The scale of one operation is new but a lot of people don’t realize that over 2,500 Indians were slaughtered in terrorist actions just in the past year — and many more thousands in recent years — so as long as the jihadists confined themselves to one massacre at a time, hardly anyone in the media took notice. It is only b/c they have pulled off a spectacular multi-pronged attack in such a major city that the media gets geared up to show it, but the slaughter has been going on in the thousands of lives for years without much international media interest.
Think someone using 5 man teams on 9/11 to turn airplanes into lethal missiles to bring us to our knees....now take that UP 100 notches...... and spread that over a city of 13 million or so....with 40 committed shock troops whose only mission was to cause as much havoc as humanly possible before they were taken down.
Now you guard a city against that scenario.