Tavleen Singh
AT last I managed to interview Mr
K.P.S. Gill on terrorism.
Did he think that this new, global
war against terrorism whose first battle was likely to be fought in Afghanistan
was going to make a difference ? No. "It will not make a difference because
terrorism is a small commander's war. Terrorist groups are discrete, disconnected,
so there are small groups in different places. Many of the groups are autonomous
and have to be tackled at different levels."
So bombing Afghanistan is not the
answer ? No, he said firmly, it was not and would make no difference to
the war against terrorism. The Americans have tried this approach before,
he added. Libya has been bombed as was Afghanistan and where has it got
them?" Besides, in his view what was interesting about the bombing of the
World Trade Center and Pentagon was that the whole conspiracy appeared
to have been hatched in the USA.
"The pilots were trained there and
many of them were American citizens. When it happened one of the first
things I noticed was the similarity to the hijacking of IC 814. Five people
per plane, no guns, only knives. The two advances on that hijacking are
one that this time they used trained pilots and two that the conspiracy
was hatched not in some other country but in the United States."
The reason why they may have felt
the need to use their own pilots was because with IC 814 the pilot was
clever enough to land in Amritsar, not Lahore, and then as usual the government
blew it by not being able to do anything at all before the plane took off
for foreign airports. With suicide missions they must have seen the importance
of having their own pilots.
Mr Gill explained that in his view
the similarities between IC 814 and the four hijackings on September 11
were not coincidental but almost certainly based on shared information.
Mr Gill believes that the only way
to tackle those who inhabit this world is to pinpoint attacks. There are,
he said, terrorist cells operating out of many European countries because
of liberal asylum and entry laws. Europe is such a sanctuary for these
groups that people joke about how there could one day be a demand for an
Islamic Republic of Europe. Should the Americans then be going for Osama
bin Laden? "Yes," he said, "he must be killed but there will immediately
be another leader."
Will America's global war have any
effect on our war against terrorism in Kashmir? No, according to him, we
will have to fight this war ourselves. So what have we been doing wrong
so far. Everything, in his view, because we continue to send mixed signals.
You cannot fight terrorism if you keep changing your approach. You cannot
defeat them if every now and then you announce that you will now talk to
them, have a ceasefire, and even agree to talk to General Musharraf. This
implies that you are fighting from a position of weakness.
Did they not talk in Punjab ? "We
did talk to them but we talked only to fight them psychologically by impressing
upon them that they could never win this war. We impressed upon them that
what they were doing was a negation of Sikhism. Just as it is wrong now
to believe that Islam is the enemy and not terrorism."
In Kashmir, he believes, that one
of the key mistakes that has been made is in appearing to seek out a political
solution. "There is no political solution to terrorism." He added that
it was important to target only the terrorists because "vicarious punishment"
of innocent people was always counter-productive.
Had he ever been asked to go to
Kashmir, I asked, and he said no. Would he agree to go? Yes.
