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May 23, 2014

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Home » Opinion » Foreign Views

World must unite to fight terrorism, wherever it lies

By Dan Steinbock | May 23, 2014, Friday | Print Edition

ZERO patience with terrorism requires multipolar counterterrorist cooperation, led by China and the United States.

According to the authorities in Xinjiang, the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) has been identified as the attacker in Urumqi on April 30, an event that killed three people and injured 79. ETIM member Ismail Yusup planned the incident outside China. The attack was carried out by 10 of his partners.

Recently, there have been similar incidents in and beyond Xinjiang, and China’s major cities are boosting security to prepare against incidents of terrorism.

As someone who has lived through terrorist attacks from the Middle East and Europe to New York City on September 11, 2001, I am not surprised to see SWAT teams in Shanghai, just as there are in lower Manhattan.

It’s painful but necessary. There should be zero patience with terrorism — any kind of terrorism.

According to China’s first National Security Blue Book, terrorist activities are spreading to more regions. Most of the attacks in 2013 were perpetrated by religious extremists.

And yet from Washington to Brussels, the threat of religious extremists and violent separatists in China is too often downplayed.

Historically, these extremist movements benefited from the Cold War. And to coordinate actions, ETIM leaders also met with Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaida leader.

Nevertheless, ETIM was largely ignored as a force of terror until October 2001.

That’s when the US invaded Afghanistan and bombed al-Qaida bases, which led to ETIM attacks against US forces.

Strange bedfellows

As a result, the Bush administration designated the movement as a terrorist organization, and so did the UN, the EU, and several governments in Central Asia. Later the US took ETIM off the list, arguing that it had little capacity to execute attacks. But there may have been another issue as well.

Reportedly, ETIM is closely associated with the World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an organization that China has accused for orchestrating terror since the 2009 ethnic violence in Urumqi. The WUC is partly funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a US non-profit organization founded in 1983 to promote democracy.

The NED is funded by Congress, via the US Agency for International Development (USAID), working closely with the State Department. The NED has funded various NGOs in Eastern Europe (Ukraine, Georgia), Iran, and Latin America (Ecuador, Venezuela). In Asia, most of its Asian NGOs focus on China.

According to a 2013 Pew survey, only 18 percent of Americans believe that democracy promotion should be the top US foreign policy goal.

Some go further.

A decade ago, Ron Paul, a veteran Texas member of Congress, argued on Capitol Hill against NED’s funding because it had “very little to do with democracy. It is an organization that uses US tax money to actually subvert democracy.”

In the Obama era, Washington’s counterterrorism efforts with China have been constrained by a stated quest to expand cooperation, but there have been policy obstacles. But there are some promising signs of increasing collaboration.

Only days ago, the military leaders of China and the US announced that the two shared a consensus on developing a new type of China-US military relationship. That is good news, especially if counterterrorism will have a role in this relationship.

In our new world, the threat of terrorism is global. Any win-lose game — “your terrorist is my freedom fighter” — can happen only at the expense of innocent civilian victims.

What we need is a multipolar, counterterrorist cooperation led by the US, along with major advanced economies, and China, along with large emerging economies.

Dr. Dan Steinbock is Research Director of International Business at India China and America Institute (USA) and Visiting Fellow at Shanghai Institutes for International Studies (China) and the EU Center (Singapore). For more, see http://www.differencegroup.net. Shanghai Daily condensed the article.

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