Posted by Carl,

Allow me a bit of chauvinism but I think a big part of it is that the average western street cops are just better and will react to contain the situation without any central direction.
Since Ray chimmed in as the expert on India CT capabilities, I don't feel offensive agreeing with you that our police will respond in a more effective manner than India's did. However, their capacity and ability to respond effectively to a complex attack will vary considerably based on where a future attack takes place. The police in NYC appear to be very capable of responding, and I'm confident that is true in other cities as well. Not so confident that capacity and ability exists in a lot of mid size cities. This largely based on budgets, if the city can't afford the right number of officers and afford to train them to the appropriate level, then we assume more risk. On the other hand, we do have armed citizens (thank God we all haven't gone metro) that will also respond.

Europe of the other hand appears to be very vulnerable to these types of attacks and if their intelligence services fails to detect and pre-empt it I suspect such an attack could have a significant impact (much like the Norway shooter recently).