Anything Goes: The Unstoppable Terrorist

Anything Goes: The Unstoppable Terrorist

Extremist instigation and terrorist strikes are today a form of perpetual war, the nuclear age version of a constantly lit fuse that will kill a random number of non-combatants. There is no distinction between one kind of ‘enemy’ and another, no preference for soldiers in ‘uniform’, between victims who necessarily belong to one faith or another, or  are faithless unbelievers. 

When we read of epic wars in history and legend, which consumed generations of protagonists, in the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Mahabharata, or The 100 Years War, we thought the time-scales were exaggerated, euphemistic, not meant to be taken literally.

But here we are, in the middle of an Islamic jihad or a Maoist  ethnic-cleansing that has carved out terms of reference that can only end with the ending of this world as we know it.

Our choices, in the face of such amoral savagery, are extremely limited. We cannot seem to do much against people who think it appropriate to kill, children, old men, girls, women, as well as people coincidentally passing by.

We, as reasonably civilised world citizens, seem to believe that we cannot descend to the Pit in retaliatory bloodshed. Not effectively anyway, though this has been tried, and continues to be policy in some places. A garland of heads for every eye gouged out, decimation for a murder, has met with some limited success, but alas, only till the regrouping.  And we cannot win the hearts and minds involved, no matter how hard we try. Fanaticism has its own unquenchable thirsts and deep fires.

Nor can we prevent rich countries funding such mayhem with one hand, while shaking hands with the civilised world with the other. A poetic declaration of televised defiance, solidarity parades, placards, songs, candle-lit vigils, commentary and eulogies, do little beyond express the pain we feel, in the face of a horror of perceived injustice.

But at the same time, and even as the battle rages, the intellectuals who analyse these things, work the levers on every side of the fence. There are justifications, debates and denouncements. Deep causes are mined, and the bloodshed is seen by some as the surface consequence of something utterly logical.

The situation of the lit-fuse, like the slow burning rope that help smokers without matches, goes on; unaddressed, unfettered, unmolested, because no effective challenge to it has yet been devised.

Yes, the terrorists of this earth are immune to condemnation. They do not feel remorse, because they do not admit to any moral lapse. The fingers of accusation of a dubious, even satanic morality, are pointed the other way. They are jabbed into our eyes through uploaded You Tube broadcasts. These are punctuated, between rants of hate, by beheadings, summary shootings, pathetic condemned men, shorn of dignity, confessing to their ‘crimes’ in misled hope. 

The terrorists no longer need middle-men to get their message out , though they are often assisted anyway by formal media, in the name of ‘breaking news’. And the politicised killing, mostly of innocents, is invariably framed as a message and a warning. The terrorist has grown well-nigh unstoppable.

Can the rich throw money at the ‘wronged’ to set things right? Not really. The terrorist has found his own sources; through Janus-aced Governments, drug-trafficking, extortion, prostitution, gambling, the exploitation of real estate, commodities, the use of unofficial channels, front establishments.

Terrorists/ revolutionaries/freedom fighters, lack for nothing; not guns, not training, not sophistication, and certainly not motivation. They are not afraid to die any more than they are afraid to kill. They live at no fixed address. Their supporters all have plausible deniability; protected by the very civilised freedoms of liberal societies and structures around the globe.  

Guerilla warfare is now the ghost- who-walks, the effective combatants are not so much timely and good ‘intelligence’ but spies and commandos trained in covert action and preventive offensives.

This, while the armed forces and Governments of the world, like so many behemoths, lumber about, flailing  and slapping at pestilential locust-beings, that clog up their innards and block up their exits.

The dreaded and offensive secret service organisations throughout recent history, the NKPD, the KGB, Mossad, ISI, CIA, the wartime SS, the late Shah of Iran’s  SAVAK, the erstwhile Tamil Tigers etc.; such organisations, on different sides of the fence, all believe/d in taking the battle to the enemy.

They infiltrate and kill on perception, not proof, and seek to blatantly influence overt outcomes. It is this kind of force that can cramp the style of global terrorism, because they are cut mostly from similar cloth, prone to the excesses that come with a licence to kill and nil culpability. They too take no chances with potentials. It gives new meaning to the Good Terrorist, Bad Terrorist debate.

If the world unites in amoral desperation now, and decides to send its troops down into the bowels of Hell, it might be on to something at last.

(819 words)

January 9^th, 2015

Gautam Mukherjee