The U.S. government needs to resurrect the nonviolent practice of “political warfare” and create an agency to manage it. The Bush administration started this process by providing more resources for public diplomacy and appointing prominent officials to oversee the task. But efforts to explain America’s values and ideals to Muslims need to be supplemented with measures that confront directly the jihadist ideology.

Mr. Obama’s administration could use as a model the British Political Warfare Executive, which rallied support for the Allied cause behind enemy lines during World War II, or the U.S. Information Agency, which helped network opponents of communism and undermine Moscow’s intellectual appeal during the Cold War.

A civilian should sit atop this new organization. His or her mission should be to undermine the jihadist ideology that underpins terrorism. We believe this mission is so important that the person should answer directly to the President, just as military combatant commanders do.

The question is: does fighting “the ideology that underpins the global jihadist insurgency” mean waging ideological warfare against Islam? In other words, it engaged in “information operations” in the same sense that Hezbollah today would understand it.

The Political Warfare Executive of World War 2 was specifically designed to discredit Nazism. It engaged in polemic, it de-programmed Nazis, it even engaged in campaigns of deception.

PWE included staff from the Ministry of Information, the propaganda elements of the Special Operations Executive, and from the BBC. Its main headquarters was at Woburn Abbey with London offices at the BBC’s Bush House. As the Political Warfare Executive was a secret department when dealing with the outside world PWE used the covername Political Intelligence Department (PID).

The main forms of propaganda were in the form of radio broadcasts and printed postcards, leaflets and documents. PWE created a number of clandestine radio stations including Gustav Siegfried Eins, Soldatensender Calais and Kurzwellesender Atlantik. In order to deliver its subversive messages, PWE also disseminated reliable news and information on events in Germany and the occupied countries, gathering intelligence from other services and agencies, including POW interrogations, and newspapers obtained from occupied countries, and bombing raid photo analysis. This latter source was used to broadcast lists of streets (and even individual houses) that had been destroyed and on occasion to mock up faked “real time” reports of actual raids. …

At the end of World War II PWE were tasked with the re-education of German Prisoners of War. As with different types of propaganda, PWE used the same ‘white’, ‘grey’, and ‘black’ classifications for German POWs. Prisoners classed as ‘black’ were considered dangerous ardent Nazis, with anti-Nazis classed as ‘white’ and regular non-political soldiers classed as ‘grey’.

The problem with creating a new Political Warfare Executive is not primarily bureaucratic. It is political. Western societies do not have the same uncompromising opposition to radical Islam that the wartime alliance had against Nazism. It is difficult to imagine the BBC, the State Department or PBS taking marching orders to discredit the foundations of radical Islam. Why even President Obama might object.

But Whitton and Harrison are right in arguing that the struggle against radical Islam can’t be won by bullets alone. The only problem is that they may be too right. No one — as yet — will bell this cat.

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Thailand is now hopelessly divided.

There are no leaders who enjoy sufficient respect to drive a grand bargain between its polarised parties.

The age and frailty of King Bhumibol Adulyadej make intervention by him a forlorn hope.

Its tourist industry has been holed below the waterline, investor confidence badly shaken - and with two airports out of action, the capital is now cut off from the rest of the country.

Thailand is an example of what happens when a society becomes divided to the point of paralysis and neither faction is willing to abide by the term of the other faction. W. Scott Thompson at the IHT argues that Thailand has always been vulnerable to a logjam but always had a monarch to clear it. Now the monarch can’t clear it and everyone is waiting to see what happens next.

There exists in many countries mechanism for clearing a stoppage. Sometimes it takes the form of a “governor general” representing a notional monarch. At other times it is the intervention of a respected organization like a church or The Emperor. In still other countries is reverence for a constitution. But when politicians decide to traditions, they sometimes succeed in destroying the only thing that will save their bacon in a crisis.

