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As India reels from the bloody aftermath of last month’s attacks in Mumbai, the stunned country is asking how a handful of terrorists were able to kill nearly 200, injure scores of others, and pull off what is increasingly being called “India’s 9/11.” Last week, for instance, tens of thousands of angry Indians took to the streets in demonstrations-not against Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Pakistan-based, Islamic terrorist organization responsible for the attacks, but against their own politicians for not preventing yet another atrocity.In their sorrow and outrage, many Indians are asking how their government failed, yet again, in its responsibility to protect its people, especially when members of the political class were a target themselves in India’s most serious, previous terrorist attack, a 2001 assault on Parliament in New Delhi.Driving the public furor are revelations that, like in the New Delhi attack, intelligence received before the Mumbai attacks indicated that the city was being targeted and the terrorists would come by sea. According to one Pakistani observer, several “low-profile attacks” were even carried out in different parts of India as rehearsals for the Mumbai assault. Somehow, this critical information, “lost in the system,” was never acted upon.Several theories have been put forward to account for these political and intelligence failures. One is that the Intelligence Bureau, the agency responsible for India’s internal security, simply is not large enough to protect a country of 1.1 billion people. Moreover, of the agency’s 20,000 employees, only 2,000 are actually engaged in the all-important field work that can be used to uncover terrorist plots before they are carried out. Understaffed and unfocused, India’s intelligence services simply lack the capacity to infiltrate terrorist organizations.Intelligence sharing is another problem. India’s approximately one dozen intelligence agencies refuse to share information with each other and do not answer to a “central command.” Wilson John, a Senior Fellow with Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi and the author of Karachi: A Terror Capital in the Making, said that even in the Mumbai attack, all emergency response units were operating in isolation. “There was no one guy in charge, which is why 10 guys were able to hold off hundreds of men deployed from the security forces,” said John.Further hindering the country’s counterterrorist efforts is that intelligence lapses are compounded by equipment failures. Consider that the Mumbai terrorists were killed only after the intervention of India’s National Security Guards (NSG), a special counter-terrorism unit. Tragically, it took the NSG nine hours to get to Mumbai from New Delhi because its airplane was unavailable. The NSG’s equipment, meanwhile, was outdated or simply lacking.India’s police might be expected to step in where its intelligence agencies have fallen short...
By Stephen Brown
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