The Naimisha Journal
The technology of inflicting large-scale violence is becoming easier to obtain, and — per quotient of lethality — less and less expensive. This in turn yields three lemmas:
(A) The target country has to be equipped to counter the entire spectrum of violence: to take the current examples from the United States—from aircraft being used as missiles to anthrax;
(B) It is almost impossible in an open society to block a determined lot from acquiring the technology they want by blocking the technology itself—the only practical way is to be a leap ahead of the technology the terrorist acquires;
(C) All this is certain to cost the target country a great deal—but that is the price one has to pay to survive in the world of today; to cavil at it is no better than an elderly couple that grudges the locks they have to put on doors in a city marred by crimes against the elderly.
As the technology of violence has become more and more lethal and as it has been miniaturised, the final act can be done by just a handful, indeed just by an individual acting alone. That individual can bide his time. He can choose his place. He has to succeed just once. For that reason, it is not possible to completely insulate a country from the depredations of the terrorist. Superior intelligence is obviously the key to making things more difficult for the terrorist. But just as important is what the targeted society does in the wake of the attack: overwhelming, and visibly overwhelming, reprisal alone will deter others from emulating the terrorist who gets through. Potential recruits, as well as the controllers of organisations and countries that backed him, must be personally touched by the retaliatory measures.
While the final act can be executed by even a single individual, terrorism as a means cannot do without an extensive network: from nurseries that indoctrinate youngsters and forge them into lobotomised killing machines, safe-houses, couriers, informers, suppliers of weapons and explosives, to those who will carry on businesses to earn the money needed for ammunition and arms, and the rest.
By now there are very many groups that have taken to terrorism. They are increasingly intertwined: in India, as well as the world over — look at the range of locations from which persons were picked up in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The knitting together comes about in many ways. Groups in India are encouraged by agencies hostile to India to coordinate their activities: for instance, the ISI has been putting Naxalite groups, the various groups operating in the Northeast in touch with each other.
Often the groups are brought together by ‘‘natural’’ factors: for instance, both groups may be running drugs — they may become couriers, suppliers, customers of each other; they may be securing arms for an arms supplier — and through him they may get to know each other; they may be using the same agents or routes for money laundering....
Among the technologies the terrorists have mastered is that of using the instruments of mass media. They use these to arouse sympathy for their cause — look at the shrewd way in which Hamas in Palestine, the Taliban in Afghanistan generate revulsion at what their opponents do by giving selective access to Western media to photograph civilian casualties. They are as adept at using the mass media as Greens and other activists for creating the echo-effect that so often leads policy makers to desist from taking stern measures.
‘‘They are wrong-headed,’’ many in Punjab used to say of Bhindranwale and his men, ‘‘but you can’t deny their idealism, their readiness to die for what they think is right.’’ The reality is altogether different. Terrorism has become lucrative business: in the Northeast, for instance, joining one of the terrorist organisations is a sure way to rake in a minor fortune — the proceeds from the ‘‘taxes’’ the organisations collect, the ransom they extract from kidnapping. The terrorists strive hard to cover their loot under the cloak of ideological, even idealist rhetoric: recall the religious rant of the terrorists in Punjab, and the reality behind it — what they were doing to young girls across the state, the properties that their leaders had amassed. Just as the terrorists strain to hide their loot, the State and society must bare the truth about them.
To de-fang the terrorist the country has to move on many fronts: their sources of money, those who give them facilities to stay and stage their operations, their sources of weapons and explosives, the network of their couriers. And the moves against these multiple targets have to be carried through simultaneously. For these measures to succeed, all institutions of the State have to act in the same direction, indeed they have to work in concert. For the police to capture terrorists and for the courts to function the way our courts do, for them to go on using norms devised for quieter times, for the Army to track down caches of explosives while the Customs men let in RDX — is to hand victory to the terrorists.
The lemma is inescapable: we cannot have a flabby State, a somnolent society and a super-efficient anti-terrorist operation. That no one gets convicted for the Bombay blasts for eight years is certain to encourage scores to sign up. Customs officers who take bribes for letting in gold one day are certain to overlook arms consignments tomorrow. Police personnel who let Bangladeshis smuggle themselves across the border in return for bribes will constitute no obstacle to agents of the ISI making their way into the country.
