Daily Times

Suicide attacks are the most virulent and horrifying form of terrorism in the world today. The mere rumour of an impending suicide attack can throw thousands of people into panic. Although suicide attacks account for a minority of all terrorist acts, they are responsible for a majority of all terrorism-related casualties, and the rate of attacks is rising rapidly across the globe.

The recent terrorist suicide attack that killed Shuja Khanzada underscores that militant groups are increasingly becoming a source of national insecurity. This and the other recent casualties equally highlight the fact that developing and fragile security control and monitoring are especially vulnerable to myriad terrorist groups and transnational militant and criminal organisations that seek to exploit the limitations in the security sections of weaker or poorly monitored national interests. Advances in both information technology and weapons systems, moreover, have given armed militant groups heretofore unparalleled capabilities, enabling more lethal operational activity as well as recruitment on a provincial and national scale.

The death of the provincial home minister by a suicide attack questions the effect of military interventions on the incidence of suicide attacks. It presents three theoretical explanations. Military interventions may boost the insurgents’ use of suicide attacks by fomenting a ‘cornered to the wall’ backlash that sanctions the use of more extreme and unconventional tactics like suicide attacks providing more and better targets against which suicide attacks can be launched. Secondly, they may promp insurgents to use suicide tactics in order to overcome their power asymmetries and to confront better-defended targets that are enhanced by interventions. Thirdly, it is possible that military interventions with specific features like paramilitary forces in the context of assisting a local government and involving larger numbers of ground troops may boost suicide attacks by tipping the balance of power against insurgents and hardening targets. Regime challengers are, as a result, likely to increase the use of suicide attacks focusing on soft targets.

Another provocative hypothesis proposes that suicide terrorists are especially likely to attack democracies. They do so primarily out of nationalist rather than religious motivations and they target democracies because they perceive democracies to be especially sensitive to suffering casualties.

Those who believe suicide terrorism can be explained by a single political root cause, such as the presence of military forces in the presence of democracy, ignore psychological motivations, including religious inspirations, which can trump rational self-interest to produce dangerous or diseased heroic behaviour in ordinary people. Those who believe that some central organisation such as the old Taliban directs such suicide terrorists ignore the small-group dynamics involving friends and family that form the diaspora cell of brotherhood and camaraderie on which the rising tide of martyrdom actions is based. Finally, those who simply dismiss jihadis as nihilists risk developing policies based on faulty assumptions that seek to challenge deeply held religious beliefs rather than more effectively channel them towards less violent expressions.

There have been numerous calls from both the left and the right to re-engage the region militarily. All political sides agreed to military intervention but are ignoring the root causes of this problem. The interests at stake in Pakistan are not simply humanitarian concerns or preserving state writ but, more fundamentally, the size of the future terrorist threat to the country. Far from hurting the terrorists, it does appear so far that engaging military would put us back on the path of a rising terrorist threat that has taken us over a decade to escape.

The return of terrorist attacks and the subsequent military intervention are, therefore, raising interest on a number of levels. One particular area that the conflict and military intervention illuminates, however, is the way in which constitutional law is subtly adjusting to the new threats posed by armed militant groups and the terrorists operating in the territories that are fragile, notably with regard to the concept of intervention by invitation in an internal armed militant conflict and the concept of implied authorisation for the use of force.

The anatomy of this conflict and the relevant reaction of parliament and the Supreme Court (SC) decision to back the military intervention and evaluation of the violence index in Karachi all demonstrate that the new paradigm of armed conflict ushers in a more permissive view of the legality of the use of military force against non-state armed groups or violent extremist organisations operating in the territories of fragile provinces and ungoverned spaces.

Recent improvement from the security point of view seen in Karachi confirms an analysis of the terrorist conflict and the legal authority asserted by Rangers and the military to legally undergird its intervention in the province. It also undoubtedly explores the contours of the changing national legal landscape and examines relevant provisions of the National Action Plan (NAP), positing that the military intervention represents a subtle shift in constitutional law vis-à-vis military force in counter-terrorism operations. It is therefore relevant that we do not lose sight of the implications of this subtle shift for national counter-terrorism operations when military forces are arrayed against armed militant groups both inside and across border regions.

Many analysts would agree that terrorism caters to the sadistic immoral need of suppressed consciousness and an over-inflated sense of self-entitlement. Do we really understand the causes of today’s suicide terrorism? What else can be done to turn the rising tide of martyrdom? There may be no simple answers to these questions but those who undertake martyrdom actions are not mentally incompetent, hopeless or poor but are educated and successful. They are intelligent, they apply advanced combat techniques and hence the National Counter Terrorism Authority (NACTA) will have to formulate a contingency framework. “Know thine enemy” is not a call for therapy but for a better understanding of who out there is dying to kill and why. Understanding that can help decision makers devise organisational and ideological solutions to defuse the threat of suicide attacks.

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