Instead, by the time the NSG was done, amid the smoke and the ruins lay dead bodies. The potentially vast corpus of information to help weed out fifth columnists was destroyed, as was the piling evidence regarding external assistance. In the event, a Mumbai-based NSG troop would only have hastened the eventual outcome. The reality is the NSG and other military special forces are trained in a version of basic infantry tactics which do not amount to tactical skills and competence in waging successful counter-urban guerilla terrorist operations.
A cadre of super-specialists is the surest bet, particularly one trained by Israeli military experts, who are the most experienced and the best in the business. The skill-sets of the special forces may be improved by these means, but without the political will to take hard decisions and to reform the whole system of intelligence, decision-making and implementation, little will be different the next time a similar crisis rolls around. It is time, moreover, for the NSG or, at least, its SAG (deployed in contingencies) to pass fully under the military’s control. For best results, this measure can blend into the urgent need to establish an independent special forces command in the defence ministry with all special forces under its control.
4) The 60-hour firefights could not have been possible without considerable caching of ammunition and other ordnance at pre-designated points within the two targeted hotels. The possibility of Lashkar fighters and sympathizers doing a reconnaissance in the months previous and, as reported, renting out rooms in the vicinity posing as Malaysian students reveals the deficiencies in the local policing system. The fact that these persons then checked into these hotels as guests or worked on the hotel staff reveals a fairly cavalier attitude of the hotel authorities in verifying the records of the people they hire and to checking the baggage of incoming guests (no X-ray machines or physical checking of baggage preceding entry into the hotel foyer). Further, it shows the negligence of the hotels in doing inspections as part of the daily clean-up detail of rooms to find goods such as cached RDX and ammunition.
There’s one other factor that is critical for success. Uruguay battling the Tupamaros and Argentina the Monteneros in the 1960s both realized what the US Homeland Security scheme, Russia fighting the Chechen insurgents in Grozny, and Israel have established: Success against the urban terrorist guerilla is predicated on “oppressive population control”. The more aggressively potential sympathizers in a society are deterred from offering moral and material support to terrorists and would-be terrorists, the more effectively this threat can be quelled. Thus, for example, nowhere are residents and citizens with Muslim-sounding names under stricter surveillance than in the US, where there has been no incidence of extremist Islamic terror after 9/11.
What is urgently called for is more intrusive overt and covert policing of the minority community in India. This may be a politically onerous but unavoidable policy. The sting of the targeted approach can, however, be diluted by subsuming it in a system of more intense monitoring of the population at large.
Bharat Karnad is professor of National Security Studies at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Comments are welcome at theirview@livemint.com