I’ve been keeping a close watch on the Indian blogosphere in the aftermath of the Mumbai bombings. Understandably, many comments have been emotionally charged. 200 innocent lives lost to an evil cause is no small thing. Close to a thousand families have forever been thrown into grief due to the actions perpetrated by a few misguided, maniacal, barbarian, bloodthirsty individuals, who live under the paranoid delusion that somehow the world can one day be brought under the rule of the Sharia and a “Grand Caliphate”, by sacrificing innocent lives. Apart from emotion, there has been a call for India to shed its “soft country” image and put up a tough face. Apparently, the cold faced old men manning our political and bureaucratic positions have really let them down. There’s an “enough is enough” feeling in the country and many feel that India must “act”, implicitly implying that India should go ahead and attack the terrorist factories across the border. But I’m afraid this sort of measure i.e., using violence/military might is undesirable, is indecisive, will only delay the inevitable and that the solution lies elsewhere.

(Actually, I’m still not very clear about what exactly is meant by “India should act now”. India has been under siege from terrorist forces for a long time – in Kashmir, in the northeast, in the Naxalite belt. Terrorism has always been there and it has been dealt with, if not effectively or in the most desirable fashion. We are talking about a problem which has managed to evade even the best intelligence establishments and antiterrorist forces in the world. If you think India has not “acted”, then you are disregarding the efforts of all those jawans and policemen (people like me and you and who have families) who have lost their lives fighting these rascals all these years, just so that we can sit down at our homes on our fat butts, munch on Uncle Chips, sip Coke and blog today. Let us not take our relative peace, stability and freedom for granted. These things just dont fall out of the sky. They are maintained by some people with their lives.)

It is very easy to hide behind the quantitative superiority of our armed forces and aver that we should use our military might to solve a problem that has never been shown to be solved by such means. By default, if a terrorist camp has to be attacked, we have to attack Pakistani territory. This means, whether we like it or not, we are giving Pakistan (a sovereign nation) a sound reason to wage war against us. So, an attack on terrorist camps = attack on Pakistan -> War. Remember that if such a situation arises, we’ll be up against an enemy which is quantitatively inferior but one which is armed with nuclear weapons. Pakistan has made it clear that it will not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if a conventional assault proves inadequate. They wont miss the chance to pop a few nukes across the border before they end their pathetic existence, will they? In that case, it is us, and not Pakistan, that will lose more (strangely, had there been no nukes, war would suddenly look like a good option!). If you ask me, I’m not ready for even one of our cities to be nuked.

Even if we take out those terrorist camps in Pakistan, how will this have any effect on terrorism? Terrorism is global. The terrorists will simply hole out to some other place and resume their terrorist assembly lines there. There’s Afghanistan, there’s Iran, there’s Saudi Arabia. Why, there’s Europe, the USA. Why go that far? There’s Bangladesh and heck, there’s India! You just need a place, that’s all. So all this talk of a military solution comes without much thought. It wont solve any problems and besides it will cause considerable damage to us. Also, keeping in mind the present state of our economy (arguably the best in recent times), launching ourselves into war is imprudent. (Picture George Bush and his defence expenses in Iraq, for instance.) Therefore, a military solution is undesirable to us and will be indecisive.

Moreover, we’ll only be delaying and even exacerbating things by using military means. Violence will create sympathy among potential recruits and the phenomenon will only gather more fire. Keep in mind that one reason the insurgency in Kashmir has gathered fire is because of the atrocities committed by our Army under the garb of fighting terrorism. They detained innocents indiscriminately and without proof, tortured them and raped women.

There are some hard truths to be accepted, by the way. Islamic terrorism is here to stay, I’m afraid, for a bloody long time. They will get around somehow and they will find newer ways to attack.

What do we do then?

I just passed college last year. I’m not some sort of an expert. What follows is pure opinion. Call it naive or whatever you like.
What I feel is that a top-down approach, like using force/military might, will not work. If a centipede sneaks beneath a carpet, will you take a cricket bat and start beating over the carpet (knowing that it is there under the carpet but not exactly where)? If you do so, the creature might just find a way out and disappear. After you give up, it might come back and give its poison fangs some good ol’ biting exercise. The right way to do it is to remove the carpet, find where it is, and after finding, then smack it dead. I think terrorism also should be dealth with in the same way – by getting to the roots.

BUT we dont know what the roots are. Terrorism is a complex problem. It is not as if terrorism = ax + by. If it was that simple, we’d have found out x and y and tweaked them so as to make terrorism zero. There are far too many factors leading to terrorism. This is precisely the reason why using force is not such a good idea. Use of force may give only temporary respite but not a long term solution.

Some of the factors that can be said as influencing terrorism are poverty, illiteracy, discrimination, oppression, religion, political situation, worklessness etc. We can say that these factors may lead to terrorism but not conclusively. In fact, these factors themselves might be affecting each other, making the problem extremely complex. Like for example, if you are living in a country in which you’re a religious minority, your religion may lead to discrimination, which may lead to joblessness and poverty and so on. Also, some of these factors may not lead to terrorism as well. For example, some of the men involved in 9/11 must’ve been highly educated because not everyone can pilot an airplane. So, it can be argued that poverty and illiteracy need not lead to terrorism. Everyone who is poor and illiterate wont become a terrorist! (I know any sociologist reading this would scoff: “So what? We know all that!” :p)

So, it seems trying to get to the roots isnt a sound solution either. Terrorism is dynamic as well. It’s nature changes. We might spend all our lives just trying to get to the roots.

BUT I have an idea.

