28 November 2008 : Globe and Mail
By TU THANH HA
A surprise attack by determined gunmen is nearly impossible to stop when it hits vulnerable hotels, especially when India itself is "a very soft target," experts said yesterday.
Indian security officials in Mumbai have been talking since the spring about the threat posed by what they described as sleeper cells, said Nigel Inkster, a former deputy director of the British Secret Intelligence Service.
Nevertheless, "it would not surprise me if something like this came to happen without the security and intelligence community in India becoming aware of it," said Mr. Inkster, who is now director of transnational threats at London's International Institute for Strategic Studies.
"A determined group of people are always going to be able to get through once, maybe twice. In the U.K. for example, in the 1990s, the security service had very good coverage of the Provisional IRA but that did not provide a guarantee against attacks on the U.K. mainland."
India is a large democracy with a substantial Muslim population that can be exploited by fundamentalists in volatile regions such as Kashmir and Assam, and unfriendly neighbours such as Pakistan.
Implementing the kind of security inspections that are part of everyday life in Israel would be hard, former El Al airlines security officer Leo Gleser said.
"It's a very soft target. It's very easy to target India," said Mr. Gleser, who runs the security consulting firm ISDS. "Hotels, malls, railway stations, you have so many soft targets in India. They're not hard to find."
India's rapid growth, with its new financial centres, commuter lines and infrastructures, is also creating more target opportunities.
"The Indian economy has grown a lot faster than the ability of its security forces," said Andrew Black, a counterterrorism analyst who runs the risk-management consultancy Black Watch Global.
Even hotels that have guards and security gates - such as the Serena in Kabul where six died after a Taliban attack in January or the Marriott in Islamabad where 43 people died in a bomb attack in September - wouldn't be able to fend off a sustained attack from determined gunmen.
"It's extremely difficult to defend yourself when your business premise is to be accessible," Mr. Black said.
The tactics in Mumbai suggested a high level of planning. Mr. Gleser noted that the attackers brought enough ammunition to fight security forces for more than 24 hours.
Mr. Black was struck by the group's willingness to lose several trained fighters rather than rely on low-skilled suicide bombers. A prolonged attack on targets with Western connections made a more dramatic impact than a single bomb attack, he said.
At the same time, by shunning suicide bombings, the attackers also opened the door to capture.
"The ability to capture people and derive information from them is going to be very important and that's quite an interesting development," Mr. Inkster said.
Mumbai has been the scene of terror attacks before. In 1993, bomb attacks, believed to be in retaliation for anti-Muslim riots, hit the Mumbai stock market, three hotels and other public places, killing 257 people. Two years ago, 187 died in a series of co-ordinated bomb blasts against the commuter train system.
In September, the Indian news media received an e-mail manifesto from a group called the Indian Mujahedeen, who claimed responsibility for past bombings and threatened to attack Mumbai next.
