Imran Aziz • October 28, 2005 4:26 PM

Combating Terrorism Nonviolently

The world has seen great changes since 9-11, great enough to get into the entire human history’s hall of fame. Just comparing the world we know today with what we knew five years ago will shock any concerned mind, especially if you are in a developing country. Changes are there in all aspects, not only in politics. We now divert our attention to terrorism, as it has arisen in the past few years. Various countries have taken steps to increase security after attacks on the World Trade Center and the United States’ Pentagon ignoring the fact that increases in security lead to decreases in fundamental rights of humanity.

Socio-Political changes are sweeping the globe and affecting economic systems at grass root levels. Every nation is in conflict with other and in a broader sense world peace is at stake. Many organizations including governments, law enforcement agencies, counterterrorism wings and task forces have established set of rules and methods to counter terrorism in an affective and legitimate way but none of them have been able to produce satisfactory results.

Terrorism is growing like child grows in mother’s womb and new forms of terror have always been introduced by terrorists. As it is difficult to define terrorism it becomes impossible to outline one set of rules or methods to counter terrorism. Terrorism is a parasitic phenomenon also when network roots are found in organized crime. Abrupt Geopolitical changes, Bad Governance and Power-Vacuum create a fertile ground for corruption and organized crime. Terrorism sponsored by organized crime becomes difficult to counter and easy to illustrate.

Naturally speaking the probability of one man’s actions is unlimited but the probability of motives behind these actions is comparably limited in this systematic world of occurrences. Nature created us, and we are forced to exist with the qualities that were imposed upon us. It is as if we were only semi-intelligent beings: intelligent only to the degree that we are aware of the fact that our actions are determined by the characteristics and the qualities that are inherent in us, and that we cannot go against them. If we are at the mercy of nature, then there is no predicting where this wild, unreasonable nature can lead us, constantly causing conflict between individuals and entire nations, who, like wild animals, are engaged in a vicious struggle of the instincts. Yet, subconsciously, we cannot reconcile the idea of ourselves on the one hand, and primitive beasts on the other.

With all understanding terrorists are humans driven by influential motives affecting their cognition and forming set of user defined rules and methods to make unlawful change in political, social, ethnic and religious levels. If humans are not part of any terrorist activity then concept of aliens and animals as terrorists would have been evolved.

An embarked strategy of reporting of unexpected behavior, patterns, or events that might signal an intensified or immediate terrorist threat has been implemented leaving a big question mark behind that what exactly should be recognized as important, reportable indicators and events that security and law-enforcement professionals need to know about. One can consider this as solution to combat terrorism in developed countries where infrastructure is strong enough to facilitate civilians or authorized personals to initiate instant alerts or messages. Some see democratization as a potentially successful counterterrorism strategy and by others as taking a backseat to the U.S.’s war on terrorism. The theory behind democratization as a counterterrorism strategy is that democratic institutions and procedures provide peaceful avenues for individuals to criticize government actions and, therefore, prevent the need to resort to violence. On the other hand, the severe repression indicative of non-democratic governments pushes moderate opposition and criticism underground and encourages the type of political extremism that leads to terrorism.

After 2001 measures has been taken to counter terrorism globally under the title “War against Terror”. No doubt it’s a great initiative but still is not promising a coherent and unified system to counter terrorism by non violent means. Killing a terrorist doesn’t help solving the equation of terrorism rather it invites uninvited humans as terrorists. At present scenario best breed method is working at morality level and creating an international networked community rejecting terrorism and organized crime.

We need to encourage the use of non-violent means in order to express ourselves, whether here in our society or anywhere around the world. We need to go back to doing the right thing. For us as a society and as a world community not to stand up and do justice and bring those who have committed these atrocities and crimes against humanity, we will be failing the most fundamental rules of humankind, which is to allow the collective interest of the people to prevail and to allow the interest of the people to be protected, both as individuals and as a group.

We need a “A Unified System to Combat Terrorism by non-violent means” basing on a new model of knowledge unification. The unification of knowledge has great implications in philosophy, and even psychology. “Textbooks” may not talk much about it, if they might do. Even in physics, which is a branch of knowledge with extreme importance, theoretical physicists seek a unified theory of universe, which they believe will be the ultimate theory explaining everything. Specifically in context of terrorism research concludes that, “When Unification Engine reduces and represents complex entity as simple entity in multidimensional knowledge forest, it formulates and factors out a common representation that maps directly abstract representation to its relationships. Entity represents type of organization, and motives behind actions represent the path to the entities (cross-links).”