In the pursuit of their goals, terrorists seek to maximise the
element of surprise on the State and the impact on the society and the erosion of its
confidence in the ability of the State to protect it. The choice of instruments by the
terrorists for facilitating the employment of appropriate elements from their tactical
repertoire has been governed by the twin imperatives of the need for maximum surprise and
maximum impact and the minimum risk of detection by the security agencies. The decrease in
the frequency of the use of certain tactics due to an effective counter to those tactics
from the security agencies has, however, not meant the permanent discarding of such
tactics. Terrorists are opportunity-oriented and do not hesitate to re-use a
temporarily-discarded tactic if an opportunity for its successful use presents itself
again due to a decrease in the vigilance of the security agencies in countering such
tactics as one saw recently during the Kandahar hijacking episode Terrorists are
increasingly technology-savvy, but not technology-slavish. They do not hesitate to revert
to old technologies and old instruments of destruction if they find that security
agencies, in their preoccupation with countering the use of new technologies and new
instruments by the terrorists, relax their vigilance against the possible re-use of old
technologies and old instruments by them. Modern technologies' unwitting contribution to
strengthening the prowess of the terrorists has been mainly in respect of communications,
improving the techniques of explosions, psychological warfare, attempts at mass disruption
of national security, economic and communications infrastructure, easy availability of
expertise in the manufacture and use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and the
availability of new technological targets against which they could use conventional
tactics like seizure of control and hostage-taking with potentially catastrophic
consequences. Of these, in the first three areas, there have already been reported
instances of terrorist organisations making use of technological advances, while in the
remaining three, the potential threat from the likely use of new technologies is more
speculative and less based on concrete evidence of actual capability. The last three areas
are in the realm of possible future scenarios to counter which the security agencies have
to equip themselves from now onwards so that they are not taken by surprise. The major
successes scored by terrorist groups in India in recent years were as much, if not more,
due to the inadequacies of the security agencies, even in respect of the implementation of
rudimentary physical and infrastructure security precautions, as to any new prowess of the
terrorists derived from modern technologies. However, modern technologies have definitely
added to the difficulties of the security agencies and, to be able to deal with them, they
have to show an ability to always keep one step ahead of the terrorists in familiarising
themselves with their impact on terrorism and by keeping themselves ready with workable
counter tactics or strategy before the terrorists start using these technologies, instead
of letting themselves be caught by surprise and thinking of the options available only
after a crisis or disaster confronts them face to face or has already taken place.
THE TEXT OF THE PAPER
TACTICAL REPERTOIRE
Till the 1980s, the tactical repertoire of terrorist
organisations remained fairly constant. It consisted of assassinations of individuals
occupying important positions in the State and society, targeted killings of security
forces and carefully-selected groups of society such as the religious adversaries (as seen
by them), the migrant farm and industrial workers etc, indiscriminate explosions directed
not at any individual or group in particular but at the society as a whole in the hope of
thereby weakening its confidence in the ability of the State to protect it from terrorist
violence, hijackings and hostage-taking.
Subsequently, the repertoire saw the addition of three more
tactics-- the suicide bombing, the manipulation of domestic and global public opinion
against the target-State through skilful psychological warfare and attempts at mass
disruption of key sectors of essential economic infrastructure such as the irrigation
systems in the Punjab, the tourist and cottage industries in Jammu & Kashmir
(J&K), the oil production and distribution facilities in the North-East, road, rail
and air communications etc.
In the pursuit of their goals, the terrorists seek to maximise
the element of surprise on the State and the impact on the society and the erosion of its
confidence in the ability of the State to protect it. The choice of instruments by the
terrorists for facilitating the employment of appropriate elements from their tactical
repertoire has thus been governed by the twin imperatives of the need for maximum surprise
and maximum impact and the minimum risk of detection by the security agencies.
