The Paris carnage of November 13,a European 9/11 , killing 132 and causing 352 injured, has made us bound to think that the war on terror against Al Qaeda is not over simply because the resurrected Al- Qaeda’s networks of Daesh/ISIS are yet great threat to humanity as they were one decade ago. After making its evilful entry into the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan, Daesh/ISIS now ruthlessly enters into the European boundaries while posing a new threat to America. But the irrefutable truth is that ISIS is eminently a global threat. To counter this threat requires revision in our strategy against combating terrorism/extremism by adopting a global strategy of ‘mutual responsibility’ of all nations from East and West.

ISIS and its agenda

ISIS is a Wahhabi/Salafi jihadist extremist militant group and self-proclaimed Islamic state and caliphate, which is led by and mainly composed of Sunni Arabs from Iraq and Syria. As of March 2015, it has control over territory occupied by ten million people in Iraq and Syria, and through loyal local groups, has control over small areas of Libya, Nigeria and Afghanistan. The group also operates or has affiliates in other parts of the world, including North Africa and South Asia.  As a caliphate, it claims religious, political and military authority over all Muslims worldwide, and that ”the legality of all emirates, groups, states, and organisations, becomes null by the expansion of the khilāfah’s [caliphate’s] authority and arrival of its troops to their areas”.

Until February 2014, ISIS was a formal affiliate of al-Qaeda’s central command. However, al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahri cut ties with ISIS due to the group’s repeated attempts to subsume al-Qaeda’s Syrian affiliate, the Nusra Front, under its command.

Despite losing its formal alliance with al-Qaeda, ISIS has the same ideology and goals and uses the same brutal tactics as its former mother organization. In an attempt to defeat rival opposition groups, ISIS has conducted suicide-bombing attacks against rebel bases and has beheaded members of other fighting battalions. For example, according to a report from Al Jazeera English in January 2014, after ISIS prevailed in a battle with the rebel group Liwa al-Tawhid Brigade in Jarabulus, ISIS led more than 100 men to the main square to be executed. While Ankara has attempted to crack down on ISIS’s oil smuggling, numerous Turkish individuals have fostered ISIS’s illegal activity by continued importation.

It has been claimed that the military airstrikes and increased surveillance on the group’s activities have also helped to significantly curtail ISIS profits in the oil industry, according to the United States.

While ISIS’s destruction of antiquities has grabbed worldwide attention, the group does not wantonly destroy everything it finds. Authorities are uncertain to whom ISIS is selling antiquities but they believe ISIS earns as much as $100 million a month from the illegal sale of antiquities looted from captured territories, predominantly in northern Iraq. The United Nations has condemned ISIS’s antiquities looting as “a form of violent extremism that seeks to destroy the present, past and future of human civilization.”

The death cult stands unassailable with the possession of sophisticated assault and defense artillery, supplied by the NATO to fight the Syrian Dictator Bashar Assad’s regime. Horrendously, it is spreading its wings across the Arab world like wildfire, and has designs to invade Iran in the near future. The group has been following the Al-Qaeda adopted tactics of ‘projecting terrorism’ as its vital tool.

The international community must not forget that on 16 December 2014, seven gunmen affiliated with the Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP) conducted a terrorist attack on the Army Public Schoo in the northwestern Pakistani city of Peshawar. The militants, all of whom were foreign nationals, included one Chechen, three Arabs and two Afghans. They entered the school and opened fire on school staff and children, killing 141 people, including 132 schoolchildren, ranging between eight and eighteen years of age.It was Pakistan’s 9/11.In a period of one month, this is ISIS’s second attack on the European soil.On October 10,two explosions at a road junction in the centre of the Turkish capital Ankara killed at least 95 people and injured nearly 200 others.Factually speaking,Pakistan’s military has sacrificed a lot in this war against terrorism.The ongoing Zarba-e azab against terrorists’ networks in Pakistan, is the most glaring example.

Terrorism and the West waged war against it

Unsurprisingly, because of the politicised nature of the term ‘terrorism’, there are dozens of definitions of what it is. For our purposes, it is worth noting four elements that are present in most definitions: (1) Terrorism is politically motivated violence. (2) It is conducted by non-state actors. (3) It intentionally targets non-combatants. (4) It achieves its aims by creating fear within societies.

‘The terrorist’, an anonymous writer wrote, ‘represents a new breed of man which takes humanity back to prehistoric times, to the times when morality was not yet born.’ James Turner Johnson insisted that: terrorism by its nature aims to undermine and erode these goods [of political communities] and thus attacks all people who benefit from them . . . the kind of violence we today call terrorism is evil in its very nature, because it attacks the foundations of political community itself . . . There is no justice in terrorism, only injustice. We cannot, however, simply assume that a war on all terrorism is justified by the horrific actions of one particular terrorist organisation unless we have a common understanding of what terrorism actually is.

Launching a ‘war against terror’ poses two problems. First, are we certain that all forms of ‘terrorism’ are manifestly unjust and by their very existence and modus operandi provide grounds for a just cause for war? Classical Just War theorists differed considerably on what they considered to be just causes for war. Just causes may entail (1) the avenging of a wrong previously committed, (2) the restoration of goods unjustly seized, (3) responding to the violation of natural law, (4) the punishment of wrongdoers, (5) the defence of the polity and the people within it and (6) the prevention of injustice. To claim that a war on terror is justified, then, we should first of all be sure that there is a just cause by balancing the contemporary context with these six moral ideas.