So who’s lying? The reality, according to an article in India’s Institute for Defence Studies & Analysis journal is that the relationship between terror groups and the Pakistani government is no longer simple. Although the Pakistani government may have initially fostered them, these terror groups, like Frankenstein’s monster, have acquired a life of their own, driven by the crime, unemployment and social conditions of the region.

The supporting structures for the proxy war in J[ammu] & K[ashmir] … have developed their own dynamics… Since the end of the Cold War, these structures have embedded themselves deeply in the political economy of the region. The Pakistani state does not control them but merely exercises influence over them and is able to exploit them to serve its own strategic designs. … Thus, there may be a grain of truth in Gen Musharraf’s statement that the Pakistan Army is unable to stop militants from crossing the LOC. The Pakistani ruling elites are not in complete control of the supporting structures for terrorism … because of the above factors, jehad and terrorism in … are likely to continue even if the Pakistani ruling elites give assurances about the withdrawal of their support.

In other words the terror gangs have become a force unto themselves. With their money and ruthlessness, terror groups are now an established social institution. The Terror Wonk says “the extensive illicit arms trade within Pakistan which ensures that there is an endless supply of weapons, the uncontrollable sources of funding – particularly narcotics trafficking and donations both from within Pakistan and from around the world, and the tens of thousands of radical madrassas that indoctrinate Pakistani youth into radical Islam from Pakistan’s bottomless well of unemployed” have made groups like LeT much more permanent than a mere government in Islamabad. The terror groups are now as much able to manipulate the Pakistani military as vice versa. They have become so intertwined that determining where one begins and ends can be difficult.

Bill Roggio notes that both the Pakistani armed forces and a gigantic criminal/jihadi gang have been implicated in the latest attack on India. The sole surviving gunman in the Mumbai attack, Ajmal Amir Kasab has fingered the Pakistani Navy and the Dawood Ibrahim criminal network for providing assistance and training for the Mumbai assault team, according to India Today, quoting police sources.

Dawood Ibrahim turns out to be one of those supremely powerful people who very few in the West have heard of. He also typifies the interchangeable nature of crime, government and the Jihad among the Muslim communities of South Asia. According to Wikipedia, Dawood Ibrahim “was No. 4 on the Forbes’ world’s Top 10 most dreaded criminals list of 2008″ and is widely believed to have been the man behind the Mumbai terror bombings of 1993. He is wanted by the United States and the United Nations and reportedly lives, unsurprisingly enough, in Karachi.

To put Ibrahim’s notoriety in perspective, the Forbes Number One criminal is Osama Bin Laden, also believed to be domiciled in those parts. Dawood’s public photographs show a man with Elvis-type lapels and suits to match. And doubtless he’s a man of some style, a kind of Islamic Bugsy Siegel in a manner of speaking. US News and World Report described him in the following way:

He is a calm and quiet man, say those who know him, even when he’s threatening your life. The boss of India’s top syndicate controls a criminal network that reaches into 14 countries, with a small army of contract killers, smugglers, and extortionists at his command. But there is another side to Dawood Ibrahim. The Muslim exile from Bombay has thrown in his lot with al Qaeda and other jihadists, according to the U.S. and Indian governments, and has become one of the world’s most wanted terrorists.

One of eight sons of a struggling policeman, Dawood started off as a petty crook but soon formed his own gang and gradually eliminated his rivals among the city’s traditional crime bosses, say Bombay police. By the 1980s, his gang, D Company, had become Bombay’s most powerful, drawing its strength from the city’s minority Muslims. The syndicate grew rich smuggling black-market gold and consumer goods into India’s closed economy and forced its way into the country’s sizzling Bollywood film industry. …

Dawood’s men ran high-stakes gambling rings, fixed cricket matches, and threw lavish parties where Indian actors and sports stars mixed with Arab emirs. Dawood pushed his syndicate into narcotics and arms trafficking, construction, real estate, and hawala, the underground bankers who move millions of dollars around the world each day with barely a trace. “It’s like a corporation of the underworld,” says Dhananjay Kamalakar, who oversees the Bombay police’s organized-crime unit. “There are monthly salaries for foot soldiers, legal defenses for those arrested, and extra pay for contract killers.

