Daily Times

Terrorism has once again been the major topic in public discourse in recent weeks. One year ago, 144 lives were lost in Peshawar’s Army Public School (APS) massacre of December 16, 2014, the deadliest attack in Pakistan’s history. On week ago, Los Angeles schools were closed due to a threat emailed to the school district, two weeks after the deadly attacks in California. The shutdown closed more than 1,000 schools attended by 640,000 students across the city. The threat was later deemed a hoax. On the same day, officials in New York received a similar message but concluded it was likely a hoax. Schools there, however, remained open. The shutdown in LA underscores the difficulties counter-terrorist forces face in responding to threats amid fresh fears of terrorism. The growing threat of terrorism is succeeding in its mean effort to force millions to change their daily patterns out of fear. Two terror attacks thousands of miles apart this week highlight the multiple facets of terrorism and the global challenges involved.

Even though there did appear to be no explosives-laden backpacks and no mysterious packages seen in the LA school terror incident it was not dissimilar to the fear witnessed by the living child survivors of the APS school massacre. What matters most is the similarity in the perception of those threats that led to demonstrate what it means to be terrorised?

Children and schools in Pakistan receive threats all the time. But with the San Bernardino shootings still a vivid memory and with a somewhat more detailed threat at hand, Los Angeles district officials believed they had little choice but to close the schools. Had anything happened to a student or teacher, the horror would have been unspeakable, a wound from which it would be hard to recover. It is easy to understand why the LA district administration erred on the side of safety.

The costs of doing this are heavy, though. Thousands upon thousands of children get forced to change their lives and plans; chances are that many of them will not recover from the stress, anxiety and the fear that it may generate. Poor families in Pakistan can ill afford education anyway and this causes even more serious problems when they cannot send their children to school if they also have to worry about the additional stress of safety in schools. Poor education, poverty and unemployment have all been well reported as known risk factors that can breed terrorism.

This is what terrorism does. It strikes such fear into us that a threatening email can force a change in our way of life and put reasonable doubts among critics to debate the legitimacy of the threat response. Terrorism aims to inflict not just death and injury but deep rooted splitting that ripples through society long after the attacks are over. But what options do we as a society have, especially when the possible victims are children? Perhaps if the Malala Yousafzai and APS attacks had not occurred then the threat response to schools in Pakistan would have been easier to dismiss. But being more relaxed a year from now could be an even bigger mistake; people with ideologically inspired evil on their minds do not tend to offer warnings.

What new wisdom can the Saudi-led military alliance for terrorism carry into the future? The coalition may serve as a platform for security cooperation, including provision of training, equipment and troops, and involvement of religious scholars for dealing with extremism. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al Jubeir did say that the participating countries would themselves decide about the extent of their participation. US State Department spokesman John Kirby said those 34 nations were already part of the 65-plus-member coalition against Islamic State (IS). Now would it be a parallel alliance or will this alliance work with the US-led international coalition? This is something worth questioning.

On a bigger level, it is important to remember that this threat did not just target the children in Peshawar and in Los Angeles. It targeted everyone who sends children off to school each day with the general sense that those children will be safe there. But then, how strongly are we willing to react to the new fear that our children’s lives might not be as secure as they had seemed? Security checks at every school before each school day? Sure, the threat this time in LA’s school district may have been unfounded but what about next time? This is perhaps the most insidious part of this terrorist threat: the strangling of liberty. Fear is dangerously powerful and can quickly become corrosive. Overreaction certainly plays into the hands of the terrorists, giving them exactly what they want in response to fear. But then no wants to be wrong and cannot afford to take the safety of children for granted either.

There are no easy answers. But as Pakistan engages with other counterparts in their alliance against terrorism, it has to be acknowledged that standing firm against terrorism requires deeds, not just words.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com