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It is interesting, on occasion,
to review the dynamism and enterprise displayed by terrorists
and their organizations, and to contrast these with the sluggishness,
the rigidity, and the utter lack of imagination ordinarily displayed
by the counter-terrorist responses of the state and its agencies.
This is, at least in some measure, unsurprising. For the terrorist,
inventiveness and constant change is a matter of survival, a question
of life and death. For those who draft state policy - including
counterterrorist policies - this is seldom the case, and despite
the hysteria that ordinarily dominates the functioning of the
internal security ministries and departments, flexibility and
responsiveness are seldom recognizable features of the decision-making
process. Of course, change is also a question of life and death
for the security forces (SFs) who actually confront and counter
the swelling terrorist offensive; but they are so far distanced
from the policy- making processes as to be virtually irrelevant
to the decisions that determine their own survival and effectiveness.
Terrorists have been particularly
inventive in, and state agencies characteristically obtuse in
their responses to, the skillful exploitation of the laws, institutions
and procedures of the very system that they seek to destroy. The
structures and processes of Parliamentary democracy lend themselves
best to such a pattern of attack, and terrorists set up numerous
'front organizations and operations' precisely to combine the
force of their extreme violence with a range of 'legitimate' devices
that help paralyze and confuse governments and their agencies.
Paul Wilkinson warns against "the huge dangers posed where terrorists
cleverly combine politics and the threat or use of violence and
where governments respond to such challenges by further concessions
or appeasement. The danger in such cases is that democracy and
the rule of law may be undermined by the weakness of governments."1
This is a pattern that is repeating
itself in many of the theatres of terrorism and low intensity
warfare throughout the world - and very visibly in India - as
democratic governments fret about the use of force against 'civilian'
demonstrators and non-governmental or political organizations
covertly backed by terrorist groups. The issue recently exploded
into public consciousness most dramatically in the context of
the al Aqsa Intifada in Israel and the Palestinian Authority areas,
where the world was confronted with wrenching images of young
boys injured or killed in what seemed an unequal battle with the
'superior' Israeli Defense Force (IDF). What was missed out in
these pictures was the coordinated and Palestinian state-backed
strategy to bring the children out into active confrontations
with outnumbered IDF personnel, and the frequent initiation of
gunfire by terrorists who often took cover behind the stone- and
Molotov cocktail-throwing mobs in order to provoke the Israeli
reaction.
While the images of the Intifada
are the most startling, systems of collusion between underground
and overground organizations and political actors, the manipulation
of legal processes, the coordination of 'democratic protests'
with terrorist actions, the selective exploitation of 'peace processes'
and negotiations, and the abuse of laws and mechanisms intended
to secure the human rights of citizens, are common to most theatres
of terrorist conflict.
While each of the papers in the
present volume are widely distanced in their respective geographical
and thematic foci, they are all integrated by a common concern
with the perverse linkages and patterns that "combine politics
and the threat or use of violence", and the state's unequal response
to these.
K.P.S. Gill
April 22, 2001
- Paul Wilkinson,
"Foreword", in Christopher C. Harmon. ed., Terrorism
Today, London: Frank Cass. 2000. p. xii.
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