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COMMENTARY Most of world's hostilities deep-rooted By James P. Pinkerton |
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Three points on the Mumbai, India, bombings, which killed nearly 200 — and what it all means for the rest of us: First, we have to come to grips with the reality that the world is awash in portable, concealable bomb-making materials. Military-surplus grenades and shells are openly for sale in many parts of the world, and plastique explosives, used by engineers as well as combat engineers, also are everywhere.
Even more abundant are devices used to control detonation, including cellphones. Oh, and the most effective tool for bomb guidance is a human being on the scene — there seems to be no shortage of would-be suicide bombers.
Just as gun crimes are frequent when people have lots of guns, so bombings are frequent when people have access to lots of bombs. India, just by itself, proves that truism: A series of blasts in 1993, also in Mumbai, killed 250. And in 2005 three bombs in the city of Delhi left more than 60 dead.
So what to do about this deadly ubiquity? We have several options:
A second point is to remember that the disputes underscoring many of the bombings, worldwide, are of long and deep standing. The most recent Mumbai attacks, for example, are being tentatively linked to Lashkar-e-Toiba, the "Army of the Righteous," a Pakistan-based Muslim group that seems able to operate untroubled by the Islamabad government.
Indeed, India and Pakistan have fought three wars in the last 60 years. Such mutual hostility has driven both countries to "go nuclear," adding yet another hideous level of danger to their tense relationship.
A principal reason for the protracted hostility between the two nations, and their peoples, is the territorial dispute over the province of Kashmir, which is majority Muslim but controlled by Hindu India. Indeed, on the same day as the Mumbai bombings, a grenade at a bus station in Kashmir injured at least six Indian tourists.
Similarly, disputes over land, and who enjoys sovereignty over it, are at the heart of the fighting between Russians and Chechens, between Israelis and Arabs, and between Sinhalese and Tamils in Sri Lanka. Each of these disputes has have left thousands dead in recent decades.
And now, of course, bloody wars have erupted in Iraq and Afghanistan. In both of those countries, various religious denominations and ethnic tribes have declared war on each other — even as, oftentimes, they seek to fight occupying (or, if one prefers, liberating) Americans and other Western forces. Once again, we see that easy-to-use explosives, combined with eager-to-die suicide bombers, make for an effective force, flummoxing much higher-tech militaries.
Third, democracy, or the lack thereof, has little to do with the problem of terrorism. President Bush misdiagnoses the situation when he argues that "the advance of freedom leads to peace." India is a free and democratic country, but that didn't dissuade the Mumbai bombers. The same is true for the bombers of Madrid in 2004 and London in 2005. Those terrorists, mostly home-grown, lived in democracy and yet decided they hated their fellow citizens with a murderous passion. Also, democratic expressions have flickered in the Palestinian territories and in Lebanon in the last couple of years, but are those places now more peaceful?
Democracy and freedom are great ideas. But in a world where tools for killing are easily available and geographical disputes are not easily reconcilable, liberty — including inevitably liberty for extremists — can be dangerous indeed.
James P. Pinkerton is a columnist for Newsday.
