After the Paris terror attacks, “we know what Mumbai-style attack looks like”, a leading British daily said on Monday, underlining that this is war in which everyone is equally at risk. In an editorial titled ‘Paris attacks: It’s war, but not as we know it’, The Independent said: “The course of inaction is no longer possible.
The danger of a Mumbai-style marauding terror attack in Britain has been understood by the security services ever since those dark days in India in 2008.
“Now, after Paris, we know what such an attack looks like. That’s the sort of war we are in. We won’t get out of it without a concerted effort.”
Random but closely co-ordinated, the attacks were precisely an act of war, the closest that terrorists can approximate to the carpet bombing of enemy cities carried out in the Second World War, it said.
“The difference this time is that there are no sirens, no air raid shelters, instead there is only the naked dread that comes from knowing that the attacks can come at any time, from any direction, and that - unlike, say, the IRA’s (Irish Republican Army) bombers - these killers want and expect to die in the process, to become “martyrs”. “With the possible exception of chemical or biological attacks, it is hard to conceive of anything more frightening,” it said.
Meanwhile, Bruce Riedel, Director of The Intelligence Project at American think-tank Brookings, said in an article that the horrific terrorist attack in Paris was likely modelled on the 2008 Mumbai attack.
He said Mumbai has been studied by both terrorists and counter-terrorists because it “set a gold standard for how a small group of suicidal fanatics can paralyse a major city, attract global attention, and terrorise a continent”.
“The Paris and Mumbai attacks both used small, well-armedbands of terrorists striking simultaneously and sequentially against multiple soft targets in an urban area. The Paris attackers added suicide vests to increase the carnage. In Mumbai, all but one fought to the death as ordered by the plot’s masterminds. “The Mumbai attackers used cell phones to communicate with their bosses in Pakistan, who gave them instructions as they carried out their gruesome operation. So far, that level of sophistication and command and control seems missing in Paris,” he said.