Terrorism

Two aggrieved Islamic men follow a foreign cause and wage jihad on their fellow Australians. Shouting Allahu akbar, they stage an ambush, raise a home-made flag and open fire on hundreds of men, women and children. They escape and die in a final shoot-out. They leave four dead and seven wounded.

It could be ripped from today’s headlines – except it happened a hundred years ago. On New Year’s Day in 1915, Gul Mehmet and Molla Abdullah, denizens of Ghantown, the despised Afghan settlement on the outskirts of Broken Hill, took up arms against the town’s citizens as they rode the train to the annual Oddfellows picnic. They did so in the name of the Turkish Sultan, who was calling for resistance to the Anzac invaders in their home territory.

Many of us would find it as hard as Shaw’s Ladvenu does to think of any good reason for torture. It seems medieval, it is abhorrent, it is internationally illegal, and it doesn’t work. Statements made under torture are legally useless, and their value as intelligence is not much better ...

Timely and accurate intelligence remains crucial to providing early warning of preparations for a terrorist attack. In this sense, high-grade intelligence represents the ‘front end’ of counter-terrorist strategy. This has certainly been reflected in the streamlining of Australia’s intelligence agencies since 9/11 and in the unprecedented resources that have been diverted to those agencies, particularly ASIO. The latter remains the agency responsible for preparing and distributing threat assessments and specific warnings on terrorist threats to Australia. This decade it has been granted substantially increased legislative powers to monitor, detain and question terrorist suspects. Due to the changes to Australia’s anti-terror laws since 9/11, ASIO’s internal security profile has become more prominent along with its increasingly close cooperation with state and federal police agencies.

Two months ago, I was in Islamabad to address an international conference on suicide terrorism. The Pakistani army was engaged in heavy fighting with the Islamic militants in the Pashtun-dominated northern Pakistan, bordering Afghanistan. The security situation was deteriorating. Senior Pakistani intelligence officers were worried that it would lead to an escalation of suicide attacks. Their assessment was supported by the other government officials, including doctors working in the region, who told me of the widespread perception among Pashtuns that the predominantly Punjabi Pakistan army was committing genocide of the Pashtun nation and was thus turning the population against the army. The aerial bombings by Pakistani helicopter gunships and the US-NATO drones were causing many civilian casualties.

Whether they be Irish Fenians, Russian revolutionaries, the ‘guilty white kids’ of Italy’s Red Brigade or (then) West Germany’s Baader Meinhof gang, African National Congress members fighting to end apartheid, Palestinian gunmen, al Qaeda bombers, or an assortment of other evil-doers, Michael Burleigh sets out the terrible things that human beings can do to one another. He provides much information about what happened or allegedly happened, and points the finger in all directions – at individuals, groups and governments alike. Few are spared his disdain.

The fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks revived familiar lines of debate about the significance of terrorism. On one side are those who believe that 9/11 brought into stark relief a deadly new challenge to our values and existence, an enemy that must be faced resolutely and fought on every front. On the other are those who believe that 9/11 gave birth (or rebirth) not to a new form of threat but to a noxious form of politics: self-righteous, muscular and xenophobic. It is to this stand-off that Robert Goodin makes a refreshing and much-needed contribution. Goodin is a rare commodity: a political philosopher who remains resolutely focused on the problems and controversies that bedevil the real world of politics and policy. His most recent offering, What’s Wrong with Terrorism?, sets out to make a ‘moral assessment of the phenomenon of terrorism and reactions to it’, asking: ‘what is the distinctive wrong of terrorism? … what makes terrorists different from, and morally even worse than, ordinary murderers, kidnappers, and so on?’

A decade ago, security was the poor cousin to economics in policy studies and public discussion.  When John Howard took office in 1996, we were in the midst of an era of euphoric globalisation in which the popular imagination was dominated by wonder at the spread of the free market, growing volumes of trade and finance, and seemingly ever-rising wealth and standards of living. As Paul Kelly has observed, Howard realised early that in this context a government’s perceived capacity to manage the economy – balancing budgets, reducing unemployment, keeping interest rates down – was, to the mind of the electorate, the prime indicator of its fitness to govern. Australians, living through the longest economic boom in decades, had become fearful of a return to the days of economic turmoil and uncertainty. In this era, national security was a most unfashionable topic – at best a distraction, at worst a distortion of the ‘beautiful numbers’ delivered by globalisation.

Books on globalisation abound, to the point that it has become difficult to say anything new about the issues at stake. But despite this challenge, Tom Nairn and Paul James manage to add substance to the debate. They do so by rethinking the relationship between nationalism and globalisation. The defining feature of this engagement is the authors’ attempt to circumvent what they believe is a very polarised debate.