A review of Ibrahim Warde's book: The Price of Fear (UC Berkeley Press, 2007)
Read the full review at: http://whatyoumustread.blogspot.com/
To people like me who are -for the most part- opposed to putting boots on the ground too often, a financial war against terrorism sounded like a great idea. Wouldn't striking directly at terrorists' wallets be both more discrete and more efficient than going into remote places like Iraq or Afghanistan with little of a case for doing so, and an even smaller chance of success?
Ibrahim Warde denounces this kind of thinking. It's not even that he doesn't agree, but the whole attempt at positing the problem as such is erroneous according to him.
Warde, a professor at the Fletcher school, gives us a few good reasons not to keep on waging the same grandiloquent financial war on terror the way the United States has since 9/11. First -he explains- every major terrorist attack since (and including) 9/11 has cost only very little money. This clearly undermines the logic of being on the watch for huge money transfers and deposits.
Second, Warde criticises the linkage which has been made between terrorism financing and money laundering. As he rightly explains, while money laundering is about turning dirty cash into clean investments in order to make a profit, terrorism financing rarely has anything in common with this logic. Most of the time (if not always) -Warde writes- terrorist attacks are financed with clean money. And for sure, making profit is never involved.
Here, we come to a third point, which is highly important to Warde -and indeed seems to be valid. That is, terrorists do not go where the cash is; it's the cash that comes to them. Hence, we shouldn't be looking for Osama's big stash of cash (which, by the way, has been hugely overinflated); what we ought to be doing is solving the political problems that have led to the rise of terrorists in any given place.
Unfortunately, that isn't what we've been working at. In fact, because it is led by bureaucrats with little or no knowledge of, or relation to the situation on the ground, Warde contends that the United States' financial war on terror has been mostly counterproductive. The case of Islamic charities is a good illustration of this, he adds.
Though Warde agrees that their loose financing system had come to need some reform, a series of groundless accusations against famous and innocent Islamic charities has created a deplorable stigma which can only contribute to more discontent against America on the part of Muslims throughout the world (and within the United States).
One last problem with the Administration's current financial war on terror has been its creation of what Warde calls "Gated Finance". In order to reconcile the Amer
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April 6, 2008
ilyas m mohsin, ppp, Platinum Contributor (253)
The mujahideen commanders, including OBL and all Taliban were honoured by Preisdent Regan as being counterparts of 'the founding fathers' of the US in the mid-80s when they were needed to humble the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
it is soeasy to mislead the western public, except the British to some extent, about threats existing and imagined. Being most uninformed and maintaining an attitude of 'could not care less' , they succumb to fear, generally, in a trice. The number of orage alerts ordered by the Administration during 2004, the election-year, are stunning. It hurt the people' psyche. Somehow it appeared as if the terrorists were suggesting a re-election of the incumbent.
In current terrorism, as rightly pointed out above, not a fortune is required. The major capital is human and that is largely available due to misery heaped on the oppressed people. The occupation forces kill one person, a dozen volunteer to avenge his death despite being lightly armed. Go to Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan etc, it is the same story. Force is assumed by the powerful to hold the magic-wand. It may at smaller and discreet scale but as atrocities are committed per routine, the urge for revenge is natural to the oppressed.
The best way to end terrorism is to get justice done and not by proclaim ing 'myway or highway.'