Eran Lerman

There is no magic Bullet to combat terrorism.”

Eran Lerman is one of Israel’s top strategic analysts on Israel, the Palestinians, Islamic fundamentalism, and the wider Middle East region. In an exclusive interview from Israel, Lerman shares his thoughts on the Mumbai attacks, global terrorism, and the role of the media.

You are an expert on global and Middle Eastern terrorism. What went through your mind as you saw foreign nationals, Jews all being attacked along with Indians?

My first instinct was that this was a very highly organized operation. Someone here had invested a lot of effort and preparation in learning about the targets. This was not a spontaneous strike by 10 young people. Some organization with a remarkable capacity is behind this and of course Al Qaeda which is not an organization but a network, a franchise came to mind. They give their signature to organizations who they believe are of the necessary quality. That was the first instinct. Then when I heard about the Chabad I thought may be its also a Middle Eastern Arab inspired operation but as the information started coming that the Nariman House was used not just for the Chabad but for other reasons, the notion that they were guided by an Arab element with a specific Israeli account to settle was also taken off. So we are left with an organization that enjoys a degree of professional support in Pakistan through the infrastructure of an Al Qaeda related organization that continues to exist there and sadly enough Pakistan from a distance seems to me to be a dangerous mix of a nuclear power and a dysfunctional state, and its scary.

“Pakistan from a distance seems to me to be a dangerous mix of a nuclear power and a dysfunctional state, and it’s scary.”
Confusion can sometime reign, when you are hit with a completely new type, or new scale of operation. We have had our own share of sea borne raids when we lost one of our most illustrious commanders more than 30 years ago as he charged with his men into a hotel in Tel Aviv under similar circumstances. It didn’t take three days but it was also a smaller hotel.

It is harder to take over such a huge hotel (Taj) when there is such a small group of people going about from one place to another.

India is an admirable democracy but some of the criticism I have heard recently from Indian friends and from other people is that it’s a “soft” state and that to me has a ring of truth in it. I don’t advocate going entirely in the opposite direction as a society as vibrant and complex as India cannot become a fortress but a much greater degree of governmental competence and proper integration of reliable intelligence and the operational arm learning to translate the intelligence is required. This will take time. When violence erupted in new forms in Israel in 2000, it took us a couple of years to put our act together and ultimately we have come to the point where terrorism no longer dominates our daily life despite the best efforts of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and so on. It takes time and organization particularly for intelligence and enforcement agencies that need to work closely together and create a balance between a soft and a fortress state that will enable them to protect the lives of their citizens.

What sense do you make of where we are headed in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks?

Unfortunately we are all in the same boat-we are in this together and we have to be very clear in our minds as to who the enemy is, what their purpose is and why this is really as much a matter for the international community as well as the individual country affected.

I’ve always been very careful to draw the line between Islam as a religion, as a civilization as an important part of human heritage and modern revolutionary perversion which some people call fundamentalism but is really a modern type of totalitarianism that masquerades as religion.

It has its roots in the 20s, 30s, and 40s and in the Nazi movement. It almost happened to India. Imagine if Subhash Chandra Bose had led India into an alliance with Hitler.

Similar things happened to the Palestinians creating the sympathies of some of the Muslim movements in the Middle East which spread over the years and took hold of the minds of some of the young people and the intellectuals of a certain kind across the Muslim world. These are the movements that are a very radicalized platform but have two kinds of attitude towards the future. There are people who are willing to wait and there are people who are trying to rush and what we see today is that these terrorist movements are part of the galaxy of Islamist totalitarians who feel that the time has come to strike and destroy the existing order, to destabilize the international community and push quickly towards total transformation.

I have to agree with those who believe that Pakistan government is as much a victim of those elements as anyone else and the President has paid a terrible price but at the end of the day it also seems there is support and sympathy from an element within the governmental structure and it is not only India but President elect Obama who is very clear that this is something that will need to be addressed. Of course beating on an entire country over the head for this, is a wrong way of going about things.

You need to first have the moderates isolate for want of better words, the “bad” guys and ultimately take them out of business but that requires a complex combination of carrots and sticks, a degree of patience and some degree of pressure. Certainly this cannot pass as if nothing has happened.

There have been questions about America’s role in South Asian politics and a lack of understanding.

I think America has a basic understanding, knowing which clan has been benefiting from what policies and what are the personal relationships that drive, what on the face of it, looks like ideology but actually are old scores being settled. All of these complex local issues are very difficult for any country, let alone an English speaking nation like America with a very limited sense of the subtleties other people’s politics. Its tough and it takes time. I was watching them in Iraq and it took them 2-3 years simply to get the hang of how things work, what you should do what with. I think the new administration will have to take a long, careful look at the Afghani situation, Pakistani co ally and its Indian intricacies for the Indian relationship. I certainly hope that they have the guiding light they need for the world’s most powerful, largest democracy to work in close cooperation.

The question of combating global terrorism continues to loom as attacks escalate and yet most people shy away from facing the gravity of the situation.

There is no magic bullet to combat terrorism for us in Israel or for anyone else. If you want to bar this gap that has opened in our lives, you have to have a set of sliding doors overlapping each other. It has to include better security at the police level and to make soft targets harder to get to, and to make the terrorist’s life harder. You need effective prevention along your border, and invest more and more resources in intelligence because there cannot be effective treatment of terrorism without effective intelligence. You also need to be able to do preventive work beyond your borders, to keep the terrorists running for cover wherever they are and keep themselves busy doing that rather than have the leisure to sit in some territory and plan their next operation; and launch it in Mumbai as they did. You have to defeat them on the very ground they chose. You also have to invest in two other efforts-one is the intellectual effort to debunk their ideology, to show that it has very little to do with the traditional interpretation of religion, that it is tainted by the totalitarian European ideas, templates from the Bolsheviks to the Nazis that essentially think of themselves as purifying their societies from foreign influences but they themselves are the foreign influence and they owe those to the perversion of the 20th century than to the traditions of their own religion.

