Commentary by Phil Gurski

We seem to be having a hard time figuring out what to call our struggle with terrorism. Leaving aside the belief, held by me and others, that framing counter terrorism in terms of war is a bad idea, it is clear that we keep changing our minds about what we are really involved in. 

After the clumsy misstep by U.S. President George W. Bush to label it a “Crusade”, we moved from the ‘war on terrorism’ to the ‘long war’ to the ‘global struggle against violent extremism (GSAVE) to ‘countering violent extremism’.  The latest iteration, which I read today in a New York Times op-ed, has me worried, as much for its pessimistic tone as its psychological effect on all of us.

According to Brian Castner, a formal explosives disposal specialist in the U.S. Army, some in that country’s military have begun to refer to the fight against terrorism as the ‘Forever War’.  This is not a good development.

War imagery

Let’s think about this phrase for a moment.  Forever.  That’s a long time.  And, what is worse, is that forever has no end.  In other words, we will be fighting terrorism and terrorists in a war with no termination.  No victory.  No truce.  No surrender.  No resolution.  Just war, interminable war.

In some ways we should have known this from the start.  Wars against abstract or common nouns don’t end because these nouns don’t reflect tangible entities.  Terrorism is no more a defined object than are drugs, poverty and cancer.  These ‘things’ are either tactics (terrorism), social ills (drugs, poverty) or natural phenomena (cancer).  They don’t have armies – yes Islamic State has a pseudo army with quasi soldiers – or uniforms or well-delineated structures.  You might as well declare war on mist. Yet we frame all kinds of social causes as war.

Don’t get me wrong, I do see a role for the military in counter terrorism measures, even if I disagree with the war metaphor.  But that role has to be constrained and carefully deployed.  Against IS or Boko Haram in northern Nigeria there is space for the army.  After all, however, this fight is for security intelligence and law enforcement agencies on the one hand and civil society on the other.  The former are tasked with taking care of those who wish to do us harm, while the latter look after addressing the conditions under which people turn to terrorism so that, in the end, fewer make that decision.

Accepting death and destruction

We must stop using war imagery when we talk about terrorism.  Aside from the reasons just cited, if those in the armed services are seeing this as the ‘forever war’ what does this mean?  If means that a hopelessness has entered into the minds of those we send to confront terrorists. 

Hopelessness not only breeds depression but it serves as an obstacle to other possibilities. If we convince ourselves that this war is eternal and that we will have to keep killing terrorists, iteration after iteration (Al Qaeda, IS in Iraq, IS, Al Shabaab, AQAP …) we consign ourselves to a non-solution.  I can think of little more futile than accepting death and destruction as the only way forward. There has to be a better way – I think a lot of people are involved in alternative approaches already – and we have to find it and implement it now.

The First World War was once called the ‘war to end all wars’.  We all know how that phrase ended up.  We need to get smart about terrorism before the Forever War becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

For our own sakes as well as those of future generations.

Phil Gurski worked for more than three decades in Canadian intelligence, including 15 at Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and is the author of the Threat from Within and Western Foreign Fighters (Rowan and Littlefield).

Commentary by Seshadri Kumar in Houston, Texas

Donald Trump fought and defeated Hillary Clinton, the media, fellow Republicans and conventional wisdom on his way to the American Presidency.

 I have watched at least eight presidential elections in the U.S. up close. As an immigrant journalist, I had the opportunity to cover the nomination speech of George H.W. Bush at the Republican National Convention, in Houston, in 1992, when the senior Bush lost the election to Bill Clinton.

The media narrative that trounced Bush was the catch phrase “Read my lips, no new taxes,” a promise that Bush had broken in his first term.

Trump’s victory has variously been described as a “revolution” and a “movement”;  and I would add a “phenomenon” as well.

A “Second Coming”

I don’t mean to serve up a post-facto encomium to Trump’s election, but I submit that Trump’s announcement in June 2015 of running for the Presidency had a certain “Second Coming” feel to it. I had the feeling then that this was not yet another candidate – I sensed a popular elation that accompanied it.

The media enthusiastically caricatured him, the pundits lampooned him, literally laughing at him.  And that laughter continues today, even as Trump’s inauguration approaches.

What catapulted Trump to national attention was his colloquial, yet somewhat exaggerated, matter-of-fact observation that Mexico is sending across border thieves, smugglers and rapists. He did not merely use the prosaic expression ‘securing the borders.’  He deliberately chose to avoid the “politically correct”.

Contest in Texas

While the other Republication candidates could be written off as soft on immigration, Ted Cruz from Texas was as hard and harsh as Trump on containing illegal immigration.

What strengthened my thinking outside the conventional box was that even Cruz failed to excite the base because he stuck to politically-correct language. Thus, a Conservative like Cruz, a very articulate and accomplished Senator, could not distinguish himself from Democrats as well as fellow Republicans.

While Cruz was shackled on immigration, Trump stood out as a torchbearer, not to speak of his visual, emotional and symbolic pledge to build a wall with Mexico. The more the media played up the wall as a divider to alienate Trump, the greater the resolve among Trump supporters in solidifying their support behind him.

