By Ambika Behal
UPI Correspondent
Published May 26, 2006
NEW DELHI — India’s former top cop says the United States has played into the hands of Islamist terrorists.
The relative inexperience of the United States in world politics led it to encourage Islamist fundamentalist ideologies before Sept. 11, 2001 and is still unable to gain the upper hand against the terrorism that resulted, said Kanwar Pall Singh Gill, the man widely known as India’s “Super Cop.”
“When America went into this ‘jihad’ mode in Afghanistan [when the Reagan administration supported Islamist mujahedeen guerrillas against the Soviet Red Army], it co-opted Muslim leadership almost all over the globe — and it encouraged fundamentalism,” said Gill, India’s former director general of police most famous for his successes in rooting out militant Sikh separatists from the Sikh-majority state of Punjab in the early 1990s.
Known for what is called his “bullet-for-bullet” approach to counter-insurgency, Gill told United Press International that the approach of other Western nations has also been too lax. “They could not justify Palestinian terrorism all these years and then expect Muslims to understand that terrorism is a bad thing,” he said.
The recent history of terrorism — including the events of Sept. 11, 2001 — goes back to the creation of radical Islamic forces which continue to operate today, since terrorism was used to overthrow the Soviet-backed regime in Afghanistan and expel the Soviet military, said Gill.
“Historically, Muslims felt that at one time they had dominated the whole world and they had a dream of world domination,” Gill said. When the Taliban regime took over Afghanistan, “their objective was very clear — a regime based on traditional Muslim values,” Gill said. At that time, “Americans were very appreciative with what the Taliban was doing,” he added.
“Sept. 11, 2001 was an act of war that went beyond the bounds of terrorism,” said Gill. He pointed out that among the first people to condemn it were Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
Despite the declaration by the United States of a war against terrorism, Gill said the number of U.S.-based Web sites supporting Indian extremists and insurgents like the Maoist Naxalites continues to be too large.
America’s post-Afghanistan policy was “not worked out properly,” he said, attributing that to America’s relative youth in terms of having been active in world politics only since the 1940s, “which is too little time to gather the experience.”
Regarding the situation in Iraq at present, “America should have done what the British did to India — divide and quit,” he said. “After all, there was no Iraq until relatively recently, the last 100 years or so.”
Recently pulled out of retirement to assist in quelling Naxalite insurgents in India’s central state of Chhattisgarh, Gill is president of the New Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management and publisher of the Faultlines Journal: Writings on Conflict and Resolution.
Asked if he believes some of his strategies developed in India could be used in Iraq, he said “all situations are different, over a period of time … imperatives change, there have to be responses which are tailored to the needs of the local situation — previous experience is useful, but not to that extent.”
India has dealt with terrorism for many years, but the country has proved able to absorb attacks without the stability of the government being threatened.
“The more you feed into the hysteria of the response, the more vulnerable you are as a society,” said Ajai Sahni, executive director of the institute and editor of Faultlines.
“If terrorism wins, it is by default,” he said.
Sept. 11, 2001 altered the geopolitical balance in which “suddenly America was not the impenetrable fortress,” he said. “You must see that American power is being eroded; there is an enormous loss of domestic legitimacy.”
According to Sahni, the United States has shown itself to be a society partly vulnerable to terror. “Here, a bomb goes off, and nobody flinches,” he said. “The worst thing you can do to a terrorist is treat his killings as just another incident.”
With controversy over the way forward in Iraq and the ever-rising death toll among U.S. troops in the news, Sahni also believes that the American way of valuing each and every life has no greater importance in a peaceful society, but “in a world of war, nothing can be more paralyzing.”
Yet defeat is going to be a difficult assessment to make. “The world has changed since Vietnam,” Sahni said. “Then you could pull out and forget, but if you pull out of Iraq now, terrorism will follow you in your baggage.”
Valuable time for action to control terrorism and address its causes is being lost, he said.
“Within 20 years you will have a demand for an Islamist republic in the heart of Europe,” Gill said in the late 1990s.
“I believe this is happening; it should be treated as a human issue without ignoring the future potential for violent ideological movements,” said Sahni. “The initiative remains in the hands of the terrorists.”
