The 26/11 Attack, Five Years Later- Analysis
November 27, 2013
On the fifth anniversary of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, Prem Mahadevan
reviews what has been subsequently learned about their planning and
significance. The conclusions? Pakistan’s culpability in the attacks is now
beyond question and the operation ushered in a ‘new normal’ in terrorist
practices.
By Prem Mahadevan
Exactly five years ago, ten members
of the Pakistani jihadist group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) landed on the Mumbai
shoreline. What followed was a 60-hour shooting rampage that became, after
9/11, the most-watched terrorist attack in history. In the years since, it has
also become one of the most-studied. Thefifth anniversary of these attacks marks
an opportunity to take stock of what has been learned about this signal event,
its motivations and objectives, and its implications for security management.
Because of unprecedented
counterterrorism cooperation between various governments in the years after the
attacks, a great deal of information has subsequently come to light. As a
result, “26/11” (as it is now called) is one of the few cases where
micro-details about jihadist operational planning, recruitment and training
processes are available in the public domain. Three arrests were particularly
crucial to this, allowing investigators to identify the perpetrators, retrace
their modus operandi and ascertain their aims. The first of
these arrests occurred during the attack itself, when Indian police captured
one of the gunmen, a Pakistani national named Ajmal Kasab. The second occurred
in October 2009, when US officials arrested a Pakistani-American named Daood
Gilani, who had legally changed his name to ‘David Headley’ in order to reconnoitre
potential targets on behalf of LeT. The final arrest was that of Zabiuddin
Ansari, a member of the core group that planned and supervised the attack, by
Indian police in June 2012.
A new ‘normal’ in terrorism
According to international security
experts, the recent attack by Al Shabaab on Nairobi’s Westgate Mall bore an eerie resemblance to 26/11. This should come
as no surprise: LeT operates an extensive training infrastructure in Pakistan,
which it uses to impart tactical skills and operational techniques (developed
jointly with Al Qaeda in the early 1990s) to foreign jihadists keen to attack
Western nationals. For some time, scattered reports have indicated that LeT is
expanding its reach to include east Africa, via Al Shabaab. If true, this would
explain the parallel between Mumbai and Nairobi.
In both attacks, a small group of terrorists armed with hand-held
assault weapons and commercially-available communications technology, caused
significant economic disruption and political trauma to a society in peacetime.
Unaccustomed to handling urban combat operations, local security forces failed
to effectively respond to a fluid and unpredictable attack pattern. Alarmingly,
simulations have revealed that Western law enforcement agencies would have been
unlikely to perform much better in similar circumstances. This suggests that
jihadists are learning to exploit structural flaws in police and military
Special Weapon and Tactics (SWAT) concepts. The key to explaining this tactical
innovation lies in understanding how LeT in particular acquired its technical
proficiency – i.e., not through in-house experimentation, but through
instruction from counterterrorist professionals.
Not just a terrorist attack, but a commando raid
Before anyone outside the jihadist fraternity had even heard of Al
Qaeda, Osama Bin Laden was employing former Egyptian policemen and soldiers to
train terrorist operatives. In order to boost its own reputation in the
international ‘jihadosphere’, Al Qaeda in the late 1980s provided high-quality
paramilitary instruction to anyone ready to wage jihad against the West. Over
the last fifteen years, LeT – long an aspiring rival of Al Qaeda – has copied
this method of self-promotion. Beginning in 1998, the group made concerted
efforts to recruit former members of the Pakistani Army –especially the Special
Services Group (SSG), a commando force – for this purpose. Training for urban
assaults was carried out by ex-soldiers of Zarrar Company, the SSG’s
counterterrorist SWAT team.
