We love comforting fictions in international relations. The most enduring fairy tale is that violence never pays. When leaders gather at forums like the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and declare that terrorism cannot serve as a strategic asset, the diplomatic corps nods in solemn unison. It sounds enlightened. It plays well on evening news broadcasts. It is also completely detached from historical reality.
Statecraft is a dirty business. For decades, sovereign actors have used irregular warfare, proxy militias, and cross-border insurgency to achieve geopolitical objectives that conventional militaries could never touch without triggering a nuclear exchange or a ruinous total war. To dismiss state-sponsored violence as a mere failure of morality is to misunderstand the cold calculus of asymmetric advantage.
I have spent years watching defense analysts and foreign policy pundits pat themselves on the back for moralizing while failing to account for why rogue states keep turning to the exact same playbook. They treat terrorism as a psychological aberration or an irrational outburst of ancient hatreds. That is lazy thinking. It is a tool. And like any tool, its utility depends entirely on the objective of the user and the tolerance of the target for pain.
Let us dismantle the comforting narrative one layer at a time.
The Cost Benefit Analysis of Chaos
To understand why terrorism remains an attractive instrument for certain capitals, look at the math. A conventional armored division costs billions of dollars to build, maintain, supply, and train. It requires massive logistical tails, specialized fuel, and vulnerable command structures. Deploying it invites immediate satellite surveillance, international condemnation, and direct conventional retaliation.
Now look at the alternative. Fund a proxy network, launder money through obscure trade channels, provide safe havens, and let ideological zealotry do the heavy lifting. The financial outlay is a rounding error in a national defense budget. Yet the return on investment can be staggering. You pin down hundreds of thousands of enemy troops in a counter-insurgency quagmire. You drain their treasury, exhaust their public patience, and project power far beyond your actual economic weight.
When Prime Minister Modi stands before the SCO and insists that terrorism cannot be a strategic asset, he is describing how the world ought to work. He is outlining a normative baseline. But normative baselines do not stop a suitcase bomb or deter a proxy army operating from the shelter of a friendly border.
The uncomfortable truth is that for a weaker state facing a dominant regional hegemon, symmetric defense is suicide. Conventional deterrence fails when the power imbalance is too vast. When David faces Goliath, David does not pick up a larger bronze sword. He picks up a sling. When nation-states face a regional superpower, they do not build matching air forces. They outsource violence to non-state actors because it creates plausible deniability.
Plausible deniability is the holy grail of modern diplomacy. It allows a government to wage war below the threshold of conventional retaliation. It creates a gray zone where international law becomes paralyzed by vetoes, diplomatic paralysis, and evidentiary debates over attribution.
The Myth of the Boomerang Effect
The standard counter-argument from the policy establishment is blowback. The narrative goes that if you feed a tiger, the tiger will eventually eat you. We point to historical missteps where groups trained by intelligence agencies turned on their creators.
This argument overstates the risk while ignoring professional competence. It assumes that state sponsors are universally incompetent. In reality, major intelligence services are ruthless auditing machines. They manage proxy portfolios the way a venture capitalist manages a high-risk tech fund. They diversify investments, maintain strict kill switches, starve recalcitrant factions of funding, and pit rival groups against one another to prevent any single entity from growing too powerful.
Pakistan's historical relationship with various militant factions is frequently cited as proof of the boomerang effect. Domestic instability within Pakistan is presented as the inevitable price of its regional proxy strategy. But view it through a colder lens. For decades, that strategy kept Islamabad relevant to Washington, constrained India's conventional options through the nuclear threshold, and maintained influence in Kabul. From a purely cynical institutional perspective, the architects of those policies achieved many of their primary defensive objectives, even if the domestic societal cost proved horrific.
State actors do not evaluate success based on whether a policy is clean or humanitarian. They evaluate it based on whether the adversary suffers more friction than the sponsor does.
Why the International Community Prefers Illusions
Multilateral summits thrive on semantic consensus. The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation includes nations that view state sovereignty as absolute and others that have practiced or tolerated irregular warfare as an instrument of foreign policy for generations. When everyone signs a declaration condemning terrorism, they are not adopting a unified security doctrine. They are engaging in diplomatic theater.
It provides a safe linguistic container for deep geopolitical rivalries. India wants to isolate Pakistan diplomatically and delegitimize cross-border incursions. Other member states want stability for economic corridors and resource extraction. By signing a statement calling terrorism incompatible with development, everyone gets what they want for the cameras. India gets the rhetorical condemnation. The sponsors get to nod along without changing a single operational protocol in their intelligence basements.
Pretending that terrorism lacks strategic value allows the international community to avoid hard choices. Admitting that asymmetric proxy warfare works forces a terrifying conclusion: conventional deterrence is broken, international law has no teeth without enforcement, and peace is often just an interlude between outsourced campaigns.
The Real Danger of the Moralizing Trap
The greatest risk of treating terrorism purely as a moral failing rather than a calculated strategic choice is that it misdirects our countermeasures.
If you believe your adversary is simply evil or irrational, your response will be moral outrage, finger-wagging at summits, and appeals to international conscience. None of these measures impose costs on a calculation-driven actor. A government willing to absorb economic sanctions and diplomatic isolation to achieve strategic depth cares very little about a sternly worded communique from a regional summit.
Effective countermeasures require shifting the adversary's math. You do not stop proxy warfare by explaining why it is bad. You stop it by making the cost of sponsorship unbearably high through covert disruption, financial strangulation, technological dominance, and credible threats of disproportionate attribution that strip away the shield of plausible deniability.
Until we stop treating state-sponsored violence as an anomaly and start treating it as a rational, albeit abhorrent, extension of competitive geopolitics, we will remain trapped in a cycle of empty rhetoric. The leaders on the podium know the game they are playing. It is time we stopped pretending we do not see the board.
