TERROR is tearing South Asia apart and hurting where it hurts most. Whether it is Pakistan or India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or Afghanistan, it is social fabric and economy is under brutal strain. In many other parts of the world this scourge is eating away innocent lives, disrupting economies, destroying social cohesion and creating unprecedented security. If we look at the Stare laws and harsh measure, resulting at times into State terrorism, the world looks least civilised. There are loud protests from all sides.

State was essentially created to secure life and regulate economic, social activities and advance human development. If it can not fulfill the basic tenets despite the citizens making all sacrifices, what good is this basic idea of the State? If people are losing faith in the capability of the State, it is just natural. If they seek sterner actions to meet the menace, they are not wrong.

Yet in the whole debate essentials are being lost. Intelligence gathering networks, policing and violence and actionable laws would always help. But these measures shall never solve the real problem; why young people who should love good life and look towards future should become suicide bombers and take innocent lives.

Suicide bombing, mapped out by the non-state actor, a renegade faction, secessionists or even nation-states, is sometimes written off as futile and incomprehensible. As one serious study after study pointed out there is condition of grave injustice or perceived injustice that often to alienation, forcing communities and individuals or even insecure nation states to terrorism. It is not an irrational exercise or mindless action. The question really is political; hence seeking solutions outside the realm of politics is a pointless exercise.

University of Chicago’s political scientist Robert Pape argues that suicide bombing contains a strategic logic wherein the perpetrators inflict sustained, brutal costs upon the State so as to compel it to re-consider its policy. In his insightful work, Dying to Win, Pape — based on a universal database of attacks from 1980-2003 — shows suicide bombings are motivated more by limited geo-strategic objectives than exclusively religious ones. Religious doctrine is mangled to sanctify the purely political objectives of the planners and to promise salvation for their pawn.

One classic example could be the response America has provided to 9/11 bombing in New York and Washington by invading Iraq and Afghanistan [with little world support for oil also] and letting its economy bleed. The Americans only prove Osama bin Laden right who had in his 2005 tapes projected that with a little effort they could hurt the Americans and let them bleed.

The bailout package to reset the financial markets sought by President Bush is $700 billion and it is hard not to notice that this sum closely resembles the amount that the United States has spent thus far in Iraq. This is Osama bin Laden's very strategy: entangling the United States abroad and plunging the country into economic turmoil. In 2004, he remarked that his "bleed-until-bankruptcy" plan was seeing "evidence of the success." Real losers are the American people and their economy.

The present pattern of suicide bombings in India and Pakistan suggests a coordinated effort at galvanising the shifting forces to achieve a certain objective. The overarching one in Pakistan is to enable the periodic regrouping of Taliban remnants against the NATO forces in Afghanistan. An accommodating western border and imprudent neo- conservative policies having hurt tribal pride and sub-nationalism have forced the locals to rally behind their renegade Pashtun kin and their foreign financiers. If they succeed, they would turn Pakistan and Afghanistan into badland of Islamic fundamentalism of the medieval period. The State actors by their faulty policies and faulty ideas of meeting this challenge by mere force are only helping these elements.

In India, Gujarat riots, and the total lack of understanding at the policy level and at the level of the police besides discrimination in social and economic activity has caused immense agony to the Muslims and the prolonged Kashmir imbroglio has added to the perceived injustice. India besides what it gets from Pakistan Taliban, ISI operatives has now home grown terrorists or militants whatever one wishes to call them. Naxalites are also born of out the same root cause, largely economic inequalities and political injustice.

William Safire in his column in the New York Times wrote way back in 2001, ‘the pride and joy of Arafat’s arsenal is a weapon of mass terror that has no known defense: the human missile’. But one might wonder why the bombers in India or Pakistan and other parts are destroying their own country?

The standard answer to this is often ‘it is outside elements that are doing this’ and ‘it is the helplessness of the masses that pushes them to throw away their life like this’ or ‘extremist religious views are behind this’. But when the psychology of the bomber is studied, it brings to light a far dodgy mentality. These bombers are less ‘outside elements’ and more of a militia raised at home.

If the State actors are serious to weed out this scourge, they shall have to change policies ands take political initiatives while dealing at the level of the security forces.

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