Terror alert

THE United States, on August 4, ordered the closure of over 20 of its diplomatic missions across the Islamic world, stating intelligence reports had warned of possible terror attacks on US facilities on that day.
The alert followed a high-level meeting on terrorism at the White House, which revealed Al-Qaeda was about to strike at US missions across the Arab world, though it named no particular country or countries. The intelligence issued from the escape of hundreds of Al-Qaeda cells via jail breaks in July. The jail breaks happened in no less than nine
countries, including Iraq, Libya and Pakistan.
Embassies in Iraq, Egypt, Afghanistan and Yemen were among countries affected, with the Yemeni capital of Sanaa appearing to endure particular attention. Britain, France and Germany also closed their embassies there.

That escaped Al-Qeada cells will sneeze and the United States would catch a cold shows how progressively unsafe the world has become. Even more importantly, it shows that raw power alone cannot solve the terror problem.
Incidentally, the terror alert has been relaxed, with most of the closed missions now open.
Two morals come from the US’ action. The first is sound intelligence. Since terror is surprise attack from a hostile underdog, its prevention is the best antidote, since victims, mostly innocent souls that have no problem with the attacker, are often sitting ducks. Sound intelligence is therefore needed to avert such attacks.

Sound intelligence prompted the US alert, and the Nigerian government would do well to put in place and maximise the result of sound intelligence, while it confronts the Boko Haram threat. But that would do only in the short run.
In the long run, what is needed is uprooting the cause of the violent campaign. Globally, the surface cause would appear an overwhelming Western cultural imperialism, perpetrated so completely that some religious opportunists seize the situation to unleash mayhem on innocent souls, under the guise of maintaining the purity of Islam.

If somewhat the West can give Islam and other non-Western cultural practices their due, the bottom would be taken off the campaign of these anarchists; and pretenders to dubious causes. That is why it was heart-warming that even President Barack Obama hosted American Muslims to the Iftar, the breaking of the Ramadan fast during this last Ramadan. Such gestures were also replicated in American missions across the globe. More of those would project that America does not hate Muslims and, with time, drive the violent fundamentalist agitators out of work.
But cultural imperialism aside, global poverty must also be addressed, such that the ranks of the hopeless and easily indoctrinated are acutely reduced. Increased prosperity across the board will, other things being equal, rid the face of the earth of that hate-filled army, ready to blow up fellow humans with themselves at the virtual snap of a finger.

For Nigeria, this is even a more durable lesson to learn. Though there is information that Boko Haram trains drug-spiked cells for its mass murder missions, a good number of those cells – if not most of them – other things being equal, are poor and uneducated.
To uproot the threat therefore, the Nigerian government should declare economic and educational emergency in the North East, the main vortex of Boko Haram, to rid the country of the dirt poor that fall victim to the sect’s end-time campaigns.

The August 4 global terror alert is a grim reminder of how unsafe the world has come to be. But it must be turned into an opportunity to solve the problem, perhaps once and for all.

from the nation