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Mumbai: what next?

We now have before us a rough sketch of the Lashkar-e-Taiba operation behind the second serial bombings of Mumbai: the worst terrorist strike on Indian targets after the 1993 attacks on the city and the mid-air explosion of Air India's jet Kanishka. Investigators have identified some of the cells that carried out the strikes, their controllers in Bangladesh and their organisational leadership in Pakistan. While an enormous amount of work remains before this sketch can, so to speak, be coloured-in, the larger question emerging before India's policy establishment is this: what next? During his visit to Mumbai on Friday, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh demonstrated that he understands the seriousness of the problem. Mumbai police authorities, he made clear, needed to upgrade their ground-level intelligence capabilities. Reports suggest that a more energetic pursuit of leads by the Mumbai police might have led to the arrest of some of the perpetrators of the bombing in the weeks before it was executed. Dr. Manmohan Singh also hammered home the need for better crisis management systems. Just how large the problems are is evident from the fact that the Mumbai police were unable even to prevent contamination of crime-scene evidence by bystanders. It took a visit by the Prime Minister to move administrators at some hospitals to provide their patients with clean sheets and a dirt-free environment.

None of what the Prime Minister said in Mumbai, sadly, is new, for administrators across India have shown a remarkable unwillingness to learn from painful experience. No State has put in place credible mechanisms to regulate the bulk sale of chemicals like ammonium nitrate and potassium permanganate, which have been used along with the better-known RDX in dozens of terror strikes, including the Gateway of India bombings of August, 2003. Across India, criminal intelligence departments have been treated as dumping grounds for officers who do not have the political leverage to secure sensitive or lucrative assignments. Solving the problem is doubly important because of the strategic context of the Mumbai bombings. Experts believe that Pakistan's unwillingness, despite international pressure, to act against Islamist terror groups operating from its soil indicates that it continues to repose faith in violence as an instrument to leverage concessions on Jammu and Kashmir. The Prime Minister has responded to growing public outrage at continued terrorism by suspending India's dialogue with Pakistan. The obvious message is that it cannot be business as usual even while Pakistan continues to encourage terrorist groups to strike, but postponement of the talks in itself will do little to solve the fundamental problem. Even as Indian strategists rethink their strategy, Pakistani officials cannot be oblivious to the consequences of the long-running war, of which Mumbai was just a part.

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