Conclusions: Global Opposition Is Crystallising.

Another reason why an Islamist movement will find it difficult to assume power in any of the key Middle East countries is that there is growing worldwide opposition to the concepts behind militancy, with most non-Muslim countries equating radical Islam and the notion of jihad (holy war) with terrorism.

Joint counter-terrorism initiatives are already being undertaken worldwide. The US, Russia, Europe and a number of other countries are co-ordinating bilaterally and multilaterally to confront the anti-Western and anti-democratic tendencies represented by figureheads such as Osama Bin Ladin, the denationalised Saudi now living in exile in Afghanistan under the protection of the Taliban movement.

This reflects a wider concern about militant Islam among the big powers than existed even until the mid-1990s. However, the seeds of such concern were sown by the late 1980s. The recognition of the dangers began almost immediately after the anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan, with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, when those who had returned from the Afghan battlefield began questioning the right of the Saudi royal family to invite US troops to base themselves in the kingdom. Bin Ladin was one of those figures.

In 1993, a draft interim report for the NATO parliamentary assembly noted that members of the alliance felt threatened by: (1) the erosion of confidence in democratic values which the Islamist movement represents, an erosion which could, reach the European countries that have large Muslim communities; and (2) the "risk of a spread of a form of terrorism based on a blind defence of Islamic values". Such sentiments have become more entrenched in the 1990s, bolstered by Western intellectuals such as Samuel Huntington who wrote the "Clash of Civilisations" on the premise that the West would in due course find itself challenged by an alliance between Islamic countries and China.

The risks inherent in "political Islam" were explained in the NATO draft report as follows: "Islamic political thought differs from Western thought on a fundamental point, namely its difficulty in accepting the independence of politics from the religious and private spheres of human activity. That independence, which has been at the root of the democratic model since the Age of Enlightenment, is an essential precondition for political pluralism, because it rejects the authorities' claim to guardianship of an absolute truth inspired by religion. As a political project, Islam thus cannot be reconciled with democracy. This has no bearing on the compatibility of the Muslim religion with democracy".

The claims and slogans raised by Islamist movements through the 1990s have only reinforced such viewpoints. Thus, for example, the Bush administration constantly cites the global threat of terrorism as its reason for building the controversial national missile defence (NMD) system.

Washington is also working closely with a number of other big powers as well as the UN to tighten the noose around the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Today Afghanistan is seen as the primary source of Islamist violence being exported to the Middle East, Central Asia and South Asia.