'ISLAMO-FASCISM' – THE SHAPE OF FUTURE CONFLICT?

Christopher Michaelsen

'Islamist Terrorism is one of our biggest security threats.'

HARDLY. The notion that Islamist terrorism constitutes one of the biggest security threats to Australia has been advanced by various Australian governments in the post-9/11 era. We have been told to prepare for a decades-long fight against ruthless, invisible enemies who hate our way of life and seek to destroy our society. As then Prime Minister John Howard said, '[T]hat attack of eleventh of September was as much an attack on Australia as it was on America. It not only killed Australians in the World Trade Centre, but it also assaulted the very values on which this nation is built.' These and other views have been repeatedly advanced by Australian leaders. They can also be found in various policy documents such as the two counter-terrorism White Papers of 2004 and 2010 as well as in several reports to Parliament by Australia's domestic security agency, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO). As of June 2013, the government's official threat level in Australia remained at 'medium' – a terrorist attack could well occur.

In light of heavily publicised campaigns to promote public awareness on terrorism and national security, it is perhaps not surprising that Australians indeed believed that a terrorist attack in Australia was only a matter of time. According to an opinion poll published by the Sydney Morning Herald in late April 2004, 68 per cent expected that terrorists would strike Australia before too long. In late 2007, 66 per cent were 'concerned' that a 'major terrorist attack on Australian soil' was going to take place in the 'near future'. Figures from opinion polls conducted on behalf of the Lowy Institute for International Policy tell a similar story. In 2006, 73 per cent of respondents considered 'international terrorism' a 'critical' threat. In the 2008 poll, this number was slightly down, at 66 per cent. At the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in 2011, 60 per cent of Australians considered the ability of terrorists to launch a major attack against Australians as 'the same' as at the time of the 2002 Bali bombings, with another 19 per cent saying it was now 'greater'.

So, are those public sentiments justified? How real and dangerous is the threat of terrorism in Australia? How has it been portrayed by the Australian government? Who is actually threatening us? And what is actually being threatened?

The terrorism rhetoric of the Australian government

When four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon in Washington DC, and into a remote field in Pennsylvania on the morning of 11 September 2001, most Australians were about to go to bed or asleep already. Not so their Prime Minister, John Howard, who had flown into Washington on 8 September 2001 for an extensive working visit that included the first face-to-face meetings with President George W. Bush and key members of his administration. Three days later, however, Howard found himself at the epicentre of the emotional firestorm that engulfed the United States in the aftermath of the unprecedented terrorist attacks. Howard's presence in Washington and his first-hand experience of the surreal and dramatic events that unfolded on 9/11 not only forged his close personal relationship with President Bush but also had a lasting impact on his approach to the challenges associated with the evaluation of the threat of international terrorism back home.

On 11 September 2001, Howard was scheduled to open a business forum at the US Chamber of Commerce to build momentum for a free-trade agreement between Australia and the United States. The Prime Minister was in his hotel room preparing for an informal press conference with Australian journalists before his departure to the business forum when his press secretary, Tony O'Leary, knocked on the door and informed him that a plane had struck the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, Howard's personal protection details from the Australian Federal Police and the US Secret Service decided that there was an urgent need to get the Prime Minister somewhere safer. Howard and his staff were rushed to the Australian Embassy, nine blocks away, where they spent the rest of the day in the second sub-basement, a windowless maintenance area below street level with a makeshift kitchen, dusty tables and broken chairs. Having witnessed the Pentagon burning a few hundred metres away and having watched the World Trade Center's twin towers collapse live on television, Howard experienced the events of 9/11 in a direct way that no other foreign leader did.

After consulting with Australian officials assembled in the Embassy's sub-basement and with key Cabinet members in Canberra in the middle of the night, the Prime Minister personally drafted a short letter to President Bush expressing horror at the loss of life and pledging 'Australia's resolute solidarity with the American people at this most tragic time'. Two days later, the Prime Minister returned to Canberra and invoked Article IV of the ANZUS Pact, the first Australian prime minister to do so since the treaty was concluded in 1951. At a press conference on 14 September 2001 he declared it was the 'unanimous view' of the Cabinet that Australia stood ready to 'cooperate within the limits of its capability concerning any response that the United States may regard as necessary in consultation with her allies'. The Prime Minister made clear, moreover, that 'at no stage should any Australian regard this as something that is just confined to the United States. It is an attack upon the way of life we hold dear in common with the Americans.'

