BackPeshawar’s children deserve an answer
The time has come to mount an allied global offensive against terror
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Thirteen years after the “war on terror" was launched, it is clear that terrorism has won. After the slaughter of 132 school children in Peshawar by the Taliban, it is useless to pretend the world is a safer place. Estimates show that terrorist attacks worldwide have quadrupled each year since 9/11. A glance at globalincidentmap.com which tracks terrorism and other suspicious activities worldwide on a real-time basis is revealing. Each of the six continents shows some form of terrorist activity.
It isn’t just the sheer numbers, but as the Sydney incident showed, its spread across the globe that confirms what an unstoppable force it has become. From Bali to Madrid, to Moscow, to Beslan via London, Nairobi, Mumbai and now Peshawar, the terror trail knows no boundaries. Indeed, with Sydney the fig leaf of invincibility that geographical or ideological bearings offered has been brutally blown away.
According to The Global Terrorism Database, an open-source information base on terrorist events around the world, 20 years ago, the five countries most affected by terror were Turkey, Algeria, Northern Ireland, Colombia and South Africa. In 2013, this list is completely different and reads Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and the Philippines.
The inevitable conclusion is that terrorism today, unlike the political violence of the ’60s and ’70s when it was a means to achieve a political goal, is an end in itself. With the Taliban turning on Pakistani children, presumably most of who were muslims, the religious underpinning has turned hazy with terrorism itself becoming a religion subscribed to by hoodlums, thugs and malcontents.
Let’s be under no illusion. There are madmen all around us and no religion or grouping is free of its loonies. Norwegian extremist Anders Behring Breivik, who slaughtered 77 people in a horrific bombing and shooting spree in 2011, was anti-Muslim and during his trial ranted about the “deconstruction" of Norway at the hands of “cultural Marxists". In August 2012, white supremacist Wade Michael Page shot dead six Sikhs during an attack on a gurdwara in Wisconsin. Long before 9/11, in April 1995, Timothy McVeigh orchestrated the most deadly terrorist attack in US history upto that point leaving 168 people dead and more than 600 injured.
It would therefore be completely wrong to trace the rising tide of terrorism merely to Islamic roots. But in as much as the terrorists and the groups in such diverse killing fields as Nigeria and Pakistan claim their motivation lies in the religion, Islamic leaders and its millions of followers need to accept that it is a scourge from within, as much as Hitler’s fascism emerged from the German reality of the 1920s. To this day questions about what Germans were doing standing by even as Jews were being slaughtered, haunt the nation. In the same way, all communities need to look within and critically identify the factors in their faith that allow monstrosities of this nature to be perpetrated.
But the world can no longer stand around and wait for this change from within. The time has come to mount an allied offensive against terrorism. In September 2006, member states of the United Nations agreed on a common global strategy to counter terrorism. Sadly, apart from routinely “condemning", “deploring" and expressing “outrage" at the many acts of violence since, there is little to show the Security Council’s Counter Terrorism Committee has achieved anything. After the September 11 attacks the UNSC adopted Resolution 1373, which outlawed terrorism and terrorism financing and provided an unprecedented mandate for UN action. But with each signatory left to his own definition of what constitutes a terrorist or a group, the Hafiz Muhammad Saeeds of this world, are free to address rallies in Pakistan despite sanctions placed against him by international bodies.
What happened in Peshawar this week is the blowback from the soft approach to terror that even affected countries like Pakistan have taken. What is needed now is the kind of resolve and determination shown in June 1941, when the representatives of Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the Union of South Africa and of the exiled governments of Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Greece, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Yugoslavia and of General de Gaulle of France, got together and signed a declaration dubbed the Inter-Allied Declaration with the determination to fight together against the Nazi evil. Within the next four years the mighty Nazi military machine had been destroyed. Peshawar’s dead children deserve a similar response.
Can nations come together to fight terrorism? Tell us at views@livemint.com
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