It was the need for maximum impact, which made the terrorists
graduate from the use of hand-held weapons of world war vintage to those of modern
guerilla warfare such as the AK-47 rifles and Stingers and other shoulder-fired missiles
and improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
It was the need for maximum surprise with the minimum risk of
detection which made them graduate from conventional explosives and timers to less easily
detectable explosives such as the Semtex and more sophisticated timers with which
explosions can be timed to take place not within 24 hours only as in the past, but even
weeks, if not months, after the planting of the device as one saw in the Brighton
explosion of the 1980s, which coincided with the annual conference of the UK Conservative
Party.
Adoption of appropriate counter-tactics by the security agencies
resulted in a decrease in the frequency of the use of certain tactics from the terrorists
repertoire. Thus, stricter laws, stricter physical security measures and the now
universally-accepted principle of "no concessions to terrorists resorting to
hijacking and hostage-taking" have led to a decrease in the number of hijackings from
an average of 41 per annum in the 1970s to 18 per annum and, during the period from 1993
to 97 for which statistics of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the US are
available, only 7 (less than 10 per cent) of the total of 87 hijackings all over the world
were due to terrorism. The rest of them were motivated by economic or other personal
reasons.
Moreover, one has seen a general decrease in incidents of
hostage-taking too not only in the rest of the world, but also in India after the firm
line taken by the Government of India in rejecting the demands of some Sikh terrorists,
who kidnapped Liviu Radu, a Romanian diplomat, in New Delhi in October, 1991, and those of
the terrorists of the Al Faran, a cover name for the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), who had
kidnapped five Western tourists in Kashmir in 1995,
In the first instance, the frustrated Sikh terrorists released
Radu, but, in the second case, the HUM mercenaries from Pakistan reportedly killed all the
hostages.
The decrease in the frequency of the use of certain tactics due
to an effective counter to those tactics from the security agencies has, however, not
meant the permanent discarding of such tactics. Terrorists are opportunity-oriented and do
not hesitate to re-use a temporarily-discarded tactic if an opportunity for its successful
use presents itself again due to a decrease in the vigilance of the security agencies in
countering such tactic as one saw recently during the Kandahar hijacking episode, when the
surprised Indian State had to deviate from the universally-accepted principle and concede
the terrorists' demands. The fact that terrorists and others in India had discarded the
use of hijacking as a weapon of intimidation for nearly six years had led to complacency
and reduced vigilance.
Technological advance places in the hands of security agencies
better means of detecting and preventing conventional tactics such as hijacking and of
hijack management if, despite the preventive measures, terrorists succeed in hijacking an
aircraft, but technology plays very little role in the use of the tactics of hijacking and
hostage-taking by the terrorists.
TECH-SAVVY, NOT SLAVISH
Terrorists are increasingly technology-savvy, but not
technology-slavish. They do not hesitate to revert to old technologies and old instruments
of destruction if they find that security agencies, in their preoccupation with countering
the use of new technologies and new instruments by the terrorists, relax their vigilance
against the possible re-use of old technologies and old instruments by them.
Thus, the Islamic terrorists effectively used nitrate fertilisers
in large quantities in their attempt to blow up the New York World Trade Centre in
February, 1993, without their purchase of this material and its transport to the scene
attracting the suspicion of the security agencies. A similar modus operandi (MO) was used
in the Oklahama bombing of 1995 by some disgruntled individuals and in the Nairobi and
Dar-es-Salaam explosions of August, 1998, by the followers of Osama bin Laden. bin Laden's
past terrorist operations in Saudi Arabia, Kenya and Tanzania had remained undetected by
the well-endowed CIA because of his use of the most primitive, but the most secure means
of communications--that is, by word of mouth through messengers -- while carrying out the
operations.
Modern technologies' unwitting contribution to strengthening the
prowess of the terrorists has been mainly in respect of the following:
* First, effective concealment of communications while
planning acts of terrorism and in their escape from the clutches of the law thereafter.
