A look at the business plan of terror
Mumbai and Oslo are two very different cities. Apart from being the financial centre and the international face of their respective countries, they have little in common. Mumbai is a city of nearly 20 million people, where billionaires vie with some of the world’s poorest people for potholed road space. The Norwegian capital is a tiny city with less than one-tenth the people in Mumbai, low-rise buildings and world-class infrastructure where most places can be reached on a bicycle.
More starkly, Mumbai lives with terror every day. In the past two decades, it has lost at least 726 lives to bomb blasts and shoot-outs. Oslo is an incredibly safe city where just one life was lost to terrorism in four decades.
But this July, the two cities were united in grief. Even before the wounds of the November 26, 2008, attacks could heal, home-grown terrorists snuffed out 23 lives in three bomb attacks in some of Mumbai’s most crowded places. Within days, Norway was shaken by the rampage of a mad man whose twin attacks killed 91 people.
Suddenly, the world seems more dangerous than ever before. Will this ever stop? Is there no place safe from terror anymore? How did all the world’s greatest armies and sophisticated police forces fail to stop the maniacs? Where did all the trillions of dollars earmarked for security go?
And finally, have we lost the war on terror?
The answers lie somewhere in the collective experience of the global society from the Americas to Europe to Asia, as we endure terror attacks each year. Surprisingly, they are not where we currently look for them.
Just as terrorism is a global phenomenon, the forces that lead to its rise and fall also work across boundaries. It is possible not only to codify these ‘laws of physics’ that define the world of terror, but also use them to predict and prevent future attacks.
Strategic Foresight Group (SFG), a Mumbai-based think tank I head, has sifted through data on virtually every terrorist group in the world and studied them for common patterns, motives and strategies.
Our findings have demolished some of the common myths about terrorism that largely dictate not only the response of the common people but also the often fruitless counter-terrorism measures of nations. In place of these old shibboleths, our research has thrown up at least 10 edicts that govern the way terrorism really operates, irrespective of its labels.
An understanding of these fundamental laws is the first step to ending terrorism.
Statutory Warning: Reading this essay any further could be injurious to your bigotry. Proceed only if you can handle the truth.
In the case of LTTE, Prabhakaran’s Tamil nationalism was a very convenient nationalism. It wasn’t an ideology that made him truly believe in Tamil welfare. Just as he was involved in killing Sinhalas, he was also involved in killing Tamil leaders who believed in devolution instead of complete separation. He also killed Tamil boys who did not join the LTTE.
Welcome to the international corporation called the Lashkar-e-Toiba.
(This story appears in the 12 August, 2011 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)