BIDEN LEAVING THE U.S. PRESIDENCY WITH AN UNWELCOME BANG

Then law enforcement agencies W find themselves unable to track the sources that nurtured and activated terrorist impulses in an individual who committed a terror attack involving multiple casualties, they fall back on the claim that it was a "lone wolf" attack.

- MADHAV NALAPAT

The reality is that terrorists are almost always never "self-radicalised". Each has drifted into thrall to terror incubators whose occupation is to groom prospective terrorists. Unfortunately for the West, strategic errors were made such as the decision in 2015 to allow a million asylum seekers into Germany with practically no vetting. Earlier, the USbacked "Arab Spring" resulted in millions from the affected countries seeking refuge in Europe rather than remaining within their own borders. Such decisions opened some countries to immigration from troubled regions on a scale not seen before, especially in Germany. Since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been a proliferation of terror modules that are being primed for acts of terror, especially in the West. They have been given confidence by strategic errors such as the full withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan in 2021. The US withdrawal abandoned that country to the Taliban. Abandoned by Biden to the Taliban was the Bagram air base and other operational sites that were needed not just for better monitoring of the situation, but intervention if called for. As of now, PLA activity in many such locations is on the rise. Such US bases were built and equipped at great expense, yet were not retained. GHQ Rawalpindi was once again, as in the 1980s, made by the US the guarantor of good behaviour, this time around by a "reformed" Taliban. The ethnic divide between Punjabi soldiers in the Pakistan military and the ethnic Pashtuns of the Taliban were ignored.

Shortly thereafter, Pashtuns in the Taliban began to resist attempts at overlordship by the Pakistan military, which by now has become an auxiliary of the PLA.