Terror & Thanksgiving

For those of us who think that we have been living through a "national nightmare," for the last eight years, as a friend of mine put it, the terrorist attack in Mumbai may serve as a bit of a correction. A well-planned attack by Islamic terrorists has killed over a hundred people and wounded more than three hundred in the city that used to be called Bombay. There are reports that foreigners (Americans, Europeans, and Japanese) were targets, and that some of these targets were killed. But it looks like most of the dead and injured are Indian. It also looks clear that the attack had substantial "outside help," though who was behind it is not at all clear. The trouble is, the Indian Government always has a pretty good idea who did it. From the Washington Post:

Indian police and terrorism experts said they were uncertain who had carried out the attack, but [Prime Minister] Singh, in a nationally televised address, used phrases usually taken here to mean Pakistan, raising fears that the violence in Mumbai could raise tensions between the nuclear-armed rivals.

So the possibility that this atrocity may lead to a real war between two nuclear armed powers is, well, very real. If you want to know what a real "national nightmare" looks like, this would be it.

We Americans have a lot to be thankful for. One thing is that we have just elected our first African American President. This shows that the quarrels among us are family quarrels, and that they will be settled by ballots rather than bullets. Another thing we have to be thankful for is that the great terror of 9/11/01 has not been repeated. At least not here.

Whatever you think about the Bush Presidency, our 43^rd President managed to prevent another terrorist attack. This was in part due to a much heightened security regime. We have been carefully monitoring terrorist communications, and the very fact that we have been doing that has made another attack difficult. But the most important reason that no new attack happened was the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Our military ventures there attracted the terrorist networks to a place where we had the most deadly military apparatus in history waiting for them. American forces killed scores of Al Qaeda's leaders, and hundreds, maybe thousands of their foot soldiers. It may be, paradoxically, that it is only our recent success in Iraq that has freed the terrorists to concentrate on other places. Oh, and another thing: we have shut down most of the financial networks that were feeding the terrorist organizations, and we have discouraged unfriendly regimes from backing these murderous rascals.

Prior to 9/11, each successive terrorist attack was more sophisticated and better funded than the last. Since 9/11, each terrorist attack has been less sophisticated and less well-funded than the last. Or at least that is what it looked like until Mumbai. But even there, the attack was carried out by a bunch of killers with rifles.

We can be thankful that we have done so well. The trick now is to keep up the pressure.