prasad1
Active member
Fighting terrorism involves imagining and preparing for the unimaginable. India has a dangerously poor record of doing either
Late in the summer of 2012, two young men sat at either end of an Internet connection linking Karachi with Kathmandu, weaving online fantasies. Their dreams, unlike those of most people their age, didn’t centre around music, or money, or love. Muhammad Zarar Siddibapa, alleged to have been the operational head of the Indian Mujahideen’s urban bombing campaign against India, wanted to know if his Karachi-based boss, Riyaz Ahmad Shahbandri, could find him a nuclear bomb. The two men, the National Investigation Agency says, discussed attacking Surat “with nuclear warheads if they could be procured.”
It was a meaningless, idle daydream — the kernel from which all hideous nightmares are born. The surreal disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370 is a good occasion for Indians to start thinking about what might happen if we are ever compelled to live those nightmares.
Bar online speculation as idle as the Indian Mujahideen’s Internet chatter, there’s no reason to think that MH370 was hijacked to stage a 9/11-type attack on an Indian city or nuclear installation. There’s even less reason to think the aircraft might have been fitted with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Yet, on the morning of September 11, 2001, there was no good reason at all to believe a terrorist attack involving hijacked jets might bring down the Twin Towers in New York.
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India’s security system must do better. The resources needed to combat future terrorism will also make the everyday lives of Indians safer: infrastructure for a terrorist chemical weapons attack, for example, will save lives during a catastrophic industrial accident.
It isn’t that nothing is being done: the Central Industrial Security Force now has United States-trained units specialising in guarding nuclear installations; the Border Security Force has at least one battalion with expertise in operating in a nuclear, chemical or bacteriological environment. The Defence Research and Development Organisation has made extensive efforts to train police, while the National Disaster Management Authority has worked to build the rudiments of a proper emergency-response force.
These efforts are too little, though — and too focussed on the catastrophes of the past, not the ones which might confront us tomorrow. Local administrators, moreover, have lacked the resolve needed to give them meaning at the level of cities and towns: not one Indian urban centre regularly rehearses its disaster responses. MH370 might yet go down as one more wake-up call India’s counter-terrorism system slept through.
MH370: India?s wake-up call - The Hindu
Late in the summer of 2012, two young men sat at either end of an Internet connection linking Karachi with Kathmandu, weaving online fantasies. Their dreams, unlike those of most people their age, didn’t centre around music, or money, or love. Muhammad Zarar Siddibapa, alleged to have been the operational head of the Indian Mujahideen’s urban bombing campaign against India, wanted to know if his Karachi-based boss, Riyaz Ahmad Shahbandri, could find him a nuclear bomb. The two men, the National Investigation Agency says, discussed attacking Surat “with nuclear warheads if they could be procured.”
It was a meaningless, idle daydream — the kernel from which all hideous nightmares are born. The surreal disappearance of Malaysia Airlines MH370 is a good occasion for Indians to start thinking about what might happen if we are ever compelled to live those nightmares.
Bar online speculation as idle as the Indian Mujahideen’s Internet chatter, there’s no reason to think that MH370 was hijacked to stage a 9/11-type attack on an Indian city or nuclear installation. There’s even less reason to think the aircraft might have been fitted with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons. Yet, on the morning of September 11, 2001, there was no good reason at all to believe a terrorist attack involving hijacked jets might bring down the Twin Towers in New York.
.....................................
India’s security system must do better. The resources needed to combat future terrorism will also make the everyday lives of Indians safer: infrastructure for a terrorist chemical weapons attack, for example, will save lives during a catastrophic industrial accident.
It isn’t that nothing is being done: the Central Industrial Security Force now has United States-trained units specialising in guarding nuclear installations; the Border Security Force has at least one battalion with expertise in operating in a nuclear, chemical or bacteriological environment. The Defence Research and Development Organisation has made extensive efforts to train police, while the National Disaster Management Authority has worked to build the rudiments of a proper emergency-response force.
These efforts are too little, though — and too focussed on the catastrophes of the past, not the ones which might confront us tomorrow. Local administrators, moreover, have lacked the resolve needed to give them meaning at the level of cities and towns: not one Indian urban centre regularly rehearses its disaster responses. MH370 might yet go down as one more wake-up call India’s counter-terrorism system slept through.
MH370: India?s wake-up call - The Hindu
