The recent bloody attacks in Mumbai, India, signal a clutching quicksand potentially more dangerous for President-elect Obama and his defense and foreign policy teams than the Middle Eastern wars or rising tensions with Russia.
The main reason is the possibility of dirty nuclear weapons and crude biological weapon formulas falling into the hands of terrorists, as Pakistan slumps into deeper failures of government.
Most dangerously, the more severely the terrorists are weakened by Pakistan’s regular forces with help from Americans, European and Indians, the more they will react with the recklessness of people pushed back to the wall. The entire approach of this kind of modern terrorist is to take as many people down before being killed.
When the leaders of the groups that dispatch such young terrorists to kill as a sacred religious duty are themselves faced with extinction, they will react with redoubled violence. They will not negotiate because the power and control they seek over entire peoples, nations or regions will not be on the table in any shape or form. The only thing on offer will be a laying down of weapons in return for some kind of pardon and inclusion in the afflicted country’s political life through democratic processes.
So the leaders of terrorists will negotiate to buy time while they acquire the ultimate biological, chemical or nuclear dirty weapons. They will have no military alternative other than this because their followers, at least those properly trained to do their bidding, will be dying in greater numbers each week. The leaders will be pushed back to the wall by anti-terrorist actions taken in concert by many nations, including Pakistan’s government.
Currently, all terrorist groups with Islamic backgrounds are engorged with money from the Afghanistani drug trade and with Western weapons captured from Afghan and Pakistan government forces or bought on the black market. Some are also former trainees of American and NATO instructors in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is easy to enroll into the national armies being stood up by America, learn strategy and tactics and then return to their traditional warlord or tribal masters and the Taliban.
To teach anti-terrorism and counter-insurgency, instructors must first teach terrorism and insurgency. With that learning, those few who come to borrow training on the behest of their masters can return to their roots to fight for tribal and community gains.
The terrorists now realize that they cannot fight to a standstill or defeat the US or the West and its protégés in Pakistan or Afghanistan. They also realize that they have killed too many innocent locals in their own backyards to be able to win hearts and minds. So the only alternative left to them is to discredit the power of legitimate local governments.
To them, power now means military power. They must demonstrate that local governments, whether or not put in place by the CIA or democratic processes sheltered by American money, are powerless to stop them from hurting innocent people. Whenever possible, they strike at the filthy rich and their symbols, such as Mumbai’s super luxury Taj and Oberoi hotels, to exploit the latent anger of poor people living in the shadows of those palaces to the “greed of the rich”.
Apart from stoking such disaffection of the poor towards the growing social inequalities in India and Pakistan, the terrorists have no interest in soft power approaches. They have killed too many poor people in crowded market places to be much loved as saviors or do-gooders.
Unlike the Hezbollah and Hamas, the terrorist groups sheltering in Pakistan do not have extensive social welfare networks. They do a little bit of social work but the bulk of their spending is on religious training schools where they indoctrinate and recruit their foot soldiers.
Now this war against terrorism is raw and bloody. It will continue to become worse. President-elect Obama may be willing to talk and make peace with even the worst and most medieval enemies, unlike the Bush years, but he has nothing much to offer that might be valued by the terrorists of Pakistan and Afghanistan.
He will offer pardons disguised in fancy words. They want power. Or, if faced with utter destruction, they will destroy whatever they can first, regardless of how dirty or heinous the weapon. People who die for their absolutist faith or wish to build kingdoms where it can be practiced freely, do not compromise as relativists would in exchange for pardon or wealth.
Their hunger is for power. Not the kind of power that a President fighting an election seeks to serve his nation more wisely. They want power to impose on everyone their version of paradise as laid down in their absolutist beliefs engraved in doctrine. They want power to create havens isolated from the contemporary world.
They do not see the contradiction in killing to install a paradise of higher values because they think opponents should be killed as an act of religious piety. To the disgust of most Muslims, the tiny minority trained for terrorism wants no truck with the world of modern rationality. They seek havens from which they can exercise power to change the world in the image of their nostalgic beliefs.
For that power they will use any means available, including dirty weapons of mass destruction. They will have no alternative especially if their dreams have no future because of military onslaught or ordinary people’s disillusionment with their endless violence. This is why the situation in Pakistan is more dangerous than any other and should be the Obama team’s top priority.