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Counter-Terrorism: The Architecture Of Failure – Analysis

19.05.12

For one thing, the reality of terrorism in India is far more enduring and complex, and the threat will persist long into the future – sheer demographics, internal and external dynamics ensure this.1 To take the case of Mumbai alone, the city has experienced repeated Islamist terrorist attacks, including the country’s worst terrorist outrage, in terms of fatalities, in the serial bombings of March 12, 1993. Terrorism in Mumbai did not start with the 26/11 attacks, nor – as the bombings of July 13, 2011, demonstrate – has it ended with them.

On a wider spectrum, India’s experience with Pakistan-backed irregular warfare and terrorism (not to mention other patterns of insurgency and terrorism) goes back almost to the moment of the twin and troubled birth of these two countries. Over these long decades, we have experienced tremendous and humiliating debacles, and should not shy from conceding these – Mumbai 26/11 was certainly one. But we have also had dramatic successes. India’s tragedy is that the lessons of both success and failure have largely been ignored and even lost. As noted elsewhere, India’s political leadership remains entirely ignorant of the operational nuts and bolts of our past counter-terrorism successes, and has chosen, instead, to rely on often dubious and inappropriate models of western ‘successes’, and on insubstantial political posturing. None of this has, or can, significantly diminish India’s vulnerabilities to terrorist violence.2 What we have had is an overwhelmingly diversionary, politically opportunistic and misconceived emphasis on theatrical – but essentially unproductive – symbolism, with a persistent neglect of the imperatives of capacity building at the most critical levels of response.3

Source: Eurasia Review