A Lengthening Chain

The recent attacks in Mumbai are already fading into the collective memory here in the United States, joining the list of organized terror attacks in places like Madrid and Bali. Much has become clear in the days since my first post on this matter: the attackers effected a seaborne insertion, seized locally available vehicles, and proceeded to conduct themselves with a professionalism approximating a special operations force. Maintaining radio silence, they split in to teams and executed a series of diversionary attacks to confuse first responders, and then moved into their target hotels and office buildings. They carried secure communications gear, were familiar with the floor plans, directed their movements with hand signals.

As Newsweek points out, at this point it is a fairly open secret that the Pakistani military had something to do with training these individuals. The article also does an excellent job of detailing the limitations of Pakistan's civilian government's efforts to confront a military establishment which has traditionally kept its own council with regard to suppressing Islamic extremists. Oh, and efforts to protest innocence by Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the Pakistani "charity" which seems to have been somehow involved, are undermined by this Times article, written by a reporter who interviewed one of their members the week before the attacks. I don't personally know anything about the organization, but the guy in this interview appears to have an agenda rather beyond clothing the poor and helping the needy.

None of this will strike any student of contemporary Southeast Asia as particularly surprising. India has shown admirable restraint with regard to Pakistan after the attacks, which is reassuring considering the weapons technology available to both parties. The solution, which would be for Pakistan to actually work to suppress violent extremist groups, may well prove beyond the reach of many of those in Pakistan who would like to see it happen. Which is truly unfortunate, in part because it means that Mumbai really is just another link in what will prove to be a lengthening chain of tragedies perpetrated by extremists, and in part because India is a democracy, and it's only a matter of time before people there start to demand a more aggressive foreign policy with regard to Pakistan. If they do, it will be hard to blame them. No doubt, this was in part precisely what those gunmen wanted when they came ashore in Mumbai, and I hate to see brutality rewarded.

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.