NEW DELHI, July 5 (UPI) -- Three key questions which remain unanswered nine months into the war on terrorism are: What is terrorism? Who are terrorists? And what is the appropriate calibrated response to different levels of terrorism?
All three questions are well illustrated by the war against terrorism in Kashmir.
First, what is terrorism? Terrorism, we are told, is terrorism, easily recognized, readily understood, and, therefore, in no need of any extended exegesis. Moreover, we are told, nothing justifies terrorism, and anyone resorting to terrorism will be dealt with as severely as were the al Qaida and their state sponsors, the Taliban, in Afghanistan.
The government of India believed this. Hence, its unstinted support, on the morrow of the Sept. 11 terror attacks in New York City and Washington. However, nine months on, no one in India, not even the most naive sponsors of an alliance with the West, believes that the international community regards terrorism in Kashmir as indistinguishable from the terrorism that killed an estimated 2,800 Americans in the destruction of the Twin Towers.
There are double standards in operation. Terrorism was immediately recognized when it was the United States under attack. But when it comes to the rest of the world, terrorism is recognized only in its overall context. The answer is, therefore, sought not in terms of a decisive, definitive riposte to terrorism but in holistically examining all dimensions of the issue.
Pakistan has for more than 50 years sponsored terrorism in the Kashmir valley on the grounds that it disputes the legal validity of the Jammu and Kashmir maharajah's accession to India.
Kashmir, according to Pakistan, is the "unfinished business" of the partition of the old British Raj in 1947.
When India took the question of Pakistan's cross-border terrorism to the United Nations on New Year's Day 1948, the United Nations agreed with Pakistan that terrorism was not the issue, the issue of accession was.
Has anything changed in this regard since Sept. 11, 2001? Indeed, has anything changed since Pakistan-based terrorists, after Sept. 11, attempted to blow up the Jammu and Kashmir legislature building on Oct. 1, 2001, and to massacre members of the the Indian Parliament on Dec. 13?
Does not the fact that the world's principal state sponsor of terrorism is also the international community's principal ally in the war on terrorism make that an impossible conundrum to untangle?
In the absence of an unambiguous definition of terrorism which would catalyze international action as soon as terrorism occurs, such a definition remains the sine qua non of converting the war on Osama bin Laden into a general global war on terrorism.
The litmus test for the South Asian sub-continent is Kashmir. With levels of terrorism escalating in the Kashmir valley post-Sept. 11, rather than falling, notwithstanding the fine words we heard from President Pervez Musharraf on Jan. 12, 2002, India would like to know just which war against whose terrorism the international community is engaged in
fighting.
My second question: Who are terrorists? With terrorism remaining undefined, the identification of terrorists remains a matter of governmental whim and fancy.
The United States did not wait to check how far the Taliban government was involved with the Sept. 11 al Qaida attack on the United States before launching the military action which drove the Taliban government from Afghanistan. But the same U.S. government is unwilling, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence available with it, to declare Pakistan a terrorist state and take action accordingly.
So, while we fight the West's war in Afghanistan, is the West ready to fight our war in Kashmir? True, the West has now agreed, after all these years, that terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir is unacceptable; yet, it is not willing to define this terrorism because it would then be obliged to make the state sponsors of such terrorism pay the price of their infamy.
My third question is: What is the international norm for calibrating the response to different levels of terrorism?
Of course, there is none. But if no norm exists, clearly there is no global war on terrorism, just the strong clobbering the weak while restraining the weak from clobbering each other.
The al Qaida attack of Sept. 11 sparked unrestrained military retaliation by the strongest military power on the weakest. We in the Indian sub-continent, on the other hand, are urged to stay our hands. For my part, I am delighted to stay my hand because I do not believe war would solve anything between India and Pakistan.
But I do find it rich that those who displayed no restraint last November are the very ones counseling restraint on others now. What is sauce for the goose is obviously not curry for the gander! There cannot be a global war on terrorism unless standards for reaction and standards of reaction are more or less the same for all.
That not being feasible in this unequal world where the dominant powers secure the sanction of the dominated to pursue their quest for dominance, I conclude that there is no global war on terrorism, it is each for himself.
We live in a world of cynical realpolitik in which the use of force to counter terrorism is not related to any general body of accepted principle but determined by the degree of one's outrage and one's capacity to do what one can about it. That is all.
Mani Shankar Aiyar is a member of the Indian Parliament representing the Congress Party.
