Going Low

[thedrifter]

December 01, 2008, 8:00 a.m.

Going Low
Is Mumbai the future of terrorism?

By James S. Robbins


The terrorist assault in Mumbai is being called India’s 9/11. Of course, so were the
July 11, 2006, Mumbai attacks, but in some ways last week’s violence is a more troubling portent of future terrorist activity. This small band of urban fedayeen may have pointed towards a post-9/11 style of terrorism that is grittier and more dangerous than what we have seen to date.

The terrorists showed more sophistication in that they executed a less-complicated attack than 9/11. The “spectaculars” that were conceptualized by al-Qaeda in the 1990s reached their epitome in the 9/11 “Holy Tuesday Offensive.” They were good techniques to utilize against a target that was not quite on alert. They are complex, require long-term planning, involve a lot of people and have multiple moving parts. But the August 2006 break-up of the plot in Britain to blow up seven trans-Atlantic airliners demonstrated the limits of these kinds of complex plans when the civilized nations are paying attention. These attacks take too long to plan and involve too many people, which invites penetration and compromise by security services.

By contrast, the October 2002, D.C. sniper attacks were an example of very effective low-cost, low-tech terrorism. Basically it was two guys with a gun periodically shooting random victims. The plan was simple, flexible, and inexpensive. Also it built momentum; it wasn’t just a single big attack with no follow-up. Every new slaying garnered more media coverage, and generated more fear and frustration. It was the story of the year for 2002, and in the Washington, D.C., area the coverage was more dense than that given the 9/11 attacks. All this was achieved without a concerted media strategy.

In Mumbai we saw a middle-ground style of terrorism that combined the spectacularism of 9/11 with the flexibility of the sniper attacks. The terrorists chose to hit multiple targets simultaneously, but used small teams whose mission was not to seek immediate martyrdom (like the 9/11 teams or any suicide bombers) but rather to generate as much chaos over as long a period as possible. In that respect they were successful; the attack started at 9:20 P.M. Wednesday and ended 8:50 A.M. Saturday — two and a half days of fighting, and of dominating the news cycle. Being an urban assault, it was difficult to root out, and in the end it was a room-to-room battle. Because the terrorist teams did not have to seize and hold terrain they were free to move from place to place sowing chaos as they went. They could have done more damage had they not holed up in a few locations (they may have been trapped and not had a choice). The terrorists hit transportation targets, a hospital, a café, luxury hotels, people who happened to be on the streets, and the Chabad House. One sour note: Gunfire was reported at the Times of India office. Very bad form for terrorists to attack the journalists who tell their stories.

Tactically, this is smarter terrorism than most of the attacks we have seen in the last decade. But one wonders if it will have the intended strategic effects, whatever they may be. Terrorism has a questionable track record in linking tactics to strategy. A one-off attack creates a momentary disruption, but then what? 9/11 clearly did not have the strategic outcome al-Qaeda intended, unless cave-dwelling was one of bin Laden ’s planned objectives. There have been five major bombings this year in India, killing around 200 and involving an average of nine bombs per incident, with no appreciable strategic impact. This time the attacks prompted Federal Home Minister Shivraj Patil to resign, which will encourage the terrorists. Maybe the attacks will also hurt the investment climate in India. The Bombay Stock Exchange was closed Thursday due to the attacks but opened as fighting continued on Friday and by the close of business the SENSEX index was up .73 percent. Tourism may be negatively affected, and was clearly targeted, but the current economic disruptions will cause much more harm in that sector. The incident will probably damage the slightly warming India/Pakistan relations. As for targeting the Chabad House, the main strategic impact is to remind everyone of the true nature of the enemy we are facing.

The most significant impact at the strategic level is probably in demonstrating an effective and replicable mode of attack. It is the type of thing that could be done anywhere; the hardest part would be inserting the teams, and if they were placed in position without the unnecessary complexity of being deployed simultaneously it would make the plan that much easier to execute. The United States is not defenseless against this type of attack; U.S. law-enforcement and domestic-security services are extremely capable. Yet to seize and hold the information domain, the random bad guy only has to walk into the middle of a crowded mall and open fire, especially if he doesn’t care whether he gets out of there alive. The coverage would be non-stop.

