[Reader-list] Experts doubt Al Qaeda link in Mumbai attacks

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

Experts doubt Al Qaeda link in Mumbai attacks
By Mark McDonald
Published: November 27, 2008
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/28group.php

HONG KONG: The men came wearing black hoods, firing automatic weapons
and throwing grenades, taking hostages, attacking two hotels, a
cinema, a café, a train station and other popular and undefended "soft
targets."

An e-mail message to Indian media outlets that claimed responsibility
for the bloody attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants
were from the Deccan Mujahideen.

Global terrorism experts said Thursday they had never heard of the
group. And based on its tactics, they said, it was probably not a cell
or group linked to Al Qaeda.

"It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not," said Bruce
Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown
University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism." "It could be
a cover name for another group, or a name adopted just for this
particular incident."

Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at
the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the
terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the
attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested that the militants were
likely to be Indian Muslims - and not linked to Al Qaeda or the
violent South Asian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the
attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no
fingerprints of Lashkar. They don't do hostage taking, and they don't
do grenades."

Hoffman agreed that the assault was "not exactly Al Qaeda's modus
operandi, which is suicide attacks."

But he said the timed attacks, which he called "tactical,
sophisticated and coordinated," perhaps pointed to a broader
organization behind the perpetrators. Fair also noted that the fact
the group had not proclaimed its ideology in a manifesto was "not at
all unusual."

"You don't see these types of terrorist operations very often, if at
all," Hoffman said. "These aren't just a bunch of radical guys coming
together to cause mayhem.

"This takes a different skill set. It doesn't take much skill to make
a bomb. This is not just pressing a button as a suicide bomber and
dying. You don't learn this over the Internet."

The word Deccan describes the middle and south of India, which is
dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahideen, of course, is the
commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. The very name - if it is
a real group - suggests a domestic agenda.

"It's maybe not so much a group as a cell that will take on a name for
a specific operation," said Fair. "In India you hear these unusual
names."

Fair did not agree that the attacks on Wednesday necessarily required
deep planning and training.

"This wasn't something that required a logistical mastermind," she
said. "These were not hardened targets. A huge train station with zero
security. Two hotels with no security, both owned by Indians.
Leopold's Café. How hard is it, really? It's not rocket science."

Fair believes the attacks could be "yet another manifestation of
domestic terrorism" that has its genesis in a longstanding
institutional discrimination against Muslims.

"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," she said, "The
economic disparities are startling, and India has been very slow to
publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on
this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India."

The CIA puts the population of India at 1.15 billion, with Hindus
making up about 80 percent of the total and Muslims 13.4 percent.

Fair said one incident - "a watershed event" - that continues to anger
Muslims were the riots that swept nearby Gujarat State in 2002. The
violence killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people, most of them Muslims.

"The public political face of India says, 'Our Muslims have not been
radicalized.' But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that's not
true. India's Muslim communities are being sucked into the global
landscape of Islamist jihad.

"Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. 'Al
Qaeda's in your toilet!' But this is a domestic issue. This is not
India's 9/11."

For Hoffman, who has studied terrorism for more than 30 years, the
Mumbai attacks are "alarming on a number of levels."

"It's not often that things in terrorism alarm me. So much is a repeat
of what we see almost every day, like suicide bombings. There's no
real innovation in terrorism, which is why 9/11 was so terrifying,
because it was so innovative and heinously clever.

"But these attacks show how a handful of men, basically using weapons
off the shelf, can paralyze a city and frustrate highly trained
security forces. These attacks were calculated to spread alarm and
anxiety - to put it quite frankly, to unhinge things - and that's
exactly what they've done."