The Caliphate, Part II

The Caliphate, Part II

Thursday, April 26, 2007

I have been noting with increasing frequency how policymakers are being influenced by academia in reference to the Islamic Caliphate agenda. There is an active academic presence that is dismissing the Caliphate as a “non-threat” to US national security and western civilization. That position, which I will confront in this article is, to me, almost as naïve as Sir Lawrence’s attempt to get the Bedouin tribal factions wounded by the Turkish invasion of the Middle East to restore basic electric power and services in the Arabian Peninsula at the end of World War One.

To claim that fundamentalist Islam has no desire or claim to the reestablishment of a Caliphate for the Islamic world is no different than claiming that Catholicism has no utility for a Pope. Such a claim is rooted in the antiquated belief that Islamic factions cannot unite for common goals or to advance their civilization. During the Cold War, for example, US intelligence viewed Soviet-controlled Islamic populations of having little long-term strategic value because any asset function from such groups was limited due to their inability to move past tribal conflict between competing groups in Islamic civilization. This belief was that since what started with Lenin and progressed with Stalin in terms of controlling Islam in the greater Soviet sphere, Islam could provide no long-term benefit for the west because it was too splintered and mired with competing sects and special interests that fought amongst themselves. US anti-Soviet policy was focused from the European approach and the containment of communism was put into play in the Middle East. In countries such as Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Central Asia, the Soviets were given free reign to deal with Islamic populations as they saw fit to with little or no interference from western powers. Joseph Stalin even went so far as to ban the religion of Islam in some Central Asian territories, and he relocated large Islamic populations by force from Chechnya to Siberia in order to liquidate them as enemies of the state and “counterrevolutionaries”.

Modern fundamentalist Islam, through groups such as the Taliban, is energizing new foundations of the Caliphate process. Academic thinkers that are stuck in the Cold War world-view that the United States and Russia will supervise the shaping of the global community in the 21^st Century alone do not understand what is happening in our world today. They do not see what is taking shape in the Islamic world and policymakers are only getting one-half of the story, as a partisan university only provides its students with one-half an education.

Prior to the imminent collapse of the perverse Soviet system in the early 1990s, even though that system was showing signs of serious strain as early as 1978, President Ronald Reagan met with Mikhail Gorbachev in Reykjavík, Iceland, in 1986 to discuss the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the deterioration of the Soviet Union. The United States knew then that the west needed to be prepared for the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

As the Soviet Union under the forces of Marxist ideology sought to conquer the entire world during the Cold War, communism contained Islam in Central Asia with a combination of diplomatic and military power. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought the communist system in direct confrontation with a new form of Islam that began to perfect transnational military insurgency operations. Using bases and support from Pakistan, Afghani Mujahadeen waged a war of attrition with the Soviet Union that lasted almost 12 years. From that experience emerged a new “Islamic Identity” movement known as the Taliban. The Taliban first emerged from conservative Pakistani Madrassas when the west failed to support the Afghani Northern Alliance in holding Kabul.

When Islam finally broke its chains from the bondage of communism and faced communist military forces on the battlefields of Afghanistan, Islamic Imams then realized that they had defeated the Soviet Union, one of two super powers controlling the world. No credit of course would be given to the United States for our efforts to contain and destroy the Soviet Union, and Islamic Imams began to spread the message that the super powers could be defeated by an “unconventional” super power, the power of the unified Islamic nation.

Partisan academics then fail to point out the lessons-learned by Islamic centers of power during World War One, World War Two and the Cold War. From those experiences, Islamic nation-states and tribes have seized upon Nazism and Communism for lessons in altering theocratic controls over domestic populations within their countries. From the west, Islamic states have learned that western countries would be willing to educate future Islamic leaders in western colleges and other training areas, and house Islamic radicals such as the Ayatollah Khomeini in exchange for guarantees on oil distribution and FOREX market stability.

The seeds of the new Islamic Caliphate were born in World War One but were contained in communism. Once free of communism, the caliphate emerges upon the unsuspecting west in a variety of ways. I will now define some areas of the new Caliphate system and how it is not only emerging but is being ignored by some academics or even levied against by change agents in western governments. It is very important for western intelligence analysts to confront any attempt to marginalize or dismiss the Caliphate because it will be factored in the global arena very soon.

Ø The Obstacle of Old – Some years ago I studied how Pol Pot was able to seize Cambodia in a revolutionary way. The key to seizing Cambodia did not rest in the affluent older classes, but in Cambodian younger populations. High-school and college students were armed with automatic weapons, given territory promises and political status in Pol Pot’s regime in exchange for their liquidation of older populations in Cambodia which were defined immediately as “counterrevolutionary”. The counterrevolutionary in communism is the unsalvageable human being requiring reeducation in forced labor camps at best and execution at worst. By seizing upon an impressionable young generation of Cambodians across the full spectrum of the society, Pol Pot did not have to negotiate with the older generations that held the wealth and institutions of the state prior to the Cambodian revolution. Fundamentalist Islam recruits in the same way for its military operations, terrorist cells and internal vice apparatus. Older Islamic individuals are spared because they do not interdict in these functions between Islamic nation-states and transnational terrorism. So this foundation of the Caliphate system is clearly energetic.

