Islamic extremismThursday's London bomb blasts once more remind us of exactly the type of enemy the West is now facing, writes Rory Miller
Islamist terrorists are not like their nationalist or social revolutionary predecessors who focused on the attainment of territorial or political objectives, and whose resort to violence was contingent on achieving specific and tangible grievances.
Groups like the IRA, Spain's Basque separatists ETA, the Kurdish PKK in Turkey and numerous Palestinian factions have killed in cold blood and have randomly targeted civilians. One thinks of the IRA's Belfast bombing campaign of July 1972 that left nine dead, including 7 civilians, and injured over 130, including 77 women and children, in the course of a few hours.
The same is true for ETA, which killed 21 civilians in an attack on a Barcelona supermarket in 1987, and 13 holidaymakers when it bombed the tourist resorts of Alicante and Benidorm at the peak of the 1999 summer season.
Nevertheless, it is inconceivable that the IRA, ETA or any of the numerous secular groups that took the lead in international terrorism in the 1970s and 1980s, would have undertaken the type of operation that we saw yesterday in London.
Unlike Islamists, such traditional terror groups sought limited political objectives and thus, though responsible for much suffering, often placed limits on the execution of their terror tactics for both moral and political reasons.
As Matthew Levitt has noted, even the most radical secular Palestinian terror groups (such as George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), limited their objectives to the destruction of only one state - Israel - whereas Islamist groups have far broader ambitions.
Moreover, traditional terror groups viewed violence primarily as a means of pressuring opponents, and the international community at large, to make political concessions. This necessitated achieving a balance between using violence to achieve publicity and political gains and avoiding the mass killing of civilians for fear of discrediting the cause and reducing public sympathy, even among loyal supporters.
As one anonymous IRA source explained following a number of high profile IRA bombings in England in 1974, "last year taught us that in publicity terms one bomb in Oxford Street is worth 10 in Belfast".
In these terms it is not a coincidence that the 191 commuters killed in the March 2004 Islamist attack on the Madrid rail system far exceeded the number of victims of any ETA attack up to that point and claimed 90 more lives than ETA was responsible for killing in the whole of 1980, its bloodiest year of terror. While the largest single mass killing operation carried out during the Northern Irish troubles - the Real IRA's August 1998 Omagh bombing which killed 29 people and wounded 200 - is dwarfed by the London attacks.
This is not to deny that Islamists have quantifiable and very real political objectives. Al Qaeda demands the removal of all non-Muslim troops from Muslim lands; Hamas demands the withdrawal of Israel from the West Bank and Gaza; Pakistani and Kashmiri Islamists demand India's withdrawal from Kashmir; their Egyptian and Algerian counterparts have battled for years to remove repressive and autocratic regimes at home.
Nor is it to deny that these, and other, issues do help Islamists gain support within the Muslim world. However, even if tomorrow all western troops were to be evacuated from Iraq and the Gulf states and sent to Cairo and Algiers to help Islamists overthrow the existing secular regimes this would not end the Islamist offensive against the West.
For this offensive is motivated first and foremost by the radical belief that the pre-eminent religious duty of a proper Muslim is not only to undertake jihad against secular Muslim regimes and non-Muslims based in Muslim lands, but by the belief that jihad must continue until the Caliphate - Islamic rule - is established in all places that Muslims live.
As terror expert Reuven Paz has noted Islamist groups are pursuing an Islamic victory over non-believers as part of an "eternal religious mission to a victory which will not be achieved for many generations". Bin Laden sent the same message in a far more explicit manner in a statement broadcast by al-Jazeera television in November 2001: "This war is fundamentally religious. Under no circumstances should we forget this enmity between us and the infidels. For, the enmity is based on creed." The belief that Islam has embarked (to quote from an al-Qaeda statement) on a "decisive [ battle] . . . between infidelity and faith" provides legitimisation for the mass-killing of innocents, including children, on a level previously unknown.
It is in this context that one should view the revelation of the 9/11 Commission Report that while based in Sudan in the mid-1990s, a report by senior al Qaeda military commander Mohammed Atef (aka Abu Hafs al Masri) rejected the use of traditional terrorist hijacking operations because they were useful primarily as an instrument to force negotiation over the release of prisoners rather than to inflict mass casualties.
Over the entire course of the twentieth century less than 20 terror attacks have killed one hundred people or more. Before 9/11 one could find little comfort in this. But in its wake, and in the aftermath of Bali, Madrid, Beslan and with the true number of fatalities in London still unknown, such figures serve only to remind us of radical Islam's end goal.
Dr Rory Miller is a lecturer in Mediterranean Studies at King's College, University of London. He is the author of Ireland and the Palestine Question, 1948-2004.