Imagine what would happen if Osama bin Laden slips out of Afghanistan. If he made his way into Iran or China, the international alliance would be confident that he can be executed without any one knowing. If he went to one of the Central Asian countries, the allies would be confident that, if they wanted him for trial, he would be handed over. If he escaped into Pakistan, the allies would be confident that Pakistan could deliver either solution — hand him over or have his vehicle fall off a cliff in an accident.
But what if he escaped into India? Acrimonious debates would explode. Should he be tried under the Indian Evidence Act or under the provisions of POTO? By ordinary courts or a Special Court? Is the Government not acting under American dictates as to what we should do? His rights as an undertrial... Another hijacking... fulsome focus on the wailing of relatives of the passengers... Released in exchange for letting the passengers go.....
Not just the formal institutions of the State, society must act to that end — that is, the overwhelming number of individuals must be acting in concert independently of or in support of what the State is doing. The State apparatus on its own can no longer stem the Bangladeshis’ demographic invasion. It can only be staunched by creating that atmosphere in the Northeast which will convince the potential infiltrator that he better stay away from this region, as it is hostile territory, a territory in which he is certain to lose life and limb.
Not just society in general, the ordinary, individual citizen too must be acting in concert with the authorities. The passenger who kicks up a fuss when he is frisked at an airport, the house-owner who insists that being advised to inform the neighbourhood police station about the new tenant is an intrusion into his private affairs - such individuals unwittingly help terrorism: on the one hand, the terrorist has an easier time establishing the safe-house from which he will carry out his next explosion; on the other, the average policeman is discouraged from doing his assigned duty.
For any of this to happen, the balance of discourse has to be reversed, literally reversed in India. Under POTO, the terrorists’ lawyer is to have the right to meet him during interrogations. Under it a policeman doing his duty can be tried on the charge that he misused his authority and he can be imprisoned for up to two years — even if he is not convicted in the end, rushing from court to court, as the Punjab policemen are doing today, will be enough. Such are the provisions, and yet the Ordinance is being pilloried out of shape. Esoteric distinctions are being made: the Ordinance provides that the terrorist’s property can be seized. ‘‘But that should be property acquired by him from the proceeds of terrorism. It would be unfair to seize property that he or his relatives may have acquired by legitimate means.’’ How will we fight terrorism with this mindset?
Temporary expedients will boomerang: giving handsome amounts to the SULFA cadre, giving them jobs, allowing them to retain weapons — these steps have resulted in Assam now having not one set of extortionists — ULFA — but two. For the same reason, were the USA, for instance, to do what news reports suggest it is considering doing — delivering a package of 7 billion dollars to a society and State as heavily Talibanised as Pakistan — it would only be compounding the problem — for neighbours of Pakistan in the immediate future, and for itself eventually. Events have repeatedly thrown up this lesson, and yet few heed it. One reason surely is that those who have a resource — say, money — or are particularly good at one thing — say, technology — instinctively think that that particular resource is what will do the trick.
The terrorist must be defeated at every turn, in every engagement. While contending with the IRA youth, Mrs. Thatcher rightly said, ‘‘Publicity is the oxygen on which the terrorist lives.’’ Success is the food on which he multiplies: the strikes against the World Trade Center Towers will live in terrorist mythology for decades, they will lure recruits to lethal organizations for long. If the terrorist is able to execute an operation successfully, he, his organisation, their sponsors must be subjected to punitive retaliation of such an order that all of them down the line feel the costs of having inflicted the violence they did. In this matter, we must remember:
— There is no kind way to prosecute a war; war is death and destruction, it is blood and gore. Those who recoil from what war entails should mobilise the people at the first sign of extremist ideology so that the terrorists are forestalled, and the State does not ultimately have to move against them — in fact, the kind who shout the loudest once war begins are the very kind who in the preceding years have lent a verisimilitude of legitimacy to the fabrications of such groups.
— No war has been won by deploying ‘‘minimum force’’—the quantum that liberals concede when the terrorist leaves them no option but to allow that something just has to be done. Wars are won by over-powering the opponent with over-whelming force. And so it must be in the case of terrorism, and of the States that sponsor it: not ‘‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’’; for an eye, both eyes, for a tooth, the whole jaw.
