Islamic State Renewal Highlights India’s Old Concerns

Dr Max Abrahms, a distinguished expert in international security, geopolitics, and relations, joins IndusLens to discuss pressing topics of the global anti-terrorism movement and India's strong stance and role. This is part two of the two-part series. In part two, Dr Abrahms highlights the necessity of having India as a permanent UNSC member, changing global terrorism landscape, and the world arriving on the same page as India regarding Islamic State terrorism. 

How can India use its strong stance against terrorism to promote peace and build diplomatic pathways for Israel and Palestine towards a two-state solution? 

Many people and governments outside of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are always looking for ways to ameliorate and even to resolve the situation. There's always been a lot of outside involvement in Israel-Palestine. Of course, the territory was originally drawn up and promised to various actors by the British. But I do think it's a misunderstanding to believe that outside countries, no matter how well-intentioned they might be, can fundamentally affect the dynamics on the ground in Gaza or Israel.

The basic problem is that Israel and Hamas have very different visions about Israel and about a Palestinian state. And I don't think that there is any realistic external solution to the problem. The sad reality is, there may not be an internal solution to the problem either between Israel and Hamas and the various terrorists in the territories. It's hard for people to acknowledge this, but some problems can't be resolved. I know that the optimist in people wants to look at problems and immediately fix them. But there is a reason why the conflict has gone on this long, despite all the bloodshed, despite all of the international involvement, all of the special envoys and all of the international financial support to Gaza and the US military support to Israel.

I'm not an optimist about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Precisely because I'm not, I have urged previous US administrations not to invest their time, not to invest their capital in trying to resolve this conflict because I simply don't think that it's a good use of time, given the position, especially of Hamas. But frankly, even the Israeli government at this point is also not interested in a two-state solution. That wasn't true in the early 1990s. There was much more room for optimism, but the peace camp in Israel has been ground down with every terrorist attack to the point where a two-state solution just doesn't seem at all viable.

Now, there's this idea that countries can sort of unilaterally recognise a Palestinian state, even without any actual negotiating progress between Israeli leaders and Hamas leaders or Palestinian Authority leaders. Perhaps Ireland or Spain will simply say that they recognise a Palestinian state. Large numbers of countries are in favour of this idea, but this is just a symbolic move. It won't fundamentally affect the lives of any Palestinians, neither would it move towards a two-state solution. I think that it has more to do with domestic politics and the fact that anti-Zionism and frankly anti-Semitism in these countries are very popular. And so, sort of unilaterally declaring a Palestinian state is a way to curry favour with biased citizens in the country, who seem to be growing in number.

For years, India has been trying to highlight the state sponsorship of terrorism in Pakistan. How can India convince nations to come together and identify countries like Pakistan sponsoring terrorism, especially after recent attacks like the one in Bengaluru?

From India's perspective, this kind of hypocrisy is completely unacceptable and outrageous. Pakistan has long been a state sponsor of terrorism and has even been a state sponsor of terrorism, not only against India, which is obviously the greatest victim of it, but also the United States has been on the receiving end, in terms of the United States' bloody experience in Afghanistan. The fact that Washington, D .C., continues to give Pakistan a pass when it comes to state sponsorship of terrorism can be hard to explain. I think there are not that many Pakistan experts who are informing U.S. policy when it comes to counterterrorism.

Pakistan is frankly a confusing country when it comes to counterterrorism because it's not 100 per cent pro-terrorism. In some cases, it can be useful when it comes to counterterrorism. It plays both sides of the aisle. It engages in counterterrorism and it engages in supporting terrorism. We've seen other countries involved in a similar dynamic. Turkey, for example, is a state sponsor of terrorism, but has also fought against Islamic State and has recently engaged in a crackdown against Islamic State suspects. Saudi Arabia has been a sponsor of terrorism with its Wahhabi ideology, which has contributed to Islamist terrorism, but in other ways has been a counterterrorism ally, supplying real-time intelligence to the U.S. military against Al Qaeda assets. The same is true with Qatar, I should finally say. It was a state sponsor of Hamas in terms of pouring large amounts of money into Gaza, which went into the hands of Hamas, but now has taken a lead role when it comes to the hostage negotiations. So, I think in many cases, the United States isn't clear if these governments are friends or foes when it comes to counterterrorism. But I think that what Washington and the rest of the world need to do is make clear that it's not enough to engage in counterterrorism sometimes. You also have to be terrorism-free yourself.

Q. India's history of combating terrorism, coupled with its current status as a key diplomatic and military power contributing to peacekeeping missions, has garnered support for its permanent UNSC membership. How might India's UNSC seat enhance its leadership in the global fight against terrorism?

I firmly would support India joining the UN Security Council. The UN and the UN Security Council were made up a long time ago, in the 40s, and this was at a time when the distribution of power in the world was very, very different. And now India is a more powerful and geopolitically important country than say even the UK or even France or even Russia. Looking at the size of the Indian economy, it will be the world’s third-largest economy by 2030. India has the largest population in the world. It has surpassed China and population growth is increasing at a more rapid rate. So, India's prowess is here to stay.