It’s an intellectual battle and has to be fought with the help of the moderate, sober voices within Islam, the Sufis and the modernists and liberal reformers who are as much if not more, the victims of these groups than any of us.

We have to bear in mind that in Algeria more than 100,000 Muslims were gunned down by other Muslims. We are working very closely with the Muslim leadership of India and we know that people there harbor a very different interpretation of the religion than what we saw (in the Mumbai attacks).

And the second effort has to be to deal with what people call the underlying causes. The key root causes are really social dislocation, the collapse of the government, corruption, frightening social gaps, rapid and uncontrollable urbanization, the collapse of traditional and social structures and the creation of semi educated urban masses that totalitarians can easily mobilize and use to find recruits.

Look at our neighboring country Jordan which by normal definition should have been a volatile state. They have 70 percent Palestinians, one million Iraqi refugees just beginning to grow, Iranian products, problems of infrastructure, problems of the legitimacy of the monarchy, but it’s stable and very little terrorism arises from within Jordan. Why? Because it is a society that gives young people an opportunity to do well and focuses on the well being of its own community rather than some global fantasy that grabs you and tells you if only some body else is in power in some other place then all will be well. And this is a telling difference.

What kind of economic impact do you see of this attack on India?

Everything that is based on past experience is made irrelevant because we are living under very different dynamics emanating from the financial centers of the world. Things that could have been easily taken care of until recently are now more difficult to mend because the tools are damaged.

Having said that let me add two contradictory statements about the Israeli situation without making a judgment because they are applicable to the Indian conditions.

There is definitely going to be a short term effect. But, we too suffered question marks about our economic reliability, and we had a certain decline in investment in the early years of the conflict that erupted with the Palestinians after the year 2000. We definitely took a serious hit in tourism and we had a situation where our hotels were literally empty. But over time the resilience of society, the determination of people from different walks of life to continue, and moreover the resilience of the Israeli economy as a system, and continued economic growth stabilized and sustained our financial institutions. People, those who are called the Pink Page community-those who read the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal before they read anything else, those who mind economic indicators, sat up after a while and said –“Look the Israelis can be viable, they can make a good product, even under such circumstances. They are a very resilient society and may be I should go over there and see if I can make an investment because people who can respond with such resilience to a major crisis are probably going to be able to weather smaller storms.” And we saw Warren Buffet coming in and we saw billions in investment coming in even before we had settled our conflict which is basically still around. So if there is any lesson here to be learnt for India or any other country, it is that if you show that under attack you sustain not only a stiff upper lip but the capacity to go about your business and even thrive, then you are going to enjoy an even greater degree of appreciation than you did before. But that very much depends on your capacity to how you will respond at a national level.

The role of the media has come in for a lot of flak, giving out sensitive information. How would you have handled something like this in Israel? I remember reading recently that foreign press had moved courts to have Israel lift the ban to go to Gaza?

The truth is we have had our own issues with media-certainly with international media but also with national media when it comes to the coverage of terrorism. With the international media we are very often upset by the almost obsessive necessity to offer justification barely camouflaged as an explanation. The problem with the national media is that they tend to give such emphasis to terror-and it’s a fact- there will be pictures of victims on the front page- that they create a sense of doom and gloom. They don’t realize that we are servicing the terrorists’ sense that they are winning.

Its impossible to assume that something of the magnitude of Mumbai will not sweep both the national and international headlines. But if you have journalists with a modicum of experience in military intelligence situations, they will have a sense when a piece of information can endanger other people. What you are describing seems to speak of inexperience and ignorance.

We had a similar sort of debate in 2000 over the Lebanon war. There was an accusation that in its eagerness to compete for the limited morsels of information the media came out with information that probably made Hezbollah’s life easier in killing our soldiers. There was a great degree of anger here too and with good reason.

Unfortunately media blackouts hardly work in today’s world in an internet environment. What doesn’t get reported one way will get reported another way and what may not be allowed in an Israeli newspaper can easily be leaked to a British paper.

Perhaps what should be done in India is to make a greater effort to bring out the other side of the story-the stories of resilience, the courage of people under fire, refusal of the Mumbai society to be frightened into submission and to drop its business and go away.

In Jerusalem as in India its impressive how quickly the burnt out bus or the stricken area is swept clean and people go back to their normal lives as best as they can. These are the tools and weapons in the war because what drives terrorism is the hope of breaking the back of the target societies. So the resilience of the target societies is one of the most important weapons against terror. You cannot deter a suicide bomber by telling him he is going to die-but you can actually tell him that he is going to die for nothing, that his sacrifice will have no effect beyond a swift and passing impact. Terror is ultimately a self serving fight for people who want to be admired for all the wrong reasons. And so when you take away that capacity to portray themselves as heroes to certain people then you very much limit their motivation.

Also what everyone needs to do is to have a much closer relationship between the law enforcement agencies, even the intelligence and defense establishment and the relevant news people, not in order to make them the voice of the government, but simply to sensitize them to when information and leaks and the use of language can actually kill people. And it has to be a consistent, long term relationship.