Steps to confront suicide bombers
JATINDER SINGH
The recent spate of Metro bombings should get us to start preparing for neutralising suicide bombers. In certain religions, suicide is intimately connected with sin because God denies the individual the right to terminate his own earthly identity. In antiquity, by contrast, suicide was neither a sin nor a crime, although it was typically the elites, to whom that freedom was a personal entitlement, who could legitimately take their own lives.
Why do we express horror at suicide terrorism? Is it the perception that suicide bombing and ‘Islamic Fundamentalism’ are correlated?
The data of past two decades indicate that there is little connection between the two or any religion for that matter. In fact, the leading instigator of suicide attacks (after the Japanese ‘Kamikaze’ pilots) is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion.
Causes of resistance
Nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have a specific secular and strategic goal to compel liberal democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organisations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective. Suicide bombers must be understood in relation to new forms of political subjectivity that have been formed in the context of resistance to the particular powers that circumscribe them.
The stress here should be not on violence as such but on spontaneous action when legal political means are blocked. The uniqueness of suicide bombing resides, one might say, not in its essence but in its circumstances.
A suicide bomber is almost always the last link in a long organisation chain that involves numerous actors. Once the decision to launch a suicide attack has been made, its implementation requires at least six separate organisations; target selection, intelligence gathering, recruitment, physical and spiritual training, preparation of explosives and transportation of suicide bombers to the target area. Such a mission often involves many terrorists and accomplices who have no intention of committing suicide, but without whom no suicide operation can take place. The purpose of suicide/terrorist attack is not to die.
It is the kill, to inflict the maximum number of casualties on the target society in order to compel it to put pressure on its government to change policy.
Suicide terrorist groups routinely attack both civilian and military targets. In India, terrorism has been confounding the Central and State governments over the past three decades.
Till now, the insurgents have been inclined to use Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) to send the signals of their intentions and there has hardly been any case of ‘suicide bombing’. This may change now considering the increased base of home grown terrorist groups within the country.
Counter tactics
The key to countering suicide bombers is to make terrorist groups aware that this doctrine will incur painful costs.
It may not be possible to apprehend would-be suicide bombers, but once it has been established that an organisation has resolved to use suicide terrorism, the security establishment should strike against commanders and field heads who recruit and train the assailants and then plan the attacks. Regardless of the presence or absence of hard evidence for planned operations, it is essential to put potential terrorists on the run.
The ideas of erecting concrete barriers, physical checking with citizens assisting, chemical detectors, sniffer dogs, scanner machines, etc., might seem ludicrously inadequate in an overpopulated country like India but such actions do serve as defensive deterrents.
These steps will reassure the public. Ordinary citizens should be made aware that suicide terrorism is a form of psychological warfare. Free people who are told that they are being subjected to psychological manipulation will develop a stronger immunity against it.
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