For Bangladesh to be part of a South Asian Anti-Terrorism Taskforce alongside the regional hegemon, India, and with the blessings of global military hegemon, the US, will be tantamount to accepting the context in which these two superpowers define terrorism, writes Mahtab Haider

IN THE past week, prime minister Sheikh Hasina’s idea of a South Asian taskforce to spearhead regional anti-terror operations has repeatedly been in the news, first taking on a renewed political significance when the visiting US diplomat Richard Boucher seemed to strongly back it, and then faltering when the Indian foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee laid it to rest with as diplomatic a dismissal as it could get.
   Without a doubt, governments across the world — not just the region — need to cooperate in countering radical militant groups seeking to achieve political aims through the use of violence, and as such any move that seeks to bring lasting peace to the communities ravaged by these low-intensity civil wars is pragmatic. But the consensus of what must be done ends there, and rightly so. The idea of the taskforce, be it multilateral as the Awami League-led alliance and evidently the US envisions it, or bilateral as Delhi seemed to prefer, is a deeply troubling one for a number of reasons. First and foremost, the government has, till now, failed to clarify what the legal framework of such a taskforce would be – and what jurisdiction the taskforce would have across national borders. Will this taskforce make recommendations to national governments, and will these recommendations be legally binding, or will it organise joint operations with troops co-opted from national armies across the region, and able to respond to terror groups militarily? If the prime minister expects to be taken seriously on this issue — and the issue is inherently serious — then she must surely understand that the gestation period of this idea is now over, and more details need to emerge on the workings of this proposed body. While there is no denying that governments across South Asia are increasingly finding themselves fighting an uphill battle against organised terrorism, and while many of the insurgents or radical militias in question are taking advantage of porous borders to perpetrate acts of violence, it is equally true that most of these so-called ‘terrorist’ groups are home-grown and country-specific, with national, rather than regional agendas. As such, convening a South Asian taskforce to deal with these disparate and isolated acts of violence would complicate matters, creating a legal framework under which one country could interfere in the internal affairs of another.
   But talk of the pitfalls of a possible regional taskforce is perhaps getting ahead of ourselves when it comes to the issue of terrorism. There is after all no universally acceptable definition of terrorism, not even in the United Nations, given that in history, it has always been the prerogative of the powerful to denounce weaker opponents as terrorists, drawing attention to their tactics rather than their often justifiable political demands. In Nepal, the decade long Maoist insurgency was originally founded on principles of social and economic justice, and it was a combination of waves of military assaults by successive governments in Kathmandu, troops rampaging through villages raping and killing in search of ‘Maoist insurgents’ that ultimately led to the Maoist high command upping the ante and carrying out an equally horrifying campaign of death and destruction. While the Maoist tactics were certainly deplorable — kidnapping and indoctrinating school children, beheading members of the rural elite, etc — their goals were admirable, and their demands for reforms had been time and again ignored by the elite in Kathmandu before they initiated their so called ‘people’s war’. While the acts of violence in which civilians were killed to advance political aims are certainly acts of ‘terrorism’, would that definition not equally apply to the killings and violence perpetrated by the government in Kathmandu as a counter-terror strategy? How can it be that when the state perpetrates violence — and almost all South Asian nations have a horrifying record of having done so — that it remains outside the ambit of terrorism? For Bangladesh to be part of a South Asian Anti-Terrorism Taskforce alongside the regional hegemon India, and with the blessings of the global military hegemon US, will be tantamount to accepting the context in which these two superpowers define terrorism.
   This is clearly problematic given the controversy and the criticism that the unjust US ‘war on terror’ is mired in — in the wake of the devastation visited upon Iraq and Afghanistan — and given that this ‘anti-terror’ agenda is predominantly driven by the US’s economic and geo-strategic interests. After all, India is more or less aligned with the US, both in terms of its economic interests and its geo-strategic interests.
   In fact, when it comes to the definition of terrorism, Bangladesh in many ways represents the best and worst of both examples. If this South Asian Anti-terrorism Taskforce had been in existence in 1971, countries across South Asia would, at least, have had to converge in condemnation of the Bengali people’s struggle for nationhood as being a ‘terrorist’ agenda or as being led by ‘terrorists’ simply because Karachi, as the establishment, would have the prerogative of labelling the struggle as it chose to. In similar fashion, while the government in Dhaka was forced to fight a long and bloody insurgency in its own Chittagong Hill Tracts, the problem was largely one of the government’s making, first by flooding the hill tracts with Bengali settlers, which triggered clashes, and then by hardening the ethnic minority contras through the use of brute military force. If there was terrorism in the hill tracts, there was state-sponsored terrorism as much as there was terrorism perpetrated by the Shanti Bahini. A South Asian taskforce could not morally ignore this state terrorism, of the kind, for example, that Delhi commits in Kashmir, or Colombo commits in Tamil-majority provinces, while seeking to counter the ‘terrorism’ of the JKLF and the LTTE.
   There is a further danger associated with the idea of a taskforce that is difficult to ignore. Not only is it morally unacceptable that Dhaka, for example, might have to be complicit in the repression that Delhi commits in Assam, if joint counter-terror operations were to become a reality, it would also make Bangladesh and its people legitimate targets for the violence that the ULFA perpetrates. In
   similar vein, Delhi will certainly not want to lengthen the list of radical groups it deals with in the home front by now committing political will or troops in counter-terror activities in neighbouring states.
   Given these realities, as justified as the government may be in seeking a regional compact that seeks to tackle the region’s growing problem of terrorism, the nature of the politics that defines this ‘terrorism’ is country-specific and is best left to national government’s to address, preferably politically rather than through the use of state sponsored violence. Most ‘terrorists,’ who are seeking to achieve political goals, after all, are also desperately seeking public support for their cause, not the public alienation and stigma associated with acts of violence. From that perspective, perhaps it would be far more constructive for a South Asian taskforce for political solutions to the innumerable insurgencies South Asian governments are faced with.

