Wisdom from an unexpected source

In a piece published in the Washington Post on June 1, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf writes

[w]e need to understand that the root cause of extremism and militancy lies in political injustice, denial and deprivation. Political injustice to a nation or a people, when combined with stark poverty and illiteracy, makes for an explosive mix. It produces an acute sense of hopelessness and powerlessness. A nation suffering from these lethal ills is easily available for the propagation of militancy and the perpetration of extremist, terrorist acts. It is cannon fodder in a war of terrorism.

General Musharraf is a man whose own commitment to democracy and justice is certainly questionable at best, but here I think he is spot on and saying something that desperately needs saying.

January 5, 2002, in the aftermath of 9/11, I wrote this:

The fact is, terrorism can't be stopped unless it is understood - any more than you can cure a disease without knowing the cause. Terrorism is born of desperation-driven fanaticism, a desperation that can't be separated from the social and economic conditions in which such as al-Qaeda can take root and grow, conditions - it must be said bluntly - which we as a nation are complicit in maintaining for our own selfish benefit.

Together, all this means three things:

One, unless we are prepared to wipe out entire peoples, our "war against terrorism" will not succeed. It will only produce more anger, more hatred, more suicide bombers; the more so as it spreads to more poor nations.

Two, patient police work of effective investigation and intelligence has done and will do more to oppose terrorism than all our bombing sorties combined. ...

Three and most importantly, our best targets for "attack" in this "extended campaign" are not the actual terrorists (who likely number no more than a few thousand) but the tens of thousands, the millions, of denigrated, degraded, and denied people among who they recruit and from who they draw their strength. Our best weapons are bread and butter, not bombs; our best tactic reconstruction, not retaliation; our best strategy justice, not jingoism. The best way for us to fight terrorism is to ensure that the dispossessed have a genuine stake in the world and don't see us as grasping bullies - and the best way to no longer be seen as a grasping bully is to stop being one

I still think so.

Footnote: Musharraf's entire piece, in which he calls on

the Muslim world to shun militancy and extremism and adopt the path of socioeconomic uplift ... [and] the West, and the United States in particular, to seek to resolve all political disputes with justice and to aid in the socioeconomic betterment of the deprived Muslim world,

is worth reading.