As it’s still too soon to say with any degree of certainty who the Mumbai terrorists are, or who sent them, I’ll confine myself to making a couple of really obvious points.
1.
Even allowing for the fact that the terrorists inevitably had surprise on their side, as well the complexities of clearing and securing hotels with hundreds of rooms, the Indian security forces don’t seem to have reacted in a quick and decisive manner to the attacks. Every hour that passes with terrorists still active in the buildings they assaulted chips away at the credibility of the Indian state.
It might be argued that the army and police have proceeded with caution in order to avoid putting the lives of hostages in danger and that’s fair enough. However, it may well be doubted whether such caution is ever going to make much difference in cases such as this, in which the terrorists have deliberately set out to kill as many innocent people as they can and are untroubled by the possibility of getting killed themselves.
The blame for this lies at the political level, not with police and soldiers, as it falls to the national government to plan the response to attacks like this, which are not aimed at the local authorities but at the Indian state itself and with a worldwide media audience looking on.
2.
We’re continually being told that a solution to the Palestinian question will bind up the wounds inflicted on the pride of certain sections of Muslim opinion by the existence of a state for Jews. It’s never been a very convincing view and every attack like this makes it less so. A solution to the Palestinian question must be found for the sake of the Palestinians themselves and not because it would cool the ardor of radical Muslim opinion in India, Pakistan, Indonesia or anywhere else. To put it another way, does anyone really believe that the coming into existence of a Palestinian state would have convinced the Mumbai terrorists not to attack the Jewish centre?
Eamonn:
Of course this has nothing to do with Israel-Palestine. The attack on the Chabad centre was an auxilliary action against a small organization that is, presumably there to proselytize among what’s left of India’s Jewish community, which dates back as many as 2,500 years. That the Chabadniks were Israeli citizens was coincidental; they could just as easily have been Americans or Canadians. (For all we know about them, they may be “anti-Zionists” like the Naturei Kuerta or the Satmars.)
Neither was the ostensible selecting of western guests at the two hotels likely to be indicative of the terrorists’ main purpose. My home town of Toronto has a very large South Asian community comprised of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, (who seem to me to be able to live together very peacefully). The growing concensus among them is that the terrorists* in Mumbai are trying to sabotage the negotiations between India and new Pakistani PM, Zardari, because they think he is ceding too much of Kashmir, not to mention wanting to sabotage the improving relations between Zardari’s government and the governments of the India and the US and efforts to defeat the Taliban in the NWTA and Afghanistan.
* the North American media can only seem to call them ‘attackers’ or ‘Islamic militants’, but a Toronto Muslim Indian cabbie had no problem calling them terrorists.