WHEN US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was in India this week, all the talk was about 'non-state actors' and the challenge they throw up to the international system. The assumption was that the Pakistan-based terrorists responsible for the murders of about 175 people in Mumbai, and the injuries to hundreds more, were non-state actors.

Yet it may be that since the 9/11 attacks in New York, the world has completely misconceived the age of terror.

The radical increase in the lethality, range, political consequence and strategic influence of terrorists comes not from their being non-state actors at all. Instead it comes from their being sponsored by states.

Sometimes they are the instruments of states and at other times they make strategic alliances with states.

A terrorist group operating without any state sponsorship is an infinitely less dangerous outfit than a terrorist group operating with the co-operation of even the most ramshackle state.

However, states not only co-operate with terrorists, in many cases they direct and even found the terrorists....