The next lesson too is so obvious that its disregard can only be taken to be deliberate: it is a fatal error to judge what needs to be done in an area or in times infested by terrorists, by standards honed from normal places and quieter times. No judge, no human rights organization that today gives lectures about the conduct of the Police in Punjab has set out how the Police was to prosecute the war when the entire judicial system had literally evaporated: magistrates were in mortal dread of terrorists, witnesses — even those who had seen those dearest to them being gunned down in front of their eyes — would not, they could not come forth to testify without risking their lives. Far from falling prey to such specious assumptions, such habitual hectoring, we should beware of the oft-proclaimed device of extremist groups and movements: to use the instruments of democracy to destroy democracy. We should bear in mind Hitler’s ‘‘legality oath’’ — he had sworn that the Nazis would use only legal means to attain power; he stuck to the oath. We should declare openly: yes, we will heed the rights of terrorists — but only to the extent to which they heed the rights of their victims.
Their access to arms, to money etc. is important, but even more consequential is the ideology of the terrorists: this is what fires them, by internalizing which they become killing machines; this is what beguiles ordinary by-standers into supporting them. More than anything else, this ideology must be exhumed. To accomplish this, there are four things to shun, and six to do.
Shun pseudo explanations. ‘‘Unemployment, specially among the educated youth’’ — each time terrorism erupts, it is attributed to some figment such as this. Unemployment was no higher in Punjab than elsewhere in the early 1980s. Terrorism erupted there and not in, say, Bihar, because Pakistan saw and seized the opportunity that the lunacy of our local politicians had presented: to gain a leg over the Akalis, the Congress leaders had patronized Bhindranwale; he went out of hand; Pakistan took over the bunch around him.
Similarly, unemployment is no less in Punjab today than it was then, but there is no terrorism — because Pakistan’s design was crushed. What spurred terrorism in Punjab, what spurs it today in Kashmir, in the Northeast is not unemployment — but opportunity: we have created an open, unobstructed field for the enemy. A country seeing that the one it views as its enemy has blinkered its eyes, that it has tied its hands, shackled its legs, sealed its lips — as we have — shall not let the opportunity pass: victory is at hand, it will convince itself.
For the same reason, shun pseudo-remedies. ‘‘But we must get to the roots of their anger,’’ many an analyst writes today. And deduces that India, Israel or Russia just must make some concession or the other on Kashmir, Palestine or Chechnya. But the ‘‘anger’’ has not been triggered by issues of this kind. It is the result of indoctrination, its roots lie not in Chechnya and Kashmir but in what is drilled into their wards by madrasas.
Similarly, on the assumption that it is inadequate development which is fueling terrorism in an area — say, Kashmir or the Northeast — governments are apt to conclude that the remedy is to pump more money into the region, or give further incentives for industrialists to set up shop there. The money just goes to the terrorists. The people, and even more so the rulers of the area, sense that terrorism brings lucre: they develop an immediate, mercenary reason for keeping the area in ferment. Crushing defeat, not more money, is the remedy.
Beware of rationalisers. They come in two sets: the liberals, and the professional propagandists. The latters’ efforts are well known, though liberal societies invariably underestimate the sophistication of their techniques, as well as their gall: in reading their tracts, for instance, the average person is liable to think that he has insulated himself by discounting their claims a bit; confident that he has taken the requisite prophylactic, he becomes all the more susceptible to the 100 per cent fabrication.
The liberal apologists are much more destructive: they are more numerous; as they are ‘‘people like us,’’ their formulations and rationalizations are more readily believed. ‘‘No religion teaches the killing of innocents,’’ says the liberal apologist today — a cliche that turns on what is meant by the word ‘‘innocent’’, a meaning the liberal never spells out with reference to the text. For instance, is the person to whom the doctrine of that religion or of that group has been offered, and who does not embrace it, ‘‘innocent’’? Innocent not in the eyes of the liberal apologist, but in the eyes of that religion or text. ‘‘God says in the holy book,’’ the liberal bleats, ‘‘‘To you your religion, to me mine’’; God declares, ‘There is no compulsion in religion’.’’ But that is but a microscopic fraction of what the text says. Nor does the liberal ever recall the very specific context in which such stray phrases occur in the text. Recall the efforts of the apologists for Commnism to whitewash the reality with essays about the ‘Early Marx’, about the ‘Paris Manuscripts’.
