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In a Colombo bar in 1988, during one of Sri Lanka’s intervals between battles, I heard an Indian journalist tell a joke about Khalistan. In the imagined first cabinet meeting of the new Sikh state, ministers described irrigation schemes, textile corridors and the sober work of government. Then the defence minister stood.

“Attack America,” he said.

The prime minister was startled. “Why?”

“Look at Japan. It attacked America. America won. Japan got bullet trains, robots and an economic miracle.”

The cabinet applauded. Cries of Khalistan Zindabad filled the room. At the far end of the table, an old schoolteacher leaned forward. “But son,” he asked gently, “what if we win?”

The joke was about Khalistan, but the schoolteacher’s question belongs to every counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaign. It asks not only how the enemy will be beaten, but what kind of country will remain when he is gone.

September 11 did not begin the age of terrorism. It began the age in which one act of terrorism reorganised the world. In the twenty-five years that followed, states became much better at finding terrorists, following their money, hardening targets and destroying their organisations. They learned much less about what should follow the destruction.

The gains were real. Intelligence moved more freely between agencies and countries. Aircraft became harder to hijack. Financial controls made money more difficult to move. Al-Qaeda lost leaders, camps and sanctuary. The campaign against Islamic State stripped it of cities, taxes and the boast that it governed a caliphate. Police and intelligence services stopped plots that will never acquire memorials because their intended victims are alive.

These successes worked best against things that could be found: a bank transfer, a training camp, a commander, a column of vehicles, a piece of territory. A cockpit can be hardened. A grievance cannot. The tools were useful. The mistake was to ask them to do the work of politics.

Part of the trouble lay in the name

Part of the trouble lay in the name. Terrorism describes a method: a bomb in a market, a gunman in a hotel, a hijacked aircraft. Separatism describes an end, however wise or foolish: a state, a border, a flag. Counterterrorism tries to stop the bomb and catch the bomber. Counterinsurgency asks who rules a village and why its people obey him. State-building asks whether courts, police, schools and ministries can govern without foreign soldiers standing behind them. After 9/11 these unlike tasks were packed into the same word. To call a movement terrorist was often to pretend that one had also explained the quarrel.

The word was useful to governments. Russia used it for Chechnya. China invoked extremism to justify mass surveillance and detention in Xinjiang. Pakistan fought armed groups that threatened the state while protecting others that served its purposes. India has treated Kashmiri militancy and Kashmiri politics as though they were the same thing. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the wider Hindutva movement have since widened that suspicion beyond Kashmir, making Muslim citizens answer for terrorists who invoke their faith. Sri Lanka recast its long war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) as part of the global campaign against terrorism. Once every enemy wore the same label, the bomb remained visible and the grievance could be ignored. A state cannot isolate the violent few while majoritarian politics puts the whole community in the........

© The Wire