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Though Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton laid out some basic policy positions in her confirmation hearings – the Obama administration will engage directly with Iran and will close Guantanamo, for example – the details of how the administration will pursue these objectives remain unclear.
Following a series of deadly domestic terrorist attacks in 2003, the government of Saudi Arabia began an ambitious and wide-ranging counterterrorism effort. In addition to traditional security and law enforcement efforts to kill and capture terrorists, a parallel strategy was launched to combat the ideological justifications for violent extremism within the kingdom.
The civilian government in Pakistan faces hard choices in its response to the Mumbai attacks. Action against the groups responsible for the violence will overturn traditional strategy that considers these groups national security ‘assets’ against India. There is also the danger of opening up another battle front for an army already conducting counter-terrorism operations on its western border.
Despite the tangled history of India and Pakistan, the latest terrorist attacks in Mumbai require the world to take a fresh look at the nature of the terrorist threat. Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group which carried out the attacks, is a global threat, seeking to promote an Islamic Caliphate by breaking up India and destroying confidence in stable democracies.
The Mumbai attacks demonstrate that terrorism demands a global response. The best way to address militant groups operating outside Pakistani state control is to promote stable democracy and increased state capacity so the government can dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism in under-governed parts of the country – a project in which both India and the international community have a stake.
Preventing an Indian-Pakistani war, investigating the LeT, and Indian law and order in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, with Ashley J. Tellis.
The objective of Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group which carried out the Mumbai attacks, is global jihad. They are second only to al-Qaeda as a terrorist group of global reach.
Just as Guantánamo's legal and geographic isolation from the United States denies its prisoners recourse to the American judicial system, it also denies its military administrators the benefits of the most current research on how to de-radicalize prisoners and reintegrate them into society.
Pakistan may be forfeiting its sovereignty if it is incapable of cracking down on militants like those that launched the recent Mumbai attacks. As it appears increasingly unlikely that the Pakistani civilian government will be able to crack down effectively, the international community should intervene to protect Pakistan’s neighbors from the threat posed by Pakistani-based terrorists.
Following the Pakistani terrorist attacks in Mumbai, the international community should respond by declaring that parts of Pakistan have become ungovernable and a menace to international security. This violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty will begin to show the world that states that harbor terrorists cannot take their sovereign rights for granted — these rights need to be earned.
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