The second problem that announcing a global war against terrorism creates is one of proportionality. We must ask whether a war against terrorism is a proportionate response to the 11 September attacks. In other words, will the expected good produced by the war outweigh the probable evil caused by it? The answer to this question is linked to our answer to the question of whether all terrorism provides cause for justified war. If our answer is in the affirmative, waging an endless war against terrorism may be a proportionate response. If, however, we believe that we can only answer the first question by reference to specific groups and campaigns, then a war against terrorism cannot be proportionate.

Islam and France

France rejects any conflation between Daesh and Islam.

Islam, in all its diversity (in terms of its schools, rituals, and practices), is an integral part of French society like all other beliefs in our country. France’s principle of laïcité (secularism) is based on tolerance. It guarantees all citizens, regardless of their philosophical or religious beliefs, the right to live together while respecting the freedom of conscience, the freedom to practice a religion or no religion at all.

In general, France remains fundamentally attached to respect for the diversity of cultures and the freedom of conscience. There are more than 500,000 African Muslims living in France.The apparent cause of the Paris terrorist incident is the French direct involvement in the war in Syria.

Rethinking the global strategy against war on terror

A few hours before the catastrophic attack in Paris, President Obama had announced that ISIS was now “contained,” a recalibration of his earlier assessments of “on the run” and “Jayvees” from a few years back. In the hours following the attack of jihadist suicide bombers and mass murderers in Paris, the Western press talked of the “scourge of terrorism” and “extremist violence”. Who were these terrorists and generic extremists who slaughtered the innocent in Paris — anti-abortionists, Klansmen, Tea-party zealots?.

Newsmen compete to warn us not of more jihadists to come or the nature of the Islamist hatred that fuels these murderers, but instead fret about Western “backlash” on the horizon, about how nativists and right-wingers may now “scapegoat” immigrants. Being blown apart may be one thing, but appearing illiberal over the flying body parts is quite another. This western attitude must be changed.A complete examination is required to revise the global security policy.If the West, after waging a years war against terrorism,still stands unsafe  as it was fourteen years ago,there arises the exigency of revising the strategy to combat terrorism.

Many realists hold that the defence of the state and its vital national interests are reason enough to go to war and that when the state’s vital interest or very survival is at stake, the only constraints should be prudential considerations. Thus, classical realists tend to be conservative about supporting the use of force. Clausewitz’s famous dictum that ‘war is nothing but the continuation of policy by other means’ does not so much give governments a free hand to wage war as implore them to calibrate their use of the military tool with precise policy objectives.

The politics of prudence calls for the application of traditional jus ad bellum criteria such as proportionality of ends, last resort (because waging war is usually more costly than other measures) and the likelihood of success. However, the key difference between realists and Just War theorists is that, for a realist, a military action is legitimate if it enhances the state’s vital national interest or contributes to its survival. For the realist, all other questions are secondary.

In many respects, the US response to September 11 was guided by this realist logic of war. Since then the US has argued that legitimate states must be free to make their own decisions about the best way to defend themselves from terrorism.  The Bush junior ‘s invasion of Iraq, its doctrine of the axis of evil and Washingon’s doctrine of exporting democracies in the Middle east via regime change, all have fueled the fire of terrorism in the Middle east.
Terrorism, the pragmatists and pacifists argue, is a criminal problem, not one that can be addressed by war.

A further argument is that terrorism can only be addressed through policies designed to tackle its root causes. In the case of the ‘causes’ of al-Qaeda, such writers point to the need to resolve the Palestinian problem, the perceived anti-Islamism of the West, and the grave inequalities of wealth that characterise the global economy. Unlike deontological pacifists, these writers do not argue that force is always unjustifiable. Instead, they significantly raise the threshold at which Just War criteria are considered met and conclude that the war against terror is imprudent and doomed to fail.

The most sophisticated writer in this genre is Richard Holmes, who attempts to blend deontological and consequentialist forms of pacifism. Holmes rejects the deontological position that killing is wrong per se, but argues instead that killing the innocent is wrong. He points out that, although the Just War tradition prohibits the intentional killing of non-combatants, in practice non-combatants are always killed in war and are likely to be so in the foreseeable future. Thus, Holmes combines the deontological prescription, accepted by most military ethicists, that non-combatants may not be justly targeted with the observation that non-combatants are always killed in war. There are a number of problems with both deontological and consequentialist forms of pacifism. Both call upon governments to abrogate their moral responsibilities by denying that the use of force can ever be justified.

Conclusion

The Paris carnage has caused a great concern for international community ,the global powers in the west and East, the Nato, the European Union,the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe(OSCE) the Organisation of Islamic Conference(OIC), including the Arab league, the Sunni Gulf States(GCC), Iran and the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO),an alliance working under the Russian auspices—to work comprehensively on a ‘coherent global security strategy’ to counter the security threats posed by Daesh or ISIS-a strategy that must address the root causes that promote terrorism.A true ‘smart power doctrine’–a two pronged combination of ‘hard and soft power’– must be the future strategy to tackle the menace of terrorism.Those states who have been funding ISIS, must stop this evil economic support.The international community with the assistance of global powers, must advance the progress for seeking meaningful ‘conflict resolutions of Palestine and Kashmir’.

The mission against Daesh/ISIS and its proxies can only be accomplished if we are united against it. Finally, few would argue with the merit of some of the alternative policies put forward by those who oppose the war and it would be fair to say that some policy proposals – such as strengthening the powers of the International Criminal Court to deal with international terrorists – would make an important contribution to promoting global cooperation against terrorism. Whilst such policies may contribute to ridding the world of terrorism in the long term, it is doubtful whether they would succeed in removing the threat posed by ISIS in the immediate term. This provides a useful introduction to understand the ethics of the war against terror: utilising the Just War tradition as an ethics of political responsibility. It’s indispensable decision for the world community to take some proactive and pragmatic measures against this expanding threat of global terrorism.