Terrorism means use of force and threats against a person, groups or governments for political or other purposes. Terrorism is not a modern activity; hundred of years ago societies were not as organized as they are today with modern facilities of roads, telephones, and regular police force and so on. Then head of strong groups of people, robbers & warriors made use of force and threats to life and property to get their aims. Now terrorism itself is quite an organized activity. There are terrorist organizations or societies which train terrorist for their purposes. Sometimes these organizations are supported by foreign governments and huge funds and modern weapons are easily provided to them.
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A regular terrorist organization usually works against the government. It tries to demolish key government buildings offices and public places like railway stations and airports with bomb and destructive weapons. It kills people and destroys property in crowed places like market centers, bus stands and railway stations. This set the people against the government and causes public demonstrations. The bomb blast and the resulting deaths and destruction in different parts of our country is an example of such terrorism. A terrorist organization operating in a country usually gets money and weapons from local as well as foreign countries. It also joins hands with forceful groups or parties opposed to the government inside the country.
Nations or big countries with in a country use terrorist methods to gain greater freedom or independence. Thus the skills in India have been committing acts of terrorism to achieve self-rules in the Punjab. The Irish people in north Ireland have been terrorizing the British government to force it to grant them independence.
There are internal or international terrorists who actively hijack planes or kidnap important or rich persons. They demand huge amount of money for the release of prisoners or some political concessions for the return of the airplanes, passengers or kidnapped persons & kidnapping have been quite common in our country.
Terrorism needs to be checked very carefully and the government should force all the people illegally present in the country to leave. It should force the refugees to remain in their camps all the time. It should make arrangements to step the illegal flow of arms and money into the country from abroad. It should have really effective secret service which can report all kinds of terrorist plans.
Other steps for checking terrorism take the use of the police or the army on a large scale can be discussed in newspapers, on the radio and TV and in the elected assemblies.
According to Globally Accepted Definition of Terrorism:
“Acts committed with the aim of seriously intimidating a population, forcing a government or international organization to abstain from performing any act, or seriously destabilizing or destroying the fundamental political, constitutional, economic or social structures of country or an international organization.”
In the 21st century, terrorism went through many big changes or great change because of modernization & new technologies. Today’s world terrorism exists with many different causes & purposes. Terrorism is used to create conflicts between different peoples, groups, countries & sometimes it is used in religious disagreements. In the 21st century, terrorism becomes more deadly than previous centuries. Today’s terrorists use many new techniques such as suicidal attacks, remote control bombs, automatic pistols & rifles, rocket launchers etc. these can result thousands of innocent peoples being killed or injured. In Pakistan everyday people were dying because of no reason & that is the reason of fear, scare which are include in everyone’s mind.
Many peoples said about terrorism that is:
According to Thomas Hobbes, who in 1651 described human life in the following
Words:
“No arts; no letters; no society; and which is the worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”
According to Malik (2001: 88), “Attempts to incorporate all the many manifestations of terrorism within a single definition were doomed from the start. The term terrorism has been applied across the whole spectrum of political violence, and over the centuries of history. It has been applied to times of war and of peace; to the actions of states, groups and individuals; to actions against liberal states and to actions against repressive states and dictatorships”
Some articles which are related to terrorism are:
According to Friedland and Merari (1998: 591), “Political terrorism is a sophisticated form of psychological warfare which aims to accomplish political ends by bearing on individuals’ emotions and attitudes. This article presents the results of a public opinion survey, conducted on an Israeli national sample, which was designed to evaluate the psychological impacts of terroristic activity and the basic assumptions that guide it. The results indicate that terrorism is highly effective in inducing fear and worry, even when the actual damage it causes is moderate. However, terrorism appears to have failed to produce the attitudinal change desired by its perpetrators, the high levels of fear notwithstanding. On the contrary, terrorism caused a hardening of attitudes, strong opposition to any form of political reconciliation with terrorists, and widespread support for extreme counterterrorist measures. Terrorism, in other words, proved to be counterproductive. These results provided a basis for an extensive analysis of the conditions that turn terrorism into a potentially effective tool of political influence, and those in which it is likely to fail”
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According to Berholz (2006: 221), “Terrorism is becoming a weapon of ever increasing importance to reach certain ends, given the potential of mass destruction available to leading international powers and the rise of one superpower dominating the international system. In most cases terrorism is driven by an ideology comprising a world view with supreme values. Since these values are absolutely true to believers, they have to be preferred to everything, so that terrorists are required to sacrifice not only the lives of others but also their own. It is therefore difficult to prevent this kind of terrorism. But the threatening damages can be mitigated by economic, technological and political decentralization. In the long run, it is even more important to win the spiritual fight. This can be done by starting from the fact that believers in ideologies whose supreme values are conflicting, can only live together peacefully, if they accept that each individual has the right to choose his or her own belief. A corresponding education has to prevent fundamentalist instruction and to inculcate the basic rules of a free society”
According to Crain and Crain (2006: 317), “In this paper we estimate the macroeconomic consequences of terrorism using panel data for 147 countries for the period 1968-2002. The results reveal that the potential gains to a country from reducing terrorism are quite large, although the specific estimates depend on a country’s population, base level of output, and investment. We present estimates of the impact of terrorism on GDP, GDP growth, investment, consumer spending, and tourism. These estimates of the marginal impact of terrorism provide a threshold against which a country’s expenditures on anti-terrorism can be weighed”
According to Victoroff (2005: 3), “This article reviews the state of the art of available theories and data regarding the psychology of terrorism. Data and theoretical material were gathered from the world’s unclassified literature. Multiple theories and some demographic data have been published, but very few controlled empirical studies have been conducted investigating the psychological bases of terrorism. The field is largely characterized by theoretical speculation based on subjective interpretation of anecdotal observations. Moreover, most studies and theories fail to take into account the great heterogeneity of terrorists. Many practical, conceptual, and psychological barriers have slowed progress in this important field. Nonetheless, even at this early stage of terrorism studies, preliminary reports suggest that modifiable social and psychological factors contribute to the genesis of the terrorist mind-set. Psychological scholarship could possibly mitigate the risk of catastrophic attack by initiating the long overdue scientific study of terrorist mentalities”
According to Coady (2004: 37), “There are different kinds of terrorism as there are of war. It is unpersuasive to make the deliberate targeting of civilians a defining feature of terrorism, and states as well as non-state groups can engage in terrorism. In a democracy, voters responsible for a government’s unjustifiable policies are not necessarily innocent, while conscripts are legitimate targets. Rather than being uniquely atrocious, terrorism most resembles small war. It is not always or necessarily more morally unjustifiable than war. All war should be avoided, but some war is more unjustifiable than other war. Comparable judgments should be made about terrorism. It is appropriate to compare civilians killed by those seeking political change and those using violence to prevent such change. Sometimes the debate should focus on the justifiability or lack of it of the aims sought. While violence should always be used as little as possible, those in power are responsible for making other means than violence effective in achieving justifiable political change. When considering the likely causes of violence, one that has received inadequate attention is humiliation. Humiliation is not the same as shame. Causing humiliation can and should be avoided”
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