RUSSIA, COLOMBO, TERRORISM - SAME RESULT

Imagine that the Sri Lankan government asks the U.S authorities to be cautious about a Tamil Tiger terrorist, and that the FBI totally ignores the intimation. Imagine also that the Tamil Tiger cautioned against in this way, carries out an attack in the United States by detonating an explosive laden device.

Improbable, would you say? This however was exactly what happened recently in the United States except that instead of a Tamil Tiger terrorist there was a Chechen radical involved, and instead of a cautionary warning issued to the FBI by the Sri Lankan government, it was the Russian authorities that did it.

The Boston bomb brothers were apparently radicalized sympathizers with the Chechen cause, and there had been a ban in place against them flying on Aeroflot issued by the Russians. A computer glitch however enabled the younger of the brothers to fall through the cracks of the system and fly Aeroflot undetected.

The FBI however virtually ignored the warning by the Russian Intelligence, and the response in approximate terms was that the 'Chechen situation was an internal rebellion in Russia that the US should not bother about'!

So much then for the attitude 'We'll safeguard our homes, but let the terrorists fry anybody abroad?'. The Americans obviously did not bargain for the fact that a radicalized Chechen rebel Muslim could also be a radicalized Muslim jihadist that would target the U.S.

These emerging details of the Boston bomb fiasco offers an insight into the perils of the big powers ignoring terrorism and radicalism abroad on the reasoning that these are domestic developments that have little to do with security issues at home.

The world is far too interconnected in this internet age for countries to treat terrorism related issues in isolation. But the United States seems to be oblivious to this reality, and this is apparent from the way the Sri Lankan terrorist issue was handled by successive U.S administrations. The Sri Lankan government even when we did have the LTTE cornered and fighting for dear life, was asked to negotiate with the terrorists.

Today, they say that the U.S is addressing a reconciliation and human rights issue as opposed to a terrorist issue, but it would be ludicrous for anybody to pretend that the issue of terrorism and the so called issues of reconciliation aren't two sides of the same coin. Furthermore, as it is now clear from the Boston bomber fiasco, these things - how to contain terrorism and how to contain the spin-off effects of armed conflicts - are best left to the judgement of the nations that experienced the violence in the first place. Had this simple rule of thumb been followed by the FBI and the other defence arms of the United States, the Boston bombing carnage which locked-down an entire city, and left several dead and maimed, could have been averted.

The point is that, to be blunt about these things, the authorities seem to appraise these issues and take decisions from an entirely different standpoint. It is almost as if they seem to reason that it is better to keep internal dissension in other countries on the boil; division in Russia for instance, could keep Russia the former Cold War enemy under some kind of tractable 'control' and keep the nation from becoming too unwieldy a force?

If this is the policy it certainly did not pay dividends. The Boston bombings should be a point of departure for anti-terrorism policy that takes the inter-connectedness of subversive movements into cognizance. The U.S should perhaps begin from Sri Lanka. Ignoring the Russian cautionary alert on the two Boston bombers was one aspect of the issue but in the light of the operation of the Tiger rump in the U.S mainland, the Sri Lankan warning about the sinister workings of the Tiger rump should perhaps be of greater security import to the U.S than even the Russian alert that was ignored.