With ISIS at its gates, a bloody demise awaits Bangladesh

When all the political posturing and amateur, televised, punditry following last Friday's attack at Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka, is over, after all the fingers have been pointed and all the chests have been beaten, what will remain with us is this:

Bangladesh is at a steep precipice and a bloody demise awaits us below. There's no telling where the next push will come from, or when, but what's more worrying is the fact that it is now abundantly clear a design for Bangladesh is being violently unveiled.

Even more apparent is the fact that the entire political and intellectual capital of the country didn't have the slightest clue where the greatest existential threat would come from, since they were too busy trotting out redundant neoliberal tropes of class and disparity to explain away the issue as economic discontent.

That might have been forgivable, if they didn't also assume the numerous acts of terror that preceded this one were motivated by party political attrition, instead of by a virulent ideological agenda.

The Bangladeshi leadership has proven itself too petty and too self-obsessed to see this bigger picture, which, regardless of how "local" its manifestations are, is a picture of global Islamism's territorial claims, and Bangladesh is prime real estate.

In fact, it doesn't even require sophisticated intelligence to know that Islamic State or Daesh has been at our gates for quite some time now, the've said they are, repeatedly, in their official publications and after every machete attack on minorities, atheists and anyone else they deemed an "unperson".

And repeatedly, our leaders and our thinkers have chosen to ignore it, perhaps because they are really that far out of touch, or because they did what children do when they feel out of their depth - cover their ears and refuse to listen.

Whatever their reasons, their failure to engage with the new paradigm has been catastrophic. But perhaps there couldn't have been any other outcome.

As a Muslim-majority, yet secular and liberal country Bangladesh was always going to be on the Islamist's radar. We are anathema, one of the largest Muslim countries by population, which opted out of Pan-Islamism, as it was called then, and turned its back on the politics of people like Sayyid Qutb and Abul Ala Maududi's Jamaat-i-Islam.

Even if we hadn't it might not have saved us, because the next-gen strain of this ideology, represented by the likes of Daesh, has no time for Jamaat-i-Islam either, which belongs, for all intents and purposes, to the world order they despise. Daesh wants to overhaul the entire system, to redraw boundaries and subsume existing structures so niggling things like national sovereignty don't get in its way.

We were marked for other reasons too. Earlier this year, Daesh reiterated that Bangladesh was a staging point for attacks in India and Myanmar and that a new Islamic entity would be carved out of territories from all the three countries in the future.

That Bangladeshi society is largely liberal and its politics secular only gave them added justification to launch from there what is envisaged as a movement to liberate Muslims from the oppression of Buddhists and Hindus, exemplified by the persecution of Rohingyas in Myanmar.

All of this was known, well in advance of the attacks. What wasn't known was that the attackers would be people not entirely dissimilar, in social orientation and background, from the people they attacked. But it shouldn't have come as such a surprise.

Any watcher of political Islam and its components, like jihadism, would know that nearly all the leading proponents of this ideology have been from urban-based, reasonably affluent environments, possessing semblances of a secular, modern education. Sayyid Qutb was, Maududi too to a lesser extent, but Osama Bin Laden was nearly exclusively so.

More to the point, Daesh recruitment globally has largely been from educated, urban and video-game playing populations, people who have Twitter accounts and imbibe the global, consumerist culture.

In fact that's where their dissonance begins, begging the question - what is it about their socialisation that makes them susceptible to indoctrination?

The sociological failure that resulted in those five Bangladeshi men, who were able to savagely butcher 20 people they had never met before as part of a routine operation is the question that needs answering.

That they were able to do it in the name of God, believing it to be a righteous act, or that they distinguished good and evil by "Muslim" and "non-Muslim" or "Bengali" and "foreign" speaks about their moral and intellectual inadequacies, which, even after we discount the fact that they were heavily brainwashed by professional indoctrinators, was produced by the socio-cultural environment they were raised in.

And that is something Bangladesh will have to reckon well with and where the Bangladeshi chapter on the war on terror will have to begin.

But there are macro factors to consider as well. These men believed they were soldiers in a global war to defend Muslim lands and Islamic lifestyles. They believed they were fighting people who had spread immorality and vice in their country and belonged to a world that was at war with a Muslim one. They announced that as they came in, saying, "You people don't have to be afraid, we won't kill the Muslims, we came here to kill non-Muslims and people who are destroying the Muslim world."

That the people they killed were not responsible for any war was irrelevant to them, and they would have made the case that the many innocent people who have died in Muslim countries were not responsible either. Once again, the fact that they could kill based on such absurd notions of equivalence or morality, is a reflection of the holes in their socialisation.

But these men are also victims. They were disposable pawns in a strategy that is shattering the whole world virtually, driven on by international interests and objectives that are still too opaque to fully understand.

And there are other theories too, about false flag operations designed to cripple burgeoning economies or legitimise military contracts, but all of these are impossible to conclude and make no difference to the fact that Bangladesh may soon find itself in a fight for its life.

And if that happens, the first thing we can hope to prevent is having Bangladeshis like those five men, on the other side of the line.