Tailors and terrorists
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LAST week, a news crew was permitted access to a “de-radicalisation” centre in Bara, in the now long embattled northwest of the country. It was a supervised tour, in which officials of the Pakistani military who run the centre, shared information about how 400 former militant soldiers are being de-radicalised. After taking the youngsters out of the battlefield, the facility provides them with psychological counseling and an education in Islamic history among other subjects, as well as training in technical skills such as tailoring, mobile phone repair and the welding of furniture. The last, it is hoped, will allow them to avail of options other than militancy once their time at the centre is over.
The effort at rehabilitating militants by the Pakistani military is a commendable one; as the military spokesperson quoted in the report said, the boys that are housed at the facility were fighting the Pakistani military mere weeks before they ended up at the centre. They are in this sense a rare bunch: those who have willingly put down arms and are choosing now to pursue an education. When they leave, they will still face many enemies who are angry at them for putting down their weapons and taking up with the government forces.
Bringing the concept of de-radicalisation, a process whose theorising and study commands many millions in the industrialised West, to Pakistan — the continuing target of terrorism-related violence — is an interesting one. In the years since 9/11 and the commencement of the ‘war on terror’, a vast number of think tanks and policy centres staffed by ever-growing battalions of terror and radicalisation experts have proliferated in the West. As countries like Somalia, Pakistan and Nigeria suffer the weight and casualties of terror’s terrible cost, these centres have from afar and at times via enterprising expatriates from terrorism-struck countries come up with varying theories of de-radicalisation. The larger the budget afforded by the government of this or that industrialised state, the more extended the theory explaining what exactly happens to the naïve recruit taken in by this or that terror group. The success of actually being able to predict terrorist inclinations is not crucial to their task; more important is cashing in on an ever lucrative industry borne of a suspicious West looking eastward on the wanting rest.
The challenge of terrorism requires analysing the societies and moral narratives that have failed.
And so their reports and books continue to birth ever more theorising; the easy targets of religion or poverty or alienation or the social media pointed to as gems discovered via deep introspection and analytical insight. Only a few among them have criticised the madness; in the words of Dr John Horgan, director of the International Centre for the Study of Terrorism at Pennsylvania State University, “Nobody watches YouTube or reads Inspire (Al Qaeda’s magazine) and becomes a terrorist; It’s absurd to think so.” Blunt as it is, Dr Hogan’s critique has not kept away titles such as Countering ISIS Extremism in Cyberspace: Time for Clear, Hold and Build that headlines an article published by the American Council of Foreign Relations.
As with everything else, the project of studying radicalisation in Pakistan is far messier, not least because of the larger size of the sample, and the greater number of both terror recruits and terror groups. The greater numbers incorporate greater variety: the likes of educated men from urban areas who may wander Al Qaeda’s way versus the orphans given up to the tutelage of this or that group. Given this variety, it is not surprising that those running the centre in Bara acknowledge that the demographic they are serving is both limited and the task delicate. Given that the centre focuses on those among terror recruits who still need an education and a skill, it could be concluded that these are the people who had the fewest options other than being recruited and those who were condemned to hatred by the desperation of ignorance and circumstance.
There is, however, another, more challenging, demographic even within Pakistan. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, is an engineer. Indeed a study completed by sociologist Diego Gambetta and political scientist Steffen Hertog found that of 404 men belonging to violent terror groups, nearly 20 per cent had engineering degrees. The population of engineers in the general population was, in contrast, only 3.5pc. The statistic shows that there is a sizeable number of terror suspects that do not turn to it simply because they lack a vocation. Undoubtedly, it is these more educated of fighters that pose the greatest of risks.
All terrorists cannot be transformed into tailors, and all engineers are not terrorists. Yet it is just this sort of reductive discourse that dominates the discourse over terrorism. De-radicalisation, particularly when it targets the sort of recruits that are housed in the centre at Bara and that focuses on practical solutions such as providing the poorest with a vocation, needs to be pursued on a larger scale.
At the same time, attention needs to be given to the fact that there are some who turn to terror because they choose to believe in its nihilistic ideology. This aspect of terror, often least understood and most often ignored, underscores the moral challenge it poses. This moral challenge of terrorism cannot be undone either by bombing terrorists or setting up de-radicalisation centres, for it requires analysing not them but the societies and moral narratives that have failed, such that the annihilation and brutality of terror appear to some a better — and even more ‘heroic’ — choice.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
Published in Dawn, August 5th, 2015
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