THE think-tank ‘New America’ has reviewed many of the terrorist activities including the Aug. 12, 2017 Orlando nightclub shooting, the 2016 Charlottesville attack, and so on in the US after 9/11. The review makes for interesting reading.

It says the far-right (white supremacists) carried out 68 attacks while black extremists carried out eight attacks, and 106 individuals were killed by far-right violent extremists in 62 separate incidents. The the media has noticed that President Donald Trump shows great alacrity in condemning Islamic terrorism but is hesitant in condemning home-grown extremism.

The review observed the terrorist threat in the US is almost entirely homegrown, as no foreign terrorist organisation has directed and orchestrated an attack in the United States since 9/11.

Many solutions have been tendered to control the hydra-headed monster of terrorism which will remain unmuzzled as long as strong states continue to accuse weak states of ‘aiding and abetting terrorism.

The best approach to control terrorism appears to be the one presented by Dr Ihekwoaba D. Onwudiwe (University of Maryland) in his book The Globalisation of Terrorism.

Dr Onwudiwe postulates that there are dominant nations that control world resources and manufacturing practices, and which possess the ability to translate their economic resources into political and military strength to maintain a world order that continues to benefit their interests.

Terrorism is a response to the global inequality that exists between nations and the structure of the world system. To curb terrorism, the only solution is a restructure of policies to eliminate cross-national inequality and the existing exploitation that extend from the core to the peripheral nations of the world.

Military interventions or other forms of social control such as economic sanctions, may work in the short run to contain terrorism, but only temporarily. In the long run, however, these policies will continue to be ineffective since they do nothing to remedy the conditions that set the state for terrorism: namely global inequality.

Ali Zulfi Bhullo

Shikarpur

Published in Dawn, August 13th, 2018