Mumbai Attacks and their impact

[Bill Moore]

Blueblood I agree, but I think advantage diminishes rapidly when you move to mid and small sized towns. NYC and LA police among others have incredible capabilities, but they don't represent most cities and towns.

[blueblood]

Blueblood I agree, but I think advantage diminishes rapidly when you move to mid and small sized towns. NYC and LA police among others have incredible capabilities, but they don't represent most cities and towns.

Not likely Bill. I compared "well funded" police forces of both countries. Smaller police forces of US are equally well equipped while the weapon of choice of Indian police in smaller cities is a wooden cane and at the most a Lee-Enfield of the 1960's vintage. More than 80 percent of police members have never operated an automatic rifle. There were CCTV videos of CST, the Mumbai railway station where the initial onslaught took place. Many Railway police constables ran away as they had no weapons. Those who had tried to return the fire but they too jammed since they haven't been used and cleaned since god knows when.

The West jumped the gun when they criticized the performance of NSG during the whole fiasco. People were comparing them with the past performances of American SWATs, GIGN, GSG9 and whatnot, but how many of these forces have faced situation identical to this. These were not some teenagers attacking a high school. They were trained by ISI and SSG(N) and had more tech than your average jihadi.

NSG did more live room clearing drills with hostages inside in less than 48 hours than many forces did in their lifetimes. The attack was deemed as India's 9/11 and so it was. Complete breakdown of the security apparatus.

American SWATs though very well trained are not designed to react to the scale NSG is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operati...er#cite_note-5

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combat_Missions

I was dumbfounded when I first saw this show. SWAT members of smaller cities were demolishing the SEALs, Green berets, Deltas and Marines Recons.

[davidbfpo]

This anniversary has just passed (26th November 2008) and led to some local commentary. There is a short article in The Times Of India by Vappala Balachandran:http://articles.timesofindia.indiati...olice-response

It opens with:

Security breaches can be prevented only through a combination of measures in which mental anticipation of the possible situation is cardinal.

The US security machinery's pre-9 /11 lapses were described as 'failures in imagination, policy, capabilities and management' by the Kean-Hamilton commission. Despite intelligence alerts since 2006 that a seaborne commando attack on multiple targets in Mumbai was likely, our resistance capacity was not strengthened.

The author has written a longer article for an Indian magazine, Defence & Security Alert, which is not linked on the Web; it is too big to use an attachment, so PM me if required with an email address.

[blueblood]

26/11 villain Ajmal Kasab hanged, Pak stops journalists from entering his village

Pakistani national Ajmal Kasab, the sole surviving terrorist of the Mumbai terror attack of November 26, 2008, was hanged in a Pune jail at 7.30 am on Wednesday, after his mercy plea was rejected by President Pranab Mukherjee earlier this month.

http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-...e1-962152.aspx


What's disappointing is the western media's use of tag of gunman instead of terrorist and even more disappointing is the Pak media's tag of accused despite the CCTV footage and the confession.

Anyhow, it's better late than never.