Lessons to learn from Mumbai

by Jim Wallace

December 12, 2008

As the smoke clears on Mumbai, it is timely to consider some lessons from this incident. As a counter-terrorist professional for more than eight years, I am one who usually cringes at the words ''mastermind'' and ''professional'' being applied to those who perpetrate terrorist attacks. They are attacks on non-suspecting, unarmed civilians and rarely require to be masterminded.

However, the tactical movements of the terrorists within the Taj Hotel reflect a moderate level of training and tactical awareness. It probably reflects not only study from their own sources, but also internet searches of Western urban combat methods.

The lesson in this is that despite the fact that we might often want to know more about the detail of our soldiers' operations in places like Afghanistan, we must resist it. News reports of contacts with the enemy can and will be analysed by terrorist organisations to inform their own tactics, and we must reduce the availability of this type of intelligence in this globally connected world.

The revelation that the Indians had been warned of a seaborne assault, even down to the detail of the Taj Hotel as a likely target, carries another lesson very relevant in Australia.

At the very fundamental level of individual decision making in crisis, the question of whether to act on intelligence and how strongly to respond, weighs heavily on individuals in authority. Fear of being seen to cause unnecessary inconvenience and perhaps economic loss, or to unnecessarily limit personal freedom, are real disincentives to act. Intelligence is seldom guaranteed accurate information.

In Australia, the deplorable lack of support for Mick Keelty and the Australian Federal Police over the Mohamed Haneef incident is an example that is sure to cause similar nervousness in governments and security forces here.

The public must accept that inconvenience and temporary suspension of individual rights are a necessary part of fighting this scourge of terrorism.

Finally, we have witnessed an event in Mumbai that was clearly not only religiously motivated, but inspired. The callous selection of Christians and Jews as targets, even to the extent that Muslims were invited to lie down while Westerners were shot dead around them, should shake us out of any denial that certain Islamic doctrines are the key inspiration for these events.

''If they turn back [from Islam], take hold of them and kill them'', Islamists are told in Surah 4:89 of the Koran. It is texts like these that are the reason that a global network of terrorism appears to operate with almost no effective central coordination. The threads of coordination are to be found in various versions of the Koran and Hadith, readily manipulated by radical clerics.

International Islamic leaders must step up to the mark. They must identify a group of religious scholars across sects who can speak with authority and clarify the meaning of these texts and qualify them for the modern era an era when any concept that people should not be accepted as friends, let alone killed, is totally unacceptable. Alternatively, if more moderate versions are deemed authoritative, they must universally reject those versions of their religious books that express their faith in this violent way.

Islamic leaders cannot achieve this alone, moderates will need our encouragement.

A reinterpretation of Islamic texts and the rejection of extreme translations are critical to change the hearts and minds of those who will otherwise continue to perpetrate these inhumane acts.

Jim Wallace is a former commander of the SAS Regiment and Special Forces, and managing director of the Australian Christian Lobby.