US and India see terror through different lenses

US president Barack Obama is planning a bigger war-chest, a troops surge and hasn’t wavered from his pledge to take the fight to the Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Obama insists that the safety of “people around the world is at stake” while focusing on al-Qaeda and the Taliban but analysts say India and the US see Islamic terrorism through different lenses.

For most governments, the Islamic terrorism issue is much like the story of the six blind men and the elephant: different pieces, but no coherent overall picture. For some, it’s like the sides of the pachyderm in John Godfrey Saxe’s poem: a wall. For others, it’s like the trunk, snake-like and hard to get a handle on. For yet others, it’s like the elephant’s tail, a rope to bind oneself with. Each thinks of it based on what he feels, but nobody knows there’s an entire elephant in the room.

“Terrorism is not a monolithic thing and not even just limited to Islamic terrorism — there are many other kinds. The US problem is with al-Qaeda. That is why it went into Afghanistan and is concerned about Pakistan’s relationship with the Taliban which supports al-Qaeda. India’s fight with terrorism is a different one,” Mira Kamdar, senior fellow at the World Policy Institute and author of Planet India, told DNA.

Right after the 9/11 terror attacks, US confronted Pakistan with a “with us or against us” ultimatum, which Pakistan accepted. Pakistan joined the US in the fight against extremist Islam, but not as New Delhi would want it. Pakistan was willing to capture and hand over Qaeda militants, who were mostly Arabs, but unwilling to snuff out Pakistani terrorist groups attacking Kashmir. The 26/11 Mumbai attacks are just the most recent example of Pakistan’s long-drawn out “bleed the enemy by a thousand cuts” strategy directed against India.

Everyone may be onto the unofficial ways in which Pakistan uses the Lashkar and Jaish-e-Mohammed to do cross-border Kashmir attacks, but it’s clear India and US face different Islamic extremist threats. Therefore, India doesn’t get a whole lot of help from the US beyond sympathy. The US needs Pakistan too much to fight Qaeda.

“Kashmir is the flashpoint and focus for groups that specifically attack India. They have no connection to the terrorists which targeted the US on 9/11. The nightmare scenario of course, is that the Pakistan-based Islamic terrorist groups that attack India could get connected up with the al-Qaeda. But so far the groups that attack India have Kashmir as their agenda. They don’t attack the US. Al-Qaeda is a kind of equal opportunity terrorist group. It can go after the metro in Madrid as easily as it can go after New York.”

Douglas Paal, vice-president for studies at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he was hesitant to predict India would get a reprieve from Islamic militancy if Obama focused his war on terror on Pakistan’s and Afghanistan. “The terrorists have an interest in diverting Pakistani forces into a confrontation with India. They are playing for the biggest stakes on the globe, which is to turn Pakistan fundamentalist.”