After Mumbai…

In a recent political analysis, George Friedman sees direct connections between the events in Mumbai and the Islamist conflict happening in Afghanistan. The fact that the attacks almost certainly originated in Pakistan — terrorists brought into Mumbai by boat from Karachi and linking up with comrades already in the city — does not necessarily mean that it was planned by Islamabad per se. It may certainly have been aided by pro-Islamist sections within Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency but probably not with government sanction – despite historic animosities between Pakistan and India over the disputed area of Kashmir.

Something more cunning may be behind Mumbai. Given the magnitude of the attack, India cannot but demand swift retaliation against terrorists operating in Pakistan. Given widespread Islamist sympathies and hostility to India, the Pakistan government cannot be seen to be helping India too much. If they do, there might be widespread Islamist protest necessitating use of the army. If they refuse and India reacts unilaterally, the Pakistan government may have to retaliate in some way. Either way, it would mean moving troops from its Afghanistan border — where it is effectively supporting the US-led war against the fundamentalist Taliban — to its eastern border with India. The net result: a weakened allied front against the Taliban.

Like most terrorist attacks, we can quickly condemn what happened in Mumbai. And as in the case of terrorism we are faced with a range of moral and political challenges. If one of the goals of terrorism is to terrorise ordinary people and thereby to bend them to the terrorists’ will, the other is often to incite opponents to overreact. With overreaction — usually massive displays of force — the victims of terrorism often become the villains themselves, and the terrorists’ actions sometimes get post facto legitimation in the public eye.

One thinks of the enormous outpouring of sympathy for the United States after ‘9/11’ — epitomised in the words of a left-wing French commentator “Nous sommes tous Américains” [We are all Americans] — and the way in which the ‘moral capital’ soon dwindled as Bush embarked on successive military adventures of increasing indiscriminacy and contempt for the laws of war.

The challenge for India and Pakistan — and inevitably for the United States — is to avoid the temptation to adventurism while responding quickly and decisively against the Islamist jihadists in both countries. Part of this must also entail strong campaigns against the kind of religious intolerance that feeds on economic poverty and popular alienation from the new world economy.

Poor people need to see that they have a stake in their societies and the economy, that they are not just disposable items on the global balance sheets subject to the market needs of their nations’ elites. Such attitude breeds despair, leads to seeking solutions in fundamentalist religions. While many fundamentalist religions inspire people to better themselves, in the hands of the unscrupulous or crazy they become weapons of mass destruction – as we have seen once again in Mumbai.

Ultimately, one would hope that humanity would grow out of fundamentalism in all its forms. But in the meantime we are challenged to work to separate such religion from terrorist opportunism.