THE INDIRECT EFFECTS OF THE SEPTEMBER 11 EVENTS AND THEIR AFTERMATH IN

— by Stephen Ellis. (Word document)
http://www.wrmea.com/ , WashingtonReport on Middle East Affairs.
> ...Rival views of world history
Since the end of the Cold War, a system of liberal global governance has 
emerged that has no single centre (even if Washington is of key importance) 
and is not based on states alone.  Integral to the system are international 
financial and quasi-juridical institutions, inter-state bodies and 
treaties, business corporations and even non-governmental organisations.   
The fact that the assailants of 11 September attacked a state institution 
and a financial and commercial centre is testimony to the acuteness of the 
attackers’ perceptions of where power and influence lie.

The fact that major decision-making centres within the system of liberal 
global governance lie in Europe and North America, and that many of its 
institutions and ideas are based on models that have their historical 
origins in Europe, colours political opinions as to the benevolence or 
otherwise of this system.  Liberal global governance is often represented 
as either generally benign (involving the imposition of superior ethical 
and legal standards including in regard to human rights, more efficient 
technology, and higher standards of living at least for substantial 
concentrations of people) or malign (involving the more or less forceful 
imposition of formidable techniques of repression and exploitation, leading 
to growing inequity).

Long before 11 September, there were signs that the contemporary system of 
liberal global governance was not universally regarded as legitimate even 
in leading industrial countries, as demonstrated by significant popular 
opposition to such symbolic events as key meetings of the Group of Seven, 
the World Trade Organisation, the International Monetary Fund and World 
Bank, and others.  In the intellectual sphere, the post-modern movement in 
arts and letters has challenged key aspects of the ideological coherence 
and, hence, the legitimacy of the world’s current dominant political 
dispensation, even in its heartlands. While financiers and politicians 
often exude confidence in the future, in both radical and conservative 
intellectual circles in the West, a self-doubt as to the evolution of 
industrial societies has become apparent.  It has become common to consider 
much recent history as a ghastly mistake caused by an over-reliance on 
theories of modernisation. For example, the US former National Security 
Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski estimated in 1993 that at least 167 million 
lives had been ‘deliberately extinguished through politically motivated 
carnage’ since the start of the twentieth century, largely as a result of 
visionaries creating ‘coercive utopias’ that largely replaced religion.    
Some intellectuals with very different intellectual pedigrees, such as the 
communist historian Eric Hobsbawm, hold a broadly similar view.

In large parts of what used to be called the third world, there has been a 
widespread popular reaction against what, in retrospect, may be seen as the 
unprecedented expectations and formidable concentrations of power and 
wealth raised among vast populations in the three decades after 1945.  
These were generated by massive systems of social engineering made possible 
by new technology and the bureaucratic organisation associated with states, 
often introduced by colonial rule or associated with the exercise of 
European or American influence. In the mid-twentieth century, scientists 
and assorted experts and politicians and the general public in many parts 
of the world came to believe that life could be made better, longer and 
richer by the application of certain techniques of modernisation or 
development that were believed to be of universal validity.   This period 
from 1945 to 1973 corresponded to the longest and greatest economic boom in 
the history of the world. It also saw the promulgation of major texts of 
international human rights law.   It witnessed independence from colonial 
rule in most of Africa and much of Asia, resulting in the existence of 189 
member-states of the United Nations today.   Hundreds of millions of people 
became the first in their families ever to receive a formal secular 
education.  Equally vast numbers moved from villages to cities.  
Populations in third world countries exploded, increasing sometimes by 
several hundred percent in less than a century.  Very substantial numbers 
of people entered salaried work for the first time, often employed by state 
organisations.

In many parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, this transformation 
turned out to be unsustainable beyond one or two generations. Some states, 
particularly in Africa, effectively went bankrupt in the late 1970s and 
early 1980s and, in return for loans, were obliged to delegate key areas of 
responsibility to the international financial institutions.  Attempts at 
liberal economic reform imposed by the latter, including the wholesale 
privatisation of state services, have often led to unexpected and 
undesirable results, including a complex interaction between formal and 
informal spheres of activity in both politics and economics.

Also in the late 1970s, conflicts in the former third world, manipulated by 
superpowers, began to result not only in a greater demand for arms but also 
to a change in the boundaries between formal and informal warfare, notably 
with resistance to Soviet occupation in Afghanistan.   With the end of the 
Cold War, armed insurrectionary groups that had previously relied on funds 
from one or other super-power turned increasingly to drug-trading or other 
forms of self-finance, as in Colombia.

