The attack is over. And suddenly everything must now be questioned, say the punditry. CNN is trawling with idiotic "experts". We are awash in insipid commentary, as well. The nearly two hundred dead, though, demand of us harsher questioning of the status quo.
Some more reading:
Saikat Datta in Outlook India:
By the middle of November, as Indian intelligence continued to check out further inputs, the pieces of an intricate jigsaw puzzle began to fall into place. Sources say they learnt that the attack would come from the sea and that the Taj Hotel would be a major target. However, it was not known whether this attack would be carried out by planting bombs in the hotel or by terrorists carrying small arms. Indian intelligence assessments were tilting towards bombs being planted and security at the hotel was beefed up accordingly to prevent terrorists from planting bombs inside the premises.
At AlterNet, Yoichi Shimatsu wonders if Ibrahim Dawood did it:
The eerie silence that accompanied the blasts are the very signature of Ibrahim Dawood, now a multi-millionaire owner of a construction company in Karachi, Pakistan. His is hardly a household name around the world like Osama bin Laden. Across South Asia, however, Dawood is held in awe and, in a twist on morals, admired for his belated conversion from crime boss to self-styled avenger.
The alternative is to acknowledge that - like rivers, languages, and history - terrorism ties India and Pakistan together. India cannot prosper while Pakistan festers. Pakistan cannot progress while standing in the way of India's ascent. Only by cooperating can both countries hope to achieve security and make dreams of prosperity come true for more than a small minority.
Three days after the start of this awful siege, which has killed more than 150 and injured more than 300 people, I remember one of the first faces to emerge out of the horrifying scenes of burning hotels, sprawled bodies and uniformed police in Mumbai. "Is he one of the victims?" asked my roommate as we looked at the fuzzy image of a young man in a dark t-shirt, the word VERSACE written across it in white. My roommate obviously hadn't noticed the assault rifle he was holding.
Islamist extremists and their backers inside Pakistan do not want that; the attacks in Mumbai may well have been calculated to set off a new Indo-Pakistani crisis. India's foreign minister said as much, pointing a finger of blame at Pakistan and telling its foreign minister, who was visiting New Delhi at the time of the attacks, that there could be no "leap" in relations unless Islamabad cracked down on the people responsible for the attacks. Pakistan responded constructively, agreeing to an Indian request that its military intelligence chief go to India to share what Islamabad knows about the origins of the attacks.
And finally, Rohit expresses many of my own misgivings on the response from the Left:
Ali parrots a well-worn Marxist line in his article. Aside from any number of grounds on which the vulgar Marxist reasoning that permeates the article (and any number of such articles on Counterpunch) can be questioned-- such as simplistic assumptions about economic base and cultural superstructure--- there is one major problem with this argument: it completely fails to explain why other disenfranchised groups or communities in India or elsewhere are not compelled by environmental or structural causes to act in the same way as those who committed the Bombay blasts.
[...] has some more worthwhile links in this post, [...]
The arguments of this guy Rohit and which you approve are quite ridiculous. So Tariq Ali is an apologist for Islamic Terror because he doesn't agree with the predictable line which is going to be adopted by Indian Government. These are typical ravings of an anti left nutjob. One line of argument advanced by this guy is especially interesting. He says Ali doesn't explain why other oppressed groups in India doesn't hit back like some Muslim youths do.. Ok, let me give a plausible analogy. In the 1930s Nazis were hunting the Jews in Germany. And not just Jews , they were also hunting Homosexuals, Communists and others. But some Jews as a form of self defense and revenge carried out several acts of Terrorism. But Homosexuals didn't take part in these revenge missions. If this guy Rohit were a German in 1930s he would have advanced the same contemptible argument. "Look, Mr Leftwinger is saying Jews are committing Acts of Terror because they are being oppressed, but he doesn't explain why other oppressed don't do the same thing, therefore he is an apologist for Jewish Terror". The reason , Mr whackjob Rohit, they don't respond the same way is because the world is a complex place. Different groups respond to same mistreatment in different ways. Only an Idiot like Rohit will think everyone will behave exactly the same way at the same time for a particular episode. The world is not mathematics or a computer program.