The news out of Bombay (Or "Mumbai", as the press insists on calling it even though the inhabitants rarely do so) has been horrific. A fishing boat hijacked; the crew missing or dead; over a dozen Jihadists attacking 20 targets in Bombay–including two hotels, a railway station, a hospital and a Jewish community centre; some two hundred known dead and maybe another two hundred before this is over; Americans and British hunted down; the involvement of Al Qaeda, the Indian Mafia, elements of the Pakistani military; and all of it converging in a three-day firefight that ended with one captured terrorist admitting that the goal was to slaughter 5000 people.
This ghastly episode is the worst Jihadist attack we've seen since Breslan and the truly frightening thing isn't the scale, but the change in tactics. In 2001, we thought that the ultimate in terrorism was suicide bombers ramming planes into buildings and maybe following it up with bombings and anthrax attacks. Now we see a paramilitary raid against multiple targets over a matter of days before the last barbarian could be ferreted out of his hole. With enough men and guns plus a bit of organisation it's a tactic that is impossible counter by x-raying shoes or setting up bollards and makes anyone who thinks that this is a law enforcement matter look like someone waiting for the happy, fluffy fun-bunny express to arrive.
As Mark Steyn said in a recent column,
This ghastly episode is the worst Jihadist attack we've seen since Breslan and the truly frightening thing isn't the scale, but the change in tactics. In 2001, we thought that the ultimate in terrorism was suicide bombers ramming planes into buildings and maybe following it up with bombings and anthrax attacks. Now we see a paramilitary raid against multiple targets over a matter of days before the last barbarian could be ferreted out of his hole. With enough men and guns plus a bit of organisation it's a tactic that is impossible counter by x-raying shoes or setting up bollards and makes anyone who thinks that this is a law enforcement matter look like someone waiting for the happy, fluffy fun-bunny express to arrive.
As Mark Steyn said in a recent column,
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.In other words, even though we've had remarkable success in fighting the Jihadists, including recently driving them from Iraq, this war is very far from over and there is no guarantee that it will stay "over there" for very long.
3 comments:
The solution is obvious. We need internal passports incorporated into subcutaneous RFID tags for every subj...er, "citizen", 24 hour schedules filed six months in advance with your local Bureau of Internal Security office, and stricter gun control legislation!
That'll make the world safe. No doubt about it!
And don't forget increased training for each and every citizen in how to avoid the dread Islamophobia.
I'm not sure whether I already asked this before, but... what would you do if you were prime minister?
And maybe not just in terms of this. What would be your main priorities, your main policies if you were to stand for PM? (Imagining that you have your own party of willing peoples)
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