Pakistan can not perennially play fall-guy and try winning international sympathy. It has all the symptoms and signs of failed nation. It can be an international responsibility, least of all of India to ensure that it gets stable government or that there is good governance there. When it fails completely and disintegrates, some of the fragmented territory (rather is big chunk) will inevitably join with India. Till this happens, we in India can at least accelerate the process and send befitting reply to Pakistan for all its misadventures so far by doing to it what it has been doing to us so far! What is Pakistan today – state with poor governance, religious Zionist calling the shots there, weak economy etc. And where terrorism grows? Consider following observation -
“States with poor governance; ethnic, cultural, or religious tensions; weak economies; and porous borders will be prime breeding grounds for terrorism. In such states, domestic groups will challenge the entrenched government, and transnational networks seeking safe havens. At the same time, the trend away from state-supported political terrorism and toward more diverse, free-wheeling, transnational networks - enabled by information technology - will continue. Some of the states that actively sponsor terrorism or terrorist groups today may decrease or even cease their support by 2015 as a result of regime changes, rapprochement with neighbors, or the conclusion that terrorism has become counterproductive. But weak states also could drift toward cooperation with terrorists, creating de facto new state supporters.” from the National Intelligence Council's "Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts" report (December 2000).
The mid-sixties saw smuggling of gold turning out to be very lucrative business of the underworld. It soon became the narcotics which was most sought after item for smuggling. Soon arms, narcotics and havala trading became lethal combination and small time smugglers no more operated independently. They were used by the international big-timers to work for them. And soon corporate culture was emulated by these smugglers / terrorists combine with overseas operation and global presence.
The D - Company has run its business from other countries using its front men and small time operatives. Thus smuggling and mafia activities in India and elsewhere are run like a corporate business. The terrorism have also started undergoing the same changes and if early indications are to be believed, the LeT, JeM or many other terrorist outfit operating from Pakistan need not get its cadre directly involved as local ‘talent’ is easily available. So ‘terrorism’ is being out- sourced as any ‘Corporate’ will out source house-keeping and maintenance services. Similarly terrorists are also more and more getting involved in real estate, havala trading and smuggling as their business verticals so that loss of one business can be absorbed by other business activities or one business can be funded by the profits of other businesses – mostly the terror operations in theirs case!
Why Mumbai terror act can not be brought to International Court of Justice?
The UN has been striving for decades to find a wording for terrorism which, instead of "all its forms and manifestations", narrows down to a specific profile of violence which can be condemned regardless of the circumstances. The absence of an agreed definition matters for many reasons. It blocks the possibility of referring terrorist acts to an international court, as for genocide and other war crimes; it leaves individual countries free to outlaw activity which they choose to classify as terrorism, perhaps for their own political convenience; and crucially it enabled the Bush administration to conjure in the public mind parallels between the 9/11 destruction of the World Trade Center and the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein. The vocabulary of terrorism has become the successor to that of anarchy and communism as the catch-all label of opprobrium, exploited accordingly by media and politicians.
The Precipice of Fear
Global terrorism threatens to undo a generation of multilateral endeavor for human development, inspired by principles of social justice and human rights. Foreign aid budgets are struggling in the wake of security priorities. Whilst there have been no major terrorist incidents in the US since 2001, the US counter-terrorism budget for 2008 is $142 billion, a figure which dwarfs the shortfall in annual funding required to meet the Millennium Development Goals which would assist almost a billion people in extreme poverty. Such dysfunctional spending priorities as in USA budget are evidenced in Indian Budget also and reflect the imperative of calming a country’s collective fear, the soft underbelly of emotion that terrorists are most adept at exposing.
A window of opportunity may exist for a new approach. There are few potential new leaders in India and Pakistan who might bring more resolve to implement the roadmap to long-lasting peace. Perhaps the blunt instruments of eavesdropping technology and counter-terrorism laws will give way to more intellectual exposure of the al-Qaeda ideology for its medieval undertones and deep anti-Semitism. In Indonesia, success against JI has been attributed in part to the advocacy work of converted terrorists to “de-radicalize” their former colleagues in prisons. A UK government programme, Preventing Violent Extremism, is dedicated to “winning hearts and minds” in a civic environment.
Nevertheless, real doubts linger over the capacity of politicians. The fundamental adjustment of attitudes necessary to neutralize terrorism can perhaps be engineered only by good citizenship. We may need to devote more energy to the integration of mixed ethnic communities and to the inequalities that are inseparable from modern economics. If we cannot convey to politicians that global fairness, peace and human dignity matter more than the comforts of consumerism, then our fate may indeed be akin to the vision of Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy in which the English poet reacted to British government-sponsored violence in 1819:
And each dweller, panic-stricken,
Felt his heart with terror sicken....
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