Mumbai’s Lessons: the terrorist perspective
India’s police and intelligence agencies, aided or observed by their foreign counterparts, now face the task of subjecting every move made by the 10 known raiders to close forensic examination, charting and collating every stage of their actions in order to attribute responsibility for the raid while learning lessons that may prevent or mitigate further attacks.
It must be assumed a similar process is underway by those who trained and then sent the gunmen into Mumbai, as well as among numerous other groups intent on damaging their opponents across the world. While the specifics of the Mumbai raid - notably the identity and motives of the attackers and their sponsors - are still uncertain, the technical details of the operation are certain to provide a wealth of tactical and generic information that will be absorbed into planning and target selection by other terrorist groups. […]