Six Years Later

Epilogue

In June 2014, Mohammed Naveed Jutt, a Pakistani terrorist from Multan, who was arrested from south Kashmir, made an interesting revelation. He told his interrogators from the Jammu and Kashmir police of how LeT instructors at the Maskar Aksa training camp in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir cautioned recruits against repeating Ajmal Kasab’s mistakes. These included a failure to sink the MFV Kuber, destroy a satellite phone, and, finally, compromising the entire operation by being captured alive.

What would the aftermath have looked like had Kasab and his comrades in mayhem followed their instructions to a T? The Kuber, and its hapless captain Solanki, would have silently dissolved into the Arabian Sea floor off Mumbai. The Mumbai police would have been left with an inflatable boat, ten unidentified bodies from four bloody sieges including one at the CST station building. A host of red herrings— red threads and student ID cards from colleges in Hyderabad, and the reference to a ‘Deccan Mujahideen’ would spawn conspiracy theories of the attackers being dissatisfied Indian youth. But, fortuitously, the enormous electronic and material footprint left behind by the perpetrators, averted what the spy world calls, a ‘plausible deniable operation’. The testimony of the sole surviving terrorist Ajmal Kasab, from Okara village in Faridkot, Pakistani Punjab (executed in Pune in November 2012), and accounts from the LeT scout David Coleman Headley and Abu Jundal, an Indian who motivated the attackers from a Karachi control room, have since peeled away the complex, multi-layered 26/11 plot. The weight of the evidence conclusively indicate Pakistani support, even sponsorship, of the attacks.

Most of their leads end at the grey headquarters of the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, on Islamabad’s Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy avenue. Predictably, ISI officials who briefed foreign journalists in 2009 insinuated the attacks were staged by Indian officials to cover up a probe into attacks by Hindu extremists. On 25 November 2009, Pakistan’s Federal Investigative Agency (FIA) chargesheeted seven prime accused for the 26/11 attacks. They included Zaki-ur-Rahman Lakhvi, Hammad Amin Sadiq, Mazhar Iqbal alias Abu al-Qama, Abdul Wajid alias Zarrar Shah, Shahid Jamil Riaz, Jamil Ahmad and Younas Anjum— and twenty others who set up training camps at Yousuf Goth in Karachi and Mirpur 204 Black Tornado

Sakro in Thatta in Sindh province and obtained firearms, grenades and explosives for carrying out the attacks. Five years later, however, the trial drags on. As of September 2014, seven hearings of the case in Pakistan’s anti-terrorism court in Rawalpindi had been postponed. Very clearly it had to do with the spectre of death that haunts prosecutors. On 3 May 2013, Chaudhry Zulfiqar Ali, chief prosecutor in the 26/11 case who promised ‘to leave no stone unturned to bring the perpetrators to justice’ was gunned down in Islamabad. LeT supremo Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, who Kasab said saw off the ten terrorists as they sailed out of Karachi, continues to roam free in Pakistan. The LeT’s military commander Lakhvi continues to direct operations and fund raising activities from within Lahore’s high security Adiala jail. Pakistan, has refused to hand over voice samples of Lakhvi and other LeT plotters which could be matched with the telephone intercepts of the 26/11 controllers. Islamabad’s inactivity is the latest in a long line of unresolved issues between the two countries including the 1993 Mumbai blasts and the 1999 hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC 814 to Afghanistan. Pakistan’s official line, that more evidence is needed to convict the 26/11 plotters, has failed to cut ice. Responding to one such statement by the Pakistan Foreign Office statement, India’s foreign ministry spokesperson Syed Akbaruddin said this on 26 October 2013:

The entire planning of the dastardly Mumbai terrorist attack was hatched in Pakistan, the training of the terrorists who launched that attack was undertaken in Pakistan, the financing of the conspiracy was in Pakistan. It, therefore, follows that 99 per cent of the evidence will be available in Pakistan. It is incumbent on the authorities there to present that evidence in order to bring to book the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks.

The Narendra Modi government lodged India’s diplomatic protests over the slow-moving trial with Islamabad two months after it was sworn in on May 26 this year. As Gujarat Chief Minister, Modi grasped the changed dimensions of the 26/11 attacks and its global dimension. ‘This is for the first time Pakistan has allowed use of sea routes to further terrorism against India,’ he said at the Oberoi-Trident hotel on 28 November as the hotels were being cleared by security forces. ‘Terrorists have targeted US, British and Israeli citizens.’ His government now has to deal with Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, sworn into office in June 2013 after Pakistan’s first ever electoral transition. The Sharif government has shown little inclination to comply with a list of Indian demands: hand over the 26/11 conspirators to India, extradite previous conspirators like Dawood Ibrahim or dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism. Pakistan’s political leadership lives in the shadow of the army that controls foreign policy as firmly as it does the world’s fastest-growing nuclear arsenal and a covert force of non-state actors.

