Noam Chomsky on the origins of terrorism – EXCLUSIVE Part I

Noam Chomsky on the origins of terrorism

EXCLUSIVE Part I

MIT linguist and perhaps the best known critic of US policies of the current generation, Noam Chomsky, speaks to Saad Sayeed on, among other things, the origins of terrorism, Kashmir, Lebanon, his friendship with the late Eqbal Ahmed and the role of the intellectual.

Q. Osama Bin Laden wants the US out of the Middle East and many Muslims would like a resolution on the question of Palestine. But would even this almost unrealistic outcome end terrorism?

A. What we call terrorism has many different roots. But remember that what we call terrorism is terrorism by people that we don’t like. Terrorism by people we do like is not called terrorism so the very term is fraught with ideology. But keeping to the conventional use, terrorism has many roots and one of them undoubtedly is the unresolved Israel-Palestine conflict where Israel and the United States (it’s never just Israel) are systematically destroying the Palestinian people right before our eyes. So, sure that evokes the feeling of anger, passion, resentment, and sometimes it takes the form of terrorism. In that sense a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, a fair and just resolution, would remove some of the sources of terrorism, maybe many of them.

Q. You just mentioned that when the media speaks of terrorism, we concentrate on groups such as Al Qaeda. But you have repeatedly stated that terrorism is also practised by states such as the US, Israel and Turkey just to name a few. How important is an understanding of these facts when we are examining the question of terror?

A. It depends on whether we want to be honest and truthful or whether we want to just serve state power. If we want to be honest and truthful, we should look at all forms of terrorism. I have been writing on terrorism for 25 years, ever since the Reagan administration came in 1981 and declared that the leading focus of its foreign policy was going to be a war on terror. A war against state directed terrorism which they called the plague of the modern world because of their barbarism and so on. That was the centre of their foreign policy and ever since I have been writing about terrorism.

But what I write causes extreme anger for the very simple reason that I use the US government’s official definition of terrorism, the definition that is in the official US code of laws. If you use that definition it follows very quickly that the US is the leading terrorist state and a major sponsor of terrorism and since that conclusion is unacceptable it arouses furious anger. But the problem lies in the unwillingness to recognise that your own terrorism is terrorism. This is not just true of the United States, it’s true quite generally. Terrorism is something that they do to us. In both cases it’s terrorism and we have to get over that if we’re serious about the question.

Q. In 1979 Russia invaded Afghanistan. The US used the Ziaul Haq regime in Pakistan to fund the rise of militancy. This gave Zia a green light to fund cross-border terrorism in Kashmir. Now we allegedly have some of those elements setting off bombs in Mumbai. Clearly, these groups are no longer controlled by any government.

A. The jihadi movements in their modern form go back before Afghanistan. They were formed primarily in Egypt in the 1970s. Those are the roots of the jihadi movement, the intellectual roots and the activist roots and the terrorism too. After all, [Anwar] Sadat was killed before Afghanistan. But when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Reagan administration saw it as an opportunity to pursue their Cold War aims. So they did with the intense cooperation of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and others. So the Reagan administration organised the most radical Islamic extremists it could find anywhere in the world and brought them to Afghanistan to train them, arm them.

Meanwhile, the US supported Ziaul Haq as he was turning Pakistan into a country of madressahs and fundamentalists. The Reagan administration even pretended that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons. They kept certifying to Congress that Pakistan was not developing nuclear weapons, which of course they were, so that US aid to Pakistan could continue. The end result of these US programmes was to seriously harm Pakistan and also to create the international jihadi movement, of which Osama bin Laden is a product. The jihadi movement then spread… they may not like it much but they created it. And now, as you say, it’s in Kashmir.

Kashmir, though, is a much more complex story. There are plenty of problems in Kashmir and they go way back but the major current conflicts come from the 1980s. In 1986, when India blocked the election, it actually stole the election, and that led to an uprising and terrorist violence and atrocities, including atrocities committed by the Indian army.

Q. How central do you think the Kashmir issue is when we look at the bigger picture and what lies ahead for India and Pakistan in regards to this?

A. Kashmir is a difficult issue. The right path for India and Pakistan is the one that has been followed over the last few years to a certain extent. Various ways of improving relations, cultural, economic, and exchanges of various kinds to try to reduce the tensions between the two countries and Pakistan has to make a very serious effort to contend with the terrorist groups that operate within Pakistan. India has similar problems. Hindu fundamentalism can be as destructive as Islamic fundamentalism, look at what happened in Gujarat.

