Attacks Shed Light On India's Failings

In the wake of last week's devastating terrorist attacks here, one thing has become clear: India's security forces are so spectacularly unprepared, its intelligence agencies so riven by conflict and miscommunication, that it lacks the ability to respond adequately to such attacks, much less prevent them.

This nation of 1.2 billion has only a few hundred counterterrorism officials in its intelligence bureau. Its tiny, ill-paid police force has little training, few weapons and even less ammunition. The coast guard has fewer than 100 working boats for a shoreline nearly 5,000 miles long.

In the latest revelation of India's lack of preparedness, on Wednesday, a full week after the attacks, sniffer dogs discovered a bag with a 17-pound bomb that was left by the terrorists in the city's central train station - known as Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus- and that was later deposited in a pile of lost bags, police officials said.

Long before the attacks on Mumbai, which stunned the world and left 174 people dead, Indian intelligence officials and their Western counterparts had passed on tips about the possibility of such assaults. But the Indians lacked the ability to assess the significance of those tips or respond to them.

As a result, a group of just 10 attackers, according to the police, took the city by surprise Nov. 26. They easily killed the police officers who opposed them and seized control of some of the city's best-known landmarks.

"The scale of the task before us is colossal," said Ajai Sahni, a former Indian intelligence official and the executive director of the Institute for Conflict Management in Delhi. "We are looking at a system which does not have the capacity to either generate adequate intelligence or to respond to it."

Vulnerable To Terrorism

Although India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has promised far-reaching reforms, earlier efforts to improve police training and effectiveness have gone nowhere.

The Mumbai attacks have pushed tensions between India and Pakistan, where the gunmen are said to have been trained, to their highest level in years. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to New Delhi on Wednesday and to Islamabad, Pakistan's capital, on Thursday in an effort to calm the situation.

The violence also has fed an unprecedented and broad-based rage at the Indian government for not having done more to protect its people.

Many Indians were stunned to discover how easily, and thoroughly, the group of militants initially overpowered the police who tried to stop them (all but one of the militants were eventually shot dead). The attackers had AK-47 rifles and pistols, and plenty of ammunition.

Scenes from closed-circuit cameras, played endlessly on TV in the days after the attacks, showed police officers running from the gunmen alongside terrified civilians. In all, 20 police officers and commandos were killed.

Commandos Not Prepared

After the assault began on the night of Nov. 26, it took hours for the Indian commando squad to arrive in Mumbai because it is based near Delhi, hundreds of miles away, and does not have its own aircraft. Even after the commandos, who are better armed and trained than police officers, began fighting the terrorists holed up in the Taj Mahal hotel, they lacked a floor plan.

In a sense, none of this was a surprise. India's National Security Guards force has only about 7,400 commandos, and it has often taken hours to respond to crises in the past. As for the city and state police forces, their equipment and training are meager, and they are lightly scattered across a vast population.

Weak Threat Assessment

Intelligence failures also played a role in India's inability to fend off the Mumbai attacks. The United States warned Indian officials in mid-October of possible terrorist attacks on "touristy areas frequented by Westerners" in Mumbai, echoing other general alerts by Indian intelligence. In the past week, reports of other, far more detailed warnings have been rife in the Indian news media, though government officials have disputed them.

But the debate masks a broader problem, Sahni said: Neither the intelligence agencies nor the government has the ability to prioritize or assess those threats, or to act on them. The wings of India's intelligence apparatus, like their American counterparts before the Sept. 11 attacks, are famous for failing to communicate and share intelligence.

In the wake of the attacks, some police officials have become remarkably outspoken and even angry about their inability to defend the citizenry or even themselves.

"The weapons they give us are no good, so policemen died," said Ankush Hotkar, a police officer, as he stood Wednesday in the cavernous hall of the main train station.