The past year has been one of extraordinary and
ambivalent developments in the South Asian region in the context
of terrorism and other patterns of sub-conventional conflict and
warfare. The sheer range and pace of transformations has far over-extended
the capacities of the very small strategic community committed
to the analysis of these trends, and the Institute for Conflict
Management has been no exception. While the pressure of these
developments has meant a much higher volume of output from the
Institute, including weekly editions of the South Asia Intelligence
Review, daily News Updates, and an unending chain of assessments,
briefs and media interventions, Faultlines has suffered
unacceptable neglect, with just a single issue brought out in
year 2004, against the scheduled quarterly publication.
For the period of our defalcation, we thank our
readers for their patience, as well as for the encouragement they
have given us through their many concerned inquiries about the
journal. Despite the enormous pressure on limited institutional
resources, it is our intention to regularize Faultlines
through year 2005, and we propose to bring out the scheduled volume
each quarter. We also hope to attend to at least a part of the
backlog as well. These objectives have been made the more urgent
by the expanding profile of instability and violence in the South
Asian region, by the sheer paucity of analytic literature on the
contemporary history and experience of insurgent and terrorist
movements here, and by the persistent superficiality, even ignorance,
of the larger academic and political debate and of the policy
paradigms that continue to dominate these issues.
The broad thrust of efforts in Faultlines,
as, indeed, the cumulative thrust of all of the Institute’s endeavours,
is, in the words of Claude Bernard, "to give birth to an
idea by making a fact appear, that is to say, make an experiment
to see."1 In the muddy waters of political
and polemical discourse, the facts relating to terrorism, insurgency
and other patterns of sub-conventional conflict and warfare have
often gone undocumented, been obscured, intentionally ignored,
or sacrificed to the imperatives of expediency and political correctness.
Eight year’s into the Institute’s existence, and in the sixth
year of the publication of Faultlines, however, our ‘experiment
to see’ has secured some notable successes, and a faint echo of
realism is now audible in many quarters, though its reflection
in policy and practice remains, at best, erratic.
The need to delve below the surface, the stereotype
and the well-meaning fiction, has been immensely enlarged over
the past years by the increasing complexity of conflicts in the
region, their ideological and material linkages across borders
and across continents, and the subtlety of transformations that
are occurring – often unnoticed till they manifest themselves
in tragedy – in the patterns and spheres of operation of radical
groups and their sponsors.
While there appears to have been a secular decline
in trends in terrorist and insurgent violence in South Asia –
as reflected in fatalities in various theatres – since 9/11, there
are dramatic skews in this trend, and there has, particularly
over the past year, been a dramatic expansion in the geographical
spread of such conflicts.2 Worse, the spheres
of political mismanagement and incompetence, of general lawlessness
and criminality, and of sectarian, communal and other collective
tensions appear to be expanding across much of the region, notwithstanding
isolated success stories and dramatic economic and technological
transformations in some areas. There are, consequently, powerful
emerging threats to regional and national stability in South Asia,
notwithstanding the apparent and significant regime stability
manifested within its constituent states.
The coming years will thus require a continuous
and intense struggle to cope with a wide range of destabilizing
factors in South Asia, and the endeavour to document, analyse
and assess the intricate dynamic of these factors will be integral
to their containment. The contribution of a multiplicity of independent
institutions and scholars will be necessary to this latter task
of study and evaluation, if future policies are to comprehend
a necessary measure of consistency and to meet with desired successes.
It has been one of the encouraging, though still limited, trends
of the recent past that the institutional framework of such independent
assessment and analysis is gradually emerging.
The present volume is a small addition to this
broader venture that seeks to scrutinize the Byzantine patterns
of terrorism and insurgency, as well as the policies and practices
to counter these in South Asia, and in the contiguous regions
that have an impact on conflict and security here.
Ajai Sahni
New Delhi
January 12, 2005