The latest grand Islamist atrocity was directed against the huge city of Mumbai, Tuesday. At least seven big explosions ripped through rush-hour commuter trains, along a string of stations on the principal north-south rail artery -- temporarily disabling the city's principal economic lifeline. It was a reprise of the Islamist attacks on Madrid's rail system, 28 months ago.
As we must surely realize from recent arrests around Toronto, New York, Miami, London, Beirut, and elsewhere, the menace is hardly receding. For each Islamist cell police break up, they are dimly aware of several others. In Mumbai, the police anti-terrorist squad had just finished congratulating themselves on breaking up two major Jihadi cells (or "modules" as they say in Indian English), and seizing large quantities of RDX explosives, cellphone detonators, assault weapons, and much else. It appears none of the suspects rounded up from those operations knew anything about this third. But according to government sources in Delhi, the police had plentiful other hints that big attacks were in planning.
How could they stop this one? No one who has attempted to ride on a Mumbai commuter train, will doubt the ease with which the system could be attacked. A couple million people pass daily through the gates of the old gothic "Veetee" alone (the Victoria Terminus, since renamed by the Hindu nationalists but still known by its English initials), in what used to be called Bombay (and still is by many of its inhabitants). You simply can't do security checks on that many people. The Islamists knew it, just as they knew you could flood out the whole subway system of Manhattan by blowing in the Holland Tunnel.
This was indeed just the fifth, if most successful attempt made on Mumbai's railways, in the last four years. The previous attempts were single explosions, a couple of them with quite crude home-made bombs. Yesterday's one was the multiple hit with powerful explosives we have come to associate with Al Qaeda doctrines, which are shared by the Muslim secessionists in Kashmir. Indeed, as I write, Indian police are already rounding up "the usual suspects" with Lashkar-e-Taiba associations.
Any modern urban area, not under totalitarian government, provides easy targets. The terrorists can hardly be intercepted at the border, for most of them are home-grown, in India, as in the West. Except, the home-grown Indian Muslim constituency is proportionally larger, and vastly larger in absolute numbers, than the Muslim constituency in the West. The pool of potential recruits and, by extension, converts to radical Islam, is thus much larger in India. But though the Muslims of secular India are more numerous than those in officially Muslim Pakistan or Bangladesh, they are long assimilated. This means they are aware of the potential for communal violence against them -- for many Hindus are prepared to take personally what few post-Christian Europeans will. Balancing these factors, the daily terrorist threat to India comes out roughly the same as the threat to Europe.
The attack on Mumbai is thus a useful reminder that we are not the only targets of Islamic fanaticism; and that in India we have a crucial Western ally, not only against Islamism, but against the growing military aspirations of China. Under present circumstances, we cannot cultivate the friendship of India too assiduously.
Meanwhile, yesterday, the Bush administration announced that the Jihadis it is holding around the world at such facilities as Guantanamo, will now be entitled to Geneva Convention privileges, as if they had been legitimate soldiers.
It is hard for me to fathom an act so irresponsible, though I perfectly understand the political and legal pressures (an obtuse recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court) to which the administration capitulated. These, in turn, were accentuated by its failure to make its own case effectively, in international propaganda. Too many outrageous lies and misrepresentations about Bush policies have been allowed to stand; and the validity of too much of the administration's moral reasoning has been left to speak for itself.
The whole point of the Geneva Conventions is to encourage legitimate soldiering, even under the pressures of war. It was written intentionally to exclude terrorists and other "informal" fighters, who do not wear uniforms or other clear markings, who arm themselves in exceptionally vicious ways, who target non-combatants as a matter of course, and whose behaviour is in every other way unanswerable to civilized norms.
The U.S. capitulation confers legitimacy upon people like the perpetrators of yesterday's blasts in Mumbai. It gives them encouragement, together with the reasonable assurance that nothing bad will happen to them if they are captured. It announces to all the enemies of the West -- internal and external -- that not even the Bush administration has the guts to be ruthless with its mortal enemies.
In the larger view, no civilization can survive treating violent savages as if they were conventional soldiers. For that is to declare that the destruction of our civilization is a legitimate end.
