Terrorism is here to stay ... so what do we do now? [THE NATIONAL]

January 14, 2016Earlier this week, an extremist attack in Istanbul claimed the lives of at least 10 people, and injured 15 more. In Australia, three young men were charged with “membership of a terrorist organisation”. In Egypt, there were suspicions that a stabbing in a Red Sea resort was the work of ISIL sympathisers. The list can go on, including yesterday’s attacks in Jakarta, simply in the past seven days alone. This trend is not going away, but it is important to put it in perspective.In a recent article published by The Nation in the United States, it was pointed out that 26 incidents of terrorism, perpetrated by vigilante groups in which more than 50 people died, took place in 2015. The vast majority of those attacks were scarcely reported in the international media. Almost all of those attacks were not in the West, but in Africa and the Middle East (especially in Nigeria and Iraq). Responsiveness to suffering is rarely an equal opportunities business. When radical, militant vigilantism takes the lives of innocent people in Lebanon, Nigeria or Iraq, it ought to attract the same level of concern internationally as France or the UK. But it doesn’t.If we do recognise that political violence perpetrated by vigilante groups is a problem that many countries in the world have to deal with, then there is something else we ought to accept. Such violence and the threat of it is going to be a facet of human existence not just this year, but far beyond it. The question is not how we can end this threat from terrorism in 2016, because that’s not possible. The question is how we deal with that threat – and how we avoid making it worse, while it eventually burns out.Part of the answer to that relates to respect for civil liberties and fundamental rights, of course. Considerations around effective, well-crafted counterterrorism strategies, are key – as are the focuses on building resilient societies that are based on the rule of law. But there are other contexts to consider too, which complicate our approaches.Within Muslim majority countries, for example, a key backdrop to this is the rise of sectarianism, particularly between Sunni and Shia.It is unfortunate that some consider that it is inevitable that these problems in the Arab world, for example, are “rooted in conflicts that date back millennia”, as Barack Obama claimed on Wednesday. But the perception is real – and it informs and colours far too much in this region.When it comes to the West, there is another set of problems altogether – and these have everything to do with the rise of right-wing populism, and that political trend’s success in mainstreaming so much of its bigotry. As the existence of terrorism intensifies, so will different leaders in both the Muslim world and the West use it for their own political agendas.There is just one problem with that, though: the world does not have time. On the one hand, many of these countries suffer from far more difficult problems than terrorism. The US, for example, loses far more citizens to gun crime. But without the strength of political leadership, it’s difficult to see such issues being addressed more effectively. The same can be said for countries in the region.What, then, is the solution? The first is to understand and appreciate that while terrorism is a problem, it is not the only one – nor the most important one – for countries to address. As mentioned previously, we ought also to pay attention to the fact that such terrorism is exponentially higher in countries in Mena and Africa. Moreover, if that assessment is taken seriously, then the question becomes: what do we do next?There will be negative and positive strategies. On the one hand, it becomes more important every day for politicians to understand where the terrorist threat comes from – and many of them do not. They ought to have a clear set of principles that leads to actual projects on the ground. While they should try to minimise damage, they should also present genuine alternatives.But perhaps most obvious of all is this, especially given what we know about the propensity of political forces to be manipulative: it remains necessary that we uncouple the political partisan messages that are being put out by both those in various Arab states, as well as governments in the West. And therein lies the rub – it is not good enough to disentangle the confusions various governments hold. They also need to build a fully thought-out alternative to their predominant frames.That, it must be said, might have worked, once upon a time. But in 2016, the average age of the Arab is much younger. And the young are always more impatient with the old.Dr HA Hellyer is an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Rafik Hariri Centre for the Middle East at the Atlantic Council in Washington, DCOn Twitter: @hahellyerSource: The National