Westerners who are accustomed to neat distinctions between a government and criminal syndicates and between syndicates and religious terror organizations, may find the boundaries blurred inside Pakistan. Bill Roggio notes that the gunmen who terrorized Mumbai may have had confederates in the city. Who better to provide that than Dawood Ibrahim? He also reports that signals intelligence suggests that LeT may be mixed up in the Bombay attack:

Indian intelligence has identified additional links to Pakistan and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. An “intercepted conversation between Muzammil, Muzaffarabad chief of LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba) operations, and a certain Yahya in Bangladesh,” showed a direct link in the Mumbai attacks, The Times of India reported. “Yahya arranged SIM cards, fake ID-cards primarily from western countries like Mauritius, UK, US, Australia.” Phone numbers on the satellite phone found the hijacked Indian fishing boat show calls were made to Zakir Ur Rehman, a Lashkar-e-Taiba training chief based in Karachi.

But the information is not necessarily contradictory. Perhaps the Mumbai operation is an intersection of several organizations. If so the specific name of the perpetrator may matter less than we think. Terrorism, crime and religious fanaticism have become a way of life in parts of the subcontinent. Maybe the real question is not who, as the Terror Wonk seems to think, but what now?

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From what I can gather there are a few interesting observations to be made of the tactics in use in Mumbai:

It appears the attackers were organized into buddy pairs, allowing one to shoot while the other moved, and so forth. Interestingly, the buddy pair has is a later innovation in small unit tactics and has only been slow to trickle through regular infantry formations. In World War I, the smallest element of maneuver (on paper) might have been a battalion or company. The Germans, in developing “storm troop tactics” then innovated even smaller maneuver elements, which we might call squads today. The role of platoons and squads became only greater in WWII. After WWII, General S.L.A. Marshall conducted a massive study of the reactions of men in combat (See “Men Against Fire”) and the result of his work was the genesis of the Fire Team. The Fire Team is now the smallest doctrinal unit of maneuver in the US military. In the Marine Corps, it is led by a Corporal, includes an automatic rifleman with a Squad Automatic Weapon, and two more riflemen.

During the Iraq War, two innovations have taken place: first, within the Marine Corps, the concept of the “buddy pair” or “buddy team” has spread dramatically, though it is still not doctrinal (it should be). The idea may have begun in the special forces, though I am not sure. The advantage of smaller and smaller units of maneuver is that if they rehearse their actions and build cohesion within the unit, they develop ever greater levels of capability *at that level*. A well-trained buddy pair with the right mindset and enough ammo can take over a city block, house by house, while under fire. The other innovation that has taken place in Iraq is to take the Fire Team and make it into a motorized element, inside one vehicle. This is less in favor now that everyone realizes that moving around in vehicles makes you seem more like robots to the locals and they then have less of a problem with killing you. In any case, all of these changes have one large thing in common — a decentralizing of decisionmaking and maneuver.

And now in Mumbai it would seem we have seen the ultimate result: autonomous buddy-pairs, with a great deal of rehearsals and navigation practice, each with its own set of goals, possibly redundant comms with brevity codes. I would imagine that each team had multiple preplanned routes to each of its objectives before they finally converged on the location for the last stand. Along the way, as some have wondered, they may have stopped for quick logistics reloads of ammo and water.

Here are some thoughts, in no order:

1. The school shooting at Columbine springs to mind when looking for analogies.

2. One of the advantages of a buddy pair, as mentioned above, is the ability to fire and move. One fires while the other moves, and then they switch. In this way, moving from cover to cover, they take ground. But this concept becomes interesting when considered against the fact that the terrorists seemingly had no one firing against them, and they did not have to disciplined in taking well-aimed shots . . .