And imagine the scenario in which terrorists seek to combine the disruption effects of Mumbai with the momentum generated by the D.C. snipers. A few gunmen could create chaos in New York one day, followed by Los Angeles the next. Then Chicago, Miami, Nashville, wherever. Every day a new target, and a new statement from the enemy reminding us that there is nowhere to hide. Couple that with the financial uncertainties and the disruption of the holiday shopping season when small businesses make most of their yearly profits and the impact could add up. Plus picture the political dance as the Bush administration tries to respond with varying degrees of effectiveness while the president-elect has to balance his own media perceptions in which any statement he makes could backfire and divert attention from the agenda he wants to set for his first months in office. Talk about strategic impact.

I would like to think that Mumbai was a one-of-a-kind incident, but there are a lot of fist bumps being traded in the jihadist underworld right now, so I suspect they will try it again. Hopefully no time soon.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

It’s Not the Cold War
Updating strategy to fight the ideology.

By Mark Steyn

When terrorists attack, media analysts go into Sherlock Holmes mode, metaphorically prowling the crime scene for footprints, as if the way to solve the mystery is to add up all the clues. The Bombay gunmen seized British and American tourists. Therefore, it must be an attack on Westerners!

Not so, said Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria. If they’d wanted to do that, they’d have hit the Hilton or the Marriott or some other target-rich chain hotel. The Taj and the Oberoi are both Indian owned, and popular watering holes with wealthy Indians.

Okay, how about this group that’s claimed credit for the attack? The Deccan Mujahideen. As a thousand TV anchors asked on Wednesday night, “What do we know about them?”

Er, well, nothing. Because they didn’t exist until they issued the press release. “Deccan” is the name of the vast plateau that covers most of the triangular peninsula that forms the lower half of the Indian sub-continent. It comes from the Prakrit word “dakkhin, which means “south.” Which means nothing at all. “Deccan Mujahideen” is like calling yourself the “Continental Shelf Liberation Front.”

Okay. So does that mean this operation was linked to al-Qaeda? Well, no. Not if by “linked to” you mean a wholly owned subsidiary coordinating its activities with the corporate head office.

It’s not an either/or scenario, it’s all of the above. Yes, the terrorists targeted locally owned hotels. But they singled out Britons and Americans as hostages. Yes, they attacked prestige city landmarks like the Victoria Terminus, one of the most splendid and historic railway stations in the world. But they also attacked an obscure Jewish community center. The Islamic imperialist project is a totalitarian ideology: It is at war with Hindus, Jews, Americans, Britons, everything that is other.

In the ten months before this week’s atrocity, Muslim terrorists killed over 200 people in India and no-one paid much attention. Just business as usual, alas. In Bombay, the perpetrators were cannier. They launched a multiple indiscriminate assault on soft targets, and then in the confusion began singling out A-list prey: Not just wealthy Western tourists, but local orthodox Jews, and municipal law enforcement. They drew prominent officials to selected sites, and then gunned down the head of the antiterrorism squad and two of his most senior lieutenants. They attacked a hospital, the place you’re supposed to take the victims to, thereby destabilizing the city’s emergency-response system.

And, aside from dozens of corpses, they were rewarded with instant, tangible, economic damage to India: the Bombay Stock Exchange was still closed on Friday, and the England cricket team canceled their tour (a shameful act).

What’s relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Nagin’s New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistan’s deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, you’ll find local lads and wily outsiders: That’s pretty much a given.



But we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.

It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.

Many of us, including the incoming Obama administration, look at this as a law-enforcement matter. Bombay is a crime scene, so let’s surround the perimeter with yellow police tape, send in the forensics squad, and then wait for the DA to file charges. There was a photograph that appeared in many of the British papers, taken by a Reuters man and captioned by the news agency as follows: “A suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station.” The photo of the “suspected gunman” showed a man holding a gun. We don’t know much about him — he might be Muslim or Episcopalian, he might be an impoverished uneducated victim of western colonialist economic oppression or a former vice-president of Lehman Bros embarking on an exciting midlife career change — but one thing we ought to be able to say for certain is that a man pointing a gun is not a “suspected gunman” but a gunman. “This kind of silly political correctness infects reporters and news services world-wide,” wrote John Hinderaker of Powerline. “They think they’re being scrupulous — the man hasn’t been convicted of being a gunman yet! — when in fact they’re just being foolish. But the irrational conviction that nothing can be known unless it has been determined by a court and jury isn’t just silly, it’s dangerous.”

Just so. This isn’t law enforcement but an ideological assault — and we’re fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideology’s advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim population’s demographic advance among everybody else.

So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists don’t seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we haven’t yet held talks without preconditions with. This isn’t about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. It’s bigger than that. And if you don’t have a strategy for beating back the ideology, you’ll lose.

Whoops, my apologies. I mean “suspected ideology.”

Ellie