WATANI International
10 January 2010
Dozens of people were killed on Sunday when a man drove a vehicle packed with explosives across a field and detonated them. The dead and wounded were entirely helpless players and spectators in a volleyball tournament in northwest Pakistan. They were victims of a suicide bomber. They were also victims, less directly, of an increasingly alarming facet of the international order: failed states, in which terrorist groups can find sanctuary and sustenance.
The bombing happened near the increasingly anarchic tribal belt encompassing North and South Waziristan. From there, Taleban insurgents have launched ferocious attacks in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Nearly 600 people in Pakistan have been killed in terrorist assaults in the past three months. The superficial explanation is that this is retaliation for the military campaign launched by Pakistan in October to clear the Taleban from the tribal areas. But that is, in reality, no explanation at all.
Radical Islamists are bent on establishing theocratic regimes across the region. They would outlaw religious and political dissent, subjugate women and — if they made their way to Islamabad — put nuclear weapons in the hands of fanatics who seek to hasten a literal apocalypse. They are not provoked into violence: holy war is their end and not merely a means. They fill a space and train terrorist recruits where the writ of constitutional government does not run.
The Taleban came to control more than 90 per cent of Afghanistan in the late 1990s, in the vacuum left by the withdrawal of occupying Soviet forces. They thereby served as host of al-Qaeda, which planned assaults on Western civilian and military targets. The attempt to bring down a transatlantic flight on Christmas Day, by a Nigerian who had apparently received orders from al-Qaeda in Yemen, fits a similar pattern. Yemen has a weak government and declining reserves of water and oil. It also has a flow of migrants from Somalia, a still more impoverished and unstable country, across a 200-mile stretch of the Arabian Sea.
Somalia is a near-textbook case of a failed state. Much of the country is in a state of lawlessness in which competing warlords battle for supremacy. The surrounding sea lanes are the scene of murderous piracy. US policy has been inconstant and ill judged, first rebuffing an Islamic movement and then extending support to it when a radical wing of it was thereby enabled to present itself as a nationalist movement.
The Horn of Africa might easily turn out to be another Afghanistan: states in nothing but name, where militant Islamism takes root and grows unchecked. It is symptomatic of a huge, global problem. In a recent book two authorities, Ashraf Ghani (a former Afghan Finance Minister) and Clare Lockhart, estimate that 40 to 60 states, home to nearly two billion people, are either rapidly deteriorating or close to implosion. These states represent a security threat and an immanent humanitarian catastrophe.
There is no glib resolution of these states’ problems. It must, however, be a central concern of Western diplomacy and the United Nations to restore effective governance to countries that lack it. The notion of state sovereignty is worse than a fiction: it is a cruel joke, in countries such as Somalia and regions such as the Afghan-Pakistani border. It is becoming so in Yemen. And in recent history Slobodan Milosevic and President al-Bashir of Sudan have invoked the principle of state sovereignty while committing crimes against humanity.
The impetus for terrorism is ideology rather than injustice. But terrorism is parasitic on conditions of lawlessness. Fixing failed and failing states is a mountainous but essential task.
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The Times, editorial