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Action taken report, still no action

Early this year, United States Senator Susan Collins explained why it was important for the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee to study November’s Lashkar-e-Taiba attacks in Mumbai.

“The murderous assault on Mumbai deserves our attention,” she said, “because it raises important questions about our own plans to prevent, prepare for, and respond to terror attacks in the United States. Careful analysis of the tactics used, the targets chosen, and the effectiveness of the Indian security forces’ response provides valuable insight into the strengths and weaknesses of our own nation’s defences.”

Maharashtra, though, doesn’t seem to think there is much to be learned from its own bitter experience.

This week, the Maharashtra government tabled its response to the Ram Pradhan –V. Balachandran Committee, which investigated the response of city authorities to November’s terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

For the most part, the media debate has focussed on the personalities who figure in the Action Taken Report — in particular Mumbai’s recently-removed Commissioner of Police, Hasan Gafoor.

What has passed unnoticed is that the Action Taken Report isn’t made up of action taken. Instead, it is a list of promises—promises, moreover, without a deliver-by date.

Six months after the massacre in Mumbai, the state still does not have counter-terrorism crisis-management protocols—the carefully-planned and frequently-rehearsed procedures that guide police and emergency service personnel through the first, inevitably chaotic, minutes of a major terrorist attack. Its police force has not been retrained and re-quipped; its intelligence apparatus has not been revamped.

In their report, Pradhan and Balachandran have called for “an integrated action plan for Mumbai, Thane and Navi Mumbai, irrespective of the administrative boundaries of the three [police] commissionerates”. “There is a need”, they add, “to examine how well other cities in the state are equipped to handle a similar terror attack”.

Pradhan and Balachandran underline the need for these plans to be rehearsed. There is, Pradhan and Balachandran point out, “no point to having procedures if officers like the Commissioner of Police and Director-General of Police do not follow them.”

Now, the state government has promised to “constitute a panel to examine the preparedness of the main cities of the state”. It promises that administrative barriers will not be allowed to come “in the way of forming an action plan.”

But the ATR does not state when the panel will be formed, who will be on it, when an action plan might be ready —and, most important, when it will actually be implemented.” And in the course of two consecutive sentences, the ATR asserts that it was wrong to say that procedures were violated on November 26, but also promises to “analyse and study the procedures and remove the lacunae.”

Pradhan and Balachandran found that Police Commissioner Gafoor had made no effort to draw lessons from what went wrong. “The Commissioner of Police,” their report states, “did not seek report from the Anti-Terrorism Squad after the incident, or do a detailed analysis.”

On the nuts and bolts of its counter-terrorism response, the ATR reveals a similar official disinterest.

The Pradhan-Balachandran report pointed out, the “police need a fully-equipped quick-response team to hand attacks such as 26/11. The existing QRT should be revamped and converted into a commando unit that can reach any part of the city swiftly. Existing assault mobiles seem to be armed police that can handle law and order problems or a gang war, but not terror”.

Maharashtra’s government agrees improvements are needed, but hasn’t committed itself either to when these will be implemented.

Force One, an elite Maharashtra Police counter-terrorism unit, is intended to meet the need for a crack special weapons and tactics unit. The ATR promises it will be run “on the lines of the National Security Guard.” The promise isn’t heartening, given that the NSG’s own military-influenced tactics and training were brutally exposed during November’s fighting.

Instead of addressing the manifest failures in its police apparatus, the Maharashtra government has defended officers like Mr. Gafoor by holding up a red herring: it wasn’t given the right kind of intelligence.

Although the Pradhan-Balachandran report did not have access to intelligence generated by the Intelligence Bureau and Research and Analysis Wing, it found plenty of evidence that the Mumbai Police had reason to expect an attack. In September, central agencies provided information that the Lashkar was preparing to target the Taj Hotel; earlier, in August, similar assertion

In response, the Maharashtra government has argued that the intelligence services “had no idea about the exact time of the attack.”

On November 26, 2008, the ATR records, the Special Protection Group and Intelligence Bureau met with Mumbai Police officials at the Trident Hotel to discuss arrangements for a forthcoming visit by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The meeting went on until 8 p.m. — less than an hour before Mohammad Ajmal Amir and the rest of the Lashkar assault squad landed off Budhwar Park, a few hundred metres away.

But intelligence reports, unlike astrological predictions, rarely make precise predictions about when and where an attack might take place.

Elite forces like the Special Protection Group, therefore, constantly train their personnel to engage with a wide spectrum of possibilities. Had the Lashkar assault team targeted the Trident while the Prime Minister was present there, it would almost certainly have been cut down in minutes. The problem was that the Mumbai police didn’t use the time between September and November to prepare for an attack.

Now, the ATR says, “analysis is being down on how to deal with [intelligence] alerts.” In other words, nothing has actually been done so far to improve the assessment of threats — or to create a mechanism for acting upon warnings.

In the United States, most major city police forces have retrained personnel to deal with Mumbai-type attacks. Singapore has conducted a massive exercise code-named Northstar-Seven exercise, simulating multiple attacks on hotels, businesses and transport networks. The exercise tested recommendations made by a team of experts who had travelled to Mumbai and met with officials involved in the November 26 operations.

No Indian city, though, has bothered to make the same effort.

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