International Crisis Group Reports on Jamaatul Mujahideen Bangladesh

The International Crisis Group (ICG) recently published a report on Jamaat-ul Mujahideen Bangladesh (JMB).  I’ve been writing about the group and their wider ties to Harkatul Jihad al Islam, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the rightist Jamaat-e-Islami party in Bangladesh.  The connections, ferreted out and mapped already, span the Indian Subcontinent and have now begun to spread, taken wider root in Southeast Asia. Now as I look at the landscape of work that deals with the politics of terrorism in South Asia, and the wider implications of the continued existence of groups like JMB,  I can think of no better work than the IGG paper.

Here’s a taste:

“Despite two government crackdowns since 2005, the organisation continues to recruit, train and raise funds. Although JMB is a much weaker force due to the arrest of hundreds of its members and the execution of its original leadership council, it remains a potent threat with a proven capacity to regenerate. Its past and present ties to Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Tayyba (LeT), the organisation responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attack and for a foiled December 2009 plot to target embassies in Dhaka, reinforce that threat.’

The Awami League government seems to have responded to the threat posed by groups like JMB.  “As a result of increased government pressure, JMB seems to have shifted strategies. Like many other jihadi organisations, it is constantly evolving and mutating; its past actions may not necessarily indicate its future direction. JMB appears to have modified its recruitment strategies, restricted its rural activities and altered its funding base. While it may have lost hundreds of operatives to the crackdowns, those that remain are likely to be more fully committed and thus more dangerous.”

So, though there have been setbacks and though the sitting government might do well to pay more attention to threats inside its own borders, its record on domestic and cross-border terrorism is not unimpressive.  “All things considered, Sheikh Hasina and her government have not done badly at dealing with the terrorism threat. But it is no time to rest on their laurels”, says Robert Templer, Crisis Group’s Asia Program Director. “JMB’s weaknesses present the Awami League an opening to reshape its response to terrorism. If it moves quickly it could eradicate the organisation once and for all”.

Here’s the crux of the problem: we simply do not know when and where organizations like JMB and LeT morph into other entities, though we can say things about how we expect that process to shape up.  We do know that there are mechanisms of social structuration that apply to groups like JMB.  There are costs borne to collective action in terrorism, costs that fall differentially on different members of a group.   As members of a group are eradicated, beliefs structure along more clearly black and white lines so that over time beliefs and consequent actions become more ideologically pure, zealous and therefore dangerous.   We know that this process is taking place.  We simply do not know when and where this process is winding its way up or down.  But we do eventually come to find out when and where this process churns on by the lethal acts these groups commit in their various guises.  

Lethal groups like JMB and HUJI exist and grow in spite of, and perhaps ahead of, assessments and  machinations of state coercion.  If we are to finally and resolutely arrest the growth of these groups, then we have to act before they, like Morpheus, slip through our hands.