Author: K P S Gill, Former Director-General,
Punjab Police
Publication: The Economic Times
Date: October 2, 2001
The world is finally gearing up
for the war against terrorism that the US has now declared, and it is increasingly
being recognised that this is not an enemy that can be defeated alone,
even by the most powerful nation in the world. There are, however, still
many obstacles to an effective international coalition against terrorism,
and one of the most significant is the ludicrous but widely circulated
proposition that 'One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter'.
This is arrant nonsense. Terrorism is not an ideology or a political agenda;
it is a method or instrumentality. Terrorism is simply the use of violence
against civilians and noncombatants, and it is high time the world rejects
and condemns all those who use the instrumentalities of terror, whatever
their proclaimed ideologies and goals. The United Nations' Declaration
on Measures to Eliminate Terrorism condemns 'all acts, methods and practices
of terrorism as criminal and unjustifiable... whatever the considerations
of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or
other nature that may be invoked to justify them.' These are the ideas
that must replace the ethic of expediency and the moral ambivalence that
currently prevails, and become the basis for the world's real war against
terrorism everywhere.
This will have to be a very different
war from anything we have seen before. Conventional forces and strategies
cannot succeed here. The terrorists choose the most unconventional methods,
and the initiative and element of surprise is almost always with them.
The terrorists have, moreover, spontaneously succeeded in creating a 'terrorist
international', a worldwide network of collaboration that transcends all
ideological concerns and divisions. The world's enforcement agencies will
have to secure unprecedented levels of coordination to generate and share
the intelligence that is the only effective weapon against this 'terrorist
internationals.' The terrorist networks will have to be disrupted and destroyed
through a combination of extraordinary tools: intelligence, financial,
ideological and military.
Terrorism undermines and destroys
the fundamental structures and functions of society; it paralyses the organs
of governance and the daily lives of millions of citizens; it manipulates
and exploits the democratic system and its freedoms to break the political
will of nations. In doing so, each act of terror adds to the relative strength
of the forces of disruption, and to the difficulties of response by increasingly
vitiated structures of governance and enforcement. The world must understand
the dynamics of terrorism if it is to respond effectively with the combined
might of the legislative, intellectual, civil, military and public forces
available to democracies. If our understanding is inadequate, if we fail,
then all civilisation and all freedom as we know them are threatened.
It has become a cliche to say that
there is "no military solution to terrorism'. This is another half-truth
that has been elevated to the status of popular dogma. Certainly, military
means alone cannot comprehensively and permanently defeat the scourge;
but neither can any other means succeed unless these are backed by military
force. Terrorism occupies and exhausts all political space; its demands
cannot be met through negotiation, because it asks for far more than can
reasonably be given. It is only when the force of terror is countered and
neutralised that the necessary space for political resolution comes into
being. Those who suffer from a certain moral ambivalence regarding the
use of force against terrorists should take a dose look at the way terrorist
regimes treat their own people.
In our war against terror, finally,
we must remember always that the fight is not against 'fundamentalism'
or between religious groups or 'civilisations'. It is a war between terror
and democracy; between fear and freedom. Terrorism must be banished from
the sphere of national and international politics; it must be isolated
and destroyed. All nations must realise the truth that the opportunistic
use or support of terrorism to undermine competing regimes is a strategy
fraught with danger; that all terrorism is evil, and not just the terrorism
directed against our own people.