Considerable numbers of states, especially those situated in former 
colonial territories, have since the 1970s lost the monopolies of 
legitimate violence that they are supposed to possess and with which they 
were formally endowed by the granting of sovereign status.  More than a few 
have lost the means, as well perhaps as the will, to articulate any 
hegemonic idea at all that could correspond to what is meant by a public 
policy.   These are often referred to as ‘failed’ states or ‘collapsed’ 
states.  The numbers of such states has grown rapidly since the late 1970s. 
They have been generally neglected by the rich world in the belief that 
their condition is not of prime international concern or even, in some 
cases, that it represents a difficult first step on a virtuous path towards 
a liberal state that refrains from intervening in social and economic 
matters.

These factors combined have helped to produce a widespread sense of 
betrayal and resentment in substantial parts of the former third world, 
sometimes accompanied by a more or less self-conscious search for whatever 
are deemed ‘authentic’ values, meaning those considered to have existed 
before European influence and modernisation.  This is the context in which 
Al Qaeda and similar networks can flourish.


Crime and politics: spot the difference

The existence of such different views of the direction in which history is 
moving is of the greatest importance for the future of human rights, as it 
challenges the notion that all the world’s people can be encompassed in an 
effective international code of human rights, a key tenet of liberal global 
governance.

If there are parts of the world that explicitly reject orthodox 
international views of morality as well as formal international laws and 
conventions on human rights, as has been the case with the Taliban 
administration in Afghanistan, then the legitimacy of the international 
system as a whole is called into question.  If there are governments that 
do not openly question the legitimacy of such a system, but which in 
practice are unwilling or unable to apply it, then the system of 
international governance is at risk of rotting from the inside.  Such is 
already the case with the many ‘failed’ states in Africa and Asia 
especially those that do not formally challenge international human rights 
legislation or related norms, but that ignore or even despise them in 
private.  Circumventing international laws while paying lip-service to them 
may be seen as part of the emerging global phenomenon of informal 
commercial and political activity, meaning those transactions that take 
place in spheres not formally countenanced by national or international 
legislation, including some that may even be illegal.  Informal trade and 
political activity may be situated on a continuum ranging from non-formal 
activity involving licit goods (such as selling food, textiles or other 
harmless products without registration) to international trade in illegal 
and harmful commodities, such as weapons or narcotics, the latter regarded 
by some governments as tantamount to an act of war.

In itself, it is banal to observe that some parts of the world have a 
serious problem of crime, for crime is always with us.  The situation is 
made much more complex and ambiguous by the fact that activities of major 
scope which are considered illegal in terms of both international 
conventions and national legislation, may nevertheless be carried out by 
senior state authorities that are formally responsible for upholding or 
promulgating the very laws they are also breaking.  Again, this can range 
on a continuum going from individual officials who corruptly break laws on 
their own initiative, to entire governments that blatantly disrespect both 
national and internationals laws for reasons of self-interest, to the most 
extreme case of states that themselves promulgate laws explicitly designed 
to condone or even facilitate crime.  An example of the latter is 
Seychelles, which changed its constitution in order to permit the passage 
of an Economic Development Bill that would enable persons investing $10 
million in the country to enjoy immunity from prosecution ‘for all criminal 
proceedings whatsoever except criminal proceedings in respect of offences 
involving acts of violence and drug trafficking in Seychelles’.

Al Qaeda is one example among many of how an international network that 
itself has no official status can use the physical infrastructure and 
sovereign status of ‘failed’ states to mount a formidable challenge to the 
system of global governance.  There are many states in the world that in 
law enjoy full sovereign rights but that in practice are willing to rent 
out state prerogatives including the issuing of diplomatic passports, the 
recognition of phony ‘embassies’, the provision of end-user certificates 
for arms-transfers, the registration of front companies and airlines used 
for smuggling, and the collaboration of central banks in currency 
counterfeiting — all of which may be useful to money-launderers, smugglers 
and fraudsters of every type, including those whose interests are purely 
financial (criminals) and those with political motives (terrorists).  It is 
important to record, though, that the intelligence agencies of major powers 
sometimes make use of these facilities also.

