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Patrick Mercer: What happened in Mumbai can just as well be repeated in Hull or Manchester
MILITARY training; automatic rifles; arrived by boat and at night; hundreds of casualties – they're all just some of the phrases that have been used to describe and, indeed, intensify the horror of the attacks in Mumbai.
Certainly, this assault has been spectacular and it has brought the world's attention back to the scourge of terrorism when many thought that it had gone away, but there's nothing new about what this handful of thugs have achieved.
What has got to be new, though, is how we deal with it.
In 1989 on the Ulster border, I witnessed an attack by about 15 IRA men in an improvised tank. They carried machine guns and flame throwers and drove off a Regular Army garrison before briefly capturing their base.
Chechen terrorists stormed a Moscow theatre and a school at Beslan using large numbers of gunmen, while Saudi Arabia has also seen several attacks by al-Qaida using multi-target tactics and terrorists determined to fight to the death.
Why don't we know much about these attacks? It's because none of them have struck where it really hurts, at a financial, soft target that is readily covered by the world's media. That's the real skill of what this group has done.
First, who are they? The reports that many of the enemy had connections with the UK, coming from Leeds, Bradford, Dewsbury and Hartlepool are now being denied, but I'd be surprised if there isn't some important link.
The single, main focus for US intelligence effort is now British-based terrorism: don't forget the foiled airline plot of 2006 – which has seared itself into US thinking – when UK citizens planned to bomb up to seven American aircraft flying out of Heathrow.
Similarly, "Britons" are often killed by our troops fighting with the Taliban while this country's first suicide bombers – public school educated – died in Israel several years ago. There will be no surprises should Mumbai's dead terrorists be found to have British jihadist connections; the real question is where they have been living in the recent past.
If they're British passport holders who have been out of the country for years, that's one thing, but if any part of this plot has been hatched in Britain or these men are based here, we should be very concerned.
There's also the question about what group is responsible. All the signs suggest that Kashmiri separatists – Lashkar-e-Toiba (LeT) or whatever name it's using just at the moment – is at the heart of things, and this appears so.
But to see this attack as an internal, Indian affair concerned simply with the on-going dispute between her and Pakistan is nave.
The links between the separatists and al-Qaida are well known: just last weekend a Birmingham man, Rashid Rauf, was killed by a US missile with a knot of other al-Qaida and Taliban chiefs on the Pakistan border – he'd started his unsavoury career in LeT.
The real clue, though, is the targets they attacked. Mumbai is an international, financial centre where US and British victims were ruthlessly sought out and murdered. Luxury hotels where mainly foreigners were gathered were attacked but, most telling of all, was the singling out of Jewish targets. The muscle of this operation was probably LeT, but it is most certainly based on core al-Qaida thinking and planning and, I have no doubt, sanctioned at the highest level.
In fact, to try to dissect which organisation did what is fairly pointless and shows a real lack of empathy with terrorist thinking. These groups mix and match, coalesce and dissolve for operations, linked by ideology and pragmatism rather than by rigid rank structures and quasi-military organisational tables. To see them in any other way is to misunderstand them.
So, what's to be done? It takes no imagination at all to see the events in Mumbai as a rehearsal for the London Olympics, for boats like those that were used there could streak up the Humber or the Thames.
Arguments that the weaponry wouldn't be available in Britain are specious – just look at the IRA's mortar attack on 10 Downing Street or the conviction of Kazi Nurur Rahman who was trying to procure ammunition and machine guns in the UK in November 2005. What's happened in Mumbai can happen just as well in Manchester or Hull.
The Government's counter-terrorist strategy, Project Contest, is being overhauled at the moment. Fortuitously, the same day as the Mumbai attacks started, it was announced that the Home Affairs Select Committee would start an inquiry into the strategy via a sub-committee that I am to chair.
Now it will have an added urgency and must scrutinise our ability to deal with attacks on this scale. But two, major points immediately worry me. First, we're told that there were only about a dozen gunmen in Mumbai, yet the death toll is now more than 250 and rising: that's a remarkably bloody tally for such a handful.
Second, when I challenged the Government on TV on Saturday about our preparations to tackle an assault of this scale, Ministers came back instantly with claims that we are. I hope that we don't have to find out the hard way.
No, we've got to take some hard and expensive decisions if we are first to deter such an attack or we have to deal with it once it's started. Certainly, we have excellent police and military forces that are used to dealing with limited, armed incidents, but an attack of these dimensions?
If we are to keep such threats at bay, we must start a determined programme to build a much larger highly specialised force than we have at the moment and the intelligence resources to support it.
It will be expensive and take time but it will, ultimately save lives. I wonder if there is the political will to achieve this?
Patrick Mercer is the MP for Newark and chairman of Parliament's Counter-Terrorism Sub-Committee.
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Saturday 11 February 2012
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