Washington swoops down

The temptation could be strong to assail America's attacks on terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan as more evidence of American hubri...

The temptation could be strong to assail America8217;s attacks on terrorist camps in Afghanistan and Sudan as more evidence of American hubris and unilateralism. It should be resisted. America8217;s action is a response to a genuine security threat to its nationals all over the world from international terrorist groups. Washington is justified in conveying the message that such acts will not be without reprisal. If proof were needed of the ominous reality of this threat, it has recently been forthcoming in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam. In a fiction-like subversion of the law, moreover, international restraint in the past has had the bizarre consequence of convicted terrorists living free lives while innocent citizens have been at their mercy. The fact of the matter is that every state subject to such threats would like to act in the way America did on Thursday. That only America can do so is because it has the power and the resources. But if its activism can help make the world an unsafe place for terrorists, theinternational community has no reason to complain.

It is best acknowledged at the outset that the American action would have acquired greater legitimacy if Washington had taken the trouble to seek an international mandate for its action. But it is easy to argue that the surprise element, and hence the effectiveness, of its action could thereby have been compromised. The United States in recent years has not exactly had great difficulty in getting the United Nations to rubber-stamp its unilateral initiatives. Strategic reasons rather than anticipation of resistance from the Security Council may well have guided it in not seeking its go-ahead.

From India8217;s point of view, there are several reasons for satisfaction and many points of interest here. America8217;s strike in Afghanistan is a vindication of what the Indian government has asserted for years: that the regions surrounding it are a hotbed of international terrorist activity which constitutes a most intractable security threat to it. America8217;s own experience should make it more sympathetic to Indian reports in the future. If not, it would be interesting to see what great contortions the world8217;s only superpower has to perform to convince the world that terrorists are indeed terrorists when they attack Americans but not when they infiltrate Indian borders to wreak havoc here. The irony is multifarious. This is the region that long swam in CIA money to pump in arms and train men against the erstwhile Soviet Union: American taxpayers8217; money is now used to point arms at them. It is a hoary tradition of successive American administrations to create monsters that eventually turn on the American peopleand American interests which must then be destroyed. Finally, there is the Pakistan angle. Islamabad may temporarily have lost its powers of speech in order to minimise the offence caused by the American action to its Islamic friends, but its status vis-a-vis the United States can no longer be in doubt, if ever it was. American officials in Pakistan were evacuated a full two days before the operation, and Pakistani airspace in all likelihood used for the strikes. So much for this proponent of Islamic fraternity.