Be alive to non-traditional threats too: Indian President

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Be alive to non-traditional threats too: Indian President
While terrorism remains the foremost challenge to the civilised world, there is need to develop capabilities to respond to non-traditional challenges, President Pratibha Patil cautioned on Thursday.
Emphasising that India stood for protection of its values, commitment to democracy, rule of law and pluralism, which enabled the country to earn the respect of the world, she said threats to these basic concepts needed to be addressed, the Hindu reported (23).
"One of the foremost threats that the civilised world is confronted with is from terrorism, and India has been its victim...but terrorism is a global challenge with a worldwide network that threatens regional and global security. The world community has woken up to this challenge. India believes that terrorism has to be confronted with all the force at our command and in close cooperation with the international community."
Ms. Patil was inaugurating a seminar on the occasion of the golden jubilee of the National Defence College (NDC) here.
Flagging other challenges to security outside the classical notions of inter-state conflict, the President said that in a globalised world transnational crimes, piracy, drug trafficking and cyber attacks no longer respected national borders and many remained interlinked.
"All this requires that we must develop capabilities of adequately responding to not only the traditional threats but also the new threats of the 21st century. The tools available to us are no longer limited to military power. Other attributes of power, including soft power, economic strength and technological advances, have an increasing role to play."
Menon on new challenges
Delivering the keynote address on the theme of the seminar, 'The Role of Force in Strategic Affairs,' National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon advocated a new, open, balanced and inclusive security architecture to correspond to the new emerging situation.
"The security challenges of the 21st century are radically different from those of the 20th. Nuclear confrontation or war between major powers is not as likely as the threat from derivatives of nuclear deterrence, namely terrorism and nuclear proliferation, which are being used to subvert the emergence of a plural, secular and democratic international order in the 21st century. The challenges of a globalised world cannot be handled by 20th century military alliances or containment strategies," he said
Courtesy: The Hindu