Why Terrorists bite the hand that feeds them

For decades, Pakistan gave financial, logistic and moral support to armed Islamic militants, who were sent out to infiltrate and destabilise Kashmir and India. As the recent attacks on the army headquarters and police compounds show, these militants have now turned against their former masters.
This is not a unique case. During the Cold War, the US government decided to support the Afghan resistance against the Soviet invader with weapons and money. President Reagan said that the Mujahideen were ‘freedom fighters’ and ‘the moral equivalent’ of the American Founding Fathers. These deeply religious heroes charmed the Americans with their brave struggle against the Soviet unbeliever. Some fifteen years later, the romance was over: the horror of 9/11 led to the war in Afghanistan.
In Pakistan, dictator Zia-ul-Haq also supported the Afghan resistance during the 1980s. Meanwhile, he ‘Islamised’ state institutions and enabled Muslim fanatics to penetrate the army. After his death, Pakistani rulers began to use Islamic militants as pawns in the conflict with India. Particularly the army and its infamous intelligence services, the ISI, applied this tactic systematically. Many Pakistanis viewed this as a heroic struggle against the heathen nation of India, much like Americans defended the support to the Mujahideen in the name of safeguarding the free world and the struggle of God against atheism. Today in Pakistan, the former heroes have also turned against the state that nourished them. After the USA, the Pakistani people will be the next victim of Jihad.
Why do terrorists bite the hand that feeds them? This tendency is intrinsic to the internal logic of terrorism. Typical to terrorism is its transformation of crime into moral heroism. It re-presents criminals – who kill and maim innocent people – as heroes, saints and martyrs. This lies at the heart of all terrorist movements: they call upon a powerful moral message to justify their crimes and characterise these as exceptionally praiseworthy acts. For the Rote Armee Fraktion and the Red Brigades, it concerned the toppling of the oppressors of the proletariat; the Zionist terror brigades struggled for a homeland for the Jewish people; Al Qaeda fights for the will of Allah. Each of these movements shares two aspects: they attracted people who were deeply concerned about some cause and wished to ‘fight’ for it; and they soon sank into a variety of forms of crime, from murder to drug trade, in the name of this cause.
This is not a coincidence. In fact, all such movements are parasitic upon the morals of a specific community. Terrorists invoke the moral values of some community (say, the Muslim community or the communist international) only to abuse these as a justification for the most horrible atrocities. Thus, they are subversive in the most harmful way: they feed on a specific people and then turn against that people by committing crimes in the name of its moral values.
Consequently, terrorists always end up attacking the communities that sustained them at some point. Whether it concerns Pakistan or the USA, each state that supports a terrorist movement will eventually pay the price.
These two countries pursued their ‘national interest’ so fanatically and unscrupulously that they sent out heavily armed Islamic militants to undermine the enemy. When a country’s foreign policy detaches itself from all moral considerations in this way, then it inevitably creates a fertile soil for terrorism – a form of crime that does not honour its master.
 

Dr. Jakob De Roover is a Post-Doctoral Fellow, Research Foundation (FWO)Flanders
Universiteit Gent - Ghent University