Mumbai Bomb Blasts Sickening

July 12, 2006

A basic rule for any insurgent movement worth its name: Do not kill civilians by the dozen with bombs set to maximize pain and destruction.

Not only does this violate every norm of human decency, it also takes you much further away from your political goals.

Case in point: The horrific evening rush hour bombings on July 11 in Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay), with seven bombs planted on commuter trains killing at least 183 people and injuring another 714. The blasts took place both on suburban stations and moving trains, with the carnage so horrific that it’s extremely painful to see even in pictures. (I have an aunt living in Mumbai; a phone call confirmed that she and her family are fine.)

After Madrid, Moscow and London, the Mumbai public transport system is the latest to be hit by terrorist attacks in the past couple of years.

Who was behind this outrage? Here, I am engaging in informed speculation, as are the authorities at this point. The blasts are likely the work of groups linked to the separatist struggle in Kashmir, a territory disputed between India and Pakistan. Since 1989 multiple groups either wanting independence or accession to Pakistan have fought a low-level war with the Indian authorities. The most extreme of these groups not only have an ideological affinity but ties with Al Qaeda.

Alex Perry of Time magazine stated on PBS’s The Newshour with Jim Lehrer that the Indian government speculates that a key player among them, Lashkar-e-Toiba, was behind the well-coordinated effort, possibly in conjunction with an outlawed Indian Islamic student militant group.

Although there are insurgency movements operating in other regions in India, terrorist acts on this scale, especially outside their spheres of operation, have been beyond their ken and capability.

Now, I have written in the past about Indian misrule in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and how the whittling away of promised autonomy and a series of rigged elections led to the insurgency. I visited the region back in 1986, before the insurgency started, and even then, among all the loveliness in a state nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, there were foreboding signs of alienation. I was asked a number of times if I had come from India, which would be akin to an American traveler to Maine being asked if he or she was visiting from the United States. It is this alienation that morphed into a full-fledged insurgency a few years after my trip. There is also no question that the Indian security forces have engaged in significant human-rights abuses since the militancy started.

But there is absolutely no excuse for the multiple bomb blasts in Mumbai.

What do the perpetrators hope to achieve by this? (Here, one has to assume that the bomb manufacturers had goals other than a nihilistic orgy of violence or to set off religious rioting.) Not only will the blasts not scare the Indian government into capitulating over the issue, they will have the reverse effect of hardening public opinion. In fact, they may even jeopardize the peace process currently under way between India and Pakistan, with the future of Kashmir a core issue under discussion.

This brings us to Pakistan. Sad to say, the Pakistani government has been playing a two-faced game in Kashmir. While its supports for the militant groups has been reduced in the recent past, especially after two assassination attempts on Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf, it hasn’t completely ended.

“Many of these [militant training] camps have been sustained, as President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani Army hedge their bets on whether India is really serious about the peace process begun two years ago,” wrote Ahmed Rashid, one of the premier journalists in the region, in the International Herald Tribune last October, shortly after the massive earthquake that devastated Kashmir. “These camps represented, even more than Pakistan's support for the Taliban regime before 9/11, the army's 25- year-long dependency on Islamic militancy as a major tool of its foreign policy in the region.”

No doubt, the Indian government has been recalcitrant in its attitude over Kashmir, as Rashid points out in his piece. But terrorism is not a legitimate tool of statecraft, and Pakistan needs to completely stop its support of the militancy, especially when the militants carry out heinous acts such as the train bombings. To be fair, the Pakistani government has been quick to condemn the attacks, and there is no evidence—yet—linking the notorious Pakistani intelligence apparatus, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to the incidents. In order not to jeopardize the peace process, the Indian government has also been reticent about pointing the finger. But Pakistan needs to stop its ambivalent approach toward militant groups operating from its soil.

The United States needs to goad Pakistan further along this route. In the past, the Bush Administration has been hesitant to push its ally Musharraf too far but its patience has been recently tried by evidence that the Pakistani government is similarly using Taliban remnants as a strategic lever in Afghanistan.

Perhaps the scale and horrific nature of the carnage in Mumbai will compel it to lean even harder.

The United States also needs to pressure India to take the peace talks more seriously so as to deliver concrete results to the Kashmiris. The quicker the peace process brings positive outcomes, the more isolated and easier to apprehend will be extremist groups such as the one probably responsible for the blasts. The U.S. should also offer its intelligence expertise to India so as to minimize the chances that incidents like this will ever happen again. (It seems that Indian intelligence knew that something on this scale was planned—it just didn’t know exactly where or when.)

What happened in Mumbai was really, really despicable. Efforts need to be made on all fronts to ensure that outrages like that don’t happen anywhere in the world again.