SOMETHING DIFFERENT: Bill Roggio on the Mumbai attacks. “The Mumbai attack is something different. Foreign assault teams that likely trained and originated from outside the country infiltrated a major city to conduct multiple attacks on carefully chosen targets. The primary weapon was the gunman, not the suicide bomber. The attack itself has paralyzed a city of 18 million. And two days after the attack began, Indian forces are still working to root out the terror teams.” If lots of ordinary people in the hotels had been armed, it probably wouldn’t have worked as well . . . . (Via Jules Crittenden, who has much more).
UPDATE: Some further analysis. “Since the period of suicide terror, terror organizations have upgraded to include paramilitary fighting units, as opposed to singular acts of terror. . . . The events taking place in Mumbai must act as a warning and turning point in the world’s treatment of the local terror armies that base themselves in various parts of the world, and threaten the world’s stability as a whole.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: Related item here.
MORE: Reader Tom Holsinger emails: “This was not an Al Qaeda operation. This was planned and conducted by Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence Agency.” Well, possibly. Stay tuned.
- THE MUMBAI ATTACKERS DID NOT USE NEW TACTICS;
- THEY'VE USED THESE BEFORE - FREQUENTLY IN IRAQ,
- AND SPORADICALLY ELSEWHERE - THE MOROS, THAILAND, MOROCCO, THE HOLY LAND, PAKISTAN, KENYA, SOMALIA, ETC.
- AND SINCE MUSLIMS CONSIDER THE WHOLE NON-MUSLIM WORLD DAR EL HARB,
- IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE THAT THEY USE THEM OUTSIDE OF WHAT NON-MUSLIMS TRADITIONALLY CALL A WAR-ZONE.
AS I WROTE YESTERDAY:
... [MANY] QUESTION WHETHER AL QAEDA IS INVOLVED, AS IF IT MAKES A DIFFERENCE: " ... probably not a cell or group linked to Al Qaeda." [NYTIMES]*******UPDATE: Mark Steyn agrees with me ENITELY:
- IT DOES NOT MAKE A DIFFERENCE IF THEY WERE "LINKED" TO AL QAEDA OR NOT.
- IT MATTERS NOT ONE WHIT WHETHER THIS ATTACK IN MUMBAI WAS PERPETRATED BY ONE JIHADOTERROR GROUP OR ANOTHER.
- THERE ARE MANY JIHADOTERROR GROUPS - ALL OVER THE WORLD, FROM THE PHILIPPINES TO MOROCCO.
- WHAT LINKS THEM ISN'T A CLANDESTINE ORGANIZATION, BUT AN IDEOLOGY WHICH IS PLAIN FOR ALL TO SEE:
WE MUST RETALIATE ACCORDINGLY.
- ISLAM.
... we’re in danger of missing the forest for the trees.RTWT!
The forest is the ideology.
It’s the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby.
Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground.
You’re sitting in some distant foreign capital but you’re minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. You’ve already made landfall.
It’s missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the “Deccan Mujahideen” or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba.
That’s a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them.
The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways.
It’s not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow.
There are no membership cards, only an ideology.
That’s what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.
BTW: I beat the great Steyn to the punch, first posting this point Friday, HERE.
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