Non-state actors have muddied the global security picture but the fundamental problems remain unchanged from those millenia ago
When Al-Qaeda launched two hijacked planes into the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001, it changed the global security landscape. It sparked the start of the U.S.-led War on Terror that brought states into conflict with non-state actors such as Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq. More than 10 years on, Al-Qaeda has morphed into ISIS, and the War on Terror is nowhere near resolving the issues that led to conflict.
In addition, other threats such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003 and now the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), as well as cybercrime syndicates post new kinds of challenges to traditional and multilateral security apparatus.
“In the past 300 to 400 years, the biggest threats (to global security) have always been state-initiated; the biggest players have always been governments,” explains Ho Kwon Ping, Executive Chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, and Chairman of the Singapore Management University (SMU) Board of Trustees. “Now, the big events are non-state-initiated. The question is: Are the traditional governance mechanisms that the states have created to deal with problems adequate to deal with these issues that are sprouting up everywhere?”
Big Brother is watching you…and it is not always a bad thing
Ho made those remarks at the recent recording of a panel discussion titled “Global security threats: Asia’s role in the world” for Singapore-based station Channel NewsAsia’s Perspectives programme. The threat posed by ISIS was a major point of discussion, and Noboru Nakatani of INTERPOL commented on ISIS’s use of social media to recruit and radicalise people. To keep track of what ISIS and cybercrime syndicates are doing, monitoring would be necessary. But how much monitoring is too much monitoring? In light of the Edward Snowden incident, where should the line be drawn between ensuring security and the possibility of abuse in a Big Brother society?
“Every time people mention Edward Snowden, there is a negative connotation,” Nakatani says. “However, from a government’s perspective, it has the right to do anything to protect its citizens from any threat. As long the laws and regulations allow it, any government can do whatever they want to do.”
“It’s unavoidable,” says James Tang, Dean of the School of Social Sciences at SMU of the need for surveillance and monitoring of online activity. “The question is: How is all this monitoring regulated? Are there mechanisms to allow the citizenry to understand how all this is done? The world is moving towards the direction of making use of all this data.”
While the panel agreed that surveillance was unavoidable, and might even be too much of a ‘Big Brother’ characteristic for comfort, it does have its merits.
“People used to say, ‘CCTV is everywhere! You can track someone’s life in public through CCTV,’” Ho says. “However, those affected by the Boston Marathon bombings were grateful that CCTV was everywhere. When the 2005 London bombings went into the underground train stations, they were caught on CCTV.
“CCTV is the best example of Big Brother watching you, so in a densely-packed society, you cannot avoid it – there will be monitoring of some sort.”
The state(s) of affair
While monitoring by states may be necessary and unavoidable, Nakatani points out that the private sector may be better equipped for the job.
“In the past,” says Nakatani, “when it came to monitoring communications, it was a question of capability – only states had it. Now it’s companies such as Apple and Google. Who has the most data and information? It’s global companies as people increasingly connect their devices to the internet. Therefore the question should be: How much information would governments like to possess with regards to their cyber capability to ensure the safety of the nation?”
Given the inability of states and multilateral organisations’ inability to solve problems, are they the best option to deal with security threats? Ho cited the example of the human trafficking in Southeast Asia and North Africa that has led to thousands of lives lost in drownings, lamenting the “total failure of multilateral organisations to meet a relatively simple threat”.
The most worrying question, however, remains: Why are youth who grew up in non-Islamic environments, often in developed countries, signing up to join organisations such as ISIS? What can be done to stop this?
“What is the appeal of ISIS [among the young]?” asks Tang? “There are different push and pull factors that bring people into the ISIS fold. Are these people the marginalised in society? Are people from prosperous countries attracted to this romantic notion of doing something important or great? So that kind of security threat isn’t just about countering bombing threats, it’s also about addressing social and economic issues.”
“I don’t think the demonisation of ISIS has led to greater recruitment of middle class, traditionally non-Muslim, non-Arab people in Western countries,” Ho asserts in response to a question from the floor about blowback. “It’s the use of social media to appeal to the disaffected young people, many of whom are middle class who did not grow up in a Muslim environment.
“It reminds me of my time in university when there was the Red Army and Baader-Meinhof gang etc. You had lots of middle class kids who were disaffected and who essentially became terrorists for the same reasons now that you find quite a number of young, middle class, disaffected and idealistic people turning to ISIS. So to me, it’s not a totally new phenomenon.”
Ho adds in conclusion: “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Our predecessors have made the same mistakes before. Technology has changed but essentially we are repeating the same old mistakes again. It behooves us to go back and look at what are the eternal mistakes that we have always made, and then we might get somewhere.”
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