‘It’s like that old story,’ US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said at a press conference in Islamabad on October 2011, ‘you can’t keep snakes in your backyard and expect them only to bite your neighbours. Eventually those snakes are going to turn on whoever has them in the backyard,’ to convey dismay over Pakistan sheltering insurgent groups to destabilize Afghanistan.

The Pakistan army’s bewildering array of poisonous snakes includes the LeT and also Sikh separatist leaders like Wadhwa Singh and Paramjit Singh Panjwar. This, even as the army battles what its 2012 assessment called an internal security situation that presents its gravest risk to its existence. Since 2007, the deadly Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has unleashed a wave of suicide attacks on airports, military installations and cities, forcing the army to attack TTP sanctuaries in North Waziristan.

The departure of the US and NATO forces from Afghanistan in late 2014, and the removal of its panoply of surveillance capabilities, will have the effect of, in the words of one Indian intelligence official, ‘turning the lights off in a nuclear-armed sub-continent’. It will add another element of dramatic uncertainty in a region crawling with non-state actors and ambitious armies. Indian leaders are clear that future attacks will not go unpunished. Speaking at the India Today conclave on 12 March 2012, the then home minister P Chidambaram ruled out war as an option against Pakistan but said, ‘If it is reasonably established that any 26/11 type attack in future has its origin in Pakistan, India’s response will be swift and decisive.’

But what of the lessons learned from the attacks? The Kargil war between India and Pakistan in the summer of 1999 prompted the setting up of the Kargil Review Committee headed by defence expert K Subrahmanyam in 2001, the first ever such publicly disseminated inquiry. The 26/11 attacks led to the constitution of a High-Level Inquiry Committee headed by former home secretary Ram Pradhan and including IPS officer V Balachandran. The two-member committee submitted a ninety-page report to the Maharashtra government, making the attacks seem a localized event. The two-member state inquiry committee had no jurisdiction over the Central forces. A comprehensive inquiry would have established, for instance, why a battle-hardened army battalion, based just two kilometres away, was used only as a perimeter-guarding force; why the crisis management team of the Central government did not meet until a day after the attacks; why the 51 SAG took nearly twelve hours to arrive from Delhi when a fly-away team of 150 commandos was kept on round-the-clock alert with an aircraft. Why the Indian Navy and the Coast Guard did not respond to intelligence alerts and failed to prevent the attacks, just as the army missed the stealthy insertion of an entire Pakistani brigade disguised as infiltrators, on the Kargil heights in 1999.

The NSG’s 51 SAG found itself tested by the firstever use of multiple sieges, and commendably handled what was a nightmare scenario for any counter-terrorist force. But its forty-three-page internal after-action report does not appear comprehensive enough for any serious understanding of the operation.

What did happen, in the aftermath, however, were spurts of hardware procurement and expansion of forces. The Mumbai police ‘Force One’ SWAT team raised a year after the attacks equipped itself with a dazzling array of firearms but has had inadequate firing practice. Weapons alone may not be the solution. Just two of the terrorists who rampaged through CST station and on the streets outside on the night of November 26, accounted for nearly a third of the 166 fatalities in the attack. Just one well trained policeman with a functioning bolt-action rifle could have averted this catastrophe. The police force, the first responders to a crisis, still suffer enormous deficiencies in manpower and training, facts noted by successive police reform commissions. India has just 134 policemen per 100,000 people. The US and the United Kingdom have ratios of 248 and 301 policemen respectively for similar number of people. Procurements continue at a slow, bureaucratic pace. In July 2014, the Maharashtra government invited tenders to install 5,000 Close Circuit TV Cameras at vital locations all over the city, the fourth time such tenders were called for in six years.

The attacks were not novel as far as fighting in builtup areas was concerned. These have been a constant feature of most counter-terrorist operations since the 1970s. The real challenges were those of command and control and mobilization of resources to deal with a multi-site attack. The marine commandos, for instance, were inducted early on only because a senior bureaucrat learned of their existence from a friend. European Union countries are believed to be working on pan-European level tactical cooperation in such a crisis. Several global police forces and SWAT team sent in their operators into Mumbai to learn how to counter such attacks and have even rehearsed responses to such scenarios. The Delhibased Bureau of Police Research and Development is believed to have put together a manual on the response to such a crisis, but till date, there is no evidence that it has been rehearsed in any Indian city.