* Second, means of having explosives reached to the target
without being detected and improving the techniques of remote-controlled explosions and
the performance of timers.
* Third, psychological warfare for manipulating domestic
and global public opinion against the target-State and in their favour.
* Fourth, attempts at mass disruption of national security,
economic and communications infrastructure.
* Fifth, easy availability of expertise in the manufacture
and use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD).
* Sixth, availability of tempting new technological targets
against which they could use conventional tactics like seizure of control and
hostage-taking with potentially catastrophic consequences.
Of these, in the first three areas, there have already been
reported instances of terrorist organisations making use of technological advances, while
in the remaining three, the potential threat from the likely use of new technologies is
more speculative and less based on concrete evidence of actual capability. The last three
areas are in the realm of possible future scenarios to counter which the security agencies
have to equip themselves from now onwards so that they are not taken by surprise.
COMMUNICATIONS CONCEALMENT
The advent of the cellular and satellite telephones, with
frequency-hopping capabilities, the Internet and Internet telephony, the various Internet
communications software such as the "Instant Messenger", the "ICQ"
("I Seek You") etc, the chat rooms and chat clubs, the bulletin boards etc, the
mushrooming of cyber cafes and the increasingly easy availability in the market place of
sophisticated encryption devices, whose sale till some years ago was restricted only to
governmental agencies, have placed in the hands of terrorists and their State-sponsors
hitherto unimaginable means of fast and reliable communications. Many of the Internet
communications software can be downloaded free of cost by anyone with Internet access.
The new secure comunications tools have greatly transformed the
terrorists' tradecraft and enabled them to plan and carry out operations, to network with
other similar-minded terrorist groups and pick each other's brains, to expand their
knowledge and expertise and to constantly interact with their State-sponsors through cyber
space while reducing drastically the need for trans-border travel and for personal
meetings.
In 1995-96, one had seen the difficulties faced by Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in controlling terrorism by the Mohajir Qaumi Movement
(MQM), as it was then known, due to its extensive use of the cellular telephones and also
how the ban imposed by the Pakistani authorities on the use of cellular telephones in
Karachi facilitated the counter-terrorism task of their security agencies and led to the
arrests of a large number of the terrorists.
Similarly, in France, the difficulties faced by the French
security agencies in dismantling the set-up of the Algerian Islamic extremist groups
operating from French territory due to their use of the Internet for communications
purposes could be overcome only when one of the terrorists based in the UK, in violation
of the instructions to use only the Internet, made an ordinary telephone call to his
Paris-based leader from a public telephone booth.
While the terrorists have kept pace with the fast-changing
communications technologies, laws, law-makers, and advocates of human rights and the right
of privacy have shown little understanding of the difficulties faced by the security
agencies due to this and of the consequent need to constantly update the laws to empower
the agencies to counter effectively the newly-acquired capabilities of the terrorists.
Not only that. They have unwittingly further facilitated the
tasks of the terrorists by opposing any restrictions on the sale of sophisticated
encryption technologies to the public on the ground that such technologies are required by
business houses in the fast expanding domain of e-commerce.
The reluctance of the State and society to adequately empower the
security agencies has thus forced upon the latter the unenviable, asymmetrical task of
countering terrorists, who use the communications technologies of the new millennium, with
laws, which are often of pre-world war, if not even older, vintage.
USE OF EXPLOSIVES
The impact of modern technologies on the use of explosive devices
has been both positive and negative. The positive impact has been due to the restrictions
on the manufacture of low-density, almost odourless explosives such as the Semtex which
are not easily detectable by mechanical detectors and sniffer dogs, the
internationally-agreed requirement of using distinct coloured markers (taggants) in the
explosives to enable easy identification of the place of manufacture, the improvement in
the quality and performance of mechanical detectors and stricter monitoring of the sale
and transport of explosives.
