The Mumbai Attacks Were Not Due to Traditional India-Pakistan Disputes

The deficiencies in India’s internal intelligence and police organizations are now becoming more visible to the rest of India and the world. Unfortunately, it took an incident like last week’s coordinated attacks to shine the light of day on these weaknesses. Addressing them will take time, capital, and another resource that is all-too-often rare, the willingness to put nation ahead of self-interest and political partisanship. These matters are for India to resolve, and I hope that it is up to the task.

However, in addition to the issues raised about India's intelligence capabilities, it is also time to start asking other critical questions.

Who were the attackers?

Why did they attack?

The knee-jerk reaction in India will be to blame Pakistan. I am sure that there are elements in Pakistan that were involved in the attacks, either with financing, logistics, or in other indirect ways. However, it is becoming clear that the attacks were not driven by traditional Pakistan-India disputes, such as Kashmir. Looking at this attack through a traditional lens is, in some ways, analogous to Spain blaming Basque separatists for the train bombings in Madrid in March 2004. Now, I admit that this analogy is imperfect. We know that the Basques had nothing to do with the attack in Madrid, whereas in Mumbai it seems that there is a real connection with Pakistan. Nevertheless, I draw the parallel to make one important point, that we cannot look at the attack through the traditional frame of India-Pakistan issues. The problem (and hence the way we try think of a solution) is much broader.

To assess the problem, we need to first look at the list of sites that were attacked and the nationality of the victims. If the goal was to draw attention to Kashmir or any other traditional India-Pakistan dispute, the terrorists would have targeted solely ‘Indian’ sites. It is true that at some sites, such as the hospital and train station most prominently, the nationality of their victims was mostly Indian. (Although, one would argue that even these locations would likely have a high proportion of Westerners.)

The vast majority of victims were killed in the two hotels (Taj and Oberoi) and at the Chabad Jewish Center, clearly targets that would produce the highest likelihood of killing Westerners. We know that the attackers deliberately sought out American, British and Jewish/Israeli victims. Survivors stated that the attackers asked people for their passports, and American, British and Israeli citizens were killed while others were released.

Clearly, these attacks do not follow the mold of traditional India-Pakistan confrontation. Which brings me back to the two questions above, who were the attackers and why did they attack?

We will learn answers to the first question reasonably quickly. For example, we already know that several of them may have held British passports. More information will follow.

The second question is more troubling. It may be easier (at least publicly) to say, “It is the work of Pakistan support for militants” or something similarly non-confrontational. However, this kind of response buries the truth in a sea of political correctness.

As we learn more, I suspect that we will eventually find evidence that links the Mumbai attacks to others around the world. This evidence, however, will likely be indirect, perhaps something as indirect as the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks having trained at similar camps to the perpetrators of other attacks. While we may not see the direct “Al-Qaeda” stamp on the Mumbai attacks, we will discover that these attacks are part of a much larger global campaign.

We know that attacks around the world are not centrally planned, funded and executed. Like cancer that has metastasized to different organs, regional attacks are often planned, funded and executed locally by a growing number of new groups that we had neither previously heard of nor encountered.

However, the common thread in the Mumbai and other attacks around the world is that they are inspired by a common cause, radical Islam. Radical Islam is threatened by the ideas of the modern world. Freedom of speech, Individual civil liberties, religious freedom, minority rights and many other tenets of the modern world pose a direct challenge to radical Islam and its goal of a global caliphate.

Americans, British and Jews were specifically targeted because they are perceived by radical Islam as the principle symbols of freedom and liberty. Like the United States, England, Israel and other democracies around the world, India was attacked because of its dedication to these principles we commonly hold dea

It is perfectly reasonable to suggest that radical-Islam is at the core of the problem and we have to think strategically about how to deal radical-Islam in all its manifestations, whether in Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, or unknown cells in the Pakistani intelligence or in any of the large number of previously unheard of groups that have metastasized around the world.

Only when we can talk about the enemy directly can we develop a approach to defeating them. Ultimately, our collective approach will include a combination of offensive and defensive components, and involve diplomatic, economic, cultural, educational, intelligence as well as military means.