Anujan wrote:
Future attacks will be deadlier. More importantly, its effects would be amplified through the media.
Anujan, at the cost and risk of predicting the future, if the past were any portent into the future, future attacks wont be deadlier, they will all be similar. Courtesy of Aaron Clauset at the Santa Fe Institute, you can look at any time-scale you want and terror has been very similar. Extreme/high casualty events have happened at the same frequency in the past decade as in the distant past. This has been the case for the last 50 years or so (just like Moore's law) even as we have leap-frogged into many different technological innovations that ideally should have changed the terrorists. Nothing that 24/7 Internets or Social media will make it change for us if you take my opinion. But then, many smartasses have predicted the future much better than me and have failed too. My logic for betting on the side of "not much will change" is that if the terrorists will change, so will the counter-terrorists, so will you and me and all you need is a small edge to deter even the most vilest idiot on the planet. That is all there is to a majority of this world, just a small edge between people and that is sufficient to produce the massive inequities. Now I am veering into piskologizing instead of talking, but yea anyway.
Without any focus on pak-based terror and as a general remark: what will change (and has definitely changed) is the way we hypocritically (often!) react to seemingly extreme events or even real extreme events. Just a case in point: we dont talk about the July 2006 train blasts in Bbay or the Gyaneshwari Express attack in the same breath as we talk of the Nov 26, 2008 attacks even though all are of similar magnitude, capabilities, and efficacy of hitting at soft targets in terms of creating terror. What has changed is our reactions to these incidents, July 2006 is forgotten while Gyaneshwari Express is not even in the back of our minds. Why? May be we can all find different explanations, but that is my point in any case. My answer is: while 24/7 news in our homes and work has de-sensitized most of us urban folks and we need a massive jhapad to react to silly stuff, it has also made us more reactive to even small things on the terror front which we would have ignored in the distant past. For many of us, the word terrorism produces complicated reactions. But terrorism is just a business as much as prostitution is, in one people get killed quickly and before the eye, in the other people die of STDs slowly. All this in turn will change how our politicians react to how urbanized people choose to react to many issues. This is the circle jerk of terrorism and counter-terrorism and India-pakistan will be no exceptions to this rule, nor will any other country can make itself an exception to this. Not that the supa-power umreeka can disengage itself from this engine, but then that wont deter the uber-amreeki patriots from making themselves exceptional to every rule on the planet despite conforming to every rule with the 120 pt T as a rule.