Shun political correctness. Few things have prevented the West from waking up in time to the dangers that Islamic terrorism today constitutes for it as notions of what is politically correct. These notions have stifled scholarship, they have stifled discourse. They have led the West to shut its eyes to the ideology by which the terrorists were being fired up. The verbal terrorism by which notions of what is correct and what is not the dominant intellectual group in India — the leftists — has enforced the norms has disabled the ruling groups, and, through them, the country, to the point of paralysis. Standing up to that verbal terrorism, liberating discourse from those notions is the first requisite of fighting the war against terrorism in India.
‘A State that’s patronising terrorists should wake up to the consequences; in any case its immediate neighbours must’
• Corresponding to the four ‘‘don’ts’’ are six ‘‘do’s’’: Believe what the ideologues and organisations of the terrorists say. The one thing for which ideologues and organisations can be credited is that they are absolutely explicit about their aims and objectives. The fault — the fatal fault — is that of liberal societies: to this day they continue to shut their eyes to what these organisations proclaim to be their aim: domination, conquest, conversion of the ‘‘land of war’’ into the ‘‘land of peace,’’ that is the land which is at peace because it is under their heel — exactly as they had shut their eyes to Hitler in the 1930s and to Stalin later. Read their press, reflect over their books and pamphlets, and act in time — that is, before they have wreaked the havoc they proclaim they will.
• To combat a
belief-system One must have a thorough knowledge of the scriptures of that
ideology: during the early 1980s, propagandists start asserting, ‘‘Sikhism
is closer to Islam than to Hinduism;’’ how can one counter the poison unless
one has deep and intimate knowledge of the Granth Sahib, unless one knows what
the Gurus fought for and against whom they fought? Commentator after commentator
has been referring to the Taliban as Deobandis, he has been recounting how they
were minted at the Binauri madrasa in Karachi. But unless we know what the Dar
ul Uloom in Deoband has been churning out we will be easily deflected from
grasping what has been forged in those factories of hatred.
Similarly, unless
we have liberated ourselves from the shackles of political correctness
sufficiently to broadcast what these religious seminaries have put out, and are
putting out to this day, how will we awaken citizens to the danger that faces
them?
• Go by what the
scripture as a whole says, not by what a stray passage plucked from it says -
what will determine the outcome is the mind which the scripture, the tradition
creates; and this will be determined by the teaching as a whole, not by a stray
passage.
• Go by the plain
meaning of the scripture, not by the construction that apologists and
commentators contrive to put on it: again, it is by the plain meaning of the
scripture that the faithful will proceed, not by the convolutions of some
liberal.
• Go by what those who are recognised by that group as authorities say about the ideology — the CPSU in Stalin’s Russia, the ulema in Islamic groups and States; not by what some columnist or retired politician says. Often great effort is expended in securing press statements that support the anti-terrorist campaign — on occasion even a fatwa has been procured to that effect. These are useless.
Those who issue
them are dismissed as ‘‘sarkari sants’’, their statements are rejected
as command performances. This rejection reflex is deeply, and consciously
instilled into members of such groups, indeed into the communities themselves.
If someone who is not a member of the group — if he is not a Communist, if he
is not a Muslim — his critique will be rejected automatically: what else can
you expect from that ‘‘agent of imperialism’’ in one case, from that
‘‘enemy of the faith’’ in the other.
On the other hand, no believer will raise questions of any consequence — neither about the basic approach of the group nor about, to take the current context, the individual act of destruction.
If he does so, his
critique will be dismissed as swiftly, and as much by reflex: ‘‘he has
crossed the barricades,’’ that was the refrain about fellow-travelers who at
last spoke up; ‘‘he is an apostate’’ — that has been the refrain in
Islamic societies for centuries about any believer who has dared to raise even
the slightest question that touches fundamentals.
• To gauge the
true content of that ideology and its potential for evil, see what these
authorities do when they are in power: to ascertain what Communism actually
means, do not be lulled by the act that Communists have to put up in a free and
open polity such as ours; see what their gods did in Stalin’s Russia, in
Mao’s China; to gauge what a religion portends, see what their rulers did in
medieval India, what Iran went through under Imam Khomeini, what the Taliban
have been doing in Afghanistan.
TERRORISM is just a weapon, it is just one among an array of weapons. To expect that by killing one band of terrorists, smashing one network, or even by reclaiming one country from the grip of an extremist band, one has taken care of the problem is suicidal. The aim of the terrorist is not to trigger one explosion, his fulfillment is not in carrying out one assassination. The explosion and assassination are instruments. The terrorist is himself an instrument, he sees himself as an instrument — of history in Marxism-Leninism, of the Will of Allah in Islam.