The first debate

Another significant episode, in my opinion, was the first Republican presidential debate conducted by the Fox News Channel. The very first debate question of the 2016 presidential race was asked by Megyn Kelley and it had to do with women. To me, it came across as similar to asking Trump if he would stop beating his wife.  

At a time when America stood poised to elect its first woman president, I saw another candidate beside his beautiful immigrant wife and an accomplished daughter. I felt that that would have a positive impact, at least on some women.

It is important to recognize that Trump supporters never saw him as Pope material. His lifestyle was not a secret. By the time allegations of his improper behaviour with women became national news, Trump was immune to the attacks as the public was already been de-sensitized to such charges.

The issues that mattered to voters were below the radar of the media, which played up sex scandals, Trump calling beauty pageant participant as fat and ugly or insulting a Gold Star Muslim family. The majority of them remained in the closet and came out on Election Day.

Fort Bend county: a case study

Something very surprising happened in Fort Bend County, where I live and publish newspapers. Fort Bend County in Texas is one of the top three most diversified counties in the country.

Nearly 25 per cent of the county’s population is Asian and a large chunk of them are Indian Americans. It has been a Republican county forever, but the county voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for the first time in more than 50 years. The last time was for John F. Kennedy.

While the state of Texas voted for Trump, Fort Bend County voted for Clinton. At the same time, in down ballots, in local races, they elected all Republicans. The precincts where Trump lost in Fort Bend County comprise a large number of Muslims and immigrants from India.

Like everybody else, these voters chose to defy convention wisdom.

India-born Seshadri Kumar started his journalism career with The Times of India in Mumbai in 1977. He worked with the Khaleej Times, Dubai, U.A.E. and subsequently with the Houston Community Newspapers and Houston Chronicle in the U.S.. He began publishing an ethnic newspaper in Houston, India Herald, in 1995, and launched a mainstream community newspaper called Fort Bend Independent in 2008. He lives in Sugar Land, Texas, a suburb of Houston.

The creation of a new Office of Religious Freedom within Canada’s Foreign Affairs department has been generally panned as “pandering” to ethnic voters. It is anything but …

A look at the provenance and profile of a similar American institution offers a few useful lessons. The Office of International Religious Freedom was created in 1998 after Congress approved legislation requiring the State Department to draft an annual report on how religious liberty was faring around the world. While the American Office has unfailing produced these reports, they have not been the kind of lightning rods that they might have been – not even during the presidency of George W. Bush. 

That outcome is not surprising given that U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright did not read too much into its creation. “This landmark law has made identifying and condemning all forms of religious persecution an integral part of U.S. foreign policy and has caused American diplomats to become more comfortable and practiced as raising the issue.” She called it a “litmus test” for dealing with other governments.

We don’t see the Canadian version being any different. Foreign policy-making is a matrix, and, with the creation of the new Office, religious liberty may have gained greater significance. But, it is highly unlikely that Ottawa will determine its diplomatic course on this one factor alone.

After all, it’s been widely reported that the idea for the creation of such an Office came in the wake of the killing in Pakistan of its minister for religious minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, in March, 2011 – two months before the last federal elections. It is germane to speculate what our newly-appointed ambassador of religious freedom, Andrew Bennett, would have done had the assassination happened on his watch.  Bennett’s office would be expected to issue a vociferous statement and he himself may decide to travel to Pakistan to lend Canada’s heft to the global outcry. But, would it make a whit of difference to minorities in Pakistan? Would they feel or be any safer because Canada has spoken out?

Unlikely.

Also imagine Mr. Ambassador of Religious Freedom meeting Saudi Arabia's new interior minister, Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, whose regime regularly jails expatriates for practising any faith in the holy land of Mecca and Medina. The outcome is likely to be no different in meetings with Chinese, Azerbaijani, Iranian, Nigerian or Malaysian leaders, for all of whom “non-interference in internal affairs” is a helpful rallying cry.

So, what’s the point? In the days following the announcement at a mosque north of Toronto, commentary has focused mostly on how standing up for persecuted faith communities in foreign lands may be a political winner with new immigrants. It is true that most New Canadians believe that we should stand up to totalitarian regimes, even if it amounts to nothing more than whistling in the wind. It could be an extension of our “soft power” and the drip, drip influence of moral suasion.

But that does not make the new Office a sop to immigrants as much as it is a recognition that Canada’s political centre-of-gravity is shifting away from a largely godless constituency to a new critical mass of citizens for whom faith is an important dimension of their lives. The first demographic would rather have the government set up an Office of Freedom from Religion – as Mary Jane Chamberlain of Toronto said in a letter to the Globe and Mail – while the second prefers an Office of Religious Freedom. This Office is a nod to the faithful.

It is again instructive to quote Albright (from her book The Mighty and the Almighty, 2006): As I travel around the world, I am often asked, “Why can’t we just keep religion out of foreign policy?” My answer is that we can’t and shouldn’t. Religion is a large part of what motivates people and shapes their views of justice and right behaviour. It must be taken into account. - New Canadian Media