Who’s behind the Mumbai attacks?
An interesting article by Alan Cowell and Mark McDonald in today’s New York Times reveals an inconvenient truth about analysts who study terrorism: they often have wildly divergent views about the same events. Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of ...
An interesting article by Alan Cowell and Mark McDonald in today's New York Times reveals an inconvenient truth about analysts who study terrorism: they often have wildly divergent views about the same events.
An interesting article by Alan Cowell and Mark McDonald in today’s New York Times reveals an inconvenient truth about analysts who study terrorism: they often have wildly divergent views about the same events.
Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims and not linked to Al Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba, another violent South Asian terrorist group.
There’s absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it,” she said of the attack. “Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don’t do hostage-taking and they don’t do grenades.” By contrast, Mr. Gohel in London said “the fingerprints point to an Islamic Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group.”
Fair goes on to make the point that India has a lot of angry Muslims of its own, and has a history of telling the world, “Our Muslims have not been radicalized.”
I would point out that the two main competing theories — a domestic group and outside involvement — are not mutually exclusive. Extremist groups have been known to share logistical networks (for safehouses, weapons procurement, etc.), and there aren’t always bright lines between them. So, it could be that domestic perpetrators of the attack conceived and executed the idea, but operatives turned to Lashkar-e-Taiba or some other group for logistical help and expertise.
UPDATE: Here’s a pretty strong clue that points to Kashmir:
A militant holed up at the center phoned an Indian television channel to offer talks with the government for the release of hostages, but also to complain about abuses in Kashmir, over which India and Pakistan have fought two of their three wars.
“Ask the government to talk to us and we will release the hostages,” the man, identified by the India TV channel as Imran, said, speaking in Urdu in what sounded like a Kashmiri accent.
“Are you aware how many people have been killed in Kashmir? Are you aware how your army has killed Muslims. Are you aware how many of them have been killed in Kashmir this week?”
On the other hand, a senior Indian military official seems pretty confident the militants are from Faridkot, Pakistan. One captured terrorist had a Punjabi accent.
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