Mumbai Terrorist Attacks: A Human Resources Dilemma?

I was at work when reporting began on the terrorist attacks in Mumbai and was dumbfounded as many others that Mumbai would be the target, especially considering the scale (I had, like many, assumed it was an attack that orginated in Pakistan).

As more information trickled out, the most impressive element of the attacks was the scale and simplicity.  It appeared more and more like a brute force attack that could be planned in a moment’s notice and quite impossible to stop outside of a police state.  I wondered if this style of attack was chosen to instill a new fear not of conspiratorial plane hijackers, training and coordinating for years. There certainly seems to be little reason why a such an attack couldn’t occur in any city where the elements of the terrorist group could fill a truck and not appear too out of place.

Gary ‘The War Nerd’ Brecher has an insightful article in Exiled Online on why he believes this act shifted away from the high-explosive, high-level planning, low-personnel approach of what we are accustomed to.

“What’s clear is that this was a labor-intensive enterprise. Terrorism is usually a matter of spending as few of your people as you can, but somebody connected with Al Qaeda or its Pakistani fan club decided to spend a lot of lives here. That’s what’s interesting, looking at these attacks cold-bloodedly.

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But it comes down to what you might as well call market forces, and in those terms it makes perfect sense. Supply and demand. Supply: it looks like the gunmen came from Pakistan by ship. Supplies of dumb triggerhappy young Pakistanis in a hurry to find martyrdom are basically infinite.

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Now quality, that’s a different issue… But when you look at the recruits the madrassas in Pakistan have been turning out, you see how far short of those goals these rookies are. Most of them are slum kids or village kids who like the free food and the idea of shooting people, the two things any teenage boy is naturally drawn to.”

Please read the whole article if you’re interested in the subject.

Brecher, as always, breaks down a little-considered factor in a manner a layman like myself can comprehend.  And his logic seems bulletproof to me.  Now what does it say about the future of terrorism and counter-terrorism, and the state of international relations, when terrorists are so plentiful, they can be expended on relatively high-cost, low-yield missions like these?

I always felt more comfortable knowing that intelligence agencies were combating intellectually-sophisticated terrorists bent on highly-public missions that were born of years of planning.  But a bunch of kids with assault rifles and RPGs in an SUV?  How do you defend against that?

(The New York Times has an update on the situation.  Apparently, Indian commandos have regained control)

… and the cow goes moo