I didn’t need to go looking for things to raise my blood pressure, through Wednesday’s endless night. But even on a day when much moved me to anger, this took the cake: We had just uploaded on Rediff the breaking story that Hemant Karkare, chief of the Mumbai wing of the ATS, had been killed in the shootout. Within minutes, I found a comment in the discussion board. It said, and I paraphrase because I’ve lost sight of the original post:

When they arrested a Sadhvi for the Malegaon blasts, I told my wife that God would punish everyone of the officers involved. And I have been proved true—Karkare has been killed by the Muslim terrorists he was trying to protect.

Excuse me while I throw up. Here is an officer who, by all accounts, has gone about his duty with exemplary evenhandedness. [Former Ambassador T P Sreenivasan, father of Columbia prof and good friend Sree Srinivasan, has a personal tribute here].

Against that, here is a party that has been screaming bloody murder against bloody murder, and demanding that POTA or worse be immediately reintroduced; that no leniency be shown to anyone suspected of complicity in any incident of terrorism. But no sooner was a ‘sadhvi’ arrested, than it does a flip-flop of Olympics proportions, and denounces ‘harsh’ treatment of suspects.

That poster, and those who within moments amplified his statement, form a natural constituency for that party. I, meanwhile, am struck by the sheer brilliance of this example of intelligent design. Let’s see: In order to punish one officer for doing his duty, god let loose a cataclysm that has thus far resulted in over 100 dead, four times that many injured, millions worth of property destroyed and a city’s fabric further shredded.

I’m fairly religious—if I can limit myself to believing in an Almighty of some kind, without the concomitant of prayer and ritual and inspired bargaining of the ‘You make my shares go up again and I’ll break a 100 coconuts’ kind. But if I thought the poster and his adherents are representative of my religion or in fact of any religion, I would turn atheist in a heartbeat.

On a different note, Fareed Zakaria is interviewed in Newsweek:

Given the delicate politics of the region—and particularly the tensions between India and Pakistan—do you anticipate Indian officials pointing fingers at their neighbor?

If you wanted to construct a conspiracy theory, it would go like this: elements of the Pakistani intelligence service that would like to get India more drawn into conflict in Kashmir might encourage this sort of thing. That would draw militants in the Pakistani tribal areas away from attacking the Pakistani state, and back to attacking the Indian state. But I’ve never tended to believe such theories. More plausible to me: this is a classic Frankenstein monster. All these groups have some degree of training and support from Pakistan. But this operation probably does not involve that directly. These groups are now autonomous, self-supporting, and have gone beyond those origins.

Over at the NYT, experts can’t quite seem to agree whether the terrorist strikes were low-level, or required a very high degree of sophisticated skill sets. Point-counterpoint:

Experts disputed the complexity of the operation.

“You don’t see these types of terrorist operations very often, if at all,” Mr. Hoffman said. “These aren’t just a bunch of radical guys coming together to cause mayhem.”

“This takes a different skill set. It doesn’t take much skill to make a bomb. This is not just pressing a button as a suicide bomber and dying. You don’t learn this over the Internet.”

But Ms. Fair did not agree that the attacks on Wednesday necessarily required deep planning and training.

“This wasn’t something that required a logistical mastermind,” she said. “These were not hardened targets. A huge train station with zero security. Two hotels with no security, both owned by Indians. Leopold’s Café. How hard is it, really? It’s not rocket science.”

For Mr. Hoffman, who has studied terrorism for more than 30 years, the Mumbai attacks are “alarming on a number of levels.”

“It’s not often that things in terrorism alarm me. So much is a repeat of what we see almost every day, like suicide bombings. There’s no real innovation in terrorism, which is why 9/11 was so terrifying, because it was so innovative and heinously clever.

“But these attacks show how a handful of men, basically using weapons off the shelf, can paralyze a city and frustrate highly trained security forces. These attacks were calculated to spread alarm and anxiety — to put it quite frankly, to unhinge things — and that’s exactly what they’ve done.”

For reasons you will appreciate, today is a low blogging day—though there is much to blog about, there is even more to do work-wise. Tomorrow is not likely to be too busy on the blogging front, either. Open thread, people—share interesting stories, commentary and such that you may find, please. Browsing time at a premium for me today.

Enjoy this post? Share it with others.

Posted by Prem on 11/27 at 02:14 PM
India • Terrorism • (2) Comments • Permalink

Page 1 of 1 pages