3. . . . A photographer noted how “cool” and “professional” they looked as they sprayed from the hip. Shooting from the hip is not extremely professional, but this only is if one wants to take well-aimed shots. Perhaps shooting from the hip is very professional if one wants to spray in across a broad angle while maintaining a wider field of view than if behind the sights of your weapon. In other words, if facing no armed opposition, you have the luxury of spraying broadly, and the most dangerous thing to you is an armed threat that comes from outside your narrowed peripheral vision while using your iron sights.

4. Note this sentence, from the AP article: “They weren’t aiming at anyone in particular. It was like they wanted to empty their magazines and do as much damage here as possible before heading to the Taj,” I would argue that the terrorists, while being superbly motivated, and having planned intricately for their assault, are nevertheless poor marksmen. Given the details that we are learning of their attack, the most surprising thing is that more people weren’t killed.

5. It seems that there is a convergence taking place within the realm of small-unit tactics. Infantry units, terrorists, police forces, criminal and narco-gangs, and so forth are all converging in terms of the tactics they use against one another. The only tactical difference between 5 terrorist buddy pairs and a Marine rifle squad is their goal: the former seeks a position to create the most carnage indiscriminately for the longest period of time while the latter might be sweeping or clearing an area or conducting a manhunt, meaning it seeks to use the utmost precision in its application of force. If I may presume: the terrorists have learned fire and movement from us, from watching us, and from reading our manuals, which are posted online. But our tactics are not geared toward indiscriminate slaughter. The question is, will they develop any tactical innovations that allow them that advantage?

Update

I’ve received email requests to show a YouTube clip of the Val Kilmer/Robert de Niro “buddy pair” from Heat, which illustrates the concept of mutual support. — W.

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Indian officials have said most, perhaps all, of the 10 attackers who held Mumbai hostage with frenzied attacks using assault rifles and grenades came from Pakistan, a Muslim nation carved out of Hindu-majority India in 1947.

Sebastian D’Souza describes how the gunmen walked through the Mumbai train station platform like a pack of raptors through a kindergarten outing. The photographer stalked the gunmen, dodging among the train carriages photographing them covertly and watched, horrified, as the “teenage gunmen” dealt out death like lollipops.

Sebastian D’Souza hears the gunfire at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus from his office across the street at the Mumbai Mirror tabloid. He follows the sound through the sprawling station, slipping unseen through parked trains. When he first catches sight of the young men, he doesn’t realize they are the gunmen. They look so innocent. Then he sees them shooting. “They were firing from their hips. Very professional. Very cool,” says D’Souza, the newspaper’s photo editor. For more than 45 minutes he follows as they move from platform to platform shooting and throwing grenades. Often, D’Souza isn’t even 30 feet away. The few police at the station are either dead, in hiding or had long fled.

The routine machinery of the great city fed more victims into the maw. Trains filled with new passengers disgorged yet more victims into the line of fire. Later D’Souza would reflect upon the blind panic which paralyzed the beat cops. Perhaps we shouldnt be too hard on these Mumbai flatfeet. They had probably never encountered something that shot back with an automatic weapon. In its own way the Mumbai event underlines what the NRA has been saying for years. Guns don’t shoot themselves. People are needed to pull the trigger. Without anyone willing to open fire, the police pistols which stayed in their owner’s holsters might as well have been bouquets of flowers.

But what angered Mr D’Souza almost as much were the masses of armed police hiding in the area who simply refused to shoot back. “There were armed policemen hiding all around the station but none of them did anything,” he said. “At one point, I ran up to them and told them to use their weapons. I said, ‘Shoot them, they’re sitting ducks!’ but they just didn’t shoot back. … ‘I told some policemen the gunmen had moved towards the rear of the station but they refused to follow them. What is the point if having policemen with guns if they refuse to use them? I only wish I had a gun rather than a camera.’”