With this expertise, LeT taught both its own operational planners and
foreign students to anticipate how police and military personnel would
initially react upon receiving news of a shooting incident. In particular,
attack plans were designed to increase confusion among police first-responders
and to retain the tactical initiative through the proactive use of fire and
manoeuvre. Until Ajmal Kasab and Daood Gilani (aka David Headley) told
interrogators about their training in LeT camps, few had realized that
personnel from the same Pakistani force that was meant to combat terrorism were
actually teaching jihadists how to inflict more damage. Even today,
radicalization among SSG soldiers remains a grossly understudied aspect of the
Pakistani jihadist phenomenon.
The SWAT hostage rescue concept – which serves as a model for units like
the SSG – relies on the assumption that terrorists eventually want to
negotiate. Thus, ex-Zarrar Company personnel working with LeT developed the
concept of suicidal assaults that continue without any scope for dialogue until
terminated by kinetic means. By fighting to the death – and using hostages only
as temporary human shields, if at all – terrorist gunmen ensure media attention
just as effectively as by holding hostages for ransom. To that extent, LeT is
reminiscent of the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas. With tactics acquired from
ex-members of the elite Mexican and Guatemalan army ‘special forces’, the Zetas
introduced a new level of professionalism and savagery into gangland killings,
which have changed the character of narco-violence in Latin America.
The planners
According to Indian and American
officials, planning for the 26/11 attack began on the basis of reconnaissance
probes conducted by David Headley in 2006-08. His controller was Sajid Majeed, a ‘Salafi’ or ‘Arabized’ jihadist born in 1976 who was
keen to undertake some personal brand-building. Lacking combat experience (a
prerequisite for leadership positions in the terrorist fraternity), Majeed also
wanted to strengthen his credentials within the LeT hierarchy. For Majid, 26/11
was an opportunity to do this, as well as a chance to kill Indians, Westerners
and Israelis in a single attack that would capture global attention.
Coordination was handled by LeT
military chief Zaki Ur-Rehman Lakhvi. Preparations for the actual attack were
supervised by mid-ranking officers from Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence
(ISI). US court documents used in Headley’s
trial have revealed that of the $29,500 provided to him for surveying possible
targets in India, $28,500 was supplied by an ISI officer with the rank of
major. Another major from the agency introduced Headley to LeT, and an ISI
colonel arranged his training in intelligence tradecraft. Even the method of
ingress used by the gunmen – landing by boat, thereby avoiding the
heavily-guarded overland border – was chosen by a member of the Pakistani Navy
with experience in amphibious operations. Finally, according to Zabiuddin
Ansari, the weapons, explosives and ammunition used in the attacks were all
delivered by ISI officials to LeT training areas in northern Pakistan. Two
officials from the agency were even present in the LeT control room in Karachi,
from where the gunmen in Mumbai were managed via internet telephony services.
The cumulative effects of these
revelations suggest that 26/11 was not the work of non-state actors alone.
During the attack itself, the LeT handlers in Karachi were overheard telling
the gunmen that ageneral in the Pakistani army approved of
their actions. Electronic surveillance later recorded senior Pakistani
officials exulting about the number of deaths caused. Although this could have
been post hoc jubilation, Indian and American investigators
strongly suspect that final approval for the plan of attack came from a
top-ranking military officer who had previously also headed the ISI. If 26/11
was not a state-sponsored act of international terrorism, then it was at the
very least state-enabled.
Preventing domestic terrorism by promoting foreign terrorism
This leads to the most puzzling question of all – what motivated the
attack? If LeT had been acting alone, then the objective could be easily
inferred. Because the attack took place as relations between India and Pakistan
were improving after years of hostility, most commentators initially concluded
that LeT was out to wreck India-Pakistan rapprochement. As it turns out, there
is no evidence that the terrorist group considered bilateral relations while
planning its assault, except in predicting (correctly) that political confusion
and international pressure would lead India to exercise military restraint,
thus allowing the attack to go unpunished.