The home ministry’s Multi-Agency Centre (MAC), an Intelligence Bureau-manned forum, now sees representatives of all India’s twenty-three Central intelligence agencies meeting every day to pool leads. The MAC, however, suffers from a shortage of trained analysts who could join the dots on emerging threats. 210 Black Tornado

The NSG has doubled in size to over 12,000 personnel to man hubs set up in Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chennai and Mumbai to provide a quicker response to Mumbai-like attacks. This dispersal does not, however, address its fundamental flaw, the lack of a permanent core. The force is staffed by personnel on deputation and remains severely constrained by lack of proper equipment and training.

The NSG’s counter-terrorist wing, the 51 SAG, and its counter-hijack wing, the 52 SAG, are staffed by personnel loaned by the army. A specialist ethos, it can be argued, cannot be driven without a permanent structure and longer tenures. A proposal made by its founders nearly three decades ago for a permanent 25 per cent staff component has still not been implemented. This has resulted in an organization which is a curious hybrid of police, paramilitary and army whose standard black fatigues barely disguise internal contradictions. All the 51 SAG veterans who saw action in 26/11 are gone, their unique experience subsumed in the ocean of the Indian army.

When it comes to procurements, the NSG’s contradictions turned into a three-legged race that also included the home ministry’s civilian bureaucrats. The force trains in isolation, without manuals and with little improvements on drills handed down from one training officer to another for over two decades.

The SAG’s three critical support arms have atrophied. The Electronic Support Group cannot intercept communications or set up a mobile command post to guide operations, the Technical Support Group lacks equipment to snoop in on terrorists and the Support Weapons Squadron is still bereft of specialized equipment to swiftly breach targets. Bafflingly, it does not even have basic equipment like armoured shields that could save lives of troopers storming defended rooms.

The NSG’s high point each year continues to be the annual raising day celebration every 17 October at their sports stadium in Manesar, Haryana, which claims money, time and effort. Commandos storm garish Bollywood movie sets, shoot clay pots filled with colored water before cheering home ministry officials, their families and the media.

The Special Ranger Group, staffed with volunteers drawn from home ministry forces, usually travelled with the SAG. In this instance, they had been taken away by the home ministry to guard India’s growing number of VVIPs. Black dungaree clad commandos continue to be a politician’s most sought after status symbol. One chief minister shooed her police guards away and directed she be flanked by her NSG commandos for a magazine cover shoot.

The Indian army’s plan to equip all its ‘ghatak platoons’, a commando unit in all infantry units with SWAT tools— door breaching grenades and submachine guns— for Mumbai-type operations, is stuck in a bureaucratic maze. The Indian Navy now polices the brown waters off the Indian coast, buying small patrol craft and raising defensive forces Naval brass worry about the impact of such deployments on their blue water ambitions.

Most of the NSG’s 51 SAG officers and men continue to serve in the Indian Army. Some with medals, others with memories of those fateful 48 hours in Mumbai. Major Sandeep Unnikrishnan and Havildar Gajender Singh were posthumously decorated with the Ashok Chakra, India’s highest peacetime gallantry award. (Also posthumously awarded to Mumbai police officers Hemant Karkare, Ashok Kamte, Vijay Salaskar and Tukaram Omble.)

Lance Naik V. Satish was awarded the Kirti Chakra; Captain A.K. Singh and Naik P.V. Manesh were decorated with Shaurya Chakras. Major Sanjay Kandwal, Major Manish Mehrotra and Major Saurabh Shah were decorated with Sena Medals, for ‘exceptional duty and courage’. Captain Mohit Dhingra was given an NSG Director General’s commendation card and now sports a tattoo on his chest, just above his heart: Unni. 

‘Mumbai-style attacks will inevitably be repeated. Terrorist groups and their state sponsors have been quick to realize the benefits of such high-visibility strikes. Four al-Shabaab gunmen carried out a Mumbai-style attack during the September 2013 four-day siege of the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi, Kenya in which seventy-two civilians were killed. At a time when insurgent groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Al Sham (ISIS) have demonstrated their ability to capture and hold territory from states and are attracting global recruits, swarm attacks like those in Mumbai could prove to be their weapon of choice to inflict terror. The Mumbai attacks were a monumental tragedy. The failure to learn from it will be a bigger one yet.