ON THE MARRIOTT HOTEL SUICIDE ATTACK





If there is safety in numbers, then why should 160 million Pakistanis not feel secure? And yet, never before, has there been such a heightened awareness of our national and personal vulnerability. Minorities such as the Ahmadiyya and the Christian communities feel threatened by an intolerant majority; the majority feels insecure from one and another. Our assassins today are not foreigners with unpronounceable names; they emanate from among us.


One can understand therefore why, following the suicide bomb blast outside the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad on 20 September, our Government should have constituted a high powered committee to formulate a national strategy to curb terrorism. The committee was required to submit its report within three days, which is roughly the same time that will elapse between the writing of this article and its publication in Dawn.


Government committees usually take longer to deliberate on issues such as national strategy. The very complexity of the topic invariably consumes months if not years, rather than days.


Following the 9/11 attack in 2001, for example, the U.S. government issued its National Security Strategy on 17 September 2002. Its revision came almost four years later, on 16 March 2006. Both documents were unequivocal in the expressed determination to 'actively fight terror'. The 2002 Strategy acknowledged that the US could not build 'a safer, better world alone'. Its plan therefore was to rely upon 'alliances and multilateral institutions' to augment its strength,' hence the US-NATO Coalition in the War on Terror.


The 2006 Strategy declared that the US intended to be primus inter pares, to be primus even when there were no pares. 'We must maintain a military without peer,' President George W. Bush warned the terrorists, aware no doubt that the Kremlin and Beijing were also eavesdropping.


Bush's resolve to 'fight our enemies abroad instead of waiting for them to arrive in our country' needs not only a strong military but also a powerful, omnipresent Navy. For the first time in America's history, the US Navy, Marine Corps and Coast Guard have produced jointly a Strategy for 21st Century Seapower, released in October 2007. Belatedly recognising that the oceans cover three quarters of our planet and therefore make neighbours of us all, the US intends to use its formidable seapower to 'help friends in need and to confront and defeat aggression far from our shores.'


To those who wonder what the US aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln was doing in our neighbourhood, the Maritime Strategy provides the answers. The US aim is to 'employ global reach, persistent presence, and operational flexibility inherent in U.S. seapower.' This will be characterised by 'regionally concentrated, forward-deployed task forces with the combat power to limit regional conflict'. Our own security strategists might like to factor in the defence of our vulnerable 1064 km. long southern coastline.


The UK National Security Strategy, issued in March 2008, is an update on a policy first developed in 2002. It looks at global cooperation in more benign terms. It talks of 'an interdependent world', and even though it concedes that no state threatens the United Kingdom directly, it does apprehend threats which could affect the UK directly and/or undermine international stability. The new UK view of security has broadened from the 'traditional focus of foreign, defence and security policies' to include 'threats to individual citizens and to our way of life.'


The French Government White Paper on national security, issued in August 2008, focuses on five strategic functions: knowledge and anticipation, prevention, deterrence, protection, and intervention. Germany despite being 'one of the safest countries in the world' yet feels threatened by 'terrorism, organized crime, energy by resource dependency, the proliferation of WMD, regional conflicts, failed states, migration, pandemics and epidemics.' Everything, except latent neo-Fascism.


Russia's security concerns are from weak state structures on its periphery, economic vulnerability and socio-economic degeneration within. China's post-Cold War apprehensions are macroeconomic instability, domestic social and political instability, and regional instability.


With such a formidable array of international preparedness, it might be useful to examine whether such military bludgeons are in fact the right weapons with which to defeat an amorphous enemy such as international terrorism. Are we using swords to duel with wraiths?


Who are these spectral terrorist groups? Unlike freedom movements such as the IRA or the Kenyan Mau Mau or the South African ANC, modern insurrectionists wear no labels. The Australian security apparatus posts a list of 19 terrorist organizations. Most of them appear, disappear and then reappear. Take the Ansar al-Sunna (formerly the Ansar Al-Islam). Listed by the Australians on 27 March 2003, it was re-listed 27 March 2005, and again on two years later 27 March 2007. These organizations follow 'the balloon principle'. Squeezed at one end, they emerge elsewhere. No-one knows under what pseudonym it operates today or where.


Whatever may the formal identity of such terrorists, one thing is certain. Terrorism is not a pensionable job. Despite the statistics, though, not all of them meet a violent end. A study was conducted recently by Martin Libicki and Seth R. Jones of the Rand Corporation. After examining 649 terrorist groups between 1968 and 2006, it finds that they cease for two major reasons: 'members decide to adopt non-violent tactics and join the political process (43%), or local police and intelligence agencies arrested or killed key members of the group (40%).' It concludes that 'military force has rarely been the primary reason how terrorist groups have ended (10%).'


Those charged with preparing our own national security strategy will no doubt take into account the experience of other countries, especially since we are their co-partners in the War on Terror. What we need to reassure them is that we are on the same side, that we are victims more than protagonists, and that we recognize that national security is a national risk that affects 160 million. A strategy, even if it can be produced within three days, has no hope of succeeding if it postulates only national security and ignores private insecurities.





[Dawn, 27.9.08, under the title 'Insecuriy at all levels'.]