However, the resulting difficulties have been sought to be
overcome by the terrorists by increasingly using commonly-available dual-purpose materials
such as nitrate fertilisers, explosives used for quarrying purposes etc, the procurement
of which does not normally attract the suspicion of the security agencies. Thus, the Al
Ummah of Tamil Nadu and the LTTE have mostly been using such dual-purpose materials.
The negative impact (from the point of view of the security
agencies) has been due to the advent of gadgets such as the remote controls of every
day-use electronic equipment, the cordeless telephones etc which can also be used for the
remote-controlled activation of IEDs and of gadgets such as the electronic agenda which
can be used for precision timing of explosions not only hours, but also even weeks and
months in advance.
The new methods of having explosives carried by the suicide
bombers, without detection by the security agencies, to the proximity of the targeted
victim or structure have been due more to their ability to innovate and improvise than due
to any new technologies. Thus, when the security agencies adopted appropriate counter
tactics to deal with explosives carried by the suicide bombers in motor vehicles, as by
the West Asian terrorist groups, or in boats, as by the LTTE, the latter started using
suicide volunteers for carrying the explosives in their person.
Now finding that the security agencies are more alert to the
possible presence of a suicide bomber carrying the explosive device in his or her person,
the LTTE is believed to be experimenting with the possibility of having the explosives
carried by a suicide bomber on a microlite aircraft, which could be made to crash in the
vicinity of the targeted victim or structure, thereby setting off a major explosion.
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE (PSYWAR)
The use of Psywar techniques to discredit a State, its
Government, security forces and agencies through skilful use of the printed and electronic
media was first perfected by the intelligence agencies of the US and other Western
countries for destabilising the erstwhile USSR and other East European countries. These
techniques were also used by the intelligence agencies of the USSR, China and other
Communist countries for backing the communist insurgencies in many countries, including
India.
The Internet and the World-Wide Web have now been added to the
West's psywar repertoire and are being increasingly used to promote disaffection against
the Governments of China, North Korea and Vietnam.
These techniques, thus initially perfected for use by one State
against its national adversary, and the medium for the employment of such techniques have
now become available for use by terrorist and insurgent organisations for exploitation
against their targeted State and its governmental agencies, at an affordable cost.
The psywar repertoire of terrorist organisations has consequently
expanded from printed publications and pamphlets to clandestine radio and TV stations (eg
the LTTE), Web sites etc. Many of the Kashmiri and North-Eastern extremist organisations
and the Islamic Jihadi organisations such as the Lashkar-e-Toiba now have their own Web
sites for propaganda against the Government of India.
Many companies such as the Netscape.com, the Geocities.com, the
Xoom. Com etc provide free of cost not only unlimited Web space, which could be misused
for such propaganda, but also online training and tools for the construction and
maintenance of Web sites.
Not only that. Terrorist organisations have now acquired, on
their own or through mercenary hackers, a capability for hacking into governmental Web
sites and destroying or distorting the efforts of the governmental agencies to correct
their baseless propaganda. There has been a number of instances of Kashmiri terrorist
organisations successfully hacking into the Web sites of the governmental agencies, the
most notable of them being their success in capturing for 24 hours the Indian Army's
Kashmir Web site in October, 1998.
In the absence of appropriate national and international laws to
prevent such misuse of the cyber space for psywar activities directed against a State, the
only weapon available to the governmental agencies is a similar capability to hack into
and destroy the Web sites of these organisations and disrupt their misuse of the Internet
through appropriate covert actions in cyber space.
Before discussing the possible future scenarios in respect of new
technologies as yet untried by terrorists, it would be in order to pose the question: To
what extent the difficulties faced by Indian security agencies till now in their
counter-terrorism operations were due to the new technologies and to what extent these
were due to their inadequacies or negligence?