As the wealth of subsequent information now
indicates, the best explanation for 26/11 lies not in the bilateral
relationship between India and Pakistan but in the domestic situation within
Pakistan itself. Since July 2007, the Pakistani army had been facing a severe
jihadist backlash, the result of its decision to storm an Islamist stronghold
and rescue Chinese citizens held captive there. In addition to resulting in
heavy civilian casualties, the army’s willingness to attack Pakistani citizens
in order to preserve a strategic relationship with Beijing angered virtually
all of the country’s jihadist groups.
The one exception, however, was
Lashkar-e-Taiba. Pakistan’s most powerful jihadist organizationdid not join the
rebellion that was brewing against the Pakistani military. In part, its
restraint was based on historical ties with the army: the two organizations
recruit from the same areas and many families have members in both. But
there were also pragmatic reasons: LeT had a massive above-ground presence in
Pakistan and could not afford to jeopardise this by criticizing the military,
much less attacking it.
For its part, the ISI’s role in the attack
can be explained by the desire to rebuild the military’s lost credibility with
jihadists by strengthening its ‘loyal’ partner, Lashkar-e-Taiba. The means
chosen was a cross-border attack that could be plausibly denied and instead
attributed to a jihadist organization from India – even if no such organization
existed. The evidence suggests that 26/11 was envisaged as a suicidal strike in
which all the attackers would eventually be killed by Indian security forces,
leaving no hard evidence that they had come from Pakistan. In intelligence
parlance, it was designed as a ‘false-flag’ operation, wherein the LeT gunmen
would contact Indian television channels and claim that they were acting on
behalf of the ‘Deccan Mujahideen’ – a phantom jihadist group that no security
agency had ever heard of before (or has heard of since, for that matter).
Three factors prevented deniability from being attained. First, Kasab
was captured alive. Speedily interrogated by the Americans, who flew a special
team to Mumbai just for the purpose, he confirmed that LeT was in fact the
organization responsible. This happened even as LeT spokesmen in Pakistan were
strenuously denying any involvement. Second, Indian security agencies scored a
major success by identifying the terrorists’ method of communication while the
attack was going on, which enabled them to listen in on the instructions coming
from Karachi. Finally, the United States leveraged its massive signals
intelligence capability to independently collect data which corroborated the
Indians’ findings. In their eagerness to create a major international spectacle
by micro-managing events on the ground, LeT controllers in Karachi left an
electronic trail that destroyed any prospect of the attack not being traced
back to Pakistan. The ISI may have overlooked this weakness in the attack plan
either because it was so keen for the operation to go through, or because it
had calculated that, even if culpability was proven, Pakistan’s nuclear
deterrent would act as a shield against any punishment.
Careerism in terrorism
One of the more interesting aspects of the 26/11 conspiracy was the
extent of internal competition and petty rivalries among LeT planners. In
particular, Sajid Majeed was reportedly desperate to upstage a rival within the
group, who had been organizing a successful bombing campaign in India. In the
process Majeed jeopardised communications security and played an instrumental
role in focusing international counterterrorist efforts against LeT. (Some
years previously, he had also been implicated in a LeT plot to attack a nuclear
installation in Australia and in 2009, was believed to be planning a
Mumbai-style attack in Copenhagen.) This pattern of reckless organizational
behaviour raises the question of whether groups such as LeT and Al Shabaab plan
their operations according to any coherent strategy, or merely according to the
whims of their middle-managers. If the latter is the case, then going after
such managers could be a viable means of preventing attacks like 26/11 and
Westgate in the future. Nuclear weapons might protect Pakistan-based jihadist
groups like LeT from retribution, and indeed elements of the ‘Deep State’ (the
military-intelligence complex) who are complicit in jihadist attacks. But they
offer no protection to individual terrorist operatives, whose main defence is
anonymity and whose operational relevance shall diminish even as their points
of personal vulnerability increase with time.
Dr. Prem Mahadevan is a Senior
Researcher at the Center for Security Studies, ETH Zürich. He holds
undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral degrees in War Studies and
Intelligence Studies from King’s College London. He is currently completing a
monograph on the role that special operations can play in combating terrorism.
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