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2 A misleading terrorism
report By Ajai Sahni
Modern governments are vast bureaucracies
engaged in an infinity of complex tasks, most of
which are turned into routines to ensure
continuity, standards and a necessary modicum of
efficiency. The flip side is that established
routines often lapse into mechanical responses,
mere reflexes that have little contact with the
original intent for which they were initiated.
The US State Department's annual ritual of
publishing what are now called the Country Reports
on Terrorism (CRT) unfortunately
appears to have slipped into
the character of just such a habitual response, an
embarrassing nervous tic that does little to
enhance the appearance or reputation of those it
afflicts, and that appears to fulfill no
significant purpose. This is the regrettable
conclusion that arises out of a close reading of
the sections dealing with South Asia in CRT 2006.
The CRT is a modestly rechristened version
of the more ambitious Patterns of Global Terrorism
(PGT), which was abruptly discontinued after a
particularly disastrous edition in 2004 (PGT 2003)
under the stewardship of the State Department's
then coordinator for counter-terrorism, Cofer
Black. The CRT is published (as was its
predecessor) under a legislative mandate to
provide the US Congress "a full and complete
report on terrorism" each year with regard to
countries that meet the criteria of the
legislation, and in this CRT 2006 certainly falls
short in its narrative on South Asia.
CRT
2006 does not, of course, fall prey to the extreme
perversity and errors that marked PGT 2003, and,
if a brief overview of trends was all that was
mandated, it would, perhaps and with some
qualifications, suffice. As a "full and complete
report on terrorism", one that would satisfy
legitimate information needs of Congress, however,
it falls woefully short.
The experience
with the appalling PGT 2003 obviously took a toll
on the confidence levels of the counter-terrorism
establishment at Washington. In replacing the PGT
reports with the CRT, responsibilities for the
compilation and analysis of data were transferred
to a newly created National Counter-terrorism
Center (NCT), and were delinked from the CRT.
Such compartmentalization has adversely
affected the contents of the CRT and, in place of
the detailed - albeit inaccurate - listings of
terrorist incidents and the aggregation of data in
the PGT, CRT cherry-picks a handful of significant
incidents in each country in the region, and
overwhelmingly relies on words such as "hundreds",
"several", "numerous", and other approximations in
its assessments of the volume of terrorist
activities in various theaters.
Within
South Asia, CRT 2005 had given some reason for
heightened expectations, particularly in its
treatment of terrorism in India, going into
surprising detail, not only of terrorist
operations and linkages, but also of
administrative culture and the infirmities of the
justice system. Indeed, this treatment gave cause
for hope that this approach would be deepened over
time and that other theaters in the South Asian
region would also be treated with a comparable
thoroughness and realism - though the treatment of
the Indian neighborhood remained politically
colored and inadequate even in CRT 2005.
Regrettably, this promise has not been
fulfilled in CRT 2006, and there appears to be a
slide back even in the quality and content of the
treatment of terrorism within India. In reporting
on Islamist terrorism outside Jammu & Kashmir
(J&K), CRT 2006 quite naturally lists three
major incidents: the July 11 train blasts in
Mumbai, the second-most-devastating terrorist
attack in the country's history; the multiple
blasts at Malegaon, Maharashtra, on September 8,
which saw 40 killed; and the March 7 multiple
blasts in the temple city of Varanasi, which left
21 dead.
Altogether surprisingly, it sees
fit to mention, alongside these, the arrest of two
suspected terrorists from al-Badr on October 27,
apparently on a mission to "establish a base in
southern India" to "facilitate terrorism on
economic and government targets". It is useful to
note that 2006 also saw a number of other
significant Islamist terrorist operations across
India at various locations outside J&K, as
well as a multiplicity of arrests of terrorists in
several locations, including several in the states
of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.
If the
obscure arrest of two "suspected terrorists"
merits mention in CRT 2006, these - and indeed
many other - incidents can hardly be rightly
ignored. If these arrests were thought to be
unique evidence of efforts to "establish a base in
southern India", this is misleading. There have
been dozens of earlier arrests that give
overwhelming evidence of an effort, sustained over
decades, to establish and execute operations in
"southern India", and these have already
manifested themselves in numerous terrorist
attacks in the region.
The analysis of
terrorism in other theaters across India is, at
best, cursory, once again randomly picking out
some incidents for
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