Apart from the usual incidents of terrorism, there have been the
following six major incidents which had a significant impact on public perceptions
regarding the respective capabilities of the terrorists and the security agencies:
* First, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi by the LTTE in
May 1991. The success of the LTTE's first suicide operation in Indian territory was not
entirely due to its using this new MO, as has often been claimed by our political
leadership and security agencies. The LTTE's success was made possible largely by the
utter negligence of those sections of the security agencies, which were responsible for
access control. The almost total absence of normal security controls such as the effective
use of metal detectors, frisking and verifying the identities of those allowed in the
vicinity of Rajiv Gandhi contributed to the LTTE's success.
* Second, the Mumbai blasts of March 1993. The explosives,
detonators and chemical timers used by the terrorists were of the Afghan war vintage, the
like of which had previously been used in Punjab, New Delhi and elsewhere. The innovations
used by the terrorists were more in their careful selection of the targets and in their
use of large quantities of explosives to cause the maximum physical damage to buildings.
Their principal aim was to destroy or damage carefully selected units of Mumbai's economic
infrastructure such as the local Stock Exchange, a five-star hotel, an airline office etc.
The human casualties were collateral and not the principal aim of their operation. Since
1991, there had been reliable intelligence reports of the ISI pressurising the Indian
terrorist groups to attack key economic targets such as the off-shore oil facilities in
Bombay High etc, but the targets actually chosen by them had not figured in the
intelligence reports. However, the interrogation report of Lal Singh, alias Manjit Singh,
of the International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF), Canada, arrested by the Gujarat Police
in July, 1992, had indicated that the ISI had sent him to Chennai to examine the
possibility of organising an explosion at the local Stock Exchange. Before the Mumbai
blasts, the terrorists involved had been preparing themselves for weeks by recruiting
people in the underworld and sending them to Pakistan via Dubai for training, smuggling in
explosives from Karachi and bringing them to Mumbai for storage. The security agencies had
no inkling of the plans, recruitment and training. There were allegations that some
sections of the coastal population and even the bureacracy responsible for preventing
smuggling had an inkling of the suspicious goings-on in those areas where the explosives
brought by boats were landed, but they did not alert the local police or other security
agencies. Thus, the Mumbai blasts could not be blamed entirely on technologies. Failure of
intelligence, inadequate analysis of even the available intelligence and the failure of
integrity on the part of those who failed to alert the security agencies made the
terrorists' success possible.
* Third, the Purulia air-drop of arms and ammunition for
unidentified terrorists in December, 1995. Clandestine air-drops had been used by the
Chinese intelligence to supply arms and ammunition to the North-Eastern insurgent groups
in the 1950s and the 1960s. As such, this MO was nothing new, but the area chosen---in the
heart of central India, away from the remote and inaccessible border regions---was. The
pilot hired by the arms suppliers, who is a retired officer of the British Air Force, had
reportedly kept the British Defence Ministry informed of the approach made to him and of
the details of the area where the air-drops were to take place. As confirmed in public by
the then British Home Secretary during a subsequent visit to New Delhi, this information
was promptly passed on to the Indian intelligence through the British Home Office. The
normal response of any professional counter-terrorism agency, on the receipt of such
precise information, would have been to organise a trap, in co-operation with the pilot
who had reportedly volunteered the information, for catching the terrorists on the ground
while they were collecting the arms and ammunition after the air-drop. Till now, no
satisfactory explanation has been forthcoming from the security agencies as to why this
was not done.
* Fourth, the Kargil invasion of 1999 when the Pakistan
army, helped by groups of Islamic jihadi terrorists, close to Osama bin Laden, occupied
the ridges in this region by taking advantage of the absence of Indian army posts during
winter. The report of the Kargil Review Committee, which enquired into how this happened,
has not yet been released to the public and, as such, one does not know its conclusions.
But, from available reports, one could reasonably surmise that the Kargil surprise was
partly due to the lack of adequate attention by the intelligence agencies to this
sensitive sector and partly due to their failure to use even the equipment and
technologies already available to them for aerial surveillance.
