dna edit: Terror blasts holes in US security

Twelve years after the terror strikes of September 11, 2001, terror returned to the United States on Monday, when two bombs went off at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three people were killed and over 140 have been injured. As of now, little is known about who is behind the attack, and the reason for it. US president Barack Obama did not even use the word terrorism; only later did a White House official declare that the authorities are treating the incident as an act of terror. However, the blasts are undoubtedly an act of terror, whether carried out by foreign or home-grown terrorists.

9/11 showed the world that the US was a target of its enemies incensed by, among other things, its foreign policy. There is also not much that the US has done in the last 12 years that would have earned it more friends.

But though the Boston bombings prove that no one, not even the world’s most powerful nation, is immune from terror strikes, the fact that the US hasn’t had a major terror attack on its soil in 12 years says something about its ability to defend itself.

Like the US, India too has its enemies who want to harm it. However, our enemies manage to strike again and again without much effort.

Terror attacks, whether by foreigners or homegrown terrorists, occur every few months here so much so that these tragedies merge into each other in a confusing jumble. Look at the last few years itself. There is the November 2008 terror attack in Mumbai, the German bakery blast in Pune in 2010, the July 2011 attacks in Mumbai, Delhi’s high court blasts of 2011 and the Hyderabad blasts in February this year.

Why do these blasts occur with such regularity? Why can’t India put a stop to them? Following 9/11, the US took a long and hard look at homeland security and fixed it.

India should take some lessons from the US on that front. Assuming terrorism is here for good — though this is hardly the best thing — may there soon be a time in India, when there is a decade between two terror attacks.