An international perspective on global terrorism. (Opinion).

On Tuesday, 11 September, global terrorism struck in the homeland and at the headquarters of globalization. The history of United States international involvement could be split along the dividing line of the attacks: the age of innocence before; and the fallen world of postmodern terror after. No one can condone the terrorist attacks, and we wish to extend our deepest condolences to all families who lost loved ones in the tragedy. As part of coming to terms with the trauma, it is important that we in the global academic community look at the civilizational imperatives, and challenge, in our collective fight against terrorism.

What do the terrorists want? To divide the West from the Arab and Islamic world, to provoke disproportionate and merciless retaliation that will create a new generation of radicalized terrorists, and to destroy the values of freedom, tolerance and the rule of law. More than anything else, they want to polarize the world into hard divisions, to break harmony into strife, to replace the community of civilized countries with the flames of hatred between communities. They must not be allowed to succeed.

In their insular innocence--and, in the views of some, in their insolent exceptionalism-Americans had embraced the illusion of security behind supposedly impregnable lines of continental defence. To be sure, the United States too had suffered acts of terror--but not as a daily fear, an everyday reality, a way of life that has become commonplace in so many other countries over the past few decades. And no one, anywhere, had suffered terrorist carnage on such a devastating, mind-numbing scale.

Osama bin Laden's evil genius has been to fuse the fervour of religious schools (madrassas), the rallying power of the call to holy war (jihad), the cult of martyrdom through suicide (shahid), the reach of modern technology, and the march of globalization into the new phenomenon of global terrorism.

Although the monuments to American power and prosperity were shaken to their foundations, the foundation of a civilized discourse among the family of nations must not be destroyed. Responses that are crafted must be carefully thought out and their consequences fully thought through, with a balance between retaliatory counter-measures and long-term resolution, and bearing in mind the lessons, among others, of the involvement of the British and Soviet empires in Afghanistan, the Germans in the Balkans and the Americans themselves in Viet Nam. The rhetoric and metaphors of frontier justice from the days of the Wild West in the United States, or from the time of the Crusades, may rouse domestic fervour but also fracture the fragile international coalition.

Like the two world wars, the "war" against terrorism is one from which America can neither stay disengaged nor win on its own, nor one that can be won without full United States engagement.

America has been the most generous nation in the world in responding to emergencies and crises everywhere else. Now that the attack has happened in their heartbreak-land, Americans should be heartened by the spontaneous, warm and overwhelming response from everyone else. The world has grieved and suffered and mourned along with Americans as one.

Nevertheless, the rhetoric of "war" is fundamentally misleading for many reasons: no state is the target of military defeat, there are no uniformed soldiers to fight, no territory to invade and conquer, no clear defining point that will mark victory. The border between "global terrorism" and global organized crime has become increasingly tenuous. In many important respects, terrorism is a problem to be tackled by law-enforcement agencies, in cooperation with military forces; its magnitude can be brought down to "tolerable" levels, but it can never be totally "defeated", just as we cannot have an absolutely crime-free society; and it is part of the growing trend toward the lowered salience of the State in the new security agenda that emphasizes human as well as national security.

The world is united in the demand that those responsible for the atrocities of that tragic Tuesday must be found and brought to justice, but the innocent must be spared further trauma. All allies and many others have already expressed full support, which has been warmly welcomed by Washington. This should encourage and help Washington to re-engage with the global community on the broad range of issues, not disengage still more through in-your-face rejections of international regimes. Global cooperation is not a one-way street: the relationship requires long-term commitment on all sides.

The global coalition to combat threats to international security, of any type, is already in place. We call it the United Nations. It did not rate a mention in the American President's address to the joint session of Congress. There is a fresh opportunity to rededicate the terms of American engagement with the international community in protecting the world from deadly new threats immune to conventional tools of statecraft. The nation of laws must turn its power to the task of building a world ruled by law. An order that is worth protecting and defending must rest on the principles of justice, equity and law that are embedded in universal institutions.

