Terrorists have been given confidence by strategic errors such as the full withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in 2021.
NEW DELHI: When law enforcement agencies find themselves unable to track the sources that nurtured and activated terrorist impulses in an individual who committed a terror attack involving multiple casualties, they fall back on the claim that it was a “lone wolf” attack. The reality is that terrorists are almost always never “self-radicalised”. Each has drifted into thrall to terror incubators whose occupation is to groom prospective terrorists. Unfortunately for the West, strategic errors were made such as the decision in 2015 to allow a million asylum seekers into Germany with practically no vetting. Earlier, the US-backed “Arab Spring” resulted in millions from the affected countries seeking refuge in Europe rather than remaining within their own borders. Such decisions opened some countries to immigration from troubled regions on a scale not seen before, especially in Germany. Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been a proliferation of terror modules that are being primed for acts of terror, especially in the West. They have been given confidence by strategic errors such as the full withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in 2021. The US withdrawal abandoned that country to the Taliban. Abandoned by Biden to the Taliban was the Bagram air base and other operational sites that were needed not just for better monitoring of the situation, but intervention if called for. As of now, PLA activity in many such locations is on the rise. Such US bases were built and equipped at great expense, yet were not retained. GHQ Rawalpindi was once again, as in the 1980s, made by the US the guarantor of good behaviour, this time around by a “reformed” Taliban.
The ethnic divide between Punjabi soldiers in the Pakistan military and the ethnic Pashtuns of the Taliban were ignored. Shortly thereafter, Pashtuns in the Taliban began to resist attempts at overlordship by the Pakistan military, which by now has become an auxiliary of the PLA.
The shock to global security of the 2021 Biden withdrawal from Afghanistan administered oxygen to hitherto hibernating terror modules in the West, returning to them the confidence that it was viable to conduct fresh acts of terror. Such confidence had been almost stamped out after the rout of the Taliban in 2001 through a combination of Northern Alliance manpower and US air and other assets. In the 9/11 attacks of 2001, terror attacks on New York and a foiled attempt on important structures in Washington, it was the hijacking and subsequent deliberate crashing of aircraft into buildings that caused carnage. Another strategic blunder by President Biden has again taken place, this time in the form of not discouraging but instead almost cheering on an extremist takeover of Syria by extremist Wahhabi militia. Given his misrule, Bashar Assad needed to go, but through popular unrest rather than by winking at the arming, funding and unleashing of Daesh elements through grey zone funding by Turkey, which remains a NATO ally of the US.
Now the blowback, expressed in terms of a spate of terror attacks across the West, has taken place. The British, German and US terror attacks involved the use of vehicles to plough into a crowd of revellers, killing several of them while wounding several times more. The explosion that occurred outside the Trump hotel in Las Vegas was the detonation of a Tesla truck loaded with explosives. Indications are that the suicide bomber in question did not seek to kill people, but blew himself up in order to protest at the way politicians were enriching themselves. Such a motive does not detract from the fact of it being a terror attack that could have caused multiple casualties. Queens in New York and Honolulu in Hawaii have also endured attacks, the Queens attack being an outlier, not taking place through explosives but through the use of guns, which are plentiful in the US.
The extremist takeover of most of Syria has given fresh confidence to individuals intending to carry out terror attacks, and to the terrorist grooming groups motivating and training the modules developed by them. Terror modules developed by them are scattered throughout the West, which remains their principal target. Earlier, the takeover of most of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 1996 was regarded as a strategic victory by Washington, given that the extremist militia effortlessly toppled the Najibullah regime in Kabul, which had been backed by Moscow earlier. It had been the National Security Advisor of President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who in 1979 launched a policy of supporting Afghan radicals rather than Afghan moderates in their justified battle against the Soviet occupation of their country. Such a strategic error was as a consequence of allying with the Pakistan military to fight Soviet forces. The Wahhabised GHQ Rawalpindi bypassed the patriotic moderates in Afghanistan and directed US training, funding and weaponry to extremists who entered Kabul in triumph in 1996. GHQ Rawalpindi was nervous that armed and moderate Pashtun nationalists may seek the return of the Pashtun territories surrendered to the British more than a century ago in the form of the Durand Line. Extremists, the brass in Pakistan believed, put their twisted ideology above ethnic loyalty. The extremist takeover of Afghanistan in 1996 lit the fuse that eventually led to 9/11. The bitter fruit of what President Bill Clinton sowed was reaped by President G.W. Bush.
In much the same way, the toppling of the regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, not by moderate Syrian nationalists as ought to have been attempted, but by a militia composed of extremist groups, generated fresh oxygen that activated Daesh sleeper modules in Europe. Some of these have subsequently conducted terror attacks during Christmas and New Year celebrations in London in the UK, Magdeburg in Germany and in New York and New Orleans in the US. Honolulu has also witnessed an explosion that was possibly another attack. Bashar Assad needed to go, because he provided a land bridge to ferry supplies from Iran to Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, but that needed to happen through the US and Israel bombing such supply routes into uselessness and encouraging popular unrest by the overwhelmingly moderate Syrians. Instead, Erdogan was facilitated in his moves to ensure an extremist takeover. It did not take long for elements in the “reformed” Taliban from turning on the Pakistan army in full force by 2023, and it is unlikely to take long before Turkey itself gets blowback because of the present leadership using Wahhabi extremists to serve its perceived interests.
But for Matt Gaetz, who was not a good choice, the Trump picks in the US national security system are outstanding in their ability. Which is why the Sino-Wahhabi lobby in the US is working ceaselessly to try and derail the confirmation of as many of them as it can. Incoming US President Trump is not the only target. So is India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, although in a different way. For more than a year, efforts have visibly intensified to discredit the India growth story both abroad and at home. As part of such efforts, forces hostile to India have been seeking to short-sell the rupee, which has been suffering a fall in its exchange rate to an unprecedented level. Their ultimate objective is to prevent inflow of investment from leaving China and coming into India, a country which would otherwise be their most natural alternative destination. Such short sellers need to be named and shamed for assisting the CCP by seeking to weaken investment sentiment in India and in the stability of the rupee. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, assisted by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, will be working to ensure that such efforts fail. As for President Biden, he is leaving the White House with a bang, although not the sort he would have liked.