The difficulties of dealing with gunmen

There are two major outstanding questions on the Mumbai terrorist - how did this happen, and what can be done to prevent it?

One of the baffling pieces questions about the Mumbai terror attacks is how just 10 people could have inflicted so much damage for over 60 hours across 10 locations. Some have been tempted to accuse the Indian troops of incompetence.

There are a lot of people alleging a cover-up. In this article, Sandhya Jain points out that a number of the facts make it seem unlikely that 10 people could have committed these attacks. How, she argues could two people hold the commandos at bay for 60+ hours while torturing and killing victims. One view is that there were mercenaries involved who were actually killed by the terrorists. Another is that there were more terrorists involved who have made a getaway, and it is being suppressed.

It's very hard to know the facts. However, in defense of those who allege only 10 people were involved, here are some things to ponder.

The first thing to remember is that gunmen intent on killing people can be surprisingly effective at causing carnage. For instance, the April 2007 Virginia Tech massacre resulted in the deaths of 32 people and injuries to scores more with just one gun man. The average per terrorist in the Mumbai attacks was ~18. The Columbine High School Massacre killed 12 people, and the shooting was continuing well after the SWAT teams arrived. It was probably the incompetence of the shooters at Columbine that kept the number of deaths so low.

The gunmen in such attacks have a huge tactical advantage. Whereas the gunmen are intent on killing people indiscriminately, security forces must only kill the gunmen and must avoid injuring all the other innocent bystanders. To make things more difficult, it's often not possible for security forces to tell who are the gunmen and who are innocent bystanders, so they need to move with extreme caution verifying identities of people before acting. There are no such constraints on the gunmen.

Also, it's hard to reason or deal with gunmen on a suicide mission. Most procedures for hostage situations tend to assume that the gunman doesn't want to die or is mentally disturbed. Terrorists are on suicide missions but are otherwise surprisingly rational, which causes many standard hostage procedures to fail completely. It is why Israel has been unable to stop Palestinian terrorists completely.

Some have wondered about the length of time it took to deal with the situation. In the beltway sniper case in 2002, the snipers were able to continue terrorising the I-95 corridor in Virginia and Maryland for three weeks, largely by moving around. The same, to an extent is true of the killers in India. They weren't stationary. In a building with hundreds of rooms, tens of floors and hundreds of innocent people, the police and army had no idea how many people they were dealing with and where they were, which made this very tough. Also, in many cases they just moved from one location to another, e.g. from the railway station to Nariman House, which meant that the responders were always one step behind. The terrain inside the building made it more like guerrilla warfare, which tends to even the odds for the underdog.

The gunmen were extremely well trained, by some reports they were trained by special forces. They carried sophisticated weapons - automatic assault rifles, grenades and two way communication devices, etc. They rigged bodies and the locations with booby traps, making negotiating the passages more difficult for the Indian commandos. They also took hostages and used them as shields.

This is a great article that describes the attacks in detail.

Even if we accept the official version of the story, there is no denying that India was woefully unprepared and the response was so poor that the death toll and injuries were much worse than they need have been:

