The battle for the Muslim mind

By C. Raja Mohan

NEW DELHI, OCT. 8. A determined America and a defiant Taliban. These are the first images from the new war against international terrorism. As bombs and cruise missiles rain on the Taliban, the theatre of conflict may be much larger than the physical territory of Afghanistan.

The war against terrorism is likely to be won or lost in the ongoing battle for the Muslim mind. Osama bin Laden wants to inflame the accumulated Arab and Muslim resentment against America. The U.S. President, Mr. George Bush, is trying to calm their nerves by saying that the war was not against Islam.

In his video-taped appeal broadcast on Sunday night, Osama proclaimed the division of the world into two - the believers and the infidels. Branding Mr. Bush the head of the infidels, he demanded that every Muslim rise to defend his religion.

Mr. Bush, on the other hand, declared that Americans were friends of almost a billion people worldwide who practiced Islam. He added that America was an enemy of those who aided terrorists and of the barbaric criminals who profaned a great religion by committing murder in its name.

Osama cannot match Mr. Bush's firepower. As he wages an asymmetric war against America, his main weapon is the proposition that there is an irreconcilable contradiction between Islam and the West. He wants to exploit this big idea to expand the war against America.

By pressing the Muslim and Arab grievances on two issues - American military presence in the Arabian peninsula, which is home to Mecca and Medina, and the Palestinian struggle against Israel - Osama hopes to weaken the international coalition in South Asia and West Asia. His call for jehad has resonated in Pakistan, where the regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf has awkwardly endorsed the U.S. military action, and popular protests have erupted. In the Arab world, the attacks have been greeted with sullen ambiguity. No government has welcomed them, but not many have condemned them either.

The world's largest Islamic country, Indonesia, has cautioned against civilian casualties while radical Islamic groups in that country are threatening attacks against Westerners.

But there are some who think otherwise. The Minister of Information and Culture in the Palestinian Authority, Mr. Yasser Rabbo, was among the few who dismissed the proclamation of Osama. ``Any crazy person can claim he is for the rights of the Palestinian people,'' he said. ``Let him say whatever he wants, but this is not the way to solve our problems.''

There may be little that the Bush administration can do immediately to remove the deep-rooted political grievances in West Asia against America. All it can hope is to keep the lid on the region through diplomatic manoeuvre and the nature of the military operations.

During his press conference in Islamabad today, Gen. Musharraf said the U.S. had promised to keep the first phase of the campaign short and targeted. But the Taliban would want to hunker down and hope that its forces would hold out long enough to cause political difficulties elsewhere for the U.S.

The Bush administration will be looking for a quick and comprehensive degradation of the Taliban's military assets. It would want to exploit possible fissures among the militia, facilitate the advance of the Northern Alliance and quickly install an alternative regime led by the exiled King, Mr. Zahir Shah. But the longer it takes to put in place a post-Taliban arrangement in Kabul and pacify key regions of Afghanistan, the greater is the danger that the divisions within the international coalition will come to the fore. In the not-too distant future, the U.S. must find a way to engage the Muslim world more productively.

For the Islamic world too, there is a hard choice to make. It can use the present crisis to move decisively towards political moderation and economic modernisation. Or it could let extremists set the agenda for an unending and ruinous confrontation with the West.

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