President George W. Bush has declared that the United States will make no distinction between terrorists and those who harbor them. Nor must Washington make a distinction between "our" terrorists and "theirs," condoning or tolerating one lot while isolating and liquidating another. For security from the fear of terrorism is truly indivisible. How many of today's radical extremists, embracing terror against a host of countries, are yesterday's "freedom fighters" trained and financed by the West as jihadis against the former enemy? Are there more to follow, more to be created?

How interconnected is the terrorists' network, how overlapping their cause? Washington must not fall into the trap, only too distressingly common in their past, of converting terror on America into terror against the world, but terrorist attacks elsewhere are seen merely as local problems to be solved by the countries concerned. It is worth highlighting that around 40 per cent of the World Trade Center victims were non-Americans from 80 countries: it really was an international tragedy.

Fundamentalism infects aspects of United States contemporary policy in ways that form the backdrop to the tragedy of 11 September. On one side, fundamentalist belief in limited government produced policies of privatizing even such critical public goods as airport security in the hands of poorly paid, ill-trained airport screeners. There are some services that properly belong to the public sector, including citizens' health, education, public safety, and law and order. There is a fundamentalist drive to promote the rule of the market in international transactions, regardless of the social consequences and oblivious of the darkening storm clouds on the horizon. And there is a fundamentalist opposition to institutions of global governance, from arms control to climate change and the pursuit of universal justice--justice without borders.

The events of that tragic Tuesday should force us to rethink old and set ways of looking at the world. In the war against fundamentalist terrorism, past enemies can be today's allies. The concert of democracies must cooperate politically and coordinate responses with one another's law-enforcement and military forces. They must forge alliances if necessary to work around the institutionalized reluctance of global organizations to respond effectively and in time to real threats instead of posturing over imaginary grievances.

Security experts will examine closely the procedural and organizational flaws that allowed the planes to be hijacked and the intelligence failures that enabled it all to be plotted without detection. Other security measures will also be put in place. But in the end there can be no guaranteed security against suicide terrorists who know no limits to their audacity, imagination and inhumanity. We must not privilege security and order to such an extent as to destroy our most cherished values of liberty and justice in the search for an unattainable absolute security. As Benjamin Franklin, one of the fathers of American independence, said, those who would sacrifice essential liberty to temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.

In looking for underlying causes, Americans should ask why they arouse such fanatic hatred in would-be terrorists. Is all of it the price they have to pay for being the world's most successful, powerful and wealthy nation? Or can some of it at least be muted by adopting policies that are more measured and tempered in dispensing justice more evenly? Fanaticism feeds on grievance, and grievance is nurtured by deeply felt injustice. Terror is the weapon of choice of those who harbour the sense of having been wronged, who are too weak to do anything about it through conventional means, and who are motivated to seek vengeance by other means.

Whatever else they may have been, the suicide terrorists responsible for that Tuesday's attacks were not cowards. On the contrary, they were exceptional in their steel of resolve, even if it was harnessed to an evil end. Random acts by individual terrorists can be sourced to the politics of collective grievance: dehumanizing poverty and spirit-sapping inequality, as well as group injustice. President Bush spoke of an "unyielding anger" in his first broadcast to the nation. Such human emotions are not exceptional to one people but common to the human race. The fury and vengeance of others fester in deeply wounded collective psyche: if we wrong them, shall they not revenge? Anger is a bad guide to policy, for Governments as for terrorists: revenge is indeed a dish best served cold.

Terrorism cannot be contained by expensive space-based shields against missile attacks. Modem military forces and security policies should be configured for threats rooted in the new security agenda, but bearing in mind that at the end of the day, it is simply not possible to construct and keep in place indefinitely foolproof protective shields against every threat.

If isolationism is not an option in today's interconnected world, unilateralism cannot be the strategy of choice either. Just as America is a nation of laws that find expression in institutions, so Americans should work to construct a world of laws functioning through international institutions.

That is why the concert of democracies to combat terrorism cannot be a closed circle, but must embrace all those willing to join in the fight against threats to a civilized community of nations. A global coalition formed to combat terrorism must not be restricted to punitive and retributive goals, but must instead be transformed into the larger cause of rooting security worldwide in enduring structures of cooperation for the longer term. The supremacy of the rule of law has to be established at the national, regional and global levels. The principles of equity and justice must pervade all institutions of governance.