Most people will naturally flee from danger. Only time, training and conditioning — a form of brainwashing — can reliably forge bodies of men who will instinctively do the unnatural. Re-read the embedded journalist’s accounts of events in Iraq and note the descriptions of soldiers or Marines who deliberately move toward the sound of firing or as it was more quaintly put in the old days, “to march to the sound of the guns”. During the First World War thousands of men would rise out the trenches to walk into machine-gun fire. The ordinary crowd at a shopping mall simply can’t be expected to do that. Maybe the most important effect of the Second Amendment is that it it implants the germ of the idea that resistance is a viable option. It’s a germ which must be nurtured by a little training. The gun is an easy thing to find. It’s is the making of a shooter which is harder.

When whole populations come under siege, as is the case in Israel, the unnatural instinct to resist eventually becomes part of the culture. The instinct to fire back supervenes over the natural inclination to flee. My guess is that the transformation will come more easily to the Third World than to civilized Western societies. The only time I saw a civilian crowd run towards gunfire was in the vast Tondo Foreshore slum, an unimaginably squalid place where life was cheap. Some bankrobbers had fled into the slums and were pursued by cops with automatic weapons. I can never forget how the kids climbed poles to get a better view of the action and a play-by-play was passed back among the onlookers. But then this was a population used to gang violence and hard living. Among the better class of people, the transformation takes a little longer. In Mumbai, once over the initial shock, the hotel staff at the Taj Mahal and the Oberoi manfully helped the guests to escape and evade, some losing their lives or coming to hurt in the process.

Prashant Mangeshikar, a guest, said that a hotel worker, identified only as Mr Rajan, had put himself between one of the gunmen and Mr Mangeshikar, his wife and two daughters.

“The man in front of my wife shielded us,” Mr Mangeshikar said. “He was a maintenance section staff member. He took the bullets.” For the next 12 hours, before Mr Rajan was finally taken out of the hotel, guests battled to stop the bleeding from a gaping bullet wound in his abdomen. It is not known if he lived.

Eventually the worm turns. But in the golden hour of the first shock, in Mumbai as over American skies on 9/11, evil will have its own way. One day, when Mr Rajan enters his Valhalla, his first act may be tell Todd Beamer what “let’s roll!” is in Hindi.

it looks as if the perpetrators were trying to imitate the tactic of ghazwa, used by the Prophet against Meccan caravans in his decade-long campaign to seize control of the city. The tactic consists of surprise no-holds-barred attacks simultaneously launched against a caravan or settlement with the aim of demoralising the enemy and hastening his capitulation.

The Bombay attacks differed from previous terror operations in India … his time, however, the approach was “symphonic”, in the sense that it involved different types of operations blended together.

Involved in the operations were men who had placed explosives at selected points. But there were also gunmen operating in classic military style by seizing control of territory at symbolically significant locations along with hostages. Then there were militants prepared to kill, and be killed, in grenade attacks against security forces. …

Although new to India, the tactic of “symphonic” attacks has been tried in a number of other countries in the past decade, notably Algeria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia, at times with devastating effects.

Most recently, it was tried, on a smaller scale, by the Taliban in the Afghan city of Qala-Mussa. Theoretically, the tactic could be used in any city, from Bombay to New York, passing through London and Paris.

Bill Roggio observes that the symphonic attacks require a conductor, score sheet and extensive coordination. It did not come cheap and was not an amateur job.

To pull off an attack of this magnitude, it requires months of training, planning, and on-site reconnaissance. Indian officials have stated that the terrorists set up “advance control rooms” at the Taj Mahal and Trident (Oberoi) hotels, and conducted a significant amount of reconnaissance prior to executing the attack. If the news about the “control rooms” is accurate, these rooms may also have served as weapons and ammunition caches for the assault teams to replenish after conducting the first half of the operation. …

One of the more intriguing aspects of the attack is how the teams entered Mumbai. Reports indicate at least two of the assault teams arrived from outside the city by sea around 9 p.m. local time. Indian officials believe most if not all of the attackers entered Mumbai via sea.

