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The terrorists’ first objective, explicit in its choice of targets, was to attract the rolling 24-hour coverage of worldwide television networks. The Taj and Oberoi hotels, the Leopold Café (immortalised in Shantaram), the railway station and the Jewish community centre: all were carefully selected to globalise the bloodshed and ensure that it attracted round-the-clock scrutiny. No less than the 9/11 attacks, 7/7 or Madrid, this was an intervention on the world stage, not a narrowly local event. It may be that the terrorists were partly motivated by anger over Kashmir or even religious disputes peculiar to Mumbai. But — above all — this was a brutal act of self-assertion by the followers of a twisted ideology whose perspectives and goals are global.
The second objective of the attack was to spray psychological shrapnel across the world, and for this to continue long after the gunfire and explosions had subsided. The haunting image of the Taj hotel in flames will not fade from memory quickly. And — as with 11 September and 7 July — internal recriminations and geopolitical tensions followed hard upon the heels of the attack. The Indian government immediately faced public fury over its failure to pre-empt the assaults and the shortcomings of its response.
Meanwhile, relations between India and Pakistan have predictably slumped to their lowest ebb since the military stand-off of 2001-02. Condoleezza Rice, the outgoing US Secretary of State, has ratcheted up the pressure on Islamabad to co-operate with New Delhi. Her successor, Hillary Clinton, appointed by President-elect Obama this week, faces a huge challenge in the wake of the Mumbai atrocities: how to mediate between India and Pakistan without becoming unduly embroiled in the Kashmir dispute, or otherwise distracted from the new Commander-in-Chief’s key strategic goals in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
All this is precisely what is intended by the enemy in this new asymmetric form of 21st-century warfare. After the initial horror of an attack, the strategic aim is to compel democratic societies, in their fury and panic, to make errors, to stumble and to resort to internal squabbling or diplomatic rows. Global consciousness quickly dwindles to Punch and Judy politics, parochialism, the flaring of old international tensions, and obsessive self-scrutiny by nations under attack.
Certainly, there are national and regional lessons to be learned from the horrors in Mumbai. The extent of the city’s vulnerability to attack has been made shockingly clear, and has already triggered an overhaul of India’s anti-terrorist strategy. Beyond the sabre-rattling of the past few days, that must include a high degree of co-operation with the civilian administration of President Zardari in Islamabad. The terrorists need India and Pakistan to be at each other’s throats, and as high a level of regional instability as possible. It follows that the two governments, as difficult as it is, must do all they can to thwart this objective.
But we delude ourselves if we imagine that this was an event whose causes and cure lie solely in the subcontinent. For more than five years, since the invasion of Iraq, it has been comforting to many to see Islamist fury as almost exclusively a by-product of that ill-starred conflict and to conclude, no less spuriously, that the threat will recede once Blair and Bush are both safely out of office. Blair is long gone and Bush will soon follow him into retirement. This was a wake-up call to those who believed that global Islamism was a temporary protest movement rather than a historic phenomenon, or that the election of Barack Obama would automatically draw to a close the ugly period of history that began on 11 September 2001.
Whether or not the struggle is called a ‘war on terror’ or something else, it remains real and deadly, not, as is so often claimed, the figment of neocon imagination. The neocons of the Bush administration are lame ducks, limping off to await posterity’s verdict. But in Mumbai, the gunmen served warning that it is business as usual as far as they are concerned. As Gerry Adams once said of the IRA: they haven’t gone away, you know.
The correct response is both global and individual. We must not lose sight of the worldwide nature of this conflict, the ideology that respects neither human life nor borders. But those who love India, as a holiday destination or place to do business, will also recognise their special responsibility not to desert this extraordinary young democracy and its grieving people. Kipling, who was born in Bombay in 1865, remembered the city with filial love for its ‘days of strong light and darkness’. To ensure that the light prevails, the world must not turn its back on Mumbai.
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