New Delhi: When the Cold War ended consequent on the dismemberment of the USSR in 1991, international communism which was the driving force of ideology behind one superpower also faced a demise. The rival US had built itself on the pull of capitalism backed by democracy and a free market resting on competition.
The military balance between the US and the Soviet Socialist Republic - both nuclear powers - had acted as a deterrent against an ‘open war’ that had already become a taboo after World War II.
The tensions of the Cold War ended when the USSR broke up following the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, and China's Deng Xiaoping - taking a lesson from the weakened Soviet economy - decided to "open" the Chinese market to the world outside and planned to follow the economic route rather than the military path, to becoming the alternate superpower.
China promoted Maoism with its instrumentality of violence in various parts of the world but adopted a quieter attitude in the matter of claiming the leadership of the Communist block. With the rise of President Xi Jinping to power, however, China is once again pursuing this ambition vigorously.
Meanwhile, the post-Cold War era saw a rise in cross-border offensives mainly by way of planned attacks of terrorist groups that could be denied by the sponsors. Terrorism by definition is a ‘resort to covert violence for a perceived political cause’ and since a ‘cause’ needed commitment and motivation, terror groups were raised through indoctrination. The motivation could be ‘ideological’ as in the case of Maoism, could be focused on the assertion of ‘ethnic identities’ as was seen in the past in India’s North-East or like what happened in Afghanistan, where militant outfits invoked the ‘war cry’ of Jehad to fight against the Soviet army there.
The motivation of religion in Islam is particularly strong because of its pull of exclusivism. In the early seventh century, Kalima came as a ringing call - ‘there is no God save Allah’ backed by the message that Islam is the only ‘perfect’ religion and also the ‘final’ one since Prophet Mohammad was the last of the Prophets.
The five fundamentals of Islam described as its ‘pillars’- declaration of Iman, prayer, fasting, charity and Haj - were backed by a set of ‘do’s & don’ts’ that were easy to understand even for the illiterate. This paved the way for territorial kinship moving towards religious brotherhood. Jehad was another duty cast on members of the faith at par with the five fundamentals and it was described as the willingness to make the supreme sacrifice to defend the faith if ‘Islam is in danger’ or to protect the community if its existence is threatened.
Radical organisations have cropped up within the Muslim world over the years interpreting geopolitical situations in their own ways and calling for Jehad to fulfil their own political objective.
The current trends of global terrorism are seen more in the Pak-Afghan region, Middle East and North Africa. Since Islam embraces all aspects of a man’s life - personal, social, cultural, political or even economic, there is no distinction between religion and politics there.
In fact, today’s Islamic radicals carry the historical memory of the anti-West Wahhabi Revolt of the mid-19th century in Algeria, Arabia and India that was led by prominent Ulema who were greatly distressed to find that after a thousand years of ‘glorious advancement’ of Islam, Western powers had encroached on ‘Muslim lands’. Their reading of the situation was that the political decline of Islam was attributable to Muslim rulers who had ‘deviated from the path of puritanical Islam’. This is why the call of Jehad given by the Ulema was accompanied by the ‘revivalist’ slogan of ‘return to the golden period of Islam’ as it existed in times of the four Pious Calphs.
The Wahhabi revolt lasted for many years but did not succeed against the superior power of the Western regimes. At the end of the unsuccessful Jehad, many seminaries came into existence for propagating the ‘pure’ teachings of the Quran - Darul Uloom Deoband was the largest on the Indian subcontinent.
The anti-West legacy of Islamic radicals showed up in our times when the Taliban Emirate assumed power in Kabul in 1996 with the help of Pakistan - at the end of a period of turbulence in Afghanistan following the withdrawal of the Soviet army from there. It was Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who had despatched the Taliban - the fundamentalist products of Deobandi Madrasahs of Pakistan - to Afghanistan to bring the situation there under control. This paved the way for the ascendancy of Taliban-Al Qaeda combine in Afghanistan. The Emirate, however, soon bared its anti-West fangs which led to the US working for its ouster. The events laid the turf for the terror bombing of 9/11 that precipitated the ‘war on terror’ by the US-led world coalition - first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq.
The ‘war on terror’ was essentially a combat of the US against Islamic radical forces that had regrouped under the umbrella of Al Qaeda and its offspring the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), in the Pak-Afghan belt and the Syria-Iraq region, respectively.
Mention must be made of the emergence of another fundamentalist stream in the period of the Cold War, which aspired to establish Islamic rule in the Muslim world but without running into a situation of conflict with the West.
In Egypt and Syria, Hasan Al Banna, an Islamic ideologue, established the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 to oppose the pro-Soviet nationalist and ‘secular’ Arab regimes of Nasser and Al-Assad and restore an Islamic state. His admirer Maulana Abul Ala Maudoodi founded Jamaat-e-Islami at Lahore in 1941 with a similar objective.
The US-led West was well poised towards these organisations and in the Indian context of cross-border terrorism in Kashmir, even tried to coin the words ‘Political Islam’ and ‘Radical Islam’ to make a distinction between the doings of militant outfits of Jamaat and the activities of the Taliban-Al Qaeda axis. The US even attempted to draw a line between the so-called ‘good terrorists’ and ‘bad terrorists’ depending on whether the terror activity was India-centric or directed against the US.
