The clash of terrors

FROM the open-air rooftop promenade on the 107th floor of the World Trade Centre this day last month, our guide showed me Staten Island where on his
last visit to the US, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee had told a meeting that he was first and foremost a swayamsevak. As I stood there gazing at the huge Statue of Liberty which looked no bigger than the Teen Murti statue, I could not have imagined that three weeks later the five-building complex which symbolised the economic might of the US would be brought down by the suicidal volunteers of anger and hatred with nothing more than a modicum of piloting skills and weapons as deadly as table knives. Black Tuesday proved that all the military might of the US was unequal to the fanatical determination of a bunch of terrorists.

Though most American leaders have called it a `war' and are determined to join it, they are still in the dark about the identity of the terrorists. But that does not prevent Osama bin Laden's name being bandied about and stray attacks on Muslims and Arabs even in faraway Australia. When the Federal Building in Oklahoma was destroyed in a bomb blast killing 156 people a few years ago, the suspects were the same group of people but when investigations progressed, the FBI found that the mastermind was a young
white American, Timothy McVeigh, deserving capital punishment. Whatever one might say about the lax security system at US airports, the FBI's capability to unravel the conspiracy is not in doubt. The first arrest the police have made on Saturday shows the law-enforcement agency is on the right track.

Yet, even before the investigations reach a conclusive stage, there are people in India who see a huge window of opportunity in the body blow the US has suffered. They are the ones who volunteer ``exceptionally strong'' support to the US to mount an offensive against those ``harbouring'' terrorism (read Afghanistan). Whatever be the duplicity and diabolism of the Taliban rulers, they cannot be faulted when they say there is no installation in their country costlier than a Cruise missile. In fact, reports from Kabul suggest that 22 years of internecine war and four successive years of drought have drained Afghanistan of all its resources, reducing people there to a primitive existence. While women are forced to remain inside their homes, even men are afraid to walk on the streets if they do not sport the right kind of beard. Unlike the rest of the world, they have not even seen the World Trade Centre collapsing in a heap of rubble and melted steel as the Taliban had decreed that television was
anti-Islamic and was banned. Carpet bombing of the sort the US tried in Vietnam would kill many people of Afghanistan _ whose average life expectancy is in any case just 40 for men and 42 for women _ but will it affect bin Laden, whose location is not even known?

Arresting such fugitives is difficult because they enjoy either a
groundswell of support or the patronage of a state. It is precisely for this reason that our police have not been able to arrest LTTE supremo Prabhakaran, who is alleged to have masterminded the assassination of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, sandalwood smuggler Veerappan and the Dawood Ibrahims. Instead of making grandiose plans to bomb a country, coordinated efforts have to be made to nab them and thus break the back of the terrorists. For this, intelligence far better than identifying a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan as a weapon-manufacturing facility for bombing operations is required. Despite so much sophisticated technology the US commands, its hit-and-run bombing operations, whether in Afghanistan or Kosovo, were far from satisfactory. What's worse, in many cases, the missiles they fired even failed to hit the precise targets as in Belgrade where it fell on the Chinese Embassy.

Allowance also has to be made for the fact that the kind of terrorist
activity Black Tuesday witnessed required no terrorist training centre.

Terrorists masquerading as pilots could have chosen any place to chalk out their plan _ a house, a school or a public facility. This again renders bombings redundant. Besides, the danger of getting sucked into a `war' that can even result in a Taliban-type regime replacing the present military regime in Pakistan is too real to be dismissed out of hand. Needless to say, a prosperous, peaceful neighbourhood is in India's long-term interest.

Unfortunately, there are elements in this country who see the situation as a clash between Hindus, Jews and Christians on one side and the Muslims on the other. Nothing can be more far-fetched than this. The seven million Muslim Arab Americans are no more responsible than Arab Christians in Nazareth or Bethlehem. A day after the terrorist attack, a rabbi and a monsignor discussed the situation on television with the rabbi commenting that every
religion faces a moral crisis. Christianity, he said, failed in the
Crusades, the Jews failed in the Roman invasion of Palestine and now the Imams around the world must take a stand against the World Trade Centre attack and say that this is not Islam. Here, not just planes but religion itself has been hijacked.

Two things about Osama bin Laden we know. The first is his pathological hatred of the state of Israel, Zionism, and the US that supports the Jewish state, and the second is his hatred of a decadent Western culture that the Pope calls the ``culture of death'', which he believes is morally numbing America's own children's minds and impacting the rest of the world.

America is the single biggest purveyor of a value-free, morally-relativist, post-modern culture that is spitting in the face of every known Christian-based virtue and a materialism that is fast undermining the pillars of a nominally Christian society. However, the spiritual impact this outrage has caused is something to behold. People are looking for spiritual answers amidst the human carnage and wreckage of destroyed buildings as the increasing attendance in churches, mosques and synagogues suggests.

A friend in the US has sent me an e-mail that said they are a strong people, not because they have guns and money but because they have faith and hope and in the end that will triumph. There is no place for revenge and retaliation in this. John Witherspoon, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, had warned the American leadership, "If your case is just, if your principles are pure, and if your conduct is prudent, you need not fear the multitudes of opposing hosts." Those who offer unsolicited support for bombing operations will do well to ask themselves whether the Americans
had adhered to these lofty principles when they armed the same Taliban against the Soviet Union and looked the other way when Pakistan-inspired terrorists made mincemeat of peace in Jammu and Kashmir for well over a decade.

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