National perspectives on counter-terrorism are proving increasingly inadequate in confronting, indeed even acknowledging, the growing magnitude and complexity of the threat of terrorism today. This is not a problem with perspectives in South Asia alone, but afflicts most countries that face some measure of threat from the terrorists. There is a tendency to focus on local events and local dynamics, and to ignore the larger, far more intricate and persistent patterns that are emerging.
The fact, however, is that it is no longer viable to speak in isolation of the threat of terrorism in, say, Chechenya, or in Israel, in Turkey or in Egypt, in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region of China, or in Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, down to Malaysia and Indonesia. Indeed, regional and sub-regional discontinuities are now becoming progressively irrelevant, as a sweeping arc of terror extends from the Caucuses, across Central and West Asia, through South Asia, and deep into the Far East. Not only has the mobility and lethality of terrorist groups working across this entire region enormously augmented, there has also been an exponential increase in the sharing of support and contacts, as a transnational web of terror is constructed, transcending all conventional political boundaries, affiliations and ideologies. This is a danger that the Security and Intelligence Forces of no single country can confront on their own. Unfortunately, while the imperatives of international 'co-operation' (nation states will have to go much further than this tepid concept if they are to collaborate effectively) are conceded, they are yet to be translated into the nuts and bolts of a working mechanism. Narrow perspectives and obsolete Cold War calculations of divergent 'national interests' have been the greatest obstacles to the development of such a mechanism, and have enormously strengthened terrorist capabilities.
At the same time, terrorists have also grown increasingly proficient in exploiting the ambiguities of the prevailing political discourse, and in harnessing a wide range of cultural and sociological concepts - race, language, descent, regional peculiarities, collective beliefs - into revitalised concepts of ethnicity and varied group identities. Such concepts are employed in the mobilisation of support, to challenge the authority and legitimacy of the state, and to channelise violence against its structures. Real and perceived failures in the processes of nation-building in the 'Third World' lend themselves easily to this disruptive enterprise. In South Asia, they have created multiple faultlines of ethnic dissonance that have then been translated into violence across the region. The cross-border movement of populations has compounded this problem, creating a fear psychosis among indigenous populations at risk of being swamped by culturally and ethnically distinct 'outsiders'. This problem is particularly acute in India's Northeast, as the demographic profile of vast tracts undergoes radical transformations.
The use of narcotics to underwrite the costs of terrorism adds another disturbing dimension to law enforcement agencies' efforts to combat both terrorism and organised crime. In the nether-world of narco-terrorism, the players find little incongruity in their combination of violence with political ambition and criminal enterprise. At the heart of this empire of drugs and terror is the collapsed State of Afghanistan that now produces the preponderance of the world's illicit opium, and that has become the refuge and fountainhead of extremist Islamic terrorism, feeding the armies of mujahiddeen and mercenaries across the world.
Little headway has been made to direct aggressive efforts, or even to begin to address, the imperative of denying international terrorist and criminal syndicates the finances, weapons, ammunition, technologies and services that keep the wheels of their sanguinary enterprises turning.
Faultlines focuses on a range of conflicts and issues that have a bearing on some of the crises that terrorism has generated in the Asian region, and many of the subsidiary issues they raise beyond national borders. Each of the papers in the present volume is founded on the premise that the magnitude and diversity of lethal and often intractable terrorist conflicts today, demand a multi-dimensional and international operational response, in the absence of which most policy prescriptions are bound to be infructuous.
Ajai Sahni
New Delhi,
November 20, 2000.