The following article is by renowned scholar of the Comparative Science of Cultures at Ghent University in Belgium, S.N. Balagangadhara. It presents an interesting thesis about the changing face and, as he puts it, "the business model," of international terrorism.
Since (as far as I know) it was distributed in limited circulation to scholars of South Asian religion, I am making it available to Kossacks interested in these matters.
Following the horrific events in Mumbai, many suggestions and ideas are floating around about the identity of the terrorists, their motives, their nationalities and the cause(s) of the attack. In some senses, these ideas and explanations fall within the limits of predictable parameters: the Hindu-Muslim conflict in India, the issue of Kashmir, links with international terrorist units, the resentment among the Indian Muslims, and so on. While some such speculations could be true, there is something else that needs to be taken into account.
Let me begin with the fact that no known group has claimed responsibility for the multiple attacks in Mumbai. In fact, one of the suspect groups, Lashkar-e-Taiba has explicitly denied authorship even though some e-mails have been received from Deccan Mujahedeen, a hitherto unknown entity. As a result of this, the 'aim' of these attacks is also unknown. Specifically focussed acts, like the Mumbai attacks, could not have the propagation of general issues like the 'plight of the Kashmiri Muslims', 'the support of India for the US foreign policy' or anything analogous as their aim. Of course, both commonsense and newspaper pundits will sooner or later bring such issues and link them to the goal of these attacks, but I think they are wrong: the Mumbai attacks were far too focussed to be commensurate with a vague and general goal.
The second striking thing, I find, is the apparent irrationality of these attacks, even when looked at from within the framework of the terrorist rationality. Sending well-trained people armed only with AK-47 and grenades, knowing that none will make it back (with a chance of capture as well), while they could have created even more damage with armed bombs placed at strategic places suggests that this event was planned to take place exactly the way it unfurled. That is to say, mayhem was a secondary focus of this whole exercise: there is something else to the Mumbai attacks than highlighting a 'social issue' or killing people at random or dying for a certain 'cause'.
- I think that the attacks in Mumbai were a response to the rather inept and amateurish bombings that took place earlier this year in multiple sites in India: Bangalore, Delhi, Surat, Jaipur and Hyderabad. Mumbai is a demonstration lesson for the would-be terrorists in India and abroad: how to make use of the local resources, exploit the local conditions and work with local elements in order to achieve the maximum result. This lesson is being taught to the potential recruits in India and abroad by an influential section of the international terrorists.
- Why the need for a lesson, and who is doing the teaching? To answer this question, we need to understand how the face of terrorism has changed in the course of the last decades. In the latter part of the twentieth century, terrorism remained both local and provincial. It was local in the sense that some or another cell (or an organization with a pseudo-military structure) undertook (mostly) small scale attacks against locally known figures. It was provincial in the sense that the attacks had very little ripple effects outside the locality (or the nation) where such events took place.
The basic "business model" (it will very soon become clear why I use an economic metaphor in this case) was also provincial: some or another country was the place for the would-be terrorists to go to, get trained in some aspects of warfare, and rely on that country for supplies and guidelines.
The terrorists were also locally organized: they functioned mostly in the form of cells that were relatively isolated from each other, and they were dependent on well-wishers and sympathizers to keep them active and alive. As a consequence, at the maximum, they were mostly annexes and appendices to the foreign policy of some or another nation and were also used in this fashion.
Given this, the association of terrorists, both nationally and internationally, took the form of networks: loosely connected at the outer rims of their organizations, these networks were something like fraternity clubs that meet on big occasions or at celebrations. They were either uncoordinated or only very loosely coordinated by the sponsoring nation.
- Beginning with the attacks of 9/11, I believe we see a metamorphosis in the nature and structure of these terrorist 'networks': they are now being transformed into a multinational enterprise. Through mergers, takeovers, and the establishing of new branches, the terrorist networks of yesteryears are transforming themselves into a true multinational firm. They are 'thinking globally while acting locally': bombs, suicide bombers and rockets in Iraq and Israel, aeroplanes in the US, grenades and AK-47s in India. They do not have a single signature or a modus operandi: they are adapting, changing and transforming their ways of working to suit the conditions they find themselves in. They effortlessly undertake purely criminal activities (just think of the drug money in Afghanistan), mix easily with the local criminal population but yet manage to retain their identities as 'elites'. These are their equivalents of joint-partnerships with local firms.
- The war in Afghanistan sounds the death knell of the old business model of going to a particular place for training, living with other 'comrades' in tents, and learning to make a bomb or blow up an armoured vehicle. Today, one has to make use of local conditions and develop strategies for dealing with different places in different ways. This, I believe, is the biggest lesson of Mumbai: instead of ineptly trying to copy Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrorists are being taught the lesson of how to be maximally effective in exploiting local conditions. This lesson was needed because the Indian terrorists created no waves despite simultaneous bombings in multiple sites in India; the international leadership stepped in to teach them how to act so that the maximum could be achieved. I believe that this is how the leadership demonstrated how things have to be done, perhaps at the behest of the terrorists in India, aimed at a very broad group of would-be terrorists across the globe.
- This has very important implications for policy makers. One cannot treat the terrorists anymore in terms of loosely coordinated networks. Today, we confront a multinational firm with a clear 'business model'. Much the same way the national governments are helpless in controlling multinational firms, national intelligence agencies will not be able to do much about this emerging phenomenon. Exchanging 'intelligence' among each other, or coordinating activities on an ad hoc basis are not sufficient anymore to contain and neutralize this threat. Neither the removal of a CEO (say, an Osama Bin Laden) nor the destruction of a training camp (say, in the tribal areas in Afghanistan) will damage this 'business model'. At the very least, we need a multinational intelligence agency with a clear mandate and the required legal powers to successfully take on the transformed nature of crime in the era of globalization, namely, terrorism.
- If we forget to look at this crucial dimension but instead focus only on the 'Hindu-Muslim' conflict or the possible role of Pakistan or the religious identities of the terrorists, then, I think, we fail to learn from Mumbai while most would-be terrorists would have learnt their lesson.
S.N. Balagangadhara
Universiteit Gent
Belgium