SAARC cooperation on managing terror

Pakistan alone has lost more than 35,000 innocent lives over the past 10 years to terror, not to speak of Sri Lanka, which confronted the scourge until a couple of years ago, and India which is continuing to face the malaise, and the indications are that the SAARC region would continue to be stalked by this spectre into the foreseeable future. The recent bomb blasts in Mumbai which exacted a heavy human toll bear witness to the grave magnitude of the problem of political terror. The truth should be countenanced that the region is yet to make any marked progress in the direction of containing or managing terror.

It is encouraging to note, though, that collective efforts are being made by this region to concertedly defuse the problem and we hope fora, such as the SAARC Interior Ministers' Conference which only recently took up the issue of terror afresh, would prove instrumental in cutting this Gordian Knot in the politics of South Asia. The problems Pakistan is continuing to confront on this score, testifies to the intractability of the problem as well as to its multidimensional nature. Terror usually grows out of socio-economic deprivations and power asymmetries within political communities. This aspect of the issue has been voluminously commented on over the years by knowledgeable sections and the Lankan state's current efforts to meet the development needs of Sri Lanka's North-East are testimony that the Lankan centre fully acknowledges this dimension to the problem.

Yet, in the case of countries such as Pakistan, the issue of terrorism is so multi-dimensional in character that simple prescriptions cannot be offered by way of resolutions and answers. In Pakistan's internal debate over terrorism, factors, such as, democracy, development and decentralization are figuring prominently as essential answers to the malaise and this is a very enlightened and recommendable approach to adopt to the issue. But in the Pakistani context, reducing the resolution of the terror issue to these factors only would be tantamount to simplifying it. This is because there is also an external dimension to the terror problem in Pakistan which has been instrumental in keeping the issue alive there.

Pakistan's North Western Frontier Province is continuing to be the scene of runaway terror and the issue is deeply intertwined with the continuing political turmoil and wasting internal conflict in Afghanistan.

The Pakistani-Afghan border is a highly porous one and managing terrorist movements from Afghanistan into Pakistan is one of the most arduous challenges Pakistan is confronting on the national security front. However, Pakistan's problems are compounded by the fact that it is also under big power pressure to contain this cross-border terror issue and to make concrete progress on this question, which would strain any state's wits to the maximum.

However, unlike in times past, Pakistan is currently a democracy and this would prove a great plus in this region's efforts to contain the terror blight. It does not follow that a democracy would be far more capable than, say, an authoritarian state in the task of taking-up the terror challenge but democracies share common political values and this could prove helpful in managing the menace and in arriving at consensual arrangements on keeping it under control.

It is important that SAARC contemplates law and order measures to manage terror, such as, more and more sophisticated mechanisms in intelligence gathering and sharing, but the ultimate answer to terror, we believe, resides in the consolidation of democratic institutions in the region and in the qualitative improvement of our democracies. If the perception on the part of a group that it is not sufficiently empowered is a fundamental driving force of terror, then, it is the increasing empowerment of persons and groups which is the answer to this sense of powerlessness.

Accordingly, democratic institutions need to take deep root in societies because it is such mechanisms that empower people and persons and enable them to fulfill their aspirations and ideals.

The external dimension in the problem of terror in this region, makes it obligatory on the part of the SAARC Eight to increasingly work on a cooperative basis to contain external interference in the affairs of the region. If self-help and mutual cooperation is greatly strengthened, efforts by the big powers to manipulate SAARC states could be defeated and regional amity considerably enhanced.