The Hindu Business Line : Who's on the hit list?

As we enter an age of paranoia, of rising and intrusive surveillance, of arbitrary arrests and detentions across the world, it is useful to ask ourselves whether we are really prepared for the future that terrorists are planning for us. Terrorist organisations, networks and operations have today become truly global, obliterating the distinction between `domestic' and `international' terrorism. Worse, centralised and identifiable locations of terrorist command and control have suddenly vapourised into innumerable, loosely organised `cells' or `modules' that operate with an astonishing measure of autonomy, seeking little more than ideological guidance from their `leaders'.

They download technical and technological information, training and operational manuals, from the Web; acquire or concoct explosives from chemicals available in the open market; and derive inspiration from terrorist strikes across the world.

Despite many individual successes against terrorism — the latest being the foiling of the conspiracy to hijack and destroy 10 passenger aircraft in the UK — an air of clumsiness and of incompetence appears to mark the State's responses to the threat of terrorism, whether it is in New York, London, Mumbai or Amsterdam.

India has been a target of terrorism for nearly two and a half decades. Yet, each new incident appears to bring out the ham-handedness of response. Not even basic response protocols appear to be in place, as common citizens mill around the site of terrorist strikes, picking up the injured and bodies or body parts of the dead, with neither police nor emergency medical personnel in sight, often until hours after the incident.

If this is the response in the heart of metropolitan Delhi and Mumbai, what hope of efficiency is there in other parts of India?

What, for instance, would we do with a Beslan?

The inadequacy of the world's understanding of, and responses to terrorism is brought chillingly home by a new television series, Terror Strikes, on Discovery Channel from September 1-11 at 9 p.m. This series documents 11catastrophic events that have shaped the trajectory of global terrorism and, in some measure, human history. Thus, we find, more than three decades after the multiple hijacking of three airliners on September 12, 1970, the world was still astounded by the events of September 11, 2001, when two hijacked aircraft ploughed into the World Trade Centre in New York, a third into the Pentagon, and a fourth, apparently intended for the White House or Capitol Hill, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania

The episode documenting the `Seige of Beslan', in which nearly 1,200 children and adults were held hostage by Chechen terrorists in a school gymnasium for 56 hours, starting September 1, 2004, is a harrowing viewing experience. But this episode disturbs at an even deeper level when we try to imagine what the outcome would be in a comparable situation in India. As many as 331 hostages, including 186 children, died in the botched Beslan operation. How would India cope with a challenge — and a catastrophe — of such dimensions?

Again, the Moscow Siege episode brings home the experience when over 900 people at a theatre in the Russian capital were taken hostage on October 23, 2002. After a standoff that lasted two-and-a-half days, Russian special forces used a `knockout gas' to immobilise the terrorists (and hostages) before they stormed the building. All 42 terrorists were `neutralised', shot at short range inside the theatre. But 129 hostages also died as a result of the anaesthetic used, possibly because of their weakened condition under the siege, or because of vulnerabilities resulting from prior ailments.

Do Indian enforcement agencies know what gas was used? Has a scientific assessment been made to determine which would be the best anaesthetic to use in such a situation? And are we otherwise prepared to deal with a comparable mass hostage challenge? The experience with IC 814 (the flight that was hijacked to Kandahar) suggests that India certainly did not have the right answers in 1999, and there is little evidence to suggest that these answers are available in 2006.

Nor is there evidence of any coherent understanding of the psychology and motivation of terrorists — though politicians and `intellectuals' regularly mouth meaningless platitudes about the need to address the `root causes' of terrorism.

The 7/7 Bombers — - A Psychological Investigation pieces together the mindset and motivation of the suicide bombers who targeted London's metro rail system in July 2005, documenting the chilling `normality' of the many perpetrators, the absence of any dramatic aberrations in their past, the difficulty of identifying potential terrorists and suicide bombers, and the centrality of the group dynamic and ideological mobilisation in shaping the psyche of the terrorists.

Then again is the challenge of imposing penalties, of pursuing perpetrators, their leaders and their sponsors While India sets up or seeks to set up negotiations with terrorist group after terrorist group, in the episode Munich: The Real Assassins, we see the Israeli secret service hunt down and kill every one of the 11 perpetrators of the Munich Olympics killings of September 1972. Other countries of the world, including the US, dedicate huge resources to relentlessly hunt down perpetrators of terrorist acts, often for decades after an incident.

The success or failure of any enterprise depends substantially on the measure of clarity that attends its conceptualisation and execution. Unfortunately, sensationalism, the absence of clarity and political opportunism have invariably undermined effective counter-terrorism responses.

The sheer range of threats, continuous adaptation and innovation by terrorists, their augmenting access to technologies of war - and potentially to chemical, biological and nuclear weapons - are a measure of the degree to which we remain frighteningly unprepared for the future.

As terrorists construct complex and innovative networks across vast areas of the world, it is crucial to understand that each terrorist attack is not something that happens to `other people' in distant places, but a model and demonstration of what can happen to us.

Our understanding of terrorism has lagged far behind its evolution, and a continuous examination of the experience across the world is now necessary if we are to prepare ourselves for the challenges that are staring us in the face.

Discovery series

September 1-11, 9 p.m.

7/7 Bombers — A Psychological Investigation

Beslan Siege

Moscow Siege

Black September & Lockerbie Bombing

Munich: The Real Assassins

Bali Bombings

One of America's Own — Oklahoma City Bombing

Massacre in Madrid

Terror in Tokyo

Last Hour of Flight 11

The Flight that Fought Back

(The author is Executive Director, Institute for Conflict Management)