The PM has accepted that it was an intelligence failure:

• The prime minister also expressed keen necessity to upgrade India’s intelligence network even as he virtually admitted that the blasts were a result of a failure of intelligence agencies in pinpointing the nature of the twin attacks.”At the macro level we had information that some groups had infiltrated in India and were going to target vital installations, our economy religious sites,” the prime minister said, adding that the seizure of 47 kilogram of RDX in Mumbai a few weeks ago was one such pointer.”But at the micro level, we didn’t have that kind of information,” he said, adding: “We need to upgrade our intelligence gathering efforts to cope with terrorism and disasters.” (link)

The difference between macro level and micro level information is the exact problem. Our intelligence agencies are not incompetent when it comes to gathering macro level information but they have frequently failed when it comes to micro level information. They know that an attack is going to take place but they dont know exactly where or when.

It’s a network

Terrorists operate in networks. Information is what drives these networks or rather, the flow of it. We can draw a crude analogy between a terrorist network and an Orkut community. Right now, there are 23,163,113 members in Orkut, all connected to each other, just like men connected in a society. What is Orkut without scraps and messages? Nothing. Information flow through scraps, profiles, testimonials, messages, photographs etc. towards a purpose is what Orkut is for.

Within this giant network, there are Orkut communities. A group of likeminded Orkutters come together to form a community. Every community has a purpose and a theme, for example, Ubuntu India:

• “Welcome to the cummunity of UBUNTU Linux lovers from India. Please exchange tips, tricks, problems and other details to make Ubuntu work for normal Indians."

Together, the members of this community discuss, share information towards a common goal. The information they share may be visible to a member who’s not a member of this community but to contribute information, s/he has to become a member i.e., she has to be a part of that community.

Ditto with terrorist networks. Terrorists can be seen as individuals in a society who come together with a common purpose and form a community i.e., a terrorist group. However, there’s a crucial difference between an Orkut community and a terrorist group. Information in an Orkut community is visible to non-members but this is not so with a terrorist group. You have to be a member of the group to even have access to information.

Suppose both are more or less the same i.e., let us remove the condition that you need not be a member of an Orkut community to see what is happening in the community, making it similar to a terrorist group. Still, dont you think you can have an idea of what is going on inside the community? Even in our scenario, some information about the community will still be visible to non-members. Surely a community must have a name? A purpose? These two pieces of information give us sufficient idea to guess what the community is all about. Besides these, definitely, we will be able to know the number of Orkutters in that community? Number is an important indicator. If the number of Orkutters in a community shoots up, we might draw a correlation between the number and the popularity of that group. Likewise, the kind of people who belong to that community might also offer us a clue about the nature of that community. So, obtaining macro level information is relatively easy.

Now, the PM and the intelligence community have revealed that they were in possession of macrolevel information. They knew from the movement of explosive material and related stuff (intercepted communications for example), in the days leading up to the attack, that something is happening. But since, they have no one inside the terrorist group, they were gleefully unaware of the micro level information i.e., the time and place of the attack. As I explained, obtaining macro level information is not such a big deal and we need not give too much credit to the intelligence community for it.

Infiltrate the networks

Obviously, the stress should be on gathering microlevel information. Question: Is this possible without being a member of the terrorist group? Wiretaps? You have to tap all telephones then. Internet surveillance? The Internet is too big a place to put “virtual taps”. Privacy is also an important issue here. Such solutions are not viable in a democratic nation. Even if you somehow tap information from telephonic and Internet communications, they’ll still use post/courier. Will you open and check out each and every letter then?

To have access to micro level information, you need to have a man inside the group – the classic double agent. You might argue saying “Dude, they are intelligence agencies for God’s sake! Surely, they’ll be having such people.” I’ll counterargue saying “If they did have someone in there and at the right places, we would have had exact information and these attacks would never have occured.”

History is replete with examples in which terrorist groups have been liquidated by using information as a weapon. One of the most famous is the way Stetson Kennedy used information to reduce the Ku Klux Klan to a joke.

We can draw a few parallels between the KKK and terrorist groups. Both have aims which are similar. The KKK’s aim was White Supremacy. The aim of Lashkar-e-Toiba is the supremacy of Islam. Both use/d the same weapon – terror. (The KKK didnt kill innocents, however.) Both received support from entities which were sympathetic to their cause (Pakistan for LeT and White Supremacists for the KKK). Both were highly secretive worlds – a lot of sensitive information is passed.

Stetson Kennedy infiltrated the KKK. He himself got initialized, became a member and slowly over time, made himself aware of all the passwords etc. and leaked this information. The KKK became a joke as all the secret information was aired through the Superman radio programme. Soon, the KKK’s membership declined and the KKK hit one of its lowest points in its history and never recovered.

I might be sounding naive in thinking that a similar solution in the case of terrorism in India is possible. But I dont think it’s not feasible. After all, we have many RAW spies across the border in Pakistan involved in top secret and highly risky operations. We have the men who can do it. We need microlevel information to preempt terrorist attacks and this is the only sureshot way of getting it.

Muscle vs. Brain

Terrorism has never been shown to be solved by violent means. I feel it has to come down to the classic confrontation between muscle power and brain power. Muscle power has proved to be an utter failure so far. Using muscle power doesnt seem to show ability but the lack of it. The United States, the United Kingdom and Israel believed in it and they have failed spectacularly. After their operations in West Asia following 9/11, the USA and the UK stand a much higher threat of terrorism today than ever and their own actions can be held responsible for it. We also know that Israel has its own share of responsibility for the state of matters in the Middle East.

So, maybe it is time to limit the role of the gun and the bomb to defence (not offence) and give our brains a fair chance instead. I’m sure the human brain is more competent than guns and bombs.