(During a visit to the US from February 21 to March 3, 2002, this writer spoke extempore on various aspects of terrorism in South Asia at the University of California Los Angeles ( February 23 ), the Potomac Institute of Policy Studies, Washington DC (February 25 ), the India Club, World Bank, Washington DC (February 26) and the James A.Baker III Institute For Public Policy, Rice University, Houston (February 28). This article incorporates the various points made by him in his presentations.

The author will be writing separately on the ghastly punishment murders of Hindus travelling in a train in Godhra near Gujarat by suspected supporters of Dawood Ibrahim, the mafia leader with known ISI and terrorist links now living in Karachi whose extradition has been demanded by India, and the subsequent anti-Muslim retaliatory killings in Gujarat, which occurred during the fag end of his tour of the US and which figured during his hour-long interview over a radio station of Houston on March 1, 2002, during which he had drawn attention to the Dawood Ibrahim angle.)

Bin Laden and Carlos

There were two important landmarks in the evolution of international terrorism since the 1970s. The first was the formation by Carlos in late 1975 of a united front of like-minded terrorist groups (the International Front of Revolutionaries) to wage a joint struggle against common adversaries, namely, international capitalism and zionism.

In organising this united front, Carlos emulated the example of the united front tactics of International Communism. The component units of this Front were free to pursue their national objectives, but co-operated with and assisted each other in launching jointattacks on their identified common adversaries. Such joint attacks came to be known as punishment terrorism as distinguished from objective or demand terrorism.

Objective terrorism seeks to achieve a specified objective and demand terrorism a tactical aim (e.g.) release of prisoners through aircraft hijacking. When the components of Carlos' front launched an act of objective or demand terrorism, they identified themselves and claimed responsibility or credit for it since they wanted their followers and the public to know that they were responsible for it. But, when they launched an act of punishment terrorism, they did not identify themselves or make any claim.

rest of the article is at http://www.saag.org/papers5/paper420.html

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