By Shamsa Aref Al Qubaisi*
Wars are usually measured by what they destroy, but this one will eventually be judged by what it creates.
Casualties, damaged ports, a closed strait, and oil above eighty dollars have been the result of six months of conflict. However, none of it captures the cost that will outlast the ceasefire — a cost currently building up quietly in displacement camps and shattered schools.
Published in March, the Global Terrorism Index recorded the calmest period since 2007: deaths dropped by 28%, and the attacks reached their lowest rate in two decades. These figures represent the past year, before the first strikes on Iran.
Terrorism is a lagging indicator, as it does not track how violent a region feels; it tracks how its institutions failed years ago. This is why many terrorist attacks occur inside countries already at war, killing roughly five times as many people as attacks elsewhere. These kinds of organisations emerge well after the state ceases to function, not before.
What draws recruits in is rarely doctrine, as more than a thousand former members of extremist groups discovered that the majority could identify a particular incident that motivated them to join — for example, an armed authority’s abuse of power that went unanswered. Evidently, ideology ranks below the simple absence of a job and livelihood, for the recruiter’s advantage is not persuasion. Instead, it is the presence of a grievance that nobody else will address.
This war is producing that grievance on an industrial scale. Since March, three million Iranians and close to a fifth of Lebanon’s population have been displaced.
Displacement is a severe hardship as it breaks up regular relationships with teachers, employers, and neighbourhoods, making it difficult for people to survive and leaving them idle in areas where armed groups already operate.
Currently, political Islamism is organisationally broken. The Muslim Brotherhood is split between rival leaderships; its senior figures are jailed or scattered, and some of its branches have been designated by many countries. Sometimes, this might occasionally be interpreted as evidence that the problem is being resolved, but prohibition merely reduces supply and has no effect on demand.
This kind of demand is never left unfulfilled; it is met later on by whoever is available, such as a local militia, a smuggling network offering wages, or an unaffiliated cell organised online.
Daesh was not built on the strength of an outlaw organisation. It was put together from what was left of one, inside a non-functional state.
This is the actual legacy of this war. Governments are adept at combatting a terrorist organisation by removing its leaders, seizing its money, and banning it by name. They are far more unfamiliar with fighting an organisation that has no leaders, no accounts, and no name — a force that naturally grows when young men, out of desperation, join whoever seems to be closest to them.
This makes the policy sequencing a pressing concern. Schools, salaries and relief convoys are being filed under reconstruction, which won’t start until the guns stop. However, they aren’t reconstruction. It is the only counterterrorism strategy that works while the pipeline is still in motion, and the longer it is put off, the more likely it is that the wrong organisations will gain control over it.
*The writer is a Researcher at TRENDS Research & Advisory.