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South Asia has seen astonishing
and contradictory developments over the past dramatic year, with
some insurgencies collapsing – most significantly, the Liberation
Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka – in the face of determined
state action, while others waned, as Governments got their act
together – the Pakistan-linked Islamist extremists in Bangaldesh
prominent among these. In other theatres, slow processes of erosion
– a combination of exhaustion, changing environments, and persistent
Security Force and intelligence efforts – have weakened enduring
movements. The Pakistan-backed insurgency in Jammu and Kashmir
has certainly lost traction, and its architects have sought to
re-engineer it as a popular street intifada with significant
success in 2010. Even this, however, shows some signs of fragmenting,
as moderate voices emerge for the first time in the Valley, to
challenge the intimidation, both of terrorists and of the street
gangs which imposed relentless shutdowns, through the threat and
use of violence, with little relief, for months at end.
Indeed, total fatalities in the
various insurgencies and terrorist movements in South Asia – Bangladesh,
Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – virtually folded
up from a surging 29,638 fatalities in 2009 to 9,431 in 2010.
2008, before this, had seen 20,733 fatalities [all data from the
South Asia Terrorism Portal]. Even Pakistan showed some
improvement on this index: 7,435 fatalities in 2010, as against
11,704 in 2009 [these figures are likely to be underestimates,
since Pakistan blocks access of media and independent agencies
to regions of conflict].
Despite these tremendous gains,
however, there is little room for complacency. While individual
movements have faded, or even disappeared, others have strengthened.
Crucially, the complex dynamic, which has made South Asia one
of the most volatile regions in the world, has not undergone any
significant structural transformation. The infirmity of governments,
their frequent ambivalence towards, or complicity in insurgency
and the politics of violence, the sheer lack of capacities for
effective governance, grievance redressal, justice administration
and security management, and an explosive demographic profile
– these are endemic across the region. Worse, the uncertain trajectory
of the Western intervention in Afghanistan, and the Damocles sword
of a premature withdrawal by Western powers, holds out a threat
of an unprecedented escalation of Islamist extremism and terror,
even as Pakistan’s accelerating hurtle towards anarchy conjures
scenarios of a progressive, and potentially total, loss of control
in South Asia.
The spectre of nuclear terror
is, of course, integral to such a future scenario. The assassination
of Salman Taseer, the Governor of Pakistan’s Punjab Province,
by a member of an elite state Security Force underlines the threat
of growing radicalism within the Army and Paramilitary establishment
in the country – a radicalism that, many fear, could combine with
non-state actors to grab a piece of the country’s burgeoning nuclear
assets.
Pakistan’s ‘descent into chaos’
not only threatens the region; it radiates waves of Islamist extremism
across the world, destabilizing an increasingly fragile world
order.
Through all this, terrorist formations
have constantly reinvented themselves within a long-war framework,
but little coherence has marked the national, regional and global
responses to these complex threats. Indeed, even the assessments
of diverse state and international agencies have been marred at
the outset by bias, incomprehension, insufficient documentation
and analysis, and a proclivity to short term political expediency.
A tremendous challenge of research
now exists. It is within this context that Faultlines,
after a few erratic years, seeks to re-establish a regular schedule
of quarterly publication, in the hope of restoring its widely
appreciated contributions to issues of policy, strategy and response,
in the world’s byzantine conflicts.
Ajai Sahni
New Delhi: January 18, 2011
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