[FONT=ARIAL][SIZE=2]At the same time, however, the attacks need to be seen as an affront on a vulnerable India. Very little appears to have been learnt from the countless terror attacks that the country's urban centres have been subjected to in recent times. Hours were possibly lost in putting together a team of NSG commandos and flying them into Mumbai. Hours after the terrorists lined up foreign nationals in the hotels, the commandos had not even contemplated a storming in.
The security experts think that the task of putting together a NSG team and give them a go ahead for an operation should not have taken more than few minutes, given the established procedures that govern these forces.
The delay, hence, defies logic. Hours after the terrorists took a number of hostages, television connections to the rooms were not cut off, thereby possibly arming the terrorists with all the critical information that they should not have fed with.
These are grim reminders of the circumstances that led to the Indian Airlines plane IC 814 hijacking to Kandahar in 1999. Indian anti-terror strategy is refusing to come of age.
For the first time, we heard of a marine wing of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba, which reportedly was training near Karachi. We also heard of the intercepts and the phone calls to Pakistan. But these were never thought to be capable of targeting Mumbai, which in 1993 had been a victim of the terror material and men that came undetected through the sea route.
Could the results of the attacks have been worse? With more than 125 dead and about 300 people injured, it may not be a question that would be asked by many. But what still sends shivers down many spines was the fact that huge quantities of RDX was reportedly recovered behind two of the hotels under attack.
The costs have been immediately felt. The English cricket tour has been called off. The Mumbai stock exchange shut for a day. In the coming days, the tourism industry will also bear the brunt.
The government, on the other hand, has come up with its usual response -- denouncing the attacks and asserting that it would bring the guilty to book. All these incidentally have been parts of the unkempt promises of earlier times.
The prime minister's promise of establishing a federal investigative agency is almost a year old. What stops him from setting up one still remains unknown. This time too he made that old promise. Very little continues to be spent on the intelligence wing of every State police department.
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