Jigsaw jihadism.

• Author: Rosenthal, Justine A.
• Position: Controlling religious terrorism - Viewpoint essay

LATELY, ALL terrorism seems to be about Islam, and it all seems to be the same. A snapshot: turn on CNN to watch a gruesome play-by-play of our War on Terror, scan the best-seller list for the newest book on Osama bin Laden, leaf through the newspaper to see the latest suicide terror attack. By all accounts the specter of jihadism looms large. Yet, some unintended trickery is afoot--imagery making the threat to Western democracy, which is frightening enough, seem like the worst kind of Hollywood doomsday movie.

Even if we suspend belief for a moment and simply cast aside all those terrorist groups that clearly have nothing at all to do with the Islamic religion--the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, the FARC in Colombia and the IRA in Ireland (to name but a few)--we are still left with a slew of seemingly similar groups all motivated by and distorting Islam to suit their own ends. Yet the problem is far more complex and, as we disaggregate the threat, we see that although "Islamic terrorism" prevails in many cases, the goals of these terrorist groups are often strikingly different.

Even if all of these terrorists intone various distortions of the Islamic religion, there are no universal agendas. The goal for groups like Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Chechen rebels is "a nation of their own" with tactics reminiscent of the ethnic violence erupting after abandoned colonialism. Groups with traditional nation-state aims--even if they use Islamic rhetoric--have little interest, if any, in the United States. Their goals remain narrow and less fearsome.

On the other end of the spectrum are groups like Jemaah Islamiya (JI) and Al-Qaeda with its various offshoots, who indeed are looking to rearrange the global order, instigate the now-infamous clash of civilizations and create a Muslim caliphate that spans continents, all the while bringing the West to its knees. Their goals are vast and global. Somewhere in the middle of all this are groups at risk, Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) in Pakistan and the separatist movements in the Philippines and Thailand. These groups are primarily motivated by state-centric goals, but all rest on the cusp of pan-territorial and far more dangerous agendas.

Without doubt, the United States needs to counter Islamic terrorists seeking the ascendance of an Islamic caliphate and the concomitant destruction of the West. But this is not a battle against all terrorists in which the Islamic religion plays a role. The danger in thinking about it as an all-or-nothing war is two-fold: first, that we will miscategorize these state-centered groups and so create inappropriate counter-terrorism strategies; second, that by doing so we will push groups that have constrained goals toward the pan-global agenda of Al-Qaeda--creating the very threat we fear most.

Birds of a Feather?

THERE IS no massive monolith hurtling toward us, razing everything in its path. There are a few big boulders and a whole lot of pebbles. Which direction and how much momentum they take on may be mainly up to us. Terrorist groups can largely be conceived as having two working parts: an identity and an ideology. When it comes to Islamic terrorism, that identity is based in religion, but sometimes the ideology is based in nationalism, while at other times in a more ephemeral, pan-territorial agenda. This difference is most stark between more traditional "ethno-terrorist" movements and the far more globally oriented groups like Al-Qaeda. As Al-Qaeda's top strategist Ayman al-Zawahiri makes clear, there is a significant difference between Islamic national liberation movements and those struggling for a new Islamic global order:

Many of the liberation battles in our Muslim world had used composite slogans that mixed nationalism with Islam and, indeed, sometimes caused Islam to intermingle with leftist, communist slogans.... The Palestinian issue is the best example of these intermingled slogans and beliefs under the influence of an idea of allying oneself with the devil for the sake of liberating Palestine. They allied themselves with the devil, but lost Palestine. Recent...