What war on terror?

The issue for the chattering classes, as ever, is not the rise of fundamentalism and extremism in Bangladesh and the current government's culpability with respect to this phenomenon. No, the issue is the besmirching of Bangladesh's image and the danger inherent in Bangladesh being identified as a haven for Islamist terror.

This response has provided a pretty good demonstration of how our own fight against fundamentalism and extremism has been complicated and rendered exponentially more difficult by the Bush administration's war on terror and the inclination to try to understand our own protracted struggle within this context.

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Bush's war on terror has had the signal (and, one might argue, single) consequence of enhancing the popularity of Islamic fundamentalists all over the world. The perception that the war on terror can more accurately be understood as a war against Islam has done more to bring thoughtful and concerned Muslims over to the world view of the fundamentalists than the decades of fundamentalist propaganda and preaching that preceded it.

Indeed, if Bush's misguided war continues, and unless his Republican party is dealt a severe rebuke in Congressional elections this November there is every reason to believe that it will, then we may soon approach a critical mass of Muslims world-wide concluding that the only appropriate response to such aggression and expansionism is the fundamentalist one.

But the popular corollary here to concerns about Bush's war on terror, which is that to raise the issue of terrorism in Bangladesh is to somehow play into Bush's hands or to legitimize US aggression in its name, is misplaced.

The war on terror neither validates the fundamentalist instinct in the Muslim world nor should it blind us to our own very real problems with fundamentalism and obscurantism.

In other words, looking at the problems of fundamentalism and extremism in Bangladesh through the prism of the geo-politics of Bush's war on terror is profoundly unhelpful, and in fact, counter-productive.

This attempt to frame the issue of fundamentalism and extremism in Bangladesh within some kind of global context serves only to strengthen the hand of our local Islamists and to provide them cover for their mission of bringing Bangladesh under their narrow and reactionary interpretation of Islamic rule.

Most dangerously, attempting to shoe-horn Bangladesh into the global narrative of the war on terror permits Bangladeshi Islamists to align themselves in the public mind with the bona fide resistance to American expansionism of groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah and to don their mantle of warriors against of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism.

In truth, there is no meaningful commonality at all between groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah, who are resisting oppression and occupation, and our home-grown fundamentalists who are instruments of oppression and who, if they came to power, would institute the virtual re-colonization of the country by their masters in Riyadh and Islamabad (or, perhaps, the mountains of South Waziristan).

Make no mistake about it, this framing of the issue of terrorism in Bangladesh within the context of the war on terror, and the argument that by raising the issue of terrorism one is helping to facilitate intervention and an attack on Bangladeshi sovereignty, is a stratagem of the fundamentalists and their "useful idiots" among the progressive intelligentsia.

Look, I sympathize with the people of Iraq and Palestine and Lebanon. I admire the resistance of groups such as Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army and Hamas and Hezbollah, and understand that in the context of the conflagration in the Middle East that they are the parties most worthy of my respect and support.

But that does not mean that my thinking with respect to Bangladesh should be distorted by the depredations of the US in the Middle East or that I need to throw in my lot with fundamentalists here in Bangladesh.

This is not to say that US expansionism does not need to be resisted, only that Bangladesh is not the Middle East and that here in Bangladesh the more pressing immediate concern is to roll back the assault on minority rights and women's rights and freedom of thought and conscience and religion that have been permitted to flourish these last five years.

And let me add that for all its rhetoric of the war on terror, the Bush administration has done nothing to help Bangladesh in our own struggle against extremism and obscurantism, in fact, quite the opposite.

In fact, as far as US policy with respect to Bangladesh is concerned, there is no war on terror at all. As has been the case elsewhere as well (see, e.g., Pakistan), the Bush administration has found it difficult to adjust to the reality that groups and individuals the US has funded and sponsored for decades and who were loyal allies during the Cold War are now the enemy. As a result, the US has been worse than useless when it comes to helping us in our own fight against fundamentalism, obscurantism, and extremism.

This is why we are treated to the spectacle of the last US ambassador acting as apologist-in-chief for the Jamaat-e-Islami and the continuation of the thoroughly misguided Bush administration policy of reaching out to fundamentalists and obscurantists in Bangladesh.

The "progressives" tell us that to raise the issue of terrorism in Bangladesh is to provide cover to the Bush administration's war on terror and to invite intervention and loss of sovereignty. They don't get it. The last thing that the Bush administration cares about is stamping out terror in Bangladesh.

Anyone who thinks that Selig Harrison's August 2 piece will incline the Bush administration to take a closer look at Bangladesh or to seek to crack down on Islamist terror here has seriously misunderstood the Bush administration's imperatives with respect to Bangladesh.

Zafar Sobhan is Assistant Editor, The Daily Star.