Olive Branch on a Gnarly Tree

OW to end terrorism? Not to contain it, nor to wear it down, nor to thwart it with counter-terrorism. End it. Put it to sleep. Disappear it.

- KAJAL BASU

This is not a question taken lightly anywhere in the world. In 2024, according to the Institute for Economics & Peace's Global Terrorism Index, 98 of the world's 195 countries were contending with some form of terrorism. The question is especially crucial for India, because, with a score of 6.41 out of 10, India was at 14th place on the GTI list. It is even more critical for Pakistan, which occupied the 2nd place with a score of 8.374.

State counter-terrorism won't cut it, because, by definition, it partakes substantially of the characteristics of terrorism itself: counter-violence, often on populations vulnerabilised by the presence of unrepresentative terrorists in their midst; sanctions that immoderately impact these defenceless soak-pits; unmanaged—and often unmanageable—societal disruption caused by the crossfire between terrorism and counter-terrorism.

Clearly, both terrorism and counter-terrorism feed the wolf in an endless spiral of escalation. This happens nearly everywhere in the world. Nearly: but not in some advanced democracies such as in Scandinavia—where multifaceted terrorism does happen, but rarely enough to not attract statal blowback, which is constrained by embedded policies of restraint.