The sudden and incredible vulnerability

Following millions of fellow Southasian citizens, this writer woke up early on the morning of 27 November to the horror of violence in Bombay. On television, I watched the images and narratives of the unfolding attack on civilian targets, feeling a complex mixture of shock, horror, revulsion and helplessness. In today's world, we have become used to watching such violence practically every day on the news channels, and the vast majority of such stories during the past few years have been emanating from Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan and my own little country of Sri Lanka. The Bombay attacks were similar to most of the stories of contemporary anti-systemic violence that we are used to. A small group of young men on a suicide mission launched an attack on a state and its civilians – civilians and civilian institutions are the most vulnerable in this type of premeditated violence – in order to create the maximum political effect within a few hours, if not minutes. In the process, these young combatants, who even the ordinary citizens now call 'terrorists', in the language of George W Bush and Condoleezza Rice, were ready to die.

The Bombay Ten (if there were indeed ten of them) are neither the first nor the last bunch of young men to practice such large-scale violence for violence's sake. The challenge for all governments confronted with the threat of shocking violence is to address it as an anti-systemic phenomenon that has acquired a global character. But, of course, nation states in such situations usually behave the way that nation states normally do. For them, violence by non-state combatants is essentially a security threat, which should be met essentially by military and coercive methods. The basic problem with such an approach, however, is that violence can only beget more violence.