Why Mumbai?

A lot of planning went into the Mubai terror attacks. What was their strategic objective? Why the torture? Why the deliberately outrageous character of the attacks? Was it just a Columbine writ large, a fit of adolescent pique?

I think Daniel Benjamin, writing in Slate, has the key element. In a sense, the victims in India were collateral damage, victims of the struggle for power and contro in Pakistan. The radical elements in Pakistan, including the various terrorist organizations, fear and hate the recent trends of raprochment between India and Pakistan. They, and their supporters in the government, the military, and the ISI have been waging a campaign of terror and assassination in Pakistan but have not been able to capture control.

The origins of the attack remain unclear: We know little about the gunmen. Of those identified, all but one are dead. It is difficult to imagine that as few as 10 terrorists—the number cited in most reports—carried out this attack or that they did so without extensive local logistical support and sophisticated planning. Most attention is focused on the outlawed but tolerated Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Tayyba, a group that Osama Bin Laden reportedly helped establish in the late 1980s to fight against the Indian presence in Kashmir and that was nurtured for most of its existence by the ISI, Pakistan's military intelligence agency. The group has been linked to the 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, which nearly sparked a war with Pakistan, and the 2005 London Tube bombings. Although the Pakistani government under both Gen. Pervez Musharraf and President Asif Ali Zardari have condemned the group, the possibility that current or former ISI personnel might be involved cannot be ruled out.

What is clear is that whoever planned the attack had an incisive understanding of how to destroy the limited progress that had been made to reduce Pakistani-Indian tensions and to undermine the new Pakistani civilian government's efforts to defeat the Islamist radicalism that is consuming the state. Shortly before the U.S. presidential election, I argued that there was a big opening for jihadists to make an enormous impact with an action that could be traced to Pakistan, thus inviting retaliation against that country. Political backlash against such retaliation might render the new civilian government incapable of cooperating with the United States against terror and would accelerate the fraying of Pakistan, where extremists often operate in the open.

The planners of the Mumbai slaughter obviously saw this opportunity. The bloodshed in India's financial hub was calculated to outrage not just Indians, who constituted the large majority of those murdered, but also, it appears, the key partners in what the jihadists call the Crusader Alliance To Destroy Islam—Americans, Britons, and Israelis. It is plausible that the two luxury hotels were targeted in order to ensure American and British victims, and anecdotal information suggests that terrorists tried to identify hotel guests of these nationalities. The fact that the local Chabad House was hit indicates that Jews and Israel were also targets. In short, this was an attack that aimed at making a mark in the global jihad, not just another battle in the historic back-and-forth between the subcontinental neighbors.

So far they have had great success. India is outraged and Pakistan is retreating into a defensive crouch. The rest of the world can not afford to let these crimes go unpunished, but every pressure put on Pakistan will make it harder for the government to purge the terror supporting elements. It would be easy to push Pakistan into economic collapse, but who wins from that? Very likely the extremists.

We can hardly congratulate ourselves for starving a few tens of thousands of Pakistanis if the result is that al Quaeda and the other terrorists wind up pocketing the nukes.