In the following years, the Australian government's description of the threat of terrorism perfectly replicated the narrative offered by the Bush administration in Washington. The replications not only contained the same metaphors and analogies but, at times, the very same wording President Bush used in his speeches following the 9/11 attacks. From the first, the President had made it clear that the United States had been attacked for its virtuous qualities rather than its policy choices. According to the President, the reasons for the assault were to be found in the identity and nature of the terrorists and not in any concrete political grievances. America was targeted simply because the attackers were primitive, barbarian, intolerant and envious. The terrorists' motivations were rooted in their hatred of democracy and freedom as well as in anti-globalisation and anti-modernism.

By explaining the attacks with reference to the alleged character of the perpetrators, Bush sought to suppress any alternative interpretations of 9/11. In doing so, the President implicitly dismissed any possibility that the attacks could have been read in connection with American foreign policy. The 9/11 attacks were rather portrayed as being directed against the United States' longstanding traditions of freedom and democracy. As a consequence, all nations that shared the United States's democratic traditions and principles were under threat. Developing the notion of the civilised world under attack also enabled the Bush administration to portray the fight against terrorism as a generational challenge of historic proportions. As Richard Jackson has pointed out, one of the consequences of these constructions, and most likely part of their intended function, was to de-historicise the 9/11 attacks from the recent past, while simultaneously imposing a radically different set of interpretations.

In Australia, Prime Minister Howard adopted this different set of interpretations as his own. Speaking on national television in 2005, he declared that 'we are dealing with a group of fanatics who have no tolerance for our way of life, who will not be happy unless they have brought down our way of life and imposed their own.' Indeed, the terrorists' objective was 'the destruction of our kind of society'. The Prime Minister employed similar language in his Australia Day address to the National Press Club in Canberra on 25 January 2006. He pointed out that terrorism remained the 'defining element in Australia's security environment' as we knew 'what our enemies think and what they are capable of'. According to Howard, these enemies 'hate our freedoms and our way of life'. Indeed, they 'despise our democratic values' and have 'nothing but contempt for a diverse society which practices tolerance and respect'.

The then Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, portrayed the threat of terrorism to Australia in similarly misconceived terms. Launching the 2004 White Paper on International Terrorism, he claimed that Al-Qaeda and other terrorists pursued a 'terrorist project of limitless ambition'. Australia was therefore engaged in a 'struggle to the death over values'. Islamic terrorist organisations, Downer pointed out, remained 'convinced that their destiny [was] to overshadow the democratic West'. Indeed, the terrorists had embarked on a ruthless mission to 'destroy our society by waging a version of total war'. The 'islamo-fascists', continued Downer, 'cannot achieve their aims through persuasion – only through fear and chaos ... Their precise goals and ideologies are so extreme – and their methods are so evil – that it is difficult for us to understand them.' Al-Qaeda's intent was 'genocidal and utterly uncoloured by reason, restraint, compassion or a notion of shared humanity'.

The Rudd government largely refrained from employing such colourful rhetoric. Nonetheless, its underlying message remained much the same: the terrorist threat had become a 'persistent and permanent feature of Australia's security environment' and terrorism 'continues to pose a serious security challenge to Australia'. Moreover, Australia now faced 'an increased terrorist threat from people born or raised in Australia who take inspiration from international Jihadist narratives'. This assessment was also shared by Rudd's successor. The Gillard government's National Security Strategy, launched in January 2013, continued to consider terrorism and violent extremism as a 'key national security risk'. Similarly, ASIO, in its latest report to Parliament, refers to the 'unfortunate reality' that the threat of terrorism remained 'real and persistent' and therefore represented the 'greatest focus' of ASIO's attention.

As Anne Aly points out (see chapter 2.), the 'values/our way of life' narrative offered by the Australian government, in particular during the Howard years, was both simplistic and misleading. What's more, as Aly has noted, this narrative prevented 'any expanded, nuanced and insightful analysis of why terrorists use violence or the threat of violence and how we might best act to mitigate or prevent it'. In fact, none of the government pronouncements offered any detailed insights on who was actually threatening us. The statements by government representatives simply referred to 'Al-Qaeda', 'a group of fanatics', 'terrorists' or simply 'enemies'. Yet such broad classifications did little to assist in identifying the source of the threat – a key first step in any threat analysis.

