The US Department of State's data on fatalities in 'international terrorism' over two decades between 1985 and 2005 yields a total of 27,137 dead. This is an under-estimate, since terrorist attacks in many theatres, such as J&K, were excluded in US estimates till some years after 9/11, from the listing of'international terrorist' incidents. Jammu & Kashmir itself, according to data compiled by the Institute for Conflict Management, has seen 41,843 fatalities between 1988 and March 31, 2008, including 14,457 civilians killed.
Significant and tragic as these fatalities are--and the disruption of millions of other lives is immeasurable--they need to be contextualised against the broader history of human strife. Within this context, international terrorism is yet to attain--and, indeed, can never attain--the lethality of conventional warfare between states.
It is useful to note that, over the period 1988-2008, the world has experienced an estimated 221 wars and civil wars, among which the current war in Iraq war alone has resulted in between 100,000 and a million deaths since 2003; the conflict in Darfur has caused between 200,000 and 400,000 deaths, again, since 2003; and the war in Congo, between 1998 and 2003, resulted in between 3.5 and 4.4 million deaths. Between 1950 and 2007, conflicts across the globe have consumed an estimated 85 million lives--the so-called catastrophe of 9/11, which saw about 2,800 fatalities, and the toll of international terrorism need to be assessed against this wider context.
My intention, here, is not to play down the threat of terrorism and the havoc it undoubtedly wreaks, but to emphasize that it is only one of the forms of the violence that has afflicted humankind throughout history, and that it needs to be studied in its realistic dimensions, and not in the emotionally fraught state in which it is ordinarily approached, even in the policy and security community.
What needs to be understood from this limited sampling of data is that terrorism does kill, outrage and horrify us--but it does not, indeed, cannot, prevail upon the target state, except where thelatter's leadership suffers a collapse of will, and capitulates. The essence of terrorism is that the terror it provokes is altogether out of proportion to the material and human damage it inflicts. This must be understood if rational responses are to be devised--and we are not to succumb to the present and widespread hysteria regarding the issue.
The Implosion: Islamist Perpetrators, Muslim Victims
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here is an internal mechanism of self-destruction in all terrorist movements, and this is increasingly manifested in the Islamist'global jihad' today. While the so-called jihadis constantly invoke Islam in their struggle, the reality is, their actions cannot be reconciled with any internally consistent ethical system, or with the teachings of theQur'an. This, indeed, is why, with an estimated 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, the forces of Islamist terrorism number no more than a few thousand. More telling is the fact that, today, Islamists kill far more Muslims than they do their declared enemies, the Christians, the Jews and the Hindus. Brian Crozier has noted, in another context, that,"where revolutionaries find it necessary to kill more people on their own side than the enemy, it must be presumed either that their cause is widely opposed or that, at least, it leaves the populationindifferent."
Such fratricide is not unique to Islamist terrorism alone, but has eventually afflicted almost all terrorist and insurgent movements of the recent past. The Khalistanis in Punjab were a case in point--nearly 67 per cent of all fatalities inflicted by the terrorists were Sikhs. In Kashmir, 90 per cent of all civilians killed by the terrorists are Muslims. While the class composition of victims is far more difficult to document, the Advocates Committee on Naxalite Terrorism in Andhra Pradesh noted that"the largest proportion of the victims of Naxalite violence are drawn from the very classes and communities they claim to be protecting and fightingfor."
The 'implosion of terrorism' has another aspect that demands attention--as with revolutions, it consumes its own children and, one may add, parents. Pakistan is perhaps the most dramatic case in point. It is Pakistan that has, par excellence, harnessed terrorism as an instrument of state policy for the past over two decades. Today, Pakistan is in the grips of a violent'blowback', what one Italian publication (Limes) has described as Il Boomerang Jihadista or the Jihadist Boomerang. According to ICM data, at least 3599 persons were killed as a result of terrorist violence just last year. Another 1,103 persons had already lost their lives to terrorist violence by March 31, 2008. Islamist terrorism within Pakistan has risen sharply over the past years, with 189 related fatalities in 2003; 863 in 2004; 648 in 2005; and 1471 in 2006, yielding a cumulative total of 7,873 between 2004 and March 31, 2008.
More significantly, the Taliban--al Qaeda combine has disrupted administrative and military control over vast regions in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and has significantly undermined faith in and the confidence of the Army which had dominated all aspects of life and politics in the country since its very birth. While its neighbourhood has, no doubt, suffered immensely as a result ofPakistan's Islamist terrorist misadventure, it is Pakistan itself that is, today, confronted by an existential threat, while its dreams of conquering Kashmir and creating a proxy state in Afghanistan lie in ruins.
The reality, across the world today, is that while non-Muslims are the proclaimed targets of the Islamist extremists and the so-called global jihad, it is Muslims who are its principal victims. The jihadis and a misconceived stream within the Western rhetoric on the subject has sought to project contemporary international terrorism as a part or the beginnings of a global'clash of civilizations', a war between the so-called Muslim and non-Muslim worlds. But in doing this they raise a bogey that does not exist, they falsify reality, and they impute far greater power to the Islamist extremists and terrorists than they actually possess.
It is useful to note that the Islamist or Islamist-nationalist insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan cannot be included within the definition of international terrorism, though they share some ideological moorings with the principal international Islamist terrorist groupings, and some insurgent and extremist groups there do engage in terrorist activities directed against civilians and sectarian rivals. Significantly, even if these are included, the fatalities inflicted on target systems--which must be conceptualised as the Western powers, including American and coalition forces located in these countries--remains minimal.
There is a growing realization on these distortions within the Muslim world today, though they continue to be ignored in the Western mainstream discourse. Powerful voices have arisen, at great risk to those who dare to speak out, and they are articulating the dissent of the majority of Muslims against the violent minority that has hijacked their religious identity and harnessed their Faith to a narrow, extremist and destructive vision.
Thus, Ziauddin Sardar, a British writer of Pakistani origin, declares, in an article titled"Islam has become its own enemy":