In 2014, over 60 countries were directly or indirectly waging war against ISIL.This post has a background.
In 2010, this blogger posted here his impressions of peaceful Islamic communities seen during his early 1980's (1979-85) travels thru west and central Africa, and especially from his many visits to the northern Nigeria and to other countries in the sub-Saharan Sahel strip from Mali-Senegal across to Chad:
A Lagos State of Mind: A 21st Century Meme to Those in the Know (Pericles21 blogpost, March 10, 2010)In those travels from 1979-85, Pericles21 observed no activist Islamic dissatisfaction with the state of 'State' affairs other than normal electoral party elections and intellectual debates about candidates who were generally cross-tribal in allegiance in the period of fresh nation-hood enthusiasm after first democratic elections. However, there was a kind of 'noticing' on the part of the non-elite educated and small businessmen that there was a growing and increasingly flagrant garnering (corruption) of oil profits into personal and 'privacied' (tax protected) foreign bank accounts outside Africa, mostly held in Europe but spreading out to exotic new (fro Africans) banking areas in the Caribbean, South America, and Asia. The occasional rag-sheet mishaps involving Islamic believers saw Islamics as usually the victims of the more aggressive and dominant tribal groups in the south of West Africa. Those events involved rapidly dying out, historic, inter-tribal rivalries and were focused on the college and university campuses where competition for scarce admission seats especially in the professional schools (medical, health tech, law, etc) sometimes escalated into very short-lived student violence that was quickly, indiscriminately put down, i.e., fairly.
The Islamic community of West Africa, although for example 40% of Nigeria, was concentrated in the north as part the Sahel. And, the Sahel had its own inter-group friction - between the nomadic and 'settled sub-groups, e.g. Fulani and the settled Hausa in Nigeria. Localized 'disagreements', were the worst one saw of inter-religious or inter-tribal friction. Boko-Haram was not yet conceived and all sub-groups would have energetically rejected its violent, all-or-nothing approach to ending corruption and solving the growing perception that the common peoples of West Africa, and especially of the Islamic Sahel, were being 'cut out' from a fair share of the wealth being generated from national resources. Those resources were then, chiefly, oil. But there was a growing realization that even outside the oil-sphere there was something happening that was starting to be felt - the increasing replacement of food-for-locals agriculture - with cash crops for export (and forbidden to be locally consumed, often with legal penalties) - primarily coffee, cocoa, rice and the newer 'White Gold'(cotton, which ironically closed a historical wheel having never resolved the dark effects of that agricultural product). It was correctly foreseen that the consequences of the disappearance of food self-sufficiency might be dire where slight weather variations on a growing or harvest season would result in a starvation era (Chad). But with a growing cash crop economy, a 'normal' food situation was beginning to settle in, i.e., the noticeable scarcity of traditional food and dependency on imported food from the developed world (white, enriched 'Wonder' bread from Europe being one of my personal eye-openers in 1982). This discordant scene was the birthplace of modern militant (and very angry) Islam in the name of Boko Haram (Africa, 'western culture/teaching is forbidden') and ISIS-ISIL in the larger Mideast (the Levant).
This post has a moral.
the costs of hugely expensive programs- money, manpower, deaths (the 'military machine')- used by western developed nations, primarily led by the United States, to shape global thinking to support and fight interventional 'wars' on foreign soil, primarily in destabilized Islamist areas in the Mideast and Islamic Africa (against Islamic jihadist ISIS-ISIL and Nigeria's Boko-Haram) , could be better spent to peacefully re-stabilize those areas through championing and effecting political-economic-social reform.This post has a thesis.
Re-stabilized nations would have long term 'compatibility' with the interests of the western developed world...those interests being (speaking candidly) peaceful markets anchored by quiescent, mass populations (consumers) made contented through a sufficient standard of living incorporating health care, food, education and money to spend. Global market stability also meshes with the development needs of China and the other 'BRIC' nations. Finally, because the politico-economic model is so far the only successful (workable) mode of organizing humanity, one assumes a peaceful global market is at least the immediate, and perhaps long term, solution for the survival and progress of humanity. This is not to say that alternative modes of organizing 'us' won't eventually come along.