At the back of all of this was the thinking of the US and its Pentagon that Pakistan was still an ally. Pakistan was soon able to project itself as a mediator in the Doha talks between the Taliban and the US on the issue of withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan which was so keenly desired by the Joe Biden Administration. The ultimate gainer was Pakistan which managed to reinstall the Taliban Emirate at Kabul and at the same time strengthen the Sino-Pak strategic alliance by arranging a ‘give and take’ between China and the Taliban regime. India has to handle this new strategic challenge posed by the Pakistan-China axis.
What has happened in recent years is that Islamic radical forces have found acceptance in the Muslim world at the cost of those ‘Islamists’ who favoured Sharia rule but who wished to be on the right side of the US or the West.
Today through the checkered course of the ‘war on terror’, the radicals have managed to spread to new areas in the Muslim world - Nigeria and Yemen two widely separated territories could be mentioned in this regard. Arab Spring was another phenomenon that facilitated the shift of many Islamists to the fold of radicalisation. There has been a wave of pro-democracy protests and uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa against authoritarian Arab rulers - beginning in 2010 - and there was an undercurrent of anti-capitalism and pro-poor polity in some of the agitations.
In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was in the lead of the Arab Spring stir against the dictatorship of President Hosni Mubarak - which pleased the West initially - but as President Mohamed Morsi ran an Islamic dispensation, radical Jihadists also strengthened their position.
Gen. Abdul Fattah Al-Sisi, who overthrew President Morsi to take over Egypt in 2014, is a US ally and one of his major challenges is to end the insurgency of Jihadists based in the Sinai Peninsula who are linked to ISIS.
In Syria, the Alawite President Bashar Al Assad is being supported by Iran in the civil war there whereas the West supported the Islamists opposed to Bashar. Islamic radical forces led by ISIS are taking on both the US and the Syrian President.
A development of considerable significance in the Middle East is that a group of terrorists of ISIS-K - a branch of the parent ISIS - carried out an attack on a concert in Moscow on March 23 with automatic guns and grenades, killing some 145 people apparently in retaliation against the Russian bombing of ISIS establishments in Syria earlier and against the Russian anti-Muslim policy in Chechnya. As expected, Islamic radicals are opposed to both American and Russian stand on Syria.
The Israel-Hamas conflict brings out again the deepening of radicalisation in the Middle East and its long-term impact on the political alignments in the region. Hamas was originally an Islamist organisation and an affiliate of Jamaat-e-Islami, that opposed the ‘nationalist’ Palestine Liberation Organisation - currently led by Mahmoud Abbas.
Over the years, Hamas has been radicalised becoming extremely inimical to Israel, though during the Intifada Israel had aided the Hamas for political reasons. Hamas came to detest the dictatorial regime of Israel in the occupied territory of Palestine.
In what marked the extreme hostility between Hamas and Israel, there was an early morning cross-border terrorist attack by a group of Hamas militants on a gathering enjoying a national day festivity within Israel which caused the death of nearly 1200 Israelis - the terrorists also took away 200 Israelis including many women and children as hostages. The attack was severely condemned by India.
Israel soon retaliated by launching a full-fledged military attack on Gaza with the declared objective of ‘finishing off’ Hamas there. The US as expected was giving full support to Israel but also unsuccessfully trying to arrange a ‘ceasefire’ for negotiating the release of hostages - the US ought to have realised that negotiations did not work with terrorists.
Also, more than 35 000 Palestinians including a large number of civilians have reportedly been killed by Israel Defence Force(IDF)and a larger number made to flee as refugees.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has taken it as a survival issue for Israel and the suggestion of a 2-state solution has remained as distant as ever. What is new in the scenario is that Iran-ruled by Ayatollahs - has taken Hamas in its embrace overcoming the historical Shia-Sunni contradictions, primarily because of Iran’s and Hamas’s shared political and ideological hostility towards the US.
An interesting fallout of all of this is that Iran, China and Russia have come together against the US-Israel axis.
With Houthis of Yemen and the Lebanon-based Hezbollah acting as Iran’s proxies and Saudi Arabia and UAE continuing to be the US’s closest allies, the superpower rivalries in the Middle East were getting bolstered because of both political and faith-based alignments.
The assassination of Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah by Israel in a targeted missile attack in south of Beirut on September 27 has been followed by Iran firing nearly 180 missiles on Israel - mostly on military establishments near Tel Aviv - on October 1, many of which escaped being shot down by Israel’s Iron Dome Defence.
Iran may have been deterred from resorting to an all-out offensive against Israel because of the complete support pledged to the latter by the US and Israel too may heed the advice of the Biden Administration not to go to an extreme in retaliating against Iran’s missile attack, the fact is that these events would keep the Middle East in the throes of violence.
India has the challenge of cautiously handling its mutual relations with the three biggest players in the region - Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran - without yielding an inch on its stand of a total denunciation of terrorism in all its forms.
The threat of radicalisation is common to the US, Russia and India and even as there are signs of a new Cold War on the horizon between the US-led West and the Russia-China axis in military and political terms, the rival powers should be wary of letting the faith-based alignments deepen the Cold War divide. Against this backdrop, India’s strategy of projecting this country as the voice of sanity and as an advocate of peace in the conflict-ridden geopolitics of today seems to be the correct line to follow.
(The writer is a former Director of the Intelligence Bureau. Views are personal)