Dr. Forqan Uddin Ahmed, Former Deputy General and Commandant, Ansar VDP Academy:
The world ‘terror’ means the action or quality of causing dread and alternatively, a person, object or force, inspiring dread. Modern words like terror, terrorize, terrible, terrorism and deterrent are believed to have been derived from the Latin verbs terror – to tremble or to cause to tremble. The central meaning of concept terrorism is ‘use of terror for the furthering of political ends’, and it was originally used to denote the use of terror by the French revolutionary government against its opponents. This is also the sense in which it was used, and on occasions justified, by the Bolsheviks after 1917. The range of activates which the term covers is rather wide. But four main forms are: assassinations, bombings, seizures of individuals as hostages and more recently, the hijacking of planes.
What fundamentally distinguishes terrorism from other forms of organized violence is not simply its severity but also its features of amorality and antinomianism. Ideologists of terrorism assume that the death and suffering of innocents are a means entirely justified by the terrorists’ political ends. Political terror may occur in isolated acts and also in the form of extreme, indiscriminate and arbitrary mass violence. It is a sustained policy involving waging of organized terror either on the part of the state, a movement or a faction.
International terrorism generated widespread concern in the societies affected, and as a result, it has spread throughout the world. Some countries, like the United States, set up special units to cover anti-terrorism, that is, measures to prevent terrorist acts and counter-terrorism. Then there is terrorism within communal situations, largely in third world countries. Here, people of different ethnic or religious character, who had often lived side by side for centuries, come to be locked in situations of violence and retribution, often involving massacres, mass kidnappings and so forth. Examples of such terrorism were conflicts between Christians and Muslims in Lebanon, Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, etc.
Guerrilla warfare is another form of terrorism. The western world realized in the 60s and 70s that how vulnerable it was to attack by urban guerrillas. Some movements, mainly anti-colonial, had employed tactics akin to those of urban guerrillas, notably the Jewish Stern Gang and Arab terrorists who attacked the British Mandatory regime in Palestine.
While dealing with the menace of terrorism, the state should be firm in its attitude. There should be no submission to terrorist blackmail. In the face of guns and bombs it would be as foolish to argue with them as it would be to present a protest note to an invading army. Government must prove that it can meet such threats with force. It should also convince the common people that it can protect them from terrorists. Above all, the Government must seek to avoid alienating the support of the masses of the population.
The other strategy is to isolate the terrorists from their host population, but this is fraught with risks requiring an extraordinarily high degree of skill, determination and patience on the part of governments and security forces. No concessions should be made by the government. If the government is too soft with them, they will be encouraged to make more demands and other extremist groups will also be encouraged to resort to terrorist blackmail. In order to maintain morale of security forces as well as public confidence in government, it is essential that the government rigidly maintains its authority and implements its policies without fear or favor.
A vital intelligence network is also necessary to combat terrorists and to conduct psychological warfare. However, the best hope for effective action to reduce the vulnerability of liberal democracies to attacks by international terrorists and narco-terrorism lies in the adoption of stronger anti-terrorist measure by individual governments.
Meeting the challenges of terrorism is not an easy proposition. It will be unrealistic to hope for the complete disappearance of terrorism from the face of the earth in the near future, but to deem it totally impossible is to turn pessimistic. Let us start removing the pricking nails of hatred, fear and distrust. Let us strive for peace. Let us move. Humanity will win as it had won many such paths before.