Americans rightly reject moral equivalence between their own virtuous" power and their "evil' enemies. They should now reflect on their own propensity toward political ambivalence between the perpetrators of terrorism and the efforts of legitimate governments to maintain national security and assure public safety.

The end of complacency about terrorism in the American heartland should encourage Washington to view other countries' parallel wars against terrorism through the prism of a fellow-government facing agonizing policy choices in the real world, rather than single-issue non-governmental organizations, whose vision is not anchored in any responsibility for policy decisions. Some Governments have been at the receiving end of moral and political judgment about robust responses to violent threats posed to their authority and order from armed dissidents. They are entitled to and should now expect not a free hand but a more mature understanding--an understanding forged in the crucible of shared suffering.

This does not give any Government a license to kill. To defeat the terrorists, it is absolutely critical that the symbolism of America--not just the home of the free and the land of the brave, but also the bastion of liberty, freedom, equality between citizens and rulers, democracy and nation of laws--be kept alive. That is a shared vision. That is why we were all the symbolic target of the attacks, why we were all Americans that Tuesday, and why we must join forces with the Americans to rid succeeding generations of the scourge of terrorism-not blinded by hatred and a lust for revenge, nor driven by the calculus of geopolitical interests, but ennobled by the vision of a just order and empowered by the majesty of laws.

For the sake of our common future, we must not allow reason to be overwhelmed by grief and fear, judgment to be drowned in shock and anger at the terrorist action--as President Bush has affirmed, we must not brand all followers of any particular faith our common enemy. Just as there coexist many ways of thinking and many different value systems within the "West', so are there many who daily honour Islam against the tiny minority who some-times dishonour it or any other religion.

In the immediate aftermath of the assaults, some have sought to resurrect the vacuous and discredited thesis of the clash of civilizations. Incidents have been reported where members of particular ethnic or religious groups going about their daily lives--shop owners, passers-by-were randomly accused of being responsible for the devastation in New York and Washington, and sometimes assaulted with deadly violence, simply because of their race, colour, religion or attire.

Individual terrorism should not provoke mass intolerance. The victims of the hijacked planes and the World Trade Center destruction, along with the rescuers, reflect modern American society in all its glorious diversity. The best way to honour victims is to recognize our common humanity and work for peace in and through justice. Islamic terrorists are no more representative of Islam than any fundamentalist terrorists are of their broader community: the Irish terrorists (or for that matter some United States-based reverends) of Christianity, or the fanatics who in 1992 destroyed the centuries-old mosque in Ayodhya of Hinduism.

The world will fall into a permanent state of suspicion, fear, perhaps even war, if we fail to make a distinction between fanatics, with a total disregard for life, who pose a threat to all of humankind--irrespective of religion, culture or ethnicity--and those who simply have different ways of organizing their lives or different cultural preferences, but share the same basic goals and aspirations of all mankind: the pursuit of life, liberty and happiness.

The need for a dialogue among civilizations is now greater than before, not less. Those whose vision rises above the obvious differences between ethnic, religious, cultural and social groups, and embraces so much that we all have in common, will not judge a human being simply on a person's looks, language and faith. This is what the dialogue among civilizations is about.

It will take time and effort to bear fruit and certainly, in the short term, will not be able to prevent atrocities like the ones just witnessed. In the long run, however, dialogue might do just that: by uniting those who strive for a common future, and thereby isolating those who want to generate ineradicable rifts between the peoples of the world. America has called on all to stand up and be counted in the war against global terrorism. We do indeed need a worldwide coalition against such horrors. However, it is just as important to stand up and resist all who would spread the message of hate and sow the seeds of discord.

The fight against terrorism is a war with no frontiers, against enemies who know no borders and have no scruples. If we abandon our scruples, we descend to their level. The dialogue of civilizations is a discourse across all frontiers, embracing communities who profess and practice different faiths, but have scruples about imposing their values on others. We must talk to and welcome into the concert of civilized communities believers in moral values from all continents, cultures and faiths. The need of the hour is for discourse among the civilized, not a dialogue of the uncivilized deafened by the drumbeats of war.

Hans van Ginkel is Rector and Ramesh Thakur Vice Rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo, Japan.