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Wednesday 18 November 2015

Double standards on terror: American or French lives are not more valuable than Indian lives

M J Akbar in The Times of India


After every terrorist outrage India asks a question that repeatedly withers on the dry sand of evasive clichés. How long will the apartheid of two laws for the same crime continue?

When America is stunned by 9/11, President George Bush pulverises Afghanistan, changes regime and exiles Taliban. When Paris is the scene of wanton murder, President François Hollande orders war machines to bomb regions held by ISIS in Iraq and Syria.

Neither goes into a brown study to ponder the causes of terrorism, a manipulative phrase designed specifically to provide cover for perpetrators of terrorism. Neither American nor French public opinion would accept such a pussyfoot leadership.

But when India is attacked by barbaric terrorists operating out of nearby sanctuaries, Washington and Paris, closely followed by London and Brussels, rush to Delhi to advise restraint. Why? Is an Indian life less valuable than an American or French life?

We need an answer.

There is one. I am not being unmindful of potential consequences in a nuclear-military zone, although at some point the big powers will have to grapple with the possibility of Pakistan’s tactical nuclear weapons finding their way into the hands of terrorists. The time has come for a war doctrine against terrorism that has no space for alibis.

Anyone who provides sanctuary to terrorists – whether individuals or governments – must be punished, swiftly and decisively, through collective military action and economic sanctions. There has to be a cost to hypocrisy.

We have a precedent. Perhaps predictably, it has been set by America. Washington has pursued and eliminated its terrorist enemies in half a dozen countries. The death of Osama bin Laden, who had been provided a secure home next to a large military establishment, was only the most dramatic instance.

How is Hafiz Saeed, living without a hint of remorse in Lahore, and planning more attacks while protected by state security, any less guilty? The United Nations has evidence against him, as has America. But Washington takes a nuanced view between those who attack America and those who target other nations. This is a compromise that cannot be sustained.

It is curious that a priest had clarity about Paris while politicians and pundits hedged. Pope Francis got it right when he called the ongoing conflict a ‘piecemeal third world war’. My qualification is that it merely seems piecemeal. Its impact is pervasive. Paris is attacked and every city feels instantly vulnerable. The purpose is achieved.

At this moment, conventional systems of security are still groping their way towards what precisely it is that they are fighting. The objective of terrorism is terror; to terrorise people and government through random mass killings. It exploits the very freedoms – of expression, communication, movement available in societies it targets.

It maximises impact with minimal investment in human capital; suicide missions are undertaken by young minds vulnerable to illusions about this life or the next. It exalts hatred as heroism.

The Geneva Convention was not written for a struggle against shadow armies that glorify mass murder or refuse to distinguish between war and peace. We need a doctrine for permanent war, and we need signatories that are ready to implement this doctrine with all the muscle at their command.

Walter Nicolai, the now forgotten head of Germany’s intelligence services during World War I, told his country that if it wanted to succeed it would have to adopt a new theory: ‘war in peace’. A hundred years later, this seems a relevant basis for an effective counteroffensive. But before we can solve the problem we must learn to recognise it. Fudge will not serve.

America cannot long continue a policy of selective punishment in a war that also afflicts its allies, friends and like-minded nations. It must accept what Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been saying repeatedly: There is no good terrorism and bad terrorism; terrorism is terrorism. To measure Osama and Hafiz by different yardsticks is akin to America saying that it would fight only Japan in World War II.

Terrorists are clear about who their enemy is: The ‘near enemy’ are those who challenge their ideas and politics within their own countries, hence the multiple civil wars; the ‘far enemy’ are those who support the ‘near enemy’, broadly the West, including Russia; and those who have ‘usurped Islamic space’, like China or India. Do we have equal clarity about terrorists?

Modi also noted that we must delink terrorism from religion. The refugees who are escaping their tortured homeland are also Muslim; in fact they are more honest Muslims than the deranged ‘jihadis’. We must learn something from this epic tragedy.

This is also a conflict between theocracy and democracy; between practitioners of faith-supremacy and believers in faith-equality as the basis of civilised behaviour. This war has to be fought at both military and ideological levels.

The answer to regression is not complicated: modernity. Modernity has four basic, non-negotiable principles. A modern nation must be democratic; it must believe in secularism; it must promote gender equality; and it must eliminate the curse of inequity and poverty. This is the charter for regions in chaos, which can save the future from ravages of the present.

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