist war strategy.

The latter can be a challenge, Gorka said, because during the Cold War, soviet agents would walk in the front door and say, "I hate communism. I want to help." In fact, Gorka said, our best agents were often ex-soviet walk-ins.

"Salafists are not going to walk in," Gorka said.

We also must rethink our own intelligence. In the Cold War, Gorka said, intelligence went straight to the president, then was systematically edited as it moved down the line.

"That pyramid of intelligence production has to be inverted," Gorka said. "Intelligence has to be written not for the president, but for the beat cop in the Bronx."

One questioner asked if it would be easier for Western governments if they let the Salafists establish a caliphate.

"It definitely makes programming your cruise missiles much easier if you have an address," Gorka joked, but said that the war in Afghanistan has decentralized Islamist terror networks. It's one of the reasons there have been no major terror attacks against the U.S. since 9/11, he said.

"In terms of operational issues and capacity, the fact that we removed this mini, tiny caliphate in Central Asia is actually good for us," Gorka said. "The second issue is, what are you going to give them as a caliphate? Because they want Spain, they want most of Europe."

Those that fund terrorism cannot be excluded, either, Gorka said. If, after 9/11, Western powers are advertising a global war on terror, then after Iraq and Afghanistan, there are two countries that come next: Saudi Arabia and Iran.

"If there's one country in the world that's been killing civilians in the name of terror for 35 years, it's Iran," Gorka said.

Gorka also said that the West must be unafraid to utilize one nonviolent -- but effective -- tactic in particular: propaganda.

"It is not a dirty function," Gorka said. "If you believe in your system, and it has just values, you need to communicate that to the world, and that is a function of propaganda."

History can also be our guide, Gorka said. All the nations of the world -- or at least the leaders -- are not living in the same century.

"We have to understand timelines," Gorka said. "We are in the 21^st century; Russia is in the 19^th; bin Laden is in the 7^th. If we don't get that, we're not going to understand the dynamics."