Who is threatening us?

Contemporary terrorism is commonly associated with so-called Islamist or Jihadi terrorism, although the usage of both terms is controversial. Indeed, the federal government's 2010 Counter-terrorism White Paper stated that 'the main source of international terrorism and the primary terrorist threat to Australia and Australian interests today comes from people who follow a distorted and militant interpretation of Islam that calls for violence as the answer to perceived grievances.'

A key exponent of Islamist terrorism is Al-Qaeda, which was reportedly founded in the late 1980s by fighters of the Mujahideen campaign against Soviet forces in Afghanistan. Most commentators agree that Al-Qaeda is not a traditional terrorist group with control and command structures but is best described as a decentralised network. Other authors go further and even question the accuracy of portraying Al-Qaeda as a network. They argue that the term 'network' is misleading, as it still implies that a well-organised core leadership in charge of the organisation or network continues to exist. These scholars prefer to refer to Al-Qaeda as an ideology.

While Al-Qaeda may be most accurately described as an 'ideology' rather than an 'organisation' or 'network', such classification is hardly constructive for the purposes of identifying the source of the contemporary threat. In order to escape these analytical difficulties, Philippe Errera, a senior analyst of the French government, proposed using the image of 'three circles' to describe different threat dimensions. According to Errera, the first circle consists of the 'traditional' Al-Qaeda leadership – that is, Osama bin Laden and other individuals who planned the 1998 US Embassy bombings in East Africa, or the attack on the USS Cole and 9/11. Significant progress has been made in disrupting the activities of this first circle, including killing bin Laden himself. Many commentators thus doubt that Al-Qaeda is capable of carrying out another mass-casualty attack of the scale of 9/11.

In the second circle are terrorist groups that may share some of the transnational ideology of the traditional Al-Qaeda leadership, but which were born out of local conflicts. The groups of this circle mainly feed off localised grievances and define their objectives mostly in reference to local political conditions. Oliver Roy, for instance, has characterised these groups as 'territorialised'. Although these assertions may elicit debate from specialists, and criticism from political leaders in whose interest it is to portray 'their' terrorists exclusively as Al-Qaeda affiliates or 'franchisees', one could place in this category groups like the Kashmiri Lashkar-e-Taiba. In Southeast Asia, organisations belonging to the second circle would include Jemaah Islamiyah, the Abu Sayyaf Group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, the Misuari Renegade/Breakaway Group and the Philippine Rajah Sulaiman movement.

The boundaries of the second circle are not fixed and there are no universal metrics to measure and characterise relations between the groups or networks of the first and second circles. This means that operational and financial links may exist between the two circles. These links, however, are unlikely to be of fundamental importance to the operation of the respective organisation or group. As Errera has put it, this second circle is 'still composed of groups and individuals whose primary objective is not that of Osama Bin Laden; ridding the world of Jews, infidels and apostates would be nice, but in the meantime they will probably settle for less.'

The third circle consists of individuals or groups of individuals who profess to act in the name of Al-Qaeda but who may not have any connections to the first and second circles. It is these individuals or groups that are commonly referred to as 'home-grown' terrorists or 'Jihadists'. In 2010, for instance, three Melbourne men were found guilty of a home-grown terror plot to launch a suicide attack on the Holsworthy army base in Sydney. As with the second circle, the exact outline of the third circle cannot be drawn, partly because individuals belonging to this circle tend to operate autonomously and for a range of different reasons. As George Tenet, a former CIA director, has observed, 'these far-flung groups increasingly set the agenda, and are redefining the threat we face. They are not all creatures of Bin Laden, and so their fate is not tied to his. They have autonomous leadership, they pick their own targets, they plan their own attacks.'

The potential size of the third circle is uncertain, as future recruits may currently have no visible violent, 'terrorist' or radical tendency. In fact, the processes of radicalisation, including the psychological and social dynamics that lead from alienation to action, are complex, obscure and subject to change over time. Research into this multifaceted issue suggests that violent extremism is always engendered by a range factors which include not only religious aspects but also personality, nationalism, separatism and discrimination. Scholars commonly agree that no single root cause is instrumental.