Lessons to learn from latest attack

WASHINGTON — Often during an especially terrible crisis, someone in the midst of it will come out with words that seem to encompass the entire tragedy. So it was in Mumbai after last week’s massacres.

“They went through the back,” Ratan Tata, the charming and sophisticated owner of the historic Taj Mahal Hotel, said on television, his voice filled with infinite sadness after the attacks on his hotel and the other sites, “and they did not go through the front.” Then he paused and added, almost innocently, “All of our arrangements were in the front.”

And right there you have the problem. THEY — the guerrillas, the non-state actors, the “comandantes de la revolucion,” the street gang members, the state proxies, the religious fanatics, the ideological terrorists and all attackers of civil society that seem to be everywhere today — always come through the back. Indeed, why would they come in the front, when that’s where the police, the commandos and the hotel’s “defenders” are?

At heart, it is this inability and unwillingness of organized societies to understand that these men have been brilliant (for centuries) at attacking our weak points, which we make quite easy for them. It’s our governments’ inability to think “outside the box.”

But this time, they may have been wrong in their suppositions of easy victory, for these attacks in India offer the new American administration a perfect first chance to put into practice the president-elect’s ideas on using smart diplomacy, backed by quiet strength, to remake American power to create a better world.

It wasn’t complicated

First, the attack. You and I could probably have pulled it off, if we had vicious, heartlessness and brutal souls. The attackers came by sea, in ridiculously small boats, into the former city of Bombay, which has a beautiful old British downtown and is surrounded by the most putrid slums in the world.

Mumbai had no naval protection; police in the city were lightly armed, without even two-way radios or bulletproof vests; there was not one SWAT team in the city; it took hours for government commandos to arrive from New Delhi. In the end, the home minister resigned, as did a number of others.

Second, the attack should have been expected — and, in fact, it was. If the perpetrators were, as is widely believed at this point, the Lashkar-e-Taiba or “Army of the Pure,” a group originally formed by Pakistani intelligence, they have already backed attack after attack on India, often working with local gangsters. Lashkar does not hide out; it has public meetings with hundreds of thousands of people and a public political/social/civic side, much like the Hezbollah in Lebanon.

American intelligence had warned the Indians of almost exactly such an attack, and the Taj Mahal Hotel had on that account kept up a higher degree of security until only days before.

Third, we seem already to know a great deal about what happened. Good intelligence tells us that Lashkar is essentially a group formed for and focused on, not the American wars in Afghanistan or Iraq, but the decades-old struggle of India and Pakistan over ownership of the beautiful, mountainous aerie of Kashmir. Since 2002, when Washington declared Lashkar officially a terrorist organization, the Pakistani government has not supported it.

But this attack is a warning. Lashkar shares training camps with al-Qaida, the American enemy in Iraq, and this attack can arguably be seen as the first time these groups have sent out virtual armies against civil society. Their aims might be to draw Pakistan into that long-feared war with India and also to push forward, through the destruction of civil societies, the eventual formation of an international Islamic state.

So now we face dangers and possibilities, both dependent upon historic knowledge.

The dangers are that Pakistan and/or India will use this horror, not to negotiate with each other, but to attack each other.

The new American administration could use this as an opportunity to get Pakistan and India to seriously negotiate; it could clarify the forces in the dangerous Afghan/Pakistan/Indian triangle or, if it only resorts to more force, it can dig us deeper into the graveyard that the region is becoming.

Universal Press Syndicate