Comprehensive fight against terror is needed
The attacks in london on Wednesday are grim reminders of not just the growing menace of terrorism but also of the urgent need for the global community to join hands in combating it. By now everyone understands that terrorism is not nation-specific, nor is it region-specific. Gone are the days when India's appeals to the world community on the issue drew muted response, at times ridicule. 9/11 changed all that, and 26/11 brought to the world's attention like nothing before had, the menace India faces. There are no quick-fix solutions, given that many terror groups have proliferated across the world, either affiliated to one or the other more established ones such as the Al Qaeda and the Islamic State or working as independent entities. The case of Pakistan is illustrative: Often the Taliban and the Haqqani Network are seen complementing each other's activities. Elsewhere, while global powers are busy seeking to play one against the other — Russia and China, for instance are propping up the Taliban in a bid to neutralise the Islamic State — they seem to forget that terror is the common binding factor for all such organisations and playing favourites will only worsen matters. History is witness to the flaws in such a strategy in Afghanistan, where various terror outfits formed along ethnic lines were pitted against one another by the West, but instead of eliminating terror the strategy ended up in reinforcing it. The US backed the Mujahideen in Afghanistan to teach the Russians a lesson, and those later returned to torment the US and the rest of the Western world. In Pakistan, the Taliban were treated with kid gloves in the years leading to the Russian disengagement in Afghanistan and then during the Taliban rule in Kabul. Today, the Taliban is said to be involved in various disruptive activities within Pakistan itself. For years, India has been asking the United Nations to reach a definitive narrative on terror so that a common approach, and not one premised on the ‘good terrorist, bad terrorist' theory, could be adopted to combat the evil. Unfortunately, member-countries simply cannot come to an agreement on this basic point. Hopefully, the london attack will propel them to reconsider their prevarication.
The audacity of the Wednesday strike is not lost on anyone. A knife-wielding attacker rammed his car through a crowd on Westminster Bridge, stabbed a policeman and tried to storm the British Parliament building before being neutralised. And he struck on the first anniversary of the Brussels terror attack, masterminded by Islamist militants and which had left 32 people dead. The use of vehicles to ram through a crowd appears to have become a favourite of terrorists of late; this happened in the French city of Nice and Germany's Berlin too. As in the case of Brussels, the attacker had been under the authorities' lens, if one goes by the statements that police and security officials have made. A senior police official remarked that the “working assumption” was that the attack was “inspired by international terrorism” and “Islamist terrorism”. It will not come as a surprise if the authorities trace the links, direct or indirect, of the slain terrorist and some of those apprehended to established terror groups.