The Indian authorities’ problem is that they have to give the impression of exerting themselves in mitigating a national tragedy as best they can. Rhetoric, therefore, must substitute for action, and with the general election looming on the horizon, even war rhetoric on occasion

SOMEWHERE along the way the Indian authorities have lost the plot in coping with the consequences of the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Granted that the question of surgical strikes against militant camps in Pakistan-controlled territory became academic after 72 hours of the tragic happenings, New Delhi relied on the amorphous ‘international community’ to pressure Pakistan to come clean. But the fragile civilian dispensation was unable or unwilling, or both, to deliver on its promises.
   There have, of course, been much posturing and many speeches from Indian leaders and their Pakistani counterparts on 9/11, but more than three months after the attacks on India’s financial capital leading to many deaths, the scorecard remains unimpressive. The United States has expressed sympathy, the UN Security Council has passed a resolution, but New Delhi is far from reaching its objective of bringing those who sponsored or masterminded the operation to justice.
   The problem is twofold: the limited interest of the major players in helping India in this area and the inability of the Indian establishment to measure up to dealing effectively with a cataclysmic event of the Mumbai variety. Americans are already seeking to make a distinction between good Taliban and bad Taliban as a prelude to striking a compromise in Afghanistan. The kind of terrorism India faces and will face in the future does not fall in the essential category for US policymakers, quite apart from who occupies the White House.
   Besides, despite the number of measures taken to streamline and upgrade the decision-making process and equipment, the Indian establishment is far from ready to face emergencies, as the recent false hijack drama revealed. It will take much more effort and cooperation between the state and federal governments to have an effective counterterrorism fighting machine seamlessly going into action.
   On the political plane, a coincidence of inhospitable events and circumstances has made India’s task unenviable. The apparent heart-warming remarks made by President Asif Zardari brought short-lived comfort because he had to obfuscate, rather than clarify, the Pakistani provenance of the attacks. They involved a wing of the powerful army, the ISI spy agency, as has now been officially stated by India. Whatever the inclination of the civilian government, its writ does not run over the army.
   In an effort to reconcile the irreconcilable, statements by Pakistani leaders were full of contradictions and red herring, as the official reaction to the Indian dossier revealed. The Zardari government seems to have little control over the terrorist camps, even assuming that it wants to abolish them, and the various forms of arrest of named leaders of terrorist groups are, at best, revolving door operations.
   The Indian authorities’ problem is that they have to give the impression of exerting themselves in mitigating a national tragedy as best they can. Rhetoric, therefore, must substitute for action, and with the general election looming on the horizon, even war rhetoric on occasion. The opposition BJP’s taunt of the Congress-led government being soft on terror must be countered with thundering speeches and yet more calls on the ‘international community’ and the United Nations to come to India’s aid. But the nations that count have their own agenda and the UN is only the stepchild of the major powers.
   Many well-meaning Pakistanis appeal to India to strengthen the hands of the civilian government, rather than call a spade a spade. But New Delhi has no option but to deal with the power structure that exists. The ethos that has evolved in Pakistan almost since independence is of an army-dominated state whose interests lie in opposing India, given the genesis of the partition and the circumstances in which it lost half the country with the birth of Bangladesh.
   Ironically, it was an army-ruled Pakistan that came closest to finding a basis for making peace with India, symbolised by the January 2004 agreement between General Pervez Musharraf and then prime minister AB Vajpayee based on the promise of Islamabad not permitting the use of the territory it controlled for terrorist activities against India. As became evident later, the general chose not to keep his word and retained the elaborate terrorist structures and permitted open and clandestine collection of funds by terrorist organisations.
   The only other occasion that promised a basic redefinition of the India-Pakistan equation was after the defeat of the Pakistan army in the Bangladesh war in 1971, with the Indira Gandhi government showing generosity in releasing thousands of Pakistani prisoners of war on the basis of an oral promise on Kashmir made by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto. But he was the leader of a defeated country and promptly went back on his word. PN Haksar, Indira’s key adviser, later told me that India made this historic gesture to bury the past and begin a new chapter in relations between the two countries.
   Returning to the present, the Pakistan army appears to have got away with inspiring, if not organising, the Mumbai attacks with a few bruises but without much body harm. India has been unable to make the Pakistan army pay for its actions. Pakistan’s standing in the international terrorism league might have gone up by a few notches but its usefulness to the United States vis-ŕ-vis Afghanistan has not diminished. In fact, it might have increased in the new thinking taking root in Washington of divorcing Taliban from al-Qaeda. Islamabad might emerge as a valuable go-between in organising a Taliban-ruled Afghanistan for Americans.
   Which brings us to the central problem of the options India has. The stark message of post-Mumbai attacks is that there is no substitute for modernising and upgrading the anti-terrorism machine and the political decision-making apparatus that must go with it so that India is ready to meet the next attack with determination and immediate follow-up action. Can India make the transition from its traditionally sloppy ways, whatever the complexion of the government, to becoming a well-run modern state capable of giving a fitting answer to those who choose to attack? That is the question.