The atrocity in Bombay strikes me as one of the two most frightening terrorist attacks on record. The other was not 9/11, but the Oklahoma City bombing. The 9/11 attack was terrifying enough, but may have represented the peak of terrorist resources and genius and probably set the terrorists back a long way in their search for state sponsors. As Edward Luttwak has noted, since 9/11, terrorist attacks have steadily decreased in sophistication and support, but not so much, alas, in effect.
The OK bombing was terrifying because it showed how much carnage one evil man and his henchman can cause. The Mumbai attack shows how many murders a handful of young men with a bag of rifles and ordinance can commit. It's the kind of thing that makes anyone who thinks about it feel like a sitting duck.
There are a couple of specific lessons from Bombay that are worth learning. One is that the Indian government was woefully inadequate in its response. It took them ten hours to get 200 commandos into the city. According to the New York Times blog The Lede, Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh apparently spent ninety minutes listening to a brief before he took action. It gets better:
Most of the NSG men have to be roused from sleep. They don their uniforms, strap on safety gear and collect ammo and firearms. It is discovered that the plane that can take 200 men, the IL 76, is not in Delhi but Chandigarh. Someone wakes up the IL 76 pilot, the plane refueled. It finally arrives in Delhi [at 2 am, five and half hours after the attack began].
Given India's vulnerability to terrorist attacks, and the recent history of those attacks, you might have thought they could keep 200 commandos in readiness.
It is also very dismaying that the police force already in Mumbai, and present at the scene of the killings, failed to shoot back at the terrorists. Now I understand that the local police were not nearly as well armed as the terrorists, and were not trained to respond to this kind of attack. But there were apparently a lot of them. Can you imagine your average New York City cop hiding behind a desk and not taking a shot when he had one? Mumbai is a city of 19 million. Surely it can afford a SWAT team, or at least a police force that is prepared to use its weapons. This suggests a deep weakness in the state that represents one of the world's most important economies, and soon its largest national population.
The other lesson is that the political solution to terrorism is no solution at all. From the National Review:
Many put the blame for the attack on years of Indian-Pakistani hostility and tension. In fact, relations between the two countries have never been warmer. This past month, Pakistan's new president stunned and delighted Indians by publicly renouncing any first use of nuclear weapons. Violence in Kashmir, the principal bone of contention between India and Pakistan since 1947, is on the decline. Before the Mumbai attacks, politicians were scheduled to start talks on permitting trade across the region's Line of Control, so that Hindu farmers in Indian Kashmir can sell their wheat or a used tractor to Muslim farmers in Pakistani Kashmir.
This is precisely what the terrorists don't want, of course. It's the fact that tensions over Kashmir are diminishing that prompted them to attack on the November 28 — just as al-Qaeda blew up Samarra's Golden Mosque in Iraq back in 2006 in order to keep Shias and Sunnis hating and killing each other. The illusion that formal agreements between peoples and governments —whether between India and Pakistan or Israel and the Palestinian Authority —can somehow defuse the terrorist problem was the among the first casualties in Mumbai. Terrorists see it the other way around: the relaxation of tensions is a problem requiring bloodshed. Islamic terrorists don't want justice or respect for their beliefs, or restoration of some imaginary homeland. They want violence and death.
This has to be understood. The terrorists attacked Mumbai because it is India's most cosmopolitan city, a simple of globalization. Mumbai is India's World Trade Center. The nations of the world cannot negotiate with people whose bottom line demand is that the world should go away. The only solution to this problem is a military solution: catch these people or kill them before they can kill anyone else.
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