* Fifth, the post-Kargil terrorist incidents in Kashmir,
many of which involved penetration of supposedly high security areas by suicide groups of
Islamic jihadi mercenaries from Pakistan. It would be incorrect to attribute these
terrorists' successes to any new technological or other prowess acquired by them. These
seem to have been mainly due to poor physical security in sensitive areas.
* Sixth, the hijacking of the Indian Airlines aircraft to
Kandahar in December, 1999. This was pure and simple due to intelligence failure at Mumbai
from where the HUM terrorists planned this operation and total lack of even rudimentary
physical security at the Kathmandu airport where the hijackers boarded the plane.
It would be evident from the above that the major successes
scored by terrorist groups in India in recent years were as much, if not more, due to the
inadequacies of the security agencies, even in respect of the implementation of
rudimentary physical and infrastructure security precautions, as to any new prowess of the
terrorists derived from modern technologies.
POTENTIALLY CATASTROPHIC SCENARIOS
Security agencies all over the world have been concerned over the
prospects of the following three potentially catastrophic future scenarios due to the
impact of new technologies on terrorism. Some experts also refer to them as new or
catastrophic terrorism.
* First, the use of or threat to use weapons of mass
disruption to damage or destroy the national security infrastructure such as civil or
military nuclear and missile-launching installations, economic infrastructure such as
banking and other financial institutions, civil aviation and other means of transport,
energy sources such as oil producing, refining and distributing networks and power
stations, water supply installations etc and the communications infrastructure.
* Second, the use of or threat to use weapons of mass
destruction such as nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
* Third, seizing control of sensitive installations such as
nuclear reactors and using them as bargaining counters to force the State to concede their
demands.
WEAPONS OF MASS DISRUPTION
The till now known weapons of mass disruption are hacking and the
computer virus as a stealth weapon and there have been many reported instances of the use
of these weapons by cyber-vandals, cyber-anarchists and other cyber-criminals for
deliberate disruption, but not yet by cyber-terrorists though, as already mentioned above,
there have been instances of cyber attacks carried out by ISI-supported Kashmiri
extremists against the Web sites of the army and other agencies of the Govt. of India.
The dangers from these weapons are enhanced due to the following
factors:
* The easy availability of the tools of mass disruption in
various Web sites free of cost.
* The easy availability of expertise in various chat rooms
devoted to computers and hacking.
* The ease with which large-scale attacks such as the
recently-witnessed distributed denial of service attacks against Yahoo and others can be
carried out through programmes and commands planted in the computers and servers of third
parties without their knowledge.
* The likely emergence of hackers as the mercenaries of the
new terrorism, offering their services to any terrorist group for a price.
* The facility of carrying out cyber acts of terrorism from safe
sanctuaries, without having to cross international borders.
* The likely use of hackers and terrorists with expertise in
hacking by adversary States, thereby giving rise to State-sponsorship of cyber-terrorism.
It would be reasonable to anticipate that it is only a question
of time before terrorist groups, acting independently or at the sponsorship of an
adversary State, start experimenting with cyber terrorism. It is, therefore, necessary
that the State remains well prepared to deal with such threats. Such preparations would
include the enactment of necessary laws to empower the security agencies, the creation of
the necessary intelligence collection capability, the setting up of special
cyber-terrorism prevention cells and special cyber-terrorism crisis management drills,
periodic rehearsals of such drills to locate and remove weak points, the setting-up of
computer security and sensitive infrastructure security cells etc.
If one goes by published reports, our response to this danger has
been tardy as could be seen from the fact that we seem to be at least a decade behind the
developed countries even in the enactment of necessary legislation. The recent Kandahar
hijacking episode brought out how our crisis management mechanism even in respect of a
conventional terrorist tactic such as plane hijacking was found wanting and it is
disconcerting to think that we may not have started thinking of the techniques of crisis
management in case of cyber-terrorism.
WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
The use of the sarin gas in Tokyo in 1995 by the Om Shinrikiyo,
which is more a religious cult than a terrorist group, underlined the dangers of terrorist
groups resorting to these weapons in future. In an interview to the American
"TIME"magazine (January 11) last year, bin Laden had spoken of his interest in
the procurement of nuclear and chemical weapons. He said: "Acquiring weapons for the
defence of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I
thank God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons, I am carrying
out a duty. It would be a sin for Muslims not to try to possess the weapons that would
prevent the infidels from inflicting harm on Muslims." One should not, therefore,
rule out the possibility of other terrorist groups having a similar interest in the
procurement of these weapons.
If any weapon of mass destruction falls into the hands of a
terrorist group, the State and its security agencies may find themselves helpless in
countering any threat by them to use the weapons. Prevention of the possibility of such
weapons falling into the hands of terrorist groups is, therefore, of the utmost importance
and this would call for special attention to strengthening our intelligence collection
capability.
The State and its security agencies have also to be clear in
their minds as to what counter-terrorism options would be available to them in the event
of the preventive measures failing and when and how to exercise those options.
SEIZING CONTROL OF SENSITIVE INSTALLATIONS
In 1995, the Chechen terrorists were reported to have threatened
to seize control of nuclear reactors and use them as a bargaining counter with the Russian
State. The Russian authorities took these threats seriously and strengthened
infrastructure security in all their nuclear installations.
The ease with which Islamic terrorist groups have been
penetrating supposedly high security areas in Kashmir speaks disconcertingly of the poor
state of our infrastrcture and physical security. It is time to devote serious attention
to this aspect and make a detailed review of infrastructure security and initiate measures
to strengthen it in all sensitive installations.
CONCLUSION
Security agencies cannot prevent, control or eliminate terrorism
as a phenomenon. This can be done only by the political leadership through timely
attention to removing the legitimate grievances of alienated sections of the society,
particularly the religious and ethnic minorities, sensitivity to public opinion and
providing the alienated sections with legitimate means of ventilating their grievances
against the State and having them redressed so that they do not feel the need to resort to
violence for this purpose.
However, it is the responsibility of the security agencies to
prevent and control individual acts of terrorism, weaken and neutralise the capability of
terrorist organisations to indulge in acts of terrorism and bring the force of the law to
bear on those who, despite the attempts of the political leadership to find a reasonable
solution to their grievances, insist on continuing on the path of terrorism.
How well the security agencies discharge this responsibility
depends on:
* Timely intelligence. Intelligence collection in respect
of terrorism is particularly difficult as it calls for the penetration of not only the
terrorist organisations, but also the minds of individual terrorists. Despite this, ways
have to be found for improving the intelligence collection capability.
* Timely analysis of available intelligence and assessment
and anticipation of likely threats.
* Constantly updated laws to empower the security agencies
to deal with new situations.
* Constantly updated physical and infrastructure security
arrangements.
* Strict enforcement of the laid-down security
arrangements.
* Constantly updated and rehearsed crisis management drills
to deal with incidents of terrorism, if the preventive measures fail.
* A clinically objective critical analysis of all major
terrorist incidents to identify personal and systemic inadequacies and follow-up actions
to enforce accountability and corrective actions.
Modern technologies have definitely added to the difficulties of
the security agencies and, to be able to deal with them, security agencies have to show an
ability to always keep one step ahead of the terrorists in familiarising themselves with
the impact of modern technologies on terrorism and by keeping themselves ready with
workable counter tactics or strategy before the terrorists start using these technologies,
instead of letting themselves be caught by surprise and thinking of the options available
only after a crisis or disaster confronts them face to face or has taken place.
B.RAMAN
(17-2-00)
(The writer is Additional Secretary (retd), Cabinet
Secretariat, Govt. of India,and, presently, Director, Institute for Topical Studies,
Chennai.
E-mail:corde@vsnl.com).