Q. What role does the international community have to play?

A. First of all we should be careful with the term international community. It’s used in an ideological sense. It’s used to refer to the United States and whoever goes along with the United States. So Blair reflexively goes along with the United States so the UK is part of the international community. France, for whatever cynical reasons, maybe sometimes goes along with the United States so its part of the community. But the term is almost meaningless. Let’s take the alleged development of Iranian nuclear weapons as an example. What you read in the west universally is that the international community has demanded that Iran not develop any uranium. Well, that’s true if by international community you mean the United States and whoever goes along with them. Certainly not throughout the world, not the non-aligned movement, which is a huge movement.

There was a conference not long ago in which they endorsed Iran’s inalienable right to carry out uranium enrichment. The countries neighbouring Iran, Turkey, and the Sunni Arab countries and so on. The populations among these, they don’t want Iran to have nuclear weapons but they prefer a nuclear armed Iran to any threat of intervention against them. So who’s the international community? What should the international community do about Kashmir? It should support efforts on the part of India and Pakistan to resolve the issue peaceably. And there are various forms in which the resolution could take place. My old friend Eqbal Ahmed, years ago proposed what seemed to be sensible plans for resolving the Kashmir problem peacefully. It’s not going to be easy but it’s not impossible.

Q. You mentioned you were friends with Eqbal Ahmed. Can you describe that relationship and perhaps explain why he has gone somewhat unappreciated in Pakistan?

A. Eqbal was an old friend from the 1960s. We were involved together in all sorts of things, resistance against the war in Vietnam, Israel-Palestine and dozens of other issues. We were generally very close in our opinions on all of these issues. I had a very high regard for him, I thought he was, apart from being a close friend, greatly liked and admired; he was one of the most acute intelligent analysts of political and cultural affairs that I knew. He was really outstanding, I just wrote an introduction to a book of his, a collection of essays that just appeared. I don’t know how he is regarded in Pakistan but he should be regarded as one of the leading and foremost Pakistani intellectuals and activists.

Q. We spoke of Kashmir earlier and that it is a colonial legacy but we rarely see the question of colonialism being brought up in the media. In fact, some journalists have dismissed it as irrelevant to the growth of terrorism. Does the colonial legacy play a role in the emergence of home-grown terrorists in countries such as the US, UK and Canada as well as to the creation of terrorism as a whole?

A. There’s no doubt about that. It’s not brought up in the west because it’s inconvenient to think about your own crimes. Just look at the major conflicts going on around the world today, in Africa, the Middle East, in South Asia, most of them are residues of colonial systems. Colonial systems imposed and created artificial states that had nothing to do with the needs and concerns and relations of the populations involved. They were created in the interests of colonial powers and as old fashioned colonialism turned into modern neo-colonialism, a lot of these conflicts erupted into violence and those are a lot of the atrocities happening in the world today.

How can anyone say colonialism isn’t relevant? Of course it is and it’s even more directly relevant. Take the London bombing in 2005. Blair tried to pretend that it had nothing to do with Britain’s participation in the invasion of Iraq. That’s completely ridiculous. The British intelligence and the reports of the people connected in the bombing, said that British participation in the invasion and the resulting horrors in Iraq inflamed them and they wanted to do something in reaction.

Q. Another popular view propagated by the media is that dictators such as Zia are local products and that capitalism is actually providing third world jobs. This theory absolves the west of all responsibility. How do you counter such arguments?

A. With facts. Sure Zia was a local product but he had enormous support through the worst of his actions from the United States. As for capitalism providing jobs, capitalism doesn’t provide jobs capital does. And capital can be used in many ways. Let’s just take the last 30 years. There is what’s called the Washington consensus, the point of view of US-based international organisations and major countries, it’s called neo-liberalism, and that was pretty much imposed on the third world, on the former colonies, for the last 25 years or so. These have been some of the worst periods in their economic history. Countries that followed the rules religiously like Latin America suffered a disaster after very rapid growth in the previous period.

So Latin America literally stagnated for 25 years following the neo-liberal rule of Washington. On the other hand there were countries that ignored the rule in East Asia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and have had very rapid growth. So does capitalism create jobs? If by that you mean the Washington-based US consensus created the very advanced economies of Japan, South Korea, and China, of course not. You can say the same about the early development of the developed countries. Take the United States, which is regarded as the leading capitalist country in the world. Is it a capitalist country? Not in any sense of capitalism that I have ever heard of. The modern economy, the so-called new economy, in the United States relies very heavily on the dynamic state sector. Computers, on the internet, telecommunications, lasers, satellites, trains, most of that comes straight out of the state sector of the economy.

Where’s capitalism? I think it must be illusions.

(To be continued)