Indian Coast Guard, Navy, Mumbai maritime police, and customs units have scoured the waters off Mumbai in search of a “mother ship” that transported one or more smaller Gemini inflatable boats used by the attackers. A witness saw one of the craft land in Colaba in southern Mumbai and disgorge eight to 10 fighters.

Two ships that have been boarded are strongly suspected of being involved in the attacks: the Kuber, an Indian fishing boat, and the MV Alpha, a Vietnamese cargo ship. Both ships appear to have been directly involved. The Kuber was hijacked on Nov. 13, and its captain was found murdered. Four crewmen are reported to still be missing.

Therefore the attacks cannot be understood as as simply some “teenage gunmen” letting off some fanaticism. Whoever staged the attacks was playing a deep game for high stakes. Taheri notes, as pointed out in previous Belmont Club posts, that the Mumbai attacks were aimed at any possible easing of tensions with India, which Barack Obama hopes to build upon to get Pakistan to crack down on al-Qaeda.

The attacks came 48 hours after Pakistan’s new president, Asif Ali Zardari, practically threw away 50 years of Pakistani policy by announcing his readiness to end the dispute with India over Kashmir.

Zardari is an ethnic Baluch who, unlike previous Pakistani leaders who had Indian backgrounds, has no direct family history in pre-partition India. As a result, he is not as sensitive on Kashmir as his predecessors.

One of the biggest obstacles to dealing with this mutating beast is the Western intelligensia’s perverse inclination to assign altruistic or holy motives to what are purely criminal or political aims. This is not to deny the genuinely spiritual aspirations of Muslims because that is a universal human trait. But there is a need to distinguish between man’s search for the numinous, which is part of our common heritage, and confidence tricks of caravan raiders who dress up their predatory activities with the color of religion. The age of the sound-bite has shown itself as bandwidth limited as the age of illiteracy. Today it is often enough to describe oneself as holy, a prophet or a messiah to blind the world to the true character of banditry.

The terrorist attacks in Mumbai occurred as India and Pakistan, two big, hostile and nuclear-armed nations, were delicately moving toward improved relations with the encouragement of the United States and in particular the incoming Obama administration.

Those steps could quickly be derailed, with deep consequences for the United States, if India finds Pakistani fingerprints on the well-planned operation. India has raised suspicions. Pakistan has vehemently denied them. …

Reconciliation between India and Pakistan has emerged as a basic tenet in the approaches to foreign policy of President-elect Barack Obama, and the new leader of Central Command, Gen. David H. Petraeus. The point is to persuade Pakistan to focus less of its military effort on India, and more on the militants in its lawless tribal regions who are ripping at the soul of Pakistan.

A strategic pivot by Pakistan’s military away from a focus on India to an all-out effort against the Taliban and their associates in Al Qaeda, the thinking goes, would serve to weaken the militants who are fiercely battling American and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

The problem with this strategy is that it is rooted in weakness. It is the alternative that remains after all the other unacceptable alternatives have been ruled out. Going in after terror groups inside Pakistan is out. Directly intervening in the dysfunctional internal affairs of Pakistan is out. Completely starving the Jihadis of material and ideological support is out. Therefore, as Sherlock Holmes once said, “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?” Which is that a West unwilling to risk fighting al-Qaeda directly must somehow find ways to convince Pakistan to combat it in its stead. It’s a strategy that follows from a process of elimination. The problem is whether the desired goal itself may in the process also have been eliminated.

