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India’s decision to host the special session of the United Nations Security Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee (UNSC-CTC) last month held in Mumbai and New Delhi, focused on new and emerging technologies is one of a number of event planned by the Government to give its counter-terror diplomacy a greater push. Later this month, New Delhi will host the third edition of the “No Money For Terror” (NMFT) conference that will look at tackling future modes of terror financing. And in December, when India takes over the United Nations Security Council Presidency for the last time before its two-year term in the Council ends, India will chair a special briefing on the “Global Counter-Terrorism Architecture”, looking at the challenges ahead. While the focus is on the future of the fight against terrorism, it is important to look at some of the challenges that already exist, especially when the world’s attention is consumed by the war in Europe, dealing with the aftermath of COVID-19, and global economic recession.

The first challenge is that the “Global War On Terrorism” (GWOT), as it was improvised (1) by the post-9/11 United States is over with the last chapter written last year, as the United States negotiated with the Taliban, and then withdrew from Afghanistan. GWOT itself was built on an unequal campaign — when India had asked for similar help to deal with the IC-814 hijacking (December 1999) less than two years prior to the 9/11 attacks (with evidence now clear that those who the Atal Bihari Vajpayee government was forced to release were all terrorists who went on to help with planning, funding or providing safe havens to the al-Qaeda leadership), its pleas fell on deaf ears in the U.S., the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and of course, Pakistan, all of whom were hit by the same terrorists in later years.

The next challenge (2) comes from emerging technologies and the weaponization of a number of different mechanisms for terrorism purposes. Drones are already being used to deliver funds, drugs, weapons, ammunition, and even conceived (3) explosive devices. After the COVID-19 pandemic, worries have grown about the use of biowarfare, and Gain-of-Function (GoF) research to mutate viruses and vectors which could be released into targeted populations. In a future that is already here, the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems and robotic soldiers makes it even easier _______. Terror financing uses bitcoins and cryptocurrency, and terror communications use social media, the dark web, and even gaming centers.

Unless there is global lethal (4) on regulating the use of these emergent technologies by all responsible states, it will be hard to distinguish their use from those by designated terror entities, or state-sponsored terrorism. Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea is the most obvious examples of countries where the establishment has supported terrorist groups carrying out cross-border strikes, drone attacks, and cyber warfare. But what does one make of drone strikes by North Atlantic Treaty Organization countries in Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and Somalia, where civilians have been killed, or Chinese government-run hackers who disable urban electric grids? Nor are there any globally accepted norms on how and in what measure one is to respond to those attacks: whether it is the U.S.’s flattening of Afghanistan post-9/11, Pakistan’s aerial strikes on its own populations in Swat and Balochistan, India’s crossing of the UN-monitored Line of Control after the Uri attack (September 2016) and missile strikes on Pakistani territory (Balakot, in February 2019) after the Pulwama suicide bombing (February 2019), or Israel’s relentless bombardment of buildings in Gaza in retaliation for rocket attacks. Without some consensus on what constitutes terror, no war on terrorism can be truly global.

The truth is global inequity, food and energy shortages, climate change and pandemics are going to be the next big drivers of strife and violence in the world, where global stakeholders are at present distracted by territorial disputes and narrow political differences. Terrorist acts of the future will grow more and more consensus (5), will need fewer people to carry out, and with their sponsors having more and more anonymity. India, as host of these counter-terrorism events, and of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the next G-20, must stop fighting the “last war” on terrorism, and steer the global narrative towards preparing for the next ones.