11 September 2001: Terrorism and After-II
19 Sep, 2001 · 581
Shabnam Mallick and Rajarshi Sen feel that the US today is in a more conducive position both resources and otherwise to take on terrorism
Today,
America
is having to argue more persuasively than ever that the moral component of its foreign policy is both necessary and sufficient safeguard against what the rest of the world, most notably its most trusted allies, views as hegemonic aspirations. Such a public image, as it were, is not conducive in the fight against such phenomena as terrorism.
America
explore beyond the Hobbesian paradigm to the direction of an evolving cooperative security regime. Cooperative security may manifest in many varieties, but should engage the minimum common denominator: Political will to think ‘out of the box’ in line with an expansive paradigm that does not view national security in zero-sum terms.
United States
is poised to cooperate with
Israel
and
India
, for instance, drawing on terrorism/counterterrorism experience of these two terrorism-afflicted countries, especially in the wake of
India
’s recent anti-terrorism cooperation with
Israel
and also in view of her lead in the last two years to have the United Nations adopt the Comprehensive Convention Against Terrorism.
It is important to note that political order often does not pertain to the social economy. It is said that politics is often not the rational adjuvant of social change. If politics is often not the rational adjuvant of social change, then political change itself, it may be argued, is contingent on the factor of political order. It is, therefore, the duty of an appropriate political order to underwrite conditions from which desirable political change obtains.
In other words, it is prudent on the part of governments to be responsive to social pressures on behalf of political change, for the sake of their own safety and stability. On the one hand, those social pressures require a functional unity of nation-states to counter sub-state threats like terrorism confronting them; on the other hand, Hobbesian political disunity between nation-states is precluding congealing of that necessary wide-ranging functional unity.
Only a continuing and prevailing government or political order will, therefore, be in any position to underwrite the dynamics of change. It is thus expected that
Admittedly, many loose ends will have to be tightened in due course. But what remains clear, however, is that at least in today’s peculiar operational situations, when increasingly sophisticated terrorists may one day have access to nuclear weapons, defenders of freedom if operating within a dedicated rubric of cooperative security-based counterterrorism doctrine, will not remain hamstrung by issues of national sovereignty and similar jurisdictional restrictions, even as the moral sanction accruing of a collective involvement of the world community will be brought to bear in, say, ‘hot pursuits’ of terrorists across international borders into hostile territory in counterterrorism operations; or, in fishing out masterminds of terror from their safe havens.
Recruiting foreign human intelligence assets, too, will conceivably pose less of a problem in the domain of collective security. For example, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) uncomfortably grapples with its current policy of having to pre-screen such potential recruits and discard those with less than impeccable background. A multilateral counterterrorism regime will entail institutionalized intelligence sharing of a more robust nature than what is in place now, and intelligence agencies that are not constrained by ‘background checks’ may surrogate when recruiting those whom the CIA, for instance, will ordinarily reject.
Collective security may also be our lasting protection, by virtue of a demonstration of multilateral cooperative unity, against what may well turn out to be a misdirected backlash of Caucasians against other races/ethnic minorities (as is evident from reports of selective aggressiveness in parts of America directed against Muslim and Sikh communities, etc., in the aftermath of 11th September), and serve to underwrite against the worst Huntingtonian nightmares of a clash of civilizations.
International legitimacy of a cooperative security-based anti-terrorism force may not only conveniently offer a pool of resources in terms of security apparatus, it could also allow circumventing domestic criticism against possible over commitment when one’s country is not directly in the line of fire; or, other criticisms against foreign intervention in the country where intervention is actually taking place. The
And the US is today poised better than any other nation to take a lead in that direction; because despite the terrorist attack America still retains the most powerful resources that are now stirred and focused to ensure what may yet be one of America’s enduring contributions to the world. That is, to paraphrase Franklin Delano Roosevelt: More than an end to terrorism, we want an end to the beginnings of all terrorism
.
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