If persuading Pakistan to fight al-Qaeda is not merely improbable but is actually impossible then enlisting Islamabad may be unattainable. Pakistan from the very beginning may have seen al-Qaeda as an indirect way of checkmating the greater power and wealth of India. By creating a threat to America in the shape of al-Qaeda, Islamabad could manipulate Washington into holding back India. The NYT notes that “according to a new book, ‘The Search for Al Qaeda,’ by Bruce Riedel, an adviser on South Asia to Mr. Obama, Osama bin Laden worked with the Pakistani intelligence agency in the late 1980s to create Lashkar-e-Taiba as a jihadist group intended to challenge Indian rule in Kashmir.” Therefore Pakistan may have foreseen that Obama’s strategy before it even occured to him. But the Obama team may have failed to draw the necessary inference. Pakistan not only anticipated that Washington would come knocking at its doorstep but actually arranged for things to work out that way.

Pakistan can continue to dangle the chimerical carrot in front of Obama. ‘Hold back India and we will help you with Bin Laden’ Then they’ll turn around and hit New Delhi in the face and there won’t be a thing India can do about it. This dynamic was used to great effect by the late and unlamented Yasser Arafat in the Middle East. He persuaded the West to restrain Israel in order to avoid empowering the radicals against the “moderates” one of which he pretended to be. Then he would encourage the radicals to attack Israel knowing Washington would always be on hand to restrain the Israelis. Arafat became indispensable to the radicals for his ability to hold both Tel Aviv and Washington at Bay and indispensable to Western diplomats who saw him as a bulwark against the radicals. In reality he was playing both ends against the middle and managed to see his stock rise in both camps even as he betrayed them by turn. This evil murderer was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 1994. How could anyone be so diabolically cunning? How often did Sherlock Holmes say that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?

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A reader remembers that the Indian Navy intercepted a pirate mothership not long ago.  Maybe when the Mumbai story is finally told we’ll discover that the intel people knew more than they could act upon.  Now the Indian Express reports that its Navy has seized what it believes to be the motherships of the terrorists who attacked its commercial capital.

India apprehended two Pakistani merchant vessels off the coast of Gujarat in a joint operation carried out by the Navy, Coast Guard and the water wing of the Border Security Force (BSF).

“We have apprehended two cargo ships in a joint operation near the Gujarat coast while they were sailing to Karachi. They are suspected to be the ships that ferried the terrorists near to Mumbai coast yesterday,” Home Ministry sources said.

Just imagine what would happen if India blockaded or inspected ships bound for Karachi. The Captain’s Journal describes how NATO operations in Afghanistan are supplied largely through that port. Nothing is simple in that part of the world.

Afghanistan is land-locked, and transportation of supplies and ordnance to U.S. and NATO troops occurs basically in three ways. Ten percent comes into Afghanistan via air supply. The other ninety percent comes in through the port city of Karachi, of which the vast majority goes to the Torkham Crossing (and then to Kabul) via the Khyber pass, with some minor portion going to Kandahar through Chaman.

The struggle against terrorism is always going to force us to choose between painful alternatives. It is mostly about making difficult political and informational choices as it is about kinetic warfare. Right now India doesn’t even know, or can’t even acknowledge, who is attacking it. On the day we can name the enemy — and name our friends — then we will no longer be at the end of the beginning, but at the beginning of the end.

