We Won the War on Terror. This is What It Looks Like
All the anti-West traditions, minus suicide bombing.
The 20th anniversary of the Bali Bombings was remembered in Singapore and Australia, but not Indonesia. For Singapore, it shows that evil still lurks south of the island. Australia, as usual, thinks that the Indonesian government is too lenient on the masterminds (the mainstream opinion), or even too hard (academics).
For Indonesia? It’s just one of the numerous bombings and attacks made in the name of Islam. Before 9/11, there were the Christmas 2000 church bombings, also largely forgotten. In a place familiar with deaths, we don’t linger on the memories of our dead.
The bombings introduced the world to Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). The group had its root in the Darul Islam rebellion that lasted from 1949 to 1962. JI founders Abu Bakar Bashir and Abdullah Sungkar attempted to resurrect the movement in 1969 following the end of Sukarno’s rule. By the 1980s it dreamed of a pan-Southeast Asian unity with members coming from Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and the Philippines.
The fall of President Suharto in 1998 enabled both men to surface, just as Osama bin Laden continued his personal war against the United States. JI made its own wars in eastern Indonesia where Muslim and Christian locals clashed. The American invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001 turned JI’s attention to the West, and its Singaporean branch planned bombings targeting American military and diplomatic personnel in Singapore. The plot was foiled in December 2001, ten months before Bali.
After Bali, there was the bombing of Jakarta’s JW Marriott in 2003, then the Australian Embassy in 2004, another Bali bombing in 2005, and JW Marriott again in 2009 – together with Ritz-Carlton. Paralleling the bombings of Casablanca and Istanbul in 2003, Madrid in 2004, and London in 2005. The end of JI went similarly to the end of Al Qaeda, through counterterrorism operations after 2008. Sungkar died from natural causes in 1999 while Bashir was sentenced in 2011. JI’s top strategist Noordin Mohammad Top blew himself up in a police siege. Several other JI figures were killed or arrested in the Philippines and Indonesia in the 2010s.
And yet the terrors continued in the 2010s, carried by Islamic State. The January 2016 attacks in Jakarta mercifully just killed 4 innocent people, compared to the contemporary attacks in Paris, San Bernardino, and Brussels.
The consensus is the war on terror is still ongoing or even lost, as the Taliban still rules Afghanistan. But over the last six years, we are no longer having to worry about terror plots in global cities. Would-be terrorists know that they would die violently anyway, and now disgruntled intellectuals don’t have to choose Islamism to channel their hatred against the West and Jews.
Professional Study of an Amateur Act
All terrorists saw themselves as rebels and fighters, and governments often call their enemies terrorists, including other sovereign states. In the early 20th century, disgruntled Westerners turned to anarchism, either hoping that a world without kings and presidents would be better for them or just to hurt the society that they despised.
The golden decade of terrorism was the 1970s and 1980s, when communist graduates from Japan and West Germany allied with secular Palestinian nationalists, and Irish and Basque militia mixed both Marxism and romantic nationalism. No airport, airplane, or city square was safe from these idealist revolutionaries. All terrorists, after all, believe that their violence is proportional to the state’s violence, and civilians who they kill are balancing the people who the state has killed.
The Iranian Revolution showed that Islamism was a more effective foil to Western domination than Marxism or nationalism, and so the association of terrorism changed from communists to Islamist. The United States itself counted Islamism as a Cold War ally, not least the Afghan Mujahideen that would evolve into both Taliban and Al Qaeda.
As Al Qaeda made its mark in the 1990s, academics and think tanks studied terrorism extensively and made deep studies on Islam, the histories of the Middle East and South Asia, and the balance between security and human rights. Terrorism and security became core subjects in International Relations and Politics majors.
The War on Terror lost global support once the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, impalpably hoping that it could occupy and change both Afghanistan and Iraq. Ironically, the removal of Saddam Hussein enabled the American military to leave Saudi Arabia, just like bin Laden demanded. Unnervingly, while the fall of Saddam didn’t scare Iran or Syria (two states identified by the Bush administration as rogue states), it has neutered Iraq to this day, making it a neutral neighbor for both Saudi Arabia and Israel.
Al Qaeda itself wasn’t an airport novel terror group with global cells, sleeper agents, and a high-tech war room. Yes, we must be thankful that most of their bombing plots, including the shoe bombing and the printer cartridge bomb, were foiled. In fact, Madrid and London's bombings succeeded because they were plotted and executed by locals who sympathized with Al Qaeda but were never part of a terror network the way JI was. 9/11 was a one-of-a-kind plot with years of international planning and selected operatives who entered America. Other bombings in Europe, meanwhile, were concocted by a group of friends relying on homemade tech and murderous hatred against their own nations.
Terrorism is Cringe
During the War on Terror decade, naturally Western students saw the West as the real bad guys. The sudden swerve from Osama to Saddam, raised the accusation of War for Oil. Abu Ghraib and the neocons. The suffering of common Iraqis. The burden of being Muslim Westerners.
There are two kinds of European atheists: Those who believe that other religions deserve to be mocked as Christianity does, and those who believe that Islam is off-limit since Muslims are victims of…Islamophobia, along with colonialization and racism. The Jyllands-Posten controversy was bad enough, and the Charlie Hebdo drawings ended with a massacre. In the age of social media and teenage diversity, the view that “Charlie staff asked for it” grew.
By the 2020s, Islamism has become irrelevant in Western campuses, even probably in Indonesia. The winner is not secular liberalism, but wokeness, the successor ideology. Anti-Semitism has been widely accepted in American colleges because it’s not linked to Nazism, but to the solidarity between Palestinians and other people of color (whether black Americans or even Asians). Resentment against European cultures and Christianity is normal for Western students. A Muslim superhero is possible, unlike a Christian superhero, or a Jewish.
The kids no longer need Maoism or Islamism to channel their anger against the status quo. They get it all in wokeness. The putdown against the Anglosphere, the hatred against Jews, and the denouncement of Christianity. The risk of the stabbing is still there. But at least we no longer need to be afraid of suicide bombings. Heck, they are the Taliban’s problem now.