Editorial, "A DECADE OF TERROR," in the 30 September 2011 (Vol. 7, Pt. 2, No. 18) issue of LAW ANIMATED WORLD

A DECADE OF TERROR

To say so may not be an inappropriate characterization of the ten years in world history since the 9/11 terrorist mayhem, perhaps the most gruesome one since the nuclear holocaust at Hiroshima/Nagasaki, at any rate the most macabre attack by a private international terrorist outfit to date. All Americans were shell-shocked, the world community was awe-struck and almost all the heads of states condemned it except perhaps Saddam Hussein of Iraq and thousands of Palestinians who danced in the streets to celebrate the attacks [news of such celebrations by fundamentalists reported also at many other places the world over]. The then American President Bush swiftly vowed revenge and designed plans to ‘fight against international terror’, declaring: “Those who are not with us are against us!” And he found solid support from the American masses at the time. What followed we all have witnessed and are still watching – an imperialist over-reaction, massacring the third world people in millions, and bit by bit, in the name of countering terrorism and decimating Al-Qaeda and other fundamentalist outfits which, curiously, owed their origin to the scheming of the CIA in their covert war in Afghanistan against the Soviet invasion. All the bombings and killings in Iraq alone are said to have exceeded even the World War II records for any single state. And in Afghanistan, though the US, allying with Pakistan, a rogue state, could overthrow the Taliban government, yet after ten years the Americans are far from totally overcoming the Talibans. Pakistan has become a terror hotbed – both a haven and a victim for all kinds of gory terrorists and though Obama succeeded in killing Bin Laden, his ghost still haunts America and the West as also India and other terrorist-stricken countries. All this indicates that mere state/international agencies’ counter-terror will not do to curb the menace of sundry varieties of terrorism all over the world but it needs the abolition of the basic inequities in the world socio-economic order and the end of all imperialist aggressions and neo-colonial collaborations for that purpose, as also to usher in human welfare oriented social systems all the world over §§§