Pericles21
The roots of current activist militancy groups (ISIS, etc.) in destabilized regions derive from the 'success' of European colonialism itself. Colonial rule over virtually all 'New World'(non-western, non-European) regions was absolute and that control was used to erase village-focused, habitability-of-place and replace that vacuum it with...nothing!The change in the role of the peoples from villager to laborer-consumer was also exampled by the change from food growers to dependency on food imports from abroad - another face of being made into a consumer market. The resulting social disruption and discontent ripened over 200 years until when in the 1960s as the colonial empires ended and independence was obtained, the enthusiasm and expectancy for change likewise collapsed when colonial subjugation was replaced by international corporate giantism and global control..and the people were again forgotten or ignored, or suppressed as before independence.
Colonialism's market-concept perspective ignored the needs of whole populations, re-modeled those regions into suppliers for mass-production, foreign monopoly-controlled resource exploitation, and most significantly established total ownership and concentration of national-asset profits. This non-beneficial change (for indigenous peoples) automatically created social discontent and spawned counter-empire forces...eventually leading to ISIS, etc.
Pericles21
(to keep in mind - in 2014, over 60 countries were directly or indirectly waging war against ISIL.)
---------Precis' and Definitions -----
In the 1960s, when independence saw the replacement of colonial masters by corporate-elite partnerships who finished the job of squeezing the final drops of profit from the now landless masses-turned labor, there was no aid and progress for the masses but rebellion through activism (and increasing militancy). In the 80s (my time of travel and work in developing areas, especially Islamic Africa), rebellion at first took the form of intellectual debate and a search for alternative, theoretical models to the stifling and increasingly corrupt status quo. Marxism offered a tantalizing vision (though still unpalletable to the African tribal POV, and the Soviet Union's facade was still intact ...so many newly independent, "3rd World" nations sought relations with the USSR to counterbalance the new corporate-elite rulers...thinking they, with their fresh crop of London School of Economics wunderkinds would be able to at least play the game of neutrality and balance-of-powers without succumbing entirely to either the West (United States and its allies, and Chase Manhattan Bank) or to the Soviet bloc (Russia, Bank of Hungary, China). China was still a minor presence though seen by on-site observers, myself included, as strategically (and smartly so) involved in low profile, though far-sighted, infrastructure projects such as the cross-Cameroon-Nigeria rail line, eventually to be extended/connected across West Africa.
Some definitions:
ISIS - Islamic (Sunni) State in Iraq and Syria, a vision of militant Islamic activists (jihadists) nurtured and matured during the civil war in Syria and in the security vacuum that followed the departure of American forces from Iraq.
ISIL - an even more activist, militant offshoot of al-Qaeda expanding the vision of ISIS to the broader Levant region of southern Turkey through Syria to Egypt (also including Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan). Currently controls areas in Libya, Nigeria, Afghanistan and other areas in Africa and South Asia.
Da'ish - a somewhat pejorative term. the Arabic equivalent of "ISIL", in Arabic as ad-Dawlah al-Islāmiyah fī 'l-ʿIrāq wa-sh-Shām, leading to the acronym Da'ish or Daesh. 'Da'ish' has been used as a way of challenging the legitimacy of the group due to the negative connotations of the word.
al-Sham - the Levant region approximately.
Boko-Haram - Nigerian-centered, Islamist militant group forbidding Muslims from participating in any aspect of Western culture, political or social (including secular education and voting in elections). It has objected to Nigeria's past Muslim president and has extended its terrorist program to neighboring states.
Post Body ----
This post responds to the November 30, 2015, Washington Post article by Jim Tankersley, “This might be the most controversial theory for what’s behind the rise of ISIS” wherein Tankersley describes as "controversial" the proposal by Thomas Picketty (Le Monde, Nov 24, 2015), that income inequality, or mal-distrbuted asset profits, is a determining factor that created ISIS and now has been responsible for the expansion of ISIS's goals to include the broader Levant region (southern Turkey through Syria to Egypt (also including Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories and Jordan).
Contrary to Tankersley, I champion Picketty's theory and react with surprise at Tankersley's challenge.
