Carnage in Mumbai

So I've been following the carnage in Mumbai since the early confused reports last night, was still on the BBC for the 0500GMT transition from the skeleton night-shift to the morning pros, and the whole thing sounds like a nightmare. As this remains a "fluid and dynamic" situation, I'm just giving you a link to CNN, as their team coverage with IBN has in fact been pretty decent.

For anyone about to dismiss Mumbai as one of the several cities made less relevant by its lack of American flags, let's put this in perspective. Mumbai, formerly Bombay, is the world's 5th largest city with some 19 million residents, it is the financial capital of the world's largest democracy, and it is among the most international cities in a subcontinent filled with international cities. In other words, it's kind of a big deal.

So the idea that groups of gunmen could invade the place, rolling up as many as ten targets with rifle fire and grenades, and then move to subsequent targets (in some cases?) by car (or according to one report, by boat?), and then have the discipline to create three hostage situations, suggests a degree of sophistication no previous terrorist attack I am familiar with has approached. It doesn't sound impressive at first, but think about it a little more- you have to have multiple strike teams, each with multiple, prioritized targets, and multiple transport elements capable of getting between those targets, all moving at the same time. In the world of organized violence, so much complexity should be a recipe for failure.

Further, the targets were mostly Western in nature- the hotels targeted were from the days of the Raj and favorite foreign hangouts, the train station a duplicate of St. Pancras in London, and the gunmen apparently sought out British and American passport holders when they were taking their hostages.

Certainly, it's possible to read this as bearing many of the hallmarks of an Al Qaeda operation- sophisticated, cheap, targeting westerners and finance. If so, we can expect to learn that it was perpetrated by a combination of locals and foreign operators- certainly, the emergence of a previously unknown organization hardly seems to offer much context or explanation. India is also about to hold the first elections in Kashmir, and this could be aimed as much at a domestic audience as the rest of the world- considering the complexity of this operation, the notion that these guys either are or were military types can't be ruled out- but if they were, I'd expect more sophisticated equipment, and besides, you'd have to be insane to do this as a foreign state. The cost-benefit just doesn't work out.

Finally, following the publication of a paper by the 304th military intelligence battalion that the Twitter service has already been used by socially disruptive groups as a real-time intelligence gathering service (here), I thought I would check out a service I've previously assumed appealed mostly to the Tiger Beat crowd. I was totally unprepared for the result- seconds-old posts by more or less regular people who are actually on the spot, watching the Taj burn from their own hotels, or who narrowly escaped the day's bullets themselves, then a cascade of information, links to real-time news feeds, someone posted a link to every emergency service and hospital in the city- it was far, far more powerful and impressive than I would have imagined, like a high-speed emergency wiki. Brace yourself, and have a look. It's a small world, after all.