Table of Contents
We are engaged in a battle of ideas [with terrorists], a struggle to the death over values.[1]
[The fight against terrorism] is now one of the greatest political challenges of our generation. And I believe our most potent weapons in this struggle are our ideas.[2]
Alexander Downer
The Howard Government has made counterterrorism a cardinal element in its foreign policy. This is evident from the amount of resources—human and financial—which have been devoted to this purpose during the past five years. More than A$8 billion has been committed to the ‘war on terror’ since late 2001, including about A$400 million in Southeast Asia.[3] Most of this regional expenditure goes to Indonesia, as it is seen as not only having the most severe terrorism problem in the region but as also the Southeast Asian country in which Australian citizens and assets are at the greatest risk of attack from groups such as Jemaah Islamiyah (JI) and the Noordin Mohammed Top network.[4] Counterterrorism assistance takes various forms. The most prominent has been the extensive technical cooperation and training provided by Australian police and intelligence agencies to their Southeast Asian counterparts. This includes assistance with forensic investigations and electronic surveillance, programs to improve terrorism database management, and training in terrorist psychology, ideology and operational methods. There has also been assistance for drafting counterterrorism legislation. In addition to these law enforcement, intelligence and legislative initiatives, the Australian Government has committed substantial sums of money to programs designed to combat terrorist ideas—its 2005 White Paper on regional terrorism (Australia’s National Security: A Defence Update 2005) made clear that the government regarded ‘extremist ideology’ as the main driver of terrorism.[5] These programs are diverse and not always placed in an explicitly counterterrorism framework. They include interfaith dialogue conferences, Muslim exchange programs between Australian and Indonesian students, youth leaders and intellectuals, educational assistance programs which are aimed at Islamic schools (such as the Learning Assistance Program for Islamic Schools), and high-level visits to Australia by senior Indonesian Muslim leaders.
These campaigns against terrorist ideology, which the government regards as part of a broader ‘battle of ideas’, are the focus of this chapter. It will explore the government’s perceptions of the ‘battle of ideas’ and critique the policies deriving from it. I will argue that this aspect of the counterterrorism effort is of questionable benefit, as it is either poorly targeted or fails to address the dynamics of jihadism and the vectors through which it is spread.
To gain a better understanding of how the Howard Government defines the ‘battle of ideas’, it is necessary to examine the statements and publications of key ministers and departments. There are three interlinked themes in this discourse: (1) ideology is the primary driver of terrorism; (2) ideas promoted by terrorists are totalitarian and based on a malign misinterpretation of ‘true’ Islamic teachings which are tolerant and pluralistic; and (3) Western nations can only defeat terrorism with the assistance of ‘moderate Muslims’.
Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer has made the most frequent and detailed pronouncements about counterterrorism, and particularly the importance of ideas. In a 2006 speech entitled ‘Ideas as Weapons’, he said:
Ordinary Australians … want to know what is fanning this violent extremism. The answer is: ideas. Even though they are couched in religious terms, the ideas that drive terrorist groups like JI and al Qaeda are political in nature. Their ideas are based on a distorted and selective interpretation of Islam.
On another occasion, he declared:
The heart of this contest [between moderate and radical Islam] is about the totalitarian mentality of violent extremism. It is about the values on which the terrorists base their ideology. … This ideology can and will be defeated if people of good faith everywhere stand up against it.[6] [emphasis in original]
Downer has been at pains to illustrate the power that ideas can have in motivating global movements. In one speech he compared contemporary terrorism to communism of the last century:
Soviet Communism began in a back room in London in 1903 with Lenin, a handful of followers and half a dozen pistols. They took an idea and turned it into a plan for political power. That revolutionary regime and its totalitarian ideology was an ideological storm that inflicted catastrophic results on the world. … At the beginning of the twenty-first century, terrorism and its extremist ideology is another storm bursting on the world.[7]
Downer pointed to the susceptibility of sections of the Muslim community to radical messages, saying ‘as people search for meaning and spiritual fulfilment they can easily be misled by utopian ideas packaged as simple solutions to complex political problems’.[8] He repeatedly asserts the centrality of moderate Muslims to the counterterrorism effort:
The most successful warriors against the Islamic extremist terrorists will be moderate Muslims.
In the Mosques, in the Islamic schools and more broadly in the Muslim community, it is moderate Muslims who can spread and give life to the great values of peace and tolerance which are at the heart of the beliefs of the overwhelming majority of Muslims.
We must support each other, as people who respect the rights of others, as people who value tolerance. We must support moderate Muslims to ensure that they successfully defeat the divisive message of hate, tyranny and intolerance propagated by the extremists.[9]
Australian Prime Minister John Howard has also spoken regularly, though in more general terms, on the importance of ideology and moderate Muslims to counterterrorism. Fighting terrorism, he says, is
not only the military battle, but also the battle of ideas. … We must try and engage and win the confidence of moderate Islamic people. … Justifying terrorism by a reference to Islam is the common thread of all the terrorist attacks that we’ve had. Every single one of them has involved some kind of indication or reference point in Islam. Now that is blasphemous, it is a misrepresentation of the Islamic religion. [This] puts obligations on all of us, including in particular moderate Islamic leaders. Because it is their faith that is being blasphemed [sic] and wrongly invoked.[10]
Howard has been especially generous in his praise of ‘moderate Muslim leaders’ such as Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf and Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Musharraf is, according to Howard, someone who has played a major role in the fight against terrorism and in leading his country to democracy. Yudhoyono is described even more glowingly as ‘one of the most capable moderate Islamic leaders in the world’.[11] Yudhoyono’s ‘election [in 2004] was a triumph for moderate Islam over the forces of evil and extremism. The terrorists want him to fail. The good, decent moderate Islamic people want him to succeed.’[12] He went on to compliment Pakistan and Indonesia as ‘two great Islamic countries, both of whoms [sic] future as pillars and exemplars of moderate Islam is so important to winning the battle of ideas against the extremist elements around the world’.[13]
It is worth noting, in passing, that the language and counterterrorism priorities of the Australian Government are almost identical to that of the Bush Administration, suggesting that the former borrows heavily from the latter. Senior Administration officials refer constantly to the ‘battle of ideas’ and the need to enlist moderate Muslims in the global ‘war on terror’. For example, in 2005 President Bush’s National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley declared: ‘we must win the battle of ideas’ between [the terrorists’] ‘grim totalitarian vision’ and the free world’s ‘positive vision of freedom and democracy’. He described this as ‘a struggle for the soul of Islam’ in which ‘Islamic moderates’ needed to ‘dispute the distorted vision of Islam advanced by terrorists’.[14]
More elaborate expositions on Australian Government counterterrorism thinking and policies are set out in a range of official documents, most particularly in DFAT’s Advancing the National Interest: Australia’s Foreign and Trade Policy White Paper (especially chapter 3),[15] and Transnational Terrorism: The Threat to Australia (especially chapter 5),[16] though the analyses of the nature of the ‘terrorism problem’ and the means of addressing it are, not surprisingly, consistent with the views enunciated by both Downer and Howard.