As the new year begins, law enforcement agencies (LEAs) will be faced with a variety of terrorism challenges in the South Asian region. These threats can be classified into four significant dimensions: gaining public backing to fight against militancy; discovering economic origins of terrorism and thwarting them effectively; utilizing advanced technologies to find and confront terrorists in cyber or non-cyber areas; and developing a joint intelligence community, communicating and collation instrument to deal with indications of terror handlers on numerous strata in the territory.
These regions have been loomed with an isolationist perspective by individual nations owing to historical conflicts and local conflicts, leaving places available for militants to function easily.
Almost everywhere in the region, public support appears to be overlooked in the battle against militancy. Public distrust primarily arises from empty assurances on critical areas of public service delivery and essential infrastructure, mending improperly the faults of earlier military operations and the double approach of the state in dealing with militancy.
It is high time that regional nations properly maintain police organizations so as not to expose the military to public anger in settled areas. The financial bars, both formal and informal, have to be outlined and documented. These deliver valuable data on how internal and external allocation is reshaping the militancy in a nation. It can also witness how criminal trends are supporting militant movements in the region. The outer funding from foreign agencies to different militant bodies can be resolved as well.
Within and across border regions, drone-based IBOs will reshape counterterrorism procedures in the region. There are signs that many militant organizations are already utilizing drones as a countermeasure against LEAs. Separated from the accuracy of the targeted attack and its preference, the drones are now slowly being functioned via localized and regional databases.
An appropriate digitalized archive is needed to be maintained at the national or regional group to automatically follow and trace the potential militants. This requires collaborative action by the regional nations, which, in the majority of conditions, remain at probabilities with each other politically, internationally, or at least on the grounds of different state systems.
The absence of any reasonable regional anti-terrorism system has set South Asian nations at the understanding of militant elements. The SCO-RATS has not been capable of bridging the disparities among regional nations, particularly after the beginning of the Ukraine and Gaza battles.
There are plausible reports that many nations are working on the ground of others to support regional feuds. It seems that regional nations or their intelligence machines are not ready to reduce or underestimate the threat of militancy in the area via collaborative standards. Therefore, these complicated elements may persist to shape and reshape the destiny of militancy in the South Asian region in 2025.