In that sense, India deserves a seat on the UN Security Council. It shouldn't be based on a snapshot in history which is unreflective of the current distribution of powers around the world. That said, I frequently mock the United Nations because it is not a moral authority on issues. Sometimes you have the most inhumane countries with specialised seats overseeing human rights, commissions, and various entities within the UN. You had one of the UN groups based in Gaza, the relief agency that was directly implicated in the October 7th Hamas attack, where its employees participated in the terrorist attack. You have the UN voting and expressing opinions, which are completely morally bankrupt. And then when it comes to actual UN moves, which in any way might be meaningful, the organisation is completely feckless. So, it's not only an amoral organisation; it's immoral and it's ineffective. This is why, I'm not sure that it matters that much beyond sort of the symbolic value of India getting credit for its tremendous geopolitical rise on the world stage.

Q. Pakistan has questioned India’s air strikes on terror camps inside Pakistan, but is it not strange that the latter recently carried out airstrikes in Afghanistan citing terror camps as the reason? Doesn't the international community recognise the charade that both Pakistan and Afghanistan harbour terrorist groups?

I think that the international terrorism landscape is changing substantially right now. This very week, it is changing. There is a lot of confusion around this group, ISK or it’s sometimes called ISKP, that is, Islamic State Khorasan or Islamic State Khorasan Province. I'm not even totally convinced that it's illuminating to separate ISK from Islamic State. It's not a separate organisational affiliate, but it's a location in which IS is a threat mounting operations and drawing recruits. But there is a sense that this Khwarazmian area, which also seems rather ill-defined, includes Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and particularly Tajikistan. These areas are of renewed concern for the international community, given the renewed and even unprecedented concern about ISK. I think that there are good reasons why European capitals are raising alert levels and calling attention to ISK. There have been several attacks foiled in Europe, and there are continued overt threats by IS-sympathetic media against Russia. I think that to the extent that we see mass casualty terrorism outside of Afghanistan, which could be linked to Islamic State, especially to ISK, there could be some international support for using military operations, so-called over the horizon capability in Afghanistan. We might see some attacks, honestly, at this rate in Tajikistan. I think that there will be more support for India, I would hope, to attack terrorist cells and training camps in Pakistan. The situation is fluid and it's evolving right now, but it is moving more on the same page as India. India has, for a very long time, been very concerned about IS and IS groups coming out of Afghanistan and Pakistan and that appears to now be more of an international concern since the Moscow attack.

About the terrorist attack in Moscow, even the Taliban has condemned the IS attacks. Is all of this about the pot calling the kettle black?

It’s smart on the Taliban's part to condemn kinds of terrorism like this. The reaction of people after Operation Al-Aqsa flood on October 7th was atypical. It was aberrant, it was anomalous because, after that attack, large numbers of student groups in the United States celebrated the violence. Thousands of protesters turned out to celebrate the violence, basically saying openly that they support resistance by any means, etc. But usually after a terrorist attack, especially a terrorist attack directed against innocent civilians, children, unequivocally, unquestionably innocent people, observers become outraged. They become sympathetic towards the target country. They get angry at the perpetrators. And so, it makes a lot of sense, even for militant groups like Hamas or the Taliban, to condemn attacks against a concert hall.

Many terrorist groups, when they perpetrate the violence, try to conceal their hand in the violence when civilians are the target. I have published important statistical work on determinants pf whether militant groups will claim credit for attacks by their organisation. My original finding with my co-author, Justin Conrad, is that when a militant group strikes a civilian target in particular in a terrorist attack, the leadership of the group is substantially less likely to claim credit than when the organisation commits the more popular kind of attacks, which are directed against military and other government targets. In these ways, militant groups try to appear more moderate to gain support. So the fact that you see militant groups like Hamas and the Taliban express their disapproval of the Moscow attack, which was directed against civilians, is unsurprising.

The Islamic State group is different from other organisations because it's maximally extreme. Not only does it try to kill the most civilians in pretty much every country in the world, but it tends to claim credit for all of its mass casualty terrorist attacks, including against civilian targets. It’s much more forthcoming with its credit claims than other organisations usually are. Credit claiming research was also very important in the Moscow attack because there was a lot of confusion in terms of attribution. Who was behind the attack? Russia came out and blamed Ukraine for the attack. But I said very early on that it was the Islamic State that was behind the attack. And one of the reasons why is that the Islamic State has a very particular, standard way of claiming credit for its attacks. And its credit claim went through that media apparatus. So I knew this wasn't a deep fake. I knew that it wasn't Zelensky behind it. Research on credit claims can provide a lot of information about who was behind an attack, as well as how other terrorist entities will respond to it.

Why are Islamic countries silent on what India has been saying for a long time - Jihadi terrorism anywhere affects everyone everywhere?

After 9/11, during the heyday of the Islamic State from 2014 to 2018 or so, it was common in the United States for people to say, why don't Muslims oppose this kind of violence? Why don't they say anything? That was unfair because there were many Muslims, including influential personalities, who were publicly and vocally opposed to al-Qaeda and Islamic State. I think that the situation is different with respect to Hamas, where I do not see Hamas getting criticised nearly as loudly as I would like to see. And that is because, in my opinion, the target is Jews. And because Israel is disproportionately seen as illegitimate especially among Arabs and Muslims. So, there's a divergence concerning how Israel is treated compared to how other countries are treated when they're struck by Islamist terrorists. I do think that we can both be mindful of the differences in terrorism of particular circumstances and recognise the obvious similarities and prioritise the fight against all these variants of terrorism.