Ø An Enemy in Deity – Fundamentalist Islam has ingeniously created an enemy against western civilization not through a nation-state system, but through deity. This paralyzes western governments and security institutions because western states have great difficulty in engaging hostile threats to national security outside of enemies defined as flagged nation-state systems recognized by the international community. When resources and personnel can flow between Islamic nation-states to the benefit of terrorist organizations and hostile nation-states themselves without linking such support to a flagged nation-state, the enemy becomes “deity”. Western governments cannot negotiate with a deity so diplomacy is dependent upon how Dar al Hab functions in relation to Fatwas issued by humans as claimed to be received from the omnipotent being. Since “deity” is the ideological theocratic function driving Islamic militancy, it cannot be anything other than a Caliphate foundation. If the opposite were true, western countries would be able to identify their enemy as a foreign nation-state. This point alone shreds the claim by some academics of the non-existence of the Caliphate.

Ø Theocratic Trotskyism – Joseph Stalin wanted Russian communism internalized. Leon Trotsky wanted Russian communism externalized in a revolutionary way to free the working classes in the west from so-called Marxist claims of “exploitation”. Why would Islam then use a form of “theocratic Trotskyism” to spread its ideology? In relation to deity, shouldn’t human beings choose their own God? This cannot be so to Islamic fundamentalism because the counterrevolutionary to communism is the apostate to Islam. This was another ideological lesson that Islam learned through its encounter with communism in the 20^th century. Islamic fundamentalism then is using the Caliphate structure as a plan to implement its vision of how human beings should worship and live on a global scale. We have seen this effect in the Taliban in Afghanistan and in certain al Qai’da controlled areas of the territories from which they have been known to operate. Other Islamic countries have already implemented these controls and a willingness to export them to western countries. In these Islamic states, vice squads roam population centers arresting people for “blasphemy”. Since blasphemy can mean anything as defined by a human in the name of deity, this is another foundation of the Caliphate system and it is another totalitarian mechanism which Islam learned from Nazism and Soviet communism, just applied in a theocratic way.

Ø Irredentism – The key to the reestablishment of the Caliphate system by fundamentalist Islam is the expansion and new construction of the mosque archipelago in western nation-states. This activity is occurring in many forms, chief among them the destruction by burning or other measures against Christian churches and Jewish synagogues, or simply the purchase of Christian churches and converting those facilities into mosques. Since the mosque archipelago claims no nation-state attachment, it falls directly in line with the fundamentalist military and terrorist activity against western nation-states. These facilities are used for recruitment purposes, raising funds, sheltering hostile personnel, storing of arms and ammunition and command and control. The global Caliphate requires such a presence in every nation-state on Earth. This fundamentalist Islamic presence is now occurring in every western nation-state. There can be no denying the implications of this activity in the reemergence of the global Caliphate and it is the key to the success of such efforts.

Ø Vice – Once population clusters reach a certain size in combination with political influence, the global Caliphate agenda then attempts to first control speech and information flows by directly engaging the targeted government and critical personalities of the state. Leo van Gough is an example of a “vice assassination”. Van Gough, who directed a film about the exploitation of Muslim women, was assassinated for it. In Canada and European countries, reporters and other media personalities are increasingly being attacked and beaten by Islamic assailants for violating what can only be described as an Islamic interpretation of “vice”. This totalitarian activity, once successful, will lead to the establishment of Sharia Law, where western law and western concepts of institution formation are replaced with Islamic law as defined by the Koran. The Caliphate must suppress or eliminate completely any intellectual competitor, especially in communications amongst the populations of the nation-state. This is again rooted in the Theocratic Trotskyite assumption that the counterrevolutionary is the enemy of the state and in Islam such an individual becomes an enemy of “deity”, which is viewed by Islam as an even higher and more dangerous crime than that of communism. Islamic populations that have become fundamentalist ones cannot tolerate any human-defined activity that moves about their communities in violation of the Koran. The Caliphate then is an emerging and extremely dangerous idea founded in totalitarian thinking with the objective of absolute control over all human populations living within its influence and reach.

It is troublesome that policymakers are being led to believe by some academics that the Caliphate agenda is not a national security problem for the United States of America. Severing the Caliphate from Islam would be like severing the Thousand Year Reich from National Socialism. Of course Hitler wasn’t telling neighboring states that he wanted a Thousand Year Reich in advance of his invasion of Poland. Nor will fundamentalist Islam come forward to tell western peoples that it wants a global Caliphate system to reign over all of humanity.

Perhaps the denial of the Caliphate by some western intellectuals is designed to be an attempt to reduce the fundamentalist Islamic threat that the west faces in the War on Terrorism. To declare a Caliphate was emerging would mean that there was a global threat facing western countries. Opponents of the War on Terrorism are burning the midnight oil trying to come up with ideas to reduce the real threat the west faces, but like Nazism, the Caliphate will bubble to the surface in an unavoidable way as the Thousand Year Reich plan rose to the surface in Nazi Germany. It is all about the totalitarian control over humans that a theocratic belief system is convinced that it is ordained to accomplish as instructed by a human-defined deity which cannot be influenced in any way by any other human being outside of the theocratic system.

Is Darfur an example of Theocratic Trotskyism? Are Christian churches being burned there and Christian populations ethnically-cleansed? What about Indonesia?

The academic and analytical push to dismiss the Caliphate is a new western intellectual drive to secure retreat and defeat in the War on Terrorism. By claiming that the Caliphate does not exist, the United States would have no interest in stopping genocide in Darfur and other locations in Africa. Denying the Caliphate agenda is advocating western defeat in the War on Terrorism.

In sum, the United States and western governments are not contextualizing fundamentalist Islam as a global problem as the west was able to do very well with communism. I am confident however that fundamentalist Islam will teach the west spectacular lessons about this error in judgment and intellectual denial will be corrected, as Hitler’s actions corrected many academic misconceptions in 1939.

I openly challenge any academic to refute this position. Denying the Caliphate agenda is comparable to the recent claims by some in academia that freedom-building is empire-building.

Christopher Farmer

MS, National Security

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