For that reason to think that by giving in over Chechnya, by making concessions to Hamas, by handing Kashmir to them, one will effectively deal with ‘‘the causes of Muslim anger’’ is to play the fool. For the believer the ‘‘problem’’ is not Chechnya or Kashmir. The ‘‘problem’’ is that aeons having passed, the world has not yet accepted his creed.
His object is not
the real estate of Chechnya or Kashmir, or Jerusalem. His object — indeed, the
duty which has been ordained for him — is to convert the land of war, that is
the land the people of which have not yet submitted to that creed, into one in
which that creed prevails. The believer cannot remain true to his faith unless
he prosecutes the war till this consummation is achieved.
Ideologues and propagandists have a well-practiced division of labour in this
regard.
The directors of the ideology intoxicate believers with visions of how affairs will be ultimately — of how total domination will be secured over the whole world. The propagandists addressing the rest of the world, on the other hand, focus a narrow beam — on the next, single objective: Palestine, Kashmir, Chechnya. The beam is as blindingly intense as it is narrow: the aim is to convince ordinary folk that if only this one concession is made, all problems will cease. This focus and suggestion is accompanied by a systematic campaign — through front-organisations, intellectuals, fellow travelers — that raises an ‘‘intellectual’’ debate, and thereby foments doubts in the minds of the victims about the moral rights of the issue.
The assault has two
prongs. On the one hand violence and terror: these aim at tiring out the victims
by inflicting death and carnage. Simultaneously, doubts are fomented in the
victims developed about the rightness of their cause — these ripen into a
rationale for capitulation: why not yield a bit on Kashmir?, after all, this one
gesture will ensure peace, and we will be free to go our way after that; in any
case, the world is not entirely convinced of our case... Victory on that one
item in its pocket, the group commences the same sequence on the next target:
and doing so is but natural, for the issue — Kashmir, Chechnya — was just an
instrument.
BELIEVERS will
inevitably come to internalise this mindset — of unremitting violence —
whenever the ideology has the following ingredients:
• Reality is simple;
• It has been revealed to one person;
• That person has put it in one Book;
• Every syllable in that Book is divine, it is the ultimate truth; anything
that contradicts what is in the Book is not just false, it is a device of the
Devil, a device to mislead and waylay the believer; nothing that is not in the
Book is of consequence;
• The Book is difficult to fathom;
• Therefore, believers require an intermediary - the Party, the Church, the
ulema;
• Once all humans embrace the way of life that the Book prescribes, eternal
peace and prosperity will break out; unless all embrace it, that dawn will not
break;
• It is, therefore, the duty of that intermediary to invite you to accept the
Faith;
• The truth of the message is so vivid that if, in spite of the invitation,
you do not embrace the faith, that is itself proof that you are inherently evil;
it is, therefore, the duty of that intermediary, indeed it is the duty of every
ordinary adherent to put you out of harm’s way: for you are then blocking the
march of History — in Marxism-Leninism, you are blocking the Will of God, you
and your obstinacy are thwarting the dawn, and manifestly you are doing so
because of the evil in you;
• As this is a duty ordained, it is but right that the agent use whatever
means are required to ensure that the Cause prevails. Unless the rest of the
world has come to consist of docile imbeciles, these propositions inevitably
entail violence — the forms of violence that come to mind when we talk of
terrorism being just the weapon of choice for a particular circumstance, a
particular locale.
THE faith has three further ingredients:
• It forecloses alternatives to inevitable, protracted, indeed eternal, and
violent struggle. Allah, for instance, repeatedly declares that unbelievers are
congenitally perverse, that nothing the faithful can possibly do will bring them
round — for, He says, I have Myself made them turn their faces away from Me;
indeed, He tells believers, I have deliberately put them in your way to test
you. They have but one aim, He tells believers: to turn you away from your
faith, to beguile you into becoming like them, to deceive you into giving up
your duty.
• It drugs the
faithful into believing that victory is not just inevitable, it is imminent.
Recall, the ‘‘imminent collapse of capitalism’’ theses that were the
staple of Communist pamphleteering.
• But as victory eludes the believers, the Faith provides rationalisations, indeed consolations for failure. It conditions the believer — in this case the terrorist — to persevere in either event, in the face of defeat as much as upon succeeding.
