Mumbai Attacker's Confession

What's interesting about Mr. Kasab's confession is not the detail of the planned attack, but how he became a terrorist (or extremist). According to the transcript, Kasab said he was "working for a pittance at a decorating shop in the town of Jhelum, in Pakistan, a job he hated. He and a friend decided to become armed robbers. They went to the garrison city of Rawalpindi, next to Islamabad, where they decided to ask a jihadist group to train them to be militants. They would then use those skills to become expert robbers. " Ultimately, they were captivated by a higher calling and gave up the worldly pursuit of money.

In a plain situation, desperate young people would more likely turn into criminals, as gangsters, robbers, drug dealers, theives, and so on. Some Uygur youth did become such people after they dropped out of school or failed to find a job. The bad image was spreading among Han Chinese in more developed area and making Uygurs a easy target for fear and discrimination. If that's the case, social program and policing actions would work and change the situation. However, as Kasab's experience showed, once these people found another way to channel their anger and grievance, things would drastically differ from a mere question of social inequality. Now, their violent actions are justified by religious and nationalistic fervor, not material compensation, which makes them much harder to be pursuaded back to normal and much easier to be grouped for a common cause.

Developmental ideology is only good for people who seek for a better material living and identify with social progression. That's why the Chinese communist party had a hard time putting down competing ideologies, particularly religious and nationalistic ones that address metaphysical world. But fundamentally the promise of a heaven after this life or a dreamland of independence is playing on the failure of a developmental promise. The problem is indeed created by the penetration of capitalism into the heartland of the Chinese nation. Extremist ideas just used the confrontation between capitalist forces and local social relations and transformed that into ethnic hatred and conflict. Therefore, it is essential to incorporate ethnic minorities into the developmental progress, otherwise we'll face the danger of losing them to the hands of terrorists. Particularly the young and the educated must be pacified through affirmative action and balanced assimilation. Note, there's no contradiction between maintaining ethnic language and culture and joining the process of development. Human rights protection does not mean stagnation for minority people. On the contrary, participation in this development is the best way to preserve their heritage while having a better life.