IT is not as if the world was not at war in 1999. Ten years ago, as the world welcomed the new millennium, the ravages of armed conflict resonated amid the imagined fears of a global computer shutdown.
Indeed, in 1999, our world had barely reached the end of the chapter on the grisly conflict in Kosovo which killed over 3,000 civilians. Pakistanis, too, had come perilously close to a nuclear cataclysm, barely avoiding a serious war with India over Kargil.
Both Kosovo and Kargil represented a conflict that has been transformed in the first decade of the new millennium. By the end of 1999, Nato operations in Kosovo had driven Serb forces out of Yugoslavia and allowed refugees to return. Peacekeeping forces (including Pakistan’s) were sent to the embattled region and reconstruction began. Before the year was out, the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia had levelled indictments against Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes.
At home, the Kargil conflict, while markedly different from the Nato effort in former Yugoslavia, was in its structural dynamics also a case of conventional warfare where two states sparred over physical territory and ended up in a conflict situation.Ten years ago, Kargil and Kosovo represented the structural dynamics of both world and regional conflict, where countries or groups of countries attacked other countries and international law, at least theoretically, marking the beginning and ending of wars.
I recall these two conflicts here, one proximate and the other relatively remote, to emphasise the dramatic transformation that the structure of conflict has undergone in the first 10 years of the new millennium.
It is relevant to mark how terror and terrorism have changed the dynamics of war and concomitantly our identities, our fears and even our hopes for the next decade. The first decade of the new millennium, notably the years following 2001, saw the emergence of conflict motivated, defined and fought solely on the basis of chasing and eliminating groups not officially affiliated with a nation state. The non-state warrior, the terrorist, would in the next 10 years become the single most important denominator in world conflict.
The attack on the World Trade Centre on Sept 11, 2001, thus was the biggest act of non-state warfare the world had ever seen. The decade saw the world clamouring to reconfigure and recalibrate identities and understandings of nation states that had heretofore seen only economic challenges. If the Peace of Westphalia signed in 1648 had marked the beginning of the nation state as a unit of governance, the attacks of Sept 11, 2001 marked the beginning of its demise. Since then, nation states, both powerful and weak, have seen their efficacy questioned and the meaning of their physical and virtual borders thrown in abeyance as they scrambled to fight an enemy not ordered along the same parameters.
The consequences of this blind scramble to understand the challenges of conflict have been tragic. Clinging to old rules, the US began two conventional unilateral conflicts aimed at shoring up strategic interests in regions where it believed the non-state groups were most deeply entrenched. Unleashed under the pretext of avenging 9/11, the wars in Iraqand Afghanistan fought with conventional armies led the world’s sole superpower on a wild goose chase that expended massive resources and saw hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.
Fighting an enemy unbound by the law, unhampered by political processes and morally unaccountable to any except itself, the US found itself abandoning core principles of due process and the rule of law, unmoored as it was in the murky moral waters of extra-state conflict. Ten years later, the two wars continue and there is little in terms of progress on fighting non-state groups.
Pakistan, a smaller, weaker state, has not been spared the transformation of warfare. In the wake of Kargil, few Pakistani analysts could have predicted in 1999 that Pakistan would be entrapped in a conflict of the kind it is today. The bloody last half of the decade saw an increase of nearly 500 per cent in suicide bombings. Since 2006, a total of over 8,000 people were killed in Pakistan as a result of suicide bombings. This figure does not include the casualties from military operations in the tribal areas and Swat which would likely cause the number to swell even more.
Suicide bombing, previously unheard of in civil conflict in Pakistan, has become ubiquitous in terms of the frequency with which it is carried out. The last few months of 2009 have been the bloodiest with a suicide attack occurring nearly every day.
The first decade of the new millennium then has been a decade of terror. It has redefined human conflict for the powerful and weak. As old institutions designed to fight conventional wars creak into action with the help of mechanisms withered by corruption and an inept bureaucracy the errors of the system are likely to trap innocent civilians.
With 2009 drawing to a close the world has failed to arrive at answers in response to terror; states have tried conventional wars, abandoning the rule of law, paying warlords, hiring mercenaries and even remote-controlled planes. Despite all these efforts countries large and small, weak and strong have failed to corner the non-state warrior who has remained impenetrable and largely unassailable. As warfare has moved away from the army barracks into the cave, the rented room and the abandoned warehouse the world is set to end the first decade of the millennium horrified by the terror unleashed but helpless against it.
