MUMBAI
IF you were a clever terrorist and wanted to paralyze Manhattan in the way that Mumbai was paralyzed last month, you wouldn’t send a boatload of men armed with assault rifles into the city.
That strategy just wouldn’t work, no matter how highly trained the terrorists were. (And, having witnessed the battles between the Mumbai terrorists and Indian security forces, I can assure the reader that these terrorists were thoroughly prepared.)
The NYPD has begun extra training in the wake of Mumbai – but a fight against such gunmen is precisely the terrorist scenario for which New York has been overwhelmingly prepared ever since 9/11. Hence the heavily armed cops in body armor in Grand Central and Penn Stations and in other potential targets, like Times Square.
If terrorist gunmen came up against even ordinary New York street cops, they’d be unlikely to survive long.
It was very different in Mumbai. Here, in the main train station, the 30 to 50 armed police on duty all ran away, allowing two calm terrorists to stroll through the station and mow people down at will.
The excuse made for them here is that the cops were mostly armed only with old-fashioned bolt-action rifles – the Lee Enfield .303 of WWII fame. But, surely, if only 10 cops had engaged the two strolling killers from different angles they would have prevailed and saved many lives.
As Sebastian D’Souza (the photographer who snapped a now world-famous shot of one of the killers in the station) said to me bitterly, the terrorists were “sitting ducks.”
The problem wasn’t the cops’ weaponry; it was their attitude and lack of training. Many police here buy their place on the force or get in through political connections. Policing is famously remunerative work, thanks to the opportunities for extortion.
There was much more courage and public spirit to be seen in the Indian Special Forces that took on the terrorists over the following days (and in the hotel staff that saved many lives).
However, even the vaunted Black Cat commandos of India’s National Security Guard were outclassed by the terrorists and broke every rule of combat 101 against terrorists and hostage takers.
There was no real security cordon around the hotels. Terrorists could easily have escaped the building by pretending to be hostages or slipped out and down a side street.
Moreover, when the commandos entered the Taj, they had no plans of the building, even though the owner and general manager were part of the crowd of onlookers outside. No command post was set up at the site, and it was never clear which agency was in charge of rescue operations.
And the final battle at the Taj – involving scores of commandos against a single wounded man – took place in a part of the hotel that the security forces had controlled on the first day of the crisis.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how Manhattan would or could deal with the kind of terrorist attacks that Mumbai – and other Indian cities – have previously suffered.
There is an enviable resilience here. On July 11, 2006, Islamist terrorists set off seven bombs in Mumbai commuter trains, killing more than 200 people. The very next day, the trains were running and packed with workers.
The cities of Bangalore, Jaipur and New Delhi have all been hit with synchronized multiple bomb blasts this year, but all have recovered with impressive speed.
Picture an attack involving multiple, simultaneous bombs in Manhattan, killing innocents in busy stores, restaurants and subway stations. The city could well be shut down and paralyzed for weeks, perhaps months, its economy on life support.
That is the real danger we should fear and try to guard against – not pairs of fanatics with Kalashnikovs trying to repeat Mumbai’s 11/26 in Manhattan.
Jonathan Foreman is deputy editor of Standpoint, a UK-based monthly cultural and political magazine.