When he succeeds,
he is fortified in the belief that Jehovah in the Old Testament, Allah in the
Quran, History in the Marxist texts, is on his side. When he fails, the
indoctrination leads him to believe that Jehovah, that Allah, is just testing
him — God wants to assess whether his faith in Him will falter in the face of
the setback. In the alternate ‘‘secular’’ religion, the adherent is
conditioned to believe that, as History moves dialectically, the setback will
itself create the conditions for eventual success.
Faced with such indoctrination, two things are imperative:
• Know the
opiate, broadcast it before hand, and thereby provide the spectacles through
which the believer will view the event;
• Having forged the spectacles, do not just sit back and hope that the
believers will see events through them. In the wake of the engagement,
especially when the terrorist group has been subjected to a setback, show up the
hollowness of the rationalisations that the believers had internalised. Of
course, the group will have its ways of shutting out the evidence of defeat. But
even as it does so, it will be weakening the foundations of falsehood on which
its edifice is built.
TILL the other day, Pakistani intellectuals and ulema were projecting the Taliban as one of the great successes — of the Army and the ISI who had secured ‘‘strategic depth’’ for Pakistan, of Islam — for rulership of pure, idealist youngsters had been established, a rulership that the people loved as it had brought peace, as it had pulled them back from the abyss of immorality and licentiousness.
That was the
refrain — day in and day out for years. And then suddenly Pakistan was being
told that joining the campaign to crush the very same Taliban was a
masterstroke. The somersaults that the Comintern used to execute seemed so
clever at the time. Soon, they delegitimised the ideology itself.
The lethal potential of these ideologies is now compounded by the fact that States such as Pakistan have adopted terrorism as an instrument of State policy. Musharraf has said in so many words, ‘‘Jehad is an instrument of State policy.’’ For such States this is a particularly attractive proposition: it is war on the cheap. The ideology that goes with adopting such means, the spread of the gun-culture that invariably accompanies such a strategy, eventually boomerangs — as the Talibanisation of Pakistan shows. But in the meanwhile the decision of a State to adopt terrorism as an instrument is certain to inflict enormous costs on its neighbours.
What was said of
Mussolini’s goons is doubly true of terrorists: ‘‘they were nothing
without the State, but with it they were unstoppable.’’ In a shrunken world,
all countries are the ‘‘neighbours’’ of such a State — as the US has
been reminded by the 11 September attacks. The State that patronises such
governments or States should wake up to the consequences its patronage will
foment. In any case, the immediate neighbours must.
Often a State can
end up inflicting grave injury on another even when it does not bear active
hostility towards its neighbour. For instance, the intelligence agencies and
sections of the Army of Bangladesh are so closely linked to their counterparts
in Pakistan that leaders and cadre of groups such as ULFA operate in complete
safety from them. Bhutan and Myanmar exemplify a different sort of situation:
the administrative grip of these countries over their own territory is so loose
that terrorists operating in India are able to carve out their own areas of
influence in those countries.
AS important as getting at the State which patronises terrorists is to get at their networks. Terrorists have established numerous fronts: mosques, madrasas, ‘‘research institutions’’, ‘‘charity foundations’’. The range of persons and organisations against whom the US and other countries had to move after the 11 September attacks — from those that had been involved in managing finances to those who had been providing safe houses — gave a glimpse of how the networks, even of just one brand of terrorism, now spread across the globe. Indeed, one of the devices they have mastered is how to use religion and ‘‘religious bodies’’ as fronts: Bhindranwale’s conversion of the Golden Temple into a headquarters for terror, eventually into a fortress; the use of charities in Pakistan for raising laundering funds for jihadi groups; the orchestrated appeals from across the globe that the Americans suspend bombing during Ramzan...
For a society to survive, it must have the gumption to tear these veils apart, expose the fronts for what they are, and demolish them.
TERRORISM constitutes a threat to all: what is being inflicted on one
country today can be inflicted on another tomorrow. It is worse than imprudent,
therefore, for a State to consort with States that patronise, finance, train,
arm, give sanctuary to terrorists.
For the same reason, and as the evil are so well knit, States should share their resources, in particular intelligence to combat terrorism. That is what should be. In the real world, a country such as India must remember that no one else is going to fight our war for us. For fighting that war the sine qua non is: when the battle has been won, do not forget those who delivered you — as, to our shame and misfortune, we in India are in the habit of doing.