A catalogue of networks abusing the facilities of sovereign states on a 
major scale would include conventional criminal gangs, both of the highly 
structured, organised-crime type, but also of the more flexible type seen 
in societies with a segmentary social structure.  It would also include 
criminal enterprises that have very strong connections to official 
authorities, such as the Russian and Ukrainian mafias and various Israeli 
commercial concerns with close links to the Israeli intelligence services.  
Groups using the facilities offered by failed states, or simply by 
compliant ones, also include certain multinational companies that are 
generally regarded as respectable, not to mention the intelligence services 
and even the political parties of major Western powers.  It is beyond doubt 
that the US intelligence services have on occasion condoned international 
narcotics trafficking in Vietnam, central America and Afghanistan, deeming 
this necessary in the light of a greater good;  that Western intelligence 
agencies and politicians aided and abetted the Bank of Credit and Commerce 
International, later to collapse in the biggest bank fraud in history;  
that officials of the Vatican bank knowingly condoned law-breaking in the 
case of the Banco Ambrosiano;  and that politicians and political parties 
in Italy, France and probably elsewhere too have used the facilities 
offered by sovereign states to generate illicit funds for their own use.  
States that use — or abuse — their sovereignty in this way do not exist 
only on the fringes of international systems of governance, but may also be 
integral to those systems for certain types of operation that do not 
receive great attention but that are important nonetheless.

Even ‘failed’ states continue to exist in international law, a fact that 
offers important rights in international legal, diplomatic and financial 
dealings to whichever person is regarded as the president of such a state.  
This may result in circumstances in which a government commits major crimes 
while asserting the privileges conferred by national sovereignty, such as 
in former Yugoslavia.  Or it may produce a head of state who is 
internationally acceptable but is in reality used as a figurehead by other, 
less respectable, interests, as in Sierra Leone, or a head of state who 
commits all manner of crimes and atrocities, offering facilities to others 
in return for payment, while professing respect for international law, as 
in Liberia.   Moreover, arms manufacturers in some countries are continuing 
to produce weapons for sale in an environment in which the formal state 
apparatus has little control.   Hence the terms ‘failed’ or ‘collapsed’ 
states, while useful in some ways, miss important aspects of the challenge 
that states of this type pose to international governance, including in 
matters of human rights.

States like these do not represent simply the dereliction of orthodox 
theories of the state, as the terms ‘failed’ or ‘collapsed’ imply: seen 
from a more positive point of view, they may articulate historical 
continuities in a great variety of fields including traditions of political 
organisation, but also morality and trade. Hence many countries known for 
their  involvement in narcotics trafficking have much longer histories of 
involvement in international smuggling, such as in the Guajira peninsula of 
Colombia, dating back to the days of the Spanish main, or in the Balkans or 
central Asia, where populations historically situated at the junction of 
large empires have evolved over centuries by playing one power against 
another.  In such areas political-military entrepreneurs may be involved in 
activities that articulate traditions and codes of morality and honour 
considered locally as legitimate but which are in contravention of 
international laws, such as in drug smuggling.  Entrepreneurs of this type 
may wage war in pursuit not only of their immediate economic interests but 
on behalf of substantial populations which consider them as legitimate, 
whatever their lack of legal status: in this case, particularly if they are 
non-state actors, they risk being labelled as terrorists.

The point here is that there are many groups in the world that may benefit 
from considerable legitimacy in their countries of origin even while they 
contravene international laws.  This observation is not intended to condone 
their behaviour but to suggest that it may not be accurate to regard them 
as ordinary criminals in any conventional sense.  <SNIP>

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Out of Control: Global turmoil on the eve of the 
twenty-first century, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993, p.17.
 Eric Hobsbawm, “Barbarism: a user’s guide”, New Left Review 206, 1994, 
pp.44-54.
 Béatrice Hibou, La privatisation des Etats, Paris: Karthala, 1999.
R.T. Naylor, “Loose cannons: covert commerce and underground finance in 
the modern arms black market”, Crime, Law and Social Change 22, 1, 1994-5, 
p.11.
 Note that ‘policy’ and ‘police’, and ‘state’ and ‘statistics’, are 
concepts emerging from the formation of early national states in Europe in 
the seventeenth century that seem of ever more questionable relevance to 
large parts of Africa and central Asia, for example. A title borrowed from 
Stanley Cohen’s article of the same name in the British Journal of 
Sociology 47, 1, 1996, pp.1-21.
The Indian Ocean Newsletter, November 18 1995.
 Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA complicity in the global 
drug trade, New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991.
Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: the inside story of BCCI, 
the world’s most corrupt financial empire, Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1992, 
esp. pp.118-54. Charles Raw, The Moneychangers: how the Vatican Bank 
enabled Roberto Calvi to steal $250 million for the heads of the P2 masonic 
lodge, London: Harvill, 1992.
See the exceptionally well-researched report of the Panel of Experts, sent 
by the Chairman of the UN Security Council Committee established pursuant 
to resolution 1343 (2001) to the President of the Security Council, 26 
October 2001, S/2001/1015.
R.T. Naylor, “The insurgent economy: black market operations of guerrilla 
organisations”, Crime, Law and Social Change 20, 1, 1993, p.47.

--
Michael Pugliese