Lessons from Boston
The speed with which US federal agents and local police moved to zero in on the Tsarnaev brothers, who planted the Boston Marathon bombs, should be an object lesson for India where investigators are still grappling with the Bengaluru blast. US President Barack Obama wasn’t just mouthing rhetoric when he said the FBI would move to the ends of the earth to find those behind the dastardly deed. Counter-intelligence measures may have failed to the extent a terror attack actually took place on US soil a dozen years after 9/11; and the FBI is ruminating on why the brothers were taken off surveillance after they and their family was interrogated at length. But the manner in which the perpetrators were hunted down symbolises the fierce national commitment to finding a definitive closure to an event in which terrorists had succeeded.
Last Friday’s lockdown in Boston may have proved expensive and some collateral damage wrought in leaks of wrong information on suspects, including an innocent Indian student. But the mission was accomplished in a massive manhunt that showed intent. As a society, we are far from the stage where we can do everything we can professionally to manage our problems. It takes a lot more than committed counter-intelligence work to keep terrorists at bay. Follow-up action in cases of terrorist action in the form of intense field investigations should be thorough and swift to bring offenders to book quickly and deter would-be plotters. We simply cannot waver in our will to act.
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