Terrorism

In National Review Online, the military historian Victor Davis Hanson argues that to counter terrorism it is time to relearn the lessons of the cold war.

We are generally aligned with Dr. Hanson's thinking and this essay too is generally sensible, although not particularly original. What caught our eye is this odd conclusion Dr. Hanson has drawn:

Meanwhile an odd thing happened. It turns out that the jihadists were cowards and bullies, and thus selective in their targets of hatred. A billion Chinese were left alone by radical Islam — even though the Chinese were secularists and mostly godless, as well as ruthless to their own Uighur Muslim minorities. Had bin Laden issued a fatwa against Beijing and slammed an airliner into a skyscraper in Shanghai, there is no telling what a nuclear China might have done.

India too got mostly a pass, other than the occasional murdering by Pakistani zealots. Yet India makes no effort to apologize to Muslims. When extremists occasionally riot and kill, they usually cease quickly before the response of a much more unpredictable angry populace.

So far global jihad avoids two billion Indians and Chinese, despite the fact that their countries are far tougher on Muslims than is the United States or Europe. In other words, the Islamicists target those whom they think they can intimidate and blackmail.

Holy mother of God! Does Dr. Hanson seriously thinks India has been given a pass on terrorism? He should read US State Department reports on the subject. But even worse, he thinks India has escaped catastrophic terror because, in effect, of the deterrence value of things like the horrible Gujarat retaliation of 2002. We are stunned that such blots on India can now be cited as examples of what may be an effective strategy to counter terrorism.

This blog has taken a very hardline posture on terror, perhaps even more so than Dr. Hanson, but we cannot agree with his spectacularly off-base characterization of India's experience with terrorism. That a scholar such as he can lapse into such careless thinking is, alas, a sign of frayed nerves in the West -- this is not a good sign if we are to win this war on terror.