In the ten months before this weekās atrocity, Muslim terrorists killed over 200 people in India and no-one paid much attention. Just business as usual, alas. In Bombay, the perpetrators were cannier. They launched a multiple indiscriminate assault on soft targets, and then in the confusion began singling out A-list prey: Not just wealthy Western tourists, but local orthodox Jews, and municipal law enforcement. They drew prominent officials to selected sites, and then gunned down the head of the antiterrorism squad and two of his most senior lieutenants. They attacked a hospital, the place youāre supposed to take the victims to, thereby destabilizing the cityās emergency-response system.
And, aside from dozens of corpses, they were rewarded with instant, tangible, economic damage to India: the Bombay Stock Exchange was still closed on Friday, and the England cricket team canceled their tour (a shameful act).
Whatās relevant about the Mumbai model is that it would work in just about any second-tier city in any democratic state: Seize multiple soft targets and overwhelm the municipal infrastructure to the point where any emergency plan will simply be swamped by the sheer scale of events. Try it in, say, Mayor Naginās New Orleans. All you need is the manpower. Given the numbers of gunmen, clearly there was a significant local component. On the other hand, whether or not Pakistanās deeply sinister ISI had their fingerprints all over it, it would seem unlikely that there was no external involvement. After all, if you look at every jihad front from the London Tube bombings to the Iraqi insurgency, youāll find local lads and wily outsiders: Thatās pretty much a given.
But weāre in danger of missing the forest for the trees. The forest is the ideology. Itās the ideology that determines whether you can find enough young hotshot guys in the neighborhood willing to strap on a suicide belt or (rather more promising as a long-term career) at least grab an AK and shoot up a hotel lobby. Or, if active terrorists are a bit thin on the ground, whether you can count at least on some degree of broader support on the ground. Youāre sitting in some distant foreign capital but youāre minded to pull off a Bombay-style operation in, say, Amsterdam or Manchester or Toronto. Where would you start? Easy. You know the radical mosques, and the other ideological-front organizations. Youāve already made landfall.
Itās missing the point to get into debates about whether this is the āDeccan Mujahideenā or the ISI or al-Qaeda or Lashkar-e-Taiba. Thatās a reductive argument. It could be all or none of them. The ideology has been so successfully seeded around the world that nobody needs a memo from corporate HQ to act: There are so many of these subgroups and individuals that they intersect across the planet in a million different ways. Itās not the Cold War, with a small network of deep sleepers being directly controlled by Moscow. There are no membership cards, only an ideology. Thatās what has radicalized hitherto moderate Muslim communities from Indonesia to the Central Asian stans to Yorkshire, and coopted what started out as more or less conventional nationalist struggles in the Caucasus and the Balkans into mere tentacles of the global jihad.
Many of us, including the incoming Obama administration, look at this as a law-enforcement matter. Bombay is a crime scene, so letās surround the perimeter with yellow police tape, send in the forensics squad, and then wait for the DA to file charges. There was a photograph that appeared in many of the British papers, taken by a Reuters man and captioned by the news agency as follows: āA suspected gunman walks outside the premises of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus or Victoria Terminus railway station.ā The photo of the āsuspected gunmanā showed a man holding a gun. We donāt know much about him ā he might be Muslim or Episcopalian, he might be an impoverished uneducated victim of western colonialist economic oppression or a former vice-president of Lehman Bros embarking on an exciting midlife career change ā but one thing we ought to be able to say for certain is that a man pointing a gun is not a āsuspected gunmanā but a gunman. āThis kind of silly political correctness infects reporters and news services world-wide,ā wrote John Hinderaker of Powerline. āThey think theyāre being scrupulous ā the man hasnāt been convicted of being a gunman yet! ā when in fact theyāre just being foolish. But the irrational conviction that nothing can be known unless it has been determined by a court and jury isnāt just silly, itās dangerous.ā
Just so. This isnāt law enforcement but an ideological assault ā and weāre fighting the symptoms not the cause. Islamic imperialists want an Islamic society, not just in Palestine and Kashmir but in the Netherlands and Britain, too. Their chances of getting it will be determined by the ideologyās advance among the general Muslim population, and the general Muslim populationās demographic advance among everybody else.
So Bush is history, and we have a new president who promises to heal the planet, and yet the jihadists donāt seem to have got the Obama message that there are no enemies, just friends we havenāt yet held talks without preconditions with. This isnāt about repudiating the Bush years, or withdrawing from Iraq, or even liquidating Israel. Itās bigger than that. And if you donāt have a strategy for beating back the ideology, youāll lose.
Whoops, my apologies. I mean āsuspected ideology.ā
Mark Steyn in The National Review