Just done with a major outlet interview in DFW, back on a flight, in Austin in an hour. about 3 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Several interviews lined up on this topic over the next couple days. One TV potential tonight. Been helping response to some small degree. about 4 hours ago from TwitterBerry
#mumbai If the cargo ship is true, it was sloppy and from and old era of terrorism. Points to legacy thinkers - governments, major org etc about 4 hours ago from TwitterBerry
#mumbai Just off phone with an ACP in Mumbai. Told him same as I tell you - I think its going to be over soon and not as bad as potential. about 4 hours ago from TwitterBerry
#mumbai The boats ridden into the bay were launched from a cargo ship. MV Alpha is primary suspect. about 4 hours ago from TwitterBerry
#mumbai NSG is finishin up operations. about 4 hours ago from TwitterBerry
Flying until mid-day. about 10 hours ago from TwitterBerry
#mumbai Hostages were a byproduct. Arguably because the escape vector was shutdown. If they were the focus, there would be more and sooner. about 10 hours ago from TwitterBerry
#mumbai I don’t suspect the hostages were part of the plan. No demands, and thus far no catastrophic second order events. about 10 hours ago from TwitterBerry
#mumbai If you want to understand the full scope and context of this attack, read www.naxaliterage.com about 15 hours ago from web
#mumbai Operations are in full swing. Simultaneously across three major points. Tear gas in Narmin, 4′th floor. about 16 hours ago from web
#mumbai Ugh. No one’s trying to shut down #mumbai except for a few overzealous supporters. Keep twittering if you want, don’t if you don’t. about 16 hours ago from web
#mumbai If you want to understand the full scope and context of this attack, read www.naxaliterage.com . about 16 hours ago from web
#mumbai Karkare wasn’t assassinated. Any terrorist claims to that are information operations designed to pump up their achievements. about 16 hours ago from web
#mumbai Taj has been cleared of noncombatants. about 16 hours ago from web
#mumbai Then a crescendo of gunfire, flashbangs, smoke grenades. IF executed successfully, it will be rapid, loud, and very short. about 16 hours ago from web
#mumbai It will be slow and boring for the next short time period. Sporadic gunfire. Ambulances running in and out. about 16 hours ago from web
#mumbai Media blackout. What that means: NSG are clearing rooms. Police are taking out prisoners and hostages. This ends pretty soon. about 16 hours ago from web
#mumbai Timing’s about correct. They’re creeping in. Police will start hauling hostages out. NSG will keep going in. about 16 hours ago from web
#mumbai This isn’t a result of Mumbai being a complex powderkeg. This is an attempt to take advantage of that dynamic. about 16 hours ago from web

The future of original journalism is the bystander with the video enabled cellphone, not Dan Rather. But John Batchelor has been following another revolutionary aspect of the the Mumbai attack, whose characteristics will be evident from the Twitter Stream: the use of what he calls the Murder Raid.

The scale of the attacks is the news. Coordinated, cocky, racist and classist, now making war on the five star hotels and transportation centers (above Chattrapati Shivaji Railway terminus), singling out American and British passport holders for slaughter, in order to strike at India’s confidence of its place in the world of great states. … Moslem-born killers. A bystander emphasizes they looked like “boys.” The twitter service report, and the flickr stream pics, shows that the massive city, tens of millions of people, major communications and transportation systems, is shut down, compromised, paralyzed in the dark. Crowds gathered in the streets in wonder, fear, frustration (right). It is daylight soon and the clean-up and hunt will begin again, and also the on-going hostage events at hotels and hospitals must be resolved.

Could this happen to New York, or Washington, or Los Angeles? We all know the answer, not if but when. And if it happens to Mumbai, it happens to all of us. My cynicism tonight makes me measure that this is not about stopping the IJ, this is about making the next IJ attack more difficult. And also making the comparable AQ attack aimed at Paris or London or New York or Chicago more difficult. Still, a murder raid, pure savagery, and shocking in its way to a world that had thought in the crash of all markets that it was beyond shocks.

“Could this happen to New York, or Washington, or Los Angeles?” Not very successfully if a substantial percentage of the population were armed. The US Constitution was written at a time when the frontier existed and you could find the murder raiders coming at any time of the day or night. Then the forest primeval was at the doorstep. Now, in a strange evolution created by hyper-civilization — the advent of air travel, globalization and political correctness –the forest primeval may once again be right outside your hotel door. Meet your new neighbors, the “teenage gunmen”. It’s too bad the concepts embodied by Second Amendment are now too distasteful for modern men of discriminating taste.  The rise of terrorism is a failure of civilization. A splintering of the Shield of Achilles. But in the jungle it is better to give than to recieve.

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