Tangible action should follow symbolism

The UN Security Council Counter-Terrorism Committee (CTC) held its much anticipated meeting in Mumbai and New Delhi on October 28 and 29, respectively, which was a “tribute and statement” to the horrific 26/11 terror attacks. A derivative of the post-9/11 multilateral architecture, the UN CTC, comprising all 15 members of the Security Council, was established by Resolution 1373 (2001) on September 28, 2001, as the UNSC adopted this formative resolution.

The CTC meetings “analyse Member States’ regular reports to the Committee, and follows up its analysis with responses that identify the areas in which states need to improve in order to achieve full implementation of the resolution.” The Counter-Terrorism Committee Executive Directorate (CTED), a special political mission established by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1535 (2004), was established in 2004 to support the committee in this work.

In the Delhi Declaration, an outcome document adopted after the two-day meeting, there were two concrete action points apart from the reinforcing of the previously stated position of the UN system on CT issues. The first one was that “Member States of the Committee will draft recommendations to counter the terrorist exploitation of Information and Communications Technology, such as payment technologies and fundraising methods and misuse of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS or drones).” The second was that “a new set of non-binding guiding principles to assist Member States in countering the digital terrorism threat will be issued, with a compilation of good practices on the opportunities offered by the same set of technologies to tackle threats.”

This is the second occasion when the CTC meeting has taken place outside the UNHQ. The first one took place in Madrid, Spain, on July 28, 2015, which focused on the foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs). The FTF-centric CTC meeting was preceded and followed by a detailed response from the international community, including at the UN. The UNSC Resolution 2178 adopted on September 24, 2014, under the US presidency of the UNSC for that particular month, created a new policy and the legal framework for international action in response to the FTF threat was adopted. Resolution 2178 requires “countries to take certain steps to address the FTF threat, including to prevent suspected FTFs from entering or transiting their territories and to have laws to prosecute FTFs.” Above all, Resolution 2178 also focused on “existing UN counter-terrorism bodies on the FTF threat, providing a framework for long-term monitoring and assistance to countries in their efforts to address this threat.”

The urgency of the threat was predicated on the fact that a number of nationals from European countries, namely Belgium, France and the UK, joined the ISIS as FTFs, thus posing a direct national security threat. In this context, I, while working for a multilateral CT apparatus in that period, was witness to strenuous activity of various national institutions in Europe to meet this danger. For instance, the UK proactively extended its support in terms of counter-narratives in the realm of strategic communications to meet the challenge of online radicalisation and recruitment by terrorists. An active border security strategy, including by the sharing of the detailed database of the FTFs, was quickly erected by the EU and national institutions so that softer borders within Europe for European nationals are not exploited by the terrorists. The best practices were shared with other parts of the world, including Central Asia (another region impacted by the FTF).

In the realm of counter-terrorism, the policy has to constantly calibrate in the light of the developments in the field. One of the themes in the Delhi CTC meeting was the global misuse of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) or drones, in particular by terrorists, and developments in UAS deployment and use for law enforcement and border security purposes. The UAS are now an integral part of the nation-states’ war strategy as we are witnessing in the deployment of Turkish drones by Ukraine against Russian tanks. Drones are also used by non-state actors. The September 2019 drone attack on Saudi Aramco’s Abqaiq refinery, the world’s largest oil refinery, is one example. The same way, there had been cross-border assaults through drones in the UAE on January 17, 2022, targeting their critical installations, including oil tanker trucks.

In the South Asian context, along the Indo-Pak International Border, particularly on the Indian side in Punjab and J&K, UAS are spotted regularly. In the last three years, sources have told me, a large consignment of pistols has been dropped by UAS and the direct consequences are the targeted assassinations in the Kashmir valley by “hybrid militants”. A drone, on June 27, last year, dropped explosives at the Indian Air Force station in Jammu, causing injuries to its two personnel. As some experts in the relevant thematic session of the CTC meeting in Delhi informed, terrorist organisations are using creative means to avoid detection of drone imports. For instance, terrorists are increasingly only procuring various parts of drones from across the world and assembling the drones themselves.

Another theme was the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT), including the Internet and social media, by the terrorists. Messaging apps like the Telegram, as informed during one of the thematic presentations, was being extensively employed as a prime communication tool in some of the terrorist-infested countries in Africa. The South Asian context is proving to be no different. One such instance came to light in the police investigation in a foiled bid to target Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rally in J&K on April 24, 2022. Before infiltrating, the alleged terrorists, who were killed, were in touch with their ecosystem on the Indian side through one such popular messaging app.

The CTC Delhi meeting, in various presentations, mentioned about the multidimensional nature of terror financing. However, the experts also cautioned that while focusing on the new technologies one shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the traditional ways of financing, like hawala payments, are still the popular practice.

Within the multilateral arena, these thematic meetings of the CTC are not new, but what’s important is the symbolism of the CTC meeting in India. The symbolism of holding a CTC meeting in the global south should now trigger a more tangible action as multilateral policy analysis and action in the CT realm call for a more grounded understanding of the relevant issues and a quick sharing of the best practices among the Member States, including between the global south and global north. This can be effectively executed by a bottom-up approach, including through a continuous expansion of the eyes and ears of the UN CT architecture in the global south, which readily informs policymaking and CT programme design at the headquarters in a time-sensitive fashion.