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B. S. Raghavan

TOMORROW will mark the completion of two years since the US had first-hand experience of the horrors of terrorism on its homeland, its national capital and the Pentagon. Many countries have been victims of this blight before, notable among them being India which perhaps bore the brunt of it for a decade and more in all its viciousness and ruthlessness.

The number of civilians and security forces killed in terrorist attacks in Jammu and Kashmir and other parts of India is more than 30 times the deaths on the US soil on September 11, 2003, but the US took little notice of the gruesome happenings elsewhere until it became a victim itself.

And then all hell broke loose, and the US catapulted terrorism as the world's topmost priority, and appointed itself to the leadership of a global coalition against it. It has, thereafter, been directing all its unchallengeable might and ferocity to "dry out the swamps in which terrorists flourish".

From the beginning, however, the US has been typically ham-handed and Janus-faced in the pursuit of its aims. After de-Talibanising Afghanistan, it should have turned its attention on Pakistan which had continued to harbour and finance a number of notorious terrorist groups to buttress its openly declared policy of providing moral, material and political support to their murderous depredations in Jammu and Kashmir and the rest of India.

Despite Pakistan's continued defiance of resolution No.1373 of the Security Council calling upon all member countries to desist from being a party to terrorist acts without advancing any excuse "of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or other nature", the US has not only been conniving at its misdeeds (including giving refuge to pro-Taliban and pro-Al Qaeda remnants and building up the nuclear capability of North Korea and Iran) but even rewarding it with billions of dollars in the form of aid and waiver of loans. The war against terrorism lost what little credibility it had when on absurd, trumped up charges, the US and the UK, ignoring the protests of heavyweights of the European Union, invaded and subjugated Iraq.

The second anniversary of 9/11 is a good occasion for the world community, especially the US, to draw up a balance-sheet of gains and losses and make mid-course corrections in the strategies and policies against terrorism.

India, in particular, as the country most affected, should come out of its passivity, and move the UN to adopt a common minimum programme binding on all States and laying down the phases, priorities and modalities whereby the supremacy of the UN can be preserved.

The present mode of leaving it to the US to dictate the targets and the course of the war on terrorism is fraught with unpredictable consequences boding no good either to the victims of terror or to the larger cause of rooting out terrorism from the face of the earth.

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