Attacks raise intelligence, security and political questions
Terrorism entered new territory with the November attacks on Mumbai, in which 172 people died. It was not the target that was new: India’s financial centre and other Indian cities have regularly suffered bomb blasts. However, the method of attack was reminiscent of American shootings such as those at Columbine or Virginia Tech. While tactics of this kind have become commonplace in Kashmir, and have been used by al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, the Mumbai attacks showed an unprecedented combination of detailed planning and coordination, multiplicity of targets and indiscriminate killing on a mass scale in a major city.
The world’s attention has since focused on the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LeT) as being closely involved in the terror. In early December, Pakistan raided militant camps and arrested an LeT commander and the head of the Jaish-e-Mohammad, another radical Islamist group. Meanwhile, India released the names, photos and home towns of nine dead gunmen it claims were from Pakistan.
In India, the attacks have prompted demonstrations of public outrage against central and state leadership. India’s security apparatus has come in for particular criticism. The resignation of the home minister, Shivraj Patil, will hardly assuage strong feelings that
action must be taken. His replacement, Shri P. Chidambaram, acknowledged there had been security lapses.
It will take months to establish the facts about the Mumbai attacks. Eyewitness accounts and initial statements from security forces presented a confused picture. This Strategic Comment does not attempt to provide an account. However, what is clear is that a group probably consisting of ten heavily armed men (nine killed, one in custody) attacked targets including the main railway terminus, a cafe frequented by Westerners, a Jewish centre and the five-star Oberoi and Taj Mahal hotels. They appear to have hijacked a trawler at sea and used a dinghy to come ashore, where they split up and took taxis to their initial targets.
The operation to end the violence took about 60 hours. During this time, gunmen were reportedly in phone contact with commanders elsewhere. People were shot indiscriminately. The large majority of those killed were Indian. However, several of the targets appeared to have been selected because foreigners were bound to be present in numbers. Victims reported that the gunmen had specifically sought out Britons and Americans. The attackers displayed considerable knowledge of Mumbai.
Intelligence warnings
In the immediate aftermath, questions inevitably arose about whether the Indian government had received intelligence regarding a possible attack, and whether more could have been done to protect against it. In a familiar pattern, Maharashtra state and Indian central government intelligence officials traded blame. However, unidentified United States government officials claimed they had passed intelligence to the Indian government a month earlier, warning of a possible plot by extremists to launch terrorist raids on Mumbai from the sea.
India’s external intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), claimed to have intercepted a satellite-telephone conversation on 18 November warning of a possible seaborne attack on Mumbai. Local officials acknowledged that some of the targets were identified in advance of the actual attack.
It thus seemed that there had been no shortage of generic threat intelligence, though this may have been insufficiently specific to enable the Indian authorities to thwart the attack – a problem not confined to India. Nonetheless, the way intelligence was collected, processed and acted upon highlighted serious and long-standing deficiencies in India’s intelligence and security structures and capabilities, which need urgent reform.
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