THE attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center - an American symbol of financial might - will serve as the new blueprint for future terrorist acts, said anti-terrorism experts.

p> Terrorists would now be emboldened to hit 'prestige targets' causing massive numbers of casualties when earlier, they might have been content with launching sporadic, smaller-scale attacks, they said.

The successful disintegration of the World Trade Center (WTC) and the reverberations the attacks produced around the world, would motivate them to unleash acts of the same scale, they added.

'From now on, we are living in a very different world, where the rules of the game have changed,' Singapore-based specialist Assistant Professor Andrew Tan told The Straits Times.

'A Pandora's box has been opened. Terrorists are very heartened by the successful attack on powerful symbols such as the WTC and the Pentagon - they now know that it is possible to succeed.

'There will be an escalation of more deadly terrorist acts everywhere.'

Dr Rohan Gunaratna, a fellow at the Centre for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St Andrew's University in Scotland, concurred.

He said there would not necessarily be an increase in the number of attacks, but rather, an upping of the lethal and prestige quotients of future tactics and targets respectively.

'Terrorists copy tactics and targets, exchanging methods and intelligence. With this incident, there will be an increase in the lethality of their attacks.

'They will wait more patiently to generate resources before hitting the big targets, aiming to kill thousands of people at one go instead of just three or four.'

The death toll in the US is expected to run into thousands - by far the highest casualty in a terrorist attack.

Previous attacks include the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which resulted in 224 deaths.

But the extent to which the current incident would influence future terrorism also hinged on how fast and how efficiently the US responded, said former Indian Ambassador to Laos S. D. Muni, who researches ethnic conflict and Third World security.

He said: 'The successful attack has bestowed greater credibility on the terrorists. If the US acts decisively in tracking down those responsible, there may not be more of such attacks in the future.

'But if it is unable to match the surprise of the terrorist attack, we can expect more such ruthless acts in the future.'

The US attacks also herald a new game in which the terrorists used the paradoxically novel yet conventional measure such as hijacking an airplane.

This caught international security analysts by surprise as they were anticipating terrorist attacks that used mass-destruction weapons, such as nuclear, biological and chemical bombs.

'This is a very cheap, very easy and affordable weapon,' said Dr Sheng Lijun, an international-relations analyst, from China but now based in Singapore.

'It takes only three months to train a normal pilot to fly a Boeing plane, and one may expect other terrorist groups to pick up such a method.'

Groups which are likely to pick up on the strategies used in this attack include the Tamil Tiger rebels in Sri Lanka, and the Aum Shinrikyo sect, which was responsible for the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack which killed 12 people.

http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/world/story/0,1870,70318,00.html?

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001

Answers

Note these paragraphs:

" He said: 'The successful attack has bestowed greater credibility on the terrorists. If the US acts decisively in tracking down those responsible, there may not be more of such attacks in the future.

'But if it is unable to match the surprise of the terrorist attack, we can expect more such ruthless acts in the future.'"

-- Anonymous, September 14, 2001