Indeed, in 1999, our world had barely reached the end of the chapter on the grisly conflict in Kosovo which killed over 3,000 civilians. Pakistanis, too, had come perilously close to a nuclear cataclysm, barely avoiding a serious war with India over Kargil.
Both Kosovo and Kargil represented a conflict that has been transformed in the first decade of the new millennium. By the end of 1999, Nato operations in Kosovo had driven Serb forces out of Yugoslavia and allowed refugees to return. Peacekeeping forces (including Pakistan’s) were sent to the embattled region and reconstruction began. Before the year was out, the International Criminal Court for the former Yugoslavia had levelled indictments against Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes.
At home, the Kargil conflict, while markedly different from the Nato effort in former Yugoslavia, was in its structural dynamics also a case of conventional warfare where two states sparred over physical territory and ended up in a conflict situation.Ten years ago, Kargil and Kosovo represented the structural dynamics of both world and regional conflict, where countries or groups of countries attacked other countries and international law, at least theoretically, marking the beginning and ending of wars.
I recall these two conflicts here, one proximate and the other relatively remote, to emphasise the dramatic transformation that the structure of conflict has undergone in the first 10 years of the new millennium.
It is relevant to mark how terror and terrorism have changed the dynamics of war and concomitantly our identities, our fears and even our hopes for the next decade. The first decade of the new millennium, notably the years following 2001, saw the emergence of conflict motivated, defined and fought solely on the basis of chasing and eliminating groups not officially affiliated with a nation state. The non-state warrior, the terrorist, would in the next 10 years become the single most important denominator in world conflict.
The attack on the World Trade Centre on Sept 11, 2001, thus was the biggest act of non-state warfare the world had ever seen. The decade saw the world clamouring to reconfigure and recalibrate identities and understandings of nation states that had heretofore seen only economic challenges. If the Peace of Westphalia signed in 1648 had marked the beginning of the nation state as a unit of governance, the attacks of Sept 11, 2001 marked the beginning of its demise. Since then, nation states, both powerful and weak, have seen their efficacy questioned and the meaning of their physical and virtual borders thrown in abeyance as they scrambled to fight an enemy not ordered along the same parameters.
The consequences of this blind scramble to understand the challenges of conflict have been tragic. Clinging to old rules, the US began two conventional unilateral conflicts aimed at shoring up strategic interests in regions where it believed the non-state groups were most deeply entrenched. Unleashed under the pretext of avenging 9/11, the wars in Iraqand Afghanistan fought with conventional armies led the world’s sole superpower on a wild goose chase that expended massive resources and saw hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties.
Fighting an enemy unbound by the law, unhampered by political processes and morally unaccountable to any except itself, the US found itself abandoning core principles of due process and the rule of law, unmoored as it was in the murky moral waters of extra-state conflict. Ten years later, the two wars continue and there is little in terms of progress on fighting non-state groups.
Pakistan, a smaller, weaker state, has not been spared the transformation of warfare. In the wake of Kargil, few Pakistani analysts could have predicted in 1999 that Pakistan would be entrapped in a conflict of the kind it is today. The bloody last half of the decade saw an increase of nearly 500 per cent in suicide bombings. Since 2006, a total of over 8,000 people were killed in Pakistan as a result of suicide bombings. This figure does not include the casualties from military operations in the tribal areas and Swat which would likely cause the number to swell even more.
Suicide bombing, previously unheard of in civil conflict in Pakistan, has become ubiquitous in terms of the frequency with which it is carried out. The last few months of 2009 have been the bloodiest with a suicide attack occurring nearly every day.
The first decade of the new millennium then has been a decade of terror. It has redefined human conflict for the powerful and weak. As old institutions designed to fight conventional wars creak into action with the help of mechanisms withered by corruption and an inept bureaucracy the errors of the system are likely to trap innocent civilians.
With 2009 drawing to a close the world has failed to arrive at answers in response to terror; states have tried conventional wars, abandoning the rule of law, paying warlords, hiring mercenaries and even remote-controlled planes. Despite all these efforts countries large and small, weak and strong have failed to corner the non-state warrior who has remained impenetrable and largely unassailable. As warfare has moved away from the army barracks into the cave, the rented room and the abandoned warehouse the world is set to end the first decade of the millennium horrified by the terror unleashed but helpless against it.
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