Plus I regard that for anyone who had traveled for any length of time in any part of the newly independent, developing nations in the 1970s through the 1980s, unequal sharing of national profits from resource wealth was then highly visible and now continues to be an unquestionable factor behind the rise of militant social-political movements similar to ISIS, e.g., Boko-Haram (Nigeria),and elsewhere in the Mideast, Africa (Mali, Somalia), Asia and in other post-colonial territories around the globe.
Personally, I view post-colonial regions, and especially the needs of their citizenry, as almost universally having been ignored by their former 'masters' such that militant disruption to social "order" ('order' favorable to Western power exploitation of resources) was inevitable.
Tankersley writes:
"A year after his 700-page opus "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" stormed to the top of America's best-seller lists, Thomas Piketty is out with a new argument about income inequality. It may prove more controversial than his book, which continues to generate debate in political and economic circles.
The new argument, which Piketty spelled out recently in the French newspaper Le Monde, is this: Inequality is a major driver of Middle Eastern terrorism, including the Islamic State attacks on Paris earlier this month — and Western nations have themselves largely to blame for that inequality."
Why do I question Tankersley's 'questioning' of Picketty? That is a perspective coming from personal experience.
In the 1980s, I was an observer in post-colonial 3rd world developing nations. There, for someone who got around unescorted and with 'feet on the ground', one heard the rising voices of young and older intellectuals, and non-intellectuals, who were 'noticing' with growing discontent and speaking with rapidly maturing sophistication about the increasingly bold and settled pattern of corruption and concentration of national resource profits among the very few at the top of the social order. (This is unsettlingly familiar to current discontent in the western-powers world where gross inequality of wealth and social goods have for at least two decades been leading to social unrest.)
From that experience, I see ISIS as an expected and inevitable player on the world stage…however much we wish ISIS had a nicer script written for it.
One could not but hear those complaining voices and not foresee predictably bad future outcomes (political discontent) in the shape of ISIS, Boko-Haram and similar voices and organizations expressing activism for change.
So, I have a healthy dose of surprise to hear from Mr. Tankersley that it is somehow '"controversial" that inequality of asset sharing is a cause for the rise of ISIS, Boko-Haram and similar voices of outrage. (I hope he is writing sardonically.)
Further, I and others saw future militant socio-political activism as not only inevitable but also as unstoppable because of the lock that exploitive capitalism/corporatism had on blocking enlightened resource-profit policies from developing both within the resource-rich developing areas and among the former colonial powers themselves.
Corporate greed and Euro-American government weakness and left-over colonial myopia, arrogance and racism: all these weaknesses led to the 1960s post-colonial collapse or poverty-continuance in the ISIS/Boko-Haram regions where a new retro-colonial status was principally characterized by replacement of food self-sufficiency (with political dependency) with political independence but as new mass consumer markets for european goods, including food. The same corruption and the new exploitive 'partnerships' between traditional (tribal) governance hierarchies and foreign corporate exploiters prevented the newly acquired oil wealth from reaching the masses. I and others spoke out about that unbalance and the then nascent signs of coming social unrest then limited to 'coffee house style', intellectualized 'social Marxism'.
We warned about the absurdly skewed concentration of oil wealth into private accounts in Switzerland, Luxemburg (and London) would lead to serious social unrest. This was famously exampled by the 1984 'Dikko Affair' - the kidnapping in England by Israeli agents of Nigeria's former Minister of Transportation, Amaru Dikko, and the attempted return of him to Nigeria who hoped to recover the roughly $5-6 Billion Mr Dikko was alleged to have embezzled from Nigeria's oil revenue. Also, in 2011, 'James Ibori' embezzlement case (Nigerian) was another prime example.
But my voice and of others were not heard, or were drowned out by the ringing of export cash registers. So, 35 years later, 'we' (America and the former Euro-colonial masters) now have 1980s 3rd world militant outrage shouting (and shooting) in our main streets and boulevards from Los Angeles to London, Paris and Rome. In my mind, the gross, profitability-prioritizing of the previous colonial powers international policy could only, logically, lead to ISIS.
If real partnerships for more equitable use of national resource profits had been created between the former colonial masters (also including America as an interested power party)and the newly independent, developing nations to create programs and policies for more equitable wealth distribution in terms of schools, industry, housing, electricity and water, ISIS and Boko-Haram would not have taken the form we see today.
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