• Lack of preparedness: The police in Mumbai were neither equipped nor trained to deal with situations like this. There was no SWAT team in Mumbai (a city of 19 million people). They had to fly in the commandos from New Delhi (where they protect politicians) so that the commandos only arrived 10 hours after the terror began. Contrast that with Virginia Tech and Columbine, where SWAT teams arrived within a couple of hours of the attack beginning, despite these not even being major metro areas.
• Lack of equipment: At the scene, the police didn't have proper bullet proof vests, few had two way radios. Even the commandos lacked night vision goggles and thermal sensors, so they were unable to see in the darkness. In fact, most of the police lacked even basic weapons or weapons training. Many have pointed out that the shooters didn't have all that sophisticated weapons. True, if you compare them to US SWAT teams. Not true if you compare them with Indian police.
• Poor training: Some of the procedures used by commandos: rappelling from a helicopter onto the roof, slowly descending down the narrow corridors, shooting blindly with the gun held over their heads suggested that the commandos weren't adequately trained, were too slow and tentative and weren't willing to take a hit. Contrast the speed of the action with what happens with the FBI or Israelis and you'll see what I mean.
• No clear demarcation of responsibility or procedures for response: India received several warnings about such an attack, the last as late as November 18, several days before the attacks. Yet, India could do nothing as intelligence filtered through the systems slowly, at each stage being met with skepticism and confusion. It's not clear that the right people were ever informed. The various agencies that were informed had no action plan of how to respond or how to coordinate. This is similar to what happened in the US after 9/11 which led to the creation of the color coded threat level system in the US.
• Ineffective communications systems: There were massive communications problems as there is no common intelligence sharing or communications system shared by all agencies. Not all the egncies involved had the same types of devices, there was no shared lines, and there were no communication and information sharing procedure. This is similar to what happened in Hurricane Katrina in the US. So, fire brigades, police, commandos, etc. couldn't convey information from one to the other quickly enough.
• Hotels with inadequate security: In most Western hotels, there would have been closed circuit televisions, sophisticated security systems, automatic doors that could be used to cordon off sections in the hotels. It seems that the Taj and Oberoi lacked even basic security systems, making intelligence about the terrorists' movements within hard to come by.
• Lack of tactical information about terrain: The commandos didn't have maps of the buildings they were entering, whereas systems in the US and elsewhere would have given SWAT teams exact maps and visual representations of all the buildings. So, the Indian commandos had to literally feel their way through unknown darkened corridors.
• No effective administrative command and control: There was an amazing breakdown in the command and control structure at all levels of the civilian administration. The Chief Minister and Governor can call martial law. They didn't do that in India, which meant huge crowds were able to gather metres away from the impacted buildings giving commandos little room to maneuver. It wasn't exactly clear who was in-charge and who needs to make what calls. There was no decision making structure and no clear lines of authority and authorities jockeyed for position and power.

I am sure that a thorough investigation will reveal a lot more weaknesses. All in all, it was very pathetic. If this were to happen again, even with advance warning, it isn't clear that India could prevent it or reduce the damage.

On the prevention front, the focus of the recriminations in India has been the ineptitude of the politicians. Unfortunately it requires a whole lot more, including a complete overhaul of the counter-insurgency systems in India. As the list above suggests, there are obvious areas of focus that stem from easily identifiable symptoms, e.g. fix security preparedness, equipment, administrative systems and procedures and intelligence gathering and response.

On the larger strategic front, though, the fixes are a lot less less clear.

The traditional view peddled by Pakistan is that Kashmir is the underlying cause of the hatred against India. However, there is a growing view as discussed in this article by Patrick French, that the type of hatred that fuels these attacks is the cause in itself and not a symptom. That the use of Kashmir and other examples of Indian transgressions are merely excuses, which, even if fixed, wouldn't root out people like these terrorists. Mr. Hafiz Saeed, head of Laskar-e-Taiba, reportedly said in 2000, “There can’t be any peace while India remains intact. Cut them, cut them — cut them so much that they kneel before you and ask for mercy.” However, he and his ilk have gone further, clubbing Israel, America and India in the same breath and avowing to establish a caliphate in Central Asia and murder those who insult the Prophet. The good news is that Indian Muslims are outraged by the terrorists. This same article talks about how Muslims were killed by the terrorists and Mumbai's Muslim council's refusal to allow the dead terrorists to buried at their cemeteries.

Fareed Zakaria argues very convincingly in this insightful piece that the solution to this problem is really to get Pakistan to start policing and rooting out the safe havens for these people within its border. To make matters more interesting, the terrorists attacks against Israelis, British and Americans has put Pakistan on the back foot in terms of their ability to continue to give aid and comfort to terrorists. Pakistan's civilian leadership seems to have got this memo from the US too, and they have made an arrest already - funny how quickly they can move when they want to. What remains to be seen is whether the Pakistani government is going to keep up the pressure or whether their resolve will wane after this token gesture.

As Richard Clarke illustrates in his article about the next steps that US and Al-Qaeda could take, the problem is that the task ahead for the terrorists is substantially easier than the one for US, and by extension India and Pakistan.